Spiritual Lessons - Learning The Hard Way

Several months ago I was having a conversation with a man who has been in church and in church leadership most of his life. He’s been a prominent figure in his church. We were discussing one of the specific teachings of Jesus. It was one of those passages that I imagine he’s taught from at church at some time in the past. Toward the end of the conversation he said these words that took me by surprise: “Sometimes that just doesn’t work in real life.”

Now, it didn’t really surprise me that he said that. To be honest I think a lot of people in church think those very thoughts about some of the difficult teachings of Scripture on a regular basis. Love your enemy? Turn the other cheek? If your enemy is hungry give him something to eat, if he’s thirsty give him something to drink. They sound good in Sunday School, but not so much at home, at work, in Wal-Mart or anywhere else we might call “real life.” That’s really no surprise. What surprised me is that he admitted it publicly. Read more

Why, O Why?!?

As you know I grew up in public schools.  With a last name like Littleton, if you use your imagination, you can probably figure out some of the things I’ve been called by those cruel little demon spawn I went to school with.  But then I graduated and moved on the the Christian University in Shawnee, Oklahoma - Oklahoma Baptist University.  Those young adults were markedly less cruel.  Yes, there were times we could devolve into the nether regions, but those were generally momentary lapses in which many young people out on their own for the first time indulge.  Then it was off to Southwestern Seminary where everyone was well on their way to sanctification.

All that to say that it’s been a while since I was last referred to as being a tool of the devil, an outlet for iniquity, depraved, foul, and playing satan’s (sic) game.  Perhaps it won’t be the last.

I’m not writing to defend myself.  I don’t believe I need to be defended.  I write only for clarification.  If you read this clarification and still want to call me a demonic scamp I can live with that.

You simply cannot have read anything I have written about the Southern Baptist Convention and not know that I do not believe all is well in Zion.  I believe we are being led down a path toward Fundamentalism with a capital "F."  I believe there are numbers of good people among us who do not see it.  They are conservative believers who simply do not understand or wish to ignore the implications of recent directions and pronouncements that have been made by some of our leaders.  It has actually been happening for quite some time.  When Fundamentalists like Jerry Fallwell can feel at home in the SBC I suspect it isn’t because Jerry Fallwell has changed.  What we are beginning to see is not simply a conservative resurgence, but a Fundamentalist coup.  And don’t you dare come on here and call me inflammatory for using the "F" word when you remain silent about others using the "M" word or the "L" word.  If it walks like a Fundamentalist and talks like a Fundamentalist, well, I think we all know what that means.  I’m not here to win a beauty contest, so while you may not like the description don’t expect me to go changing my ways any time soon.

So, am I just putting up acidic comics to offend the other side?  To "attack" them?  If that is what you think my purpose is then you are simply employing shallow thinking.  If I simply wanted to attack the other side I would probably go about it more like an anti-Jeremy Green.  Except with fewer quotes.  And fewer blatant mischaracterizations.  And more logic.  And a heart (see, I know how to use prose as well a comics for my purpose).  No.  This isn’t about attacking people.  It is about critiquing a movement.

I could always do the propositional blah, blah, blah thing, and that’s largely what I’ve done in the past.  I actually think I’ve made some pretty salient arguments [wink, wink. nod, nod].  But movements are not often sustained on direct discourse alone.  That is the very reason we have editorial cartoons in America.  If you think editorial cartoons are simply to show the other side to be dolts then you have a shallow understanding of the purpose of that sort of humor.

I’m not going to give a lecture on the purpose of humor.  Humor is the sort of thing that if you have to explain it it isn’t funny anymore.  Students don’t do term papers on humor.  I also realize that people do not find the same things humorous.  I suspect that George Bush does not spend a lot of time reading editorial cartoons.  Those in power seldom do.  Those in power do not generally produce editorial cartoons, either.

But humor can make a point in ways direct discourse can’t.  It can be disarming.  It can break down barriers (yes, it can create them as well).  It can keep us from taking ourselves too seriously.  It can expose difficult truths about us while making us laugh at ourselves at the same time.

At the risk of being pedantic (as if that has stopped me before), let me take a moment to use a couple of last week’s comics as examples of my intent.

We all know Al Mohler is a great leader.  What he has done at Southern is remarkable.  When a friend went to visit with each of the seminary presidents back in the late 90s he came back with the report that all of the Presidents were nothing but empty suits.  Except for one.  Al Mohler.  But I was offended at Dr. Mohler’s seminary report.  I was offended that he spent less time talking about the great things going on at Southern and more time patronizing me and others who voted for the Garner resolution.  He did it in a powerful way that got him lots of applause because he knows how to work a crowd.  And he spun some magic that day.  But I was not impressed.  I was overwhelmingly saddened.  I wasn’t the only one.

I could have said all of that and more last Monday.  And in fact, in a way I did.  I just didn’t use the words above.  I used the genius of Scott Adams and a good photo editing program.  The risk of humor is that, like art, people will get different things out of it - sometimes things nearly the opposite of what the artist intended.  I’m saying to you that I can live with that.  If you think the comic last Monday was simply about a vicious attack on Al Mohler I’ll still go to sleep peacefully tonight.  Being misunderstood is a risk in using the medium of humor that I am willing to take.  I’ll have "constructive dialog" in other spheres - maybe in the comment section of your blog, or over on SBC Outpost.  I’ve never wanted my blog to be a "Baptist" blog and I often feel that posts like this come too often as it is.

I also poked fun of Ben Cole.  I said that he squealed like a girl in a public restaurant.  I depicted him as a fanny pack wearing zebra about to be eaten by lions for his weakness.  If you’ve met Ben you know he is a sharp dressed man.  A hair is never out of place.  He wouldn’t be caught within a ten-foot poll range of camo.  He is proper in all that he says and all that he does.  I also consider Ben to be a friend.  If he weren’t he just might give me that sock in the nose he threatened.  But I knew I could have a little fun with him and he would simply give it back.  And give it back he did.

Ben is very bright.  At 30 he is a sharper thinker than most I know twice his age and he is a sharper thinker than me, for sure.  I don’t always admire his ways, but I do admire his gumption, his willingness to lay it on the line without concern for what his critics will say, his blatant honesty and his dogged determination.  In a very surface way that comic about him was an apt description of Ben, but there is a whole lot of irony in it as well because if you know Ben you know that he’d kick that lioness in the teeth.  And that’s what, to me, made the comic funny.

Robin Foster implies I may have done what I’ve done to drive up blog traffic.  The truth of the matter is that my blog traffic did go up last week.  But I posted those comics because we were in Bible school and they were quick and easy - and entertaining.  I made myself laugh at every one of them.  And I wanted to provoke you to think.  Think about what we are becoming.  Al Mohler is not a tyrant, but Fundamentalism is tyranny, and if he says things that aid us along a path in that direction I won’t mind pointing it out.  The Caner boys are often full of hot air and bravado and I may post a comic that indicates that I think their rhetoric is sometimes just childish posturing.  Just go read the archives from April to October 2006 at Tom Ascol’s blog for an example.  Jeremy Green’s contributions to the ongoing Baptist discussion is nothing but a noxious monologue and I’m not a child of the devil simply because I point it out. 

So, I’ll continue to post comics, but it won’t be an every-day thing.  Maybe once a week.  And I expect my traffic to decline.  But I’m not going to change what I do in the interest of blog traffic.  Now you at least know my motivation.  And if you still don’t like my comics….well…. ppbthbbbpth.

Giving Justice Away

[If you’re looking for my thoughts on the SBC go here.]

For some reason David Fitch’s chapter on Justice in his book The Great Giveaway has been one of the most difficult for me to get through and process.  That is probably true for a number of reasons.   Justice is a much-talked-about subject these days.  It tends to get polarized into a political debate over just what justice is.  Jim Wallis’ vision of justice is obviously very different from the version promoted at the two Justice Sunday events.  And both sides can easily end up sounding very much like "Christianized" versions of the two political parties.  Add to that the entrenched nature of capitalistic ideology not only in the culture, but in the church (both left and right versions of it), and the problem becomes that much worse.

Fitch says that Biblical justice is bound up with righteousness and that Biblical righteousness is more than personal moral excellence.  At its heart Biblical righteousness is relational.  It is first of all vertically relational - God, in his own righteousness, reaches down to humanity to bring reconciliation between us rebels and himself.  The righteousness that we enter in to is then horizontally relational between us and others.  But that righteousness is lived out in community.

Too often even our attempts at community within the church are poor shadows of what a Biblical community practicing righteousness is about.  As an example, many of our benevolent works are done outside the faith community.  They are done down on the street corner.  They are given in a check or gift card or sack of canned food to a stranger who never enters into (and is never invited to enter in to) the faith community.  Don’t misunderstand me (or Fitch) to be saying that no one ever shares the gospel with that person.  Maybe we do.  But do we invite that person to enter into our community as one of us even if for the moment they say "no" to the gospel?  Do they become anything more to us than a name on a roster of "Those We’ve Recently Helped?"

But perhaps Fitch’s most radical sounding thoughts center around what it means to practice justice within the faith community itself.  I made a similar point in a Sunday School class this past week.  It seemed to be the natural outflow of the new Christian community in the book of Acts for the disciples to so view their possessions as gifts from God that it was not unusual that one might be led to sell personal property to meet the needs of someone in the community of faith.  How many times in modern religious life - outside of freakish cults or the radical lifestyle of the Amish - have you ever heard of someone taking out a second mortgage on their house to help out a brother or sister in Christ who has become overwhelmed with medical expenses?  How many have sold real property for a similar purpose?

We simply never hear about those sort of things because we either view them as far too radical or we begin to fear that such a proposal sounds too much like socialism.  That, and in America and the west we have a long, entrenched history of valuing individual property rights very, very highly (the original version of the Constitution set out to guarantee everyone the right to life, liberty and property).  We might sacrifice a little disposable income, if we believe we have it to spare.  But we don’t go so far as to sell something off of value to help a brother or sister pay for a surgical procedure.  But Biblical justice might very well do just that.

It isn’t necessarily a matter of living communally - with a communal purse (bank account), though for some it might very well be that.  But it is a view of ourselves not as owners, but as stewards of what we have been given.  God owns it.  If he calls us to use it for the sake of another, do we have the freedom - not the political freedom, but the inner freedom, the spiritual freedom - to release it to another for their good?  It also isn’t about everyone having the same amount of stuff - or even making sure that the poor have more stuff.  We do need to make sure that the needs of the poor are being met.  But to teach a poor man that what he needs most is financial wealth may only be enslaving him to the same greed that our culture at large is enslaved to.  Justice teaches us all to live with dignity before God in this world no matter the amount of our possessions.  And that’s hard to digest.

Those Blasted Arminian/Emergent/Liberal Types

I wish my friend Steve Walker had a blog, but alas, he has opted for something better - a motorcycle.  I, on the other hand, have a blog.  However, with the rising price of gasoline my wife, who is "frugal" is now beginning to weigh scales of economy with probabilities of skin coming into too close contact with asphalt.  I’ve had motorcycle wrecks before, but always on a surface much more forgiving than concrete.  For now I’m left to pay more than $60 to fill up my van.  And some time for blogging.

Which brings me to a quote Steve sent me last week.  It’s about the relationship between orthodoxy and orthopraxy.  And unity.  Here it is (from an old post at PostReformed.com):

Jesus, of course, gives us the right model to follow. Take a look at
Jesus’ ministry. Seriously, look at it. Read through the gospel
accounts, and tell me this about the three and a half years we have
recorded: Is Jesus concerned with going around and correcting the
systematic theology of the day? Or is He calling the poor, the
downtrodden, the demon-possessed, the prostitutes, and the tax
collectors to gather around Him and have a meal?

You may say that’s a false dichotomy. Maybe it is. But I’ve spent a
lot of time around a lot of different types of Christians. Want to know
what I’ve found? There are a lot of Arminians, Emergents, and “liberal”
type Christians who follow Jesus a lot closer than I do when it comes
to the stuff that separates the sheep from the goats. What am I
supposed to do? Go tell them that if they just fixed their theology,
got Reformed, and started confessing Westminster, they’d be more
gracious people, better followers of Jesus? And give them what as an
example? Myself? No way! Would that I had the heart for the poor found
in many of them! Various Reformed churches that spend all their time on
the finer points of theology while battered women can’t find shelter?
Certainly not! Would that we were more like some of our brothers and
sisters, to whom we impute all sorts of evil, in following Jesus!

As it says, there’s probably a bit of a false dichotomy in there, but there is a good point being made and it isn’t just about the need to be both orthodox and compassionate toward the less fortunate.  It is about the relative importance of some of the doctrinal hills upon which we are willing to die, and/or kill.  Which reminds me of the other quote Steve sent which is from Tim Keller about B. B. Warfield.  Keller said that Warfield had a vision one time in which a
sheet was lowered from heaven, and in the sheet were all sorts of Arminians, and
Semi-Pelagians, and so forth. And the Lord said to Warfield, "Kill and eat!"  Hahahaha!  Hehe……..he…….[ahem].

I’m not a "unity at all costs" kind of guy.  But for the most part I think that most of our denominational/interdenominational responses have been of one extreme or another.  We either work for unity with just anyone and everyone with little if any parameters (so long as a person can make at least a half-hearted affirmation of a potential deity somewhere), or we require people affirm all of the essentials of the Christian faith along with a litany of other doctrinal positions besides - or just declare that everything is essential.

Given the world and religion of his day, it does seem that Jesus was rather ambivalent about most of the things that get people all doctrinally worked up these days.  He never demanded a singular view of the atonement - or even advocated a primary view, at least not in the doctrinal terms that get bandied about today, his eschatology was very non-particular (yes, I’ve read Matthew 24/Mark 13), he never laid out an established ecclesiology and he never baptized anyone, whether infant or adult, either by sprinkling, pouring or immersion.  I’m not suggesting those matters don’t have their place.  I am suggesting they may not have the place to which we have elevated them.  One thing he did elevate was the unity of the brethren and sistren.   Maybe we should all get into a good heated argument about that. 

And motorcycles and blogs.

Divest for Darfur

Our world is experiencing a modern-day tragedy that is largely underreported.  The problem is that Sudan doesn’t have anything we want or need.  Thus, when two million people are displaced from their homes, hundreds of thousands are murdered, hundreds of thousands more are beaten and raped and those poor souls have to compete with the chaos that is Iraq, they go largely unnoticed.  Well, I’ve noticed.  And I hope you have, too.  We can do something.  Will we do something?

Have you heard of divestment?  It’s one of the key tactics that was successfully used to end apartheid in South Africa and it can help end the violence in Darfur, too. 

To "divest" means to withdraw investments from companies who are supporting the genocide in Darfur by doing business with the government of Sudan.   

Join me in fighting the genocide by urging Fidelity and other investment institutions to divest their holdings from any and all companies doing business with the government of Sudan. 

Click this link to sign the Divest for Darfur petition now and help cut off financial support for the government-sponsored violence in Darfur!

Diplomacy is crucial, but economic pressure may prove an even more powerful way to force Sudan to cooperate with international efforts to end the genocide.

Sudan has been very responsive to economic pressure in the past so we have reason to hope that they will pay heed to the divestment efforts.

Please do not stand by while the violence continues - you can make a difference.

Click here to add your name to the Divest for Darfur petition to Fidelity now.

Thank you for your help.

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The Save Darfur Coalition is an alliance of over 180 faith-based, advocacy and humanitarian organizations whose mission is to raise public awareness about the ongoing genocide in Darfur and to mobilize a unified response to the atrocities that threaten the lives of more than two million people in the Darfur region.  To learn more, please visit http://www.SaveDarfur.org

On The Move - A Review

Last February Bono spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast.  It was a powerful speech.  W Publishing Group, a division of Thomas Nelson, has put the speech into a book titled On The Move.  Here’s an exerpt:

"…The one thing, on which we can all agree, among all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and the poor…God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house…God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them…"

This speech, and now this book, mean to inspire those of us who live in the midst of some of the greatest prosperity the world has ever known to share our blessings with others in this world who endure some of the harshest, grinding poverty this world knows of - specifically in Africa.  His primary point is that if America and other wealthy countries would forgive the debt of the poorest countries, and would dedicate 1% more of the federal budget to poverty relief efforts in Africa, it would literally revolutionize that continent in terms of education, business opportunity, AIDS relief, health and hunger.

The book is 64 pages short, which includes the speech in two formats.  There are many compelling photographs of the faces of those facing unimaginable living conditions in Africa today.  All royalties from this book will be donated to The One Campaign to make poverty history.  This was an important speech, the text of which is now available to you in this great format.  The drawback is the price ($10.39 from Amazon.com) - a little high for such a small little book, but the royalties are going to a great cause in the One Campaign.

Your Killing Me

I want to give a follow-up to yesterday’s post.  I spent much of the afternoon yesterday reading the articles that the BP story linked to which can be found at the Evangelical Outpost blog.  On the whole they offer some very good perspectives.  I would rank two of them as very good and another as outstanding.

Outstanding
Darrell Cole, Assistant Professor of Religion at Drew University

"To torture someone, or to countenance your government torturing
someone, is to admit that you fear death more than you fear displeasing
God and it is to admit that you love something more than you love God.
To torture someone is to betray a disordered love for something that
can never be a proper ultimate good. Not even our society or our own
lives, as much as we love them, are that good."

Very Good
Robert Vischer, Associate Professor at the University of St. Thomas school of Law in Minneapolis

"Self-preservation is not the ultimate value underlying Christian
ethics, and recognition of that fact must underlie any attempt to
articulate a Christian response to torture. The specter of terrorists
holding information that could save thousands of lives does not alter
or eviscerate the Gospel’s call to transform our world through an
abiding and uncompromising ethic of love. Foremost in any framework
purporting to implement this ethic is a prohibition against using our
fellow humans instrumentally, as a convenient means to our chosen ends,
no matter how noble."

Mark Liederbach, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

"One can’t help in the final analysis recall the words of Caiaphas as he
argued that crucifying Jesus was the only way to save the way of life
the Pharisees had come to love and cherish: "It is expedient for you
that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation
should not perish." Caiaphas was right in the sense that his prediction
did prove to be of great value for the many, but this does not justify
the ethic under which he functioned. One would need to be perfectly
omniscient in order to have proportionalism or utilitarianism be the
guiding moral principle. For those of us who are not omniscient,
commands and principles must lead the way and shape how a utilitarian
calculus is employed. Certainly one could foresee that if employed
Krauthammer’s Caiaphas ethic may indeed provide the results he argues
for–but at what price? The argument may sound good, but we must be
careful lest we forget that this "Caiaphas ethic" is far more dangerous
than it appears. Indeed, it can even be used to justify the murder of
God."

These are well worth your time as together we consider a Christian response to torture.