Reading and Other Matters

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

Ever have one of those books you were embarrassed to say you hadn’t read but were afraid to admit it? You know, the kind of book you feel you would be caught with your pants down if someone asked you to weigh in on it for some reason: “You mean, you haven’t read such-and-such?”

So it is with Neil Postman’s Technology. I just finished it and feel guilty about having not read it a long time ago. I could not put it down. Now I can say to you, my readers, “What do you think of Postman’s view on the pervasive role of technology in American culture?” “What, you haven’t read it? You really need to do so.”

With this grand confession behind me, I actually don’t have a large quantity to say about the book itself except to say that, at its core, Postman reminds us of that most profound truth that the things that influence us the most in our day-to-day lives are the most subtle and evasive. We think we control our lives by sheer force of our own awareness of these influences. But like all things cultural, we are as much servants as kings of our own domains.

So embedded are our perceptions, in fact, in the “taken for granted” nature of the cultures surrounding us that we are rarely conscious of how these cultural phenomena affect us and the others around us. Like an iceberg in the North Atlantic sea, we may well be able to see and understand a small part of how our influences work and affect our lives, but it is the vast underworld beneath the waterline that is most telling. It is this underworld of culture that James Hunter says, in his book, To Change the World, that is most deceptively strong because culture is “most powerful…when it is perceived as self-evident.”

Such, says Postman, is the case especially with the technologies that fill our lives. We are often unconscious victims of the very tools we think we control. And by tools, he is not just speaking of the mechanical and electronic devices that fill our lives--computers, toasters, mp3 devices, and the like. Language, as we now use it, is a technological tool. How about polling? Think about how our values are being controlled now by the mere fact that we can almost instantaneously determine that 47% versus 53% now believe such and such is right. And, we now live in a world where we can know the most minute details of the most mundane set of facts immediately, all at our googled fingertips.

Our world is too much with us and we don’t even know it. I wonder how these technologies shape us ever so subtly? What is that Christian virtue of ‘patience’ you ask, for example? At one time, patience was that human enterprise that stretched out between spring-time when my grandfather farmer put his potato seedlings in and the fall when he pulled the potatoes out of the ground. For me, patience has been reduced to a milla-second as I pound on the side of my computer because it isn’t fast enough. Patience completely redefined and I don’t even know it!

Speaking of patience, I have got to end. I need to download my next book on my iPad.

“The medium is the message”

By Maria Boccia, PhD
Professor of Pastoral Counseling and Psychology
Director of Graduate Programs in Counseling Charlotte campus

I am actually going to quote Wikipedia: ‘"The medium is the message" is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.’[1]

I recently visited a church in which the medium used in the presentation of “worship” led me to think about this idea. When the service began, the lights in the auditorium were turned down, and spotlights on the stage and the worship team members were turned up. There was stage smoke billowing on the platform so that the spotlights created a visual line to the musicians. Four giant screens broadcast images, first of a meditation, then of the words of the songs the musicians were playing. As the singing progressed, a camera focused on each musician so that their image was projected onto the four giant screens as they played or sang. The background of the stage was composed of white and gray cutouts that were arranged in such a way as to resemble a house of cards stacked on one another. At first I did not notice the cross. But as I looked around me, I noticed that far above on the rim of the ceiling structure that held the spotlights was a cross. At the end of the set of songs, appropriately, the audience burst into applause. My husband leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I’m waiting for Tina Turner to appear.” It was quite a performance.

I have also attended churches where everyone was encouraged to “make a joyful noise.” Some have been so committed to this that I have heard choirs sing off key, singers sing out of time with each other, and been subjected to a variety of screechy trumpets and violins, all of which have so distracted me from the worship of God that I could not focus on why I was there. Clearly, the church I just described was committed to not allowing these kinds of distractions from attendee’s worship experience. The musicians performed professionally and the quality of both instrument and voice were excellent. And yet, it did not lead me to worship.

Worship. A most central activity of my faith, and yet so difficult to define, capture, and facilitate.

I have noticed a trend in churches to have people lead worship who have no training in theology, church music, congregational singing, and sometimes even musicianship. Sometimes they are songwriters. Sometimes they are singers. It seems to have become quite rare for them to be trained worship leaders. As a consequence, the experience I described above is becoming more and more common.

One of the challenges, of course, is that many people find themselves joining a church with people from many different backgrounds, church traditions, and preferences. What one person needs to lead worship is different from what another needs. This is one of the things I see valuable about the multitude of congregations we have today. The variety of church cultures provides the possibility of each of us finding a church whose leadership provides a worship context that leads us into the presence of God. But, can we get it wrong? My reflection is not about the “worship wars.” It’s not about contemporary or traditional or blended or whatever. It is about worship and how the media we choose influences our worship.

It is a tremendous responsibility to stand in front of God’s people and lead them into his presence so that they may praise, honor, and glorify him in an act of worship. James writes “let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment” (James 3:1). This is the verse that drove me to seminary because I realized that if others were turning to me for leadership or instruction, I needed to be responsible about being adequately prepared to honor God and be faithful with the responsibility entrusted to me in the form of these people’s lives. So too should worship leaders be cautious and careful about how they lead others in worship. The medium through which we choose to express ourselves is a part of the message. It shapes the message. It is, as quoted above, symbiotic with the message.

I want to believe that the goal of every worship leader is to direct God’s children to enter into his presence and worship him. To do this, however, is not a simple task nor a small task. It is one that carries great significance, and requires much thought and preparation. If God gives you the responsibility of leading his people in worship, I pray that you will consider James’ words and ensure that your gifts and calling are strengthened and grown rich with adequate preparation. Formulate your theology of worship and ensure that it is consonant with your theology of God and church and spiritual formation. Use your theology of worship as a foundation for how you plan and lead worship, choose setting and context and instruments and songs and psalms, and everything other aspect of the experience you give to the people God has entrusted you to lead in worship. Anything less is a disservice to God’s people and disrespectful of the worship God as due.

---

^[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

Gender: Creation or Construction?

By Maria Boccia, PhD
Professor of Pastoral Counseling and Psychology
Director of Graduate Programs in Counseling Charlotte campus

I am taking a break from grading my students’ “theology of sexuality” final research papers from the sexuality courses I taught this spring and summer at Gordon Conwell. Foundational to their theology is the Genesis account of our creation. It is very obvious from even the most superficial reading of Genesis 1 and 2 that our maleness and femaleness are a part of God’s act of our creation. Human beings are male and female, designed and created so by God. We as Christians tend to see this as so foundational as to be beyond question. Any small or great deviation from this fundamental dichotomy is presumed by us to be something gone wrong. We live, however, in a radically changing culture in which postmodern, deconstructionist interpreters are gaining ground in presenting gender as a social construction.

The argument for the social construction of gender asserts that gender and sexuality do not exist as unique, dichotomous, biological entities. Rather, culture, or rather the dominant voices in society, use language and power to create these ideas of gender and sexuality. These ideas, they then argue, are used to suppress and persecute those who do not conform to these socially constructed definitions. Many of the writers arguing for the social constructionist view are homosexual or in some other way a part of the LGBTQ community. One of my students pointed out that “Michel Foucault . . . was the first to question the ideas of gender and sexual identity. He himself was a practicing homosexual but refused to identify himself as homosexual or as a specific gender. He questioned the commonly held ideas of a static gender and bimorphous sexuality. He preferred the idea that people can self-associate with a specific gender if they so please, as long as they realized that gender is a culturally conditioned idea and generally arbitrary.” Foucault, you may recall, is also the philosopher responsible for the beginnings of postmodernism philosophy as well.

Another student read and reviewed a recent publication by Inter-Varsity Press by Jenell Paris, The End of Sexual Identity (2011). Her review of this book, slightly edited, says:

Evangelicals need more thoughtful and informed writing on the area of gender and sexuality, but Paris’ work is not one that proves helpful to believers. A trained anthropologist, Paris’ main crux of her work is a dismissal of the traditional personal identifiers of sex like heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual. She says instead to reject any sexual orientation label and live as an un-sexually oriented person. She purports that sexual orientation language is falsely stigmatizing and isolating to those who are given sexual orientation labels. . . Paris’ disregard for sexual identifying language is on the cusp of full-fledged identification with queer theory’s central position, namely that gender is culturally constructed and arbitrary. The beginning of Paris’ book is basically affirming the idea that sexuality is culturally conditioned to the point where gender is only cultural and thus arbitrary. . . . What Paris desire to do – make sexual orientation not the ultimate thing – is a reasonable endeavor, but the means by which she attempts to do it – by disregarding sexual identity language markers – is caustic to her eventual goal. . . . she is on the precipice of queer theory, and she needs to move back into a more bibliocentric and theological understanding of language.

It was not very long ago that I would have said that the distinction regarding sex and gender is clear between a Christian and non-Christian worldview: God created us male and female, Period. Yet, here is a book published by Inter-Varsity Press almost fully affirming Queer Theory regarding sex and gender: Sex and gender are arbitrary. We need to abandon the words.

My colleagues on the faculty and I were recently discussing the importance of theology and doing theology. We believe that not only do professional, vocational pastors and ministers need to be grounded in theology, but every member of the church, everyone seated in a pew or chair, needs to “always be ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence” (1 Peter 3:15). Leaders, especially, are admonished to be “ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction, for the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance with their own desires and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths” (2 Timothy 4:2).

When we think “Gospel,” we tend to think of the good news that God became flesh and dwelt among us, and died on the cross, rising again from the dead, to redeem us from our sins and give us eternal life. But the gospel is bigger than that. It is encompassing. It defines a world view that touches every aspect of our lives. We need to be salt and light in every corner of the world, to bring God’s truth into every dark place. This issue may appear philosophical and esoteric, however, it will trickle down in very practical ways. Indeed, it has already trickled down to shape our culture’s view to the point of endorsing practices such as gay “marriage,” which is wholly contrary to the teaching of Scripture on sex and marriage. In Ezekiel, God tells the prophet that the watchman is called upon to warn the people of coming judgment. If the watchman fails to do this, he too is held accountable and subject to the same judgment. We are called to warn. We need to speak truth to our generation. For their sakes and ours.

The Hard Work of Hospitality

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

We first take away their cell phones. We take away their cell phones and then we take away their access to Facebook, followed by their access to email and the internet, and finally (gasp) we take away their IPods. We call it a Technology Sabbath. All of their forms of media are gone in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. You can almost see the scratch marks on their laptops and IPods as we pull them all away for thirty long days.

After this, we put them through one month of hard situations in which they, as a group, are required to crawl together over various obstacles. Some of these obstacles are solid and real, even terrifyingly real. They find themselves high above the treetops on a high ropes course and dangling on the side of a mountain on a rope climb. Some of the obstacles are less concrete but every bit as real as they are confronted with theologically rich questions they cannot answer easily. Finally, they are required as a group to confront the discomfort and dissonances of a cross-cultural setting in South America.

For many summers now, I have had the opportunity to observe cohorts of approximately thirty young adults each year being challenged by a Lilly-funded youth program we host at the Ockenga Institute called Compass. They move from living in a wilderness setting, to the classroom, and finally to a missions context. It has been a laboratory of community of sorts for us as we have had the privilege of standing back, year after year, and observing intentional community in the making, where complete strangers are transformed into a lifelong community of brothers and sisters, all in the confines of one month. How long does it take for the awkward glances of a nervous stranger to become heartfelt straight-ahead, eye-to-eye acknowledgements of a fellow believer in Jesus Christ? We have found it has not taken long when these fellow believers are required to face hard times together.

And it does not take long for these young people to express authentic forms of hospitality toward one another. We see it everywhere, from the simple words of encouragement extended to a sister who is trying to make it up the last 20 feet of the side of a mountain, to their small group conversations as they tell each other their stories, to the youth sitting up all night next to a fallen comrade who was a stranger only a few weeks prior, caring for her as she barfs up foreign food in a foreign land, to the worship they share that, at moments, are deeply moving and instructive to their souls as brothers and sisters in Christ.

The lesson learned in simple ways is that extending hospitality to one another in our churches is not always easy. It is not easy for these youth on a one-month excursion into community building, and it certainly is not easy for us in our churches. But too often we have relegated our expressions of hospitality to its entertainment value. Isn’t this, in fact, what we point to in our culture when we talk of the ‘hospitality industry?’ We point to entertainment in all its forms. Hospitality and entertainment have become synonyms in our cultural consciousness.

Unfortunately they have become synonyms in our church lexicon as well. Too often we have built our lives together around entertainment. At worst, our times together serve as distractions; we use them like watching a good movie or a baseball game on television where the entertainment value of the experience itself becomes an end in itself. Too often hospitality is relegated to self-selected venues where we invite those we feel most comfortable with to share a common experience of mutual gratification. Often times not much is required of us outside of the effort it takes to make a salad or, in the case of a typical men’s ministry, pancakes. We like to keep things light and conversational. In fact, this is how we measure success and failure for ourselves; the degree to which we individually leave feeling at least mildly satisfied.

There is nothing wrong with any of these forms of entertainment in themselves. However, the danger that entertainment brings to the topic of hospitality is when the entertainment value of our lives together takes over. The various enticements of the forms of entertainment at our disposal can easily serve as a distraction to the hard work required of expressing true hospitality to one another.

Look and listen closely to the stories around you in your churches. You will see and hear hard choices being made everywhere: An unemployed brother over there just trying to keep his credit rating from exploding; the teenager over here making decisions surrounding new temptations that could impact the rest of her life; the couple over there whose marriage secretly isn’t going all that well; the single sister over here who is so lonely she can hardly keep herself together; and the elderly woman over there who has got to make a decision on when to pull the plug on a life partner. If all that our hospitality involves is simply about entertaining ourselves, none of these stories will be heard let alone responded to.

Reading the Bible in Light of Scot McKnight’s Blue Parakeets

By Roy Ciampa, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

If you read Christian blogs you are probably already familiar with Scot McKnight’s popular and insightful blog, Jesus Creed. I don’t always read blogs, (Christian or otherwise), but when I do, I prefer Jesus Creed… That is, whenever I go there I find good, sane wisdom. Scot McKnight’s writing is always worth your time. I just came back from a week’s vacation. I brought three books along with me and although I spent some time with the other two books the one book I read straight through (years after everyone else already read it, probably including you) was Scot McKnight’s The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2008).

I think it is a wonderful and even very important and easy book on the interpretation of Scripture. It is an easy read and is not the kind of book that is likely to persuade anyone who is already committed to a different way of reading the Bible, but for those who are not already committed to a different way of reading the Bible, who are looking for some initial guidance and/or are willing to let Scot serve as their insightful guide, this will be a very helpful book. (Scot teaches undergraduate students at North Park University and this book is filled with material reflecting that context and clearly would be very useful for students in a context like that, as well as for many other kinds of readers.) The book discusses the tendency to read the Bible as a law book or a rule book or to treat it like a puzzle, and argues for the need to understand it as God’s story in which God spoke to (and through) different people in their days and their ways.

“Blue parakeets” (a reference explained through an observation of bird behaviors at a birdfeeder in the McKnight’s yard) are texts in the Bible or questions that people ask about them that cause us to stop and think again about our understanding of Scripture and how we use it today (see pages 24-25). Scot asks us to face up to the fact that readers pick and choose (or adopt and adapt) which texts we will obey and apply (and he provides plenty of evidence that that is indeed the case) and he seeks to uncover the unwritten and unconscious process of discernment that would explain how we go about that process of picking and choosing so that we can think more clearly about what we are doing and why. Along the way the book emphasizes a number of themes that have become dear to my own heart (and which I have addressed in some of my earlier posts here), including, among other things, Augustine’s promotion of a hermeneutic of love. He also emphasizes the importance of learning to read the Bible with the Great Tradition (but not through the Great Tradition).

I am slightly uncomfortable with some of the language used here and there (like “Is this passage for today or not?”; page 25), but Scot clarifies (I think) that it isn’t ultimately about some passages being for today or not but about whether they are to be applied/obeyed/practiced today and in our culture (or in other times and cultures) in the same way as would have been expected for the original audience or if they may serve as “blue parakeets” that can lead us to stop and think and point us to something beyond the original context and inform our understanding and behavior in different ways that are also informed by the rest of Scripture and our ever-developing understanding of creation and culture. (Scot would compare and contrast “our days and ways” with “those days and ways.”)

The Residue of Another Day

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

When I came through the front door of the house the other day, Cec, my wife, hardly had to look up. She knew precisely what I had been doing that afternoon. I wore the residue of my day’s avocation like a woolly cloak. Although she hadn’t followed me step by step through the day, she knew with certainty my life had something to do with rich black dirt, back yard greenery, mulch and twigs , and…sweat. I had spent the entire day accumulating such, little by little. What to do with the excesses of the day? Off to the shower I went.

We talk a great deal these days about building lives of character, both in our churches but also in terms of a larger value-laden conversation we have with our culture. More times than not we speak of the enterprise in simple subjective terms as if character were a commodity that is manufactured solely from within ourselves. Like hardboiled New England farmers we think of character building as picking ourselves up by our bootstraps and “just doing it!”

Without diminishing our own initiative in living lives of integrity, I am increasingly thinking of character as an external phenomenon, as those things in life that cling to us. I used to meet regularly with a group of men on Wednesday mornings, and we used to talk often about the nature of temptation and the fact that none of us seem to get through a day without feeling the often-times grimy effects of the culture around us. How do we keep ourselves clean when our entire environment is so contaminated?

Indeed, in many respects, we are the sum total of the residue that clings to us. None of us—not even those of us who live between parsonage and pulpit—live outside the realm of our influences. And isn’t it the case that the influences that are least apparent to us are the most destructive spiritually? And we wonder why the Apostle Paul is so intent on disciplining us to put on the whole armor of God to combat the influences that so easily cling to us.

But, to speak of Christian character only in terms of the boot black that rubs off on us from our world is to look at one side of the story. What of the godly residue that we brush up against in the context of the influences God places in our lives each day? Can you name the five most influential individuals in your life, past and present? Who has God put in your life that has shaped you, one person, perhaps, who has altered your thinking and behavior in dramatic ways? Who has left a residue on your life? And, what character residue are others receiving from you as a result of your influence on their lives?

De-centered

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

There is no gravitational pull quite so strong as that exerted by the human imagination.

And I don’t mean that in a good way.

The sun may hold eight planets in its sway (or nine, depending on what they are saying about poor Pluto this week), but my mind can bring the entire cosmos into its orbit. The universe swirl around Me, and each thing in it grows or shrinks in significance depending on how it shapes my town and my job and my family. It’s an absurdity, of course, but it is an absurdity that plays itself out each day of our lives.

I was reminded of this recently when I made my first trip to Hong Kong. The city was a wonder, with buildings stacked upon buildings like the playroom of a Lego-mad millionaire. The biggest building in town, the recently completed International Commerce Center (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Commerce_Centre), stands at the edge of Victoria Harbour and virtually cries out, “Yes, we’re going to build. We’re going to build big buildings, and we’re going to build one after another after another and dare anybody to stop us.” As if the scope and scale were not enough, every night a dozen or so of these skyscrapers on Hong Kong Island light up with a soundtrack booming in the background. You can see it all from the Avenue of the Stars, Hong Kong’s answer to the sidewalk outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater. (I got my picture by Jackie Chan’s handprints, though the Bruce Lee statue is the more popular venue.)

But the buildings weren’t the only impressive thing about the city. The subway was clean and efficient, the streets safe, the opportunities for shopping and eating endless. More surprising was the natural beauty of the place. The crowded and touristy Peak Tram on Hong Kong island quickly gives way to a stunning walk around the Peak for the moderately adventurous, and I had the Sunset Peak trail on Lantau all to myself the last day of my trip. The volcanoes may have stopped spewing fire long ago, but they are still in the business of providing spectacular views.

As I reflected on all this, it struck me how even on my most “selfless” days, I still assume that the world essentially revolves if not around me, at least around eastern Massachusetts where I live…or at least the Eastern Corridor from Boston to DC. Yet a visitor from Hong Kong must find Boston a quaint little city, or maybe even a provincial village – a few good schools, yes; at least one very nice modern building (the Hancock Tower), a pleasant river, with some nice scenery around if you have a car and a few hours to spare. But the Hub of the Universe? Not hardly.

It was a blessing to be de-centered in this way. The practical implications for thinking about the mission of the church in the modern world are obvious: you don’t need Philip Jenkins to tell you the church is no longer a Western cultural phenomenon (if it ever really was one to begin with). A bit of vacation time and a plane ticket can open your eyes soon enough. And the theological implications are equally clear. We are not at the center of things, whatever our addled brains might tell us. The center does not lie in me, or in Boston, or even in splendid Hong Kong. The center is ever and only the throne of God: “Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing: ‘To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!’” (Rev. 5:13).

What ticks God off . . .

By Maria Boccia, PhD
Professor of Pastoral Counseling and Psychology
Director of Graduate Programs in Counseling Charlotte campus

February is “Black History Month” and GCTS-Charlotte has decided to celebrate this with a series of special chapels during our Saturday classes. This past Saturday, our own Dr. Rod Cooper, the Kenneth and Jean Hansen Professor of Discipleship and Leadership Development, was the speaker. I would like to share with you some of his thoughts from Saturday. He started with the story of a confrontation on the steps of a church in Jackson, Mississippi in 1965. “. . . at the top of the front steps stood a row of White ushers, arms linked barring the entrance to the church. There were 4 or 5 Black men dressed in suits standing at the bottom of those same steps, facing the doors. As one of the Black men approached the top step, an usher disengaged his arms from the others and smashed the would-be visitor in the face sending him sprawling down the steps to the ground. Inside, you could hear the congregation and the choir singing the hymn, >Love divine, all loves excellingY= Do you know what really ticks God off C its when people who say they belong to him don=t act like HimCespecially those who say they believe in HIS word.”

Dr. Cooper reminded us of the history of Israel. They were God=s chosen people, chosen to represent God to the rest of the world, different from all the cultures around them. Or they at least they were supposed to be. Instead, however, they tended to conform to the surrounding cultures - wanting a king, worshiping other gods, making unholy sacrifices. But AGod will not stand for his name to be trashed and his word to be broken. It is at those times that God sends a prophet. Prophets speak thus saith the LordCProphets get in the face of people who claim to know Him and admonish them to get their behavior in line with their belief system. . . . In the fullness of timeCGod sends prophets.@

AThere was another nation that rose up and proclaimed that it also believed in God and his word. The critical documents written for that nation were based upon the principles and beliefs of ONE bookCthe Bible. In factC180 of the first 200 colleges of this nation were Christian. God takes his word seriouslyCand those who say they believe it and when their behavior doesn=t match the wordChe sends a prophet. For you see if there is one thing that God cannot stand B it=s when people who say they know him don=t act like him and trash his reputation.@

We now have a national holiday celebrating the contribution of Dr. Martin Luther King. Dr King is a national hero, and his reputation has been sanitized - he was a great civil rights leader, a man pursuing social justice, etc. Dr. Cooper told us about how Dr. Martin Luther King saw is calling. After his first arrest and night in jail in 1963, at the age of 26, he questioned whether he was doing the right thing, especially putting his wife and child at risk for this cause. Dr. King prayed, and God spoke to him in Micah 6:8 A And what does the Lord require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God?@ Dr. Martin Luther King was not a social activist. He was a Prophet of God called to a people who claimed his name but did not live as God had called them to live.

Micah 6:8 describes the work of Dr. King, and tells us what are the distinguishing characteristics of a people who belong to God. This is not a suggestionCthis is a direct command. In fact it is a requirement to be called Amy people.@

To do justice: ADoing justice means to be ethically responsible and to take action. God is not a God who passively sits by and does nothing but he invades history to change the system to right wrongs. He did this when he said to PharaohClet my people goChe came to set the captive free. When we are prophetic about injustice and invade the system to change the systemCwe are acting on God=s behalfCwe are doing what a Good God would doCwe are doing justice.@

To love kindness: ATo love kindness literally means to respond to others with a spirit of generosityCgraceCand loyalty. It is the belief that love overpowers evil and truth overcomes wrong. It is the belief that essentially in the other person=s heart. there is a desire to do the right thing.@

To walk humbly with your God: ADr. King knew that in order to change the system with an attitude of love it would take a strong abiding relationship with God. Dr. King knew that when you attempt change in God=s power and in God=s way you will get God=s results. The word Awalk@ means to accompany. To stay close enough to God to get your orders from Him. Humility says I know where I have come fromCand it is only by God=s grace. Humility says that the battle is the Lord=s Humility is standing stillCand watching the salvation of God.@

Dr. Cooper told the story of a inventor who developed a new car. He brought the blue-prints to potential investors. The investors questioned whether it would work. The inventor invited them outside, where a model of the car waited. They went for a ride and discovered it was exactly what the blueprints said it would be. Then Dr. Cooper challenged all of us: the Bible is God=s blueprint for how we should live. Can others look at our lives and see the same thing in there as they read in God=s Word?

Lost in the Taiga

By David Horn, ThD
Director, The Ockenga Institute

What could it be? Scanning across the sea of dark green coniferous forest, there it was, a square break in the darkness, a tiny patch in the fabric of the uninhabited Siberian quilt. It almost looked like a tilled garden. But, how can this be? They were hundreds of kilometers from civilization.

From their helicopter on that spring of 1982, Russian geologists looking for drilling sights in the subarctic mountains--taiga--of Siberia were desperately searching for a small morsel of land where they could put down. What they found, instead, was a thin fragment of civilization that first dumbfounded them and then captured their full imaginations. Parachuting in, they found themselves staring into the black din of a musty, sticky cabin, barely held up by sagging ceiling joists.

And from out of that cabin came an amazing human story. Huddled in that humble cabin came five hollow figures seemingly held together by bailing wire. First came the old man, his disheveled beard matched by his patched—his re-patched—shirt and pants. Two grown sons followed him, and then, behind them they could hear the hysterical cries of two grown daughters. It was summer so all were without shoes. But, come winter, they walked the snowy mountain range with homemade birch bark boots. The geologists stood face to face with the Lykov family. In turn, the Lykov family stood face to face with other human beings. The grown children had never seen another human face other than their family members. Never. They lived their lives completely to themselves, surviving solely on subsistence fare of potatoes and pine nuts.

What could have driven this family of hermits into this vast wilderness? Vasoly Peskov tells this amazing story that has reached millions of readers in his chronicle, Lost in the Taiga. What drove this family for decades into a life radically set apart from civilization? The Lykov family was part of a small group of “Old Believers” who began their journey from the outside world during the reforms in the Russian Orthodox Church during Peter the Great. Systematically setting themselves apart from the world, they spent what time they had each day that was not filled with scraping together enough food for the next, in long ritualistic, pietistic prayer. Their sole goal in life was to remain uncontaminated by the larger world.

The story of the Lykov family was part of my summer reading. I found it an amazing story not because it was so dramatically different from where most of us live our lives, although this is certainly the case in one sense. Quite the opposite, I found the story so compelling because I related so much to it. What is this impulse in all of us that closely measures our commitment to Jesus Christ by the degree to which we separate ourselves from the world around us? Like the Lykov family, I realize there is safety in maintaining a distance from the world, be it geographical, intellectual, or moral. But, in playing it safe, do we not risk a contamination of another sort? Like the Lykov family, losing contact with their world caused them to live tiny, utterly selfish, and distorted lives.

The point is, Jesus’ example in the Gospel clearly points us to the often forgotten truth that we, the Church, need the world out there—our associations, our towns and communities, our relationships with our unbelieving friends and enemies—as much as they need us. Without continuous, ongoing connections with our world, we all run the risk of living very small safe lives robbed of the very relationships that stirs the gospel in our souls.

Fun for the Whole Family?

By Sean McDonough, PhD
Associate Professor of New Testament

A large woman, couchbound for years, walks upstairs to the utter amazement of her family. A shy young man begins courting an inflatable doll named Bianca, and is affirmed in his relationship by a small town. A not-traditionally-beautiful little girl goes off to a beauty pageant accompanied by her bickering parents, her silent brother, her gay suicidal uncle, and her drug-abusing, foul-mouthed grandfather.

Film-goers may recognize the above as representative snippets from three films: respectively, Lasse Hallström’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993); Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl (1997); and Jonathan Dayton’s Little Miss Sunshine (2006). The cynical among us might look at the list (and indeed the films in their entirety) and think, “Fun family entertainment, Hollywood style.”

At one level, the critique would hold. The families in these films (if we can count Lars and Bianca as a ‘family’) put the dys- in dysfunctional, and none of them constitute “family fare” in the traditional sense of the word. A few moments around the dinner table with Alan Arkin’s ‘colorful’ grandpa in Little Miss Sunshine would give the proverbial drunken sailor pause, while even the generally sweet-tempered Lars and the Real Girl centers on a man and, um, an inflatable doll. Anyone thinking to gather the young kids around for Edifying Video Night with one of these films should un-think it pretty quickly.

We could go on and level a salient cultural critique as to why these films roll the way they do. They could be seen as the quintessential products of the postmodern ethos, where traditional values are there only to be shredded, and alternative life-style choices – whether it is affairs with married women (or unmarried dolls); septuagenarian heroin ingestion; or illicit water tower climbing (one of the many memorable scenes with a young Leonardo DiCaprio in Gilbert Grape) -- are there to be tolerated, if not indeed celebrated.

They could also be seen as a perhaps welcome salination of the sickly sweet family films of a bygone era: here comes Lassie to drag Timmy out of the neighbors’ cobra pit. Mom had told him a hundred times not to go in that thing, but we know he’ll learn his lesson and they will all live happily ever after. (“Gee, Mom, you’re swell! And you too, Lassie!” “Ruff!”)

And yet…I found myself moved by all these films, and wondered what it was that touched me. They are all well directed and well acted, but that only provides a lowest common denominator for enjoyment. What distinguishes them is that, for all their visible dysfunction and edgy behavior, they really are sweet at heart. The characters may find themselves lost in a jungle of pathology, but they eventually hack their way through the brush to find one another, and with that to find some kind of peace amidst the chaos of life.

The fact that they find it in the worst possible circumstances of ordinary life makes the grace of re-discovering one’s family all the more profound. In Gilbert Grape, a dropped birthday cake can rip your heart out, but the mother’s trudge to the second floor becomes a kind of ascent of Jacob’s ladder. Try to keep a dry eye as kindly Karin berates Lars for not recognizing what they are doing for him, “Every person in this town bends over backward to make Bianca feel at home. Why do you think she has so many places to go and so much to do? Huh? Huh? Because of you! Because - all these people - love you!” As for Little Miss Sunshine, all I can say is that you may never think about Rick James’ Superfreak the same way again.

I may be wrong about the merits of these films. But it is not because there is something strange about the idea of love appearing in the strangest of places, or of something – or Someone – pulling people together when everything seems to be pulling them apart. Whatever the filmmakers’ motives may have been, the films can function for us as parables of the divine seed of the gospel that flourishes in the most unlikely soil.