Archive for August, 2007:
Individualism or Community
As I continue to work through the doubt of my faith, I am drawn by the love of a community around me. When I found myself in my hardest moments of doubt, I do not need someone to give me the “quick answers.” I don’t believe there are any easy answers to most hard questions. Although discussion is key, sometimes community is just a friend with an open ear, an open mind, and a loving heart. Unfortunately this idea of community is undermined by the individualism of our culture.
“No Christian is an island” as the saying goes. Yet it is hard to be in community in our society. American individualism is the dominant view of our culture. Each person must live for himself. At best we can unite as a family, city, or a patriotic nation. Many encouraged me to keep some distance from my family after I moved back in with my parents due to their probable adoption of a 19-month-old baby. To many a family member’s primary duty is not to the family, but to his or her self.
Objectivity v Subjectivity Pt. 2
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG17Atw-Qcg]
This is the second part in the discussion. I hope that this is a good follow up to the first one, and as always you can either post questions and comments here or on the YouTube page.
Objectivity v Subjectivity Pt. 1
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=48OBeoMLso4]
Part 1 of my discussion on Objectivity and Sujectivity. The video says it all, so enjoy!
bees & inerrancy
I remember one summer evening when I was a kid, walking into a grove of bushes to fetch a baseball that had been hit foul into the thick of them. I retrieved the ball and on my way out of the grove, I noticed a strange humming, a dissonance of sorts.
Bees. Everywhere.
I had been taught to not run, but to calmly walk out of a situation like that. So slowly I moved, careful not to disturb any branches or otherwise incite the stingers. I made it out without getting stung, but I never forgot that experience.
And I sort of feel the same way in talking about Biblical inerrancy. Am I nuts? Like I’m walking into a thicket of trouble. I’m only after one thing. I will disturb a nest or two. But the misconceptions out there are staggering, and mis-defined “inerrancy” pulls as a dead anchor on the faith of Christianity. It can’t help.
So let’s talk about what inerrancy isn’t, or what inerrancy shouldn’t be. The term “inerrancy” is a recent one, and has not been with us throughout church tradition.
I’ll just come out and say it. The Bible is not “exact.”
On Doubting My Faith
“Too much to deny and too little to be sure”
(Pascal)
“Faith appears where least expected and falters where it should be thriving”
(Yancey)
The North American church has given in to a sad stance on what it means to believe. It has slid into an all or none fallacy. This means a person either believes without reservation and without doubt, or they cannot be considered a Christian at all. Philip Yancey, author of the book Reaching for the Invisible God, explains that Christians regrettably view doubt as a “skeleton in the closet.” Christians are scared to talk about it, so they lock it up. Thank God such a view of faith is unwarranted by true Christianity.
“Dear Legalism,” A Personal Letter of Hope
The following post is a journal entry I wrote late Saturday night, August 15, 2007 (with a couple edits for the sake of explanation).
The night after I was baptized on March 15, 2005, I wrote:
“I will never deserve the love you’ve shown me, but I will spend the rest of my life trying to earn it.”
The day I realized I wanted to spend the rest of my life with the beautiful woman who is now my wife, in November 2006, I wrote:
“As always, I will spend my entire life striving to be at least halfway worthy of all the blessings you have bestowed upon me.”
Where did this come from? How could I not see that the Lie of legalism was already planted and growing in my newfound faith? As I read this, I am totally appalled. Each of these writings came at pivotal points in my life, and in my faith especially. And now I write again, as I struggle with the shadow of fear and inadequacy. Truly, I am grateful for the love shown for me by God the Father and Christ, but why do I feel that I must still earn it after the fact?
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“your God don’t have to go home, but He can’t come here”
I was an evangelical Christian when I went off to college. I joined a nondenominational campus Christian group as a freshman, went to some Bible studies, and attended church most every Sunday morning along with sometimes participating in a weekly Wednesday night worship service.
And already you’re judging me.
It has long been asserted among evangelical Christian circles that Christian viewpoints are often disdained and/or ridiculed in most college classrooms by professors. I remember when I was as a sophomore in my Exploring Religions class, hearing the professor opine about how the Hebrew word for God in the first few chapters of Genesis is grammatically plural in some instances, so he questioned how Christians could possibly believe in only one God (nevermind respecting the grammatical subtleties of a dead language from another culture, or even the author’s possible intentions). In other words: anyone that still held onto the idea of the existence of only one God after learning this was perhaps an idiot. This was his dismissive attitude all semester exclusively toward Christianity. And so it goes for Christian beliefs on a fair number of campuses: evangelical Christians often perceive belittlement regarding what they believe is the truth from their respective campus community.
But it’s not just me saying this.
