The Gospel According to Tolkien

But the “consolation” of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

Thus from J.R.R. Tolkien "On Fairy Stories" (22) and he goes on--and this is the point of my posting this post today:

...it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.

It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be “primarily” true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it had possessed. It is not difficult, for one is not called upon to try and conceive anything of a quality unknown. The joy would have exactly the same quality, if not the same degree, as the joy which the “turn” in a fairy-story gives: such joy has the very taste of primary truth. (Otherwise its name would not be joy.) It looks forward (or backward: the direction in this regard is unimportant) to the Great Eucatastrophe. The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is preeminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused.

This last spans pages 23-24 in the linked material, and it should explain why I present this today. In the Incarnation, our sense that the world is, in some way, enchanted was validated and outstripped. The world is far more than enchanted. The God of history has come in human flesh. The child of promise has come, and how great was the promise! The promises are quite fantastic, defying what is natural. But these promises fit naturally into the world that we, as Christians, live in.

In the land of Faerie, what happens follows a different logic than we are accustomed to in our everyday lives. The poet and the novelist understand its workings better than the physicist or the psychologist. There is an atmosphere of possibility, as it were.

Why shouldn't the dead rise, if it be God's will? This is how the incarnation infects reality with what we first get a taste of in Faerie-land. And yet, there is no guarantee that the dead will rise. There is, after all, that conditional "if it be God's will" and God is wiser than we are about what works out for the best in his world, and we will see on that day, when we see another Eucatastrophe, when Jesus Christ comes again from heaven, that God has been just and good and right in all he has done. And here is reason to trust his promises: Jesus came, the God-man, to die for our sins when we were dead in them. It is as if the curtain had fallen on the play of the world, all was lost, we were doomed, and then, as we turn to leave the theater in dismay, the curtain rises, and another act begins, and this act we have recorded fourfold in the Gospels, and it is real--not a mere play, which we could walk away from, but reality which, if we accept it, must fundamentally alter how we stand in the world.

Wittgenstein and Transgenderism

1. What is it to be a man? We are constantly having to remind ourselves not to look at the subjective sense of the word, but at how we would say of someone else that he is a male.

2. Is it possible to be in error about this sort of thing? If I happened to say I were woman, that would be wrong.

3. If someone who appeared to be a woman insisted she were a man, what difference would it make? Perhaps she goes into the men's restroom. Of course, then the sign "Men's" would no longer function as it used to--the sign would have changed.

4. Suppose someone who appears to be a woman to me comes and tells me that she is a man. Under one use of the word, the one we are accustomed to using with infants, she is wrong. How would I convince her? I would explain, "No, you must not understand what you are saying, that word only applies in a context like..."

5. What do we do when we disagree about what a word means (how it is to be used)?

4. When the use of a word changes, the concepts associated with it shift, as it were, and we have trouble matching up what was said before with what is said after.

6. The words "man" and "woman" as they are used by those who affirm the possibility of transgenderism being, at worst, neutral, seem to be subjective terms, like "believe" and "pain". How do I know someone else is transgender? Perhaps there are indications--he acts like a woman. Of course, this requires us to agree on what it is to "act like a woman".

7. Suppose there is nothing it necessarily is to be a man or a woman. Then have these words lost all sense? What difference would it make, then, whether I were a man or a woman? Which bathroom I use? But then I should change whether I was a man or woman simply by changing which bathroom I used. And if we were to do away with the distinction between the restrooms and locker rooms and such...?

8. Why is it that a man who claims to be a woman wants to change his appearance to fit with what we think of women as looking like? Is that what it is to be a woman? But he didn't look like that when said he already was one.

9. If I were to wake up one morning to find I was a fully functional woman physically, would I be a woman? Well, that's how I use the word, and others, too, would be inclined to say "he's turned into a woman!"

10. If there is a particular way of using "man" then there are also a whole host of ways to misuse it. In the new way of using it, what would count as misusing it? If I were to tell someone they were a man, and they claimed otherwise, would I be misusing the word? Then no one can lie about whether they are a man or a woman?

11. I fill out a form which asks about my gender: male/female. At the end of the form, I sign, saying the information in the form is complete and correct to the best of my knowledge. To sign there, does it matter how I answered the gender question? Suppose that were the only question on the form. Then what sense would signing there make? Perhaps I am saying that this is how I normally answer, but why couldn't I be male one day and female on another (according to this new use of the words)?

12. I am giving testimony in court and I say "I saw a woman walk out of the store..." I later learn that she calls herself a man. If the court is now looking for a woman, because of my testimony, will they have trouble finding her? No...

13. Suppose the opposite case happens: I meet the woman and find out that she calls herself a man. I then testify that I met a man... What will they look for now? Someone who identifies as a man? (Perhaps I ought to say "I met someone who claims to be a man, but looks like women tend to look")

14. A burglar discovers he has been described to the police as "a man". He is approached by a detective, "excuse me, but you match this description of a man who burgled the bank last Tuesday" "Oh, that can't be, I'm a woman!" So do the terms "man" and "woman" no longer say anything about the appearance? Should the detective assume the description was just a bit off, or should he keep looking for someone who identifies as a man? Suppose he only has a warrant to arrest the culprit under the description of being a man, then can he arrest the burglar who calls himself a woman?

15. Perhaps we may say that someone is a man, even if he identifies as a woman, but then if he says otherwise we must change. But then, of course, to avoid being wrong we must great every new acquaintance with "Hello, my name is B. B., I'm a man, and you are...?" and the other person will respond in kind. But all this has to do with is what pronouns I use with this other person, and which restrooms, etc., we each use. It can have nothing to do with how I respond to her, according to our new language.

16. If I wish to refer to someone I saw, should I say that she looks like women tend to look? Or may I still say that she was a woman? If I must expand it in this way, perhaps we ought to come up with a shorter collocation.

17. I always think ideas are fishy when they imply odd collocations. "Never say that someone is a woman until you have asked what he or she would like to be called" sounds an awfully lot like "never say 'I know...' only, 'I believe quite strongly...'" or "Always say the qualification 'x'".

18. Someone acts very strangely. May we not say that he has a mental illness until we have determined precisely what is wrong? We may, of course, be wrong.

19. Suppose someone said "If only I looked like a woman instead of a man, then everything would be better!" Well, what would they have done a century or two ago? Surely something could be done about the problem even then, and yet they could not have changed their appearance so thoroughly.

20. If someone says "Thank goodness I live in the 21st century, those medievals were so much more helpless against the problems of life than we are!" then I know they have no perspective--and I doubt they understand what the problems of life really are. (Chronological Snobbery).

21. Perhaps this is all irrelevant to how the language works now. But that requires that we detach--in our language--what we should do from what they should have done. Then I cannot say "The Christians should not have fought the crusades," since morality has, apparently, changed since then.

22. "It has not changed. It would have been good for them back then as well as us now, it is just that now we can" But why? Do we just know these things? Some morals may be embedded in our language, but not those we argue about.

23. "It is good to be true to oneself." Such a mess. What is it to be true to oneself?

24. I decide I feel more true to myself if I murder--does that justify murder?!

25. Our language has gotten so subjective over the past few years. How am I to argue with "I feel..."? What has "I feel..." have to do with it being so? They are miles apart (except in certain cases).

26. How does a child learn the concept of "man" and "woman"? These days, it is hard to imagine. Either it must tie to behaviors or appearances, but our culture refuses to tie gender to either. "Away with stereotypes!" "Your body doesn't have to limit you!" What does, then?

27. Is it now possible to say "I am a martian" and be taken seriously? Why not? If I say I am a martian, what do you expect differently of me? That I am crazy? But not if I said "I am a woman." Why not?

28. We at least seem to agree that there is something it is to be a woman, and that it matters. But what is it supposed to be if it has nothing to do with the body (transgenderism) nor with behaviors (anti-stereotypists).

29. There are those who wish to remove all gendered speech. At least they're consistent. But could you be transgendered then? It would have to be expressed differently, and it would have even fewer implications then than it does now.

30. Watching things shift, one wants to ask what everyone means when they say these words.

31. "Well, you use them all the time. We mean the same as you do." No, you evidently use them quite differently.

Confession and Repentance

It is hard to confess sin. It is harder to repent of sin.

It is relatively easy to admit that one struggles with a sin, but it is monumentally difficult to attack sin with the viciousness it deserves.

It is far harder to hate sin than to admit sin. It is so much easier to make light of our foibles than to feel the weightiness of sin.

You can know that you sin without repenting. You can even hate your sin, in one sense, without repenting.

To weep over sin is not intended to be a mere metaphor, but a real occurrence.


Yet to weep over sin requires that we be uncomfortable with ourselves.

We must die to our old selves, and the weight of this metaphor has been lost when we kill only our old fingernails and our old hair and our old earlobes. We must kill our old selves to the core. Our deaths must be so deep that we feel the pain of death. We are so sinful that we think our sins are required for our self-hood, and it is that self which must be killed.

We will not kill our sins until we recognize that there is a life after the death. We will not fight sin until we see that the fight can be won. We must be comfortable with our sins in the same way that we are comfortable with the fact that grass grows. We know that we can deal with the grass, but we do not permit it to grow too tall. It is not the comfort of a bed, but the comfort of knowing what to do with it. We kill it, even if it kills us. And so we will live all the more, because the death of sin is expunged.

We need not fear sin anymore than we fear a dead grizzly. It is ugly, and we should remove it, but it cannot harm us.

To merely admit sin, and then go on sinning, is to let sin live. To admit a struggle is not, actually, to struggle. To say "I struggle with..." but to continue in it without a fight is to lie. Too often, I suspect, saying "I struggle with this" is merely saying "I do this, and I know I shouldn't, but don't be surprised if I do it more." That is not struggling. Struggling against sin is deeper and harder and far more exhausting, but in the end it is far more refreshing. It is struggling for a breath of air. It is struggling for more of the God who gives life because he has already given us life.

To struggle against sin is to depend on the Spirit of God, and to hate sin as God hates sin, whether we recognize its weighty oppressiveness or not, and be moved to kill the old self because we love the life of Christ which lives in us, because we love the Lord who died that we might live.

We confess our acceptable sins, and then joke about them. Are we too afraid that we will fail in the fight against sin to begin? Yet our Lord has already defeated sin, and he is with us to conquer sin. Are we too attached to our old selves? O, come, lop off that gangrenous arm you call yourself! Live in the light, the life which God provides, which has been made manifest in Christ. It is so much better to live than to die. You are not that gangrenous arm, you are in Christ, a new creation, there is a far better self to be, one so far beyond your imaginings. If you kill the old self, you get a far better one.

You will not kill that old self all at once, but you must be killing it all. We must not be content with our present state of sanctification. We are but small saplings, and we must grow into Christ's likeness--that great tree from whom we have life.

I do not write this that you may have guilt, but that you may have be truly free of guilt in the eyes of God. Repent and believe in the gospel: that Christ died for such ugly, dead, wretched beasts as we were, that we might have life and the beauty of God in us. Is the promise so little? Press on, for the joy set before you, to the high calling of the Lord!

Paris & Hospitality

Permission to be cynical? Caveated by the fact that I spend much less time paying attention to the news than I probably should.

Why is it that I see so much more about the terrorist attacks elsewhere now that the news is covering a terrorist attack in Paris?

Granted that the other terrorist attacks matter, and supposing the gap in news coverage is unjustified, the problem is not in the coverage of Paris, but in the lack of coverage of others. Supposing that problem, then, repentance will look like more coverage of the other terrorist attacks from now on, whether or not such news will sell, whether or not people care, and whether or not it makes us feel good to care about it.

Repentance will look like more caring, not hiding behind pseudo-care to avoid having to care about yet another evidence of the utterly fallen state of this world. Let us mourn for what is before us rather than diverting attention far and wide. Focus on the brokenness of this world, and call on the God who is just and will bring justice. Hope in him, and know our need for his great and perfect justice. He knows more than we do how broken this world is, and he cares more than we do. So much so, in fact, that he sent his Son to die--so great is our injustice and his justice--that we might live--so great is his love.

We were hostile toward God, yet he welcomed us into his kingdom, making peace with us by the death of his son. We crucified Jesus Christ, as we killed the prophets before him. He came to live among us, and we rejected him. He gave us the land, and we profaned it, worshiping idols in his house.

How then, since God has welcomed us in this way, shall we seek to exclude people from the kingdom? And if not from the kingdom, then how much more must we welcome them into our earthly dwellings?

There are things to be considered regarding how we keep terrorists from entering our land, of course, just as there are considerations regarding who is permitted to approach the Lord's Table. Yet the Israelites were called to welcome the sojourner among them, yet command them to keep their laws, and to exclude them if they would not. Therefore, I say, let strangers come in, yet hold them to the same standard as others.

I do not know how we strike this balance. This is a broken world. I do not know how the balance was struck in Israel. I do know that we must welcome the poor, the stranger, the widow, and that we rarely do. This is our guilt. We who are strangers on earth, shall we turn our backs on those who flee from their homes? We who are not yet at home, shall we, who know the yearning for our heavenly home, refuse to shelter others in our lands?

I do know that our home will come, and on that day justice will be served by the King. He comes to make things right. Therefore we seek to bear witness to his justice and mercy by showing the hospitality we do not deserve to the least, though they do not deserve it, and though they will not earn it.

Explanation/P.S. I have a paper due at the end of the month on the theme of Hospitality and how it is developed in the Bible.

Christian Authenticity

Authenticity is contrasted with going along with the crowd. It is often regarded as lazy, thoughtless, and a being imprisoned by what others think. It is what Disney calls us to, saying "be yourself".






There is something very dangerous about this. It leads, in the form it is in today, to an individualistic rejection of authority, of doing things one's own way without much thought to how it will affect others, which is contrary to what the Bible teaches. It is, then, solipsistic in the end.

But we desire something in this. What is right and true and good in this which is now perverted?

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2015/november-web-only/illusion-of-respectability-allen-guelzo.html

The end of the above article sparked the thoughts to follow. In brief: it is when we recognize that we are under the good authority of God that we may ignore what others may think and truly find ourselves. It is only then that we may truly pursue what is truly mot valuable to us, to love the sweetness of God.

As Christians we are authentic in that we recognize who we truly are, as in the image of God, yet sinners, and are freed from sin, so that we are now justified sinners. We need not be concerned with what others think of us, for it is the judgment of God with which we are concerned.

We are enabled to do as we desire, and to desire what is truly good for us. Do what you want! But only once the Spirit has changed your hearts so that you want what is good. This is freedom: to love what is good.

Certainly, freedom is not to be found in mere legalistic obedience. The obedience to what others--not ourselves--desire is legalism. "Affirm this" "belittle that" this is the law of our age: to affirm all those who let anyone be, lest you be shamed and hated. The obedience to what God commands is an obedience born out of love for God and is therefore a free obedience, and because we know that our lives are hid with Christ, we are not afraid of the merely human punishments. Thus we are freed to do what we desire, when we desire the holiness of God.

This is not a freedom from right and wrong, but a freedom to do the right and avoid the wrong, as the Holy Spirit empowers us. And it is a freedom to admit when we do wrong, for our Father who is in heaven forgives us--even cleanses us from all unrighteousness.

This is not a freedom from authority, but a freedom found in the right authority. We will regard someone as the authority. If we regard others as our authority, then we will be enslaved to them. If we see ourselves as the authority, then we can never be wrong, and we deny our experience of life as finite and fallible. If you are the authority, then why do you feel guilt or shame? Why is there any need to apologize? Why do you submit to teachers who grade what you write, or to courts which say "do this"? If you are the authority, then what about me? If you are the authority, then truly "no rights, no wrongs, no rules for me"--or anyone else. Then why are you bothered by famine and war and terrorists?

Then to whom shall we submit as the rightful authority? Some say we must muddle along, doing as best we can. Then there is no one to adjudicate right from wrong, no court to which we may appeal for justice on the earth. In the end, we must appeal to some authority, and we must hope that someone will bring justice.

Do you appeal to the right side of history? How do you know that it will not turn out bad for you? Come, we expect justice. We all yearn for justice. If there is no one who will finally bring justice, then we yearn in vain. If it is up to us to bring justice, then we make ourselves the authorities.

Is there no way out? Is there no authority? Is there no one who will bring justice?

We proclaim that there is one to whom all authority has been given, who died to save us from our sins and brings justice, who will come again to judge the living and the dead. We are not the authorities, but we submit to the one who is. In this we find freedom from oppression, freedom from striving, and freedom from guilt and shame. Yes, even freedom from sin.

Therefore we proclaim the one who is greater then us. We proclaim because we are under compulsion, for so great is our love for him who saved us that we cannot resist but are burdened for those who have not heard that there is a king in heaven who will bring justice.

And because the one who saved us was regarded as a sinner, as accursed, so if we are counted sinners and accursed for his sake we will rejoice in that we are counted worthy to share in his suffering. I say "for his sake" for we do not desire to be counted sinners and accursed as those who are truly sinners and accursed are, those who reject our Lord and refuse his mercy. But if the world calls us evil for obeying the Father who made us at the first and who remade us in the image of Christ, then we have no reason to repent for we know that the God of justice calls us good and righteous and perfect in his Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.

So we do what our God commands, and we can do nothing else without being inauthentic to the new nature which has been placed within us by the Holy Spirit. For we see that we have been made a new creation, and are now called to live like it, to live in the truth in which we have been called. Indeed every command which we have from God is this: to be who we now are, his people, holy and blameless. To do otherwise would be the true being false to ourselves. And so we call out with the Gospel to those lost in darkness, to those who do not know themselves, that they are lost and in need of a savior, and in that savior they will find themselves.

The world is desperate to find themselves, but we have found ourselves in Christ. The world thinks it is free because it is a slave to its passions, but we have been freed from worldly passions, having been given the desires fit for us, the true love which is from God, and which has been evidenced in Jesus Christ who died to save us from our sins, not being willing to lose his handiwork, but being merciful towards us. The world does not know this love, and yet calls out "love, love" where there is no love.

Surely, their hatred devours them. For we hear how depression is on the rise, and though we know that we remain troubled by such things even as Christians, yet we also know what the world also knows, that depression is often an anger turned in toward oneself. But who are we to judge ourselves in this way? The Lord judges and he has justified us. But the world knows nothing of this justification, and so they  hate themselves for their imperfections and even for their finitude, for they think they are right to judge themselves, being their own authority. Behold, if we they have no grace toward themselves, how will they show grace to others? For this is why many commit suicide: because they have no hope. Yet we do have hope, and so let us cling to that hope and share that hope that some might be saved, and not only from this death but from the one to come. For it is by this hope that we hold on to the truth, not submitting to the falsehood which surrounds us, but keeping ourselves holy in the Lord.

We ourselves are not yet wholly purified, though we are pure before God, and God holds out mercy to us when we fall. So, then, if we find that we judge ourselves as if we were the authority in such matters, we must reach out to receive the grace which we received at first, to receive forgiveness from sins and remember that God has loved us with an unfailing love, not because we were good but because Christ is good and paid the debt we owed. Indeed, see how unlovable we find ourselves in such times, and know that we are more unrighteous in ourselves than we know, and then behold the grace of God, that he should love us so much that he would save us by sending his son, Jesus Christ our Lord, that whoever trusts this Jesus for forgiveness of sins is forgiven.

So it is that we are free, because when we sin we have forgiveness through Christ, and because we are being made perfect like Christ. So that when we find ourselves perfect in heaven--what we cannot imagine now--we shall say "this is who I truly am and was, and now I will be" yet now we must die to ourselves according to the flesh that we might become more like we will be, as we eagerly anticipate that perfection which is now so alien to us that we grasp for our old selves, though they are not who we were made to be. We find ourselves in this age so inauthentic that we do not know what true authenticity would look like, but in the day to come we will be fully, as we were meant to be, and as we are growing into, remade in the perfect image of Christ.

Appeal to Authority

Appeal to authority is commonly heard as the name of a fallacy. However, sometimes it is appropriate to appeal to an authority, as when we have questions about a topic which is generally relegated to experts, and where the experts are in relatively good agreement. If you want to know how far away the Earth is from the Sun, appeal to authority is fine, and just about the only way most of us will learn that information. Similarly, germ theory, basic genetic theory, and the top ten hits are all things we know, most of us (if we know them), on the basis of authority. The question, then, is when appeal to authority is fallacious.
 The most obvious case where appeal to authority is fallacious--and this is covered in any decent logic textbook--is when the authority is not an authority in the right field. Stephen Hawking on religion, or, the usual example, pick a celebrity on almost any topic.
 The other case where an appeal to authority is insufficient is when someone else can establish the contrary by appeal to an equally valid authority. This may be regarded as a subset of the above, but where no one can claim to be an authority on the issue. There are an enormous variety of cases where we depend on this kind of authority, however. Medical professions have many areas where we must follow some authority or another, but they disagree and are equally valid authorities. How are we to proceed? Here the concept of a burden of proof is helpful. The way we tend to go is to follow the established majority, which may or may not be right. We cannot all study the issues involved, so some kind of authority must be involved, but the authorities, on certain issues, disagree--and this is true in any scientific field, the issue is that in medicine we must go on.

So there is a puzzle here. We cannot simply appeal to anyone with a medical degree as an authority, but we cannot all get the proficiency with concepts required to evaluate the research ourselves--and if we did, we would likely have a smaller chance of getting at the truth than those whose profession it is. So, in general, we go with the majority unless we have encountered arguments and evidence which provide reason to think that the majority is suspect. Such arguments can be very difficult to evaluate, however, because they can easily use technical jargon which appears to establish a claim, yet which might not.

With issues like these it is helpful to step back and establish heuristics which we can apply to the conclusions, of the form "if the studies give x kind of conclusion, something has probably gone wrong." For example, if studies seem to show that we should, in general, eat in a radically different way than we have always eaten, either the reason should be shown in how we live radically differently (and there is probably an issue with how we are now living in that case) or something has probably gone quite wrong. Another might be, for a Christian, if studies show we should altogether avoid things which the Israelites were supposed to eat (e.g., meat, unleavened bread, wine), then something has likely gone wrong--which is not to say that we ought to eat the same as the Israelites did. Also, the right diet is liable to result in our enjoying food more. And those are just about diet. Things regarding surgery and other medication would be harder to establish, but hard thought could probably get some kind of conclusion-heuristic thinking running sufficiently to enable us to evaluate at some level the more disagreed upon practices. Some of that thinking goes on in bioethics, but this kind of thinking would be broader than that.

This kind of approach needs to be done carefully. We need to avoid gut-reaction kind of thinking that says "I don't think God would allow such-and-such" unless we have good reasons, grounded in Scripture, for thinking so. I have heard people who don't believe wormholes or time-travel are possible for this reason, which strikes me as odd. Our God is big enough to handle all sorts of things which might make us uncomfortable, and humans have, historically, been uncomfortable with all sorts of things. People once claimed that flight was impossible because if God had wanted us to fly he would have given us wings. These are cautionary tales of this kind of conclusion-heuristic thinking going wrong.

The final case that I intend to cover here is where the question is such that the idea of an authority on the issue is itself invalid. Again, this can be construed as a form of the first or second instances, where we are all counted as authorities and yet many reasonable people disagree. What is an example of this? In my view, there are some philosophical and theological issues which fall into this category. Even granted that Scripture is always a valid authority, the issues we address in theological and philosophical discourse usually cannot be settled by an appeal to another mere human's argument or view, even if that other person has a PhD in a relevant field. This does not mean that we all need to delve into such issues at the PhD level, and it does not mean that PhD's are no better off than the rest of us, but it does mean that if we are to claim a doctrine we should understand the arguments pro and con at some level, at least long enough to see how the arguments work. With theology, because it is always applied, we need to have enough of a grasp of where the doctrines come from to understand how they should work out, and to establish a great enough confidence to live them out. The conclusion-heuristic thinking approach can be helpful here, too. One very important criteria is this: does this doctrine either rest on or support the essential gospel of doctrines? That is, does the doctrine either show the cross in a more beautiful light or under gird the cross work of Jesus Christ? True doctrines tend to wind up at the cross at some point. True doctrines should serve to increase love for God and others.


Life under God is communal, and thus we have teachers in the Church, but it is also individual, and so we each must come to know and love God for ourselves.

Perspective on Evil

As human beings, we desire to see the big picture of what is going on. I think this is partly behind the success of news outlets: they give us a sense of knowing what is happening all over. And because we do not trust that someone is in control of things, we get upset by what is happening, and want to fix things. But we cannot.

Anyone can recognize that worrying about the direction the world is headed does not do any good. Many recognize that we surely are not all supposed to uproot our lives to do something about it, and even that if we did, we likely would make only a small dent in things. Others devote themselves to causes, good causes, but so often the cause becomes all that matters.

The true worldview must be able to handle this situation. That is, whatever is ultimately true, it must enable us both to care about the sorrows of this world, and yet live balanced lives. It is ironic that the extremes tend to be callousness toward sorrows and caring about some cause, and that the causes can so often overshadow people. People become so passionate about causes that they no longer care about other people.

We must see even our causes as overshadowed by something greater, or our causes will become more ultimate than the people we claim to serve.

"And when you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. This must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. These are but the beginning of the birth pains.

"But be on your guard. For they will deliver you over to counsels, and you will be beaten in synagogues, and you will stand before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them. And the gospel must first be proclaimed to all nations. And when they bring you to trial and deliver you over, do not be anxious beforehand what you are to say, but say whatever is given you in that hour, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit. And brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death. And you will be hated by all for my name's sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved" Mark 13:7-13

 In this passage, Jesus places the news into perspective. The bad stuff--and it is bad--is to be expected. Expected, but not minimized. Yet it is placed in perspective by the last sentence: "But the one who endures to the end will be saved" There is a hope that we hold, that there is a God who holds the whole world in his hands, and who will, in the end, make all things right. So we work hard to make things better now, but we know we will not make things all better, for only God can, and God will. It is in light of the finished work of Christ that we can claim that we already have the victory, and this enables us to care, knowing that God, too cares. And it enables us to put causes in perspective, caring for others with the love of God, which we have seen in Christ, rather than caring first about what we do, for in Christ it is all done.