Where is God when things go wrong?

Where is God when things go wrong?

by John Blanchard

The appalling devastation following the recent tsunamis in south-east Asia have had countless people asking the age-old question, ‘Where is God when things go wrong?’

A reader’s letter published in the Daily Telegraph put into print the conclusion reached by many: ‘Those with religious beliefs are surely right to consider that a national disaster is a test of their faith. On the abundant available evidence does it not seem that, if there is or was a God, it is now malevolent, mad or dead?’

The prima facie case against the idea of an all-powerful, all-loving God is simply put. How could such a God preside over natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, volcanoes and hurricanes, sweeping thousands of people to their deaths in a matter of hours?

Can he really be the Creator of the many living organisms, from poisonous vegetation to viruses, which can disfigure, dismember or destroy us? Can he possibly be standing idly by while millions of accidents wound and kill countless people every day? Is he benignly supervising ‘man’s inhumanity to man’, from international wars to one-on-one violence?

Hopeless encounter

Many people go beyond accusing God of impotence or worse and simply declare that he does not exist. But this conclusion raises critical questions. If we are biological accidents rather than part of God’s creation, why should we be remotely concerned at other ‘accidents’ such as natural disasters?

If we are the chance products of mindless evolution, how can we make moral judgements that define good and evil, just and unjust? How do conscience and our sense of personal obligation have any traction if we reject our creation by an all-righteous God?

Strange as it may seem to many, our perception of evil and suffering points towards the existence of God, not away from it! Getting rid of God leaves us trapped in what Jean-Paul Sartre called ‘that hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silence of the universe’.

The Bible does not give us all the answers to our anguished questions on the subject of evil and suffering, but that should not surprise us. God’s transcendence puts the understanding of his sovereign ways beyond our finite understanding and he is under no obligation to tell us everything we want to know.

Yet being left with doubts is not the same as being left in the dark. The Bible tells us all we need to know — and begins at the beginning.

Uncomfortable idea

God created the world without blemish and crowned his creation with humanity, made ‘in his own image’ (Genesis 1:27). Everything was ecologically and ethically perfect until Adam first sinned — wrecking his relationship with God, shattering his own personality, condemning his own body to decay, disease and death, and throwing the whole cosmos out of sync.

As the representative head of the human race, Adam took the entire species with him. As a result, we are all by nature rebels against God, and contribute repeatedly to the world’s sin, sadness and suffering.

The argument that an all-powerful, all-holy God would intervene to prevent evil leads logically to an uncomfortable idea — that in moral matters we would be reduced to the role of puppets, not responsible for a single word, thought or deed (good or bad). But this is not what the Bible teaches!

Beyond understanding

While making it crystal clear that God decrees everything that happens, the Bible teaches that he is neither the author of sin nor in any way implicated. Instead, it tells us that human beings are free, responsible and accountable moral agents, answerable to him for every thought, word and deed.

Then where is God when natural disasters happen and when moral evil leads to pain and suffering? Exactly where he was at the moment of the world’s greatest sin and suffering — the crucifixion of his beloved Son, Jesus Christ.

Then he was in complete control of an event brought about with ‘the help of wicked men’ but which nevertheless took place according to ‘God’s set purpose and foreknowledge’ (Acts 2:23).

Analysing how this could be so is utterly beyond our finite understanding. As Don Carson puts it, God’s way of working ‘defies our attempt to tame it by reason … we do not know enough to be able to unpack it and domesticate it’.

Compassion on the needy

Traumatic experiences often put this conviction to the test — but the test can be passed. One survivor of Hitler’s notorious Holocaust wrote that during his time in an extermination camp he never once questioned God’s action or inaction.

He wrote, ‘It never occurred to me to associate the calamity we were experiencing with God — to blame him or believe in him less, or cease believing in him at all because he didn’t come to our aid.

‘God doesn’t owe us that, or anything. We owe our lives to him. If someone believes that God is responsible for the death of six million because he doesn’t somehow do something to save them, he’s got his thinking reversed.’

One last thing. God is in compassionate control when things go wrong, graciously pointing to our limitations and to our utter dependence upon him.

He diverts our attention from time to eternity, warning us of an eternal day of reckoning, yet promising to comfort, strengthen and enable all who commit their cause to him — the one who is ‘gracious and compassionate’ (Psalm 111:4) and who pours out his ‘unfailing love’ (Psalm 33:5) on all who truly turn to him.

http://www.evangelical-times.org/articles/mar05/mar05a15.htm

Turner’s Creed on The Modern Mind

Turner’s Creed
An excerpt from Ravi Zacharias’ book “Can Man Live Without God?” Steve Turner says “No!”…But we try all the time….

Creed
by Steve Turner

We believe in Marxfreudanddarwin

We believe everything is OK

as long as you don’t hurt anyone

to the best of your definition of hurt,

and to the best of your knowledge.

We believe in sex before, during, and

after marriage.

We believe in the therapy of sin.

We believe that adultery is fun.

We believe that sodomy’s OK.

We believe that taboos are taboo.

We believe that everything’s getting better

despite evidence to the contrary.

The evidence must be investigated

And you can prove anything with evidence.

We believe there’s something in horoscopes

UFO’s and bent spoons.

Jesus was a good man just like Buddha,

Mohammed, and ourselves.

He was a good moral teacher though we think

His good morals were bad.

We believe that all religions are basically the same-

at least the one that we read was.

They all believe in love and goodness.

They only differ on matters of creation,

sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation.

We believe that after death comes the Nothing

Because when you ask the dead what happens

they say nothing.

If death is not the end, if the dead have lied, then its

compulsory heaven for all

excepting perhaps

Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Kahn

We believe in Masters and Johnson

What’s selected is average.

What’s average is normal.

What’s normal is good.

We believe in total disarmament.

We believe there are direct links between warfare and

bloodshed.

Americans should beat their guns into tractors .

And the Russians would be sure to follow.

We believe that man is essentially good.

It’s only his behavior that lets him down.

This is the fault of society.

Society is the fault of conditions.

Conditions are the fault of society.

We believe that each man must find the truth that

is right for him.

Reality will adapt accordingly.

The universe will readjust.

History will alter.

We believe that there is no absolute truth

excepting the truth

that there is no absolute truth.

We believe in the rejection of creeds,

And the flowering of individual thought.

If chance be

the Father of all flesh,

disaster is his rainbow in the sky

and when you hear

State of Emergency!

Sniper Kills Ten!

Troops on Rampage!

Whites go Looting!

Bomb Blasts School!

It is but the sound of man

worshipping his maker.

Steve Turner, (English journalist), “Creed,” his satirical poem on the modern mind. Taken from Ravi Zacharias’ book Can Man live Without God? Pages 42-44

Ten Commandments: Do legal principles support the Court’s split decision?

News analysis
Ten Commandments: Do legal principles support the Court’s split decision?
Also: Implications of the end of O’Connor’s swing vote

July 6, 2005
Fred Hutchison
RenewAmerica analyst
http://www.renewamerica.us/analyses/050705hutchison.htm

The Supreme Court issued a split decision Monday, June 26, concerning state government displays of the Ten Commandments. The Texas state capitol was allowed to display the Ten Commandments in one case (Van Orden vs. Perry). On the other hand, two Kentucky county courthouses were forbidden to display the Ten Commandments in another case (McCreary vs. ACLU). The court intends to sort out such displays on a “case by case basis.” Interestingly, both cases were decided by five-to-four decisions, and the deciding swing vote was different in each case.

O’Connor-Breyer law

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a moderate judge, was often the unpredictable swing vote in 5-4 decisions. Her announced resignation on Friday, July 1, is poignant because she voted against both Texas and Kentucky in the Ten Commandments cases. Her resignation came six days after this negative set of votes.

O’Connor has a reputation for deciding her vote based upon the feel of a case. However, a non-rational swing vote does not necessarily result in irrational law. That is because the judge assigned to write an opinion for a 5-4 decision has an opportunity to use rational legal principles in defense of the majority opinion. Is that what happened with the Ten Commandment split decision? The question can be answered by ascertaining whether the difference between the two Ten Commandments decisions can be supported by consistent legal principles.

Judge Stephen G. Breyer, who votes with the liberal circle of judges more often than not, sometimes surprises expectations and makes a cameo appearance as a swing voter. He voted against the Kentucky courts, but voted with the majority to accept the display of the Ten Commandments in the Texas case. He issued a separate concurring opinion so he could explain the criteria that guided him to part company with the liberals plus O’Connor in the Texas case, but to join them in the Kentucky case. In his moments as a temporary moderate, Breyer has a knack for writing an opinion to rationalize a close court decision. Rationalizations can be good or bad, of course. When we have O’Connor-style decisions rationalized by Breyer, we must weigh Breyer’s analysis to see if it provides a sound basis for consistent law.

Consistent legal principle

Breyer calls for case-by-case decisions for Ten Commandment cases because he regards many of them “borderline” in constitutionality. Borderline cases might be decided by feel, judgment call, the application of evolving criteria, or the analysis of enduring legal principles. O’Connor tends to decide her votes by an unpredictable mix of feel and judgment call. Breyer uses evolving criteria to decide borderline cases. He specifically said that the Texas case is borderline.

Judge Antonin Scalia is troubled by the split decision and Breyer’s use of evolving criteria. Said Scalia in his dissenting opinion in the Kentucky case, “What distinguishes the rule of law from the dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority is the absolutely indispensable requirement that judicial opinions be grounded in consistently applied principle.” Consistent legal principles help to secure a government of laws and not men. Scalia is worried that evolving criteria opens the door to arbitrary court judgments that can lead to a government of arbitrary will of men, and not laws. Scalia thundered his dissent in robust language, calling arbitrary swing decisions rationalized by evolving criteria a “dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court Majority.” This colorful phrase by a master of rhetoric can never be forgotten once it is heard. I imagine the crystal chandeliers in the courtroom rattled as O’Connor and Breyer were hit by the shockwaves. Sandra Day O’Connor, a frail, irritable, fading light, is retiring from the court, and no longer has to face the magisterial terribiltas of Scalia.

Law and motives

That said, why did Breyer vote to allow the Texas state capitol to display the Ten Commandments, but vote to not allow the Kentucky courts to display them? Both depictions were part of a montage of displays and monuments to cultural and legal history. Breyer said that he distrusts the motives of the individuals who installed the Kentucky display, but can accept the Texas displays as a borderline case of mixed motives. Before we consider Breyer’s evolving criteria, which contributes to his distrust of the motives in the Kentucky court officials, we must consider what motives have to do legality.

Motives are subtle, tricky, slippery things that are hard to get at, but sometimes are a factor in crime. Motives for a crime are sometimes instrumental, but never wholly sufficient, in establishing who is the guilty party. Hercule Poirot was baffled in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, because everyone in the first class passenger car had both motive and opportunity.

Motives may also help to determine the seriousness of a crime. Manslaughter is different from premeditated murder, because the motives are different. However, a crime must occur before the issue of motives becomes legally relevant. Poirot did not begin to search for motives until he observed the dead body. Some states do not recognize a homicide without a dead body. Others require convincing evidence of death if the body is missing.

The violation of law is an objective event because it involves an overt action that violates a specific law. Thus, the existence of crime must be established in court as an objective verifiable fact. One might have evil motives and desire to commit murder, but no crime exists if one has taken no action to commit murder or to conspire or arrange a murder. A crime in the mind or heart might offend God, but only human action can violate human law.

A judge must determine if an objective violation of law has occurred when a state official displays the Ten Commandments before the consideration of motives is relevant. There is no specific law or constitutional clause that expressly forbids displaying the commandments in public places. Therefore, a determination must be made of how a public display of the commandments violates a particular prohibition in the Constitution — or there is no legal issue. Until the fact of a violation of law is established, any discussion of motives is a red herring. Certain factors — such as motives, context, and history, which Judge Breyer emphasized — might play a role later in the trial, but are extraneous until a violation of law is clear. An astute legal analysis will cut away things like motives, context, and history with “Occam’s Razor,” so that the objective essence (or “thing-in-itself”) can be seen. (William of Occam, 14th century English philosopher, proposed a “razor” to peel away layers of complex information like peeling an onion to reach the simple straightforward truth that lies at the core.)

Fuzzy logic and bad grammar

Breyer began his logical process with a vague assumption about the “thing-in-itself,” when he asserted that the Ten Commandment displays are “religious symbols.” When the presupposition is shaky, all the logic that follows will be shaky. After his fuzzy beginning, Breyer switched to “motives, context, and history” as his criteria for determining if a borderline case is acceptable. Notice how he moved to the more superficial factors before he proved why the displays are religious symbols or explained how this violates the Constitution. Presumptions about motives can be even more fuzzy and subjective than Breyer’s unexamined presupposition of “religious symbols.” The analysis of context and history as a rationalization for a fuzzy presupposition must be spun in spidery threads. Breyer built a cotton candy house upon a marshmallow foundation.

Breyer’s errors can be set right by a freshmen course in logic. Build a case for your main presupposition, instead of making an assertion and rushing forward into particulars that do not prove the assertion. Argue from a rock-solid presupposition, and do not to confuse the thing-in-itself (the “numina”) with its superficial covering (the “phenomena”). Establish the major premise of your syllogism with great care, before going on to your minor premise. If a college debater makes his major premise by arbitrary assertion, his debate opponent will destroy him in rebuttal, because his major premise is floating in air without support.

Breyer’s errors could have been avoided if he had listened to his grammar school teacher who taught him not to confuse subject and object. When people stop speaking correctly, they stop thinking clearly. The object contains the thing-in-itself, and the subject is the person who perceives, acts, or has motives in relation to the object. A Ten Commandments display is an objective reality open to legal scrutiny, and is also the object of a logical statement or sentence. The official who has a subjective bundle of motives is the subject of a sentence. Breyer has confused subject and object, and has embarrassed his grammar school teacher.

As the fictional Sherlock Holmes used to say, the error is “elementary.” At one time, a liberal education rooted out a student’s elementary errors through grammar and logic. A course in Quintilian’s rhetoric did the job beautifully. The humanities, which once served as the core curriculum at colleges, are now replaced by a smorgasbord of superficial electives. The surviving humanities have been gutted and neutralized by multiculturalism. This system produces people who make decisions like O’Connor and rationalize their decisions like Breyer. An advanced civilization cannot long be sustained by those who are not in command of the basics of elementary education.

“Religion” malapropisms

The use of vague, slippery words is another evidence of a deficit in elementary education. An elementary education is successful if one writes and speaks clearly, because he has selected and framed precise words to convey sharply defined ideas. The word “religion,” for example, can be used in a very specific sense, but Breyer uses the word in a way that is broad, vague, and blurs his meaning.

Breyer calls a display of the Ten Commandments a “religious symbol.” Before we can comment upon this loaded label, we must unpack the words. First of all, what is the definition of religion? In common usage, it can be many things, including a system of faith and worship, a set of doctrinal or theological beliefs, a religious order, a set of spiritual exercises, a belief in a supreme being, or devotion to a principle. The First Amendment refers to religion only in context of “an establishment of religion.” The magnificently educated gentlemen founders who penned this line understood that the word “establishment” imparted to “religion” a precise meaning. The only definition of religion that fits “the establishment of religion” is a denomination, or religious order, or other institution that men can organize and establish. The founding fathers were concerned about the issue of Christian denominations that were the established churches of certain states. This is the only definition of religion that has any traction in the Constitution. Does the display of the Ten Commandments by a state agency constitute the establishment of a religious denomination by the state? Of course not.

The endorsement muddle

Breyer says that “endorsement of religion” is what offends the court in the Kentucky case. “Endorsement” is one thing and “establishment” is another. O’Connor-Breyer law has wandered far from the Constitution, unless there is a logical necessity that an endorsement must swiftly deteriorate into an establishment. Only the most imaginative or paranoid person could suppose that an endorsement of “religion” by a state is evidence that the state has established a religious institution or is on the verge of doing so.

Is a Ten Commandments display an “endorsement?” The Ten Commandments are a condensation of God’s law, the universal moral law. Can the display of law be an endorsement? Were the state officials of Texas and Kentucky saying to the public, “We approve of the Ten Commandments and recommend that you approve of them too?” That is unlikely. God’s law judges us and condemns us because we don’t obey it. Both God and man’s law warns to us against evil behavior, stings our consciences, warns us of consequences and establishes the limits of behavior that will be tolerated. The posting of law–such as the Ten Commandments–is a warning, not an endorsement.

So far, Breyer’s malapropisms include “religion” and “endorsement.” These muddles are made worse by a misunderstanding of the nature of law. Breyer is a vocabulary-challenged judge and has lost his way in the realm of words. Yet another consequence of a weak elementary education.

A religious symbol?

Are the Ten Commandments a “religious symbol,” as Breyer says? A symbol is a sign with a “referent,” which is an object of meaning to which the sign points. Religious symbols can be an aid to worship because they point to divine objects that can be worshiped. But suddenly, we are thrown into a definition of religion quite different from the kind of religion implicit in the establishment clause of the Constitution. O’Connor-Breyer law uses a slippery definition of “religion” that varies according to O’Connor’s fluctuating moods and Breyer’s changing needs for rationalization.

Is there any conceivable definition of “religious symbol” that fits a display of the Ten Commandments? There are two: (1) A religious legalist might believe obedience to the universal moral law is “religion,” and that the Ten Commandments are a symbol of that religion; and (2) A religious mystic might use an image of the Ten Commandments as a symbol of the holiness of God, and use it as an aid to worship. Both of these practices are possible but rare. Neither the legalist nor the mystic would be offended by a public display of the Ten Commandments.

The ACLU law of hurt feelings

The ACLU case that prevailed in Kentucky expressly represents those offended by the displays. No one who is offended by the displays would ever view them as a religious symbols in the manner of the legalist or the mystic. He would only call it a “religious symbol,” if he misunderstood what a religious symbol is.

What the existence of a party with hurt feelings has to do with law, I do not know, but ACLU lawyers have pitched their tents in the swampy campground of “law as hurt feelings.” Law must always hurt someone’s feelings. The attempt to abolish hurt feelings would require the abolition of law itself.

The ACLU goes a step further and condemns hurt feelings even if they are caused by the ignorance of the person offended. If one is offended because he misunderstands what he sees when he looks at a Ten Commandments display, the ACLU proposes that his “rights” were violated. Anyone who is offended by the display of the Ten Commandments because he thought it was a religious symbol would fall into this category. Judges like O’Connor might have a bad feel about a case if they thought someone was offended, even if the purported offense came through ignorance.

What if someone was offended for the right reason? The commands of God are offensive because they convict man of sin. Could the ACLU claim someone’s rights were violated because they were offended by the displayed commandments in this way? Not at all. The Ten Commandments are an equal opportunity offender. They offend people of every creed and people of no creed. The Ten Commandments are nondenominational and ecumenical. They are no respecter of any would-be established church. They indiscriminately offend both free-thinking theists and confessors of creeds with conviction of sin. “Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped and all the world may be guilty before God.” (Romans 3:19)

The ACLU might argue that the posting of the Ten Commandments discriminates between religion and irreligion. Not so. Firstly, morality is not precisely the same thing as religion. Breyer said it is OK if something displays a moral message, but not OK if it is too “religious.” Secondly, the Ten Commandments equally offend the religious and the irreligious. The universal moral law is written upon all men’s hearts. That is precisely why it challenges and offends the conscience of every person. Even atheists who embrace natural law theory agree with this. That is why a display of the Ten Commandments is compatible with the statue of the blindfolded lady who hold the scales and the words “Equal justice under the law” inscribed over the main entrance to the Supreme Court. This is a phrase from the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

An artificial dilemma

Breyer said that the relationship between government and religion should be “separation,” but not “hostility and suspicion.” He may still be stung by President Ronald Reagan’s statement that the courts had become hostile to religion. Breyer explained that his effort to balance separation and non-hostility brings about difficult borderline cases in which a one-size-fits all test is not possible. This was an implicit admission that there will be no consistent legal principles, only evolving criteria.

I am sure that Breyer regards this delicate balancing act as sophisticated and wise. However, his evolving criteria for case-by-case judgment is an engine to stir up legal confusion like clouds of dust.

This legal tempest is all a futile and unnecessary exercise. Breyer’s balancing act is an effort to solve a dilemma created by the court. The court incorrectly supposes that the Constitution decrees that “religion” defined in a broad vague way must be separated by a “wall” from government. The Constitution says no such thing, of course. As courts expanded their fuzzy definition of religion, and secularists became more allergic to the slightest taint of religion, the wall of separation was built higher and higher. The court tried to make the state a bastion of pure secularism quarantined from the plague of religion. We could not come to this strained artificial situation without a powerful hostility to religion by secular elites and a legal system ready to pounce on any creature from the jungle of the religion that got over the sun-bleached and sterile walls of secularism.

Breyer’s criteria

Breyer’s criteria are the motives, context, and history of a display and also whether the display has a “predominantly secular message.” Texas passed the history test because its display was forty years old. This “grandfather clause” allows respect for the past. Respect for the past is a good thing, but how can the passage of time make an illegal thing legal? How does time make display more secular? How does long acceptance and veneration make something secular? Are we not more likely to venerate old monuments with an almost religious reverence and show less reverence for new displays? Breyer is getting things backwards. He is multiplying the confusion because he is balancing apples against oranges.

The display of the Ten Commandments among secular monuments to the past helped to bring the Texas display into a borderline situation. Does a “religious” item tucked away amidst “secular” monuments somehow get cleansed of the taint of “religion?” Does this “cleansing” make it smell better to the ACLU? How does secular camouflage transform the illegal to the illegal? Does the presence of secular items somehow tame and domesticate the religious “animal?” If the animal reverted to a state of nature would it grow vicious? Is Breyer trying to sort the religious “animals” and separate the wild from the tame?

The Ten Commandments displays in the Kentucky court houses were of more recent vintage than the one in Texas, and other secular symbols were added later in an effort to meet court approval. Somehow, Breyer took this as evidence of a religious purpose. Why a recent display must be interpreted as having a religious purpose that an old display does not was never explained. Breyer assumed that because the secular parts of the Kentucky displays were added later, the original display must have had a religious motivation. The

later additions must be a deceitful cover up. But why should Kentucky be punished because their officials were trying to meet arbitrary court standards? “We caught you trying to satisfy us and obey the law! Therefore, you must be guilty.” Only jaundiced suspicions could lead one to get things so backwards. Perhaps, Breyer is only suspicious of living Christians who make new religious displays, but is reverent towards dead Christians who made the old religious displays. “Our religious forebears were honorable folk, but our religious contemporaries are sinister.”

Consider some of the fallacies: (1) A recent date of creation proves religious motives. (2) Time gradually transforms the illegal and sinister to the legal and honorable. (3) Adding secular items after a display has been set up proves improper motives. (4) Adding later items in order to obey the law represents violating the law. (5) Incorrect motives can determine whether a violation of the law occurred. (6) A judge has godlike power to see the heart and read human motives. (7) Religious motives of living religious people are sinister and the object of suspicion by a judge. (8) Religious motives of people who have been dead a long time must have been honorable. (9) A judge’s suspicion makes legal things illegal in borderline cases. These are the fallacies of a child, a person with inadequate education, or a person trapped in irrational myths.

Passive-aggressive justice

The Kentucky officials must have felt that they had been to a kangaroo court. O’Connor’s vote against Kentucky because she had a bad feeling about it and Breyer’s negative suspicions, upside down logic, and confused comparing of apples and oranges must have felt like a no-win situation. The automatic anti-religion vote of the three liberal judges rounded out the 5-4 decision against Kentucky. Kentucky could not prepare an adequate defense, because the arbitrary law of the O’Connor-Breyer court is unpredictable. Their mad-hatter law fluctuates so rapidly that one has no consistent legal principles to stand behind. This is the very nature of a lawless protection-racket state where there is no shelter of law for the weak to hide under from the arbitrary whims of the powerful. As a result, the weak must pretend to be free, while playing the game of their protection-racket masters.

In this case, the masters are a passive-aggressive court that serves the interests of a liberal elite. The passive-aggressive personality disorder is in essence a cluster of behaviors designed to mask an anti-social strain while finding sly ways of being subversive. O’Connor has an antisocial, irrational “whim of iron” cloaked in softness and decorum. Breyer is a passive-aggressive rationalizer who presents himself as seeking to avoid conflict and hostility, while secretly he is driven by antisocial suspicion and malice. His logical fuzziness and shifting concepts are reminiscent of the double-bind head games played by the passive-aggressive. These folks hate unambiguous law, such as the Ten Commandments and a jurisprudence of consistent principles, because it spoils their game and reduces their power.

Justice broken “lock, stock, and barrel”

Every component of Breyer’s rationale to accept the Texas case and reject the Kentucky case is either fuzzy or fallacious. There is no sound legal principle anywhere to be found in these wretched muddles. It is like a gun with a jammed lock, a broken stock, and a crooked barrel. Before the gun will shoot, most of the parts must be replaced. In such a case, why not just buy a new gun? The retirement of O’Connor offers the opportunity to bring in a new judge who is a legal craftsman of consistent legal principles. With O’Connor gone, there will hopefully be fewer 5-4 decisions based upon feelings and fewer opportunities for Breyer-defended kangaroo courts.

RenewAmerica analyst Fred Hutchison also writes a column for RenewAmerica.

© 2005 Fred Hutchison

Thanks, Da Vinci Code

Thanks, Da Vinci Code
The book sends us back to Christianity’s “founding fathers”—and the Bible we share with them
by Chris Armstrong | posted 11/14/2003

It’s been a while since Christian History got an online response to rival the emails that poured in after last week’s “Behind the News”. We enjoyed reading your responses to staff writer Collin Hansen’s fact-checking piece on Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.

One thing that encouraged us about your letters is this: In the face of spurious claims from a man who poses himself as a historian even as he writes a novel (“All descriptions of … documents … in this novel are accurate”), some of you turned to the apostles and church fathers, to see what they and their Bible really had to say about the divinity of Jesus Christ.

Anything that leads people back to those dynamic early centuries of the church can only help the Christian cause. Obviously no human untruth can obscure the truth of the Gospel. And the first thing you notice when you read the early “church fathers” is that they are completely convinced Jesus is God himself. I’m talking about those bishops and teachers from the 100s and 200s too—long before the Nicean council (Brown claims) enforced on the church the supposedly minority position of Christ’s divinity.

True, few Christians need the knock-down argument that these earliest teachers provide—at least, to convince themselves that Jesus is God. We may find that early testimony helpful in talking with those who have become muddled by Brown’s book. Or to respond to those who have grabbed hold of that book’s “historical” arguments as a blunt instrument against a faith they already dislike.

But the church’s earliest teachers—Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and others—provide us with many more valuable things.

These were, after all, the church’s “founding fathers.” I don’t mean that in the precise political sense used by the Catholic and Anglican confessions: that today’s bishops and popes stand in a direct, traceable succession with all the other bishops (for many of the “fathers” were bishops) back to Peter. Rather, I’m talking about the process of discernment that played itself out in the church’s first centuries.

Make no mistake, the questions the first Bible scholars and theologians wrestled to the mat were some of the most momentous ever decided in the church. The question of how the man Jesus could be (as he and the apostles claimed) God himself was only the first of these.

The early fathers also asked how Jesus could be both wholly divine and wholly human—having two natures in one person. They asked which documents being circulated and read in the early congregations could be trusted to continue building up that church in the “nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4, KJV) They asked which of these were most consistent with the first eyewitness reports and, especially, the continued experience of a Jesus who still lived and moved and had his being in his people—the Body of Christ.

But these thinkers faced another crucial question about the Bible—beyond identifying the books that, by the church’s second century, had already begun to form themselves into a recognizable New Testament. They asked, what do we do with the Scriptures that Jesus himself used, which describe who God is and how he has dealt with his people before we showed up? That is, how do we read the Torah?

By a few decades after the resurrection, when the church had launched out from its original Jewish population base and was spreading through the empire like a firestorm, this was the question of the hour. The Greek-speaking gentiles, used to their philosophers’ high-toned, abstract teachings about a God who was “thought thinking itself,” just didn’t know what to do with the Hebrew Scripture. It was so—well—”earthy.” The God in its pages was always getting his hands dirty in the affairs of humans—kings, wars, marriages. And the Hebrews described God’s character with such startlingly concrete, personal metaphors and terms—wings, hands, emotions.

Moreover, how were the early gentile Christians to find life-giving instruction from the Torah’s long passages about wars, genealogies, and ceremonial law—linked to an ethnic people to which they did not belong and a temple that had been destroyed in A.D. 70? Surely these Scriptures had been preserved in order to prepare the world for Christ. But where in their pages was the Christian reader authorized to find him?

So the Bible teachers of those first centuries had daunting work to do. And they did not do it in dusty libraries and obscure classroom debates, as we might imagine from looking at the faith-detached work of some modern academic Bible scholars. Rather, the fathers (and mothers!) of the church approached Scripture reverently and with joy. They found in it the Fountain—the source of everything that mattered.

Irenaeus, Origen, and the rest studied the Hebrew Bible (though usually in Greek translation), along with the apostles’ documents that would become the New Testament, with an almost physical thirst for God and his truth. They read them in settings marked by worship and the pursuit of holiness. And they believed that as they read and submitted their lives to the Word and their thoughts to Christ, the Holy Spirit was at work to open the eyes of their hearts and to build his church so “the gates of hell will not overcome it” (Matt. 16:18, NIV).

What came out of those “first Bible studies”? Only the central doctrines of the church, and some of the most exciting, challenging (and yes, sometimes downright strange) interpretive work that has ever been done on the Christian Scriptures. Think these first teachers are worth reading? You bet.

John Chrysostom, Athanasius, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Gregory of Nazianzus—Christian History is trying to do our bit to bring today’s Christians back to these names, which have become obscure to us. Our Fall 2003 issue is dedicated to these and other early Bible teachers, their interpretive techniques, and the questions they asked and answered.

Working on this issue has stirred in me again the passion for Bible study that I first experienced as a college-aged convert. I hope the issue, which will begin mailing at the end of this month (November), will provide to many readers the same experience.

As we do for each issue, we will also be featuring a new article from issue #80, “The First Bible Teachers: Reading over the shoulders of the church’s founding fathers,” each week on www.christianhistory.net, starting on December 19th. Meanwhile, if you want to explore the fathers’ interactions with the Bible, check out Christopher A. Hall’s Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers (InterVarsity Press, 1998). Or, for a thorough soaking in the early fathers’ own writings, see any volume of InterVarsity’s new Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture.

“Don’t know much about history,” croons the song. That’s surely the condition of the church today. So the editors at Christian History celebrate when something comes along—yes, even the Da Vinci Code—to remind us that the best path to the church’s future is through our shared past.

Chris Armstrong is managing editor of Christian History magazine.

Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Breaking The Da Vinci Code

Breaking The Da Vinci Code
So the divine Jesus and infallible Word emerged out of a fourth-century power-play? Get real.
By Collin Hansen | posted 11/07/2003

Perhaps you’ve heard of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. This fictional thriller has captured the coveted number one sales ranking at Amazon.com, camped out for 32 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List, and inspired a one-hour ABC News special. Along the way, it has sparked debates about the legitimacy of Western and Christian history.

While the ABC News feature focused on Brown’s fascination with an alleged marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, The Da Vinci Code contains many more (equally dubious) claims about Christianity’s historic origins and theological development. The central claim Brown’s novel makes about Christianity is that “almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false.” Why? Because of a single meeting of bishops in 325, at the city of Nicea in modern-day Turkey. There, argues Brown, church leaders who wanted to consolidate their power base (he calls this, anachronistically, “the Vatican” or “the Roman Catholic church”) created a divine Christ and an infallible Scripture—both of them novelties that had never before existed among Christians.

Watershed at Nicea
Brown is right about one thing (and not much more). In the course of Christian history, few events loom larger than the Council of Nicea in 325. When the newly converted Roman Emperor Constantine called bishops from around the world to present-day Turkey, the church had reached a theological crossroads.

Led by an Alexandrian theologian named Arius, one school of thought argued that Jesus had undoubtedly been a remarkable leader, but he was not God in flesh. Arius proved an expert logician and master of extracting biblical proof texts that seemingly illustrated differences between Jesus and God, such as John 14:28: “the Father is greater than I.” In essence, Arius argued that Jesus of Nazareth could not possibly share God the Father’s unique divinity.

In The Da Vinci Code, Brown apparently adopts Arius as his representative for all pre-Nicene Christianity. Referring to the Council of Nicea, Brown claims that “until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet … a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless.”

In reality, early Christians overwhelmingly worshipped Jesus Christ as their risen Savior and Lord. Before the church adopted comprehensive doctrinal creeds, early Christian leaders developed a set of instructional summaries of belief, termed the “Rule” or “Canon” of Faith, which affirmed this truth. To take one example, the canon of prominent second-century bishop Irenaeus took its cue from 1 Corinthians 8:6: “Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ.”

The term used here—Lord, Kyrios—deserves a bit more attention. Kyrios was used by the Greeks to denote divinity (though sometimes also, it is true, as a simple honorific). In the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint, pre-dating Christ), this term became the preferred substitution for “Jahweh,” the holy name of God. The Romans also used it to denote the divinity of their emperor, and the first-century Jewish writer Josephus tells us that the Jews refused to use it of the emperor for precisely this reason: only God himself was kyrios.

The Christians took over this usage of kyrios and applied it to Jesus, from the earliest days of the church. They did so not only in Scripture itself (which Brown argues was doctored after Nicea), but in the earliest extra-canonical Christian book, the Didache, which scholars agree was written no later than the late 100s. In this book, the earliest Aramaic-speaking Christians refer to Jesus as Lord.

In addition, pre-Nicene Christians acknowledged Jesus’s divinity by petitioning God the Father in Christ’s name. Church leaders, including Justin Martyr, a second-century luminary and the first great church apologist, baptized in the name of the triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—thereby acknowledging the equality of the one Lord’s three distinct persons.

The Council of Nicea did not entirely end the controversy over Arius’s teachings, nor did the gathering impose a foreign doctrine of Christ’s divinity on the church. The participating bishops merely affirmed the historic and standard Christian beliefs, erecting a united front against future efforts to dilute Christ’s gift of salvation.

“Fax from Heaven”?
With the Bible playing a central role in Christianity, the question of Scripture’s historic validity bears tremendous implications. Brown claims that Constantine commissioned and bankrolled a staff to manipulate existing texts and thereby divinize the human Christ.

Yet for a number of reasons, Brown’s speculations fall flat. Brown correctly points out that “the Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven.” Indeed, the Bible’s composition and consolidation may appear a bit too human for the comfort of some Christians. But Brown overlooks the fact that the human process of canonization had progressed for centuries before Nicea, resulting in a nearly complete canon of Scripture before Nicea or even Constantine’s legalization of Christianity in 313.

Ironically, the process of collecting and consolidating Scripture was launched when a rival sect produced its own quasi-biblical canon. Around 140 a Gnostic leader named Marcion began spreading a theory that the New and Old Testaments didn’t share the same God. Marcion argued that the Old Testament’s God represented law and wrath while the New Testament’s God, represented by Christ, exemplified love. As a result Marcion rejected the Old Testament and the most overtly Jewish New Testament writings, including Matthew, Mark, Acts, and Hebrews. He manipulated other books to downplay their Jewish tendencies. Though in 144 the church in Rome declared his views heretical, Marcion’s teaching sparked a new cult. Challenged by Marcion’s threat, church leaders began to consider earnestly their own views on a definitive list of Scriptural books including both the Old and New Testaments.

Another rival theology nudged the church toward consolidating the New Testament. During the mid- to late-second century, a man from Asia Minor named Montanus boasted of receiving a revelation from God about an impending apocalypse. The four Gospels and Paul’s epistles achieved wide circulation and largely unquestioned authority within the early church but hadn’t yet been collected in a single authoritative book. Montanus saw in this fact an opportunity to spread his message, by claiming authoritative status for his new revelation. Church leaders met the challenge around 190 and circulated a definitive list of apostolic writings that is today called the Muratorian Canon, after its modern discoverer. The Muratorian Canon bears striking resemblance to today’s New Testament but includes two books, Revelation of Peter and Wisdom of Solomon, which were later excluded from the canon.

By the time of Nicea, church leaders debated the legitimacy of only a few books that we accept today, chief among them Hebrews and Revelation, because their authorship remained in doubt. In fact, authorship was the most important consideration for those who worked to solidify the canon. Early church leaders considered letters and eyewitness accounts authoritative and binding only if they were written by an apostle or close disciple of an apostle. This way they could be assured of the documents’ reliability. As pastors and preachers, they also observed which books did in fact build up the church—a good sign, they felt, that such books were inspired Scripture. The results speak for themselves: the books of today’s Bible have allowed Christianity to spread, flourish, and endure worldwide.

Though unoriginal in its allegations, The Da Vinci Code proves that some misguided theories never entirely fade away. They just reappear periodically in a different disguise. Brown’s claims resemble those of Arius and his numerous heirs throughout history, who have contradicted the united testimony of the apostles and the early church they built. Those witnesses have always attested that Jesus Christ was and remains God himself. It didn’t take an ancient council to make this true. And the pseudohistorical claims of a modern novel can’t make it false.

For more on what the early church fathers can teach us about Jesus and the Bible, see our sequel to this article. To schedule an interview with Collin Hansen, please contact him contact him at cheditor@christianhistory.net.

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christian History magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Christian History.

Helping the “Healthy”

Helping the “Healthy”
How do we preach saving grace to those who just aren’t “good” at sinning?
by Craig Barnes

I have about decided that the most dangerous thing people can do in the church is be healthy. The leadership will either overuse them on committees and ministry teams, until they’re no longer healthy, or we will just ignore them. Clergy have a particularly hard time knowing how to care for those who do not appear to be in trouble.

It isn’t really that difficult to preach to prodigals. Pastors are well trained for this task, believe it is core to the gospel, and love nothing more than proclaiming the forgiving grace of God to the sinner. But what does the pastor have to say to all of those elder brothers who have faithfully stayed in the pews of the church their whole lives?

Face it—caring for the elder brother is a drag. He doesn’t want any of our sexy recovery programs because he isn’t divorced, bereaved, or addicted to anything other than playing it safe. He doesn’t have a dramatic story to share because he never got around to making a mess of life before returning to the outstretched arms of the rejoicing Father. So all we say is “Well, you have always been here and we’re proud of you, too. Now, about the stewardship committee—”

I am not exactly sure that the elder brother is spiritually healthy. The point of the parable, it seems to me, is that the goal is to find yourself in the arms of the Father. It may be that the elder brother was in greater danger of never finding those arms than the prodigal who had to run away to return to them. But that is precisely my concern. How do we preach saving grace to those who just aren’t good at sinning?

The preacher has to remember that not being a flagrant sinner is a particularly seductive means of rebellion. This was essentially Jesus’ point to the Pharisees. Those who have not broken the rules may be farther from the Father’s arms than those who’ve broken most all of them. Sin is anything that separates us from God, and nothing does that quite like not feeling the need for mercy. Again, the point isn’t to be good. The point is to get into those arms, and grace is the only way there.

This means preachers are called to peel back the veneer of spiritual health in the elder brothers, and help them to see that beneath all of those years of careful living lies a soul that is as dangerously parched as that of the prodigals. Their right answers, dedicated volunteerism, beautiful families, and well-marked study Bibles can keep them away from the love of the Father just as much as the prodigals’ wantonness.

Whether he realizes it or not, like everyone else, the elder brother yearns to be in the right relationship with God. But for him, that requires repenting of his years and years of living so carefully that he doesn’t need grace. This is not an easy point to make as a preacher.

Over the years, I have learned to get at this hard truth by telling short, subtle anecdotes. For example: “A woman is vacuuming one day, praying that God will make her a better mother. As she looks out the living room window, she sees her five-year-old son in the backyard. He is throwing a ball up in the air and clumsily trying to catch it. She doesn’t know why, but she can’t stop crying.”

It is not necessary to interpret the story by making the obvious point that the goal is not to be a better mother, but gratefully to enjoy the child God has given her. With prodigals you have to be obvious, but with their careful, hard-working elder siblings, only subtlety will pierce through the self-righteousness. This is why Jesus liked parables so much.

Other preachers may prefer different strategies for speaking to those who have lived too carefully. But clearly, the healthy members of the church are in just as big trouble as everyone else. If we pastors ever get confused about that, we have only to look just beneath the surface of our own spiritual veneer.

Editor at large Craig Barnes is pastor of Shadyside Presbyterian Church and professor of leadership and ministry at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Copyright © 2005 by the author or Christianity Today International/Leadership Journal.
Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
Fall 2005, Vol. XXVI, No. 4, Page 138

Leader’s Insight: Time in the Back of the Boat

Leader’s Insight: Time in the Back of the Boat
Learning stillness in the storms of life.
by Kirk Byron Jones, guest columnist

One night, during a busy season of speaking engagements, I suddenly stopped preaching before the sermon was over. I turned to the pastor and said tersely, “I can’t go on!” I had come to my limit. I felt no physical pain, just a deep sense of fatigue. I had experienced the feeling before, but never to the extent of being forced to bow to that weariness so abruptly and so publicly.

Soon after that incident, I began having difficulty sleeping. I felt stinging sensations and numbness. My heart would begin beating very fast at times. Most frightening of all, I had moments of intense anxiety. For a month or more, I was entangled in something I had never experienced before and could not shake.

This crisis started while I was pastoring in Chester, Pennsylvania. I was also a husband, the father of two young children, and a Ph.D. candidate. I was busy. Like most pastors, too busy.

The busy church has become the norm in America, and with it the hurried pastor. It almost feels wrong if the church calendar has an empty space, if members aren’t involved in three or more ministries, or if we don’t sense a quickened pace in our conversations, meetings, and worship. Congregational expectations are high, but pastors’ expectations of themselves are even higher. For many, reputation, self-image, and the perception of their standing with God are at stake.

In my own pastoral experience, the resulting overload expresses itself in three basic ways: over-scheduling at church, under-scheduling with family, and no scheduling when it comes to doing things for my own personal nourishment.

It was during this period that I turned to Mark’s Gospel. There I found practices that have reduced my stress level and changed the way I approach my personal and vocational life.

Stern words
Mark 4:35-41 is the story of Jesus calming a storm by merely speaking to it. We spend so much time preaching about Jesus speaking to the storm that we hardly notice his prior respite in the back of the boat.

We cannot be certain of what Jesus did while he was in the back of the boat, but we know there were some things that he did not do. Since he was the only one back there, we know that he did not preach, teach, or heal anyone. He was not engaged in ministry to others. If Jesus regularly found time to rest and renew his energies, why shouldn’t we do the same?

“The back of the boat” is where we take a necessary break from life’s activities. It is a time for remembering who and whose we are. This is vital, because so often we lose our personhood in our work, forgetting that God loves us for who we are, not for what we do.

This is something that I affirm in my private devotions every morning. I have also set times for exercise, recreation, and hobbies. This is a way of keeping my emotional and spiritual tank full. Moreover, every pastor needs to observe an extended period of time in the back of the boat.

I have determined to schedule my times in the stern with the same purposefulness that I schedule ministerial responsibilities. If we make rest a priority in our ministries, we will experience more delight and peace in our work. I believe that our service will be infused with dynamic, new, creative power. Look at what Jesus was able to do after spending just a little time in the back of the boat.

A slow, savoring pace
Jesus’ ministerial style stands in direct contrast to the styles and speed of most pastors. Jesus calmed the fears of the disciples and the storm that threatened them, but only at the appropriate time. Jesus did not hurry into action. He moved at what I refer to as a “savoring pace,” a speed of ministry characterized by peace, patience, and attentiveness.

Moving from hurrying to savoring must be intentional. New power comes with giving myself permission to decline an offer to speak. I experience it in the refreshment of spirit I feel when I emerge from my Sabbath Day. Initially I felt guilty when I told others that I would not be available for ministry one day a week, but that guilt evaporated when I realized that the preacher who entered the pulpit rested was more turned on about ministry and life in general.

We ministers need to learn to practice “sanctified negligence.” We don’t have to justify it; the respite will justify itself in our readiness to do the things to which we say “yes.”

Whatever the strategies, it is imperative that we own our power to slow down and appreciate life, loved ones, and ministry more.

For peace, be still
If the events in Mark 4 were to be performed on stage, perhaps the role that most of us could play without much rehearsal at all would be the storm itself.

Yes, the storm. Most of us are walking storms, moving from one thing to the next without stopping.

I have had to learn stillness; it doesn’t come naturally to me. And I find that when I do not practice stillness diligently, I am once again carried away by the winds of hurry and waves of overload. Sometimes stillness is a struggle, but the payoff, the still-point of utter delight at being and being with God, is worth the effort.

To respond to this newsletter, write to Newsletter@LeadershipJournal.net.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today International/Leadership Journal.
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February 13, 2006

Schedule, Interrupted

Schedule, Interrupted
Discovering God’s time-management.
by Mark Buchanan | posted 02/02/2006 09:00 a.m.

“Teach us to number our days aright,” Moses asked God, “that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps. 90:12).

There is a right way to tally up days. There’s an arithmetic of timekeeping, and God must tutor us in it. Wisdom is not the condition for learning this arithmetic. It’s the fruit of it. Wisdom comes from learning to number our days aright. You don’t need to be wise to sign up for God’s school. But if you’re diligent, attentive, and inquisitive in his classes, you’ll emerge that way.

It’s easy to get this wrong. God’s school is not like most. It’s not regimented, age-adjusted, fixed in its curricula. The classroom is life itself; the curriculum, all of life’s demands and interruptions and tedium, its surprises and disappointments. In the midst of this, through these things themselves, God hands us an abacus and tells us to tally it all up.

Meaning?

Meaning, work out where time and eternity meet. Pay attention to how God is afoot in the mystery of each moment, in its mad rush or maddening plod. He is present in both. But too often, we are so time-obsessed that we take no time to really notice. I have a pastor friend in Toronto who one day after a Sunday service received a note: “Pastor Peter, I would appreciate it if you prayed shorter prayers. Your pastoral prayer this past Sunday was 12 minutes, 43 seconds in length. Please strive for greater brevity.”

The note was unsigned. The only thing we know about this man, woman, or child is that the writer is so bound by time—counting the minutes—that he has never learned to number his days. This person can tell time, but not discern seasons.

Miss that, and you miss wisdom. For only those who number their days aright gain a wise heart. Only they become God’s sages: those calm, unhurried people who live in each moment fully, savoring simple things, celebrating small epiphanies, unafraid of life’s inevitable surprises and reverses, adaptive to change yet not chasing after it.

The Ironic Secret
I write this at a time when the church talks much about being purpose-driven. This is a good thing, but we ought to practice a bit of holy cynicism about it. We should be a little uneasy about the pairing of purposefulness and drivenness. Something’s out of kilter there. Drivenness may awaken purpose or be a catalyst for purpose, but it rarely fulfills it: More often it jettisons it.

A common characteristic of driven people is that, at some point, they forget their purpose. They lose the point. The very reason they began something—embarked on a journey, undertook a project, waged a war, entered a profession, married a woman—erodes under the weight of their striving. Their original inspiration may have been noble. But driven too hard, it gets supplanted by greed for more, or dread of setback, or force of habit.

Drivenness erodes purposefulness.

The difference between living on purpose and being driven surfaces most clearly in what we do with time. The driven are fanatical time managers—time-mongers, time-herders, time-hoarders. Living on purpose requires skillful time management, true, but not the kind that turns brittle, that attempts to quarantine most of what makes life what it is: the mess, the surprises, the breakdowns, and the breakthroughs. Too much rigidity stifles purpose. I find that the more I try to manage time, the more anxious I get about it.

And the more prone I am to lose my purpose.

Truly purposeful people have an ironic secret: They manage time less and pay attention more. The most purposeful people I know rarely overmanage time, and when they do, it’s usually because they’re lapsing into drivenness, into a loss of purpose for which they overcompensate with mere busyness. No, the distinguishing mark of purposeful people is not time management.

It’s that they notice. They’re fully awake.

Zigzags and Detours
Jesus, for example. He lived life with the clearest and highest purpose. Yet he veered and strayed from one interruption to the next, with no apparent plan in hand other than his single, overarching one: Get to Jerusalem and die. Otherwise, his days, as far as we can figure, were a series of zigzags and detours, apparent whims and second thoughts, interruptions and delays, off-the-cuff plans, spur-of-the-moment decisions, leisurely meals, serendipitous rounds of storytelling.

Who touched me?
You give them something to eat.
Let’s go to the other side.

Jesus was available—or not—according to some oblique logic all his own. He had an inner ear for the Father’s whispers, a third eye for the Spirit’s motions. One minute he’s not going to the temple, the next he is. One minute he refuses to help a wedding host solve his wine drought, the next he’s all over it. He’s ready to drop everything and rush over to a complete stranger’s house to heal his servant, but dawdles four days while Lazarus—”the one he loves”—writhes in his death throes (John 11:3), or fails to come at all when John the Baptist—”the greatest in the kingdom of heaven”—languishes on death row (Matt. 11:1-11). The closest we get to what dictated Jesus’ schedule is his statement in John’s Gospel: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:8).

The apostle Peter, after declaring that Jesus is “Lord of all,” describes the supreme Sovereign’s modus operandi: “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and … he went around doing good” (Acts 10:36, 38, emphasis mine). So that’s it, the sum of Christ’s earthly vocation: He wandered, and he blessed. He was a vagabond physician, the original doctor without borders. His purpose was crystallized, but his method almost scattershot. “My whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted,” Henri Nouwen said near the end of his life, “until I discovered the interruptions were my work.”

Paying Attention
No, Jesus didn’t seem to keep time. But he noticed. So many people along the way—blind men, lame men, wild men, fishermen, tax men, weeping whores, pleading fathers, grieving mothers, dying children, singing children, anyone—captured his attention. He stopped to tell a lot of stories, many of which arose out of interruptions: “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me” (Luke 12:13); “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Luke 10:25); “Son of David, have mercy on me!” (Matt. 15:22). What’s more, he invited others to go and do likewise. Those driven to get and spend, to judge and exclude, he called to attention.

Look at the birds!
Look at those flowers!
Do you see this woman?
Where are the other nine?
Why do you call me good?
Who do you say I am?

Life does not consist in the abundance of our possessions, Jesus warned. And then he told a story about a rich fool who noticed all the trivial things but was oblivious to all the important ones. What matters, Jesus concluded, isn’t being rich in stuff: It’s being rich toward God. He explained the essence of such richness elsewhere: It’s having eyes to see, ears to hear. It’s to notice, to pay attention to the time of God’s visitation. “The dream of my life,” Mary Oliver writes,

Is to lie down by a slow river
And stare at the light in the trees—
To learn something of being nothing
A little while but the rich
Lens of attention.

Jesus was that “rich lens of attention.”

To live on purpose means to go and do likewise. Purposefulness requires that we pay attention, and paying attention means, almost by definition, that we make room for surprise. We become hospitable to interruption. To sustain it, we need theological touchstones for it—a conviction in our bones that God is Lord of our days and years, and that his purposes and his presence often come disguised as detours, messes, defeats.

I came to you naked, Jesus says. I came to you thirsty.

“When, Lord?” we ask, startled.

When he wore the disguise of an interruption.

Think a moment of all the events and encounters that have shaped you most deeply and lastingly. How many did you see coming? How many did you engineer, manufacture, chase down?

And how many were interruptions?

Children? You might have planned as meticulously as a NASA rocket launch, but did you have any idea, really, what it would be like, who this child in your arms really was, who you would become because of him or her? The span between life as we intend it and life as we receive it is vast. Our true purpose is worked out in that gap. It is fashioned in the crucible of interruptions.

The Crucible of Interruptions
The movie Mr. Holland’s Opus tells the story of a man with a magnificent ambition. He wants to be a great composer. But he still has to pay the bills, so he and his young wife move to a small town where he teaches high school music, strictly for the money. All the while, he works on his masterpiece, his opus, laying the ground for his real calling. The plan is to teach for a few years, then step into his destiny.

But life keeps intruding. One year folds into two, into five, into fifteen. And then one day, Mr. Holland is old, and the school board shuffles him out for early retirement. He packs his desk. His wife and grown son come to fetch him. Walking down the school’s wide, empty hallways, he hears a sound in the auditorium. He goes to see what it is.

It’s a surprise.

Hundreds of his students from his years of teaching—many now old themselves—dozens of his colleagues, both current and former, hundreds of friends, fans, and well-wishers: The room is packed. All have gathered to say thank you. An orchestra is there, made up of Mr. Holland’s students through the years. They’ve been preparing to perform Mr. Holland’s Opus—the composition that, over four decades, he hammered out and tinkered with, polished, discarded, recovered, reworked, but never finished.

They play it now.

But of course he knows, everyone knows: His opus isn’t the composition. His real opus, his true life’s masterpiece, stands before him, here, now. It’s not the music. It is all these people whom his passions and convictions have helped and shaped. It’s all that was being formed in the crucible of interruptions. This is his work. This is his purpose.

Finally, after all these years, he’s learned to number his days.

In 1973, the comedian Johnny Carson nearly caused a national crisis with a single wisecrack. That was the year North America’s long flight of postwar prosperity fell to earth like a shot goose in one ungainly plummet. There was runaway inflation. There were oil and food shortages. All the abundance that Americans had come to see as their due, their birthright, suddenly seemed in jeopardy.

And so, on December 19, 1973, at 11:35 p.m., when Johnny Carson walked on the live studio set of The Tonight Show and quipped, “There’s an acute shortage of toilet paper in the United States,” it wasn’t funny. The joke had a toehold in reality: Earlier in the day, Congressman Harold Froehlich from Wisconsin had warned that if the federal bureaucracy didn’t catch up on its supply bids, government agencies would run out of toilet tissue within a month or two. Carson took this shard of trivia and played it for a laugh. Then, as was his trademark, he swung at an invisible golf ball, took a commercial break, and got on with the show.

Not so the nation. Twenty million viewers flew into panic. The next morning, hundreds of thousands of frantic shoppers lined up outside the supermarkets of America, poised to dash to the paper aisles and stockpile rolls, fighting over bundles of two-ply and four-ply. There were brawls in the aisles and scrums at the checkout. Some store managers tried to limit sales to four rolls per customer, but they had no way of monitoring how many times a customer came back, and most came back repeatedly. By noon on December 20—mere hours after Johnny’s flippant remark—America was sold out.

Johnny Carson’s offhand gag line had sparked a national run (no pun intended) on toilet tissue.

We’re generally gullible about news of scarcity. We have, it seems, an inbuilt skittishness about shortfall. This has been with us a long while, since the garden, by my reckoning.

Most of us live afraid that we’re almost out of time. But you and I, we’re heirs of eternity. We’re not short of days.

We just need to number them aright.

Mark Buchanan’s latest book, from which this article is excerpted, is The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring the Sabbath (Word, 2005).

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February 2006, Vol. 50, No. 2, Page 43