Case for Christ: Heart or Head

Our spring “trimester” study group at church last night began a six-week series of discussions on Lee Strobel’s and Gary Poole’s book and DVD study called The Case for Christ.

This study is aimed at a general audience of people investigating the Christian faith, probably, for the first time in a serious way. Since the room was filled with people who were already Christians (some for many, many years), the approach probably felt somewhat basic.

It is helpful, though, especially for longstanding Christians, to examine their faith through the eyes of someone who might be skeptical. I, for one, have the tendency to over complicate the issue. A case in point:

During one segment of the DVD, Lee and his wife Leslie described how they came to a faith in Jesus. Leslie Strobel mentioned that her conversion was primarily emotional and a matter of the heart. Lee, on the other hand, mentioned that he needed to investigate the claims made regarding Jesus to determine their validity. He is, after all, a journalist and it is a natural for him to engage his head before his heart.

This led to a discussion in our group about the different methods of obtaining knowledge about the Christian faith. I jumped right in with a defense of an intellectual approach. My wife, Gale, said, after we had been talking for quite some time, that it is ALWAYS the heart.

I thought about this even after the meeting: She’s right!

First of all, it’s the heart of God that is first engaged: “For God so loved the world…”

And, then, our hearts: “We love because He first loved us…”

The idea that there’s a dichotomy between “heart” and “head” is really a distraction from the real issue. When God enters the scene, heart and head are reunited.

Review: reJesus

Near the end of their book, reJesus, Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch put forward a provocative idea: Jesus didn’t ask us to worship Him. Jesus demanded obedience instead. 

This is a simple idea when you think about it. In its day, this idea changed the landscape, shifted the paradigm, and turned the world upside down.

To this day, I nod my head in agreement with this idea. But, then, while the idea is still reverberating, I shake my head in sadness as I realize how far from it I’ve strayed. I think longingly of a time long past “when I knew next to nothing” and Christianity was exciting and scary and exhilarating and delicious and sweet and all that was Christianity was someone named Jesus; no institution, no programs, no buildings, just Jesus. That was all and that was enough.

If I approach the message of Christ as a call to obedience it changes radically what I do on Sunday morning and even more radically what I do on Monday morning. 

Frost and Hirsch don’t claim this idea is original. But, then again, Christianity is not about originality. It’s about following. Following, by its very nature, is not original. Paul told the Philippians to follow him as he followed Christ. And we follow those who came before who followed Christ. Nothing original here.

But a lack of originality does not necessarily preclude the use of creativity.

Sounds odd, doesn’t it? Originality is not creativity: This is the kind of paradox Frost and Hirsch seem to address in reJesus. And, as they compellingly argue, we need to address this kind of paradox, both as individuals and in groups.

How do we follow Christ creatively?

Their answer does create possibilities for creativity: We need to get to know the Jesus of the gospels. What kind of man was/is He? What did He teach? What is it about Jesus that surprises us? And, maybe as important as the things we don’t know, what do we do with the things we think about Jesus that cannot be validated by the gospel accounts, about the “ things we know that ain’t so?” 

This is the second book they’ve written together. The first book, The Shaping of Things to Come was about ecclesiology and how the church could become more missional and incarnational. ReJesus, however, centers upon the more foundational idea of how a study of Jesus (Christology) informs and shapes the mission of the church. “Christology,” they say, “is the key to the renewal of the church in every age.” Christology leads to Missiology which then informs Ecclesiology. This is constantly recalibrated with every age in church history. 

As they say: “The inference is that by and large the church as we currently experience it in the West has to varying degrees lost touch with the wild and dangerous message it carries and is duty bound to live out and pass on.” In their third chapter, they include a generous profile of the Pharisees, a group about whom Jesus said nothing good. Every point they make about the Pharisees could also be applied to many contemporary groups of Evangelicals. Their point? That our institutional structures and even our so-called Christian sub-culture has lost touch with the Jesus of the gospels. And this is what we need to regain: We need to re-Jesus the church. 

If their first three chapters are theologically heavy, their fourth chapter takes a light-hearted turn. The chapter is entitled “ I Have a Picture of Jesus” and examines artist’s depictions of Jesus through the centuries. They discuss paintings they rename “ Bearded Lady Jesus” and “Spooky Jesus” to show how our preconceptions can work their way into who we think Jesus was and is. I’d love to take a small group through just this chapter and then end the session with a paraphrase of the prayer by C. S. Lewis, “Lord, I pray to you not as I think you are but as you know yourself to be.” 

All in all, I liked their book; it gave me much to think about and I recommend it highly. Their last three chapters give practical advice as to how to put the idea into practice and how they think Christians could be obedient to their calling. You may not agree with everything they say and they don’t provide an exact blueprint. But then again, they leave plenty of room for creativity.

What’s the big deal about the ARIS Survey?

Here’s a link to Touchstone’s summary of the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS).

Take a look and make a comment. We’ll talk a bit about this on Sunday.

One of the more interesting findings:

Most of the growth in the Christian population occurred among those who would identify only as “Christian,” “Evangelical/Born Again,” or “non-denominational Christian.” The last of these, associated with the growth of mega-churches, has increased from less than 200,000 in 1990 to 2.5 million in 2001 to over 8 million today. These groups grew from 5 percent of the population in 1990 to 8.5 percent in 2001 to 11.8 percent in 2008. Significantly, 38.6 percent of mainline Protestants now also identify themselves as evangelical or born again.

“It looks like the two-party system of American Protestantism—mainline versus evangelical—is collapsing,” said Mark Silk, director of the Public Values Program. “A generic form of evangelicalism is emerging as the normative form of non-Catholic Christianity in the United States.”

Resurrection Songs 7

Johne Donne: Holy Sonnets X

Death be not proud, though some have callèd thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Resurrections Songs 6

Loretta Lynn: Everybody Wants to Go To Heaven

Timing of Evidence

Read Craig Blomberg’s post about when resurrection beliefs became widely known and believed.

This sounds remedial to Christians who take for granted that Jesus rose from the dead. “Of course,” we say. “If Jesus really rose from the dead, the belief would have surfaced very early in church history…like, RIGHT AFTER IT HAPPENED!  Isn’t that obvious?”

Well, no. Or at least it isn’t obvious to a large number of scholars who want a bit more evidence than 2,000 years worth of people saying, “I believe.”

But, even when scholars look at the resurrection from a rules of evidence perspective, there’s enough to say that the belief is rational.

Blomberg’s post describes the work of two scholars who–though they come from wildly different traditions and come to different conclusions–explain why they believe the resurrection was accepted very early in church history. Why is this important? It rebuts the argument that the gospels and the resurrection stories came later after much thought and reflection.

Evidence for the Resurrection

The Evidence for the Resurrection website gives reasons why someone should believe that the resurrection of Jesus truly happened.

There’s enough on this site to give you something to think about. I think that one of the more compelling arguments that something wild happened is this one:

But the most telling testimony of all must be the lives of those early Christians. We must ask ourselves: What caused them to go everywhere telling the message of the risen Christ?

Had there been any visible benefits accrued to them from their efforts–prestige, wealth, increased social status or material benefits–we might logically attempt to account for their actions, for their whole-hearted and total allegiance to this “risen Christ .”

As a reward for their efforts, however, those early Christians were beaten, stoned to death, thrown to the lions, tortured and crucified. Every conceivable method was used to stop them from talking.

Yet, they laid down their lives as the ultimate proof of their complete confidence in the truth of their message.

This is difficult to explain. The apostles really believed that Jesus rose from the dead, or they were just, plain crazy.

Week 2 SBH Discussion: The Strange Story of Easter

In this week’s session, Chuck reviewed the Easter stories in each of the four gospels:

·         Matthew 28:1-15

·         Mark 16:1-13

·         Luke 24:1-12

·         John 20:1-18

The Easter story—as suggested by Wright—is actually a strange story, with unusual details. Opponents of Christianity point to inconsistencies in the individual gospel accounts as proof that the gospels were made up by those people in the early church.

Related to Wright’s point in SBH, Simon Greenleaf—a lawyer and author who wrote at the beginning of the last century—subjected the gospel stories to modern day “ rules of evidence” as if the gospels were exhibits for a case in a court of law. What was his conclusion? The inconsistencies in the gospel stories, rather than destroying claims made in those stories, actually go further towards proving that the manuscripts were very early documents in the history of Christianity and that they were probably written by eyewitnesses to the events described. In other words, they were not fictional pieces or legends or myths or some sort of oral history that were compiled at a later date. If the stories were made up, he reasoned, the details would match and fit together more neatly than they do. The fact that there are inconsistencies in the gospel accounts match the way witnesses to a crime may emphasize different aspects of what they saw without calling into question that what happened really happened in the first place.

Resurrection Songs 5

Jars of Clay: All My Tears

Resurrection Songs 4

Handel!

That’s all I need to say. The sound is very low at the beginning of this video. It gets louder, so no need to adjust your volume setting. This is a stunning performance by Teddy Tahu Rhodes from New Zealand, although I don’t think what he performs can be classified as a mere “song.” I enjoy this piece of music very much.

Gospel as Story 3

C. S. Lewis saw a good story as providing “concrete experience of the universal.”  He held that thinking and experiencing, by themselves, were not complete. Paul F. Ford explains what Lewis thought about story this way:

“Essentially, Lewis saw story as the bridge between two ways of knowing reality: thinking about it and experiencing it. Thinking is incurably abstract; experiencing is always concrete. The human dilemma is that ‘as thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; [as experiencers] we do not clearly understand [what we are experiencing]. The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off; the more deeply we enter into the reality, the less we can think.” (Paul F. Ford; Companion to Narnia; Introduction; pg xxi)

As products of modern and post-modern society, this dilemma becomes more and more urgent. In my case, I think way too much. My need is to become more active to assimilate the reality of what I think. Others around me, though, are simply too active. They just don’t have time to be contemplative. Because of the choices available, we can pursue those activities that make us feel most comfortable without ever needing to do the work necessary to bear fruit using the opposite method. If you’re active, you can be always active without ever needing to be contemplative. If you’re contemplative, you can certainly find the books and websites that feed your contemplative nature without ever needing to be active.

It is not that this is any different that at any other age, just more pronounced.

For Lewis, the “thinking and the experiencing come together in one place: a good story.” It is a combination of the ideas of looking at something and looking along something. Looking at corresponds with thinking and is abstract. Looking along corresponds with experience and is sensory, concrete. A good story, because of the design imposed by its author, brings forward those things that are of ultimate importance. C. S. Lewis said it this way:

“As a work of the imagination, [a story] helps people to both contemplate and enjoy either an aspect of reality they already know or something that they don’t know and the author of the story thinks they should.”

This is why the gospel’s original form is as story. When wrenched from this original form—to some propositional formula, for example—the gospel loses its’ power.

When I’ve talked about this idea in the past, the idea that comes across is that it is the story that’s important, not the subject of the story. And, sometimes, it is perceived that because I’m using the word story (remember the word fantasy from yesterday’s post?), or because Lewis says that story is a “work of the imagination” that the content of that story may or may not be true. If we tell the gospel as story, can we rest assured our audience will consider our story as fact? Do we undermine our case by using story?

I don’t think so. The gospel has always been story, from its inception. Even the gospel in the Old Testament is told as a story. Its form as story in no way undermines it as fact. Additionally, if Lewis is right, this is the way the gospel was designed, so that its hearers could respond to some “concrete experience of the universal” even if they weren’t around to see Jesus heal or hear Him speak.

But, there’s one other thing about story that is even more interesting. Eugene Peterson, in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, takes these ideas a step further when he says,

“Story is the most natural way of enlarging and deepening our sense of reality, and then enlisting us as participants in it. Stories open doors to areas or aspects of life that we didn’t know were there, or had quit noticing out of over-familiarity, or supposed were out-of-bounds to us. They then welcome us in. Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.”

As such, stories are initial building blocks of community.

Gospel as Story 2

It seems, then, that the old adage, “show, don’t tell”, applies to the telling of stories as well as to the writing of them. But the temptation to “tell” is always present:

• What if my audience misses my point?
• What if my audience draws different conclusions?
• What if my audience ignores this story?

I’m using “tell” or “telling” in this post to indicate the presence of language, both verbal and nonverbal, explicit or implicit, which dictates or “tells” people how they should feel about the particular story they’re hearing. This is to be differentiated from “telling” the story, which is simply an arrangement of the events in that story, and I’ll refer to as “showing.” I suppose this might be confusing–and I might need to change the words signifying the ideas later–but I will stick with this definition for now. Later I’ll incorporate the idea of story “showing” versus story ‘telling”.

I think there are a number of motivations for “telling”. Make no mistake: some motivations for “telling” are certainly good and proper and right. We love Jesus and want other people to love Jesus too because we believe Jesus loves them. This leads us to tell other people about Him, which is fine, by itself. This “telling”, however, sometimes includes, especially in formal preaching, arcane historical data or a deconstruction and reconstruction of the underlying text (which, by the way, is not the story). Also, we might add our own emotional interpretation; we tell people how we feel and we imply others should feel as we do. We may illustrate the story with other stories having nothing whatever to do with the original story and thereby imply that there is some perceived correct reaction to the story.

Paul F. Ford describes, in his introductory essay for the Companion to Narnia, why C. S. Lewis thought we should avoid what I’m describing as “telling”:

“Lewis offers much hope to those who would read his stories as to how and why he wrote them. He complains that the heart of any story is often undetected by the most earnest critic thereof. A story is a ’series of imagined events’, ‘a net of successive moments.’ Yet the critic concentrates on style, order, and character delineation, the ‘everything else’ which ought to exist in fantasy for the sake of the story.” (Paul F. Ford; Companion to Narnia; Introduction, pg xxviii)

I’ll leave aside the idea of “fantasy” for a moment. Don’t get hung up here because the word means “something made up” or “fiction”. I’ll return to this idea in the next post. For now, I want to concentrate on the idea that the critic of the story misses the heart of the story and why this happens. Lewis complained that in most criticism that the “series of imagined events” or the “net of successive moments” is broken. We are asking people to look not to the heart of the message, where meaning resides, but off to the side, where we think meaning resides or where we desire the meaning to reside. This is not unusual: many times this off-to-the-side type of study does, indeed add to the meaning of the story. But adding to the meaning and the meaning itself are two different things.

I’m not talking here about commentary, explanation or translation. These are types of story “showing” in and of themselves, and although they seem to be off-to-the-side studies, they leave the substance of the story intact. In this type of story showing, the voice and thoughts and feelings of the writer/speaker are left out of the telling.

Within criticism, on the other hand, the voice, thoughts and feelings of either the writer or the speaker are the main point of the exercise. And, in the mind of the reader or the hearer, the message becomes, more or less, a sales pitch, not a story. If a sales pitch, then the story becomes something that can be bought and consumed rather than something that can be contemplated and lived. In other words, the goal of telling is for it to work, to achieve some end determined in advance which may or may not have anything to do with its’ underlying true meaning. This can be effective, but when the buying and consuming is finished, so ends the effectiveness of the story.

The goal of story showing should be not to find something that works but to transform people who hear the story. This transformation  happens from within rather than from without. The effect can be and sometimes is permanent.

I guess, the operative question that should be asked by the hearer of any story is this: “Is this story one that can be lived?” If no, then the story should be forgotten. If yes ask, “What would happen if I do live this story?”

Gospel as Story 1

Yesterday, we talked in our class about telling the gospel as story. I’d like to spend the next couple of days expanding upon that idea.

I’ve learned most about story from reading writers who write great stories. There are some writers, however, who have even written about the process, thus shedding light about how to approach a story, both as a reader and as a writer.

One of those writers was C. S. Lewis.

Now, it seems that a figure who towed so high in 20th Century Christian history would have little to say to those people in a postmodern setting. Some postmodern Christians believe that Lewis is quoted way too often. This is unfortunate because, although Lewis was the quintessential modern, he also possessed postmodern and even medieval sensibilities. His was a curious mixture, to be sure, but I think much can be learned from his eclectic application of thinking styles from across the ages.

I also think it interesting that the personal story of C. S. Lewis sounds like stories told by so many people who’ve been disaffected by the so-called modern ecclesiology prevalent in so many churches. Paul F. Ford, in his Introduction to the Companion to Narnia, writes this:

“As a child, Lewis had been told how to feel about God and religious realities. And this obligation to feel froze his feeling. Night after night in his school dormitory, he tried to muster all the proper feeling attendant upon saying the Lord’s Prayer with devotion. His scrupulosity wearied him and he gladly gave all this up when he left the practice of his religion in his early teens. There were ‘watchful dragons’ at the Sunday School door, and these fostered a schism in his personality that lasted into his forties.“  (Paul F. Ford; Companion to Narnia; Introduction Essay; pg xix)

Lewis “had been told how to feel.”  If we are to tell the gospel as story, this is to be avoided at all costs. People will feel what they will about Jesus. If they cannot generate a feeling, they will become frustrated, angry, hurt, confused and leave the church or, worse, they will stick around and become pretenders, acting as though they feel something they really don’t. I guess this is something also to be learned: Expecting people to feel the same way you do about things is not only an unrealistic expectation, it’s an unusual expectation as well.

Resurrection Songs 3

Continuing with our series on Resurrection Songs, here is an incomplete video by Big Daddy Weave:

I’m sure that, between the video and the link to the lyrics, you’ll get the idea as to what the song is about.

SBH: Link to an Outline

Outlines can be fun. I know, sometimes they’re a bit short on detail. And, if you try to pretend you’ve read the book after you’ve only read the outline, you could be in for a bit of embarrassment. But, as resources, they’re invaluable.

So, here’s a link to Rev. Kevin Twit’s excellent outline on Surprised by Hope.

See you Sunday!

Resurrection Songs 2

Here are a couple of songs by one of my favorite acoustical artists, Bob Bennett.

The first is called Man of the Tombs, a re-telling of the story related in Mark 5. It’s one of those songs that I listen to again and again. When viewing the video, is that a storm brewing behind the curtain?

The second song looks like Bob’s opening number from the same concert. I’m not sure what’s going on with Chuck Smith’s “hair.” Don’t be thrown by that; just sit back and listen to Bob’s powerful, minimalistic version of the old hymn My Redeemer Lives:

Also, though I don’t have a video for it, consider some lines from Bob’s Still Rolls the Stone:

Hearts aflame with mercy
Like the sun in midnight sky
While the doubter shrugs his shoulders
And the cynic wonders why
But as it is in Heaven
So now we proclaim
The Lord tells us here to do the same

To Be Surprised

We see glimpses now;
in that day
we will
see it
straight on.

In the days
after death dies
we will see all
as it was
created to be.

And we will be…
Surprised!

 

Unmuddling the Future

 Three dominant ideas drove Christianity from its very beginning:

• That Jesus was the promised Jewish Messiah,
• That remission of sins came through the blood of Christ’s sacrifice and
• Resurrection from the dead.

We see this idea in the New Testament in Peter’s sermons in Acts 2 and 3. We see it in Paul’s sermon on Mars Hill:

“…Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because he has fixed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness through a man whom he has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising him from the dead.

“Now when they heard of resurrection from the dead, some began to sneer, but others said, ‘We shall hear you again concerning this.’” (Acts 17:30-32)

Regarding resurrection from the dead, N. T. Wright, in the first three chapters of Surprised by Hope, argues that even Christians have become muddled in their thinking about what happens after death. He states there is a widespread belief in the afterlife, but resurrection gets short shrift, if it’s even mentioned at all. Your soul “going to heaven after you die” is a redefinition of death and is not at all the same thing bodily resurrection. He writes, “…death will not be simply redefined but defeated. God’s intention is not to let death have its way with us. If the promised final future is simply that immortal souls leave behind their mortal bodies, then death still rules—since that is a description not of the defeat of death but simply of death itself, seen from one angle.” (SBH, pg. 15)

This may sound a bit technical. You might say that he’s splitting hairs. What does it matter?

It matters because what we think about what happens after death affects every other aspect of our existence. We not only think of a blessed hope out there in some distant future, but we press on to bring that future into our present. I say that because we pray, “thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.” He fashions His will in us and spreads it outwards. The curse is lifted. But it’s good to remember that the curse will not only be lifted from us, but from all of creation. The earth is also redeemed by Christ.

Some Reviews of SBH

Since our class didn’t start as I expected yesterday (but will begin instead next Sunday), I thought I’d point to some reviews of Surprised by Hope:

Stop here first for Reviews on Amazon.com.

Michael Spencer at iMonk reviews Surprised by Hope.

James Gibson at Sanctus points out distortions arising out of the Time Magazine interview.

Trevin Wax interviews N. T. Wright about Surprised by Hope and other things.

Resurrection Song?

[Updated: 2/2/2009: My hope is that Resurrection Songs will be a regular feature at ...& following, at least for the time we're discussing N. T. Wright's book. It's a way to think around the topic without trying to think through the topic. There's no disputing the power of music and--for those of us who grew up in the rock-and-roll generation--songs (even popular songs) are the way we engage poetry. If you know of any Resurrection Songs, leave a comment or send me an email. I'll do my best to feature the song on the site. At the end of our study, I'm hoping we'll have quite a selection of Resurrection Songs. rjjf]

I know this song was used as an “anthem” for the Obama campaign. So what! I still like it.

And the question I ask is, “What does it mean?” With a bit of lyrical engineering, you could make it mean something higher (if it doesn’t already). What do you think?

[Read the lyrics while you watch and listen.]