Marriage, Covenant and Contract

Tuesday 18 November 2008 at 7:54 pm This is part of a conversation on marriage that I had online. I wanted to save some of what I wrote. more...

The kingdom is within/among you

Friday 14 November 2008 at 10:45 pm This is a question I got from a friend.

"Hey, Paul,
yesterday at my Bible Study group, we were going over the passage where Christ is saying "the Kingdom of Heaven is within you". And then we started asking the question of "well, then what would that look like?" and "How would you act on that?" Any comments or thoughts?"

Answering questions like this can get long, so I like doing double duty by sharing them with others too. Hope you find it helpful. more...

my take on the prop 8 debate

Tuesday 11 November 2008 at 9:23 pm

Still a hot topic in CA. See below.

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Letter to a friend, the age of decay

Saturday 18 October 2008 at 01:09 am

Probably the best way for me to begin is to share with you some of my own thinking lately on some of the matters you shared as well as other related matters. My thought journey, as has yours, is shaped by my work, my reading, and my experiences both private and public.

PDF version

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Free will and determinism

Thursday 16 October 2008 at 10:45 pm Got a note from someone on this very deep, interesting, and fascinating topic. It was a fun response to write and I think there might be a couple of you that are also interested in the subject so I'll post it here as well.

The conundrum develops immediate when the two: free will and determinism are set as philosophical abstractions against each other. When you approach the issue as a problem in this manner it all seems too hard and too irreconcilable. At the same time, however, both in life, and as we experience life through story, the two are in fact quite compatible and necessarily joined. All of us imagine our decisions to be free, yet I find the notion that there is both meaning and purpose in history, past, present, and future, to be nearly universal too all people. You could not be frustrated with the unfolding of a tragedy and in fact angry about it if you did not at some deep level assume that there is both purpose and intentionality behind it. I often see people who easily, simultaneously hold that God doesn’t exist and they are furious at him without a shred of irony.

The truth is that you need to believe in both free will AND some sense of purpose in history in order to act. If you really didn’t believe in real agency in any sense, why do anything at all? You would have to decide that agency is an illusion and you might as well stop putting out the effort. If you imagine that history is in fact completely free and that even the most inconsequential decisions you might make could have VAST repercussions that are completely unknowable (ever see the move “The Butterfly Effect”?), then you would hardly dare to make any choices out of paralyzing fear. In order to live you naturally, assumedly, simultaneously hold them both together without even knowing it.

In every story you have read and enjoyed, the characters in that story both are real agents (I prefer this term to “free will” because all of our choices are in fact conditioned by the past, our culture, our genetics, our options, etc.) AND the development of purpose and destiny in the story. Any story which doesn’t have both is rejected by people as uninteresting and unrealistic. Why is that? Why can we, on one hand very naturally assume that both real agency and purpose and destination in history are not in conflict yet when we pull them out of time and into philosophical abstraction see them as contradictory?

Let’s say that you have a 5 year old child. Is your child a real agent in your home? Your child decides whether she wants to eat cereal or yogurt, whether she wants to play or watch TV, whether she wants to obey you or defy you. How free is your child really though? I bet you and your husband can in fact regularly not only predict but also guide the decisions of your child. Do you do so malevolently? I doubt it. You are probably doing so, placing decisions before her, decisions she may chose wisely on or poorly, all along the way to help your child grow, develop, learn, thrive, flourish. Is she no less a real agent because of the actions of the agency of you and your husband? She is both a real agent, AND there is purpose, direction and destination in your home.

Since she’s only 5 the playing field is small, but as she grows the decisions, the freedoms, the stakes all rise enormously. If this is true for you as human parents, just a few decades older than your child, and a few degrees of knowledge and power above her, what would the relationship look like between us and God who created this universe of enormous age and incredible vastness and indescribable complexity and beauty? Your child thinks she now knows something about freedom and something about your control over her world and she does. How much does she really know about it compared to what you know? What is actually foundational for her future flourishing but her ability to trust you and your husband as loving parents? When Jesus taught us to pray “Our Father” he was embedding a very fertile seed in our relationship and in our understanding.

I’ll make some links here of some things you might find helpful. Some are from me, some are from sources that I’ve found helpful in it.

Peter Kreeft is a philosopher who grew up in North Jersey in the RCA and then after Calvin College converted over to Roman Catholicism. He’s fun to listen to. Here are two recordings of his things that touch in these matters.
http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio/20_cslewis_time-eternity.htm
http://www.peterkreeft.com/audio/29_lotr_fated-free.htm

Tim Keller is a favorite preaching of mine. Unfortunately his church charges $2.50 a sermon for an mp3 download. This is a sermon he did on the subject. http://sermons.redeemer.com/store/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_ID=18598&ParentCat=6

This was a lesson I gave in the context of our Adult Sunday School on the book of Ephesians. Here’s a study guide that you can read through. http://livingstonescrc.com/small_groups/ephesians/predestination.pdf . Here’s a recording of the class: http://livingstonescrc.com/ssaudio/2007/092307_election.MP3

Unity of sanctification and justification in preaching

Tuesday 14 October 2008 at 11:08 pm

Again, a lot of this stuff I have picked up from Tim Keller and worked it over in my head. I’ve done so much Keller stuff I actually got a letter at church addressed to “Tim Keller, Living Stones Church”. This is both flattering and troubling at the same time.

We agree that certain preaching traditions have their difficulties. Many of us have experienced the “Where’s Waldo” school of preaching where we look for Jesus under every OT rock. We’ve also seen the American revivalist make every sermon an evangelistic altar call approach. That approach has within it usually a very rote approach to gospel articulation which I also resist as a reduction of the real deal. The seeker movement brought us a dearth of wisdom sermons. Count how many seeker services pick texts from Proverbs. In the seeker movement sales events they taught you to name your sermons things like “5 keys to a healthy marriage” or family or sex life or community or whatever itch the neighborhood needs to scratch. Then there’s the emergency sermon that cries out for some sort of expression of outrage or indignation. You get these on the right and the left. Right now in CA some pastors are fervently telling us what way to vote on 8. In Costco today I was behind a a pick-up truck that had a hand-written sign in the back that said “A vote for 8 is a vote for HATE”.

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Gospel vs. Wisdom

Tuesday 14 October 2008 at 1:45 pm

Wisdom is management within the age of decay. Wisdom involves problems that we can cope with or deal with. Wisdom involves things we can manage, things within our capacity.

I, in a sense, are seeing two levels in the world.

When I talk about the age of decay, I’m talking about the fact that all of human history is a 100% holocaust against which there is no worldly remedy. There is no denial of this in any secular thinking. The sun will run out of fuel, the universe will continue to expand, a meteor will strike the world causing a new mass extinction, 100% of the people you know will be dead in 100 years or so and almost all of them will be forgotten. All human efforts are an attempt to mitigate and forestall this holocaust but absolutely none of them even pretend to be a remedy. There is only one remedy, and that is resurrection, and there is only one who was raised, Jesus.

When I talk about “wisdom”, not even in the Biblical sense, I’m talking about managing the world within the holocaust, within the wire fencing of this concentration camp. You can tell people how to get off the bottle, how to raise better kids, how to be more moral, how to feel better about the losses they will inevitably suffer, but all of that is management. Gospel is an entirely different level.

Gospel is connection between the present age of decay and the age to come. Gospel is the story of the beginning of the renewal of all things. Gospel is the only hope that everything sad is becoming untrue. Gospel is the hope of a world that is shackled to the age of decay, awaiting the freedom of the children of God. Gospel is the world set right, of which we have, nor does any human strategy even pretend to make, no earthly aspiration towards. Gospel is the path of crucifixion, resurrection and exaltation of the center of all things leading the way for all that was made for that center (Eph 1:20-23).

Wisdom is fixing what you can fix, and giving people some comfort in the mean time. Gospel is a firm and certain hope in a specific person and our connection to him. Wisdom is what we can do to make things a little better. Gospel is what Jesus has done because we could not.

PS. In thinking a couple of minutes about what I wrote it is easy to think that I’m working an escapist vein. Remember I said that Gospel is the connection between these two ages. What we see in this is that the Christian life is an overlapping of these two ages, it is beginning to live in the second, while we still remain in the first. Within this understanding escapism reigns.

The invasion of the age to come (being in Christ, kingdom of God/heaven, “life of the age to come” (trans. In John as eternal life))
into the age of decay brings hope amidst suffering, and promise amidst efforts of sign-posting (witness) and samples of restoration. We have the promise that our labor is not in vain, that through Gospel the efforts begun via the cross in this present age are fulfilled in the age to come.

Tim Keller on Personal Prayer

Thursday 02 October 2008 at 8:17 pm This is an outline of the 4th of his talks he gave to his leadership group. In it he works through Eugene Peterson's ideas about Evening and Morning prayer and gives a simply outline on nuts and bolts of doing a simple, personal prayer time. PDF copy. more...

Why Sarah Can't Talk

Wednesday 01 October 2008 at 2:04 pm About two years ago I started listening to Tim Keller. What I found in him was a way to articulate Reformed theology in a contemporary, credible, engaging way. I’ve spent many, many hours listening to his sermons, his lectures, his Q/A sessions. When I first started this process I figured I’d be able to channel him quickly and easily. My background was in Reformed theology, I knew my Bible, I knew the kinds of people he was engaging, I’m an articulate guy, I figured it would be a snap. I was wrong. One of the things I have learned over the last two years is that language is difficult especially when you are engaging complex and difficult realities. You can’t simply memorize key phrases or positions or illustrations and spout them out in a compelling and engaging way and give people confidence that you have a handle on these things. What you have to do is immerse yourself in this body of knowledge, in the new perspectives, working them through yourself in your mind, retracing the steps your mentor has taken, re-inventing the wheel. Within this process of assimilation what you begin to do is selectively adopt what your mentor has given you, add to it some of what you have learned, and what emerges is a new, more helpful, fully owned perspective. This perspective then can be grown, cultivated, and added on to.

Why can’t Sarah talk? Because she simply hasn’t had time to assimilate this world. There is a body of knowledge, there is a community of language, there is a skill and a repertoire out there in this world of national politics that we have all grown accustomed to hearing. We have, from our different perspectives, developed reactions to certain elements with this language world, and we know what we like and what we do, what we believe in and what we do not, what we trust and what we don’t. This isn’t to say Palin isn’t smart. This isn’t to say Palin is dumb. What this says is that she simply hasn’t had the chance to really operate in this field at this level.

Some may say “So what? She’ll learn, give her a chance. Does it really matter that much?”  We wouldn’t say the same thing of an airline pilot. This kind of speaking is an essential part of the job. Part of the job is of course decision making, but another part is communicating trust, confidence, competence to the country that you at least know what you are doing.

Through the financial debacle we are all getting a lesson in the value of trust. Trust matters in terms of leadership. Can you project competence even if you really aren’t sure what to do? Can you engender trust even if you are wrong? These are important skills. America’s great presidents could lead people to trust them, even when they were wrong. Of course we want them to be right, but it is a key skill.

Immediately people will turn and say “Obama lacks experience” and this is correct. Others knock Obama for basically campaigning for this position for the last 4 years. OK, but what he’s managed to do in these last 4 years is learn this skill. He’s clearly got significant gifts, but he now through the primary ordeal has emerged with a mature skill set of sitting down, doing interviews, debating, articulating policy and perspective.

Part of consequence of elevating Palin the way McCain did was (and her agreeing to go along with it) was to place her in this situation. Now it’s time for her to pay the piper. Her performance hasn’t been stellar. The McCain campaign has two bad options from its perspective: send her out there to do the hard work of learning this skill in prime time and possibly doing damage to the campaign effort, keep her sequestered, studying privately and see if she can learn this without doing the damage. The problem is the clock is ticking and her absence is greatly noticed which is also a negative.

Mortgage mess

Wednesday 01 October 2008 at 1:45 pm

1. Years of low interest rates certainly set the stage for a housing bubble. We all know that the equation for buying a house is VERY dependent upon the interest rate. You can buy much more house at 6% than you can at 8%, thus you leave room in a two income budget to have housing prices rise. Just check the math sometimes. If you have 20k a year to spend the house price at 6% is far higher than it is at 8%. This got the housing market rolling upwards.

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