The news that Rick Warren‘s son had passed away by suicide will undoubtably continue to be international news for some time, because the combination of tragedy and celebrity tends to be so tantalizing in our culture. Not that that’s healthy, but there isn’t much I can do about it.

I did notice one oddly uplifting trend as the news spread… and I say “oddly” because it came from social media, which basically draws its dark life-force from vitriol, ignorance, and hate.

Among Warren’s many critics from within the Christian world (and any supremely public figure within Christianity will, by definition, draw a zillion critics), I have yet to find one that does not consist of pure grace and empathy. I’m sure there are exceptions, but I’ve yet to find one (Westboro, I’m looking in your direction).

And there is a special beauty in that observation. Ever since the advent of Christianity, even in the months following Pentecost, disagreement and dissent has been a mark of Christian life. Dissent, regardless of appearance, is not a sign of weakness, but, rather, it indicates strength. Whenever an organization exists without any conflict, it is reasonable to assume that something unhealthy and dangerous lies beneath its surface.

In the wake of tragedy, we put aside the differences, theological disagreements, frustrations, jealousies (the guy sold, like, a billion books), and squabbles, to come together to offer support for the Warren family in the unifying center of who we are: Jesus. And if I know anything about Jesus, he does not shy away from tragedy, loss, and suffering. Actually, that is sort of his thing…

An intrepid reader, Jonathan, had a great comment on my last post about that guy offering $10,000 to ‘prove’ a particular way of reading the creation narratives in Genesis. It’s important to point out that by ‘intrepid reader,’ I mean ‘one of my oldest friends from high school and college, who was also in my wedding.’ Calling Jonathan a ‘reader’ is like saying my mom is a huge fan of my music: it might be true, but it also masks reality.

That said, here is his comment (reposted without his permission):

I’ve thought a lot recently about this, and how hard it is to disabuse ourselves of post-enlightenment thinking. Science is so very good at what it does, that we seem incapable of seeing truth as anything other than empiricism. And really, that’s a shame. Because trying to reconcile empiricism is a losing battle (and frankly, a waste of time much better spent).

I thought this deserved a direct response because I think he is absolutely correct. The scientific method excels at what it does: studying repeatable events. I am living proof of the effectiveness of science, as without it, I would have died of leukemia in early to mid 2006 (dx’ed Oct 2005). But when we equate ‘truth’ and ‘science,’ we have a problem. Indiana Jones, in “The Last Crusade,” put this clearly: Science is the search for fact. If you want truth, go to the philosophy department.

The reason why this confusion between fact and truth is problematic is that 99.9% of my existence and experience consists of non-repeatable events. If we limit truth to empiricism, as Jonathan warned, we unwittingly dismiss most of the human experience, and the things that make us human – the arts, aesthetics, relationships – get implicitly marginalized and dismissed as fluffy bits that really aren’t important.

Ironically, assuming that science is the fount of all truth ends up dehumanizing us.

I don’t know…what do you think?

A Young Earth Creationist has offered a $10,000 prize to anyone who can “disprove” the “literal” interpretation of Genesis 1.

There’s that word again…”literal.” While I am not qualified to talk about science with any authority, I can talk about the Bible. And I cringe every time someone uses the word “literal” to describe the way they interpret a set of documents that are at minimum 2,000 years old (quite a bit more than that for Genesis, as it were).

When we start using words like “literal,” “metaphorical,” or “allegorical,” we are unwittingly imposing modern categories on ancient texts. Ancient writers simply didn’t think in those terms, and herein lies my biggest concern: when we assume the Bible possesses a modern, post-Enlightenment worldview, we inevitably force the texts to say things they never intended. And that’s a problem.

We can see that Joseph Mastropaolo is making this exact mistake because he is seeking to argue that Genesis 1 (the creation narrative of 6 days) is the most “scientific” explanation of origins. But assuming that Genesis 1, along with the rest of the Bible, made sense in its original, ancient context, why would we want to apply a thoroughly modern category like “scientific” to something that came to its final form well before even the pre-modern era?

People don’t read the Bible for instruction in anatomy and physiology (e.g., they believed our thoughts came from our intestines) or geography (they thought the Earth was a disc or “chug”), so why do we assume that the Bible is fine for other scientific questions?

This isn’t an attack on the Biblical Narrative (as anyone who knows me will attest, I take it very, very seriously), but it is a short plea to stop and evaluate what the Bible is and isn’t trying to tell us.

Ultimately, I think we have lost our ability to read these ancient writings with historical empathy. In our narcissistic minds, we assume that the ancient writers perceived and talked about reality much in the same way as we do today. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and it doesn’t take much effort to see it – though we must be willing to look.

If this peaks your interest, I will be co-hosting a seminar on faith and science at Redeemer Lutheran Church on April 14th, 6:30pm. We will look at some of these issues in much more depth… but there won’t be any $10,000 prizes, unless you are feeling generous.

It appears they’ve announced that they will be protesting Sandy Hook Elementary. I can’t say I’m surprised.

What actually surprises me, however, is that they still appear to be operating under the assumption that someone still takes them seriously. In 2007 they were labeled “The Most Hated Family in America” in a documentary done by the BBC with  Louis Theroux. It’s a great show, by the way – I highly recommend it. I remember watching the national media’s reaction to this wonderfully dysfunctional family, specifically noticing how any anger directed towards them simply fed the group’s narcissistic sociopathy (I’m not sure if that’s a real thing, but it fits).

But honestly? I say pity them as you would the kid that starts fights in school because no one believes he really is Batman. Stop taking them seriously, stop allowing yourself to get angry, stop complaining about them. They feed off negative emotion like I feed off bacon: every chance they get.

Start treating them as they really are: deluded, sad, angry people who have no capacity for self evaluation. It is widely acknowledged that the patriarch, Fred Phelps, is a mentally ill, abusive, megalomaniac that keeps his little family in line by means of fear. That’s a hard way to live, both for him and his family.

While I have been pretty snarky during this brief post, what I am about to say is intended to be extremely serious (so please don’t send me any hate mail): Listening to( and reading) the rants by their leader, Fred Phelps, it is fairly clear that he suffers from at least a personality disorder and quite possibly other significant mental health issues. I find it deeply ironic and unsettling that they will be demonstrating in the wake of an event that will hopefully bring mental health awareness/issues to the national conversation.

 

 

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In my last post, I described the functions God created, according to Genesis 1. The first three days of the narrative explain the functions of nature that God established: time, weather/precipitation, and vegetation/food. The next step, after functions, is to install the functionaries, which are the entities of nature that perform or inhabit the functions.

Before we get into that, it’s probably a good idea to talk about method, because for most readers of the Bible, using Genesis 1 to talk about functions and functionaries may seem weird. For a more in-depth discussion of these topics, I recommend John Walton’s “The Lost World of Genesis 1.” Much of what I say is in dialog with his work, and some of it is just plainly stolen from him. Seriously, it’s a great book.

Questions about origins dominate the way we read the Biblical creation narratives, which is no surprise. Unfortunately, we often forget to consider what kind of questions we should be asking because it seems quite obvious to us that discussion of the origins of the earth and humanity ought to be concerned with scientific and material concepts: nuclear chemistry, orbital physics, chemical compositions, distances, and age. In a post-Enlightenment (and scientific) world, these are the things that we concern ourselves with when we ask, “Where did we come from, and how did this all get here?”

In fact, it is very, very difficult to imagine doing it any other way. But for most of history, humans have not conceived of the earth’s origins in these terms. Our preoccupation with materials is a modern thing. Ancient cultures saw the world in very different ways.

That is not to say that they were “primitive” or “dumb.” Well… they were just as dumb as we are today. But rather than a scientific explanation for the origins of the earth, many ancient cultures, especially the Ancient Near East, sought to understand the world in terms of its function and meaning. They accomplished this by using myths – narratives that offer an explanation. These myths described what it meant to be human, why the earth was created, and how it was created through divine activity. Far from being primitive, these narratives are often quite brilliant, complex, and contain tremendous insight into the human experience. They are still read today for this reason.

But they are not scientific accounts, and bringing scientific questions to these texts, including the Bible, fails to understand the cultures in which they were written. I’ll have to get to the functionaries next time because this post is already getting too long, but suffice it to say that the Biblical accounts of origin, the creation narratives of Genesis 1-3, occupy an ancient worldview that has no preoccupation with the materials of creation. As with my previous post, it is interested in how the elements of the universe functioned in an ordered system and how these elements gained meaning when they worked together to support/sustain human life.

Theologically, this means that God is perfectly happy to enter into human weakness (and culture) in order to reveal himself. All communication is governed by culture, and God revealing himself to humanity is no different. Even using the pronoun “he” in reference to God illustrates this point. So when God was answering the questions of  ‘who we are and how did all this get here,’ he did so in a way that made sense to the Israelite culture.

If you would like a more in-depth look, I highly recommend the book by John Walton: 

See larger image The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Paperback) By (author) John H. Walton List Price: $16.00 USD New From: $8.55 In Stock Used from: $7.05 In Stock

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In Genesis 1:5, part of the creation narrative in 7 days, God calls the light ‘day’ and the darkness ‘night.’ Why wouldn’t God just call them ‘light’ and ‘dark?’ This signals to us that something strange (to us) is going on in the text, and it turns out that it has to do with how we understand existence in the modern world. That might seem like a huge leap, but allow me to explain.

We in the modern world posses a material ontology, meaning that we tend to think about something’s existence based on its material properties. Salt exists because Sodium and Chlorine bonded ionically, and thus it possesses the material properties required to give salt its existence. The chair I am currently using is made from the finest cheap plastic goop you usually find in only the lowest grade outdoor patio furniture. It possesses legs, a back, armrests, a seat, and it starts to bend in funny ways during the winter when I let the space-heater get too close. All material properties, giving rise to what I call ‘chair.’

It’s completely natural that we would take this same material-oriented ontology to the text of Genesis 1, because when we talk about the origins of the universe, we do so in a materially oriented fashion. We want to know about the age of the Earth/universe, the composition of planets and stars, distances, etc. These are all material concerns.

Material ontology is part of our worldview, and worldviews always insert themselves into interpretations. So, we have to ask ourselves: Did the Israelites (and the rest of the Ancient Near East) view the world in a materially oriented way? In other words, when they wrote about origins and creation, were they referring to the materials of the universe, or did they have something else in mind?

Obviously, I wouldn’t have bothered asking the question if I didn’t think there was something else going on. We can see a different understanding of the world in verse 5, where God calls light and dark by different names. ‘Day’ is a period of light, and ‘night’ is a period of dark, and when that section concludes with “And there was evening and there was morning, the first day” we see exactly what God just created: Time.

A period of light followed by a period of darkness gives us the basis for time, unless you live in Scandinavia during either the winter or summer. It’s important to note that for us materialists, God hasn’t created anything material on this day. The sun, moon, and stars don’t come until day 4, and no one in the ancient world had any concept of the particle-wave theory of light. Rather than creating materials, God is establishing functions.

That word, functions, is enormously important because while we often judge the existence of something on its material properties, the people of the Ancient Near East had a functional ontology. For them, something existed if it had a function in an ordered system. My cheap, plastic chair, in this sense, isn’t a chair until someone actually uses it, giving it a function. The ancient Israelites didn’t understand how the earth revolved around the sun, or that the moon reflected the sun’s light, but the interchange between night and day created the function of time.

Before we jump into the rest of the days in Genesis, we ourselves, in our materially-ontological glory, use functional thinking as well. If I told you that I got a new computer,  you probably aren’t going to be interested in when and where it was manufactured, the chemical composition of the components, etc. You’d be asking me about its speed, storage capacity, features, battery life, etc. In other words, you’d ask me about its functions, not its material composition. The Ancient Near East, and Genesis 1 in particular, is quite like that.

See how this plays out over the next few days in the creation narrative:

And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

During day 2, God separates out “waters from the waters” (whatever that means) and eventually ends up with “waters above” and “waters below.” According to ancient reasoning (see the image), water fell from the sky so there must already be water up there (they didn’t know about the water-cycle), hence the “waters above.” The important word here usually gets translated “expanse” or “firmament”, and it is what’s formed after God does all this separating. This firmament was like a giant dome, and God calls it “heaven,” though in Hebrew the word is “sky.”

So… the big question here is: What did God actually do? He didn’t create anything material, but what function do we see? Go back to what I said about waters being “above.” The heavens/firmament hold back those waters and control their flow – meaning they allow for the function of precipitation and weather.

Day 3:

And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

A lot happens on day 3. Dry land appears, the seas are gathered together, and then the Earth does something amazing: it sprouts vegetation. It never says anything about the material composition of seeds and plants, and we are only told that the Earth itself sprouts. If we hold to a materialistic view of this creation account, then it would seem as though plants are just appearing like mold on a piece of bread. This won’t make much sense, and we would have to contort the text in order to make it fit into our worldview. However, from an ancient, functional perspective, here emerges the function of vegetation.

We now have 3 functions: time, weather, and vegetation. In my next post, we will look at the functionaries.

If you would like a more in-depth look, I highly recommend the book by John Walton: 

See larger image The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Paperback) By (author) John H. Walton List Price: $16.00 USD New From: $8.55 In Stock Used from: $7.05 In Stock

 

Everyone knows Spiderman. He flips around with web shooting out of his hands and beats up bad guys. But…if you ask how he gained all those superpowers, you might get different answers depending on the generation of the person you are asking. The older crowd knows that he was bitten by a radioactive spider, which, rather than giving him leukemia, made him a hero. However, the younger generations would answer that he was bitten by a genetically modified spider. Why the difference?

Stan Lee created Spiderman in the early 1960s. In the cold war era, when it seemed like nuclear war was both inevitable and imminent, radiation and nuclear fallout had Americans shaking in terror. Spiderman being bitten by a radioactive spider spoke to an underlying fear that resonated with many.

Spiderman’s popularity experienced a resurgence in 2002 with a new series of movies. This time it wasn’t radiation. A genetically altered spider bit Peter Parker, which makes perfect sense. In 2002, the Human Genome project was about a year from being completed, with rough drafts of the entire human genome already being disseminated. It was an amazing accomplishment. At the same time, our culture was becoming more aware of the possibilities and dangers involved with genetic modification. It wasn’t the radiation of the 1960s, in part because we were doing it to ourselves (and our food).

This is a small example, but it shouldn’t be too surprising. Artistic expression often works with themes that resonate in culture, even when those themes aren’t obvious. In fact, I have a hunch that literature (and I use this word very, very loosely) often speaks to a culture most powerfully when it works with themes that are under the surface. When an unexpected nerve is hit, it hurts worse.

Aside from interesting cultural analysis, the kinds of stories that our culture finds compelling can also tell us a lot about ourselves. Consider the biggest blockbusters over the last few years. What do they have in common? Have you noticed that there have been nauseatingly large quantities of superhero movies? You haven’t? Oh…I see. You live in a cave.

What kind of hero do we want? Let’s leave Spiderman behind and look at two of the biggest superhero franchises over the last few years: Ironman and Batman. Both movie franchises made gobs of money, and most of the movies were fantastic (except for Ironman 2 – that was awful). There are some eerie parallels between these two.

Both are the alter egos of wealthy billionaire playboys who use technology to gain an advantage over their enemies. And both commit acts of subjective violence, underscoring our deeply held belief that violence really can solve the world’s problems. This isn’t a commentary on violence per se, but it does show perhaps who we really trust in our society. We look to the billionaires and entrepreneurs, and especially to science and technology, to solve the problems that we face every day. We hope that through the use of money and technology we can actually even address the great evil that works its way through our world.

This really makes a lot of sense. To whom does our culture look up? We idolize people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, those wealthy, brilliant innovators at the forefront of technological advancement, and we hope that through their innovation our problems will be “solved.”

I’m not intending simply to browbeat our culture and tell them that they’re putting their trust in the wrong thing. In fact, humans of been doing that for as long as there have been humans. But I do see some interesting parallels between our desire for a superhero and Jesus’ experience of the people he encountered in the Gospels. Everybody was looking for a hero to save them from the Romans (they called that hero “Messiah”). And so Jesus had to confront the people’s expectations while at the same time reshaping their desires. God was going to do something very unexpected.

The kingdom of God, after all, was not something that was going to be achieved by military force. Instead, a new reality invaded the world, bringing God’s presence in and through the work of Jesus himself. Or, to put it another way, God’s presence was returning to Earth. While I’m sure nobody would have objected to God’s presence, it’s hard to imagine that this is what the people thought they really wanted.

The same goes for us in the modern 21st-century. Our culture desires billionaire superheroes to bring innovative technology and scientific advancement, and we think this is going to actually save us from both ourselves and the evil that we encounter in our world. However, that hasn’t worked so far, and I really don’t think it’s going to work in the future.

Jesus is not a superhero that is here to solve all our problems. Instead, he is God’s presence that has come to confront evil and actually take the full force of that evil onto himself. This goes far deeper than merely solving problems. It actually cuts right to the core of who we are as individuals and as communities. The problem is that the line between good and evil is drawn down the middle of each of us. Neither a superhero nor Google can save us from this reality.