China's future and the West

In chapters six and seven of “Making Sense of  GOD” , Timothy Keller describes the implications of three possible sources of identity. Historically, people defined themselves by their society and its values and advancement. He gives the example of warriors who counted it an honor to die in battle for their people. Modern society tells people to find themselves in their own desires and values, regardless of social constraints, mores, and values. Biblically, believers in God defined themselves by their relationship to Him and in Him.

There is a curious shift in society to which I have no insight. In the past few decades, China has shifted from a very tradition-honoring society to one in which entrepreneurship is highly rewarded. While paying homage to the wisdom of ancient Chinese culture and tradition, it appears that China is moving culturally in the direction of valuing innovation and modernity, not foe their own sake, but because they promote efficiency, productivity, and prosperity. The outcome of this shift is outside my understanding, but it raises a question for believers.

In the west (Europe and North America) the new definition of self has been tried and found wanting. We have become societies of infinite variability with innumerable factions self-defined by their own values. And the conflict between factions seems to grow without limit. Christians, with centuries of history of sectarianism, seem to still, somehow unite based on the core values of who Jesus is, what He did, and what He commands, but are rapidly minoritizing in western society.

China has a much weaker basis in Christian values than the west although the gospel has been there for centuries and has a foothold. How will China fare as they progress into the social experiment of abandoning their tradition? Will their society dissolve into a sea of conflicting factions, will they retreat into the safety of tradition, or will Christianity have the opportunity to form a new basis for social values and function? How will the west react to the changes in China? Is this the precursor to that period in which the gospel will be preached effectually to every nation and every person? (Matthew 24:14) Will the west seize the weakness of Chinese society to prey on them? Or will China discover a new strength in a society based on Christian values and practice, and simply leave the west to dissolve in the post-Christian chaos of society that worships individuality above all?

A Challenge to the Hallmark Channel

A Challenge to the Hallmark Channel

The romance movies aired endlessly on the Hallmark channel, cookie cutter though they be, have a fanatically loyal following. They are women’s drug of choice, just as DUIT[1] is men’s endless obsession. And to be fair, it must be a profitable product, and far more uplifting than most of the unwatchable drivel on networks. Even though the plots are cut out with a cookie cutter, it is a clean cookie cutter. 

What is the challenge? Simply this: in life, only love that matures endures past the initial rush. C. S. Lewis put it this way [2]

I think the thrill of the Pagan stories and of romance may be due to the fact that they are mere beginnings—the first, faint whisper of the wind from beyond the world—while Christianity is the thing itself: and no thing, when you have really started on it, can have for you then and there just the same thrill as the first hint. For example, the experience of being married and bringing up a family cannot have the old bittersweet of first falling in love. But it is futile (and, I think, wicked) to go on trying to get the old thrill again: you must go forward and not backward. Any real advance will in its turn be ushered in by a new thrill, different from the old: doomed in its turn to disappear and to become in its turn a temptation to retrogression. Delight is a bell that rings as you set your foot on the first step of a new flight of stairs leading upwards. Once you have started climbing you will notice only the hard work: it is when you have reached the landing and catch sight of the new stair that you may expect the bell again. This is only an idea, and may be all rot: but it seems to fit in pretty well with the general law (thrills also must die to live) of autumn & spring, sleep and waking, death and resurrection, and “Whosoever loseth his life, shall save it.”

After the wedding comes a life of growth and change, or else failure. Positive dramatizations of marriage at midlife have typically focused on the children, in sitcoms such as Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, My Three Sons, or The Brady Bunch. There are occasional shows that perhaps show the struggles of a married couple at midlife, and show the moral growth and maturing love that enables them to remain together. But they are few, and often hard to watch. Surely the creative genius of the producers and writers of the Hallmark channel can rise to the challenge of dramatizing struggle and growth in an appealing, compelling way.

Old age brings another type of challenge, as those who have matured in love deal with the gradual decay and failure of their bodies. Transcendent love emerges - the transformation of human devotion to focus on heavenly objectives and beings. The care and tenderness between those who have lived and loved for forty or fifty years is obvious to anyone who spends a few minutes in their presence. The outworking of all that God has done in their hearts over the years makes them almost a different kind of person. When the body fails, the soul is released. Sitting by the bed of affliction of such a saint, perhaps in hospice care, the Presence of God overwhelms the visitor, and the quality of His supernatural divine love is sensed. The Hallmark challenge is to convey this essence via movie and television. There is no cookie cutter for God’s activity in our lives.

[1] DUIT = driving under the influence of testosterone

[2] The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume II: Family Letters 1905-1931. Copyright © 2004 by C. S. Lewis

Book Review: The Mideast Beast, by Joel Richardson

In The Mideast Beast, Joel Richardson argues that the antichrist of Revelation, the beast of Daniel, one and the same, will lead an Islamic nation or coalition, potentially a revived Caliphate. The various passages he considers and the logic he presents vary in depth, but certainly are worth considering. The fundamental premise he challenges is the widely held belief that the antichrist will head a revived Roman Empire, or at least have a European base. 

His strongest argument is the map. A comparison of the three empires unambiguously identified in Daniel 2:36-39 - Babylon, Medo-Persia, and Greece, compared to maps of the Roman Empire at its height and the Islamic Caliphate at its height, is compelling.  The fourth empire of Daniel 2:40-43 geographically is much more aligned with the Rashidun Caliphate or the Ottoman Empire than the empire of the Roman Caesars. The argument for the Roman paradigm is time. Rome conquered the remains of the Greek empire and ruled in its place. The Islamic Caliphate appeared almost a thousand years after the Greek domains of Alexander’s successors were conquered. Is time or geography more important?

There is also a discussion about the scope of the domain of the antichrist. If the antichrist leads a revived Islamic Caliphate covering the regions identified by map, he would not have the authority to force all people in the inhabited earth to take his mark in order to buy and sell. (Revelation 13:14-17) Some possible options: 

• Islam dominates the entire earth, not just the mid eastern region where it is currently predominant. The worldwide migration of Muslims might set the stage for this possibility.
• The passage in Revelation is speaking metaphorically or poetically about everyone who dwells in the kingdom of the beast, not literally the entire inhabited earth. Daniel 2:39 describes Alexander the Great’s empire as ruling over the whole earth, even though we would today call it a regional power.
• The beast of Revelation and the evil ruler of the fourth empire in Daniel are different, the events are in different eras, and the map of the Islamic empire is irrelevant to the prophecies of Revelation.

Another item of dispute is the identity of the people of ‘the prince who is to come’ (Daniel 9:26) with Rome. Although Titus was the commanding Roman general of the legions that destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD (and later emperor of Rome, 79-81 A.D.), the troops were a conglomeration of subject peoples. Richardson presents evidence that these people were from the nations surrounding Israel, her perpetual enemies, and not ethnically Roman. 

Are the enemies of Israel are identified by ancestry or geography? There are many conflicting theories about where the descendants of the peoples named in Daniel and Ezekiel have migrated to. It is an inarguable fact of history that the people living in the lands that surround Israel have consistently hated the Jews. Projecting this to the future, the geographic origin of Israel’s future invaders will be will be unambiguous, whereas their ancestry could be arguable.

The book concludes with a heartfelt plea for reaching Muslims with the gospel. Muslims are devout people who seek God with ardor, but have been taken in by error. God loves them and wants to reach them with Truth. He hears the cry of Ishmael’s seed. Even if the hypothesis of this book is wrong, the Islamic world represents the largest unreached people group in the world. Can we receive the heart of Christ for the lost?

What is Truth? Pilate asked Jesus this question (John 18:38), because he was not at the Last Supper (John 14:6). Richardson does not address this question in depth, but it is critical. Islam teaches that Jesus was a prophet. Believing this does not meet the standards that Jesus set. The Bible identifies three types of things necessary to belong to Jesus.

• We must believe specific things, primarily that Jesus is Lord, and that God raised Him from the dead. (Romans 10:9)
• We must do the things Jesus commanded, not Pharisaical rule following but acting from the heart. (Luke 6:46)
• We must have a relationship with Him, so that we know His voice, and He knows us. (John 10:14)

This is not a multiple question exam. These gifts of God’s grace are more like three sides of a triangle. If the triangle represents salvation and peace with God, these are the stuff that the triangle is built of. They depend on and interact with each other. Being God’s child is vastly more important than knowing the future nationality of antichrist. A good bottom line on Richardson’s book.

Fractal Time and Biblical Prophecy

God’s Fractal Time

Envision time as a one-way street whose direction is fixed by entropy. The second law of thermodynamics fixes its irreversibility - no backing up! How do we reconcile this with Biblical prophecy and the doctrine of predestination? 

Using distance as a metaphor for time, we can imagine a second dimension (or more) perpendicular to our time-street. Imagine turning right 90 degrees. As we proceed in this direction, time on the original line is unchanged but seems to continue advancing for us. Imagine a grid of such streets. We advance on the cross street until encountering another street, and turns right again (imagining that entropy flows differently on Main Street than on our side street). Two more such maneuvers and we are back to the original time-line but upstream of our starting point. 

One might wish for such a trip, but such are not possible for mere mortals, as physics apparently confines us to our current timeline. We might think God inhabits some multidimensional continuum, and perhaps the angels, but there are still questions. If God desires all men to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4), how does He orchestrate time to give each individual, give each individual the best possible opportunity to be saved? When He allows prophets to see future events (e.g., Daniel, Revelation) is He allowing them a view from afar through this multidimensional time fabric, or recording future events on a heavenly DVD and playing it back for the prophet, or allowing them a short trip outside our timeline?

The story gets more complicated as we contemplate the hints that God may not be limited to integer time dimensions. Suppose our space-time continuum is constructed by God with fractional time dimensions. A one-dimensional one-way time street manifestation of fractal time might be self-similar constructs on different scales. For example, the concept of a Sabbath rest occurs on a weekly basis (Exodus 20:8-11), a seven-year span (Exodus 23:11) a 49-year span (Leviticus 25:8-11), and a 490 year span (2 Chronicles 36:21)). It is difficult to imagine how this would manifest in a multi-dimensional time construct.

What does this have to do with prophecy and predestination?  Our common sense concept of cause and effect is a tiny subset of the nature of God and the universe He constructed. Some consider causality to be a gift of God to humankind, given so that we live in a universe we can comprehend and act in with purpose. The angels behold God’s face, yet a third of them rebelled, knowing and experiencing the consequences (being eternally exiled and imprisoned in the lake of fire), and yet rebelling anyway. We have free will, but not seeing God eye to eye, the consequences of our choices are not visibly evident at the time of decision, so we accept or reject Him by faith. For most, the choice is offered more than once, so that when the curtain rings down, no one can say God didn’t give them a chance. 

Thus prophecy and predestination may be manifestations of God’s use of time, as a construct in which future events are foreshadowed by earlier incidents on a smaller scale. The one difference is freewill - humans can change their mind and repent, and turn to Him. This disturbs the symmetry of fractal constructs, but serves God’s ultimate purpose. If, on a later iteration of a sequence of events, we choose His path, and stick with it, the ultimate consummation is changed. The concept of fractals and the concepts of prophecy, foreshadowing, and repetition are not identical, but related in how we experience time. This dynamic is poetically described in The Four Calls, by Isaiah Baltzell (as L. Baltzall)

Does the Faith of Christopher Columbus Matter?

Does The Faith of Columbus Matter?

What geopolitical events triggered the Spanish crown’s decision to fund Columbus to sail west? The largest underlying factor seems to have been events in the centuries-long struggle between Christianity and Islam. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453 closed the western entrance to the Silk Road first blazed by Marco Polo in 1271-95, pushing Europeans to seeks another trade route to the Far East. The second was the conquest of Grenada in 1492 by the Spanish monarchy, ending the Moorish and Islamic presence in Iberia. That presence went back to 711 AD when the Moors invaded the southern tip of Western Europe, and advanced until the battle of Tours in 732 A. D. when Charles Martel defeated them. They remained a presence in the Iberian peninsula until 1492. After they surrendered at Grenada, they went south to Africa. 

In the 15th century, multiple European nations and explorers were seeking the advantages that would come from finding the alternate route to the Far East. In 1488, the Portuguese reached the Cape of Good Hope which showed promise for a sea route. Columbus advocated a direct western route, which he believed would be shorter. He made several mistakes in his calculations such as the radius of the earth, the size of a degree of longitude on the ground, and the total longitudinal span of the Eurasian landmass. (Per Wikipedia article.) He never got to the Far East. The flip side of this is that Columbus discovered a whole new world!

Columbus’ character is much harder to determine. There are many markers to devout Catholicism, but also actions that suggest the world’s approach to life. Faith markers: one ship named for St. Mary, another for the “little one” (maybe like El Niño or maybe just a small ship); using 2 Esdras 6:42 (an apocryphal reference) as evidence of a smaller ocean; naming the Lesser Antilles for saints; a book on prophecy written near the end of his life. Worldly actions include taking a mistress, tyrannical control when he had authority over new world settlers, seeking wealth from the profits the Spanish crown made in the new world, and enslaving native Americans. 

We remember a gifted sailor, explorer, and entrepreneur on October 12th, the day he first sighted land in the Western Hemisphere. It would not be fair to judge him by the standards of our time. Modern geography is based on centuries of mapping, charting, and geodesy since 1492. Biblical standards of character have been well known for thousands of years. We are all sinners, some saved by grace. Columbus, for all his faults, set in motion the settlement of the Americas. Does his faith matter? Perhaps to the extent that his life demonstrates the profound impact that one person can have, acting in faith, even though flawed.

Transcendence

Transcendence refers to the aspect of God’s nature and character that is independent of and beyond all known laws and principles within this universe. An easy and very shallow metaphor might be that spherical trigonometry transcends Euclidean geometry. Euclidean geometry is accurate for local travel, but directions for traveling large distances are not accurately captured in a rectilinear model. Seafarers have known for centuries to use latitude and longitude in a spherical coordinate system to navigate. Flatland (by A. Square, a.k.a. Edwin Abbott) provides fictional but much more entertaining examples.

Transcendence in matters of faith is not an excuse for not being able to articulate aspects of God’s nature, but a recognition of reality. Everything that we know and experience, accessible to our senses, capable of being reasoned by us, was created by God and therefore a subset of His eternal reality. C. S. Lewis discussed this in his essays, The Weight of Glory and Transposition. Biblically, God’s transcendence includes His ways being higher than our ways, and His thoughts higher than our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9); His throne being eternal (Psalm 99:2); His word being eternal (Psalm 119:89); His kingdom being eternal (Daniel 4:3); eternal life through faith in Jesus (John 3:15-16); and His unseen eternal glory. (2 Corinthians 4:17-18) 

On a human level, the glory of God includes His unfailing love, His perfect holiness, His unlimited power, wisdom, justice, and goodness. But in eternity, in His presence, are these attributes amplified or are they all intrinsic dimensions of a unified divine nature and essence as Thomas Aquinas said.  Even with all of Scripture, we lack words and concepts to meaningfully discuss this question. Is this a cop-out or a recognition of reality?

We have many questions. The problem of pain remains one of the chief stumbling blocks to faith for many. How can a good God allow terrible evil to occur and sometimes to triumph? Other questions: If God created the universe, where did God come from? If God is love, why did He command the Israelites to kill every man, woman, and child in Canaan? We struggle with the mystery of the Incarnation. Is it fair for God to create human beings with specific attributes - desires and limitations - and then call it sin when they respond to them? The answer to these issues lies in God’s transcendence. We don’t see the whole picture and have to trust Him.

Another aspect of transcendence is human response to being in the presence of God. Being overwhelmed by God’s presence is a not uncommon experience for believers. It is also Biblical. See, for example, Exodus 33:18-23; Joshua 5:14; Leviticus 16:2; Daniel 10:9; Isaiah 6:5; Ezekiel 3:23; Matthew 17:6; Acts 9:4; Revelation 1:17.

I was surprised to read in the last half of the first chapter of Timothy Keller’s book Making Sense of God that even atheists have transcendent experiences. He cites several examples of committed atheists who have described coming “... upon something inherently ‘wholly other’, whose kind and character are incommensurables with our own...” Despite a commitment to explain all human experience in an evolutionary biology framework, they are unable to so explain these experiences. Yet do not bow before the Maker of all things.

What is the point? The most important thing is not any of the following, true though they be: God does not owe us an explanation; If God were to answer our questions, we would be incapable of understanding the answers; We cannot sit in judgment of what God says or does. Instead, the most important observation is this:

God is so amazing that joining Him in His enterprise of redemption will be an adventure that we cannot fathom.

Does The Dogma Live Loudly Within You?

How does a life of faith contrast with a life of dogma? Dogma is something held as an established, authoritative tenet, a propositional axiom. Faith is trust in someone or something  that one holds onto despite difficulties and in confusing circumstances. We can have faith in tenets as unshakeable truths, but faith has a far broader scope. Dogma connotes authority; we can trust authority or rebel. Jesus enjoins us to trust Him on the basis of knowing Him, of having a relationship so strong that we recognize and understand His voice. (John 10:4 & 27) It is not doctrine to know the voice of the Lover of our soul. In the words of a traditional hymn, trust and obedience are inextricably linked at the core of our relationship with Jesus.

Both faith and doctrine influence our lives, in that we honor what we believe, and who we believe in. God created both the angels and humankind a certain way, and it seems logical to us that He would  command and bless our fulfilling the nature He created us with.  In life, we often find that God-given desires are not fulfilled. We blame this on sin (our own or others’), or opposition by the world, the flesh, or the devil. The gospels show that Jesus’ earthly life included fasting, denial of the flesh, and suffering. With Him as role model, this suggests that God’s intention for Adam and us is to overcome naturally good things for the sake of transcendent spiritual values, as Jesus did. (For example, His spending 40 days in the wilderness.) Lucifer’s downfall was that he believed that the light and beauty of his God-created nature would be fulfilled when he ascended above God. (Isaiah 14:13-14) He tempted Adam and Eve that they could become as God. (Genesis 3:5) It is a subtle path from “God created me this way”, to “God intends me to fulfill the nature He created in me”, to “the ultimate fulfillment of God’s creation is for me to be as God, and ultimately transcend Him.”

Does God take us through trials to reveal our true internal condition to us and to others? The life of faith - knowing Jesus even in the storm - suggests that we know Him best when we have nothing else. I have found the homeless have a strong connection to the Lord; they have tried and found Him faithful.

We all experience storms; whether He takes us through or we tough it out alone depends on us. If our faith speaks through our lives and actions, is it an assertive self-conscious (or self-righteous) display, or the aroma of a life broken by storms and saved by His hand? Is it a dogmatic life that acknowledges the struggle to reconcile relationship with Jesus with the imperatives of a world system that we live in?

The world, with its focus on intellectual understanding without a spiritual dimension, sees the Bible as a source of intellectual propositions, not a revelation of eternal truths. The intellectual content of the Bible is glorious (Psalm 119), but that is the farthest the world can get. The eternal presence of God is not merely a different view of reality, it transcends all that we can see or understand in the world. The life of those who know and walk with Jesus may appear governed by dogma to unbelievers. Only those who have access to that inner source of life that flows out of the innermost being of Jesus’ people (John 7:37-39) can discern the life of faith. The only way to experience this artesian well of eternal life is to receive Jesus and surrender to Him.