Fanboys and Fangirls

I used to be obsessed with Middle-Earth. As a fantasy writer, I wanted to create an entire world, and when I learned that Tolkien already did that – not just the world you see in The Lord of the Rings, but a whole mythos as well – I was fascinated. I still am fascinated today, but I’m no longer set on learning Sindarin. Don’t know what Sindarin is? I’ll tell you: it’s the mark of someone who knows a LOT about Tolkien. Elen sila lumenn omentielvo. I was a fan.

Did you know that “fan” is short for “fanatic”?

“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” – Winston Churchill

The dictionary on my tablet even has an entry for the word “fanboyism”: “blind, aggressive devotion.” Ouch. Not a label I would want. Why is this even a word? In this ‘enlightened age’ (*snark*) does “blind, aggressive devotion” have a place? The very fact that such a word exists is proof: obsession reigns in American society today. This is evident not only in the fandoms but in the “hatedoms” as well. You gotta love it or you gotta hate it; there’s no such thing as mere indifference. There are some diversions that have a polarized group of people who know about it, like Justin Bieber: there are people who are obsessed with him and people whose existence seems to revolve around bashing him (at least, it seems so if the topic comes up). Same for Twilight and the books that follow.

Why is obsession such a thing?

We’re looking to fill our empty lives.

When you set up Christ as the lord of your life, dying to your sinful desires and pursuing his will, he fulfills the deepest desires of your heart. Everything else in life is put in its proper place as secondary. Education, career, gaming, comics, Tolkien – what relevance do they hold to a follower of Christ? Only as much as they help further the kingdom of God and bring him glory.

After I started following Christ, fantasy stories went into their proper context. I no longer write as mere escapism, but as participation in what Tolkien termed ‘sub-creation’. I am made in the image of God, who is the Creator; activities that reflect his image bring him glory, so I write with that in mind.

You may recall the Lewis quote from my post on balanced faith. “All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are to be encouraged,” writes Screwtape in his letter to a junior tempter. We are created to worship God with our whole being, and to dwell on whatever is pure, lovely, and admirable. When we reject his sovereignty in our lives, it leaves a big hole in our hearts that we strive to fill.

Let’s turn away fanboyism with an indifferent hand and devote our whole selves to God.

Balanced Ideas in Our Faith

“I had not forgotten my promise to consider whether we should make the patient an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist. All extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy, are encouraged.” – The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis

It seems that many bad ideas and heresies in the Christian faith come from a biblical concept that has been twisted too far in one direction or another. I’ve come to the conclusion that several seemingly dichotomous statements are really ends of a spectrum, and the truth is in the middle.

For example, free will and predestination. Are the two concepts a dichotomy, or ends of a spectrum? What is the correct belief about them?

Let’s go extreme in the direction of free will. Such a doctrine states that man chooses God, that we can lose our salvation. Pretty self-explanatory. But go too far, and you end up with Deism: God isn’t involved at all, and us humans determine what will happen to us. There are no such thing as miracles, and Jesus was not God in the flesh. What’s the point of prayer if God’s not involved?

On the other hand, predestination says that God chooses us, and that we can’t lose our salvation. But go too far and you dissolve man’s responsibility for sin; if we’re all predestined, then doesn’t that mean we’re cosmic puppets and that God scripts out sin for us so that Jesus’ sacrifice wasn’t pointless? And how is that a loving God if he doesn’t give us the choice to love Him? What’s the point of prayer if the answers are already laid out?

So the truth must be balanced, because clearly God is sovereign, and clearly man has personal responsibility for sin.

The main problem here is a question of predestination and how it relates to God’s sovereignty. After all, if God knows the future, then that means that the future is set, right?

I think this comes from a misunderstanding of how God perceives time. Remember, he is outside of time, which means that it’s not linear to him. I require another Lewis quote to explain this more clearly; here, in The Screwtape Letters, a demon is explaining to his nephew (a junior tempter), how humans perceive time compared to the spirits:

“…the Enemy does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it.”

The concept of God experiencing all of Creation all at once while we experience it one event at a time – in other words, everything is in the present to God – kind of leaves the known-future-is-predestined argument wanting, as this argument puts God within the constraints of time and we know He is unbounded by it.

So how does God’s sovereignty relate to our free will? What’s the balance? I can’t say I know for certain, and I’m not much of one for philosophical debates (I’m all about what’s practical – if an idea isn’t true, it isn’t useful to me), but I do know that I have choices and choosing to obey God is a good choice. I also know that God is my Maker and is my sovereign Lord who loves me, so I should choose to obey God.

We see the Bible balancing itself in the matter of faith and works. Paul makes it clear that we are justified by faith in Christ and not by works. Later we see James support that, while we are not saved by our actions, faith is evidenced in what we do. “Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.” What terrible things happen when the church only focuses on one and forgets the other! On one end you get legalism – the idea that we need to earn our way into heaven – which leads into spiritual depression. At the other end you have what I shall call antinomianism, the idea that because we are saved by faith, we can reject all laws, including moral standards of our culture, and live however we want. “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!”

We must be careful to examine the teachings we receive, always checking it against the Scriptures as the Bereans did in Acts 17. If a teaching logically leads to behavior that is not Christlike, we must check if it is a Scriptural concept, and if it is, see what other concepts are meant to go along with it to balance it out. Our enemy would love nothing more than to break the church up into factions over some unhealthy extremism.

Please Stop Hating on Muslims

Before I begin:

1. I am grieved by what the ISIS is doing to Christians. This post is not talking about them.

2. I believe ‘Chrislam’ is utter heresy. I’m sure there are many Muslims who would agree.

Speaking nothing but hatred for Muslims seems to be a fashionable thing to do in conservative circles. But my siblings in Christ, please don’t participate. It does nothing to advance the gospel, nothing to help the victims, and nothing to change the hearts of Muslims. If anything, it is the sort of response the devil is trying to provoke, as it builds a wall between followers of Christ and the unsaved, and it distracts us from living out what Jesus commanded us: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength; and love your neighbor as yourself.

“But are the Muslims really my neighbors?” you may wonder. Maybe not phrased as bluntly as that.

Let me tell you a story.

A homeless man was trying to find food and shelter when winter came. The rains made his clothes damp, the evening chill seeped into his bones, and the bitter north wind beat his face, leaving him thoroughly cold and half dead along the road. A priest happened to be driving down the same road, and when he saw the man, he avoided eye contact and accelerated past. So too, a church elder, when he came to the place and saw him, crossed the street and passed by on the other side. But a Muslim, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He got out of his car, went to him, and gave him balm for his chapped face. Then he brought the man into his warm car, took him to get some hot food, and after that went looking for a shelter where the homeless man could find the assistance he needed.

Which of these three was neighbor to the homeless man?

“Hey, all she did was tell the parable of the good Samaritan, except she changed everything to be modern.”

Yes, that’s exactly what I did.

“But there are no good Muslims,” say the intended audience. Maybe they don’t say it so bluntly, but the sentiment is still there. Funny, the Jewish society that Jesus lived in would’ve felt the same way about Samaritans, who were the descendants of Jews who intermarried with Gentiles. In Jesus’ parable, the priest and the Levite avoided the potentially dead victim because contact with a corpse would defile them, to great inconvenience and personal cost. However, the Samaritan investigates (he’s under the same defilement taboos as the Jews, BTW) at his inconvenience and personal risk (traveling with an injured person would’ve been slow-going, leaving them at risk of bandit attacks) in order to show some mercy to this battered body next to the road.

Not all Samaritans would be like that example, obviously. Some were quite violent against the Jews. However, Christians aren’t always loving and even-tempered, or even true followers of Christ; in any large group of people you will find a wide spectrum of character. There’s been great good done in Christ’s name, such as the casting out of demons, the caring for of orphans, and many, many meals cooked up for a sick friend. But there’s also been some extremely evil acts done in the name of our good Lord. The Catholic Church of the Renaissance era was extremely corrupt, and the Spanish Inquisition was a part of that. For a modern-day example, just look at Westboro Baptist Church. Not only do they not resemble Christendom in general, they aren’t even similar to other Baptists!

When someone devotes themselves to a cause that is apart from Christ, they will inevitably go down a destructive path, whether it’s Islam, atheism, environmentalism, activism, food, movies, or gaming. Just like everyone else, Muslims desperately need the love of Christ, and hateful talk will not help them see it.

Oops, I Broke It...

Well, four posts in and I already broke the blog.

"Crazy girl, what is she talking about?" you mutter.

I had been thinking about writing a blog for months. Perhaps even over a year. Writing comes naturally to me, and I have copious amounts of ideas to share. Spreading biblical truth is especially important to me, since there seems to be such a lack of it in our confused society.

Eventually, I did start this blog, with the intent of ironing out wrinkles in the fabric of mainstream Christian thinking. The spark that started this engine was a worldview class I started teaching in January for my church's youth group. We meet only twice a month, so I decided my first series of posts would be geared towards supplementing the teachings presented in our discussion group.

While I think this is an excellent idea, it also proved to be the blog-breaker. I tried too hard to write what I thought was necessary for my youth group, rather than writing on issues that weighed heavily on my heart. The post I promised on divine revelation remains unfinished, because I don't think it's what God would have me write, at least for the time being. Far better to address questions being posed to us in everyday life.

So what is weighing on my heart right now? I'll share some of it with you. I recently went on a church retreat where the topic of study was that of being part of the chain of Christian faith that has persisted for the last 2000 years, and passing truth on to the next generation. I don't want to see fair-weather faith and irresponsibility in my generation. I don't want to see the glory of Christ traded for some feel-good teachings attributed to Jesus. I don't want to see bold truth traded for trendy buzzwords and a hip Sunday morning atmosphere. I want to encourage the current generation of believers to be genuine followers of Christ.

There are other issues, not quite as monumental as this. Nonetheless, they must be addressed. What is a proper Christian response to homosexuality? What is church anyway? How do we serve God if we're not pastors or missionaries? What is good worship? And what is with this essential oils trend I see among 'biblical homemakers' (a term which deserves its own post)?

So here's an apology to you, readers; I promised a new post this week and totally didn't deliver. What I will promise is that from now on, I'll be writing about the questions God places on my heart, rather than what I think is 'supposed' to come next.

The Seven Worldviews

It's been a busy weekend, so I'll keep this short.

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the foundational questions of worldview is “What is God?” There are seven different answers to that question, as presented by Norm Geisler in When Skeptics Ask; a few have their own subtypes. Here they are:

1. Theism: God exists.

               -Polytheism: many gods exist.

2. Deism: God exists, but isn’t involved in the world.

3. Pantheism: God is everything, and everything is God.

4. Panentheism: God is developing/evolving with the rest of the world.

5. Finite Godism: God exists, but is limited or imperfect.

               -Open Theism: God doesn’t know the future.

6. Agnosticism: we can’t know if God exists.

7. Atheism: God does not exist.

Knowing these concepts of God can help you identify them in the culture around you. Can you think of a popular science fiction franchise that is steeped in pantheism? (Hint: “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us…it binds the galaxy together.”) What reasons might a panentheist have for supporting humanitarian projects? Do you know of any worldviews that are a mix of two or more of these?

What's Your Worldview?

We've established that worldview is a person's beliefs and assumptions about reality. Your worldview affects your values, which affect your behavior, which affects your culture.

Have you thought about your worldview? Do you think you make assumptions or do you think that you consciously choose to believe in what you do? Do you even know what your worldview is? Here are some questions to help you think about that:

-Who, or what, is God?

-What is a human being?

-What is "nature"?

-Where did life come from?

-How do we know what is really true?

-What is morality, and how is it determined?

-What determines the value of children?

-What role do parents play in raising children?

-What is religion? How does it fit into everyday life and business?

-What is sacred, and what is secular?

-What is the purpose of man? Why does he exist?

Your answers to these questions will reflect your worldview, whether or not you're aware of what it is.

Greek Philosophy and Hebrew Theology

Are you a Greek or a Hebrew?

“What kind of question is that?” you may ask. Maybe you’re looking at the title of this post and thinking, “I’m neither a philosopher nor a theologian. Is this post for me?” Yes, it is.

I’m talking about worldview.

The Greeks worshiped a pantheon of gods, but these gods were too human. Instead of awe-inspiring deities, it was more like soap opera characters with superpowers. So the Greeks started to reject the idea that a higher power existed. Instead, impersonal Nature was the driving force in the universe.

Because of this, the Greeks had no cause to believe that divine revelation existed. Instead, they tried to determine absolute truth based solely on human reason. The problem was (and still is) is that in such a situation, truth becomes muddled. Black and white merge into grey, and virtues are subjective. The Greeks pursued philosophy because they had no answer to the question, “What is truth?”

On the other hand, no one remembers the Hebrews for their philosophers, because they didn’t have any. They had no use for them. See, the Hebrews did not believe the power of human reason was sufficient to find truth; it’s too subjective. In order to find truth, divine revelation is necessary, as it came from God our Creator, definer of the universe, and is therefore objective.

Such a society produces theologians, people who study God, and all their philosophy (that is, way of thinking) is concerned more with the practical application of the truth revealed to them. The Halakha (part of the Talmud) is full of various rabbis’ teachings on how to apply principles found in the Torah to everyday life (“halakha” literally means “the way of walking”). The Hebrew question wasn’t, “What is truth?” but rather, “How do we live the truth?”

Thousands of years later, western civilization still reflects the Greek view. Even those who are Christians still subscribe to Greek ways of thinking, and quite often teaching in contemporary churches does not reflect the view that all Scripture is God-breathed. Living the truth has been traded for feel-good, self-improvement type of teachings, which leave many of us grappling with the idea of ‘dying to self,’ among other Biblical concepts.

So: do you use your reason to find the truth, or do you use it to figure out how to live the truth?

Are you a Greek, or are you a Hebrew?