A Metaphor for Grace
May 28th, 2009
Sometimes I occasionally hear a non-Christian sort of person question how God could, to paraphrase, “condemn someone simply for not believing in Jesus.” This strikes me as profoundly missing the point.
Suppose a man has murdered and raped many people, and has justly been apprehended and sentenced to death. He cries to the judge for mercy, and the judge has compassion and says, “I will commute your sentence – if you only apologize for what you’ve done.”
Suppose the man replies, “How dare you condemn me to death simply for not apologizing!” That’s what asking the above question sounds like to me.
A Facebook Experiment
May 16th, 2009
In my line of work (software R&D), folks often talk a big game about using evolutionary methods to solve problems – after all, since the vast, intricate complexities of life arose through random trial-and-error, shouldn’t most of our piddling computer problems be solvable that way as well? I’m not personally familiar with many problems that are actually solved this way – and, in fact, the very idea that software can be developed randomly by trial and error strikes me as patently ludicrous.
I think it might be interesting, though, to try an experiment with Facebook. Facebook has this feature where individual developers can create “Facebook apps,” like quizzes and little games and things. You can embed these little programs in your Facebook profile, and then they proliferate like viruses by sending messages to all your friends on your list, trying to get you to embed the program as well. In a way, a Facebook app is sort of like a basic living cell – it has the machinery to reproduce rapidly, and can live or die based on whether somebody somewhere finds it useful or entertaining.
Suppose someone developed a Facebook app that, every time it was shared with someone new, rewrote its own code ever so slightly – a point mutation, or a copy-and-paste, any of the sorts of operations that DNA might undergo. How many generations would it take before a simple Facebook app that, say, displays a random message on your Facebook profile, becomes an in-browser word processor? Or even a highly annoying celebrity-themed quiz? Or anything new at all?
The very idea seems silly to me – the odds are tremendous that a single code tweak in a program results in a broken program. I doubt such an app would survive even one or two generations from its original inception. So many changes have to be made in concert to even have the code compile, it seems useless to expect random piddling to result in anything but a mess. I can’t change the name of a variable without first declaring the new variable in a previous statement – if I change a variable declaration first, none of the usages of that variable will be recognized, etc, etc.
But even supposing there was a way to guarantee that your Facebook friends only got successfully compiled applings, there’s a still huge distance between “simple Facebook app” and “Hollywood quiz.” What possible step-by-step path could exist between the two, such that each program along the way is more advantageous or useful for the Facebook user than the previous step?
What If There Were…
April 27th, 2009
… a weird sect that took Jesus’s admonition to not worry about tomorrow so literally that they forbade the use of calendars? What would result?
Quick Thought on Mercy
April 23rd, 2009
God offers over-the-top mercy, but I think most of us aren’t as interested in receiving mercy as in being excused.
Josiah
April 17th, 2009
I suppose I should clarify my last post a bit. I don’t mean to argue that God is not concerned at all with state power – given a choice between a just government and an unjust government, God would undoubtedly choose the former. I strongly suspect, however, that in the absence of a just people, a just government is meaningless. It’s sort of like music and lyrics. People can talk all day about lyrics they love, post them on their blogs and such – but if the music’s no good, the lyrics certainly aren’t going to make up for it. Good music saves mediocre lyrics far more often than good lyrics saves a mediocre tune, and likewise with people and government. You can’t impose righteousness from the top down.
For some reason, I felt the need to look up Josiah this morning – a Sunday School example of a Biblical king who did right. What I had forgotten, or perhaps never really learned, is what Josiah’s reforms didn’t matter at all. The king did everything right, and God said, “Well, that’s nice. I’m still bringing the wrath down.”
Consider the words of the prophetess Huldah to Josiah:
“This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: Tell the man who sent you to me, ‘This is what the LORD says: I am going to bring disaster on this place and its people, according to everything written in the book the king of Judah has read. Because they have forsaken me and burned incense to other gods and provoked me to anger by all the idols their hands have made, my anger will burn against this place and will not be quenched.’ Tell the king of Judah, who sent you to inquire of the LORD, ‘This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says concerning the words you heard: Because your heart was responsive and you humbled yourself before the LORD when you heard what I have spoken against this place and its people, that they would become accursed and laid waste, and because you tore your robes and wept in my presence, I have heard you, declares the LORD. Therefore I will gather you to your fathers, and you will be buried in peace. Your eyes will not see all the disaster I am going to bring on this place.’ “
All of Josiah’s reforms saved Josiah, but not Judah. You can force folks to celebrate Passover, you can use the power of the state (violence, mostly) to slaughter the priests of the idols and knock down their places of worship, you can even get everyone together and have them pledge themselves to the Lord once again. It doesn’t necessarily mean God is pleased with your society.
I’m sure it’s not entirely as cut and dry as all that (it never is), but it’s an interesting story nonetheless.
“Fundamental Principle of Christian Social Theology”
April 15th, 2009
So here’s a fun quote from conservative writer Albert Jay Nock, courtesy of Jonah Goldberg over at National Review Online:
To take another example, the present state of public affairs shows clearly enough that the State is the poorest instrument imaginable for improving human society, and that confidence in political institutions and nostrums is ludicrously misplaced. Social philosophers in every age have been strenuously insisting that all this sort of fatuity is simply putting the cart before the horse; that society cannot be moralized and improved unless and until the individual is moralized and improved. Jesus insisted on this; it is the fundamental principle of Christian social philosophy. Pagan sages, ancient sages, modern sages, a whole apostolic succession running all the way from Confucius and Epicetus down to Nietzche, Ibsen, William Penn, and Herbert Spencer – all of these have insisted on it.
I find this quote quite interesting – I don’t think I’ve ever heard so many different sages and philosophers so neatly tied together along with Jesus! Nietzsche even! The question is – is this true?
Well – I think the sentiment that the state is mostly worthless for improving society is emphatically true. I’m not sure it’s fair to suggest that Jesus “insisted” on this particular point, although I think it’s implicit in his methodology – God did not appear to be in the habit of giving moral instruction primarily to kings and potentates, but to the people generally.
You might argue that God often spoke to people “collectively” rather than “individually,” but I find that distinction to be brain-warpingly useless. The point is, does God seek to reform the world through state power, or through the people, individually and collectively? The answer to THAT question seems fairly clear.
Good thoughts to muse on, I guess…
GraceConversation.com
April 5th, 2009
My dad, an elder at my home congregation, is now participating in a very interesting online discussion blog called GraceConversation.com – between two more “progressive” Church of Christ folks and two more “conservative” Church of Christ folks. It’s the kind of conversation that seems like a really good thing to have, so I thought I’d post a link to it.
I put “progressive” and “conservative” in quotes because I’m afraid that terms like that may communicate more than it actually intended, as labels often do. Nonetheless, there are obviously very different groups within the Church of Christ, and the less traditionally-minded often dismiss the more traditionally-minded without really addressing their arguments in a respectful, loving way. So I’m glad that my dad is participating in this, and I pray that it helps lead the church to a greater understanding and more unity.
On a slightly related note, sometimes it bothers me when progressive Church of Christers insinuate that the root cause of the conservative’s disagreements is that they take the Bible or Scripture too seriously. They don’t necessarily say this directly, but I’ve heard it as the thrust of various arguments. The word “legalism,” for example, can connote this in certain cases. If the issue at hand is a lack of mercy, love, and unity, that is NOT from taking the Bible too seriously, or too literally, or too authoritatively, or from a hermeneutic that interprets every verse of Scripture as a binding law. It can’t be, because so much of Scripture is dedicated to precisely those things.
Proverbs 2
April 3rd, 2009
For those of us wrestling with theological issues, it may be encouraging to read Proverbs 2. God didn’t wait until the New Testament to promise wisdom and understanding to those who ask God for it.
Pardon the Mess
April 2nd, 2009
I’ve decided Reasonings will be the first thing to get the new makeover – to ChrisGuinCreations.com. For the next bit, though, it may be unsightly. Apologies.
A Paradox of Friendliness
February 28th, 2009
“Community” is one of those words that feels overused to me. As someone participating in a form of “organic” church, it comes up quite a lot. I even once saw a website capitalize the word as though it were God.
It strikes me as too simplistic. A godly community, like a godly marriage or a godly friendship, has many obvious and wonderful benefits. But would it hurt to acknowledge, every so often, that it requires a great deal of effort? That true community, like marriage or friendship, doesn’t just “happen” and stay “happened”? That to a certain extent, it isn’t natural, organic, or easy?
Community and friendship are easy (and even then not very easy) only with people who are pretty much just like you. But that’s clearly not what God calls us to. Nor is engaging in community with people who are very different simply a question of getting over our initial prejudices and giving it a try. It can take continual effort to be engaged with someone who isn’t like you.
Some Americans, I think, fool themselves into thinking that they have reached across boundaries. Some have, of course, but a great many have reached across only superficial boundaries. Skin color, sexual orientation, sex, national background, etc. can be barriers, but among people who are otherwise basically the same they’re not that difficult to cross – if we’re both educated, intellectual, young people who think alike and value the same things, being in community with each other isn’t that hard.
But crossing other kinds of boundaries – age, culture, and education level, for example – can be harder. A whole heck of a lot harder.
And then there’s another paradox – the more effort it takes to be someone’s friend, the less that friendship actually feels like a friendship. Friendship isn’t supposed to be an effort, right?
I remember feeling this way in my church youth group back in high school. There were a couple people like me, but most of the other kids were very different in one way or another. They had different tastes in things to do, were much older or younger, lived in a different culture. But they were all very nice, and often made honest efforts to connect with me. It just didn’t matter much to me, because who wants to be the guy who takes effort to talk to? I made a distinction to myself around the 7th or 8th grade or so: there’s a big difference between being friendly and being a friend, and “friendly” can only take you so far.
It presents a difficult core to the question. An ideal-looking community would surely have everyone be sincere, authentic friends with everyone else, regardless of intelligence, background, age, or culture. But there’s a level at which you just CAN’T be authentic friends with everyone. You can only make an effort, and that effort will at some level be noticeable.
So when it comes to building a community of Christ, is it reasonable to expect that everyone be authentic friends with everyone else? Is that what a godly community really looks like?
I’m inclined to say no. I think loving each other is very different from being best friends with each other. Evangelical churches talk a lot about “relationships” and so we figure that’s the end-all, be-all of Christianity, but there’s also the “mission” component (another recent fad, but one I respect somewhat more). What should unite us should not be, at bottom, our love for each other. What should unite us should be our commitment to Christ. We love each other not because we like each other, but because we’re committed to following Jesus.
The idea of working together towards a common goal can actually break down more barriers than the idea of liking spending time with each other – since there’s lots of people out there we don’t really like spending time with. I imagine that, if you want to form bonds with someone not at all like you, it’s easier to do so as a fellow solider in an army rather than standing awkwardly at a “mixer” with drinks in hand.
Community can, of course, bring about mission via encouragement and spurring. But mission can also bring about community, by giving us something to work towards outside of ourselves, making us a part of something bigger – our personal enjoyment of another person’s company matters less.
I don’t think this means we shouldn’t be friendly or make efforts to be friends with people not like us. But we should be aware that it isn’t easy (it’s artificial, to a significant extent, which isn’t bad), and we shouldn’t base all our evangelistic efforts on our ability to like being around other people. Because we won’t always.