As the Deer

James Sire uses a book to answer the question Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All? He might also titled it Why I Believe Christianity Is True.  This work offers an apologia for faith and a rationale for being Christian.

In Part 1 he explores the reasons we believe anything.  I believe X because… my parents believed it… my priest told me so…  the Bible says it’s so… my society believes it… because it’s true. The responses he offers come from a survey of college students.  He makes a helpful distinction between causes of belief and reasons for belief. Sire’s preferred reason is this:  I believe X because it offers the best explanation for the tough issues of life.

In Part 2 Sire explains why he believes Christianity gives the ‘best explanation.’  He discusses the reliability of the Gospels and the problem of evil.  The heart of the matter for him is Jesus:

For a long time it has been my fascination with Jesus — his character, the brilliance and wisdom of his teaching, the depth of his compassion, the endlessness of his grace in forgiving sin — that has kept me in the faith.

For Sire, the resurrection validates Jesus.  He sees seven reasons to believe the resurrection happened:

1. The disciples and early followers of Jesus believed he was resurrected.
2. The tomb was empty.
3. The testimony of women.
4. New Testament accounts of Jesus’ appearances after his resurrection.
5. The transformed lives of the disciples.
6. Jesus became understood in highly exalted terms immediately after the resurrection.
7. Continuity and coherence between the resurrection and the entirety of Jesus’ life.

Of these reasons, Nos. 2, 3, and 7 sway me most.  It comes down to how much credibility you give the gospel testimony to the resurrection, and opinions on that differ widely, even in the church.

Anyone who disagrees with Sire’s presentation will still benefit from walking along with him, and perhaps his quest will prompt them to explore their own reasons for what they believe.

Gwen Cooper adopted a blind kitten who lost its eyes because of an infection. She wrote about what happened next in Homer’s Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned About Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat.

From the Monitor’s review:

She took the kitten home and named him Homer, rightly assuming that life with him would be a type of odyssey. But little could she have imagined the character that she would encounter behind Homer’s odd, eyeless facade.  The little cat (he never grew to be more than 3 pounds) turned out to be a daredevil, a spitfire, and a passionate lover. Homer, who of course had no way of knowing that he was blind, simply assumed it was normal to navigate fearlessly in the dark, lunge five feet into the air to capture flies in his mouth, and hurl himself onto the top shelves of closets for entertainment. He also assumed it was normal to enthusiastically befriend all he met, in addition to becoming an eager, adoring, gallant beau to Cooper.

Our orange tabby Jane isn’t blind, but she’s fearless too.  We call her Mordor, Destroyer of Worlds.  We could learn something from cats about what is normal and how to navigate in the dark.

E. suffered from Alzheimer’s for nine years before she died early Tuesday morning.  At her memorial service today, the chaplain noted even after her mind and memory disappeared, her songs remained with her.  She kept singing. 

So it was fitting for J., who is a dementia sufferer himself, to sing Great Is Thy Faithfulness at her service.  His songs have remained too, as God has remained faithful to him. 

Sitting in our white pews, we in the congregation sang For All the Saints.  One line caught me:

We feebly struggle, they in glory shine.

We are feeble, and we struggle — whether we’ve lost our minds or only think we have.  And I wonder, what is it in us that will shine?  Maybe there’s a particle of light lodged in us that will grow up one day to burn like a hot sun.

I’ve spent a lot of time lately with death, or with almost-death.  I don’t want to get morbid or philosophical, or even squeamish at how messy the process is. 

I only want to say one thing:  death is an inconvenient bastard.

Either he gets to the tree too early, when the fruit is still green, or he dawdles in late as it rots on the ground.  He doesn’t read the seasons well. 

Death at the right time is a friend, as they say, but I’m convinced he can’t tell time, so he tends to come too late or too soon.

Adrian College, a small Methodist school, rededicated a garden honoring Arlene and Mickey Phelps, two beloved members of the college community.  President Jeff Docking spoke at the ceremony and said he looks out on the garden from his office every day.  You can read more about the Phelps Garden here.

It was a lovely day, cool for August.  I took this picture of the college chapel too.  It’s a popular place for weddings.

Adrian College began 150 years ago as an abolitionist school, and the chaplain’s office continues that tradition today by supporting the Not For Sale campaign.

At Theolog, Bob Cornwall asks what makes a good pastor, in particular whether seminary training is essential

Jesus was relatively uneducated, as were most of his disciples and many of the great saints of history. In certain pockets of the church, a growing number of voices suggest that a seminary education is not only unnecessary but even detrimental to effective ministry. Just to make sure we get the message, a shelf-load of books detail all the important things that a minister won’t learn in seminary.

What they neglect to mention is that courses in Bible, theology and church history (my specialty) are very important, if not essential, to effective ministry. It’s upon these courses that we build our understanding of the practical sides of ministry.

Pastors should study the Bible, theology and church history, but whether a seminary course best does this is an open issue.  I can’t answer that question anymore.  (My ambivalence about seminary probably arises here.  My recent studies in preaching at Christian Theological Seminary were invaluable.)

Beyond this, I see four things that make a good pastor:

+  a connection to Christ sustained by prayer

+  credibility, honesty and basic trustworthiness

+  a capacity for affirming relationships

+  competence in preaching and worship

I left out calling because any vocation can be a calling, and all believers can serve as priests to one another.

So these four marks are essential — the rest will work itself out.

In a New York Times essay, Robert Wright, author of The Evolution of God, says religion and science can stop feuding if each is willing to change.

Religion must modify its idea of God to one compatible with evolution.  God dropped the ‘algorithm of natural selection’ into the pond and stepped back to let it work out its own logic.  Such a deity can comport with science.

Science, on its part, can admit the processes of natural selection may logically lead to a ‘higher purpose’ written into the structure of nature itself.

In his quest for harmony, though, it appears to me religion travels farther than science.  Wright’s evolved idea of God is really 18th century Deism.  At the end of the essay his preference for science peeks out:

Of course, religion doesn’t have a monopoly on awe and inspiration. The story that science tells, the story of nature, is awesome, and some people get plenty of inspiration from it, without needing the religious kind. What’s more, science has its own role to play in knitting the world together. The scientific enterprise has long been on the frontiers of international community, fostering an inclusive, cosmopolitan ethic — the kind of ethic that any religion worthy of this moment in history must also foster.

So I don’t know.  Wright’s God seems small and unsuitable for worship.  He makes me wonder if, in spite of intentions to do justice to science and religion, at the end of the day you lie down with one or the other.

His essay is worth reading.  Let me know what you think.

We walk our dog on Broad Street past Second Baptist Church, and along the way someone often asks, “What kind of dog is he?”

“She’s a rescue dog,” we say.  “Her name is Jazz.  She’s part Basenji, with lots of other things mixed in.  They picked her up off the streets of New Orleans after Katrina, and later we adopted her.”  We’re a little proud of Jazz’s celebrity status as a Katrina survivor.

The vets at the animal shelter who examined her concluded she was a street dog even before the hurricane.  We have given her her first permanent home.  She enjoys less freedom now than before the storm, but she doesn’t have to sleep in alleys anymore or scrounge for scraps in dumpsters.  She sleeps on a soft, dry bed, eats twice a day and soaks up lots of love.  We call her the love sponge.

I’d never heard the term ‘rescue dog’ before Jazz came into our lives.  She was rescued, saved, and her story has taught me about salvation, about being saved.

My church doesn’t talk about salvation — that’s for Baptists and Pentecostals.  The language of ‘being saved’ makes us uneasy, and our theology makes salvation unnecessary anyway.  Since God’s love embraces everyone, the danger of being lost threatens no one.  No one needs rescue.

But Jazz’s story tells me something different, and it illustrates a basic theme in the New Testament.  The lost are truly lost, wandering the streets ‘without hope and without God in the world,’ until love finds them, rescues them and brings them home.

When children in the foster care system are adopted and find a permanent placement, they call it their forever home.  My wife and I gave Jazz a forever home, and in a far larger sense, God provides us a forever home in Christ.  We’re not God’s children automatically by birth or nature, says St Paul, but by the grace of adoption.

We once were lost, but now we’re found.  Then we become love sponges.

David Lewicki, a Presbyterian pastor in New York City, pulls back the curtain on a secret of blogging.

But blogging, for me, has never been about exposing myself. Rather, it has always been a careful process of hiding as much as I reveal. It’s not an unselfconscious medium at all–every blog I write is carefully crafted to show a certain highly self-conscious personae. They’re written to look casual, offhand, spur-of-the-moment. But I labor over them, going back to change pieces; editing; correcting; improving. Until it is–or is it until I am–just right.

Bloggers hide as much as they reveal.  This is true.  I censor my blog and leave much of me out.  It’s like having guests over for dinner — they only see the rooms in the house you want them to see, which you clean like a fiend beforehand.  So on my blog I only put presentable things out on the table.  I don’t edit as much as Lewicki does — I smooth out the writing a little and watch the verbs.

In the movie Julie & Julia, Julie’s husband in a fit of frustration labels her blogging narcissistic.  As Lewicki notes, though, narcissism in blogging can be an illusion, and the persona ‘artificial.’  Personal blogs speak in the first person, but as Thoreau observes, in all writing ‘it is the first person that is speaking.’

Marc Gustafson, a doctoral student at Oxford, is studying the conflict in Darfur.  He says ‘Save Darfur’ activists have harmed more than helped.

From 2006 until 2008, when the Save Darfur Coalition and many other groups began to pressure the government, the allocation of US funds shifted dramatically from humanitarian aid to peacekeeping, presumably due to the influence of the lobbyists and public pressure campaigns.

Of the $2.01 billion that was spent, $1.03 billion (51.3 percent) was spent on humanitarian aid, while $980 million (48.7 percent) was spent on funding peacekeeping missions, a significant shift toward peacekeeping.

In the end, these proportional changes were problematic because, as many casualty surveys show, the number of people who were “killed” in Darfur declined significantly after the April 8 cease-fire of 2004, while the rate of those who were dying of disease and malnutrition remained high.

Had the Darfur activists not advocated for a reallocation of funds, more lives would probably have been saved.

More lives saved, if not for activists trying so hard to save lives.  Not much more to say here — except that the problem with activism is the Law of Unintended Consequences.  Activists seldom recognize this law.