A question.

In a large portion of the Christianity, particularly the younger generation, the orthodox tenets of the faith are being 're-imagined', 're-painted', and ultimately 're-written'.  I believe much of this is being done in the name of cultural relevance instead of in the name of Jesus, with Biblical truth bowing to popular culture; not for the sake of evangelism but for the sake of acceptance.

The Bible, our highest authority and truth, finds itself secondary to, among other things, cultural trends, popular opinion, therapeutic needs, and entertainment.

In an article, David Wells quoted radical deconstructionist Stanley Fish as saying, "since there is no such thing as truth, all that we have left is power, politics, and persuasion."

In a time when American culture as a whole seems hopelessly adrift and when some in the Church are cutting loose their anchors and sawing down their masts to drift ever more efficiently, is this true?

In the absence of Biblical truth, is the Church left with only power, politics, and persuasion?

If so, what do we even have to offer the world but more of the same?

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In speaking about Christ's call to the disciples to follow Him, Diedrich Bonhoeffer says this about the calling of Matthew (or Levi).

"Had Levi stayed at his post, Jesus might have been his present help in trouble, but not the Lord of his whole life. In other words, Levi would have never learnt to believe."

As Christians we are called the same way, are we not? Like Peter, John, Matthew, and the other disciples we are called to leave our nets, our boats, our pasts, and our selfish-ambitions and to walk with Jesus.

To those who've been brought up in the Church, you may be numb from this concept's familiarity. "Yes, yes I know. I must deny myself, pick up my cross, and follow Jesus", you may say as your mind gets lost in the seemingly dramatic nature of His command.

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Kim and I have spent the last week battling, first, a round of sun/food poisoning followed by an exchange of the flu. It hasn't been the easiest of weeks here.

In the midst of that we helped our friends, Seke and Eggie, out by doing the photography for their wedding. (Pam, you would've been proud) I put a few of the photos below.

We should have a video of two more uniquely Mongolian activities coming soon.

Oh, and if you weren't aware, in the judo competition last night a Mongolian just won the country's first ever Olympic gold medal. To celebrate, the whole country partied last night, declared today a national holiday, and took it off work.

An odd part of late summer here is the infestation of moths. These white, large-antennaed, fuzzy moths about the size of my palm invade Erdenet. First they cover windows and walls, sneaking in through cracks in doors and screens. The sound they make as they hopelessly beat their wings against the glass is like when you rode a bike with a baseball card in the spokes as a kid. They crawl, circle, and sputter everywhere. Then, almost all at once, they die and move from being wall and window coverings to being even more disgusting interior and exterior carpets, and their moth fur blows visibly through the air. It's kind of like that scene in Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom when Indy is covered in bugs and he's looking through the hole as the ceiling is caving in and yells, "WE...ARE GOING...TO DIE!"

Only it's not that bad...but you get the idea.

Kim's teaching has been going well. She's starting to teach computer to her kids this week and she should be back to full-time work craziness (AIDS, Human Trafficking, life skills, & health seminars) when school resumes on September 1st. She'll also start teaching the photography class again next month so she's really looking forward to that.

Our English conversation hour on Fridays has been awesome. They're probably our favorite students out here. They have great English (and Russian and sometimes Turkish) and are so eager to learn. In fact, one of our students is in Los Angeles right now for her first trip to America. We're excited to hear stories and see pictures.

I'm getting back into the swing of things after a few weeks off at the hospital and will be starting to teach at the (YWAM) missionary base two nights a week again in a couple weeks. Most importantly, the Bible studies at the church have been going really well. This past week I did a lesson on the Covenants (Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, & the New Covenant) and I really do simply feel blessed to be able to teach.

Randomly...

-I've been enjoying reading books by and about dead guys.

-For you music fans, NPR made an entire Tom Waits live set available for download. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92916923

-I made my first ever soup the other night when Kim was sick. You can call me Emeril now. "WHAM!" Sorry, that was lame.

-Did I read correctly that USC is ranked #3 going into this season and that they're facing #1 Ohio State in their second game? Can someone tape that (or every SC game) for me?

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In my last proper blog I wrote about an observation I made by looking at U2, Barack Obama, and Rob Bell.  I talked about how I think Obama and Bell play fast and loose with the English language, either changing meanings or leaving large words vacant for people to fill with their own meanings (like “love”, “hope”, and “change”).  My concern was that, as a pastor and a politician, I think those men should be held to a higher standard; but even more importantly I wanted to point out that we let them do that.  We have to see our role in it.

That led to the center of my observation: we like things that we can put ourselves in to; that we can pillage and hollow out.  We like songs, movies, books, politicians, pastors, spiritual or theological views, and people because we can make them more about us than anything else.

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It seems I'm not alone with my sense about how Obama (and Bell) use their language.

Here is an interesting piece from, of all places, USA Today on Obama's flexible use of English.

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In the Illinois senator’s world, words have no fixed meaning, and truth is often just a matter of perspective.

By Jonah Goldberg

Asked to define sin, Barack Obama replied that sin is "being out of alignment with my values." Statements such as this have caused many people to wonder whether Obama has a God complex or is hopelessly arrogant. For the record, sin isn't being out of alignment with your own values (if it were, Hannibal Lecter wouldn't be a sinner because his values hold that it's OK to eat people) nor is it being out of alignment with Obama's — unless he really is our Savior.

(Illustration by Suzy Parker, USA TODAY)

There is, however, a third possibility. Obama is a postmodernist.

An explosive fad in the 1980s, postmodernism was and is an enormous intellectual hustle in which left-wing intellectuals take crowbars and pick axes to anything having to do with the civilizational Mount Rushmore of Dead White European Males.

"PoMos" hold that there is no such thing as capital-T "Truth." There are only lower-case "truths." Our traditional understandings of right and wrong, true and false, are really just ways for those Pernicious Pale Patriarchs to keep the Coalition of the Oppressed in their place. In the PoMo's telling, reality is "socially constructed." And so the PoMos seek to tear down everything that "privileges" the powerful over the powerless and to replace it with new truths more to their liking.

Hence the deep dishonesty of postmodernism. It claims to liberate society from fixed meanings and rigid categories, but it is invariably used to impose new ones, usually in the form of political correctness. We've all seen how adept the PC brigades are celebrating free speech, when it's for speech they like.

Words as power, facts as myths

Obama gives every indication of having evolved from this intellectual soup. As a student and, later, a law school instructor, Obama was sympathetic to Critical Race Theory, a wholly owned franchise of postmodernism. At Harvard, Obama revered Derrick Bell, a controversial black law professor who preferred personally defined literary truths over old-fashioned literal truth. Words are power, Bell and Co. argued, and your so-called facts are merely myths of the white power structure.

When Hillary Clinton criticized Obama for being all about empty rhetoric and no action, Obama mocked Clinton — "Don't tell me words don't matter!" — sounding like a sorcerer offended by the suggestion that magic incantations are mere sounds.

One reason Obama seems arrogant is that he can never admit he was wrong, a common shortcoming of politicians. But Obama sometimes literally gets exasperated with people who think his words can mean anything other than what he thinks they should mean. Even when he says things he later regrets such as on, say, the North American Free Trade Agreement, he merely says that his rhetoric got overheated, but that he was still accurate. When Jeremiah Wright, his pastor and "spiritual adviser" of 20 years, was caught on videotape (recorded and sold by Wright himself) saying things that contradicted everything Obama ever said about being a post-racial, moderate candidate, Obama simply said that that's not the Jeremiah Wright he knows, as if his personal perspective settled the issue.

Would that I could have told my math teacher upon receiving a failing grade, "That's not the math I know."

On the troop surge, Obama's position has changed countless times, but he says it's unchanged. Worse, he has this grating habit of prefacing his new positions with something like "as I said at the time." But he didn't say "it" at the time, he said the opposite of "it." But saying that he said "it" is, to him, the same as having said "it."

We're told that Obama is "post-racial," but he invokes his own race whenever convenient (e.g., to suggest his opponents are racists, to win support of people who want to vote for him on account of his race). Indeed, the very idea that Obama is post-racial is postmodern claptrap, since only a black candidate can be post-racial, right? No one would say John McCain transcends race. If being post-racial is something only a (liberal) black politician can do, what is "post" about it? Post-racial is just another convenient term used to advance a left-wing agenda under the guise of some highfalutin buzzwords.

A theoretical reality

The Obama campaign has a postmodern feel to it because more than anything else, it seems to be about itself. Its relationship to reality is almost theoretical. Sure, the campaign has policy proposals, but they are props to advance the narrative of a grand movement existing in order to be a movement galvanized around the singular ideal of movement-ness. Obama's followers are, to borrow from David Hasselhoff — another American hugely popular in Germany — hooked on a feeling. "We are the ones we have been waiting for!" Well, of course you are.

In Berlin two weeks ago, Obama's speech was justified solely by the fact that he was giving it. He offered no policy and — not being a president — really had no reason to be there other than to tell people, essentially, "now is the moment." He informed the throbbing masses, bathing in his charisma the way hippies wallowed in the mud at Woodstock, that the greatest threat facing the world is the possibility we might allow "new walls to divide us from one another." Nuclear war? Feh. No, walls, walls are the danger. Of course, these new walls aren't real. Some might even say they're just words.

But not Barack Obama.

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Wordle is a web application that creates 'word clouds' of texts. Basically, the more frequently a word is used the bigger it is in the 'cloud', the less it's used, the smaller it is.

For example, here is the book of Luke wordled:

And here's Hebrews:

You can do any text you like with it. Here is one of Luther's Easter sermons:

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In my last blog I posted a lot of population stats about Mongolia. If you didn't read them or just skimmed over them, some of the ones I really wanted to stick out to you were these:

-HALF of the population is under 23 years old.

-40% of the entire population is living in one city alone, Ulaanbaatar.

-43% of what was once a nomadic culture are now living in cities. There is a large migration from the countryside to the cities.

My dad sent me this article that puts a more personal face on those numbers.

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A small, hungry cat is tied up next to the door of this family's ger. It meows incessantly and seems eager to be free as it strains at the cord around its neck. Animals often reflect their owners.

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Things have been really busy over here. We've been in Ulaanbaatar for the past few days seeing our friend Rachel off as she's done with her PC service. It'll be hard to see her go, especially for Kim. We've spent the last couple weeks helping her pack and she and Kim have been doing fun stuff like making purses out of their badly translated t-shirts. We'll say goodbye with a great dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant here in UB and then we'll head back to Erdenet tomorrow.

Aside from that I've been thrust slightly prematurely into teaching a Bible study at the church we go to in town. I was supposed to start doing it August 19th and co-teach it with my friend Johnny when he gets back from Ireland but, as with all things in Mongolia, it doesn't happen according to plan and in a way that is very 'trial by fire'. The unexpectedness aside, it's been going fantastically. The first class was on "What is the Bible" and the second was "Why Can We Trust It". The next few will be overviews of the Old and New Testaments. The Mongolians have been patient with this suprisingly dry and humorless American and it's invaluable for me to go over this material myself and to learn to teach it in simple terms because of the language barrier. (That was actually a fun lesson I learned. Remind me to write about that later.)

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We are leaving for a UB tomorrow to see our friend Rachel off as her PC service is over and she's on her way to Cambodia for six months before going home.  I'd hoped I'd have my follow up to the Bono, Bell, and Obama post done by now but I had to teach two Bible studies at the church this week so I've been swamped studying and writing for those.  In the mean time I read this Tozer excerpt last night and thought I'd shared it with you. 

"Seekers after God. Thanks be to God on high that these too are among us. They are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Their number is not large when counted against the millions who have forgotten their Maker, but taken together they are a goodly company and dear to the heart of God. Ah, those God-hungry souls! By nature they are no better than the rest of men, and by practice they have sometimes been worse. The one sign of their divine election is their insatiable thirst after the Source of their being. Deep calls unto deep and they hear and respond. These are almost always a disappointment to themselves, and sometimes they have for a while been a stumbling block to the world, as were Jacob and David and Peter. But many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it, and their questing hearts find what they seek at last. The grace of God meets them as they return and changes them from what they are sorry they have been, into what they have so fervently longed to become. We know what the wise Greek could not know, that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses. Seekers after God there surely were even in those old Grecian times and their destiny lies in the hand of the One who gave His only-begotten Son to die for the life of the world. One word needs to be added. It will go better in the of reckoning for the seeker of pre-Christian days who stretched out pagan hands toward God in hope that he might find Him, than for the careless sinner of who is sated with hearing and who refuses to repent and believe."

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This will not go where you think it will.

I love U2.  Now, I don’t love them in that untouchable they-can-do-no-wrong kind of way but their music has been my soundtrack through all parts of my life; through my twenties, from California to New York, and from Israel to Mongolia.  Like Rob Bell said in his book Velvet Elvis, I would mark the U2 concert I went to as one of the best live shows I’ve ever seen – now, I believe he went so far as to use the words ‘sacred’ or ‘religious’ but I won’t make that mistake.  On top of the amazing performance and incredible production you would expect, it is still a memory that gives me chills because I got to share it with two of my best friends and we got to watch the entire show from the hole in the middle of the stage so Bono and company were all 10 feet from us.  

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