Dan Scott

What Do Narnia and Physics Have In Common?

Dan Scott — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:36:58 -0800

A few years ago, I wrote a paper with my son-in-law, Austin, that we presented at a C.S. Lewis conference held at Belmont University. Though the paper is largely about education, our premise centered on the idea that learning of any sort must be preceded by wonder. As we are entering the time of year when thoughts quickly turn to wonder, I thought this might be an interesting read.

“Wonder rather than doubt is the root of knowledge.”
Abraham Joshua Heschel

Albert Einstein became the world’s most famous physicist because of a day dream. When he was sixteen years old day dreaming came more naturally than study, and he attributed his successes to the fact that he never gave up this propensity. The daydream came while he was reading Aaron Berstein’s Popular Books on Natural Science. The author asked his readers to imagine running beside an electric signal as it moved through a telegraph wire. It was a small leap for him to shift his imagination to something even more fantastic, running along side a beam of light.

This fantasy would preoccupy him through a number of alterations until the visions used him to incarnate themselves within mathematical equations, one of which is now as famous as any chant or incantation. “What would it be like to race a light beam?” This question does not exactly qualify as a scientific problem worthy of a hypothesis and study, but it is the very question that ended up toppling Newtonian physics.

Every educator dreams of igniting such dreams in even one student. It is the rare physics professor though who realizes such a lofty dream. Einstein was not intellectually conceived through the skills and disciplines of the field but rather through the flash of one powerful image in a moment of awe and wonder. In the beginning was the fantasy and the fantasy became flesh and dwelt among us. That is the path of all great ideas. The issue now is, from where will such ideas come in a world without wonder?

Knowledge after all is not a thing that can be possessed. It is a state of being. The moment a student comprehends a theory imposing order on a random string of information or grasps the essence of a particular object, she is wooed into an altered state of awareness. Like all altered states, the one provoked by a quest for knowledge is addictive to some and repugnant to others.

Thus, some seek for the minimal bits of knowledge needed for their basic survival but disengage from the quest as soon as possible. Others find themselves being seduced by the allure of the quest and find in learning a delight that rivals all physical joys. Education is the process by which this altered state takes place and through which a self becomes transformed.

C.S. Lewis understood that education was driven by wonder. He wrote on a wide range of topics with such a depth of knowledge that it is difficult for anyone to speak about his corpus as a whole. Many do not even attempt to find a single basic element in Lewis’ works. However, one basic element did inspire Lewis throughout his career and in all of his work—the ability to wonder. Awe united Lewis’ academic works to his fairytales and his faith to everything.
The Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel said,

“There are three aspects of nature which command man’s attention: power, loveliness, and grandeur. Power he exploits, loveliness he enjoys, grandeur fills him with awe. We take it for granted that man’s mind should be sensitive to nature’s loveliness. We take it equally for granted that a person who is not affected by the vision of earth and sky, who has no eyes to see the grandeur of nature and to sense the sublime, however vaguely, is not human.”

The world around us inspires awe and wonder, and the sense of the sublime and the feelings it inspired in Lewis became his muse.

--This was just a small excerpt of that paper, but I love the ideas that it presents. What things inspire awe in you? What brings you that incredible feeling of wonder? If you are busy in the activities of day-to-day life, you might, like myself, have a tendency to forget those awe-inspiring things. But it is important to remember and reflect. While we cannot always jump and act, we can always consider. Where would we be if C.S. Lewis had forgotten his sense of wonder? How much richer life is because he remembered!

Reformation Day - Why Is It Important?

Dan Scott — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 09:50:38 -0700

Well, Reformation Day is this weekend. Unfortunately, many Christians are unaware of the importance of the Reformation.

Why is that important? Well, the answer to that question involves Mr. Henry M.

Never heard of him either?

Ahhh…..

Almost everyone who takes an introductory psychology course reads a passing reference to Henry M. in the textbook. However, I finally read his entire story and was spellbound by it.

In the early 1950’s, Henry M. was struggling with some sort of emotional difficulty that seemed resistant to all conventional treatment. So, incredibly to us today, his doctors decided to lobotomize him. They removed his hippocampus, a small organ inside the human brain whose purpose was unknown at the time. Then, for the rest of his life, the psychologists studied him.

After surgery, Mr. M. could do almost everything normally. He could speak without difficulty. He could read and write. He could take care of his basic needs. He had no problem with eating, dressing, hygiene and performing daily tasks. He only had one problem: he had no past. He didn’t know who he was or what he had experienced. On any given day he could not remember the events that took place. He couldn’t remember the people whom he had met, or things he had read, from the day before. He could listen to the same jokes again and again with fresh delight. Day after day he met the doctors and nurses, who cared for him at M.I.T, as though he were meeting them for the first time. He had become a prisoner of an eternal present.

Think about what “life” became for Henry M. Although he survived, although he could have fun, was capable of reproducing, could function in all the functions necessary for human existence, he did not really experience “human” life. The human being that Henry M had been, died in 1953, the year he lost his past. A person without a past doesn’t know who he is, does not know how he connects with the rest of the world, and does not know what any of his actions, even the pleasurable ones, actually mean. He experiences every event in life as disconnected from all previous and future events. He experiences events one at a time, isolated from any frame of reference or explanation that would link them together. In other words, the events of his life may provoke emotions, but never meaning. He becomes an intelligent animal. He lives, but he doesn’t know why.

Some years ago, I came to the conclusion that the spiritual life of most modern American Evangelicals and Charismatics has become like the world of Henry M. We like our joyful services. We experience the presence of God. We have learned to market ourselves. We carry on our church business. We continue to exist. However, we have largely lost our spiritual past and this has left us woefully unprepared to meet the spiritual challenges ahead. It leaves us incapable of growing quality lives and of reaching for maturity in all areas of life. We move heaven and earth to convince people to begin the spiritual journey, but have lost the map of where to direct them afterwards. Our interconnection with the culture around us has become almost entirely reactionary. We rage at cultural change but we offer no alternatives. We do not read. We do not create. We do not offer solutions. We seem only capable of critiquing the secular culture. And, while meaningful critique is important, it is not enough. Our spiritual ancestors did not just rage at other cultures and religions. They created an alternative civilization. They developed and refined their gifts and talents based on their Christian worldview. Now, the surrounding culture views us as perpetually angry and defensive. The unbelievers know we do not like what they are saying and doing but they do not see us as having any developed ideology or culture of our own.

In my opinion, the reason for this state of affairs is that we have forgotten who we are. For well over a generation we ridiculed and abandoned all the tradition, ceremony, doctrine, spiritual wisdom and artistic heritage of our Christian past. Instead of blaming our sense of inadequacy and spiritual dissatisfaction on our lack of prayer, study and creativity, we blamed our ancestors and their contributions. In other words, because we were unhappy with the present state of the church, we lobotomized it. Now, instead of connecting our lives and churches to the Christian community of the ages, we seem only interested in the feelings of today. The future frightens us because we are not sure of who we are. So, we don’t prepare for the future either. We have learned to be content with good services and a growing crowd. We watch our church budget and try not to make waves. We seem neither to notice nor care that the quality of our people’s lives seems not to change from month to month or from year to year – not to even mention from generation to generation. We have become content with just existing.

I believe that we have tried to address some of these issues at Christ Church, but doing that is going against the tide of both the American secular culture and the church culture. Nonetheless, I believe that we must keep moving against that tide. American Christians are in danger of becoming unbearably superficial, simply because we no longer take the time or energy to learn and draw from the richness of our heritage. That means that it becomes more and more difficult to win thinking pagans to the faith. It also means that it becomes more and more difficult to give our children the tools they need to grow into mature and well-equipped Christians. At best, they tend to become pagans who go to church on Sundays.

We do not know our Jewish heritage. Hence, we no longer memorize or recite the Ten Commandments. Therefore, our children do not know or revere them.

We do not know our Christian heritage. Hence, we do not know the creeds or the stories of good and evil that the church has participated in throughout the centuries (and may do again)! Therefore, we have no defense against heresy or mental sloth.

We do not know our reformation heritage. Hence, we do not know the deeds or words of Luther, Calvin or even Wesley. Indeed, we do not even know why these people are important to us. In many cases, we do not even know who they were.

We do not know our artistic heritage. Hence, we have lost our appreciation for centuries of hymns, painting, stained glass, architecture and other artistic treasures that were the results of gifted Christians creatively using materials to give witness to the story of redemption. Like science and mathematics, art is a continual conversation with the present and the past. Art builds upon or reacts to, what has come before. Without a Christian past, our modern Christian artists can only borrow from the secular world for their artistic ideas, or, if not, they remain trapped in perpetual artistic adolescence because they have no mentors, colleagues or adversaries.

We do not know our spiritual heritage. Hence, we have lost the lessons of the church fathers, the medieval mystics, the reformers, and the thousands of Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox people of prayer and spiritual disciplines who wrote of the dangers and delights of their spiritual journey. Therefore, we too easily fall prey to charlatans, self-appointed gurus and con artists. We also tend to remain superficial and juvenile in our own individual spiritual journey.

We do not know our literary heritage. Hence, we have lost Dante, Milton, Bunyon, and Augustine. Much more seriously, in an age when the English Bible is available in a thousand versions and supported by thousands of commentaries, serious Bible study has become the dinosaur of American church life. Therefore, we cannot draw on our own heritage when we attempt to explain and defend our reasons for disagreeing with the non-believing culture around us. As we face a world that is increasingly hostile or apathetic about out faith, we have neither a light for our feet nor a lamp for our pathway. Indeed, we have no pathway. We insist on making up the journey as we go along.

In such a climate, it is no wonder that we provide few great leaders or thinkers for the various fields of society. Those Christians who do make it into places of leadership often keep their faith reserved for the “spiritual” part of their lives. It seems not to influence their decisions as bankers, governors, scientists or educators. Even more ominously, the faith increasingly seems not to influence the various aspects of the individual Christian’s private life. Many Christians seem amazed to hear anyone think that their faith should influence anything about their lives outside of that emotional part they call their “spirituality”.

Our definition of “spirituality” is much too narrow. Our happy church life is simply not enough. Likely, Mr. M was happy enough when he was well fed, sheltered and clothed. He was no doubt happy that his immediate needs were fulfilled. Happy or not, he had lost his ability to think about long range issues. In his lobotomized state, he had no future difficulties to face, or future opportunities to meet. That very illusion helped him to be happy. However, it was a shallow happiness that was the result of being incapable of realizing his true situation. That, I believe, is the state of American Evangelicalism, and certainly the state of the Charismatic Movement.

Like Mr. M, we too are locked into seeking only what appeals now, at the moment. Or, worse still, we are locked into defending and perpetrating the secular culture of a generation ago, believing that to be our Christian heritage. The lobotomy has affected both the right and the left: Christian liberals want us to adopt the present secular culture, the conservatives want us to adopt the secular culture of the 1950’s. In both cases, our Christian roots have been largely lost.

Remembering the events and issues of the Reformation would go a long way toward helping us recover our heritage and our minds!

Well, I’ve certainly written enough for now. I didn’t even get around to talking about the Reformation! I will write about this important history next. At least then you will be prepared with why it is important.

God = ?

Dan Scott — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 08:39:20 -0700

The word “God” means so many different things to people...

Of course, the English word “God” would have been unrecognizable to ancient Hebrews and Greeks. Early English speaking Christians searched for a word that would express what the Hebrew scriptures meant by the words “Yahweh” or “Elohim”. They chose the word “God”. Unfortunately, we use the same word to refer to any deity of any religion. That means that the word “God” does not communicate the same thing to everyone.

Socrates always insisted that the first order of business in any discussion is to define the terms to be used. We don’t want to upset Socrates, so lets stop and define the word “God”.

First, Christians believe that God has a personality. He is not like a borderless mist, some undefined, impersonal force of nature. God has a personality. We can know Him, communicate with Him, even have a relationship with Him.

Once we begin to believe that God has a personality then we are likely to ask, “what is His personality like?”

The Bible says that the essence of His personality is a quality called “holiness”. Being holy certainly means that He doesn't lie. He doesn't cheat. He doesn't go back on His word. But even more importantly, the Hebrew word kadosh, which we translate “holy,” means “other.” When we say that God is Holy we are saying that He is not like us or like anything else that we can or could ever know. He is beyond comprehension. He is “awe-inspiring”.

The only thing we can know about God are those things which He has revealed to us. However, even those things are sometimes difficult to grasp, as we have seen. Then, beyond all the we do know about God, there is infinitely more that we do not know. Realizing this keeps us from trying to make Him into our image. It stretches us toward Him rather than trying to bring Him down to our level. When we reject the idea that God is “beyond finding out,” we make a mental or physical image and call that image, “god.”

The Bible calls that process idolatry. It is strictly forbidden by scripture. The problem is, we all have idols; we must always be working to destroy them. We never get to know the real God if we keep admiring the substitutes we have made!

Yet once again we return to worship. We cannot figure God out, but we can worship Him, “in the beauty of holiness”. Jesus tells us (in Matthew 6:9) that we should begin our prayer by recognizing this aspect of God’s character, by saying, “Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed (Holy) be Thy Name!”

The Gospel of Halloween

Dan Scott — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 10:09:14 -0700

We are in the season of masquerade. Soon the streets will be filled with pumpkins, cats, little red devils and mighty super heroes about waist high. Many of us are afraid of Halloween, either because it has become unsafe to take our children from door to door to collect candy, or because many Christians have come to believe that there is something inherently wicked about this holiday when children dress up in masks, capes and costumes. The charge of course is that Halloween has pagan roots, which is true. What is also true is that our contemporary preoccupation about paganism sometimes drives me up a wall!

According to some people, even Christmas and Easter (or an annual celebration of any kind) is a Hellish invention to trip up the saints as they make their way toward Heaven. The source of some of this attitude towards holidays is a war against any part of our human experience that might actually be fun! But replacing elements of our life that have non-Christian sources would be next to impossible. If we really wanted to be rid of all things with pagan roots, we would have to rename the days of the week and the months of the year. Also, church steeples and the great seal of the United States would have to be eliminated. (Church steeples are rooted in the worship of – Ok, I'll say this as delicately as I can – "fertility.")

But before any of my readers get their righteous ruffles up, I'll quickly reassure you that I agree that many aspects of Halloween have become unsafe and unholy. In fact, I'll even agree that it started out unholy – before Christianity even arrived in Northern Europe. It was a very important day on the Druid calendar, among the Celtic peoples of the British Isles. When my Irish ancestors became Christians however, they did what Christians often did; they re-appropriated this festival for a new purpose. Halloween was now to be called All Saints Eve, a time to remember all the saints of God who were not honored by name on other days. (Many of the 'bigger and more famous' saints had their own appropriated day of celebration. Apparently we needed a day to honor all the 'little people!')

Anyways, the old Druid holy day got converted. What survived was our custom of dressing up.

Quite honestly, I love dressing up. Always have. I love the theater, acting, stages, props …all that stuff. So as a kid I naturally loved Halloween. Back in the ancient days of my childhood, even very conservative Christians didn't mind dressing up their children like witches because we thought there were no real witches left in the world. We were playing around with something that had been vanquished, defeated. We only started worrying about the significance of Halloween when people began to take witchcraft seriously again. Now, even Christians take it seriously – and, unfortunately, fear it. So a good fun day for children has been effectively destroyed. (It makes one wonder if there will be any childhood at all in the near future.)

Anyways, I loved Halloween. My parents bought me a Superman suit when I was in the second grade. I wore it to school under my clothes and impressed several of my schoolmates by opening my shirt to show them the famous “S" on my chest.

The most important thing about that suit was the cape. Because, as every child knows, the cape is the piece of clothing which really makes Superman SUPERMAN! If you let a boy tie a towel around his neck, you will see him instantly turn into a flying fool. He will run faster than a speeding Chihuahua. He will leap tall end tables in a single bound.

I loved it. Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, the Flash, and Iron Man - all those guys. A humble worker at The Daily Planet could turn into quasi-deity by just changing clothes in a phone booth. A humble preacher's kid from a house on the river bank could turn into the champion of justice, the guardian of the oppressed. One red piece of cloth could do that!
Children can play these types of roles openly and without shame. Adults learn to dress up and pretend a bit more subtly. By mutual agreement, we decide to allow others to play along in this ‘game’. We play without comment, because the other players return the favor. And many times, as the song says, we get lost in the masquerade. The reason children want to dress up and pretend is because that is what they see modeled by adults. Much of life will be about dressing up, pretending, and hiding out… first behind this mask and then the next. Unfortunately, few people get around to developing the person behind the mask. Indeed, some people panic when they lose their mask because they are not sure if there is anything behind it.

I once heard an Orthodox priest say, “The problem with you pastors who don’t wear vestments is that you never take yours off!” I had to think about that for a while. His point was that when we consciously put on a mask or a costume, we are complexly aware that we are playing a role that is not in all respects who we actually are. A judge wears a robe and a policeman wears a uniform because they realize that they are speaking on behalf of the law and not their own behalf.

Perhaps if we put on a mask more often, we might become more aware of our invisible masks.
Some masks are real: they reflect some role we play on behalf of others, but which require more than we are humanly able to give. The doctor’s smock, the priest’s collar, the judge’s robe – all these say to the wearer and to those who view them that the role the person is wearing is more than the person of himself or herself.

Some of our masks are false and should be discarded. The mannerisms and material objects I display in order to hide my insecurities, the continual references to academic degrees or accomplishments – these kinds of masks distort my humanity and help me hide from myself the need to develop and mature.

The saints are the people who discard false masks and who become what the real masks represent. We have all “put on Christ.” The mask is far beyond where we are when we first dress up as Christian. A saint is a person from whom the Lord rips off the “Jesus mask’, only to reveal that the person underneath has been molded by that mask and now has genuinely become what he was pretending to be.

Those are good things to think about as we approach ‘All Saints Day’ the day that replaced the night of devils and deception.

Now, if I could only fit into my old Superman costume…

In Praise of Civility

Dan Scott — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:22:16 -0700

When Walter Mondale and President Reagan were about to begin their first debate, Mondale began with a statement: "Tonight, I will say some strong things about the President's views and policies. I would like it to be understood that I mean no disrespect, either to the man or to his office. I enjoy President Reagan's company, and I know him to be a decent and kind man."

At this, President Reagan replied, "I like you too Fritz, let's go to it!"

The audience laughed and the debate began in earnest. Mondale did not hold back. He hit the president's policies hard. But he had already announced his boundaries: he was not going to cross the line into dishonor for his opponent.

Walter Mondale didn't win my vote that night but he did win my respect. He had modeled how a person can be passionate for his cause and still remain a gentleman. His words reflected what our national leaders thought, once upon a time: that it was as essential for a statesman to promote national unity as it was to advance his political persuasion.

I miss the values and the culture that Mondale demonstrated in that debate.
The attribute that Mondale demonstrated that night is called "civility." It is a word that is closely related to "civilization," the state of living and working together in a way that promotes the common good of all who comprise it. Civilization depends on people learning the sort of social protocol and mutual respect that will allow them to process their differences without destroying the underlying unity that makes their quality of life possible. Unless we want to adopt the ways of those nations where political differences get settled by civil war, we must remake and maintain our commitment to civility.

Here's another story that helped me learn the meaning of civility.

When I was a little boy, we became terrified about the threat of a Kennedy victory in 1960. There were all sorts of sermons and conversations in the air that year about how Catholics would run the government and persecute Protestants.

Kennedy won anyway, of course.

Some weeks after Election Day, my Dad heard me singing some anti-Kennedy chant I had learned in school. I forget the lines but it was about how unfit John Kennedy was to be President. When he heard me singing, my Dad, who had opposed Kennedy, told me to stop. I was never to sing that song again. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Son, John Kennedy is the president of our country. The Lord wants us to pray for him. The election is over. Mr. Kennedy won. Now all Americans must respect his office and pray for him."

The day the President was killed, my father wept. He did not say something like, "Well, Kennedy finally got his," or "That good-for-nothing Democrat is dead." He said, "Oh God, they've murdered our President." My father had somehow made the man whom he had voted against, "our president."

When we live in a democracy, we are not obligated to like the person who holds an office. We are even less obligated to like our political opponent. As believers however, we are always obligated to treat all people with respect, especially when they are the leaders of our nation. This is especially true for Christians, who are commanded to “pray for the king,” even if that king is Nero and is slaughtering other Christians.

As an American who has spent considerable periods of time living outside the country (as both of our current candidates for President have done) I have always marveled at the way we transfer the presidency and the other high offices of our land. Since the beginning, each party has been willing to pass the baton of leadership to their opponent because both have had a common commitment to values and institutions that they believed to be more basic than their underlying differences. This should not be taken for granted. It is a gift – a gift that requires civility and a high view of civilization.

Discussion about important issues ought to (and usually does) provoke people's passion. Apathy, especially over things that impacts people's happiness and well-being, is not a virtue. We all get heated about out politics, our religion and our standards of quality. We should; these things reflect who we are.

However, a warning is in order: ideas and issues are not made in the image and likeness of God; people are. It is, therefore, no crime to expose the weakness of a bad idea. It is a sin to ignore human dignity. Civilized life – learning to become a gentleman or a lady – is about making a difference between how we treat ideas and as opposed to how we treat the people who hold those ideas. Expressing sarcasm and cynicism about another human being – even our political opponent -- diminishes his or her humanity. Unbelievers can do it; a believer must not.

Mr. McCain is, as his campaign continually reminds us, a war hero. He has demonstrated extraordinary courage and patriotism in times and places where there were no cameras and no press.

Mr. Obama is an extraordinarily brilliant United States senator who now represents the hopes of millions of Americans that our long nightmare of racial division and social stratification is ending.

Surely, we can choose the candidate who most represents our views for the nation's future without demonizing, ridiculing and diminishing the other party's leader.

If all else fails, perhaps it will help to recall that when we ridicule a standard bearer of a national party during an election, we are ridiculing all those who support him. We push away our friends and family who believe differently that we do and leave no room for serious discussion.

Serious discussion requires civility, like that demonstrated by Walter Mondale in his fight for the presidency. He lost his quest for our highest office; he succeeded in keeping his country safe and united. If that's not strong leadership, I don't know what is.

What Is Liberalism?

Dan Scott — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:21:27 -0700

What is a liberal?

Some of the popular definitions for the word "liberal" include "showing or characterized by broad-mindedness;" "generous and broad sympathies," tolerant," "having political or social views favoring reform and progress," " tolerant of change;" "not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or tradition;" "a person who favors a political philosophy of progress and reform and the protection of personal civil liberties."

"Liberalism," is thus a philosophy that seeks to advance "social progress," usually defined as continual movement towards increased personal freedom and broader protection for the individual from the threat of poverty, prejudice, illness and ignorance. Liberalism is thus an orientation toward the future rather than the past.

These definitions beg a question: who gets to define these terms? What is "progress," "poverty," "prejudice" and "ignorance?" How does a society alleviate the illnesses of its citizens? What is the "future" towards which liberalism pushes us? Is this future inevitable, irresistible, divinely determined or created by human initiative?

For most people claiming to be liberals, it is human government that becomes the agent of societal transformation, the force that enables "progress;" that is to say, "movement toward the future." Government decides what constitutes "ignorance," "prejudice," "progress," and "poverty" because democratic government is simply the formalized will of the people.

As in the case of "conservatives," there are many different kinds of "liberals."

It may be shocking to many Americans to learn that our "liberals" are often viewed by Europeans and people of other industrial nations as "moderates" or even as "conservatives." Furthermore, even in our own country the definition of what makes a person a "liberal" varies from region to region.

However, in hopes of gaining some common definition of a label we use daily, let's look at some of the possible meanings for the word.

Social liberals seek to create a secularized public sphere in which the representatives of the various religions (as well as those of no religion) can work together to maintain the common good of its citizens. The values of our public life should thus be founded upon the latest findings of science (including the social sciences.) Since a well-ordered society requires continual investment in the common good, social liberals are dedicated to public funding of such things as education, health care, mass transit, parks, and other resources that work together to promote human dignity and expression.

When stated this way, is likely that most Americans will have considerable sympathy for "liberalism." Americans generally prefer a future orientation rather than one focused on the past. The issues that provoke people who might otherwise think of themselves as "progressive" to resist the liberal label, involves the role of religion and religious values in society, the means by which social infrastructure is to be funded, and whether or not these aims can be reached without a loss of traditional culture and values.

A social liberal can be (although usually is not) a religious conservative. For example, a person who is deeply committed to his or her church and its teachings may not believe that the state ought to be an expression of any particular church. In this view, it is better for the state to be apathetic and neutral where religious questions and values are concerned. This encourages freedom for all religious people to express their various faiths unhindered by any state preference for a specific faith. Historically, this was the traditional Baptist position.

"Theological liberalism" is an intellectual attitude toward one's own faith that says in effect: "my faith contains many precious things that I do not want to lose. However, I am a modern person who must take into account all sorts of scientific discoveries and social advances. Therefore, a religious man or woman should reinterpret his or her faith in order to bring its values into the present age."

Theological liberalism makes it possible for some professing Christians in our times to support things that leave orthodox believers angry and bewildered. An obvious example is homosexual unions. Some church groups have decided that ordaining openly partnered homosexual church leaders is a "prophetic" statement that pushes the Christian faith into the modern world. An orthodox Christian, who may otherwise agree with the aim of political liberals to promote and maintain a social infrastructure, cannot conscientiously condone such actions. By rejecting such "progressive" actions, an orthodox believer becomes a "conservative" almost by default. In the present polarized political climate it becomes difficult to see another possibility.

Fiscal liberalism is the belief that a society's economic health is the result of strategic public investment. Strategies to advance social progress may include public debt or the printing of paper to float governmental expenditures. The best-known economist of this school is John Maynard Keynes, the architect of President Franklin Rooselvelt's New Deal.

A more extreme version of economic liberalism is the socialist (and mixed economy) model preferred by many European countries, especially in the aftermath of the Second World War. In this model, citizens are protected by an extensive social net that provides financial help during times of unemployment, by free or nearly free health care services, and by providing easy access to higher education.

Maintaining an economically liberal society requires the collection of higher taxes, of course, since someone must pay for all the social amenities enjoyed by the populace.

At the core of the conservative-liberal divide is the issue of how individualistic VS how communal a well-ordered society should be. Should a culture create the sorts of infrastructure that provide the greatest amount of good for the greatest numbers of its citizens? Or, should a culture provide the greatest possible amount of freedom for its creative and entrepreneurial citizens, who will in turn develop the businesses and organizations that will lift all the other citizens?

History suggests that a society that allows the greatest freedom for its creative and enterpreneurial citizens will produce the most wealth. However, this wealth often comes at an enormous cost for the elderly, the ill, the disabled and those who for whatever reason are unable to participate in the wealth of their fellow citizens. For this reason, American culture has tended to vacillate between a free-market and a commitment to social nets that protect the most vulnerable.
.
If you consider yourself to be a "liberal," you may want to ask whether you wish to embrace all the meanings of the term listed here or merely some of them. If you do not consider yourself to be a "liberal", you may want to consider whether any of the aims of those referred to as "liberal" appeal to you, or whether you may share something in common with those who do.

Cultural Revolution

Dan Scott — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:19:49 -0700

On May 16, 1966, Chairman Mao set into motion a movement of youth and peasants who would work untiringly for nearly a decade to rid China of all "foreign," "elitist," and "bureaucratic" elements. He called for the masses to unleash their frustration against the educated classes.

We call Mao's movement "the cultural revolution."

In that decade of ideological madness, the Chinese people learned to think and speak in clichés. Sentences often began with "as the Chairman says, …"

In the movie, The Red Violin, a woman who loves music has to hide her records and instrument from the young punks who roam the streets in search of people like her, people who care about culture. She has to sit in silence while sarcastic "no-nothings" publicly ridicule an old music teacher because the man had taught Bach and Beethoven instead of popular Chinese music. It was a time to hide one's love of learning, culture and refinement. For the moment, the mob was in control.

I believe that we are in a sort of "cultural revolution" like that in our own country. One can detect, in the political speeches from both the right and the left, an appeal to resentment, to class alienation and the economic anxieties of the populace.

On the left, this cultural war sounds something like: "wealthy people have made your lives miserable long enough. They make their money while you suffer. They get their health insurance while your children go sick. Aren't you tired of it? Don't you want a change? If we don't stop the right wing from controlling everything, some Hitler is going to take over soon and destroy the last freedoms we have left!"

On the right, the cultural war sounds something like: "Aren't you tired of how the people in the arugula and wine crowd keeps looking down their long noses at you? Well, that's who controls the media! That's who keeps trying to destroy your faith in God and the American constitution. If you let them get their way, you can say goodbye to your churches, your hunting parties and to any business opportunities that are still left in this increasingly socialistic nation of ours!"

This cultural divide deeply affects the church. It has become difficult to have a conversation about literature, art and culture from a Christian standpoint. It is even more difficult to talk about discoveries made in the last few decades in fields such as physics and paleontology. There are, to be sure, orthodox Christians in these fields and some of them write and speak, but one wonders how many believers have the patience or the capability now to actually listen to them.

I have lived long enough to see even biblical studies become a secondary concern of most churches and of most Christians. We seem to keep dumbing down and the more we do, the more shrill our voices become agaist those with whom we disagree.

To be sure, the intellectuals have brought some of this on themselves, including many theologians. Academia has become ever more detached from day-to-day reality. That is why people trained in our universities often display an alarming lack of common sense. They do often seem to mock the ideas and practices that bring comfort and meaning to millions of their fellow citizens. So it is tempting to mock them back – the pointy headed, good-for-nothing privileged class of lazy bums. However, if in the process of mocking the intellectuals we dismantle the culture and social graces that has made our civilized life possible, we may open the doors to the same barbarism that ruined Rome and brought a thousand years of a dark, illiterate, cruel and base existence to the peoples of Europe.

Our corporate leaders have also brought some of their woes on themselves. President Reagan convinced us that a rising tide would lift all boats. "If we would stop restraining business, we would create an economic machine that would make us the envy of the world. Health care would be better managed by the people who know how to make creative business decisions than by government bureaucrats. Our companies would make health care benefits a part of our pay."

Well, all of that worked for many years. Then, or so it seems to many of us, our corporate leaders learned that they could make even more money if they could break their unspoken contract with the American workers. They learned that they could employ the workers of other nations, people whose standard of living did not require the same salaries as Americans. They could buy and sell, merge, and dismantle their own companies. And, by the way, health care had now become too expensive for the companies to offer. So the workers, who were now making less pay relative to the current economic realities, were on their own. Of course, the ones who were actually sick would have a difficult time getting health insurance, but that was just the cruel reality of the global marketplace.

Regan was right, I think. However, he did not anticipate the effect of fallen human nature upon those who make corporate decisions. He was right to think that the "invisible hand of market will force a person to be prudent or to fail"; he did not seem to realize that the invisible hand of market forces will not force a man to be just or even mindful of the suffering of those who get crushed in the gears of our global economic machine. I am not saying that it is a business leader's responsibility to shoulder this reality, but by the turn if the century, we have convinced ourselves that it was nobody's concern. We had become social Darwinists – even many of us who oppose biological Darwinism!

So man of us have become dismayed and angry. Someone, or something has taken away our culture, our borders and our sense of national identity. Who is it? Who do we blame? What questions do we ask?

But where do we begin? Do we join the hatred of the left against business and thus destroy the structures that create our jobs? Or, do we join the hatred of the right against artists and intellectuals, who create the communication and dialogue that gives us meaning an purpose for our lives and culture? Which Cultural Revolution do we join? Which pied piper do we heed – the ones on the left or the ones on the right? How can we escape the sound-bite and cliche-ridden talk that passes for conversation, so we can figure out where we are and where we need to go?

My answer may sound self-righteous (and it may actually be self-righteous), but Christianity refuses to join either of these crusades against humanity. Christianity rebukes arrogant intellectuals and calls them to serve and to teach those who do not know. However, Christianity calls the person with financial gifts to serve others and not to forget the stranger, the sick, the elderly, the widow, the orphan and the other folks who get left behind.

I have been thinking about these things as all my friends push me to commit myself in this election. I am not ready to empower the rage of either side against the other. I am not holding myself aloof because I have no opinions. I am refusing to commit because I have not yet found a way to have a conversation about the issues of this campaign that is not an endless flow of clichés and repetitions of fear-based pandering.

I would like to consider the issues of this election in the light of the Lord's message in Matthew 5, 6, & 7. Senator Obama says that the Sermon on the Mount would wreck our Department of Defense. But isn't that the point? We are proclaiming a kingdom that will ultimately wreck every nation's Department of Defense. In the meantime, we tolerate the need for national defense; but we do not glory in it. We realize that even the Lord told us that we would always have the poor with us, but we don't forget them.

We take our civic responsibilities as serious as we can; but we never forget that no person and no human ideology can have our ultimate loyalty. Our kingdom hasn't come yet, but we judge all issues facing our present kingdom in the light of the values of our ultimate kingdom.

That's what makes a Chairman Mao and all his ilk so angry at us. We can't join their cultural revolution. We have another king and another country. So we make our decisions the best way we can, realizing that "here we see through a glass darkly and only then face to face".

And one thing more – some of the people on the other side of the aisle from me share my higher loyalties to the kingdom not made with hands. So I refuse to allow my transitory, provincial and limited understanding about political and cultural matters, to separate me from people with whom I intend to share eternity.

I have joined the real Revolution – the one that will soon overturn all the nations of this world. That's why I can't join the other ones -- at least with the deepest part of my heart. I am a citizen of this nation and a patriot. I believe that my allegiance to the kingdom of God has real consequences in this world in our time. I am not sitting around singing, “this world is not my home; I’m just a passin’ through. The decision to be a follower of Christ does not excuse us from the obligations that all mature people must accept, including those related to citizenship. It does force us to deal with life and with people very differently than unbelievers. It also helps us put political life in its place, as important but not ultimately so.

Political Glossary #1

Dan Scott — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:00:08 -0700

After writing it, I decided to not publish my blog about my son-in-law's deployment to Iraq.

Experience has taught me that our culture – and especially church culture -- no longer tolerates nuanced opinion. The prevailing belief is that one is either on the "right" or the "left", and that all subcategories of thought, emotion and opinion assigned to those two broad labels naturally attach to one of these polar positions. Thus, we tend to select the media outlets most favorable to our stated position, form our friendships, alliances and even our churches according to how they revolve around one of these labels. We also tend to consider or dismiss issues and ideas according to how they seem to support or threaten our social and political identity.

This polarized environment leads us to speak in sound bites and clichés with those who agree with us and call the result, "a conversation." Of course this is not real conversation at all but it takes a lot less work than a "real conversation."

A real conversation requires the following:

A willingness to speak one's true thoughts about the subject at hand
A willingness to listen to the true thoughts of another; without using the time when the other person is speaking to craft our own speech
The ability to maintain respect for the person with whom we are conversing even when we disagree with his or her opinion
Being more concerned with finding the truth about a matter (or at least gaining understanding the other person's opinion) than with winning an argument.

I invite the reader to ask himself or herself if we have very many conversations these days, at least as I define "conversation" here.

I say all of this to point out the fact that it has become notoriously difficult to have a political conversation nowadays – at least with people who feel differently about political matters. One of the reasons is because we don't always share with them the same definitions for the words we use to discuss political life. So I thought it might make sense to create a political glossary – defining our political vocabulary in an unbiased way and with as much "common" sense as possible.

We could begin a political glossary with the words "right" and "left." The terms were first used in a political way in France, where the early attempts at parliamentary democracy resulted in hundreds of delegates sitting in a massive room, grouped by political orientation, from the royalists on the extreme right to the anarchists and socialists on the left.

So do those labels tell us anything at all, here in the United States, in 2008? Well, yes. They tell us whether a person is generally more interested in social change (left) or in maintaining continuity with the past (right). Few people sit on the extreme boundaries of these positions, however. Most people position themselves somewhere away from the extreme of their stated position. This means that a person who is somewhat more interested in social change than in continuity with the past will have a lot in common with a person who is somewhat more interested in continuity with the past than with social change. In fact, these two people will likely have more in common with one another than with those who "sit on their side of the aisle" but at the edge of the room.

At present, the American media seems to define us all as sitting at the edge of the room. Thus, if we are on the "right" side of the aisle (as I am) then we are expected to be in agreement with every idea and emotion represented on "our side of the aisle" and to find every idea represented by the folks on the other side of the aisle thoroughly repugnant and nauseating.

As I just said: I sit on the right side of the aisle. That tells you that I am more committed to maintaining continuity with the past than I am to facilitating social change. This does not mean that I am uninterested in social change at all, however. Actually, I am extremely interested in social change. I just want to experience change in a way that does not sever my social, spiritual and cultural root system. That makes me a conservative, although not one that a person like Rush. Limbaugh or Ron Paul (both of whom claim to be conservatives) would affirm. Both of those gentlemen (if gentlemen they are) sit further toward the edge of the room than I do.

I am also a Republican, or at least I have voted that way most of the time. Now what does that mean? What exactly is a "republican" or a "democrat?"

Here's a simple explanation. Since the beginning, our country's leaders and thinkers have been divided about whether the nation ought to be governed as a pure democracy – a place where every citizen has as much say about every decision as everyone else – or as a republic – where every citizen helps select the best and the brightest political thinkers among us to make those decision that most of us do not have the experience or training to make.

So. A democrat leans more toward the idea of pure democracy. A republican leans toward the idea of a republic.

Historically, republicans have kept democrats from degenerating into mob rule. However, democrats have kept republicans from forming an oligarchy. That's why we tend to change parties every few years – to keep our nation from tilting toward either one of these extremes. Kept in power too long, each party tends to drift toward its most radical position.

In the last twenty-five years or so, both of our parties have shifted away from being republicans or democrats and toward being conservatives and liberals. Before, each party had both liberals and conservatives and had to work through the differences of the nation before arriving at a party platform. Today, the parties – and those who belong to them – are able to escape real conflict of opinion within their own parties. It is possible to read only those magazines, listen only to those radio personalities and to affiliate only with those people who are in substantial agreement with us. This creates a climate in which the opinions of the other party seem like insanity, like the babblings of madmen. It opens up a chasm between the parties that forces people at the center to choose between the extremes, least they fall into the widening abyss.

In such a climate, nuance and moderation gets lost and civility and respect colors one as cowardly or duplicitous. So the radicals and extremist rant while the centrists and moderates remain silent, shamed by their desire to maintain community with those with whom they disagree.

That's why I thought I would create a political glossary before sharing my own views on the war, public service and political life.

Faith to Faith: A New Conversation

Dan Scott — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:03:11 -0700

There’s no getting around it. We live in a culture that includes beliefs and practices from every major world religion, and a whole bunch of minor ones. And we need to know what our neighbors, co-workers, and sometimes even our family members believe. That’s why I wrote Faith to Faith: A Conversation About Christianity and World Religions. This isn’t your typical “us vs. them” book about Christianity and other beliefs. I wrote Faith to Faith to give my fellow Christians as accurate a picture as possible of the beliefs and practices of the various world religions, not because I want to prove them wrong, but because we need to know how to relate to them.

The folks at Conversantlife.com thought it would be helpful to know a little more about my new book. So over the next few weeks I will be responding to some questions about Faith to Faith and why I wrote it. Even though I’m the one answering the questions, this isn’t intended to be a one-way conversation. I’d love to hear your responses to my thoughts. Even more, if you have a question you’d like to ask, please post it in the comments section at the end of this post.

You refer to your new book, Faith to Faith, as a “fictionalized account” of a three-day interfaith conference you attended a few years ago. What were the circumstances that led to your involvement in this conference?

For ten years, I pastored a mid-city congregation in Phoenix called The Valley Cathedral. It was a large church that erupted into the life of the city in the 70s and 80s. By the early 90s, it was rocked by scandal and division. The demographic shifts around the little affluent island of Central Phoenix (where the church was located) became frightening to many. However, many began to come to the church from the margins of society. Most of our suburban congregants could not relate to either our area’s changing needs or to the changes we made to accommodate those needs. So I began to meet church leaders who were more involved socially in the lives of the poor.

Many of these new friends were further left on the political and theological spectrum than me or our church. I found myself in the curious place of agreeing with my liberal friends about the problems of our city and its people. However, I disagreed with them about the solutions and about the deepest roots of the common issues we faced. I certainly disagreed with them about spirituality. So while I was glad to be friends with people of other religions and was willing to cooperate with them to bring food, shelter and clothing to the poor, I could not worship in Native American ceremonies or participate in New Age convocations. This stance perplexed both “liberals” and “conservatives” in Phoenix.

My conservative friends were aghast that I would even participate in the interfaith conference at the Franciscan retreat center. One radio talk show host denounced me for being cozy with the Catholic bishop of Phoenix. Emails alleging all sorts of doctrinal and spiritual errors about my approach kept the atmosphere hot around me for several years. Naturally, my liberal friends assumed that I was crossing over, or, in their words, “maturing.”

I had not crossed over. I was an orthodox Evangelical Christian. I just wanted to “be at peace with all people in so much as lies within me,” as St. Paul puts it. So I wanted to learn what the Buddhists thought or why a professor of economics at ASU had become a follower of a Native shaman. I also wanted to know why the church, the love of my life, was so repugnant to so many spiritual seekers in our city.

The years of trying to pastor the people of central Phoenix while dodging fire from fellow believers did not turn me into an embittered liberal. They did make me willing to be “the Protestant presenter” at the interfaith conference. There comes a point in which your reputation is so shot that you no longer have the energy to defend it. That’s when you can finally just do what you think is the right thing to do. I knew that I was still an orthodox Christian and that I knew where the boundaries were between us and the other great world religions. Then I asked myself if the Lord would attend such a meeting. When I determined that he would, I went. Once I got there, I had to decide how I would represent my Lord, my faith and even my fellow believers who were upset with me. I wanted to be faithful to that responsibility.

That pretty well sums it up!

What was it about your experience at the interfaith conference that prompted you to write your book?

I was amazed to sense the deep hunger for God in that conference. I liked most of the presenters and could relate to their spiritual journey. I kept asking myself why, in view of their sincere respect for the Lord Jesus, were they not making their way to Him.

A Buddhist is very likely to honor Jesus and to be extremely respectful as we talk about his teachings and about his death and resurrection. A Muslim, despite the current spiritual war, is also inclined to profound sentiment about Jesus. Most of the world’s seekers respect our Lord. So why don’t they follow him? In many cases, it is because of us! We often speak and live in ways that becomes a stumbling block to the world’s seekers.

Meanwhile, we spend enormous amounts of money to relate to “seekers” who are almost always affluent consumers only marginally interested in spiritual things. It’s the wrong approach for our evangelism, our theology and our spirituality. We have been going the wrong way, like trying to run a combine on the beach while the fields are white and ready to harvest.

I wanted to share these feelings with fellow Christians. I wanted to tell them that New Agers are usually hungry for God. They are certainly no scarier than the secular folks we have been trying to reach, people who often have little concern about their souls.

Who is your intended audience for Faith to Faith? In other words, who should be reading this book?

My main audience is Christians. I want to awaken in them a concern for the peoples of the world who seek the Lord of Life but who do not encounter Him in our churches. I want to urge us to stop secularizing our worship in a mistaken attempt to reach unbelievers. I want us to rediscover awe and wonder in the presence of God – the otherworldly and mysterious otherness that woos the soul Godward and reminds us that we were made to live forever. That is what all people everywhere seek who are concerned about eternity, meaning, and about forming a relationship with their Creator.

Why They Killed Jesus

Dan Scott — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:42:54 -0700

This was my text from Palm Sunday; I thought it would be appropriate still, given the season.

All over the world today, preachers will be speaking about the paradox of Palm Sunday. On the first day of this week, the people of ancient Jerusalem cheered and wept as Jesus came into town, riding on a donkey. By the end of the week, the same people were calling for his death. This is of course, an example of the fickle nature of crowds and of political opinion. But surely there is more to it than that! Unless some things happened in that week that we do not know about, the crowd’s rapid move from exaltation to rage seems jarringly disjointed. Perhaps that’s why the story continues to intrigue us.

I was thinking about all of that this week as I began to prepare for this message. I reflected on the social conditions of that era, trying to gain some new understanding of the context within which the events of Palm Sunday and Holy week occurred. As I did, I began to realize that Jesus had become an intolerable threat to many powerful people. His existence had become the source of considerable anxiety for those at the top.

Of course, the human beings who were so disturbed at Jesus had no idea that they were really small-time players in a cosmic drama. The real powers behind the events of Holy Week, the real source of the anxiety that gripped the kings, priests and finally the mob, were invisible to human beings. The invisible powers were, however, the ones really calling the shots. I want to talk about them in a moment. First though, let’s talk about the human side of this story. Let’s ask ourselves why the leaders of first century Judea wanted to kill Jesus Christ.

Jesus Was a Political Threat

Jesus was not a political threat because he cared about politics. Actually, he had become threatening because he viewed the political system under which he lived as irrelevant. He preached that the kingdom of God was coming; that the joys and fortunes of the masses would no longer be dependent upon states and kings. Because of this message, Jesus is often depicted as a revolutionary by those who want to make our Lord look like Che Guevara, plotting against governments out in the jungle somewhere.

The truth is, Jesus was nothing like Che Guevara. He was much more radical than that.

The greatest insult to people in power is not opposition or insurrection. Powerful people usually love a fight, especially with people they view as punks and trouble makers. What really upsets powerful people is when portions of the populace they believe they are entitled to rule, begin to view their power and their structures with indifference. That kind of attitude, that doesn’t even view conflict as necessary, signals the imminent shift of authority and privilege.

However, when history is moving in this way, even great armies can do little to restrain it.

When the mighty Soviet State finally came to an end, Michael Gorbachev’s rule extended to about thirty feet down the hall from his office in the Kremlin. Outside the Kremlin, the Russian people had already turned their faces toward the Russian Republic and its flamboyant new leader, Boris Yeltsin. The premier of the Soviet State kept signing papers and issuing proclamations but his time and the time of the government he represented had run out. Soon the hammer and the sickle came down for the last time.

Jesus came to announce that the history of the entire world was about to turn. So He wasn’t concerned about Rome. He wasn’t even concerned about the religious elite in Jerusalem. Jesus and His followers were already turning their faces toward a new government and toward a new King. They were already proclaiming the good news: that God is as interested in servants as He is in emperors and that the long night of oppression was coming to an end.

Jesus was not attacking the government or society; he was merely telling people that the current structures were no longer relevant. So the rulers couldn’t figure out his angle, couldn’t decide what it was that He wanted.

Jesus could not be pigeon-holed. He was not a member of the left and He was not a member of the right. The Sadducees were the liberals of the day; Greek-speaking, philosophically-trained folks who were completely out-of-touch with merchants and farmers. The Pharisees meanwhile were proscribing clichés and laws, worshipping the past, ignoring the pain of the people and entirely missing the movement of history. Each side gave Jesus a chance to make His choice because each side believed that the right and the left were the only two choices available. But Jesus chose neither the left nor the right. After all, why should One squabble about which side of the bus He is going to sit on if He knows that the entire bus is about to go over a cliff?

No, Jesus was looking to neither the right nor the left for salvation and deliverance; Jesus was looking up! He knew that salvation was not about either overthrowing Rome or voting righteous people into the Roman senate; salvation was about confessing loyalty to the kingdom of God and placing one’s trust in God alone.

Now, talk like that always gets a person in trouble and it certainly got Jesus into trouble. That’s how he brought the wrath of both the right and the left upon himself – by treating politics as largely irrelevant.

Jesus Was a Social Threat

In Jesus’ day, everyone knew their place. The Romans were the rulers, the Greeks were the artists and teachers and the priests were the religious authorities. Little by little, these groups had formed an uneasy alliance in order to protect the interests of the other. Each group knew that they all needed the peons at the bottom of the pile to keep things going and that maintaining this system required the peons to keep understanding that they were peons.

Peons didn’t need a lot of money. Peons didn’t need a lot of education. Peons needed to work hard, accept their lot in life, “party hardy” from time to time and above all, to remain satisfied with their place at the bottom of society.

The problem was, Jesus gathered masses of those peons and told them that they were made in the image and likeness of God. He appointed fishermen to become teachers of the scripture. He told the peons to pay their taxes to Caesar but to give their allegiance to God alone. Jesus invited publicans, whores and farmers to step out of their appointed places in the culture and to step into places of authority and influence. Of course, this sort of thing had to be stopped. To maintain the structures of society, people had to keep their appointed place.

Often ones place in society was determined by ethnicity.

The greatest battles of the early church were about ethnicity, by the way. The people of God had to figure out how they would carry out in practice what they confessed in theory – that in Christ there is no distinction of class, race, or language. We have never completely mastered this part of the gospel. For this reason, one of the most difficult things a church faces even today is becoming a real community that includes people from all backgrounds.

I have experienced this dilemma most of my life.

The most striking thing about the early Pentecostal movement, you see, was neither tongue-speaking, healing nor the other spectacular features of our movement; it was the fact that the different races of the nation and the world were worshipping together. The Azusa street revival, that launched the Pentecostal movement into the world, was led by the son of a slave but it soon attracted Whites, Hispanics and even Jews. It took an entire generation to dismantle the interracial structure of the various Pentecostal groups because it “was not practical” in a country oppressed by segregation. It’s taken Pentecostals several generations to heal from the rupture that resulted from pulling back from the unity that characterized the early revival. One wonders what would have happened had the early Pentecostal leaders stood their ground against a sinful and bigoted culture to maintain their original vision.

Thankfully, we have another chance in our times. Churches all over the globe are deciding that racial reconciliation really is an essential part of the gospel.

To return to my point though: it is jarring to those in power when a people begin to ignore the social protocols that determine those who are “in” from who are “out.” When a people begin ignoring the social barriers, not because they want to be trouble-makers but simply because they want to obey Jesus, it causes people to think about the injustices that are often otherwise invisible to the top half of the social order.

When our family moved to Ecuador, we had a decision to make. We were told that Ecuadorians with a European heritage would not worship in a church full of Indians. We were advised to create separate churches to accommodate this cultural reality. We decided against it though because it seemed inconsistent with the gospel. So the going was rough for many years. We won mostly poor, uneducated and socially marginal people at first. However, as the years went by, the gospel began lifting our people. The children and grandchildren of the early converts became professional, educated and even wealthy folk. Today, the Ecuadorian evangelicals are a prosperous new middle class.

Many missionary strategists in seminaries theorize that a nation is easier to win from the top down. I think that history does not bear that out. Most of the time, it is those in need that first receive the gospel. Gradually, because of what God does to transform those converts, the upper classes slowly come around.

Jesus had some upper class converts but most of His people were in great need. So Jesus preached to them: “Come unto me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.” Jesus told His disciples: “go into the highways and byways and find the lame, the halt and the blind and bring them in that my house may be full.” Furthermore, He was not just speaking about Jews; the prophet had said of Jesus, “He will speak peace to the heathen.”

This was unthinkable. Who did Jesus, a carpenter’s son, think He was! Well, that depended upon who you asked! The apostle Peter said about Him, “the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief of the corner; this is a marvelous thing in our eyes.” The scribes and Pharisees, on the other hand, said, “This man receives sinners.” Or, “What good thing ever came out of Nazareth?”

One thing for sure, the established social order was not happy watching this break down of the barriers and walls that protected their privilege and class. Understand now that Jesus was not a communist! He was not against the upper class and He was not against the lower class; He simply ignored class distinctions all together. That is what had become intolerable.

Jesus Was a Generational Threat

Our Lord was 33 years old. He was much too young to have enough experience to instruct anyone – let alone to reform the entire society. Where had He gone to school? What office had He held? Who did He think He was?

The older we get, the younger people seem! The other day, Trish and I were coming out of the hospital as a group of doctors in white coats were coming in. After we passed them, I asked Trish, “Do you think that last doctor was out of high school yet?” The truth is though; the man who saved Trish’s life didn’t look much older. Sometimes it seems the kindergarten is taking over the world and it is upsetting!

Each generation has it’s unique rhythms and ways of doing things. The generation before us seems too stodgy and set in its ways; the generation below us seems unruly and inexperienced. Furthermore, our opinions tend not to change as we get older. I’m fifty-five now; people thirty-five look very young to me. So what would I do with a thirty-three year old who wants to tell me that he is about to overthrow the order that sustains my livelihood and my purpose in life? First, I’ll laugh. Then, if he doesn’t go away, I’ll try to find a way to get rid of him! That’s our natural tendency.

Actually, many thirty-three year olds are saying these sorts of things about church. We are not any more disposed to listen to them than past generations. When they tell us that they want to sing different songs, or to dress differently, or to organize differently, we tend to tell them to go elsewhere. So they do. They start new churches that meet the needs of their own generation. That’s why, all over America, churches are segregating – not by race this time, but by generation! It is a very troubling and hurtful situation.

We who are older tend to blame the young people for not having respect. But don’t you think that is probably what the elders in the Sanhedrin said about the Lord and his young disciples?

The fact is, every revival in history has been a youth revival. The Pentecostal revival, where I found the Lord and was raised, was started by twenty and thirty year olds. They were still living when I was a kid, urging us to maintain the traditions that they had started in the early part of the century! They left their denominations when they were young but they thought it would be a sin if we left the ones they founded when they were young!

It is worth asking ourselves this morning what our church plans to do to ensure that a new generation of Christ Church leaders will have the freedom to reach this city and this nation? What are we doing to support, train and encourage our young believers? Will we make it easy to be a Christian here or will we make it easier for our young adults to go elsewhere to serve the Lord and to grow a church?

The elders of Jesus’ day made their decision: they would not listen to a young man call their traditions and their ways of doing things into question. They decided that He had to die so their old order could go on its way undisturbed – all the way to oblivion.

Jesus Was a Religious Threat

The way that Jesus interpreted the Bible and lived out His faith undermined the authority of the scribes, the priests and the rabbis. What were the priests to think when Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan? I mean, the thieves in His story beat up a man and left him for dead while the priest passed by without even stopping to help. Or, what about the time the Pharisee went to temple and prayed beside the publican and Jesus remarked that God had heard the Publicans prayer but did not hear the Pharisee’s prayer? This was really rough stuff! It wreaked havoc with the religious structure and culture.

Jesus was not starting a new religion. He was as committed to the authority of scripture and to the message of the prophets as any Pharisee. What he rejected was the tendency of the religious leaders to make idols out of the cultural wrappings that surrounded the faith. Jesus honored the Sabbath; He did not honor the layers of rules surrounding the observance of Sabbath. Jesus respected the temple; He did not respect the merchandising and political shenanigans of the temple guard. Jesus quoted Moses with love and devotion; He did not quote Moses to frighten or to attack unbelievers and seekers.

It may surprise you to know that in matters of doctrine, Jesus was a Pharisee. He never objected to one thing that the Pharisees taught. What he despised was the attitude of the Pharisees. He thought that their attitude destroyed the faith they professed. He did not even believe the heathen would be better off by converting to their way of thinking. Once He said, “You encompass land and sea to make a convert and when you convert him, you make him twice the son of Hell as yourself.”

These are not words designed to soothe religious leaders. To say that one can be correct doctrinally and yet miss the entire point – that one can quote scripture and become a missionary to spread the faith and yet not really know God – how harsh!

You can be sure that some of the most faithful and knowledgeable Jewish leaders were behind the decision to assassinate the Lord. Isn’t that something, that a spiritual leader could feel so defensive about his faith that he becomes willing to influence a government to kill people?

No doubt about it, Jesus brought the wrath of the religious leaders – both liberal and conservative – upon His head. His teachings rebuked the ideas of the left and the spirit of the right and He simply could not be allowed to live.

Jesus Was a Spiritual Threat

In the end, none of the human opposition was important enough for the Lord to notice. He had not come to this world to fight any human being, even the ones who sought his death. He came into the world to save all human beings from a tyranny much greater than any political, social, generational or religious system. He came to deliver us from the power of darkness. As Jesus began His ministry, St. Matthew quoted the words of the prophet, “they that sat in darkness have seen a great light.” Or, as the apostle John put it, “for this cause the Son of God has come; to destroy the works of the Devil.”

This is the point that even Christians often miss. Jesus did not view evil as a metaphor or as a human weakness. Jesus saw evil as an intelligent system of spiritual powers that oppress and destroy human life. That was the war Jesus came to fight; this was the revolution Jesus came to lead and the powers of darkness were determined to destroy Him before the word got out.

Everywhere He went Jesus cast out evil spirits and shed the light on evil systems. He was as ready to deliver the emperor as He was to deliver the slave.

A few years ago, some theologians from Europe and the United States went into Latin America to preach what they called “liberation theology.” They tried to convince our people there that the oppression would not end until the people took to the streets with guns and Molotov cocktails. These arm chair revolutionaries were offering only more misery and sorrow and thankfully, the people realized it. A real revolution was brewing that this handful of do-gooders would have never understood. People were praying for Jesus to show up and destroy the power that oppressed their lives. Soon, nation after nation was turning to the Lord and discovering that freedom from oppression is something that happens in the heart and not from the end of a gun.

Jesus told Pilate, the Roman governor, “my kingdom is not of this world, else my servants would fight but my kingdom is not from here.” How much more plain could our Lord be? He is not at all interested forcing people to accept Him; Jesus delivers people who voluntarily cry out to Him. This is a spiritual conflict, not a political, social, religious or military one. The way we conquer is simply to heal, serve and transform the peoples of the world.

Perhaps this is a good place to tell you that I believe our church can only succeed in reaching this city if we realize that our struggle is a spiritual one. In the end, no amount of marketing, planning, programming or organizing can accomplish the work we need to do. Only a spiritual transformation that comes from proclaiming the kingdom of God over all human sin and depravity, over all corporate and governmental oppression and neglect, can do the work we must do.

So, I really misnamed this sermon. No one really put Jesus to death; Jesus voluntarily laid down His life in order to destroy the works of the Devil. He descended into Hell but on the third day arose and ascended to the right hand of God, the Father almighty. From thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.

That is the good news and that is the revolution for which our Lord and countless martyrs have given their lives. But we don’t blow people up in order to spread our faith; we lay down our lives to proclaim the inevitable victory of the Kingdom of God.

Perhaps the song writer was talking about this reality when he wrote:

Do you feel the darkness tremble
When all the saints join in one song
And all the streams flow as one river
To wash away our brokenness

And we can see that God You're moving
A mighty river through the nations
And young and old will turn to Jesus
Fling wide you heavenly gates
Prepare the way of the risen Lord

Open up the doors and let the music play
Let the streets resound with singing
Songs that bring Your hope
Songs that bring Your joy
Dancers who dance upon injustice

The people on that first Palm Sunday would get confused later in the week. They would join their human rulers in calling for the Lord’s death. However, a few weeks later, these same people began to join the revolution of the ages and began to lay down their lives in search for a world to come. They will all join their Lord in announcing the dawning of a new day when no one rattles a saber and no one drags a chain. The lion will lay down beside the lamb and men will beat their swords into plowshares and not learn of war anymore.

This is why evil angels and evil men plotted together to destroy Jesus. As long as war continues and oppression endures, evil remains, whoever is in power. But someday the last cannon will fire and the last flag will unfurl. On that day, it will not be a few straggling souls in Jerusalem but all the peoples of the earth who will greet the returning king, this time on a great white horse riding. And they will say, Hosanna, Hosanna in the highest; blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.