Build

I work as a program specialist at a place which supports individuals with intellectual and physical disabilities. Our vision statement is to “impact the world with capabilities.”. This manifests itself in a myriad of different ways, but is particularly evident in the following.

One of the individuals we offer support who is diagnosed with moderate mental retardation is a small business owner. He founded B____’s Shoe Shine, a company which provides old fashion shoe shining. He has a broad client base which extends throughout the community.

Before starting his business this individual had a habit of asking people if they would like him to shine their shoes for them. He has always had a proclivity towards helpfulness especially in the area of cleaning. This was recognized by a team member working in his home, and with some help from other team members he was able to parlay his skill and passion for making people’s shoes look good into a business. He now is able to hand people a business card and ask them if they would be interested in a shoe shine.

This anecdote provides a window into something both troubling and hopeful in the climate of much popular western ideology. What follows expounds upon this.

Asking new people you meet, and even old friends, if it’s okay to shine their shoes is not normal. At least not anywhere I’ve been to. The abnormality of that behavior coupled with the intrinsic devaluation of individuals with intellectual disabilities in our society creates an image for the aforementioned individual that is pitiable and demands condescension rather than respect.

There are two ways to try and help alter this negative perception. The first would be to deconstruct. In this approach team members working with this individual would tell him to stop asking people if he could shine their shoes. Simple enough. The second approach would be to take the behavior leading to this negative self image, asking people to shine their shoes, and use them to construct a positive image. This is not so easy.

Deconstruction, in this instance, requires little thought or imagination. For many it is instinctual. Upon recognizing something perceived as bad or wrong many try and find a means to deconstruct and subsequently stop the action (through physical action is being referred to here, metaphysical ideas often find themselves fitting into this same paradigm). Construction, however, asks one to spend time to consider the situation. It is a result of more than a reactionary action. Instead it shows respect to the situation at hand, no matter how bad, and in contrast to making something less bad, offers a means of making something better. Construction is inherently positive, whereas deconstruction is an inherently negative phenomenon.

There is a time for deconstruction. Actions require reasons, and history comes down to us as a long list of brave men and women struggling against idolatry and false gods, and it is because they were able to see things like genocide and slavery, abortion and adultery for what they truly are that they had the motivation, much less the means, to struggle against them. Finding and discussing the shortcomings of something is important to process of its redemption, however it is a means to something better not an end in itself.

Christ’s commands to his disciples weigh much more heavily, using Jeremiah’s paradigm, on building and planting rather than rooting up, pulling down, and destroying. In a world of cynicism and disbelief we as Christians should be the ones to say that yes our world is broken and God’s people are lost, but that God is fixing His world and finding His people. We must move beyond our gawking at the decimation of Eden, and continue the work of building God’s Kingdom.

Politicians regularly wrestle with the tension between all and nothing.  Voters rarely reward the faint of heart but tend to flock to winners who risk and win.  The Democrats have won big in the last eight years partly by capitalizing on the distance between all and nothing.  When they put a proposal forward, they make it say everything; no compromise and no concessions.  This strategy has granted the Democrats (Republicans, not squeamish about using such tactics when they are in power) two advantages.  First, when the legislation fails, only grabbing support from a handful of ideologues and purists, the party in power can claim that its opponents are obstructionists.  More than that, the opponents resist the principle of the intended legislation making them bad people.  Consider the resent piece of legislation on guns which failed in the Democratically held Senate.  If the Democrats were smart, they would have passed the legislation piecemeal the way that Lyndon Johnson worked for Civil Rights or the way that Henry Clay passed the Compromise of 1850.  Rather, President Obama poured all his goals into a single piece of legislation (clip limitations, assault rifle, and background checks) knowing that if it did not pass he could accuse the opposition of standing idly by while more kids are killed.  The Democrats did the same thing with the Dream Act in 2011 when Senator Reid reintroduced the bill without the border enforcement component.  Republicans had agreed to vote for the act as long as the border security went with the bill, then Senators Reid and Durbin removed the border security component.  When the Republican supporters bailed the Democrats labeled them Tea Party radicals.
Second, Democrats have been able to promote themselves as the only people with ideas.  Of course during President Bush's administration the Democrats turned "No" into a political motto, engraved on the very keystone of American democracy - the right to resist.  Now the Republicans are the party of no and the Democrats position themselves as the people with ideas willing to risk their professional careers to get something done.  Thus, the reigning party claims that their opponents offer no ideas, or at leas no serious ideas, about how to better the country.  We are told to ignore the idea that the Senate has reneged on its responsibility to produce a budget every year because they know full well that the Republicans would never pass whatever budget the Democrats put forward.
In recent debates over guns, healthcare, and gay marriage, we have been told that we can only choose between all or nothing.  Problematically, no party gets everything; demanding it will yield nothing.  Once the public becomes frustrated with such false-dilemmas, the party in power will appear narrow and obstinate, a set of characteristics that ruin political losers.

St. Martin

This is what I believe. I believe that someone at LBC should go now and take a piece of a coat and nail to the wall in the prayer chapel. Here's why.

Back at the dawn of Christian monasticism there was a man named Martin whose friends called him Marty. Marty was a pretty good guy and was enough of a Christian to recognize suffering in the world and react in a way Jesus would. So one day Martin is entering the city of Amiens in norther France with his buddies and he sees a beggar who's almost naked shivering in the cold and begging for money. Marty then ignored the beggar because he knew the guy was gonna spend the money on booze and drugs and moved on. I'm just kidding. Marty didn't have any money, but he took his cape and cut it in two and gave half of it to the beggar. Later Marty had a dream where he saw Jesus coming to him wrapped in half a soldier's cape and saying, "Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me." This story became so synonymous with the life of Marty that images of the guy almost always involve him preforming this act.

Here's where it gets to why someone should nail a piece of a coat to the chapel. There was a church that kept a small piece of Marty's cape, which was called a capella, and the church became known as a "chapel" and the folks attending to matters there "chaplains." So there ya go.

Jesus says, "Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you." I think Marty got this. Christians should be reminded to pray that they get this as well.

Bibliography:  
The Story of Christianity , Justo L. Gonzalez

As the Supreme Court debates the Constitutionality of laws controlling the establishment of marriage, I wonder about the validity of the terms of that debate.  The arguments coming from the chamber yesterday (March 26) reveals convoluted thinking on this subject.  It seems like both the justices and lawyers are caught between the social sciences and Constitutionalism.  Social science is the study of causes and effects inside human populations.  Using statistics and studies, social scientists try to detect patterns in human society  in order to determine which activities, policies, and/or behaviors benefit the individuals in that society.  In the case at hand, one of the bases for arguments about the legality of same-sex marriage rest on the effects that same-sex marriage (a social institution, recognized by the states) has on individuals (the couples themselves and/or the children raised by such couples.)  I find this line of thinking convoluted since the standards for determining benefit seem amorphous and really those conditions that agree with a certain set of presuppositions about what a healthy person (holistically not just physically) looks like.  Never mind that for the moment; such considerations lie beyond my point.  The second standard, Constitutionalism, requires that laws not violate the principles (it is hard to define this any more than by using the term principles because the legal community has, for some time, debated the usefulness of the Constitution and the terms of its relevance for modern law...) of the Constitution.  Of the many ways of understanding constitutionalism, the most often cited derive from the Fourteenth Amendment and refer to the ever expanding monolith labeled civil rights.  In this thinking, the Constitution guarantees individuals in America (itself a questionable limiting factor in modern politics) a certain extension of the individual's identity.  This is problematic in some cases and not so much in others.  For example, as regards segregation, going to competitive schools and having a vote are obvious extensions of the individuals identities.  Race should not impede someone from being able to live out their political and economic lives.

It was hard to tell from the arguments from the Supreme Court what logic the Justices will use to decide on the constitutionality of both California's proposition 8 and the Federal Defense of Marriage Act.  Neither of these lines of argument seem to make a great deal of sense.  Sociological reasoning seems ineffective at determining the benefits of same-sex marriage.  First, how does one decide whether or not a type of relationship is beneficial to certain individuals?  How does a social scientist know that the relationship in question is the thing that has led to either a good or bad result in individual lives?  How long must a sample group experience same-sex marriages to determine benefit?  Second, what does the Constitution have to do with theories about benefits to individuals?  This seems like a normal debate for politicians but not clearly for constitutional arenas.  I am not unaware of the many civil rights decisions in which the court has recognized the economic and social ramifications from certain social conditions.  These cases have established that society, by imposing certain social and economic statuses on individuals, determines their legal and political standing as well.  But to say that patterns of either benefit or harm using the limiting factor of sustained same-sex marriages seems far less reliable than proving that black children suffer harm through educational segregation.

The logic of civil rights seems even more incredible in this case which leads me to believe that the Court does not have a clear sense of how to judge this case.  In what way is a proclivity or attraction a civil right?  Well, the argument goes, a person gets as much opportunity to chose to whom he/she is attracted as a person can choose his/her own skin color.  Thus, the argument for same-sex marriage as a civil right rests on two things: the biological nature of same-sex attraction and the right to live according to that attraction so that neither the political, economic, nor social status of the individual is diminished by it.  There are at least two problems with this logic.  First, a person's attraction to a certain sex has no rational relationship to a person's economic, political, and/or social status.  Second, debate over same-sex marriage has nothing to do with an individual's tastes, proclivities, and/or attractions.  The constitutional argument is over marriage, a decision to live in a committed relationship which has an expectation of sexual relations (and other things, of course, but these are the bare minimums so lets just look at these.)  If we wish to use the terminology, and I do not think there is a good reason to do so, let us say that each individual has a right to have an attraction to a certain type of person.  How can we possibly legally, and philosophically for that matter, forge a necessary connection between having an attraction and having sex?  I am not saying that there is no reason why people who have a certain attraction will not want to have sex; I am saying that there is no constitutionally imaginable link creating a right to practice an attraction.  People have all sorts of attractions which no law can possibly proscribe but for which no law should create a constitutionally protected path to fulfillment.  There seems to legal basis for protecting certain behaviors simply because they stem from an individual's attraction.

It seems to me that the Court has no clear way of settling this issue, and maybe it should not try.  If, however, the Court decides that same-sex marriage is a civil right, it will also, by necessity, claim that the Constitution of the United States secures for each individual the right to pursue their attractions.  As far as the social sciences logic, the Justices have already complained that they do not have access to enough information to prove same-sex marriage is beneficial to the individual.  This seems like a non-starter since all it would do is allow what is already going happening.  The civil rights logic is the most consequential and yet seems to confuse the court and public.  I hope the Court, at least, gets some clarity before they make what could be one of the most far reaching watershed decisions in this country's history.

A Conversation with a Re-formed Catholic

A Conversation with a Re-formed Catholic

    I had the privilege to sit down with one of my good friends Tim and pick his brain about his life previously as a practicing Catholic and now as a Presbyterian. He ecstatically agreed and we had a great conversation about his life. Tim grew up in Harrisburg, the son of Catholic parents, he was baptized as an infant, went to a Catholic school, was confirmed and went to Mass every weekend. Tim said he did the whole “shabang.” Here is a bit of our conversation:

     Sam: What was your biggest problem with Christianity before becoming a Christian?

     Tim: The fact that I didn’t know a lot of nice Christians was the biggest problem. When my friend tried to introduce Christianity, he came out kinda snobby and attacked the faith that I grew up with. He pointed out the things that Catholicism did that did not line up with Christianity like the pope, confession, communion, baptism and Mary. I knew the gospel before when in Catholicism and they are not that different from Protestantism.    

      Sam: What would you say Protestants miss in terms of understanding Catholicism?

     Tim: When I talk to them they have this radical, radical view of Catholicism. They think that Catholics have this view that the only way to get to heaven is your works, that Mary is glorified more than Christ. It isn’t the case, she is just glorified. It is still wrong, but they sometimes have the view that she is over Christ. They sometimes think the Pope is some sinister power hungry anti-Christ. They feel as if the priest is like a walkie-talkie for God when in the confession booth and that is not the case.

     Sam: As a Protestant now what would you tell your Catholic self five years ago?

     Tim: I would probably tell my old Catholic self: “Is the faith that I am pursuing and taught, truly following scripture and Christ?” I would ask myself to evaluate the wrongs and the rights of what I was learning.

    Tim went on to describe his experiences coming from a Catholic context and becoming Reformed. Tim to this day has only been a Christian for a year and a half. He attends Thaddeus Stevens where he says he has the hardest time living for Christ. Tim later in the discussion commented on how there is a need to know the “deeper things” of Christianity. He  told of how his encounters at college with inner-city students have required him to learn to answer some of the harder questions of life and how even though they may be looked down upon for being from the city, they were certainly not dumb. Tim said there is a need for students of the Bible to go and befriend some of his colleagues to show that Christianity has the answers and that Christians are not hypocrites. 

Leaders today

In every generation there has been a popular movement to take a single characteristic of Christ and wrongly characterize him. The Gnostic church had this problem by making everything immaterial, the Roman Catholic church has this problem by making God overly concerned with service. Today we are by far to concerned with leadership. Is this true that Christ was a leader? Yes, of course that is true, the shepherding quality of Christ makes this extremely evident but that is not all that he does. Christ is not primarily focused on what makes a good leader; Christ doesn't demand us to go make leaders in the church. Instead we make disciples; does this require leadership? Yes but our role is not to focus on leadership.

Often times when we make this our focus we are taking qualities of leadership from secular leadership models and applying them to Jesus, the same way that most "Christian counselors" today use Freudian psychology with a bunch of proof texts tagged on. The church in America continues to measure our internal success by leadership seminars and numbers in the pews. This is not the success of Christ, at least not the way we ought to concern ourselves with spiritual maturity as taught by the Scriptures.  Christ the Savior died on a cross and rose again from the grave, that is success. What isn't successful is people who use Christian language, make worship erotic and can not articulate why the trinity is important in an "applicable" way.

The leadership movement is having a poor effect on the church for multiple reasons. The biggest problem I see, aside from wrongly characterizing Christ, is that everyone is a leader. That is not true, if everyone becomes a leader in the church, there is no longer any reason for the church to assume authority over anyone. We call people "leaders" because of an inventory they took in their undergraduate studies and placed them in roles as leaders, but not only do they lack the intrinsic desire but they are not capable. This will drown out the leaders already in the church, hurt and burn them and force them out because someone else is using gifts they don't have to fulfill a leadership role they don't belong in.

Was Jesus a leader? Yes, He was a leader but He was also a Servant and a Judge. The church needs to stop focusing so much on a single characteristic of God; especially this way. God is not sitting on a throne with a clip board and whistle as our spiritual coach, He isn't walking around carrying a brief case with numbers of who is and is not in the church, and He definitely is not raising up a church of elite leaders to just "live life together." He is calling us to make disciples despite of our leadership abilities, this is kingdom work, not being extreme or radical in your Christian walk.

"hip theology" 2.0

Rob Bell is back on the theological circuit with a new book. Just as warm and compassionate as before in "love wins". He begins this new video saying,  "I think there are a lot of people in our culture who can't do the God sort of belief system or the idea, so there is a very very very popular movement that essentially says this is all there is." The problem with any type of theology that caters to a specific audience is, it ends up looking and sounding likes it audience. That kind of chameleon Christianity is exactly what Rob Bell is talking about in his new book. It is an attempt to get people back into the church with soft, comfortable, therapeutic language and tone. His idea of overly compassionate theology is explicit when he explains that Atheism is not good enough explanation for life's questions, because of experience. "These seemingly supernatural occurrences have no other explanation except there is a loving God who gave them to you" seems to be the main idea. True God does give us experiences in life in order to grow to know him and deepen our affection for him. Although that is true this is not the center for our understanding of God.

If the new book entitled "What we talk about, when we talk about God" is as creative and organic as it sounds the orthodox community ought to be concerned about this book. That being said I am no prophet so I won't make predictions on the book but I will say this promotional video raises similar concern that the love wins promo did. Talking about God in new and fresh ways are fine, but when they re-define your theology in a way that makes appeals to people who are not religious, it will probably have a tough time fitting into the orthodoxy. Rob Bell is not tackling doctrines like sex or hell anymore that evangelicals even range on this book is a spear head at our understanding of God, which means we have a lot to worry about.

What concerns me the most is how he defines God at the end of the video. He makes the claim that God is not pulling us back to primitive living but instead always pulling us forward. This is Niebuhr and Bultmann for public consumption. It is a progressive and modern theological thrust; this makes works like Christianity and Liberalism a key text for Christians today. J Gresham Machen, Cornelius Van Til and Carl Henry were all men who confronted the liberal movement of the 20th century head on, we need to pay attention to these men and respond to men like Rob Bell in a similar fashion. Pay attention to what will happen with this book which comes out on March 12th 2013.

What follows is a stream-of-consciousness rambling. It's a little off the beaten path and uncommon for what one will typically find here. But what is this if not a place to think and write and come away unjudged (though admittedly, never truly unscathed)? 

While reading Christianity and Liberalism by J. Gresham Machen a thought crept into my head. Does the loss of biblical centricism in the church inevitably lead to loss of authority in the culture at large? Does the church play that big a role in the life of the world? My gut says "no". But God is bigger than that. And his plans come about in the manner of his choosing. So couldn't it follow that his church is the catalyst for the culture, instead of the other way around, where culture dictates what occurs inside the walls of the church? I know that some view the church's newfound "tolerance" for sins of every kind novel, a new surprise to those in the evangelical world. But Machen knew it well, and he wasn't surprised by it. Once you allow criticism to creep in eat away at God's authority like maggots to road kill you lose everything. And it inevitably leads here. To where we are. Right now. 

I know that some may object to my employing what is known colloquially as the "slippery slope" argument, but I do not care. It's a valid argument. Once you invite doubt to set in about the inerrancy of Scripture you see no issue with women's ordination. Then you see no real need for a historical Adam. Once that's taken care of you really have no ground to stand on against homosexuality so they're now allowed full acceptance into membership and ordination. After that it makes perfect sense to simply throw out the bits of the Bible you still hold to be true altogether. Getting back to my point, how the church and culture relate to one another has been a topic of discussion since the first century. I'm not forming a thesis, merely asking a question. Have we in the church mixed up the formula? Have we inverted the figures? And can we flip them back, relate the culture to the church instead of the way it's been for the past two thousands years, before we lose authority altogether?

Speaking of running always in pursuit of something new... western thinkers seem to be all a tizzy over the possibility that the Roman Catholic Church will undergo some sort of Postmodern transformation.  The Cardinals will enter the Vatican as if it were a chrysalis.  The new Pope, preferably young and non-western, will turn the stodgy and slow moving religion of the Middle Ages into a beautiful, free, colorful butterfly.  This modern concern for catching tradition up with present trends has to it a glint of nobility.  Real problems and concerns demand that people react rather than predict.  Sometimes using traditions people can prejudge a crisis making them slow to meet the moment's demands.  In the modern western mind, however, individuals and institutions must flex with change because it serves as the essence of reality.  Traditions, more than the Roman Catholic Church, have become the outmoded DNA system; people should abandon it for a more freeing physiology which allows for unhindered, erratic flight.  Ideas that do not change, such as religious dogma and sacramental institutions, serve only to contain individual freedom.  The Roman Catholic leadership will have to explain why, even though it may choose someone non-European, it remains anchored to timeless traditions.  In fact, in the Postmodern world, all Christians have to make this argument without sounding like some kind of antiquated larvae.  We must turn the dialogue: tradition gives meaning to human lives which often become untethered from their real identities by the dizzying changes of daily life.  I wish the Cardinals luck.

Always on the Search for Something New

Acts 17:21 Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.

While in Athens Paul preached to the Athenian Jews in the synagogue.  Verses 17 and 18 describe his conversations with "devout persons" in the synagogue and "some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers."  They wonder what "this babbler" Paul, wishes to say.  He wished to preach the gospel, and that is precisely what he did.  But Luke gives us commentary on the typical behavior of Athenians in verse 21.  We are told they they spent "their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new."  Not complimentary in the least, it gives us a good picture of the culture Paul regularly spoke to.  A twenty-first century Christian is hard-pressed to relate to Paul's ministry of the first.  But this glimpse Luke gives into the minds and attitudes of Paul's hearers shows that not much has changed in 2,000 years.

Modern evangelicalism, with its "5 steps to a better marriage" or "7 guidelines of biblical stewardship" or some of its proponents' incessant need to find "new ways to live the Christian life," shows that the Athenians are alive and well among us, here and now.  Why?  Why do Christians think that we need to rethink everything?  Christ's church has persevered through two-thousand years of war, hatred, persecution, scandals, and endless splits.  And yet it remains.  If she loses her tradition, the church loses her effect, her witness.  And if she is always on the search for something new, she will lose everything she already has.  The importance of tradition is lost in the world of instant coffee and diet pills, and the church has struggled in attempts to relate to that world.  But why must we look for something new?  Why has it become so novel to hold on to the past and use that as a guide for the present and then on into the future?  Let us use the Athenians as a case-study for ineffective ministry. Let us hold on to what we have, and stop the fruitless search for something new.

"Never blush to own your religion; your profession will never disgrace you: take care you never disgrace that. Be like Jesus, very valiant for your God."  - Charles Haddon Spurgeon 

What if the Christian thought of their responsibility in life and service to society the way Charles Spurgeon does in this quote? C.H. Spurgeon makes a very hard claim for the Christian to follow with diligence. The previous charge is one grounded in a kingdom ethic that comes from scripture; one of valor and integrity. A person might react and say, "that is easy enough for him to say, he wasn't dealing with the same amount of opposition we have today in America, things have gotten worse." That type of thinking has prevented us from paying closer attention to church fathers and thus crippling our understanding of Christianity. I would submit that Charles Spurgeon deserves more attention than most, due to the fact that the church in his day had a similar status to our churches today. Like Spurgeon we must know the word, love the word and proclaim the word in love for the culture surrounding us. If the church in America will continue to submit its theological confession to the sensibilities of the culture, than it will end up much like the Church in Europe, dead and numb to the proclamation of the Gospel. 

"Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect." Romans 12:2 

Why verbalcatalyst?  A question better than its answer - it was available and given the absolute flood of digital opinions, beggars cannot be choosers.  Yet, even in the necessity there lies some invention.  Our tweeting, texting, and posting culture churns out words in such incredible volumes that words themselves are beginning to lose power and meaning.  It seems easy to give in to the trend and begin to imagine that words are poor communicators - action, action, we need action!  Yet Christ is the living word, the power of God unto salvation.  So words can transform, organize, and change people, environments, and contexts.  We must believe, despite the effects of verbal inflation in a gratuitously gregarious culture, that we can help change the world through words.  So, verbalcatalyst.