Hope, and the Problem with People

Last week we were talking about hope. I hope you found it hopeful.

Our key text was 1 Corinthians 13:7: “Love hopes all things.” And we were pondering the exposition given to it by the Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. If you didn’t read that one, I really encourage you to go back and read it before forging ahead. Some of what I will say depends heavily upon it.

The big realization with which we left off was this: Christian hope is not ever to fail. It is to persist all the way to its fulfillment in eternity. We are to hope until we see the object of our hope, the blessing, the justice and the righteousness guaranteed to us by God, in eternity. All of life is to be lived in hope.

Now, let me mess that up.

Going to the Dogs

“They are all silent dogs; they cannot bark, dreaming, lying down, loving to slumber.”

Our late Shih Tzu was not a silent dog, but he was probably as close as you’ll ever get. He almost never barked, and when he did, about the most you’d get from him was a polite, solitary “Arf.” If you didn’t respond to that, you were on your own.

A non-barking dog is world’s greatest pet when you live in an apartment and want to maintain some sort of decent relationship with your neighbors. But our little guy would not have made much of a watchdog.

Top 10 Posts of 2023

We could probably sum up the inadvertent theme of this year’s top ten new posts with the words, “Jews, More Jews and Book Reviews”. If only I had managed a book review of something related to the people of Israel, we could have done it all in a single post.

There’s no denying how personal politics became in 2023. Everybody has an opinion, informed or otherwise. Without further ado, here are our ten most-read new posts of 2023.

Anonymous Asks (282)

“Do I need institutional accreditation to pastor?”

It very much depends on what you mean when you use the word “pastor”. There are at least three possibilities I can think of. (1) You are contemplating making a livelihood from preaching and teaching in a local church. (2) You desire the work of an elder and are just using “pastor” in a less formal sense as a synonym for “shepherd”, which it is. (3) You are using the word in a completely informal sense, meaning you just want to care for God’s people even if nobody but the sheep and the Lord notices you doing it.

Reasoning About Reasons

Years ago, I sat on a civil court jury. A fellow had incurred a fatal injury and his family was looking for monetary redress from a panoply of defendants.

The duty assigned to me and to my fellow jurors was first to assess the evidence and determine if, in fact, there was any blame to be allocated. But the job was a great deal subtler than that. If we determined that something or someone was to blame for this man’s regrettable demise, our second task was to allocate responsibility between the guilty parties, using a number for each culprit less than and totaling 100 (say, for example, 50% to the victim, 25% to his employer and 25% to the company that leased the equipment on which he died).

Apparently, basic math was a prerequisite for jury duty. Who knew?

Mining the Minors: Haggai (5)

Exactly three months after the returned exiles of Judah obediently began to rebuild the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem following a hiatus of at least seventeen years, the prophet Haggai delivered yet another message from the Lord to his people. Unlike the previous two, which were messages of undiluted encouragement, this one did not seem designed to spare anyone’s feelings.

Sometimes we need an accurate assessment of our spiritual state in order to move forward.

Too Hot to Handle: Nonsense That Remains Nonsense

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Tom: C.S. Lewis has a line I love. He says, “Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.” It applies nicely to lots of religious words and concepts.

I felt a little like that reading the Moody Publishers piece you sent me this week, Immanuel Can. The author of “Worship Leaders: We Are Not Rock Stars”, Stephen Miller, has written a short promotional piece entitled “Worship Leaders are Theologians”, in which he uses one extra-scriptural term to define another. My head is spinning trying to sort out all the modern church-speak.

How far away are we getting from the New Testament here, IC?

Quitting Before the Final Whistle

“It’s not over ’til it’s over” — so goes the famous saying in the world of sport. Pity the poor competitor who thought his team had secured victory, began celebrating, and forgot the last-ditch home run, the injury-time goal, the buzzer-beating long shot, or didn’t quite get into the end zone before spiking the ball. Apparent victory suddenly turns to horror and shame.

Who would choose to be that man?

In scripture, we find this observation: “Love hopes all things.” A hundred times, perhaps, I have seen and heard this phrase … from the pulpit, on plaques, on the radio, and of course, in every wedding ceremony since Adam. Never have I thought much about what it means.

“Love hopes all things.” Sounds nice. So what?

Missing the Obvious

The tendency to read familiar Bible passages the way we have always read them is almost overwhelming, and sometimes we miss the obvious. Our assumptions about the meaning of any word or phrase invariably default to the way we first heard them or had them explained to us. Viewing them more accurately is the task of a lifetime of attentive reading and study.

The dissenting views of other Christians and the proliferation of translations helps. Hearing a text the way someone else hears it forces us to ask which interpretation — if any — is the correct one.

Anonymous Asks (281)

“What’s the difference between legitimate criticism and the kind of judgment Jesus condemned?”

“Judge not, that you be not judged,” said the Lord Jesus, providing critics of the Christian faith with their all-time favorite verse, which they translate into something like “Never form an opinion about how we live or what we are doing, and definitely never express one.”

Well, we know the Lord didn’t mean that. He also said, “Judge with right judgment,” so the first verse is manifestly not intended to be taken as a blanket statement.

Right at the Last

It’s Christmas again. We’re right at the last of the year.

It makes you think, doesn’t it? When you’re young, it makes you think of toys and candy and holidays. You’re all about looking forward in your youth. Later, you’re more about looking on: about watching your own children experience the same pleasures, more than feeling them yourself. And as life moves on, and more and more of your lifespan slips into the rear-view mirror, you can’t help but gradually shift to a looking back sort of mood: the end of each year becomes an occasion for mental stock-taking and thinking about what it’s all added up to.

Harking the Herald Angels

“So this is Christmas,” sang John Lennon, “and what have you done?”

That Lennon — never one to get a point.

Whatever Christmas means, you can trust me: it’s not about what you’ve done. When you get stock-taking at the end of the year, you can easily get more than a little depressed. How has the year worked out? Did you achieve all the goals you set for yourself? Did you always live up to the mark, always do your best, and always win what you hoped? How’s it all been going?

Merry, merry Christmas indeed!

Mining the Minors: Haggai (4)

Three old trees of considerable size overshadow my backyard. Between them, they block most of the sun’s rays and tend to kill off the grass near the house. Every year, once the snow is gone and the temperature is regularly above zero, while those big trees are still bare and letting the sun through, I go out with a couple bags of the hardiest, quickest growing grass seed I can find on sale and sow the affected area to catch the spring rains. If the timing is right, I’ll often see little green shoots in a week or two. By June, the whole lawn looks lush.

Next year I’ll have to do it all over again, but that’s how it goes.

Too Hot to Handle: Diluting the Faith

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Salvation Army founder William Booth once said, “I consider that the chief dangers which confront the coming century will be: Religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, politics without God, and Heaven without Hell.”

Author Daniel Sweet believes American Christianity is already there. One of the problems Sweet identifies is the dilution of the faith almost exactly the way Booth described.

Tom: What do you think, IC? Any of Booth’s formulations ring true to you? I’d argue politics was always without God, but other than that …

A Dose of Worldliness

What does it really mean to think or to speak “like a Christian”?

Does it mean to be able to make inside spiritual jokes, or to speak bluntly about the human situation? Does it mean to think only from individual experience, or to have a view of the world? Does it mean always to have tidy answers, or to be willing to speak unflinchingly about difficult questions? Does it mean presenting oneself as the self-satisfied fount of all knowledge, or as an earnest learner, a work-in-progress still growing into new answers?

Here are two sets of song lyrics from the same year. One song is nominally Christian and the other is not. Can you guess which is which?

The Language of the Debate (10)

Most of the time, I post a quote at the top of our blog’s homepage because I thoroughly agree with it and its author has said something in a way I only wish I might have. Once in a while, I put up a quote I don’t fully agree with, but which nicely distils some current political or theological issue in a way that may provoke thought and inspire our readers to see if they can come up with a better way of formulating the idea.

So it is with the quote I’ve had up since last week from Doug Wilson. Doug writes, “There are three basic ways for us to organize ourselves — tribalism, globalism, or nationalism. As a Christian, I don’t want tribalism, and I don’t want globalism. What does that leave me with?”

Indeed. What does that leave him with?

Language Armageddon

Our thought life is a function of our vocabulary. Think about that ... assuming you are able.

Anthropologist and author Christopher Hallpike has observed that it is remarkably difficult, perhaps impossible, to communicate effectively or even think lucidly about something for which one’s language has no words. Societies do not generally have words for concepts they don’t use, items they have never seen or beliefs they haven’t developed.

A higher vocabulary generally reflects higher intelligence, and a shriveled vocabulary limits one’s ability to think and understand beyond the most basic level.

Anonymous Asks (280)

“Is there such a thing as a necessary evil?”

I opened up this can of worms by referring to systematic theology as a necessary evil a while back, so obviously I think there is. From the perspective of humanity, “necessary evils” are undesirable choices that may confront us for no reason we can discern, but more often come about when we have already departed from the word of God in some way, and no longer have the same menu of options available to us as we would have had prior to sinning.

Such choices are “evils” not in the sense that choosing them is in itself always a wicked act, but in the biblical sense, where all possible outcomes of our choices are varying degrees of disagreeable to the person choosing. The Hebrew word for “evil” may refer to either sin or simply misfortune.

Was C.S. Lewis Saved?

“In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

— From Surprised By Joy,
C.S. Lewis, 1955

I loathe theological debates.

To clarify, I do not dislike discoursing about God, and I have no objection to good faith arguments over what the scripture actually teaches to the extent they cleave as closely as possible to the language of scripture itself. The moment they drift off into coined, often pretentious theological terminology, however, we are in a marsh of our own making, and on our way under.

Mining the Minors: Haggai (3)

When things are going wrong around us and the obvious blessings of God a distant memory, it’s natural to wonder why. Scripture offers us a variety of possible explanations.

Job suffered because Satan was trying to break him, and God allowed it for a time in order to prove a point. David spent years on the run from Saul in fear of his life because it was not yet God’s time to give him the kingdom. Israel slaved away in Egypt in order to give the Amorites sufficient time to repent and to become a great nation, among other things. The tower of Siloam fell on eighteen people and killed them, and the Lord told his disciples the victims had done nothing out of the ordinary to deserve their fate. Perhaps it was “just one of those things”. A man was born blind in order that God might display his works in his life.

Things go wrong for all sorts of reasons, don’t they. It’s not all one thing, and we may never know the real reasons in this life.