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Social Justice Reading List

2011-10-26T21:21:00.000-07:00

“But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-falling stream” – Amos 5.24

The following is a brief reading list for those who are interested in finding out more about social justice and what the Bible says about it. Originally put together as a pastoral note for GracePoint Presbyterian Church in Sydney, NSW, 30th Oct 2011.

Books

Generous Justice – TimKeller

Itis commonly thought in our secular culture that the Bible is one ofthe great hindrances to doing justice. In GenerousJustice,Timothy Keller illuminates a life of justice empowered by anexperience of grace: a generous, gracious justice.GenerousJustice isa book for believers who find the Bible a trustworthy guide, as wellas for those who suspect that Christianity is a regressive influencein the world.

Ministries Of Mercy – TimKeller

TimKeller shows through Scripture that caring for the needy is the callof every believer, not just through church programs or churchleaders. He doesn't just tackle the why,but also the how, asin how we can carry out this ministry as individuals, families, andchurches. Thoroughly biblical yet practical.

GoodNews To The Poor – Tim Chester

TimChester argues passionately that evangelism and social action areinseparable, as two arms of the church's mission. He presents abiblical case for truly evangelical social action that is shaped andinspired by the gospel showing how social activity is a response toevangelism, a bridge and a partner to it.

WhenHelping Hurts – Steve Corbette and Brian Fikkert

Mostevangelicals, when thinking about helping the poor, feel a bit at aloss about where to start. When Helping Hurts is a practicalbook about ministering to the poor in a truly transforming, effectivemanner. The book is divided into three major sections: Foundationalconcepts for helping without hurting, general principles for helpingwithout hurting, and practical strategies for helping withouthurting.

Evangelism And Social Action– Matthias Media

Amini-zine (very short magazine) put together by Matthias Mediaaddressing the issue.

~www.matthiasmedia.com.au/evangelism-and-social-action

Online Articles – For thosewho aren't ready to spend money on a book!

The Gospel And The Poor –Tim Keller

~www.thegospelcoalition.org/publications/33-3/the-gospel-and-the-poor

HowDo We Work For Justice And Not Undermine Evangelism? – Don Carson

~www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2010/10/18/asks-carson-justice-evangelism/

SevenPassages For Social Justice – Kevin DeYoung

~www.thegospelcoalition.org/search/results/&q=seven%20passages%20for%20social%20justice&p=1&f=

Ten Theses On Social Action– Justin Taylor

~www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2009/08/22/10-theses-on-kingdom-of-god-and-social/

Bonus: Videos And Sermons

A conversation between Tim Keller, John Piper, and Don Carson

Steve Chong from Kirkplace Presbyterian (Kogarah) talks with John Piper

When does the line between social justice and the gospel get blurred?

Free Gospel Coalition sermons on Public Justice

2011-09-06T20:50:00.001-07:00

What is a feeling but a thought that one is too lazy to think about?

Reflections from "ONE"

2011-08-31T21:01:00.000-07:00

Last night, I went with some church friends to hear John Piper and John Lennox give a talk at the Sydney Entertainment Centre. Here is a thought I had based on something John Lennox said and a prayer that I wrote at the end of the night.

John Lennox
A five-year old child and a father are spending time together by watching cartoons. That's a nice occasion. Do you know what would be a tragic one? A twenty-five year old son and his father spending time together by watching cartoons. Why is that tragic? Because they should have other ways to spend time together! They should be going to a baseball game or to a Broadway theatre show. They should be sitting at home by the fireplace chatting about work. They should be sharing drinks at a pub chatting about married life and having children! They should debate politics or theology, share about finances or where they're going next for vacation! They shouldn't be watching Spongebob!

Don't misread me. The problem isn't the idea of watching cartoons with your dad. There's nothing wrong with that. The problem is if you have nothing else to do, no other way to relate to your father than to watch cartoons with him. That's the real problem. If you've got no other dimension in your relationship, no other things in life to share with your father, that says that there's something wrong in your relationship. It's not that you don't have a relationship with your father; it's that it is tragically shallow.

Yet this is what so many of our relationships with our heavenly father are like. Every single church have people that have been going for years, five years, ten years, fifty years... but still demonstrate the same exact knowledge of God as a new Christian. After so many years of going to Sunday school or attending Bible study or listening to sermons, they still pray the same exact prayers, state the same exact biblical truths, and live the same exact lifestyle, not having grown deeper in their knowledge of God in years. They supposedly know God and are in a relationship with him through Jesus, yet feel so little passion for the one who went to the cross for their sakes that they can't be bothered spending time with him.

John Lennox last night mentioned 2 Peter 1.5-7: "For this reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge and self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love." The thing about all these attributes is that they do not save. goodness, knowledge, self-control... without them we would still be secure in the kingdom as long as we have the faith in Jesus that imputes on us righteousness before God. But they still matter. Why do they matter? Because they are things that we automatically seek if we have that saving faith. And if we don't seek them? "But if anyone does not have them, he is nearsighted and blind, and has forgotten that he has been cleansed form his past sins." (1.9).

To add to my faith other things does that mean that the gospel isn't central in my life. The knowledge that Christ died and was risen to atone for sins will always be central in my life. I am not departing from that truth, I am increasing in my knowledge of it in depth and breadth. As I go deeper in the Scriptures, I grasp all the complexities of the atonement that make God's redemption plan beautiful: the covenant of Abraham, the foreshadowing through the law and the prophets. As I grow in breadth of the gospel, I discover its implications for all the different aspects of my life; I grasp the way the gospel transforms my relationships with people, my pursuits in life, my finances and the way I spend money, my view of work and career, my view of family and marriage, my disappointments and regrets, my recreation and the way I relax, and on and on.

I am not unsaved if I do not add to my faith. I am saved by grace alone, through faith in Christ Jesus alone. I do not need to work to be in a relationship with God. I do not need to present myself perfect before knowing him. Christ has already secured that all for me. The problem is, if I do not add to it, then my relationship with God is tragically shallow. And who, knowing the greatness of God and his abounding mercy and steadfast love, knowing what he's done on the cross, who would WANT a shallow relationship with him?

I wonder how many people are going to go to heaven knowing pretty much nothing about God. I wonder how many people are going to know more about Jesus than the elementary ideas they learned in Sunday School. I wonder how many people are going to get to heaven, have a look a the supremacy of the eternal world over our world, and say, "If I had known what it was like, I would have invested more in it."

Prayer
I resolve to making knowing God my chief pursuit in life. I resolve to consider all other investments a waste compared to the investment I make in my savior. I resolve to diligently study the Bible to know God more deeply in this present age, and in eager anticipation of the day when I will know him and see him face to face.

I resolve not to waste a second any longer on things that won't last. I resolve to know suffering and all manners of difficulty as gaining Christ. I resolve to use every challenge and difficulty to magnify Christ by declaring that he is worth me enduring every trial.

For Christ died for me, to give me himself, to secure for me pardon, to give me new life. And therefore every challenge that I face I rejoice in. I relish every tribulation as an opportunity to consider all other things loss for the sake of knowing him. I resolve to rejoice when I am counted worthy to suffer for his name. I resolve to pour out my life, reserving not a drop for myself. I resolve to know that every effort that is not made to gain Christ is an effort wasted.

I resolve to count every breath of life on earth a gift. I resolve to live my life reflecting the grace of my king, with an ever sure sense of his presence in my life.

God, help me to do all these things that I resolve to do. I know that I cannot do it of my own strength or will because in my sin I do not love your nor do I consider you great. What I need is such a revelation of Jesus' greatness, such a knowledge of his love and goodness, such a clear, real vision of his greatness and glory that my heart would be turned towards you, that I would consider you alone worthy of praise. In the name of Jesus, who bought me and who advocates for me before the holy throne of God, in his mighty name I pray. Amen.

Two ways to "do" in a church

2011-08-29T23:44:00.000-07:00

I'm starting this blog back up again and this is the only fanfare for it.

"You who are trying to be justified by the law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace." Gal 5.4

"So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature.... But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law" Gal 5.16, 18

There are two ways to do things in a church. Well, actually, there are two ways to do things in the Christian life. There is the grace-based way, and the works-righteousness-based way.

The works-righteousness-based way does things in order to secure salvation, whereas the grace-based way does things as a reaction to being saved. Those who do things by a works-righteousness framework are seeking to be justified by their works. There are two different ways you can do this. One is, you do things in order to earn the love of God. The thinking behind it is basically, "If I do this consistently, then my relationship with God will be right." Ex: If I just go to church every week, if I pray and read the Bible regularly, because I heard that God likes that, if I try to do fewer selfish things, if I talk about Jesus all the time, wear a cross necklace, and make the bulk of my social circle Christians, then I will be right with God. The other way to do works-righteousness stuff is to do things in order to establish or prove your love for God. Now this way is a fair deal more sinister, because it is a sinful heart condition masquerading as a godly motivation. This method basically says, "I am doing this in order to prove, either to myself or to others or to God himself, that I love God." What makes it sinful is the second part that is implicitly tacked on: "...because if I love God this much, then he'll have to love me back and accept me.

What the two have in common is that both presume that the individual needs to initiate a love relationship between God. I need to make an effort, I need to go first and open a relationship with God, I cannot face God before I get this part of my life straight, etc. The problem is that no amount of righteous deeds can cover up this sinful heart of mine. For someone who operated under the works-righteousness framework (or as Paul says in Galatians, "seeking to be justified by the law", Gal 3.10-12), there are only two outcomes: self-deceived pride as I make myself think that I am doing just fine by my own efforts, or inescapable despair as I realize just how sinful I am and my inability to get rid of my guilt just by doing

Come ye weary, heavy-ladened
Lost and ruined by the fall
If you tarry, 'til you're better
You will never come at all

The grace-based way of doing things is when I realize that I am not made right before God by my own efforts, but by what Christ has done for me. In the grace-based way of doing things, I do them not because I want to earn my salvation, but because I already have salvation. Those who live this way say, "I do this stuff because I know that God loves me through Jesus and I am so overwhelmed, so taken, so changed, so transformed by the reality of that love that I respond in obedience." People who do things this way do not so much establish or create their love for God through deeds, but merely express their love for God, a love that was created as a result of God's first love for us. The key difference is that God initiated, not me (1 John 4.19).

The problem in church is not so much that we actively encourage a works-righteousness-based framework for doing ministry or serving; it is that we are passive in our teaching of grace. The human heart, when left to its own devices, ALWAYS gravitates back to the works-righteousness framework of faith. This is true even of seasoned ministry workers and Christians. Take church announcements for example. Say, I want to make a church announcement about doing a short-term summer missions to university students. I can do it this way:

"Let me encourage you all to seriously consider doing summer missions! There are so many opportunities out there; you can go to another country like Taiwan or Malaysia, or you can stay local and do a mission somewhere in another state. We're all uni students and we've got lots of time and this is the best way to redeem that time for the kingdom! You know here in Sydney (or NY), we take for granted the freedom to worship God and all the great teaching about the Bible that we get here, but out in other places, they don't even have Bibles. I went last year and I had so much fun and made so many new friends who were so passionate about the gospel... what could be more fun that hanging out with other Christians who are on fire for Jesus?"

Do you see what's going on there? What are the reasons I gave you to do summer mission?

1) It's a great way to invest your time in heavenly treasures as a university student
2) Lots of places outside of home need to badly hear the gospel preached.
3) Being with other passionate Christians is a great experience.

Now here's the astounding thing. None of those reasons are wrong or even bad. They can all fall either into a works-righteousness framework of doing, OR a grace-based framework. But for an average young Christian who is trying to work out what the Christian life looks like, which framework do you think he'll gravitate to?

If you don't give the grace of God as a reason, it doesn't matter how many other reasons that you give that are really good. Chances are, the average Christian will only come away thinking, "Wow, if I want to be a real Christian, I better go on summer mission sometime", and that's only a short step away from, "I'm an alright Christian. My relationship with God is just fine, because I went to summer mission last year. I'm doing my part, so I should be fine", which is only a short logical leap from the mentality that, "It's what I do that saves me."

So the application point here is, when you teach other Christians, never neglect to mention grace. Do not take it for granted. It can be anything from plugging your missions team to asking people to help out for an outreach event, to teaching your disciple how to be servant-minded, to preaching a sermon to writing a Bible study to having a godly conversation with a Christian brother or sister. Any time you tell someone to "do", give them grace as a reason.. It may sound forced the first few times you try it, but it's better to awkwardly mention grace than to coolly lead someone down a path of works. Here's an example of how I'd give an announcement about doing summer mission:

"One of the things about life is that joy is not make complete until it is shared. Isn't it true that one of your first impulses when you receive good news is to find somebody to tell? Well, this same principle holds true for the Christian life. That is why Jesus says to "go and make disciples of all nations..."; the reality that he is the risen King is so great that the disciples couldn't have kept it to themselves even if he tried! Well, if you're someone who is likewise so blown away by the good news of Jesus that you want to share it with someone, then let me tell you about summer missions...."

The whole idea is to make clear that, "If you're feeling so moved by the love of God and the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ, given to you so undeservingly and expressed through the cross, then let me tell you how you can express that joy!"

This is a MUST-DO in all our churches, in all our ministries, and in all the ways that we teach, disciple, and work for the kingdom of God. If we are not serious and intentional about this, we'll end up with a bunch of shallow Christians keeping our churches going but who ditch the work of the gospel the instant that the going gets tough or the going gets boring. Or we'll end up with a bunch of Christians who lack the assurance of salvation and frantically do thing after thing in the hopes that at the end of their life they'll muster just enough works to get into the gates of heaven but secretly in their heart no that it is not possible.

Come ye sinners, poor and needy
Weak and wounded, sick and sore
Jesus, ready stands to save you
Full of pity, love, and power

-Dan

Grace And Pastoral Counseling

2011-04-07T06:43:00.000-07:00

I think I need learn to pastor with more grace. What does that mean? To live gracefully means to conduct your life in such a way that is consistent with the fact that you are yourself a recipient of grace. To speak with grace is to speak in such a way that points to the grace of Jesus Christ. One can live graciously in two ways. One can point to one's own sinful nature, essentially demonstrating the point that, “we are all in the same boat morally”. Or one can point to the beauty of God's goodness and the riches of his mercy. A gracious word is one that leaves the recipient thinking, “wow, this guy truly understands that he is no better than me.” A ungracious word leaves the recipient feeling sheepish or guilty. A gracious word leaves the recipient feel accepted and loved, shown grace from a fellow recipient of grace.
Consider the following scenario. You are looking after a Bible study leader who is constantly late for meetings, writing Bible studies late, and doing a poor job because of his under-preparation. How would you deal with it? Would you come down hard on him, or speak to him gently? Would you approach him with a whip or with gentle words? What outcome do you desire from your rebuke? Our mistake is that we too often seek to correct behavior and think that the right approach is whatever will get us the correction we want. We counsel as mechanics rather than as pastors. “As long as its running the way you want it, the problem is fixed” Consider, instead, these questions: “What's this person's theological issue? How can I help him realize his sin and the manner in which he is behaving in a manner that is inconsistent with his gospel reality? How can I speak to him in a way that demonstrates the grace of God and encourages him to change in light of the gospel rather than from fear of punishment?
What does it mean to pastor graciously? It means to live in such a way that my achievements and maturity and merit point not to my own goodness but to the goodness and power of the One who wrought it within me. As a mature Christian, it can be so easy to create an unbridgeable chasm in maturity between yourself and someone that you disciple. If you've conducted yourself in a way that causes your student to say something along the lines of, “my mentor is so godly and mature. I'll be lucky if I can be half as mature as him one day!” YOU'VE FAILED. Our pastoral work should NEVER point to our own goodness. When our goodness is observed, it should point to the wonder of a God who can make that out of a wretch like me!
We can pastor ungraciously in many different ways. We can glorify our own actions and service. In myself, I see a lot of insidious manners in which I do this. As a long-time Christian, I am quite savvy at disguising the ways I use my accomplishments to point to my own goodness. One way is by teaching in a self-centered manner. Rather than consider what my student needs to hear, I brashly and inconsiderately teach whatever my hobby horse is at the moment; I send off works of writing that I think will help them but really will just create in them a sense that I am so far ahead of them in godliness. Pastoring is always ever an other-centered work and we forget this so easily. All manners of true, disciplined, godly encouragement and admonishment focus on the the person we are caring for. There are so many ways to be uncaring in our care. We can be long-winded because we just love talking our thoughts out loud. That seems helpful because the things we say are godly things, but it can actually be very unloving if its something that doesn't suit the person at the moment. We can share too many of our successes while making no mention of our failures. We can just do something well in the name of modeling, but not use it as an opportunity to teach and encourage someone else to give it a try.
What does gracious pastoring look like? How can we accomplish this? To do this, we must constantly be returning to the gospel of grace. We must use every opportunity to reinforce in our people the belief that it is God who changes and transforms. Salvation is by grace alone, but so is sanctification. When I live a godly life, I must always be quick to remind those I model to that this is the result of a good, powerful God working in a rebellious, helpless sinner. When I perform a ministry skillfully, I do not let the opportunity pass to emphasize God's gifting of different people to do different things, all for the edification of the Church to the glory of God. When I give someone a chance to try a ministry, I am quick to emphasize what they did well, offer feedback that is constructive and grace-filled, and pray for them to grow as God allows them.
Our churches do not need more pastors who are good at everything. We needs more pastors who live unashamed, repentant lifestyles who openly admit that they themselves are still works in progress.
Our churches do not need more good doers. It needs more broken but redeemed people pointing with their thoughts, speech, and act, and entire life conduct to the one true Good-doer in this universe.

On Sin And The Elderly

2011-03-14T06:21:00.000-07:00

The longer you live, the more it becomes evident in your life that we are all heading in either one direction or the other. Either we're becoming more like Christ, or we become more like our sin. If we are not regenerate and being sanctified, our sin and its conditions slowly take over until we become nothing but a caricature, a perverse exaggeration of the evil that was in our hearts.

When you get old, whatever it was that you hung your hat on, you become that thing.

As your higher intellectual functions shut down, you lose more and more of your common decency. And that's when your sin emerges. Whatever greed, pride, lust, malice, envy, hatred, discord, jealousy, selfish ambition, or bitterness you had before, you become consumed by it until it becomes all that you are. All that's left of you is that condition.
My landlady told me of an old woman that her daughter (who works in a nursing home) knew. She was so frail that she could not feed herself, yet she was so proud that she wouldn't let others assist her in eating either. It was a pathetic sight, watching her try to spoon food into her mouth and spilling it halfway, all the while angrily refusing to let anyone help. She was so consumed by her pride and independence that in her old age it manifested itself into a grotesque and tragic self-annihilation.
The unsettling part of this is, the spirit that made her seem so pathetic is the same one that we would see in a young person and call noble. Fifty years ago, her pride in herself and independence would have been praised as virtues, but in old age it looks so stupid. It's not that she was stupid to hang onto who she was; it was that time revealed how stupid that attitude was to begin with.

If you're not being sanctified by Jesus, you're not being saved by him either. And whatever emotional or mental damage sin has wrought on you will remain until you become controlled and defined by it.
I knew an old woman once. Month by month, parts of her body and mind would break down and what emerged intact in all of that mess is her jealousy of another old woman. She was so paranoid, so consumed with the completely unreasonable suspicion that people liked the other woman more than her. She thought people stole from her. She thought her son was conspiring to steal the affection of her grandchildren away from her. She thought that she was being neglected when in fact she was being perfectly taken care of.
What I realize is that the hate and insecurity was always there. The only difference between that old woman now and ten years ago was that a decade ago she had the mental faculty to hide it and keep it under control. We humans are so clever with our sin and deceit. Perhaps because of the nature of the fall, sin is always elementally something done in secret. But it comes out when you're tired, when you're deeply provoked, and when you're old.

What consumes your life? What sins or effects of sins aren't you allowing Christ to deal with? At the end of your life, what will you look like? Will you look like someone whose body is outwardly wasting away, but whose soul is deeply satisfied in Christ? Or will you look like someone who's perpetually miserable, an ugly, deplorable version of yourself, everything about you crumbling away but your rotten core?
What little sins live in your heart now that you refuse to deal with? What little things do you think are acceptable or inconsequential? What do you think that will look like when you're finally too old to pretend that it wasn't defining your entire existence?
What kind of things do you hang your hat on? That you went to a prestigious college? That you went to Stuyvesant? Do you know how awful of a feeling it is to try to tell people about something you think is a feat, but have them not care? Do you think your grandchildren are going to care all that much about what you did or who you were back in the day? Do you know how painful and miserable it is to be nothing left but a bunch of bygone achievements?
What kind of things do you hang your hat on? That you're a good speller and have impeccable grammar? Do you know how big of a jackass you're going to sound like when that's all you brag about and all that comes out of your mouth are corrections? Actually, some people, in their youth, already seem like this.
What kind of things do you hang your hat on? That you're really good at Starcraft 2? That you're a geek or a nerd? That you love Glee? That you appreciate classical music? That you can recite every line from Star Wars? That you succeeded despite the odds? That you're a triathlete? That you know your cars? That you've got an iron will and determination? That you make playing the flute look cool? That you're you? That you're a sarcastic, but funny person? That you love beer? That you love coffee? That you're a Steelers fan? That you're from New York? That you can turn a phrase? Are you prepared for that to be all that you are?

What's going to be the last thing you're conscious of before you draw your last breath? When everything else fades away, your liver function, your kidney function, your lungs and heart, your memories, your logic, your coherence, what will be the last thought to go? It is said that on his dying bed John Newton, the author of the hymn “Amazing Grace”, said:

My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things: that I am a great sinner and that Christ is a great savior.

I earnestly pray to God that my identity will be so bound up in Christ that in my heart will be nothing but joy and anticipation in meeting my Lord. I pray that, starting today, God will reveal to me those sins that, if I don't fight now, will blossom into something so overwhelmingly ugly that I become nothing but that sin. I pray that each day I will more and more reflect the Lord's glory, being transformed into his likeness in holiness and beauty. I pray that even as my mind goes, to my dying breath I will remember that I am a great sinner, but Christ is a great savior.

Church For All People – The Argument For Diversity

2011-03-08T06:46:00.000-08:00

A little over two months ago, I started a Word Document that I titled, "On Church Planting". In it I've been recording little nuggets of insights as they come to me related to church planting. As GracePoint starts a church service in a new suburb, there have been myriad little things that I've been thinking about that I want to remember if I ever get a chance to plant a church. Here is one that I wrote recently that I would like to subject to the review of others for sound doctrine and faithfulness.

In my church, I will not have FCG or Extreme*. I do not want to create a specific, targeted ministry. I believe that the gospel is relevant to all people and for all people. Moreover, it unites all people, no matter the diversity. “In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit”.
I am convinced that God meant for his churches to demonstrate unity in the gospel by having all manners of diverse people worshiping him together. I want my church congregation to cut across every demographic, whether age or race or social class or upbringing or education or personality.

The key passage for me is Ephesians 2.11-22: Paul's great treatise on unity in the gospel (the theme of being one in Christ extends all the way to 4.16). In this section, Paul addresses Gentiles and Jews together and tells them how they should relate to each other. “He himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility... For through him we both have access to the Father by one spirit.” In the first-century church, the major obstacle for church unity was how to incorporate the Gentiles into the body of believers. But Paul makes it clear here that through Jesus the church was a new creation; one in which all people, both Gentiles and Jews, have access to God through Christ. He then goes on and says, “In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord” (3.21). Sharing in Christ means to be part of a building that is a holy temple to God. Furthermore, in 3.10, we are told that God's intent for this beautiful mystery (now revealed) is to make known his manifold wisdom to the heavenly realms!

God is glorified and his wisdom is made known in the gathering of all people, Jew or Gentile, into his family. What this translates to in terms of church-planting is that God is most glorified when people of all kinds of backgrounds and ethnicities gather to worship him. To the degree that we unite around another common interest that is not Jesus, we are robbing God of his glory! But how does God get his glory when people of all kinds come to worship him? His greatness is made known when the elderly worship with the young, when the rich worship with the poor, when former enemies lay down their arms before Christ, when people of different factions and families fellowship with each other. When people who normally don't get along embrace each other and worship together, it is a testament to the power of the gospel and the greatness of Christ. Before him, we break down all dividing walls and find supreme shared joy in considering him supremely great.

(On a side note, this also points to why it is such an affront to Christ when we wantonly call any hanging out time “fellowship”. When we flippantly use the term koinonia, we are in danger of mistaking “fellowship around another common interest”, with "fellowship around Jesus". Are we really expressing unity in Jesus when all the guys come over to play video games, or are we expressing unity in Marvel vs. Capcom 3? Are we really expressing unity in Jesus EVERY time we eat together, or are we expressing unity in our common physiological need for physical sustenance?)

More and more I see churches that target specific kinds of people as going against the unity of the gospel. According to Acts, the only demographic targets for missionaries were by geography. When Paul planted churches, he chose a city, preached at the synagogues there, preached at the city centers, the agoras, the downtowns and the CBDs, established a regularly-meeting assembly of believers, and moved on. He didn't say, “Alright, in Corinth we're going to need a church for the temple prostitutes, a church for the elite noble class, and a church for the peasant class, who are the patrons of the temple prostitutes.” He just preached the good news about Jesus to all who will listen, established leaders of that church, and left.
So why is it then, that when I think of New York City, I can't help but think, “Alright, we're going to need churches for the Latinos living from Corona to Woodside, a few more Chinese churches in Flushing, a few more Korean churches in Bayside, and a few more churches for people who wear skinny jeans and horn-rimmed glasses and wool caps in the summer, believe it's okay to smoke cloves and drink bad beer, and commute to worship service on fixed-gear bikes in Williamsburg”?

Why are there so many ethnic churches? Sometimes it's good. Sometimes, it's a matter of mission. Just as you need to learn the Japanese language to be a missionary in Japan, you need to have Spanish-speaking church services for the Hispanics who no hablan ingles in Queens. But I can't help but feel like there is also a great danger that our churches fall victim to, which is uniting around the language and the ethnicity and the culture and tradition. When we unite around being Chinese, we make a kingdom out of being Chinese. No thank you. My citizenship is in heaven.

The principle sin in my meditation is the sin of uniting around anything or anyone but Christ. The above is its application in ethnic churches. But this sin can creep up in any church in any number of sinister ways and I am only beginning to scratch the surface in trying to understand it. For one thing, I wonder if many otherwise perfectly healthy churches might have this problem; that its people are too homogenous and comfortable, that the way its people welcome newcomers is artificial and ineffective, that people who think differently or have different interests find it very difficult to worship God or be accepted there.

If I am so convinced of this, then it must follow that to not do so (build and plant diverse churches) is not only disobedient to God, but also to our own detriment. I believe that it is helpful to form ministries that target specific kinds of people, but detrimental to form churches that unite around that specific kind of people.
But why do our churches do this? Because it is easier. It's the homogenous unit principle. The like likes like principle. It is easier for us to unite around race or common interest rather than Christ. As individuals, it feeds our idolatry and as a people it feeds our primal “Babel” urges.
But when we plant a church for a specific demographic, we are disobeying God and we are sowing the seeds for numerous problems in the future. I wonder if the issues plaguing our Chinese-American churches is an apt example. So much time and energy and resources is spent on the generational, cultural gap; on the perpetual war between first and second generation, on the power struggle between the Chinese-speaking immigrants and their children that the gospel suffers. How can the gospel go our if a church is so mired in bureaucracy and worldly politics, each faction trying to get its own way and build its own little kingdom inside God's kingdom? What an affront to the great King!

In conclusion, I want to plant a church that is diverse in every way. It will be harder and it will require maturity and that each individual is truly in Christ, but it will be immensely rewarding. I will not build any ministries that seek to divide my people so that they don't have to go outside their own comfort zones and fellowship with believers who are different from them. I don't mind having specific ministries addressing specific needs of specific kinds of people, but I will not have them at the cost of unity. I believe that in God's infinite wisdom, he has ordained it so that people expressing fellowship across different life-stages is good and beneficial. This means encouraging the workers in my church to disciple and pray for the students. This means the families and couples in my church inviting the single people over to their homes. This means children sitting in the pews with their mom and dad to hear the Word of God together.

I want to plant a church united in Christ, for his glory alone.

*I don't mind having a Uni-targeting ministry as long as it does not supplant community groups. I want all my uni students and workers to be mixed together. Likewise, I don't mind having a high-school Bible study as long as it doesn't obstruct their presence in the worship service. The principle is that the church is unified. As long as targeted ministries do not impede corporate worship (Sunday service, community groups), I am alright with it and will even encourage my people's desires to meet the specific needs of different kinds of people.

Please feel free to correct and admonish or leave queries or comments, as long as they are edifying.

On Teasing: A Meditation For Christian Leadership

2011-03-01T21:17:00.000-08:00

It occurred me last night that teasing discourages godly relationships. At times. Not all the time. But quite often. Especially with those who already have trust issues and difficulty opening up and seeking godly counsel, whether from a peer or from a mentor. This is tricky because, under certain other conditions, teasing also strengthens and affirms friendships. There is a delicate balance between the benevolent belittling you find between good friends and the hurtful harassment of a one-sided relationship.

Teasing And Godly Counsel
Why is it so hard for some people to open up? Because as sinners, we all have things to hide; sinful things, shameful acts of evil, things we do that we're afraid to admit to others. For us, the command to “have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them” (Eph 5.11) terrifies us!
But some people do take that step. At some point in every young Christian's life, there is a realization that for growth and maturity to happen, they MUST confess their sins to other people and seek accountability. At that point in their spiritual walk, the road forks. One is the narrow, precarious path towards holiness and the other is the enticingly safe and firm highway towards a Pharisaical, outward, performance-based religion. Do you realize that sometimes Christians choose to take the narrow path and we punish them by teasing them?
When you are talking to a young Christian who is learning to open up to you and allow you to speak the truth in love into their lives, the absolute WORST thing you can do is abuse the authority you've just been granted. How does that happen? It happens when they're talking to you about a girl or guy they like and you tease them. It happens when you make light of their struggles and imply that it's not a big deal. It happens when you betray their trust and gossip their secrets away.
We are doing our people the greatest disservice when they take a big step to expose their life to the light (in the form of accountability) and instead of shining the light of the Word on them, we make light of their pursuit of holiness by making fun of them. Our job at that moment is to be Christ to them and to speak his Word into their life. HOW DARE WE, at that moment, choose humor and self-indulgence instead of choosing to love and encourage and soberly instruct?

One of the issues that I'm seeing at GracePoint, especially among the young men and women that I spend most of my time with, is a lack of accountability and godly, fruitful relationships. Most of us are content to hang out with one another in the name of Christian fellowship, but we shy away from rebuking and challenging each other to live the Christian life. I think there are a number of factors that contribute to this, but I'm realizing that teasing is a big one. If, on the rare occasion a young Christian makes the difficult decision to open up to an older brother, and we PUNISH him for that by making it really embarrassing, by badgering him needlessly for more information, by devilish banter, how can we expect accountability and trust to be a part of our community life? Take heed, leaders. Each individual is judged for his or her own sin, but teachers are judged more strictly in accordance with the extra responsibility they have (Jas 3.1).

How do I know when it is appropriate?
As I mentioned above, teasing in and of itself is not wrong. It depends on the motive. It can be for the purpose of advancing oneself by putting down others, or it can be for the purpose of affirming and strengthening a friendship. The first question you have to ask is, “what is going on in my heart?” Do you genuinely want to hurt that person? Even if you don't, are you at risk of being too careless with your tongue (your words and language), which James says can be used to corrupt the whole body (Jas 3.6)?
After you thoroughly examine and test your motives, you still need to consider whether your friend understands and appreciates your motives. If your language causes other people to stumble, then it is better for you to give it up for the good of others. Here are some practical questions you can ask to determine if teasing is appropriate:
Does my friend trust me? To what degree does he understand and believe that you love him and want to build him up? Have you adequately demonstrated to him in the past that you care for him? Have you demonstrated that you are trustworthy? Perhaps the biggest factor here is trust. When you make fun of someone, you are, in a sense, exposing a vulnerable part of their life and using it for humor purposes. Before you do that, consider whether you have permission to access your friend's vulnerabilities and exploit it for the funnies.
How sensitive is my friend? What is his disposition towards embracing playful ribbing? We must acknowledge that, due to different culture, upbringing, and personality, different people have differing sensitivity towards teasing. This diversity is a beauty of God's kingdom, where all different kinds of people are brought into unity under Christ. But it's also why you need to consider that some people are more sensitive than you are and you need to respect that and honor them. “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace” (Eph 4.3)
How far am I going into indulging my appetite for putting down others? This goes back to the original heart motives question. We are all sinners. Sinners elevate themselves over others. To do a good job at that, we also need to put down others. Therefore, even as saved Christians, we all from time to time still need to wrestle with and kill that desire to hurt others. I know that I often don't notice myself crossing that line; I think I'm just taking advantage of an opportunity to make a joke and then later I realize what I said was really hurtful and definitely not worth the laughs.
Ultimately, teasing is not always unwholesome talk, but it can become so if you do it the wrong way or if you're not careful with your thoughts and attitudes. If in our language, there might even be a hint of impurity, we are clearly told to skip it (Eph 5.3)!

On Gay Jokes
We need to stop making gay jokes. We SERIOUSLY need to stop.

In Closing
There is a pastoral move that we leaders love to pull off; one that most people don't even realize they do, but sounds so familiar because we all do it. It is the, “lead off with playful teasing and then transition into the 'in all seriousness, this is what the Bible says mode...” move. It's a predictable trope, but it works well. The idea is that when you begin with teasing, you are building rapport. “Friends tease” you say, “That's what they do, so in order to get in good with this guy, I must tease. Plus, it'll also be fun.”
I'm becoming more and more convinced that this doesn't work. In fact, it can be harmful in a number of ways:
It makes accountability more of an ordeal than it needs to be. Some people just love putting others in the hotspot. A group of girls turn into a group of flesh-eating predators when the conversation turns towards the topic of romance, and often one girl gets devoured. But girls are not exclusive offenders. When we do this, especially leaders to the people they lead, we're putting a shame tax on godly counsel. We're saying, if you want my biblical wisdom, you first need to pay with your humiliation. Ultimately we're discouraging others to share their lives and seek the help of others. Whether they're confessing their sins, disclosing a portion of their personal life, or asking an embarrassing question, treat them with the utmost dignity and honor, and don't do anything that will make it harder for them.
Some teachers can't back up their jokes and teasing with actual godly advice. If your motive isn't edification, or if you lack the biblical knowledge to give godly wisdom, then kindly keep your (often) damning words to yourself. Also keep your jokes to yourself, because without counsel, they become little more than senseless aggravation.
It runs the risk of making light of something we want to take very seriously. We want to take holiness very seriously. We want to take sanctification very seriously. We want to take accountability, rebuke, correction, and edifying love very seriously. If we want these things to be a part of our community life, then maybe regarding these things with sobriety and solemness might be a good idea. Don't get me wrong; there is a place for light conversation and (as I've said many times already), teasing can be a very joyful thing at the right times, but maybe the right time isn't an occasion where you are hoping to give godly counsel. Maybe, for the sake of your people's spiritual health, you can skip the jokes during those occasions and make up for it during the times when you're just hanging out.

Addendum
I should also mention that the above is a result of deep and sincere introspection into the way I lead and pastor my people. In everything I've said, I am the worst offender. I've hurt people, made too many inappropriate jokes, and discouraged people from trusting me. I am sincerely sorry for it and I resolve to be a better leader and model by being more wise with my words and my banter. Know that every grave command I issued to my peers at church is first and foremost one that I issue myself for the sake of my own godliness.

Oh God of all people, you created every living thing to give you glory. For man's sinful condition, you've given your Son Jesus as the ultimate, final, all-sufficient cure. For holiness, you've given us your Spirit, who moves us to hate our sin and to love and pursue Christ. And you've given us each other, to mutually encourage, strengthen, correct, and exhort. In our residual sin we exploit our relationships for self-advancement and empty, hollow, unproductive, cheap humor. For that we ask for forgiveness. Give us your grace to work with one another for your glory instead of against one another for our own. In Christ's name, amen.

The Story Of My Life - Revelation

2011-01-13T05:44:00.000-08:00

It is a historical fact that never has a series that's been started on this blog ever seen completion. My posts listing is littered with drafts and random ideas that I've jotted down but never taken the time to fully develop. For that I apologize. I do, however, fully intend on finishing my faith journey series, because I see tremendous value in documenting how I became a Christian and hold out hope that people who are someone along the path I traveled might have a glimpse of where they are heading. Plus, it's all already completely written on my private journal.

Before I go on with that, I just wanted to jot down a few thoughts I've had as I read through Albert Mohler's excellent blog series (now there's an internet author that I can learn many things from) on the Christian worldview. In his first installment, Mohler makes the claim that a central axiom in the Christian worldview is that God reveals himself to us. God is not discovered. He is not conceived of by human ingenuity or formal logic. God is known as he makes himself known to his creation. Furthermore, what we know about God is what God reveals to us.

I think that last point is crucial. J.I. Packer, in his book, "Knowing God", makes a profound observation in that lower orders of beings are dependent on revelation for knowledge of higher orders of beings and that this principle works in degrees. For example, a human can learn much about a tree or a rock just by observation, but less about certain animals if they are reclusive (such as an octopus). As a creature's intellectual order increases, so increases its ability to withhold knowledge; we all have secrets from each other. Thus, if God is truly the highest being over and above all creation, and he is infinitely greater in magnitude over all other beings, then it stands that, while God can have total knowledge of us, he can also absolutely withhold any knowledge of him from us. Any creature can only know as much about God as God reveals to him.

There are two implications. First, God's self-revelation, then, is completely an act of grace. It is by an act of grace that we know anything about our own creator, for it is information that God could have easily withheld from us. He didn't owe to us knowledge of him. Therefore it must be a gift.

And second, having this axiom as a starting point avoids myriad (but not all) epistemological tangles. Divine self-revelation removes the weight of interpretation from fallen, error-prone humans and places it on a sovereign, mistake-free God.. What we know about God isn't dependent on how smart, or clever we are; it's not dependent on whether we've understood him correctly and it's not dependent on lofty biblical scholarship! Scripture's truth is perspicuous; it is plain and ready to understand because God's Word does not return to him empty, but accomplishes the purpose for which he has sent it" (Is 55.8-11). Those who have a biblical degree and have studied Greek and Hebrew and know how to use BDAG in a sense do NOT have a leg up on a lay reader of Scripture because the burden of knowing God does not sit on us, but on God himself. We do not discover, he reveals.*

This latter statement means a lot to me personally, because it was this realization that set me off of a path of despairing self-doubt and put me on a path towards secure, true knowledge. I always held deeply in my heart that if humans have any part in the attainment of something as crucial to life as knowing God, then we were doomed. There would be no hope. All throughout my life up until my third year of college, I felt the weight of pluralism on me, crushing me and suffocating me. There were too many beliefs in the world! If WE were the ones responsible for knowing God, then we're doomed! We're just as doomed as pure democracy once it left Athens. There was simply too much opinion, too much self-interest, too much personal stake. Moreover, there was too much perspective. No individual saw the whole picture, and we were all too selfish to be able to actually cooperate and put the puzzle together.

You know that feeling of having an upset stomach in your sleep? It hurts so much that you'll actually wake up in the middle of the night, but you're never fully awake because you're so tired. And so all night you just have this unsettled feeling; you don't get good sleep and you're so drowsy and groggy that you're only semi-aware of what's wrong. Every day for two years I had that feeling; before I went to bed in my dorm, when I woke up to go to class, during breaks, eating lunch with people, hanging out with people. Every day, for two years. I tried to banish it away; I tried to just fall back asleep, but I knew that the problem was always there, even when I ignore it. That problem was that I didn't know anything for sure and couldn't be sure of anything. I was a philosophy major and my peers delighted in that ambiguity, but I hated it. My professors and classmates loved the agora of ideas; they were indeed the men of Athens who wanted Paul to preach endlessly on a subject. I was only in that damned city because I was waiting for someone to tell me who the unknown god was.

Let me remind my readers that I went to a Christian college. See, this problem wouldn't have been a quarter as distressing had I just gone to a secular institution. But what really sent chills through my soul was knowing just how badly CHRISTIANS disagreed with each other. Gordon College celebrated those disagreements. They called it unity in diversity. My freshman year, the school recruitment tagline was, "Freedom within a framework of faith." Today I vomit at the thought of that. Today, I understand what that statement truly is: a thinly veiled desire to replace any unpleasant parts of your Christian belief with whatever it is that fits your fancy.

The resolution, the antacid to my unrest was when I realized that it was never man's prerogative learn about God. In fact, man, in his sinful state, is completely unable to know God or understand him. "Their foolish hearts were darkened..." Understanding this turned me to Christ, who is both revelation incarnate, and the solution to our blindness. Christ doesn't just come as God himself and say "here I am, now get to know me", but he also overcomes and removes my sin, which was the obstacle to me wanting to know him as who he truly is. I realized that the solution to the problem of interpretation is not a transcendent hermeneutical method, but that the object of interpretation is a self-revealing person. God isn't just knowable, he wants to be known by his people and he demonstrates his knowability in sending his Son, Jesus to earth to tabernacle among his people.

Therefore, a central tenet of the Christian worldview is that it is neither constructed nor discovered by humans; it is revealed as a gift of grace by God.

I thank you God, that you shroud yourself in darkness and yet you send the light of the world to us. I was once walking about in darkness, but a light has appeared. I was once blind, but my sight has been restored. In my helplessness, you reached out to me with your Son and saved me and gave me the truth. Jesus! Jesus! Oh how sweet your name is to me! I was once lost, but you saved me. I was once starving, so hungry. I thirsted, panted, for a drink that will satisfy me, and you were living water. Jesus! Jesus! I praise you for in you I have found my way home. Amen.

Prelude - The Story Of My Life

2010-12-28T19:50:00.000-08:00

Facebook has documented most of my religious journey from a pudgy little Matthew Ha, strutting around church like I own the place because everyone in church knows either myself or my parents, to where I am now. When I first got facebook before my first year of college, I think I was just "Christian". Two years later, I had changed my religious views to say, "Creation-Sin-Redemption", reflective of my frustration and weariness of wandering around lost in Gordon College, a veritable intellectual agora of competing Christian beliefs, and betraying my desperate longing to belong to a transcendent meta-narrative that explained my life, no matter how insignificant I was made out to be. A year later, my religious status once again changed to say, "Reluctant reformed evangelical Christian". God had my hand and was finally leading me out of the crowds. I was starting to realize what I truly believed but the realization was lined with an edge of wariness and a reluctance to admit that I had become a kind of person I had previously contemped. As I left Gordon College, I changed my religious status to say, "Rationally-reflecting reformed evangelical Christian" and to this day, I joyfully and unashamedly embrace that label.

The year of 2010 has, without a doubt, been the most transformative year in my entire life. I almost see this year and the next one as the final chapter of my bildungsroman and the rest of my life as simply the epilogue; the "and he lived happily ever after" portion of my story. At the beginning of the year, there were only two things that I held in my heart as essential to my identity and one fell away, revealing who I truly am. Today, I am no longer an incorrigible New Yorker, but I am definitely an incorrigible reformed evangelical, gospel-centered, Bible-authoritative Christian. Over the next few weeks or months, I wish to chronicle my faith journey and how I got to where I am.

A grace-filled letter to Ghandi

2010-10-26T17:33:00.000-07:00

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ" - Mahatma Ghandi

A few months ago a young couple invited me to their house for dinner. I showed up and we had a wonderful time dining together. Shortly after dessert, the wife cleared the table and went into the kitchen to wash up. The husband was a friend of mine and so I said to him, "Thanks for having me over. It was truly kind of you. The meal was was delicious and I am thoroughly satisfied. You're a great guy. But your wife! I can't stand her! She's completely unlike you! I don't like her and I can't enjoy your company when she's around!"

"Look, don't get me wrong, man. I've got nothing against you. I think you're awesome. But I really dislike your wife."

Okay, that never happened. Let me be very clear about that. I should hope that I have more tact than that. But seriously though, WHO WOULD DO THAT?? That story is so unrealistic and outrageous, you couldn't even find that situation in a crappy sitcom. Even if you truly don't like someone, you don't badmouth them to their spouse!

It's ludicrous for more than one reason. On the one hand, anyone with more than a few milligrams of common sense know that there are certain social norms that you are ignoring when you're that blunt with someone about a person they care about. However, I think there is something more disturbing about this story than just the number of social rules of behavior you break. I think it's that intuitively, we know that no matter how much you dislike someone's wife, you CAN'T disparage someone in front of their husband. No matter what you have against someone, you can't just criticize them before someone who loves them!

Why? Because you have to figure that if he married her, he's got to love her. And that love is real whether it's love because of her character or love despite her character.

I'm thinking what the venerable Mahatma Ghandi said about Christians is just as denigrating to Christ as it is to his people. The Bible says that the church is the bride of Christ and that he paid no small price and went through nothing less than hell to have her. In Ephesians 5, Paul says that the love that husbands have for their wives should be modeled after the love that Jesus had for the Church, his people. He gave up his life for her to make her holy and worthy of him as a husband. He is at work to cleanse her and make her a radiant, beautiful bride, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless (Eph 5.25-27).

Ghandi, when you profess your affinity for Jesus but not his followers, you are in essence slapping his wife across the face while at the same time calling him your friend. What you fail to understand is that Jesus does not love his people because of who they are, but rather in spite of who they are. Furthermore, you fail to understand the nature of the Church; your presumption is that the Church is an organization of people who seek to look more like Jesus. While that is true in a different context, you miss the entire point of grace. You fail to understand that one does not become a Christian by what he or she does, but by what Jesus has done for him.

Ghandi, You make an astute observation that Christians are so unlike Christ. The reason is because Christ has become for us what we could not be; perfect in holiness, compassion, and love. The beauty of being a Christian is that its only requirement is to admit failure and come empty-handed before God to receive mercy. "The Church is a society of sinners - the only society in the world in which membership is based on the single qualification that the candidate shall be unworthy of membership" (Charles C. Morrison)

The failure of Christians to be like Christ does not merely point to the hopelessness of humanity in willing to be good; it also points to the depths of God's mercy and grace shown in the undeserved love of Jesus for a broken, evil, people. Ghandi, your presumption that Christians can flawlessly emulate the goodness of their leader, Jesus, is at best a deep misunderstanding of who Jesus is (that he alone is good), and at worst an arrogant belief that you're capable of accomplishing what other humans cannot (perfect goodness).

Your work in bringing peace to India and justice to her people is admirable and immense. As a Christian, I strive to bring justice to the world because I believe in a God who is perfectly just. I seek peace in everything because I believe that God wrought peace in his damaged world at great cost to himself. I do not call myself a Christian because I seek to be like Christ. I call myself one because by grace he has sought to make me more like him.

Your believe that peace in the world is attained through a system of moral values. I believe that peace is attained through a peacemaker and a sacrifice of peace. You believe that the world needs more good, compassionate, loving people like yourself and the person of Jesus Christ. I think the world only needs one perfectly good person.

Ghandi, my Christ is not like your Christ. Your Christ is utterly inadequate; powerless to save the world. If Christ were your Christ, the extent of his influence would be to inspire a bunch of miserable misfits to attempt to be loving and fail catastrophically. But the true Christ is not like that. The true Christ did not entrust the salvation of the world to anybody. He just went and did it.

I thank you Jesus, for you even though I am so unlike you.

What makes a boy a man?

2010-10-05T20:42:00.000-07:00

Above is the subject of my current existential crisis. It's not something I haven't wrestled with before. It's something I tried and failed to get into the conversation of the Boon boys last year when I organized our first ever "Boon Church ExtravaMANza". It's something that Mark Driscoll originally got me interested in when someone sent me a near-viral youtube clip of him lambasting the boys in his church. And nearly three years ago, on my xanga page, I wrote that my lesson for the year of 2008 was:

Passion without temperament is immaturity

Anyway, as life cycles, I find myself revisiting this issue and experiencing a deep discomfort with where I am right now, prompting this following brain dump.

Last December, right before I left for my MAP internship in Australia, Stanley asked me how I saw myself in terms of maturity. My reply was, "severely conflicted". When I look around at those my age, I see many ways in which I am clearly ahead of my peers. I am wiser, more biblically literate, more responsible, more driven to pursue God, more articulate, and I had a car. But when I considered the spiritual giants that I endeavor to imitate, I feel miles behind and despair at the long way I have to go. I feel self-centered, self-conscious, irresponsible, uncaring, unthoughtful, unsteady, under-dressed, rash, temperamental, immoderate, immodest, and immature. I know that last one kind of covers the whole thing, but I needed a third "im-" for the poetic value. I feel like a sapling next to a mighty oak. I feel like the Stuyvesant freshman with the giant backpack taking the LIRR with all those well-dressed Wall Street big guns who live out in Manhasset. Like I said... brain dump.

Some days, I make decisions that surprise myself; decisions I wouldn't have had the godly wisdom to make in the past. Some days I make decisions so appallingly boyish that I wonder if I might have even grown backwards. It doesn't help when people remark about how young I am to be a MAP apprentice. Before I came to Australia, one of my desires was to work a year or two before locking myself into the ministry track. Conversations with Don eventually convinced me to dive right in. I wish I had thought about it some more. Back then, I didn't know that certain plumblines of worldly maturity overlapped with biblical maturity, such as financial responsibility. That one still really kills me.

On Friday evenings I feel like line (a) and on Sunday evenings I feel like line (b.)

In me is an ever constant fear that I may slow down in growth, regress to the mean, and even begin to lag behind those in my cohort. A great part of that fear is sinful. It arises from my desire to stay ahead of the pack, to shine, to be the young gun. It's pride and I need to daily repent of that, asking God to help me make less of myself and more of him to works in me and him whose energy I daily labor with. Actually, this fear is mostly that. It's mostly pride. But it reminds me of an issue I faced also about a year ago: the issue of whether I run to finish first or to avoid finishing last. For some people, the verb "to chase" is in an active voice and for others, it is in passive. Why are some people chasers and other people ones being chased? Why do I consistently find myself in the latter category?

It's not that I haven't considered the ways in which I've clearly grown. I've taken a major step forward ("Major Stepforward") in romance and relationships. Ironically, romance and relationships is the subject matter than launched me into this crisis. Another way I've grown is out of the pathetic shell of fatalistic determinism. I've grappled with the angst of my ownmost possibility and won. I can accept the responsibility of my choices now. My life is no longer ruled by cause but by will.

Having said that, last night I woke up in the middle of the night and made a major realization ("Major Realization"). I realized that demographically, there is no one in the world with a greater capacity to do ministry... nay, to do anything, than me right now. I am a young, healthy, single male with minimal relational attachments and very few financial obligations. I can survive on rent money and oatmeal. Actually, that thought's crossed my mind many times before. What was new last night was the frightening irresponsibility when I do less than more than other people.

So as not to end this post Psalm 88-style, here is an article by the world's most boring tweeter, Reverend R. Albert Mohler, on the marks of manhood. It is oftentimes hard and confusing to distinguish what the world says about manliness (enjoying the taste of rare meat, able to hold down large amounts of alcohol, opting to "walk it off" instead of seeing a doctor) and what Scripture says. It's really a mess of truths, half-truths, and complete lies out there. This article has helped me to identify categories that I may think about and reflect upon separately.

Thoughts From An INTJ

2010-08-30T00:09:00.000-07:00

Thinkers run the world. Thinkers call the shots. It’s always been that way throughout history. It’s meant to be that way. It can’t be any other way. But knowing this fact and dealing with it means coming to grips with the inherent weaknesses of human leadership. It will always be that those who make the decisions struggle to understand the ones they make decisions FOR.

Has it really taken me 22 years and a college degree to learn this one fact, that humans aren’t robots? Feelings aren’t weaknesses. They aren’t diseased outgrowths of human evolution that need to be transcended, as some later, post-Wittgenstein Analytics would have it.

A warning to all foolish thinkers out there; future decision-makers and scientists alike. You have been born with a terrible deficit in your humanity. You have been born with the inability to speak a language that the rest of the world are fluent in. You have been born with the inability to speak the language of emotions, and until you come to terms with that, you will be distant, lonely, misunderstood, and inept at living. You pride yourself in understanding with effective clarity the language of logic? You pride yourself in cutting through the BS of emotions, in order to make the right logical decisions? Don’t be an idiot. There are depths of logic and understanding that you will never understand if all you know are propositions, conditionals, conjunctions, and disjunctions.

Your language isn’t better than the language of the poets. It is primitive. It is rudimentary, building blocks of REAL language. You are speaking binary code and assembly when the rest of the world is communicating on AIM and Gchat. Your language is the equivalent of the grunts and brutish gestures of cavemen.

It's been almost a year since I wrote these words into another journal that I own. To me now, what matters now more than reason or emotions is will.

Disillusionment

2010-07-08T00:17:00.001-07:00

Something I've seriously been struggling with is trying to understand why it is that certain churches so alienate people who are different. If the gospel transcends all boundaries and is really meant to destroy the dividing wall of hostility, then why do the churches of Jesus make it so hard for a Christian who is different to live and thrive and give glory to God? In my life, there have been three churches that I consider my church. In one of them, if you don't like softball, you're an outsider. In another one, if you're not studying at a prestigious Boston educational institution or able to converse about jazz or indie music, you will feel left out. In another, if you don't like meeting up to drink coffee and talk about life, you're not growing in Christ. In all three, if you're not committed to dropping 50 bucks a week eating out, then you're not fellowshipping with Christians. Call these observations unfair caricatures if you will, but caricatures only accentuate the truth; they never perpetuate it. Why are we still making it so hard for different people that God gifted with differentness to be lovers of Jesus Christ?

Perhaps the issue isn't as bad as I think it is and perhaps I am just amidst a season of emotions. I am still young and young people are not yet steady and set. Perhaps this is a part of the brokenness of a redeemed-but-not-yet realized-eschatology church. Perhaps it is God's way of reminding me that the church is a broken place that will hurt you and let you down, so don't place your ultimate trust in it the way you ought to place your ultimate trust in him.

Another related issue I've been struggling with is this: Why don't reformed evangelical churches do more things to love mercy and act justly in a social manner? This question is like a stench I can't scrub off that follows me everywhere and unsettles me. If the gospel that saves kings is the same gospel that saves beggars, why is it that so often I feel that what I'm being taught in the churches that I am a part of wouldn't work in most parts of the world? Is the theology I am being taught a bourgeousie theology? Why does it feel like these walls are too high and the gates too thick for the poor?

It goes much deeper than the pedantic statement that, "Evangelical Christians don't care about the poor". I have a deep fear that the claim only describes a symptom and that the real issue is systemic to the teaching that I've grown so accustomed to and so readily accept as God-inspired truth. Moreover, I have a deep fear that I am too much a part of the system to objectively understand it. I am a part of the problem. I need to think about this more.

Good Monsters

2010-07-06T15:26:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,

This past Sunday, Eugene from GracePoint church reminded us from the Scriptures the following:

"The world's economy tells us to work so that we may gain, but God's economy tells us to work so that we may give."

Isn't it a beautiful reflection of the gospel when our lives are not oriented around personal gain, but in giving? Well here's a chance to put the gospel's transforming work into practice:

My birthday is coming up on July 17th! Instead of giving me a present, please consider donating to this charity in order to help people in the world get clean water.

http://mycharitywater.org/p/campaign?campaign_id=5251

1 billion people in the world don't have access clean water. ONE BILLION! That totally blew me away when I found that out. But we can help change that.

Since it is my 23rd birthday, I am asking for a donation of $23USD. If 50 people give that much, we can raise enough water for 57 people. But please feel free to give more if you are able to!

Please give if it is indeed in your heart to love as Christ has commanded us, and as a sign of the gospel's influence in your life practice. Even if you weren't going to give me a present, please consider giving!

"Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Luke 12.33-34

In Christ's service,
-Dan

P.S. - If you'd like more information about this charity organization, you can go here. I've done my research and I can verify the honesty of this website.

2010-06-17T05:09:00.001-07:00

Why do you run? Because you want to be first, or because you don't want to be last?

On Respect

2010-06-08T23:47:00.000-07:00

Respect is recognition of worth.

I would rather have someone hate me and respect me than someone contempt me and find me likable.

An enemy that I respect is an adversary. A friend that I don't respect is a utility.

Respect can be given or acknowledged. To the degree that I esteem someone who doesn't deserve it, I lose my own esteem.

2010-06-01T23:44:00.001-07:00

What I fear vastly more than failure in trying is failure to try. To me the greatest buffoon isn't the one on the dance floor. It is the one coolly sipping his drink at the bar wanting to dance but paralyzed by uncertainty. I contempt those who've thrown in the towel before even stepping into the ring.

2010-06-01T23:09:00.000-07:00

"His whole life was a million-to-one shot" Why wasn't Ivan Drago a hero? It's not because he lost. It was because he wasn't human. He was a caricature of adversity. At the end of the day, I can only believe in a hero who bleeds.

2010-06-01T07:31:00.001-07:00

(As of 26th May: "It's been a long time since I've written a lengthy post. For the last few weeks, all my most profound revelations have come in brevity. Therefore, until further notice, I will be posting in the manner of aphorisms, perhaps with occasional commentary.")

It is a fallacy to believe that we can “want to want”. If desire is measured by action, then what you want ALWAYS prevails. You can want what you don't choose, but ultimately what you choose is what you want the most.

_____________________

Exposition

When I say, "I want to get in shape" but I stay indoors and eat an extra bag of chips, I make myself a liar. I do want to get in shape, but I want the immediate pleasure of food more.

When I say, "I want to forgive you" but my actions show otherwise, then I make myself a liar.

When you say, "I want to live for God" but you can't rock up for a weekly Bible study, then you make yourself a liar. I will take your statement at face value, but at best it's a white lie because you fail to mention that you want to live for yourself MORE than you want to desire God. Can you want to want God? It is a logical fallacy. It creates an absurd infinite regression of desire.

The phrase "want to want" is the pathetic, therapeutic, nonsensical utterance of a weak-willed human being who lacks the fortitude to overcome immediacy. You only hear someone "want to want" something when there is something he knows he should want, but he cannot bring himself to give up something he considers of lesser value. If I "want to want" being in shape, then I desire a greater desire to be in shape; one that will overcome my desire to eat delicious, unhealthy food. But it is meaningless because how can one desire desire? One who "wants to want" lives inauthentically; he cheats on that which is his greatest desire. With whom does he cheat? With the desire he thinks he should have.

If I hear someone say, "I want to seek after God, but I just don't have that desire within me", I am hearing someone who is burdened (or at the very least, discomforted) by his earthly lifestyle. Yet he does not have the tenacity to do something about it. He lives a lie.

The bottom line is, you either want or you don't want. Do not make up self-pitying statements of woe about how you wish you could desire more! Your actions betray your heart's deepest desires. In the Christian life, in the physical fitness, in staying off of facebook, pick your temptation; pick the poison that you drown in.

2010-06-01T06:38:00.001-07:00

On Discipline: The thing about discipline is that it is cross-disciplinary. If you lack discipline in one area of life, you do so in others. Discipline is the skill of doing unpleasant things for the sake of growth. You want to know a man's diligence in Bible reading? Look at his diligence in physical fitness.

2010-05-26T22:50:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since I've written a lengthy post. For the last few weeks, all my most profound revelations have come in brevity. Therefore, until further notice, I will be posting in the manner of aphorisms, perhaps with occasional commentary. Starting with this one:

"I will die before I let life curl me up into the fetal position."

2010-05-24T20:25:00.001-07:00

Today was a completely normal day. And my life was forever changed.

Value, Beauty, and Perception

2010-05-05T05:58:00.000-07:00

Three years ago, a world-renowned violinist named Joshua Bell dressed himself in nondescript clothing, took his 3.5 million dollar violin to a crowded Washington D.C. subway, and started playing as if he were a talented panhandler. After forty-five minutes he had performed 6 classical pieces in front of just over 1000 morning commuters and collected 32 dollars for his work.

You can read the entire article here.

Some of the points in the article really grated me because here in one place are so many things that I completely disagree with in the topics of beauty, art, and music. I've seen this article mentioned on occasion in my internet wanderings since the social experiment, and it is often cited to criticize common people for not recognizing beauty in the world. And then depending on what part of the human condition is your hobby horse, you're going to want to mention something about how we move along too quickly in life or how we're not attentive enough to our surroundings or whatever.

"If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made . . . How many other things are we missing as we rush through life?" - Bill McGee

Sounds really meaningful, doesn't it? Doesn't it make you want to just slow down in life, and try to take in everything around you?

I'm not one for that kind of sentimental stuff and what really pisses me off is how people who read things like this just nod in agreement without even thinking for a second about the presuppositions undergirding this experiment's conclusion. I believe the same exact experiment would yield completely different results if we moved the fixed point from the artist to the common people, and here's what I mean.

What assumptions are made? One assumption is that this guy is world-renowned, therefore he must be one of the best in his craft. One assumption is that because he sells out concert halls at more than $100 dollars a seat, he's definitely got the talent. One assumption is that because he plays a violin which, in a market, is worth more than 25 of these, he must be really good.

We can keep unraveling assumptions. We can go into how often people today automatically correlate quality with price and then I can spend the rest of this space ranting about gearheads and their fixation on expensive musical toys. Honestly, I judge someone whose musical skill is lower than the worth of their instruments. It may be something I have to work on, but if you went out and bought an $800 electric guitar with a $400 pedalboard and you don't know what powerchords are, please don't speak to me ever again.

In the experiment, the control was the musician. The quality of Mr. Bell's music was not a variable; it was fixed. We just assumed that he played really well. I am curious how the results might have been interpreted if, instead of assuming that Joshua Bell was a GOOD violinist, we assume that the MAJORITY is always right? Then what can we conclude?

We can perhaps conclude that to some stuck-up, snobbish, elitist classical music connoisseurs, Joshua Bell's name (and his 400 year old Stradivarius violin) means something, but to the average joe he sucks. We can perhaps conclude that good "high-brow" music only has substance in a very specific, artificially-constructed environment and that out in the real world, it's meaningless. We can maybe venture that good music is 25% objectivity and 75% elitist culture. And don't even get me started on hipsters.

I've stated before that musical quality does not occur in an objective vacuum. So whereas there are objective values that make art good or bad, it is fruitless to discuss it without taking into consideration culture and socio-historical situatedness. Simply put, we do not judge artistic quality from an impartial judge's standpoint; the critic is always and already in motion.

I love classical music but I cannot tell the difference of interpretation from one artist to another if my life depended on it. I love cheese, but put a gun to my head and blindfold me and ask me if I am tasting Munster cheese from Munster, Germany or from Monroe, New York and you'll have to shoot me. I love coffee, but I have a really hard time believing that there is an objectively better way to pour hot water over ground up seeds. And make no mistake; when you call something good or bad, you are making a value judgment.

I will not pay for Belgian sea salt or ask for Fiji water. I do not believe the North Face will keep me warmer than that jacket I bought for 20 bucks at Jembro. I will gladly eat "authentic" Mexican food made by Chinese people in the kitchen. I don't need key limes from Florida to make an awesome margarita. Itzhak Perlman does not create hauntingly beautiful music; he just follows instructions and plays the notes on the page. For every John Mayer or Eric Clapton, there are a hundred 17 year-old kids on youtube who are just as technically gifted on the guitar. Leonard Bernstein does not wave a wand better than Harry Potter. And for crying out loud, please do NOT get me started on female vocalists.

We do it in every area of life that is meaningful to us, be it cuisine or music or fashion. We construct value; we arbitrarily assign it. We don't deceive on purpose; most of the time we do it we're really just lying to ourselves. We so desperately want there to be more meaning on this earth than we see. We need the things we care about to bear significance, and all significant things have value; have good and bad. So we try to find value in everything.

And when we can't find it, we make it up...

Christianity and Social Justice

2010-03-29T02:33:00.000-07:00

Sam Harris and the End to Religion
Dennis sent me this link to this short CNN article concerning atheist author Sam Harris. Titled, “Why we should ditch religion”, the article also includes a recent interview with him and outlines some of his basic beliefs. I wikipedia'd the guy and found out that Harris believes in discourse that he calls “conversational intolerance”. He doesn't believe tolerance and letting people believe whatever they want to believe is the solution to coexisting in a pluralistic world. Though I am a Bible-believing Christian and I have little to agree with him, I do agree on this point. I believe that blind tolerance is not sustainable in a society of such diverse beliefs; it is neither sustainable nor logically possible. So I credit him in his boldness in claiming that all religious people are wrong in their beliefs

Harris' basic claim in the interview is that religion is not only obsolete, but its continuing to linger on in the new secular society is actually harmful and dangerous. He believes that all the energy spent on arguing over gay marriage is taking away attention from real serious issues concerning human life. “We should be talking about real problems, like nuclear proliferation and genocide and poverty and the crisis in education....These are issues which tremendous swings in human well-being depend on. And it's not at the center of our moral concern“ According to Harris, it's not at the center of our concern because we are arguing too much over peripheral religious issues. Because we are so focused on meaningless religious issues like what God wants and what's going to happen in the afterlife, we “talk about things like gay marriage as if it's the greatest problem of the 21st century.” And while men in positions of power debate endlessly on those issues, people are suffering.

“It's completely insane”

As a morally-conservative, Bible-believing, Reformed evangelical Christian, I reject his claim that issues like gay marriage and abortion are completely irrelevant to human well-being. But as a born-and-raised liberally-educated New Yorker (and to some extent, a halfway decent human being), the recesses of my heart resonate deeply with his concern. His rejection of religion arises out of a deep compassion and concern for people who are truly in need. My heart breaks for the injustices that are going on in the world. From the homeless guy named John who hangs out around GracePoint to the women in all parts of the world who are kidnapped, forcefully injected with addictive drugs to weaken their will and make them dependent, and made to work as a prostitute for the rest of their lives; the other day I broke into tears at my desk for a good ten minutes just reading about it. It's horror and injustice of cosmically heartbreaking proportions.

And that is no hyperbole. These things break God's heart.

And for these reasons, I am often to tempted to say, “What the hell. Why are we focusing so much on these moral issues that don't even hurt anyone at the cost of compassion and mercy ministry and fighting social injustice?” And it still makes me sick to think of how much Christians squabble over meaningless things when people are dying and starving, when the economy worsens in our own country and the sins of the private sector screw over so many innocent men and women. When Christian men, in the name of God, stand up for big corporations that use child slaves and destroy ecosystems. And you can ask Euge or Owen 'cause I've talked with them about these things; this issue sickens me and tears me apart. How is a Christian supposed to be obedient to God in our world?

These questions fracture my soul. It's the natural reaction and temptation of any half-decent human being to say, “Let's stop talking about gay marriage and issues that aren't even harming anyone and start loving like Jesus did” “Let's stop wasting time with religion. People are dying.” “Let's drop these seemingly petty issues and help those who are truly in need”. The Levite passed over his neighbor because he was more concerned for his cleanness than he was for the life of a human being. Let's be the good Samaritan. You can be a good Samaritan even if you don't believe in God.

But what I've been realizing more and more is, it doesn't work like that. We cannot do that. We cannot give up the gospel, our only hope for true restoration and peace, for a temporary solution. We must still fight for Christianity, just as we fight for the well-being of our brothers and sisters. Why do we love them and care for them? Because God loved them and cared for them. Because Jesus loved them and had compassion for them.

If we give up fighting for Christ in order to bring short term relief to the suffering of the world, we are selling out any hope of a permanent end to suffering. It would be like cutting your finger and then selling your liver for a band-aid. Who does that? We cannot stop fighting. We cannot surrender God's truth in order to save a few people, and in doing so, damn those people, damn ourselves, and damn our posterity.

I confess, I have hatred for my brothers and sisters. Through my upbringing, it's natural to hate Southern Baptist Christians. I hate the Christian right. I hate James Dobson and George W. Bush and Pat Robertson and Gary North. It's a sin and it's something I have to constantly repent of and deal with in my heart. I still cannot, for the life of me, align myself with people like them. But this I do realize, that if it weren't for these men who are fighting so hard for Christian values and dying every day (at least in their public image) in order to uphold the gospel, Christianity would have fallen long ago in my country. If they stopped doing what they were doing and without regard to who hates them, our nation would have fallen completely over to Satan.

The Gospel and the End to Suffering
Mr. Harris may not realize that in his reasoning for abolishing religion he is making a value judgment that all forms of Christianity (minus the heretical ones) and virtually every monotheistic religion affirms at the core of their beliefs. Mr. Harris is saying that, human life is of value and therefore we should fight for it. Another thing Mr. Harris may not realize is that, as an atheist, he has no grounds for making this value judgment. All value judgments by definition carry with it the force of an imperative. An imperative is an “ought”; it is a claim that one SHOULD or MUST live a certain way. In this case, Mr. Harris is saying we value human life therefore we SHOULD be caring for it. But if he doesn't believe in God he has no grounds for telling anybody how they SHOULD live. In a world lacking a God or transcendent being, all we have are opinions.

The ironic thing is, in Christianity (and most monotheistic religions for that matter), there is a ground for valuing human life. As Christians, we believe that everyone is made in the image of God, and therefore all lives are of value. Our beliefs give meaning to our compassionate works. Our religion gives substance to that which we believe in our hearts. Without God, all Sam Harris has is a firm conviction in his heart that humans are valuable, but no way to substantiate that conviction.

In the gospel, we have more weapons for bringing peace and justice to all of humanity than any compassionate secular atheist. For one thing, we have a reason. God sees human life as important. It has value and dignity. Therefore we should fight against injustice. We should fight against the dehumanizing of women. We should fight against poverty and hunger. But more than that. We have hope. What good is it to fight if there's no guarantee of victory? But in the gospel, we have an assurance that one day, what Christ did will bring an end to all that is evil and unnatural in the world. In the gospel, we have a God who says that he will, “wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” In the gospel we have a God who will make everything new and gave us the assurance and receipt that it will come to pass through the resurrection.

Mr. Harris, you know in your heart of hearts what the right thing to do is. But without Jesus Christ, you have no reason to do it and no hope for every achieving its completion.

Jesus Anointed at Bethany
In Mark 14, a woman came to Jesus with a bottle of very expensive perfume, worth more than a year's wages. In an extravagant show of love and sacrifice, she poured the whole dang thing over Jesus' feet and washed it with her hair. Some of the social justice advocates among Jesus' disciples were outraged. “That perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor!” What is with this wastefulness, this callous lack of concern for the suffering?

I finally understand now why Jesus rebuked his disciples and said to leave her alone. “The poor you will always have with you. But you will not always have me” That woman out of all the people understood Jesus' true worth. She alone realized that Jesus was the end to the poor. He was the end to suffering to evil and persecution and injustice. So by making this show of sacrifice, a show that surely made the practical cringe at the thought of the wastefulness, the woman demonstrated that she love the poor. She loved the poor because she loved Christ, the solution to the poor.

The downtrodden we will always have with us. If we sell out our savior Jesus Christ, then we will sell out the final end to suffering.

The i*DENTITY Project Pt 1: Shot Across the Bow

2010-03-26T20:40:00.000-07:00

Introduction
I'm starting a new series exploring Western philosophical and socio-cultural issues centered around self-identity. I will be drawing together personal observations from contemporary culture and philosophy. I will be asking questions such as, "Why is individualism and uniqueness of such high value in our culture?" "What is with the obsession with being different?" "What are the historical and philosophical roots that contributed to the radical contemporary vacuum of corporate meaning and identity?" What is the relationship between individualism and identity? Why are our young people today so obsessed with being different and unique? What does this have to do with the presence of a pervasive loneliness in the hearts of Western individuals?

This is a monumental project for someone so young, inexperienced, ill-equipped, and relatively ignorant as myself, but it is a subject I find myself thinking endlessly about nowadays. I hope to receive encouragement as well as correction when merited. I hope readers who share in my experience can affirm its validity with similar stories and anecdotes of their own. I ultimately hope to put together an informative series that ultimately serves as both an encouragement and a warning to young and old Christians alike. An encouragement because I truly believe that all that we lack we have in our Lord Jesus, who has saved us into a radical new identity as members of God's household (Eph 3.18-22). And a warning for those who find themselves constantly being led astray by the cultural ethos of our day and finding more joy, identity, meaning, and significance in earthly categories.

I recognize that I still owe one last installment on "The Stanley Files". It is under way and will be titled "On Helplessness". I'm making it a regular habit to bite off more than I can chew.

"The world is meaningless, there is no God or gods, there are no morals, the universe is not moving inexorably towards any higher purpose. All meaning is man-made, so make your own, and make it well. Do not treat life as a way to pass the time until you die.
Do not try to \"find yourself\", you must make yourself. Choose what you want to find meaningful and live, create, love, hate, cry, destroy, fight and die for it. Do not let your life and your values and you actions slip easily into any mold, other that that which you create for yourself, and say with conviction, \"This is who I make myself\".
Do not give in to hope. Remember that nothing you do has any significance beyond that with which imbue it. Whatever you do, do it for its own sake. When the universe looks on with indifference, laugh, and shout back, \"Fuck You!\". Rembember that to fight meaninglessness is futile, but fight anyway, in spite of and because of its futility.
The world may be empty of meaning, but it is a blank canvas on which to paint meanings of your own. Live deliberately. You are free."

In the internet circles I frequent, I often stumbleupon web pages with philosophical inspirations such as the one above. I share this one in particular because it is exceptionally succinct and straightforward. It captures much of the post-modern ethos and it is an apt description of the worldview of most of my generation, Christians and non-Christians alike. The people that I am particularly compassionate for are Christians (usually younger, idealistic ones) who confess their faith in God but whose hearts and lives are much more aligned with this belief.

Essentially, the author of this anonymous post makes three claims and offers one imperative. The three claims are, "The world is absent of meaning", "Humanity is absent of normative behavior" (there is no universal morality), and "There is no hope for transcendent validation" (meaning, all we have is all we got). The imperative goes as such, "Therefore... go and MAKE YOUR OWN meaning!"

There is a fourth implicit claim involved in this post. This claim is the fulcrum upon which stands the author's entire philosophy of life. The claim is this: "It is possible, without the aid of transcendent validation, for humanity to create her own meaning"

In my next post, I hope to reject this premise and thus bring down this moral framework which, I believe, as it were, is already made out of ideas and thoughts more fragile than a house of cards anyway. So don't think my ambitions too lofty.

-Dan Shih

Works that have served as recent sources
Two of Tim Keller's sermon series, “The Necessity of Belief” (9/03 – 10/03) and “Living in Hope” (3/04 – 5/04), Eugene Hor's sermon series on Ephesians (9/09 – 6/10), various commentaries on Ephesians. The Next Evangelicalism, by Soong-Chan Rah. Various secondary philosophy texts. My peers.

Why I think John Piper needs to listen to more Muse and Dream Theater

2010-03-16T07:48:00.000-07:00

(A reflection on the use of contemporary rock-based music in corporate worship. I welcome peer-review)

John Piper and D.A. Carson, two of the most respected figures in the evangelical church, recently did a joint series of lectures titled, “The Pastor as Scholar and the Scholar as Pastor”. Piper lectured on the former title and Carson did the latter. In the last portion of the night there was a Q&A session with the two theologians and one of the questions asked was:

“What are some of the biggest issues that you think the church and evangelical scholars will need to deal with in the next 20 years?”

A lot of prominent things were brought up, including Islam and the exclusivity of Christ, the doctrine of Scripture, a cluster of contemporary issues relating to family life (e.g. homosexuality, spanking, submission of wives to husbands), epistemology, justification and substitutionary atonement in biblical thought, and redefining 'tolerance'. But one of the last things that was brought up was by John Piper. This is what he said:

(emphases added)
“I think that the explosion of... I don't want to just say contemporary worship music and contemporary worship forms, a very rock-oriented...whether or not the ethos generally associated with that on a Sunday morning can sustain the gravitas of the glory of God over the long haul... whether it can hold it. It is possible, there are contemporary worship songs that draw out my heart into the bigness of God in a most marvelous way. But there is a kind of low-brow, hip, cool, ya'll come, family, chatty, way of doing worship today. The question is, if it becomes more and more prevalent, what becomes of the majesty of God in this world? I is very hard to maintain the sense of bigness and the majesty of God if everything in the service is calculated to be chummy, and close and warm and touchy and feely...something's got to break there.”

As a Christian musician, my first reaction to Piper was defensive. “We're doing a plenty good job, and there are plenty of good songs that we sing on Sundays!” After I had a few minutes to knock down my pride, I realized that Piper spoke validly but from a unique and very narrow perspective. If you listen to the rest of his response (and you can hear the entire night's lectures here) he makes it clear that he is hopeful about the future yet skeptical. The implication is that contemporary rock music lacks the musical tools to adequately represent the weightier portions of doctrine and Christian themes. Some examples he gives of those things are the doctrine of God, the significance of hell and the glory of the cross; Piper doesn't believe that those things can truly fit into what he called the “talk show” atmosphere of contemporary worship liturgy.

I believe there are two issues here that need to be separately addressed. One is the long-term adequacy of rock music in replacing classical music for contemporary corporate worship. And the other is the tragic loss of the weightiness and primacy of God's glory in American Christianity. Though I have many thoughts on the latter, right now I am more interested in re-visiting the relationship of rock music to worship.
I think there are two reasons why Piper might not have distinguished these two issues in his statement. One is that the nature of a Q&A doesn't allow the speaker a lot of time to think through his response. In addition, it was one of the last questions of the night and they were running really short on time. I think the other reason is that Piper might not have as deep an insight into the nature of rock music as an average person. Bear in mind this is the guy who reads Scripture and prays four times a day, is involved in a multitude of Christian organizations, preaches almost every week at his church, regularly blogs and adds resources to an entire website devoted to his preaching and teaching, and when he actually does have time to read a novel, reads something as educational and soul-feeding as Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. Human beings who do all that don't have time to listen to and reflect on rock music.

This is why I believe that John Piper's skepticism concerning the emotional range and depth of rock music is completely unfounded. I can understand where he's coming from and sympathize with him; he probably doesn't encounter that much rock music beyond the precious little Christian musicians offer. And I've gone over this time and again in my head and in my personal writings. I've tried to understand “where is rock-based contemporary Christian music in the scope of musical history?” and I waffle back and forth between, “dying and on its last legs” and “undergoing birth pains but ready for a glorious revolution.”
There are gems today. Keith and Kristen Getty consistently write lyrically-excellent, musically-accessible, cross-centered worship music. Chris Tomlin will usually have one or two keepers in every album. The wheat and the chaff are being separate as we near the midpoint of an entire century of rock-based worship music and good stuff is emerging as time is allowed to test them. But the bottom line is, still today, good worship songs are tiny oases lost in the desert of dry, base, cheap, crude, and stiflingly one-dimensional worship songs.

For the reasons and feelings stated in the last two paragraphs, I can sympathize with John Piper's sentiments. However, Christian rock music is such a pathetically narrow slice of what rock music has to offer that how can Piper think to simply write off such a magnificently deep and diverse genre? It's like saying, “starch-based products like bread are no longer adequate to eat in church because communion wafers taste bad.” It's laughably poor reasoning!
Before I go on, I must clarify what I mean by “rock music”. I am using the term in as broad a sense as possible; as any music that utilizes or has its roots in a traditional rock-instrument band. I am using the term in broad comparison with Western classical music”, which has historically been the medium of music in corporate worship.

Why is my definition of rock music important? Because I think the strength and salvation of its contribution to church is found in its diversity. Chris Tomlin's rock music, in mood, has never come close to “majestic” or “epic”. Hillsong has never confronted the weightiness of glory. I can't think of a worship songwriter that has even attempted, never mind succeeded at making me feel the pain of sin or the day of judgment. Contrast that with Bach's arrangement of “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” or the Dies Irae in Mozart's famous Requiem Mass or Lotti's Crucifixus.
Oh, but in rock music, there's epic. There's majestic. There's deeply sorrowful as well as unfathomable rage and anger and wrath. When I think of epic, my mind immediately goes to Muse's “Knights of Cydonia”. How much more majestic can one get besides the slow-down towards the end of Queen's “Bohemian Rhapsody”? The emo movement (of which I am the worst) has given us the full range of sorrowful musical tools, ready to be adapted into Christian themes.
An electric guitar with distortion and delay on and in the right hands can be more epic than a legion of violinists. Five men or women holding five different rock instruments with the right amps will make the NY Philharmonic urinate their San Pellegrino. Has the London Symphonic Orchestra melted anyone's faces lately?
When I think of glorious tunes, two works that come to mind so simultaneously that they both get stuck at the doorway into my consciousness are the powerful finale to Dvorak's New World Symphony and U2's “Beautiful Day”. Someone with more musical experience than I can probably name more adequate representations in both the classical and rock genre for every mood and emotion required in church music.
The difference between classical and rock, when you look at the masters of each, is no longer that of depth or complexity or virtuosity. It's a matter of high-brow verse low-brow. It's a matter of conceitedness, arrogance, and snobbishness. How was it ever a fair comparison, pitting Beethoven and Brahms against Kings of Leon and Blink 182? Why didn't anyone ever compare Franz Xaver Sussmayrr with Led Zeppelin or Coldplay?

Let me conclude with this. As a future pastor and lover of music, I am constantly thinking through in my head issues pertaining to the role of music in worship. When I ponder the state of contemporary Christian music, I experience equal parts nausea and faint, but real hope. Ultimately, I truly believe that we are at the cusp of what could be a beautiful revolution in corporate worship. All revolutions start with death. But when I listen to Third Day's powerful arrangement of Agnus Dei, or when I explore the ever-increasing number of non-mainstream artists who are writing genuinely Christian music* (cf. Downhere, David Crowder, and Chapel Band '08's Redemption Portrait), I feel hope. I feel hope that we will emerge from our shackles of the same old stuff and begin to tap into the vast wealth of musical richness the new era is offering us.

Pastor Piper, you think Jonathan Edwards is the only one who can convey the bigness of God? Listen to some rock music!

*One caveat I feel I must make. A warning to distinguish the sheep from the goats. The Christian music industry is large enough so that there are actually artists who will, in a clever public image move, pretend that they are Christians writing on Christian themes in order to garner the popularity and use Christian consumers as a springboard to get them started. A few examples that come to mind: Evanescence and to a lesser degree, the Blackeye Peas (Where is the love) and Kanye West (Jesus Walks). I also caution against Christians who are musicians who lack the desire to use their music for the good of the church. But that's a post for another day.

The Stanley Files - An Interlude into "Fight Night"

2010-03-12T04:28:00.000-08:00

(Dear Stanley, this is not the response I promised)

"The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses - behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights." - Mohammad Ali

I've been thinking about this quote since I saw it on a poster in Jack Wang's frat house this past January. It strikes me that there is a string of wisdom that this motivational aphorism displays that cuts through many different areas of life. If you replace the word "fight" with "Christian life" and "dance under those lights" with "face trials", you get the following:

"The Christian life is won or lost far away from the witnesses - behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I face trials of many kinds"

Isn't that so true? James says that the testing of our faith completes it, making it mature by the addition of perseverance. But too often we overlook the nature of our trials: as that of "tests"! Our trials grow us when we emerge from them faithful and victorious. But trials also reveal to us the level of maturity we've already attained. I am struck by the implication of James chapter 1, which is that trials and tribulations come along as the last step of maturation; it makes us "mature and complete, not lacking in anything" (1.3). That's got to mean that there must be growing to be done beforehand.

The truth for any sport, perhaps especially boxing, is that you don't win or lose the match on the day of the match. You win or lose the match every day, out on the running path, in the sparring ring, in the weight room. You win or lose when you decide whether to finish the last set of push-ups or let the last set finish you. You win or lose when you decide it's too cold to go running today, or you should take a break because you had a big workout just two days ago, or you decide that an extra meal out with the guys to a place where you KNOW will tempt you to eat poorly is a worthy setback. Each of those are mini-trials and tribulations that determine the outcome of the big game.

Does any of that sound familiar? What if I "Christianized" it? The truth for the Christian life is that you don't defeat or succumb to temptation when you're facing it down. You win or lose that match every morning before work or school, when you decide whether you want to read your Bible or not. You win or lose when you decide you're too tired to work hard to understand Scripture and instead choose to surf youtube videos or flip through boring programs on the television. You win or lose when you think that you've earned a break from praying 'cause you attended that big prayer meeting Sunday morning, or that you can skip your reading because you were preparing a Bible study this week. Wow! What kind of damned spiritual barometer have you been measuring with?

You win or lose the big battles when you win or lose a multitude of little ones.

On fight nights, we triumph because we are a finely-tuned, disciplined warrior for Christ. We lose because we didn't see the significance of daily training and let ourselves grow those spiritual love handles. We win by making the competition not look like competition; when we are so deeply hidden in Christ that the pleasures of the world beckon from an eternal sky's distance away. We get our asses knocked to the ground when we think that we can walk this earth safely and that there is always time later to seek after things above.

These principles don't only apply to the areas of Christian life pertaining to temptation. They apply everywhere; meaning that every area of your Christian living is affected by your determination to be spiritually prepared. How do you deal with tragedy? How do you deal with loss? Can you cope? Will you grieve or will you despair? Why is it that some Christian men and women who lose what they most wanted out of life can move on while others are destroyed by it? There is only one factor, and that is the degree to which you have already placed your treasures in heaven. Are you working towards this, Christian? Or are you going find on that day when you face inevitable mortal suffering that, to your surprise, your spiritual reserves are gassed?

How do you deal with frustration? Can you love your enemy? Can you love a church member who rubs you the wrong way? Can you love a good friend who's made an insensitive comment? Or will it cause you to lose your cool, to blow your top, to break out the cold shoulder, to bottle up feelings of anger? Have you been working on being completely humble and gentle, bearing with all your brothers and sisters in love, or were you waiting for fight night? Have you been actively pursuing this by drawing every day from the depths of Christ's love for you, or did you think that you can just rock up to the ring on the night of the match and overcome your enemy the great tempter?

I venture that our culture doesn't do this well. We don't value spiritual discipline and preparation because, like all disciplines, there are no immediate results. In our culture which so highly esteems immediate gratification, we don't think the work of preparing every day is worth it. Or even worse, we don't see the desperate need to start today. We don't read our Bibles because we don't notice a day to day difference in our behavior, or our temperament, or our mood, or our character. We don't acquire an immediate increase in knowledge of Christ or spiritual wisdom and understanding. So we let ourselves get saggy. We grow those spiritual love handles. We eat that spiritual garbage. We sit on the couch and watch TV. We go out and enjoy life; we pursue other treasures. (What are those other treasures to us? Ultimately, they are the things that we regard as having more worth than our spiritual health). And then, one day it hits.

Tragedy. Testing. Trials and tribulations. Or maybe perhaps an opportunity for spiritual blessing that requires a certain degree of maturity.

The first three, we understand what will happen. We'll fall. We might survive, but only as one escaping through the flames.

That last situation I mentioned is of deep significance to me. I had to learn this lesson the hard way. I hope she doesn't mind me sharing this, but before I started dating Kat this time around, there were at least two other times that we could have gotten together. Both those times for us, the attraction was there but the maturity wasn't. And so we crashed and burned. Hard. Dear God, it took me so long to recover from each failure. For us, incidentally it was always the odd-numbered years that really kicked our tails.

But by the grace of God, those failures made me see this stark truth; that each time God had sought to bless me, I couldn't receive it because I lacked the faith and spiritual fortitude! So from that last time on, I was determined never to let this happen again. I would die in the spiritual weight room before I faced defeat of such bitter taste again.

I thank God for Kat because I know that our past attempts to date wouldn't have ended in such catastrophic, yet faith-building and life-saving manners if she hadn't so resolutely sought after Christ, despite giving up something that she wanted so badly as well. In quite a literal sense, I wouldn't be where I am now if it weren't for her. And we wouldn't be where we are now if it weren't for the past. And now we both know that if we're seriously going to love each other we better love God even more than each other.

Don't be fooled, Christian. You don't see the fight nights come. You aren't given 12 months to train. Just be thankful that you are given today to start.

The Stanley Files - On Priority

2010-03-03T05:08:00.001-08:00

[
and we know, new jack city gotta keep my brother
but to be number one, i'ma beat my brother
-Kanye, Big Brother

I've redacted my last post "On Pain" and the one on "Diligence" and have decided to work them into a 5-part series of posts inspired largely by the thoughts of my dear friend and mentor. ]

when it feels like livin's harder than dyin

for me givin up is way harder than tryin

-Kanye, Champion

A few weeks ago I wrote an entry in which I quoted Stan; "The euangelion for me is that anyone can be better with nothing more than diligence". I have since added to my understanding.

I was in Sydney city today meeting up with a couple of Gracepoint guys. As I walked down the street, I could have scanned over the street signs and ignored the cars driving on the wrong side and imagine myself back at home walking down Wall Street. "Power suit, power tie, power steering." The well-dressed men and women that passed me all exuded determination and confidence. They were winners. They were motivated. They were achieving life.

Across a busy street I picked out one suited gentleman. He was young and asian; skinny build and probably a little taller than me, with short, gelled-up hair. As I stood outside a busy food court waiting for my friend, I pictured that man walking into Boon church at 12.30 for English service. I envisioned him joining the Boon softball team or playing pick-up soccer after church. I imagined him coming home from college a few years ago to talk to Scott about working in VBS, or telling Don he couldn't serve this year but he definitely will after he gets into med school or after this long stretch of applying for jobs. I imagine him meeting up with the older career people at Saigon after Sunday service.

Then I realized that he was essentially indistinguishable from anyone I've ever met at Boon. Not because of his age or race (those features only aided my revelation); he was indistinguishable from anyone I've ever met in my entire life.

I looked around at all the people rushing past me. Anyone could be a church leader. Anyone could have given up church after college. Anyone could have been a concert pianist. Anyone could have entered the MLB draft. What makes us something and not something else? It's not just diligence; it's not just how hard we try. It's what we choose. Every choice we make is a thousand choices we didn't make.

Every win is a thousand losses in another competition. To become the best tight end in football history, Antonio Gates said no to being a really good power forward. To be the most well-known basketball player in the world, Michael Jordan said no to being the most mediocre #23 in baseball. Paul was never married, but Peter only wrote three Epistles. Don Carson will write more Christian books this year than the entire Boon church English congregation will read, but he won't win a VCF softball championship.

Every yes is a thousand nos. You make partner, but you lose your family and ability to lie (name that classic movie). You become a tri-athlete, but you only read three books of the Bible this year. You listen and understand rap music and memorize Kanye's entire Graduation album, but you forget which opus all your favorite Beethoven works are.

Lately I've been working harder than I have ever worked before, making sure not a moment is wasted, not a second goes un-redeemed, not a single activity I do impedes or stagnates my growth. I want to be growing every second, in every manner. For the first time in my life, I can honestly say that I am applying myself to the fullest extent and and racing towards the heights of my potential as a human being, limited only by physical decay and death. And along with this newfound determination, I have experienced grief and anxiety unlike anything I've ever felt before. Every time I spend half an hour reading the NYTimes, I ask myself why the hell I wasn't reading a Christian book. When I finish a chapter of a book Eugene calls "a quick read", I glance at the clock and can't believe the morning's gone by and I haven't even typed up my thoughts yet. I go for a run and cook dinner and my evening's gone. I write this blog and go to bed right afterwards and fall behind on the book I'm reading with Kat.

For the first time in my life, I truly understand what priority means. Priority is the deliberation of the thousand and one ways you can spend your next hour, your next day, your next ten years, and picking one. I contend that many people living full lives consisting of twenty four hours in each day have never had to deal with the issue of priority. You can't understand priority until you have driven that gas pedal into the floor. You can't understand priority unless you have pushed determination to its limits. How many have done this?

A week ago, I would have answered that question by saying, "Not anyone who has seen every episode of The Office, or won a beer pong tournament, or spent their summer waiting for VBS to end so that they can have nerf wars." But my realization is this: Yes they have. They have all done this. They have all chosen their priorities and applied all their determination and God-given cunning to achieve their goals. There is no lack in determination for the man who can shotgun ten Coors lights, and no little sacrifice; you only get one liver. There is no lack of determination in someone who's watched every season of Scrubs at least four times through and scored 30,010 points on Scrubs trivia on facebook. There is no lack of determination. There is only choice. There is only one yes and the thousand nos left behind.

What if we don't remember choosing? How do we know where are priorities are? A few days ago, I discovered formspring and so anonymously sent my friends this question, "If it's true that the way that your time is spent determines what's most important in your heart, then what do you love?" Last Fall, I asked my worship music class to fill in this blank, "You can tell a person's values by looking at ________" and some of the responses I got were, "What he talks about, where he spends his money, what he sacrifices for" You've already chosen. Everyone's already chosen their priorities.

Most of my readers are where we are by the decisions we make or by the way we allow decisions to be made for us. So where are you, Christian? Who are you? Where are you going and who are you going to be in a decade, at retirement age, when you're one breath away from ending your life journey? Do you realize that will be where you are when you stand before God to give account?

We don't waste time. We always spend time on what's important in our lives. No one has a minute more or less than anyone else and the way that you spend it will make you who you are. You can get into that better medical school. What will it cost you? You can get into that better conservatory, what will you say no to? You can read every reformed preacher's blog and every reformed book to have ever rested on a shelf. What will you say no to? You can be the best Settlers of Catan player East of the East river. What will it cost you?

I am still getting used to this. I don't like knowing that there are certain things that I won't be able to do. Read all the Christian books I set out to read, memorize all the Bible verses I want to memorize, not die: I can only pick two out of the three. Meet with every guy in my community group twice a month, talk to Kat on the phone five times a week, not die: I can only pick two out of the three. After I started keeping a regular prayer journal, I was astounded to discover how few people you can actually lift up in earnest prayer each day.

I believe that I can improve on the efficiency of the way I achieve life. I will roll out of bed tomorrow morning, body aching everywhere and then running 1.5 miles before rocking up at church with nothing but a banana and a doubleshot of espresso in my stomach, hating the bitter taste of determination. But a year from now I will hate it less.

At the end of it, your life will be a bar graph. Diligence will determine how high those bars go. Priority will determine how you label each bar.

As I proof-read all that I wrote above, I think the most tragic thing is that those whom I wrote

about and inspired my thoughts won't even know it. Maybe even more tragic than that is in preaching to the choir, I am contributing to someone's pious guilt.

The Stanley Files - On Pain

2010-02-23T20:42:00.000-08:00

"Pain is weakness leaving the body" - Gatorade ad campaign

"Discipline is the self coming to terms with the truth that pain is often good for you" - My 59th St. Bridge Revelation

There were moments during my wilderness period where I was so keen to avoid pain that I would avoid my mentors and anyone who I knew would kick my ass about my mind's thoughts and my heart's desires. Then I realized that there's no growth without pain and if I let this become a pattern in my life, I will get nowhere. If spiritual growth, nay, if growth as a human being wasn't a priority to me, I could spend my whole life not facing the music.

I am firmly convicted by the belief that every decision you make in life does two things: It takes you either farther along the road or backwards along that same road. On one end of the road is the likeness of Christ and on the other end is hell. Everything you do will cause you to move either up or down; there are no side-steps. It's like one of those old school side-scroller video games, like Super Mario or Sonic (Note to self: good future sermon illustration); if you're not going forward you're going backwards.

The second thing I believe choice does is it determines trajectory. On that uni-dimensional road called sanctification (or damnation, depending on which way you're going), you gain momentum. There are no harmless choices, no choices you can take a break in, no decisions you can throw the towel in. In every decision you make, you are setting for yourself a precedent by which you make future decisions.

I realized that if I continued to let that antiquated, primitive, primal, animal pain-avoiding instinct guide my actions, I will end up going down towards the wrong end of the path. So I began to face the music. The truth will set you free, says Christ, but it will make you scream and whimper and beg for mercy first.

Today, I have a healthier view of pain. I try to keep the pain-avoiding instinct off unless I am lighting a barbecue grill or taking on Stanley Lee in the Octagon (ironically, it stays off when I'm talking with Stan about life things). But my experience has also opened my eyes to all the people who live like I used to. I guess I never realized this, but there are people who live their entire lives driven by only one motivation: the avoidance of pain. Like squirrels, chipmunks and the like, they scamper at the first hint of danger. What marks a small woodland creature? Cuteness and feebleness. Cuteness because they are small and weak and harmless. Feebleness because they lack the capacity to become fearsome, intimidating; they lack the ability to transcend their limits.

How do we live? There are two ways. One is to see every situation as an opportunity to grow. The other is to see every situation as a potential for pain and discomfort. These principles that govern pain and growth are applicable to our Christian lives. In church issues, it often comes out in the areas of avoiding correction and rebuke. I've seen people who are SO GOOD at doing this, that they not only avoid the situations that might bring about correction, they avoid interaction with godly people altogether. How do I know it happens? Because I was so good at doing that myself.

What marks a small woodland creature? Cuteness and feebleness. And fear. To avoid facing the music, you can't just avoid people, you also have to avoid situations that will require you to open up. You have to avoid admitting your weaknesses, your sin, your sinfulness, your dependence on God. You have to hide away every hint of fallenness away from the rest of the world. And to hide who we are is to always fear that we will be found out for who we are. There is so much insecurity in living a life like that. Every single day it plagues you like an awful smell right under your nose that you can't get rid of. That fear discomforts you, never lets you relax like a wet sock inside a tightly-laced hiking boot.

It is a pathetic existence. To live in fear of pain is to live as if you're always being chased from behind. I don't think I've completely subdued this impulse within me; it is still more natural for me to take the path that avoids pain. I still have to consciously choose the path that leads to growth, even if it means cutting off parts of my body like my hand or my eye. I now I have a willingness to do it. Growth by pain isn't the natural impulse within me, but at least I'm getting better and better at choosing it. And it definitely gets easier over time.

Dan Brown, Religion, and the Limits of Science

2010-02-19T00:49:00.001-08:00

So I just finished reading Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. It took a little over a week, and reading it caused in me a similar sensation to eating crackers with vegemite spread; I felt disgust and nausea, but I just couldn't stop. Dan Brown is a good writer; there's no getting around it. He exploits the cheapest tricks in mystery writing to keep you hooked, and I still stand by my belief that there's nothing wrong with enjoying his anti-Christian, anti-organized religion fiction as long as you keep in mind that it is fiction.

At first, I didn't really understand what was causing my upset intellectual stomach. I couldn't pinpoint what it was that he was doing that just made me feel so much outrage. It wasn't just how he mixes truth and fiction so well that even the blatantly unhistorical portions are mistaken as facts. It wasn't just his oversimplification of very complicated historical and philosophical ideas and trends. It wasn't the way in which he portrayed all forms of established religion and doctrinal orthodoxy as a small step away from terrorism and the way he takes moral corruption, a tragic truth in Christian religion, and blows it up into preposterous, conspiratorial proportions. I can even forgive the overuse of symbolism (even the invention of a completely fictitious discipline, "symbology") because it makes for an excellent and gripping read.

I think this time around, one of the biggest bones I have to pick with Dan Brown is the insidious way in which he defines and categorizes big ideas such as reason, science, and religion. He does not merely over-simplify complex concepts; you can make the case that things like religion and science have quite simple definitions. Instead I would frame his offense as incorrectly portraying these ideas as they relate to each other. The entire premise under Angels and Demons is that science and religion have been at war each other for epistemological supremacy (of course, Dan Brown didn't call it that because it would encourage his readers to look up epistemology and when they do, the foundation for his entire story would crumble). Science wants to describe truth one way, religion another; but both can't be right at the same time and that's why over history blood was shed, men were martyred, and atrocious acts of torture and treachery were committed by "both sides" (but ESPECIALLY religion, says Dan Brown).

I call what Dan Brown does insidious because he wields such an enormous influence over popular culture. One of the difficult things for me to realize is that not everyone who reads the book, in fact not even everyone who is reading this blog, shares the same foundational philosophical convictions as I do. And that's part of the reason why certain presumptions he makes in the book leave me with intellectual diarrhea and leave others with a profound sense of enlightenment. Even though I immediately dismiss some of his presuppositions of life as wrong-headed to the point of being stupid, I can't assume that everyone agrees with me. So, even though I am painfully aware that I am once again late to the game and everyone else has already gotten past all this hype, for the rest of this blog, I hope to illuminate(i) the underlying philosophical premise that Dan Brown and I disagree on. And hopefully it will segue well into my next blog, on faith and reason.

It's true; there was a brief period of history (modernity) in which science and religion were forced like Roman political slaves to enter the coliseum and duke it out. The reign of science and Modernity's dreams of subjecting mother nature to the omnipotent laboratory was cut short by a bloody awakening. We were startled and horrified by the realization that even science could be used for destruction and atrocity; that the propensity of humanity for evil underlined all our other endeavors and aspirations; that the line between good and evil cut across every human heart, cut across every new technological discovery and man-made innovation, and poisoned every attempt to pull ourselves out of our own depravity by the bootstraps of our cunning and intellect.

To Dan Brown's credit, he did talk briefly about the horrible things that have been done in the name of science, but my point isn't to argue pragmatics; I didn't mean to begin discussing which system of belief works better in creating peace and social harmony. My point is, the argument of science verses religion is inherently flawed. You can't compare the two because the premises on which you define these two concepts is wrong.

In his book, Dan Brown creates a situation in which the reader can entertain two questions: 1) Which is better for creating social harmony, science or religion? 2) Which is more reliable for discovering truth, science or religion? I argue that both questions are logically nonsensical. It's like asking, "What tastes better, a poem or high-definition television?" or “What's more effective in getting rid of head lice, the Pythagorean theorem or Mike Ditka?” (actually, that last one has a reasonably defensible answer).

Dan Brown's operative premise for asking the first question is that both science and religion are man-made tools for enforcing social order. Science gives us bombs and cures for diseases, religion gives us a placebo in the form of a higher purpose for living. Now which one would you rather have governing society? I venture that to make this assumption is to do massive injustice to both things. It is taking two things, both of which have nobler objectives than a mere sedation of the masses, and defining them by the uneducated popular impressions that the public have, and then forcing them to do your will.

It took me 15 minutes to write my last sentence because I didn't know how to complete the part after “It is taking two-”. Is it taking two disciplines? Two beliefs? Two ideas? Two worldviews? And that brings me to my next point. Science and religion aren't even in the same category of objects! Wikipedia defines science as a “systematic knowledge-base or prescriptive practice that is capable of resulting in a prediction or predictable type of outcome”. In the broadest category of understanding, science is a methodology. It is a set of rules that you follow in order to arrive upon a certain conclusion, within the prescribed system.

What's important to point out is that science is a system. It is consistent and coherent. Working within the system produces dependable results. But it also presupposes that there are certain questions and conclusions that can be asked which operate outside the scientific system. What that means is, there are certain questions regarding life which science is not meant to answer. You can ask a chef how to make a poached egg, but you can't ask him to explain the chemical process of denaturing the egg proteins when heat is applied. You can and he might know, but his answer will be outside the discipline of cuisine. In the same way, you can ask a scientist why a baseball hit by Barry Bonds will land in McCovey cove instead of flying into space and he'll explain to you stuff about the gravitational force. But if you ask why there is gravity, he cannot, by virtue of the limits of his discipline, answer that question.

My point is, if you direct enough “how”s and “why”s to science, you'll inevitably solicit a frustrated throwing up of arms reaction followed by an aggravated, “That's just how it is!” And THERE you encounter the limits of science. Science does not have an answer for why every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It cannot answer why there are four fundamental forces and not three or five. It cannot tell you why energy cannot be annihilated but only converted to other equivalent forms. The most that a scientist can do when faced with these questions is offer a poetic speculation in awe and wonder, and refer to the inter-connectivity of these first principles in all areas life.

In understanding this point, whether you agree with it or not, it is important to distinguish the questions that science has not answered yet and the questions that science by the definition of its own system cannot answer. I am totally down with the whole idea of the inevitability of the scientific progress in answering our questions, just not ALL questions. You're right. We were stupid to think that the earth was the center of the universe. We were stupid to think that the heavens were a canopy and that God literally pitched a tent over the earth. But these kind of discoveries are different categorically from the answers that truly echo in the human heart. Does it satisfy your bones, secular humanist, that a star is a flaming ball of gas? Are you pleased with your discovery that love is a certain psycho-biological state?

In C.S. Lewis' book The Abolition of Man, he describes people who reduce all knowledge into scientific categories as “men without chests”. They have satisfied their intellectual thirst but for those who do have chests with hearts, after their victory they feel a deep hollow emptiness; a gripping loneliness and a sense of alienation and exile as they emerge into their new world, a world divested of illusions and lights. In this world, any question that science cannot answer must not be relevant to live. And therefore meaning and significance is abolished. Purpose and normative living was ejected out into the deep cold of space. Ethics is pragmatic but ultimately unfounded. Concerning the abandonment of value judgments, Nietzsche wrote,

“Indeed, we philosophers and 'free spirits' feel, when we hear the news that the is dead, as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the love of knowledge is permitted again the sea, our sea, lies open again, perhaps there has never yet been such an open sea” (Human, all too Human)

But in his prophetic brilliance, he also realized that this freedom was cold and vacuous; a freedom humanity was not meant to have. We've been untethered from the sun, and now we're plunging continually through space in all directions, backwards, sideways, and upwards:

“We have left the land and have embardked. We have burned our bridges behind us – indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity.... Woe, when you fell homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom – there is no longer any land”

I lament my inability to resist the temptation to sidetrack into my favorite philosopher in all the land. I venture that science is incapable of answering the same questions that religion answers, and vice versa. When religion tried to answer scientific questions, Galileo was scandalized and the church was disgraced. But when science tried to answer religion's questions, people quickly realized that the world it created was neat and orderly and cold and barren. We left Eden and quickly realized that the world was harsh and unsuitable for humankind, who didn't even have fur for warmth or fangs for hunting.

I conclude by stating that religion and science was never at war; at least not until the foolish humans pit them against each other by locking them in the Octagon, with disastrous results. Science is not in the same category as religion. It is perpendicular to her. Science can be used for immense good or devastating evil, but one thing it cannot be used for is telling us why we're here and what our ultimate purpose is.

Why Christians can have nice things

2010-02-01T02:34:00.000-08:00

It took me a really long time to realize that if something is desirable, even pleasurable, it doesn't necessarily mean it is a bad thing. How tragic is our state of fallenness, that we consider good things to be evil in a world that God created and called "good" on the first day?

“Before the Lord God made man upon the earth He first prepared for him by creating a world of useful and pleasant things for his sustenance and delight. In the Genesis account of the creation these are called simply `things.' They were made for man's uses, but they were meant always to be external to the man and subservient to him. In the deep heart of the man was a shrine where none but God was worthy to come. Within him was God; without, a thousand gifts which God had showered upon him.” - A. W. Tozer, The Blessedness of Possessing

Idolatry had from the beginning been humanity's sin. The heart of idolatry is mistaking gift for Giver. When we take the treasures around us and elevate them to the status of God, that is idolatry. But the punishment is contained within the sin. The Διὸ παρέδωκεν, the “therefore God gave them over”of this sin is that we would cling with fervor onto something that is not meant to last; something that moth and rust destroy; something that will ultimately be lost with time. The self-contained punishment of God for our idolatry is that we would suffer loss and despair when that which was fleeting finally is gone.

However, enough Christian literature has been written about idolatry and wiser men than I have preached powerfully against it. I am interested in the antithesis to idolatry. What is the opposite danger? It is monasticism. It is a complete denial of earthly pleasures. Jesus never said, “do not enjoy treasures on earth”. That command is very different from “do not store up treasures in heaven” Treasures on earth are still that. They are meant to be enjoyed. They are the thousand and one gifts that God showered his children; gifts that were meant to be delighted in; gifts that were meant to direct worship back to the Giver.

Earthly treasures are vehicles by which God's children enjoy and treasure God. A gift is of worth to the degree that it points to and magnifies the One who ascribed its worth; the One who is by nature of infinite worth. Like a rainbow that leads to the pot of gold at the end, gifts are beautiful and enjoyable; but they are a means. God is the end of pleasure.

But this isn't the understanding of many Christians. Many sincerely pious but severely misled Christians believe that the less you enjoy life, the more you are glorifying God. If you are loving life, nurturing other hobbies, sharpening skills in other things, doing anything other than sitting at home and reading the Bible, you are committing idolatry. Isn't that the attitude that we have sometimes? How do we enjoy God, how do we treasure him and him alone; how do we worship him in the throne of our hearts? Only by reading Scripture and praying. It's not worship if you do something else. It's not worship if you enjoy life.

How is that treasuring God? I would like to say that those who live in denial of earthly pleasures are guilty of sinning against God. How? Because their actions undermine the goodness of Creation for the enjoyment of man. Their attitude throws the Lord's gifts back at him and declares them unworthy. And furthermore, the sheer dissatisfaction of living such a life of denial will inevitably lead to a deep-seated resentment in their worship of God. “Why is treasuring you so difficult, Oh Lord? I have given up everything for you, and life sucks now”

The person who lives in pious denial will eventually be crushed to death between a rock and a hard place. Anything they desire that is of the world will seem like idols by default. When they try to enjoy it, they feel guilt and shame. But when they say no and hide from it, they find that what they treasure isn't a treasure at all. “Oh Lord, if you are all I need, why did you make sports so fun? Why did you make video games so enjoyable? Why did you make the opposite sex so desirable?”

On the one hand, we have the temptation to turn gift into idol. On the other, we have the misguided notion of denying all gifts completely. So what is the aufhebung, the dialectic sublation of these two theses? The answer, at least practically in our Christian lives, is to get rid of the gifts and true joys that take away from your passion for Jesus. Those things that are prone in your life to become idols; those things that your heart desires more than their makers; those things must go. BUT, those gifts and true joys and delights that fuel your passion and love for the Lord, keep them and be thankful for them. To the degree that an earthly treasure increases your delight in the Lord, to that degree keep the treasure and glorify its Maker.

Take stock, Christian, of the treasures in your life. Which ones bring you into deeper delight and worship of its creator. Which ones take you farther from him?

Ultimately, a sign of deep spiritual maturity is the ability to guiltlessly enjoy earthly treasures in the context of God's gifts. The pursuit of academic excellence; a successful business; an art or work of art painstakingly perfected; the companionship of a girlfriend or boyfriend; the satisfaction of beating a video game; the elation that comes from achieving an athletic goal. All these things are gifts. They feel good because they're supposed to feel good. Our Father knows how to give gifts. He knows that we like fish better than snakes or stones. And those who are confident in that truth can truly enjoy life. In the end, those who are gripped with the goodness of God, who are confident in the security of their true, eternal, secure, heavenly treasure; they will not be afraid of going after what they desire.

It took me a long time to learn this. For a large part of my Christian life, I wasted away in despair; not understanding why not having any gods before Him made life suck so much. It was only after I worked all this out that I could guiltlessly live and enjoy. It was only after I made this realization that I could have nice things, do fun things, have a girlfriend, and all while give thanks to God that these gifts, though fleeting they are, are in my life.

The Stanley Files - Diligence or Why I Love Kanye

2010-01-30T04:58:00.000-08:00

“The Good News for me is that anyone can become stronger with nothing more than diligence.” - Stanley Lee, 1.20.10

I've been on a Kanye West craze recently. If you've been hanging around with me recently, you might have noticed that.

I've been trying to figure out why I love his music so much. For one thing, I think he is the second-best rapper of all time (behind Jay-Z, of course). His lyricism is unparalleled, and his flow is rivaled only by (maybe) Eminem. But that's not the main reason. I think I really started listening to Kanye after I realized that his musical content only consists of two subjects: The carnal gratification of sexual desire through the objectification of women, and the constant desire to be the best. I'm intrigued and impressed by his seamless incorporation of both subjects into his songs. I believe the first one is tragic but necessary in his music, but what I'm most drawn to is the second subject; his never-satisfied desire to succeed; to be bigger, to be number one; to get to the top; to overcome all odds. And its his sheer force of will and determination that I'm so attracted to.

this is the story of a champion

runners at the mark as they pop the gun

stand up, stand up, here he comes

tell me what it takes to be #1

Some people listen to Kanye West and hear another pompous, talentless recording artist, so full of himself. I hear an educated man who is intimately acquainted with the inner workings of fame, someone who truly understands the desire to be great, and therefore deeply understands human nature. Some people listen to Kanye and hear a man who only stumbled into popularity by the sheer stupidity of the population. I listen to Kanye and I hear a man who made it to where he is through hard work and sacrifice. Someone who is so determined to be the best that he never takes a day off. And yes, I see someone who is full of himself, selfish, and impatient. But it doesn't change or diminish the part of his character that I admire and love so much.

like we always do at this time

I, I go for mine, I gots to shine

now throw your hands up in the sky

Kanye is a hard worker. There's no getting around that. He's one of the few rappers to spin his own beats; in fact he even got his start by producing for Jay-Z. There's no one in the public light that inspire me more to work hard than Kanye. Sure, there are my football role models. Everyone knows that Kurt Warner got his start bagging groceries; we've all heard ad nauseum about Peyton Manning's work ethic and his discipline in studying film. But the truth is, there's no one that embodies determination more than Kanye West.

I always had a passion for flashin'

before I had it, I closed my eyes and imagined

the good life

It doesn't matter, PD, that his vision of the good life is completely different from the good life according to the wisdom of Proverbs. Kanye's raw determination to achieve it is the same as my determination to achieve a good life as taught by the Word of God. Sure, he may be going after the wrong things in life, but his diligence and persistence often eclipses the diligence of a Christian pursuing the glory of God. Does it shame you, Christian, that a man like Kanye West more doggedly seeks after fleeting glory and temporal treasure than you do after eternal treasure and the supreme glory of God? It ought to.

what you about?

all that independent sh--

traded it all for a husband and some kids

you ever wonder what it all really mean

you ever wonder if you find your dreams

There are readers right now who are thinking, “How could Dan, a future pastor, enjoy someone as worldly as Kanye? Isn't there a contradiction between the lifestyle and values that he represents and the life and truth according to the gospel of Christ?” For you who are uneasy with my Kanye fascination, I implore you to read harder into all that I've written so far. I never once endorsed Kanye's other values. I never once spoke of his objectification of women or anything of the like. My whole point is this: Kanye West works harder to achieve his goals than MOST Christians work to bring about the kingdom of God. And you can't take that away from him. In fact, if anything we all should be ashamed by our own work ethic.

I think of the churches I've visited since I started college and the thousands of Christians that I've met and talked to and sometimes I get the feeling like overall, there's a real lack in a sense of urgency. I feel like most of the time we forget the gravity of our kingdom work; how important it really is. Have we forgotten that every lull in our fervor means a few less people hear the gospel? Perhaps we don't realize that every moment of laziness and idleness we entertain means that some people drift farther from God. Perhaps we've forgotten that our work is a matter of life and death, that heaven and hell for God's people hang in the balance of our diligence.

As I sit here writing, I am getting angrier and angrier at myself for those moments when I was lazy, or failed to answer God's call, or took a day off I didn't deserve. I also think about the hundreds of churches in our country who just get along. They tend to their own things; make sure service runs on time every week and that the organist remembered to practice; they occasionally run middle-of-the-week Bible studies; the parents keep their children out of trouble; make sure they don't smoke or hang with the bad crowds; the congregation shows up every Sunday to put in their time. Nothing too big happens, no ambition, no rocking of the boat. Everyone gets along. To you pastors and Christian workers who are only interested in getting along, shame on you. To you ministers who give up greater gospel work in the world for the sake of maintaining the status quo, shame on you. To the Christians in Boon Church, the Christian in Flushing, and NYC, and the US, and the rest of the world who have forgotten that they are first and foremost, citizens in heaven working for a greater cause, who have settled, who are content with a lifestyle of “work, work, work, work work, play, church” SHAME ON YOU

Don't settle. Don't sediment. Don't let a man like Kanye shame your gospel-commitment. Don't give in to that temptation.

or they could step out of bounds quick

the sidelines is lines with casualties

who sip the light casually

they gradually become worse

don't bite the apple, eve (Empire State of Mind, Jay-Z)

A Brief Layman's Theology of Fasting

2009-12-22T13:52:00.000-08:00

There are certain physical manifestations of emotional occurrences that are common to all of humanity. Insomnia is characteristic of overwhelming anticipation; who can sleep the night before Christmas morning? Indigestion is often associated with stress, as well as high blood pressure especially if the stress is chronic. What are the physical manifestations of intense longing? Perhaps insomnia, diminished pleasure in other activities, the inability to focus on anything else, or anyone else. As the villain in the movie Hitch said, “Colors are dull, food has lost its taste…” When you want something (or someone) more badly than anything else in the world or out, your body reacts by suddenly losing its desire for other things, including things necessary for survival. You’re not hungry, you can’t sleep, and you can’t take your mind off of the object of your affection.

David wrote Psalm 63 in the Judean Wilderness while he was running from King Saul. Inside the rain-shadow of Israel, the area gets less than 11 inches of rain per year. It was during this time, running for his life while being pursued by an army, hiding as a fugitive in one of the most barren places in the country, that he penned the following words:

“Oh God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you,

My soul thirsts for you

My body longs for you

In a dry and weary land where there’s no water.”

Forgetting about his own weariness, forgetting about his physical thirst and hunger, David writes that he earnestly seeks God. He can’t even begin to think about his material needs when he is so desperately longing for his Lord. “I have seen you in the sanctuary, and beheld your power and your glory”. David had an intimate knowledge of the goodness of God, and the satisfaction of knowing him and its superiority over even the richest of worldly pleasures. “Your love is better than life… my soul will be satisfied as the richest of foods” David knew that the love and approval of God was better than even life itself, and was ready to forfeit it even as his being was being supremely satisfied in the presence of his Lord.

I would like to suggest that this is the basis for fasting. Fasting is outcome of a soul saying, “God, I want you so bad I don’t even care about physical hunger, I don’t care about physical thirst, I don’t care about death. All I want is you”. When someone is madly in love, it is like his self is elsewhere while his body tries to maintain status quo. He remains listless as other things go on around him because he’s only thinking of one thing. If you ask him if he wants to get something to eat, he’ll reply, “It’s okay, I’m not hungry”. If you ask why he looks so tired or weak, he’ll tell you it’s because he hasn’t been sleeping well.

During these intense periods of longing for your Maker, that is when you fast. You take the time that your body normally uses for daily survival-maintaining rituals (such as eating), and you turn that time towards God.

Men and women who are madly in love with God sometimes seem like their mind is elsewhere. Maybe they don’t exhibit those extreme symptoms of a romantic obsession, but if you could picture them in your mind’s eye, they will always be looking upwards. They are God-centered, heaven-faced, and always thinking about the object of their utmost affection, Christ Jesus their Lord.

People who remind me of this are John Piper, my friend and mentor Greg O’Brien, and my dear friend Mushroom Cheng. Anyone who talks to these people for more than five minutes will know what their minds are constantly thinking of, or who their minds are constantly thinking about. I look up to these people and admire their single-minded passion. I want to be obsessed with Christ and his supremacy to the point of being slightly aloof all the time. That’s the level of desire I want to have for my Lord and savior.

A Christmas Thought

2009-12-21T19:26:00.001-08:00

The Jews have always had privileged access to the words and commands of God. Ever since they became a nation, the God has spoken to his chosen people through a number of different ways. He spoke to Moses as a burning bush and chose him to be Israel's leader and his spokesperson and through him, he gave them his written commands, which they were to bind on the tablets of their hearts. After Moses came his understudy, Joshua, followed by the Judges. There were, of course, numbers of prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel. He spoke through David with the Psalms; he used a draft-dodger by the name of Jonah. He used a talking donkey to speak some sense into Balaam; during the days of Moses he even manifested his divine presence as a pillar of fire or a spiraling cloud in order to provide protection for his people.

Then one day, after the prophet Malachi spoke his last word, came silence. For four hundred years, God's people heard not a single peep from their Lord. Kingdoms rose and fell, Israel found independence for a brief period of time only to be crushed again by the mighty Roman Empire. Chanukah was invented. Finally, after four centuries of silence, the God of the universe finally spoke again. His first words?

Goo goo ga ga.

Lots of good thoughts packaged into a bad blog

2009-12-10T13:15:00.001-08:00

Been thinking about momentum in the context of sports. Momentum is an illusion, even in physics. In physics, momentum is the product of an object's mass and velocity. An object's momentum is an arbitrary equation; it's a number constructed out of two other numbers that are real quantifiable measurements. Actually, now that I think about it, I don't want to go down this slippery slope because if I call momentum an illusion, then I have to call all other physical measurements such as velocity and vectors illusions. The only real measurements of any object is its mass, volume, and position in time. And even then, illusions though they're not, they are still arbitrary. Alright, that's a thought for another day.

At any rate, momentum is certainly an unquantifiable element in a sporting competition. You often hear color commentators report about it based on highly unscientific factors, like "which team needs the win more" "which team scored more in a row" or "which team overcame an enormous psychological obstacle by accomplishing something they've been struggling at" (i.e. Brandon Jacobs' monster catch and run for a TD on Sunday). They factor in excitement and morale. They factor in winning streaks. In short, they factor in things that are completely irrelevant to a team's likelihood to win.

Momentum is not real; not in the physical world and not in sports. But what is real and what isn't real anyway? Is evil real? Augustine famously made the argument that evil has no real substance; it is the absence of something. I always hated that argument. Anyone who wants to argue that cold is not real because it is the absence of heat, or darkness is not real because it is the absence of light can first spend the night naked and blindfolded on my front porch before we engage in meaningful discourse.

(I believe the fulcrum of this debate is your metaphysical foundation. Augustine and Aquinas presuppose a universe constructed out of matter. Varying degrees of being have varying degrees of form and less unintelligible matter, until you get to the highest being, which is actus purus, pure act. According to this metaphysical worldview, things that lack form, such as darkness or evil, lack existence. But I embrace a good deal of Humean skepticism in this matter. For me, perception doesn't point to a metaphysical structure. All I can be sure of is the information of my senses. For me, that's where existence starts. Sorry, Aquinas, but the problem of theodicy remains)

My point is, though there are no scientific ways of quantifying momentum, in sports or in physics (I would argue that the current "scientific way" of quantifying momentum isn't scientific; it's mathematical), it exists. We can't actually grasp it, and we argue about who has more of it (or at least Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth do), but it's real. Ask any football player what it's like to be down two TDs in the first quarter of a four-quarter game. Ask him if playing the other 45 minutes of football is easier if you're down two TDs or up two TDs. Ask him which one is more like stopping a freight train and which one is more like accelerating a freight train going downhill. When your opponent has all the momentum, it is very difficult to regain it by sheer force of will.

Normally in sports, when you're sent reeling you need to stop the game in order to regroup. You can call a timeout or just hang on and try not to lose any more yardage before halftime. During the break, you need to re-center yourself, get hyped up, adjust to what your opponent is giving you, and hopefully turn it around. I guess all this is to say that, when you're in the middle of the game, it's hard to stop something that's happening.

In no particular order, the list of amazing subjects I touched upon that I did immense injustice to: theodicy, metaphysics and its death after Modernity, physics and the nature of the world, being and existence, the arbitrariness of time and position, thrownness, continental philosophy and the connectedness of the universe, and of course, going for it on 4th and 2 at midfield.

If you're out of tune, you suck

2009-12-01T14:46:00.001-08:00

Lately I’ve tried to stay away from saying anything too disagreeable when I get on my soapbox. I didn’t feel like getting into any debates online and I was too lazy to properly research my position, so for the most part I’ve been keeping my opinions to myself. However, I think I’m ready to subject some of my thoughts to peer review. The topic is “intonation as a measure of musical quality”. Go ahead and tear into it, you vicious, liberal...

The progression of music through history, like any progression of art through history, can be charted by its stages of rule-breaking. Music establishes its boundaries, visionary artists transcend those boundaries, and then music establishes new boundaries. Throughout history, almost every element of music, from rhythm to dynamics, from melody to meter, has had rules broken by some class of music, ranging from high-brow classical to low-brow popular.

While this is not an exact science, trends of music culture can be identified. Before Beethoven, few composers would dare modulate outside of their parallel and relative keys, but the introduction of new dissonances in the Romantic era of classical music saw artists bring on increasingly chaotic chord progressions. Brahms did things with the orchestra that Mozart wouldn’t dream of; he bent and broke rules, and established new rules of conduct for the same works; symphonies, concertos, and whatnot.

Towards the end of the 19th century, the classical world started getting tired of even the most fundamental rules of music; the paradigm of keys and traditional rhythmic patterns. French Impressionism paved the way for the likes of Schoenberg and Stravinsky and their work in atonal music (music that essentially lacks a central key signature). Everyone began experimenting with unconventional time signatures; ones where the numbers aren’t always divisible by either 2 or 3.

The astute connoisseur of music will identify these trends in any genre. The Beatles aren’t iconic just because of their great music and its represented ideology; they revived the traditional guitar-based rock band and paved the way for all rock music afterwards. The patron saint of alternative rock music is U2; there are few alternative artists who haven’t stolen (or borrowed, or w/e you want to call it) from their familiar delay-pedal electric riffs. Before jazz got big, seventh chords were unheard of and likely to be considered noise rather than music!

Anyway, I’m painting with broad brushstrokes and generalizations, but my point is, there are no musical rules that haven’t been broken. Good, new music happens when a forward-thinking artist says, “hey, let me try this that no one’s ever done before” and it catches on.

Now, of all the rules that have ever existed and of all the ones broken, one rule in my mind that has stood steadfast across all genres and time periods is the rule of intonation. What I mean is, I CAN'T THINK OF ANY KIND OF MUSIC WHERE A RULE GOVERNING QUALITY ISN'T "THE SINGER OR MUSIC MUST BE IN TUNE*. We’ve left all the other rules in the dust; thanks to the foggy world of Indie, good music nowadays doesn’t even have to have discernible conflict and resolution, cadences, refrains, theme and variation, consistent key or time signature. thanks to pop radio, good music nowadays doesn’t even need to have real instrumentalists! For every rule, there’s at least one accepted artist breaking it.

BUT THE ONE RULE IN MY MIND THAT IS STILL UNTOUCHABLE IS THE RULE OF INTONATION. I can’t accept as a musician an artist that intentionally sings off-key, no matter what cultural messages it sends out. I don’t think I am ready for it, and I don’t think our world is ready for it. Does anyone else feel this way? I am thinking primarily of two songs. One is “Paper Airplanes” by MIA and another is “Anyone else but you” Moldy Peaches, which was featured in the recent film, “Juno”. Oftentimes on the radio, you’ll hear musicians who don’t rely on auto-tune enough and have off-key parts in their songs, but I think these two offenders are particularly egregious because to me, in their music they don’t even sound like they’re trying.

I think because of alternative and indie music, the traditional standards of judging vocal quality is now out the window. People with “bad voices” can still earn fans if the fans feel that their voice is unique enough to stand out. With the birth of rap, there is now “good rapping” and “bad rapping”, although of course there’s vast disagreement as to what is which. However, no matter what timbre of your voice and what inflection of your rhythmic poetry, one rule that still stands fast to me is, “IF YOU'RE OUT OF TUNE, YOU SUCK”. I’m sorry MLIA, I know you’re trying to convey to us your laid-back, gangsta lifestyle full of swagger with your relaxed style of singing, but it’s no excuse to relax your vocal chords to the point of wretched tonal quality. It’s one thing to try to bend some rules; it’s another to make my ears bleed and make me want to kill something when I listen to your music. I’m sorry, but I’m not ready for it.

Does anyone else feel this way, or am I too doggedly stubborn with my musical preferences? Are most people really okay with out of tune singers; is intonation perhaps just a wretchedly joy-draining pet peeve of mine? No one else wants to slay an innocent victim when “Paper Airplanes” comes on the radio?

My final point is this. I admire Jay-Z and I love his music. I also support his campaign against the over-use of auto-tune. From a firmly ethical standpoint, I’m still undecided about whether auto-tune is good or bad for the music world; whether its considered cheating or its as legitimate as any other electronic aids. But, come on Jay-Z! If you’re going to sing that poorly in the first 10 seconds of your song, how the heck do you expect to convince people that auto-tune is bad? Plus, you’re a rapper! This isn’t even your fight! Why don’t you let the indie artists, who stand to lose a lot more, take the lead in this crusade?

*The closest exception I can think of is the use of the whammy pedal by electric guitarists, which in a way is a descendant of the classical vibrato; but even then the controlled pitch-shifting is a far cry from the junk you hear from artists who don’t even try to sound good.

The Neurosis of Guilt among Pious Christians

2009-11-24T20:17:00.001-08:00

Speaking of works-based righteousness: I think our congregation still struggles with this deeply. It’s part of our set Asian-American, bi-cultural neuroses. It’s packaged in with the things we’ve been taught at home, by our parents, by the performance-driven culture around us. My parents are the best parents in the world; they give me more than I ever deserved and support me more, so much more than the parents of a lot of my friends. They never pressure me except not to waste my potential. Yet I still feel it because I grew up saturated in it. That constant guilt during my waking hours, like the feeling of coldness during sleeping hours (if you’ve ever tried to sleep without adequate blankets, you know what I mean) is always there, pushing me onwards to perform. I’ve talked about the difference between chasing after something and going after something because you are being chased from behind. Works-based guilt is a cause for the latter.

The thinking I am speaking of exists by the presupposition that we must fend for ourselves; that God will not come to save us, that God is not in the business of saving us, but only judging us. We think if we’re going to make it through the judgment day grind, we’re going to have to take our piety upon ourselves and work towards pleasing God. We acknowledge salvation by grace with our lips, but our hearts are far from it. We acknowledge that we’ve been “saved by Jesus Christ” and that we’re “born-again”, but after that conversion, we live as if we’re still on the wrong end of God’s wrath. So we work all the harder. When we get lazy and stop reading the Bible regularly, we beat ourselves up over it and subject ourselves to self-inflicted emotional trauma. If we forget to do devotions in the morning and our day goes badly, we think God is “disciplining us” for our grievous error. If we don’t get something we want, even if it’s a good thing, we think it’s because we didn’t pray hard enough and never think that it might possibly be that in God’s sovereign plan, the timing wasn’t right.

Not only is this a profound misunderstanding of faith, it is a deep affront to God’s saving power and it is often disguised as piety. When we lament, “why can’t I just be a better Christian?” and put ourselves down for our piss-poor effort, we are in essence spitting upon the work of the cross, nullifying the precious jewel and regarding it useless in our predicament. Not only that, just consider what happens when we do succeed. If I read the Bible every night and pray for an hour before I go to bed, who gets the credit then?

I hear it more often than not, “I struggle so much with loving God. I can’t seem to do my devotions consistently. I fail all the time.” While this sort of self-reprieve is no worse than completely giving ourselves to sin without abandon, it is no better either. What’s the difference between sinning and being okay with it, and sinning and complaining about it? There is no difference; neither one grasps the power of the gospel, the gospel of the one who knew no sin and yet became sin for us.

A warning to the pious. My friends, beware of guilt. It is dangerous because it makes us think that having it is the only way we can live with our sin. We think if we’re not feeling guilty about our failings then we are not truly right before God. But the truth is the exact opposite! Our guilt is very real and we can only be right before God if it is removed, not if it is lived with. If all we had to do was struggle with our constant guilt, then Christ died for NOTHING!

What’s the difference between being chased and chasing something? The former is done out of fear and the latter is done because of love. Don’t chase after piety because death is chasing you from behind. Chase after loving God because grace has given you motivation.

2009-11-14T15:18:00.001-08:00

“I’m a war of head verses heart, it’s always this way
My head is weak, my heart always speaks before I know what it will say”
- Crooked Teeth, Death Cab for Cutie

Talking about the distinction between soul and body is dangerous. It’s facetious. There is NO clear line between soul and body, mind and matter, reason and emotion. They are heuristic categories. We human beings love to multiply distinctions. We do it because it makes the world simpler, easier to understand, and more manageable. We love to categorize, to dissect, and to label. And it’s not wrong. We can’t have it any other way. But to do so is to risk losing sight of the fact that we are WHOLE. There is a human being. There is no digestive system, circulatory system. There isn’t a sex drive and an appetite. There is a human being. You were wrong, Clive Staples Lewis, when you said “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body”. What we are is a human being. What you are doing is creating all sort of religious, philosophical, and ethical problems by multiplying distinctions where they ought not to be.

Why do we do this? First of all, because it’s easy. It’s easy to decide on a macro level where the eyeball ends and the skull begins, where the small intestine ends and the large intestine begins, where the tendon ends and the bone begins. But on a molecular level, no such distinction exists. On a macro level, we know when we are being driven by emotion and when we are being driven by reason. But if we subject our inner thoughts to deep introspection, we’ll realize that trying to distinguish the two is foolish; it is a result of an inadequate understanding of our cognition. It’s a result of oversimplifying our brain processes. The Vulcan race from the Star Trek franchise is an interesting philosophical thought experiment, but it would not be possible, nor would the existence of such a race be logically tenable. You might as well try to invent a race of beings that could only conceptualize numbers but not words.

If we were really honest with ourselves, we’d realize that all our emotions are a logical result of complex inner thought and logic. All of them are explainable, they all have an origin somewhere, no matter how confusing they seem to us. If we were really honest with ourselves, we’d realize that no one reason’s logically in an objective vacuum. Reason isn’t an impartial tool that we use to arrive upon an objective answer. If it were so, then why would we disagree? On anything? The two are inextricably connected. We can’t separate it.

Then WHY? Why do our feelings and thoughts always seem to be so opposed? Why do we speak in these terms? Why do we say things like, “Listen to your heart” as if our brains were out to steer us wrong? Why did Obi-freakin’-Wan tell Luke to “trust your feelings” instead of that expensive, high-tech targeting system in his X-wing fighter? Why does it seem like our hearts desires and our brains “oughts and shouldn’ts” are always in conflict?

I don’t know. I have a few insufficient answers. It could be the result of sin fracturing a being that God regarded as “good” and “whole” and “complete” into incomplete parts that are always in conflict with one another. It could be that after three thousand years of Western, Greek-influenced philosophy, we as a culture are ingrained in our understanding of what makes an individual that it’s impossible for us to imagine it any other way.

I think it’s our burden to unseat this misconception. It’s a great distinction for non-meaningful circumstances, such as when I say, “I hate working out, but I know it’s good for me, so my reason overrides my emotions”. But when it comes to the important issues, it’s dangerous. Because what does God save? Our souls? So our bodies are meaningless? We can treat it like trash and do whatever we want to it? That’s exactly the kind of reasoning that Paul wrote 1 Corinthians to combat.

Anyway, I don’t think anyone really goes to that extreme. I think this mis-led thinking is more insidious than that. Nobody says, “Well my soul is saved, so I might as well trash my body now”. But a lot of us are led to think that perhaps reasoning is more important than feeling and that we must subject our passions to our logic. Or some of us might go the other way and think that there are some questions in which “a logical answer isn’t possible” and that you had to trust your intuition. Both beliefs are wrong-headed. The first one is held under the mistaken assumption that you can actually reason objectively without letting your personal biases factor in, biases that are intrinsic to your very being, biases that all humans have because if you don’t have it then you wouldn’t have an identity. The second one is held under the mistaken assumption that intuition precludes logic. Your feelings tell a thousand tales of your reason; just in a language that you don’t understand.

Where am I going with all this? I’m re-reading some of my notes about Kierkegaard. Part of his life’s work is to remind Christians that choosing Christ is neither emotionally nor logically tenable. It’s a choice that’s doesn’t just go against your feelings, it goes against your reason. It is ultimately an “absurd leap of faith”. You didn’t choose Christ by reason; you didn’t do it because it was the most logical decision. You didn’t choose Christ because he fulfilled all your emotional needs. Yes, maybe that was the case on the surface. But ultimately, if you truly understood your faith, you’d realize that throwing all of yourself passionately onto this man-God is a choice that is made in absurdity.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you first have to invent the universe

2009-11-10T09:18:00.000-08:00

Draper sent me this link: http://melindataub.com/god-twitters-creation/ and it reminded me of a lofty thought I had while I was taking a physics class over the summer. It is called:

How to create the universe in infinity easy steps
1) Create light.
2) Back up a second, you have to invent the concept of creation.
3) You can't back up without first explaining the concept of progress and sequence
4) But you can't have sequence without first setting in place the skeleton of sequence, which is time!
5) Okay, okay, it's clear what we need to do first is invent time.
6) Wait, what do you mean by "first"?
7) First is like, what takes place all the way on one end of the timeline; the end marked "beginning"
8) Alright, seriously, we're getting nowhere with this. If we want to invent time, let's just start by inventing numbers.
9) One....
10) Two...
11) Three...
12) Quick question, if we haven't got sequence yet, is this happening all at once?
13) Yes, and if you keep interrupting me, the universe will never be created!
14) I don't understand your statement
15) Oh right, I forgot. I haven't created the concept of causality yet. Well you see, I had in mind that the universe I created will be governed by these rules which I will call logic. What I just said is an example of a "conditional". It is a truth-function that takes on the form of an "if-then" statement. The truth of the second part (which I will call the apodosis) depends on the truth of the first part (the protasis). Anyway, my point is, the entire world will function this way. It is the language of propositions. It is what my humans will use to describe what's going on. Logic will be the backbone of language.
16) Uh... cool! Can you remind me again, what language is?
17) ...
18) And, what's truth?
19) Also, I forgot to mention, you didn't even explain what a concept is.
20) You seriously have to stop explaining things with other things that you haven't created yet.
21) Oh my God. Screw this.
22) Oh. My. WHAT!?

The Problem of Dissonance

2009-10-21T15:03:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since my last attempt to be true to the purpose of my blog. A couple of times, I've dabbled with topics that deal with reason and revelation and the doubts of my faith, but nothing I've written so far can really count as sincere wrestling; not the direct wrestling with divine issues that I had hoped to accomplish for this blog. I think my reasons for staying so shallow on this blog thus far are two parts laziness, two parts fear, and one part I honestly don't know where to start. Well I've decided to get over my laziness. I don't know what it is I truly fear about writing my thoughts. One part is, I am anxious about people knowing that I struggle with such deep-seated doubts concerning my faith. Another part is, some of the things I believe and some of the things that I claim will be considered far-fetched, theologically unsound, doctrinally dangerous, and even blasphemous, especially because I am associated with such an orthodox, reformed church. But I think I've decided that if I do have beliefs that are wrong, they won't right themselves unless I subject them to the scrutiny of others anyway. And I always hope that what I write will resonate with someone else who ponders the same issues.

Having said all that, I still haven't a clue where to start. I feel like all the questions I have are webbed into an intricate network of issues with no discernible center or focus. Therefore, I've decided to do something that I'm not good at: approach all my issues haphazardly and unsystematically and hope my readers will see all the issues together as they bleed into one another.

Today I wanted to ask a question that I formulated one year and six months ago: "Why is dissonance beautiful?" Why do pleasure and pain, joy and suffering cling onto each other so inseparably that you cannot have one without the other?

The question as it exists in my mind is really difficult for me to explain because there are so many different levels and contexts in which I can ask it; yet I believe they are all related and all ultimately the same question. I suppose I'll approach it from three different angles.

1) One of the things you learn in literature 101 is that all good stories have a conflict. How interesting would it be if you read a story that began "Once upon a time", went on with "and, encountering no problems of disturbances from their current condition, they lived happily" and then ended with "and continuing their happy living, they lived happily ever after"? That tired old way of ending fairy tales is only meaningful if there were some conflict that needed resolving.

One thing I've become more and more aware of is a plot trope that you find in a lot of action-adventure movies. Towards the last third of the film, the protagonists have come up with a plan to resolve the conflict, whatever it is. But if the rest of the movie just showed the good guys pulling off their plan without a hitch; it would leave the last part lacking. So they throw a hitch into the plan in which a final turn in the plot can take place. One example of this is the movie Armageddon. At the end, just as they finally overcome all the other problems in their plan and is ready to take off from the asteroid, they find that they can't remotely detonate the bomb, so someone has to stay behind and play the sacrificial lamb. Another example is the movie Independence Day. At the end, they finally figure out a way to overcome the alien invader's shields, but after engaging the alien spaceship for a while, they realize that they're not doing enough damage and running out of missiles, thus necessitating a sacrificial lamb to fly into the alien craft as it's about to fire and blow it up.

My point is this: conflict drives the plot of a story. Without it, it would be incomplete. What is essential in a good story, whether it's a movie, book, or even something that happened in real life, is dissonance.

2) I've always HATED classical music. Not classical music in general. I love that. Classical music as in music written during the classical period; Mozart and Haydn and Salieri and the like. The mathematical precision of each piece, the perfect harmonies and most importantly, the lack of musical dissonance. Everything was perfect fifths and major thirds; all the chord progressions were neatly cadenced, all the ornaments and variations - predictably constructed. Every time I listen to Mozart, it always gave me the same sick feeling; the feeling you get when you eat too much candy all at once. Like the stomach-ache that follows an over-indulgence of sweets, classical-period music left me with an emptiness, a yearning for something more savory.

What's my favorite genre of classical music? I've always been a huge fan of late Romantic and Impressionist. My favorite composer is Chopin. Why? Because after Beethoven, classical music evolved and a new element was added. In the music, there was bitterness, there was discord, there were chords that don't work with each other. But it wasn't chaos. It wasn't the unintelligible, chaotic dribble of Schoenberg's atonal music; music without a center. There were absolutes. There were still key signatures, time signatures based in double and triple meter; there were still cadences and structures and stories; but the stories had more moods. If classical-period music was about unicorns and butterflies and fairy tales with happy-endings; Romantic music introduced sorrow and pain and darkness and told real-life stories. Classical-period music puked rainbows and lived in a dream world of pastel colors and unending sunshine; Romantic music grasped the ugliness of life and embraced rain and hail when it came.

I know there are people who find Mozart delightful. I am not calling them shallow people. I am, however, calling Mozart's music, standalone, shallow music. It's too perfect. It's too harmonious. It's too happy. And because of that, it's incomplete. What is the depth that Mozart is lacking? Dissonance.

3) My strength is music, so I have more metaphors from music to explain what I mean by dissonance. Even in its fundamental structure, music as the relation of certain sounds with others, there is the concept of consonance and dissonance. In music theory, the fifth interval (C to G, D to A, E to B and so on), is called a "perfect fifth" because there is a mathematical perfection in the relations of their frequencies. The fifth of a note is always 3/2 its frequency in hertz. Thus if A is 440kHz, the E above it is 660kHz. If I played a fifth interval on the piano for you, even if you were completely unmusical, you would say to me, "That's nice". You might not know the right words, but you would agree if I told you that it was "harmonious". But if I played for you two notes that were a half-step away from each other, you would say to me, "That's ugly" or "That sounds bad". If you heard it inadvertently, you might think that someone just accidentally sat on the keyboard.

My point is, even in the fundamental building blocks of music, in the theory and the math and physics that constitute its very structure, there is ingrained the idea of consonance and dissonance*. YET, dissonance is necessary! If we didn't have dissonance, we wouldn't have music. We would have harmonious chords; we'd have various nice sounds that can be created by instruments, but we wouldn't have music.

In a grander manner, if we didn't have dissonant chord progressions and conflicts in the plot of a musical piece, we would have nice-sounding music, but we wouldn't have beautiful music.

Dissonance is needed for beauty. Pain is needed for pleasure. Conflict is needed for resolution. But WHY?

You might be thinking, "Well this is not a big deal; all you've said so far is that in order to appreciate goodness, you need badness. In order for cadences to mean anything, you need a progression. In order for 'happily ever after' to mean anything, you need a problem" What's the big deal? It just means you need to hear some bad news first. It just means you need to hear some dissonant sounds in your musical piece. What's so bad about that?

But don't you see? In the grand picture, bad news isn't simply bad sounds. It's death, and pain and suffering! It's warfare and murder. It's selfishness and greed. It's theft, it's pride. It's envy and sorrow. It's the loss of one's children, the loss of one's parents. Dissonance in life is being born in a nation that's not the USA and being condemned to a life of hunger and extreme poverty. Dissonance in life is being born blind or being born without the ability to use your legs. Dissonance is unrequited love. Dissonance is splinters and canker sores. Dissonance is death. Dissonance is the knowledge that if you do everything right in life, you'll end up in the same cemetery as the guy who did everything wrong in life.

In one sense, this is no real revelation to the astute liver of life. We all know that life is pleasure and life is pain. "You take the good, you take the bad, you take 'em both and there you have: the facts of life". How do you measure a year? "In inches, in miles, in laughter and strife". To enjoy the sun is the run the risk of getting sunburn. To each a watermelon is to pick out the seeds. To eat steak is to kill a cow. To ask a girl out is to run the risk of being rejected. You can't separate out the pains of life. To do so would be to make it less beautiful, or less colorful. Read "The Giver", watch "Pleasantville", and they illustrate this idea better than I can ever do.

Yet, WHY? Why is it this way? Why is pain inextricable in life? Why is a life without pain bland and shallow and undesirable?

I have some answers. I have unsatisfying answers. They relate to our God. I'll bring the issue back to theodicy in my next post.

Absolutes

2009-10-13T13:48:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking about absolutes a lot. The current album I'm obsessed with is "Absolutes" by Barcelona. I've been thinking about the need for absolutes as a defining part of my psycho-social constitution; as THE defining part of my formation that makes me what I am: A conservative, reformed-evangelical, Bible-believing, Chicago statement of inerrancy-signing Christian. But since I haven't worked out anything specific in that area, I'll just share one of my earlier thoughts regarding absolutes.

"Only a Sith deals in absolutes. I will do what I must" : Obi-Wan Kenobi, in Star Wars Episode III, referring to the evil Anakin Skywalker.

"Deals in absolutes --> Sith Lord" : Obi-Wan Kenobi, as rendered by the rules of Western formal logic.

"All who deals in absolutes are Sith Lords" : Obi-Wan Kenobi, as rendered by the rules of Aristotelian formal logic.

"All A are B" : One of the templates of a universal statement, or "absolute" statement.

I should probably add that, Obi-Wan was responding to Anakin's own statement, "If you're not with me, then you're against me", which is the same exact proposition form. But I think Russell's paradox has something to say about this bind.

I should also add that I haven't been completely true to the original purpose of this blog's creation. I haven't even come close to talking about the issues that intrigue me the most: the issues of reason, revelation, theodicy, and why I am a self-hating reformed evangelical Christian. Everything else that I write about are meaningful to me at an arm's length. But those issues frighten me; the ones that I really want to write about. They are so deeply ingrained into my own constitution as an individual that I afraid that if I begin talking about it, I will reveal too much. But soon. I'm almost ready.

Intolerable Tolerance

2009-10-07T18:30:00.000-07:00

A repost of an excerpt from Chuck's blog.

"It is an interesting observation on today's religious climate that many people now get every bit as steamed up about insisting that 'all religions are just the same' as older dogmaticians did about insisting on particular formulations and interpretations. The dogma that all dogmas are wrong, the monolithic insistence that all monolithic systems are to be rejected, has taken hold of the popular imagination at a level far beyond rational or logical discourse. The 'remote god' view encourages it: if god is, or the gods are, far away and largely unknowable, all human religions must be vague approximations, different paths up the same mountain (and all paths get lost in the mist quite soon anyway). Equally, the pantheism that sees 'god' as the divine or sacred aspect within the present world leads ultimately in the same direction: if all religions are responding the to 'the sacred' in this sense, they are simply different languages expressing the same concept.

Few who embrace one or the other of these beliefs (or in some cases, it seems, both) stop to consider how remarkably arrogant and imperialistic these rejections of the supposedly arrogant and imperialistic religions actually are. They are saying with all the authority of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment behind them that they have discovered the hidden truth that all the great religions (especially Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) had missed: all religions are 'really' variations on the Enlightenment's idea of 'religion.' Well, of course: if you start with that idea, it would look like that, would it not?

But why should we believe the Enlightenment's arrogant claim any more than anyone else's? Some Christians, thinking to be generous-spirited toward those who embrace different faiths, have spoken of such people as 'anonymous Christians'; this is now generally accepted as hopelessly arrogant. Why should a Buddhist want to be an 'anonymous Christian?' But by that same token it is just as arrogant, if not more so, to claim that the adherents of all religions are really 'anonymous Enlightenment religious persons.'

We cannot, obviously, settle this huge debate here..."

-N.T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus, pages 100-101

Habits of Learning

2009-10-03T19:30:00.001-07:00

I am fully convinced that there are people out there who can learn more about the world by going out and mowing the lawn than other people do after four years of college and four years of grad school. Perhaps the fresh, earthly smell of cut grass will cause this person to ponder the beauty of the natural world. Upon reflecting on nature, he'll be reminded of Psalm 19 and be led to ruminate on the theology of general revelation. One doctrine will remind him of another doctrine and before he stows his lawnmower away in his garage, he will have discovered new truths about the world around him and the God that created it. That's one way I imagine a person can go about doing household chores.

Last week, I wrote about habits of reading and how poorly we Christians read our Bible. The truth is, there was nothing particularly spiritual in my criticism. I honestly think we as a culture are just horrendously inadequate when it comes to basic intellectual skills. Today, when I went to the PaLM-sponsored Worship Conference held in Queens with some of my praise team members, I was thinking about the skill of learning. I have to admit, after the initial worship session and the keynote message, I was thoroughly unimpressed. Although the rest of the conference, especially the workshops, was really good and I ended up being blessed greatly, I was worried because I really had to pull the teeth of my worship team members to shell out $65 and attend the conference. I was anxious that they'd think this day was going to be a waste of time and money and blame me for that.

So I decided to pull them aside right before the workshop session and remind them, "Remember, if you're really serious about learning, it's not about what they spoon-feed you, but what you decide to take from the plate and put into your mouth". The truth is, as bad as a conference can be (and that conference was EXCELLENT), you can always learn a lot by keeping your eyes and ears open and assessing every experience with a critical mind. "Why was I put off by what this person said?" "How can I verify that what this person said was true?" "What does Scripture have to say about this subject?" "As horribly as that person put it, what can I take away from his lesson?"

Even if it's something you've heard time and time again, you can still re-think those lessons and perhaps unravel some more of the big picture, or unearth some more of the epistemological foundation upon which your presumptions are built. What I mean is, even if it's something you've heard a lot, you can still ask yourself questions like, "Well where did I hear that the first time, and is it a valid idea?" "How did I as well as this presenter arrive upon the same conclusion?" "How might our agreement on this idea yet diverge into disagreement about this other, related idea?"

Why are these habits of asking good questions and being observant important? First of all, because I'm sick and tired of people complaining about how bored they are... in class (ahem, high schoolers), at Christian conferences (ahem, clergy and full-time ministers), or at church during a preacher's sermon (ahem, Boon Church English congregation!). And second, because critical learning not only allows you to take the most away from any situation, it also helps you to identify and reject harmful, wrong lessons! Think about it this way. If you are tied down to a chair and spoon-fed food, you are still being fed and nourished. But you won't be able to do much to defend yourself if someone comes along and scoops a big dollop of rat poison into your mouth. Whereas if you're someone who carefully examines everything you eat and make sure you choose only the finest quality cuisine, you will become a very healthy person.

The same can be said about our lives. Note I didn't say our "spiritual lives". This is a principle that goes beyond what we do concerning our faith; it's a principle that distinguishes intellectually fit men and women from intellectual fatties and slobs.

When I look down at my notes from today's conference, a little under half of it have to do with the subject, "Worship". The rest of my notes are just little things that I jot down as one thing a person said reminded me of something unrelated, or perhaps a reminder for me to think through something that I haven't really thought through. No one says you have to learn exactly what the speaker is teaching you. If he's a good enough speaker, he'll make you do it anyway. But if he's not, it's YOUR responsibility to get the most out of it.

Reflections From A Kingdom-Warrior

2009-09-22T23:13:00.001-07:00

Last night, Pastor Scott, some members of the Boon Church servants team, and I had the wonderful opportunity of having dinner with Reverend Wayland Wong at Pastor Don’s house. A seasoned minister, Wayland is one of the most respected Chinese-American pastors in the country. Based out of Orange County, CA, he has been working with Chinese churches and is incredibly knowledgeable in the area of Chinese ministry and the unique cultural challenges with running a one in America. He has more decades of ministry experience than I have years (even including my years in HS as a youth leader).

I was really excited to meet him and drill him with questions because Chinese-American ministry happens to be my passion. I had been reading articles from a newsletter called FACE (Fellowship of American Chinese Evangelicals) that he started in the 70s. In addition, I had spent the last summer interning with ISAAC (Institute for the Study of Asian American Christianity) and was all ready to pick his brain about all the challenges and strategies of running a Chinese church. I had pictured him as someone very strategically-minded, a visionary, an outside-the-box thinker. I imagined he was sly, clever, perhaps even a little devious. I couldn’t imagine a person with any other kind of personality who would survive that long in his chosen field. As someone with so much experience, I was all ready for him to lay down some secrets, some dirty moves, some trick plays in order to get ahead of all the church bureaucracy. I was really expecting him to say things like “This is how you get a Chinese board of deacons on your side” or “When you start a ministry you know that they won’t like, make sure you do this and this”.

It turns out my expectations were way off. Instead of church-building strategy, he spent most of the night preaching to us, imploring us to have unity and love in Christ. He warned us multiple times about the dangers of “doing church” and missing the point of all of that church-building. He reminded us that ultimately we are called to build God’s kingdom, and not fight the Chinese board for more rights. He reminded us that no matter what circumstances we’re placed in, whether the English Congregation has its own budget or not, whether our voice is heard in church governing or not, we have the command from Christ to make disciples and to strengthen one another in Christ through the Word.

I was surprised, but when I got home, I began to understand it all. After a lifetime of serving the church, Reverend Wayland Wong had learned this precious piece of wisdom, and that is to bear in mind always what our ultimate purpose of doing church is. It is to glorify God and to see him magnified in the eyes of as many people as possibly in the world. He had probably seen time after time how easy it is for church leaders to lose sight of this and disintegrate into bickering, gossiping, slander, and church-splitting. He had probably felt the passion in each of our hearts in PD’s house that night, and recognized that same danger within us, and that was why he chose to spend most of the night reminding us of the true purpose of church.

He gently encouraged us to seek change and revival not in grand church changes, not in a parallel church-leadership (that is to say, a Chinese board AND an English board), not in new programs or events, not in coffeehouses or praise nights or revivals, but in individuals. He reminded us that revival starts with individuals gripped with a powerful desire to return to God, and those individuals seeking out other individuals to teach, admonish, encourage, rebuke, pray with, and search Scripture with. And those individuals forming groups, and those groups coming together to be the body of Christ. As he spoke, my eyes were opened to how much more I could be doing RIGHT NOW, with the circumstances that God has placed me in.

I am so young. Within me there is still so much fight, so much fire, so much youthful passion. Yet another thing Reverend Wayland said was how important it was to choose your battles, and not just that but know who you’re battling. The enemy is not other people. It’s not another congregation or another church or another church leader. It is Satan, who’s work is to divide God’s people and destroy the work of the gospel. If we don’t keep that in mind, we’ll be lost within our own selfish desires and deceptively personal causes and the work of the kingdom will not be done.

I want to challenge you, Christian. What’s important in your life? What battles have you fought and are they the one’s that will win ground for Christ’s kingdom? If you’ve lived your life safely, always seeking stability, keeping your head down and trying not to offend anyone, then where is your passion, your urgency to see the gospel go out? Do you have that fire in your belly, that devotion in your will? Tonight, I was reminded of what ought to be the most important thing in my life. I hope reading this gives you an opportunity to reflect on what that is for you.

Habits Of Reading

2009-09-21T13:18:00.000-07:00

Last week, my brother Andrew shared that he has been trying to read through the gospels and is having a hard time focusing. While I don't doubt for many of us, a big reason we have difficulty reading the Bible consistently is a mixture of heart and discipline issues, I think for people who have been Christians for a long time, reading the gospels pose a different problem.

I've gone to church since the second grade, and between that time and now I've probably heard, read, or encountered in some way every story in every gospel at least a dozen times. I suspect this is true of many people reading this note. So when we decide to read Matthew or Mark or Luke again, we get bored. What am I supposed to get out of this? I know these stories backwards and forwards!

The truth is, familiarity breeds negligence. As soon as our eyes graze the heading, "The Calling of the First Disciples", "Jesus Calms a Storm", "The Parable of the Lost Son", we recall all we know about the story and then just read through it on auto-pilot. So we zoom through it, not carefully taking time to note the details and to savor each sentence or word. Because we've read it so many times, we think there's nothing left for us to learn from Scripture!

Well, right now as I prepare a sermon series on Mark, I realize that we are all SO WRONG! Our familiar style of reading the gospels (or really anything in the Bible we think we know well) is just POOR READING. It's a careless, haphazard, missing-many-details habit that we have to change or else risk never growing and never encountering the Bible in a deeper manner.

The truth is, right now I'm only beginning to learn to develop right habits of reading and asking the right questions. "Why did the author put this story in between these two stories?" "How come the author included this detail about Jesus?" "Why does Jesus take only these disciples with him?" It's really a discipline of productive reading that is applicable to any literature, not just the Bible. And, to risk being unscientific, I would even claim that part of the reason why we don't have good habits of reading is because of our TV and internet culture, where the goal of new products and applications is to make things as accessible as possible (hence, as brainless as possible).

If God is really the God about which Paul extols, "Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge!", and Scripture is his Words, then how can we possibly ever declare (even in our subconscious) "I've learned all I can from this passage". It is intellectually prideful and downright wrong. What we need to do is learn how to humbly approach the Word of God and have our spiritual ears opened. "He who has ears to hear, let him hear". How do we do that? We must prayerfully approach our Bible reading. We must avoid being in a rush, or treating it like an item on your to-do list that you are seeking to check off. We must avoid approaching the text too academically, like a reading for a class that you must work through. But at the same time, we have to approach it with right techniques to understand the meaning in the text.

Ultimately to do this, it's about time, persistence, and humble, prayerful, willingness. It requires that you do acknowledge that the Bible is the inspired Word of God and that it was written for you. It requires that you acknowledge that it is first and foremost, His Word, and that you must let it speak to you instead of you probing around for your own answers.

Try this exercise. The next time you go over a gospel, instead of just reading through it blindly, pay particular attention to one aspect of the stories. Pay attention to the different factions of people (the Pharisees, the disciples, the evil demons, the crowds) and how they view Jesus as the story progresses. Try to get your head around this complex interplay of recognition and confession from each of the groups. Have you ever paid attention to that before? What does that teach us about our hearts and how different people recognize Jesus differently?

If you develop right habits of reading, every time you read the Bible, you will learn something new. It's a practice, one of eternal spiritual value, and one that doesn't come naturally but must be worked at.

The God of Aristotle, Hume, and Christianity

2009-09-18T12:37:00.000-07:00

Greek mythology used to be called Greek religion. We forget oftentimes, but the characters of lore that we love so much, mighty Zeus, evil Hera, regal Apollo, beautiful Aphrodite, at one point they were gods. These gods were anthropomorphic, which means that they were modeled after humans. They ate and drank heavenly nectar, they slept, they fought each other, they bled when they were cut, they felt fear and jealousy, they exercised deceit. In short, they did all things humans did. And yet the humans, the real humans venerated them, prayed to them for prosperity, and offered sacrifices to them in fear.

The Greek gods were not all-powerful. They were not all-knowing. They were certainly not ever-present. They did not create the world. They all had weaknesses, they all suffered just like the people who invented their image. They lied to each other, kept secrets from each other, forgot things about the world and themselves. They left Mt. Olympus to visit earth. They utilized the absence of one god in order to set a trap for that god. In short, aside from a few supernatural powers, these Greek gods were human.

And then there came a point in Greek history when the people became skeptical of their deities. They started noticing that the correlation between rich sacrifices and abundance in crops was of little statistical significance. They started realizing that their prayers went unheard, that no one they knew had ever actually seen one of these gods in person (of course, there were reasons for that. “A friend of a friend of a friend once told me that they saw the goddess Artemis in the woods, but he can’t really tell you because he got turned into a deer), and that those “Oracles” at Delphi were often wrong (my brother Andrew says to watch the end of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuJY27kfqIc).

Also around this time, a man named Socrates wandered the streets of Athens, questioning everything from Greek religion to the nature of knowledge. His student, Plato publishes an alleged dialogue of him questioning the moral character of the Greek gods (Euthyphro), and his grand-student, Aristotle, develops the ground-breaking concept of the “unmoved mover”, which forever changed Western thought.

The “unmoved mover” is a speculation necessitated by Aristotle’s metaphysical structure. Briefly explained, one of the varieties of arguments (the cosmological argument) goes as such:

Every finite being has a cause
Nothing finite can cause itself
There cannot be an infinite regress of causes

Therefore, “There must have been an uncaused causer that began everything else in the universe”

Whether we use ‘move’ or ‘cause’ is insignificant. What is significant is that there arose in the foundations of Western thought hints and a foreshadowing of a different kind of god. This god isn’t human and finite. It was all-powerful and responsible for the creation of the universe. If the original Greek gods arose out of a cosmic loneliness felt by humankind, this new god arose out of a reasoned, philosophical necessity. There needs to be something that explains why there isn’t just nothing. And therefore, a god must exist. If the original Greek gods were born out of deep, reflective wonderment of the stars above, this new god was constructed out of pen and paper, in the study-room of philosophical writers.

The founding fathers of Modernism picked up on these ideas and elaborated on them. They were concerned with rationally proving that God exists. “These are truths which we can agree upon. I will demonstrate that out of these truths arises the existence of God as a necessary conclusion.” Out of these were born the traditional arguments for God* (cosmological, ontological, teleological, etc).

Sounds all well and good, right? The problem is that, instead of reviving religion in their time, which is one of the aims of at least a few of these philosophers, what it did was create a god that was cold and absent, and very much NOT the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The god that they imagined was simply some being who got the whole world started and then sat back and relaxed. It wasn’t a god involved in the affairs of everyday humanity. If all the philosophers needed for their arguments to work is someone to wind the toy up and let it run, then that was all they got. Why not have a God that was sustaining the universe every second with his mighty hand? Because we don’t need one! We have science, causality, and the principles of natural law to explain that!

These two conceptions of god/gods dominated Western philosophy from its inception and to some extent, even now. You had to choose between either a god that was human, all too human, or a god that was absent, all too absent.

What of the God of Christianity?

Somewhere in between Aristotle and David Hume, a man was born in a small town in the backwater region of Europe. A few hundred miles East of Athens, a baby sleeps in a trough. The baby grows up to be a boy indistinguishable from any other human on the planet. runs around and plays with the other kids in his town. He loses his temper, skins his knee when he stumbles, and cries when he bleeds. He eats and drinks, he defecates. He blows his nose, he sneezes and occasionally feels under the weather.

When this young man turned thirty, he does something that was surprisingly popular back then in that region of the world. He claims he is the Messiah of Jewish prophecy. But he goes one step further and explains that he will not just save the Jews, but all of mankind.

A few months into his ministry, he acquires for himself twelve disciples. He continues to preach about the kingdom of God. One late evening, after a long day of preaching and performing miraculous wonders this man finishes gets on a boat with his disciples to cross the Sea of Galilee. A furious squall comes up and threatens to overturn the tiny boat and everyone in it. The disciples stumble their way to the back of the boat, where their leader was sleeping soundly. Rousing him awake, they cry in terror, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”

Shaking off a yawn, and casually taking a moment to stretch, he gets up and speaks to the storm, “Quiet! Be still!” Immediately, the wind dies down sheepishly and the waves disappear, leaving the lake completely calm.

In the original text of this story, Mark 4.41, it says that the disciples “were terrified and asked each other, ‘who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!” It is at this moment in which the God of Christianity and his true nature is revealed. It is a revelation more powerful and more telling than countless hours of reflecting upon the wonders of the skies or frantic writing in one’s study. It is at the moment when the disciples realize exactly who Jesus is. Jesus is the God of heaven and earth. He is the creator of the universe. He is the ruler of every drop of water, every slight breeze, and every inch of metaphysical reality.

And yet was this not the same man who was napping in the bow not a minute before? Was this not the same man who preached earlier today with a nasally voice because he was battling a cold? Was this not the same man… who was a man?

This is who our God is. He is the unmoved mover; the Bible says he is the originator of the world. By exercising his infinite power and authority, he speaks a beautiful world into creation. And yet, he was a human! The Bible also says that he came down, was found in appearance as a man, humbled himself to death, even death on a cross! Our God is not just a manifestation of a human being like the Greek gods. He is wholly good, wholly perfect, and wholly competent. Our God is not impersonal, unconcerned, an absentee Father. He is wholly involved in the workings of his creation and the affairs of his dearly chosen people.

This is the God we worship.

*Necessary footnote: To be fair, the Enlightenment thinkers, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and so forth didn’t create these. They had their origin in Aquinas and scholastic philosophy. But they did make them into the monster that I described.

British Pop and Danish Philosophy

2009-09-16T16:59:00.000-07:00

feel the rain on your skin

no one else can feel it for you

no one else, no one else can

speak the words on your lips

drench yourself with words unspoken

live your life with arms wide open

today is, today is where your book begins

the rest is still unwritten

People who are familiar with my random, short-lived obsessions for certain artists or songs might recall that around the time that I discovered the name of the song in that Pantene Pro-V commercial a while back, I developed an infatuation with Natasha Bedingfield. I've since cooled down a little, but another reason why I loved her hit single "Unwritten" was because the lyrics were philosophically enticing. There's a surface similarity between the free-spirit, "carpe diem" lifestyle that the song espouses and one of the foundational tenets of Existentialist philosophy.

Existentialism is a branch of thinking that arose in the mid-19th century as a reaction against Modernism, the Spirit of the Age. Existentialism says that one of the basic facts of life is that it cannot be understood or described in the general, abstract manner; it must be experienced concretely. This is a turn away from tradional approaches in philosophy, whose focus was on offering grand explanations of the universe as viewed from an outside perspective. Existentialism's ultimate subject matter is the existing, concrete, living, individual. It seeks to examine the facts of life from an insider's perspective; asking the traditional philosophical questions, but with a more subjective bent.

Existentialists believe that concrete existence cannot be explained in an objective, scientific, facts-based manner. Thus you must "feel the rain on your skin" because "no one else can feel it for you". In light of this, the individual and his decisions becomes of infinite importance. It doesn't matter what you should do, it's what you end up choosing to do that affects your life. In the absence of meaning and prescription, we end up creating ourselves each day one decision at a time. "Today is where your book begins, the rest is still unwritten".

As we reflect into meaning of our own lives, "staring at the blank page before us", we can have different approaches and attitudes. The great Christian thinker, "Soren Kierkegaard", the first emo kid, and who Pyper calls the "favourite philosopher of anguished teenagers" developed the idea of "angst", or a sense of dread, insecurity, or even despair in the face of one's freedom to make one's own decisions. For Kierkegaard, the dread was a distinctly religious one, for our decision to choose Christ invites the possibility that we are wrong. To quote my favorite professor, David Aiken, "To sit at Christ's table is to run the risk that you are Judas".

There's also the absurd indifference of Albert Camus, as espoused in "The Stranger". In a "universe divested of illusions and lights", self-reflection becomes as pointless as existence in general, and thus in the end whether you make one decision or another doesn't matter.

Side comment concerning last weekend's VMS debacle: I find it fascinating that Taylor Swift's song "You Belong With Me" and Beyonce's "Single Ladies" were in the running for the same award. I can think of so many different ways in which these two music videos wouldn't even be in the same category. A few that come to mind are, "genre", "songs that don't blatantly exploit sex appeal", "songs that involve more than just three girls dancing in black and white", "songs in which the lead singer isn't wearing an asymmetrical outfit". Feel free to add some more.

Heavier Things

2009-09-12T13:20:00.000-07:00

Today I completed a bike tour from Bear Mountain, NY to 103rd St. Manhattan. Forty miles of pedaling in silence offered me lots of time to reflect deeply. Here are a few of my thoughts:

There are some people whose greatest fear imaginable is to try their hardest at something and still fail. So they don't try. And there are some people who relish the opportunity to meet their limits and create new ones. They aren't satisfied with not failing; they must hit the wall and then push the wall farther back.

Which kind of person am I? After five and a half hours of biking I still don't really know. I just know there are uncomfortable hints in my life that point more towards one than the other. For one thing, my greatest fear isn't that I try my hardest and still fail; it's that I didn't try my hardest and that's why I fail. There was never a defeat in my life that I didn't attribute to my laziness or apathy or lack of discipline. Everywhere I am, intellectually, spiritually, musically, physically, I can be farther if not for my lack of effort.

I deeply fear that my greatest shortcoming is that I don't try.

What motivates me? The way a bike tour works is, if it's popular enough, loads of people sign up who aren't in the physical shape to actually complete it. So after everyone has taken off from the starting line, a few trucks lag behind in the back of the pack to pick up those who have thrown in the towel (or who've stopped for other reasons, like irreparable road damage or some other emergency). When I ride, I'm constantly pushing forward, trying to pass people and not letting them pass me. But what I realized today is that I wasn't doing it because I wanted to be first. I was doing it because I didn't want to be last. I was petrified that I would get left behind and have to ride that damn truck back to the festival and eat the free lunch that is supposed to be for the winners. There's a difference between someone who pushes forward because he's chasing something and someone who's doing it because he's being chased. What is that difference?

That's it for now. Oh, and biking in midtown sucks. Almost got T-boned by at least a dozen yellow taxis. Use your freakin' turn signal!

Proverbs wisdom, money, and righteous living

2009-09-08T09:44:00.000-07:00

I'm taking my blog in a new direction and pledging regular updates. From now on, instead of ambitiously large posts that no one cares about, I will use this space for short little theological, philosophical, or homiletic reflections. They'll be easier to read and less time consuming to prepare.

Proverbs 10.16
"The wages of the righteous bring them life,
but the income of the wicked brings them punishment."

Pastor Don preached on Pr. 10 this past Sunday. In light of this chapter, I've been wrestling a lot with coming to terms with the American economy and Capitalism. The American economy (very broadly speaking) is run on the assumption that if you are rich, it's because you worked hard for your money and if you are poor, it's because you didn't try enough and you deserved your poverty. In short, "everyone gets a fair chance". But today no one can look at the folly of our economic system and turn a blind eye to the people that fall through the cracks. Everyone knows someone who's hard-working and disciplined and smart but simply can't pull himself out of his circumstances.

"bill, i believe this is killing me"
as a smile ran away from his face
"well i'm sure that i could be a movie star
if I could get out of this place."

Likewise we are all too familiar with the rich boys riding of the coattails of their father's wealth; we've all heard stories of Asian parents who sacrificed so much to bring their kids to the U.S. and give them a better chance, a better education, and those kids who didn't understand how much their opportunities cost their parents.

But then there's Pr 10.4 "Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth." How do we understand money and finances in light of Proverbs wisdom? I think ultimately the Bible doesn't make any value judgments of any man-made economic system. Pr 10.16 acknowledges no correlation between righteousness and wealth or wickedness and poverty. All it says is, if you faithfully obey God, your money will bring you life. Likewise, no amount of gold or dollar bills will save the wicked from the ultimate wrath of God. Underlying all of the verses that we looked at on Sunday is the idea that righteous living far out-values monetary wealth. The bottom line is, regardless of wealth or poverty, the goal is to please God with whatever we have.

"Ill-gotten treasures are of no value,
but righteousness delivers from death" Pr 10.2

Theodicy Part 1: Individualistic Variations On An Athiestic Theme

2009-07-08T20:11:00.000-07:00

It's been a while.

Today I'd like to kick off a four-part series on my reflections on Theodicy. I'd like to start with a short story I thought of earlier this morning in the shower. The finale will be an explanation of why I think God is first and foremost, before everything else he is, a story-teller.

Once upon a time there was a man named Sarkar. Sarkar's life sucked. His wife died. His kids hate him. His dog accidentally got into some chocolate and died. He lost his job and his house fell over right after he made his last payment. But that's okay because his whole family's dead anyway. One day he was trying to cross the street when a truck hit him. Due to internal injuries, they had to remove his left leg and 2/3rds of his liver, which doubly sucked because by this time he had turned to alcoholism as a solution to his problems.

(Did I mention he was a Mets fan?)

Finally, Sarkar got fed up with his life and decided to do what all people do when they hit rock-bottom. Find someone to blame. He had heard of a far-away guru who lived in a cave somewhere on the top of a mountain. He sold his SUV (which was remarkably unharmed by his owner's bad fortune) scrounged up every last bit of money that he had, and got on a plane to the country to which the mountain on which the guru sat belonged. Let's say Nepal. He hired two sherpas and a llama. Llamas climb mountains, right? Well at any rate, he makes his way up to the top of the mountain, found the guru there, and asked him this question: "Why does my life suck?" The following conversation ensued:

Guru: You are being punished.
Sarkar: But why am I being punished? What did I do wrong?"
Guru: Well... it's not so much what YOU did, perse...
Sarkar: What do you mean it's not what I did? Then who did it? And why am I being punished for their wrongs?
Guru: It was your father's grandfather. He pissed off God by worshiping other idols, and so now you're reaping the consequences of his sin.
Sarkar: Whoa, hang on a second. You're saying God is doing this to me? God is the one responsible for my f----- up life?? So it's not what I've done, but he's the one doing this to me?
Guru: In a way, yes. But not for no good reason. I mean, he's totally gotta defend his honor. Now your great grandfather was a heinous-
Sarkar: Wait, what do you mean "defend his honor?" He's gotta defend his honor by punishing ME for what my GREAT GRANDFATHER DID?
Guru: Yeah, basically. So you're familiar with all that "God is perfectly just" stuff, right? Well if someone sins, God justice is so great that it demands-
Sarkar: Alright, alright, alright. Hold on a minute!
Guru: Okay, here goes...
Sarkar: Let me just see if I got this whole story straight. So once time there was this guy, whom I've NEVER EVEN MET. He just so happens to be my dad's dad's dad. And he worships some other god. And since he worshiped some other god, my life is in the pits. My life ONE HUNDRED YEARS LATER. Never mind the fact that I've never worshiped ANY god in my life. I've never intentionally pissed anyone off, human or deity. Forget that I've always tried to live my life fairly, or as you would say, justly. None of that matters, because well I have to pay for the sins of my forefathers. And so my wife died. My dog died. My liver died. My kids never want to talk to me again. All that suffering, that's not unfair at all. It was fair payment for the idolatry of a man who lived a century ago, whom I've never met. Do I have the gist of it?
Guru: Well, yes...if you want to put it that way....
Sarkar: What. The. Fu-
Guru: But hold on! If it makes you feel any better, you're the fourth and last generation, so your kids get a fresh start!

Quite ironically, Sarkar found that though he finally found someone to blame for his problems, the relief of that burden didn't alleviate his suffering one bit. At that point, Sarkar got so fed up with the ludicrousness of the guru's wisdom and, silently fuming, made his descent of the mountain. The sherpas tried to rob him, but he spent his last cent on that plane ticket to Nepal, so they had to settle for ditching him halfway down. He hung on as long as he could, but with one leg and 1/3 of a liver, didn't last very long against the cold. He died.

The end.

Next week: "Our Enlightenment Inheritance"

Not "because of", but "in spite of"

2009-06-10T10:47:00.000-07:00

But God demonstrated his own love for us in this: while we were sinners, Christ died for us. -Rom 5.8

Four out of the last seven times I've prayed publicly (that is, with other people), I somehow found myself saying this or something similar to this line:

"...and we thank you that you love us because-"

And then I'll awkwardly stumble around with my words before getting back into stride. I can't believe I've never thought about this, but there's really no easy way to answer that question. asking "why does God love us?" gets at the heart of unconditional love. There's no reason or rhyme to it. It's absurd. The only explanation I can think of is Ephesians 1.11-12

"In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory."

So ultimately God's love for us as shown in the cross is for the ultimate end of his glory. All the same, that doesn't really help me grasp the ludicrous extravagance of his mercy, that we who were once at war with God would be bought back into his camp at the price of his only-begotten son. This is a thought too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. But it is in the heart of the gospel.

O Lord, I am astonished at the difference
between my receivings and my deservings,
between the state I am now in and my past gracelessness,
between the heaven I am bound for and the hell I merit.
Who made me to differ, but thee?
for I was no more ready to receive Christ than were others;
I could not have begun to love thee hadst thou not first loved me,
or been willing unless thou hadst first made me so.
O that such a crown should fit the head of such a sinner!
_ such high advancement be for an unfruitful person!
_ such joys for so vile a rebel!

Infinite wisdom cast the design of salvation into them mold of purchase and freedom;
Let wrath deserved be written on the door of hell
But the free gift of grace on the gate of heaven.

Let thy love draw me nearer to thyself,
wean me from sin, mortify me to this world, and make me ready for my departure hence.

-Adapted from Valley of Vision, by Arthur Bennett

The gift of dying alone

2009-06-08T08:38:00.001-07:00

I don't read many Christian dating books; I've read through Joshua Harris and dabbled with Dobson, but most of my knowledge of romance has been gained from life's most brutal teacher. That and mentor's. But I've always found it odd when Christians I trust, MARRIED Christians I trust, ask me if I have God's "gift of singleness".

Anyone else find it weird that what would have been an aberration in idyllic, prelapsarian existence is now considered... a gift? In Eden, if you were single, you were lonely, and you weren't single for long. Why is it that now we're on the other side of the cherubim, the ONLY THING in Genesis 1-2 that wasn't considered good by God...is now a gift?

And then those well-meaning, but married men and women will say, "You don't understand what it's like to be married. Sure it's wonderful (they whisper that part shamefully), but there are so many things that you can't do once you have to take care of someone else. You're so free when you're single! Being single offers you so many advantages to do ministry!" That may be true, Mr. and Mrs., but isn't desiring singleness for its advantages kind of like desiring physical disability "for the perks"? You always get a nice spot in any parking lot! You can sit all the time!

Am I wrong in thinking this? I just don't want people to call it a gift. You don't have to call it by what I think it is, an aberration rooted in the Fall. But if you choose to be single to serve God, just say "I want to be single". And if you want to comment on how it's been years since my last girlfriend, please do that. But calling singleness a gift is like walking up to a guy standing by himself at a tennis court and telling him how jealous you are that he doesn't have to share the court with anyone.

On Death And Dying

2009-06-05T06:06:00.000-07:00

it's a bittersweet symphony, this life. you get a diploma, you try to get married, you die.

I’ve been thinking about death a lot recently. The thoughts creep up on me and catch me unawares, when I'm eating alone, doing my devotions, playing Madden NFL. Once or twice they emerge in the middle of a dream and balloon into an anxiety great enough to rouse me from slumber. But, most of the time, I’d say they catch me right before I lay down to rest and right after I rise to wake. They don't command my attention for too long; just long enough to remind me that I still need to deal with it.

I think this all started after my dog Lucky died just over a month ago. I forced myself not to grieve because I was still away at school and finals was just about to begin. When I got back, I never really did give myself enough time to think about it and get over it. So perhaps now these thoughts and emotions are finally leaking through the barriers I erected to protect my conscious awareness. Perhaps as catharsis, I need a good cry. But since I don’t really know how to just sit down and command that function to occur within me, I’ll write up some of my thoughts about death and dying.

Life is unbearable without friends and family, but death is even worse so. Because who then will plan your funeral? Who then will speak at it and remind those who are alive of the flightiness of life? Who will come and be reminded?

Flowers: I can't think of a better way to portray the absurdity of life (except perhaps the myth of Sisyphus, but that's a different kind of absurdity). An object that was created to be beautiful for an insignificant moment in time, and then succumb to the ugliest fate for anything on this side of metaphysical reality. The last time I was at a funeral, I remember looking around the room and noticing that there were dozens of flowers everywhere; probably more than a hundred total. First of all, that must have been expensive as hell. And all for what? So we can enjoy them for the hour-long service, that isn't even about the flowers? And then they get thrown out. What a waste. Then I thought, no, that's not a waste. Not compared to a human life lived like a flower. You accomplish glorious, yet fleeting beauty, and then it's all over, and you bring none of that with you. Now that's a waste.

Only with death does life matter. Otherwise, we'd have an infinite amount of time to correct our mistakes. But precisely because existence is just a Being-towards-death, just a delaying of the inevitable, just a waiting for that last grain of sand to cross the threshold into the bottom of that hourglass, precisely because of all these things does life matter. Not only so, but life matters infinitely. Or, rather, eternally.
"God hath given to man a short time here upon earth, and yet upon this short time eternity depends.” - Jeremy Taylor

The way I feel right now is precisely why Aquinas must be wrong in his theodicy.

I don’t want to think about it anymore; I can’t. It’s agonizing. The weight of it presses in around me from all sides, like being twenty thousand leagues under the sea. But we must think about it. Like the Israelites at Sinai, we must drink every bitter drop; we must taste the consequences of our sin. Only then will redemption taste as sweet as it is.

But we can’t steel ourselves from the experience either. We can’t harden our hearts in the hopes of protecting it. We must do that which is harder than hardening our hearts. That which is counter-intuitive to our thinking; something unfamiliar and completely alien compared to our defense mechanisms. We must let our hearts be broken.

This will be the last sad/negative post for a while, I promise.

Rest in peace, Lucky, whatever the hell that means for animals.

Sin, Evil, And The Boondock Saints

2009-05-30T06:58:00.000-07:00

[Read this only if you like philosophy]
The great Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton had this idea that of all the central Christian doctrines, sin is the only one that is empirically evident. That means that, of all of our core beliefs (God's sovereignty, human sin and error, the Incarnation, the atonement of the cross), the idea that there is evil is the most provable based on observations of the world around us. I think there are some hard-headed Nietzscheans and the like who would reject the notions of good and evil, but these are philosophical idealists. I also think that, for the most part, all the upper echelons of philosophical academia have abandoned this notion of "absolute moral relativism". Heck, I'd even make the argument that moral relativism in its purest form was never even an idea entertained by any respectable thinker. "Everything is relative; there is no absolute moral law" is not embraced by anyone but misled and misinformed Stuyvesant students whose little knowledge puffs them up, but that's another blog for another week. That entry will be titled, "Don't saw off the branch you're sitting on".

[For the rest of you, start here]
For now, it suffices to make this point. There is evil in the world and we connect it to the vast evidence of pain and suffering that occur. No human who exercises either compassion or common sense can look at the injustices occurring all around us, people going hungry, people dying at the hands of other people, natural diseases and disasters (are they that natural?), and the existence of gangster rap, and deny that evil exists.

If this is the case, then we have to ask the following, "How?". I would like to propose two ways of answering this question.

If you've been in college for more than a year, I'm assuming you've seen the movie "The Boondock Saints" (1999). It's about two Irish twins residing in Boston, who became vigilantes after accidentally killing two Russian mafia members. "After a message from God, the brothers, together with their friend David Della Rocca, set out to rid their home city of Boston of crime and evil" (Wikipedia). The following youtube clip is a scene from the end of the movie, when the two vigilantes and their new accomplish sneak into the courtroom where mafia boss Joe Yakavetta was standing trial. He knew that he was going to get away scot-free because of his connections and the way he had the jury "wrapped around his fingers". Please watch, but note that there is strong language and implied violence.

How did the Boondock Saints address the problem of evil? Their presumptions are clear: The problem is there is a group of people in the world, we'll call them evil people, who commit evil deeds and make life hard for the rest of us. They cause us to suffer, to have pain, to endure injustices like loss of loved ones, violence, abuse, hunger and thirst, heartbreak. If we could just eradicate these evil people, then the good people will be rid of evil.

Now read and ponder this quote:
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

I've been thinking about this quote for one month, one week, and six days; ever since Pastor Jonathan Kerhoulas at Citylife Crossroads service. The truth is, the Boondock Saints were wrong. There are no absolutely evil people. There are no absolutely good people. The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. This is what the Bible says about evil. "There is no one righteous, not even one" (Rom 3.10). Every human being in the world is in the same boat. We were created by God as good, but because we fell, we are all sinful and we fall short.

I think this is hard teaching because we don't like to think of ourselves as the problem. It's so much easier if removing evil were as easy as removing the black sheep from the flock of white. But it's more like destroying the mold from a basket of apples. And "who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? This is why the Boondock solution isn't just. In the short run, it will save many people and remove a great deal of evil from the world. But it won't remove the evil within the hearts of the good guys, the "lesser forms of filth".

This is so important for us as Christians to understand because only by understanding the all-embracing, systemic nature of sin can we truly grasp the deep, transforming power of the gospel. See, no amount of human-originated justice, whether vigilante or socially-enacted, can root out the sources of sin within the heart of every man and woman. The only thing that can do that is the atonement found in Jesus' blood and the reconciling, peace-making acceptance of Christ as our savior. "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor 5.21), and ONLY through him who knew no sin can we be made righteous.

G.K. Chesterton, when the a British newspaper posed this question to various eminent authors, "What's wrong with the world?", responded simply:

Dear sirs,
I am,
Sincerely yours, G.K. Chesterton

What's wrong with the world? We are.

Sola Deo Gloria

In the end we lie awake and we dream of making our escape

2009-05-27T15:58:00.000-07:00

_ As indebted as I am to my alma mater, I'm kind of mad at Gordon College's great books honor course because it took the name that I was originally going to use as the title to my blog: The "Jerusalem Athens Forum". I realized while writing my last college philosophy paper (ever) that the things that I am most passionate towards- that which I spend the most time thinking and reading about- all have to do with the mediation of faith and reason.
_ In this blog I'd like to explore the issues of "reason verse revelation", "science verse religion", "unreasonable faith" and "unfaithful reason". My aim is mainly cathartic; I want to use this place to dump the questions and issues that I think about all the time. But it is also didactic; I hope to be able to educate and challenge those who are reading, especially the Christians, to think more deeply about their faith. Not more academically or scholarlily, mind you, but deeply, meaning in a way that shows that their faith actually is the most important thing in their life. (You can all thank Mushroom for the necessity of this last caveat)
_ I welcome feedback as long as it's respectful and edifying, even if it is admonishing. I hope to blog at least once a week, but look for a new post soon because I can't wait to get started!

Sola Deo Gloria,
-Dan Shih

P.S. - Anyone know what the html coding is for indentations?