Monday - Called to Faith

There's been a lot of talk about atheism vs. belief lately. Every few years there seems to be a new crop of books that pop up about how religion is an evil influence on society. This year, I discovered Tim Keller's The Reason for God. I saw a clip of Keller giving a talk at Google summarizing part of his book and I was intriqued. I added his book to my Amazon wishlist and in a happy coincidence, it happened to be part of our assigned summer reading for work.

My goal for Monday was to explore the relationship between faith and reason and to generate some discussion about issues like evolution and atheism. The teenage years are crucial to the development of a real, lasting faith. It's the time of life where you make the decision for yourself—is this for real? We had a speaker one year who made a comment that stuck with me: for some of the campers, our camp may be the last religious experience they have for 15 years, or ever.

The Premise of Tim Keller's book
Is it ok to have doubts? The premise of the atheism books used to be religion is bad. Now it's gone so far to say that respect for religion is bad. It used to be a common belief among scholars that the more technologically advanced a society got, the less religious it would get. The more economically developed, the more "enlightened," the less religious it would get. Now we know that's not so. Orthodox faith in America has actually gotten stronger, though mainline denominations like the Methodists are in decline. But at the same time, secular thought has gotten stronger as well, leading to this conflict of differing viewpoints. Is it possible to reconcile faith and reason?

I handed out some materials ahead of time to get the leaders thinking about some of the issues that might come up that evening (much of which comes from The Reason for God:

- 1 3 basic kinds of reasons to believe/disbelieve
- 1.1 1) intellectual reasons
you read the arguments and you say, these are compelling
arguments I do/don't
- 1.2 2) Personal reasons
people don't just believe/disbelieve because of intellectual
reasons, they do so because of personal reasons. Something
bad happens to them. Some people take this and say, I need a
God, some say, I don't need a God who would allow this.
Success, some people say they can do it on their own, some
feel hollow
- 1.3 3) Social Reasons
you tend to find most plausible the beliefs of the people in
the community you most want to be a part of
- 2 It takes as much faith to disbelieve in God as to believe
- 3 Evil and Suffering - Look at all the pointless and senseless
suffering in the world, given all that, there may be a God who's
good, but unable to stop it, or there may be a God who is powerful
enough, but not good enough to stop it
- 3.1 How do you know it's pointless? How do you know it's senseless
and that there's no good reason for it? The only answer we have
is "I can't think of a good reason"
- 4 If there really is a God, how can so many bad things have been done
in his name
- 4.1 Out of Christianity came the crusades, out of Islam came
terrorism. But look at atheism -Stalin. If you believe there is a
God, it's easy to twist that into, I believe, you don't and you
must destroyed. But if you're an atheist, you can think: if I can
do this and get away with it, I won't have to pay for it. You can
twist anything into violence. It's a tie.
- 5 I don't know if there's a God or not, but no one can really know for
sure
- 5.1 Agnostics: elephant and blind man: 6 blind men grab the elephant
in different places and come to different interpretations of what
an elephant is like, and that's how religion is.
- 5.2 Newbigin: In that story, the real point is constantly overlooked,
It's told from the point of view of a person that isn't blind,
but sees what the blind men are missing out on. The only way you
could see that is if you think you're not blind. You're assuming
you have the knowledge that you think no one else has.
- 6 Until you prove there's a God, I don't have to believe in God
- 6.1 Problem is that's a big leap of faith: why would you assume that
God would be something inside of the world and provable?
- 6.2 The russians sent Yuri Gregoran into space. He said, we sent
someone to heaven, he didn't see God anywhere.
- 6.3 CS Lewis: If there is a God, you don't related to God that way,
it's more like Hamlet trying to prove there is a Shakespeare.
Shakespeare would have to write himself into the play (much like
Jesus did).
- 6.4 I can't prove to you that I'm not a butterfly dreaming I'm a man.
- 6.5 Moral convictions, humans have rights. How can you prove that?
- 6.6 If you are living as if there is no God, that's an act of faith
- 7 It makes more sense to believe than disbelieve
- 7.1 Fine tuning of the universe
- 8 Why would a good God send people to Hell?
- 8.1 Hell, says Keller, “is the trajectory of a soul, living in
self-absorbed, self-centered life, going on and on forever…hell
is simply one’s freely chosen identity apart from God on a
trajectory into infinity.”
- 8.2 Story about Lazarus and the rich man in the Bible. The rich man,
doesn't even ask to get out of Hell. He's still so selfish and
self-centered, he still thinks that Lazarus should do his bidding.
- 8.3 Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in
your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become
oneself, to get an identity, apart from him….[sin] is not just
the doing of bad things, but the making of good things into
ultimate things.” Everyone no matter if they’re Joe Blow or
Madonna has to find some way to “justify their existence.” And
when you and I turn to anything other than God we Sin.
What are the personal consequences of Sin? One consequence is the
loss of your true identity, and with that any sense of personal
stability and peace. Ultimately “A life not centered on God leads
to emptiness. Building our lives on something besides God not
only hurts us if we don’t get the desires of our hearts, but also
if we do.” Sin’s consequences don’t stop there, the consequences
of sin are not just personal, but social and cosmic.
- 9 Yeah, but aren't Christians just hypocrites
“If Christianity is all it claims to be, shouldn’t Christians on
the whole be much better people than everyone else? This
assumption is based on a mistaken belief concerning what
Christianity actually teaches about itself.” You don’t clean up
and then come to Christ, you come to Christ because you’ll always
need to clean up and his Spirit more than your good intentions
makes all the difference in the world. To mix metaphors the
church is a hospital ward full of sick people, of course its
going to look worst than the world outside.

And then some questions they might share with their group:

1.    What does the word faith mean to you?
2.    Is it ok to doubt?
If you had all of the answers, you'd be God. Being a mature Christian is sometimes about accepting that there are sometimes no good answers.
3.    What do you believe about the way the universe was created?
4.    We were taught that there were rules that govern the physical universe (think of Newton and the apple), but now we know that this isn't necessarily so. How did hearing about some of the weirdness of the bigness and the weirdness of the smallness affect the way you think about God and faith?
5.    How does the circle vs rectangle example affect the way you look at the arguments between Christian denominations? (Make sure your campers understand the concept first) Predestination vs. Freewill?
6.    Make sure the campers understand the flatland example. Flatland is all we have (reductionistic) vs. There's more - nudges, feelings, perception of the greater truth
7.    You might discuss thin places. In Celtic spirituality, certain locations - especially islands, mountains and springs - became sacred and were visited by people on relevant occasions. They were called "thin places", because here the division between heaven and earth was said to be at its narrowest. A lot of us think that Sumatanga is a thin place.
8.    How does the theory that there are 11 dimensions affect your understanding of God?
9.    A Samaritan woman once asked Jesus where her people should worship God - on Mount Gerizim, as had been their custom, or in Jerusalem.

John 4:20. The underlying question was whose religion was correct, stated in terms of the proper place for worship. To this question, Jesus replied:

Woman, believe me, the hour comes, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, will you worship the Father. You worship that which you don’t know. We worship that which we know; for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour comes, and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such to be his worshippers. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

How does this video affect your understanding of this scripture?
10.    What's wrong with thinking that God is only being in a certain place, a church, at camp? There is no word in Jesus' language for spiritual.
11.    What difference does faith in God make in your

For the actual program, we showed part of Rob Bell's Everything is Spiritual video. I went through the video and outlined it and then cut out parts of it to get it to fit within our time frame. I wish I had a picture of how we projected it, because it was a neat set up visually. The setup of the video is Rob Bell on a plain stage with a big whiteboard. And we set it up so that it was us watching it on a plain stage of a white drop cloth. Anyways, Bell ties Genesis and creation to quantum physics and string theory. It's really fascinating stuff, and it really makes you see things in a whole new way. We got a great response from it, and the counselors felt like it really set up some really great discussion for that evening as we broke into groups.

When we came back from groups, we showed another 20 minutes of the video, and then at the end of the clip, I spliced together the music from the video into a loop so that I could drag out the end of the video. He essentially ends the video making the point that everything that you do is spiritual. There's no word in the Hebrew language for spiritual. It's ALL spiritual. And that there's a lot more going on in our world than we can perceive. Scientists believe that there are at least 11 different dimensions. Unbeknowngst to the campers and most of the counselors, we replaced the light bulbs in the front part of the room with blacklights. Through some experimentation, I found that you could pretty much hide messages on the walls in plain sight  by taking brown grocery bags and writing messages on them in highlighter. Because they were the same color as the walls in the rooms we were in, they blended nicely.

One of the more vivid examples in the video is of flatland. So we had some folks act out that illustration as a closing. The video ends, the techno music loops, the screen goes dark. We flip on the blacklights. We had marked all of the campers with a Jesus fish logo with highlights (that we disguised, so it wouldn't be obvious that it was a highlighter), and on the walls is written the message "this isn't all there is... there's more" which suddenly is visible, when it wasn't there before. On stage, we have a dramatization of the flatland example. We had 2 people go up and pick up a bedsheet on which we had masked out the 2 stick figures. At a certain point we have them drop the sheet and then we have these 2 figures dressed in white playing the stick figure roles and then a dancer comes in from the back who is wearing a black shirt with a cross on it (I wanted to use the trinity triquetra symbol, but we were afraid it wouldn't translate). The dancer interacts with the stick people and then on a cue, after the dance is finished, they pick up the sheet again (it's actually a 2nd bedsheet), on which we have written "God is near" in glow in the dark ink. We cut the lights and now all you see is darkness and the words, "God is near."

Incidentally, the reason my notes from Rob's sermons have stopped is that Rob is on sabbatical from teaching, though they're having a great list of guest speakers during that time. So that will pick back up once he's back in the pulpit.

Steve Carter's message, Out of Egypt from a few weeks ago is definitely worth a listen as a primer on the Jesus is the new Moses line of thought. He's on our list of folks to look into for future Encounter weekends in Gatlinburg.

Great quote from that article:

I suspect that Bell frequently rouses two useless responses among church leaders. Some will sit on the sidelines, buy his stuff, marvel at his ability, and applaud his efforts. Others will sit in the peanut gallery, heckle his success, and condemn him for what they deem poor theology or inappropriate this or that. I'd encourage church leaders to find a third response: learn what we can from Rob Bell, then get off our keisters and do something. After all, perhaps the best lesson from Bell is that he's attempting something for the kingdom.

Rob continued going through Philippians ever so slowly. Today it was chapter 2, verses 3 and 4:

3Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. 4Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.

This was another great message where he breaks down each little piece of this passage which is saturated with good stuff. I don't think I have time to really capture what the whole of the message was in here. I mainly just want to give a synopsis of what I came away with, both for my own records, so that I can refer back to it at some point if I'm teaching something regarding this topic, and so that others out there can do the same.

He begins by talking about the Trinity and goes back through the previous chapter again, looking at all of the ways that Paul references the members of the Trinity both communally and individually. And then talks about how God, the Son, and the Spirit exist in community, each feeding and serving each other.

"God's eternal reality is the love between Father, Son, and Spirit...This is what God is...Union and communion are the goal of all created reality." -- Scot McKnight

And then he goes on to talk about what "looking not to your own interests but to the interests of others" looks like using that example of the Trinity. He quotes the theologian Karl Barth, and talks about those people who just get under your skin. Those people who just do things the complete opposite way of how you think they should be done, and those people who are strange and different.

We discover respect for each other, not on this ground or that, perhaps without any grounds, counter to every ground, simply because we are bidden when looking at our neighbor to think of the "one thing" - Karl Barth

The one thing here being God's grace. Paul is saying: if you want to understand God's Grace: orient yourself around the strange, the different, the coworker you can't stand, the embarrassing relative, the person who makes you crazy. In trying to love and serve them you will begin to get a glimpse of what it's like for God to love you with all of your strangeness, differentness, etc.

the strange, different, unintelligible, subjective aspect of my neighbor is the garment in which the "one thing" meets me. - Barth

Another great message from Bell.

Philippians 2
1If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose.

This was a great message that talked about unity in Christ. One might imagine that it was at least somewhat aimed at what CRNinfo calls the ODMs, the online discernment ministries. Just Google Rob Bell's name and you'll get plenty of bile spewed forth about him being a heretic, etc., from a lot of fundamentalists, etc. Sometimes this bothers me. I listen to his sermons and think, wow this is so great, so thought-provoking. This message has really helped me understand God in a deeper way. And then I read of people online not feeling that way at all and it makes me wonder, "what am I missing here?" But in praying it over, the Holy Spirit reminded me of John 15:1-17: in other words, where do you see the fruit? I have seen a lot of fruit in my life over the last year or so since I've been listening to Rob Bell's sermons each week and learning more and more about Judaism and how it helps us understand Jesus as a first century Jewish rabbi.

The crux of the message is that we're going to have different opinions and interpretations. But there's something bigger going on than our differences... He shared that Robert Winslow had done a study about house churches and that people tended to leave those groups when they found out that their interpretation of scripture differed from their own. Very true. In looking for a church to attend, I have paid a lot of attention to the differences between what I believe and what they believe. Mainly because I want my daughter to be raised in an environment where she is taught the interpretations that I hold to be true. But what Bell is talking about here is more than just biting your tongue, it's about us having a church where we can be together and still disagree on some issues. He talks about us deciding to start with Jesus: "an we agree that the body of Christ was broken and His blood was spilled out for the healing of the world? Can we agree on that? Can we?" Paul isn't saying that we have to agree on everything.

Romans 14:
1Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters. 2One man's faith allows him to eat everything, but another man, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. 3The man who eats everything must not look down on him who does not, and the man who does not eat everything must not condemn the man who does, for God has accepted him. 4Who are you to judge someone else's servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.
5One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. 6He who regards one day as special, does so to the Lord. He who eats meat, eats to the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who abstains, does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. 7For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. 8If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.

9For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living. 10You, then, why do you judge your brother? Or why do you look down on your brother? For we will all stand before God's judgment seat. 11It is written:
" 'As surely as I live,' says the Lord,
'every knee will bow before me;
every tongue will confess to God.' "[a] 12So then, each of us will give an account of himself to God.

13Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in your brother's way. 14As one who is in the Lord Jesus, I am fully convinced that no food[b] is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for him it is unclean. 15If your brother is distressed because of what you eat, you are no longer acting in love. Do not by your eating destroy your brother for whom Christ died. 16Do not allow what you consider good to be spoken of as evil. 17For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, 18because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and approved by me.

All of that has a heavy influence on my view of alcohol and wine, exactly the point I was trying to make when I was having the argument with our speaker from the Encounter weekend last year. There are things that are not a sin for me that are a sin for you, and vice versa. Let's stop passing judgment on one another and not look down on one another. Bart Campolo made a great point about this very issue when he shared a story about a friend who became a Christian and gave up cards, because she was told that card are of the devil. That included UNO. He was saying that he believed that God would honor that because it was done in the right spirit, even though he didn't agree with it. He felt like God would be pleased.