Theology

This is Part I of II in a blog series of my thoughts on justification.

Recently, thanks to a long commute, I've been whiling away the driving time by listening to audio books and podcasts. One podcast I especially enjoy is Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. Google it. If you're interested in history (especially Ancient Western), you'll enjoy Hardcore History.

The past several months, Carlin has been doing a series on the Eastern Front of WWII, on which the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany battled from 1941 until the end of the war in 1945. Most of my interest in World War II has been relegated to the Pacific Theater, largely because that is where my grandfather fought. I've read a great deal about the massive sea battles, and the horrible fear of the soldiers fighting hand-to-hand in the great dug-out anthills of small tropical islands. But I had never really read much at all about the Eastern Front. And I think I am thankful for that. What Dan Carlin describes in his 4-part series is truly horrible. All war is horrible, no doubt, but there are extremes even within this gruesome sport, and it seems that both the Nazis and the Stalinists crossed over all extremes during their bitter struggle. The level of hatred was truly shocking to me.

Of course I have read of such hatred before. Accounts of the holocaust and martyrdom are common fare in schools these days. But there was just something about the way Dan Carlin described the hell of the Eastern Front that made me take more pause than usual. I began to think.

I began to think, as we all do from time to time, about what might have been revealed about my own character had I lived through such desolation and hopelessness. How would I have stacked up? Would I have given in the the thirst for revenge as the Soviets did when they pillaged and raped Prussia with abandon? Would I have revealed my own lust for cruelty like the Nazis did in their treatment of the Soviet women and children as they ransacked through the Russian countryside?

Most of all, though, I began to wonder about my faith. In these past several months, I feel I have grown more in my Christian walk than I have in many years. And I feel that I have begun to understand a little of the sheer power of God's transforming grace. And yet, I am forced to wonder, is it easier believing in the authority and power of perfect goodness while living in a relatively good state of affairs? My life is easy. I complain, but when I think about the physical agony of the populace of Leningrad, not to mention the absolute psychological desolation that must have resulted from slowly watching your family starve to death, and then being forced to feed upon them in order to survive...how can my life even compare? How can my sins even compare? My sins, as grievous as they must be...the evil I have seen and known and inflicted, as bad as it is...they are nothing to what was done during that "Great" War. And I am forced to wonder, possibly for the first time, along with Voltaire and Wiesel, is God's authority and goodness really able to overcome such horror? Can it ever really be washed away? Is Christ's blood really that potent?

Lord, may it be so! Here, if ever, is a place for your liberating judgment to take place! Burn away the chaff that clings to the souls of these men and women. Glorify them in your righteous grace. For if you cannot, there can be no hope for our world! Let us not forget, after all, that even as I sit in the relative peace of my couch, drinking my soda and eating my chips, evil endures...death continues to cast fear...atrocities consume innocent lives.

Oh my. Far too long silent. And, I can't really promise I will be doing any better in the near future. Classes and church work have been....time consuming, to say the least. I sincerely hope to start writing again in the near future.

At the very least, I can point you to some new content over on BDWHITE.com. Yeah, remember that site...where I used to write stuff? Well, since I'm still preaching fairly regularly, I thought the least I could do would be to post my latest sermon up there, especially since I managed to get it recorded. So, here's the link:

B.D. White Sermons

The specific sermon you're looking for is "The Church Is...". Clicking on the sermon title (or this link) will take you to a very rough (read--copy and pasted) html version, but there is a nice PDF version listed below the description, as well as the audio recording in both ogg and mp3 formats. Let me know what you think!

Oh, by the way--Claire, if you read this and then go listen to the sermon audio...please forgive my horrible, horrible Scottish accent. Or, at least, don't make fun of me...too much. ;-)

The interplay between Calvin and Wesley in one quote by a semi-Barthian missiologist:

Faith can only be appropriately defined as at the same time a divine gift and a human act.

Beautiful.

Finally got around to posting my Sunday sermon online over at BDWHITE.com. It's over in the "Sermons" section, per usual.

My deliver of the sermon on Sunday was lacking, and the sermon itself is fairly short for the topic (there was quite a bit more that I would have like to have put in). But, I think the text is fairly solid.

I know I'm really behind on writing and blogging and photos right now. School and Church have taken top priority, but I hope to find some room in my schedule for these other activities as well, especially since I enjoy them! Until then, though, hopefully my brief pops in and out will suffice.

Consider this thought: “The church is anti-missional.”

Who would agree with this? Do not we, as Christians, profess mission to be not only the command of the church (indeed, of Christ!), but also the sustaining life-blood of the Christian life? What are we if we are not professing our faith? Certainly living a life of faith includes profession at its heart.

And yet, there is the reality that gets in the way of our perceived understanding of the nature of the church.

Consider the prison church, setup by a missionary at the gates of the penitentiary, so that those who are released from their confinement, seeing no where else to go, are embraced by the arms of this simple, loving structure.

But what happens? Submitting to the life of the Gospel, the ex-cons are reformed. They marry, form families, have children. But with children come responsibility—responsibility for their safety and care. For that is the duty of a loving father. And so, with shock, the reformed man now sees the danger to his family—the very source of his salvation is now a welcome mat to those very influences and dangers he wishes to protect his family from. How can he allow his children near the prison—a place filled with rapists, murderers, child molesters...

And so, the church is moved...into the suburbs.

The great victory and defeat of the Gospel in one life.

So is the church missional? It does not seem so. For, the (empirical) nature of church would seem to be one of defense, maintenance of the status quo, once it has become comfortable enough, that is.

Here's a really interesting tidbit from some reading I was doing for class today:

Do not regard it as your task, and do not bring any pressure to bear on the peoples, to change their manners, customs, and uses, unless they are evidently contrary to religion and sound morals. What could be more absurd than to transport France, Spain, Italy, or some other European country to China? Do not introduce all that to them, but only the faith, which does not despise or destroy the manners and customs of any people, always supposing that they are not evil, but rather wishes to seem them preserved unharmed.... Do not draw invidious contrasts between the customs of the peoples and those of Europe; do you utmost to adapt yourselves to them.

When do you think something like this would have been written? It seems pretty modern, right? I mean, all this talk of respecting other cultures and such. Would you believe this was written by Pope Gregory 15th in 1659? (The quote is taken from Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions, 2nd ed.: New York, NY: Penguin 1990, page 153.)

I think this is a good example that perhaps the Christian missionary movement, even as early as the 1600s (well into the colonial period), was not so evil and imperialistic as much of the rhetoric would have us believe. Now, I am not denying that there were certainly great evils done in the name of evangelization and the Gospel, but I think it is interesting to note these idealogical stances long before we were properly "enlightened" by postmodernism.

An example to go with my blog post below:

Absolute Certainty Video (link to YouTube video)

Nothing I say will ever express my experience of who God is sufficiently for this man to understand it. His "experience" of God is so vastly different from mine, we will simply talk past each other ad naseum and accomplish no real communication in the process.

Believe it or not, I do believe that a faith language can be created between us, though--for faith is God's gift to give. It would just take a very, very long, compassionate time.

I don't know if I will ever go back to Japan, at least as a missionary. But if I do (or if I go anywhere else as a missionary, for that matter), I will certainly approach missionary life differently the second time around. That is not to say that my experience in Japan was bad in any way. Quite the contrary, I feel immensely blessed to have spent time with an amazing people who are the caretakers of an amazing society. But my time there was also a proving ground for many of my initial thoughts about what a missionary is—what a missionary's job is.

For a long time now (really, ever since I read Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments) the problem of subjectivity has haunted my thoughts. The hauntings became even more persistent while in Japan, because here I found a practical example of the concerns I had seen Kierkegaard raise. Granted, I doubt Soren had been thinking about foreign missions at the time of writing his “little pamphlet”. All the same, I could not help but recognize a similar problem occurring in my own ministry as Kierkegaard had described through the guise of Johannes Climacus.

The problem of subjectivity is basically the difficulty we encounter as individuals in expressing our thoughts and experiences to other individuals. Put simply, I can never adequately describe my experience of the apple pie I just ate to you. Even if I give you a piece of the apple pie, your experience of it will be different. The pie is a few minutes older, perhaps you aren't as hungry as I am, perhaps you really hate apple pie. You will never know how it felt for me to eat the apple pie because you are not me.

This seems obvious, right? I mean, that's simply the way the world works. Very true. And the way we have come to deal with this problem is by simply ignoring it. We do our best to describe our thoughts and feelings to others, and when those others don't quite grasp what we want to express, we move on, slightly exasperated, but understanding of the barrier constructed between us by our own individuality.

Strangely, though, we have also devised certain categories of things/ideas/experiences that we expect absolutely everyone to know and understand in the same way. The “simple” term for this category is “objective truth.” Now, I won't be going into the difference between “subjective truth” and “objective truth,” but what I will say is that there is typically a misunderstanding about what it means for something to be objectively true. As I've already mentioned, we typically think of things that are objectively true as things that are true—and understood as true—by everyone equally. But that is not the case. Simply because something is objectively true does not negate the fact that we experience it as individuals, i.e. subjectively.

And herein lies the problem that I experienced with my mission in Japan. Read more »