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Remember that book I was reading a long time ago? Evangelism After Christendom?  Yeah. It’s back thanks to a Kindle edition.

When we left Stone, he was attempting to give us the idea that in the Christian tradition, evangelism could possibly be viewed as a core practice in a loosely Macintyrian sense. Stone also takes some time to point out core problems with the way evangelism is often executed in modern churches. Chief among these problems, he argues, is that evangelism has become essentially a marketing regime which seeks to attract new people by either a) trying to make the gospel more intellectually respectable b) trying to demonstrate that it is practical (good for society, economy, or personal psychology), or c) attempting to alter the traditional “stuffiness” that has categorized church in the past and instead make church more accessible to a wider audience. Stone:

Creative reconstructions of evangelism are being attempted today, and they succeed in expanding the church by adapting it to new generations that are put off by boring liturgies, irrelevant preaching, and stuffy pipe-organ music.  But while these reconstructions have triumphed in making the church more relevant to the tastes, expectations, preferences, and quest for self-fulfillment of both the unchurched and the dechurched, they have utterly failed to challenge the racism, individualism, violence, and affluence of Western culture.  They in no way subvert an existing unjust order but rather mimic and sustain it.  Our greatest challenge is to find ways of practicing evangelism in a post-Christendom culture without at the same time playing by the rules of that culture.

Cliff’s notes? Marketing evangelism works – at least if what you mean by “works” is “attract more people”, but it doesn’t do a terribly good job of remaining true to the Christian ethos, which if you will remember from our first discussion, is what really matters. Stone again:

We kid ourselves if we think we have moved beyond Christendom simply because we are able to reach more people by getting rid of our stained glass and stuffy sermons and providing a “product” that is more user-friendly. Neither large-scale revivals that boast thousands of converts nor fast-growing megachurches that have dropped from the sky into suburban parking lots as of late are in any way indications of the proximity of God’s reign, nor is their winsomeness and friendliness to be equated with Isaiah’s “peace.” In fact, the failure of evangelism in our time is implied as much by the vigorous “success” of some churches in North America as by the steady decline of others.

This is, I think, a profound statement. You may recall a recent post where we talked about the metrics we use to evaluate whether God is “working.” What is true on an individual level is also in many ways true for Christianity as a collective – namely that we tend to view God “working” in rather selfish terms – specifically when it looks like our agenda is “winning”, our political candidates are getting elected, and our numbers are increasing. There are no shortage of problems with this theology, as pointed out in the previous post, but Stone adds another: by using metrics of success that are external to the practice, we are essentially distorting and subverting the practice itself and trading excellence for sheer effectiveness, and indeed by confusing the two. Returning to the oft-used analogy of sports, effectiveness is winning a championship – excellence is playing to your highest potential day in and day out, letting the results speak for themselves. Ted Williams is considered to be one of the finest hitters to ever play the game of baseball, but he never won a World Series. You don’t necessarily have to be excellent to be effective – in fact, being effective can be achieved in plenty of ways contrary to the ethos (ideals) or telos (purpose) of the tradition you find yourself apart of.

One way Stone proposes that we counter this tendency is to first ground evangelism theologically, rather than allowing it to be whatever it wants in order to be successful.

Those who think theologically rarely think about evangelism, and those who think about evangelism rarely take the discipline of theology very seriously.  For one thing, very little in the present reward system of most churches supports thinking theologically about evangelism. Excellence in evangelism is almost wholly governed by numerical measures of success, and pastors are rewarded primarily insofar as they attain those measures.  Those who produce the literature on evangelism – especially that which concentrates on the models that are widely touted as successful in the North American context – are particularly reluctant to think critically about the theology presupposed in their practice. Their focus instead is on finding new and creative ways to express Christian beliefs and practices – forms that are more indigenous, user-friendly, and “relevant” to the experience of contemporary human beings, or more successful in making converts in an already crowded marketplace of competitors.

…

This book is written out of the conviction that there is no substitute for serious theological inquiry about evangelism as a practice.  In fact, theological inquiry is itself an intrinsic part of that practice.  We cannot proceed by merely trotting out a handful of “successful” pastors of fast-growing congregations to tell us what “works”.  For it is the very question of what we are working toward, what is deemed valuable and beautiful, what we are seeking, that in our time must be reexamined and that too often goes unchallenged altogether.

…

The “practicality of theology does not lie merely in its strategic movement toward concrete proposals for action. Practical theology is not a bag of tricks, but a process of laying bare the assumptions that guide our practice and then drawing critically upon the practical wisdom of Scripture and the Christian tradition in order to rethink and reconstruct those assumptions.

Stone’s conclusion? Evangelism isn’t about trying to translate the message we think we know into a new context, but about residing in a changing context and remaining (or becoming) faithful witnesses of God’s peace. This is not about setting up an alternate culture that never interacts with the world around it. It is not a culture that is different because it shuns sex, drugs and rock and roll, but because it challenges, in the case of our current position, the very foundations of modern society – the economic, social and political power structures that so often serve as today’s “powers and principalities of this dark world”.  Evangelism, for Stone, is primarily about remaining grounded in a life of faithful dedication to the ethos of the Christian tradition – in his words, “witness to God’s reign of peace”.

When the practice of evangelism is not grounded firmly in the comprehensive life of witness, the church is inevitably instrumentalized, reduced to a mere tool in the service of heralding the gospel, rather than the social embodiment of God’s new creation in Christ, the very news that is to be heralded as good. For, as always, the embodiment is the heralding; the medium is the message; incarnation is invitation.  That is why, as I shall attempt to argue throughout this book, it is impossible for the church to evangelize the world and, at the same time, to serve as a chaplain to the state and allow itself to be disciplined by the logic if the market.

There are some real issues in that statement – issues that challenge the predominant theology (primarily soteriology and eschatology) in some deep and profound ways. My personal belief is that most people are not ready for the type of change that Stone is outlining, but that it might be possible to move things slowly in that direction.

This weekend I finished reading David Orrell’s book “The Future of Everything: The Science of Prediction“.  As an applied scientist, the public perception of scientific modeling has been a side interest of mine. In particular, as science is pressed more and more into the service of politics and ideology, the general lack of understanding about what scientists know and how they know it should be a deep concern to us all. In The Future of Everything, Orrell attempts to give an overview of how scientific modeling has developed, what its shortcomings are, and how far we can really expect mathematical models to predict the future.

Effectively, Orrell starts with the following observation: despite an exponential increase in funding and computing power over the last 100 years, predictive models (particularly in the fields of weather and economic forecasting) have made surprisingly little progress in producing accurate predictions about the future. In fact, modern weather forecasts for beyond a few days are only marginally more accurate, on the whole, than a forecast based on the climatological average for a particular day, in spite of their increasing complexity. Orrell spends much of the book exploring why models fail to give accurate predictions, with climate, the economy, and genetics as his three case studies.

Over the course of the book, Orrell explores a variety of shortcomings in modern mathematical models which aren’t necessarily solved by better computers or more complicated models. Some of the most important ones are (in no particular order):

• Attempting to model complex non-linear systems is mathematically problematic: In the 18th century, mathematical modeling seemed to offer limitless progress.  Newton’s laws had transformed a seemingly complicated universe into a few lines of mathematics. If we could predict the course of the stars and planets, surely the world was at our command.  Well, not exactly.  As it turns out, Newton’s laws of motion turn out to be one of the easiest physical things to model. As Orrell says, part of Newton’s genius was picking a system that was possible to model – the same being true of Gregor Mendel’s study of genetic traits in peas. There may be simple equations for how a planet moves around the sun, but trying to predict how the wind blows (or how a plane flies) is a lot more complicated.
• Chaos: Jeff Goldblum made chaos a trendy term in Jurassic Park, but it remains fairly misunderstood. In modeling, a chaotic system is one where small changes in the initial conditions can dramatically alter the trajectory of the system. Because we can never know the precise initial conditions of a system like the atmosphere or the economy, small perturbations in the initial conditions (or parameters) used in models can have a large effect on the resulting predictions. The fact that model parameterization is often at least somewhat subjective compounds this issue.
• Computational irreducibility: Systems exist which are fairly simple, non-chaotic, produce clear patterns, behave according to only a few rules, and yet are computationally impossible to predict. The best example of this is Conway’s Game of Life. The Game of Life functions according to only four rules, yet it is impossible to write equations which will predict the state of a cell at any arbitrary time. The only way to find out is to run the system.
• Emergent properties: Emergent properties refer to the unpredictable ways which simple entities interact to form complex results. Think “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” These emergent properties cannot be simplified to simple physical laws.
• Feedback loops: Most systems have competing positive and negative feedback loops which control the system. One example is blood clotting. Positive feedback is necessary to quickly stop bleeding. If unchecked, all your blood would clot and you would die, so negative feedback slows the process when it reaches an appropriate level. The way feedback loops interact with each other complicates model parameterization.
• Matching the model to past observed data does not ensure accurate predictions: Just because a model matches past observed data does not mean it is correct, nor that it offers any predictive power about the future. A chicken might build a model that predicts a long and happy life based on observations of the farmer coming to feed him every morning. That model holds well, until the day he becomes the farmer’s dinner.

Orrell summarizes as follows:

Prediction is a holistic business. Our future weather, health, and wealth depend on interrelated effects and must be treated in an integrated fashion.

Long-term prediction is no easier than short-term prediction.  The comparison with reality is just farther away.

We cannot accurately predict systems such as the climate for two reasons: (1) We don’t have the equations. In an uncomputable system, they don’t exist; and (2) The ones we have are sensitive to errors in parameterization. Small changes to existing models often result in a wide spread of different predictions.

We cannot accurately state the uncertainty in predictions.  For the same two reasons.

The effects of climate change on health and the economy (and their effects on the climate) are even harder to forecast. When different models are combined, the uncertainties multiply.

The emergence of new diseases is inherently random and unpredictable. Avian flu may be the next big killer – but a bigger worry is the one that no one has heard about yet.

Simple predictions are still possible. These usually take the form of general warnings rather than precise statements.

Models can help us understand system fragilities.  A warmer climate may cause tundra to melt and rainforests to burn, thus releasing their massive stores of carbon.  However, the models cannot predict the exact probability of such events, or their exact consequences.

So where does that leave us? Orrell again:

Einstein’s theory of relativity was accepted not because a committee agreed that it was a very sensible model, but because its predictions, most of which were highly counterintuitive, could be experimentally verified.  Modern GCMs (Global Climate Models) have no such objective claim to validity, because they cannot predict the weather over any relevant time scale. Many of their parameters are invented and adjusted to approximate past climate patterns.  Even if this is done using mathematical procedures, the process is no less subjective because the goals and assumptions are those of the model builders. Their projections into the future - especially when combined with the output of economic models – are therefore a kind of fiction.  The fact that climate change is an important and contentious issue makes it all the more important that we acknowledge this.  The problem with the models is not that they are subjective or objective – there is nothing wrong with a good story, or an informed and honestly argued opinion. It is that they are couched in the language of mathematics and probabilities: subjectivity masquerading as objectivity.  Like the Wizard of Oz, they are a bit of a sham.

…

[A]s I argued in this book, we cannot obtain accurate equations for atmospheric, biological, or social systems, and those we have are typically sensitive to errors in parameterization.  By varying a handful of parameters within apparently reasonable bounds, we can get a single climate model to give radically different answers.  These problems do not go away with more research or a faster computer; the number of unknown parameters explodes, and the crystal ball grows murkier still. … We can’t mathematically calculate the odds, even if it looks serious, scientific, and somehow reassuring to do so.

Orrell is clear to point out, however, that the fact we cannot guarantee the accuracy of our predictions does not mean they are necessarily wrong, or shouldn’t be heeded. Varying parameters in climate models may in fact produce a wide range of results, but that doesn’t mean we should take a wait and see approach. Economic models failed spectacularly to predict the current economic crisis – but it still happened.

Orrell’s argument, then, is for a kind of literacy when using scientific models to inform decisions. Scientific predictions can be helpful, and often are. But they are limited in their ability to predict future events with certainty, and these problems aren’t necessarily going to be solved with better data and models, or with more powerful computers. They shouldn’t be ignored, but rather viewed for what they are: a tool for helping us understand the present, and hopefully make the best decisions we can about the future.

“I can’t help but thinking that at this level, it’s not really the priority.  I mean, I’d gladly trade my Lotus developed suspension for some Toyota developed door trim.” – James May, reviewing an inexpensive Malaysian car.

Let’s be honest. There is an element of any corporate worship service that boils down to performance. This isn’t meant to be a criticism per se, but simply to state what I take to be a clear reality that the way things are done in contemporary worship settings (and by this I mean contemporary as in current, not any particular style of worship), execution of the specific elements matters. Anyone who has been to a church where the worship band was awful or the preacher put you to sleep is keenly aware of this. Some level of execution is important. Most people, given a choice and all other things being equal, would choose a service with a high production value over one with generally poor execution.

One disturbing trend in many churches, though, is a preference for execution over thoughtfulness. There are many reasons for this, I think, and many of them have their roots in the more widespread emergence of what Lindbeck would call “experiential expressivism” in recent years. Whatever the cause, most worship pastors, and to a large extent most parishioners prefer well executed services to meaningful ones, or, perhaps to put it differently, the “meaningfulness” of a service is a function primarily of its execution, rather than its content.

This actually leads to some pretty interesting consequences, at least in practice. Consider, for instance, the abundance of new worship songs which sound fun, have a good beat, and can move people to a different emotive state, but whose content is either remarkably thin, or worse borders on theological garbage. Think about whether, at a typical worship service, the songs are chosen because they sound good together (or have a particular emotional movement to them), or because they harmonize theologically. My sense is that if many of us were honest we find ourselves in services where, if there is planning, that planning is primarily centered around emotional content rather than theological content, which suggests that the primary aim of our execution of worship services is to make us feel good, rather than to actually encounter God in some sort of meaningful way.

Which brings me to my opening quote. What, really, is the priority in what we’re doing in corporate worship? It seems to me, unfortunately, as if we’ve traded our foundational beliefs and theology for a more emotional product that makes us feel good, at the expense of some pretty serious theological incoherence and inconsistency. I want to be very clear that this is not a question of worship *style*, at least in the sense that many of us think of it, nor is it a function of the amount of pure effort or thought – I’ve been in thoughtful an coherent services ranging the gamut of multiple dimensions in the traditional / progressive divide. What it is a question of, I think, is the *types* of thought we put into our services:

• Do our words, welcomes, prayers and songs speak with a unified theological voice? Do they suggest a common eschatology, soteriology, etc? If so, what is that voice? If not, what message are we sending?
• Do we spend more time thinking about the flow of the service, especially the emotional flow of the service, than we do the voice of the service? For example, when we consider movement, are we thinking primarily along the dimension of how a particular sequence of elements will people will feel, or about the progression of the message and proclamation of the sequence (e.g. fast song, fast song, slow song; or song about Jesus’s life, song about Jesus’s death, song about Jesus as risen Lord)?
• What metric do we use to evaluate whether a particular service was “effective” or “well executed”? Do we look at performance criteria (i.e. how well everything came off), emotive criteria (i.e. how well everyone felt at the end), or transformative criteria (i.e. did anybody actually change as a result of what we did here)?

Unfortunately it’s not hard to find examples of services which are, by and large, both poorly planned and poorly executed, but it’s probably even easier to find services which are poorly planned and well executed. Perhaps it’s too much to ask for a well planned, well thought-out, well executed service on a consistent basis. But if we have to choose between the three, it seems to me the priority shouldn’t be on execution.

Last week, Richard Beck posted a piece on his blog which puts very well something I’ve been saying for years (here, or here, for instance) – namely that if we’re going to claim that we’re Pro-Life, we should actually be Pro-Life, otherwise we should shut up about it. Beck, interestingly, takes things one step further by pointing out that in reality, “Pro-Life” looks a lot more like “Anti-Sex”.  An extremely interesting read, and one which I’ve posted (in its entirety) below:

It seems to me that most Pro-Life people I know really aren’t Pro-Life at all. They are, rather, Anti-Sex. That is, the abortion debate is often just a cover to wage war on the sexual revolution and the Dawn of the Pill. What many Pro-Life people are angry about is the casual sexuality of our age, an era of “abortion on demand.” Pro-Life advocacy, then, is often (consciously or unconsciously) really a way to get sexually promiscuous people to face the “consequences” of sexual activity. The focus on life is often cover for Puritanical worries about sexuality in modern America.

Why do I draw this conclusion? Because most Pro-Life people I know are only Pro-Life in this one area, and only in this one area. They are not, generally speaking, consistently Pro-Life. For example, most Pro-Life people are…

…not Pro-Life when it comes to gun control.

…not Pro-Life when it comes to preemptive war.

…not Pro-Life when it comes to capital punishment.

…not Pro-Life when it comes to global malnourishment.

…not Pro-Life when it comes to universal health care.

…not Pro-Life when it comes to entitlement programs for the women and children of the working poor (to remove the economic incentives for abortion).

…not Pro-Life in promoting condom usage to prevent teenage pregnancy or AIDS in developing nations.

In short, the only thing many conservatives are Pro-Life about is, well, abortion. Which, incidentally, is the only thing on the list that’s about regulating sexual behavior.

Which kind of makes you wonder…

Well I’ve got God on my side
And I’m just trying to survive
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love
Fear’s a dangerous thing
It’ll turn your heart black you can trust
It’ll take your God-filled soul
Fill it with devils and dust

Springsteen’s words have been on my mind in the past few days with the current hot button issue in the church I currently worship at, at least for the next few months. The issue itself isn’t really my concern – frankly I could completely care less, and I suspect most of the people in my general area probably agree. I’ve been well beyond where the progressive group is wanting to go, and I think they’re going to be highly disappointed when they get there and realize it’s no different from where they are now, but for the moment let’s set that aside. The larger issue here, in my view, is the one raised by Bruce: What if what you do to “survive” kills the things you love?

The core motivation for the push, in my view, is for the “next generation” – our kids, if you will. I think this is, on the surface, wholly commendable. Certainly when you talk about a tradition, one of the questions that isn’t asked enough is how we can change and adapt the tradition to make it relevant to the next generation – how we as the current generation can excite and enable the generation below us to continue practicing that which we have found to be true and important, even if the specifics of that practice looks slightly different than the ones we embraced. I think in this particular case there is sincerity in the motive of those who would move things forward – they are genuinely fearful of the state of worship that will be handed to their children, and I think with good reason.  Personally I would have a whole different list of concerns when it comes to worship if I were making the list, but I can certainly understand their dissatisfaction and desire to pass to their children something better than what they experience themselves.

But here’s the issue: what if what you endure to bring change ends up being more destructive than the status quo – in other words, again, if what you do to survive ends up killing the things you love. Put in the context of this specific discussion, if the transition becomes a fight, and the fight becomes nasty (which isn’t, you know, entirely out of the question when you’re dealing with things that have marked traditional social boundaries for 150 years), do your kids inherit a legacy of different worship, or do they inherit a legacy of their friend’s parents – people who called themselves Christians – saying really mean-spirited, hurtful things about their parents? In college ministry we deal often with kids who’ve come from churches which have endured painful splits, and the fallout from the deeply personal attacks that result can be dramatic, having powerful and destructive consequences for the children of those involved in the actual arguments years after the fact. If what you do to pass your children a legacy you think they’ll appreciate (which, in fact, they might not) results in driving them away from the tradition of Christianity altogether – fear is a dangerous thing.

My personal opinion is that given the current climate, it is going to be difficult for either side to come away with a victory worth having. Neither group stands to gain enough to offset the incredible level of damage that might result should either side start taking things personally. I think there may be solutions which are acceptable to both sides, but crafting something that diffuses the situation – let alone making everyone come away feeling good about it – is going to take divine guidance to say the least.

A couple of days ago a friend posted a status update on Facebook about his personal experience of searching for God working on that particular day. His final sentence ended as follows: “Even if we do not see God working we need to have faith that he is still working in us Even if we do not see God working we need to have faith that he is still working in us.”  That status update raised a few personal questions for me regarding how we perceive God to be working in the world, and some deeper issues associated with that.

The core of the issue, really, comes down to this question: “When we look for evidence of God ‘working’ in the world, what criteria do we use to judge whether God is actually working in the world?” While there may be some objective truth about whether God is working in the world around us, the way we interpret events around us as either being part of God’s plan or not seems to be much more subjective and open to personal interpretation.  Our tendency, I suspect, is to judge what God is doing in the world based on our perception about the relative success of particular things we think God should be doing in the world – in other words our perception of how God is working in the world is intimately colored by our own values and agenda, and in a very subtle way, we’ve changed the question from, “How is God working in the world?” to, “How is God working in the world around me to increase my wealth/happiness/satisfaction?”

It may seem like a narrow distinction, but there is a huge gulf between believing that God is working toward my happiness, wealth, and satisfaction and simply believing that God is working. Even though most people say they don’t believe in a prosperity Gospel, most of us have an implicit assumption in our theological foundation that God should reward those who are good and punish those who are evil. As someone who is good, then, I should be able to see evidence of God working around me to make my life better – I should get the new job, or the raise at work, and my kids should never act up, always get good grades in school, and be the star of their respective soccer teams. We wouldn’t be so naive as to publicly say we believe this, of course, but let’s examine the core question again: what criteria do we use to determine whether God is working in the world? Do we really believe that God is working (at the time) when our 401k takes a 40% hit, or we suddenly have termites eating up our house? Insurance companies and lawyers seem to find God working in tragedy (always nice to see they aren’t liable for “acts of God”), but we seldom take that view ourselves when the ball comes up double zero. No, if God is working, he must be working *for* me.

The danger then, as I see it, is this: if God is in the business of looking out for my personal interests (as I define them), then everything is fine, so long as things are going the way I want them to. But when your father dies of cancer, or you lose a child to a miscarriage, or your husband leaves you after three months of marriage, it becomes rather difficult to write those events into the narrative “God is working for good” if by “God is working for good” we really mean “God is working to improve the personal satisfaction, happiness, and wealth of all those who are called according to his purpose.”

If God is ultimately, primarily interested in improving the lives of those who are faithful to Him, then the conclusion one is forced to draw in the above conclusions is that a) God isn’t doing a very good job of “working for the good” or b) the people in the above situations more or less deserve what they got. It’s also possible to conclude that c) the situations above really aren’t that bad, and that the people in them stood to suffer far more unless these situations happened, but I think this argument cheapens the very real pain and suffering people go through in times of crisis. If we accept conclusion a), then God is impotent or tyrannical, and if we accept conclusion b) we move quickly to a place of pride and arrogance or guilt and shame, depending on which side of the crisis we’re on.

One of the major underlying issues in this process is our common practice of using analogies that point from man to God, as opposed to the other way around.  In the ensuing discussion, my friend compared how his father treated him (not letting him steal candy from a store) to how God treats and sometimes disciplines us.  Both my friend’s analogy and our tendency to apply our personal thought process to God fall under this category of analogy. The problem is that the analogy between God and man turns out to be rather tenuous.

Let’s consider the example of comparing God the Father to an earthly father. When we invoke this analogy in the incorrect direction, we are saying that we can infer how God the Father treats us by observing how earthly father’s treat their children.  Thus just as earthly fathers may know much better than their young children which actions are beneficial and which ones are not, God the Father knows better than us and influences things around us so that we will make better choices.  The problem with applying this logic is that we are in some sense creating God in our image, rather than the other way around.  Furthermore, every analogy breaks down at some point – so exactly how far do we carry this particular one? Can we also infer that God the Father abandons his children, as earthly fathers often do? Does he disappoint them with no good reason, as earthly fathers often do? What of fathers who treat their children with indifference or neglect? Are these qualities we can ascribe to God as well? Just how strong is this analogy?

Obviously I think there is something to the analogy – we do not call the first person of the Trinity “God the Father” for no reason, and the Bible itself clearly speaks in these terms (see also Matthew 7).  But I believe the analogy should generally run from God to man, rather than the other way around.  In other words, we should infer how to treat our children based on how God treats us, rather than inferring how God treats us (especially on a topic as diverse and intricate as theodicy) based on how we treat our children.  When we start to run the analogy backward, there are some pretty serious issues that come up.

These issues seem small, but they manifest themselves in devious ways when we make inferences about how God thinks/acts based on how we think/act.  It shows up when we superimpose our will on God’s will, when we take our interests and judge God’s actions on how well he promotes them, while ignoring or overlooking the possibility that God might be interested in, or doing, something else in the world (think Isaiah 55).  It happens when we write our stories in such a way that God is on “our side” to the exclusion of other people.  Do we really think that God chooses sides?

The functional upshot of all of this is that we don’t always know what God is doing, and we have to accept the idea that he isn’t always doing what we think he should be.  As God promises to usher in “a new heaven and a new earth”, we need to be aware of the fact that God’s work might mean we lose the privileged position we occupy in the current world. Unfortunately, we often find it easy to write our view of God’s agenda as if it is pretty much identical to our own, limited, personal agenda. When we do this, we begin to measure God’s faithfulness in terms of whether or not he is serving our own interests, rather than by looking at events in the world and engaging in the process of discerning what God is doing, and how we can participate in that.

The first view prays for God to “bless us”, while the second view asks for God to reveal to us where is working, believing that God’s work is blessed already.

So in a practical sense, we return to the question, “What criteria do I use to judge whether God is working?” If my standard amounts to me getting a raise at work, the kids doing great in school, my 401k not losing value, attendance at my church generally trending upward, and Republican candidates winning political races, I would suggest that I’m thinking in terms of the first view rather than the second, and that I’m making “God’s agenda” into my agenda, rather than the other way around.

Another quote for thought from Stone’s book, “Evangelism after Christendom“… This one is heavy…

The problems involved in thinking about evangelism as a practice, therefore, are not only strategic but ultimately theological. The argument of this book is that the prevailing model of practical reasoning employed to a great extent by contemporary evangelism is inadequate to the Christian faith, ecclesiologically bankrupt, morally vacuous, and tyrannized by a means-end causality that is eschatologically hopeless insofar as it externalizes the means from the end. The way this usually works is that once the aim of evangelism is asserted in terms of converting, initiating, recruiting, or persuading, strategies are developed and implemented, typically on the basis of their strictly utilitarian value in reaching that end.  Both the “end” and the “means” then tyrannize the church as it is forced to forget itself and the One whom it follows in the name of both the end and the means. In the process, the church’s fundamental calling to bear faithful witness is edged out in favor of what “works.” Moreover, we who have been made witnesses by the Holy Spirit fail to be guided in our practice by Spirit-formed virtues such as love, hope, faith, presence, patience, humility and courage, for “witness” has now been hijacked by an evangelism that turns it into a tool employed as a means to something else – namely the converting or initiating of other persons. Evangelism finds it all too easy to jump ahead to some imagined result and then to adjust the meaning of witness in accordance with what will “work” to achieve that result.  It forgets that Christian witnesses engage in the practice of evangelism for no other reason than that they have been made witnesses.

“3 out of 4 Christian teens walk away from the church after they leave home,” the website loudly proclaims. Why? “[M]ainly because they are not equipped to examine the skepticism and atheism they encounter after leaving home, often coming from their college professors.” The answer? A new wave of Christian Apologetics, of course, complete with plenty of rhetoric, and tried and true arguments that have been in freshman philosophy textbooks for ages.

Before starting, I think it’s only fair to say that I’m a stakeholder in this debate on multiple levels. I’m a Christian, but more than that I’ve been actively involved in university ministry for over 10 years. In that time I’ve dealt with close to 1,500 students as a speaker, class teacher, and counselor. I’m as concerned about the exodus of teens as much as anyone else, but unlike the New Apologists, I have a very different perspective on why it is occurring, and consequently what the solution should be. I think it’s also important to say that I recognize that the men who are crisscrossing the country on speaking tours do genuinely believe they are doing good, that their work is a “ministry”, and that ultimately they are doing God’s work, saving people from the evils of liberalism. Unfortunately, my own experience suggests that Christian Apologetics – specifically Christian Apologetics as it is currently practiced – misses the mark in several important areas, and indeed causes more harm than good.

The New Christian Apologists read the absence of the 18-35 demographic in our churches to be a symptom of good, biblically based, young Christians from strong families meeting activist, staunchly atheist, liberal professors in their university classrooms, who pervert the truth of God and lie to our children.  The problem, then, is one of information – if we can supply our children (and specifically those in college and those about to be in college) with “good” information about how they can counter the “bad” information they are receiving or are about to receive, then we can really make a difference in the problem of our teens leaving the church in droves. There are a wide variety of takes on what this information should look like, and my purpose here is not to debate any of them head on. I agree, in general, that we could and should do a much better job of inviting our youth into meaningful discussions about faith, and that we should try to get them to engage in the philosophical dialog with the world that Christianity has been involved in since the time of Paul. Where I disagree, however, is in the fundamental premise that this lack of information is the real cause of students rejecting Christianity. There are a lot of kids who leave the church, to be sure, but there is something else – something much more major – going on here, I suggest.

I’ve been doing this for a while, and the students I know personally who’ve walked away from churches numbers probably in the tens-of-dozens.  In that total number of cases, I can think of only a handful – four, perhaps – who cited traditional apologetic questions (“I don’t really believe there is a God / How can there be evil in the world if God is all good and all powerful, etc”) as even a contributing factor in their decision to walk away.  Furthermore those who have talked about apologetic questions as reasons of their rejection of the prototypical Evangelical Christian lifestyle tend to be very well read on the subject – people who’ve done a fairly extensive amount of searching on their own in both Christian and non-Christian apologetic literature, and ultimately find more doubt than faith. This in itself is a powerful topic, and one that I might tackle later, but is somewhat tangential for the purposes of the immediate discussion. I submit that the evidence, at least gathered from an informal survey of people who actually *are* leaving the church, suggests that apologetic questions (and by extension militantly godless, atheist professors) are not really the major reason the college students I’ve talked to are rejecting faith.

Fundamentally I think there are a number of reasons why those in the New Apologetics movement make this mistake, but I’ll take a quick shot at three of them.  First, when you hold a really good hammer, it’s easy to see every problem as a nail. A dozen years ago, decent apologetic literature was genuinely difficult to find, and in general I applaud the apologetic community for a much needed refresh of presentation in the past decade. Today, however, there exists a wealth of apologetic literature, classes, books, cd’s, tapes, videos, and radio shows, all of which have a vested commercial interest in trying to cast apologetics as the solution to as many problems as possible.  As a result, the New Apologetics movement seems to be, as we like to say in the engineering trade, a “solution in search of a problem”, and when you are a solution in search of a problem, almost any problem will do. I feel like in some ways I’m being a little unfair, so let me pause and say that Apologetics does actually do a lot to help some very real problems, and I think that in some sort of academic sense it’s important that it continues. The issue, I think, is when the apologetic movement tries to create problems that don’t really exist, especially when doing so seems to serve its own economic interest.

Second, the majority of people who actually participate in driving the movement are travelling speakers and authors, as opposed to ministers. It’s not terribly difficult to imagine why this is, given that ministers generally have more than enough on their plates without spending time writing apologetic literature. Where this gets us into trouble, I suggest, is that the people who write the literature and give the speeches and drive the movement in general have become disconnected from a day-to-day ministry context in a single place. I take it to be a simple fact of life is that ministry looks very different day in, day out on the ground than it does at 30,000 feet flying over Wichita, KS on the way to your next speaking engagement. This is not to say that speaking engagements can’t be an important part of ministries in a local context, but it is to say that you can never truly understand what the particular problems in a particular ministry in a particular place (say, Wichita) are unless you actually spend time there, and a good bit of time at that. In the same way, to actually understand the needs and problems of campus and youth pastors, in a very real sense you have to be one, rather than just interacting with them.  This disconnect shows up most strongly in that apologists spend most of their time talking *to* students and pastors instead of listening to and dialoging with them.  I’m certain that every apologist worth his or her salt can of course come up with students who they’ve touched, and people who they “listen to” to help change and guide their ministry – and I’m not at all suggesting these people don’t exist.  What I am suggesting is that the majority of contact those on the professional speaking circuit have listening to actual students and ministers is self-selecting at best, and causes them to seriously overstate the prevalence of students rejecting faith due to a lack of apologetic information. This isn’t a criticism of apologetics, per-se, as much as it is the crusader type of Christian ministry that has been prevalent ever since the Great Awakening. Revivals and crusades may draw really large crowds and look really good on paper, but they often leave a lot of wreckage in their wake that pastors on the ground have to deal with months and years after they’re gone. Regardless of their message, whether these revivals and crusades on balance are a greater source of harm or good is certainly up for debate in many circles, and with good reason.

Finally, the new apologetic movement has invested itself heavily in support of a particular, and in my mind problematic soteriology – namely that salvation hinges primarily on the intellectual acceptance of a few key propositions.  In other words, salvation itself is primarily a problem of not having good information, and as a result good apologetics equates to good evangelism, and vice versa. There are a lot of things we could say about this, but I think we’ll save them for a later post. Suffice it to say that this brand of soteriology causes a lot of practical problems when you try to apply it, which lead to some of the disconnects we’ll talk about later on.

So all of that being said, if the apologists really have missed the boat and there really is something else going on here, what is it?  After all, it’s not just enough to say that kids aren’t leaving for apologetic reasons unless you can provide a decent alternative that explains why they’re headed for the door in ever increasing numbers.

For my money, the single factor that I can point to in about 75% of cases when students reject faith is the cognitive dissonance they’ve felt for 18 or more years between the outward message they hear preached at church and the actions of church members, most importantly their parents and youth pastors.  From the time kids are young, they’re told that God should be the most important thing in their lives, but the see their parents place money, work, kids, family, church – almost everything above God. In Bible class they are taught about the fruits of the Spirit, and that a life where Jesus is Lord will have certain characteristics, but they observe the lives of “Christians” around them and note that instead of peace there is worry, instead of patience there is anger, instead of kindness there is bitterness, instead of gentleness there is callousness, and the list goes on.  By the time they are entering college and having to make their own decisions about what they want to do with their lives, they’ve been given so many conflicting messages about what it is supposed to mean to be a Christian and what it seems to mean in actual practice that they’re done with the whole thing, and ready to try something – anything else. The problem, in other words, is not bad apologetics, but bad praxis. It’s easy to find a good book on Christian apologetics, but it’s much harder to find a person in churches today who lives a just, merciful, humble, Christ-centered life – and at the end of the day the problem most college students have with Christianity is the lack of the second, rather than the lack of the first.

I’ve raised a lot of issues in this post that probably merit further discussion, and it’s already extremely long as is, but let me close for now with a final critique. The apologetic movement does try to draw people in and expose them to a brand of Christianity that is, at least on the surface, less anti-intellectual than Evangelical Christianity writ large. However, in practice it often suggests a very simplistic, almost black-and-white approach to answering what are, almost always, very nuanced questions. It doesn’t really seem honest, either in an intellectual or theological context, to provide half-page or 15 minute answers to something as serious and layered as the problem of evil in the world. Indeed, the presentation of such answers seems to represent a clear and present danger to honest discussion. As a result, I think it is absolutely critical to distinguish here between the idea of apologetics practiced well, and the actuality of apologetics practiced poorly – a distinction we will probably get into in subsequent posts.

My wife’s grandparents are guardians of tradition. I don’t say this as a criticism, but merely by way of introduction. As many people their age, they grew up in the wake of the great depression, fresh with the memory of what it was to be in serious want – something I think few of us who grew up in the boom years of the 80′s and 90′s can really appreciate. Over the years, they have collected various objects from other people’s estates, family heirlooms, and created a few things along the way. Katie’s grandfather is a storyteller, and one of his great pleasures in life is to recount the story of each object, sharing the value and meaning of every item in their possession. From rocks to magnificent pieces of furniture and cut glass, each item’s value is based on its story, and he knows them all. In many ways, their house is a museum, full of objects that have been cataloged and displayed, all of which are priceless in some way and cannot be thrown away. When they were younger, they traveled the world, living in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), St. Kits, and various places in the United States before finally settling in the small town of Canyon, in the panhandle of West Texas.

Every time we visit them, I am challenged by the collision of reform and tradition, new and old. Several times on our most recent visit, Katie’s grandmother would mention, “We’re stuck in our deep ruts and we just keep going along!”, to which Katie’s grandfather would remind her, “Comfortable ruts.  Comfortable ruts.” For many things in their mind, the way things have always been is they way they should continue to be, and for many things that have changed, the best thing that could happen would be for things to go back to the way they were. I am exaggerating things a bit here to be sure (Katie’s grandmother knows more about Photoshop than my father, for instance), but I don’t think it’s terribly unfair to say that they are guardians of orthodoxy – trying as best they can to preserve both in memory and in practice “the way things were”, even though that struggle is becoming more and more difficult as the world sweeps around them.  Those of you who know me would probably agree that I’m someone who, at least for much of my life, has been primarily  disdainful of or subversive to traditions – particularly traditions which seem to serve little or no purpose.

I believe this conflict is particularly relevant as broader society continues to grapple with exactly what it means to be “post-modern”, and how (or if) we will return to some center of meaning. Obviously it has implications beyond the immediate conflict of culture to the constant clash between old and new, established and emerging. But in the end, the question comes down to this: how do we respond to change and tradition?

One option is to embrace and defend traditions at all costs. The problem with this view is that it’s easy to become like the village of Anatevka. As Tevye states:

Because of our traditions, we’ve kept our balance for many, many years. Here in Anatevka we have traditions for everything… how to eat, how to sleep, even, how to wear clothes. For instance, we always keep our heads covered and always wear a little prayer shawl… This shows our constant devotion to God. You may ask, how did this tradition start? I’ll tell you – I don’t know. But it’s a tradition… Because of our traditions, everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do.

While traditions may help us keep our balance – like a fiddler on the roof – we run the risk of becoming so disconnected from our traditions that we have no idea why we practice them or where they come from. While some traditions may serve a useful purpose, it is essential that we possess at least some measure of understanding of the traditions origins and meaning. As we become more disconnected from traditions, we lose the ability to determine whether a particular tradition makes sense in a modern context. There’s an old story about a girl whose mother was teaching her to cook a ham.  The first step was to cut three inches off the end of the ham. When asked why, her mother responded that it was how she learned it from her mother. When the girl asked her grandmother, she replied, “I cut the ham off because the pan was too short.” I think all of us can think of things that we do “because it’s the way it’s always been done” that have outlived their usefulness. The unquestioned defense of tradition does not distinguish between traditions that are good and bad – it sees all traditions as important, valuable, and necessary to continue.

The other extreme tries to jettison all traditions. It starts with the assumption that all tradition is bad, and wants to throw the whole thing out and start over. That might be nice, assuming you could actually do it, but in reality we can never fully separate ourselves from the traditions we grew up with. Even if we try to throw away all the assumptions and “start fresh”, our perspective is still colored by our former practices. Furthermore, “old” traditions are usually jettisoned only to be replaced by “new” traditions that look suspiciously similar to the old ones, with a few minor changes. When we attempt to divorce ourselves from our traditions and history, the end result looks suspiciously like those who blindly defend tradition – we are disconnected from our traditions even though we still practice them.

My belief is that one of the primary tasks of each generation is to reevaluate and reinterpret traditions in a new context – to see which traditions serve a valuable purpose, and which traditions simply don’t make sense anymore. Above all, we must remain connected to the traditions we practice, instead of blindly continuing a practice we don’t understand. In many ways, this makes the job of the older generation even more difficult, as they are responsible for not only passing on traditions, but allowing things that were of vital importance to them to fade away. Furthermore, the communication of traditions cannot simply be reduced to “That’s the way we’ve always done it”, but requires patience and understanding. Above all, however, it requires open and honest communication between young and old, and a large amount of patience on both sides.

My wife’s grandparents have seen the world change around them, and while I think they mourn the passing of some things, I think they also realize that for the most part progress has been a good thing. There are new practices and new technologies they choose not to embrace, but they also understand that they cannot stop change, and are in many ways determined to be teachers of the things that were. In many ways it makes me wonder: What things will we value and strive to pass on? What novel innovations will become our cherished traditions? What will we cling to while the world changes around us? Can we preserve any of what we’ve learned from our parents and grandparents, or will their stories and experiences die with us? Someday we too will live in a world that looks very different from the one we see now. How will we change, and how will we share our stories with those who come after?

What is there to be said that others haven’t already mentioned about U2′s 360 tour? At this point, it seems like most of my friends and circles have seen and spoken about the tour, but Wednesday was my turn, and I’ve finally had a couple of minutes to sit and relate my experience.

First of all, it’s worth pointing out that this was the 4th time I’ve seen U2 in concert, but the first time I’ve seen them in a stadium, as opposed to an arena. While having a concert in a venue as large as Reliant is great in a lot of ways, it does really tone down the energy level quite a bit. I will never forget the moment they walked on stage the first time I saw them in Austin, as the sound of the crowd drowned out the music. While the stadium was larger with an incredible amount of people, it just didn’t have the same energy as previous shows.

As usual, the technical side of the show was amazing.  The set was over the top, and the video work was some of the best I’ve ever seen. I don’t know who gets to engineer those sets and design them, but if anyone out there happens to read this, I’d be happy to send a resume.  While the technical side of things is cool, the reason you go see a band like U2 isn’t their hardware, but the music. To me, there were really three moments in the concert that stood out in particular, and I won’t be taking them in chronological order.

One of the great things about U2 in general, in my opinion, is their ability to take their songs and reinterpret them in new, but honest contexts. One of the best examples of that, I think, was their performance of “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, a song written over 25 years ago about an incident where the British Army shot and killed 13 civil rights protesters in 1972. As the band played during this tour, the video screens flashed images primarily of the election troubles in Iran, particularly the scenes of violence, where the chilling refrain, “How long, how long must we sing this song?”, seemed to echo more of despair than U2′s generally upbeat and hopeful take on the future being “a better place“.

Mark Love’s comments on the first encore are really better than anything I could say, but none the less the moment was powerful. As a brief recount, the first encore began with a video of Desmond Tutu, then led into “One”, which has been a staple of U2 encores for as long as I’ve seen them. At the end, however, Bono moved smoothly into a single verse of “Amazing Grace”, which was marvelous on many levels. First, it’s perhaps a bit surprising to hear such a classic gospel song at a secular rock concert, but for me it wasn’t just the song – it was the feeling and honesty of Bono’s voice, particularly as he (and most of the crowd) sang the first two lines: “Amazing grace how sweet the sound/ that saved a wretch like me!” To me, it dovetailed perfectly with Bono’s added emphasis during “City of Blinding Lights”: “Blessings not just for the ones who kneel – luckily.” I think there is a wonderful and implicit recognition in the music of U2 that “there but for the grace of God go I”, and that God’s blessings are not the possession of the church, but rather of God, and his to do with as he sees fit.

For me, though, the high point of the concert was without doubt the juxtaposition of two songs in particular. At times it’s been hard for me to pick my “favorite” U2 song, but for quite a while now it’s been “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” There are a variety of reasons, but at the core I think the song perfectly mirrors the current religious discontent of many in my generation – that we’ve heard a message of God that somehow seems to be lacking, and even though there is this massive carrot being held out, there’s still something missing – something unfinished. As Love would say, it is a “properly eschatological” song. Crucially, though, and I am certain intentionally, as the song faded away, a new voice entered in -

When the night has come
and the land is dark
and the moon is the only light we see -
I won’t cry, I won’t cry,
no I won’t shed a tear,
just as long as you stand,
stand by me.

As I mentioned before, in many ways it seemed to me this was a more reflective, less hopeful concert than previous times I’ve seen them. Even though the Vertigo tour’s closing “40″ shares a common refrain with “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, the tone of the songs could not be more different – while “40″ boldly declares the words of Psalm 40 (“I waited patiently for the Lord / He inclined and heard my cry”), “Sunday Bloody Sunday” takes a much more cynical view of progress: “And the battle’s yet begun / this many lost but tell me who has won?” In the middle of this time of reflection, however, was the bold and beautiful pronouncement of belief following one the two most profoundly (and self-described) gospel songs in their canon – that though we walk in the valley of the shadow of death, we shall fear no evil.

A while back, Jeremy sent me a book entitled Evangelism after Christendom (Bryan Stone). For those of you who don’t have friends in interesting graduate programs that actually read books, I would suggest you find some, and then have them tell you what to read.  It cuts down on the amount of bad books you go through significantly, and allows you to read more bad books in your own field, if you choose.

With most Christian books I’ve read in recent memory, I generally read the first few pages, say, “Oh, I know what this is going to be about”, and then spend the next 300-500 pages discovering the book was, indeed, about exactly what I suspected on page 4.  With this particular read, however, I’m close to 50 pages in and I have absolutely no idea where he’s going to end up, which is an extremely exciting and refreshing feeling.

Stone begins his book with reference to the idea of Christianity in general, and evangelism in particular, as practice.  In doing so, he begins with Alasdair MacIntyre’s (virtue ethics) definition of a practice, which is probably easiest to explain using James McClendon’s analogy of a game.

One of MacIntyre’s core principles of a practice is that if a “means is internal to a given end”, then “the end[s] cannot be characterized independently from a classification of the means”. In other words, it is impossible to separate a practice from the “internal goods” of that practice. What are internal goods? It’s perhaps easiest to start by talking about what they are not.  For starters, internal goods are not merely skills or rules. Consider baseball, for instance.  There are a variety of skills that might be required to play baseball – running, throwing, and catching, for instance.  However, none of these *are* baseball. The practice of baseball is something other than running, throwing, or catching, though all of those skills are required in order to participate in the practice. Whatever skills are required for a particular practice, however, the practice cannot be reduced to any of them, and each skill is judged by how well it serves the practice, not the other way around.

Additionally, Stone  points out that there may be “external goods” which result from a practice – in the case of baseball, money and fame – but that these external goods do not define the practice, and in fact can generally be achieved by other means which have nothing to do with the practice in question (say, being a personal injury lawyer).  Stone also notes that often times our desire for these external goods can distort the practice, and cause us to miss the point of what the practice is ”really” about, if they become our goal.

A practice, then, is about more than the individual skills required for it, and more than the external goods produced by it.  It is also about joining a tradition that self-justifies the practice, and requires participation to fully understand.  More on this in a later post, but for now suffice it to say that a practice is about more than having a certain skillset, or a certain set of rules, or a certain set of results, and even when it is done alone is an inherently social activity that requires a communal agreement on what the practice entails (think about the game of Solitare, for instance).

Let’s stop, then, and consider in our own particular context how these ideas might relate not just to the “practice” of Evangelism, but Christianity as a whole.

There are certainly a number of “skills” (for want of a better word) involved in the practice of Christianity. Prayer, meditation, study, service – each of these forms an important part of the Christian experience, but as a practice, Christianity cannot be reduced to any of them.  Additionally, it’s often tempting for us to think of these skills as the measure of the “Christian-ness” of a person, or of ourselves.  If we’re not careful, our pursuit of quiet time, study, or even service can actually subvert us from the ethos of what it means to live Christianity as a practice. Finally, we find it easy to mistake the external goods of the practice (morality especially) for internal goods.  While these external goods may result from the practice of Christianity, they are not unique to it (i.e. there are moral non-participants in the practice), and when these external goods become our ultimate aim, distract us from the essence of Christianity as practice.

What does it mean to practice Christianity?  What are the “internal goods”? What are the things so central to the practice that they cannot be characterized apart from it?

I was driving back from the store a week or so ago when I heard a song from the new Regina Spektor album called “Laughing With”.  Something about the lyrics captivated me enough to want to get the rest of the album, which I finally did tonight (will see how that goes tomorrow, perhaps).  None the less, I thought I’d post them here for reflection.

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God
When they’re starving or freezing or so very poor

No one laughs at God when the doctor calls
After some routine tests
No one’s laughing at God
when it’s gotten real late
And their kid’s not back from that party yet

No one laughs at God when their airplane
Starts to uncontrollably shake
No one’s laughing at God
When they see the one they love hand in hand
with someone else and they hope that they’re mistaken
No one laughs at God when the cops knock on their door
And they say “We’ve got some bad new, sir,”

No one’s laughing at God
When there’s a famine, fire or flood

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God
when they’ve lost all they got
And they don’t know what for

No one laughs at God on the day they realize
that the last sight they’ll ever see is a pair of hateful eyes
No one’s laughing at God
When they’re saying their goodbyes

But God can be funny
At a cocktail party while listening to a good God-themed joke or
When the crazies say he hates us
and they get so red in the head
You think that they’re about to choke
God can be funny
When told he’ll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie
Who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus

God can be so hilarious
Ha ha, ha ha

No one’s laughing at God.
We’re all “laughing with God”.

Veni, veni Emmanuel;
Captivum solve Israel,
Qui gemit in exilio,
Privatus Dei Filio.

Gaude! Gaude! Emmanuel,
Nascetur pro te, Israel!

There have been a few occurrences recently that have prompted people to ask me about various issues related to God and science, so I thought I’d take a moment or two outline some views here.

I think the only way to begin the discussion is with two simple points:

1. The first point, I think, is summed up extraordinarily well by Daniel Gilbert in his book Stumbling on Happiness:
   

   [S]cience is one of those words that means too many things to too many people and is thus often at risk of meaning nothing at all. My father is an eminent biologist who, after pondering the matter for some decades, recently revealed to me that psychology can’t really be a science because science requires the use of electricity. Apparently shocks to your ankles don’t count. My own definition of science is a bit more eclectic, but one thing about which I, my dad, and most other scientists can agree is that if a thing cannot be measured, then it cannot be studied scientifically. It can be studied, and one might even argue that the study of such unquantifiables is more worthwhile than all the sciences laid end to end. But it is not science because science is about measurement, and if a thing cannot be measured – cannot be compared with a clock or a ruler or something other than itself – it is not a potential object of scientific inquiry.

2. In addition to Gilbert’s point, I would also add that science must be repeatable. In 1989, two scientists from the University of Utah reported achieving nuclear fusion at room temperatures. The announcement was met with a great deal of excitement and energy. There was only one catch. Nobody else could get it to work. In order for something to be proven scientifically, it cannot be a one-off event. Science searches for answers to questions that are both empirical and repeatable. If you can’t repeat what happened, it isn’t science.

Taken together, these two prospects do not bode well for connecting God or creation with true science – and not for lack of effort to discover or suppress “evidence” on either side.

The prophet Isaiah writes:

To whom, then, will you compare God?
What image will you compare him to?

The very idea that – if God is all-powerful and “wholly other” like we claim he is – we could somehow observe, measure, or place him in some sort of “test tube” and experiment with him is quite frankly absurd. The problem is not that we haven’t gotten the right tools or haven’t looked in the right places – it’s that the very philosophy of doing so is bankrupt. As Gilbert argues, saying that we shouldn’t look at God scientifically isn’t saying that we shouldn’t study him, or that study of God in some sense isn’t valuable – rather it’s saying we should study “God” in a way that makes sense, and that way is not with lab coats, telescopes and microscopes.

The second point drops the underpinning from creation arguments (on both sides, incidentally) in a similar way because, by definition, they’re not repeatable. We know about star formation because we can observe millions of stars in various stages of their lives. We know about galaxies and black holes and supernovae because we can witness them across the universe. But we can’t roll back the clock and observe the creation of the universe, regardless of which side of the fence we’re on. We can’t see the big bang or ask God to do it over again – this is the one universe we have, and witnessing the creation of a second one isn’t really something that’s going to happen any time soon. As a result, we’ll be left with lots of questions, searching for answers, many of which we’ll never have ironclad answers to.

Finally, with regard to many creationist (including intelligent design) arguments, it is essential, in light of the two bullet points at the top, to consider the claim that is being made, and whether that claim makes any sense in the realm of science. The claim made by any creationist argument is as follows: “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.” Regardless of your belief on the validity of that statement, I hope you can see why it is not a scientific statement in any way. I firmly believe that the study of the origin of the universe is a tremendously interesting and important metaphysical question, but not one at all suited for scientific inquiry.

Ultimately, belief in God, as Scripture points out constantly, is about faith, not knowledge. For centuries, philosophers have struggled with philosophically proving and disproving the existence of a higher power, and each attempt ends with the conclusion that the question is “non-falsifiable” – it cannot be proved or disproved by observation or experiment. For generations, Christians glorified what they called “the Mysteries of Christ” – comfortable with a certain amount of “unknown”. While we continue to search for knowledge, my hope is we can become more comfortable with the Mysteries of Christ, and ultimately not feel the need to Q.E.D. prove something beyond our comprehension.

This article was originally posted by Edward Fudge, who maintains a large blog/email list, and was reposted by Brian Mashburn, who I occasionally read. I found it to be an interesting article, and one I identified with in some ways. Emphasis added.

My home base is with the Churches of Christ because that is where God has placed me for now. If I ever sense that God is leading me to a different subdivision on the Christian map, I will not hesitate to move. The truth is that I am at home wherever believers worship God, proclaim Jesus Christ, teach the Bible, live in the Spirit and love each other. The spiritual address is irrelevant.

I also remain in this nondenominational movement of my youth because I have complete freedom of understanding and conscience. I have a congenial home congregation, the Bering Drive Church of Christ in Houston, Texas, in which I have served as a teacher and an elder since 1982. A new generation of Churches of Christ is coming on the scene: one focused on Jesus Christ rather than on a church system, that proclaims justification by grace through faith rather than salvation through human effort or doctrinal conformity, and that enjoys fellowship with other believers based on commitment to Jesus rather than on sectarian allegiance or denominational membership.

I also reside among the Churches of Christ because I appreciate their founding ideals. The 19th-century Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement from which it sprang began with the goal of uniting Christians under the leadership of King Jesus without regard to human traditions or creeds. Its founders’ vision was to be “Christians only, but not the only Christians.” It adopted the more ancient slogan, “In matters of faith, unity; in matters of opinion, liberty; in all things, charity.” It professed to “speak where the Bible speaks and to be silent where the Bible is silent.” It offered freedom of conscience to individuals and autonomy to congregations. I find these ideals to be biblical in origin, refreshing in theory and hospitable for daily living on the ground.

Not everyone in Churches of Christ enjoys the freedom of which I speak, or encouragement in their local fellowship, or healthy gospel preaching from the pulpit. I encourage them to work for such results as God gives opportunity. If the doors are slammed shut in their face, these individuals must sometimes leave the “home-folks,” as the Apostle Paul was required to do, and go where God is leading. When that happens, I confidently commend them to his tender care. I deeply regret that some among these churches have been brainwashed to believe that they have no other spiritual option. Those who are responsible for such nonsense will one day answer to God.