John Piper: on the Collapsing Bridge in MN

Putting My Daughter to Bed Two Hours After the Bridge Collapsed

Talitha prayed “Please don’t let anyone blame God for this but give thanks that they were saved.” When I sat on her bed and tucked her in and blessed her and sang over her a few minutes ago, I said, “You know, Talitha, that was a good prayer, because when people ‘blame’ God for something, they are angry with him, and they are saying that he has done something wrong. That’s what “blame” means: accuse somebody of wrongdoing. But you and I know that God did not do anything wrong. God always does what is wise. And you and I know that God could have held up that bridge with one hand.” Talitha said, “With his pinky.” “Yes,” I said, “with his pinky. Which means that God had a purpose for not holding up that bridge, knowing all that would happen, and he is infinitely wise in all that he wills.”

Talitha said, “Maybe he let it fall because he wanted all the people of Minneapolis to fear him.” “Yes, Talitha,” I said, “I am sure that is one of the reasons God let the bridge fall.”

Speechless.

Falling away from faith Pt. 2

It doesn't take long to discover that Christians don't agree on much of anything. You can find pro-choice and pro-life Christians, Christians who believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ and those who don't, Bible-believing Christians and Bible-critiquing Christians, pacifists and militarists, soul-winning missionaries and food-giving social justice activists. There are even Christians who don't believe in God!

All of these Christians draw on a combination of tradition, experience, Scripture and reason to explain the version of faith they find most compelling, most fitting, most true. Being the most compelling explanation of the faith apparently matters to most versions of Christianity. Tolerance for diversity of opinions doesn't often characterize theological discussions.

Certainly, some ideas about what it means to be Christian have less credibility in the larger Christian culture (mainstream Protestants and Catholics). Still, centuries of debate have gone into some of the core doctrines the (majority) church claims as inescapable, Holy Spirit-given truth.

One of the ways Christians manage the diversity of opinions is to reduce the faith to "five essentials" or the ancient creeds or the little 'o' orthodox core tenets. Then believers debate which ones those are, appealing to established authorities such as the Pope (RCC), tradition (EO), or the Bible (Protestants). All versions claim a connection with the early church and the Holy Spirit.

Since sharing a common view of essentials has mattered to the "church" for most of history, I often felt compelled to weigh theological arguments and decide between them (I didn't think much about who had the right to interpret as I did which interpretation made the most sense to me). I discovered early in my journey that "trying on" a viewpoint aloud (online especially) was dangerous to me and my business. I wasn't in "danger" as in 'at gunpoint', but rather, the questions I had and my attempts at answering them called my faith into question for communities who depended on shared faith statements.

By this time, I had read a ton of theology. The claims to certainty started to sound a little desperate to me (perhaps mirroring my own need to find a place to stand confidently). I asked myself: Why was there such a need to clamp down and require a perspective of fellow "believers" (or doubters)? Why must those in leadership state emphatically that an answer can be found or that a specific tradition has found it? I realized that I knew the answer to that question, though.

For instance, if one of the tenets most believers accept is that the Bible tells the true story of salvation, yet there are 15 different ideas about what that story is, the next step is to wonder how to interpret the Bible in order to arrive at the "right" answer. And of course, committing to an answer matters because things like where you live (America or abroad), how you spend time (winning souls or working in a job or raising your kids), how you spend money (donations to missions or soup kitchens), and how you treat "the lost" depend on how you answer this question. Even whether or not you believe in creationism versus evolution or how to think about miracles (do we pray for the sick expecting healing or not?) impact how you see reality, how you interact with it. These issues are not abstractions. I knew that how I lived my faith depended on the answers I believed.

So I changed the focus of my questions. I pulled back the lens and determined that doctrinal issues would fall into place if I found a reliable source of interpretation for the Bible and the tradition. Rather than asking which doctrines were truest or most correct, I decided to find out who had the best credentials to determine what those doctrines ought to be. Simple enough, right?

Falling away from faith Pt. 1

One of the interesting things about discussions related to "walking away" or "falling away" (interesting variation on perspectives those two labels indicate, don't you think?) is that those who still have faith often feel that they welcome questions, that they exercise faith, that they are willing to live with some cognitive dissonance while the ones on the outside were not.

The issue of trust comes up frequently - as in, can't you trust God with your questions? Why would the Bible be untrustworthy for matters of faith (even if we admit that scientifically or historically it is not 100% accurate)? An assumption is often made that the one who "walked" is just unwilling to allow for there to be mystery at all.

I want to share in several freewrites what it feels like to lose faith. This is a bit of how the journey "felt" as I went through it (more than a detailed expose of how my questions knit together to strangle my faith).

Like any good evangelical, I accepted the planks of faith that I had been taught (inerrancy of Scripture, absolute values for God - the omnis, Jesus as God's Son who died and rose again to save me from my sins, the importance of evangelism as the primary mission of the church, the power of the Holy Spirit to change me into a Christ-like person over a lifetime of prayer, Bible study and obedience, the necessity of the church to represent God on earth).

Salvation became the first battleground for my mind almost immediately upon conversion as I had to consider (and accept) that my high school classmates, step-family and neighborhood (most of whom were Jews) were all bound for hell... de facto. This concern broadened as I studied history and wondered how on earth Chinese and Africans in Old Testament times were supposed to get saved. The question deepened when I met my first Muslim in France and discovered that entire mission agencies were devoted to reaching (at that time) the 800 million Muslims in the world. I read widely the various answers to the question of who gets saved and why or how (there are a surprising number of postulations and few match up with each other, to be honest)... and decided the surest bet, no matter what answer (predestination, free will choice, God's sovereignty, my obedience to "go"), was to do something about hell-bound Muslims, not just to read more about them.

Putting my trust in God that he had instituted these fundamental planks of faith led me to radical commitment - living abroad to reach Muslims for Christ. The details of this journey are well-known here so I won't repeat them now. Suffice to say, failure on the mission field (every kind - missionaries who had affairs with believers, un-believers and maids; the lack of conversions; the inability of missionaries to share enough common ground theologically to meaningfully disciple the few converts there were; deaths on the field; the betrayal of trusted converts who turned in missionaries to the police; the pregnancy of a single missionary by a converted translation partner) led to repentance and a new resolve to let God be God by investing in the prophetic holiness movement.

Eight years later and three more children, all kinds of inconsistencies in experience and theology in that movement led me to wonder what we were playing at. The Internet broke into my life at that time, and suddenly I discovered an enormous world of Christians who not only didn't believe like me, but were adamant that their version of faith was the more accurate one. Reformed theology was familiar enough, but the daily encounter with apathy toward the billions of people heading to hell for eternity so chilled me, I felt it my duty to sort out who had got God's heart on the matter.

The upshot, though, is that those encounters dislodged my confidence in a single answer. I felt a bit desperate, as though that one loose Jenga block had disrupted the tower, but if I was careful, I could slide it back in and all would be well. I headed down the road to answering this riddle with that intention. What I never imagined is how many blocks would be pulled out of the tower each time I read, discussed or thought through my evolving questions.

I sincerely wanted to find the missing block, to put Humpty back together, to put enough glue on the loose pieces to hold the fragile structure in place. What I discovered instead: that honesty in the quest required faith and courage I'd never been called on to exercise.

(Part 2 tomorrow)

Rambo's Understanding Conversion

Scot McNight put me onto Rambo's Understanding Conversion when we got into a discussion about patterns related to walking away from faith. I googled and found the page linked above. Here's a salient portion which I found provocative!

People ask me, “What it is that changes when a person converts?” I’ve struggled with that over the years. Drawing upon my own observations, as well as the literature, I’ve tried to put together four major things that happen in a conversion process.

One of the few things that sociologists and psychologists agree upon is that, almost without exception, changing to a new religious orientation takes place through what the sociologists call kinship and friendship networks of one sort or another. Sometimes they’re very intense. Sometimes they’re minimal. In any case, people who convert or change religions usually do so through personal contact, and not through impersonal methods of communication, although that happens sometimes.

Secondly, what is very clear is that virtually all religious groups emphasize the importance of relationships with the leader of the group, and with members of the group. One of the things that is very striking when you go into a religious group is that there is enormous affection. People in some groups will even address one another as brother and sister, or other terms that communicate that relationships are very important. Living in the kind of society in which we do, with the need for relationships with other human beings, it’s no wonder that this is one of the most important attractions, as well as consequences of a conversion process.

I think that, perhaps because of the Protestant bias in the founding of psychology, we have denigrated the role of ritual. But, it’s very clear from the work of people like Victor Turner and others, that what we do has a powerful impact on what we believe, and what we experience. These things just don’t drop from heaven, but rather are engaged in actively. I use a term, which I take very seriously, that rituals are the “choreography of the soul.” It seems to me that they invite people into a new way of being.

The third thing that happens when people become converts, is that the way in which they interpret life—their rhetoric—changes. Now, this varies from group to group obviously. It varies, both in the content, and the degree to which they apply it to different aspects of their life. In some cases, for people who are very totalistic in their conversion, they now have an interpretative system that applies to anything and everything. This is one of the things that is very disruptive to families.

For instance, if I had an automobile accident and somebody asked what happened, I might reply, that the crazy guy was drunk, and he hit me. However, a religious convert may say it was the will of God. That infuriates some people, because it’s an interpretative system that is very discordant with the way in which the average secular person, at least in the United States, operates to interpret life. For some families and other people, it’s like a fingernail scratching on the blackboard. When a person converts, their whole strategy of attribution has changed.

The fourth thing that changes is the notion of role. Social psychologists and sociologists have talked about this for a long time, and it’s really in some ways rather a mystery. For example, if I were sitting in this audience as an auditor, the likelihood of me asking a question in this group is probably one in a thousand. Because my role is to be a presenter, I get nervous about it, but I can do it, and I would probably talk too long. Role is very powerful in shaping peoples’ perceptions and behaviors. When people become a member of a new religious movement, or when they become a passionate Roman Catholic, they have a new perception of themselves that often empowers them to do things, to believe things, and to feel things that they have not have been able to prior to that time.

Let me wrap it all up. I will speak now about the consequences. Suppose person X has become a member of the Mormon Church, and someone asks me, “Are they better off or worse off?” You can imagine that in many of the contexts that I work in, this is usually a loaded question. As a psychologist, I do not want to judge someone by some absolute ideal, but rather to consider what their life was like before they became a convert. Suppose someone had been a drug addict, and now they’ve really reformed their lives. They may still not be a very good person. They still don’t know much about the theology. They still have some habits that I consider atrocious. They’re still people that I probably wouldn’t go out and have a drink with. Nevertheless, I would say their life has been made better, psychologically speaking.

But, I also want to argue in terms of what I’ve been pushing for, and that is honesty. There are some conversions in which one could argue that the convert has psychologically regressed. Now, in some cases, converts temporarily regress, psychologically speaking, but as they are involved in a group over a longer period of time, through the structure of the group, through new disciplines, through new behaviors and so forth, they shape a new personhood. So, it has a lot to do with when the person is evaluated, and how far they’ve come from where they were before. Also, in considering this issue of consequences, I think one of the most important questions to ask ourselves is, on what basis am I evaluating this person? It’s very rare that people will come clean and say, “I am evaluating this person from the point of view of . . .” and then say an orthodox Evangelical Christian, or a psychoanalytically oriented psychologist, or whatever. We just make blanket judgments that are, in my opinion, usually useless, unless we understand the person who is making the assessment, and their evaluation of what is taking place.

I can't seem to get very far beyond this need to keep thinking about what has happened to me and why... like all the time.

Religion beat became a test of faith

This could be my story. (Thanks to Jesus Creed for the link)

Swap beat writer with missionary, Calvary Chapel with the Vineyard and Catholic Church RCIA classes with Catholic grad school...

Hairspray

Go see it! Liam wanted to go to the movie for his 13th birthday tonight and so we sat in a long row and laughed outloud, sang along (quietly) and walked out of the theater singing and dancing. "You can't stop the beat!" I couldn't stop smiling and had no idea that the subject matter had to do with the Civil Rights movement. How can a musical be wonderfully funny, cheerful, optimistic and important all at the same time? Find out.

God is not a person

Blow my doors off.... why didn't this jump out at my more forcefully in grad school?

I'm rereading She Who Is for the discussion I'm leading in August. I stumbled on these lines and just had to post them for your comments. Johnson is talking about the justification for using extra-biblical language to talk about God (of course building to her point which is women's experience ought to be equally sufficient in the naming of and characterizing of God as men's has been for two millenia). She begins with Aquinas (a giant in her Catholic world).

In one of those myriad interesting little discussions that Aquinas carries on in the formal framework of the quaestio, he deals luminously with the legitimacy of this historical development. The question at hand is whether it is proper to refer to God as "person." Some would object that this word is not used of God in the Scriptures, neither in the Old Testament or in the New. But, goes the argument, what the word signifies such as intelligence is in fact frequently applied to God in Scripture, and so "person" can be used with confidence.

I had no idea that the word "person" is never associated with God in Scripture. Mind-blowing.

I should have caught that at some point in four years of grad school. It just reminds me again how easy it is to think we know things that we honestly don't know.

Did you know that God is never identified as "person" in Scripture? If so, how do you feel about using that kind of language for God? How would it change how you see God if you removed the identification of "personhood" with God? How does the idea of "person" shape our view of God (after all, person in our times has to do with rights, identity, individuality, personality, will... it's more than human being, isn't it?)?

I'll be interested in what you all think.

No one told me about the dreams

Of babies, childbirth, toddlers.

I'm 45, telling Jon that surprise! the vasectomy didn't work and we're pregnant with my much-wanted number six. I'm happy and perplexed at my happiness, even while calculating in an instant that I'll be 65 when the baby is 20. My dream-self is observed by my invisible self, as often happens in my dreams. I'm asking the dream-me how to rearrange the bedroom to make space for diapers and a changing table, how to run a business and look after a toddler, how to mother a little one when I'm tired and busy. Jon smiles, confused, but then says that it's a privilege to have a baby in your forties... even though he'll be fifty by the time that baby's born.

And then I wake up.

In the last month, I've buckled toddlers into car seats, I've held the hands of tiny children not mine, but who have been entrusted to me. I've seen a miniature Noah climbing concrete walls and Johannah's red hair all curly and uncombed, she so much smaller than me that she fits into my lap.

In one dream, I'm asleep with a baby tanked out on my chest. I wake up remembering that that was my very favorite part of being a new mother: napping on the couch with a sleeping baby nuzzled into me.

Once awake, I usually can't remember if I'm pregnant or not, if Johannah is packing for college or Noah is building houses in California. I pat my stomach to remember the empty womb.

I haven't talked about the dreams. It seems odd to me that they're coming so frequently now, so vividly, so obviously signs of midlife and loss and memory and young motherhood and a page turned that can never be un-turned.

Yesterday morning, Jon rolled over and declared: he had had a dream. That alone was worth noting. I dream in Technicolor daily and remember many of my dreams for years. Jon rarely remembers his dreams and most of them are in black and white. Consequently, I rarely hear him start the day with: I had a dream.

I saw Jacob as a little boy, needing my help. He was so cute, so little, big smile. And then I was crying...

And then so was I.

No one told us about the dreams.

Up since 5:00 a.m.: business driving me crazy

I pledge never to criticize any business's prices again.

I pledge to accept the prices as representative of what that company needs to charge in order to create fair compensation for its expertise, materials and promotion of itself for the purpose of remaining a viable business.

I will not make random calculations in my head about the amount of money it takes to produce the materials, distribute the product or how much energy/expertise/experience went into the original creation.

I also pledge never to assume that it is easy to run a business, to get customers, to produce the promotional copy for a website, to keep up a blog, to send out email notifications, to train teachers, to stay abreast of the latest developments in technology and education... as though these are after-thoughts and have no bearing the on the cost of the materials to which they pertain.

I confess that I now understand why teachers are paid so little when compared with the universities and schools for whom they work, who must take the lion's share of the tuition to run the business side of the school, and to recruit students. Hello. Who can teach without students?

This summer I live with the daily awareness that the changes I'm making to my business have the ability to either make it or break it. The stress of being in charge is something I have never felt in 7 and a half years of running Brave Writer. I feel responsible for the salaries of my teachers and their general happiness with the job they do so well for Brave Writer, the satisfaction of my customers who are both amazingly supportive and enthusiastic, the need to consider the tight budgets of most homeschooling families, the responsibility to sustain income we've come to depend on, and the need to create materials that serve the purposes for which they are designed.

Suddenly, in an attempt to stay current, I find that I'm on the edge of a breakdown. I don't think it's possible for me to do any more work than I am. I literally can't turn off my brain. I wake up with whole new sets of considerations I must take into account.

Every time I turn around, I think of another permutation that ought to be considered in the redesign of my website, of the registration process (which is effing - excuse the language - complicated), of the new learning platform (which has a learning curve of about 90 degrees straight up!). And every time I think of another change to the existing structures, it's $500-$1000 more to a developper than I planned to spend. Worse, I can't even tell if the end result will be experienced as better (it may look better, but will it accomplish the things I hoped it would alleviate as well as enhance?).

I'm exhausted, stressed, tired, worried, anxious and sick of being a business owner today.

Harry Potter and the homeschooling world

Obviously with Potter on the brain, my weekly column had to be about HP and his power to enchant the previously condemnatory constituency of which I'm a part. :)