False Dilemma

Two weeks ago, I ranted eloquent about how Evangelicals surrender their “weapons” by surrendering their reason and good judgment with regard to scripture. I also noted that often this surrender seems curiously to impair their judgment concerning the nature of God himself. Evangelicals seem to err by either making God unapproachable and distant at the expense of God’s love and mercy or embracing the more recent trend of doing just the opposite: making God so personal at the expense of God’s majesty and power. All too often Evangelicals buy into this false dilemma that God is either majestic and infinite, or God is personal and caring. Now a false dilemma can be resolved in one of two ways. One way to resolve the false dilemma is by realizing that two sides of the either/or aren’t the only options. There could be a third option. The other way to resolve a false dilemma is to realize that the two sides of the dilemma may not be mutually exclusive—the two claims are compatible. A story attributed to the former editor of Christianity Today magazine, Kenneth Kanzer may help to illustrate this point. He received a telephone call from a trusted friend to let him know that the daughter of another friend has been struck by a car while crossing the street. She was not fatally hit but was rushed to the hospital. A little while later he received a phone call form another trusted friend about the same girl. He was told that she was riding in a car and when going through an intersection a truck had gone through a red light and struck her side of the car killing her instantly. Both phone calls came from trusted friends and were talking about the same girl. As it turns out both were true and compatible. The girl was standing on a corner and when the light changed she stepped in to the intersection and was struck by a car. She was injured but not killed. The driver quickly put her into his car and headed for the hospital. While in transit as he passed through an intersection a truck ran a red light and struck his car on the side she was on and she was instantly killed. Both claims were true and compatible. Someone not taking the time to check the facts or making assumptions could easily creat a false dilemma whine none exists.

With regard to this dilemma of a loving God or an infinite deity, it’s interesting that the agnostics and atheists with whom I have conversations, tend to find the idea of a personal relationship with God to be incompatible with their idea of an infinite being. Recently, I was talking with one of my professors about Abraham’s friendship with God and he found the idea of the traditional Christian deity who is infinite, omnipresent, etc. having a friendship with humans dumbfounding to say the least. He said, “I’m sorry but if God exists (and I don’t care if he does,) then God would be soooo big that any relationship with he or she would be a non sequitur.

Contrast this with the average Evangelical who finds a personal relationship with God incompatible with strong emphasis on the infinite nature of God. In my previous post, I mentioned how it never ceases to amaze me that I have to remind Evangelical Christians who live in the buckle of the Bible belt that God:

Doesn’t have a body
Isn’t really blue like Jazz
Is more interested in righteousness than whether or not:

A) You have self-esteem
B) Churches are purpose driven, seeker sensitive, or creatively decorated
C) 12 steps to anything


In other words, why is it that Evangelicals err on the side of God as the warm and fuzzy therapist/social worker while Agnostics and Atheists wonder how we could conceive of a loving relationship with the infinite and the ineffable? It’s a question worth pondering. What is it about the ineffable mystery of the ages that non-believers find so difficult to embrace? What is it about the super-cool college roommate version of God that seems to be found so attractive that we so willingly ignore the warnings of scripture to not go after that which tickles our ears in favor of the latest 12 step audio-series? Perhaps C.S. Lewis’ ole demon Screwtape gives us some clue as to why it is easier to make God either useful or unreachable rather than accept who he says he is. Screwtape, a senior demon, gives advice to Wormwood, his subordinate, on the dangers of prayer for corrupting a soul:

You must keep him praying to it—to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him. You may even encourage him to attach great importance to the correction and improvement of his composite object, and to keeping it steadily before his imagination during the whole prayer. For if he ever comes to make the distinction, if ever he consciously directs his prayers “Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be”, our situation is for the moment, desperate. Once all his thoughts and images have been flung aside or, if retained, retained with full recognition of their merely subjective nature, and by him as he is known by it—then it is that the incalculable may occur.

The incalculable that many Atheists and Christians fear alike is a relationship like no other. A relationship not of equals—for God is soooo big and we are so small. But rather a relationship of mystery and dare I say it, audacity, that wrapped in the grace and colored by the Cross, we approach the throne and find not just the High King of Heaven, not just the Ancient of Days but a God dangerously devoid of all our images and pretensions, gloriously absent of all our machinations, but none-the-less unquestionably near us, most definitely for us and mysteriously longing to be with us.

For make no mistake, the mystery of the grace of God cannot be the great ineffable mystery unless God is both infinite andlonging—unless the dilemma truly is false and its resolution is found in the compatibility of Infinite majesty and Godly desire:

Behold now the dwelling place of God is with men. And they shall be his people and he shall be their God.

This is not a useful relationship. This is not a contradiction. This is both the majesty of God and the desire of the ages.

In the Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the children are about to meet Aslan, the great Lion, and Lucy asks if he is safe. The answer she receives is just as relevant for those of us looking for a safe God as it was for a child looking for a tame lion: “Of course he isn’t safe. But he is good.” There is no such thing as a safe lion or a safe God. Something we would do well to keep in mind the next time we are either tempted to see God as unapproachable and cruel or the next time we walk into a Christian bookstore looking for a book, or CD, or sermon series that promises to make God useful for our needs.

Taking Every Thought Captive

Lately I’ve been thinking about Paul’s warnings against Christians checking their brains at the door of the church. I’ve been meditating particularly on 2 Corinthians 10. The context is that Paul is defending his ministry and in particular his harsh words for false teachers. He says in v. 4:

… weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses

Now many have taken this verse and transformed Paul’s statement into a rallying cry for some Star Wars version on spiritual warfare where our weapons are Angelic versions of Luke Skywalker running around sword-fighting with bad Halloween costumes spurred on by our prayers. In this Spielberg concept of Paul’s statement, the fortresses in question are “demonic strongholds” usually associated with some particular demonic specialist who is identified by simply picking your favorite sin and tacking on the phrase, “Spirit of _________” (i.e. he has the demonic spirit of bad table manners). However, Paul says otherwise, he goes on to name both the weapons and the strongholds:

We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

In other words, the weapons seem to be the ability to take every thought captive and the thoughts in question are the speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God. I think we can infer that if we are to imitate Paul, we are to take every thought captive, which means we should take every speculative opinion and test it under our obedience to Christ as Paul was doing with false teaching. It seems to me that it is a corollary to 1 Thessalonians, 5:21:

But examine everything carefully; hold fast to that which is good;

Given the passion with which Paul explains the value of obeying Christ by examining arguments and speculations, two questions strike me as important:

1) Why is it that so many Christians follow after any Tom, Dick and Joel Osteen who has a Armani suit and a bestseller about a new exciting idea that for some reason neither the Apostles nor Jesus seemed to find important enough to even mention in passing let alone sermonize about (ever notice how many verses Paul dedicates to “Seven Things that Steal Your Joy or for that matter “12 steps” to anything?).

2) Why is it that, within the aforementioned bestsellers, we find sandwiched between “Yes you can!” and “Claim your miracle!” are usually really bad speculations about the very nature of God?

On point two, let me just give you a sampling of the people who fire off statements that evangelical sheeple (sheep like people) have bought without so much as a flinch:


• T.D. Jakes admits that God isn’t a trinity really; he’s just an immortal guy with three jobs. Not much fuss from the Christian community. Jakes is still popular. Even with Promise Keepers.

• Kenneth Copeland says that God has to ask permission to work within the world after the fall in the garden. God had to make a deal with Abraham to allow Him (God) to work in this world. Jesus later had to use the words of faith to enter the world as well. Copeland as of this writing is still one of the wealthiest “evangelicals” (and I use that word loosely. . . “evangelicals” not “wealthiest”) in America and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee asked for Copeland’s help in raising money. As of this writing Copeland is still on the air teaching false doctrine for fun and profit, but ironically Huckabee seems to now be running for vice-president or possibly secretary of interior.

• Gwen Shamblin teaches that Jesus was the first thing God ever created. There was no major reaction from the Christian community until MCOI publically addressed her teaching. Shamblin’s Weigh Down Workshop was accepted by Christian publisher Thomas Nelson as well as thousands of churches who seemed to feel the mandate of the church was to declare war on fat. Evangelical sent Ms. Shambling in excess of 100 million dollars which evidently provided enough revenue to pay for the hairspray for her Sandi Patti inflatable Christian hairdo.

There is not time, space, or antacid to mention the number of heresies that Benny Hinn has propagated and then recanted on TBN.

Sometimes the surrender of our weapons occurs in a blatant way. Gwen Shamblin said that Jesus was created and “being fat is sin” (see our article Weighed Down With False Doctrine and people may not buy this malarkey (loosely from the Greek meaning “Insanely obvious heresy”) because “I want to lose weight and this ‘Bible study’ will help me do that.” Other times it is more subtle. There is a surrender of our reason to our emotions or our lack of will to think and pray about difficult issues within our worldview. If God is all powerful then we can’t have free will so when Copeland extracts a story about faith being a force that Jesus uses to enter the world, the sheeple say, “That seems right. That explains a lot. And Kenneth has such a lovely Learjet, God must be blessing him.”

What all of these speculations have in common is that they err by bringing God down in his attributes in order to make him personable (from the French meaning “fuzzy and soft.”) The idea is that if the trinity is a mystery, it frustrates our relationship with the Godhead three in one. I’ve heard people say as they surrender their discernment, “How can a God who is triune, immutable, omniscient (and a lot of other Latin words I don’t have the time nor inclination to look up), understand me? I want a relationship with God that is personable. You know, God is my big buddy. Besides, new Christians can’t be expected to understand this stuff.” Christianity Today quotes T.D. Jakes in their article Theology: Apologetics Journal Criticizes Jakes :

I think it's very, very significant that we first of all study the Trinity apart from salvation, and first of all that we embrace Christ and come to him to know who he is. Having come to know who he is, then we begin to deal with the Trinity, which I believe is a very complex issue. The Trinity, the term 'Trinity,' is not a biblical term, to begin with.
It's a theological description for something that is so beyond human comprehension that I'm not sure that we can totally hold God to a numerical system. The Lord said, "Behold, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one, and beside him there is no other." When God got ready to make a man that looked like him, he didn't make three. He made one man. However, that one man had three parts. He was body, soul, and spirit. We have one God, but he is Father in creation, Son in redemption, and Holy Spirit in regeneration.

Here we have an example of a speculation that is in dire need of bringing captive to the obedience of Christ. The text does not say God made man to look like him with parts. It says, “God made man in his image.” The imago dei (don’t be sheeple, look it up) is not about looking like God since Jesus says, God is spirit, immaterial. He doesn’t have a body. I’m amazed I have to make that case so often in mainstream churches. I get my crotchety curmudgeon suspenders on and start talking about “these young church goers with their PowerPoint and their music, no respect for church history and the creeds.” Then I take Metamucil.

Most of the readers of our blog haven’t surrendered their weapons. Here’s a principle to engage in loving admonition (from the Latin for “harp on at the top of your lungs in polite company”) your weaponless friends with the next time they say, “I know [insert flashy Christian celebrity here] has some strange doctrines about God but they make me feel like God . . .”

The Discernment Principle: Bad conclusions almost inevitably follow from bad premises and if it’s doctrinal conclusions, to paraphrase Paul, bad premises about the nature of God particularly corrupt good doctrine.

Addendum to the Discernment Principle: (even if it makes you lose weight).

In a few weeks I will talk about false dilemma between a mysterious, unchanging, all powerful God and God who loves me extravagantly and obscenely.

When Human Rights Go Very Very Wrong

Sometimes being offended isn’t a bad thing. Sometimes being emotionally harmed by someone’s rant, or sentiment, or opinion is just what my soul and character needs. How could that be the case you say? Well consider the following exercise that I occasionally engage in. I write about free speech a lot. I defend it daily. I’m writing my dissertation on a defense of speech rights. So frequently I hear people say that as a white Anglo-Saxon protestant male, I’ve never experienced hate speech. Up close. I don’t know how it feels to be thought stupid, wicked, or lumped into one category with “my people.” And they are right. As a general rule, I don’t encounter racism, sexism, etc. on a daily basis. It’s cozy up here in the ivory tower. So every so often I purposely expose myself to offense and ridicule. While I could do just by picking up any article or book by Richard Dawkins, my favorite way of doing this is by looking at sites that sell t-shirts on the internet. Sites like Café Press are filled with page after page of T-shirts making fun of and ridiculing Christians. Here’s the one that is my favorite to get offended by:

Christianity:
The Belief that some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
Makes perfect sense.

That offends me on so many levels. It implies that if I genuinely believe this that I’m stupid, or irrational. It offends every Christian martyr in China that is languishing away in prison or has died with the name of that “Jewish zombie” on their lips. But here’s the thing. Something important happens when I meditate on my offense. First of all I learn to accept that the price I pay to wear my T-shirt that has the argument for the existence of God draped across the back is that others get to disagree with my entire belief system in as tacky a way as they want. Second, I get a picture of what the gospel translates to people who have a completely scientistic (not scientific) worldview. If we are nothing but a random collocation of atoms arranged by chance, then the idea of a human being who rose from the dead and offers grace for the scales of cosmic justice, really does sound strange. Suddenly, it begins to really hit home that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. Thankfully we have it. Third, thinking about my offense forces me to CALM DOWN. To gain some distance and not lather up a good helping of Pharisee-like indignation that if I let it would have me using my least favorite phrase: “How Dare They. Think of the Kids. There ought to be a law!” Finally, it forces me to do probably the most difficult thing Jesus asked any self-righteous wind-bag like myself to do: You all know the words, sing along with me:

But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous (Matt. 5:33)

Somewhere behind these T-shirt sentiments is a person God loves very, very much. And that goes for Nazis, Islamo-facists with their “Death to America” and even Richard Dawkins. A little exercise in offense leads to some much needed prayer (and just try to hate someone you are praying for—I dare you.) Because I need to be like my Father in heaven who doesn’t censor hatred by pouring down consuming fire on the head of the Neo-Nazi World Church of the Creator every time he invokes the name of Christ in the same breath with the phrase “Mud people”. God warms his face just the same. He holds out salvation freely for him as well.

Now all of this isn’t just academic because there is a growing trend in the world that sees offense as the kind of harm that warrants silencing in the name of social justice and equality. Commissions are being set up to hear complaints by those who have been offended and those who feel threatened by any anti-religious or bigoted sentiment. One such commission in Canada, the Canadian Human Rights Commission subpoenas the offending party to appear before the commission to answer for their words or writing. Keep in mind that the offended party has no expenses whatsoever. The offender must (if she’s smart) obtain legal counsel and appear before the commission. However, I have it on good authority that the CHRC has a 100% conviction rate. Every single person that has made it before the full commission has been forced to either apologize—or if the offended party requests in their initial accusation—render monetary damages. (As erudite columnist Mark Steyn has commented, how can you tell if a legal proceeding is a kangaroo court? One clue: If it has a 100% conviction or acquittal rate). What kind of things get you hauled before the CHRC? How about a statement by Steyn in which he says, “The number of Muslims in Europe is expanding like mosquitoes.” That’s number 16 on the commission complaint filed by the Canadian Islamic Congress. But here’s the kicker, it’s actually part of a quote from Steyn’s book America Alone where he quotes a Scandinavian Imam. Here’s the full quote:

“We're the ones who will change you,' the Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. 'Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children.”

Now I ask you. If Steyn quoting an Imam about European birth rates is fair game, do you think, dear reader, that half the criticism on this blog would fare much better if someone gets offended or feels discriminated against? How about books that you have on your shelf criticizing Joseph Smith or Judge Rutherford as false prophets? Have you printed anything in a blog that might cause a JW or Gothardite to feel they were less than equal, or that might, just might make some crazed lunatic who just read your blog this morning kill the next JW that crossed his threshold? Remember the hypothetical killer doesn’t have to be anymore than just that, hypothetical. Don’t believe me? Ezra Levant , the publisher of the Canadian magazine, The Western Standard, has been hauled before the inquisition . . . ahem I mean commission for publishing the infamous Mohammed cartoons because a member of the Muslim community is concerned for his safety:

"God forbid if somebody reads from his Web site - [if] any fanatic reads it - and he attacks me, who's responsible? If any crime [is] committed against me or my family, I will hold Mr. Ezra Levant responsible."

And apparently so does the inquisition ( did I do that again? ).

Mark Steyn gives the nightmare scenario if a commission like this comes to the states:

“It is an illiberal notion harnessed in the cause, supposedly, of liberalism: gays don't like uptight Christians flaunting the more robust passages of Leviticus? Don't worry about it. We'll set up a body that'll hunt down Bible-quoting losers in basements and ensure they'll trouble you no further. Just a few recalcitrant knuckle-draggers who decline to get with the beat. Don't give 'em a thought. Nothing to see here, folks.”

Bottom line: I would like it if nobody made fun of Christians. I’m tired of being stereotyped as stupid, wicked, or both. I’m tired of every time I see a movie that has a Christian in it I know he will be a buffoon, a child molester, a serial killer or all three. I’m sick and tired of evangelicals being lumped into the same 30 second side bite with the political flavor of the month. There are two problems with creating speech codes. 1) Our Constitution guarantees freedom of speech but nowhere guarantees freedom from being offended. 2) Speech is too fluid to carve up with the giant sledge-hammer of law. In the process of straining offending gnats with speech police we could end up swallowing a crisis of liberty including religious. And lest we forget our inquisitions could end up silencing voices that God even tolerates