I have heard it said that the longest journey in life is from the head to the heart. Another way to say the same thing is that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Yet another aphorism of our time is that beginning well is a momentary thing; finishing well is a lifelong thing. All of these point to one reality-our knowledge and our response are not always in keeping with each other. We seem to be inclined to separate what God intended to remain joined together.
Solomon proved this centuries ago. He made a fascinating statement in the Book of Ecclesiastes. He relates all the areas in which he searched for meaning-pleasure, riches, power, fame, and everything else one could imagine. Through all of these forays in a search for fulfillment, he says, "My wisdom stayed with me" (Ecclesiastes 2:9). How is that possible, we ask, when his day-to-day life was a colossal mess? I understand him to mean that in the midst of his duplicity, his theoretical knowledge of right and wrong never left him. He knew how to discern. But he was volitionally weak and unable to resist the tug of attraction into wrong behavior.
I have shared the following story many times over the years. Those from parts of the world where this is foreign shake their heads in disbelief, wondering how this can even be theoretically plausible, let alone practically workable. But read the reasoning first and then I will try to explain.
I give you an example of my older brother, who lives in Toronto, Canada. The story dates back to the late 1960s. At that time he was a systems engineer with IBM. Since that time, he has gone on to do several very impressive things in the world of computer software. In other words, he is mentally all right. He doesn't have any major problem as far as his IQ is concerned. I say that because you may begin to wonder as I tell his story.
When he was in his mid-twenties, my brother came to my father and said, "You know, Dad, I've always maintained even when we were in India that I'm only going to marry the girl you choose for me. I guess I am ready now. Would you please begin a search for a girl for me to marry?"
I really didn't believe he'd go through with it. We were living in Toronto, thousands of miles and a cultural planet away from the land of our birth. But this was his choice. He wanted my parents to help in "The Search." My father and mother said, "Fine. Tell us the kind of young woman you're looking for:' My brother gave his "ideal partner" speech and proceeded to describe the kind of person he would choose to marry.
Under normal circumstances, the parents would travel around and look for somebody that met the criteria, but in this instance my brother said to our father, "Look, you really don't need to do that. Why don't you just write to your sister in Bombay and let her do the groundwork? We'll just correspond back and forth and take it from there:”
Thus began his quest and what I called our family entertainment hour every night around the table. My father wrote to his sister, and in response came numerous letters with suggestions, photographs, and information sheets ad nauseam. Oh! The jokes that would fly! The unsolicited advice from every member of the family was profuse. The sarcasm, wondering whether this poor woman had the faintest clue of his shortcomings! (From my experience with photographs I have learned that if you find a good photographer and pay him enough, he can make anybody look splendid. One of the first things people do when you arrive for a speaking event is to compare the reality with your publicity photograph. Many times they can probably say, "Twenty years ago he may have looked like that, but now...")
Pictures can tell an awful lot that's really not there. The camera can and does lie. But my brother would sit in his bed at night and look over all those pictures, study the lists of accomplishments and qualifications, and say, "What do you think of this one, Rav? Isn't she lovely? Look at the description. She's even the church organist:' I could not resist pointing out how important a feature that was for a successful marriage.
He narrowed the "applicants" to a short list and, finally focusing on one person, began to correspond with her. Then they advanced to telephone conversations, but not many because that was "too expensive:' One could tell that reality was closing in. Finally, believe it or not, they both felt this was it. The dates for the engagement and the marriage were set with these two never having met.
My brother and my father flew from Toronto to Bombay. More than one thousand wedding invitations were sent before my brother and his bride-to-be had ever seen each other. Two days after his arrival was the engagement date and a day or so later was the wedding date. He would then bring his bride back to Canada, all within a week, and they would live "happily ever after." That, at any rate, was the plan.
I thought to myself, Oh my! You know, this is faith. Maybe it is even less than that. This is credulity! I began to get really concerned, so before my brother left for Bombay, I mustered up the courage to caution him. I said, "I don't want to challenge anything you're doing, but I do have a brief question. What are you going to do when you arrive in Bombay, come down the Jetway and see a young woman standing there with a garland in her hand, and say to yourself, Good griefl I hope that's not her. I hope that's somebody else! Or she looks at you and thinks to herself, I hope that's not him. I hope that's his brother! What on earth will you do? Are you going to take her aside, talk it over, and then make an announcement saying, `We have met ... we will not be proceeding with our plans'? Will you get on the telephone or write letters to everybody and say, ‘Folks, we've met. The wedding is off."'
My brother just stared at me. He said, "Are you through?" I told him that for the moment I was just awaiting his answer. Then he said something that was absolutely defining for him: "Write this down, and don't ever forget it: Love is as much a question of the will as it is of the emotion. And if you will to love somebody, you can.”
That statement brought our conversation to a sudden stop. That was thirty-five years ago. My brother and his wife now have three children and make their home in Toronto. Has it been easy? No. Marriage never is easy. But the challenges they face do not come from an absence of commitment.
The statement "If you will to love somebody, you can" has the ring of truth, but deep inside we wonder, How does one "will"? It is a little bit like ordering somebody to love you. How does one go beyond the discernment to the practice? If knowledge does not guarantee behavior, where does one go to translate the prerequisite into action? Can it really be done?
A FALSE START
The first thing to bear in mind is that we exaggerate the separation of the emotion and the will as two distinct faculties of operation-some kind of misshapen two-headed monster. Think, for example, of the caricature we make of one difference between men and women. We seem to think that women are more emotionally driven and men more cerebrally driven. If that caricature were true, why is it that more men fall into infidelity after marriage than do women? If women are more emotionally driven, should it not be the other way around? I think it more appropriate to say that women in general recognize the emotional ramifications of their acts better than men do. Men do feel emotion, but they do so selectively and fail to face the consequences of reality. Betray a man and you find out that his emotions surge to the top. I believe that a legitimate understanding of what is happening here can preserve the grand union between emotion and will.
Without the will, marriage is a mockery; without emotion, it is a drudgery. You need both.
We like the side dealing with emotion, not the will. I have now been married more than thirty years. I often look back at the time when I was on the other side of the marital line and remember how I thought about marriage then. One particular conversation stands out. A year before I was married, I was sitting in a Christian education class when the professor quite dramatically started to philosophize about life. Commenting on the home, he said, "I want you students to know that love is hard work."
I leaned over to my classmate and whispered, "I wouldn't want to be married to anybody who goes around telling everybody how hard it is to love me:'
He said, "I agree with you. Why don't you ask him about it?" Like a fool, I did.
I stood up and said, "Excuse me, sir ... I am not quite comfortable with your categorization of love as `hard work."'
The professor stared at me, evidently not taking too kindly to my challenge, and demanded, "Zacharias, are you married?"
When I responded, "No, sir," he said, "Then why don't you just be quiet and sit down? You don't have a clue what you are talking about." I sat down.
One year later I was married. After being married all these years, I can unblushingly say, he was right. Love is hard work. I would carry it one step further. It is the hardest work I know of, work from which you are never entitled to take a vacation. You take on burdens and cares. You inherit problems. You have to feel beyond yourself. You have to think of things other than yourself. Your responsibilities are now multiplied, and you are trusted with greater commitments.
You see, the easiest part of our marriage was the wedding ceremony. I remember arriving at the church early. I could hardly wait. As the church filled with guests and the appropriate music was played for the ceremony to begin, I turned to see my bride enter the sanctuary. No, I did not think of all the weddings I had gate-crashed or of all the ceremonies I had witnessed. This was not someone else's wedding; this was a special moment for us. It was one of the most ecstatic feelings the human heart could ever endure. There is no word in the English dictionary to describe it except the word Wow! It was the crystallization of my every romantic dream. That which was once far off was now near. That which I longed for was now in hand.
As Margie came up the aisle to join me at the front of the church, my heart was in a flutter. So much so that when the minister told me in old English to "salute the bride," out of sheer nervousness I was on the verge of literally saluting her. There is nothing so magnificent as a beautiful, blushing bride behind a veil that cannot hide the radiant glow of a dream coming true. If the flutter of a heart were all that one needs to fly, the groom would soar to celestial heights. No! The groom does not need to soar at that moment, for God Himself comes near and says, This is My precious gift to you. Receive it with reverence and guard it with diligence. The ceremony was followed by the reception. What a wonderful way to celebrate with friends. At the end of the reception we drove to the honeymoon capital of North America-Niagara Falls-where we stayed for the night at Michael's Inn. (Thankfully, Michael wasn't.) From there it was on to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. I remember carrying her over the threshold. My heart was as full as I had hoped it would be. I had an overwhelming sense of gallantry as I carried her into the room.
At about two o'clock in the morning, Margie got up. I thought, Surely the honeymoon couldn't be over already... where is she going? So I asked, "Where are you going, honey?" She answered, "I'm going to get a glass of water." I said, "Stay right here, I'll get it for you:' That was May 6, 1972. I was thrilled to get up at two o'clock in the morning and get her a glass of water. My! What sacrifice!
But five years go by. Someone has wryly quipped, "Sacrifice in America is when the electric blanket doesn't work:' So one night I find myself comfortably tucked in bed, and about two or three o'clock, I hear the rustle of the sheets. She's getting up again, and the temptation is to pull the covers over my face and cease to hear anything at that moment for at least one reason. She looked different. You see, on May 6, 1972, she looked grand. Absolutely grand! But five years later, she had some funny things in her hair at night that generally prompted one question, "What stations are you able to get under that influence?" I have been chided for that remark many times so I should add that she no longer wears them.
Times have changed. But I do recall that sight. Somehow the first word that leaped into my mind was not the word Wow! But I still do the right thing, because the tug of love is a commitment stronger than merely the flutter of the heart.
Chivalry in love has nothing to do with the sweetness of the appearance. It has everything to do with the tenderness of a heart determined to serve. That is the first hard lesson to learn. You do not act under the impetus of charm but out of a commitment to make someone's life the joy you want it to be. In the early days of marriage, joy precedes the act. Tragically, as the years go by joy can be severed from the act until finally, the act itself is no more. This ought not to be. Over time it is the companionship that brings joy, and service is the natural outworking of the joy of commitment. Failure to act kills it.
William Doherty begins his excellent book Take Back Your Marriage with a powerful illustration. His office is located in St. Paul, Minnesota, not far from the farthest point north on the Mississippi River. He describes the river's formidable but silent current that drives its waters southward. "Everything on the water that is not powered by wind, gasoline, or human muscle" heads south. Then he adds these words: "I have thought that getting married is like launching a canoe into the Mississippi at St. Paul. If you don't paddle, you go south. No matter how much you love each other, no matter how full of hope and promise and good intentions, if you stay on the Mississippi without a good deal of paddling-occasional paddling is not enough-you end up in New Orleans. Which is a problem if you want to stay north.” 1
But this kind of commitment does not come easily. Only if it is taken seriously does it become a sheer delight of the heart. I will also add that this kind of commitment is not seen much in the times in which we live. The reason we have a crisis in our gender relationships is not that we are culturally indoctrinated but that we would rather be served than serve. We would rather be the head than the feet. The Christian faith stands unique in pointing out that the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost. The Son of Man came to serve. This means that the service He gave to humanity was given even when we least merited that sacrifice. There is a joy in service that transcends emotional temporariness.
A REALISTIC PICTURE
An act, especially of such magnitude as marriage, must be thoughtfully considered before it becomes an act. Impulsive acts die impulsive deaths. This works both ways, in honoring that which is right and in resisting that which is wrong. Always make the decision before the emotion stirs you into wrongheaded commitments. We refer to people as impulse buyers. That is not a good way to buy. Step back, measure the value of what you are getting, and then buy it. This applies a thousand fold more in marriage. Don't be deceived by the flutter of the heart. Love is a commitment that will be tested in the most vulnerable areas of spirituality, a commitment that will force you to make some very difficult choices. It is a commitment that demands that you deal with your lust, your greed, your pride, your power, your desire to control, your temper, your patience, and every area of temptation that the Bible so clearly talks about. It demands the quality of commitment that Jesus demonstrates in His relationship to us.
Jesus said that greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friend. But it is probably more difficult to live a life of continual dying to oneself than to die in one moment. Marriage is hard work, and that's why, when you come to that pivotal moment of decision, my suggestion is that you seek the advice of somebody you love and respect. Don't make such a decision on your own just because you have romantic feelings. Seek out the wisdom of your minister, the wisdom of your parents, and the wisdom of friends, and realize that romance has to be transcended by a strong will and a degree of commitment to you and by you. The important thing to bear in mind is that you must face your willingness to die to yourself before you choose to walk down the aisle. Is this person the one for whom you are willing to die daily? Is this person to whom you say, "I do" also the one for whom you are willing to say, "No, I don't" to everybody else? Be assured that marriage will cost you everything. I recall a young couple who came to me for premarital counseling. They looked so much in love and cherished each other. But as I administered a premarital test to see where their expectations and hopes matched or differed, something very startling emerged. They disclosed to me that the young man had tragically contracted a deadly disease some time back, a disease that would also make intimacy precarious. Only in his twenties, he was facing death within two to three years. As we talked, they were obviously struggling with whether it was the right thing to be married or whether they should just let this dream die. Their love was deep, and they were willing to face even a short wedded life to have the delight of those few years. Many asked them to think it through carefully.
My counsel to them was simply this: Think it over, because the person you are now and the person you will be when you have to say your final parting will not be the same. You will have to change and work at sacrificial expressions in such a way that it will not be just your names that will change but your very being. Each of you will have a part of the other in your emotions and in your thinking so that you change for the sake of the other. Can you face the aloneness when he is gone and then find it possible to love another with a part of this person ever in your soul? Will you want to go through it all over again? Think about it, because you will be giving huge portions of yourself over a short period.
I could not fight off the tears when I heard their decision, although their reasoning was sound. They both knew that to marry would entail an emotional component that would put them on the edge, right from the beginning. When the time came for him to depart, her life would also have been spent emotionally, though she would still be young. Recognizing the emotional cost of saying yes, they chose the path of saying no to conserve the power of her youth and save it for someone else who in the long run would merit that total investment of her life. They chose to give up their dream of marriage but remained very close friends.
To many of us this story may seem sad, but it is the lesson of the will. If you are to learn to control the will, you must harness it early in any battle. Lines must be drawn not at the level of acting but at the level of thinking. Lines must be drawn not at the level of doing but at the level of desiring. Lines must be drawn not at the level of contact but at the level of sight. Lines must be drawn knowing that marriage is not just a condition of being but a condition of becoming. The two become one, but the becoming is both a moment and a process.
STEADYING THE WILL
How do you harness the will? First, by recognizing that dying to yourself is an act of the will. You must choose to lay down your life in the best sense of the term. You surrender your will to the will of God by an act of commitment and in the power of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God. That is the indispensable beginning. No one likes to begin life with a funeral. But in a sense, that is where marriage begins. You choose to die to yourself and to bring to life a new affection.
The famed Scottish preacher Thomas Chalmers once preached an unforgettable sermon titled "The Expulsive Power of a New Affection:' While his theme was conversion, the implications are similar for marital commitment. An affection of such force takes charge that it expels other affections that are inimical to this one. That is the first step-dying to yourself.
There is no greater illustration of marriage and of the appropriate action to take when it is in trouble than the story of the prophet Hosea. A pastor, Hosea married a woman who sold herself into prostitution. Even the names of their three children illustrated the pain of this broken home. But the remarkable thing is that while Hosea's wife was still in her lifestyle of prostitution God commanded him to buy her back. Even more remarkable and difficult was the rest of God's command to Hosea: "Go, show your love to your wife again" (Hosea 3:1).
We see it here clearly. Love is a command, not just a feeling. Somehow, in the romantic world of music and theater we have made love to be what it is not. We have so mixed it with beauty and charm and sensuality and contact that we have robbed it of its higher call of cherishing and nurturing. Watch two young people in a passionate embrace-it may be love, but it may also be nothing more than passion. Watch two elderly people walking hand in hand with evident concern for each other, and you are closer to seeing love in that relationship than in the youthful embrace.
G. K. Chesterton said these powerful words: "They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words-'free love'-as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word."
This brings into focus an element of the will. The will is that faculty which can only be tested when pain is as much a part of its choice as pleasure is. Let me state it another way. The will is that disposition of the mind that will choose a path and bind itself with love, even if pain is mixed with the choice. In the West, particularly, we have become so resistant to pain that at the slightest hint of it, we prepare to flee by some shortcut or some solution that masks the discomfort.
By His example, Jesus teaches us the opposite. Think back to the scene we find within the pages of the Gospels when Jesus was about to be tried and crucified. He struggled with the agony of being separated from His Father and of bearing the entire weight of human sin. None of us will ever know what that felt like, but we know what it is to bear a small portion of sin's weight and feel crushed by it.
During the days of my undergraduate studies in India, I remember an incident that to this day brings a negative response within me. We were in the midst of a class when the professor asked the student in front of me to answer a question. The student stood to his feet, presented his answer, and as he was about to sit down, the student next to me covertly slid the stool out from under him with his foot. I only had a fraction of a second to reach out and try to push the stool back into place so that the young man would not land on the floor with a terrible, possibly injurious jolt. But I couldn't do it fast enough and the student fell hard.
The professor had only seen my hand trying to reach the stool and assumed that I had pulled it out from under him. Without any discussion, he ordered me out of the class. I got as far as saying, "But sir ..:' before he interrupted me and said, "I don't want any explanation for such a shameful act. Just get out of my class:' The boy who had actually done it sat quietly and said nothing while both the boy who fell and the professor thought it was I who had done it. Others who had watched it all happen thought they had better stay out of it for fear of some reprisal. In short, I bore the wrong of another person and to this day am rankled by the memory.
That is a small, minute thing in the light of what I say to you. When Jesus took, by His own will, the guilt of the world upon Himself, knowing the agony of separation from the Father that would follow because the Father would have to treat Him as the guilty one, He cried out to His Father, "If it is Your will, take this cup away from Me" (Luke 22:42 NKJV). He did not want to taste the bitterness of human sin, the greatest consequence of which was separation from God the Father. But then He also cried, "Nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done" (v 42 NKJV).
I wonder what I would have done if a third student, in order to protect me, had stood up and taken the blame? I would have found it unfathomable, but an act for which I would have surrendered much in order to express my heartfelt gratitude. You see, the will is always in a dramatic clash with other wills, including our own wishes. Fear, self-protection, indifference-numerous emotions and concerns test the will and often lead us astray. At the moment my will is tested to do wrong, it must remember the price that was paid on my behalf by the One who took the punishment for my will. By that act, He invited me to die to my own will, having received the gift of being accepted by Him, which my will alone could not have made possible.
In exchange, I receive the will of God by which to live and find delight. Nothing brings harmony more than embracing the will of God. Nothing brings fragmentation more than turning away from the will of God. Marriage is the harmony of God synchronizing two wills with the will of the Father. When that happens, the heart resounds with the feeling, even though it involves sacrifice.
Marriages are broken when even one of the two wills breaks from the will of the Father. When that happens the heart is broken as well, even though there is a path that may seem to provide an easier way out. That is when God takes over. Unless I understand the Cross, I cannot understand why my commitment to what is right must take precedence over what I prefer. Your marriage, as your conversion, begins at the Cross. Only then does the resurrection follow.
When my younger brother was about seven years old, he contracted double pneumonia and typhoid fever. As each day came and went, his condition deteriorated and the doctors said there was little chance of him recovering. Our entire family moved out of our home to live with my aunt while my mom was living in the hospital with my brother.
I recall going to visit him in the hospital one evening. He was not expected to survive the night. He looked absolutely pathetic, shriveled to a bundle of bones. But something happened that night as we were to find out later. All of us, except my mother, left the hospital not expecting to see him again. But my mother spent the night by his bedside, reaching out and touching his face or stroking his head. As the night wore on, out of sheer exhaustion she fell asleep in her chair. Night after night she had stayed awake, yet on this night, his last night, she had run out of strength. Her head drooped and she fell asleep for a couple of hours-the very hours she was told he would die.
She awakened with a start to find him still alive. In fact, she felt a warmth to his body she had not felt before. As one day passed into another, he became stronger until he had fully recovered.
My mother told us often that she felt that when she had given all she had to give and could give no more, God had taken over and given her the sleep she so needed as He restored the ailing frame of her son. This, to me, is a remarkable expression of will and hope. The rest of the family was comfortably asleep at home. The one whose heart was most entwined with his young life, by sheer sacrifice and self-denial, worked for his well-being until she could do nothing else but stay close, and that's when God took over.
When your will is committed to God, He carries you when all else seems spent, to rescue what you had invested by your dedication.
A few days ago, while writing this chapter in a small Asian city, I took an early morning walk and saw two workmen who were dismantling a cement block wall, taking great care to keep the blocks intact for another structure they were building. What a metaphor this is for the home! When two lives meet, they are like two distinct walls. Each has to start by dismantling his or her wall one brick at a time, and then those bricks are taken intact and with other materials used to build a structure with a roof that brings them together at the top. That is the new home. Two wills are as two walls. Rightly dismantled and rebuilt they provide the strength for a new union of two lives.
The playwright Thornton Wilder said it well: "I didn't marry you because you were perfect. I didn't even marry you because I loved you. I married you because you gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage. And when our children were growing up, it wasn't a house that protected them; and it wasn't our love that protected them-it was that promise." 3
Notes:
1. William Doherty, Take Back Your Marriage (New York: The Guilford Press, 2001), 11.
2. G. K. Chesterton, "A Defence of Rash Vows" in The Defendant (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1904), 23.
3. Quoted by William Doherty in Take Back Your Marriage,7.
Extracted from Ravi Zacharias’ I, Isaac, take Thee Rebekah.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Living as a Called Person
SOMETIMES ONE FINDS A MOST BEAUTIFUL LINE IN AN old book. For example, I found this one in a book written almost eighty years ago entitled A Casket of Cameos, by F. W. Boreham, in which he reflected on the faith of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom (from an even older book). Tom, an old slave, had been wrenched from his old Kentucky home and put on a steamship headed for unknown places. It was a terrible moment of crisis, and Boreham observes, "Uncle Tom's faith was staggered. It really seemed to him that, in leaving Aunt Chloe and the children and his old companions, he was leaving God!"
Remember, it's an old book, but there's a nugget of truth coming. Falling into a troubled sleep, the disoriented slave had a dream, Boreham wrote. "He dreamed that he was back again, and that little Eva was reading to him from the Bible as of old. He could hear her voice: `When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; for I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, Thy Saviour."' The dream and its powerful message put Tom's heart at rest.
A necessary rest indeed because, soon after, Tom was suffering under the antagonisms of a sadistic master, Simon Leg.
Boreham continues:
THE CALLED PERSON
It is this quality - the quality of an inner-directed person - for which we seek when we compare driven persons and called persons. Driven people often project a bravado of confidence as they forge ahead with their achievement-oriented life plan. But often, at the moment when it is least expected, adversities and obstructions conspire, and there can be personal collapse. Called people, on the other hand, possess strength from within, a quality of perseverance and power that are impervious to the blows from without.
You never know when you're going to bump into one of these called men or women. They can emerge from the strangest places and evince the most unique qualities. They may be the unnoticed, the unappreciated, the unsophisticated. Look again at the men Christ picked: few if any of them would have been candidates for high positions in organized religion or big business. It is not that they were unusually awkward. It is just that they appeared to be absolutely ordinary.
We have to keep reminding ourselves: No headhunter in his or her right mind would have vetted most of them for leadership in the kingdom of God. But Christ did, and that made all the difference.
The Scriptures are dotted with called men and women, of course. Mary, mother of Jesus, has to be near or at the top of the list. You wonder about what's behind the phrase, "And Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart." No need to grandstand here; no need to impress anyone.
Caleb (of Joshua and Caleb fame) sure qualifies. "I followed the Lord my God wholeheartedly," he said as he summed up his life. Or Stephen, reputed to be the first Christian martyr: "a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit." Great lines, these.
But I have to say then that when I line up all the called folk, John the Baptizer comes first. He has been an inspiration to me in the highest and, especially, the lowest moments of my life. And I have known some of the lowest of moments. On those occasions particularly, John was there with me. So let his story wash over you for a moment and see if it has the same effect it has had on me.
THE MAN WHO LOST HIS JOB
Start with courage. John the Baptizer abounded in it. When the crowds came streaming to the Jordan River valley to take his measure, John had the audacity to tell them that they ought to back off from exonerating themselves on the basis of their claim to racial or religious superiority. They should, he said, face up to their need for spiritual and moral repentance.
The baptism (usually reserved for Gentiles), he claimed, would be good for them. It would offer proof of the genuineness of their long-awaited contrition. His words must have driven the sanctimonious man in the crowd mad.
No wonder no one was ever neutral about John. The man never wasted words, never flattered a soul. You loved him or hated him. You're probably aware that one of the haters eventually removed his head. But only after John had finished his work.
Humanly speaking, John didn't have much going for him in terms of an attractive public world. We assume his parents died while he was quite young. He grew up in the desert where he partook of an austere diet and wore off-brand clothing. You can only conclude that you are watching a man with extraordinary inner strength and orientation.
John, this called man, is a marked contrast to the Old Testament's King Saul, a driven man from the start. John seems to have had from the very beginning a vivid sense of destiny, the result of a heavenly assignment that came from deep within as he immersed himself in the writings of Isaiah.
One sees the contrast between Saul and John most vividly when their personal identities and their sense of vocational security are under attack. Saul, the driven man, you will remember, reacted violently, lashing out at the younger David as he followed him all over the desert in an attempt to destroy him. And each time he encountered David, he appeared more foolish than he'd been previously.
But John is another story. Watch him when the observation is made that his popularity may be headed into serious decline. To put it another way, study John when he learns that he is losing his job.
The moment I have in mind comes after John has introduced Christ to the multitudes and they have begun to transfer their affections to this "Lamb of God" John 1:36). It is brought to John's attention that the crowds, even some of his own disciples, are turning to Jesus, listening to His teaching and being baptized by His disciples. One gets the feeling that those who brought the news to John concerning the decline of his ratings may have anticipated (even hoped?) that they would get the chance to see John react just a bit negatively. But if that was the case, they were to be disappointed.
A man can receive nothing, unless it has been given him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, "I am not the Christ," but "I have been sent before Him." He who has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom's voice. And so this joy of mine has been made full. He must increase, but I must decrease. (John 3:27-30)
So what is the man saying here?
• Called People Understand Stewardship
First, John's comments begin with the principle of stewardship. Those who have instigated this conversation apparently believe that John will be rattled when he hears that his life as a crowd gatherer is over. But in fact he was anything but rattled. He seems, rather, to have been delighted.
Here's how John sees it. Having never owned the crowds in the first place, John was prepared to surrender them to Jesus if that was God's plan. That's the thinking of a steward, a key quality of a called person. The task of a steward is simply to properly manage something on behalf of the owner until the owner comes to take it back. John knew that the crowd leaving him for Christ was never his in the first place. God had placed them under his care for a period of time and now had taken them back. With John that was apparently just fine.
How different this is from the driven Saul, who assumed that he owned his throne in Israel and could do anything with it that he wished. When one owns something, it has to be held onto; it has to be protected. But John did not think that way. So when Christ came to compel the crowds, John was only too glad to hand them off and get out of the way.
John's view of stewardship presents us with an important contemporary principle. For his crowds may be our careers, our assets, our natural and spiritual gifts, our health. So - and think before answering! - are these things owned, or merely managed in the name of the One who gave them? Driven people consider them owned; called people do not. When driven people lose those things, it is a major crisis. When called people lose them, nothing of substance has changed. The private world remains the same, perhaps even stronger.
I love the words of Cardinal Danneels of Brussels:
• Called People Know Exactly Who They Are
A second quality of calledness is seen in John's certainty of his own identity. Let me paraphrase his remarks. You will remember that he said to his visitors, that I've told you often who I am not namely, the Christ. Knowing who he was not was the beginning of knowing who he was. And John had no illusions as to his personal identity. That had already been established in his interior, private world.
By contrast, those whose private worlds are in disarray tend to get their identities confused. They can have an increasing inability to separate role from person. What they do is indistinguishable from who they are. That is why people who have wielded great power and enjoyed positions of privilege find it very difficult to give them up, and will often fight to the death to retain what they've had. It is why retirement is difficult for more than a few men and women. And it helps to explain why a mother may suffer depression when her last child has left the home. Come to think of it, I was the one who felt the depression when our kids left home. Apparently, it works either way.
We need to ponder this matter of identity carefully, for it happens to be a very contemporary subject. John could easily have taken advantage of the crowd's gullibility during the early days when he was popular. Or he could have been seduced by their applause. The fact that the masses were switching their favour from the priests of Jerusalem to him could have supercharged him with arrogance and ambition. It would have been rather simple to nod yes to questions as to whether or not he was the Messiah.
I suspect that there was a small window of time when he could have gotten away with making outlandish claims about himself. You can almost hear a man of lesser integrity than John in a moment of weakness saying, "Me, the Messiah? Well, I hadn't thought about it quite like some are saying it, but perhaps they're right, there is something kind of Messiah-like about me. Why don't I fly with this idea of Messiahship for a while and see what transpires?"
If that had been John, he probably could have pulled off the hoax for a short while. But the genuine John would not even try. His inner sphere was too well ordered for him not to have seen through the terrible implications of a misplaced identity.
If there was a moment when the crowd's praise became thunderous, the voice of God from within John was even louder. And that voice spoke more convincingly because John had first ordered his inner world out on the desert.
Don't underestimate the significance of this principle. Today in our media-fashioned world many good and talented leaders face the constant temptation to begin believing the text of their own publicity releases. And if they do, a messianic fantasy gradually infects their personalities and leadership styles. Forgetting who they are not, they begin to make dangerous assumptions about who they are. Did any of this stuff tempt the recent mayor of New York City to think that he could get the rules suspended so that he could run for a third mayoral term in a two-term system?
St. Paul offered a valuable precedent when he wrote to Timothy and recited his call from Judaism to Christian faith and apostleship: "I was the worst of sinners, he wrote; I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man ... the grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly" (1 Tim. 1:13-14). A man with a memory like that, regularly freshened, is not likely to think of himself more highly than he ought.
• Called People Possess an Unwavering Sense of Purpose
A third look at John's remarkable response to his interrogators will reveal that the prophet from the desert also understood the purpose of his activity as forerunner to Christ. And this is another dimension of calledness. To those who questioned him regarding his feelings about the growing popularity of the Man from Nazareth, he likened his purpose to that of the best man at a wedding: "He who has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend [that's John] of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom's voice" (John 3:29). The purpose of the best man is simply to stand with the groom, to make sure that all attention is riveted upon him. The best man would be a fool if in the middle of the wedding processional he suddenly turned to the wedding guests and began to sing a song or engage in a humorous monologue. The best man has fulfilled his purpose most admirably when he draws no attention to himself but focuses all attention upon the bride and groom.
And that is what John did. If Jesus Christ was the groom, to use John's metaphor, then the Baptizer was committed to being best man and nothing else. That was the purpose that flowed from his call, and he had no desire to aspire to anything beyond. Thus to see the crowd headed toward Christ was all the affirmation John needed; his purpose had been fulfilled. But only called people like this man can relax under such circumstances.
I love Robert Browning's lines in his poem, "Bishop Bloughram's Apology:"
Among the things we can say about John is this: He was never baffled, and he never lost life. Hard to do if your purpose is lofty and imaginative, if it calls from you every ounce of moral and spiritual energy you have, if it is bigger than you are.
When the 9/11 catastrophe took New York's Trade Towers down, my wife, Gail, and I headed for Ground Zero to contribute our energies to the work of the Salvation Army. During that first week when all seemed so chaotic, we were part of the thousands of workers and their relief supports who attacked the rubble in hopes that we would find trapped people still alive.
By the hour I worked as part of a team that brought everything from cold water to fresh boots to the men and women who formed the bucket brigades intent on getting to anyone who had survived. Occasionally, we would hear the signal that meant "Silence" as the suspicion arose that a voice or tapping was heard underneath the concrete and steel.
Late one night I stood in a circle of fire-fighters who had been working 24/7, refusing to rest.
"Don't you think you'd profit from a few hours away from this place?" I asked.
"Not a chance," their leader said. "We've got brothers in that pile, and they may be waiting for us."
It was moments like this that would cause me to occasionally find Gail at the station where she was dispensing aid, walk off to a corner with her, take her into my arms, and whisper, "I was made for this!"
Now I have a slight, momentary sense of how the great saints -John the Baptizer included - must have continually felt as they lived down through the centuries, caught up in a lofty sense of purpose.
• Called People Practice Unswerving Commitment
Finally, John, as a called man, also understood that some things need to be released. Mothers know they must eventually release their children to a more independent life. Mentors know they must release their proteges at an appropriate moment.
John's comment, "He must increase, but I must decrease" (John 3:30), spoken to those who had queried him about his attitude, illustrates the principle of planned released. A called person - because he is a steward, because he knows who he is, because he is purposeful - anticipates the day when it is time to step back and let go. In this case it was a crowd, a temporary reputation, and a bevy of disciples that had to be released to Jesus' influence.
No driven person could ever say what John said, because driven people have to keep gaining more and more attention, more and more power, more and more material assets. They have to hold on; they cannot let go. Too much of themselves is wound up in what they are doing.
Occasionally we hear the story of an organizational leader who, having given powerful leadership to an institution, comes toward the end of his working life and keeps holding on to leadership long after he should have let it pass into the hands of someone in a younger generation. Or he ensures that the leadership passes into the hands of a son or a daughter so that he can maintain his influence.
Somewhere in my library is a book in which the story is told of an English headmaster who was appointed when he was forty-five years of age. His first act was to write himself a letter to be opened on his sixty-fifth birthday. In it he wrote (and I paraphrase), "Today you are sixty-five, and it is time to give the task of being headmaster over to a younger person. You will tell yourself that there is no one who can replace you; that the school cannot do without you. But don't believe this self-aggrandizing propaganda."
Sure enough, when he turned sixty-five and opened the letter, he found that he entertained those exact feelings about his indispensability. But he took his own advice and released the leadership to another. Which is exactly what John did.
It is these kinds of qualities - John's sense of stewardship, his awareness of his identity, his perspective about his role, and his commitment to the principle of release - that mark a called person. And they are the characteristics of a person who builds first in the interior or private world so that out of it will flow fountains of life.
How totally different were the lives of Saul the king and John the Baptizer. The one sought to defend a golden cage, and lost; the other was pleased with a place in the desert and a chance to serve, and won.
You sense a maturity in John's thinking that is uncommon. There's a peacefulness about him. This is not a rattled man whose sense of well-being craters when his public world changes.
There's a quality of joy that ought not to be confused with the modern-day version of happiness - a state of feelings dependent upon everything turning out all right. When others thought that John might be worried about ending up as a failure, they discovered that he actually was quite satisfied, in spite of the fact that his audiences were leaving him. Some folk in John's generation might not have thought so, but John had such an assurance because his evaluations were based first on his private world, where real values can be fully formed in concert with God.
John is in fact the quintessential called man. He illustrates what Stowe meant when she wrote that Simon Legree's blows fell only upon Uncle Tom's outer man, but not upon his heart. Something stood between John and the public evidence that he may have been a failure. It was the unquestioned reality of God's call, which John had heard in that private world of his. And that voice was louder than any other sound. It came from a quiet place of order.
THE ROAD TO CALLEDNESS
As one looks with admiration at John the Baptizer, the obvious question is, How did he get that way? What was the source of this determination, this stamina, this unswerving ability to look at events in a totally different way than others did? A quick overview of John's background offers some insights into the structure and substance of his inner life.
If there is one thing that begins to explain John, it has to be the kind of parents he had, who shaped him in his earliest days. He had good genes, physically and spiritually.
It is clear from Scripture that Zacharias and Elizabeth were godly people with extraordinary sensitivity to John's call. It had been revealed to them through various angelic visions. And they in turn from the earliest days began to pump that destiny into John's soul. We have little indication of John's family life after he was born, but we do know that his parents were marked with an extraordinary depth of integrity, godliness, and perseverance.
John's parents must have died when he was still a very young man. How he handled the loss we do not know. But when the Scripture next highlights John, he is living alone in the desert, separate from the society to which he would later speak as a prophet.
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip was tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness. And he came into all the district around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. (Luke 3:1-3)
These words contain an intriguing insight. Caesar, we're reminded, was in Rome doing whatever important things Caesars do. Annas and Caiaphas, major-league priests, were in the Jerusalem temple promoting organized religion. And various other political personalities were going and coming in public places, participating in seemingly newsworthy events. Their worlds were the impressive public worlds of power, notoriety, and human connection.
Then this: But the word of God came to John, an insignificant man in the most insignificant of places: a desert. Why John? And why a desert? Think about it!
I am reminded of Herbert Butterfield's words, which have always humbled me:
So why John? First answer: Only God knows. Beyond that one simply has to say because John responded. The call demanded submission to God's ways, God's methods and God's criteria for success. And John was willing to accept those terms no matter what the cost to him in pain or loneliness.
Why a desert? Perhaps because in deserts people can hear and brood upon things not easily heard or thought about in busy cities, where people are usually hurried, surrounded by noise, and steeped in self-importance. Sometimes in cities the shrillness of the public life is so great that the whispering voice of God cannot be heard. And sometimes in cities, people are too proud to listen to God amid all of their steel and concrete skyscrapers, their colourful theatres, or their incredible temples.
God drew John into the desert where He could speak to him. And when He got him there He began to stamp impressions onto John's inner world that gave the son of Zacharias a totally different perspective on his times. There in the desert he gained a new view of religion, of right and wrong, of God's purposes for history. And there he developed a special sensitivity and courage that would prepare him for his most extraordinary task: introducing his generation to the Christ. His private world was under construction - in the desert.
The word of God came to John in the desert. Such a strange place for God to speak. What can one learn in deserts? I am inclined to forsake deserts, to detour around them whenever possible. To me, deserts mean pain, isolation, and suffering. And no one cares for any of that. Deserts are hard places in which to live, physically or spiritually. But the fact is unavoidable: The greatest lessons are potentially learned in deserts if one, in the midst of struggle, listens for God's call.
In deserts, one learns about dryness, because deserts are dry. John would learn not only to cope with the dryness of the desert, but it doubtless taught him to appreciate the aridity of the spirits of the people to whom he'd speak at the Jordan.
In the desert a person learns dependence upon God. Life in the wilderness, as the Hebrews had found out centuries before, cannot be sustained without the benevolence of a merciful God. Only a person who has suffered desert-like hardship knows what it is like to totally cast himself upon God because there is nothing else left.
There is a slightly brighter side to deserts, however. Wilderness provides a place where one is free to think, to plan, to prepare. And then at an appointed time, like John, he comes charging out of the dry land with a message, something to say that will expose hypocrisy and superficiality. Issues are addressed that cut through to the bottomless depths of the human spirit. And an age of people is introduced to the Christ of God.
In the desert a person can be called. As John stood up first to his critics and then to the furiously defensive Herod, whose immoral life the prophet rebuked, he began to reveal that special quality of calledness. You can see it in his serenity in the midst of his prophetic performance. Something special within was operating, providing him with an independent base of judgement and wisdom. Few could withstand his message.
What was the makeup of that private world that was formed in the desert? Frankly, the biblical writers do not give us much of an answer. We are simply treated to the evidence of an ordered inner life. John is a prototype of the product we are looking for. In a public world where all seems chaotic and disordered, he moves with assurance and certitude.
Have Saul, John, and my friend the "successful bum" taught us anything? I think their message is plain. Look inside, they say. What makes you tick? Why are you doing all of that? What do you hope to gain as a result? And what would be your reaction if it were all taken away?
I look inside my private world and discover that almost every day I have to wrestle with whether I will be a Saul or a john. I have lived in a competitive world where achievement is almost everything. Now as I journey through my sixties, the challenge has morphed a bit: how to back out of organizational leadership and influence, gracefully turn it over to another generation, and embrace a quieter (and far more sane, actually) role: being a mentor, a cheerleader, an encourager to the young.
This may sound sort of noble, but it's not always that simple. I always enjoyed being in charge, more or less. I could still find it easy to join Saul, to be driven to hold on, to protect, to dominate. And I might even find myself doing those sorts of things while telling myself that I was doing God's work. But as John did, I have concluded that it's time to practice the principle of release and go on to other things. As Henri Nouwen eloquently put it: to embrace littleness, hiddenness, and powerlessness. Frankly, I'd rather hug other things, but this is the way of the cross, the way of the called person.
Extracted from Gordon Macdonald’s Ordering Your Private World.
Remember, it's an old book, but there's a nugget of truth coming. Falling into a troubled sleep, the disoriented slave had a dream, Boreham wrote. "He dreamed that he was back again, and that little Eva was reading to him from the Bible as of old. He could hear her voice: `When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; for I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, Thy Saviour."' The dream and its powerful message put Tom's heart at rest.
A necessary rest indeed because, soon after, Tom was suffering under the antagonisms of a sadistic master, Simon Leg.
Boreham continues:
A little later, poor Tom was writhing under the cruel lash of his new owner. "But," says Mrs. Stowe, "the blows fell only upon the outer man, and not, as before, on the heart. Tom stood submissive; and yet Legree could not hide from himself the fact that his power over his victim had gone. As Tom disappeared in his cabin, and Legree wheeled his horse suddenly round, there passed through the tyrant's mind one of those vivid flashes that often send the lightning of conscience across the dark and wicked soul. He understood full well that it was God who was standing between him and Tom, and he blasphemed Him!" 1
THE CALLED PERSON
It is this quality - the quality of an inner-directed person - for which we seek when we compare driven persons and called persons. Driven people often project a bravado of confidence as they forge ahead with their achievement-oriented life plan. But often, at the moment when it is least expected, adversities and obstructions conspire, and there can be personal collapse. Called people, on the other hand, possess strength from within, a quality of perseverance and power that are impervious to the blows from without.
You never know when you're going to bump into one of these called men or women. They can emerge from the strangest places and evince the most unique qualities. They may be the unnoticed, the unappreciated, the unsophisticated. Look again at the men Christ picked: few if any of them would have been candidates for high positions in organized religion or big business. It is not that they were unusually awkward. It is just that they appeared to be absolutely ordinary.
We have to keep reminding ourselves: No headhunter in his or her right mind would have vetted most of them for leadership in the kingdom of God. But Christ did, and that made all the difference.
The Scriptures are dotted with called men and women, of course. Mary, mother of Jesus, has to be near or at the top of the list. You wonder about what's behind the phrase, "And Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart." No need to grandstand here; no need to impress anyone.
Caleb (of Joshua and Caleb fame) sure qualifies. "I followed the Lord my God wholeheartedly," he said as he summed up his life. Or Stephen, reputed to be the first Christian martyr: "a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit." Great lines, these.
But I have to say then that when I line up all the called folk, John the Baptizer comes first. He has been an inspiration to me in the highest and, especially, the lowest moments of my life. And I have known some of the lowest of moments. On those occasions particularly, John was there with me. So let his story wash over you for a moment and see if it has the same effect it has had on me.
THE MAN WHO LOST HIS JOB
Start with courage. John the Baptizer abounded in it. When the crowds came streaming to the Jordan River valley to take his measure, John had the audacity to tell them that they ought to back off from exonerating themselves on the basis of their claim to racial or religious superiority. They should, he said, face up to their need for spiritual and moral repentance.
The baptism (usually reserved for Gentiles), he claimed, would be good for them. It would offer proof of the genuineness of their long-awaited contrition. His words must have driven the sanctimonious man in the crowd mad.
No wonder no one was ever neutral about John. The man never wasted words, never flattered a soul. You loved him or hated him. You're probably aware that one of the haters eventually removed his head. But only after John had finished his work.
Humanly speaking, John didn't have much going for him in terms of an attractive public world. We assume his parents died while he was quite young. He grew up in the desert where he partook of an austere diet and wore off-brand clothing. You can only conclude that you are watching a man with extraordinary inner strength and orientation.
John, this called man, is a marked contrast to the Old Testament's King Saul, a driven man from the start. John seems to have had from the very beginning a vivid sense of destiny, the result of a heavenly assignment that came from deep within as he immersed himself in the writings of Isaiah.
One sees the contrast between Saul and John most vividly when their personal identities and their sense of vocational security are under attack. Saul, the driven man, you will remember, reacted violently, lashing out at the younger David as he followed him all over the desert in an attempt to destroy him. And each time he encountered David, he appeared more foolish than he'd been previously.
But John is another story. Watch him when the observation is made that his popularity may be headed into serious decline. To put it another way, study John when he learns that he is losing his job.
The moment I have in mind comes after John has introduced Christ to the multitudes and they have begun to transfer their affections to this "Lamb of God" John 1:36). It is brought to John's attention that the crowds, even some of his own disciples, are turning to Jesus, listening to His teaching and being baptized by His disciples. One gets the feeling that those who brought the news to John concerning the decline of his ratings may have anticipated (even hoped?) that they would get the chance to see John react just a bit negatively. But if that was the case, they were to be disappointed.
A man can receive nothing, unless it has been given him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, "I am not the Christ," but "I have been sent before Him." He who has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom's voice. And so this joy of mine has been made full. He must increase, but I must decrease. (John 3:27-30)
So what is the man saying here?
• Called People Understand Stewardship
First, John's comments begin with the principle of stewardship. Those who have instigated this conversation apparently believe that John will be rattled when he hears that his life as a crowd gatherer is over. But in fact he was anything but rattled. He seems, rather, to have been delighted.
Here's how John sees it. Having never owned the crowds in the first place, John was prepared to surrender them to Jesus if that was God's plan. That's the thinking of a steward, a key quality of a called person. The task of a steward is simply to properly manage something on behalf of the owner until the owner comes to take it back. John knew that the crowd leaving him for Christ was never his in the first place. God had placed them under his care for a period of time and now had taken them back. With John that was apparently just fine.
How different this is from the driven Saul, who assumed that he owned his throne in Israel and could do anything with it that he wished. When one owns something, it has to be held onto; it has to be protected. But John did not think that way. So when Christ came to compel the crowds, John was only too glad to hand them off and get out of the way.
John's view of stewardship presents us with an important contemporary principle. For his crowds may be our careers, our assets, our natural and spiritual gifts, our health. So - and think before answering! - are these things owned, or merely managed in the name of the One who gave them? Driven people consider them owned; called people do not. When driven people lose those things, it is a major crisis. When called people lose them, nothing of substance has changed. The private world remains the same, perhaps even stronger.
I love the words of Cardinal Danneels of Brussels:
When I get home after a long day, I go to the chapel and pray. I say to the Lord, "There it is for today, things are finished. Now let's be serious, is this diocese mine or yours?" The Lord says, "What do you think?" I answer, "I think it's yours." "That is true," the Lord says, "it is mine." And so I say, "Listen, Lord, it is your turn to take responsibility for and direct the diocese. I'm going to sleep."2
• Called People Know Exactly Who They Are
A second quality of calledness is seen in John's certainty of his own identity. Let me paraphrase his remarks. You will remember that he said to his visitors, that I've told you often who I am not namely, the Christ. Knowing who he was not was the beginning of knowing who he was. And John had no illusions as to his personal identity. That had already been established in his interior, private world.
By contrast, those whose private worlds are in disarray tend to get their identities confused. They can have an increasing inability to separate role from person. What they do is indistinguishable from who they are. That is why people who have wielded great power and enjoyed positions of privilege find it very difficult to give them up, and will often fight to the death to retain what they've had. It is why retirement is difficult for more than a few men and women. And it helps to explain why a mother may suffer depression when her last child has left the home. Come to think of it, I was the one who felt the depression when our kids left home. Apparently, it works either way.
We need to ponder this matter of identity carefully, for it happens to be a very contemporary subject. John could easily have taken advantage of the crowd's gullibility during the early days when he was popular. Or he could have been seduced by their applause. The fact that the masses were switching their favour from the priests of Jerusalem to him could have supercharged him with arrogance and ambition. It would have been rather simple to nod yes to questions as to whether or not he was the Messiah.
I suspect that there was a small window of time when he could have gotten away with making outlandish claims about himself. You can almost hear a man of lesser integrity than John in a moment of weakness saying, "Me, the Messiah? Well, I hadn't thought about it quite like some are saying it, but perhaps they're right, there is something kind of Messiah-like about me. Why don't I fly with this idea of Messiahship for a while and see what transpires?"
If that had been John, he probably could have pulled off the hoax for a short while. But the genuine John would not even try. His inner sphere was too well ordered for him not to have seen through the terrible implications of a misplaced identity.
If there was a moment when the crowd's praise became thunderous, the voice of God from within John was even louder. And that voice spoke more convincingly because John had first ordered his inner world out on the desert.
Don't underestimate the significance of this principle. Today in our media-fashioned world many good and talented leaders face the constant temptation to begin believing the text of their own publicity releases. And if they do, a messianic fantasy gradually infects their personalities and leadership styles. Forgetting who they are not, they begin to make dangerous assumptions about who they are. Did any of this stuff tempt the recent mayor of New York City to think that he could get the rules suspended so that he could run for a third mayoral term in a two-term system?
St. Paul offered a valuable precedent when he wrote to Timothy and recited his call from Judaism to Christian faith and apostleship: "I was the worst of sinners, he wrote; I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man ... the grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly" (1 Tim. 1:13-14). A man with a memory like that, regularly freshened, is not likely to think of himself more highly than he ought.
• Called People Possess an Unwavering Sense of Purpose
A third look at John's remarkable response to his interrogators will reveal that the prophet from the desert also understood the purpose of his activity as forerunner to Christ. And this is another dimension of calledness. To those who questioned him regarding his feelings about the growing popularity of the Man from Nazareth, he likened his purpose to that of the best man at a wedding: "He who has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend [that's John] of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom's voice" (John 3:29). The purpose of the best man is simply to stand with the groom, to make sure that all attention is riveted upon him. The best man would be a fool if in the middle of the wedding processional he suddenly turned to the wedding guests and began to sing a song or engage in a humorous monologue. The best man has fulfilled his purpose most admirably when he draws no attention to himself but focuses all attention upon the bride and groom.
And that is what John did. If Jesus Christ was the groom, to use John's metaphor, then the Baptizer was committed to being best man and nothing else. That was the purpose that flowed from his call, and he had no desire to aspire to anything beyond. Thus to see the crowd headed toward Christ was all the affirmation John needed; his purpose had been fulfilled. But only called people like this man can relax under such circumstances.
I love Robert Browning's lines in his poem, "Bishop Bloughram's Apology:"
In everyman's career are certain points
Whereon he dares not be indifferent;
The world detects him clearly, if he dare,
As baffled at the game and losing life.
Among the things we can say about John is this: He was never baffled, and he never lost life. Hard to do if your purpose is lofty and imaginative, if it calls from you every ounce of moral and spiritual energy you have, if it is bigger than you are.
When the 9/11 catastrophe took New York's Trade Towers down, my wife, Gail, and I headed for Ground Zero to contribute our energies to the work of the Salvation Army. During that first week when all seemed so chaotic, we were part of the thousands of workers and their relief supports who attacked the rubble in hopes that we would find trapped people still alive.
By the hour I worked as part of a team that brought everything from cold water to fresh boots to the men and women who formed the bucket brigades intent on getting to anyone who had survived. Occasionally, we would hear the signal that meant "Silence" as the suspicion arose that a voice or tapping was heard underneath the concrete and steel.
Late one night I stood in a circle of fire-fighters who had been working 24/7, refusing to rest.
"Don't you think you'd profit from a few hours away from this place?" I asked.
"Not a chance," their leader said. "We've got brothers in that pile, and they may be waiting for us."
It was moments like this that would cause me to occasionally find Gail at the station where she was dispensing aid, walk off to a corner with her, take her into my arms, and whisper, "I was made for this!"
Now I have a slight, momentary sense of how the great saints -John the Baptizer included - must have continually felt as they lived down through the centuries, caught up in a lofty sense of purpose.
• Called People Practice Unswerving Commitment
Finally, John, as a called man, also understood that some things need to be released. Mothers know they must eventually release their children to a more independent life. Mentors know they must release their proteges at an appropriate moment.
John's comment, "He must increase, but I must decrease" (John 3:30), spoken to those who had queried him about his attitude, illustrates the principle of planned released. A called person - because he is a steward, because he knows who he is, because he is purposeful - anticipates the day when it is time to step back and let go. In this case it was a crowd, a temporary reputation, and a bevy of disciples that had to be released to Jesus' influence.
No driven person could ever say what John said, because driven people have to keep gaining more and more attention, more and more power, more and more material assets. They have to hold on; they cannot let go. Too much of themselves is wound up in what they are doing.
Occasionally we hear the story of an organizational leader who, having given powerful leadership to an institution, comes toward the end of his working life and keeps holding on to leadership long after he should have let it pass into the hands of someone in a younger generation. Or he ensures that the leadership passes into the hands of a son or a daughter so that he can maintain his influence.
Somewhere in my library is a book in which the story is told of an English headmaster who was appointed when he was forty-five years of age. His first act was to write himself a letter to be opened on his sixty-fifth birthday. In it he wrote (and I paraphrase), "Today you are sixty-five, and it is time to give the task of being headmaster over to a younger person. You will tell yourself that there is no one who can replace you; that the school cannot do without you. But don't believe this self-aggrandizing propaganda."
Sure enough, when he turned sixty-five and opened the letter, he found that he entertained those exact feelings about his indispensability. But he took his own advice and released the leadership to another. Which is exactly what John did.
It is these kinds of qualities - John's sense of stewardship, his awareness of his identity, his perspective about his role, and his commitment to the principle of release - that mark a called person. And they are the characteristics of a person who builds first in the interior or private world so that out of it will flow fountains of life.
How totally different were the lives of Saul the king and John the Baptizer. The one sought to defend a golden cage, and lost; the other was pleased with a place in the desert and a chance to serve, and won.
You sense a maturity in John's thinking that is uncommon. There's a peacefulness about him. This is not a rattled man whose sense of well-being craters when his public world changes.
There's a quality of joy that ought not to be confused with the modern-day version of happiness - a state of feelings dependent upon everything turning out all right. When others thought that John might be worried about ending up as a failure, they discovered that he actually was quite satisfied, in spite of the fact that his audiences were leaving him. Some folk in John's generation might not have thought so, but John had such an assurance because his evaluations were based first on his private world, where real values can be fully formed in concert with God.
John is in fact the quintessential called man. He illustrates what Stowe meant when she wrote that Simon Legree's blows fell only upon Uncle Tom's outer man, but not upon his heart. Something stood between John and the public evidence that he may have been a failure. It was the unquestioned reality of God's call, which John had heard in that private world of his. And that voice was louder than any other sound. It came from a quiet place of order.
THE ROAD TO CALLEDNESS
As one looks with admiration at John the Baptizer, the obvious question is, How did he get that way? What was the source of this determination, this stamina, this unswerving ability to look at events in a totally different way than others did? A quick overview of John's background offers some insights into the structure and substance of his inner life.
If there is one thing that begins to explain John, it has to be the kind of parents he had, who shaped him in his earliest days. He had good genes, physically and spiritually.
It is clear from Scripture that Zacharias and Elizabeth were godly people with extraordinary sensitivity to John's call. It had been revealed to them through various angelic visions. And they in turn from the earliest days began to pump that destiny into John's soul. We have little indication of John's family life after he was born, but we do know that his parents were marked with an extraordinary depth of integrity, godliness, and perseverance.
John's parents must have died when he was still a very young man. How he handled the loss we do not know. But when the Scripture next highlights John, he is living alone in the desert, separate from the society to which he would later speak as a prophet.
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip was tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness. And he came into all the district around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. (Luke 3:1-3)
These words contain an intriguing insight. Caesar, we're reminded, was in Rome doing whatever important things Caesars do. Annas and Caiaphas, major-league priests, were in the Jerusalem temple promoting organized religion. And various other political personalities were going and coming in public places, participating in seemingly newsworthy events. Their worlds were the impressive public worlds of power, notoriety, and human connection.
Then this: But the word of God came to John, an insignificant man in the most insignificant of places: a desert. Why John? And why a desert? Think about it!
I am reminded of Herbert Butterfield's words, which have always humbled me:
Both in history and in life it is a phenomenon by no means rare to meet with comparatively unlettered people who seem to have struck profound spiritual depths ... while there are many highly educated people of whom one feels that they are performing clever antics with their minds to cover a gaping hollowness that lies within.3
So why John? First answer: Only God knows. Beyond that one simply has to say because John responded. The call demanded submission to God's ways, God's methods and God's criteria for success. And John was willing to accept those terms no matter what the cost to him in pain or loneliness.
Why a desert? Perhaps because in deserts people can hear and brood upon things not easily heard or thought about in busy cities, where people are usually hurried, surrounded by noise, and steeped in self-importance. Sometimes in cities the shrillness of the public life is so great that the whispering voice of God cannot be heard. And sometimes in cities, people are too proud to listen to God amid all of their steel and concrete skyscrapers, their colourful theatres, or their incredible temples.
God drew John into the desert where He could speak to him. And when He got him there He began to stamp impressions onto John's inner world that gave the son of Zacharias a totally different perspective on his times. There in the desert he gained a new view of religion, of right and wrong, of God's purposes for history. And there he developed a special sensitivity and courage that would prepare him for his most extraordinary task: introducing his generation to the Christ. His private world was under construction - in the desert.
The word of God came to John in the desert. Such a strange place for God to speak. What can one learn in deserts? I am inclined to forsake deserts, to detour around them whenever possible. To me, deserts mean pain, isolation, and suffering. And no one cares for any of that. Deserts are hard places in which to live, physically or spiritually. But the fact is unavoidable: The greatest lessons are potentially learned in deserts if one, in the midst of struggle, listens for God's call.
In deserts, one learns about dryness, because deserts are dry. John would learn not only to cope with the dryness of the desert, but it doubtless taught him to appreciate the aridity of the spirits of the people to whom he'd speak at the Jordan.
In the desert a person learns dependence upon God. Life in the wilderness, as the Hebrews had found out centuries before, cannot be sustained without the benevolence of a merciful God. Only a person who has suffered desert-like hardship knows what it is like to totally cast himself upon God because there is nothing else left.
There is a slightly brighter side to deserts, however. Wilderness provides a place where one is free to think, to plan, to prepare. And then at an appointed time, like John, he comes charging out of the dry land with a message, something to say that will expose hypocrisy and superficiality. Issues are addressed that cut through to the bottomless depths of the human spirit. And an age of people is introduced to the Christ of God.
In the desert a person can be called. As John stood up first to his critics and then to the furiously defensive Herod, whose immoral life the prophet rebuked, he began to reveal that special quality of calledness. You can see it in his serenity in the midst of his prophetic performance. Something special within was operating, providing him with an independent base of judgement and wisdom. Few could withstand his message.
What was the makeup of that private world that was formed in the desert? Frankly, the biblical writers do not give us much of an answer. We are simply treated to the evidence of an ordered inner life. John is a prototype of the product we are looking for. In a public world where all seems chaotic and disordered, he moves with assurance and certitude.
Have Saul, John, and my friend the "successful bum" taught us anything? I think their message is plain. Look inside, they say. What makes you tick? Why are you doing all of that? What do you hope to gain as a result? And what would be your reaction if it were all taken away?
I look inside my private world and discover that almost every day I have to wrestle with whether I will be a Saul or a john. I have lived in a competitive world where achievement is almost everything. Now as I journey through my sixties, the challenge has morphed a bit: how to back out of organizational leadership and influence, gracefully turn it over to another generation, and embrace a quieter (and far more sane, actually) role: being a mentor, a cheerleader, an encourager to the young.
This may sound sort of noble, but it's not always that simple. I always enjoyed being in charge, more or less. I could still find it easy to join Saul, to be driven to hold on, to protect, to dominate. And I might even find myself doing those sorts of things while telling myself that I was doing God's work. But as John did, I have concluded that it's time to practice the principle of release and go on to other things. As Henri Nouwen eloquently put it: to embrace littleness, hiddenness, and powerlessness. Frankly, I'd rather hug other things, but this is the way of the cross, the way of the called person.
Extracted from Gordon Macdonald’s Ordering Your Private World.
An Ancient Message, Through Postmodern Means , to A Post Modern Mind by Ravi Zacharias
In April 1981 Daniel Yankelovich, a social analyst, wrote a very insightful article in Psychology Today. His principal thrust was to analyze how Americans were thinking about life and where we were headed should such ideas go uncriticized. It was a warning to the West. In his opening remarks, he defined the role and the imperative of culture. Quoting sociologist Daniel Bell, he said, "Culture is the effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the existentialist situations that confront all human beings in the passage of their lives" (Yankelovich 1981, 36).
To define culture even in these terms may well be outdated now. Some months ago I was lecturing at one of the universities in the country when a student stormed up to the microphone and bellowed, "Who told you culture is a search for coherence? Where do you get that idea from? This idea of coherence is a Western idea." I replied by reminding her that all I had done in that instance was to present a sociologist's definition that culture sought coherence. "Ah! Words! Just words!" she shouted back.
"Let me ask you this then," I pleaded. "Do you want my answer to be coherent?" Some laughter rippled through the auditorium. She herself was stymied for a few moments. "But that's language, isn't it?" she retorted.
I asked her if language has anything to do with reality "Must words not point to a referent? If you are seeking an answer that must be coherent, but culture itself does not have to be, from whence do you get this disjunction?" One could sense the turmoil within her. Indeed, later on I was told that this individual was a rather outspoken person whose lifestyle was radically aberrant from the normal. Her struggle for coherence was rooted in her very physiological dissonance.
This student may well be the quintessential postmodernist. Our bodies and proclivities are defining our reason for being. That is how intense I believe this struggle is becoming. Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault-both brilliant yet tragic figures-can be seen as the definitive bookends of the twentieth century. Foucault, of course, was a leading French intellectual who, owing to a very promiscuous life, died of AIDS at the age of fifty-eight. He was a lover of the writings of Nietzsche, who, ironically, had died at age fifty-four in the wake of his pitiful bout with venereal disease and insanity
So even as we look for our cultural moorings and try to understand the radical shifts that have disrupted the shared meanings of the past, attempting a coherent answer becomes a prohibitive challenge.
Walter Truett Anderson humorously gives us an insight into this in his book Reality Isn't What It Used to Be. He reflects on our predicament by presenting an analogy from baseball. A premodern baseball umpire would have said something like this: "There's balls, and there's strikes and I call 'em as they are." The modernist would have said, "There's balls and there's strikes, and I call 'em as I see 'em." And the postmodernist umpire would say, "They ain't nothing until I call 'em" (quoted in Middleton and Walsh 1995, 132-33). In brief, all reality is subject dependent. The postmodernist frames reality by naming aspects at his or her whim.
You and I have in some ways been so influenced by this culture that we too cannot get ourselves completely outside of it. We are locked into this postmodern mindset, or at least some elements of it. Perhaps the most radically affected of all are our children. If you talk to your teenager after a movie that your son or daughter wanted you to see, you suddenly hear comments such as, "I'm sorry, Dad, but I hadn't noticed all the bad language until you were sitting next to me." It is almost as if they live in that world, and they don't even notice it anymore until somehow, someone with a counter perspective is sitting next to them. And then they mutter, "Oh-oh. I've blown this one." The disorientation is thus double-edged, both external and internal. Reality is redefined, and our own thinking is unwittingly reshaped.
THE CENTURY OF CHANGE
How did we get where we are today? I perceive that five major shifts in this century have brought us to where we are. No doubt there are others.
The first major shift was the popularization of the death of God movement, the bequest of Nietzsche. Remember how poignantly he talked about the madman running with a lantern, looking for God and unable to find him? That parable stabbed at the heart of reality, offering a different way of looking at things. Then Nietzsche says, "Indeed, this has been such an enormous shift, even as the philosopher's blade has dug into the heart of theism." He warns his readers of the disorientation that would ensue: "Who gave us a sponge to wipe away the horizon? What sacred games will we need to invent? Is there any up or down? Must not lanterns have to be lit in the morning hours? Are we not straying through an infinite nothing? Can we not feel the breath of empty space?" He writes of this radical shift that has come about-there is no up; there is no down. New lights have to illuminate our path. New sacred games need to be invented. Finally, he concludes that the shock is too staggering to immediately gain a footing. "Maybe my time has not yet come," he says. "It takes time for ideas to completely take hold in the mindset of a culture" (Nietzsche 1954, 125).
Nearly one hundred years later, his time has come. There is a popularization of the death of God. The idea of God's nonexistence now either explicitly or implicitly permeates almost every major discipline in secular universities. In fact, a parent recently told me of his daughter's initial orientation at a prestigious university not far from here. In their video presentation, the closing testimonial to the university's intellectual strength was given by a young graduate. Borrowing from Richard Dawkins, she looked into the lens of the camera and said, "One of the best things this university has done for me is that it allowed me to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist." Imagine promoting a very sophisticated university with a testimonial of atheism to prospective students.
The second major shift is the disorienting blow of religious pluralism, principally within the context of Western culture. In 1893 at the Chicago Conference on World Religions, one of India's renowned philosophers, Swami Vivekenanda (who incidentally was not one of the program speakers), got up from his chair and went up to the podium. He said this:
We who come from the East have sat here on the platform day after day and have been told in a patronizing way that we ought to accept Christianity because Christian nations are the most prosperous. We look about us and see England, the most prosperous Christian nation in the world, with her foot on the neck of 250 million Asiatics. We look back into history, and we see that the prosperity began with the invasion of Mexico. Christianity wins its prosperity by cutting the throats of its fellow men. At such a price, the Hindu will not have prosperity. I have sat here today, and I've heard the intolerance. Blood and sword are not for the Hindu whose religion is based on the laws of love. 1
I am not questioning whether he was right or wrong. His facts clearly were tendentious and at least equally offensive to those he was charging with discourtesy. But beyond the polemics, this is the reigning perspective in the way the Middle Easterner and the Far Easterner think about Christianity. I have spoken in some of the toughest settings in the Middle East. In two rare opportunities, I had the privilege of addressing audiences in Damascus, Syria. Half of the challenge is removing the prejudice of Christianity's baggage across the centuries. But as a result of the infusion of those worldviews into North American, the same prejudices have taken hold in the West. You soon begin to realize how disorienting this has been to Western culture, which has borrowed from Christianity's capital but does not know how much it has borrowed. Now, in numerous academic settings, the most vitriolic attacks upon religion are leveled almost exclusively against the Christian faith.
The third shift is the power to inform through the visual and the blurring of reality and imagination. The visual has changed the way people arrive at truth. Is it not interesting that every previous movie production of the sinking of the Titanic sent the audience away feeling sorry for what had happened and very shaken up by the tragedy but that in this latest production, the plastic heroes have surfaced to the top from the sinking ship? The romance of the arts through the eye gate has sunk reality and glamorized the artificial personalities of stage heroes. In fact, now the Titanic is to be rebuilt and will set sail in 2002, ninety years to the day from the original voyage. Some will pay hundreds of thousands for the best suites, even as this is now branded "The Ultimately Unsinkable." Reality has crossed swords with imagination and lost. William Blake warned of the peril of the eye: "This life's dim window of the soul / Distorts the heavens from pole to pole / And goads you to believe a lie / When you see with and not through the eye.",
We are intended by God to see through the eye, but with the conscience. Now we see with the eye, devoid of a conscience. The English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge tells of the time he was in Biafra and some prisoners were about to be executed. The guards lined up the prisoners, and the officer shouted the countdown: "Ready, aim-" Just then a photographer for one of the major networks shouted, "Cut! My battery is dead!" The execution was momentarily suspended until he could get a fresh battery pack. Then the countdown resumed: "Ready, aim, fire!"-bang, bang-and the prisoners lay dead. Muggeridge wondered what some future generation would say of the barbarism and where it lay. Would they blame the viewers? Would they castigate the cameraman? He said, "I strongly suspect somebody may plump for the cameras" (1977, 64). Muggeridge may have a point. The medium does become the message, and this blurring between the real and the imagined is really locked into the medium itself.
The fourth shift is the lost center of cultural molding. There is a vacuum at the heart of our culture. Saul Bellow argued in his 1976 Nobel Laureate lecture:
The intelligent public is waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy and social theory and what it cannot hear from pure science. A broader, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. If writers do not come into the center, it will not be because the center is pre-empted; it is not. (Quoted in Smith 1992, 2)
There is no center to hold things together. Or to put it differently, there is no metanarrative to life, no overarching story by which all the particulars can be interpreted. But while no story is dominating our culture, the means to knowing have taken over as the ends of knowledge. In Beyond the Postmodern Mind, Huston Smith makes this comment: "If modern physics showed us a world at odds with our senses, postmodern physics is showing us one that is at odds with our imagination. We have made peace with the first of these oddities, but the problem of the new physics cannot be resolved by refinements in the scale" (1992, 7). How do you measure the imagination? There is no scale.
If I were to identify a handful of fearsome realities, this would be near the top. The pursuit of knowledge without knowing who we are or why we exist, combined with a war on our imaginations by the entertainment industry, leaves us at the mercy of power with no morality.
On several occasions while I was driving and listening to music, every now and then a piece would come on that I found either unmusical or jarring. I would shut the radio off. But then one day I was taken to see a play called The Phantom of the Opera. Suddenly I realized that some of the music I had not quite enjoyed was from this play. I was amazed at the difference knowing the story made, whenever I heard the music subsequently. In fact, the music in some portions is utterly magnificent. The love songs, the discourses, even the arguments make sense when you know the story Life needs a story to understand the details. Life needs to hold together at the center if we are to reach to distant horizons. But our culture neither owns a story nor holds at the center.
The final significant change is the shifting of power to a younger world. I have heard it said that over sixty percent of this world's population is under age twenty four. If you talk to a Hollywood mogul today, he will tell you that in producing films, if one can win the following of an eighteen-year-old male, it will be a blockbuster hit. Teenage girls will go to see a movie that their boyfriends want them to see, but the reverse does not hold. The extraordinary economic power of this younger generation increasingly defines cultural priorities.
THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL IMPACT
What, then, have been the results of these shifts? I will underscore just five' of them.
The first is philosophy's move to the existential. The power of a Jean Paul Sartre or an Albert Camus was significant in the decade of the 1960s and 70s. Historian Paul Johnson points out the devastating impact of Sartre on the intellectuals of the Angka Loeu movement in Cambodia that destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands in that "Gentle Land" 3 Indeed, a tremendous power was unleashed as philosophers, through drama and literature, handcuffed the intellect of society's power brokers. Stories were introduced to tell us that "man is the measure of all things," but they never told us about the entailments of evil men and women who wrested power and developed the means to destroy their own people. Sartre's recantation on his own deathbed notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that philosophy's shift to the existential cut a wide swathe in our world.
The second result is the artist's move to the sensual. When God created humanity, two very clear sanctities were imparted. One was the sanctity of life itself; the other was the sanctity of sexuality. Artists are creative people. When they lose the vision of the grand Creator, the greatest artist of all, they will attack the very things that he branded sacred-life and sexuality. With such surrogate creators now in full expression, what do we see? The celebration of violence and eroticism. The desacralizing of the human body has mangled life, and our culture slides pitifully into indulgence of the erotic and the perverse. A repeated, painful refrain in numerous conversations is a mother who is troubled about finding erotica in her young teenage son's possession. The proliferation of erotic material-from books to magazines and now to the internet-has undermined this generation. Recently in England mothers have been outraged because teen magazines are peddling sexual topics, and they argue that this material is making their daughters "sex-mad." Foucault's death from AIDS moves one between compassion and confusion when we realize that it was the willful embodiment of a philosophy that drove him there.
The third result is religion's move to the mystical. Buddhism has become one of the most popular religions of our time because of the widespread interest in spirituality; feelings are constructed into techniques and aphorisms. Buddhism is a classic example of "how to be good without having God"-how to be ethical without having absolutes.
A fourth result is education's move to the skeptical: "You can't believe anything anymore." "You can't be sure of anything anymore." From fuzzy logic to relativism, the homeless mind has moved to the homeless idea. To argue for truth today is to stir an immediate debate, as if a heresy of devilish proportions has been invoked. The so-called death of God spelled the death of theology, but the morticians of the Absolute were not content to stab God-talk. Inevitably God's undertakers were marching to their own funeral, with all of knowledge being pronounced dead.
Here we see our fifth result-the individual's move to the transcendental. That is, he is his own divine being. The reader is sovereign over the author. As you read anyone else's story, you deconstruct it and reshape it to your own interpretation. Philosopher Richard Rorty says in his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: "[The Nietzschean self] would seek consolation, at the moment of death, not in having transcended the animal condition but in being that peculiar sort of dying animal who, by describing himself in his own terms, had created himself" (quoted in Lundin 1995, 30). Here is self-deification in the making.
A DIVIDED WORLD
How, then, have East and West responded to these phenomena? If I were to draw a continuum, I would put the Western world on the left and the Eastern world on the right, based on the following generalizations. In the West, Christianity has become marginalized, and in some cases even ridiculed. In the East, Western religion is criticized and Eastern religion is protected. In the West, Christianity struggles with higher education and trends in academia. In the East, there is a resurgence of aggressive pride in ancient wisdom.
In the West, theology has been replaced by religion. In the East, religion has always been seen as a pursuit and thus continues. In fact, one of my colleagues who works with us in India says that India never moved from premodern to modern to postmodern. India just leap-frogged over modern, moving from the premodern to the postmodern. In the West, objective truth has been displaced, and there is nothing to replace it. In the East, displacement of objective truth was not felt because the cultural focus was elsewhere.
Some time ago I was addressing men and women from the bar association of a major city. I knew it would be a challenging audience because words and arguments are their daily fare. I began by recounting a television news item I had just witnessed. A major network had as their first item of news a survey asking people if words meant anything specific at all. Do words such as affair and adultery have particular public meanings, or could the person speaking fuse them into his or her own private meaning? In our salvation by-survey culture, the journalists asked people if anything meant anything anymore. Having concluded that there were significant variances in the way people used words, they next inquired if morality was purely a personal matter, or if there were indeed absolutes. Every person interviewed on the street answered the same way: "No! There is no objective morality; we have to define it in our own terms." First item: Were words subject to the user? Second item: Was morality a personal matter? Having settled on a confused answer that left the individual lord over reality, the newscaster went on to discuss a third item on the news-a warning to Saddam Hussein. If he did not stop playing his word games, we were going to start bombing Iraq. How ironic, I thought. We arrogate to ourselves moral authority and deny referents to words, except when we deal with others who play the same game. It was fascinating to see the expressions of those in the audience change and to see them recognize that communication is impossible if we do not grant univocal meaning to our words.
WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY
If this is our culture, where does that leave us? The challenge, as I see it, is this: How do we communicate the gospel to a generation that hears with its eyes and thinks with its feelings?
First, postmodernism may be one of the most opportune thought patterns presented to us for the propagation of the gospel because, in a sense, it has cleared the playing field. All disciplines have lost their "final authority." The hopes that modernity had underscored, the triumph of "Reason" and "Science" that many thought would bring in utopia, have failed in almost every respect. With all of our material gains, there is still a hunger for the spiritual. In virtually every part of the world, students linger long after every session to talk with me and plead for answers to their barren lives. All the education one gets does not diminish that search for inner coherence and a story line for one's own life. I can picture many of their faces as I read hundreds of letters that come, confessing to spent lives and bankrupt hearts.
As much as postmodernism has confused language and definitions, there is a yearning that the postmodernist's own cavalier attitude does not diminish. But our response becomes more difficult because of what I call the "Vietnamization" of the conflict. Classical techniques don't work anymore. There is no front line or single column to attack; the conflict is on many fronts. Maybe postmodernism is a legitimate child of the confusion of the 1960s. But I assure you that it has cleared the playing field.
In February of this year I spoke at the University of Sheffield. When I walked into the auditorium the opening night, the place was packed to capacity. At the end of the forum, one student came to me and said, "I came in here straddling two worlds. I cannot leave the same way Can you help me?" What a joy to observe a young Sheffield student give his life to the Lord. Indeed, there is still an openness. Postmodernism may not be as daunting as we may sometimes portray it.
Second, there is just enough of the modem worldview left so that reason still has a point of entry. But we have to use this knowledge wisely. We cannot give an overdose of argumentation.
Third, there is a tremendous search in the postmodern mind for community Only in the gospel message that culminates in worship is there coherence-which in turn brings coherence within the community of believers, where both individuality and community are affirmed. "Worship," says Archbishop William Temple, "is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by his holiness, nourishment of mind by his truth, purifying of imagination by His beauty, opening of the heart to His love, and submission of will to His purpose. All this, gathered up in adoration, is the greatest expression of which we are capable" (quoted in Watson 1976, 157). The worship of the living God is what ultimately binds the various inclinations of the heart and gives them focus. And a worshiping community binds the diversity of our culture, the diversity of our education, the diversity of our backgrounds, and brings us together into a corporate expression of worship. One of the most powerful appeals to the postmodern mind is a worshiping community.
Fourth, we must be observant of God's sovereign intervention in history. When Princess Diana died, the whole world was hearing with its eyes. A few days later when Mother Teresa passed away, the world was again listening with its eyes. One was a woman who despite having everything lived with rejection in her innermost being. The other, having nothing, spent her life taking care of the rejected of this world. I think these are sovereign moments in history I remember being in the Czech republic a year ago and being told how when the power of Soviet ideology was broken, the churches suddenly became full. People came expectantly, but somehow, there was nothing there. That moment was squandered.
And last, we are living at a time when G. K. Chesterton's dictum has proven to be true. Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain, but meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure. We have exhausted ourselves in this indulgent culture.
I began by telling of Yankelovich's description of the titanic changes that are underway. He said in his article that the stakes in such changes are high. He conducted some case studies of numerous couples to see where we are headed and arrived at an astounding conclusion. This is what he said about one of those couples, whom he called Abby and Mark:
If you feel it is imperative to fill all your needs, and if these needs are contradictory or in conflict with those of others, or simply unfillable, then frustration inevitably follows. To Abby and to Mark as well self-fulfillment means having a career and marriage and children and sexual freedom and autonomy and being liberal and having money and choosing non-conformity and insisting on social justice and enjoying city life and country living and simplicity and graciousness and reading and good friends and on and on. The individual is not truly fulfilled by becoming ever more autonomous. Indeed, to move too far in this direction is to risk psychosis, the ultimate form of autonomy... The injunction that to find one's self, one must lose one's self, contains the truth any seeker of self-fulfillment needs to grasp. (1981, 36, 50)
What an opening to lead to the cross of Jesus Christ!
The most dramatic truth about the gospel is that it contradicts us in the way we experience ourselves as alive and compels us to redefine drastically what we mean by life. Jesus contradicts our routine in the way he contradicted the first disciples, even while he was heading toward the cross. They were the ones marked out for death; he, "the dead one," was really the living.
With all that the cultural terrain presents to us, the dictum that "to find one's self, one must lose one's self" contains a truth any seeker of self-fulfillment needs to grasp. This the church must keep in mind too. The windows of opportunity are momentous. He who has ears, let him hear what the Lord has provided for us.
References
Johnson, David L. 1985. A Reasoned Look at Asian Religions. Minneapolis: Bethany House.
Lundin, Roger. 1995. "The Pragmatics of Postmodernity." In Christian Apologetics in the Postmodern World. Edited by Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.
Middleton, J. Richard, and Brian Walsh. 1995. "Facing the Post-modern Scalpel: Can the Christian Faith Stand Deconstruction?" In Christian Apologetics in the Postmodern World. Edited by Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.
Muggeridge, Malcolm. 1977. Christ and the Media. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1954. "The Gay Science." In The Portable Nietzsche.
Edited by Walter Kaufman. New York: Viking.
Smith, Huston. 1992. Beyond the Postmodern Mind. Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books.
Watson, David. 1976. I Believe in Evangelism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
Yankelovich, Daniel. 1981. "New Rules in American Life: Searching for Self fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down." Psychology Today 15 (4): 35-91.
Extracted from D.A.'s Carson (General Editor)'s Telling the Truth
To define culture even in these terms may well be outdated now. Some months ago I was lecturing at one of the universities in the country when a student stormed up to the microphone and bellowed, "Who told you culture is a search for coherence? Where do you get that idea from? This idea of coherence is a Western idea." I replied by reminding her that all I had done in that instance was to present a sociologist's definition that culture sought coherence. "Ah! Words! Just words!" she shouted back.
"Let me ask you this then," I pleaded. "Do you want my answer to be coherent?" Some laughter rippled through the auditorium. She herself was stymied for a few moments. "But that's language, isn't it?" she retorted.
I asked her if language has anything to do with reality "Must words not point to a referent? If you are seeking an answer that must be coherent, but culture itself does not have to be, from whence do you get this disjunction?" One could sense the turmoil within her. Indeed, later on I was told that this individual was a rather outspoken person whose lifestyle was radically aberrant from the normal. Her struggle for coherence was rooted in her very physiological dissonance.
This student may well be the quintessential postmodernist. Our bodies and proclivities are defining our reason for being. That is how intense I believe this struggle is becoming. Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault-both brilliant yet tragic figures-can be seen as the definitive bookends of the twentieth century. Foucault, of course, was a leading French intellectual who, owing to a very promiscuous life, died of AIDS at the age of fifty-eight. He was a lover of the writings of Nietzsche, who, ironically, had died at age fifty-four in the wake of his pitiful bout with venereal disease and insanity
So even as we look for our cultural moorings and try to understand the radical shifts that have disrupted the shared meanings of the past, attempting a coherent answer becomes a prohibitive challenge.
Walter Truett Anderson humorously gives us an insight into this in his book Reality Isn't What It Used to Be. He reflects on our predicament by presenting an analogy from baseball. A premodern baseball umpire would have said something like this: "There's balls, and there's strikes and I call 'em as they are." The modernist would have said, "There's balls and there's strikes, and I call 'em as I see 'em." And the postmodernist umpire would say, "They ain't nothing until I call 'em" (quoted in Middleton and Walsh 1995, 132-33). In brief, all reality is subject dependent. The postmodernist frames reality by naming aspects at his or her whim.
You and I have in some ways been so influenced by this culture that we too cannot get ourselves completely outside of it. We are locked into this postmodern mindset, or at least some elements of it. Perhaps the most radically affected of all are our children. If you talk to your teenager after a movie that your son or daughter wanted you to see, you suddenly hear comments such as, "I'm sorry, Dad, but I hadn't noticed all the bad language until you were sitting next to me." It is almost as if they live in that world, and they don't even notice it anymore until somehow, someone with a counter perspective is sitting next to them. And then they mutter, "Oh-oh. I've blown this one." The disorientation is thus double-edged, both external and internal. Reality is redefined, and our own thinking is unwittingly reshaped.
THE CENTURY OF CHANGE
How did we get where we are today? I perceive that five major shifts in this century have brought us to where we are. No doubt there are others.
The first major shift was the popularization of the death of God movement, the bequest of Nietzsche. Remember how poignantly he talked about the madman running with a lantern, looking for God and unable to find him? That parable stabbed at the heart of reality, offering a different way of looking at things. Then Nietzsche says, "Indeed, this has been such an enormous shift, even as the philosopher's blade has dug into the heart of theism." He warns his readers of the disorientation that would ensue: "Who gave us a sponge to wipe away the horizon? What sacred games will we need to invent? Is there any up or down? Must not lanterns have to be lit in the morning hours? Are we not straying through an infinite nothing? Can we not feel the breath of empty space?" He writes of this radical shift that has come about-there is no up; there is no down. New lights have to illuminate our path. New sacred games need to be invented. Finally, he concludes that the shock is too staggering to immediately gain a footing. "Maybe my time has not yet come," he says. "It takes time for ideas to completely take hold in the mindset of a culture" (Nietzsche 1954, 125).
Nearly one hundred years later, his time has come. There is a popularization of the death of God. The idea of God's nonexistence now either explicitly or implicitly permeates almost every major discipline in secular universities. In fact, a parent recently told me of his daughter's initial orientation at a prestigious university not far from here. In their video presentation, the closing testimonial to the university's intellectual strength was given by a young graduate. Borrowing from Richard Dawkins, she looked into the lens of the camera and said, "One of the best things this university has done for me is that it allowed me to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist." Imagine promoting a very sophisticated university with a testimonial of atheism to prospective students.
The second major shift is the disorienting blow of religious pluralism, principally within the context of Western culture. In 1893 at the Chicago Conference on World Religions, one of India's renowned philosophers, Swami Vivekenanda (who incidentally was not one of the program speakers), got up from his chair and went up to the podium. He said this:
We who come from the East have sat here on the platform day after day and have been told in a patronizing way that we ought to accept Christianity because Christian nations are the most prosperous. We look about us and see England, the most prosperous Christian nation in the world, with her foot on the neck of 250 million Asiatics. We look back into history, and we see that the prosperity began with the invasion of Mexico. Christianity wins its prosperity by cutting the throats of its fellow men. At such a price, the Hindu will not have prosperity. I have sat here today, and I've heard the intolerance. Blood and sword are not for the Hindu whose religion is based on the laws of love. 1
I am not questioning whether he was right or wrong. His facts clearly were tendentious and at least equally offensive to those he was charging with discourtesy. But beyond the polemics, this is the reigning perspective in the way the Middle Easterner and the Far Easterner think about Christianity. I have spoken in some of the toughest settings in the Middle East. In two rare opportunities, I had the privilege of addressing audiences in Damascus, Syria. Half of the challenge is removing the prejudice of Christianity's baggage across the centuries. But as a result of the infusion of those worldviews into North American, the same prejudices have taken hold in the West. You soon begin to realize how disorienting this has been to Western culture, which has borrowed from Christianity's capital but does not know how much it has borrowed. Now, in numerous academic settings, the most vitriolic attacks upon religion are leveled almost exclusively against the Christian faith.
The third shift is the power to inform through the visual and the blurring of reality and imagination. The visual has changed the way people arrive at truth. Is it not interesting that every previous movie production of the sinking of the Titanic sent the audience away feeling sorry for what had happened and very shaken up by the tragedy but that in this latest production, the plastic heroes have surfaced to the top from the sinking ship? The romance of the arts through the eye gate has sunk reality and glamorized the artificial personalities of stage heroes. In fact, now the Titanic is to be rebuilt and will set sail in 2002, ninety years to the day from the original voyage. Some will pay hundreds of thousands for the best suites, even as this is now branded "The Ultimately Unsinkable." Reality has crossed swords with imagination and lost. William Blake warned of the peril of the eye: "This life's dim window of the soul / Distorts the heavens from pole to pole / And goads you to believe a lie / When you see with and not through the eye.",
We are intended by God to see through the eye, but with the conscience. Now we see with the eye, devoid of a conscience. The English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge tells of the time he was in Biafra and some prisoners were about to be executed. The guards lined up the prisoners, and the officer shouted the countdown: "Ready, aim-" Just then a photographer for one of the major networks shouted, "Cut! My battery is dead!" The execution was momentarily suspended until he could get a fresh battery pack. Then the countdown resumed: "Ready, aim, fire!"-bang, bang-and the prisoners lay dead. Muggeridge wondered what some future generation would say of the barbarism and where it lay. Would they blame the viewers? Would they castigate the cameraman? He said, "I strongly suspect somebody may plump for the cameras" (1977, 64). Muggeridge may have a point. The medium does become the message, and this blurring between the real and the imagined is really locked into the medium itself.
The fourth shift is the lost center of cultural molding. There is a vacuum at the heart of our culture. Saul Bellow argued in his 1976 Nobel Laureate lecture:
The intelligent public is waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy and social theory and what it cannot hear from pure science. A broader, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. If writers do not come into the center, it will not be because the center is pre-empted; it is not. (Quoted in Smith 1992, 2)
There is no center to hold things together. Or to put it differently, there is no metanarrative to life, no overarching story by which all the particulars can be interpreted. But while no story is dominating our culture, the means to knowing have taken over as the ends of knowledge. In Beyond the Postmodern Mind, Huston Smith makes this comment: "If modern physics showed us a world at odds with our senses, postmodern physics is showing us one that is at odds with our imagination. We have made peace with the first of these oddities, but the problem of the new physics cannot be resolved by refinements in the scale" (1992, 7). How do you measure the imagination? There is no scale.
If I were to identify a handful of fearsome realities, this would be near the top. The pursuit of knowledge without knowing who we are or why we exist, combined with a war on our imaginations by the entertainment industry, leaves us at the mercy of power with no morality.
On several occasions while I was driving and listening to music, every now and then a piece would come on that I found either unmusical or jarring. I would shut the radio off. But then one day I was taken to see a play called The Phantom of the Opera. Suddenly I realized that some of the music I had not quite enjoyed was from this play. I was amazed at the difference knowing the story made, whenever I heard the music subsequently. In fact, the music in some portions is utterly magnificent. The love songs, the discourses, even the arguments make sense when you know the story Life needs a story to understand the details. Life needs to hold together at the center if we are to reach to distant horizons. But our culture neither owns a story nor holds at the center.
The final significant change is the shifting of power to a younger world. I have heard it said that over sixty percent of this world's population is under age twenty four. If you talk to a Hollywood mogul today, he will tell you that in producing films, if one can win the following of an eighteen-year-old male, it will be a blockbuster hit. Teenage girls will go to see a movie that their boyfriends want them to see, but the reverse does not hold. The extraordinary economic power of this younger generation increasingly defines cultural priorities.
THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL IMPACT
What, then, have been the results of these shifts? I will underscore just five' of them.
The first is philosophy's move to the existential. The power of a Jean Paul Sartre or an Albert Camus was significant in the decade of the 1960s and 70s. Historian Paul Johnson points out the devastating impact of Sartre on the intellectuals of the Angka Loeu movement in Cambodia that destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands in that "Gentle Land" 3 Indeed, a tremendous power was unleashed as philosophers, through drama and literature, handcuffed the intellect of society's power brokers. Stories were introduced to tell us that "man is the measure of all things," but they never told us about the entailments of evil men and women who wrested power and developed the means to destroy their own people. Sartre's recantation on his own deathbed notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that philosophy's shift to the existential cut a wide swathe in our world.
The second result is the artist's move to the sensual. When God created humanity, two very clear sanctities were imparted. One was the sanctity of life itself; the other was the sanctity of sexuality. Artists are creative people. When they lose the vision of the grand Creator, the greatest artist of all, they will attack the very things that he branded sacred-life and sexuality. With such surrogate creators now in full expression, what do we see? The celebration of violence and eroticism. The desacralizing of the human body has mangled life, and our culture slides pitifully into indulgence of the erotic and the perverse. A repeated, painful refrain in numerous conversations is a mother who is troubled about finding erotica in her young teenage son's possession. The proliferation of erotic material-from books to magazines and now to the internet-has undermined this generation. Recently in England mothers have been outraged because teen magazines are peddling sexual topics, and they argue that this material is making their daughters "sex-mad." Foucault's death from AIDS moves one between compassion and confusion when we realize that it was the willful embodiment of a philosophy that drove him there.
The third result is religion's move to the mystical. Buddhism has become one of the most popular religions of our time because of the widespread interest in spirituality; feelings are constructed into techniques and aphorisms. Buddhism is a classic example of "how to be good without having God"-how to be ethical without having absolutes.
A fourth result is education's move to the skeptical: "You can't believe anything anymore." "You can't be sure of anything anymore." From fuzzy logic to relativism, the homeless mind has moved to the homeless idea. To argue for truth today is to stir an immediate debate, as if a heresy of devilish proportions has been invoked. The so-called death of God spelled the death of theology, but the morticians of the Absolute were not content to stab God-talk. Inevitably God's undertakers were marching to their own funeral, with all of knowledge being pronounced dead.
Here we see our fifth result-the individual's move to the transcendental. That is, he is his own divine being. The reader is sovereign over the author. As you read anyone else's story, you deconstruct it and reshape it to your own interpretation. Philosopher Richard Rorty says in his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: "[The Nietzschean self] would seek consolation, at the moment of death, not in having transcended the animal condition but in being that peculiar sort of dying animal who, by describing himself in his own terms, had created himself" (quoted in Lundin 1995, 30). Here is self-deification in the making.
A DIVIDED WORLD
How, then, have East and West responded to these phenomena? If I were to draw a continuum, I would put the Western world on the left and the Eastern world on the right, based on the following generalizations. In the West, Christianity has become marginalized, and in some cases even ridiculed. In the East, Western religion is criticized and Eastern religion is protected. In the West, Christianity struggles with higher education and trends in academia. In the East, there is a resurgence of aggressive pride in ancient wisdom.
In the West, theology has been replaced by religion. In the East, religion has always been seen as a pursuit and thus continues. In fact, one of my colleagues who works with us in India says that India never moved from premodern to modern to postmodern. India just leap-frogged over modern, moving from the premodern to the postmodern. In the West, objective truth has been displaced, and there is nothing to replace it. In the East, displacement of objective truth was not felt because the cultural focus was elsewhere.
Some time ago I was addressing men and women from the bar association of a major city. I knew it would be a challenging audience because words and arguments are their daily fare. I began by recounting a television news item I had just witnessed. A major network had as their first item of news a survey asking people if words meant anything specific at all. Do words such as affair and adultery have particular public meanings, or could the person speaking fuse them into his or her own private meaning? In our salvation by-survey culture, the journalists asked people if anything meant anything anymore. Having concluded that there were significant variances in the way people used words, they next inquired if morality was purely a personal matter, or if there were indeed absolutes. Every person interviewed on the street answered the same way: "No! There is no objective morality; we have to define it in our own terms." First item: Were words subject to the user? Second item: Was morality a personal matter? Having settled on a confused answer that left the individual lord over reality, the newscaster went on to discuss a third item on the news-a warning to Saddam Hussein. If he did not stop playing his word games, we were going to start bombing Iraq. How ironic, I thought. We arrogate to ourselves moral authority and deny referents to words, except when we deal with others who play the same game. It was fascinating to see the expressions of those in the audience change and to see them recognize that communication is impossible if we do not grant univocal meaning to our words.
WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY
If this is our culture, where does that leave us? The challenge, as I see it, is this: How do we communicate the gospel to a generation that hears with its eyes and thinks with its feelings?
First, postmodernism may be one of the most opportune thought patterns presented to us for the propagation of the gospel because, in a sense, it has cleared the playing field. All disciplines have lost their "final authority." The hopes that modernity had underscored, the triumph of "Reason" and "Science" that many thought would bring in utopia, have failed in almost every respect. With all of our material gains, there is still a hunger for the spiritual. In virtually every part of the world, students linger long after every session to talk with me and plead for answers to their barren lives. All the education one gets does not diminish that search for inner coherence and a story line for one's own life. I can picture many of their faces as I read hundreds of letters that come, confessing to spent lives and bankrupt hearts.
As much as postmodernism has confused language and definitions, there is a yearning that the postmodernist's own cavalier attitude does not diminish. But our response becomes more difficult because of what I call the "Vietnamization" of the conflict. Classical techniques don't work anymore. There is no front line or single column to attack; the conflict is on many fronts. Maybe postmodernism is a legitimate child of the confusion of the 1960s. But I assure you that it has cleared the playing field.
In February of this year I spoke at the University of Sheffield. When I walked into the auditorium the opening night, the place was packed to capacity. At the end of the forum, one student came to me and said, "I came in here straddling two worlds. I cannot leave the same way Can you help me?" What a joy to observe a young Sheffield student give his life to the Lord. Indeed, there is still an openness. Postmodernism may not be as daunting as we may sometimes portray it.
Second, there is just enough of the modem worldview left so that reason still has a point of entry. But we have to use this knowledge wisely. We cannot give an overdose of argumentation.
Third, there is a tremendous search in the postmodern mind for community Only in the gospel message that culminates in worship is there coherence-which in turn brings coherence within the community of believers, where both individuality and community are affirmed. "Worship," says Archbishop William Temple, "is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by his holiness, nourishment of mind by his truth, purifying of imagination by His beauty, opening of the heart to His love, and submission of will to His purpose. All this, gathered up in adoration, is the greatest expression of which we are capable" (quoted in Watson 1976, 157). The worship of the living God is what ultimately binds the various inclinations of the heart and gives them focus. And a worshiping community binds the diversity of our culture, the diversity of our education, the diversity of our backgrounds, and brings us together into a corporate expression of worship. One of the most powerful appeals to the postmodern mind is a worshiping community.
Fourth, we must be observant of God's sovereign intervention in history. When Princess Diana died, the whole world was hearing with its eyes. A few days later when Mother Teresa passed away, the world was again listening with its eyes. One was a woman who despite having everything lived with rejection in her innermost being. The other, having nothing, spent her life taking care of the rejected of this world. I think these are sovereign moments in history I remember being in the Czech republic a year ago and being told how when the power of Soviet ideology was broken, the churches suddenly became full. People came expectantly, but somehow, there was nothing there. That moment was squandered.
And last, we are living at a time when G. K. Chesterton's dictum has proven to be true. Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain, but meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure. We have exhausted ourselves in this indulgent culture.
I began by telling of Yankelovich's description of the titanic changes that are underway. He said in his article that the stakes in such changes are high. He conducted some case studies of numerous couples to see where we are headed and arrived at an astounding conclusion. This is what he said about one of those couples, whom he called Abby and Mark:
If you feel it is imperative to fill all your needs, and if these needs are contradictory or in conflict with those of others, or simply unfillable, then frustration inevitably follows. To Abby and to Mark as well self-fulfillment means having a career and marriage and children and sexual freedom and autonomy and being liberal and having money and choosing non-conformity and insisting on social justice and enjoying city life and country living and simplicity and graciousness and reading and good friends and on and on. The individual is not truly fulfilled by becoming ever more autonomous. Indeed, to move too far in this direction is to risk psychosis, the ultimate form of autonomy... The injunction that to find one's self, one must lose one's self, contains the truth any seeker of self-fulfillment needs to grasp. (1981, 36, 50)
What an opening to lead to the cross of Jesus Christ!
The most dramatic truth about the gospel is that it contradicts us in the way we experience ourselves as alive and compels us to redefine drastically what we mean by life. Jesus contradicts our routine in the way he contradicted the first disciples, even while he was heading toward the cross. They were the ones marked out for death; he, "the dead one," was really the living.
With all that the cultural terrain presents to us, the dictum that "to find one's self, one must lose one's self" contains a truth any seeker of self-fulfillment needs to grasp. This the church must keep in mind too. The windows of opportunity are momentous. He who has ears, let him hear what the Lord has provided for us.
References
Johnson, David L. 1985. A Reasoned Look at Asian Religions. Minneapolis: Bethany House.
Lundin, Roger. 1995. "The Pragmatics of Postmodernity." In Christian Apologetics in the Postmodern World. Edited by Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.
Middleton, J. Richard, and Brian Walsh. 1995. "Facing the Post-modern Scalpel: Can the Christian Faith Stand Deconstruction?" In Christian Apologetics in the Postmodern World. Edited by Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.
Muggeridge, Malcolm. 1977. Christ and the Media. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1954. "The Gay Science." In The Portable Nietzsche.
Edited by Walter Kaufman. New York: Viking.
Smith, Huston. 1992. Beyond the Postmodern Mind. Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books.
Watson, David. 1976. I Believe in Evangelism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
Yankelovich, Daniel. 1981. "New Rules in American Life: Searching for Self fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down." Psychology Today 15 (4): 35-91.
Extracted from D.A.'s Carson (General Editor)'s Telling the Truth
The Touch of Truth by Ravi Zacharias
My challenge in this second address is to underscore the points of contact we still have in this desensitized culture in which we live. I have selected as my text the twenty-fourth chapter of the book of Acts. Paul is on his way to Rome. But here he stands before Felix to make his defense. Tertullus the lawyer has finished with his prosecutorial speech and thrown down the gauntlet. Paul makes his response and assures Felix that he has not violated either the law of the land or the Law of God. He is sure that the real reason for his accuser's opposition is that he has become a follower of the resurrected Jesus Christ. Felix then makes his pronouncement on what he has heard:
Many of you may have read the following poem in one commentary or another, or seen it in some devotional book. Unfortunately there is uncertainty as to who authored these lines. That aside, it may be rightly inferred that they were penned either by someone in Christian ministry or by someone very close to someone in ministry:
The longer I have been in ministry, the more I have reflected on the extraordinary ways in which God molds and shapes his chosen instruments. An old adage says: "He who shapes the back for the burden, also shapes the burden for the back." The Scriptures are filled with narratives of God's shaping process. He raised Joseph in a desert in order to use him in a palace. He raised Moses in a palace in order to use him in a desert. In that glorious passage in Luke's third chapter we read: "In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene-during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the desert." Did you hear that? There were seven larger-than-life characters punctuating the historical landscape, yet the word of the Lord came to a rather strange man wearing strange clothes and eating strange food, appointing him to stand before the Herods of his time.
Billy Graham was once asked by a press reporter, "How is it that there are so many more educated and more capable preachers in this world but God has chosen you to become the evangelist to the world?" Out of the overflow of his own humility, Billy Graham said, "When I get to heaven that is going to be my first question." Every one of us who has been called into the privileged role of vocational Christian ministry will have the same question for God. You know the glorious sensation every time God uses you. You walk away wondering how this is even possible-that he has taken such a weak, stumbling vessel and somehow brought something good through you. Paul, I believe, saw himself that way. He describes himself in his conversion as one abnormally born, almost prefiguring what C. S. Lewis said of his own conversion as one dragged into the kingdom kicking and screaming, "the most ... reluctant convert in all of England" (1955, 228-29). The apostle Paul, as one commentator paraphrases him, describes it in more visceral terms: "I was torn, wrenched away from my mother's womb, the most feisty convert in all of Palestine." And yet God raised him up.
Paul's biographical background helps put in perspective the shaping process begun long before this moment in front of Felix. He was born a Hebrew He was a citizen of Rome. He lived in a Greek city. At his commission, God said of him, "This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name" (Acts 9:15-16). One might well ask what was in him that was so unique. From his pen flowed a third of the New Testament. Through his dogged determination and answer to God's call, the Gentile world was to hear the grand news of the gospel. Better still, what is it that God poured into him? And how do we understand the methods that he used from which we can borrow in our time as well?
New Testament scholar William Barclay suggests that when Jesus ascended into heaven, Christians were possibly outnumbered by about one to thirty thousand. Some scholars challenge the exact number, but none suggests that the disparity was anything less than humanly insurmountable. Not only were the numbers staggeringly disproportionate, but the cultural animosities ran deep and passionate.
While we live in this postmodern era characterized by such strident uprooting of shared meanings from the past, let us remind ourselves that it was not any easier in Paul's time. He faced an immense challenge too, particularly in Corinth. The temple of Aphrodite spilled out its prostitutes by the hundreds every night; indeed, Corinth was a byword for sensuality and debauchery Rome's erratic and erotic self-indulgence speaks volumes even in the fallen stones of Pompeii visible to this day. The arrogance of Greek learning punctuates landmarks in philosophy. Into this discord came Paul, and now he stands before Felix. I present this man as a model because he had both theological integrity and methodological genius. He did not put asunder what God had joined together. Here is the setting as described in the words of one commentator:
I cannot help but think of a similar moment when Mother Teresa stood before the leaders of our time and addressed the attendees at the Presidential Prayer Breakfast in Washington. This diminutive woman, just four feet and a few inches tall, stood in front of an audience of luminaries from around the world and fearlessly pleaded for the protection of babies in their mothers' wombs. She called for leaders to take pity on the weakest and to show compassion on the little ones. "How," she asked, "can we speak out against violence when we are the most brutal with the most defenseless?" Numerous media elite reported on that awkward moment for the president, the vice president, and their wives, as this meek and selfless person spoke with conviction. The "weak" of this world confounded the "strong." Such was the scene centuries ago when Paul stood before Felix.
The first thing he did as he discoursed before Felix was to broach the theme of righteousness. In short, he found some common ground as a point of reference. Os Guinness contends that there are at least four stages that we have to bear in mind for effective communication: identification, translation, persuasion, and justification. First, the communicator identifies with the listener. Some point of resonance must be struck with the listener. Then, one must make sure that the content of communication is within the idiom of the one to whom the communication is made. This is the step of translation. Next, the ideas being transmitted must have a persuasive element to them. Finally, there must be justification, answering the question of why the ideas presented are worthy of being accepted over against any variation or contradiction of them.
In that first step of identification, it is critical that we find a point of reference and common ground. After being on campuses now for a few years trying to communicate the beauty and the cogency of the gospel, I have noticed some trends. There was a time when the cosmological argument-arguing from causality and the First Cause to this present universe-was an extremely powerful argument. There is no doubt that the argument is still valid and even needed, but the receptivity to such an argument has been dulled over the years and pompously blunted by naturalistic scientists. From the misuse of David Hume's arguments to a Big Bang mysticism, skeptical cosmologists mock even its legitimate use. They themselves assume causality in all matters of effect, but when it comes to the universe's existence, they ignore causality and do not ask questions of the Big Bang that they would ask of any other bang-What caused it? In many academic settings, therefore, one comes to a dead end, arguing against a prejudice that refuses to change.
We move then to the teleological argument, the argument from purpose and design to Designer and Creator. But talking about the specified complexity and the intelligibility in this universe only brings the inevitable challenge as naturalists constantly blur the distinction between aesthetic design and intelligent design. Arguing for a Creator is John Polkinghorne from Cambridge University, in his book The Quantum World, and Michael Behe, who in his book Darwin's Black Box, shows us the irreducible complexity of the human cell, which biological evolution cannot explain. Behe's expertise in biochemistry prompts him to state unequivocally that biochemically, macroevolution is impossible. To that assertion, atheistic thinkers like Richard Dawkins respond with the charge of "intellectual laziness." Convinced of a "Blind Watchmaker," they argue that somehow, sometime, they will find out how design is actually just random that anything would look like design if you pulled it out from a myriad of possibilities. Not only do they argue against their opponents, but in effect they argue against their own assumptions in life. Nevertheless, they have worked hard to neutralize the design argument just as they did the cosmological argument.
Where then does one go to find common ground? I refer to the moral argument, which argues for God from morality. This issue captures the interest of most minds, and even the postmodernist struggles with it and finds himself hard-pressed to escape from its clutches. Naturalists are trying valiantly even as I speak to show how even our moral sense has evolved. New articles are being written on the biogenesis of ethics. But the point I want to make is that no matter where you go across the globe, when you get into the throes of the moral argument, people are listening. Whether you're in Bombay or Nottingham, whether you're in Harvard or Princeton, students listen carefully when this subject is addressed. In last month's issue of Atlantic Monthly, an ethicist attempted a full hit at our moral sense and said we can now completely explain ethics on the basis of biology. A feeble attempt to be sure, but it is a desperate move to take away the last argument that throbs within the human frame. They try hard to formulate in their minds a response to the question of how objective ethics can somehow exist without a transcendent reality They struggle with it, and that struggle is evident.
A few years ago I was speaking at the Center for Geopolitical Strategy in Moscow. It was a very difficult three-hour session. I sat with seven generals around me. My wife was with me, along with one of my colleagues, and around us were atheists systematically and intensely throwing their questions at me. When one walked into the building, one felt dwarfed because of its size-eight stories above ground, four stories below ground. But more than its size was its story of a nation. This is where the mind of the former Soviet Union was forged. Anybody who was a great name in the country had graduated from there.
We sat with faculty members as grim in countenance as imagination had conjured up through pictures. Their pointed questioning seemed relentless and unwavering. But then a break came. In an effort to disarm them from their official self-exaltation, I asked them why their young people were in such a hopeless state if their ideology was as effective as it was pretending to be. Why is it, I asked, that they were unable to harness the heart with respect for life after decades of indoctrination in egalitarianism? Then, as I shared my own conversion story from a bed of suicide, it was as if the scales began to fall from their eyes.
That night my wife and I had dinner with the chief historian. We sat in a very meager-looking restaurant having a meal together. I leaned over and said, -General, I have a question for you, sir. Have you ever read the story of Joseph Stalin? As you know, he was once a seminary student, and then abandoned his faith in God and decided to knock God out of his people entirely"
I then told him the following story: "Stalin was having dinner with a woman who was a visitor from overseas. In the course of their conversation, she asked him how long he expected his people to follow him while he tortured them so relentlessly Stalin did not answer her. He asked the waiter to bring a live chicken; he clutched the live chicken under his arm as he proceeded to defeather the bird. He completely denuded it and placed that bird on the floor. Then he picked up a piece of bread and moved away The chicken hobbled over to him and nestled between his trouser legs. He bent down with the bread in his hand, and the chicken started to peck away at that bread. Stalin looked at the questioner and said, ‘Madame, have you seen this? I inflicted such pain on this chicken. It'll follow me for food the rest of its life. People are like that chicken. You inflict pain on them, and they will follow you for the rest of their lives.' What do you think of that story, General?"' I paused and endured the silence.
He could not fight back the tears that flooded his eyes, and his lips quivered as he nodded his head. He knew what he had seen in his country. In these seven decades, the bequest of a philosophy that masqueraded as one for the common man had reduced life to that of refuse. Is it not intriguing, though, that even in an atheistic nation, the moral law still stabbed like a hatpin in the heart, which bleeds in silence. Even while one may want to fight it, there seems a paucity of words.
When Mother Teresa finished her talk in Washington, the entire audience of hundreds rose to their feet in a standing ovation. The president, the vice president, and their wives did not stand because the issue was very clearly a challenge to their views. And so they stayed seated on the platform as the audience rose to its feet. Philip Yancey, who interviewed the president after it was over and he was in the presidential limousine, made this comment: "Just before we bade good-bye to the President, I said, `President Clinton, what did you think of what Mother Teresa had to say today?"' President Clinton paused, and said, "It is very difficult to argue against a life so beautifully lived."
It is vitally important in the last moments of this century, when only vestiges remain of moral law, that somehow we reach into what remains to find common ground. Paul shows us how and why he held on to this as his first point of entry. Paul is obviously reasoning with an unrighteousness man about righteousness. He is talking to a Roman. He knows that some perspectives on morality were not the same. But think with me for a moment about how he probably presented the issue.
Paul was a Hebrew by birth, a citizen of Rome living in a Greek city. For the Hebrews, the ideal was symbolized by light: "The Lord is my light and my salvation." "This is the light that lights every man that comes into the world." "The people that sat in darkness have seen a great light." For the Hebrews, that was the epitome of every ideal. For the Greeks, the ideal was knowledge-episteme-from which we get epistemology, to know, to understand the truth. Their legacy is the academy. Philosophy, the love of wisdom, is rooted in Greek thought. For the Romans, the ideal was the pursuit of glory. Rome was the city of which it was said that it was not built in a day, that it was a city to which all roads converged-the glory of Rome. It was the city over which Augustine wept as the barbarians scaled its walls and ransacked it. From that destruction of what he had thought was an eternal city, he penned his immortal City of God. For the Hebrews-light; for the Greeks-knowledge; for the Romans-glory.
Here stands a man, a product of these three cultures. How does he engage all three? Writing to the church at Corinth, he says this: "For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,' made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ" (2 Cor. 4:6, italics added).
A face. A face bearing the focus of all that the best of human ideals could have pursued. The light of light, the source of all truth, and the supreme glory.
When I was growing up in India, we had a man working in our home. He came from a village, and city life with all of its offerings was quite foreign to him. One day my mother gave him some money to go and see a movie. He'd never seen a movie. She instructed him on how to purchase the ticket and that there would be an usher to help him find a seat. He got all dressed up, polished his shoes and off he went. He got there late, bought the ticket and entered through the front door. Everything was dark and all he could see were beams coming in through the back wall. He stood there for a few moments enthralled with the particles of light emerging through little openings in the wall. He thought this was wonderful, and indeed it kept him entertained for a few fleeting moments until he thought the sound was coming from the opposite side. So he decided to turn around, and suddenly he saw the screen filled with a face and a scene that matched the sound and told the story. He let out a shout of glee of Archimedean proportions. In fact, he caused such a disturbance that one of the ushers had to come and commandeer him to his seat.
That is, to me, a perfect illustration of human pursuits-thinking we have found it in our tiny little specks of information. But then all of our efforts, exploits, and yearnings are like beams of light, finding a consummate expression upon a face: the face of Jesus Christ. For Paul, righteousness was no longer an idea or an attainment, as much as it was an embodiment and an imputation that followed such a recognition. How much we need to learn from this message.
All around us we hear thundering forth the word morality. Yes, we must be a moral people. But morality is a fruit, not a tree. The tree is rooted in Christ's righteousness from whom the nourishment comes to produce the fruit of moral purity. I challenge you: when you are preaching righteousness, when you are calling a people to goodness, do not stop with morality alone, because a nation can be morally lost just as easily as immorally lost. What you have to point to ultimately is the centerpiece of righteousness, our Lord Jesus Christ. Righteousness or morality is still a point of reference, but the word is vacuous without Christ as the referent. Incidentally, that is why C. S. Lewis has been one of the most powerful apologists of this century. He well understood that the unshakable moral sense within every culture only made sense by invoking the "Lion of the Tribe of Judah."
Paul moves from a point of reference to a point relevance. He talks to Felix about self-control. Do you think Felix needed to hear about self-control? Living with a sixteen-year-old, whom he had procured through a sorcerer's incantations, he was hardly a man whose passions are well ordered. She was another man's wife when Felix orchestrated this steal. He himself had been married several times. With the power of a king, he still lived with the mind enslaved by sensuality and power. With honor and genius, Paul talked to him about self-control, a point of relevance for him.
The Holy Scriptures are filled with such points of relevance whenever God speaks to a nation or to individuals. A few days ago, along with my wife and some friends, I was seated on the hillside of ancient Laodicea in Turkey We opened the Bible and read from Revelation 3. Laodicea was known for three or four things. The city was a wealthy one, and its inhabitants bragged of their riches. The textile and garment industry flourished. They were known for an eye ointment that they had manufactured and sold to many parts of the world. It was a popular spot for visitors because of the nearby hot springs at Hierapolis. Known for their wealth, their textiles, their eye ointment, and their hot springs-what does the Word of God say to the Laodiceans through John's Revelation? He says, "You think you are rich, but actually you are very poor. Come and buy gold off me so I can clothe you in white linen, and anoint your eyes that you may see, for you are neither hot nor cold." You think they understood what that meant? The relevance!
With the same kind of relevance, God spoke to Sardis, which had been conquered while its soldiers were asleep. God said to the church at Sardis, "Stay on your watch! Stay on your watch!"
Where is the point of relevance in our time? I believe it is the hunger for love. Even one as cerebrally intimidating as Bertrand Russell said that love was an unsatisfied hunger in his life. Bear in mind that as I say this, my ministry often takes me into the arena of argumentation. I am often forced to deal with arguments and counterarguments. But now, after two and a half decades in the ministry, there are some truths that emerge more clearly, more beautifully, more persuasively in my own mind. We as Christians make a staggering claim: we lay claim to truth that is exclusive. In a society that not only does not believe in a metanarrative or in exclusivity but also rejects the notion of objective truth, ours is a monumental claim. We proclaim one way to God Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. When we lay claim to truth in such radical terms, it is imperative that such truth be undergirded by love. If it is not undergirded by love, it makes the possessor of that truth obnoxious and the dogma repulsive. I believe it is vital that we understand this.
Two years ago when my wife and I went to Honolulu to be alone for a few days, I recalled the story of the famed missionary Joseph Damien, known as Damien of Molokai. That island is one of the most beautiful parts of the world. But Damien, who was Belgian by birth, left his homeland, not because he sought an Edenic setting, but because he wanted to minister to the inhabitants of that island who were expelled to that spot for having leprosy All of the Hawaiian islands spilled out their lepers into Molokai, for people feared contagion and knew nothing of a cure. Here in a land of great beauty those decimated by this dreaded disease were imprisoned by the world's tallest sea cliffs. To this very day, although the numbers now are few because of a cure, visitors may not just arrive on impulse. Special permission needs to be obtained, and we were able to receive it. What a memorable day that was!
In this setting Joseph Damien poured his life into those people. He embraced them. He loved them. He literally gave his life for them. One morning as he was pouring some boiling water into a cup, the water swirled out of the cup and fell onto his bare foot. He was rudely awakened to the fact that when the boiling water fell on his foot he did not feel it. He took some more boiling water, poured it onto the other foot, and there was no sensation at all. He was terrified of the ramifications. He got ready that morning, went behind the pulpit, and nobody there knew why he changed his opening line. He always began his sermon by saying, "My fellow believers." This morning, however, he began by saying, "My fellow lepers." He was now one of them.
Before we left, we walked into the bookstore and saw the picture of a beautiful young woman on the cover of a book. Her name was Olivia. The book was her story. I turned through the pages and saw how over the years the disease had marred and deformed her body. It was a terrible thing to see. My eyes were drawn to a letter she had written to the well-known actor Alan Alda. She wrote in words to this effect: "In my lonely, wretched life here I enjoy a few things. One of them is watching your program M*A*S*H. But, Mr. Alda, I was very troubled this evening watching today's episode. In one of those attempts at humor you looked at your colleagues, and commenting on the mess in the room, you said, `What do you think you are? A bunch of lepers living in a leper colony?' Mr. Alda, please don't ever say anything like that again. Those of us who have leprosy are not lepers. We are people who happen to have leprosy."
As we were leaving, I looked at the woman who was showing us around, and I said, "I see a marker here for Joseph Damien's grave. Is Damien buried here?"
"No, sir. Damien is buried back in his home country in Belgium," she said. "The government demanded that his body be flown back." But the people from here wrote and pleaded with them to please send the body to Molokai, for they were the people who found life because of him. Yet the Belgium government saw him as one of their great heroes and wanted to keep his body there. The people wrote back, saying, "Would you consider sending some part of his body, some memory of his physical presence, that we can bury him here?" The authorities cut off the right arm from his corpse, and it is buried in Molokai. That was the arm that reached out to these people who were discarded from life's mainstream.
As we boarded the small plane to leave, I said to my wife, "Isn't it a telling illustration? Leprosy desensitizes you to the sensation of touch. But it did not desensitize them to the reach of love."
It is of enormous interest to ask recent converts to Christ-converts from one of the world's major religions, why, humanly speaking, they were drawn to Christ. The answer is commonly one of two predictable replies. Either there was a supernatural intervention within their lives, or a Christian cared enough to reach out to them by life and example. The miraculous, interestingly enough, "works" within their philosophical worldview of angelic messengers. The reach of love works within their frame of existential need. To many of them, strangely enough, apologetics works after their conversion as they are challenged by those who wish to accuse them of surrendering to a "false system of belief."
With all of the proclamation, let us not stop loving the people to whom we minister. One of the things I've learned is that the antagonist will thank you for being patient and kind, not for being hostile or attacking. The audiences listen to you in courtesy because they long for a point of relevance in a world where many hunger to belong and to experience love. Postmodernism has been categorized by some as "a structure of feeling," and this characterization provides the church with both a predicament and a solution. God himself speaks in emotionally laden terms.
The felt need cannot be ignored, but it is important that having met on common ground, we rise to the higher ground of truth, not just emotion. To that end, there is a narrative behind the love. Love does not come without either a story behind it or a story ahead of it. The story is a gripping point of contact. But it is a story grounded in truth. I am not at all surprised that in numerous encounters, Paul pauses to tell his own story because it pointed to the gospel story. The true story, the narrative, the illustration may unlock more suppressed emotions and bring translation to a person better than any argument could.
Paul guides us from a point of reference through a point of relevance to a point of disturbance. His final challenge to Felix comes when he reminds this petty potentate that there is a judge of all the earth. Os Guinness, in the book No God but God, which he coauthored with John Seel, says: "It is truth that gives relevance to ‘relevance', just as ‘relevance' becomes irrelevant if it is not related to truth" (1992, 169). That is an important caution to remember, the more so in this postmodernist mind-set when truth is displaced by "relevance." There was no compulsion in Paul to avoid the hard part of his message. He could have stayed with the more palatable aspects of the gospel. But for this chosen instrument, the gospel had the uninviting dimension of judgment as well.
Properly understood, the prospect of judgment forms an important part of rescuing us from our own self-destructiveness. Recently I received a letter from a new Christian studying at a sophisticated university overseas. She stated that whenever she read of the cross, it brought her to her knees, and she would weep thinking about the love of Christ. But whenever she read of hell, it made her angry with God. How fascinating, I thought. Reading about the cross without seeing the hell of it is not understanding the cross at all.
So we are reminded again that all of Paul's genius in method did not rob him of the responsibility of theological integrity But then, we might well ask, why this approach? Why this track on which to come to Felix? Why righteousness, self-control, and judgment? Was it because they are the tenses of the Christian faith? The past of every person's sin countered with the righteousness of Christ? The present of temptation responded to by the strength of self-control within the believer? The future of judgment secured by God? Or was it because of the three persons of the Holy Trinity? The Son brings us into righteousness; the Holy Spirit gives us self-control; and the Father, in judgment, offers mercy? Or perhaps Paul was thinking much more of the promise of the Holy Spirit offered in John 16:8-11 where Jesus says: "When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment."
I lean to the last of these explanations. Paul knew what it was that the Holy Spirit had promised to bless. Conviction is the prerogative of the Holy Spirit. The communicator of the gospel finds concepts that the listener will find persuasive, but the transformation from unbelief to belief is only legitimate when God brings about that change, not our eloquence or genius. The apologist clears the bushes so the listener can take a good look at the cross, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings about the change in the heart of the individual.
What happened next in this encounter is fascinating! Felix kept Paul around for some time to see if Paul would offer him a bribe. Do you see what is going on here? What would Felix have inferred if Paul had tried to bribe him? He would have dismissed Paul's message of righteousness as all theory!
He would have uncovered Paul's offer of self-control as duplicitous. He would have mocked Paul's caution of judgment as hypocritical. In short, the cardinal claims that the messenger had laid before the skeptic were now being tested within the messenger himself.
Marie Chapian in her book Of Whom the World Was Not Worthy tells of an evangelist named Yakov who was witnessing to an older man by the name of Cimmerman who knew a great deal about the church and politics, and despised the hypocrisy he had seen in the church. When Yakov talked to him about the love of Christ, Cimmerman said, "Don't talk to me about Christ! You see those priests there, with all their vestments, all of their cloaks, all of the big crosses on their chests? I know what they're like. They're violent people. They have abused their power. Don't tell me about Christ! I know what it is like to watch them kill our people, even some of my own relatives."
Yakov paused for a moment and then said, "Cimmerman, can I ask you a question? What if I stole your coat and your boots, put them on, broke into a bank and took the money? I was chased by the police but I outran them. What would you say if the police came knocking on your door and charged you with breaking into a bank?"
Cimmerman said, "I would deny it because I did not."
"Ah! But what if they say that they recognized your coat and your boots from a distance? You had to have broken into the bank!"
Cimmerman said, "Yakov, just leave me alone. I know what you're driving at. I do not want to get into this discussion."
Yakov went away, but he kept coming back only to live the love of Christ before him. Finally one day Cimmerman said, "Yakov, tell me about this Christ that you so love and live for. How can I know him?" Yakov told him how to commit his life to Christ. Cimmerman knelt down on the dust outside his home with Yakov and received Christ into his life. He stood up and embraced Yakov and said, "Thank you for being in my life. You wear his coat very well."
The morning after I finished my open forum at the University of Iowa, one of the organizers told us of a conversation he had with a medical doctor he had brought with him the previous night, who was a very outspoken skeptic. As his wife drove this doctor back home, she looked at her and said, "What did you think of this evening?"
She answered, "Very, very persuasive. I wonder what he is like in his private life?"
What our culture needs is an apologetic that is not merely argued, but also felt. There has to be a passion in the communication. There must be a felt reality beyond the cognitive, engaging the feeling of the listener. Second, it must be an apologetic that is not merely heard, but also seen. We live within a context that listens with its eyes. So much has happened over the last few years to discredit the carriers of the gospel that seeing is indeed going to be a precursor to believing.
Finally, we need an apologetic that will rescue not only the ends but also the means. I bemoan the loss of linguistic strength in our time. Jacques Ellul rightly describes this culture as one that has humiliated the word; we have lost the beauty in language. Alexander Pope described the conversion of water into wine: "The conscious water saw its master and blushed." A thousand pictures could not do better than that word picture for us.
Our postmodern mind-set has not only relegated words to a lesser value but has lost the splendor of possibilities in verbal communication. The apostle Peter in his letter has a worthy reminder to all who tend to get preoccupied with the experiential and lose the propositional. He himself experienced one of the grandest spectacles ever vouchsafed to the human eye. He was witness to the transfiguration of our Lord and had seen Moses and Elijah descend in that momentous event. He was so overcome by this glimpse of the eternal that he wanted to make his home on that mountain and not return to the drabness of ordinary existence any more. Yet it is this very Peter who in his epistle warns us to stay firm in our commitment because "we now have the most sure word of prophecy" The written had a more eternal reality than the momentary exhilaration of a single experience.
In the beginning was not video. In the beginning was the Word. To a generation to whom life and feeling have become inseparable, how wonderful to bring the answer in which life and word become inseparable, even as the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.
References
Behe, Michael. 1996. Darwin's Black Box. New York: Free Press.
Chapian, Marie. 1978. Of Whom the World Was Not Worthy. Minneapolis: Bethany
Guinness, Os, and John Seel. 1992. No God but God. Chicago: Moody Press.
Lewis, C. S. 1955. Surprised by Joy. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Macartney, Clarence E. 1974. Bible Epitaphs. Grand Rapids: Baker.
Polkinghorne, John. 1989. The Quantum World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Extracted from D.A.'s Carson (General Editor)'s Tell the Truth
Then Felix, who was well acquainted with the Way, adjourned the proceedings. "When Lysias the commander comes," he said, "I will decide your case." He ordered the centurion to keep Paul under guard, but to give him some freedom and permit his friends to take care of his needs.
Several days later Felix came with his wife Drusilla, who was a Jewess. He sent for Paul and listened to him as he spoke about faith in Christ Jesus. As Paul discoursed on righteousness, self-control and the judgment to come, Felix was afraid and said, "That's enough for now! You may leave. When I find it convenient, I will send for you." At the same time he was hoping that Paul would offer him a bribe, so he sent for him frequently, and talked with him. (vv. 22-26)
Many of you may have read the following poem in one commentary or another, or seen it in some devotional book. Unfortunately there is uncertainty as to who authored these lines. That aside, it may be rightly inferred that they were penned either by someone in Christian ministry or by someone very close to someone in ministry:
When God wants to drill a man, and thrill a man, and skill a man;
When God wants to mold a man to play the noblest part;
When He yearns with all His heart to create so great and bold a man
That all the world might be amazed;
Watch His methods, watch His ways.
How He ruthlessly perfects whom He royally elects.
How He hammers and hurts him, and with mighty blows converts him,
Into trial shapes of clay which only God understands,
While his tortured heart is crying and he lifts beseeching hands.
How he bends but never breaks, when his good He undertakes.
How He uses whom He chooses and with every purpose fuses him,
With mighty acts induces him to try His splendor out.
God knows what He's about.
The longer I have been in ministry, the more I have reflected on the extraordinary ways in which God molds and shapes his chosen instruments. An old adage says: "He who shapes the back for the burden, also shapes the burden for the back." The Scriptures are filled with narratives of God's shaping process. He raised Joseph in a desert in order to use him in a palace. He raised Moses in a palace in order to use him in a desert. In that glorious passage in Luke's third chapter we read: "In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene-during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the desert." Did you hear that? There were seven larger-than-life characters punctuating the historical landscape, yet the word of the Lord came to a rather strange man wearing strange clothes and eating strange food, appointing him to stand before the Herods of his time.
Billy Graham was once asked by a press reporter, "How is it that there are so many more educated and more capable preachers in this world but God has chosen you to become the evangelist to the world?" Out of the overflow of his own humility, Billy Graham said, "When I get to heaven that is going to be my first question." Every one of us who has been called into the privileged role of vocational Christian ministry will have the same question for God. You know the glorious sensation every time God uses you. You walk away wondering how this is even possible-that he has taken such a weak, stumbling vessel and somehow brought something good through you. Paul, I believe, saw himself that way. He describes himself in his conversion as one abnormally born, almost prefiguring what C. S. Lewis said of his own conversion as one dragged into the kingdom kicking and screaming, "the most ... reluctant convert in all of England" (1955, 228-29). The apostle Paul, as one commentator paraphrases him, describes it in more visceral terms: "I was torn, wrenched away from my mother's womb, the most feisty convert in all of Palestine." And yet God raised him up.
Paul's biographical background helps put in perspective the shaping process begun long before this moment in front of Felix. He was born a Hebrew He was a citizen of Rome. He lived in a Greek city. At his commission, God said of him, "This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name" (Acts 9:15-16). One might well ask what was in him that was so unique. From his pen flowed a third of the New Testament. Through his dogged determination and answer to God's call, the Gentile world was to hear the grand news of the gospel. Better still, what is it that God poured into him? And how do we understand the methods that he used from which we can borrow in our time as well?
New Testament scholar William Barclay suggests that when Jesus ascended into heaven, Christians were possibly outnumbered by about one to thirty thousand. Some scholars challenge the exact number, but none suggests that the disparity was anything less than humanly insurmountable. Not only were the numbers staggeringly disproportionate, but the cultural animosities ran deep and passionate.
While we live in this postmodern era characterized by such strident uprooting of shared meanings from the past, let us remind ourselves that it was not any easier in Paul's time. He faced an immense challenge too, particularly in Corinth. The temple of Aphrodite spilled out its prostitutes by the hundreds every night; indeed, Corinth was a byword for sensuality and debauchery Rome's erratic and erotic self-indulgence speaks volumes even in the fallen stones of Pompeii visible to this day. The arrogance of Greek learning punctuates landmarks in philosophy. Into this discord came Paul, and now he stands before Felix. I present this man as a model because he had both theological integrity and methodological genius. He did not put asunder what God had joined together. Here is the setting as described in the words of one commentator:
What a contrast. On the throne sat Felix, the faded and withered pagan. A former slave. He became a favorite of Claudius, and by that emperor was exalted to high rank. Greed, cruelty and lust were stamped upon his countenance. His administration as procurator of Judea had been marked by injustice, extortion and violence. By his side sat the lovely Jewess Drusilla, a daughter of Herod Agrippa. She had first married a Gentile, who to please her, had become a Jew. Then Felix, with the aid of a sorcerer's incantations, had won her from her husband and was living with her in sin and shame. All that was dishonorable in mankind was represented by that combination of Felix and Drusilla as they sat on the throne awaiting the address by Saint Paul. Before them, with chains on his arms and his body scarred with the marks of his sufferings for Christ's sake, and his coarse garment, which his own hands had woven, contrasting with the velvet and purple of Felix and his paramour, stood the lonely ambassador for Christ. (Macartney 1974, 142)
I cannot help but think of a similar moment when Mother Teresa stood before the leaders of our time and addressed the attendees at the Presidential Prayer Breakfast in Washington. This diminutive woman, just four feet and a few inches tall, stood in front of an audience of luminaries from around the world and fearlessly pleaded for the protection of babies in their mothers' wombs. She called for leaders to take pity on the weakest and to show compassion on the little ones. "How," she asked, "can we speak out against violence when we are the most brutal with the most defenseless?" Numerous media elite reported on that awkward moment for the president, the vice president, and their wives, as this meek and selfless person spoke with conviction. The "weak" of this world confounded the "strong." Such was the scene centuries ago when Paul stood before Felix.
The first thing he did as he discoursed before Felix was to broach the theme of righteousness. In short, he found some common ground as a point of reference. Os Guinness contends that there are at least four stages that we have to bear in mind for effective communication: identification, translation, persuasion, and justification. First, the communicator identifies with the listener. Some point of resonance must be struck with the listener. Then, one must make sure that the content of communication is within the idiom of the one to whom the communication is made. This is the step of translation. Next, the ideas being transmitted must have a persuasive element to them. Finally, there must be justification, answering the question of why the ideas presented are worthy of being accepted over against any variation or contradiction of them.
In that first step of identification, it is critical that we find a point of reference and common ground. After being on campuses now for a few years trying to communicate the beauty and the cogency of the gospel, I have noticed some trends. There was a time when the cosmological argument-arguing from causality and the First Cause to this present universe-was an extremely powerful argument. There is no doubt that the argument is still valid and even needed, but the receptivity to such an argument has been dulled over the years and pompously blunted by naturalistic scientists. From the misuse of David Hume's arguments to a Big Bang mysticism, skeptical cosmologists mock even its legitimate use. They themselves assume causality in all matters of effect, but when it comes to the universe's existence, they ignore causality and do not ask questions of the Big Bang that they would ask of any other bang-What caused it? In many academic settings, therefore, one comes to a dead end, arguing against a prejudice that refuses to change.
We move then to the teleological argument, the argument from purpose and design to Designer and Creator. But talking about the specified complexity and the intelligibility in this universe only brings the inevitable challenge as naturalists constantly blur the distinction between aesthetic design and intelligent design. Arguing for a Creator is John Polkinghorne from Cambridge University, in his book The Quantum World, and Michael Behe, who in his book Darwin's Black Box, shows us the irreducible complexity of the human cell, which biological evolution cannot explain. Behe's expertise in biochemistry prompts him to state unequivocally that biochemically, macroevolution is impossible. To that assertion, atheistic thinkers like Richard Dawkins respond with the charge of "intellectual laziness." Convinced of a "Blind Watchmaker," they argue that somehow, sometime, they will find out how design is actually just random that anything would look like design if you pulled it out from a myriad of possibilities. Not only do they argue against their opponents, but in effect they argue against their own assumptions in life. Nevertheless, they have worked hard to neutralize the design argument just as they did the cosmological argument.
Where then does one go to find common ground? I refer to the moral argument, which argues for God from morality. This issue captures the interest of most minds, and even the postmodernist struggles with it and finds himself hard-pressed to escape from its clutches. Naturalists are trying valiantly even as I speak to show how even our moral sense has evolved. New articles are being written on the biogenesis of ethics. But the point I want to make is that no matter where you go across the globe, when you get into the throes of the moral argument, people are listening. Whether you're in Bombay or Nottingham, whether you're in Harvard or Princeton, students listen carefully when this subject is addressed. In last month's issue of Atlantic Monthly, an ethicist attempted a full hit at our moral sense and said we can now completely explain ethics on the basis of biology. A feeble attempt to be sure, but it is a desperate move to take away the last argument that throbs within the human frame. They try hard to formulate in their minds a response to the question of how objective ethics can somehow exist without a transcendent reality They struggle with it, and that struggle is evident.
A few years ago I was speaking at the Center for Geopolitical Strategy in Moscow. It was a very difficult three-hour session. I sat with seven generals around me. My wife was with me, along with one of my colleagues, and around us were atheists systematically and intensely throwing their questions at me. When one walked into the building, one felt dwarfed because of its size-eight stories above ground, four stories below ground. But more than its size was its story of a nation. This is where the mind of the former Soviet Union was forged. Anybody who was a great name in the country had graduated from there.
We sat with faculty members as grim in countenance as imagination had conjured up through pictures. Their pointed questioning seemed relentless and unwavering. But then a break came. In an effort to disarm them from their official self-exaltation, I asked them why their young people were in such a hopeless state if their ideology was as effective as it was pretending to be. Why is it, I asked, that they were unable to harness the heart with respect for life after decades of indoctrination in egalitarianism? Then, as I shared my own conversion story from a bed of suicide, it was as if the scales began to fall from their eyes.
That night my wife and I had dinner with the chief historian. We sat in a very meager-looking restaurant having a meal together. I leaned over and said, -General, I have a question for you, sir. Have you ever read the story of Joseph Stalin? As you know, he was once a seminary student, and then abandoned his faith in God and decided to knock God out of his people entirely"
I then told him the following story: "Stalin was having dinner with a woman who was a visitor from overseas. In the course of their conversation, she asked him how long he expected his people to follow him while he tortured them so relentlessly Stalin did not answer her. He asked the waiter to bring a live chicken; he clutched the live chicken under his arm as he proceeded to defeather the bird. He completely denuded it and placed that bird on the floor. Then he picked up a piece of bread and moved away The chicken hobbled over to him and nestled between his trouser legs. He bent down with the bread in his hand, and the chicken started to peck away at that bread. Stalin looked at the questioner and said, ‘Madame, have you seen this? I inflicted such pain on this chicken. It'll follow me for food the rest of its life. People are like that chicken. You inflict pain on them, and they will follow you for the rest of their lives.' What do you think of that story, General?"' I paused and endured the silence.
He could not fight back the tears that flooded his eyes, and his lips quivered as he nodded his head. He knew what he had seen in his country. In these seven decades, the bequest of a philosophy that masqueraded as one for the common man had reduced life to that of refuse. Is it not intriguing, though, that even in an atheistic nation, the moral law still stabbed like a hatpin in the heart, which bleeds in silence. Even while one may want to fight it, there seems a paucity of words.
When Mother Teresa finished her talk in Washington, the entire audience of hundreds rose to their feet in a standing ovation. The president, the vice president, and their wives did not stand because the issue was very clearly a challenge to their views. And so they stayed seated on the platform as the audience rose to its feet. Philip Yancey, who interviewed the president after it was over and he was in the presidential limousine, made this comment: "Just before we bade good-bye to the President, I said, `President Clinton, what did you think of what Mother Teresa had to say today?"' President Clinton paused, and said, "It is very difficult to argue against a life so beautifully lived."
It is vitally important in the last moments of this century, when only vestiges remain of moral law, that somehow we reach into what remains to find common ground. Paul shows us how and why he held on to this as his first point of entry. Paul is obviously reasoning with an unrighteousness man about righteousness. He is talking to a Roman. He knows that some perspectives on morality were not the same. But think with me for a moment about how he probably presented the issue.
Paul was a Hebrew by birth, a citizen of Rome living in a Greek city. For the Hebrews, the ideal was symbolized by light: "The Lord is my light and my salvation." "This is the light that lights every man that comes into the world." "The people that sat in darkness have seen a great light." For the Hebrews, that was the epitome of every ideal. For the Greeks, the ideal was knowledge-episteme-from which we get epistemology, to know, to understand the truth. Their legacy is the academy. Philosophy, the love of wisdom, is rooted in Greek thought. For the Romans, the ideal was the pursuit of glory. Rome was the city of which it was said that it was not built in a day, that it was a city to which all roads converged-the glory of Rome. It was the city over which Augustine wept as the barbarians scaled its walls and ransacked it. From that destruction of what he had thought was an eternal city, he penned his immortal City of God. For the Hebrews-light; for the Greeks-knowledge; for the Romans-glory.
Here stands a man, a product of these three cultures. How does he engage all three? Writing to the church at Corinth, he says this: "For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,' made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ" (2 Cor. 4:6, italics added).
A face. A face bearing the focus of all that the best of human ideals could have pursued. The light of light, the source of all truth, and the supreme glory.
When I was growing up in India, we had a man working in our home. He came from a village, and city life with all of its offerings was quite foreign to him. One day my mother gave him some money to go and see a movie. He'd never seen a movie. She instructed him on how to purchase the ticket and that there would be an usher to help him find a seat. He got all dressed up, polished his shoes and off he went. He got there late, bought the ticket and entered through the front door. Everything was dark and all he could see were beams coming in through the back wall. He stood there for a few moments enthralled with the particles of light emerging through little openings in the wall. He thought this was wonderful, and indeed it kept him entertained for a few fleeting moments until he thought the sound was coming from the opposite side. So he decided to turn around, and suddenly he saw the screen filled with a face and a scene that matched the sound and told the story. He let out a shout of glee of Archimedean proportions. In fact, he caused such a disturbance that one of the ushers had to come and commandeer him to his seat.
That is, to me, a perfect illustration of human pursuits-thinking we have found it in our tiny little specks of information. But then all of our efforts, exploits, and yearnings are like beams of light, finding a consummate expression upon a face: the face of Jesus Christ. For Paul, righteousness was no longer an idea or an attainment, as much as it was an embodiment and an imputation that followed such a recognition. How much we need to learn from this message.
All around us we hear thundering forth the word morality. Yes, we must be a moral people. But morality is a fruit, not a tree. The tree is rooted in Christ's righteousness from whom the nourishment comes to produce the fruit of moral purity. I challenge you: when you are preaching righteousness, when you are calling a people to goodness, do not stop with morality alone, because a nation can be morally lost just as easily as immorally lost. What you have to point to ultimately is the centerpiece of righteousness, our Lord Jesus Christ. Righteousness or morality is still a point of reference, but the word is vacuous without Christ as the referent. Incidentally, that is why C. S. Lewis has been one of the most powerful apologists of this century. He well understood that the unshakable moral sense within every culture only made sense by invoking the "Lion of the Tribe of Judah."
Paul moves from a point of reference to a point relevance. He talks to Felix about self-control. Do you think Felix needed to hear about self-control? Living with a sixteen-year-old, whom he had procured through a sorcerer's incantations, he was hardly a man whose passions are well ordered. She was another man's wife when Felix orchestrated this steal. He himself had been married several times. With the power of a king, he still lived with the mind enslaved by sensuality and power. With honor and genius, Paul talked to him about self-control, a point of relevance for him.
The Holy Scriptures are filled with such points of relevance whenever God speaks to a nation or to individuals. A few days ago, along with my wife and some friends, I was seated on the hillside of ancient Laodicea in Turkey We opened the Bible and read from Revelation 3. Laodicea was known for three or four things. The city was a wealthy one, and its inhabitants bragged of their riches. The textile and garment industry flourished. They were known for an eye ointment that they had manufactured and sold to many parts of the world. It was a popular spot for visitors because of the nearby hot springs at Hierapolis. Known for their wealth, their textiles, their eye ointment, and their hot springs-what does the Word of God say to the Laodiceans through John's Revelation? He says, "You think you are rich, but actually you are very poor. Come and buy gold off me so I can clothe you in white linen, and anoint your eyes that you may see, for you are neither hot nor cold." You think they understood what that meant? The relevance!
With the same kind of relevance, God spoke to Sardis, which had been conquered while its soldiers were asleep. God said to the church at Sardis, "Stay on your watch! Stay on your watch!"
Where is the point of relevance in our time? I believe it is the hunger for love. Even one as cerebrally intimidating as Bertrand Russell said that love was an unsatisfied hunger in his life. Bear in mind that as I say this, my ministry often takes me into the arena of argumentation. I am often forced to deal with arguments and counterarguments. But now, after two and a half decades in the ministry, there are some truths that emerge more clearly, more beautifully, more persuasively in my own mind. We as Christians make a staggering claim: we lay claim to truth that is exclusive. In a society that not only does not believe in a metanarrative or in exclusivity but also rejects the notion of objective truth, ours is a monumental claim. We proclaim one way to God Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. When we lay claim to truth in such radical terms, it is imperative that such truth be undergirded by love. If it is not undergirded by love, it makes the possessor of that truth obnoxious and the dogma repulsive. I believe it is vital that we understand this.
Two years ago when my wife and I went to Honolulu to be alone for a few days, I recalled the story of the famed missionary Joseph Damien, known as Damien of Molokai. That island is one of the most beautiful parts of the world. But Damien, who was Belgian by birth, left his homeland, not because he sought an Edenic setting, but because he wanted to minister to the inhabitants of that island who were expelled to that spot for having leprosy All of the Hawaiian islands spilled out their lepers into Molokai, for people feared contagion and knew nothing of a cure. Here in a land of great beauty those decimated by this dreaded disease were imprisoned by the world's tallest sea cliffs. To this very day, although the numbers now are few because of a cure, visitors may not just arrive on impulse. Special permission needs to be obtained, and we were able to receive it. What a memorable day that was!
In this setting Joseph Damien poured his life into those people. He embraced them. He loved them. He literally gave his life for them. One morning as he was pouring some boiling water into a cup, the water swirled out of the cup and fell onto his bare foot. He was rudely awakened to the fact that when the boiling water fell on his foot he did not feel it. He took some more boiling water, poured it onto the other foot, and there was no sensation at all. He was terrified of the ramifications. He got ready that morning, went behind the pulpit, and nobody there knew why he changed his opening line. He always began his sermon by saying, "My fellow believers." This morning, however, he began by saying, "My fellow lepers." He was now one of them.
Before we left, we walked into the bookstore and saw the picture of a beautiful young woman on the cover of a book. Her name was Olivia. The book was her story. I turned through the pages and saw how over the years the disease had marred and deformed her body. It was a terrible thing to see. My eyes were drawn to a letter she had written to the well-known actor Alan Alda. She wrote in words to this effect: "In my lonely, wretched life here I enjoy a few things. One of them is watching your program M*A*S*H. But, Mr. Alda, I was very troubled this evening watching today's episode. In one of those attempts at humor you looked at your colleagues, and commenting on the mess in the room, you said, `What do you think you are? A bunch of lepers living in a leper colony?' Mr. Alda, please don't ever say anything like that again. Those of us who have leprosy are not lepers. We are people who happen to have leprosy."
As we were leaving, I looked at the woman who was showing us around, and I said, "I see a marker here for Joseph Damien's grave. Is Damien buried here?"
"No, sir. Damien is buried back in his home country in Belgium," she said. "The government demanded that his body be flown back." But the people from here wrote and pleaded with them to please send the body to Molokai, for they were the people who found life because of him. Yet the Belgium government saw him as one of their great heroes and wanted to keep his body there. The people wrote back, saying, "Would you consider sending some part of his body, some memory of his physical presence, that we can bury him here?" The authorities cut off the right arm from his corpse, and it is buried in Molokai. That was the arm that reached out to these people who were discarded from life's mainstream.
As we boarded the small plane to leave, I said to my wife, "Isn't it a telling illustration? Leprosy desensitizes you to the sensation of touch. But it did not desensitize them to the reach of love."
It is of enormous interest to ask recent converts to Christ-converts from one of the world's major religions, why, humanly speaking, they were drawn to Christ. The answer is commonly one of two predictable replies. Either there was a supernatural intervention within their lives, or a Christian cared enough to reach out to them by life and example. The miraculous, interestingly enough, "works" within their philosophical worldview of angelic messengers. The reach of love works within their frame of existential need. To many of them, strangely enough, apologetics works after their conversion as they are challenged by those who wish to accuse them of surrendering to a "false system of belief."
With all of the proclamation, let us not stop loving the people to whom we minister. One of the things I've learned is that the antagonist will thank you for being patient and kind, not for being hostile or attacking. The audiences listen to you in courtesy because they long for a point of relevance in a world where many hunger to belong and to experience love. Postmodernism has been categorized by some as "a structure of feeling," and this characterization provides the church with both a predicament and a solution. God himself speaks in emotionally laden terms.
The felt need cannot be ignored, but it is important that having met on common ground, we rise to the higher ground of truth, not just emotion. To that end, there is a narrative behind the love. Love does not come without either a story behind it or a story ahead of it. The story is a gripping point of contact. But it is a story grounded in truth. I am not at all surprised that in numerous encounters, Paul pauses to tell his own story because it pointed to the gospel story. The true story, the narrative, the illustration may unlock more suppressed emotions and bring translation to a person better than any argument could.
Paul guides us from a point of reference through a point of relevance to a point of disturbance. His final challenge to Felix comes when he reminds this petty potentate that there is a judge of all the earth. Os Guinness, in the book No God but God, which he coauthored with John Seel, says: "It is truth that gives relevance to ‘relevance', just as ‘relevance' becomes irrelevant if it is not related to truth" (1992, 169). That is an important caution to remember, the more so in this postmodernist mind-set when truth is displaced by "relevance." There was no compulsion in Paul to avoid the hard part of his message. He could have stayed with the more palatable aspects of the gospel. But for this chosen instrument, the gospel had the uninviting dimension of judgment as well.
Properly understood, the prospect of judgment forms an important part of rescuing us from our own self-destructiveness. Recently I received a letter from a new Christian studying at a sophisticated university overseas. She stated that whenever she read of the cross, it brought her to her knees, and she would weep thinking about the love of Christ. But whenever she read of hell, it made her angry with God. How fascinating, I thought. Reading about the cross without seeing the hell of it is not understanding the cross at all.
So we are reminded again that all of Paul's genius in method did not rob him of the responsibility of theological integrity But then, we might well ask, why this approach? Why this track on which to come to Felix? Why righteousness, self-control, and judgment? Was it because they are the tenses of the Christian faith? The past of every person's sin countered with the righteousness of Christ? The present of temptation responded to by the strength of self-control within the believer? The future of judgment secured by God? Or was it because of the three persons of the Holy Trinity? The Son brings us into righteousness; the Holy Spirit gives us self-control; and the Father, in judgment, offers mercy? Or perhaps Paul was thinking much more of the promise of the Holy Spirit offered in John 16:8-11 where Jesus says: "When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment."
I lean to the last of these explanations. Paul knew what it was that the Holy Spirit had promised to bless. Conviction is the prerogative of the Holy Spirit. The communicator of the gospel finds concepts that the listener will find persuasive, but the transformation from unbelief to belief is only legitimate when God brings about that change, not our eloquence or genius. The apologist clears the bushes so the listener can take a good look at the cross, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings about the change in the heart of the individual.
What happened next in this encounter is fascinating! Felix kept Paul around for some time to see if Paul would offer him a bribe. Do you see what is going on here? What would Felix have inferred if Paul had tried to bribe him? He would have dismissed Paul's message of righteousness as all theory!
He would have uncovered Paul's offer of self-control as duplicitous. He would have mocked Paul's caution of judgment as hypocritical. In short, the cardinal claims that the messenger had laid before the skeptic were now being tested within the messenger himself.
Marie Chapian in her book Of Whom the World Was Not Worthy tells of an evangelist named Yakov who was witnessing to an older man by the name of Cimmerman who knew a great deal about the church and politics, and despised the hypocrisy he had seen in the church. When Yakov talked to him about the love of Christ, Cimmerman said, "Don't talk to me about Christ! You see those priests there, with all their vestments, all of their cloaks, all of the big crosses on their chests? I know what they're like. They're violent people. They have abused their power. Don't tell me about Christ! I know what it is like to watch them kill our people, even some of my own relatives."
Yakov paused for a moment and then said, "Cimmerman, can I ask you a question? What if I stole your coat and your boots, put them on, broke into a bank and took the money? I was chased by the police but I outran them. What would you say if the police came knocking on your door and charged you with breaking into a bank?"
Cimmerman said, "I would deny it because I did not."
"Ah! But what if they say that they recognized your coat and your boots from a distance? You had to have broken into the bank!"
Cimmerman said, "Yakov, just leave me alone. I know what you're driving at. I do not want to get into this discussion."
Yakov went away, but he kept coming back only to live the love of Christ before him. Finally one day Cimmerman said, "Yakov, tell me about this Christ that you so love and live for. How can I know him?" Yakov told him how to commit his life to Christ. Cimmerman knelt down on the dust outside his home with Yakov and received Christ into his life. He stood up and embraced Yakov and said, "Thank you for being in my life. You wear his coat very well."
The morning after I finished my open forum at the University of Iowa, one of the organizers told us of a conversation he had with a medical doctor he had brought with him the previous night, who was a very outspoken skeptic. As his wife drove this doctor back home, she looked at her and said, "What did you think of this evening?"
She answered, "Very, very persuasive. I wonder what he is like in his private life?"
What our culture needs is an apologetic that is not merely argued, but also felt. There has to be a passion in the communication. There must be a felt reality beyond the cognitive, engaging the feeling of the listener. Second, it must be an apologetic that is not merely heard, but also seen. We live within a context that listens with its eyes. So much has happened over the last few years to discredit the carriers of the gospel that seeing is indeed going to be a precursor to believing.
Finally, we need an apologetic that will rescue not only the ends but also the means. I bemoan the loss of linguistic strength in our time. Jacques Ellul rightly describes this culture as one that has humiliated the word; we have lost the beauty in language. Alexander Pope described the conversion of water into wine: "The conscious water saw its master and blushed." A thousand pictures could not do better than that word picture for us.
Our postmodern mind-set has not only relegated words to a lesser value but has lost the splendor of possibilities in verbal communication. The apostle Peter in his letter has a worthy reminder to all who tend to get preoccupied with the experiential and lose the propositional. He himself experienced one of the grandest spectacles ever vouchsafed to the human eye. He was witness to the transfiguration of our Lord and had seen Moses and Elijah descend in that momentous event. He was so overcome by this glimpse of the eternal that he wanted to make his home on that mountain and not return to the drabness of ordinary existence any more. Yet it is this very Peter who in his epistle warns us to stay firm in our commitment because "we now have the most sure word of prophecy" The written had a more eternal reality than the momentary exhilaration of a single experience.
In the beginning was not video. In the beginning was the Word. To a generation to whom life and feeling have become inseparable, how wonderful to bring the answer in which life and word become inseparable, even as the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.
References
Behe, Michael. 1996. Darwin's Black Box. New York: Free Press.
Chapian, Marie. 1978. Of Whom the World Was Not Worthy. Minneapolis: Bethany
Guinness, Os, and John Seel. 1992. No God but God. Chicago: Moody Press.
Lewis, C. S. 1955. Surprised by Joy. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Macartney, Clarence E. 1974. Bible Epitaphs. Grand Rapids: Baker.
Polkinghorne, John. 1989. The Quantum World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Extracted from D.A.'s Carson (General Editor)'s Tell the Truth
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)