Cc--Christianese 13: God is Knowable

--The other side of yesterday’s discussion about God’s mystery is God’s knowability.
--Sometimes, we are baffled by God, and the more we consider the gulfs of capacity (knowledge, power, goodness) that separate us from God, we can become almost pessimistic about the possibility of knowing anything about God.
--But without undoing the mysteriousness of God, we must also declare that God wants very deeply to be known and has made us for precisely this purpose.
--And in a certain sense, trusting that God wants to be known is itself an act of faith that motivates us to try to learn about Him because we believe He did give us the capacity to do so.

So how can we know God?
--Well, one way is by studying the world He gave us, since the artwork always says volumes about the artist. That’s in fact, a big reason why any artist does artwork: to be known.
--For instance, one of the reasons we even bother studying nature (and doing science) is because we believe there is a natural order or law to the universe that we can discern. And if God is the giver or maker of that orderly nature, then we know that He, Himself is an orderly God. So we study anything about Him we can find because He reveals Himself to be discoverable. A God who would make this world is an orderly God, a knowable God.
--This study of the natural world reaches its pinnacle when we start to study the human body and our relationships because we are told that we were the highest point of the created order (“very good”) for precisely this reason of revealing God’s knowable features.

3+4PM Heartbreak actually hurts.

University of Michigan researchers recently did a study testing the effects of heartbreak on our physical sensation of pain. They showed recently heartbroken people pictures of their exes and also subjected them to something like the pain of burning coffee on their arms and discovered the same region of the brain registered the sensation. Thus, both physical and psychological stimuli register as pain, which any heartbroken person could easily tell you. Their theory? Evolution recognized our need to respond to social threats (as social beings) every bit as vividly as to physical threats, and so it granted us similar sensations for both. I must be honest. The inventiveness of materialists astounds me sometimes. Here’s my theory. God built us to feel in our bodies the things He wanted us to learn about Him. God built us with such a deep desire for communion and love that it’s literally embedded in our bodies. And so we are wired to feel the loss of love in our bodies (just like the gaining of love) because our bodies are given to represent God and to teach us about Him. Since we are love beings made in the image of a love God, we feel these truths of God right in our bodies (or brains). Now, I may just be a silly, naïve, superstitious Christian who can’t help but see things different from materialistic scientists, but I just seem “wired by evolution” (or a generous Creator) to see bodily phenomena as ways in which our bodies were designed to reveal the God in Whose image we are made.

2PM New app calculates nutrition from photo of your food.

This must be the single most brilliant application of technology to solve a demand and problem that I’ve seen recently. You use the iPhone app to take a picture of your food, and it will return to you a calculation of the calories, fat, vitamins, etc. so you can decide how to eat it or if to eat it. Also, you can use it to keep track of your eating online in a kind of diet journal for accountability or just to know what you’re doing with your mouth. Brilliant! It’s so hard to tell what’s in food and this solves that problem with something like facial recognition software, I guess. I don’t have an iPhone, and I’m not dieting anymore, but this is genius.

Wacky Wednesday--Adoption Is A Bad Idea

Note: Before reading the following arguments, please understand that they are not what I believe. On Wednesdays, I deliberately argue for wrong ideas, challenging my listeners to call and defend the obvious right answer, which is usually far harder than one would expect. This is a summary of what Wacky Andrew will be arguing, not a representation of what real Andrew believes.

--You don’t know what you’re going to get.You’re inviting social services into your home

--Adoption is a difficult, frustrating, expensive, draining process.

--People with children may neglect them in trying to take care of new ones.

--No one has unlimited time, money, or emotional resources.

--What if the kids are dangerous or untrainable?

--Why would you take on the problems of kids who aren’t your own blood?

--We should be spreading the Gospel and evangelizing the lost, not squandering resources on orphans.

--How is it my fault that someone else made kids they can’t take care of?

Resources:

Christian Alliance for Orphans

2+3+4PM Time says parenting makes you unhealthy.

A recent article in Time revealed that research indicates that being a parent is statistically bad for your health. The short version is that you eat worse and exercise less when you have kids than when you don’t. Hence, having kids puts you at higher risk of being fat and at risk for a variety of health adversities. I think the first knee-jerk reaction to this is to dispute the findings or to be outraged at yet another attack on parenting and children from Time magazine. Okay. But here’s my take. Der. How many thousands (I hesitate to consider millions) of dollars were spent proving what any parent in the universe could have told you was true?

But of course kids have adverse impact on your body. They cost you all sorts of things. I used to be really good at pool and I knew new music a lot and I read more books when I wasn’t a dad. Of course. I mean, imagine if someone came out with a story showing that having children is economically disadvantageous. Booorringgg, right? So why is it offensive to imagine that children may be bad for our bodies, either directly or just by virtue of taking time away from maintaining them? See, the underlying premise of stories like this (in my opinion) is that bodies are good (and money is good). Therefore it’s a bit dumb to become a parent. Well, isn’t that generous and Godly of you!

Of course children are costly in myriad ways. It’s cheaper to not have them. You’re healthier and probably prettier when you don’t have them. You certainly can more easily have fun as a couple without them. So what? None of those things are the reasons why you should have them in the first place. And if there are costs, even big ones, associated with giving life to another human being, well at least you can say you’re just returning the favor. There are lots and lots of costs of having children, and that’s just the price of doing business. So stop pretending that you have to have all these material advantages, as though married parents are somehow in a competition with single people for the “who has the best life” cup.

Theological Tuesday: Why are there four Gospels?

As anyone who has tried to comprehend the New Testament knows, the world would be a lot simpler for us if there had been one single definitive Gospel of Jesus Christ rather than the four we do have in the canon (and the ones that were excluded for good reasons, like Thomas). There are tensions between the accounts, things that seem vital to one aren’t even mentioned in others, and above all for the modern American Christian, none of it is particularly chronological. So, why did the Gospels take between two and four decades (more for John) to appear, and why did there need to be more than just one of them?

CC--Christianese 11: God is Beauty

--Now, unlike many of the other terms I’ve been describing, the Beauty of God isn’t one that requires a special word, but since it fits in with the other omni’s we’ve been using, I thought it would be worth mentioning here.
--But the idea is quite simple. God is beautiful in the sense that any way in which you truly behold Him (through the eyes, the mind, the spirit, whatever) is always going to entail an overwhelming sense of aesthetic or artistic appeal.
--Beautiful things are things we not merely like to look at, but we lose ourselves momentarily or for an even longer time in looking at them. We long to look at them and find ourselves captivated by them and wanting the experience of seeing them to go on and not end.
--And we want to share that experience immediately with other people.
--And this is merely the way it works with our visual sense.
--Every experience like this is really a pointer toward the Beauty of God, Who is so compelling and majestic that we literally lose awareness of anything else when we are near Him or in “sight” of Him.
--So it’s not merely that God is beautiful. That’s obvious.
--It’s that God is Beauty itself in the sense that all other forms and experiences of beauty are just reminders or hints of Him and that He is the source and standard of the very idea of something being aesthetically appealing.
--That’s why when people speak of God, they always find themselves a bit stymied by the limits of language, just as it’s virtually impossible to convey love in words. So we must resort to poetry or to song or dance to somehow convey the depth and motivational power of encountering something so beautiful.
--It’s also interesting as an after-note that there’s no widely used term for this one, perhaps Omnibellus or Omnibellaforma, but I know not nearly enough Latin to invent words in that language.

4PM Evanston paper pranks locals

Phone lines at city hall blew up last week after the local paper “The Evanston Roundtable” in Evanston, IL (not far from my own hometown of Downers Grove outside Chicago) notified residents that they would now need to purchase a “snow removal sticker” to place outside their homes as evidence they had paid the snow removal tax of $2.25 per day. If they did not have the sticker in place, their street would not be plowed. In the ensuing furious response by the public, city hall simply reminded people that the story had been published on Friday, April 1, 2011. This, of course, made all the more irritating in the aftermath of major blizzards this year. But it does say something about the confidence in local government that so many people believed such a ridiculous program was really possible by their government. PS, you really must read the actual story/prank/alert. It’s hilarious. They truly “snowed” the residents with all the little add-ons to the program.

3PM Cardinals 8, D-Backs 2

Above: Berkman before HR 2

In a game that was really over before I even arrived (my show doesn’t end until 7:00 and for reasons that pass understanding, local weekday games start at 6:40 instead of the otherwise universal norm of 7:10, but all petty whining aside…). Nevertheless, it was great fun for the boys to meet Baxter (always a thrill) and to watch my Cards brutalize the D-Backs behind our worst starting pitcher. It’s great to see the bats finally coming to life (two games in a row now), and I was able to see not just one but Lance Berkman’s first TWO home runs as a Cardinal in the same game. So much fun! See you at the game tonight.

Below: Berkman after HR 2

2PM Texas may raise limit to 85

The Texas House voted to allow some stretches of road with high visibility to have their speed limits raised from 80 to 85MPH. The real question in my mind is why bother having a speed limit at all? I’m not mocking, I’ve driven in Germany, and it was wonderful to be able to drive the speed I felt safe driving. I’m really wondering why bother having a speed limit at all, since it seems doubtful that you’re going to come along and radar time someone at 95 just to give them a 10 over ticket. But more importantly, what I always wonder is what improvement has been made in the skill and reaction ability of the drivers who will be using this new speed limit. Again, I like high speed limits, but I am a realist who knows that most Americans are only just marginally competent to drive under ordinary conditions and so I do not trust them to drive at high speeds only because we’re way too permissive in our licensing. Germany has no limit, but it’s routine to flunk your driver’s test in Europe more than once before qualifying only because they’re that strict.

Ethics: Is Income or Wealth Inequality Bad?

We regularly hear some people (usually on the left) complain about the “rich-poor gap” or about the terribly unfair “distribution of wealth” or even about “income-“ or “wealth-inequality” as the proof of an unjust society. Conservatives (and libertarians) tend to respond with contempt to any and all of these worries, but is there anything to it? In what ways is equality a good goal to aim for, and in what ways not? Is inequality a default indicator of injustice or poverty? Can a society be highly prosperous and also highly unequal?

Resources:
List of countries by income equality (Wikipedia)
Measuring inequality (World Bank)
US taxes it high earners the most (Tax Foundation)

CC--Christianese: Omniscience (part 3 of 3)

--In realizing that God knows everything, there is an immediate question people have about whether God knows the future.
--Well, of course He does.
--And I don’t just meant to be flippant about it, but if everything that exists comes into being and is overseen directly by God and is in fact only a result of His mind, will, and enacting, then the notion that there even ever could be something come to pass which does not and would not have this nature from the beginning is silly.
--The past, the present, and the future all equally flow out from Him and are therefore contained in His mind (known by Him) before they ever manifest as we encounter them in time.
--This also explains why some notions of God’s knowledge of the future are a bit absurd, such as that “God looks ahead to see what is there and announces it now.”
--But this starts from the human acquisitive experience of knowledge. If God ever did look toward the future, He would only be looking at what He has already imagined and willed into existence, just like for anything in the present or the past.
--God no more “acquires” knowledge of the future than He does of the present or the past.
--Another way to think of this is to start by not assuming our notions of time even apply to God. He is beginning and end, the Creator of even time itself, as we noted in discussing what “eternal” means. Therefore, to imagine that time would somehow constrain God by preventing Him from knowing something about the future, a constraint which doesn’t even apply to God, is just silly.
--The reasons we don’t know the future are because we aren’t there yet (a limitation) and knowledge doesn’t flow from us (a difference in the nature of knowing).
--But since God already is there because the future flows from Him, both of these limits are silly.

CC--Christianese: Omniscience (part 2 of 3)

"Whoops!" I forgot to post this on Friday. Here you are:
--It means God knows everything.
--But God doesn’t know in the sense that we do, acquiring knowledge of them. He is the source of knowing.
--That’s why God doesn’t just know everything, He literally is the source of all things being knowable. So, the idea that there could even exist something outside this scope is just nonsense.
--But it’s pretty natural to make this mistake of thinking there could be something God might not know if you start from the idea of His knowledge works like ours does, acquisitive and responsive to things that begin outside of us.
--Here’s an imperfect analogy. When you talk to someone, first you think an idea, then you form it into words, then you speak the words, then the other person hears them, then they comprehend them. And so their knowledge of your mind is mediated by all these stages.
--Well, one way to think of the knowable world is that the things we know are like the words in a conversation from God. So, to say that God would be speaking words that He didn’t previously fully comprehend is totally nonsense.
--Any knowable thing initiated first in Him just as the words people hear you speak initiated first in your mind.
--To think that you would “discover” or “find” yourself to be speaking certain words is impossible, except for some sort of cognitive disorder. And that’s why we don’t say that God acquires knowledge of things, we say that God is the reason they are knowable in the first place.
--It is in this way that God literally knows everything before it is even an object of knowledge.
--Thus, it’s not that God is “capable of” knowing everything. It’s that God literally knows everything before it even comes into existence as a knowable in any other way at all.

2+3+4PM New musical mocking Mormonism

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, have produced a Broadway musical about a couple of Mormon missionaries from Salt Lake City to Uganda, and it is supposedly hilarious and very well done as a musical comedy, mocking both Mormonism and American optimism about globally evangelizing people into American optimism. It’s getting good reviews, and I anticipate the first reaction by many Evangelicals is pretty positive. But this is because they hate Mormonism, not because they suddenly love Stone and Parker, or (more to the point) religious mockery in general. For my own part, I have never been bothered by satire directed at my religion. It’s often on target, and when it’s not, I just figure being misunderstood is sort of a thing for Christians and Christianity going back to our Savior. But at the same time, I’m exactly not a fan of mocking other religions. And the reason is that whatever their flaws, the people who believe in them really do believe in them. So if my goal were to reach Mormons, I would find it counterproductive to do so by way of insulting them. Besides, this is a Broadway (New York) production, and it doesn’t really take very much courage to mock Mormonism in New York. And we know that the track record for conservative Christians in response to art/film/comedy directed at our religion hasn’t been particularly tolerant. So, it seems like we’re only interested in protecting our own reputation and not in protecting the respect of persons we really disagree with. I think we all know that Stone and Parker (or New York art culture in general) is just as capable of skewering us as of skewering them. If anything, it seems like the Gospel idea of concern for others above for ourselves would be more patient with criticism of our beliefs and less patient with criticism of other people’s beliefs. My Gospel teaches me that there’s nothing noble about making others pay the price or take the hit for something. Instead, it teaches me that a willingness to take the hit or pay the price someone else might rightly deserve shows love and shows that I’m more than just interested in my own reputation/skin. For instance, maybe in saying this, I get called “soft on Mormonism” or a “Mormon sympathizer.” Well, that sounds awfully similar to the sort of allegations against Jesus, to my ears. So this concern about how we (as believers in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, not merely as advocates of some particular religion) respond to mockery of religion, especially religion we disagree with, is a serious question. Do unto others...?

4PM Music industry seeks $75 TRILLION award.

In an effort to prove that no one has a larger sense of their own self-importance, music industry executives are suing file-sharing website Limewire for $75 Trillion (yes, Virginia, trillion with a T). As contrary evidence that not everyone in the world has lost their minds, Judge Kimba Walker laughed them out of court by explaining that this would be “more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877.” But after all, where would Edison have been if not for the music industry?

3PM Hugo Chavez’s take on Mars

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has a theory about why Mars is desolate, since it was once a thriving and advanced civilization. His theory? “Maybe Capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived, and finished off the planet.” Yep, predatory capitalism and the free market destroyed Mars and this should be a lesson to us all. Well, one thing you have to admit about Chavez. He’s make a great Las Vegas show. Unfortunately for Venezuelans, that’s not his venue.

Current Events

Afghans “avenge” Koran burning, kill 12 (NYT)

Sen. Lindsey Graham on First Amendment limits (Politico)

Regarding Lindsey Graham (National Review)

Terry Jones explains himself (Christian Post)

Top 10 reasons burn-a-Koran day is unbiblical (CP)

The GOP path to prosperity (WSJ)

GOP blueprint would remake Medicare, Medicaid (NYT)

Moment of truth (NYT)

The Ryan Resolution (WSJ)

Medicare for a new century (WSJ)

Budget battles test both leaders (NYT)

How Ryan’s plan would change Medicare (CSM)

USSC grants stay in AZ execution (AP)

USSC upholds AZ tax credit program (NYT)

USSC upholds AZ tax credit program (CBS)

Read the Opinion (Findlaw)

Q&A with Rick Santorum (Christianity Today)

CC--Christianese: Omniscience (part 1 of 3)

· --Literally, it means all-knowing or possessing all knowledge.
--In some ways, this seems almost bafflingly massive, and it should.
--But in other ways, it’s just a byproduct of the other attributes of God.

--If He is all-powerful and is the one who holds the entire universe together at every moment, then it’s pretty logical to realize that He knows every single little aspect of that universe fully.
--If there were any portion of it He did not know this way, He wouldn’t really be in control of it and this would constitute either a limit on His power or His sovereignty or His sustaining of it all.
--But there’s an important distinction between the knowledge of God and the knowledge of people, a distinction which is not captured by the simple ideas of a tremendous difference of scope.
-- See, the experience of human knowledge isn’t just that it’s limited by our senses and our location and other factors. It’s the fact that it is acquired. We receive information and thereby acquire knowledge.
--For God, since He is the creator and sustainer of everything, there is no sense in which He ever acquires information. He literally is the source of information, the disseminator of it. Things come to be first in His mind and then in reality and then they can be known by other beings like us.
--Even when God looks at things and seems to “discover” them to be good or pleasing, this is a human way of speaking rather than an accurate representation of God “gaining” perspective.

4PM Quote

“In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.” --Fashion pioneer Coco Chanel

Once again, what seems to be correct at first glance winds up having devastating and evil consequences when thought through fully. Although this seems like a definition (similarity is replaceability, difference is irreplaceability), what she’s really saying is that the key to being a valuable human being is to be different and therefore irreplaceable.

Coco seems to think that human beings are essentially similar until they differentiate themselves somehow with their eccentricities. But this is a false starting point and a fabulous recipe for neurotic insecurity! “Am I different enough to be a real person yet?” How about starting with the idea that each individual is so totally unique in their nature that it must be a sinful paradigm to think of them as being ever replaceable at all. Ask a parent whether his children are replaceable. It’s not that they are so different or unique from a social scientist’s point of view. (That may be a telling indictment of social science, by the way). It’s that they are so unique from his point of view since they are HIS children. Nobody is replaceable, therefore it’s not necessary to strive toward irreplaceability and the differences that seem to make it so. Stop trying so hard to be different. You already are.

3PM Quote

“The less of routine, the more of life.”
--Philosopher Amos Bronson

This is a wickedly false view of humanity which reduces the meaning of life to a variety fetish. Although routine can of course have its own dangers, the notion that somehow the quality of life is related to a lack of repetition is simply false. Try telling a stay-at-home mother that her life is less life because she is changing diapers, feeding, wiping noses, washing dishes, and preparing meals over and over and over and over and over again. It is her loving devotion to something other than personal self-stimulation that makes her sacrifice of variety such a bountiful demonstration of love. We have an expression that “variety is the spice of life,” which is much more apt, since the implied contrast here is that no one eats three meals a day of spice. Variety may enhance the meat and vegetables and starch of solid routines, but don’t worship it as the purpose of life.

2PM Mariah Carey’s nursery.

In anticipation of her twins (a boy and a girl) being born soon, Mariah Carey is building a tremendously luxurious nursery, including walk-in closets, a gold-and-onyx couch worth $1 million, descending flat-screen TVs, and diamond-encrusted iPods for each child. According to this story, “It might seem over the top, but Mariah has waited a long time for her baby dreams to come true and she says the twins will be the most spoilt kids on the planet.” Now, I have no idea whether Mariah Carey will actually turn out to be a good parent (along with Nick Cannon) or not. But the early indications here are not good. Yet this notion of spoiling children really raises a concern all of us parents should take seriously. If God is loving and the best Parent there is. The real question we must at least periodically ask ourselves is whether we’re capable of depriving our children of things for their own good the way He deprives us of things for ours.

Wacky Wednesday--Why Would I Want Salvation?

Note: Before reading the following arguments, please understand that they are not what I believe. On Wednesdays, I deliberately argue for wrong ideas, challenging my listeners to call and defend the obvious right answer, which is usually far harder than one would expect. This is a summary of what Wacky Andrew will be arguing, not a representation of what real Andrew believes.

--Explain to me why I would want it?

--Everything I understand and like about my life is stuff you say won’t be true in heaven.

--There’s not going to be any controversy in heaven, right? But I like controversy.

--There’s not going to be any problems in heaven, right? But I like solving problems.

--We won’t have sex in heaven? And why in the world would I look forward to that?

--Can I play X-box in heaven? Golf? Will I still shank shots? Will it bother me? The whole fun is that it bothers me.

--Why would I want to sit around singing boring songs all day long?

--An hour of church is already too long, and you’re telling me I should be eager to experience church for eternity?

--Will Christians be there? That alone is reason enough to not go.
--Salvation would require me to obey this tyrant of a God you say is really good but who punishes decent people with hell forever? Really?
--So, this egomaniacal tyrant of a God wants me to sit around worshipping Him for all of eternity singing one word over and over, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” and you think that sounds like an appealing thing?
--Your Bible says I should hate my parents, my wife, and everything in my life if I’m going to be a disciple of Jesus. Does that sound like a good trade?
--Your Bible says I should rather cut my eye out and my arm off rather than miss heaven. Well, you’ll pardon me for thinking that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
--Christians don’t really seem all that happy, and they’re supposed to be the ones showing me what heaven will be like?
--I understand that hell sounds like a pretty bad thing, but most of the portraits of heaven don’t sound much better, to be honest with you.
--To get to heaven, I need to take up a cross and deny myself? Ooooh. So much fun.

CC--Christianese: Omnibenevolence

--Literally it means all-loving or totally or fully loving or wanting good toward all others.
--When the Bible says that God is Love, it doesn’t mean that God is a loving being or that love is something you can say of God. It really means that His very Nature is constituted by Love, just like His very Nature is Spirit.
--This means that God finds His maximum satisfaction in the service of others, in devotion and sacrifice for others.
--What it means in practical terms is that God always wants what is best for each of us and for all of us together.
--This is the basis of all morality.
--It also means that there is no possibility of being more loving and sacrificial and generous than God is.
-- Just like with the issue of omnipotence, God is the maximum possible love-Being, so to speak.
--What this means for us is rather obvious. If God made us in His image and His primary essence is this sort of other-benefitting service orientation, then we should expect that the heart of human nature and the meaning of life would be inseparably connected to the very same thing.
--God is all-loving, and we should strive to be this way as well.
-- And when we do this, we should expect to find us the most satisfied with ourselves and the most pleasing to Him.
--And if God's very nature is love, and if God was always sufficient within Himself for all of eternity, it means He had to be in relationship for all of eternity. He was. In the Trinity.

2+3+4PM KPXQ Pastor's Appreciation Lunch

This Friday, April 8 from 11 AM-130 PM at the JW Marriott-Camelback Inn in Scottsdale. 10th Annual KPXQ Pastor’s Appreciation Lunch with Jim Daly of Focus on the Family. Free lunch and giveaways for all pastors and ministry staff. Register here.

Theological Tuesday

We routinely refer to Jesus as our Savior, but it recently occurred to me that many Christians may not even know what they mean by calling Him that. And if Christians aren’t sure, then it’s pretty likely that non-Christians aren’t either. This has serious implications for our evangelism if our goal is to get people to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior. To wit, shouldn’t they know what one is before we try getting them to accept Jesus as theirs? How much of the problems we have in discipleship might be tied to this? From what are they being saved? Is it only hell?

CC--Christianese 8c: God is He (part 3 of 3)

--So if God isn’t implying superiority, and if He’s every bit as much feminine as masculine, why does He refer to Himself as He so explicitly in Scripture and only obliquely as She, like in comparing Himself to a mother hen?
--Because what’s the purpose of the Bible after that of revealing who God is? Isn’t it in revealing who God is TO us?
--The Bible is ultimately a RELATIONAL text, revealing who God is, who we are, and also especially the relationship between God and us and His deepest desire to be married to us for eternity.
--And so the repeated use of masculine for God is not a way of saying men are closer to God’s nature than women, but of saying that God is TO US like a husband and father in the masculine aspects of those relationships.
--So “He” doesn’t in any way deny God’s equal femininity, but affirms His masculinity in relationship to us, His Bride.
--And that’s why we’re finally in a position to answer another fascinating question people sometimes wind up asking that really puts all this He-ness of God to the test.
--“Could Jesus have been incarnated as a woman?”
--That’s not quite the right way to ask the question.
--Obviously He “could” have. That’s trivial.
--The right way to ask it would be, “Would the symbolism and theology have been as rich and accurate if Jesus had incarnated in a female body?”
--And the answer is, “No.”
--But here immediately people go completely wrong by thinking that this means women are inferior or flawed or something like that. That’s not it at all.
--The real reason for Jesus not being in a female body is because it would have lied about His relationship to us, His Bride.

4PM Come on an LA gang turf safari?

Despite all the offered justifications, the idea of people paying to go on a guided tour of the gang turfs of LA like it’s some sort of human safari strikes me as extremely weird. You have to sign a waiver holding them free from liability if you happen to get hurt or shot in the process. Doesn’t that sound like a sensible thing to do with $65?

3PM All-you-can-throw-away sushi?

A California man recently sued an all-you-can-eat sushi shop because he claims to have suffered “humiliation, embarrassment, and mental anguish,” when they charged him a la carte prices for his sushi lunch. The reason? He refused to eat the rice and only ate the raw fish, which the owner claimed was a violation of the terms since the fish is obviously the most expensive ingredient. This would have been easy for the patron, David Martin, to avoid if only he had asked in advance if this would be a problem or if he could pay more to eat it his way. In essence, being a little bit less presumptive and selfish could have solved this whole mess. But the fact that he’s outraged is amazing since what he did was in essence to keep filling up plates of food at a buffet and throw away 80% of what he took, demanding the right to keep doing so.

2PM Art or garbage?

Since artists have historically been incapable of defining their own field (What is art?), I think we should let garbage collectors decide. Garbage men know what garbage is, and if they think something is trash, then it isn’t art. So, when a $50,000 fiberglass cactus in Albuquerque was recently knocked down by vandals, the decisive verdict was rendered not by art collectors who rescued the project but by the city workers who took it to the dump as trash and had it destroyed. Conclusion? Not art.

Ethics: Is Lingerie Good?

If you ask many women, they will say that lingerie is a perfectly normal and healthy part of a marriage because men are visual and it’s good for men to find their wives alluring. If you ask many men, they will agree. On the other hand, some Bible passages seem to push the other direction:

1 Timothy 2:9-10 says, “Likewise, I want women to adorn themselves with proper clothing, modestly and discreetly, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly garments; but rather by means of good works, as befits women making a claim to godliness.”

1 Peter 3:3-4 says, “Your adornment must not be merely external--braiding the hair, and wearing gold jewelry, or putting on dresses; but let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is precious in the sight of God.”

And if nakedness was good enough for Adam and Eve, why isn’t it fully satisfying enough for people today? So I thought we could talk about it tonight.

CC--Christianese 8b: God is He (part 2 of 3)

--The question is why God takes for Himself the masculine gender in pronouns. And this is actually both simple and complicated, as you’d expect with matters of gender.
--As we noted yesterday, our feminine role (we humans, both male and female) is to be the receivers of God’s blessings, initiated by Him as masculine to us. And our duty is to return love and affection to God for them.
--That, ultimately, is why God is He and we are she.
--But if gender (and masculine/feminine as gift giver/receiver) are showing something about God, isn’t God incomplete if He’s ONLY a He?
--That’s exactly the right question. And since we know God is complete, it means that God must have in Himself the gendered features He is revealing to us in male and female, right?
--But where is God the receiver of anything?
--In the Trinity. In the community of the Trinity, God is both masculine giver of honor, glory, and service and the receiver of it from one Person to another.
--So this means (and here I know some people are going to hear this wrong, but so be it) God is every bit as feminine as He is masculine.
--God made US in His Image, and then differentiated us into genders from the same single substance in Genesis 1 and 2. This alone should prove the equal dignity and value of men and women in imaging God’s full nature. Unless someone would prefer to affirm the heretical view that women are not really made in God’s image.
--And if someone chafes at the notion of God also being feminine, what you do in fact usually find underneath that reaction is a kind of superiority/inferiority of male over female.
--So if God isn’t implying superiority, and if He’s every bit as much feminine as masculine, why does He refer to Himself as He so explicitly in Scripture and only obliquely as She, like in comparing Himself to a mother hen?
--That’s for tomorrow.

2+3+4PM A breast-feeding baby for girls?

A new doll is soon to be available in American toy stores that will imitate breast-feeding. The girl wears some sort of halter top with a sensor that when the doll’s face comes near it will start cooing and moving like a suckling child. Apparently it’s causing quite a controversy already.

Part of me understands this only because it’s something new and different than we’re used to. And there’s always a semi-understandable “oddness” factor to something new. But on what grounds would you say that a doll that pretends to drink a bottle or pees in its diaper or cooes or imitates sleep is right but a doll that breast feeds is inappropriate? Can you really defend the position that all those other aspects of making a doll as lifelike as possible are good but this one is somehow forbidden? Is this the one aspect of mothering which is so distasteful we have to keep our young girls from reenacting it?

I know this is going to surprise some people, but my own boys (at least Spence and Ethan, the 6 and 4) both grew up seeing their younger brothers being breast-fed by mom. And you know what they did? Both of them at different times thought it was cute to imitate mom with their own dolls or stuffed animals. If this is a such universal and natural impulse by all children that even boys might do it, why not girls?

Some people are complaining that this is oversexualizing them. I don’t understand that at all. Would a girl who imitates this without using a special doll to do so be engaging in some inappropriate self-sexualization? Oversexualizing girls means turning them into objects of sexual desire. Enabling them to fantasize (play, imagine) about the day when they might have their own child to nurture and care for with their bodies is the most non-sexualizing (in the erotic sense we object to) thing I can imagine. In fact, if anything, it more reinforces the normalcy and health of having children and feeding them with your body, being a living gift to your children.

CC--Christianese: God is He (part 1 of 3)

--Why does the Bible call God a He/Him?
--We don’t mean that God is a masculine body. That doesn’t make any sense, given that God is Spirit, not bodied.
--Why not she or it?
--God is not It because God is telling us something very important about Himself through gender. And if He were It, then gender would be a useless clue about God. Also, it typically refers to objects rather than to people.
--But why not she?
--The basic difference between male and female is in who initiates the giving of a gift and who receives it. And since God is in every way the initiator of gifts: the gift of life, of love, of Creation, and of salvation, He is masculinity itself.
--But remember that masculine also means to serve, to be devoted to, to protect, to provide, and to nurture the female.
--And since the Bible calls us the Bride of Christ and very overtly compares our relationship to Jesus as that of a bride to a bridegroom, we learn that we all (male and female human alike) are positioned as feminine to God’s masculinity in all these ways.
--And if someone thinks that this is a statement of inferiority, just consider the sort of love displayed for a bride by a groom, the awe and wonder and devotion of the groom watching her walk down the aisle. Then consider the wonder and love displayed by God in making us, making Himself known to us, and in sending Jesus to die for us when we needed it.

2+3+4 PM "Thru the Bible" restarts tonight!

J. Vernon McGee’s program “Thru the Bible” restarts its five-year cycle of touring the Scriptures on the Bible Bus tonight. If you’ve never listened, why not check it out? It’s only the single most listened to Christian radio broadcast in history, heard in over 100 languages in over 200 countries. 7:00 PM right after my show every weekday and again at 4:00 AM for you night owls or early risers.