CC--Christianese: Eternal and Eternity

--When we say God is eternal, we mean a handful of things, some of which are obvious and some of which are not.
--The first is that before this universe was here, God existed.
--The second is that after this universe stop being here (if it does), God will still exist.
--So it’s useful to think of this series of events we think of as the history of the universe as being a big character in the middle act of a three act play. God is the only character in the first act, and we aren’t entirely sure what the third act will be (or if there might be fourth and fifth ones to come). But God will be the central character in all of them, regardless of what happens otherwise. There will never be a time without God.
--But there’s another aspect of God’s eternality that we often overlook. Though it’s very difficult to comprehend, the very experience of events leading from one to another that we call time is something that God created. Just as you might step forward and then step farther forward again, time in many ways is a kind of experience of movement in a direction, the difference for us being that we only go one way. But God not only made all three dimensions of height, length, and width, He also made time. So, although there’s no way for our language to express it, God existed before there was even time, and will exist even after there is time no longer.
--So not only is God first and last (why the Bible calls Him the Alpha and the Omega), God is somehow prior to and also totally beyond even the limit of being in such a series of events like time.
--That’s what we mean when we say God is eternal.
--And when we say that we will be with God for eternity (or in hell for eternity), we mean that our experience of either will go on without an end in time, possibly even beyond time in some way we can’t currently comprehend.

03/18/11 4PM Quote

“Harmony seldom makes a headline.”
--Silas Bent

What do you hear about the Middle East? Conflict and fighting all over the place, right? And what if there were merely peace in the Middle East? You know what you’d hear about it? Nothing. Do you know how I know? Because you never hear a news report, “Once again today, no fighting in Ireland.” But for years, what did everybody hear all the time about the fighting over there? Seriously, “Harmony seldom makes a headline.”

03/18/11 3PM Does genetics undermine morality?

Great article in Christianity Today, called “Sin in the Double Helix,” about the implications of genetic research and the connection between traits or abilities and genes. If it turned out that immorality or the disposition toward immorality were somehow connected with our genes, that wouldn’t disprove anything Christians have ever said. It would, in fact, just be a biologically based way of saying precisely what we’ve always said. People are twisted, right down to their very core nature. We just never called it genetics. We call it original sin.

03/18/11 2PM Lord of the Dance 3-D winner

Cathy Todd West wrote on KPXQ's facebook page: I like being confident that what I choose to listen to assists me in making additional positive choices!! Good input = good output

Congratulations, Cathy!

Current Events

Why not to worry about radiation in US (CSM)

Japan’s nuclear crisis: a timeline (CSM)

Does Twitter make better journalism? (NYT)

The digital pileup and its costs (NYT)

Happynomics? (NYT)

How the Internet tried to kill me (NYT)

Confessions of a recovering op-ed columnist (NYT)

A golf course shooting shakes the notion of refuge (NYT)

Poker bots invade online gaming (NYT)

Muslim leader denounces extremism at ASU conference (AZR)

Phoenix drops to 6^th largest city, behind Philly (AZR)

Let the kids rule the school (NYT)

New AZ mortgage-aid plan (AZR)

NRA declines to meet with Obama on gun policy (NYT)

CC--Christianese: God

--When Christians talk about God, what do they mean?
--Obviously, this is a fairly large subject, and it’s presumptuous to even pretend to cover it in a minute and a half.
--Nevertheless, here are some things that help define God.
--God has always existed.
--God has unlimited creative power.
--God made everything that we know and see around us.
--God is in control of everything that happens.
--God is perfect, meaning that everything He does could not have been done any better.
--Although Christians call God Him or He, this does not mean God has a gender in the sense that we understand it. In part, this is because God does not have a body, although He did choose to live a human life in a human body as Jesus.
--God’s character is defined by the fact that He feels maximum fulfillment in serving and benefitting others, which is the basis of all morality.
--God knows everything, including the future and our thoughts.
--God is the most beautiful Being in every possible sense of the word.
--God is both far too great and complex for us to understand and yet God has made it possible for us to still do so to a great degree. This is because God is a Person with Whom we can have a personal relationship, in fact three Persons and yet only one Being.

--God is the only Being like God that ever has or ever will exist.
--God has chosen to show us Who He Is through the text of the Bible, the world around us including especially the human body, and the various things He does in this world, particularly the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
--That, in it’s most ridiculously abbreviated form, is what Christians mean by “God.”

03/17/11 2+3+4PM Win Lord of the Dance 3-D Tickets

It’s St. Patrick’s Day! And to honor that, KPXQ is giving away tickets to Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance 3-D. Just check out our facebook page and post something about why you love KPXQ. I’ll be announcing the winner tomorrow on air at 1:56.

Wacky Wednesday--We Shouldn’t Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day

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.

--Does drinking honor God? Does overeating honor God? Does brawling honor God? Does chasing tarty women honor God?

--Isn’t it sort of racist? Do you get as excited about Cinqo de Mayo?

--Why does everyone want to be Irish anyhow?

--Nobody really even knows who he was or what he did.

--Saint(?) Patrick’s day is a bit Catholic, isn’t it?

--Protestants and Catholics in Ireland have been killing each other for as long as anyone can remember.

--Kissing strangers?

--“Lucky” cloverleaves?

--Where in the Bible do we see the command to celebrate individual people with holidays like this? If we’re going to have these sort of days, aren’t there better people to start with? St. Paul’s Day? St. Peter’s Day?

--How does it work to have a big party day with lots of meat and drink right in the middle of Lent?

--Are you going to pinch people who don’t wear green tomorrow?
.

Misc.
· From Wikipedia:
o Little is known of Patrick's early life, though it is known that he was born in Roman Britain in the 4th century, into a wealthy Romano-British family.
o His father and grandfather were deacons in the Church.
o At the age of sixteen, he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and taken captive to Ireland as a slave.
o It is believed he was held somewhere on the west coast of Ireland, possibly Mayo, but the exact location is unknown.
o According to his Confession, he was told by God in a dream to flee from captivity to the coast, where he would board a ship and return to Britain.
o Upon returning, he quickly joined the Church in Auxerre in Gaul and studied to be a priest.
o In 432, he again said that he was called back to Ireland, though as a bishop, to Christianise the Irish from their native polytheism.
o Irish folklore tells that one of his teaching methods included using the shamrock to explain the Christian doctrine of the Trinity to the Irish people.
o After nearly thirty years of evangelism, he died on 17 March 461, and according to tradition, was buried at Downpatrick.
o Although there were other more successful missions to Ireland from Rome, Patrick endured as the principal champion of Irish Christianity and is held in esteem in the Irish Church.
· The shortest St Patrick's Day parade in the world takes place in Dripsey, Cork. The parade lasts just 100 yards and travels between the village's two pubs.

Response
· Fun is presumptively good.
· It’s a Christian holiday, or at least it can be.
· The Bible actually loves parties.
· A feast is the predominant metaphor for heaven and eternity
· Several feasts were set up throughout the year and people were required by the Old Testament Law to save up for them.
· Even if it’s just a secular holiday, there’s nothing wrong with that.
· If in addition it’s a celebration of a guy who evangelized pagans, wow, that’s terrible.
· Instead of complaining that everything in the world isn’t as it should be, take a moment when something fairly decent shows up and embrace it. Stop beign such a Grinch about everything.
· Abstinence isn’t inherently better than indulgence.
· Feasting is very Godly
· Prodigal dad
· Jesus’s first miracle
· Passover
· The wedding supper of the lamb
· Feast parables
· It doesn’t have to be anything more than just good fun to be good.

Resources:
The real St. Patrick (CT)
St. Patrick's Day (Wikipedia)

CC--Christianese: How can we solve the problem?

--If we can understand why we develop insider terminology, we may see a way to solve the problem.
--Nietzsche said that we use labels as a way of gaining power over things that we don’t fully or really understand. Like planting a flag on a mountain to claim it.
--And once we’ve put a label on something, we often pretend like that proves we have the idea well under control, forgetting that we really don’t. It’s like the authority of Adam in naming the animals.
--But of course the problem is that this little deception is easily exposed when someone simply asks us to explain the meaning of a term in such a way that they can understand it.
--Similarly, for Ludwig Wittgenstein, the best way to know whether someone actually understands an idea (such as a math operation like addition) is to have him explain it to children.
--And the common result of forcing people to examine their ideas and terms so rigorously that they reach this level of clarity is that they actually find the terms to be largely unnecessary.
--So my goal in dealing with the problem of Christianese is to accomplish two goals.
--First, that you understand these concepts properly.
--Second, that you can explain them to someone else through the use of ordinary words and examples. In the end, this is the best way to avoid all the problems I’ve been outlining for the last two days, even though it’s perfectly understandable why we acquire terminology in the first place.
--And what this will do is put us in the right frame of mind so that if someone ever does ask us what a term means (when we’ve inadvertently reverted to using it), we won’t react with the contempt of the fake expert who only knows the terms, but with the educational patience of the actual expert who understands the ideas.

03/16/11 2+3+4PM Arizona Cityfest

It's finally here! The Luis Palau Arizona Cityfest is happening this Saturday and Sunday at Tempe Town Lake. Toby Mac, Skillet, X-sports demonstrations, activities for kids, evangelism, and anything else you can name. Come out and stop by the KPXQ tent. I'll be there from 5PM to 10PM on Sunday.

Theological Tuesday

--Did Job really exist?

Show notes:
Textual indications that the book is an inspired parable or play rather than a history
o Just doesn’t seem like real life that people would speak for such extended duration in a conversation.
o Getting back double at the end seems quite a fairy tale
o Naming the daughters only and only at the end.
o Having 7 sons and 3 daughters at the beginning and at the end.
o The bit about getting back double of everything just has the sound of a fairy tale (they rode off into the sunset and lived happily ever after) to it.
o The style of speech is extremely unusual for actual conversation. Who speaks for pages at a time and then listens while his friends do the same? Very uncommon in real life.
o The characters seem more like archetypes or caricatures for kinds of errors than they do like real people.
o The whole backdrop of there being these regular times for the sons of God to come and be in front of God repeatedly is just strange.
o The level of the catastrophe at the beginning and the doubling of everything at the end is a bit hyperbolic

Textual indications that the book is a history rather than an inspired parable or play
o “There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job….” Job 1:1
o Use of names for people
o Giving of numbers of cattle, etc.
· Other information
o We don’t know where Uz was (or even if it was a real place for sure)
o We don’t know who wrote this book
o It’s extremely old, perhaps older than any other book in the Bible.
o Ancient literature of fable wouldn’t have included names of children and other specifics so as to appear like a history.

Expert views
o "There is a minority view among Rabbinical scholars, for instance that of Rabbi Simeon ben Laqish, that says Job never existed (Midrash Genesis Rabbah LXVII). In this view, Job was a literary creation by a prophet who used this form of writing to convey a divine message."
o From the Jerusalem Talmud we hear a similar statement by Simeon ben Laqish:"Job never actually existed; he is only the imaginary hero of the poem, the invention of the poet" (Yer. Sotah 20d)."

Would it matter if it were “merely” a play?
o Does it become more or less powerful when thought of as an actual guy or as a prophetic illustration?
§ Being real carries more tangibility to the modern reader
§ Would it to the ancient reader?
o Does it matter in the context of the book
o Does anything about the book suffer from the idea that it’s a literary invention for a point?
o You like Jesus’s parables, right?
o Does anyone believe that Lucy, Peter, Edmund, and Susan are real? Does it matter?
o Must Job exist?
o What hangs on it?
o Can the Bible be the Word of God without Job existing?
o Does the idea of even considering the possibility scare you?
o Why?
o What is our notion (in America in 2011) of epistemology and metaphysics?

What does it mean to be real?
o So, what’s more real, those events or the God who oversees them as revelations of Himself?
o Did Little Red Riding Hood or Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty exist? Does it matter insofar as those fairy tales convey real meaning and content?
o Can something be true without being historically real?
o Can it be real without having existed in history?
o Does it tell or reveal truth even if it isn’t factual?
o Which is greater the fact or the truth?
o In art, is a painting ever true, by this standard?
o Doesn’t the rendering of it immediately distort it?
o Even photorealistic paintings aren’t real. A photograph isn’t real.
o The beauty of language is that it distorts the physical reality it describes, but this also can mean that it brings even more meaning and truth to that reality, especially when the five senses (which by no means are the key standard of either nature or ultimate reality) aren’t equipped to capture the full truth behind what they perceive.
o We read newspapers and we see photos and we think that defines truth.
o Can something be true even if it isn’t “real?”
o Does God exist independent from and prior to the physical world of events?
o Is 1984 less true because it’s science fiction?

Can a story be more true precisely because it isn’t real?
o To deconstruct the story is often to destroy it.
o The story is the meaning.
o Stories don’t necessarily embody points or lessons, maybe the point or lesson is the far less real thing than the story you drew it from.
o Careful here, this verges on dualism or Platonism
o “not limited by corrupt flesh…”
o Gnosticism

Are there other examples of non-factual content in the Bible?
o Jesus’s parables
o Nathan’s parable to David
o Various prophetic dreams, visions, and messages.
o Songs
o Psalms
o Proverbs
o Ecclesiastes (Note that Job is right in this section of the Bible)
o Tons of prophetic imagery.

What are concerns if it isn’t a factual story?
o It feels like compromising on the authority of Scripture
o Liberals who don’t take the Bible seriously of course love this idea.
o The slope seems slippery. Like if we admit that any part isn’t historically reliable we’ll lose the whole thing.
o If some parts of the Bible aren’t factually historically real, how can we know what is and what isn’t?
o
§ Is this really so hard to tell?
§ And even if it isn’t easy, it’s a task the Bible itself presents to us with its wide variety of literary styles.
§ You can’t analyze and dissect each of these the same way, as if they are mere logical constructs.

What’s the real point of Job
o It’s not that this guy suffered.
o It’s that this human really didn’t deserve anything he didn’t get (hell is like this only forever).
o And that this guy shows us by contrast the real Savior Jesus who suffered far worse than this (and didn’t deserve it) but did so not only without complaining but chose to suffer this way out of love for us.
o Job is learning to love God as opposed to God’s gifts.
o Jesus came to lose the gift of God’s love in order that we could have it.
o Is the Bible about what God did or Who He Is more primarily?

My only view is that you don’t have to have a view.
o It’s every bit as meaningful and carries just as much real revelation if it never took place in history, as long as it’s genuinely inspired by God, which it clearly is.

CC--Christianese: Why is it problematic?

--Although it’s perfectly normal, there are loads of problems with having insider terminology.
--First, the basic idea of Christianity is to share our faith with other people.
--It’s also a problem to have insider lingo because outsiders feel excluded and don’t want to admit they don’t know what’s going on.
--In some social groups (academic disciplines, for instance), this can be used deliberately as a way to screen people or make them feel inferior or like outsiders (marginalized).
--But in Christianity, where the heart of our faith is to share it with others and include them in our thing, it’s really contrary to everything to have language exclude, especially since God so closely identifies Himself with language (The Word).
--Another problem with Christianese is that in replacing a complex idea with a term, you run the risk that subsequent users of the term may shade or distort its meaning. Once again, precisely the usefulness of the symbol or term (its simplicity) leads to its problem of vagueness. When you say less, you say less. Der.
--Yet a third problem with having insider terms is that the insiders themselves may not really understand them even though they are capable of using them fluently. And this is a barrier to their own understanding of the meaning and obviously of their ability to communicate it to non-members.

03/15/11 4PM The coming cashmere shortage.

Cashmere (the material made from goat hair) apparently requires particular conditions to grow, and this may mean we don’t have enough of it soon. In Mongolia, where most of the best cashmere is taken from the goats, the problem is it’s been too cold the last two winters (under 50 below zero). So there isn’t enough food to feed both the animals and the herdsmen. Add to this the problem that the recession has reduced the price so low that they can’t turn a profit selling it. So, they’ve been slaughtering the goats and eating them instead. Add to this the problem that other places where cashmere is produced (Iran and Afghanistan) have had too warm of winters recently so the goats aren’t producing the necessary thickness of hair. So, none of the normal places fall into the environmental zone needed (plus the recession), and it looks like there may be a global cashmere shortage, not to mention that it’s bad for the shepherds! No big lesson here. I just thought it was fascinating.

03/15/11 3PM Perfect political cartoon.

What a great reminder that evil, even great evil, may ultimately only point to the person who committed it.

03/15/11 2PM NYC abortion rate 41% overall, 60% among blacks

Data released in January from 2009 about New York City abortion rates is incredibly depressing. The overall rate is 41%, and that rate skyrockets to 60% among blacks. This means that for every five pregnancies in NYC, there are only three live births because two have been aborted. Among blacks, reverse the numbers. For each two new children, three black babies were killed in the womb. As this outstanding article in the NY Post points out, “It is indeed heartbreaking that 60 percent of all unborn African-American babies are aborted. Just think about it: Black women in our city have three abortions for every two live births. The Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nation are giving "fist bumps" all around.” So how does the argument that better safe sex programs would solve this work? Oh, yeah, they’ve been active in the city and supported by the state for decades. The track record is clear. If we hate babies (and black babies in particular!), we should keep abortion safe and legal because it most certainly will not be rare.

Ethics: Should Premarital Sex Be Illegal?

BYU’s promising basketball player has been sidelined for the remainder of the season because he broke the honor code when he had premarital sex with his girlfriend. Apart from causing a wave of complaints about privacy and the modern age, I think it raises a very interesting moral question. Just how bad is premarital sex, and is it bad enough that it should be against the law (as it is in the Bible)? Can you make the case for such a law on secular grounds? On religious grounds? Would our society be better off with such a law? (Were we better off when we had such laws?)

CC--Christianese: What is it?

--We’re starting a whole new series on Christianese…terms and words Christians use that other people don’t necessarily understand, including many Christians.
--People sometimes ridicule or lament the existence of such terminology. But this misses the point a bit.
--So why do we have such specialized words?
--Having insider terms and lingo is normal.
--Any group of people with a long enough history and complex enough concepts is going to develop shorthand terminology to refer to more complicated subjects or ideas. This is the way all language works.
--Try imagining every time someone wanted to talk about politics and didn’t have the word “republic.” You’d have to say, “I’m glad we live in a place where the citizens hold the political power and delegate representatives to make rules on their behalf within limits set by a Constitution and without royalty.” See why we use terms?
--But the advantage that terminology gives to insiders is precisely its greatest problem to outsiders and newcomers who don’t yet speak the lingo.
--And since Christianity is specifically intended to reach out to non-members, this creates a structural problem which tends to hinder the very work of evangelism (a term we’ll define, but not today).

CC--10th Commandment: How is it connected to the 0th Commandment?

--"I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.”
--"You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor."
--There’s a beautiful symmetry to these. All the other C’s flow from an error in the preamble, failing to ponder who God is and what he’s done for us, therefore making Him first and foremost in our lives.
--The implied contrast of the preamble is that no one and nothing else has ever done anything like this for you.
--But the real first manifestation of failing to consider God isn’t murder and theft or even breaking the Sabbath. It’s coveting.
--Just as every other major sin starts with failing the 0th one, each of them doesn’t happen immediately or directly, they all begin with heart longings that we indulge until they become actions. --And if you find yourself coveting, look back to God, your deliverer and provider, and remind yourself that He is sovereign over your life and to not worry about it. Then, go serve your neighbor and rejoice in his successes as a way of showing that you trust God and His ways of building community and acquiring the true riches of living and loving as He does.
--So this bookends the whole list and reminds us that just as all sin begins with turning away from God, it begins in the heart before it ever reaches the level of a crime action.
--One almost wants to say that the list should both begin AND end with the preamble as a reminder for emphasis.

03/11/11 4PM Baggage fees costing TSA millions

So it seems like a simple matter of a business decision, right? Airlines decide to start charging customers a fee for checked baggage. Oh, sure it’s annoying, and it’s a good reason to fly Southwest, but lots of people just pay the fee. But lots of other people do the next best thing: just pack less and carry-on more. Unfortunately, this new increase in carried-on bags demands more man-hours by TSA inspectors because they are handling a significantly higher volume. This of course costs money because they have to hire and schedule more hours. In testimony before Congress, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano said the annual cost of airlines doing this to the TSA: $260 million!!! This is a classic example of what economists call “externalizing” a cost to someone other than the corporation. In this case, the TSA, therefore the Federal Budget, and therefore you and me. Great work, airlines!

03/11/11 3PM Atheist to host BBC Bible program

BBC has announced that an atheist Hebrew scholar (Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou) is going to host its new series on the "The Bible’s Buried Secrets." It’s going to explore modern archeological discoveries and how they might influence our understanding of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Now, I think some people would freak out because , “How can a person of anti-faith properly represent the faith text we call the Bible?” But I don’t share that view at all. There’s no problem hearing it from an atheist, and in fact what you might hear is a completely unbiased perspective instead of a doctrinally limited one. In fact, this is one reason why I wish I had taken Greek from the atheists in my philosophy department back at Illinois, since I’d know they for sure weren’t importing any doctrinal bias into the vocabulary. (Although it would have been ancient, rather than Koine Greek.) But part of my non-objection to this is that when I went to Israel, I learned a ton about my Christian faith from a Jew who probably knows the New Testament better than 90% of Christians. Sometimes outsiders have a unique capacity to show us things that insiders can’t.