Category: Uncategorized

by Robert Martin

This past summer, as we do every summer, my family (myself, my wife, and our two daughters), met up with my father, his siblings, and all of their families down to grandchildren—The Reunion of the descendants of Clyde and Fanny Martin. As always, it was an amazingly fun affair with many in-jokes being retold, those friendships that only cousins can have being renewed, and all the old stories being brought out and dusted off.
But one thing struck me this time that I wasn’t sure I had noticed before. Without exception, everyone who was there had been through, either recently or in the not too distant past, some event of suffering and pain. Cancer was present in the room. Broken relationships were inscribed in the faces of spouses and children. Long term illnesses were still taking their toll. While poverty itself was not an issue, certainly finances were difficult for many. Mental illness was not unheard of in our gathering, either. Parents were dealing with difficult children, and even the children were impacted by all of these things as they had been watching and observing their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and siblings struggle through the many different aspects of pain.
This was, and is, my family. I don’t know if there are any other families out there like ours, but I would expect that in any such gathering, it would be a rarity for there not to be some form of suffering taking place. It may not be widespread, it may just be one or two people, but it will be there. And, along with those experiencing the suffering, there will always be someone close to the situation who, while the suffering is not their own,  must deal with it every day as caregivers.
The attention in these family gatherings, many times, is on those who are experiencing the pain directly. We defer to the grand aunt facing chemotherapy. We give space and grace to the grand uncle wrestling with depression. The spouse having to break off the marriage is given comfort by many loved ones. But, what about the grand uncle who drives the aunt to chemo every week? Or the grand aunt who has to diligently be aware of her spouses depression? Or the parents of that broken marriage, tending to the many feelings of pain and anger? What do they do?
My family has managed to answer these questions. Although, it wasn’t something that we distinctly chose to do, consciously. There was no declaration of “This is what we will do”. It was simply what happened. For us, it was a natural effect of us being family. When a family member is suffering and another family member is a caregiver, the whole family rallies. Prayer, emotional support, finances when needed, a shoulder to cry on, a caring ear, all these things, freely given. We are family. There is no question that we care for each other, both the person needing the care and the caregiver.
In The Caregiver’s Beatitudes, one of the primary themes I express is the role that community plays in caring for a loved one and for the support of the caregiver. Alone, we will struggle, we will fight, but it will take everything that is in us. There are those who make it through alone, but those are extraordinary situations, I believe. Instead, I believe that the community plays an immense role in this dynamic. What do we do when a loved one suffers? We gather around them, we gather around the caregivers, and together, as a community, we support each other. This is what we do.

by Shauna Marie Hyde
(For the complete post, click here)

Recently I lost someone who I never dreamed would be someone I would ever meet much less deeply love. Our story is told in the book, “The Vicar of Tent Town.” One day a few years ago I heard about some people living off the Elk River in West Virginia, so I went to see what was going on. It was a slippery muddy hike but I found them. They had cleared off an area and had tents set up with tarps overhead, a fire pit, and had made a fairly decent place to live.
As I entered the camp, a man came up to meet me. We introduced ourselves and sat down to have a chat. Noah told me later that I was the first church person who had sat down and spent time in Tent Town. That simple act was what made him take me seriously and know that he could trust me.
I began to visit often trying to bring needed items and to take them somewhere if they needed a ride. The church people began to accompany me or send donations if they were unable to go. Bit by bit they just became a part of the congregation. Noah became a dear friend. I learned a lot about homelessness from spending time with them and hearing their stories. I learned that many of them have jobs, many are educated, and many are cynical about church people. A lot of churches won’t help unless thy sit through a church service, have a long list of unobtainable rules and are so judgmental in their attitudes that they never treat homeless people as people. They get tired of the assumptions that they are lazy moochers, all of them are druggies, or are mentally ill, or are running from the law. There is plenty of that; however, there are two major populations of homeless people that might surprise you: veterans and kids running away from abuse and LGBTQ youth who have been kicked out of their homes.
Did you know there are more empty buildings than there are homeless people in the USA? “There are more than five times as many vacant homes in the U.S. as there are homeless people, according to Amnesty International USA.” http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/more_vacant_homes_than_homeless_in_us_20111231 I could not even begin to guess at how many church buildings there are that often have empty rooms the majority of the time.
How is someone living on the streets, working less than 30 hours per week because that was the only job they could find, supposed to save up enough money for rent, deposit, utilities and its deposit, etc.? What little money they make goes to food, required clothing for the job, and bus fare and basic survival.
There was a time when anyone could find sanctuary in a church. Now people are more worried about their buildings, getting sued, vandalized, stolen from, and that something terrible will happen when they offer sanctuary. Guess what? Something terrible is happening without “those people” being around. We see life-threatening violence in schools, malls, and churches…and it isn’t “those people” doing it. That is a heartbreaking issue for another blog.
When it comes to the homeless and working poor we are just too busy, too selfish, too focused on what we want, getting our way, etc., to offer people sanctuary. It is time to be proactive with world transformation! It is time to be the church and offer sanctuary to those who are hurting, lost, scared, unheard, and slipping through life as living ghosts.
The irony is Christians worship someone who was homeless when he walked this earth. Possessions did not slow him down, people did. Guess what else? He was crazy – crazy in love with humanity! He was crazy enough to sacrifice a life of comfort and then life itself in order to offer the world sanctuary.   I propose revival! I propose we sell all the trappings and fancy accoutrements we believe we simply must have in order to worship a God who decided to become human and homeless in order to reach us. I propose we offer sanctuary to any and to all in the name of God who went to such great lengths to offer sanctuary to all of humanity.
Who knows? Perhaps my friend Noah might still be alive and well on this earth.

By Steve Kindle

Somewhere in the world there should be a society consciously and deliberately devoted to the task of seeing how love can be make real and demonstrating love in practice….If God, as we believe, is truly revealed in the life of Christ, the most important thing [to God] is the creation of centers of loving fellowship, which in turn infect the world. Whether the world can be redeemed in this way we do not know. But it is at least clear that there is no other way. ~Elton Trueblood

One of the most difficult realities for American Christians to accept is that nothing, and I mean NOTHING belongs to anybody. Every thing in the universe is the Lord’s. And every person. It’s difficult because we all conduct our lives in the midst of a consumer society that rewards acquisitiveness and power over others. As the bumper sticker proudly announces, “The one with the most toys wins.” So we live our lives competing against one another, and when we win, we feel very entitled to ownership of the spoils. As one of my parishioners put it when asked to help support a local “safety net” initiative, “I worked hard for what I have and no one’s going to take it from me.”
No wonder congregations are uneasy during “Pledge Season.”
Another strong disincentive for understanding biblical stewardship is that it has largely been reduced to issues of money. Our “Stewardship Moments” are confined to urging congregants to increase their annual monetary pledges. And on a typical Sunday, the worship leader may include the “many ways we give in addition to our bills and checks,” yet, the focus is on what goes into the collection plate.
The only thing that can turn this around is a comprehensive understanding of stewardship that relocates the Christian from a consumer of church services to a caretaker in partnership with God of all that God gives us to manage on God’s behalf.
Human beings were created for a high purpose—to collaborate with God in “tilling and keeping.” To till means to derive from creation what it is intended to yield for sustenance and comfort. To keep means to manage the tilling in such a way that those generations who follow will be able to derive from tilling the same level of sustenance and comfort. This two-fold process is intended to maintain a self-sustaining world into perpetuity, but only as long as we remember who owns it, and that it is not ours to usurp for our own advantage.
God intended for Israel to be “a light to the nations,” a light that displayed for all to see how living by God’s intentions for the world would result in shalom, well-being for all.  The psalmists envisioned a time when all the world would ascend the hill to Jerusalem for instruction in God’s ways. Today the church’s calling  is to model a way of life built on, in Trueblood’s words, “the creation of centers of loving fellowship, which in turn infect the world.”

My book is an effort to lift up this majestic calling that we humans are privileged to undertake by looking carefully at the biblical material, coming to see the world as God would have it, see how some of the Scriptures’ traditional meanings need to be reassessed, as well as find rich meaning in otherwise overlooked verses. I even provide a sermon in the final section.

 
Here’s a link to a serious book review by a Bob Cornwall: http://www.bobcornwall.com/search?q=Stewardship

Bob Cornwall, author of Unfettered Spirit: Spiritual Gifts for the New Great Awakening, has published an extract on ordination (The Biblical Call to Ordained Ministry). I think this would be a good launching pad for a discussion of the nature of ordination and what this means about church polity, if anything.
Read Bob’s post first, but then think about this: Are there any functions of the church that should require the participation of an ordained minister? What are these things? Why does ordination only apply to one called to exercise pastoral gifts? (Does it?)
 

This is the third in a set of responses to Philosophy for Believers. Links to all responses can be found in the introductory post to the series, along with a schedule of future posts.
As I get older, I grow increasingly fascinated with the question of how one arrives where one does in terms of understanding one’s faith. In looking back over my life, I realize, as I have written elsewhere, that I was strongly influenced by a theological system that was built upon a philosophical foundation that emphasized the compatibility of faith and human reason. It is this background that I bring to this question and to the reading of Dr. Vick’s comprehensive overview.
As I have come to see things, faith does not exist outside of reason. In other words, for faith to be faith, it need not be unreasonable. Intelligent, rational beings can accept scientific findings and theories, including that of evolution, and be able to posit a strong faith in both the presence and the current activity of the divine.

At the same time, faith does not require proof. While faith is not unreasonable, it does not depend on being proven. At the risk of jumping too far ahead in the argument to Aquinas, it must be noted that even Aquinas’ five ‘proofs’, in my view, point the evidence in the direction of God yet do not contain within them the absolute proof that would come from a direct manifestation of the divine in the present moment.
Thus to Fred, I would say with Kierkegaard that for faith to be faith, there has to be the element of leap. I would also say that the leap is not only not unreasonable, but, to the contrary, is, in fact, quite reasonable. Thomistic claims of unmoved mover, first cause and the like make reasonable sense.  In asserting these arguments, one makes use of one’s mind to determine the validity of a claim for God. Yet the conclusion, while making sense, does not, as I see it, constitute absolute proof.
With respect to Frederica, we are told that she believes that she can’t prove God’s existence. We are also told that she does not believe that you have to prove God’s existence to believe. It seems that Frederica, if she were to believe in God, would be more open to an experiential understanding of the divine, i.e. something that might move her spiritually and touch her heart. That experiential sense of the divine is very powerful in many people and has been in the history of religion.

When all is said and done, the bottom line for me is that for faith to be faith, it has to entail FAITH. In other words, when it comes to the interplay of divine and human, there is so much that we simply do not know. The not knowing does not negate the possibility or value of believing. It remains a necessary safeguard into thinking that we actually know more than we do, one of the great dangers in the history of religion!

This is the third in a set of responses to Philosophy for Believers. Links to all responses can be found in the introductory post to the series, along with a schedule of future posts.
There are a number of crucial issues in this chapter, but I think the best place to respond is on the issue of “proof” and “belief,” question #19 in the book exercises. “Fred believes that he can prove the existence of God. He believes that to believe in God you have to be able to prove that God exists. Frederica believes neither of these. What is the issue between them?”
Having discussed what it means to believe, in chapter 3 of his book Philosophy for Believers  Edward Vick turns to the more controversial question of why we believe.  It is also where I have my first real disagreement with Vick.  I had two main issues with Vick’s discussion, the way he described the three main approaches, and his understanding of faith.
Vick describes three main approaches to supporting religious beliefs, presuppositionalism, evidentialism, and fideism.  Unfortunately from my perspective the first two get a somewhat distorted presentation. For example, I would not fall into the presuppositionalist camp, but I was still somewhat surprised that as an example of presuppositionalism Vick choses the presupposition that:

The Bible is to be taken as true and its world view is to be taken as the context and basis for all assertion we make. (p 58)

While I agree with Vick that this is “a gross oversimplification” I have no doubt that supporters of presuppositionalism would say the same thing and would then go on to explain that the statement itself is an oversimplification of their views.
Much the same can be said about Vick’s presentation evidentialism, though perhaps because it was closer to my beliefs, I found his presentation even more suspect.   For example, Vick writes that “both alternative views agree in their belief that the Bible is true. There is no need for proof or discussion of that assumption” (p. 59). That is not even close to my view. If, as an evidentialist, I believed that “there is no need for proof or discussion” about the Bible, then why did I write a book called “Evidence for the Bible?”
Vick goes on to further claim that evidentialists make another presupposition that “the claims made in the very varied ‘books’ of the Bible can be shown to be true” (59).  Vick is not very clear on this point. If he means that evidentialists view at least some of them as testable and open to examination, he is correct. But this is a “presupposition” that investigators of any proposition make, be it in the realm of religion, history, science or any other type of claim.  As such it would be a valid point, but hardly an argument against evidentialism.
If on the other hand, he means that evidentialists assume propositions are true before they can go “in search of ‘evidence’” that is at best simply false.   In addition, it would be a back handed way of claiming that evidentialists are biased and thus would be little more than a fallacious ad hominem attack.
Finally, Vick claims the “hidden Presupposition is that faith is in some way depended upon possessing and understanding evidence” (p 60).  Again, this is simply false, but his error goes to the crux of the issue and is one of my major issue with Fideism, which Vick defines as, “We come to truth via faith, not reason.”
A big problem here is that Vick leaves faith undefined,except to quote August Sabatier, “Faith, which, in the Bible was an act of confidence and consecration to God.”  While I basically agree with this view of faith, it does not explain how in faith we come to truth.

Faith is the confidence we have in a belief, more importantly it is the confidence we have that leads us to act.  We can believe that a bridge will hold our weigh, but it is only when we act and cross the bridge that we can be said to have faith.  We can believe in God, but if that belief does not affect how we live, then we do not have faith.
In addition, faith cannot stand alone. It requires an object, i.e., something in which to have faith. An important aspect of faith is that it is separate and distinct from evidence.  While one’s faith may be supported by evidence, it can also be a blind faith that lacks evidence, or is even contrary to the evidence.  Likewise faith is independent of truth.  Different people can have a strong faith in differing and even contradictory beliefs.   In short, faith is a statement of confidence in a belief, it tells you nothing about whether or not the belief is true.
As I pointed out last time, this is where evidence comes in.   To be clear, evidence is not required.  We are saved through faith, not through evidence and in fact, I believe many and probably most Christians came to a saving faith without any consideration of evidence.
But if the question is asked, what should I have faith in, faith will not answer this question. The Mormon in the example I wrote about last time, had faith in Mormonism.  Atheists have faith in their beliefs.  Everyone has faith in a great many things, and live their lives accordingly.   Thus, with so many possible objects of faith how do we know what to have faith in?  Why should we have faith in Jesus but not Allah, Vishnu, or Buddha?
This goes to the core of my problem with both presuppositionalism and fideism. Has God really left us to just randomly pick a presupposition or an object of faith?  Is it really, ‘You pays your nickel and you takes your chances,’ and then only after you die will you find out if you pick correctly?   The bottom line is that the only way one can objectively make a choice, or to know if your current faith is correct, is to look at the evidence.
Having said this, let me say that I do agree with Vick’s closing remarks, i.e., these are not rigid camps and that we must beware of oversimplification.  In reality, probably no one is in a single camp.  We all hold some beliefs because of a presupposition, others because of evidence and still others because the way we live our life gives us confidence in our belief.
But again, as Paul wrote in 1 Thess 5:21 “Instead, test everything. Hold on to what is good” (ISV).