Monday, February 23, 2009

Desert Island Dinner Party Invites

You remember these questions from college roommate surveys or ice-breakers.

1. If you could invite any three people to dinner, fictional or non-fictional, historic or contemporary, who would they be and why?

2. If you were stuck on a desert island and could only have one book, which book would it be and why?

If you're a follower of Jesus Christ, do you have to answer "Jesus" to Question 1 and do you have to answer "The Bible" to Question 2?

My first (reflexive) response is to say, no, being a Christian doesn't mean you have to give Christian answers to survey questions. David Crowder is not my favorite artist, John Piper is not my favorite author, and Facing the Giants is not my favorite movie. I always get annoyed when people have to put "Christian" answers to their preferences. Christ came to set us free, not entrap us in Christian cultural bases.

But my second response is that I'm supposed to be hinging my life, here and eternal, on the fact that Jesus is my first love, creator, best friend, and savior. And the Bible that sits on my shelf is supposed to be the living word of God, a "lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path," the ultimate source of day-to-day truth. If I'm at all serious about any of it, are my honest answers not obligated to be Jesus and the Bible respectively?

If I were given two free tickets to a Caribbean cruise, should I not take my fiancee? Sure, it's my choice in a technical sense, but if I chose anyone other than her, you'd be in the right to smack me and say, "What's the matter with you?"

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Coming Up For Air

Interactive experience and Wikipedia research clues me in to the enormous diversity and controversy of opinions surrounding the precedence for practice of baptism. (Fun fact: John 3 records that Jesus went around baptizing while John 4 said it was actually His followers. What a not-straightforward text.) I can't speak with great intelligence on the subject, but at church this Sunday, the pastor's sermon mentioned that one powerful idea associated with baptism is the symbolic act of being dead and buried (as you're immersed in the water) and then resurrected (as you rise back out of the water) as with Christ. Scriptures like Romans 6:3-5 and Colossians 2:11-12 seem to corroborate the theme.

If your imagination runs over this image, it's pretty arresting stuff. Imagine being forcibly held underwater, gasping for air, waves of shock and pain jarring through your nasal cavities, your torso arcing spasmodically. Death is no stasis, no absence of activity, but a terrifying, crushing, inexorable experience. And after the seconds-turned-eternity underwater, you suddenly rise, break over the surface, and gasp in a noisy, ragged breath that restores your lungs to capacity. It's a raw, powerful first breath that shakes you and punches you with the unmistakable miracle that you are now alive, gloriously alive, and free from the asphyxiating waters dripping off your face.

Maybe what I've described was not your baptism experience, but it might hold some bearing on what it means to be dead and then resurrected.

I keep a folded piece of paper in my Bible that reminds me of a figurative baptism I once had. During my freshman year of college, I was taking a computer science course in programming JAVA. Five months after I had taken my final exam, my friend Francis and I received a notice from the Rice University Honor Council that stated that we were being accused of colluding, specifically copying code, on said take-home exam. Never mind that I got an A+ and Francis failed the exam, that the evidence was incredibly circumstantial, and that we didn't cheat. We had a total of three or four successive hearings, spread out over a month-long period, each with the threat of suspension or expulsion with little to no means of appeal. Of course, for us, academic suspension would definitely mean the end of our Naval scholarships, which would mean we couldn't pay for school. During that month, Francis and I were as stressed as we'd ever been. We couldn't sleep at night, and every day was filled with continual worries of our college degrees, Naval careers, and lives swirling indefatigably down the toilet. No school would admit us after we were branded as cheaters. No employer would ever hire us. In a very melodramatic sense, we felt like we were on the verge of being separated from our lives, as good as dead. In a more practical sense, I lost ten pounds from stress and anxiety.

So after a month, we finally got a letter from the Honor Council that read as follows:

Matt Dunn, I am writing to inform you that the Honor Council has reached a decision regarding your case in COMP 201. The Honor Council has found you "Not In Violation" of the Honor Code in COMP 201.

I recall a very tangible, corporeal relief overwhelming me when I read those words of exoneration. Never mind that I was never actually guilty of the sin. In my mind, in some sense, I had considered myself dead and now I saw myself alive, and the best physical parallel was coming up for air after being held underwater.

It's a silly example, in retrospect, and I shouldn't have been so bent out of shape over something like being expelled from college. But the vivid sensation of being alive after my guilt was cleared was unforgettable. Like baptism, the letter physically reminds me of salvation. It has stayed in my Bible for over three years now.

Friday, February 13, 2009

Stranger than Fiction

The reason I haven't posted in a while, and probably won't for some time, is that I've been recently engrossed in the series Battlestar Galactica. It's been an enormously thought-provoking show whose episodes and developments posit challenging ideas about issues of human nature, purpose, and faith. A large subplot of the series has been about humanity's pursuit of God and the relevance of religious faith to both society and individual decisions. It's been my least favorite subplot, the part where they talk about finding God and what comes of it, and I think I've realized why.

The first reason is that I'm always uncomfortable when I hear fictional representations about God interacting with people. The Left Behind book series. Fireproof. In His Steps. When critics label these books Christian propaganda, it's a little hard for me not to agree with them because I already think that it's treading on dangerous ground to suppose or assume how God would respond to a certain situation. Our Texas high school football team is losing games and quarreling with each other, but once we band together, hold hands, forgive each other, and learn to pray as a team, God rewards us and Joshua 1:9's us and gives us the state championship game? A lot of these stories become moralistic tales and compartmentalize God into some convenient, personified distributor of good karma.

The second reason, a related thought, is that these fictional representations of God are uncomfortable because we often find ourselves representing God in fictitious ways. The parental God who is deeply grieved every time high schoolers make out without having a Define-the-Relationship conversation. The cool God who, if you interacted with Him, would probably be pretty cool and relaxed and have a beer with you because He loves you. The conservative God who preserves the Republican party like it's the new chosen people.

Thirty-nine years ago, the movie Patton came out, where actor George C. Scott gave a legendary acting performance that he felt was true to the character of General Patton. It has since been an odd phenomenon that people at large associate the historical Patton with the movie characterization. Is the movie Patton far off from the historical Patton? Probably not. There's a lot of truth in George C. Scott's representation. But people don't think of the real Patton. And sometimes I'm afraid that could happen with God. It's not that the parental God, or the cool God, or the conservative God are each complete falsehoods, but they're all in some way fictional and a lot of people look to them to see God. Can we presume to represent God so well that our fictions can be considered biographical?

Interestingly enough, I've found myself arguing on the other side of the line too. During my sophomore year of college, a very post-modern pastor wrote the Rice Thresher with a letter to the editor, arguing that Jesus did not know He was God, but that His unintended death, a consequence of His bucking Roman authority, opened the way to salvation. She qualified her statements with the question, "How can I presume to know the mind of Christ? I can't." And I thought for a while about this statement, "How can I presume to know the mind of Christ," and on March 26, 2006, I replied,

You wrote that we can't presume to know the mind of Christ. I was reading through 1 Cor 2, and I agree that in our state, we probably won't be able to comprehend fully the "mystery / hidden wisdom which God ordained for the ages for our glory." But we do know that Christ was filled with the Holy Spirit, and also that "we have received...the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God." Would this not extend not only to spiritual gifts, but also to salvation through Jesus? The chapter also ends with the verse, "But we have the mind of Christ." I read that, through submission and filling of the Holy Spirit, God grants us more and more understanding of His nature, which is also that of Jesus, since "I and the Father are one." In that respect, the more we study Scripture under the revelation of the Holy Spirit, the more we can presume to know the mind of Christ.

My contention, at the time, was that we can't claim to know nothing about God or Jesus. God does show us a lot about Himself. To say otherwise in the name of open-mindedness belittles what He did, the time He spent here on earth, the way He's revealed Himself to us over centuries, and the way He interacts with us today. We do know that He said in 2 Chronicles 7:14, "If My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land." We do know that in that verse, there is truth about God's compassion and mercy in the face of repentance. But do we know it well enough to proclaim that it will be true in the case of the high school football state championship? We must be careful to tell a true story when people say, "Tell me the story of Jesus."

I seldom know where I'm going with a train of thought, but once again, my post ended up talking about how it's important to avoid ugly extremes on both sides of an issue. Which is how Plato represented ethics and morality: a system of behavior whose ultimate goal is to achieve the golden mean between two wicked extremes. I should probably write about that sometime.

If I had to pick one fictional representation about God and what we know about Him, it would be from C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. Mr. Tumnus says something true: "He's not a tame lion, but He is a good lion."