A Purpose Driven Follow Up...

A slower-to-judge friend of mine posted a this interview with Rick Warren in one of my comments. It appears that I, and others, may have been quick to pass judgment on Rick Warren regarding the whole double-speak thing.

Rick Warren defending himself (and successfully, I might add), explaining that the video in question was not a public statement, but video was intended for his congregation alone. He said:

The truth is, Proposition 8 was a two-year campaign in the state, and during those two years, I never said a word about it until the eight days before the election, and then I did make a video for my own people when they asked, "How should we vote on this?" It was a pastor talking to his own people. I've never said anything about it since. I don't know how you take one video newsletter to your own church and turn that into, all of a sudden I'm the poster boy for anti-gay marriage.

He later explained that part of his beef is that the homosexual community does not believe that someone like Warren (and by extension, other Christians) can love them, be friends with them, yet disagree with homosexual (“gay is the new black”) political platform. In this, I actually empathized with him. It is frustrating but perhaps expected: Christians are taught to love those who are different from them and their own, but we do not always get the same treatment in return.
There were other statements that Warren made that I was happy about it. For instance, he took a stand on non-interference and refused some government money. Wisely, he did not want strings attached. I cannot support him enough in this. I do not have, in principle, a problem with many para-church organizations that do accept federal money, but there is often a cost of identity that I think may make it not worth it.

If I could ask Rick Warren one question it would be this. Refusing government money, because you don’t want the government to mess with your religion, is sound and classical libertarian principle. The government does not get its fingers into the church’s businesses. On the same token, why endorse a “yes” vote on prop 8? The Christian definition of marriage is something that Christians should defend. Why should we allow the government to have its fingers in it? The opinion of the body politic means little to me for what marriage is, for the same reason that the opinion of the body politic means little when it comes to baptism. Such is a similar classical libertarian principle that makes accepting money from the government a bad idea. So why care about prop 8?

Very tied at the conclusion of an awe inspiring week concluding with an amazing service in 3 acts this morning.

8am - Proclamation of the Resurrection amongst the dead in the yard - 43 people attending
8.30am - Breakfast as on the lake shore with the Risen Jesus - some 50 people
9.30 am - Celebration Eucharist with a congregation of somewhere around 180 people!!!

The presence if the Risen Christ was definitely amongst us - and people had the chance to respond through renewal of baptismal vows and holy water at 8am, through anointing with holy oil as a symbol of wanting the presence of the Risen Christ in us and then giving a candle lit from the Paschal candle to call us to take the light of the Risen Christ out from the Church building into the ordinariness of everyday life at 9.30am.

Fantastic - praise God!

Here's the sermon at 9.30 am or a version of it...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When Pepsi-Cola was launched in China, its marketing managers wondered why its famous slogan, 'Come alive with Pepsi ' was not achieving the impact that it had achieved elsewhere in the world. It was discovered that the translator had rendered it: 'Pepsi brings your relatives back from the dead.'

This is the shocking claim of the Easter Gospel - that one man, Jesus of Nazareth has come back from the dead. All of us like a happy ending. The girl gets the guy. The guy gets the girl. The bad guys get got and everyone walks off into the sunset to live happily ever after. Yet the events that Mark records for us that we hear again this morning, are so shocking, that it stuns the central characters into a terrified silence.

There was once a man who was convinced he was dead. His wife and friends became so concerned for him that they referred him to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist set out to prove to the man from medical evidence that dead men don't bleed.

Eventually the man said, "OK, you've convinced me, dead men don't bleed."
At which point the psychiatrist produced a needle and jabbed the man. Looking down with horror at the blood spurting from him, the man said, "Good Lord, dead men do bleed after all!"

Dead men don’t bleed. Dead men don’t come back to life. Fact. Jesus of Nazareth, this outlandish prophet had had his rightful end in the eyes of the authorities. Fact He was silenced permenantly by crucifixion. Fact.

And then, as was the custom, some women - Mary Magdelene, Mary and Salome - were making their way to Jesus’ tomb to anoint the stinking body with spice and oils. They has known Jesus in life as their teacher, Lord, Saviour, Messiah and friend. Now, with crushed hopes, they go to deal with Jesus as a corpse.

As they go along, they chat together, ‘Who will roll away the stone?’ How were they to get to anoint the body? They were still living in a world that says you roll a stone on place over a tomb on Friday it will innevitably be there on Sunday. Whilst the women demonstrate some faith a courage by going to the tomb at all, they carry on living in a world where death has the final word.

Then, bit by bit, this world of theirs and ours is dismantled and everything is thrown off kilter. The women look up and notice that the stone covering the tomb where Jesus’ dead body lay, has been rolled away. They enter the tomb, and in place of a dead body they encounter a living young man - a white robed angelic
visitor. The women are alarmed - a biblical understatement - as their world has been turned upside down.

The young man speaks - do not be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here...’ And suddenly the certainty that is the life experience of these women and all of our lives, is is violently unsettled by the resurrection, plunging the stone from the tomb into the millpond of history. As the experience of the resurrection hits home, the effects of it ripple out across from then to now and beyond.

The fear that the women felt was natural when all of a sudden, something as certain and inevitable as death, is no longer certain or inevitable, the world has changed dramatically. The women may also have been frightened because they were to be the bearers of a message that unsettled them and the other disciples further. Jesus was going ahead of them to meet them in Galillee - the place where this whole roller-coaster began - back in the context of their everyday lives.

Jesus is suddenly at loose in the world, but he is not here now as a corpse or as a two thousand year old story - but he meets us here as a living reality - not on out terms but on his. There is no escaping him, no containing him, no forgetting him. He comes to meet us and claim us in love. Life as we have known it cannot continue because Jesus goes ahead of us to love us into loving and to call us to discover the empty tomb and the rest of the story for ourselves.

Jesus met the women at the tomb and turned their world, their expectations of life and of death upside down and confirmed for them ultimately that Jesus is who he said and demonstrated he is - God’s Son. Jesus meets us this morning and every day in our everyday lives - an uncontainable living reality, turning expectations of life and of death upside down and confirmed for them ultimately that Jesus is who he said and demonstrated he is - God’s Son.

And because of this - all of a sudden things that seemed impossible are now possible - like the declining of a fight by young men like the teenager Jimmy Mizzen, or the forgiveness Margaret Mizzen his mother showed her son’s killer, instead feeling sorrow for the killer’s parents for what they would now have to live with for the rest of their lives; like the transforming of the life of Shane Taylor - one of the UK’s most dangerous prison inmates, originally imprisoned for attempted murder but then after instigating a riot had his sentence extended by 4 years. Whilst in prison he discovered that he could be locked up and yet free - free from anger and fear that was driving him to be the sort of man he had been.

Friends this is the power of the resurrection, but not just as an event that happened some 2000 years ago, but a person - Jesus - who will transform your life into resurrection life in just the same sort of way - maybe not as dramatically, maybe not over night, but he will if you you will let him.

The women ran off terrified at the empty tomb - terrified at what they had experienced, but maybe terrified at what God was offering - unsettling, but life changing, life affirming transformation not of Jesus, but of their lives.

This Easter day, where are we each? Are we running off, frightened that God can see past our British reserve, frightened that we don’t believe or love enough. Friends do not be afraid - Jesus meets us here this morning - he believe in us enough, he loves us enough. The women on that first Easter morning could not accept the reality of a resurrection life - yet this morning through Jesus’ resurrection we are offered the chance to ‘come alive’ and know freedom from fear and the unconditional love and forgiveness of God. At the empty tomb the women could not accept that new vision of life - the question the Risen Jesus asks us this Easter Day is - can we? Amen.

God, time, and Free Will: Am I Making Any Sense?

As many of you know, I have serious reservations about the a-temporality (“God is outside of time”) and its relation to free will, which I define as the ability of human agents to choose between alternatives. I am writing a paper on this for my Aquinas class, and my thesis is this: God’s a-temporality, and knowledge gained by such, cannot be reconciled with human free-will in any workable, meaningful sense. It is very important to note that I am not yet endorsing Open Theism for this paper, only that I don’t think Aquinas’ view solves the problem. This blog is my practice round. I hope that I am making some kind of sense?

What is free will?

One of the problems I have with this paper is that I work with a definition of “free will” that is a little different than Aquinas’ view. I think of free will like this: a temporal agent has free-will when it is in that agent’s power, now, to either refrain from some future action, or actualize some future action. So I have free will if I can refrain or actualize from going to a Good Friday service tomorrow. You can are free if you can refrain or actualize drinking that cup of coffee Monday morning. The professor is free if s/he can refrain or actualize from doing his pile of grading come the end of the semester.

Such is so simple that it seems to make sense. Notice, however, that there is a degree of contingency here. What this means is that something is capable of being other than it is. Additionally, in terms of the future, something is capable of being prevented. “Two and three make five” is not contingent because it cannot be any other way. However, “The General Sherman tree is the largest tree in the world by mass” is contingent because that tree could have been chopped down in 1832. “Obama is the President of the United States” is also contingent because he could’ve lost.

Most future events we think of as contingent, but add something else. “Obama will win a second term in 2012” is contingent. “I drink another cup of coffee tomorrow at 9:00am” is contingent. The important thing about future contingencies is that they are contingent and are mutable by our actions. Obama gets voted out 2012 because the libertarians finally get a good candidate and he steals democratic votes. I refrain from that second cup of coffee because I want to fast on Good Friday or something. We cannot, however, change some past contingent like Obama being elected in 2008, or the latte we drank yesterday afternoon. So our past is contingent and immutable, while the future is contingent and mutable.

God’s eternality (a-temporality)

It is important to note that “eternality” is actually a negation that means something like “without time,” which is why I use “a-temporality” for the same concept. If God is outside of time, than a few things follow: (1) Time prepositions such as “before,” “fore,” “after,” “during,” etc should not be applied to God. (2) God takes in all knowledge of human activity “in one act of understanding.” This is exactly what Aquinas believes. For us, time is like a dot of light going across a straight line, but for God the line is already completely lit up. (3) There is no change in God’s knowledge. This again, was an assumption of Aquinas. Additionally, God can never be wrong about anything.

God’s knowledge of our future actions cannot really be called fore-knowledge. Rather, it should just be called “eternal knowledge.” God is aware of the coffee I am having tomorrow afternoon, the fact that I am typing this paper now, and philosophical wise-crack comments I made last night after class all in the same act of understanding. It is something like looking at film strip. We know that there events in the film, we know when they occur, but I do not know them in a sequential temporal order. We, as temporal beings, see time in a sequence of events. The past is done, the present is where the choices are made, and the future will be one way or another based on a choice we make now. But given God’s a-temporality and knowledge, there is simply no difference of this kind between past, present, and future. God sees Obama being reelected in 2012 just like he sees Obama getting elected in 2008. To say something like “God saw Obama getting elected in 2008, and now knows that Obama will be elected in 2012 is to place temporal prepositions on an a-temporal being.

Refraining from that cup of coffee?

Recall what I said about free-will: a temporal agent has free-will when it is in that agent’s power, now, to either refrain from some future action, or actualize some future action. I can refrain from a cup of coffee tomorrow, or I can drink it. Now recall that God’s knowledge cannot change and that God cannot be wrong. God sees me already drinking that cup of coffee tomorrow morning, just like he sees me trying to explain all this to another grad student last night. If I refrain, from that cup of coffee, have I not proven God wrong about something? God, in his eternality, sees me drinking a cup of coffee at 9:00am tomorrow. If God is never wrong, how can I do otherwise?

The response to this is that it is still my choice. God may know exactly what I’ll do, but I still choose those things. My choices cause God to know. The problem is that this is a confusion of what I mean by “choice.” Something is not just a result of my choice if I caused it, but is the result of my choice if I caused it and could have done otherwise. The future we see is contingent, but it is not mutable by our actions under a “God outside of Time” thinking. If it was, God would either be wrong, or his knowledge would change as our choices affect future states of affairs.

So there it is

And that, very briefly stated, is why I do not think that God’s a-temporality can be reconciled with human freedom.

Did I make any kind of sense? Am I clear? Or was this just some existentially driven, and caffeine infused, philosophical gibberish?