Liam Kinnon

“…the Europe of science and technology, the Europe of civilization and culture, must be at the same time a Europe open to transcendence and fraternity with other continents, and open to the living and true God, starting with the living and true man.”
- Benedict XVI
Taken from here: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/253063/tale-two-europes-george-weigel

Anne Rice apparently quit Christianity today.  She claims to still be a christian, but she does not like a whole lot of Christianity.  Leaving aside that I agree with a number of her points, I disagree with the larger spirit of what she was saying.

Let me start a little earlier than I was initially going to.  My faith, my Christianity, and my love of Christ remained with me through my late teens for one reason: logic.  I was confronted by two strong desires that were hugely in conflict.  The first was for freedom, complete, uninhibited freedom.  The second was for justice.  Don’t think these two conflict? Let me explain further.

The freedom I craved was the freedom from constraints.  I wanted to be able to drink whatever I wanted, as much as I wanted.  I wanted to sleep with whomever I wanted.  I also wanted revenge on a person who nearly ruined my family, by any means necessary.  That desire for vengeance held the key to the problem I was faced with.  I knew something wrong, something inexcusable, had occurred; yet to walk away from my faith was to allow that the two worlds, the one in which this person believed he was right, and the one in which I believed he was evil, were mutually exclusive.  I could not accept that.

It was in this realization that I figured out what sin is.  Sin is the catastrophic consequence of wanting things my way, applied universally.  To acknowledge the sin in this person’s actions also meant acknowledging the sin in my desire for vengeance, my desire to pass the hurt back.  Yet this is the cost of absolutes, that standards exist, standards I may not like, but that I am constrained to.  I take up the constraints with the hope and faith that Christ will eventually make sense of what I cannot.  I just can’t say I will always like it.

I just read this post on worship bands by Fearsome Tycoon over at the Boar’s Head Tavern.  He has this to say about worship bands.

A huge part of it is theological. There is no way to do “praise band” without turning the service into a “show.” Disagree? Find me one praise band that plays from a loft behind the congregation, where no one can see them except the pastor. A core purpose of a pop-rock performance is draw attention to the performers. I have watched and played in praise bands. I’ve never seen one that didn’t want, no, need to be seen. A guy with a guitar does not have the liturgical significance that an altar, a Bible, a crucifix, a font, or even a simple pulpit does. And I find it ironic that evangelicals tend to label as “idolatry” any and all significance attached to physical objects, yet their service is completely fixated on the power of the personality of the performer.

I had a strong reaction to this post.  I have played in, and led, praise bands.  I was reminded of an experience I had a year and a half ago.  I was leading the worship team for the service we would have every Friday night on campus.  We had lost the location we had played in the year previously, and I wanted to take the opportunity of a new space to get the band out of the way.  The president of the Christian Fellowship and I decided to move the band to the side, facing the screen and words along with everyone else.

People did not like it.

The reaction was one of the toughest moments I went through with Christians, and is probably one of the reasons I have had little desire to try leading a team since.  In discussions with other leaders of the group we moved the band back to the front, and reengaged the show. I have struggled with that whole experience for the 18 months that have passed since.  I know I let my anger and the insecurity of being a new leader get in the way of properly explaining why I felt like having the band at the front was not the ideal.  I also wonder to what extent we have been trained to mimic the leader at the front.  The modern congregation feels lost when all they have are the words and God to meditate on, thus the worship leader serves as the model for engagement.  I don’t think this is necessarily correct, but is it wholly incorrect? To what extent are sermons, liturgy, and prayers any less a moment where the leader’s ego can get in the way of God?

As a person who still plays in a worship band, and enjoys it, I don’t believe that the spirit can’t move when a band is at the front.  I believe people can have a legitimate encounter with Christ.  I do believe that there is a danger of idolatry in this current iteration of “church.”  I believe though, that on the opposite end there is a danger in idolizing an irrelevant, or worse incomprehensible, liturgy and hymns at the expense of a meaningful service for the participants.

I thought about what Nakedpastor said about this recently:

Abraham Heschel once said that the first commandment… to not have any other gods before me… is the first one because idolatry is the root of all the others. Calvin said our minds are factories working around the clock in the production of idols, and labyrinths of idolatrous thinking. The church is constantly setting up idols for people to believe in. Then when these idols, these small gods, don’t deliver, and the people for good reason lose their faith in them, we blame the people for it.

I think to some extent idolatry lurks in every corner, and it is only with a Christ-centered team with strong accountability that any church can overcome this.  Egomaniacs and psychopaths survive in personality dominated churches or movements; teams and accountability prevent them from ruining everything.

This one was too good to pass up.  I promise this is the last one relating to Pat Robertson for the foreseeable future (roughly the next ten minutes… just kidding).

NPR posted this letter from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.  It is awesome.

Dear Pat Robertson,
I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I’m all over that action.

But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished.

Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle. Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven’t you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”?

If I had a thing going with Haiti, there’d be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it — I’m just saying: Not how I roll.
You’re doing great work, Pat, and I don’t want to clip your wings — just, come on, you’re making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad. Keep blaming God. That’s working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

LILY COYLE, MINNEAPOLIS

I think that about sums up everything I wish I’d come up with on the matter.

Don Miller, my favorite Christian Author* had this to say to Pat Robertson:

An appropriate response to Pat Robertson:
“You seem angry and tired. Christ loves you. He is not impressed with your religious posturing. He really loves you. You don’t have to hide behind anything anymore. The good news really is that good.”

I think that is about perfect.  Read his whole post.

*I guess by necessity he published with a Christian publishing house, but I see him as almost a young Buechner in terms of honesty.

Yesterday it may have seemed like I was picking on a church here in Toronto. I made a comment that I believe is justifiable criticism. Now I would like to say one very positive thing the pastor said, that I think more churches could learn from. His comment was that they were a church that had Arminians and Calvinists, among other groups that do not necessarily hold the same theological viewpoints.

It was a powerful statement, whether intended or not, as to what things are essential. Instead of fighting each other, dividing and splitting over obscure theological unknowables, we should be aiming for unity. Let’s be honest, we cannot sort out the paradoxes of theology. God is an infinite being who holds within himself everything we view as opposite. To borrow a phrase from a quantum physicist, if you think you understand God, you don’t. We are given powerful indicators as to his character, his goodness, and his love for us. But we will never know this side of heaven, and possibly the other side as well, how the paradoxes unfold together.

I attend a Christian Classics Reading Group, hosted by my good friend Matthew Hoskin and a few weeks back we were discussing the creeds. While discussing why we need them it seemed to me that they are powerful forces for unity. They are a test of orthodoxy if you will. Instead of asking if someone is a five point calvinist, or some other strange standard for determining their orthodoxy, should we not be asking instead if they believe the Apostles, Nicene, or Athanasian creed? If we accept Christ as the center of Christianity, theology should not be a force for division.

I can’t get past Jesus.  Science can say what it wants about millions of years ago, but 2000 years ago the world fundamentally changed.  Was it actually today?  Who knows, and does it really matter?

The world is fundamentally not right.  We all know this.  We all feel the brokenness permeating everything, just below the surface.  

We look for cures.  

Some say look to science, but science explains everything without giving it any meaning.  Some say look to politics, but kings, prime ministers, and presidents have failed again and again across the millennia to make the world  a better place.  So I look to God.  Not God, the absent, who made the model train and walked away, but God the father.  He watched the conductors derail their trains, their lives, and ruin everything about themselves and each other. 

God, the perfect, watched his creation distort the perfection they were given into war, hate, starvation.  Even when we forgot about God we recognized the broken and we tried to fix it. We called it inequality, and made a new stratification.  We called it poverty, but there were too many empty mouths to feed.  We forgot the first term: sin, and what it requires: a sacrifice.  

God did not forget.  In an inexplicable way God joined us in his son Jesus.  God, the perfect, became God, the human.  Not just human but the perfect human, the one we were all supposed to be.  Jesus scared the authorities of his day so they killed him.  He died and his cult vanished, he rose again and his follower caught fire.  They told the world, as I tell you now:

Beyond hate there is the love of God.
This was the Resurrection.
Beyond this broken world there is the work of Christ’s followers.
This is the Resurrection.
Beyond death there is the life of bent knee and dry eyes.
This will be the resurrection

He is risen!
He is risen indeed!

This thought has reoccurred to me a number of times. It is kind of simple and definitely in need of refinement. It is essentially related to the problem of evil. When you ask nonbelievers why they don’t believe in God, especially those who once did, you frequently get an interesting response. “If there is a God look at all the pain he’s caused, all the evil he allows. How could anyone believe in him?” They blame the God who doesn’t exist for the problems in the world. But there is a disconnect. Without God being responsible for evil we are left with two possible conclusions as to evil’s existence. There is no evil, or evil is humanity’s fault.

In the first category you have Nietzsche and Richard Rorty. Evil is merely a definition that varies according to person or the powerful. This is, so far as I can tell, the most logical outcome of true atheistic ethics. However, if you don’t subscribe to that outcome of atheism you are left drawing the same conclusion as the Christian.  We’re responsible.

This is where exitential guilt comes in.  Every time I lie, every time I take an action that in some way injures someone else, it is my responsibility.  I can blame no one else.  This guilt seems to be little felt in the West, where the consequences for something as simple as buying a cup of coffee or pair of sneakers are so far removed from us we don’t see them.  But we’re contributing to the mess of the third world by our mere existence.  Forget pollution, try and imagine everyone on earth producing as much physical trash as we do, there isn’t the landfill space for it.

Christianity, and Judaism before it, had and has a word for this problem: sin.  We are responsible for the problems of the world, merely by existing.  The atheist doesn’t agree with us on the terminology.  But if they believe that evil exists in the world then we are on the same page.

For torture to be condemned requires absolute morality.

Atheistic utilitarian ethics eliminates restraint in information gathering provided more lives are at stake than the one being tortured.

As we have seen with nations like China and Soviet Russia, when God is removed from the equation torture becomes a viable option.  Torture’s use can be for anything deemed a threat to the state, internal or external.

Deism will not do, the blind watchmaker who disappeared could care less about any of us, much less one of us.

Nations whose constitutions are declared under God, such as Canada or the U.S. must subscribe to absolute morality or forfeit honouring their constitution.

Nations with a constitutional directive to employ absolutes in their ethical processes cannot resort to Torture for information gathering.

(This is my first simul-blog with Deep and Meaningful for Dummies, an awesome project by my friend David.)

It’s rare that parody is this good. The music kicks in around a minute in. I’m guessing by the “expelled” stamped on the forehead of the guy at the beginning that this is part of the advertising for that Ben Stein documentary. Regardless it is hilarious and the beat is pretty awesome.