Simple Thinking

Church, Culture, and Homosexuality

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:58:06 -0400

If I struggled with a homosexual disposition, my local churches are probably the last places I would turn to for support. Whereas Jesus Christ established the Church to provide love to a hurting world, many Christians in the last half-century have failed to love their neighbor as themselves by an unwarranted discrimination against homosexuals. They have treated this reality as a unique and unforgivable sin, and have forgotten St. Paul’s exhortation to judge not those outside of the Christian faith. In the last few years alone I have witnessed several Christians leaving my local church because, after confiding in a fellow Christian that they were struggling with homosexual desires, they were essentially told their temptation was itself a sin; the overwhelming feeling that their temptation was uniquely grotesque drove them into isolation instead of the arms of Jesus Christ. This sad reality is only amplified in popular media, when CNN, for example, invites a Christian thinker on their show to discuss this issue and displays an education on homosexuality that you would think comes from extremist bumper stickers backed with damning Old Testament passages. Rather than offering a cure to an affliction we should all be sympathetic of, Christians have become strangely content only to affirm the affliction of homosexuality while forgetting it, like every other distortion of our nature, has a cure. The Western Church has developed a perverse interest in this particular sin instead of a pure interest in holiness, using its power of influence to tear down instead of building up. We should not be surprised, then, when our culture calls us bigots and, consequently, finds no reason to turn towards the Christian for an insightful discourse on this issue.

One of the Western Church’s greatest mistakes has been thinking homosexuality is a unique sin biblically; this mind set has, of course, led to Christians treating homosexuals with contempt because of ignorance. (If you disagree you should visit your local youth group, where one of the most common phrases you will here will be, “That’s gay,” or “Don’t be a faggot,”.) The only unique sin biblically is the sin of pride. Every other sin is equal, in kind, in that it is a distortion of God’s design for our lives. It is true that some sins impact our society worse than others. In this sense, and in this sense alone, it could be argued that the practice of homosexuality has worse repercussions in our society than many other sins; one of those repercussions is the loss of the traditional family, for example. Even still, there are sins that entail consequences worse than homosexuality, like adultery, which effects the health of the traditional family more directly than the lifestyle of homosexuals ever could. Because the Church’s moral and political stance against homosexuality among their own members is being challenged by secular society, the Church should respond appropriately and truthfully. But this should only be a defensive stance, not offensive. The moment the Church goes on the offensive by judging those outside the Faith, it becomes distracted from its true purpose: to be a light unto a dark world by offering good news, not bad. We are fools to cut off peoples’ noses and then offer them roses to smell. Just as a skilled doctor performs triage, the practice of prioritizing patients’ treatments based upon the severity of their condition, so to must the Church perform spiritual triage, and know what sins will only distract it from the greatest threats.

Of all the confusion surrounding the debate on homosexuality, the question of genetic determinism certainly remains the greatest: Do homosexuals choose to be gay, or are they born that way?

Every person struggles especially with some specific disposition. For some it is drinking, for some it is sex, for some it is lying, for some it is homosexuality, for some it is lust, for some it is judgment, for some it is gluttony, for some it is pride, and so on and so on. But our dispositions do not and should not define our identity, and thinking this way, in terms of homosexuality, is altogether inconsistent with the way we usually think about dispositions. A person with a homosexual disposition chooses to be gay for the sole reason that a person with an alcoholic disposition, for example, chooses to be an alcoholic. When you consider every other desire known to mankind—alcoholism, pedophilia, murder, depression, lust, etc.—homosexuality turns out to be the only disposition our culture treats as sacrosanct; it is the only desire that our society commands us to accept without rational evaluation. Our society teaches us to overcome most other desires because they are diseases, disorders, and biological impairments. This begs the question, on what moral or logical grounds can we separate homosexuality from any of these other desires? According to what reason should we support genetic determinism for homosexuality and not all other desires, such as alcoholism? While some of our desires certainly do correspond to our design, not all do. Finally, the question of whether or not a Christian can be gay is best answered by a few other questions, such as, can an adulterer be a Christian, or a liar, or a murderer? Jesus made it clear that we all fall short of the glory of God, and that all have committed murder, adultery, and lied in their heart; and it is the heart that matters most. The practice of sinful dispositions, not the dispositions themselves, are what separate us from God.

We as the Church should have been walking side by side our brothers and sisters fighting homosexual dispositions yesterday. Leaving any Christian to fight their temptations alone is a sure sign of ignorance and hatred, not love; and it is love, above all else, that marks the disciple of Jesus Christ. Local churches are hospitals, and in the truest sense. Assuming that by recognizing their sickness they desire wellness, gay Christians should feel just as welcomed into God’s hospital as much as adulterous Christians, for example. If local churches have support groups for alcoholics, why not homosexuals? The latter should be embraced with love just as much as the former; because “come to God just as you are” applies to both the heterosexual and the homosexual. Local churches should seek the latter out rather than avoid them. The Church should be especially known as the greatest supporter of homosexuals; not of their sexual practice, but of them as men and woman made in God’s image, and of those struggling to overcome a weary burden. The classic saying is true: Christians should love the sinner while hating their sin, and that includes their own. So just as the Church cannot love a person without hating their sin, it also cannot hate sin without loving the person who commits it. God calls you to genuinely love men and woman battling homosexuality while simultaneously opposing their disposition. But that does not mean avoiding walking along side them in a journey that will certainly be one of their toughest. No. It means grabbing coffee with them, and simply listening to their story—their own unique struggles with homosexuality; it means not trying to fix their struggle for them, because only God can do that.

Listen. Show them love. Offer your support. Share your own struggles instead of your own helpless opinions.

The Generation of Incredulity

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 19:41:00 -0400

Malcolm Muggeridge once said that one of the most peculiar sins of the twentieth century was the sin of credulity. He believed, as do I, that every generation has and will make the mistake of thinking that, whether by politician or philosopher, some new idea or truth has been discovered that will make our society finally progress. You can easily find examples of this today, such as Rhonda Byrne’s best-selling book The Secret, or the cultural hype over President Obama when he was sworn into Office—somehow he alone was supposed to save America, put it back on course, and then we would all watch it flourish. The former will go down in history as a great paper weight, and the latter has only been great at making promises. Whereas Muggeridge called the twentieth century an age of credulity, the twenty-first century is more like an age of incredulity suffering from a hangover. The free thinkers of the twentieth century, for example, promised a sexual revolution that would bring freedom and, consequently, happiness. But did it? No. It’s only brought addiction to porn, widespread STDs, and the deterioration of the family. That’s happiness I’m happy to do without. Post-modernism—the cultural mood that there are no absolute morals or absolute truth—has left our society haunted by the fact that, no matter how hard we try to scrub religious doctrine out of our society, religious doctrine—call it what you may—is the only thing able to diagnose what’s wrong with our society, let alone the only thing willing to admit there’s something wrong with man and his society. So, instead of being blamed for credulity, my generation can only be blamed for incredulity. When asked how to deal with our country’s ethical ills, the modern man chooses to solve the problem by denying there ever was a problem. According to him, the gods are no longer angry as the ancients believed because, well, there are no gods—especially the God of Christianity. And if there is no God, not even gods, man has to outgrown his need for things like ethics and morality, and, now, being more proper, grown into things like affairs, tax fraud, murder, and, ultimately, idiocy. As Nietzsche wrote, the idea of God is, once again, dead.

Now, it’s not true that our society doesn’t believe in ethics and morality whatsoever. Popular atheists of the day—Christopher Hitchens, for example—argue that we can have things like morality and ethics without God. But my intention isn’t to argue that point here. I only mean to point out the fact that the more we divorce ourselves from God, the more confused we become as to why we should live according to any normative morality. What follows is confusion, but not about things like morality and ethics—no society can survive without such ideas. It’s much worse. Instead, we’re now confused about God: we don’t know why our forefathers believed in Him in the first place, and, much worse, we don’t know why we stopped believing in Him to begin with. This, in affect, is the hangover we’re suffering from: the fact that the last several generations before us left the reservation in search of “freedom”, but only found anarchy, and, what’s worse, have left my generation to deal with the consequences. One of those consequences is the belief that’s been manufactured and sold to us that popularity is better than truth—pure pragmatism. You can see this, of course, in our society’s emphasis on political correctness: don’t say what’s true, only what’s decidedly popular among elite liberals that were educated at UC Berkeley. So it’s no surprise that the questions we’ve lost answers to—the meaning of life, objective truth, objective morality, etc.—are the very questions that continue to plague the average man struggling to understand his purpose in this world painted with only grays. And now we’re starting to find out how much we need black and white to navigate our way through this abstract, but very concrete world.

But the reason that religion is being privatized and marginalized today is because, for one, it’s offering a cure to a world that doesn’t believe it’s sick. Whereas Paul preached good news to philosophers who were searching for a cure to their brokenness, Christians today preach good news to people who don’t think there ever was or is bad news. In affect, today Christianity’s core message—something along the lines of, “There’s something wrong with you, and here’s the cure.”—is thought of as a horrific nightmare rather than good news. This is why C.S. Lewis said that “the task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.” Today, the market place of ideas is not so much a thriving metropolitan of diversity as much as it is a wasteland of tried and abandoned ideas. I think what’s necessary for progress now is for things to get worse in our society before they can get better—much, much worse. The truly bad news is that our generation has no fight left in it, only mere apathy. The seculars will drive our society into the ground further while the idealists—those few who are still fighting for meaning and truth—regretfully watch in horror, knowing that only a death of sorts could bring new life to our society. In the end, our generation will go down in history as the generation of incredulity, a generation that died by drowning in a sea of grays.

“Who gave us a sponge to wipe away the whole horizon?” Friedrich Nietzsche

Pride Will Kill You

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:18:00 -0400

Of all the vices that stop so many people from succeeding in life, pride is without a doubt the greatest. If Bill Clinton had told the truth, for example, about what really happened during his Presidency, he could have been forgiven, and, subsequently, moved onto greater things; the public certainly has shown a forgiving spirit. But pride has been, is, and always will be the greatest trap for any person to overcome, because it requires brutal and uncomfortable self-examination; because pride tells you that you’re greater than you really are, or were ever made to be; and because pride is many times all that you have left before you hits rock bottom—left to face the grim and sobering reality that you, nor anything other person, owns anything in this life, not even your own life. And at the heart of pride lies an attitude of superiority that you’re somehow better than another person, or better off than they are in life. Pride keeps you from bending your knee low enough to realize just how alike you are to the person next to you, and the person next to them; that is to say, exactly alike. And when you realize you’re exactly like the person next to you, you also realize another startling fact: no matter how much you act like it, you’re not God—an unacceptable fact for some people. As C.S. Lewis said, “There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘All right, then, have it your way.’” In the end, pride gives you the delusional idea that in some tiny but existent way you have control over your life. And so as long as you think you can play God you’ll always be trapped by your own self-deception; by the lie that you’re better off as an autonomous, self-dependent person who needs no helping hand to survive this brute and unforgiving world. In other words, your pride rejects the very thing that saves you: grace.

But grace is a bitter pill to swallow because it entails humility, and there is nothing easy about it. Humility is all about doing the one thing that is so incredibly contrary to your human nature: accepting defeat. Now, obviously, this doesn’t mean giving up altogether; on the contrary, it means exact opposite. Because unless you know the nature of how bad your circumstances are you’ll never be able to overcome them. And that’s where humility comes in: it’s the process of realizing that, unless you’re humble enough to accept grace, you really are screwed. By choosing to live by pride you choose to die, but not in the positive sense. Thus the paradox Jesus gives: “Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.” Pride makes you fight to hang onto everything in this life, while humility makes you realize that nothing in this life is worth hanging onto save grace. And that is why grace feels so costly, because it rips to shreds every bit of pride in you, taking away the very thing you’ve built your entire life on. The result? You’re freed from a losing battle, and, consequently, you understand that grace costs you nothing that’s worth keeping.

Freedom from pride brings freedom of life. The only freedom pride brings is the freedom of self-destruction—God certainly gives us that freedom. But laying down your pride is a life-giving decision, because you’re giving control of your life over to God, the one being who can manage your life perfectly; and only a perfect being can ensure total peace instead of total anxiety. Naturally, you don’t have to worry about your life being in the wrong hands anymore; namely, in your own fallible hands. Instead of worrying over whether or not you made the right choice, allowing God to break your pride completely and accepting His grace entails enjoying the knowledge that no matter what happens in your life, no matter how bad you mess up, God is in control; he won’t let your life slip into a meaningless disaster that would otherwise send you into a state of complete apathy. But being humbled means being shown your place, specifically, that there is someone out there greater than you; not greater in degree, but in kind. And at the end of the day, no matter how prideful you are, you desire to give your life over to someone capable of handling such a impossible and screwed up mess; you long for someone who can make right what’s been wronged. Freud called it wishful thinking, but Jesus called it humility. Pride will ultimately lead you down a road that ends in embarrassment. As Chesterton wrote, “Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.” If you act as God and live by pride you’ll end in lunacy; if you act as a human and live by humility you’ll receive the Crown of Life. No matter what your pride tells you, no matter how great its promises, it lies. Humility might be a bitter pill to swallow, but it saves your life. In the end, pride will kill you.

The Right Answers aren't Good Enough

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 07:24:00 -0400

Every part of me as a philosophy major wants to say that I have, so far, learned a lot in my young life. There are a lot of people I want to say with conviction to, “Yes, you’re right, I do seem to know quite a bit about quite a lot for my young age.” And to be fair, I really have gone to great lengths in the last several years of my life to learn as much as I can about anything and everything. I’ve poured into authors like Chesterton, Augustine, and Boethius, Descartes and Plato; listened to a ridiculous amount of lectures on iTunes University; started arguments with people much wiser than myself only to understand their brilliant minds better; and I’ve even stormed the gates of Heaven in prayer for acceptance into the Honors program I’m now studying in. So in all fairness, I know I have an unusual thirst for knowledge.

Yet now I’m starting to realize that I don’t know nearly as much as I thought I did. That’s to say the least. And to make matters worse, not only do I not like this, but the Western culture I live in doesn’t like this either. My culture values intellectual confidence far more than it values intellectual humility. It values mere answers rather than valuing both the answer and the process that leads one to the answer. And although I know I must be confident in certain things, many things, I also know I must be humble in how much I don’t know. And this is incredibly important, because it’s exactly in knowing you lack knowledge that you then want to seek it. But this is where I’ve failed in basic epistemology. I’ve forgotten, my culture has forgotten, that what you know is only half of it. The other half is how do you know what you know?

You see, the last few weeks I’ve been reading the Early Church Fathers: Clement, Ignatius, Irenaeus, etc. And I learned something profound after reading so many personal letters between these figures, their autobiographies and their biographies. And that is this. They had nothing to rely upon to strengthen their faith besides themselves and the Holy Spirit. They didn’t have the canonical Bible like we have today. That’s huge! Sure, they had a few to several books now found in the Bible, but I don’t think I’ve ever stopped to think about what that meant for them exactly. That means they had to do all the hard work that I know enjoy all the fruits of: grueling analyzation of every text now found in my Bible (and even those that didn’t make the cut), prayer and fasting to decide which books were spiritually authoritative, forming ecumenical councils (no small task, people) that dedicated their lives to ensuring all future Christians would have an official language of their faith, and dedicating themselves to learning philosophy to defend their beliefs against complex heresies like Arianism. All so that their foundation of Christ upon which they hold fast to the faith would be greatly strengthened all the more by a common language known to all believers everywhere.

And they did all of this knowing they could be martyred. And many of them were.

Unlike myself, these men had to start with essentially nothing. They didn’t have the “right answers” like I have today, answers that were refined through genius minds such as Augustine, through giant intellectual periods like the Middle Ages, and reformations like Martin Luther’s. They were laying a foundation for their Faith while at the same time defending attacks against it and all the while working in darkness, so to speak. In fact, have you ever seen construction workers trying to finish a concrete foundation in the midst of heavy rain and during night time? I have, and it’s insane. They have to mix the concrete, pour it, strike the excess, level it and smooth out the surface. And if you don’t think that’s hard enough, try it sometime. It’s back breaking work. But then you should try doing that while also protecting the concrete from heavy rain that can ruin the mixture of the crete—making it set too fast or too slow—while working with minimal lighting—making it difficult to tell whether your surface is truly level and as smooth as you think it is. And to make it an accurate analogy, try doing all of that while being under physical attack and having to give your life up to ensure the foundation sets like it needs to in order to withstand the stress it’ll be under for who knows how many millenniums. From what I’ve read so far, that seems to be a good picture of the Early Church at work before Constantine.

But the “foundation” of the Faith is standing just fine today, people.

So not only did these godly men accomplish their improbable, monumental mission, but they accomplished it well. Were their mistakes made? Yes. Because every foundation is bound to endure stress cracks. But comparing fruits and sins of certain Christians today with these Christians wouldn’t be wise. For many Christians today, sex, money and power are the greatest temptations. Do you know what the greatest temptation was for many of these early Christians? Yes, you guessed it: causing their own martyrdom too soon and a horrific one at that.

I say all of that to say this. I know a lot of answers to a lot of questions, especially concerning my faith. A lot of my Christian friends do. But I’m just now realizing I don’t know how to defend those answers on my own, at least not like the Early Church Fathers learned to do. I’ve heard Francis Chan ask something along the lines of, “What would the Church look like if everyone in the Church lived like you?” This is a good question, and another question should be asked: What would the Church look like today if we (my generation) were the Early Church Fathers? Would we even have a canonical Bible today? Would we be able to philosophically dismantle heretical teachings like Arianism, or universalism? Would we be able to teach the Bible to the persecuted church by memory? The questions could go on and on, but I’m afraid my generation would utterly fail to answer these questions in the positive.

I’m afraid that as of now I would fail to answer these questions in the positive.

And so, I’m now realizing that answers aren’t enough. They might be enough for us today, but they aren’t enough to ensure the stability and flourishing of a future worldwide Church. The Early Church Fathers knew this. We have to struggle to understand the answers for ourselves, not merely take our inheritance as Christians without understanding the blood, sweat and tears that produced it. A few weeks ago a professor told my class that in a survey of hundreds of Christian students attending Biola—one of the most respected Christian institutions in the world—only three (maybe five) percent of them knew the Ten Commandments. What a wake up call. When our generation of Christians is considered in the scheme of church history, it’s safe to say we’ll be one of the greatest anomalies: the greatest access to the Bible in all of history, and yet the least knowledge of it; the greatest opportunities to defend the faith intellectually, and yet the most anti-intellectual; and on and on and on.

The right answers are good, but they aren’t good enough. I need to start learning for myself, and stop being so content with manufactured answers that pacify my intellectual fears. I need to struggle more with what I know. We all need to do this.

When I am Weak, You are Strong.

Tue, 01 Mar 2011 01:52:00 -0500

Father, you sustain all of me (Acts 17:8). There is no part of me that you are unaware of (Psalm 139:16), no part of me that you do not provide for (Matthew 6:26). You tell me not to worry about tomorrow, for you have conquered the world and every tomorrow to come (John 16:33). When I am not smart, You are. When my thoughts are unsound you guide my steps as a friend guides a blind friend (Mark 8:22).

When I am weak, You are strong Father. Selah (pause and reflect).

When my entire being is like a desert, you are my source of living water. When I walk in the wilderness and am dying from my journey, my hands shaking and my knees giving out, you come to save me (Isaiah 35:3,4).