The City Online

The book of Revelation will the last class I teach in Torrey Friday. This is good since the first I taught over two thousand classes ago was Genesis.

It took me seventeen years to get through the Bible. Now I am moving to Houston to start again. Reading a book slowly again and again for years produces many opinions in a man. I moved from skeptical about Obadiah to loving Obadiah. Somethings did not change: I still am tempted to skim big chunks of Numbers. When even Fred Sanders cannot help you “get” a book, you are probably invincibly exegetically ignorant, but I refuse to give up.

Some opinions gained are sectarian and should be argued such as my particular view of the Eucharist, but there were a few simple truths that stood out to me that I don’t think are that controversial. I surely knew them seventeen years ago, but they were impressed on me so many times in reading and tutoring the Bible that they are stamped on my soul.

God is love. There are times in the Old Testament when a reader might doubt it, but always, at the bottom, God is wooing humankind. In the end, He does not just relate to the pain of our brokenness, He is broken. He does not stand afar off and smite, as He could, but is smitten enough with His beloved children to be wounded for us.

The God of the Bible is Triune and so can love within the three Persons fully, but that love overflows and fills creation.

God is just. If His love is sometimes hard for readers to see, the justice of God may be what obscures this vision. God hates injustice. He hates the poor to be oppressed by the powerful and for the many to covet and steal the wealth of the few. He hates to see the wicked prosper and the good to be left empty. Each immortal soul matters to Him and He will perform radical surgery to reach out to each one and remove the cancer we keep giving ourself by our selfish choices.

Justice is the scalpel he uses, but love is the motive. A man can make himself so sick, cling to the rot and the ruin so tightly, that no pain is sufficient to remove it. Those men make themselves hateful to God, but only because they refuse His justice and loath His love to cling to their tiny desires instead of embracing God.

God is the subject of the books of the Bible.

Moses is there, but as the servant of God and giver of His law. David is there, but only as a man after God’s heart. Esther is there, because she risked all to save His people. Everything and everyone in the Bible disappoints . . . including the vision of God each character enshrines, but God stands behind each failed attempt to capture Him, carve Him, put Him in a location, and limit Him to a time.

God alone is at the end of all the dreams of the pilgrim. God alone is at the end of history. God alone can love through ruin and rubble. God is so beautiful that being near Him can make a shepherd poetic, a king wise, and a murderer a saint.

God loves the Jewish people. God is so much the beginning, center, and end of the story that He would need no other character to make the Bible complete, but God chose to reach out to humanity. He focussed on one group in particular, His Chosen People, the Jewish nation. He loved them and blessed all the nations through them. He took on their flesh and suffered the tyranny they suffered. He became man as a Jew and so exalted that nation.

He did this not to exclude the rest of us, but to provide a path, a personal path, a human path to us. He did not love “us” in the abstract or en masse. He came to Abraham, to Moses, to David, to Isaiah, and finally to Mary so we could all become His children. He loved the Jews in particular, because His love for me, for you, is never general but particular.

His is no Godly impersonal welfare system for humankind, but personal Divine Charity for a person.

God knows. The God of the Bible can face hard truths. He hides from nothing and we can tell Him everything, because He knows it. No impiety is hidden from Him and no blasphemy makes Him insecure. He demands worship only because it is appropriate for us and good for us, not because it adds anything to His glory. He knows the worst of us, and the best that is possible, and allows humanity to live in His sight.

God began history, He uses patterns in time to reveal Himself, and someday He will end the story. History does repeat, but it is going somewhere. Every hard lesson is learned again, more intensely, but school will be out someday. Virgins conceive. A remnant returns. This is that spoken of by the proper. Again. And again. But not forever.

I love the Bible, but not as much as I could. After seventeen years, and thousands of hours of discussion, I have just started. Just the notion of God’s love overwhelms me, staggers me, and compels me to read again: Moses, Paul, John.

Now to begin reading and following the Logos  again in Houston. Anybody want to join me?

Listening in on conversations is not good, but sometimes it cannot be avoided.

Ahead of me on a plane, one man bellowed the problem with America. “Too many irrational people.” he mooed.

Irrationality, like the plague, is universally to be avoided, so I was interested to see how to avoid the problem.

“People just do what their religion says,” he spat.

That was it. I listened to him for what felt like hours, because it was hours and he never got much beyond that one point. He wanted ethics based on reason, science, and evidence, not on religion. I hear this sort of thing often, but I don’t understand it.

Why isn’t religion a good basis for ethics?

“Reason” is very good, but a way of thinking, not a thought. One can build a house with a hammer, but not, generally, of hammers. Reason is a tool to apply to good thoughts, but there is no reason religion cannot provide some of those thoughts.

Science is very good at tellings us what “is,” but “is” famously doesn’t equal “ought.” Com-box Atheists are always worried about magical thinking, but it is hard to see anything more magical than pulling an ought from any amount of is. Science can tell us the way the world is, but one simply Kant, sorry for the pun, get science to say the way things “ought’ to be.

The minute it does philosophical or ethical assumptions have been smuggled into the discussion.

Ethical evidence is good, but religion seems perfectly capable of producing it.

If not careful Americans will end up with ethics drawn from entertainment, at least as dubious as any source one can imagine. Christianity, by contrast, claims to be a word from the Almighty and All Knowing, who might be thought to understand how His creation ought to be. Older religions like Christianity have spent centuries with very bright people working out the implications of this revelation.

Surely adopting such a package would be better for most of us, than trying to be a local Aquinas and creating a world view for ourselves.

The problem was plain. The man on the plane did not think religion contained knowledge, but this assertion is hard to justify. Is it true God exist? If so, and we assert it with reason, then we know it and are feee to act on it. Is the Bible the Word of God? If so, then when we know this, we should act on what it says. This all may be wrong, but it seems, at least on the surface, more promising than the list I heard on the plane.

Next time you hear: “only very religious people oppose x” you might think: only the people who are part of a worked out worldview they don’t abandon to suit the whims of the times. Religion may not contain knowledge, or a given religion may contain none, but in forming our ethics, Christian religion has a better claim than most fields at being helpful.

We are not going back to Eden, but are here to build a City. That is the truth expounded in the Christian Bible and that is the truth that moved Augustine to write.

If you don’t want to live in a City, you should go to Hell, because it is a City that is coming: the new Jerusalem. There is a place for the country, I am from West Virginia after all, but it is the City where human things reach their fullness.

It is obvious this is good and bad. The day is coming when the City will be all good, but that will only be when Jesus rules on Earth. It will never come from Christian in this lifetime or from non-Christians.

No present City, not even Houston, is perfectible and we should fear any group as mad and tyrannical that pretends it can be. Instead, we try to improve what we can while recognizing that in this present city we are pilgrims. We occupy until He comes, but we are not going to achieve final victory until He comes.

No Christian should ever be too comfortable with the Establishment, especially when we are the Establishment. The Establishment is always corrupt. It is not left, however, to the Christian to avoid the Establishment for we must love even our enemies. There would be an ease to avoiding the temptations of power by shunning the powerful, but what if they convert? What if we prevail Harvard’s faculty? What if HBU or some Christian college become powerful by doing good?

Power sometimes flows, often comes, to those who loath it: Washington or Cincinnatus. Sometimes it does not. But when a good man comes to power, he can use it well. Sometimes a bad man in power will also, by Providence use it well. Both may fail.

The result of any act is subtle in history. A good act may do harm in the short term and a bad act be helpful and provide “relief.” We do not see history as God sees it from start to finish and so we must avoid superficial judgments. This rebukes the television evangelist who sees “smiting” after every sin and the secularist who thinks fifty years of secularization in Europe shows secularism can work.

Both are hasty in judgment.

Christian oppose vice, because it is wrong. In the end, virtue will exalt a nation, but it may also bring problems as well in the short term. Jesus was virtuous and died. Socrates was virtuous and died. Virtue triumphs, but not today.

Christians do not think the right always wins, but that the right will eventually win. If we don’t know the right from outcomes, what does show it?

First, there is the overall outcome or judgment of history. Murder looks likely to bad, because generally, over time, humans have found it to be so.

Second, there is the knowledge that comes from God. God may reveal to humankind the flow of history and of ethics, especially in areas where our desires might create easy errors in our judgment.

Third, experience combined with reason suggests long term outcomes, but it cannot fix goals. Of course, what it cannot do is pick for us which outcome is best. Recently I was reading a Victorian secularist, who would be horrified as modern secularism. The “ends” he desired, the manly virtues (his language) are the opposite of many our present secularists goals.

Of any individual, it is impossible for us to tell who is “good” or “evil.” Many who do evil things may be better on the whole than many who do not appear to do evil. Many actions that are bad become mixed with actions that are good and so do as much good as harm. We can judge an individual action, but not motivations.

We are none of us pure and none of us without the common grace of God.

Lord Jesus Christ may I live in your City some day.