Many wonderful things happened at my church today, but as we all know the First Rule of Blogging is that one should always focus on the negatives.

Admittedly this Rule is in direct conflict with the Christian rule, “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” (Ephesians 4:29)  Perhaps some Christian bloggers think that the Rule for what goes into their keyboard, is different from the Rule for what comes out of their mouths.  Still, there is a time and a place for criticism in “building others up”; I pray that the Lord would give me the right spirit and tone.

What bothered me didn’t have anything to do with the church service itself; it was a flyer for another event.  It was a Methodist organized “Good Friday breakfast”, with some speaker talking, and the fateful line was something like the following:

Individual tickets—$35.  Sponsor a table of eight: Bronze Circle: $250, Silver Circle, $500, Gold Circle, $1000.

There would be nothing particularly remarkable about seeing this sentence in an advertisement for a political rally, a theatre meet-and-greet, or a fundraiser for some other type of secular non-profit corporation.  Yet I couldn’t help but feel like there was a contrast between the point of the event—which one presumes has something to do with Christ’s Crucifixion—and the means chosen to finance the event and make it available to the public.  Perhaps, before mediating on Jesus’ Passion, the organizers of this event should meditate on the following Bible passages:

In the following directives I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good.  In the first place, I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, and to some extent I believe it.  No doubt there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God’s approval.  When you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, for as you eat, each of you goes ahead without waiting for anybody else.  One remains hungry, another gets drunk.  Don’t you have homes to eat and drink in?  Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?  What shall I say to you?  Shall I praise you for this? Certainly not!  (1 Corinthians 11:17-22)

While this breakfast probably does not include a specific Communion ceremony celebrating the Lord’s Supper, its purpose is still centered around remembering the same event.  We do not come to the Cross as “Bronze” or “Gold” circle members, we come as sinners saved by grace.  Nor is anyone excluded from the Cross because they cannot afford to pay $35 for a meal.  As it is written:

Since you call on a Father who judges each man’s work impartially, live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear.  For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.  (1 Peter 1:17-19)

God will judge us all impartially, so we ought to be afraid to draw wicked distinctions between those who have the silver and gold, and those who do not.  The “reverent fear” has to do with the fact that God is zealous for his holy Name and will not leave people unpunished who discriminate in this way.

If the organizers of this event suddenly decide to fear God and respect the poor, there is an easy solution.  Try the phrase “suggested donation”, and make explicit the fact that those who cannot pay are still allowed to attend.  Remove the silliness about different levels of prestige associated with different contribution levels.  And then maybe you will understand what happened at the Cross better.

It turns out that there is an explicit rule about this in the New Testament:

My brothers, as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don’t show favoritism.   Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby clothes also comes in.   If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the floor by my feet,”have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?  (James 2:1-4)

This passage of Scripture was instrumental in the formation of the Free Methodist denomination.  The other Methodists were literally charging people money in order to sit in reserved pews.  I saw some of these myself when I visited an old Anglican church in Williamsburg, Virginia (a sort of colonial “living history” tourist attraction), which has been in continuous operation since 1711.  It’s rather charming to sit in the Pews reserved for “George Washington” and “Thomas Jefferson”, but less charming to think of poor people being unable to sit down in the church because of their lack of funds.

That’s what makes Free Methodists “free”—you’re free to sit wherever you want, although it was also associated with their political activism to end slavery, unfortunately still necessary.  “Freely you have received, freely give” (Matthew 10:8).  Who will put the Free back into these Methodists?

(If you’re curious, the “method” part of Methodism was basically small group Bible studies, with literacy training for poor workers who needed it.  This was also politically subversive back in the day, since workers who could read demanded better treatment from their employers…)

Now the Church is the manifestation of the Kingdom of God here on earth.  Its King is Jesus Christ, and we do the things that we do in order to please him, not the world.  A lot of the things that Christians bicker about, Jesus might not care one way or another.  “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” (Luke 12:14).  But if there’s one thing that made Jesus flip out, it was contaminating God’s holy place with commercialism:

When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem.  In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money.   So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.  To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here!  How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!”   His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.” (John 2:13-17)

When I see things like the flyer I mentioned, or church bazaars, I wonder what Jesus would do today.  Possibly something that would get him arrested.  (According to the synoptic Gospels, he was indeed arrested just a few days after making a similar scene.)  Presumably if I were holier—if I had more zeal for God’s house—I would also fly into a rage and turn over tables, instead of simply noticing the inconsistency and calmly writing a blog post about it.

The bottom line is this.  The Church belongs to Jesus, and we are not at liberty to run it like a business.  Not even like a non-profit business.  True, a shrewd Christian leader with business experience might well be able to extract valuable life lessons from how the business world works.  But this cannot include the lesson that status and privilege is distributed on the basis of money.  The Church is an anticipation of the New Jerusalem, the home of righteousness, in which the only kind of riches that counts is being rich towards God.

Update: upon returning to church the next week, I found that I was mistaken about the Good Friday breakfast being sponsored by a Methodist organization.  It was actually being sponsored by the YMCA, the speaker being the CEO of some Christian organization.  The event was clearly explicitly Christian, so my criticisms still apply, except for the remark about putting the “free” back into the Free Methodists.

Back in the comments section of my post on Giving Thanks, an old college friend and I are discussing the age-old problem of why God permits suffering and other evils.  This is a serious problem; in my view the Argument from Evil is the only really formidable positive argument for Atheism.  (By a positive argument for Atheism, I mean something that provides specific evidence against God’s existence, rather than merely making the negative claim that there isn’t enough evidence for Theism to believe it.  In order to show that Christianity is plausible, both claims must be addressed.)

The conundrum is famous: If God is the All-Knowing, then he knows what things are evil, if he is the All-Powerful, he should be able to prevent them, and if he is the All-Loving, then he will want to prevent evil.  So why is there evil?

The only way to solve the problem is to postulate the existence of some good thing which cannot exist unless evil either exists, or is at least possible.  (Common “defences” might refer to putative goods such as free will, the opportunity for humans to exercise virtues, the orderliness of the universe, an afterlife of a sort that depends on people having had certain experiences, etc.)  If the good is such that it is logically impossible to get it without (possibly) getting the evil too, then the defence would be successful, since when we say that God can do anything, we don’t mean that he can or would create a logical contradiction.  (As C.S. Lewis says in The Problem of Pain, “Nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”)  I’m not going to attempt a detailed defence here, but I do want to make some general points about the Argument from Evil.

My first point is that God’s omniscience actually makes the Argument from Evil weaker, not stronger.  The reason is that we humans are not omniscient.  If we are ignorant, there’s no particular reason to assume that we know what is the morally best way to run a world.  Suppose that you wrote down a list of all the things you regard as good (happiness, knowledge, beauty, whatever).  Suppose you figured out a way to weight all of these factors numerically—of course, there’s no way we could ever agree on how to do this, and I’m not convinced it even makes sense, but let’s run with it—so that you could assert that some possible kind of universe (call it \(U\)) is optimum: the best possible.

[Note for experts: my kinds of universes \(U\) here aren’t exactly the same as the “possible worlds” discussed by analytic philosophers.  If the best possible kind of universe contains something like free will or nondeterminism, there will be multiple “possible worlds” \(W_1, W_2 \ldots\) consistent with the same overall plan \(U\) of the universe, some of which may be morally better or worse compared to the others.]

Now if God knows about even a single kind of goodness that we are ignorant of, or if he weights the various kinds of goodness differently than us in any way, then of course God will view some other kind of universe \(U^\prime\) as best.  It seems infinitely unlikely that \(U = U^\prime\) just by coincidence, so it seems to be almost certain that the universe will appear to us to contain evils that we can’t explain.  One can argue about whether this is a sufficient explanation, but it’s definitely something that has to be taken into account.  The idea that a superhuman entity which created the universe will see things exactly the way we do is absurd:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
(Isaiah 55:8-9)

The second point I’d like to make, is that the Argument from Evil has emotional force as well as intellectual force.  Atheists tend to get annoyed when Theists suggest that Atheists don’t believe in God because they resent him.  I’ve certainly seen plausible cases of this, but I don’t want to speculate that all Atheists are this way, since I don’t like making unfounded accusations about individual people’s characters.  (Maybe that’s why my Politics category only has one post in it so far.)

Nevertheless, leaving the Atheists aside for a moment, I think I can say from an examination of my own heart, and conversations with other people, that it’s easy to carry an unconscious grudge against God for various real or imagined grievances in our lives, or the lives of those we care about.  Even if we have no grudge, there can be a deep sense of pain from all the kinds of grief that we don’t understand.

So the Argument from Evil carries emotional force as well as intellectual force.  There’s no necessary reason why an intellectually satisfying answer should be an emotionally satisfying answer, or vice versa.  One should bear this in mind when evaluating the intellectual arguments, since we may be asking from an argument something that no argument can do.

Finally, I believe that Christianity has resources for addressing the Argument from Evil which don’t exist in generic-brand Theism, or indeed in any other religion.  It’s much too simple to say that the existence of evil contradicts Christianity, when in fact the most basic doctrine of Christianity logically implies the existence of evil.

The basic doctrine is that 1) we human beings are wicked and deserve punishment, and that 2) in order to forgive us, God became an innocent human being and allowed himself to be tortured to death by us, and that 3) this act provides us with spiritual healing now, as well as physical immortality for all eternity.  Now regardless of whether you like this idea, even if you find it implausible or downright incomprehensible, you must admit that it’s an idea about how God relates to evil, and uses it for the sake of good.  If there were no such thing as innocent suffering, Christianity wouldn’t even be possible.  If Christianity is true, then God has arranged things so that the most important thing that ever happened was a horrible but redemptive evil.  All other evils, we view in the light of the Cross.

Today is Thanksgiving Day (in the United States), a day set aside for us all to remember the things in life we are grateful for.   Fortunately, Nicole and I started the process of gratitude earlier this week when we finished writing and mailing our thank-you notes for the useful and beautiful presents we got by agreeing to spend the rest of our lives together.

All of us have been supported by other people in many ways, or we would not be alive.  All of us should be grateful more often for those things.  Those of us who believe in God have the privilege of also having someone to thank for the blessings of life that don’t come from other human beings, such as the sun and moon, stars and trees, happy coincidences, good health and harvests, etc.  Even when the good things come from other people, we can still accept it as ultimately coming from the hand of God, who has, after all, provided those other people with the ability and conscience to help us.

But what about when bad things happen?  Is it consistent to attribute everything good that happens to God, but then turn around and say that God has no responsibility for any of the bad things that happen?  Should we blame God for the bad as we praise him for the good? If religious folk thank God even for the indirect results of God’s providence, that are mediated through human choices, why should we not take the same attitude for bad things caused indirectly by God?

Some people say: God does not cause evil, he only permits it.  This idea can be comforting to those who have suffered greatly, because then they don’t have to deal with resentment towards a God who inflicts suffering as well as joy.  Others may find this a pedantic distinction, saying that God is equally responsible for the evils he permits.

The Bible, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to refrain from attributing sorrowful events to God:

When disaster comes to a city, has not the Lord caused it?  (Amos 3:6)

When the evil comes from other people, this is in one sense a violation of God’s will, who has most definitely commanded us to love our neighbors (Lev. 19:18), strangers (Lev. 19:34), and enemies (Ex. 23:4-5, Prov. 24:17-18, 25:21), and who has set a day of judgement in which wrongdoers will be punished.  When a woman is raped, this horrible crime arises not because God approves of rape, but because God allows the will of wicked men to affect other people.

Nevertheless, God does allow it, and the Bible is not shy about describing such things as being (in another sense) God’s decision and will.  When the righteous St. Job loses everything, including his children, to a combination of “natural” disasters and bandit attacks, what does he do?

At this, Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head. Then he fell to the ground in worship and said:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;
may the name of the Lord be praised.”

In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.  (Job 1:20-22)

Job attributes the disaster to God’s “taking away”, but he does not blame God by charging him with “wrongdoing”.  What gives?  How is it possible for God to do something evil without being evil?  The key is what the patriarch St. Joseph says to his brothers, when he forgives them after they had sold him into slavery:

“Don’t be afraid.  Am I in the place of God?  You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” (Genesis 50:20)

One and the same act can be both evil and good, depending on whose intentions we consider.  The selling of Joseph into slavery is evil as done by his brothers, because they intended to harm him.  It is good as done by God, because God’s intentions were different: God did it in order to save lives.  (I am not trying to make any comment about free will here; presumably if Joseph’s brothers had freely chosen not to sell him into slavery, then God would also have chosen something different.)  Thus God can condemn what people do, while simultaneously using it for his good plan.

That must be why, after the Apostles were flogged for teaching about Jesus, they were

The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.  (Acts 5:41)

Why on earth did they take this attitude?  St. Paul explains it like this:

We also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.  And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.  (Romans 5:3-5)

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.  (Romans 8:28)

The idea that God does not cause bad things to happen is a superficial teaching.  It evades the cross and forgets the gospel message that we are to rejoice and thank God for everything that happens to us.  That is why St. James tells us to

Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.  Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.(James 1:2-4)

But perhaps James was just copying his brother’s idea:

“Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.  Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matt. 5:11-12)

In conclusion, it doesn’t make any sense to thank God for the good things in life and absolve him for the bad things.  No, we should also credit the bad things to God, and give thanks for them as well.  Not because the evil is imaginary, but because he intends to use it to build us up into more loving people, for the sake of the salvation of the world.

But perhaps your last year was actually quite pleasant, as mine was.  In that case, let’s not forget to thank him for the obvious blessings as well.

A few weeks ago I started to describe what holiness means, and someone requested that I go into more detail.

One way to approach this is through the concept of the numinous, described in the classic work The Idea of the Holy by the Blessed Rudolf Otto.  This book was a significant influence on St. Lewis, who discusses the numinous especially in his introduction to The Problem of Pain.  The concept of the numinous is difficult to explain because most of the language we use to describe it has come to mean other things.  In English, the words “awesome” and “awful” both used to mean the same thing: the feeling of dread, wonder, uncanniness, terror, or reverence one gets in the presence of something you believe to be eerie or supernatural.  As Lewis points out, we use the same word “afraid” when we say that someone is a jungle is “afraid of tigers” as that someone in a haunted house is “afraid of ghosts”.  But in the first case, the fear is just for our own safety, whereas in the case of ghosts one is afraid of what the ghost IS, more than what it will do to you.

Please note, I am not claiming that ghosts exist, but rather using them as an example to make a point about human psychology.  Just as we have a sexual instinct which responds to sexual stimuli, so we have another instinct which responds when we believe we are encountering supernatural stimuli.  The hairs stand up on the back of our neck and we feel chilly.  In that sense it feels like fear, even though the experience may be pleasant or unpleasant, and we may or may not be concerned for our physical safety.  Atheists, pagans, and Christians all experience this feeling on certain occasions; the difference is how they interpret it.

In our own minds, we can feel numinous feelings without making any connection to ethical concepts; a pagan or a pantheist may feel that they are worshiping a Spirit which is beyond human notions of good or evil.  However, when ethical concepts do intrude, a special composite feeling arises.  In the case where the object is perceived as Numinous Evil, we call the feeling that arises in us Horror.  This feeling can be excited by natural objects which seem “eerie” such as corpses or creepy insects.  (Lewis claims that there is no survival advantage in this feeling, but it seems to me that avoiding diseased corpses and dangerous insects may well have evolutionary advantage.)  It can also be excited when we read or watch movies about vampires, werewolves, demons etc.  (This assumes that the movies treat the topic seriously, of course.  Monsters that think and act just like regular people are humorous, since we expected a numinous thrill and then it was a false alarm).

When the object is perceived as Numinous Good, this composite idea is nothing other than the Holy.  (Unfortunately, there’s a lack of grammatical parallelism here, in that “Holy” refers to the Object about which we have numinous feelings, whereas “Horror” refers to the feelings themselves.)  The distinctive characteristic of holiness is that ethics itself becomes imbued with supernatural significance.  This experience is not always happy.  As the classic example, consider Isaiah chapter 6:

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. ² Above him were seraphs [burning ones], each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. ³ And they were calling to one another:

“Holy, holy, holy is YHWH of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”

⁴ At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

⁵ “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, YHWH of hosts.”

⁶ Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. ⁷ With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”

⁸ Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”  And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”

If you are a nonreligious person, I hope you tried to read that as you would some passage in a fantasy novel, with “suspension of disbelief”.  Put aside how you feel about Christianity in general, and just ask how this passage makes you feel, as if it were a fictional work of art.

Doubtless Isaiah knew beforehand that he had ethical shortcomings; perhaps he lied, or berated someone.  But before, it was a matter of merely personal regret, excused by the fact that everyone does it.  In the presence of this astounding vision, his guilt becomes something completely different: a feeling of uncleanness and shrinking before a majestic purity, that even the angels had to hide their faces from.  It was like coming into a formal dinner party stinking, and wearing no clothes at all.

This is a numinous problem, not just an ethical problem.  So it needs a numinous solution.  The coal from the altar makes “atonement” for Isaiah’s uncleanness.  That is, it allows Isaiah to become a participant in the numinous, in a way that covers up or removes his guilt.  Only then can St. Isaiah hear God’s call to be a prophet, denouncing the sins of others.

It’s a mistake to try to argue that Christianity is true before the audience knows what Christianity is.  Before people can understand Christianity, they have to understand the basic concepts in which it is expressed.  Without the concept of holiness, nothing we say about God deserving worship, or about Jesus dying on the cross for our sins, or about love requiring purity—none of it makes any sense at all!