This is one of those posts where I’m hoping that you, my wonderful readers, will comment at great length on your blogs and or in the comments below. I’m trying to figure out what the buzzword/catchphrase “social justice” means in terms of Christianity. Why?

Well maybe you heard about what Glen Beck said:

I’m begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them…are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words ’social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words.

Now if you’re like me, you probably don’t much care what Mr. Beck says so I don’t want to make this about him. What I do want to do is take this and unpack it. I know the term gets used in both political and religious circles and means different things to different people. Apparently it was coined by A Jesuit priest name Luigi Taparelly. There wasn’t a great deal of explanation as to what he meant by it (at least not that I could understand), but I think it’s important to note that at its origins it wasn’t a liberal political/communist/socialist issue.

In our church it seems to be used in circumstances where we as believers are called to act in our community to see the needs of the poor and disadvantaged met. It’s not a call to influence the government or to seek solutions from them. As frequent commenter on this blog Chris Walker said, that just sounds like charity. I suppose he’s right, depending on how you define charity. With a broad definition that would fit. But is that all there is to it?

Jason Rennie points us to Leviticus 19:15 – “Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly.” What does showing partiality to the poor look like?

I’m not sure. It seems like there’s more. What do you think? What are our responsibilities as believers in this arena? Is there anything that goes beyond charity that we’re called to do in the community?

In the Presbyterian Church we practice the baptism of infants. It was a bit of a change to me given my Baptist/Methodist background. Once I thought about it a bit and saw how it went down though I was largely okay with it. It’s basically almost identical to a baby dedication similar to what’s practiced in both of those other denominations (at least the ones I attended) there’s just the added bit of the baby’s head getting wet.

I’ll admit I wasn’t too sure about getting it done to my kids since I was raised with the notion of a “believer’s baptism” firmly entrenched in my mind. After I thought about it though and had it explained to me by some of the elders in my church I decided to go ahead with it and each of my children was baptized as an infant.

Essentially Presbyterians look at it as akin to circumcision. It’s a symbol of you being in the covenant family. Though it’s not a visible mark, it serves the same purpose. There’s no salvation implied for the baby as their might be with someone who engages in a “believer’s baptism” situation. Basically the parents and the church agree to work together to raise the child in a way that pleases God, teaching them about our religion our beliefs.

So I was reading the Bible this morning and came across Romans 2:25-26. “25Circumcision has value if you observe the law, but if you break the law, you have become as though you had not been circumcised. 26If those who are not circumcised keep the law’s requirements, will they not be regarded as though they were circumcised?” I think this applies to baptism as well. To me the parallels seem obvious.

Whether you’re baptized as an infant, as an adult believer, or not at all what’s more important is that you have the Gospel. If you don’t have that, no amount of water is going to make you one of God’s children. That’s not to say that baptism isn’t important. It has its place as circumcision did, but the water isn’t the active agent in any of this. I’m not sure that anyone’s arguing that in the case of the believers who are baptized as adults. I just want it to be clear to those that are anti-”paedo baptsim” that we don’t believe it is in the case of children either.

This is my stab at Alan Knox’s Scripture as We Live It series, wherein he takes a piece of scripture and shows how we most often live it out. Apologies to Alan if this falls flat.

But though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach unto you any gospel thing other than that which we preached unto you we have decided is that which you should believe to be absolutely true, let him be anathema. Galatians 1:8 remix

We believers split up pretty easily over things that aren’t the Gospel.

Baptism? Not the Gospel.
Communion? Not the Gospel.
Church polity? Not the Gospel.
Preferred version of the Bible? Not the Gospel.

What is the Gospel? It is that “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand”. It is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek”. Addendum – Salvation itself is not the gospel, but it is a result of or as a friend put it “an implication of” the gospel, the Kingdom of God being at hand.

These things are worth getting excited about. These things are perhaps even worth letting someone be anathema, should they preach a different set of good news.

So let me ask you, what gospel is your church preaching?

Here’s an interesting quote from Stealing Jesus:

For some people “are atheists because of a higher implicit theism than that professed by believers. They reject God because His name has been taken in vain, and they are unable to distinguish between His holiness and its profanation.” In other words, they rebel, both intellectually and morally, against what legalistic faiths have made of God, “both in the realm of truth and in the realm of the good, in both culture and ethics.”

Now I don’t know if there really are any (functioning) atheists that arrived where they are because of this, but it’s in line with a thought I had yesterday. In some ways, the church has done more damage to people’s faith than a thousand million Dawkins/Darwins/Hitchens. When someone steps out of our theological comfort zone we can be so quick to tell them how wrong they are and that the error is going to lead them out of the body. You tell someone that often enough and they’ll start believing it. If they do then they’ll either give up telling you that they believe what they do and go along to get along or they’ll just throw their hands up and leave. Sure, they might also come to agree with you, but have you done God’s work in that case? Or are we profaning God by taking his place in the judgment seat?

Now just for the sake of clarification I do think there are times that a person can be in legitimate danger of heresy, but I would argue that those cases are rarer than we really want to make them.

According to Wikipedia “Parkour (sometimes also abbreviated to PK) or l’art du déplacement [1] (English: the art of moving) is the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one’s path by adapting one’s movements to the environment.” You’ve seen these guys jumping around like monkeys/Spiderman and in case you still don’t know what I’m talking about, have a look at this:

Parkour – Simple Truths from Danny Pack on Vimeo.

I particularly like this one since it’s a bit more raw, but I could watch them for hours. So now that you’ve seen it, what’s the point of Parkour? For those that don’t know, the philosophy of parkour is as follows:

Parkour is the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one’s path by adapting one’s movements to the environment.

• Parkour requires… consistent, disciplined training with an emphasis on functional strength, physical conditioning, balance, creativity, fluidity, control, precision, spatial awareness, and looking beyond the traditional use of objects.
• Parkour movements typically include… running, jumping, vaulting, climbing, balancing, and quadrupedal movement. Movements from other physical disciplines are often incorporated, but acrobatics or tricking alone do not constitute parkour.
• Parkour training focuses on… safety, longevity, personal responsibility, and self-improvement. It discourages reckless behavior, showing off, and dangerous stunts.
• Parkour practitioners value… community, humility, positive collaboration, sharing of knowledge, and the importance of play in human life, while demonstrating respect for all people, places, and spaces.

—American Parkour Community Definition [2]

So what does this have to do with Christianity? Well I’m reading this book called Stealing Jesus and while I plan on dealing with that in what will probably be a series of posts, watching this old video and chatting with a buddy made me think that there’s something in common with the way Christianity is looked at in Bawer’s book and how a traceur (one who practices parkour) looks at obstacles in his path.

When Fundamentalists are presented with an obstacle, such as evolution, they would would tend to either ignore the issue outright as long as possible, or fabricate some elaborate solution to get over/under/around it. Neither ignorance about it, nor building bridges or tunnels in the form of “creation science” seems like a particularly good solution to me. While they are certainly “solutions” of a sort, their use of avoidance techniques looks unhealthy. I understand the notion that the paths we have followed for generations are “good enough for me” as the song goes. I know the argument that says that engaging with the culture can lead to tainting our beliefs or harming us spiritually. Why climb a wall when we can go around it? Why swim through a river when we can dam it or build a bridge? Those are common questions and I think we can learn a thing or two from the traceur.

“Modernist” Christians, a term in vogue in the ’30s, took a different tack. They embraced the things some Christians look at as obstacles. The knowledge that science brought was (rightly so) looked at as a good thing. Instead of reacting to it or treating it as adversarial to God’s word, they tried to understand how to move through a life of faith with that new understanding as a part of it. It lead them to ask questions about their understanding of the creation accounts in the Bible and to ask if they were intended to be literally true or if there was another purpose for their being there. The “gymnastics” that modernists or emergent brethren are accused of going through may look a lot like the things that traceurs do, but just as the above points say, they aren’t doing it to show off. Science and culture aren’t things to be avoided or blown off. We need to deal with them. But again, why? Where’s the benefit in this?

In short I believe that engaging with the world around you can give you a more robust faith. Too many Christians I see every day have their heads down and accept what they are fed without asking questions. They live the life they are told to live and only seek out experiences that are approved of by their pastor/church/friends. The take the safe, clear route rather than the more direct and interesting one. Will that get you want to go? Sure. Ultimately I do believe that both the avoider and the engager will end up in the same place, but what sort of life are we called to?

Now there are dangers if you take the path less traveled. As it is with parkour, discipline is required as is a fair amount of flexibility. We need to be aware of the challenges around us and face them, looking beyond the “traditions” for ways to understand the world we live in. There’s definitely something to be said for examining the ways others do things, whether we agree with them or not, and using those ways to improve ourselves. Regardless of which way you choose to go though, that last bullet point is something that we could all benefit from, Christians or not. Whatever path we choose, we must value “community, humility, positive collaboration, sharing of knowledge, and the importance of play in human life, while demonstrating respect for all people, places, and spaces”.

Yesterday in my reader I saw a link to a new(ish) book edited and written in part by John MacArthur called Thinking Biblically

It caused me to tweet “If you want to “think Biblically” (whatever that means) why would you read John MacArthur’s book about it and not just read the Bible?” Now that was part serious question and part me chumming the waters to see what others would think. I don’t know anything about the book beyond what the Amazon blurb says:

What we think shapes who we are. That’s why the Bible tells us, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2a). In a world of differing voices competing for our allegiance, we must learn to “think biblically” so we can distinguish good from evil. God is the Creator of this world; his voice-his Word-must guide our thoughts and our lives.

With the Bible in their hands, John MacArthur and other scholars and teachers from the Master’s College confront the false worldviews that dominate our postmodern world. The authors provide models for cultivating a biblical mind-set on worship, psychology, gender, science, education, history, government, economics, and literature. This book will help anyone who is striving to think biblically in today’s culture.

Last night I didn’t even know that much. Let me say this. I don’t think that books on the Bible, commentaries and history and the like are bad things. As Brian aka MisterDubbs said “It’s arrogant to assume that by reading the Bible and the Bible alone we will have all the requisite knowledge to understand it in all its cultural, historical, and theological implications.” I think that’s accurate. It was a series of texts written by men thousands of years ago. We have a hard enough time interpreting modern literature that originates in our own culture. So a little help is a good thing.

What I do have a problem with are books that purport to tell us how to think. I’m skeptical when it comes to any book/person that says “your way of thinking/acting/living is bad, here’s how you should think/act/live”. (Yes I realize that the Bible does that and I’m suspicious of people using it to tell me how to think/act/live too.) That’s what this book and whole hosts of books seem to be doing.

“Grow your kids God’s way!”, “Live your best life now!”, and now “Think like the Bible would have you think!”. People, well meaning people, are reading these books to figure out how God wants them to live. I don’t really fault them for that. This is a complicated world (it always has been) and seeking answers is legitimate. I believe that the Bible has some of those answers and I also believe that your fellow man can have some as well. I just believe being in community with other believers who challenge what we believe and who struggle along side us to learn what God has to say to us is more useful than the latest Christian self-help missive or commentary will ever be.

Am I over reacting? Are these books really useful? Will people use these books alongside the Bible and in communtiy to figure out the answers to their questions, instead of swallowing their favorite Christian guru’s opinions whole? Help me think this through here.

I cast some thoughts about friendship here, mostly about Christians limiting their friendships. Today I’d like to noodle on social media and “friending”. I tweeted a couple of questions over the weekend:

What does being a friend mean to you? What does it take for you to call someone your friend?
How has social media affected our definition of the words “community” and “friend”. Has it diluted it, broadened it, both?

The consensus seems to be that a friend is someone that you can call on in your time of need. I think that’s certainly one good criteria. That latter question ended up getting me a wider variety of answers. Before I delve into that, let me tell you what prompted these questions in the first place. It gets back to my podcast on critique.

One of the answers I kept getting, whether stated or implied, was that one didn’t critique one’s friends publically. Setting aside the notion of whether or not that’s true, what really jumps out at me is the notion that if you follow someone on Twitter or Facebook you are a friend of theirs on some level. I think that dilutes the definition of friend, at least the idea that a friend is someone that you can rely on and that you can share meaningful parts of your life with.

Don’t get me wrong, I do have “real” friends on Twitter, Facebook, and in the blogging/podcasting community. Some of these people I’ve met only a few times and others not at all. I wouldn’t have met most of these people any other way. So in that sense, it may have broadened my definition of friendship/community to include people I’m not physically proximal to. Those are people that I will share my deeper thoughts/doubts/fears with. Those are people I would “take aside” and hold accountable or challenge. I also expect those people to do the same for me.

Those people are only a small percentage of my crowd/tribe/whatever though. If I follow you or friend you that likely means I’m interested in what you’re saying. It certainly means that potential friendship is there, though as I told one guy, forming/maintaining friendships strictly through social media is practically speaking exponentially more difficult. It means I will be “friendly” with you, applying the Golden Rule as liberally as I can. More than likely though you’re not my friend and none of the rights and honors thereto appertaining, appertain to you. So in that sense my concept of community/friendship stays pretty tight.

I don’t want to water the word “friend” and I fear that the wider the social media net goes, the more likely that is to happen, at least on a macro level. What about you? Thoughts?

I asked a question on Twitter last week, the gist of which was, “why do I only see praise for podcast novels in the public stream. It generated quite a brisk conversation. I decided to create an audio response to the feedback. I hope you enjoy it!

Shows/People referenced:

Braindouche
Zach Ricks
Brand Gamblin
Dan Rabarts
Rich Asplund Jr
ObiOrion
Pip Ballantine
Tee Morris
Rick Castello
Michael Falkner
Marnen Laibow-Koser
Dan Absalonson
Alasdair Stuart
Steve Eley
Nathan Lowell

Blogs mentioned:
Why Michell Plested cares about critiques and feedback.
Why Odin One-Eye reviews podcasts.
Svallie’s take on reviewer’s ethics.

Dan Sawyer answered my opening volley in our debate on science and religion in a post titled A Skin-Deep Territory Distinction. He makes some good points regarding areas where science and religion touch, overlap and even (as he says) aim for the same territory. For the most part I don’t think I can really disagree with what he said. There is one thing I’d like to examine though.

He says that the concept of Non-overlapping Magesteria, which is similar to what I’m proposing, isn’t historically representative of the relationship between science and religion. That may very well be true, in fact I guess based on his examples I know it to be true. I suppose when I think of religion I’m thinking of it as a tool though. Not how that tool has been used, but how it should be used. Again, just trying to think this through and I could well be wrong, but here goes.

Let’s go back, let’s go way back. Religion was a tool that man used historically to explain things going on around them and more than likely they didn’t make a clear cut distinction between the natural and the supernatural. if it rained, a natural phenomenon, they may come up with a supernatural cause. Let me pause here and say that I think all religions (even my own) were sort of manufactured by men. I think that Christians/Jews had the advantage of the basis of their religion, their relationship with God, being true. So, man historically used religion as a tool for everything from examining the natural universe, to making laws, to relating to their god(s).

Along comes science. Science as earlier defined is based on observation and reproducible test results and not on superstition or mythology. I think that gives us better results where the tool is appropriately used. Currently science does have a lot of useful things to tell us about human nature, consciousness, the ultimate nature of reality, origins, endings, and morality. I think religion certainly has things to say about those topics too. So I suppose making a stark contrast between the natural and the supernatural and thus making a stark contrast between science and religion may be a mistake.

It seems that the magesteria do overlap to a degree, whether its simply bumping up against one another or getting thoroughly muddled. It doesn’t surprise me. There’s nothing magical about either “magesteria” after all. They are tools and like any tools they can be misused. If the only tool you have is hammer then everything you encounter may look like a nail. Sometimes, just like physical tools, science and religion can be misused by themselves to answer questions they aren’t best suited for and sometimes they can be used in tandem for a better result.

Stephen Jay Gould, advocate of the NOMA view seems to indicate this in this quote:

[E]ach subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority … This resolution might remain all neat and clean if the nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA) of science and religion were separated by an extensive no man’s land. But, in fact, the two magisteria bump right up against each other, interdigitating in wondrously complex ways along their joint border. Many of our deepest questions call upon aspects of both for different parts of a full answer—and the sorting of legitimate domains can become quite complex and difficult.

Dan goes on to say that religions’ focus is “on securing and/or maintaining power” and is “concerned with controlling the behavior of beings in the temporal world”. Again I can’t argue that this hasn’t pretty consistently been the case. I would argue that this is not the fault of the tool or in fact its actual purpose. People have used science and philosophy and probably another thing or two lying about for the exact same purposes. That is a people problem.

He closes by saying:

Besides, I daresay that a religion which made no claims about reality, made no demands on its patrons, promised no rewards (temporal, eternal, or existential), and said nothing substantive about human nature would maintain a hold on parishioners for very long. Don’t believe me? Look at the thin attendance of liberal protestant churches compared to moderate and conservative ones.

All religions I’m aware of do all of these things. My original definition said that religion was “to put us in touch with whatever we believe to be true about something that exists outside of the natural realm”. There will be claims about where reality meets god. There will be demands made on how we are to relate to the supernatural and the natural. There will be rewards, though in Christianity most of those rewards are rightly laid up in Heaven and thus supernatural, not all of them are. They do say something about human nature and since there is something of the divine in us it is right for religion to speak to those areas. So religion is not purely supernatural, but it is that which allows us to examine where the supernatural and the natural collide and influence one another, something science can’t do.

Periodically (weekly I believe) there’s a chat on Twitter about science fiction called appropriately enough, SciFiChat. The whole think is conducted by making sure that everyone involved includes the hashtag #scifichat in their tweets. This ensures that everyone can see what’s being said even if you don’t follow everyone involved. You can see most, if not all of it, here. This past week it was on religion in science fiction and being a big fan of both I definitely made some time to take part.

During the discussion the question was asked, “Is science diametrically opposed to religion?” Both Zach Ricks and I agreed that that wasn’t the case. He said, “Some people believe that science destroys faith, I don’t agree with that stance at all.” To which I replied, in agreement, the “the two are examining different things.” Writer, philosopher, and all around cool guy J. Daniel Sawyer tagged me on Skype and asked me if I’d like to flesh out and debate that point on our respective blogs. Always ready to cross swords, I agreed. We put it up to age before beauty and since we’re both pretty grizzly looking (in the bear sense) age won out so I get to fire the first volley.

Thanks to Sid I’ve learned that defining my terms is pretty important in these sorts of situations. The definition of science to which I refer is “knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method” aka natural science. That is defined as “any of the sciences (as physics, chemistry, or biology) that deal with matter, energy, and their interrelations and transformations or with objectively measurable phenomena”. Science deals with the natural world. It tells us things like how and at what temperature water freezes. It tells us how species adapt to their surroundings and pass that on to their young. It describes the processes of the universe, at least so far as we are currently able to measure and observe them.

Religion on the other hand serves a very different purpose. Again, referring to Webster, religion is “a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices”. The purpose of such a system is to put us in touch with whatever we believe to be true about something that exists outside of the natural realm, at least that’s how I see it. There exist things that do not belong to the natural world. God, angels, and demons, belong to this class of things. There may well be other things that are supernatural, but that’s a different topic. The point is that these things are not objectively measurable.

So, when I say that science and religion are not diametrically opposed, by that I mean one can be both scientific and religious when it comes to your world view. Science is used to look at and interact with our physical world and religion is used to look at and interact with the spiritual and supernatural world. In that sense science and religion seem to me to be dramatically different in terms of their purpose. The opposition, the downright animosity, that often exists between representatives of the “two worlds” is one that I frankly don’t get. Too often it looks like people who each believe that their particular way of looking at everything in creation can eventually answer the prevailing questions without any help from the other. That hardly seems necessary or productive.

Dan says that “science and religion can not meaningfully be said to be examining different things.” I’m not sure if we’re using different definitions for the terms or if our respective world views are different. Whatever the case I look forward to what he has to say.

His response.