Discovering the Real Jesus in Monroe

The cultivation of the inner life is a slow-cooker, not a microwave. It is true that, on occasion, God can nuke the human heart such that it fast-forwards in maturity (= fruitfulness). But in general fruit grows slowly, and must be cultivated and attended to. McHearts are cheap; hearts slow-morphed into Christlikeness are thick, expansive, and costly.

Needed: much still-time with God spent listening and meditating on what one hears from God. It is out of this inner place that relevant, fruitful action comes.

In Matthew 18:3 Jesus says, “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Part of this is one of those upside-down-kingdom things, since children approached to lower levels of human expendability. To understand Jesus one must give up all self-pretension and all self-aggrandization. It’s instructive to note that this does not mean that one remains, mentally, as a toddler.

C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, writes:

“Because Christ said we could only get into His world by being like children, many Christians have the idea that, provided you are ‘good’, it does not matter being a fool… Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary. He told us to be not only ‘as harmless as doves’, but also ‘as wise as serpents’. He wants a child’s heart, but a grown-up’s head.”

“AIR-GUITAR” RELIGION

FRANCIS BECKWITH’S LOGICAL ARGUMENT AGAINST ABORTION[1]

(Beckwith is currently Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Jurisprudence at Baylor University.)

1. The unborn entity, from the moment of conception, is a full-fledged member of the human community.
2. It is prima facie[2] morally wrong to kill any member of that community.
3. Every successful abortion kills an unborn entity, a full-fledged member of the human community.
4. Therefore, every successful abortion is prima facie morally wrong.

This is not a religious argument, but a logical argument. No appeal to religion needs to be made.

By “full-fledged member of the human community” is meant that the conceptus[3] is as much a bearer of rights as any human being whose rights-bearing status is uncontroversial, like you or me. As Beckwith says, “the unborn entity is entitled to all the rights to which free and equal persons are entitled by virtue of being free and equal persons.” “Full-fledged member of the human community” cannot mean something like “viability,” since then we have two problems:

1) the arbitrariness of deciding who’s a full-fledged member and who’s not; and

2) the odd philosophical idea that there is suddenly a “moment” (call it time ‘t’) when the conceptus/fetus/inborn child becomes a person, which means at time ‘t-minus-1 second’ it was not. “Abortion advocates argue that the unborn entity is not a person and hence not a subject of moral rights until some decisive moment in fetal or postnatal development.” (Beckwith, 130) Such a position is incoherent and fraught with philosophical problems.

“Virtually no one disputes – including leading defenders of abortion-choice – that every mature human being was once an adolescent, a child, an infant, a baby, a newborn, a fetus, and an embryo.” (131) But the abortion advocate argues that it is morally permissible to end a human being’s life at the embryo stage of human life. How is this possible? Beckwith says they argue that not all human beings are equally intrinsically valuable (IV) because some do not have the present capacity to exhibit certain properties or functions that would make them IV. (130) Thus, the fetal self is not “intrinsically valuable.”

Beckwith holds to a “substance view of persons.” This means that a human being “is intrinsically valuable because of the sort of thing it is and the human being remains that sort of thing as long as it exists”. That is, an individual “maintains absolute identity through time while it grows, develops, and undergoes numerous changes”. To use another example, the term “universe” refers to one entity that goes through various stages. The universe at t + 1 second, though much smaller and far more inchoate then the universe now, was still at that time as much “the universe” as it is now. So, the term “universe does not suffer from vagueness. It is in precisely that sense that “person” does not suffer from vagueness as well.

Various functions and capacities, whether fully realized or utilized do not constitute a person. Thus a human being is never a potential person, but is always a person at different stages of development, whether potential properties and capacities are actualized or not.

To explain: a human being may never realize the ability to reason logically. It would then lack this ability. In contrast, a frog is not said to lack something if it can’t study logic, because by nature it is not the sort of being that can have the ability to do logic. But a human being who lacks the ability to think logically is still a human being because of her nature. A human being’s “lack” makes sense if and only if she is an actual human person. (E.g., a rock does not “lack” the ability to see.)
Most pro-abortionists argue that personhood is not inherent or intrinsic, but based on certain capacities and functions, be it consciousness, sentience, self-awareness, the ability to reason, and so on.

WHAT ABOUT THE FOLLOWING POPULAR ARGUMENTS FOR ABORTION CHOICE? Beckwith says they many commit the informal logical fallacies of “appeal to pity” and “begging the question.”

“An argument from pity is an attempt to show the plausibility of one’s point of view by trying to move others emotionally, although the reasonableness of the position stands or falls on the basis of other important factors.” Here are some arguments from pity:

Argument from the dangers of illegal abortions
If abortion is made illegal then women will perform illegal abortions.
If women perform illegal abortions then women will be harmed.
Therefore if abortion is made illegal then women will be harmed.

This argument “begs the question.” Only by assuming that the unborn are not fully human does the argument work. “But if the unborn are fully human, this abortion-choice argument is tantamount to saying that because people die or are harmed while killing other people (i.e., unborn people), the state should make it safe for them to do so.” (94) Therefore, the argument begs the question.

Argument from financial burden
We can’t minimize the fact that there are tragic circumstances, like a poor woman with four small children who becomes pregnant by her alcoholic husband.
“But once again we must ask whether the unborn entity is fully human, for hardship does not justify homicide.” (98)
For example, if I knew that killing you would relieve me of future hardship, that’s not sufficient justification for me to kill you.
Argument from the unwanted child
This argument, again, begs the question.
Because only if we assume that the unborn re not fully human does this argument work.
It is extremely difficult to argue that the value of a human being depends on whether someone wants or cares for that human being.

GRIEF

(Door, in Jerusalem)

Twenty-four years ago I became a “man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” A son was born, and survived, for which I will always be grateful. His twin brother, whom Linda and I named David, died. David was fully formed, yet stillborn. I held the weight of his dead body in my arms. I never will forget that moment, nor do I want to. I have rarely, if ever, felt such inner pain. “Grief” is a word we use to describe the indescribable. I was “grieving.”

I read selections from four books every morning. One of them contains selections from the writings of C.S. Lewis (A Year With C.S. Lewis). Thirty-nine years ago, when I became a Jesus-follower, Lewis was there to greet me. I went to my parents’ home and found my Lutheran confirmation Bible, and then went to a bookstore looking for Christian books and purchased Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics and C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I, the new Jesus-follower and philosophy major, had some powerful guns in my hands. As I read Bonhoeffer I did not understand him. Later in life I was finally ready to read The Cost of Discipleship, parts of which have never left me. Bonhoeffer’s book renders most “discipleship” books written after him unnecessary.

It was Lewis that initially captivated me. Here was a brilliant scholar, a very good thinker, a convert from atheism to Christian theism, who also wrote for children. Lewis combined a sharp intellect with childlike wonder. He was introspective, perhaps too much so. Lewis lets us into his inner life, and I was drawn in to the working out of his salvation.

I read Mere Christianity, then the space trilogy (especially Perelandra), then the brilliant Till We Have Faces (I’ve read this at least three times), the Narnia books, and his books on miracles and pain and joy and so on.

Then I read A Grief Observed. It’s about what’s happening to Lewis’s insides after his wife Joy died of cancer. Initially he published the book under a pseudonym, N.W. Clerk. (Sometimes I kick myself for not buying the N.W. Clerk edition for $20 I saw in a used bookstore in the early 1970s.) Lewis exposes all of himself in this grief journal; his pain, his doubts, his anguish, his awkwardness, his loneliness, his fears, in what is an unforgettable architectonic of grief. When I first read it I thought Lewis, at times, was abandoning his Jesus-faith. Then I realized he’s still fully a Jesus-follower who now sounds like a 20th-century lament-psalmist, who, in this journals, bears his entire heart and soul before the God he follows and the God he wonders about.

A Grief Observed was hard for me to read. I could not help but think of Linda, my young and beautiful wife, and what it would do to me should she die before I do. Or, conversely, the thought of her being alone without me is hard to entertain.

This morning, again, in the daily Lewis readings, the selection is from Lewis’s grief book. It’s hard to read. But it’s real. Lewis writes:

“Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel his claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him in gratitude and praise, you will be – or so it feels – welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence… There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited… Why is He so preent a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?… Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe sich dreadful things about Him.”

If you’ve never before heard such words come out of a God-believer you’ve never read the Psalms. You’ve never internalized the cry of Jesus from the cross, “My God, why have you forsaken me.” You’ve never understood Paul, who writes in Romans 8:18, “I consider these present sufferings not worthy of being compared to the glory that will be revealed in heaven. After reading Lewis on grief I admired him more than ever. Following Jesus is not about being “happy” all the time; it is about advancing his Kingdom against the kingdom of evil and darkness and sin. As I now write this there is a lot of grief out there. In Jesus, the promised Messiah of Isaiah 53, we have “a man of sorrows who is acquainted with grief.”

If you are grieving today and are a lover of Jesus, you do not need to be ashamed of your grief and inner struggle. In Jesus you have a Redeemer who is well-acquainted with the depths of anguish and the turbulent seas of your soul. And while following Jesus has brought me the greatest joys in life, I have found him sympathetic to my every weakness, and that I can bring every part of me to him.

(Lewis published A Grief Observed in 1961. After that he wrote things like Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, and published Christian Reflections.)

From the Middle East Media Research Institute: “Among these, there was one coin that had an inscription on it, and an image of a cow symbolizing Pharaoh’s dream about the seven fat cows and seven lean cows, and the seven green stalks of grain and seven dry stalks of grain. It was found that the inscriptions of this early period were usually simple, since writing was still in its early stages, and consequently there was difficulty in deciphering the writing on these coins. But the research team [managed to] translate [the writing on the coin] by comparing it to the earliest known hieroglyphic texts… Joseph’s name appears twice on this coin, written in hieroglyphs: once the original name, Joseph, and once his Egyptian name, Saba Sabani, which was given to him by Pharaoh when he became treasurer. There is also an image of Joseph, who was part of the Egyptian administration at the time.”

(Green Lake, Wisconsin)

I am taking time this morning to again read John chapters 14-17. In these great chapters Jesus instructs and counsels his disciples about kingdom-living after he leaves them. I invite you to join me in this. Use John chs 14-17 in your devotional time. Saturate yourself in these scriptures.

When God speaks to you, write down what he says in your journal. If you would like to share with me what God is saying to you, please do this. Thanks to those of you who are already sharing your thoughts with me!

At Redeemer we’ll be spending several months in these verses. Why so much time? Because here we have single Jesus-sentences that contain entire worlds of meaning. Like, e.g., the one verse we looked closely at yesterday, John 14:1, where Jesus says “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in me.” Personally, I think I could spend several weeks just on that one Jesus-thought alone!

This coming Sunday I will preach on John 14:5-7. Is there a higher, richer thing in the New Testament than what Jesus says in John 14:6? I am thrilled to think that I get to spend this week prepping for this, and then share what God is telling me with my church family.

Blessings to you for a God-saturated week!