Dear Pastor Johnston

Dear Pastor Johnston (A fictitious name):


A short time back I was waiting for something, I don’t remember what, so I clicked on an I-Tunes freebie named Rise UP. It’s played and sung by a new – at least new to me – artist named Diane Burch. Her voice is clear, crisp, and seems to just draw one into listening. There aren’t many popular “stars” like that anymore. Mostly they make noise, talk dirty, and call what they scream singing.

I don’t know if she wrote the lyrics but they make for a thoughtful poetic kind of tune. Today, finding a popular song with words that have actual meaning is a treat. Much of the popular stuff we are all subjected to is nothing more than sexual innuendo with a thumping guitar rhythm driving it. I wish more of the new worship-choruses we sing were oriented more for poetic, meaningful, God-centered language rather than what appears to be words thrown together to accommodate the off-beat rhythms of a garage-band guitar.

I suppose the younger people enjoy the garage-band sound, at least they pretend they do so we cater to their whims. All of Christendom, at least in the U.S., seems to cater to what people like and not what they need. Forget that boring stuff like sin, repentance, obedience, redemption people don’t like to hear that stuff; It makes them feel bad. Instead let’s continue to lead them to believe they can choose to avoid hell if they're in the mood. Tears of sorrow for the guilt of sin(?), man it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that. But I digress.

Back to Diane Burch. One line that stands out in her tune is “…if it’s happiness you want, life is what you’ll get.” Whoever wrote that actually thinks and is a poet. There is another stanza that deserves comment as well:

Why not say it like it is
Like you know you should
Before they break your little heart
Ooh, break it good
Feelings on the inside
Never let you down
So why not say it like it is
Even if it don't make your mama proud

From our past conversation's you know I’m absolutely against the premise of this song. “Feelings on the inside never let you down,” is the kind of information recent generations of American children have been raised and on which our grandchildren are being raised. Feelings are not the means of cognition, yet we have allowed this irrational, evil concept to insinuate itself into our minds’. We have abrogated our responsibility in that we no longer seem able to make the crucial distinction between our privatized experiences and the reality of God speaking to us through the cognitive message that is the Word.

Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, who, for the most part influences much of American thinking today, made the point long ago that in changing our concepts we will change how we experience the “phenomenal” [reality]. We can see this Kantian philosophy, for example, mirrored in Oprah's push for the Zen-like nonsense of Eckhart Tolle. Little do we realize that Zen Buddhism in disguise is quickly becoming the religion of America. Many Church leaders, no longer able to differentiate God's reality from wishful thinking, preach using nothing but the language of "values" and "feelings," both of which are the mainstay of Zen Buddhism, Oprah, and Eckhart Tolle.

Personal experience is everything in the minds of most Americans. If we have a bad experience we are told all we need do is change how we think about it and we will find peace and harmony. Feelings, rather than thought, are what we use to feed our emotional experiences so as to change our consciousness of reality. We do this because we actually believe "feelings on the inside, never let you down.” So the feelings we have about our experiences is what we preach, teach, and talk about. We live, breath, think, eat, and sleep, feelings. What we fail to recognize is that by buying into this lie we have slipped into the relativistic-realm where truth becomes a matter of personal preference and not the objective absolute Truth that is embodied in Jesus Christ.

Here is the problem in all of this: My feelings about my experiences are indefinable impressions of the past with no basis in the reality of the present moment. They are nothing more than a fleeting emotional response to a moment in time which has passed by the time my autonomic nervous system sends its sensory signals. In other words, as soon as the present moment passes - the feeling passes. A Zen Buddha understands this since it is his life-pursuit to empty his consciousness of God's reality because he believes the empty mindedness of Nirvana is the only true reality.

We do, however, remember what we thought about that fleeting sensation, but as humans we are unable to remember the actual feeling. The result of this inability to remember the actual sensation leads millions of us into addictions, family breakups, crime, narcissism, all the ills of our sinful-humanity as we go on a quest for the Holy Grail of a ethereal feeling which can never be relived in exactly the same way.

Each new moment presents a different situation with a new and different feeling. Therefore, If we do not mediate our emotional response to sensory input through our mind’s we live more like instinctive animals than as creatures made in the image of God. That is why Jesus gave us this as the 1st commandment, “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this [is] the first commandment.” (Mk 12:30).

Too many, maybe most, of America’s citizenry believes feelings are the only legitimate validation for our ethical, moral, teleological, and theological choices. Even pulpit talk is generally about "feelings" and "values" with seldom a word about "character" or "virtue;" and never any about the use of the mind in relation to our physiological makeup as image bearers of the living God.

I realize character and virtue are old fashioned words which suggest living in harmonious communal unity based on shared principles as codified in Scripture: And I realize that using our mind's to actually think is hard work. But, if we continue to let our emotions (feelings) rule our lives as Christians or as a nation, we can only expect more and more evil to prevail as we slowly descend into ever more barbaric patterns of living.

Pastor’s nation-wide should be talking about this stuff. But they won’t. Too many of them were supposedly educated in Universities and Seminaries which have lost the ability to teach our young how to think. They don't know how the mind works, and don't know that they don't know.

The shame is that careful attention to the actual words in scripture taught as fact to our congregations would go a long way toward reversing this travesty. But, I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Redemption is the plan

When things fell apart in Eden, God did not trash plan A only to move to plan B. He immediately enacted his plan of redemption. This plan includes the redemption of man and the resurrection of his physical body. Paul tells us in Roman 8:19-20 that God is even going to redeem the present earth. If God is not moving to plan B with man and the earth, it is very possible that God will also redeem the animals.

I'm not linking the above quote. I'm using it to pursue a thought, not to point to a particular person for any reason. As a matter of fact, I got the quote from a blog I read frequently because of the truth and wisdom I find there. The thought I'm wrestling with is this: Is God sovereign or not, and if so what does that mean and what are the ramifications.

The writer above eludes to the idea that God does not have alternate plans for His work of redemption. I agree. What I find curious, however, is in our use of language we often trap ourselves by saying inexact things. I do it all the time: I mean to make a particular point, but when I write down the words the concepts I had in mind come out twisted and garbled. We all do this. It is part of the life we live in a fallen universe. I will probably do it in this post, but I hope not.

In the quote the writer says, "...He immediately enacted his plan of redemption." My understanding of Scripture is that God has revealed to us that creation itself, the universe, me, you, dogs, cats, - everything is encompassed in the concept "plan of redemption." I believe everything that exists was made to be redeemed, in my thinking I can't accept that things "fall apart," as though by accident. Things did come "apart" in the garden but not by accident. God designed everything in that story to happen just exactly as He tells us it happened.

Moreover, I believe redemption is the plan, it is not part of something else. Creation was made to fall which makes it the beginning of the "enact(ment) of redemption." If God subsequently enacted a plan of redemption,..." the implication is that it is subsidiary to something else, or a plan "B."

If Creation wasn't made to fall God got blind-sided by Satan and His - God's - original plan was thwarted. Even sin entering the world is part of the "plan of redemption." It did not happen by accident. If any part of creation or redemption is accidental then God is not sovereign and all this time I've spent worshipping Him has been a waste and lost cause. I refuse to accept that idea.

Sin, the fall, all the stuff we humans face in life, yes, even creation itself is the master plan of a sovereign God - and this plan is good. It is very good. (Gen 1:31) God is sovereign and the implications of this fact are seldom examined by we humans.

Thinking is hard work and we don't like to work. We would rather rely on our limited knowledge which can barely deal with the idea that God would have created us for one purpose and one purpose only - redemption. Yet, that is the fact. (Eph 2:1) We, the elect, were created to be redeemed and given to God's Son to live finally with Him as His chosen. (Jhn 15:16)

In the meantime just trying to understand the concept of sovereign is a challenge we should all come to grips with. The word means absolute rule over everything - not just some things. If we accept that definition we have a lot of thinking to clarify.

Thinking and Loving God

Apparently there are others who believe that the anti-intellecualism so rampant in some churches needs to be addressed. Piper's Desiring God conference this year is on that very subject. I'm going to see if I can't figure a way to attend.

Hat Tip to PJ Cockrell.

Doug Wilson on Thinking

Pastor Wilson has a great post about thinking - particularly thinking correctly. He began the article with a bunch of things he prefers: You know like the taste of butterscotch over that of spinach. I thought; duh! Who doesn't. But then he went on to say things like:

John Stott once wrote that fuzzy thinking was one of the sins of our age, and he was right. And Dorothy Sayers argued in her great essay on the lost tools of learning that we must learn how to make careful distinctions.

In our day, some profound spiritual errors proceed from Christians who have gotten tired of the need to do just this.

There are very good insights in this article. You can read it here.

Materialism Out; Spirit In

Long ago I read several books by Ayn Rand in which she proposed "emotions are not the means of cognition." Rand was a "pop" philosopher disdained by the intellectual elites so the only contact most people have had with her is through their high school assignment to read and discuss her book "The Fountain Head."

Objectivism, her philosophy underpinning  her books, and atheism were Rand's springboard to notoriety.  She believed that all a human needed to live the good life was available to him through the evidence of his senses coupled with a strong obedience to the necessary materialistic application of that evidence.

What Rand never dealt with, as I recall, was the animating activity on men by the cascade of chemicals in the brain. By that, I mean, I don't recall reading anything about her dealing with consciousness, or to put it in my simple language: how is it possible for anything or anyone to be self-aware?

Now comes the hint of a new strain of thought prying at the door of the materialistic-evolutionary lock-box. Some are beginning to question the cant of the likes of Rand and Richard Dawkins which is; we think because that's the way we evolved - accept it as fact and move on.

In Section 5, devoted to neuroscience, Staune conscientiously explains that contemporary research is far from being unanimous on a number of key issues, most notably the exact correspondence between neuronal phenomena and mental events, and particularly conscience. He patiently argues that in humans the animating force cannot find expression without neuronal activity, but is not a mere result of such an activity. Boldly he puts forward the possibility that much current rationalist and scientific research offers again acceptable space for a dualistic hypothesis (body and spirit).

My-oh-my! What will science do once it is cornered by popular demand to explain why we are able to think merely because a bunch of chemicals in our brains fire synapses in a particular order? What/Who decides the order of firing from which abstract thought is derived?  In other words can evolution explain why it is I'm able to ask that particular question? I don't think so.

Materialism appears to be increasingly ruined and “passé.” A spiritual and religious alternative, for the moment mostly akin to Platonism (presented in some detail), seems to him the most plausible replacement; in any case divine presence and intervention in one form or another have again become, he maintains, fully plausible. I will not enumerate here the powerful voices adduced by Staune to support his conclusions.

The article the quotes came from here. It is an interesting read.

Hat tip to Remonstrans for pointing me to the article. Read their post - Humor In Unbelief.

Groothuis Articles

Doug Groothuis at Denver Seminary has a link with some of his articles. This is a great resource for those interested.

THINKING FOR CHRIST!

A good source

I found another source for very good articles on Reformed Theology. The quote below is from one of Rev. Samson's posts:

Romans 12:2 teaches us that our mandate as Christians is not to allow the world to squeeze us into its mould, but to be different - transformed, even metamorphosized, by renewing our minds to the will of God. To avoid the world's mould, we must first recognize what it is, and see the pitfalls ahead of us. If we do not, we might find ourselves caught up in the thinking of the culture around us without even realizing it. We must understand what the world thinks, how it thinks and how it wants us to think. Then we need to take deliberate steps to walk not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of scoffers; but delight in the law of the LORD, meditating on it day and night.

 I often run into Christians who believe there is no need to really understand how the world around us thinks. I suppose if we all believed that there wouldn't be any reason to claim to be Christian.

The shallowness of the thinking of so many Christians is astonishing. Rev. Samson is exactly right in saying we need to take deliberate steps to avoid thinking as the secular-world around us thinks. We have to spend time "renewing our minds" as God through the Apostle Paul instructed us. If we don't we won't know when our thinking is the world's and not "the mind of Christ's"