We had a great Sunday.
There's lots to talk about...
For now, though, I would like to begin addressing some of the questions that many of you guys have about God/Jesus/Christianity/Bible.
Thus far, on Sundays, we have addressed the following questions (you can access the podcast here.)
1. Is the Bible really God's word to us & is it reliable?
2. Why is Christianity better than other religions?
3. How do I know God's will for my life?
This week we will be answering this question:
What role does the Holy Spirit Play?
Since we can't answer every question on Sunday morning - we are going to answer some questions here on the blog.
I've asked my good friend, Dr. Chuck Pearson, who is a Physics professor (and genius) to help provide some of the answers. Chuck is answering today's question. Chuck's smart and his answer is in depth (which means long.) :)
Enjoy.
I have really found myself, over the past several weeks, taking a lot
of stock in what has led me to this point. I'm careening now towards
20 years of my life knowing Jesus Christ as a personal Lord and
Savior, and while I've resisted using that particular language for a
large swath of my life because I know the baggage it carries, this
relationship with Jesus is very real and very tangible, and it has
informed an awful lot of decisions I've made in my life that have
brought me here.
Why do I believe in Jesus? Why did I give my life over to Him in the
first place, and what has kept me believing that this crazy story
about a man who also just happened to be totally God, and who got
executed for crimes he didn't do and then turned around and CAME BACK
TO LIFE? I mean, what makes that real?
Thinking about this has led me to a really stunning revelation for me.
I'm frequently frustrated talking to students of mine here, and
people in this community broadly, about Jesus. Rome is a church-laden
town. I work with Christians of many fairly conservative stripes, as
do many of you. Christianity is all around us. And it really seems,
day in and day out, that if you don't buy in to Jesus and you want
evidence that Jesus isn't terribly real, all you have to do is look at
the the pastors and church leaders in Rome, the Christians you work
with, the very state of Christianity in northwest Georgia, and you've
got all the evidence you need. Gossip spread everywhere, people at
one another's throats, churches that are cold and unwelcoming, lives
that show no evidence at all of a sovereign and powerful God, just
stories and legends that may have had weight 2000 years ago - or even
100 years ago - but are worthless and useless in our modern time.
My job has me working for a Christian institution, under a mission
that's all about the Lordship of Jesus Christ even over education,
engaged day in and day out with Southern Baptists who have the same
basic insight into the Gospel that I do. (Honestly? Best job I've
ever had, and it's not even close. There aren't too many places in
the United States where I could do the things I do, teach the way I
teach, and still have the opportunities to advance that I've had. It
fits me to a tee. But...) Day in and day out, I see people, in the
name of Jesus Christ, treat other people like absolute garbage.
Student vs. student, student vs. faculty, faculty vs. faculty, and
administration vs. ... well, everybody. I see the command to love one
another trashed. I see the bitterness and the resentment and the raw,
unadulterated inability to just get over it.
And if I'm not careful, I see it in myself, in how I treat others, and
if I start pointing that finger at others, fingers would come pointing
right back at me.
And - again, if I'm honest - I see friends at other institutions, and
stories from other outposts of Christian higher education, that are a
thousand times worse and uglier than any story I could tell about my
experience. This problem isn't a problem with any one workplace, or
any one city. It's a problem with all of us.
What makes this so stunning is that, nearly 20 years ago, I went to
college in Terre Haute, Indiana, absolutely desperate to break any
ties with Christianity and make myself a brilliant and logical
scientist and engineer, free of any superstitions or any fake god to
limit the possibilities in my world. College was going to be my
ultimate freedom - not to party hearty and pick up women and live the
college life (although if I could get over my geek nature and live
that life, that would be a nice side benefit) but to free my thinking.
I could follow new heroes of mine like Kurt Vonnegut and e.e.
cummings into a mindset where all the stupid traditional lessons from
mom and dad and sunday school teacher were broken and I could truly be
open-minded - where I could truly figure out what open-minded actually
MEANT.
And what completely blindsided me was actually living out that first
year trying to figure out what way of living life would actually work,
and finding the brainiacs and free-thinkers at Rose-Hulman, and
figuring out very quickly that I hated all of them. Just hated them.
They were jerks, and not only did they want nothing to do with me,
they didn't want anything to do with anyone who didn't fit in their
own, neat circle. And there were the guys who pledged fraternities
(and I have to clarify "social fraternities" for reasons that will
become clear shortly), who were perfectly willing to be your friend
over beers and parties. But I tried one dorm party and had a
perfectly miserable experience with alcohol, and the moment I started
saying "no, thanks" to the booze I found pretty uniform rejection from
that crew.
The people who reached out to me and who showed me compassion were the
people that ultimately informed my way of thinking. The people who
actually treated me with kindness were the people I listened to.
I found myself lining up pretty effectively with a service fraternity
called Alpha Phi Omega, figured out that a lot of the old Scouting
ideals in that group lined up with my own idealistic nature, and it
was very straightforward to pledge what turned out to be a very
different sort of fraternity, and find a great deal of fulfillment
learning to "be a leader, be a friend, be of service". That was the
type of thing I went to college to do.
One of the guys in APhiO decided that I was worth a great deal of time
and investment, for whatever reason. I mean, REALLY decided. (I
wonder after the fact if he wasn't in need of a friend himself, and if
I had listened to him at one point and he decided that I was going to
be faithful. The friendship has lasted, that's for sure.) There was
a Bible study that met in this guy's room, and halfway through my
freshman year he decided that I needed to be in that Bible study.
Through forcible dragging out of my dorm room, if necessary.
What stunned me then - and, 20 years on, what stuns me even more - is
how RIGHT the relationships were between the people in that Bible
study. How much they cared for me, and not just because "hey he
doesn't believe this Jesus stuff", but because I was a person and I
was worth something because of my humanity. Honestly, at that point
I'd called everything into question all over again, because there was
so much I had counted on that hadn't gone right. I wasn't tearing up
my classes like I thought I would, I had already changed my major once
and I was needing a serious GPA win in Winter '91 if I was going to
avoid changing majors again, and we've already established that all
the free-thinkers I was going to hook up with free-think with were
complete jerks who wanted nothing to do with anybody who wasn't
already them.
And these Christians were NOTHING like the Christians I had
encountered growing up...which, now that I think about it, remind me a
bit of the Christians that I get complaints about around here, the
Christians who don't act the slightest bit the way that Jesus did and
who don't show any evidence in their lives that God is real and can
change their lives. These Christians lived it, day-in and day-out,
and they shared Jesus with me without mentioning any four spiritual
laws or any need for a relationship or any sort of hard sell. They
believed what Jesus said, and even if they didn't do everything
perfect all the time (and several didn't even come close), they were
honest about it and still welcomed me in with all my flaws.
This is long before I actually began to seriously consider all of the
deep theological issues in the Bible, or before I began to work
towards reconciling the science I had loved all my life (and that I
began to realize was beyond mere love, it was a real and holy calling)
with the faith that so many said it wouldn't reconcile with, or before
I really made it an intellectual faith. This was me figuring out what
unconditional love looked like, and being completely blindsided by it.
So: "Why is it easier for some people to accept the story of Christ
than others?" Because those people have actually seen what the love
of Christ looks like, and have had to respond to it. If the church
around those people is dead, if it's full of gossip, if the people
tear one another down instead of sacrificing themselves for one
another, then somebody watching that group will say "there's nothing
real to that Jesus they claim." When we act like the words of Jesus
mean something, and being perfect as our Father is perfect is
something that can actually be done, and we show that we love the Lord
our God with all our heart and soul and strength by loving our
neighbor as ourselves, we should never be surprised when God breaks
through and people are changed.
Posts
8 comments:
Please note: Random line breaks are my own, and not Josh's. If pressed, I shall blame Blogger's inferior site design, although in reality I can't edit my own work for beans.
Please also note that this puts lie to any claims Josh might make about me being a genius.
Thanks Dr. Pearson for sharing. Good Read.
So let me get this straight: You were a very bright science major that couldn't find friends at regular fraternities, and since the bible-belts were friendly because they "have to be", you decided that they were right and that God is real. Trying to fit in did not work out like it was suppose to. So you went to the place where all the goody goody kids like everyone because thats what someone wrote in the Bible that Jesus said to do or they might not get into Heaven. Sounds like terrible logic to me. There is a reason that you once doubted God. Big, omniscient, and free-will granting space-God that that isn't in space or the clouds, but just somewhere out there. Or better yet, he lives in our hearts. You should be nice because it's the right way to act, and you should help humanity because that's what will help progress civilization and create a better world for us. THAT makes sense, without adding some crazy prehistoric belief that holds science back. Do work, Doc.
Dr. Pearson:
Being snubbed by some people is a very poor reason to stop being a free thinker. Accepting the world as it is is not about joining a club, it's about intellectual honesty and having an inextinguishable love for the truth. It's about following the evidence where it leads and not living your life by what "feels right".
I'd also suggest that subjective "experiences" of a relationship with Jesus is a poor source of evidence for the existance of Jesus. Genesh is just as real to some people for the same reason. I'm sure you'd not accept subjective experience as evidence for the existance of Genesh.
Full disclosure: Josh tipped me off to the anonymous comment before it came up. I don't think he was totally keen on posting it (in fact, given his ruffled fur on the latest post, I'm pretty confident he wasn't keen on posting it). I'm cool with it because I'm pretty sure that wasn't an uncommon response to reading that (oh, look at the fundie who is doing science for Jesus and is everything wrong with how science gets done) and it's worth a fire-back.
So, responses:
To both Scott and anon-guy: Of COURSE being snubbed by people is a lousy reason to make a faith decision of any sort. Please note that going in, for very different reasons, I was going to get very serious about making the opposite faith decision because bible-belters where I grew up were stupid. If different groups had done the snubbing during that first year, the story would have come out very differently. My brain is STILL churning over that. I don't have that one fully answered yet, and it's 20 years on.
And again: please note what question I answered. The acceptance and the grace shown to me was NOT the reason I accepted the story of Christ. That's only what got me in the door. Dealing with Jesus - and I don't mean just saying "oh, hooray, God must be real!" but actually confronting the absolutely ludicrous idea that this person was once dead and then came back to life - was another issue entirely, and if I'd been dependent on other people for that knowledge, once those people were gone I would have found some other group of cool kids with cool takes. Honestly, the whole irony of the story was how hard it is to find Christians who ARE friendly, no matter how much they "have to be" - and trust me when I say I've watched way more people walk away from Jesus because the Christians are jerks than I have encountered people who genuinely were impacted by the kindness of the bible-belts. Mine's a pretty rare story, truth be told.
But how I dealt with Jesus is another post entirely.
Anon-guy: Christians do rigorous science. The media storyline talks tons about the evangelicals who walk away from scientific life because they can't make their faith fit around it and how absolutely incompatible the two are. Honestly, that's what I expected going into grad school. I got hit over the head with the clue stick on that one, repeatedly. Not only did I find way more Christians than I *ever* expected, but tenured faculty doing serious work at every level, getting the publications out, advancing the basic research and the public good. Yeah, there was some bickering over origins, but evolution is the dominant paradigm in the sciences *for a reason*. Again: there was a ton to work out in how to put the two together and make sense of them. Different post, but probably a question that needs to be answered. Quick summary: I love intelligent design theory, I want to see an intelligent design theory that works, right now there just isn't one and the modern evolutionary synthesis is the winner and still-for-150-years-champ in the scientific debate, and yet I still believe that there's another answer out there to be had.
Scott: Genesh, hrm? I admit that I don't know much about Hindu deities, which of course leads me to expected appearance critique. Elephant head? Seriously?
(For the uninitiated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganesha )
That didn't answer every question, I know, but I actually want to sift through more of this territory in future things I fire to Josh. I'm on Facebook. Anon-guy especially, don't hesitate to send the message that way and follow up. I don't just like this sort of conversation, I need it to keep me in check.
Let me first say that I'd prefer to continue this conversation in person. This is a poor forum for exchange of ideas.
Dr. Pearson, you are not the first christian I've ever met with advanced scientific training. Indeed, I've met christians in all walks of life and levels of intelligence and education.
It's completely unsuprising to me considering the Pakistanis and (soon) the Iranians have the bomb. They do all this phyisics while laboring under the weight of thier Islamic superstitions. Clearly, you can go through the motions of the scientific method and get great results while accepting all manner of bizarre metaphysics. If you had to be an atheist to do proper science, we'd have never had a Newton or even a Darwin (for he was just as christian as the village vicar when he first set foot on the Beagle). It would have been impossible for science to lift us above superstition if you already had to be free of it to start with.
It would be just as possible for me to go into a church and go through the motions of eucharist and prayer. I think i'd be more capable than most at converting people because I have a better understanding of how it works.
But, if I were to do so I'd be living a lie. On the one hand I'd be extolling the virtues of religion and on the other i'd privately know that it's a huge flim-flam.
Scientists who practice science at work and then abandon all scientific princples in the church and the bible study group are living a similar lie. On the one hand, the scientific method does not allow us to go beyond the evidence in our claims to truth and on the other religion lauds accepting groundless claims (ie faith). These are two completely separate and diameterically opposed epistemologies that lay claim to the same ground of truth. It's plain intellectually dishonest.
Superstition may not deny a person access to the mechanics of scientific discovery, but it does deny one an appreciation of the stark, austre beauty of the universe as it is and not how we wish it to be.
I don't say these things to be provocative or disrespectful, it's just the world as I see it.
Yeah, Scott, we're into full-on meta territory now. You're getting into Steven Jay Gould nonoverlapping-magesteria and all that - not necessarily that take precisely, but the territory that the concept was generated to address. I don't believe in keeping my science and my faith totally separate, but I believe that it's possible to do relevant and rigorous science in the light of Christian faith, rather than putting that faith in a box and only letting it out on Sunday.
Stay tuned. We'll figure out how to trade ideas In Real Life. With food, preferably.
The light of christian faith? Christianity doesn't shed any light. What sort of revelations does christianity have for physical law?
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