The Unseen World - Part 1: The Past Darkness

1. The Reality of the Unseen World

"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."

[Ephesians 6:12] 

As a kid, I was always interested in and drawn to things like traditional superstitions of the Old South, stories about my great aunt who lived in a haunted house, even that weird feeling you sometimes get walking alone in the woods, that you've silently entered something else's domain. These always seemed like little doors or invitations into a wider reality, yet one that seemed both confirming of, and not allowed by, my faith. If the Bible is true, and God is real, then for a Westerner it seems like any evidence for the existence of the supernatural is evidence for faith. (A point we'll return to later) Yet at the same time, pursuing knowledge of the more darkly mysterious side of reality seemed to lead quickly in unwise directions, and felt like a kind of secretive lure away from God.

Many years later, after coming to live in Taiwan, I have slowly realized that for the majority of people here, the unseen world was not a mysterious possibility but a part of their daily life. They were surrounded by reminders and habits that displayed this. Spending my youth in the rural American South had prepared me for this perhaps better than most Westerners, but still I had not experienced anything on this level: Daoist trigram mirrors over doors, fear over picking up dropped money that could be a lure for ghost-marriage, incense sticks offered not only at temples but at the front doors of apartment buildings, people burning paper money on street corners in ubiquitous metal cans designed specifically for that purpose, gnarly-rooted sacred trees encircled with red cords, pendants and amulets worn around the necks of both adults and children.

These tables loaded with snacks, incense, and spirit money are an offering
to appease any harmful ancestral spirits which may be in the area 

And this is not some kind of remote tribal area. Taiwan is a technologically advanced island nation with more smartphones than people, with convenience stores where you can pay your bills and buy concert tickets and send packages and pay for it all with a metro card, and where green energy and smart cities are becoming a reality more quickly than for most of the United States.
Life in Taiwan has taught me that the unseen world does not flee just because technology progresses.

Yet most Americans do not consider an unseen world in their day to day life. The excluded middle, the part of reality which touches the spirit world yet remains connect to our own as well, is something many traditional cultures fear and give great importance to, yet remains ignored if not disbelieved in by most Westerners. There are various philosophical reasons for why the West moved away from this, cartesian dualism being one, and others will be discussed below.
But it's a worldview-level difference, which is true for most conservative evangelicals. (Charismatic or Pentacostal churches would be a halfway exception) We leap from our visible surroundings to God on His throne and rarely consider that anything lies in between, and find more or less all parts of the Bible that mention non-scientific phenomenon to be something that has to be taken on faith, as evidence for the unseen world is not exactly a common phenomenon (Not like it is in some parts of the world. When spiritual fear would drive people to Church, the Enemy pretends not to exist. When spiritual fear drives people to ally with darkness, the Enemy is quite active).

For most Westerners, though, with no context of or seemingly much evidence for a supernatural world we inhabit prior to death, our faith becomes focused on a supernatural world which exists after death, but our Christian life in the meantime becomes very intellectualized, a set of propositions to which we give assent and which we defend from attack by means of logic and reasoned debate and the principles of God's revelation to us. Which is good, and necessary, but it leaves out a whole giant piece of reality, which many other cultures are quite concerned about, and which local religions exist to deal with. When we bump into people from those religions, we find that they are not interested in our logical and reasoned debate, since religion for them is a matter of the unseen reality that affects their lives, yet they find Christians have little to say about this.

To be sure, many Americans have inherited, or brought with them from their family's origin countries, certain beliefs or superstitions, perhaps reduced to a rote family tradition, which harken back to an older time. And the older, geographically-established American subcultures, places like rural New England or the Appalachians, have their own local folk culture. Folk culture always knows about the unseen world. It may have confused, exaggerated, or purely fanciful explanations for it, but there is a tacit acknowledgment there that puts them ahead of we moderns who think ourselves clever for disbelieving in evil spirits but talking about "bad vibes."

(Ironically, despite disbelieving in this "middle world," the American church still struggles to avoid a Christian folk religion mentality, for which this article is a decent introduction)

2. The Unseen World vs. Fantasy vs. Folk Tradition, for Christians

A close reading of the Bible shows us that this unseen world is both acknowledged and treated critically as well. We have both acknowledgments that behind idols are spiritual forces of darkness, and sarcasm about how an idol is nothing but the other half of the wood the idol maker cooked his food with. (Interestingly, my purely subjective experience in Taiwan has the same dichotomy--some temples feel dark and disturbing on the spiritual level, others like a scam to fool sincere people)

I am not suggesting that Christians are supposed to accept wholesale the claims of various cultures regarding the unseen reality around us. From selkies frolicking in an Irish cove while keeping an eye on their seal skins to the gates of Chinese hell that are thought to open at the beginning of Ghost Month, there are innumerable beliefs about the unseen world across human culture. We don't need to give specific credence to any of them in particular, but we should recognize that the idea of an unseen reality in this life has been something humans always knew, and that every culture likes to make up stories about it does not mean it's not real any more than sci-fi proves that space travel never really happened.

So why did Christendom seem to move away from all this interest in the unseen world? How did Christians follow along with this idea of a material world yet retain a belief in high heaven and God on His throne? Part of the reason may be that the Bible's take on the unseen world is much darker than much of what we find in popular folk culture, or perhaps we could say it is less balanced.

We don't find any mention in scripture of unseen forces doing what C.S.Lewis once called "minding their own business." There are no little sprites or fairies just doing their own thing. If anything like the vast number of folk culture entities and creatures have ever existed, Genesis is almost entirely silent about them (the Nephilim being a sort of intriguing exception), yet it speaks of angels and demons quite straightforwardly. The part of reality that scripture is concerned with, visible or invisible, is a conflict between God and the enemies of God, and how God's redemptive plan plays out from the beginning to end of human history. Lewis and some of his friends actually seemed to mourn this fact, as expressed in his novel That Hideous Strength by Dr. Dimble at one point, that all of reality was getting caught up into the all-encompassing battle between Good and Evil. The old "elf land" or that part of the unseen world which seemed to be an almost neutral territory, was passing away, or had already done so, and now everything was drawing near to the final cosmic battle of Good and Evil; everything had to take a side, in the end. (Current and prolific author John C. Wright's Moth and Cobweb series deals with this as well--his "twilight world" characters begin to find themselves caught up in a war between light and darkness, and it becomes obvious that there is no middle ground to hesitate on for long)

As a tradition, however, even elves--which Tolkien sort of baptized into the noble Eldar--were thought of in a somewhat darker fashion before Tolkien wrote about High Elves, filled with the light of Valinor, and it became a new archetype. Before then elves and other creatures of the "middle world" had been mostly thought of as capricious beings, prone to stealing from people and playing tricks on them; if not fully bent on evil, yet also the sorts of beings which could not endure the sound of a church bell. There is a whole realm of fantasy, derived from folk traditions, of creatures which could not stay in "Old England" after the Church arrived and became established. Rudyard Kipling portrays this with a sort of nostalgic wistfulness in the story Dymchurch Flit, showing that same desire of Lewis, that what of that old world could not baptized need not be entirely banished. (But while I can feel their wistfulness strongly as expressed in their writings, I suspect it's a very sneaky form of temptation that certain well-educated people are susceptible to, rather like our "pet sins" like narrowly-focused gluttony that are so hard to confess and get rid of because they seem innocuous)

Due to this complicated idea present in English-speaking culture (I think the West in general, but I have not studied the question in other languages) that the "grey area" or twilight world, the Old things, must go away when the light of the gospel has arrived, we can see one way that the Church wasn't putting up much of a fight to retain a biblical concept of the unseen world. The entire folk tradition was relegated to anthropological studies as both the advent of the Church and the industrial revolution made it both unrighteous and increasingly irrelevant. Thus in the West, we stopped thinking about the world in terms of even having this unseen "middle" realm. 

In Taiwan, the same thing is happening in churches to a problematic degree--people either want to turn off that side of reality which represents their old spiritual bondage, or they found it more natural to become Christians because they never put much stock in traditional religion to begin with. That makes it challenging for many Taiwanese believers to share their faith incarnationally with other Taiwanese who still follow the old traditions.

3. The Unseen World in Scripture: Earth as Enemy-Occupied Territory

When we look at scripture's portrayal of the unseen world, which possesses not an ounce of the (possibly wrongful) sense of nostalgia we find in the authors I mentioned above, we learn that we live in a wider, and darker, world than we have typically been willing to recognize. The Bible was written by people who lived in that world and knew it, and it is full of commands to stop serving those unseen powers and worship God alone. Every idol and pagan altar--and even those "high places and spreading trees" I didn't understand about before I lived in Taiwan, with its divine trees and temples or shrines at every picturesque elevated spot--was a portal to that unseen world which affected all areas of life, and still is considered to do so in many parts of the Old World where traditional folk culture survives.

As I mentioned above, the world peopled lived in was all the folk world, once upon a time, usually before the gospel had been there long. Grimm's Fairy Tales, at least in their original conception, harken back to a time when Germans considered the forest to be full of portals to the unseen world--with its dark silent valleys, mysterious rings of mushrooms, ominous standing stones, and hollow halls beneath the fells. For Celtic peoples, the original feasting and rituals at the end of Autumn, which have partially continued and partially re-emerged as Halloween, were originally an open recognition of the dark side of that other world, and a simultaneous attempt to rebuff and appease it. (That doesn't necessarily mean holidays with an original pre-christian influence are harmful, as I wrote about Christmas a while back)

Once, that dark unseen world reigned supreme on earth. G.K.Chesterton has written powerfully in the Everlasting Man about that Old World, which he identifies with Carthage, the Canaanite superpower finally utterly defeated by Rome (Carthago Delenda Est!) 140 years before the coming of Christ. With its dark rituals and infant sacrifices to Moloch lying underneath all the trading and sea voyaging, Chesterton argues, Carthage was the final culmination of a kind of hellish pragmatism which was happy to cooperate with dark powers of the unseen world to any level of depravity, so long as it achieved the desired results. (This article is a decent brief summary of Chesterton's take on what was hanging in the balance with Rome vs Carthage, and draws a tragic parallel between infant sacrifice and the abortion industry)

We can catch a glimpse of that darker world here and there throughout scripture, often in verses we gloss over or find confusing as modern Americans. One chilling example is 2 Kings 3:27, when Israel's armies have defeated and cornered a pagan king, who in desperation performs a ritualistic sacrifice of his own firstborn son, and summons wrath against Israel, who retreat and head back home.

When the king of Moab saw that the battle was too fierce for him, he took with him 700 men who drew swords, to break through to the king of Edom; but they could not. Then he took his oldest son who was to reign in his place, and offered him as a burnt offering on the wall. And there came great wrath against Israel, and they departed from him and returned to their own land. [2 Kings 3:26-27]

Some well-meaning commentators trying to make sense of the account miss the point and say that since it seems impossible that it could be God's great wrath against Israel, it must have been human wrath, either the Moabites being roused to angry desperation, or even that the invading army was disgusted at the display and changed their minds about attacking. Some translations use different wording on the assumption that this is the case. (I am using the NASB above). Yet this word wrath is associated with divine wrath and not human indignation when used elsewhere in scripture. At least one commentator concludes, as seems the most straightforward interpretation to me, that the sacrifice was a "success" and demonic wrath was summoned against the invading army, who departed as a result. I have heard enough testimonies when learning about spiritual warfare at seminary, and much more so from Taiwanese people about temple healings and exorcisms, and other demonically-motivated "helpful" results, to know that the Enemy will "play by the rules" and offer help on their own terms if it keeps people in spiritual bondage.

That is the spiritual darkness that Israel was surrounded by, and repeatedly ensnared by and plunged into, until God would send such severe punishment that they nationally repented and tore down the altars and high places, only to succumb to the lure of darkness once again. To understand the conquest of Canaan and ongoing fighting between Israel and the surrounding nations, one must understand that Canaanites did not merely fear the dark unseen world and try to appease it, but were outright worshiping and allying with it, especially against Israel. Canaan combined advanced cultural achievements, like iron weapons and the precursor to the alphabet we still use today, with dark rites and whatever aid from the unseen world they could muster, whether imaginary or real. (Witness their confusion as they call upon different powers to aid them in their battles, and understand that God was in a sense proclaiming Himself to them as He shattered their armies, as He shattered Egypt and their dark spiritual traditions generations earlier)

That was in the time of Moses, and the generations that followed. Even as Moses led Israel through the desert, they continued to practice rituals to appease the unseen spirit world. The book of Leviticus commands the Israelites to stop making sacrifices to demons of the desert, as they had been prone to do. (Leviticus 17:7)

Going back even earlier, Genesis suggests that the pre-flood world was yet more deeply under the influence of evil, and the unseen world was in fact dominating the world in a rather visible fashion. Evil spirits walked among men and, depending on your interpretation, even took human women to be their wives, and gave birth to men of unearthly power (the Nephilim mentioned above), a crime for which some spirits were imprisoned permanently in "chains of darkness" to await final judgment, referred to in passing in 2 Peter 2.
Noah's flood cleaned the world in more than one sense, then, yet in particular evil locales, enclaves, and time periods of history, wicked people have repeatedly tried to bring back that deeper darkness. Much interesting fiction has been based around the struggle to stop this kind of thing (bad group of people try to make an alliance with evil powers, good guys have to go stop them), and when we feel that somehow it's a true picture of the world even though we ourselves never seem to encounter it, we are subconsciously resonating with a truth about this world, just one that we've never been taught to see with the eyes of a biblical worldview. Yet that is the world we live in; one in which unseen evil power strives against the people of God, against the truth of the gospel, and seeks to keep lost people lost, and draw them more deeply into darkness.

3.5 Note: I am not being dark for dark's sake

I hope the reader will not misunderstand. I am not trying to be lurid or provocative in this post. Living in the spiritually darker environment of Taiwan has helped me to notice that the Bible is pretty straightforward about the darkness of the unseen part of the world we live in. It's easier to miss in some translations which seem to obscure it by choice of wording due to an unconscious cultural bias on the part of some translators or commentators which the writers of scripture did not possess.

It has also made me more sensitive to false and misleading portrayals of evil. When one has experienced the cruel hatefulness of the Enemy, the ruined lives and pain caused by satanic deception and bondage, you realize that whatever somber yet stylish aesthetic the forces of darkness are often portrayed with in Hollywood is a lie. Real evil is fearful and twisted and sickeningly ugly. At best it can temporarily pretend not to be so, but it does not love the beauty or even the intelligence it must use as tools of deception until it has enough control over its victims to drop the pretense.

I live and work in a place where that darkness is less deep than it was generations ago but has still not been effectively lifted, as it once had been in most of the West (as we continue into post-christianity it will eventually return, unless a major revival happens), and that is a burden of doing ministry here. Spiritual darkness is neither an esoteric, "best not to go there" topic to be nervously avoided, nor is it anything to be inquiring too eagerly into. It's just a bitter fact of life for many people in the world, something the freedom of Christ can deliver them from, breaking the sometimes multi-generational chains of fear and misunderstanding that bind them. It's also a reality of ministry, especially in certain parts of the world.

So my goal is not to creep anyone out, much less leave you with a morbid fascination, but to point out that the supernatural world is not something you only experience after you die, you live in it now, even if you close your eyes to it. And remember the Bible nowhere says that the devil is on a throne down in hell, that is not a scriptural teaching. (The lake of fire after judgment is punishment for Satan too.) He was cast down to earth, not to some volcanic inferno realm of Dante, and remains here, and wherever people live in spiritual bondage and serve the unseen world by following its rules, evil is behind it. When you see news articles about about weird and disturbing stuff that powerful people are caught doing, that's all part of it too.

4. But now...

We do not live in the same era as the the old Canaanite alliances with evil. Something has happened. A light has shined in the darkness, and it became our light. Our King has come, and conquered.

When the Son was born into this world as a human, he was coming to be a sacrifice for sin, but in the doing of it He was also literally invading the world, both seen and unseen. Demons were terrified of Jesus for a reason, then, and the legion possessing the Gerasene man begging not to be sent into the abyss make sense in this context. They had not expected this kind of divine invasion, not before the judgment that they knew was eventually coming. Satan seems to have more or less panicked and tried everything he could think of to stop Jesus: temptations, slander, and eventually betrayal and murder, though of course he only succeeded in doing exactly what God had already intended from the beginning. (Check and mate, God wins.) And when Christ died and rose again, He proclaimed victory over death, and over the powers of darkness in the unseen world, and His name now carries the ultimate authority:

9 

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations... [Matthew 18:18-19a]

Sometimes we skip over or rush through verse 18 to get to the "missions part." But verse 18 is what predicates the Great Commission that follows. We can carry on the mission of disciple making and kingdom growing because Jesus initiated it and it proceeds on his authority. We can take the gospel as a light into dark places, because the darkness still has strength and malice, but its authority has been taken away. Christ has won, and now His kingdom advances. And we are the servants of His kingdom, with His authority.

Let us be not oblivious to the unseen world, nor overly fearful, nor pridefully incautious, but go forth and shine in dark places, that unseen chains shall be broken and those who have dwelt in darkness may see a great light.

(Thanks for reading. We'll continue this discussion of Christ's victory and the unseen world in the Church Age later in Part II)

Avoiding "Friendly Fire"

Today I want to post about something very important that I've been learning in the last year (through the election and with the confederate statues issue, etc)...


"I can't go to bed yet, someone is wrong on the internet"

It's common to decry the anger and lack of civility in arguments online, for politics or theology or anything else. This is partly because the semi-anonymity of online comments tends to bring out the worst in people; also when you aren't face to face with someone, there is a tendency to respond to "wrong ideas" and forget that you are really responding to a person. (I think one could make the argument that someone who has decided to become an avatar or promoting conduit for those ideas deserves to be treated as such, but otherwise not.) Also, people are sinful and many simply have zero interest in treating other people well and enjoy trolling, insulting, and/or disputing, and the internet is a convenient tool doing so.

But one more specific danger of arguing on social media, for those who do it for reasons more or less involving what is true and what is not, and not because they simply enjoy it, is that you don't know the context of error that people live in and are responding against. So they may be coming at the issue from a different angle from you, and may indeed be wrong on some particular aspects which you may be pointing out accurately. But if you were to enter into their context, and see the errors they are confronted with and responding against, you would find you were fighting on the same side as them.

As the graduate of a well-known seminary, I and many of my former classmates have trouble not responding to error when we see it, especially theological error. (Yes, sometimes things are not a matter of perspective, but violate basic truths. If you believe the Bible is true, then you believe it's worth arguing about; for humans, one necessitates the other) We certainly have many issues where we disagree; part of going to seminary is being exposed to the scriptural fountain of theological truth whose water is poured (along with many sweeteners and artificial flavors and dyes) into the giant soda fountain of theological opinion, and we all have our favorite flavors of soda even when we did not come to seminary already possessing deep worldview differences that influence how we approach even that pure fountain.

But on the occasions when I have taken issue online with a fellow seminarian or anyone else either expressing a truth unclearly or expressing what was not true, I have often found that their intent was to combat an error they had seen in some other place. Perhaps they had been reading Genesis 1 and 2 and thinking about God's command to humans to be stewards of the earth, and then, stung by a video they saw of environmental devastation somewhere, posted an article which strayed over into dangerous "climate care is the gospel" territory. It is not wrong to stand against that error, indeed it is necessary to do so, but one needs to understand their motivation for posting to address the errors in a constructive way.

Understand 1, before deciding whether engaging 1 or 2 is better worth spending the time for 3

Attacking the wrong they saw, not the one you see

A vivid ongoing example would be the endless array of opinions possessed by American Christians regarding President Trump: If you live in a context (online and/or offline) where most people react to Trump with visceral hatred as a mascot of everything they despise, moving in the direction of truth requires setting aside those emotions and considering the actual ramifications of his actions as president, at least some of which have been positive and helpful, as was also true for Obama. So this is something it was fair to challenge people to do when Obama was the president they loved to hate, and it's fair now that we have a traditionalist authoritarian narcissist in the White House instead of a progressive ideological narcissist.

On the other hand, if you live in a context where there are a lot of people who consider Trump as God's gift to the Church, and to America, which are considered more or less the same thing, then moving in the direction of truth does require challenging some very erroneous assumptions there. (My own stance is that we must be more pragmatic and recognize that, like Treebeard in LotR, the Church should not be on any politician's "side," because none of them are on our "side," and certainly the political machine and swamp of corruption are hostile and corrosive to even those comparatively good men who find their way into positions of power. It is good to be concerned for the state of one's nation and culture; we do not give up our passports or our hard-won freedoms or stop paying taxes or stop driving across local bridges when we enter God's kingdom, for His kingdom is not of this world. But we also don't need the influence of Washington to get things done, and we greatly weaken ourselves to lean on that splintered staff; for we are the adopted sons and daughters of God Almighty)

With our current social media environment (exacerbated by the desire of companies like Facebook to become a walled garden that you never need to leave, by bringing news and everything else into the FB bubble) these arguments all fall into the same space. So I can see posts praising good actions by the president met with offensive hostility by Trump haters, and posts attacking the conflation of what is Caesar's and what is God's met with defensive hostility by Trump supporters, all on my FB wall on the same day.

I have written elsewhere of how the two camps and other zero-sum ideological groups could attempt to live together in relative peace by regarding each other as different nations in the same country. But what I'm talking about today is another way, especially for those being pulled to one side or the other but not yet "in the camp." Sometimes protesting the particular errors around them can drive people too far in a particular direction; many historical evils would be less inexplicable (though not less wrong) if we could feel what it was like to be in a particular context, the unfairness, the personal pain, etc. I see a dangerous tendency to use that kind of language now. In the past, violence usually follows, and that's been true for a couple of years now in America.

So while it's as important as ever to engage and combat falsehood, and keep ideological thinking from undermining the truth that changes not, it's also important to recognize that lots of people's worldviews are being pushed to extremes in our crazy fragmenting society, and attacking their ideas without understanding where they come from is not defeating that extreme thinking but is strengthening it and pushing those attacked to double down on those ideas. This is true of theology as well as politics, since we don't necessarily treat those convictions differently.

So, is it necessary to stop arguing about important issues in "the commons" for which social media has become a very poor replacement? It's useless to even try to say that people shouldn't argue online, but actually I don't think it's necessary to say that. We should argue sometimes, it's an important part of discovering and defending truth. But if truth is indeed our motivation, we should try as much as possible to argue constructively.

Avoiding Friendly Fire

So how do we engage error online when we consider it an appropriate situation to do so, yet focus on attacking the untruth while still loving the person? And more specifically for this post, how do we figure out if there is really a point of disagreement worth engaging, or whether the person is responding to their own context and not yours (or since you are part of their context if you can see what they are posting, we could say, responding to a different part of their context) I think we can do so by making use of two questions:


Important Question #1: What do you think the greatest danger/problem here is?

By asking this question, you do two things. You let the other person feel listened to (because you are in fact offering to listen), which tends to diffuse a lot of potential badfeel if constructive disagreement is going to follow. You also identify what really motivates them in the argument. If you were arguing with a robot, you wouldn't need that, but since even INTPs are people too, it's always more helpful to respond to that motivation too and not merely its symptoms.

In asking, you may find that you don't disagree in any fundamental way, you just don't consider the thing they've honed in on to be the primary issue at stake. In that case you can either end the discussion on friendly terms, agreeing that they are right to be concerned about that thing, or you can shift the argument to whether that thing is really the primary issue. In that case you may need to ask some more questions to find out why they are so worried about that particular issue.

One example of this would be the churches that consider drinking any alcohol to be sinful. That is scripturally indefensible, and the attempt to do so leads to convoluted absurdities of interpretation. However, one often finds that when normally sound, bible-loving pastors also preach this extra-scriptural rule, there are usually strong personal reasons for doing so. (A loved one was lost to a drunk driver, or ruined their own life through alcoholism, etc.)
It is right to stand against misuse of scripture even (especially?) when it has good motives, for that is how heresies tend to begin, with the best of motives. But at the same time, when attacking someone's error, it's important to know what the real motivation behind it is. All the arguing about alcohol in scripture may have been useless, where the person in question may have really needed someone to walk through the grief of their loss with them, so that they did not need to deal with it by bringing the authority of scripture to attack the source of their pain.

Important Question #2: If you were in charge, how would you solve this?

This is an invitation to constructive and not destructive thinking. Sometimes people have never thought this far, and it stops them short. Sometimes they have thought about it a great deal, and will be relieved that someone wants to hear them out.

It seems (at least to me) that a reply to this question of "I'm not saying I have all the answers, just that this isn't right" is basically a cop out. They just want to express disapproval, there is no substance to their opinion to argue over. On the other hand, as Sun Tzu teaches us in the Art of War, it's often wise to leave your opponent one line of retreat. Often lines such as the one above are a way of retreating from the artillery of reason offered in good faith with dignity and order intact.

This question is also one in which you're more likely to come away with something useful for yourself. It's highly unlikely that you are going to convince anyone of anything online via an argument, even a polite and constructive one, but this means that at least one side gets to be heard, and invites the other side to respond in kind. If you have an audience, asking them how they'd solve it also invites the audience to think in a critical way about your opponents proposed solution. If it's implausible or problematic in other ways, that's usually going to much more obvious to bystanders than when you're arguing about the problem itself.

Potatoes argue from identity. Don't be like a potato. Also the cake is a lie.

So...

In an age of ideological conflict and identity fragmentation, Jesus said it best: "whoever is not against us is for us." When we attack the arguments of people who are addressing problems from their own contexts, we need to at least understand their motives. We might be accidentally engaging in friendly fire, distracting or defeating their efforts to engage people in a different context from ours.

I have done this. As an INTP, for an argument I don't shoot a tiny missile at the other person as in my diagram above. I cease to restrain the hungry attack raptors and they devour anything in the argument that's not rock solid. I am not saying I win every argument, there is much I don't know and many other skilled debaters around, and if it comes down to good-sounding rhetoric or emotionally resonant language I'm okay at best. But I am good at seeing what is inconsistent or weak in an argument and articulately dismantling it. And, due to that, there have been times when everything I said was correct and every issue I raised was legitimate, but it was a misdirection from another real problem that needed dealing with, which I wasn't aware of. That didn't delegitimize my own statements, but it made them less helpful in the overall struggle against falsehood.
So today's post is written as much to myself as to anyone else reading it.

I do think arguing online can be selectively useful, and I also do it much less than I used to, partly from being busier with worthwhile things. I usually approach it from the stance that I want to learn more about what other people think and also demonstrate when a position is logically indefensible. Those have been tricky goals over the past year on many topics, especially when emotions and identity are so commonly involved. So my advice to everyone (most of all myself) is to only go into an argument 1) as much as possible not because you are "triggered" by something that seems indefensibly wrong and know exactly how to reduce it to a pile of shattered inconsistencies (or raptor poop), 2) having pictured what realistically winning the argument or having a profitable discussion as a result would look like and making that your goal, and 3) use the questions above and similar ones as needed to keep ideas and people separate, and show that you are willing to listen and learn, and yet that listening and learning doesn't mean conceding the point.

That's all for this post. Have a Resplendent Reformation Day and Happy Halloween!

INTP Thoughts: From Sherlock to Lecrae - Post-postmodernism

I have several posts on their way to being finished, but here's what's on my mind these days.

What Sherlock Holmes Missed

"The world is woven from billions of lives, every strand crossing every other. What we call premonition is just movement of the web. If you could attenuate to every strand of quivering data, the future would be entirely calculable... as inevitable as mathematics." - Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock, Season 4 Episode 1)

As an INTP, I am constantly analyzing how everything in the world fits together, in an increasingly complicated model, which means my default state is a deep curiosity about everything, especially areas where I have no experience or knowledge (wikipedia was dangerous for a while until I got used to its existence), since it's all helpful for building the model of how everything works and and is influenced by everything else. Despite not being a dominant intuitive type, for areas of the model where we have a lot of experience/data, INTPs can still sometimes make leaps of intuition like Sherlock Holmes (though obviously not as dramatically and not enough to base a legendary fictional career on) because we've understood something deeply enough that we can make educated guesses according to its nature with some degree of accuracy, what Sherlock was expanding to all of reality in his super-INTP-ness. (Must have access to... ALL the data)

What Sherlock missed, however, at least in the context of the quote above, was inevitable, given that his character in the (deservedly) popular series is written as a dismissive atheist. Without factoring God in, it really all becomes math, because there is no greater Mind and Will behind observable reality. People are ultimately predictable, in this worldview, because in the end everything does come down to clockwork... the big bang was when the unthinkably immense wound-up spring was released (For many physicists who are not believers, their definition of God is "Whoever or whatever wound up that spring the first time"), and everything is simply energy falling downhill from there, and all people who ever lived are merely a curious by-product of radiant energy from our star striking a body in space with the right collocation of elements enough times that it started an extremely complicated and impossibly unlikely (except that we can observe it happened) self-sustaining chemical reaction which somehow got more and more complicated as it went along, unlike the way anything else works in nature.

If all that were true, then yes, we could at some point design a vast quantum supercomputer which would be a (lowercase) god for all practical purposes, which could model enough of the universe to know the future and predict natural phenomenon and human behavior.

What those atheists (including people like Neal Stephenson, author of books like Cryptonomicon and Reamde which I enjoyed a great deal) and the character of Sherlock Holmes in the popular current series have in common, is an almost charming anachronism: they are loyal modernists in a time when we are already leaving postmodernism behind for what comes after.

Post-postmodernism: I identify as a genius

The Legacy of Modernism, and the end of Postmodernism

To oversimplify, Modernism rejected traditional values and authority in favor of a grand forward-looking narrative in which we could throw off convention and become whatever we want. It became increasingly turbulent, however, and as Postmodernist thinking emerged there was doubt and rejection toward various premises previously taken for granted. In postmodernist thinking there could be no uniting narrative, no objective truth, all was constructed by one's context ("you only think that because ____"). In the popular consciousness, it was the age of subjectivity, "truth is relative."

Now that postmodernism has peaked and gone into decline, we are entering the new age of Post-postmodernism (no better term has been agreed on yet, my favorite so far is "metamodernism"). As with previous shifts, we preserve some remnants of previous ages while rejecting the current unifying idea and seeking a new "center" to hold things together. It will be a very interesting time if we don't all kill each other in ideological civil wars first.

In a nutshell: At the change of each thought-age in the West, people have rejected something that kept society at peace (common tradition under an aristocracy, common trajectory under a bureaucracy, common tolerance under a plutocracy) as the sins of each ruling group become too obvious and unjust to ignore. As the times shift, whatever was "the center" that held everyone together begins to give way at the same time as the group in power loses legitimacy, and there is a massive societal shift. Modernism: Reject Unifying Tradition - Find your own path
(What keeps us from fighting - a story that unites us)

Post-modernism: Reject Unifying Narrative - Find your own viewpoint
(What keeps us from fighting - living and letting live)

Post-post modernism: Reject Unifying Tolerance - Find your own identity
(What keeps us from fighting - good fences make good neighbors? the jury is still out)

What Comes Next: Messiness

The advent of post-postmodernism can be seen with the focus on identity recently. First we lost the unifying traditions, then we lost the unifying story, now we're losing any unifying identity labels too. When Lecrae decides that he's been trying to put aside his blackness to be Evangelical and says he doesn't want to do that anymore, he's responding to the shift where a deeper part of his identity he calls his roots (the racial/subcultural identity) calls more compellingly than a shallower one (Evangelicalism emerged in response to certain factors, like Fundamentalism before it, and the Church will remain long after both are merely part of Church history). Leaving evangelicalism because associations or aspects of it start to conflict with another part of one's identity doesn't mean leaving the Church, but it demonstrates when cognitive dissonance gets too strong, we "pull back" to less ambiguous identities.

Ironically the same phenomenon is at work with Southerners resisting attempts to purge Confederate flags and statues from the public eye. "Southerness" for many is an identity deeper than an Evangelicalism that says to keep things comfortable, Lecrae shouldn't be "too Black" and Southerners shouldn't be "too Southern." But the world is tired of playing nicely with others a little too different from us for comfort, and "the center is failing to hold," as in Yeats' famous poem. "We do" is no longer a quick answer to the question "who benefits?" because the "we" is getting really iffy.

In the Church, selfless love is supposed to be the glue that holds us together. When by the Spirit's help we manage it, it does work beautifully. In the world outside however, once tradition was found oppressive, and the narrative deconstructed, a broad-minded tolerance was preached as the new glue that would keep us all together. It has failed.

So How Do We Engage an Age of Post-Postmodernism?

For Christians, every change of thought-age is both troublesome and helpful. Modernism was sure there could be no supernatural, but people went to church because that's what good people did; post-modernism wasn't so sure, but it fractured the basic concept of absolute truth and people began to lose the church habit. Post-postmodernism is thirsty for the divine again, and searching for truth, but it wants to fracture us into identity groups at the same time, and a generation is growing up largely unchurched but ready to embrace causes and identities that don't compromise.

So on the one hand, our marching orders have never changed: Speak the truth in love, make disciples of all nations. Actually do that, don't talk about doing it or hold conferences about doing it. On the other hand, understanding and enduring the next decades will require a lot more wisdom and boldness than the Church has shown in recent decades. Do a little reading on the times; a storm is coming. Some have predicted the nation itself will get fragmented into groups that align based on those deep identity fault lines that have slumbered under a wealthy and tolerant age but never went away. That may never happen, but it's clear we are not entering an age of stability, but of things being pulled apart in seismic shifts. When the center can't hold, to continue with Yeats' poem, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The Church, built on a rock against which the gates of hell may not prevail, has been acting like an eager-to-please kite, blown here and there by popular secular trends. ("We can do feminism too." "We can care about climate change too." "Please acknowledge our relevance in the areas you've developed." "Notice me, Senpai." -- Meanwhile there's a steady trickle of evangelicals to Catholic and Orthodox churches) Now weak-conscienced church leaders are debilitated by every accusation of collective guilt the world throws at them. Commanded to love proactively, we are passively nice. Directionless except for inertia, we have expressed our dismay at the state of society either silently in the voting booth or loudly on social media, but not often made disciples of our neighbors. Even when we've strayed perhaps too far into politics, we've mostly chosen the label "Conservative." (What, exactly, are we trying to conserve at this point? It's a lose-lose proposition, wading into the political arena primarily concerned that we come across as respectable folk who know how to retreat with their honor intact. But I digress.)

The choice to be passive, tolerant, and easily swayed, damaging to the church in the best of times, will not even be a choice in the days to come. Belief is coming back into fashion to an almost alarming degree, and institutions with weak and yielding faith will simply not endure. Houses built on the sand will not survive the storm, but the Church as a whole is antifragile. She has survived every tumult of history, for Christ sustains her. The Kingdom will advance, but it may advance without you.

So: Be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, not just the belt and shoes that can be coordinated with your Sunday outfit. In the post-postmodern age, believe unapologetically and they will come, and see whether we truly do have life abundantly and the words of eternal life. If we truly believe Christ is the only hope for a sin-struck world sinking into chaos and clinging to dreams of the latest reincarnation of Babel, now is the time to start acting like it.

"That's not how I see it" - The Grace of Differing Perspective

On Sept 1, 2016, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick knelt for the national anthem instead of standing in respect. He had previously sat out the anthem in pre-season games, but at this game began kneeling in protest, a practice which he continued and which spread to other players.

What emotions do you feel, seeing this?

This touched off an ongoing firestorm of controversy, with people viewing the action in very divergent ways. Some saw the gesture as a brave act of protest, an unwillingness to stay silent in the face of injustice, especially regarding police shootings and the Black Lives Matter movement. Some players agreed with his motives and began to protest in a similar fashion, though not always for the same reasons.

Others, however, saw a highly-paid athlete disrespecting national symbols--and by extension the nation which had given him so much. They argued his refusal to respect the flag and anthem (and to some extent the NFL and the NFL audience) was disrespect of the country, its principles, the soldiers who died to protect it, etc. They considered it fundamentally wrong, regardless of his intent.

My Facebook feed is currently crowded with memes both supporting and decrying the NFL anthem protest. Social media is not a good place to look for balanced perspectives and careful thought on the best of days, and there isn't much of it out there right now. I don't think there's any point in even calling for it, to be honest, human nature being what it is. But there is something we do need to remind ourselves, which I believe could at least keep us from unfriending each other (another rising trend) and exacerbating the thought war online which has increasingly been taken to the streets.

"Thought Nations" - Diversity is more than skin deep.

I live in East Asia. One look is enough to know my ethnicity is not from around here (some kids like to poke my "tall nose" when their parents aren't around to scold them), but the differences don't stop at the physically observable. The Chinese metacultural worldview has some deep fundamental differences from that of the West. Differences that go the core of one's worldview, the kind I enjoy learning about but couldn't entirely adopt even if I wanted to; they're too deep for me to reach. One example would be views on authority and freedom. Many if not most Chinese/Taiwanese/East Asian people believe societal order is considerably more important than freedom. Authorities ought to rescind freedoms if people began to act wantonly, they say, in fact that's an important responsibility of authority. (That in Taiwan democracy coexists with this cultural worldview leads to interesting results)

While people expect some big differences in Chinese and Western values and outlook, they sometimes fall prey to the somewhat-propagandic notion that America has common values and principles. We can say "we are one" all we want, but in truth America has always had different subcultures, and when progressive ideals shifted from melting pot to identity politics, all hope of forging some kind of common identity was lost. (Believers are called to be One in Christ too, but the Church is not exactly a paragon of social unity; why should we expect it from ever-shifting society lacking that underlying spiritual reality?)

What we have now, then, is an array of subcultures. Much has been made of trying to divide America up into its underlying geographical component nations, for example the popular "11 nations of the United States" map. Yet in 2017 these historically-derived distinctions may not be the most practically important; what should we say about various "blocs" of Obama or Trump voters, for example, who can barely maintain speaking terms? They may not fall into any convenient historical or geographical areas, but they do have internally cohesive and mutually incompatible worldviews. Effectively, they are different nations scattered throughout one nation-state. What we saw in the aftermath of President Trump's election was one or more "thought nations" within America refusing to accept the results. "Not my president" meant, "not the president of my nation," the thought-nation that is more real to me than the less personally relevant legal reality of the actual U.S.

It has been reported that former president Obama is currently taking unprecedented (for a former president) steps to oppose President Trump and fund and lead opposition to cause problems for him and his agenda. Obama can do this more or less openly and with great support from many Americans, perhaps including some of you reading this, because he is a leader of their nation, which they consider the True America. Most people from the area where I grew up would see things in the opposite way; Obama's progressive ideals were imperiling True America. Their dislike (to put it mildly) for him was not racism, but due to his position as a leader in the assault on "their America," which like most other groups, they call "America."
Kaepernick kneels for a similar reason; because the America he sees does not resemble the American nation of his own ideals. The America others see may correspond closely with theirs, however, or diverge even more widely than for him. There are diverse nations which share our nation-state in an alliance of necessity which grows less feasible the more they imagine themselves to be the one true nation.

A Ray of Hope - Acknowledging Perspective

While fights over resources between rival groups are unavoidable in the history of humanity, there is a relatively simple and straightforward way to avoid losing friends and making enemies in this brave new ideological world--simply acknowledge that some people live in the same country but a different nation than you do, and they see things very differently. I have friends with worldviews that diverge to the point of complete incompatibility with mine. If you put us on a committee that had to make policy decisions, we'd be constantly sparring opponents at best, if not outright enemies. And it's no good to say "we're all Christians." As I've explained in previous blogs, your convictions, Christian and otherwise, are all twisted together; we can study the same passages of scripture and come away with very different conclusions and priorities, because we never really set those aside without long-term effort and the help of the Spirit, and even then it can creep back in, as it does with famous pastors who after long years of careful exegesis are not immune to blind spots.

But I can recognize that other people's views and values have deep differences from mine, no different in some ways than my Taiwanese friends, and accept them in that sense, if they can accept a similar arrangement on their side. We are really from different cultures, and things are getting to the point where it's more harmful to pretend that's not the case than otherwise.

Is this a complete embracing of postmodernism (even as we leave it behind now for the as-of-yet-unnamed current age), an admittance that there is no truth, only different perspectives, a "diversity of truth"?
"By no means," but we can certainly admit that there is a diversity of priorities. To take our initial example, for some people respecting national symbols is an important priority. For some people that simply isn't much of a priority at all, they never grew up caring about that sort of thing, while for some it's the very importance of those symbols that make them important focal points for protests.

What's happening on my Facebook wall regarding the NFL protests is neither racism nor treason, it's simply people with different cultures and priorities looking at the same action in very different ways, but not really acknowledging that those different cultures and priorities exist. Yet doing so would allow what feel like betraying comrades to become, in a sense, foreign friends. We live in diverse thought-nations while inhabiting the same physical and online spaces. Acknowledging the difference in perspective that comes from that is in fact an acknowledgment of universal truth.

A Useful Theological Example

(Credit for this pic: brazilcarroll)

Scripture makes a lot of what are sometimes called "gnomic" truth statements: not statements wearing little pointy red hats, but timelessly true or proverbial statements which communicate the nature of reality. ("God is good," "birds fly," etc) And whether birds fly is not a matter of your perspective on birds, it is a general truth about the vast majority of birds; at best you could try to pick apart language as a thought exercise, constructing some scenario where what we call what birds do something else, or else deconstructing the idea of flight, but birds still would be flying around outside untroubled by your sophistry.

This recognition that there are divergent perspectives from which to look at the same issue gets hairy when we attempt the sacred challenge of maintaining sound theology. Scripture itself does not allow for a multiplicity of mutually exclusive interpretations of the same passage, even though that's exactly what we have in the Church now, for basically the reasons described earlier in this post. Scripture is making claims about the world, not presenting them for round table discussion. You can discuss them anyway, of course, you can even judge scripture from the standpoint of values themselves mutually incompatible with scripture ("Paul was a misogynist," and other such incoherencies), but the Bible itself teaches us that to do so is neither to believe it nor even to take it seriously.

No, there is a different kind of perspective consideration I'm more interested in, because it resolves some thorny theological debates by reminding us that a valid alternative perspective does exist in scripture--not that of some people vs. other people, but of men vs. God.

While we cannot hope to see from God's perspective even approximately, it is well to remember that He has one. If we accept that He interacts with created man within created space-time, yet Himself exists in a timeless state apart from His own creation, some endless debates resolve themselves almost automatically.

Prophecy, for example, from a time-bound perspective, is something God "knows will happen." Even in a time-bound sense it is not merely that--a lot of prophecy is actually what we called "gnomic truth" above, pronouncements of what has always been true.

But from a timeless perspective, all prophecy is simply a communication by God of what is, either always, or at a specific point in time we humans have not yet reached. We humans have to travel through history to get there, and for some prophecies it seems we travel through multiple instances of the same prophecy being fulfilled, suspiciously like reality unfolds in a way that will suddenly make sense when our eyes are opened. But God isn't waiting for these things to happen as we are; He is omnipresent in time as well as space, but He created both and exists beyond both. The Lamb was slain before the foundations of the world.

Taking this perspective, then, or at least recognizing it, the "problem" of election goes away. To speak of God "looking down the halls of time" is forcing God into a human perspective to which He is not limited. He does not need to look down halls, His presence is in all time as in all space.


***Well it's late, time for some reading before bed, and this post is long enough. I hope to examine the topic again in more detail, as I believe it is very useful for examining the question of free will vs. sovereignty. But for now, if you can't believe you have friends who could possibly hold the opinions they do, consider whether they might not really be foreign friends--from a different thought nation than you, and approach them as if they are from another part of the world. In at least one very pragmatic sense, they are.

Hurricanes and the Goodness of God

For my American readers, this hurricane season will be one that many people remember for decades after the unprecedented flooding that Hurricane Harvey brought to the Houston area. Hopefully, it will also be remembered how people came together to help each other in the midst of a tense period in our national mood, when scenes of cooperation, relief, and unselfish neighbor-love are like balm to a frenzied social soul.

Now with Irma shredding through Caribbean islands and barreling down on Florida, we seem poised to be dealt another heavy blow from weather conditions not under our control. Only time will tell the scale of the damage there. Almost certainly there will be many billions of dollars of damage, countless lives disrupted, and a few ended. For Christians, not only in America but in all the world, we do believe there is One who has power over the weather, a God without whose permission nothing can occur, blessings or tragedies alike. So why does He allow these things to occur?

No Humansplaining

It is always ill-advised and futile to attempt to give narrowly specific reasons that large-scale natural disasters occur. Was Houston being judged for its sins like many claimed or implied New Orleans was in Katrina? Were the 16,000+ killed in the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami disaster more sinful than the rest of Japan or the rest of East Asia? Were the people whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices or who were crushed by a falling tower in Siloam more guilty than the rest of Jerusalem? (Luke 13:1-5, Hint: Jesus says "No!")

In the whatever'th-wave of the feminist movement we're in now, "man-splaining" is criticized as men offering unnecessary or patronizing explanations to which they expect women to listen respectfully. Or something like that. These things tend to be flexibly defined by those who wish to claim victim status, whether they have a legitimate cause for complaint or not. (They might as well lock up all the INTPs now, we love to explain things to anyone willing to listen to that much excited detail.)

But there is another kind of mansplaining, or humansplaining, which I would love to see end, and that is when people with positions of spiritual authority start trying to explain things they don't understand because they feel people expect them to have an explanation. Like the occasional situation in Chinese culture where courtesy demands a response to tourist inquiries of how to get to a place even if the local being asked has no idea, it's not so much about knowing, as feeling that you are in a position where giving an answer is expected and so you come up with a good-sounding one.

As a missionary with a seminary degree, I am sometimes put in this position. While I am not a very worthy example, at least I do try to always say when I don't know something off the top of my head but will go research it and have a better answer later, or else that the Bible doesn't actually give us an answer, so I neither have one nor should you trust anyone who says they do. It may be less satisfying than a pithy response you can copy and paste onto a picture and pass around social media, but I don't dare put words in the Bible's mouth. (If you feel I have done so with this post, feel free to let me know)

When a pastor or prominent Christian or anyone else stands up and says that a disaster happened for positive or negative reasons--as judgment for sin, or to bring everyone together--they are choosing from various possibilities, hopefully biblical-based ones, but they have no possible way of knowing the real reason or combinations. We are not privy to an explanation from God, and be very cautious about anyone claiming that they are.

But if we can't known the specific reason, then on a more basic level, why would a good God allow disasters like Katrina, like the Tohoku Quake, like the flooding in Houston, like the crises which you didn't even know were claiming lives every day in less-reported areas of the world, to happen? And can we answer that question without "humansplaining" or adding purely speculative ideas to scripture?
I think we can, and this is my attempt to do so.

A hurricane season that will be long remembered...

Why God Lets Hurricanes Strike Major Cities

I. Because when ocean water reaches a certain temperature, and seasonal wind patterns...

We know this reason, or at least learned it in high school or saw it on the weather channel at some point. This is what people call the scientific reason, and what atheists tiresomely pretend makes God unnecessary until you bring up that this is not the Why at all, but the How. Personally I find it fascinating, how the unbelievable amount of energy representing in a raging hurricane is all the result of a positive feedback loop that can emerge from the tranquil, sun-warmed ocean when conditions are right. But that's wandering from the thrust of our topic.

As I have blogged previously, the ancient Greeks spent some time thinking about why things happen, and came up with the brilliant idea that every event had multiple causes, as seen from different perspectives.

For a simple example, a crystal goblet dropped on a stone floor shatters into scintillating shards. Why? Well, 1) because someone dropped it. But also 2) because it's crystal. If it was rubber or wood, it mostly likely would have survived the fall. Also 3) because the floor is stone. If it had been thick shag carpet, the goblet probably also would have been fine, though my allergies might not. Also 4) because in some humanly incomprehensible way, the shattered goblet fits into the vast and mysterious unfolding of all things, under God's authority and obeying His will. When we ask "why did this happen" we are usually speaking more to the that last category. What was the ultimate purpose?

I am not here suggesting the Greek causal categories are comprehensive or even correct. But their reminder to us that there is not merely one reason for things to occur is important.

So for our damaging hurricane, we could come up with a similar set of explanations. "Why did a massive hurricane strike a populated area with lethal results?":

1) Because of a set of natural phenomenon which to some extent can be traced back in chains of cause and effect to the beginning of the universe. Energy was transferred and the earth went around the sun and the ocean sloshed around for millennia and the hurricane was always going to happen at that time, unless you want to go really deep into arguments about human free will and chaos theory, and suggest the sinking of some Carthaginian trireme during the Punic Wars was just enough energy disruption to butterfly effect the hurricane into being thousands of years later. Perhaps so, but even that can be described precisely by physics, if we had access to the data.

2) Because people decided to build a city there. Actually there are lots of big coastal cities, and hurricanes have a very wide track. Sooner or later every city near the coast will be hit, it's just a matter of time. If we didn't build any major cities within 50 miles of the coast, hurricanes would rarely ever threaten them seriously.

3) Because people build communities out of materials which can be affected by storms. I live in Taiwan, where cities are dense and built mostly out of concrete and steel. Here in the capital metro area, even supertyphoons are mostly just a day of missed work or school, while eating instant noodles you bought at 7-11 before the storm got too intense to carry an umbrella, and listening to the wind howling past the windows. People who live in the mountains are at greater risk of mudslides and flash flooding, however, because of the nature of their environment. Our choice of living space and way of life does render us more or less vulnerable to nature's occasional fury, and like New Orleans, deciding to live in low-lying coastal areas is simply accepting the risk that sooner or later there will be tragedy.

4) Because God did not prevent it. I say it in this way, because when people ask the question in other way (If God is good, why does He send hurricanes) they are implying that a hurricane wasn't going to happen, and God "incited" it. But it was, as we explained above. Given scientific superpowers, we could trace the unbroken chain of cause and effect and energy transfer and weather patterns all the way back to the Creation event. This is important. God's creation is real. It is broken by sin, but it still functions according to knowable and consistent physical laws. Now the Bible certainly does speak of God causing disasters specifically as punishment for sin, but it also certainly does not say that every natural phenomenon which humans are caught up in and suffer is a punishment from God.

So we live in the kind of world where hurricanes happen, we have built cities in their path, and we haven't built those cities to be hurricane-resistant. Yet knowing all this, God doesn't stop them. Why? This brings us to the second part of what we mean when we ask why a disaster occurred:

II. Because God did not interfere in the Natural Order on this occasion

We spoke of the unbroken chain of cause and effect which proceeds forth from the creation event: God can and does interfere with this when He decides to, but this is a specific and special event, what we call a miracle. Even in the Bible, which being concerned with God's salvation plan for humanity and interactions with us mentions miracles and direct acts of God very frequently, we still read of a natural world that is God's creation and functions more or less as it was designed to, a world where the sun is a light-emitting object that God placed in the high heavens for the benefit of earth (a different kind of geocentrism -- the sun doesn't revolve around us, but it's there for us and not we for it), yet not a world where the sun is a little god in a chariot that rides around the sky every day but might choose not to do so tomorrow, or might be caught by a hungry sky wolf instead. The very existence and persistence of creation is itself a miracle, to be sure, but to speak as though every single thing that happens each moment is an arbitrary supernatural intervention risks ignoring a default reality the Bible itself assumes, the blessing of being able to take reality for granted, a core component of a scriptural worldview that all modern science is based on and to which it testifies.

So science is true and godly in the sense that it measures this physical world God established to function according to the laws of physics, neither arbitrary nor pantheistic. Yet if we believed only in this, we would be deists and not followers of Christ. As Christians we understand additionally that the One who set those parameters is present and active, and can always make the call to intervene directly, and does so both unprompted for His own reasons and in answer to our prayers.

So then under what conditions does God intervene? The Bible gives us some general categories:

1) Salvation history - God's interactions with the Patriarchs, miracles on behalf of Israel, through His prophets, in the person of Jesus Christ, etc. The Bible is mostly about this--God's special interactions with individuals and nations in His eternal plan for our redemption, and what happened in history as a result.

2) Judgment for Sin - Both the Old and New Testaments mention specific occasions not directly related to the progression of salvation history, which show God specifically acting to punish special sin. In the Old Testament we famously have Sodom and Gomorrah, but in the New Testament we also have Herod, receiving the crowds' adulation in a blasphemous way (Knowing who the LORD was, he still welcomed the crowds' praising him as divine) and being struck down for it. This is mentioned almost parenthetically as a direct punishment by God, and not as the Spirit-empowered act of any apostle, like the blindness of Elymas. We can assume if God punished both individuals and cities/nations directly, in both Old and New Testaments, for sins other than causing harm to Israel (as in the case of Egypt), then He may still do so today.

3)  As an Answer to Prayer - Whether it is the healings and exorcisms performed by the disciples, or the miraculous answers to prayer the Church has seen from its inception until today, Christians know that God is sometimes willing to intervene dramatically. Testimonies to medical "mystery" cases where tumors vanish and doctors are confused by inexplicable recoveries are so common (even discounting the made-up, "share this post for a blessing" ones) that if modern scientists were as inquisitive as their forebearers we'd have whole fields of research trying to figure out by what means these things are occurring. (expect some kind of quantum energy/power of positive thinking explanations to crop up eventually as a way to get around a Biblical explanation if they haven't already, East Asia is way ahead of the West on that front)
Another specific example pertinent to our topic today: After a particularly severe typhoon here in Taiwan a few years ago, cleanup had just begun and rescue crews were still trying to get to people trapped in the mountains, when another typhoon headed for the island. Many people prayed earnestly, and the typhoon made an abrupt u-turn and headed straight back into the Pacific Ocean where it dissipated. I've heard similar stories in other places, and can't speak to their veracity, but at least I've witnessed it happen once myself in this case.

All this has prepared us to answer the central question: If a hurricane was going to hit a city through natural processes, yet God could directly intervene if He so desired, why didn't He do so?

Let's check our categories of Divine intervention mentioned above:

1) Is the hurricane part of salvation history? By definition, no.

2) Is the hurricane judgment for sin? Possibly. As I said above, it's foolish for us humans to pronounce this without knowing the mind of God (let alone start listing out which sins we guess God is punishing or why it was these people and not other people), but with Biblical precedent we also can't rule it out. I personally don't like this explanation because a hurricane is not really a "black swan" event; they happen every year, some are always more powerful than others, and it's only a matter of time before a large city is affected.

3) Did people earnestly pray in faith for God to send the hurricane somewhere else but He answered no? That's complicated, isn't it? Who would you pray for the storm to hit instead of you? As a Christian I fully believe that if many churches gathered together and prayed for God to make the storm do a 180 degree turn and head back out into the Atlantic, He could and might do that. I've seen a similar thing happen once, as I noted above. Obviously I have no way of knowing if those prayers occurred, though I think people tend to not pray with that kind of real urgency unless there's a special emergency. Sometimes we blame God for things we never really petitioned Him to change, but both scripture and the church's experience of great acts of God suggest that there is power in many people humbly petitioning God that a single person's earnest request does not have. To investigate how that works would both take a longer blog than this, but it can be said that prayer is never a means to manipulate God; we can never discover a formula by which to get consistent affirmative answers to our various requests, the Bible only touches on the topic of which prayers are pleasing to God, while telling us that there are some requests to which we will get consistent affirmative answers (Like James 1:5). (Note: This isn't a question of sovereignty--if God has ordained a thing, He has ordained the means, for example the prayers of many, by which it shall occur.)

III. Because Suffering and Pain is the Default of our World, not the Exception

Perhaps I was the only person who hadn't figured that out, but growing up this was not clear. Life wasn't perfect, but it was alright, and events like serious sickness or car accidents or job loss or natural disasters were tragic intrusions in how life ought to be. Much of the developed world seeks to make this perspective as much a reality as possible--that through use of resources and wise decision making, the suffering of this life may be minimized for as many people as possible. This is not a biblical perspective, but it's a natural human one, that leads to evils as well as good. (Trying to minimize suffering leads to acts of mercy and the alleviation of need, but also to abortion and euthanasia)
Scripture does not describe the world exactly in this way. Rather, a peaceful life free from tragic incidents or societal chaos is a blessing from God, a manifestation of Shalom, something to be sought after not because it is "normal" but because it's what people want and how the world was initially supposed to be. We are all longing after Eden, but sin has turned our quest for it into the welfare state, or even communist regimes.

When man fell, he dragged creation down with him. we have no idea if the world had hurricanes before the fall; although people do like to take one verse and run with it, on this question at least there is biblical evidence to suggest that before Noah's flood the climate didn't allow for that kind of thing. By the time of Noah's flood, not only had the fall taken place, but mankind was so wicked that God initiated a pan-disaster that dwarfs the most furious hurricane the world has ever known. To run the risk of the "humansplaining" I mentioned above, my understanding ("I, not the Lord") is that hurricanes and many other potentially lethal weather events began in the post-flood world as an inevitable result of changed climatic factors. (There is also some biblical evidence to suggest "climate change" in terms not of global warming, which an increasingly small number of people cling to in the face of insurmountable evidence to the contrary, but of the increasing instability of the climate is also an inevitable result of the fall, and will only get worse until the end.)

I have mentioned in a previous blog how, just as you cannot get the tin out of a bronze-alloy sword without destroying it, our post-fall world is alloyed with sin. God will remove it one day, but in doing so "the heavens will perish with fire" and the "earth shall melt like wax." He delays so that more will know Him, more will fill His tables at the feast and enter His dwellings, before the end comes and the door is closed.

Hurricanes are an inevitable phenomenon in our sin-alloyed world. God does not, except in special cases, intervene to prevent the natural consequences of sin. That is the reality of the messed-up world we inhabit. Yet through common grace, by wisdom and understanding the nature of creation (effective city planning and disaster preparation, science that understands the weather and also stronger building materials, etc), we are free to develop ways to mitigate the destructive power of natural phenomenon, and indeed we have done so to a large degree.

So pray for recovery in Houston, pray for mercy in Florida and the Caribbean, and indeed for western wildfires, violence in Syria and Yemen and Nigeria and Sudan and American inner cities and elsewhere, tensions on the Korean peninsula, and a whole host of situations. But if you are simply praying that God will make all the bad things and the hurting stop, that prayer may arise out of the heart's distress, but it does not correspond to biblical reality. The consequences of human sin will wreak havoc as they do, until the final judgment.

Then, what should we do?

God has entrusted the task of letting the world hear the gospel to us. While movements of the Spirit are bringing millions to His kingdom, they are doing so alongside and through the faithful service of brothers and sisters around the world. We are His witnesses, and that is our constant and joyful responsibility whether or not we see God specifically intervening to do miracles on His own. "He's not a tame lion," but we are no longer languishing in the endless winter of frozen Narnia--Christmas has come, and Aslan has died, defeated death, and opened the way.

Now should we sit and question God for letting nature take its course, a course we chose ourselves in Eden by deciding we had better options than trusting obedience? Not as believers. We are on this earth to proclaim Christ to a world that desperately needs hope beyond this world. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. When confronted with disaster, we have two necessary options:

1. Pray, but don't do it alone. God does listen to our requests made in faith. If He chooses to let nature take its course, that is not being mean or unjust, that is in fact exactly justice. He may rather choose to show special mercy in a specific situation, even in a miraculous way, but my experience at least is that He rarely does so when we are casual about asking. And I don't mean prayer memes on FB, but roomfuls of people on their knees.

2. Go. Help. If you are burdened by a disaster, demanding the government or somebody do something on your behalf earns you zero points. (maybe even negative points, by encouraging a culture of shifting Christian responsibility up the secular ladder) Also you can earnestly request, but are unable to demand God do anything. But you are quite capable of being the body of Christ and bringing love and joy to a broken world. If people need help, you go help them.

And some people already are, as we watched in Houston. But what if, like Paul and his race, the Church was excited and even competitive about this? What if the government complained that so many Christians were already responding that they couldn't get state and federal aid in there? (I'm not talking about interfering with professionals doing their jobs, I'm saying a) that's an excuse when there's so much that can be done, and b) Christians can get access to that training too, yeah?) What if we decided no one would outdo us in showing charitable love and being first on the scene to bring mercy and relief in times of disaster and hurting?

I guess, in that situation, the Church might even look like salt and light to a hungry and darkened world. Pray for Florida, pray for Houston, pray for God's mercy on those involved in these and other disasters nationally and globally. Then recognize that God might be prompting you to be one of those expressions of His mercy that you were praying for, and go help someone.

Welfare and The Wall: Nehemiah in 2017 America

(Just a short one today. Have been teaching on Nehemiah at our summer camp, and while the content of those lessons was certainly not focused on what I'll talk about here, it struck me as a very appropriate book for 2017 and the raging ideological conflict that tempts me to quit facebook about once a week.)

"Let me signal my disapproval of Nehemiah"

Nehemiah: "Hand me another brick" 
Christian SJW: "No, you racist, build love not walls"

Nehemiah: "Distribute this food to all those hungry poor people" 
Christian Libertarian: "No you commie, they'll just keep hanging around looking for handouts"

Reading of Nehemiah in 2017 is rather fascinating. I can't help but feel it's sad that progressive evangelicals were not around at that time to enlighten Nehemiah and explain how the social justice and state-funded poverty relief that happen in Chapter 5 are great and all, but God's will could never involve building a wall around Jerusalem because the nations were supposed to gather to His holy temple (gates in the walls don't make it okay, they suggest you think you have moral grounds to differentiate between kinds of people trying to come in), and how you can't possibly defend yourself from outside threats and still call yourself a witness to the nations, not that nations actually exist.

They could also explain how the Levites were wrong in Chapter 8 to tell the people to stop mourning and rejoice on Sukkot, because obviously holidays are not about celebrating, but exist as reminders of things that you should feel guilty about. 

(Maybe you just wanted to have a good time partying or relaxing with your family and friends, but modern morality means still having fun along with the cognitive dissonance of a guilty conscience for the wrongs of history, which is the mark of a "good person" in very confused 2017 America.)

Nehemiah built a wall; as a society we're flying toward one at 1000mph

WWJD: He would confuse you and you wouldn't like it, but you'd say "yes, Lord"

Yes all that above was sarcasm, but I learned it from the best (Jesus, Isaiah, etc).

One great thing about scripture in the midst of all these public-thought-wars is how it falls diagonally across our ideological lines of battle. If we let it, it won't prove or disprove our stances, it will change our priorities. As a friend said recently, when your priority becomes loving as God wants us to love, you don't need to be commanded not to murder people anymore. When your priority becomes reaching the nations for Christ, you don't need to be told spending all your money on a comfortable life for yourself isn't the best use of your resources.

But don't imagine that your priorities have already been straightened out by scripture, that you see clearly because your heart feels the pain of God's heart and/or your logic is impenetrable, and other people just care too much about their pet issues to listen to you. Neither the strength of an emotion (your feels don't matter and can be chemically manipulated) or the strength of a theological argument (you only know some of what you don't know, you don't know if there are important factors you don't know at all that would change the entire question) are grounds to say you have escaped bias and other people would understand what God meant by this or that scripture as applied to a particular current situation if they'd stop being stubborn and deluded.

Your spiritual worldview is not and cannot be partitioned off from the rest of your worldview. Whether you are a red-blooded national patriot or consider yourself an enlightened citizen of the world, you are not centered on scripture while other people are getting influenced by Right or Left ideology, you're the same as them, and so am I. Letting scripture influence your worldview filter more and more without first filtering out any dissonance with the worldview you already have is an intense, lifelong process, but you won't make any progress until you realize how deeply your culture/upbringing/education affect your thinking about scripture and theology.

Embrace the Bias, but let the Word transform your Worldview

Don't pretend you don't have a bias, you do. Everything about growing up in our time has been aimed at biasing you in one way or another, and I am continually astonished at the naivety of people who assume if something is presented by a person paid to know about it, it must be true by default. In 2017, there is no such thing as neutral, unbiased territory. Everyone wants a piece of your opinions, and they're all trying to purchase real estate in your worldview; don't give either away for free. And those people who most love to proclaim themselves moderates (whether political or religious or both) also tend to be most influenced by random and irrational things instead of at least having a strong worldview they subscribe to that makes claims about the world and truth. In the philosophical sense, they are not the most, but the least free. Trying to not have strong or settled opinions just means you have a weak view of truth. (How you express them is a different question, naturally)

So embrace your bias, but come often to scripture and hold even your most basic premises loosely, able to be challenged and shifted around by the Truth. That's what the Word of God does when we stop twisting it into strange contortions (sometimes unconsciously, with the ease of old habit) to avoid uncomfortable clashes with the cultural ideals that we grew up with and that surround us persuasively now.