Creation and Conduct

The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. . . . The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple; the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. (Psalm 19:1-2, 7-8)

Some nineteenth-century literary critics, who regarded the Bible as a work of exclusively human origin, were convinced that Psalm 19 was a composite of poems from two different sources. The same author could not have composed both parts, they believed, because of their contrasting subject matter. The first section deals with the natural order, the starry heavens and the sun’s course across the sky. Never mind that the idea of the heavenly bodies communicating knowledge seems fanciful, or that the sun’s revolving around the earth is an antiquated concept in today’s Copernican view of the solar system. At least this part of the psalm celebrates a universal perspective.

By contrast, the second section focuses narrowly on an Israelite nationalistic concern, and celebrates the Law of Moses. An enlightened perspective, the critics thought, would surely relegate most of the Jewish Law to its proper niche in the museum of discarded standards, where they believed the superior insights of modern social and religious thought had placed it. Evolving humanity had arrived at a new way to formulate morality, one that didn’t purport to originate in divine pronouncements from on high.

What did these critics miss? They overlooked the insight that no “law,” or pattern for human conduct, rests upon any enduring foundation apart from the acknowledgment of God’s “handiwork” in the creation of the physical universe. If God is not “real”—if His work doesn’t underlie all that exists—then neither is there any basis for order on the plane of human relationships. Values and standards will be set merely by whichever human group is able to impose its ways upon others and force them into its mold. As William Penn said, “Those who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.” The God who brought what is seen out of what is unseen, who separated light from darkness, has also differentiated human conduct into actions that are either right or wrong—and made the differentiation clear.

Paul wrote to the Romans concerning those who would sidestep this truth, “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse . . .” (Romans 1:19-20). Psalm 19, in linking the Law of the Lord to the cosmic panorama, makes the same point. However enlightened we may consider ourselves, when it comes to questions of how to deal with others and manage our personal lives—or the life of our society—we can’t write our own standards. The parameters have been set by the Word of Him who made all things.

The Analyst

Our Creator is an Analyst.

It wasn’t enough just to launch the “big bang,” when “what is seen was made out of things which do not appear” (Hebrews 11:3). In the beginning there was nothing but light. But light reveals nothing if there’s nothing else to reveal. So the Creator took a further step. He “separated the light from the darkness.” As the older translations say, He divided. That’s what an analyst does, for analysis is the process of differentiating things into their components. God continued His analysis until the created order began to take shape, no longer “without form and void.”

In other words, God created information. As Gregory Bateson pointed out, information is “a difference that makes a difference.” There’s no information in sameness; information is the difference between one thing and another. That’s the principle of the digital computer. A “bit” is either on or off, and everything the computer does for us is based on the difference between what’s on and what’s off. God is the original Programmer-Analyst.

In a day of post-modern skepticism about the possibility of knowing what’s true and what isn’t, the Christian thinker needs to emulate the Creator in His digital differentiation. As Harry Blamires wrote five decades ago, “The thinker hates indecision and confusion; he firmly distinguishes right from wrong, good from evil; he is at home in a world of clearly demarcated categories and proven conclusions; he is dogmatic and committed; he works toward decisive action.”

A Christian intellectual may well acknowledge nuances and “gray areas,” but works through them to a firm conclusion. He or she is like the men of the tribe of Issachar “who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do” (1 Chronicles 12:32).

In submission to the Creator, we pursue His analytical ways. We learn to differentiate and distinguish, in order to contribute to His purpose for human civilization. The English Old Testament begins with God’s differentiation of the created order. It closes, in Malachi 3:18, with an admonition to carry the process of analysis into the realm of human conduct: “Then once more you shall distinguish between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him.” With our culture in moral meltdown today, we need this type of analytical skill more than ever.

Am I Really Worshiping?

Worship isn’t a program we watch; it’s a meeting with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ. We’re God’s people gathered in His presence, reaffirming our covenant with him. That has implications for how we structure a worship service. Worship isn’t about me, or you, it’s about the Lord — and how He meets us for healing, encouragement, instruction in right living, and other benefits of being in His presence.

This leads to a larger question: How do we prepare ourselves for worship, and are we really worshiping if we’re not inwardly prepared and focused? Here’s my “take” on what it means to really be worshiping.

The biblical words for worship, in both Hebrew and Greek, refer to specific actions — usually either bowing or falling prostrate, or “giving thanks” which is a word derived from the word for “hand” and really refers, not to gratitude, but to taking an oath of loyalty to the Lord with uplifted hands. So you can see that the biblical worshiper knew he was worshiping when he performed the associated physical actions. It would never have occurred to David, for example, to ask whether he was really worshiping.

Perhaps some will object that in the New Testament there’s more concern with inward motivation in worship. In my opinion, the two Testaments don’t differ in this respect. The Old Testament worshiper also had a heartfelt motivation to express his loyalty to the Lord, as a member of the covenant community. This comes out, for example, in many of the Psalms.

The New Testament is also concerned with our outward, as well as inward, response. Paul, talking about the Lord’s Supper, says that we shouldn’t receive it in an unworthy manner. But the context of his statement shows that he didn’t mean introspection into our personal spirituality. It was, rather, an awareness of our place within the body — the believers around us — so that in eating and drinking we don’t neglect the needs of our brothers and sisters (1 Corinthians 11). And Jesus makes an astounding statement in the Gospels (Matthew 23:16-19) when he speaks about swearing by the gift on the altar. He says it’s the altar that makes the gift sacred, not our offering that sanctifies the altar. In other words, it’s God, represented by His altar, who validates our worship, and not our motivation. To concentrate on our motivation, or whether we’re “prepared,” is to put ourselves into the central focus — and that’s idolatry.

We in the Western world have become so used to thinking of worship as a cognitive or “thought-type” activity, internal rather than external, that we tend to navel-gaze, wondering whether our motives are what they should be. But when worship has a recognized, biblically based structure, and when we participate along with others in following that structure with the intent to bring honor and glory to God, why should we ever have to ask ourselves whether we are worshiping? Our feelings aren’t relevant to this question, if we’re obeying what God has commanded us to do to honor Him.

Jesus tells this parable in Matthew 21:28-31: “What do you think? A man had two sons; and he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ And he answered, ‘I will not’; but afterward he repented and went. And he went to the second and said the same; and he answered, ‘I go, sir,’ but did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” Jesus doesn’t even go into the question of the two sons’ motivation; he focuses on how they acted. His answer indicates that the one who did the right thing, after repenting, was the one who pleased his father.

What I’m trying to do here is to offer a word of liberation to those who are under the bondage of excessive introspection and self-criticism. Let’s trust that God is big enough to accept our worship and be blessed by it, even if our motivation — by our standards — may not be as pure as we would like. Is it paradoxical to imagine that we might have standards more stringent than those of the holy God? But perhaps that’s the case!

[This material appeared originally in the January, 2005 issue of ReUnion, newsletter of Union Congregational Church, North Aurora, Illinois.]

Impermeable Matter and Subatomic Space

To us, the physical universe appears “solid” — that is, most physical objects appear impermeable. If you strike a nail with a hammer, the nail head does not pass through the head of the hammer. If it did, the hammer would be useless as a tool for driving nails. Fluids or gases, of course, behave differently. We can pour one liquid into another, such as two-cycle oil into gasoline for our line trimmer or snow thrower. The fluids mix in such a way that we can’t immediately grasp the oil and pull it bodily out of the gasoline. But the two fluids remain what they were, and if left undisturbed the oil may eventually separate from the gasoline. Unless a chemical reaction results in the recombination of the molecules into some new compound, the molecules of each fluid or gas in the mixture remain “impermeable” — that is, they retain the properties of the original substances.

What makes the impermeability of “solid” substances, such as steel, wood or even human flesh, a puzzling phenomenon is that no object we encounter in the normal course of events is really solid. All substances and objects are made up of atoms which, in turn, consist of subatomic particles — protons, neutrons, electrons, with the first two being further subdivided into “quarks.” (This is an oversimplification of a more complicated picture, which I am equipped neither to fully understand nor to describe.) The distances between the components of an atomic nucleus, and between the nucleus and its orbiting electrons, are comparable in terms of scale to the astronomical distances between the bodies of our solar system. This means that “solid” substances are not solid at all; in fact, the space they occupy is mostly just that — space. It has been suggested that if the space between all subatomic particles of the universe could be removed, the entire universe would shrink to the size of something like a grapefruit, or even a golf ball. Physical objects are not “solid” at all, but consist mostly of space between the subatomic particles that make up their molecules.

Within four-dimensional Newtonian space, material objects and substances — despite their not being “solid” at all — are held together by some kind of organizing force. Their molecular structure is sustained by what is called “nuclear binding energy,” or some similar term. Several nuclear, electro-magnetic and gravitational forces operate to both bind and keep apart the subatomic particles of matter. Reading discussions of this topic, one gets the feeling that physicists do not really understand how these forces and energy particles operate but are simply giving technical names to phenomena thought to occur, as though naming them would explain why they behave as they do. This is like saying that people gather together because they are gregarious, when being gregarious is just another way of saying that people like to be sociable. Exactly how and why an object or substance is able to hold its “shape,” given the fact that it consists mostly of space, is probably as puzzling a question now as it ever was.

What would happen if, from within four-dimensional Newtonian space, we could observe the effect of introducing additional dimensions into consideration — dimensions of which we cannot conceive given the limitations of a four-dimensional world of distance, volume and time? Would some kind of “nuclear binding energy” allow an object to retain its shape while ceasing to be impermeable? There is plenty of space between the subatomic particles of physical objects to allow them to “pass through” each other, if particular forms of binding energy allowed each object to retain its integrity while doing so.

Is this what happened at the resurrection of Jesus Christ? “Eight days later, his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. The doors were shut, but Jesus came and stood among them, and said, ‘Peace be with you’” (John 20:26). A four-dimensional universe could not have come into existence unless its Creator was operative in dimensions beyond the four that we normally experience. Could Jesus’s resurrection, and what He is able to do as the risen Lord, be the result of God’s continued multi-dimensional activity? Perhaps the universe is kept from collapsing into a tiny “golf ball” of spaceless matter through Jesus Christ, who “reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power” (Hebrews 1:3).

Scientific Knowledge and Faith

For most people of contemporary Western culture the arbiter of reality, or truth, is probably the enterprise we know as “science.” We understand truth to be that which can be scientifically verified. The word science comes from the Latin scio, “I know,” and science represents for us that which we can know for certainty. But our confidence in science as the uniform guarantor of knowledge might be misplaced.

A typical image of the progress of science pictures succeeding generations of scientists building upon the achievements of their predecessors, verifying their conclusions and correcting their errors. Few people are aware that science, as we understand it today, has not developed in this manner, but instead has evolved through a series of “revolutions” in which the underlying assumptions of the previous era have been called into question. Science has moved forward not by the steady accumulation of data, but by the replacement of old paradigms of understanding with new insights — insights which came not from newly discovered data but from a different way of structuring and interpreting the data already available.

For example, ancient and medieval astronomers operated with Ptolemy’s system in which the earth was the center of the universe. The Polish astronomer Copernicus, however, developed a different paradigm in which the sun, not the earth, was the center. In this heliocentric model, which he published in 1543, the observed movements of stars and planets in the night sky were no longer understood as their movements with respect to the earth, but as resulting from the earth’s revolution about the sun.

At the time there was no real “proof” of Copernicus’s theory, since the observations of astronomers could still be forced into Ptolemy’s geocentric system of epicycles. Copernicus’s system was thought to be an interesting possible alternative to Ptolemy’s, but was no more “scientifically” challenging; thus it failed to generate much controversy when first proposed. A century later, when Galileo invented the telescope, more accurate observations of the night sky provided the data needed to completely call into question Ptolemy’s earth-centered model. It was only then that Copernicus’s system became controversial. This was largely due to a failure, on the part of church leaders, to separate biblical teaching and Christian doctrine from philosophical assumptions on which the old science was based. Eventually, of course, even Copernicus’s heliocentric model had to be abandoned once vastly more powerful instruments revealed the enormous, multi-galactic scope of the universe.

The example of the “Copernican revolution” shows that science evolves not by accumulation of new facts but by the insight of individuals who are willing to question the unproven assumptions of a previous scientific establishment. The history of science is filled with breakthroughs of this sort, such as Isaac Newton’s “laws” of gravitation, or Einstein’s theory of general relativity which modified and replaced them. Einstein’s theory, which suggests that gravity is an effect of the “curvature” of space, is not self-evident to an observer working within the Newtonian four-dimensional structure, which has no place for “curved” space. Scientific advance, then, does not depend on accumulating observations or measurements or copious experimentation within the established paradigm; it depends on the insight of an individual who is able to break out of that paradigm and think about the phenomena of the universe according to a different model. (The classic discussion of this issue is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962.)

The early nineteenth-century French mathematician Laplace developed a theory of causal determinism: if we could know the precise present state of every atom in the universe, we could determine the exact course of past and future cosmic events. A popular view of science might agree with Laplace — would not the knowledge of everything be the key to the solution of all problems, through science? But this “thought experiment” destroys science itself by removing the element of human insight by which scientific knowledge actually moves forward. Therefore, Laplace’s hypothesis is sometimes called “Laplace’s demon.”

The point of this discussion is that science is not a mere objective body of knowledge requiring no personal involvement. Science is simply what scientists do, based on their unproven and unprovable philosophical assumptions about the nature of reality and how it can be known. The scientific enterprise is an exercise in personal commitment, and scientific knowledge is personal knowledge (see Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 1962). It is, therefore, akin to religious knowledge; like religious knowledge, it depends upon the exercise of faith.

Can the faith of the scientist be correlated with the faith of the Christian believer? If the universe is God’s creation, and if Jesus Christ is “upholding the universe by his word of power” (Hebrews 1:3), then the faith of the Christian and the faith of the scientist must become one. We will explore that thought in future entries.

“Martin Luther King Day” in Evangelical Perspective

As a student at Boston University in the 1960s, I was part of a group that was bused down to Selma, Alabama, just before Martin Luther King’s Selma-to-Montgomery march. The atmosphere in Selma was like that of an evangelical revival; we sang gospel songs and listened to fiery sermons — one being by A. D. Williams King, MLK’s brother. We marched around Selma in a civil rights demonstration, jeered by the bystanders and soaked by a downpour. Later, as pastor of a small Methodist church, I heard Dr. King speak on Boston Common, and I and a few of my parishioners picketed the Massachusetts State House singing “We Shall Overcome.” As a Boston University graduate student I examined King’s typed doctoral dissertation in the School of Theology library, comparing the idea of God in the thought of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman, and may have quoted from it in a term paper.

Those were in my “liberal” days. Later, when I became an evangelical Christian, my perspective changed. The civil rights movement had lost its original Christian impetus — if that was, really, anything more than window dressing. I understood that the drive for “equality” was based on the New Testament principle of oneness in Christ (e.g., Galatians 3:28), but that divorced from its Christian orientation it becomes distorted and just one more example of totalitarian “political correctness.”

Combined with the contemporaneous “sexual revolution,” the civil rights movement has done much to destroy African-American family structure. It may have restricted economic and educational opportunities for black people by eliminating their distinctive institutions in the effort to integrate them into the larger social fabric. Shaping congressional districts to ensure the election of minorities has actually reduced the number of African-Americans in Congress, by making them non-competitive in the “white” districts that remain (non-competitive not because of their race, but because of their political ideology). As one African-American noted in a TV discussion I heard several decades ago, “we’ve been civil-rightsed to death.”

I do not blame Martin Luther King for what happened to the movement after his passing. My point is that he has become an inappropriate symbol for what passes for “civil rights” today, which includes homosexual “marriage” and all the rest. It is well for the evangelical church to steer clear of MLK Day. It grieves me that evangelical churches have adopted the secular and popular calendar as their “liturgical year” — Mothers Day, Valentines Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Armed Forces Day, even Pastor Appreciation Day. The liturgical churches, which follow the traditional church year, have been in a measure protected from this incursion.

“Majoring in the Minors” in the Church

As a student at Illinois Wesleyan University in the late 1950s I was required to select a major field. I was headed for the ministry in The Methodist Church, but at that time Methodist seminaries didn’t recommend a college major in religion for pre-theological students. (I think seminary faculty were afraid that students entering with a college religion major would have to be re-educated!). As a result, I needed to choose a different major.

Because of my interest in music I chose to major in that field. Illinois Wesleyan had a prestigious School of Music, but I was in the College of Liberal Arts. Therefore, I became the only liberal arts music major in the university, and took forty hours in that field. Although I had enough religion credits to count for a major, and was going on for more work in that field rather than music, I spent my college years “majoring in the minors.” (I couldn’t even minor in religion, because IWU’s course catalog didn’t provide for a “minor” designation at that time.)

I’ve never regretted my “majoring in the minors,” because the knowledge and enjoyment of music has always been an important part of my adult life and has certainly contributed to the ministry. However, when the process of “majoring in the minors” is applied to areas of life outside of academia the results can be ludicrous.

A man who pursues a hobby, to the neglect of his family relationships or gainful employment, is pursuing the wrong major. A parent who pushes a child to develop talent in sports or some other field, to the neglect of the child’s character development, is doing the same thing. A politician who focuses on superficial solutions to public issues, such as government-run health care, is misplacing his emphasis. In this instance the focus ought to be on the reduction of medical costs through the elimination of layers of bureaucracy, the reform of litigation, and education in life-style changes that promote better health and reduce reliance on harmful and expensive drugs. You can easily multiply the examples where “majoring in the minors” has unintended consequences that only add to life’s problems.

The church in North America today is similarly addicted to misplaced emphases. Church leadership is always tempted to stress denominational distinctives; theologians tend to focus on the salient aspects of their particular point of view. Catholic, Reformed, Dispensational, or Pentecostal doctrine comes to the forefront in place of what C. S. Lewis wanted to call “mere Christianity.” These things become the “majors,” while the heart of New Testament faith — the living presence of Jesus Christ with His people — becomes the “minor,” mentioned only in passing.

Lay people sometimes fare no better. They might choose a church to attend based on such things as worship style. Do we sing “contemporary” choruses, old-time “gospel songs,” or stately organ-accompanied hymns or chants? Does the preacher use a manuscript, or speak in extemporaneous fashion? Do officiants wear casual clothes, encouraging other worshipers to do the same, or do they dress more formally or even wear vestments? Do we lift our hands or pray in other tongues during worship, or do we participate more placidly? Compared with the presence of the risen Jesus Christ, by the Spirit, these differences are only differences in style. Elevating them to prominence is truly “majoring in the minors.”

If Jesus Christ is who the Scriptures say He is, Christians need to become trans-denominational. If, as Hebrews (1:3) states, Jesus is “upholding the universe by his word of power” (1:3), and if, as John (1:3) says, “all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” — then the living Christ is present wherever His people gather to honor and celebrate Him. We can be aware of His appearance, or parousia, in any worship setting regardless of style.

The presence of God, revealed in His Son, can break through into our lives because Jesus is alive — and, as Paul reminds us (Acts 17:28) quoting a Greek poet, “In him we live and move and have our being.” In a culture increasingly hostile to Christian faith, it is time for Christians of all traditions to quit “majoring in the minors,” and make it evident in all aspects of living, including formal worship, that Christianity is Jesus.