A Charge to Maintain Liberal Arts

by Diane Vincent
The Scriptorium Daily

 

A few weeks ago Biola had the delight of installing our new Provost and Senior Vice President, Dr. Deborah Taylor. Part of the installation involved a series of charges from faculty who had been invited to articulate some of the key challenges ahead of Dr. Taylor in her new role, from Biblical and missional fidelity to commitments to diversity and global impact.

 

I was tasked with delivering the charge to maintain the commitment to the liberal arts. It was a humbling task to try to speak for and to so many, let alone to in 4 minutes or less distinguish what makes the study of the liberal arts worth striving for at a Christian university. But one of the great things about Torrey is that we are constantly planting the seeds and then tasting the fruit of what the liberal arts has to offer as a handmaiden to theology and worship. That, and I had just finished reading Dante’s Paradise and talking for hours with students about what kind of happiness were we made for exactly. That and I just observed Dr. Todd Thompson lead a class on Augustine’s On Christian Teaching. That, plus the thoughts of John Henry Newman, the Westminster Catechism, Josef Pieper, John Calvin, Thomas Traherne, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Edmund Burke, Augustine’s City of God, the Gospels, Job, Genesis, Paul’s epistles, and many others from the books we read. So given all that, here’s what I came up with after many years of listening and taking part in the great conversation:

 

———

 

“Dr. Taylor,

 

“We are a place that trains nurses and scholars, equips teachers and engineers, prepares members of symphony orchestras and film crews. We display a dazzling diversity of what it can mean to serve the common good in the name of Jesus Christ. And God is calling our students to be missionaries, to write novels, to start businesses, to raise families, to lead churches, to run cities; He is calling our faculty to write books and articles and symphonies, serve on hospital boards, run master classes, make art. But none of us were made for work. Our truest vocation lies not in the limited and changeable work that we do, but in the call to behold our God. God is calling us not to work for Him forever, but to enjoy Him forever.

 

“For this vocation, we all, students and faculty alike, need the liberal arts in this learning community. We need the space, the unhurried time, the freedom to cultivate our capacities to understand the truth for the sake of delight, unfettered by any other uses we might put the truth to. For our ability to see and to enjoy persist beyond any immediate practical use we can come up with!

 

“The exact disciplines listed under the liberal arts have changed over time; for starters, I suppose, we could look back to the 7 liberal arts rooted in the ancient tradition: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. All exercise the mind in order to nurture the two kinds of enjoyment proper to human beings: the joys of language and the joys of thought. For intrinsically enjoyable are the apt phrase, the elegant sentence, a well-refined argument, a complex pattern discerned and communicated, whether through poetry, music, or a differential equation. These things are in themselves delightful, and the liberal arts grow our ability to see them for what they are, and to simply enjoy them.

 

“Moreover, pursuing together the joys of language and the joys of thought nurtures our communion with each other and with God; we learn to speak and to hear more truly and fully; we learn to perceive, to understand, and to judge more wisely…about anything! The liberal arts encourages us to consider wisdom not as fragmented facts or disconnected specializations, but as a unified whole, a pattern of relations and significance whose unity comes from being the work of a perfect Creator.

 

“Dr. Taylor, keep urging us all to return again and again to what is elementary, what is foundational. To consider as carefully as we can first principles, to refine our capacities for the most abstract thinking and clearest expressions of thought, and to search out the ground we humans hold in common with each other, the dead, and the yet unborn, and glory of glories, even with Christ himself, who showed us what being human really means.

 

“But let us not in that continual return to elementary things, begin to neglect or fragment into disconnected pieces what God has made unified and full of significance. Keep reminding us that all created things, seen rightly and fully for what they are, can lead us back to their Creator. In their goodness, and order, and beauty, we are led to contemplate Him who is perfectly good, all-wise, and sublimely beautiful. Do not let us grow weary of discerning meaning in all the world and in seeking the unity of truth, for, as Augustine says “Wisdom is not many things but one thing in which there are immense and infinite treasuries of intelligible things”.

 

“And finally, Dr. Taylor, keep preserving for us the kind of freedom we need for speaking clearly and thinking deeply, those activities through which we pursue our truest vocation—the one thing that human beings do entirely for its own sake!—to behold and thereby to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind.”

Eliminating Competing Concepts of God

by Lenny Esposito
Come Reason Ministries

Yesterday, I wrote about how Christians must understand the essential beliefs defining Christianity. Having a strong knowledge of what delineates a Christian versus an impostor is crucial. I pointed to the Nicene Creed as a good summary of the essential beliefs Christians must hold to guard against various heresies proffered by groups who claim to be Christians, such as The Way International, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Mormons.1

Today, I'd like to begin unpacking just what some of those beliefs entail. The first sentence of the Creed reads:

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.2

While the sentence is short, it packs within it an amazing amount of theology. It teaches that God must be singular, God must be creator, and God must be eternal and separate from his creation. These attributes of God are not only logically coherent, but they do a lot of work at eliminating may other faith systems.

God is One

The first foundational belief Christians hold is there is one God and only one God. I've explored this concept here, explaining that “for God to be Almighty God, He has to be a single being.”3 The fact that God cannot have an equal rules out Eastern faiths such as certain forms of Hinduism, Mithraism, and more modern faiths like Mormonism.

Not only must God be a single being, he is recognized as the creator of everything else. God cannot be God is he is merely a part of something bigger because just like polytheism above, it robs him of his supremacy. God can never be a part of a larger whole. Given this, we know God is therefore self-existent. He needs nothing or no one else.

God is Creator

Only God has this attribute. All other things are contingent. They rely on someone or something to create them or to empower them. The universe is running out of time and energy, therefore it must have been wound up a particular point in the past. The universe cannot exist for eternity because its energy would have been depleted an eternity ago. Further, the universe is inside time itself, and the existence of time needs explaining as much as the existence of matter.

God is Eternal

We describe the created universe as matter, energy, space, and time. We've said that those things that have a beginning, like our universe, need a creator to explain their existence. However, for God to be God, he cannot rely upon any kind of creator. Therefore, God must have never begun to exist. God is by definition uncreated and eternal. He has no beginning and no end.

God is Transcendent

Given each of the points above, we can know that God is transcendent. In other words, God is separate from his creation. He did not need to create the universe and could have existed just fine for eternity without creating it. The doctrine of God's transcendence is an important one and rules out most other Eastern faiths. Beliefs that hold to a concept that where God is either inside his creation (panentheistic faiths such as Buddhism, other forms of Hinduism, animistic faiths like those African tribes or Native Americans held) or faiths that believe all is God (pantheistic faiths such as Taoism and Vedanta Hinduism) fail here.

In understanding what God must be, one can effectively eliminate all belief systems that are not monotheistic as being logically inconsistent. The Nicene Creed gets the concept of God right in its very first sentence and screens out not only those belief systems mentioned above but other faiths like Mormonism with its unending generations of exalted beings or Christian Science which is ultimately pantheistic.4 If God is to be God, he must be almighty, maker of heaven and earth, eternal, and transcendent. Spaghetti monsters or flying teapots won't cut it. Anything less is not God.

References

1. Esposito, Lenny. "How to Spot Impostor Christianity." Come Reason's Apologetics Notes. Come Reason Ministries, 21 July 2015. Web. 22 July 2015. http://apologetics-notes.comereason.org/2015/07/how-to-spot-impostor-christianity.html.
2. "Nicene Creed." Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Christian Classics Ethereal Library, n.d. Web. 22 July 2015. https://www.ccel.org/creeds/nicene.creed.html.
3. Esposito, Lenny. " A Christian Must Believe There is One God." Come Reason's Apologetics Notes. Come Reason Ministries, 15 May 2014. Web. 22 July 2015. http://apologetics-notes.comereason.org/2014/05/a-christian-must-believe-there-is-one.html
4. Mary Baker Eddy taught "There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all. Spirit is immortal Truth; matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God, and man is his image and likeness. Therefore man is not material; he is spiritual," (Eddy, Mary Baker. Miscellaneous Writings. 1883-1896. Boston: Trustees under with Will of Mary Baker, G. Eddy, 1924. Print. 21.)

A Few Brief Thoughts on the Hatmaker Hermeneutic

by Kevin DeYoung
The Gospel Coalition

In the past week we’ve seen a prominent Christian philosopher and a prominent Christian author state publicly that they no longer hold to the historic understanding of biblical sexuality. A number of excellent responses have already been written—most significantly, Wesley Hill challenging Nicholas Wolterstorff’s shallow exegesis and lack of charity, and Rosaria Butterfield reminding Jen Hatmaker that we must love our neighbors enough to speak the truth.

I’ve written before about gay marriage and about why the church can’t simply agree to disagree on this issue. And if you want more in depth discussion, I wrote a book entitled What Does the Bible Really Teach about Homosexuality?. No doubt, you can find even better stuff out there from other men and women defending the historic understanding of biblical marriage and sexuality. I won’t repeat those arguments here.

But I do want to offer a few quick thoughts about the Facebook post from Brandon Hatmaker (Jen’s husband). While I commend the Hatmakers for what seems to be a serious process of reading, reflection, and prayer, I find the logic of their position unconvincing. Most of Brandon’s post is about the work they did to come to their new position. The defense of the position itself comes in these two paragraphs:

Every verse in the bible that is used to condemn a “homosexual” act is written in the context of rape, prostitution, idolatry, pederasty, military dominance, an affair, or adultery. It was always a destructive act. It was always a sin committed against a person. And each type of sexual interaction listed was an abuse of God’s gift of sex and completely against His dream for marriage to be a lifelong commitment of two individuals increasingly and completely giving themselves to one another as Christ did for the church.

But not one of these scriptures was written in the context of marriage or civil union (which simply did not exist at this time). Each act mentioned in the bible was sin, no doubt. In context, we believe the same today. Just like heterosexual sex outside of marriage is sin for obvious reasons, whether consensual or not, we still believe homosexual sex outside of marriage is a sin.

Three quick thoughts:

1. The “not that kind of homosexuality” argument has been refuted by a number of conservative exegetes and by a host of LGBT-affirming scholars. If Paul only meant to talk about pederasty, why didn’t he use the Greek word for pederasty? If he wanted to spare committed homosexual partnerships from his condemnation in Romans 1, why did he echo the language of creation and talk broadly about “exchanging” natural functions for those that are unnatural? If the New Testament only had “bad” homosexuality in mind, why do sources from the Greco-Roman world demonstrate that every kind of homosexual relationship was known in the first century, from lesbianism, to orgiastic behavior, to gender-bending “marriage,” to lifelong same-sex companionship (see Thomas Hubbard, Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents)? Non-Christian scholars know better than to try to “rescue” the New Testament from itself. Which is why Louis Crompton, a gay man and pioneer in queer studies, could write: “Nowhere does Paul or any other Jewish writer of this period imply the least acceptance of same-sex relations under any circumstances. The idea that homosexuals might be redeemed by mutual devotion would have been wholly foreign to Paul or any Jew or early Christian” (Homosexuality and Civilization, 14).

2. I fail to see how the logic for monogamy and against fornication is obvious according to Hatmaker’s hermeneutic. I appreciate that they don’t want to completely jettison orthodox Christian teaching when it comes to sex and marriage. But the flimsiness of the hermeneutic cannot support the weight of the tradition. Once you’ve concluded that the creation of Adam and Eve has nothing to do with a procreative telos (Mal. 2:15), or the fittedness of male with female (Gen. 2:18), or the joining of two complementary sexes into one organic union (Gen. 2:23-24), what’s left to insist that marriage must be limited to two persons, or that the two persons must be faithful to each other? Sure, both partners may agree that they want fidelity, but there is no longer anything inherent to the ontology and the telos of marriage to insist that sexual fidelity is a must. Likewise, why is it obvious that sex outside of marriage is wrong? Perhaps those verses were only dealing with oppressive situations too. Most foundationally, once stripped of the biological orientation toward children, by what internal logic can we say that consensual sex between two adults is wrong? And on that score, by what measure can we condemn a biological brother and sister getting married if they truly love each other (and use contraceptives, just to take the possibility of genetic abnormalities out of the equation)? When marriage is redefined to include persons of the same sex, we may think we are expanding the institution to make it more inclusive, but in fact we are diminishing it to the point where it is something other than marriage.

3. The appeal to Christ and the church does not support Hatmaker’s argument; it emphatically undermines it. Paul’s reference to the mystery of Christ and the church only works if there is differentiation in the marital union. The man loves and leads and sacrifices as Christ; the woman submits and respects as the church. However that plays out in practice, the irreducible minimum is that the two are not interchangeable. Hatmaker can say that in marriage “two individuals increasingly and completely giving themselves to one another as Christ did for the church,” but that was positively not Paul’s argument. He did not foresee two individuals acting as Christ, but one (the husband) cherishing like Christ and the other (the wife) following like the church. We cannot insert two men (or two women) into the logic of Ephesians 5 and get the same mystery, let alone a full-orbed picture of the gospel.

The biblical teaching about marriage is not an oh-by-the-way piece of ethical advice that can be easily swapped out for other arrangements. I know these are difficult, painful issues. But we have to prayerfully and rigorously think these things through. We are bound to hear more stories in the years to come about other Christian leaders and other Christian institutions celebrated for their new-found enlightenment. What we won’t hear about–though there will be plenty of examples—are the stories of all those who will continue to hold to historic orthodoxy, and do so with winsomeness and without wavering. Neither will we hear the stories of those whose Christianity ends up looking very different on the other side of their theological change of heart. If we tug at the Bible’s teaching on sex, family, and marriage–the basics of which have been affirmed for two millennia and are still affirmed by almost all Christians outside the West—we will lose more than logical and hermeneutical consistency. We lose important elements of the gospel itself.

A Few Thoughts on the Hatmaker Position on LGBTQ

by Sean McDowell
SeanMcDowell.org

For a variety of reasons, I rarely respond publicly to other Christians. But in this case, I feel compelled to do so.

Last week, in an effort to be compassionate and loving, popular Christian author Jen Hatmaker came out in support of LGBT relationships, referring to them as “holy.” While other Christian influencers have come out in favor of affirming theology, this caught my attention because my wife has personally benefitted greatly from her books. In fact, she has even read out loud to me some particularly funny and insightful portions from one of Jen’s book.

Rosaria Butterfield wrote a poignant reply to Jen Hatmaker, which is worth reading, regardless of where you stand on the issue. And so have Jake Meador and Kevin DeYoung. The issue seemed closed to me, until a close friend sent me a link to a Facebook post by Jen’s husband Brandon Hatmaker, clarifying their position on LGBTQ. This particular post was the reason I felt compelled to weigh in.

Essentially, Brandon describes how he and Jen have been on a yearlong journey trying to reconcile the pain they see in the lives of LGBTQ people with the “historic Christian position” on homosexuality. After much study and prayer, they mutually concluded that God blesses homosexual relationships in the context of marriage.

Now, for the record, I do not question their motivations. In fact, I have no reason to doubt that they’re trying to do what they believe is right for a community that has often felt alienated by the broader culture and, sadly, the church. My father taught me to always assume the best in others, and I certainly extend that courtesy to them, as I hope they will to me (if they happen to read this).

Much could be said about their announcement. I would prefer to sit down and talk with them in person. Maybe we will get that chance someday. The invitation is open from my end. But since they made their views known publicly, I will respond in kind. A few points stand out to me as worthy of commendation.

For starters, they describe how they studied both Scripture and various books on all sides of the issue at length. They claim that affirming Christians have not abandoned the Bible, and they point to the fact that there are many thoughtful theologians and leaders on both sides of the issue.

I am glad they are willing to entertain both sides of this issue. Many are not. But based on Scripture, I remain unconvinced. I have read all the books they cite and dozens more. And while the revisionist position is possible, it certainly has not carried the burden of proof and been shown to be the most reasonable.

Until the middle of the 20^th century, the church has been essentially unanimous on its views that God created sex to be experienced between one man and one woman in a lifelong married relationship. Church leaders debated the role of women in the church, pacifism versus just war, the nature of the end times, and many other issues. But until recent times, when the sexual revolution began to shape culture and seep into the church, there has been no significant debate about God’s design for sex and marriage. Of course, this doesn’t mean the traditional view is right. But it should take some weighty exegetical arguments—which have yet to be demonstrated—to overturn the 2,000-year tradition of the church. Does he really understand better than Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin?

Most of Brandon’s Facebook post involves describing their journey towards embracing revisionist theology and also appealing to Christians not to discount their commitment to Scripture. Brandon briefly sums up his theological conclusions with these words:

Every verse in the Bible that is used to condemn a “homosexual” act is written in the context of rape, prostitution, idolatry, pederasty, military dominance, an affair, or adultery. It was always a destructive act. It was always a sin committed against a person. And each type of sexual interaction listed was an abuse of God’s gift of sex and completely against His dream for marriage to be a lifelong commitment of two individuals increasingly and completely giving themselves to one another as Christ did for the church.

But not one of these scriptures was written in the context of marriage or civil union (which simply did not exist at this time). Each act mentioned in the Bible was sin, no doubt. In context, we believe the same today. Just like heterosexual sex outside of marriage is sin for obvious reasons, whether consensual or not, we still believe homosexual sex outside of marriage is a sin.

I respectfully disagree because while biblical prohibitions may be written in the context of the sins he mentions, the moral wrongness is based upon its violation of God’s creation imperative (Gen 1, 2). The sins he mentions are destructive, but that’s not why they’re wrong. Rather, they are destructive because they are wrong. And they are wrong because God intended sex to be experienced between one man and woman in a lifelong marriage relationship (Gen 2:24). This is the consistent teaching behind the entirety of Scriptural teaching on sex. God’s creation narrative provides the basis for human sexuality and consistently lies behind biblical guidelines (e.g., Leviticus 18:22; Romans 1:26-27).

The Hatmakers also reason that when it comes to marriage, faithfulness trumps gender. Hence, whether heterosexual or homosexual, sex is designed for monogamous “marriage” of two individuals who sacrifice for one another.

But Jesus seemed to hold a different view. In fact, Jesus believed that gender distinctly matters for marriage. He didn’t see marriage as two individuals sacrificially committed to each other, but as a male and female sacrificially committed to each other which, as a union, represents God's love and faithfulness for the church. In Matthew 19, Jesus was asked about whether divorce should be permitted for “any reason.” He says:

He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

To answer the question about the permissibility of divorce, Jesus cited both Genesis 1:27 and 2:24. Yet he only needed to cite Genesis 2:24. Why include 1:27? It’s as if Jesus was going out of his way to affirm the creation narrative that sex is reserved for one man and one woman within marriage. Jesus affirmed the perpetual applicability of Genesis 1-2 and that marriage is a gendered institution. Paul also saw marriage as a gendered institution rooted in God’s original creation (e.g., Ephesians 5:31).

Obviously much more could be said. This is a sensitive issue and we need to tread with love and care. And yet we also need to remember that love rejoices with the truth (1 Cor 13:6). I appreciate that Brandon speaks about his commitment to Scripture. My concern is that he is importing an external narrative into the Bible rather than letting it speak for itself.

Update on a Spurious Bonhoeffer Quote: Not to Speak is to Speak, Not to Act is to Act

by Warren Throckmorton

In late August, I published an examination of a popular quote commonly but incorrectly attributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

The quote cannot be found in Bonhoeffer’s writings and no other primary source has been found. The first appearance of the entire quote I can find is in a 1998 American Interfaith Institute newsletter. The quote has been popularized by Eric Metaxas who still attributes the quote to Bonhoeffer even though he has refused to provide a primary source for it.

Today, I want to present a source for part of the quote which is earlier than 1998. In Robert K. Hudnut’s 1971 book, A Sensitive Man and the Christ, he makes a case that even a sensitive man must act when the need arises.



There are two aspects of this passage which may link it to the eventual misattribution to Bonhoeffer. One is Hudnut’s challenge for the church not to be silent in the face of social evils. The second is the reference to Niemoller and resistance to the Nazis. Through the frailty of memory and lack of citation, someone could have reworked this into a quote about the church not being silent and attributed it to Niemoller’s colleague, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

For “Not to act is to act” by itself, one can go back to 1945 when Francis McPeek said church inaction was a form of political action in an essay titled, “Not to Act is to Act.”

For “God will not hold us guiltless,” one can find many references to that sentence by going to Google books and entering the sentence in quotes. The links returned go back to 1681.

The Hudnut quote was pointed out to me by a Twitter user. I would like to thank him but I can’t find the tweet. If my helper is reading, please identify yourself in the comments.

Down and Out at Del Mar

by Mark Bauerlein
First Things

The most dismaying thing I have read in this year of crummy happenings was a one-page vignette in Hillbilly Elegy, J. D. Vance’s tale of growing up an Appalachian expatriate in southern Ohio. Most of this super-successful book covers family life—quarrels, drugs and drink, obscenity, and assaults, sprinkled with genuine acts of love. But the incident that struck me transpires in the workplace, not at home. No national events are involved, no big money at stake, no death or disaster, just a small conflict of personalities.

Vance works in a tile warehouse, saving up for law school in the fall. For all of her filthy language and endless grudges, Vance’s grandmother has planted in him a solid work ethic. He may be surrounded by screw-ups, but he shows up on time and does his job. The pay is decent, $13 an hour, and Vance pulls as many overtime shifts as he can.

 

He gets along with others, too, even nineteen-year-old Bob, who started before Vance but has a different attitude. Vance sees the job as a way out of the dysfunction of his past, and he finds no reason why Bob shouldn’t as well. Bob has a pregnant girlfriend and he needs money and health care. The small company provides them; it even hires her to answer phones. Nothing stands in the way of a stable working-class existence for the couple.

 

But they can’t keep it together. The girlfriend misses every third day and Bob one day a week. He arrives late and takes long breaks. Vance and a coworker make a game of it, setting a timer when Bob leaves his post for the bathroom and shouting updates to the crew: “Thirty-five ­minutes! . . . Forty-five minutes! . . . One hour!”

 

The boss is forbearing and urges Bob and his girlfriend to shape up or else he’ll have to let them go. Vance watches in bemusement, knowing the outcome. The boss fires the girlfriend after a few months and Bob soon after. Bob’s response: “How could you do this to me? Don’t you know I’ve got a pregnant girlfriend?”

 

Bob’s story sets a theme for Hillbilly Elegy. Why can’t these people straighten up? The usual answers don’t apply. Bob doesn’t need more access to healthcare, better benefits, or more education. He can do the job just fine if he puts in the effort. He doesn’t lack a “living wage”; his pay covers expenses. A nice apartment nearby runs only $500 a month, and a regular workload after a year on the job yields $32,000 plus benefits.

 

Bob may end up on welfare, but public assistance won’t help. His problem is internal. Only a change in character will fix him. The state doesn’t distinguish deserving poor from undeserving poor, and it can’t reach into people’s hearts and transform them. Bob needs moral reform, which the state cannot provide. In many discussions of human behavior and social policy with well-meaning friends who care about making society more just, I’ve realized that only people with direct experience of dysfunction in the underclass accept this truth.

 

Mexican Ray was one of a bunch of guys around the Del Mar Racetrack in 1980 and ’81. For two months each summer, I did nine hours a day, six days a week in this world all its own. I sold the Herald-­Examiner racing edition in the plaza outside the grandstand, my brother in the clubhouse. Horse racing has its glamor among owners and breeders and high-end gamblers who never showed whether they were winning or losing. Those were my brother’s customers. I was on the seamy side with cleaning crews, workers in the stables, and “stoopers,” vagrants who collected hundreds of tickets off the ground in hopes that someone had mistakenly tossed a winner.

 

I made a dime for every paper I sold, and arrived each morning with an empty wallet so that I could run through the betting windows only the money I’d made that day. Cigar Eddy, a tall old man with a lump on his forehead, managed the Pasadena Star-News, with fifteen-year-old Alex and his brother working the stands for him. Hippie John was a wiry thirty-year-old with stringy hair who always kept a deck of cards handy. He’d draw you into a quick game of blackjack, but get jumpy and wild-eyed if you won three hands in a row. Cadillac hung in the shadows, dealing dope to teenage track workers.

 

I never knew where Mexican Ray got his money. He didn’t have a job at the track, but he showed up every day and hung around the newsboys with the ease of a down-and-out man of the world. He looked forty years old, with a genial smile and dark clothes that were threadbare but had the semblance of sharp tailoring. He had a wary air about him, but he could be relaxed and kind. One time, after Eddy got so mad at his workers that he fainted to the ground, Ray pulled him to a bench, put one arm around his shoulders, and fanned his face with a paper, repeating, “Take it easy now, keep quiet, Eddy.”

 

You could tell that none of the young guys hustling papers and whatever else they could sell would ever be anything but what they were then. I mingled with them knowing that I had college waiting once the season ended. Their next step was Hollywood Park and Santa Anita, tracks where the horse racing moved in its annual cycle through Southern California. You might think that if these stragglers only had more Earned Income Tax Credit and free transport to health clinics they could have risen out of instability and grubbing and sleeping on the beach now and then. But that would only show you didn’t really know guys like Ray and the rest.

 

One day, Ray hit an exacta for three or four hundred dollars. There were a few cheap motels nearby that charged $20 per night. Ray could have bargained with one of them and rented a room for the rest of the summer. A hot shower and clean sheets every night, TV and coffee in the morning.

 

Instead, Ray disappeared for three days. We wondered what happened to him, but not too much. People came and went all the time; no one at the track followed anybody very closely.

 

But when Ray returned one afternoon, we all noticed. He strolled with a big smile and clean-shaven chin. His black hair was cropped and oiled neatly off his forehead. He had a bright new shirt and shoes that looked right out of Guys and Dolls. He sidled to the bench next to Cigar Eddy and mumbled, “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.” Someone asked him where he’d been and he replied, “Tee-Zhay.”

He loved our reaction, but played coy. It took a while to gather that he’d taken his winnings to Tijuana and had a heckuva time. Now he was back, broke, ready to start up his regular life. But he was happy. Only after a few days did the glow wear off.

 

What do you with Mexican Ray? If he’d won more money, he just would have stayed in Tijuana longer, then resumed his pattern of hustling day to day. Inevitably, though, Ray would reach a crisis point. He had a kind of devilish innocence, but that wouldn’t save him from jail, illness, hunger, or worse. When I think back on those characters who made the grandstand at Del Mar such an education for a kid like me, I’d rather not know what happened to them.

 

We have to accept that there is no explanation for Bob and Ray, not one that we can plug into a government program. Nobody ever taught them a work ethic; parents were drunks; they’re depressed . . . maybe that’s true. But it doesn’t explain why Bob can’t be on time and Ray gets on that bus for T-J.

 

I asked my friend David, an attorney with underclass clients, to account for Bob. He replied, “The guy has no sense of an order higher than himself.” That sounded too conceptual, so I asked for specifics. “Bob has no idea that the company he works for has to have people do things or it can’t survive. To him, it’s just some force telling him what to do.” The company has to operate on a long-term plan, he said, but Bob can’t see it and he has no plan of his own.

 

That clicked as soon as he said it. Bob and Ray will remain who they are until they realize there is an order to existence, and that it is rational and good. A higher plan would prompt Bob to devise a “lower” plan of some kind. It would make Ray seek the stability of the motel across the street. Without it, company demands are ­unreasonable to Bob, and Ray sees the motel as a sad alternative to three wild days down south. Secular minds don’t make this connection between metaphysical order and daily habits. The lure of prosperity should be enough to ensure good behavior, and welfare programs should work. But they don’t, not for Bob and Ray and others in the underclass. That’s why secularists say, “They just need more education.” They suspect that some kind of moral reform is needed, but they don’t want it to be ­metaphysical.

 

In truth, for people at the margins, the bourgeois virtues of thrift, delayed gratification, cleanliness, and moderation must have a deeper rationale: An orderly life is called for by an orderly universe. Call this the social argument from design. Bob and Ray are mysteries of dysfunction. They mark the limits of material solutions to it. Their salvation must be equally mysterious and sublime.

Do I need a Job or Vocation?

By Greg Peters
Scriptorium Daily

Every year some untold numbers of students enter their senior year in colleges and universities across the nation. They’ve done it! They have successfully navigated the complexities of earning a bachelor’s degree in their chosen field of study. They have masteredthe art of reading, listening, note-taking, test-taking, and essay-writing and demonstrated some amount of competence to their professors. Diploma mills aside, they have earned an education, perhaps even a good one if they went to the right school. Proverbially the world is their oyster!

Yet the future is often uncertain and before long a general anxiety tends to set in among this population of university students. What will I do after I graduate, they ask? Should I go to graduate school? Should I get a job? Where should I live? Who should I live with? Moreover, these students have parents who are (at least) middle-aged and (likely) have been taught by a fair number of middle-aged professors. Recently a talk with a student brought up the reality that I have been a university professor long enough that she wondered why I wasn’t tired of it, perhaps especially since I too am middle-aged. She was concerned about the prospects of her own future and she expressed that she did not just want to have a job but invest her life in something more meaningful.

Now, many forms of employment can be meaningful to some people at some times but there are way too many people who appear to be only working for the weekend or working for their next vacation. They do not necessarily enjoy their jobs but they enjoy some of the side benefits: summers off for teachers, generous retirement contributions or good medical coverage, for example. Mostly they are unhappy with the day to day realities and rhythm of their life so they attempt to compensate by being materialistic (a “at least I make lots of money” mentality as they accumulate more and more stuff), by being negligent (“I’ll do my job but not too well because this place sucks”) or being discontent (jumping from one job to another, chasing an elusive dream perhaps). Let’s face it, it would stink to study accounting to find out that you hate being an accountant and it would be a miserable experience to find out that you studied to be a nurse but then realized you hated being at a hospital, clinic or doctor’s office day after day.

So what is it that might make someone happy over the long duration of a job? What may stave of the discontentment of yet another day at the office? Many folks who are happy in their jobs will tell you, “I do not have a job, I have a career.” Fair enough. Some people do find meaning in their jobs by realizing that this is a career, something that they have striven for and worked hard to achieve. But sometimes, perhaps often, even this sentiment will not redeem a rather harsh job situation. If you are a teacher and you hate the rhythm of your life due to the school year, realizing that your job is a career will likely bring no more happiness once August comes around again.

Theologically, however, there is something more: vocation. Now, “vocation” is not just another word for “career.” Rather, it has a divine connotation and weight to it. It has been said that the greatest contribution that the Protestant Reformation made to the Christian church was the re-affirmation of the Apostle Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith and that the second greatest contribution was a theology of vocation. And talking about vocation was something that the Protestant Reformers did with regularity and to great effect. For example, Martin Luther once preached that “Our foolishness consists in laying too much stress upon the show of works and when these do not glitter as something extraordinary we regard them as of no value; and poor fools that we are, we do not see that God has attached and bound this precious treasure, namely his Word, to such common works as filial obedience, external, domestic, or civil affairs, so as to include them in his order and command, which he wishes us to accept, the same as though he himself had appeared from heaven. What would you do if Christ himself with all the angels were visibly to descend, and command you in your home to sweep your house and wash the pans and kettles? How happy you would feel, and would not know how to act for joy, not for the work’s sake, but that you knew that thereby you were serving him, who is greater than heaven and earth.” (“Sermon for Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity,” preached on October 3, 1529). On another occasion he preached to Christian rulers, “The prince should think: Christ has served me and made everything to follow him; therefore, I should also serve my neighbor, protect him and everything that belongs to him. That is why God has given me this office, and I have it that I might serve him. That would be a good prince and ruler. When a prince sees his neighbor oppressed, he should think: That concerns me! I must protect and shield my neighbor… The same is true for shoemaker, tailor, scribe, or reader. If he is a Christian tailor, he will say: I make these clothes because God has bidden me do so, so that I can earn a living, so that I can help and serve my neighbor. When a Christian does not serve the other, God is not present; that is not Christian living” (“Sermon in the Castle Church at Weimar,” preached on October 25, 1522).

In the Scriptures there are two primary meanings of “calling” or vocation (vocare = to call): 1) the call to membership in the people of God (e.g., Is. 41:8-9); and 2) particular callings by God toa special work, office or position of responsibility within his covenant community. To illustrate, the word for “church” in the New Testament is ekklesia, which is derived from ek (from, out of) and klēsis (calling). Thus, the Greek word for church literally means “calling out of” or “called out ones.” This etymology demonstrates a general call to membership in the people of God. Yet, God calls some individuals out of the church (literally, out of the called out ones) to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:11-12). This illustrates God’s practice of calling out to a special work, office or position of responsibility. Some callings are to specialized roles in church and society and others are to particular duties within these spheres. Theologian Douglas Schuurman sums it up well when he writes that “the Bible has two basic meanings for vocation or calling. Each of these has two forms. The first is the one call all Christians have to become a Christian and live accordingly. Of this there is a general form, where the proclaimed word echoes the voice of creation calling all away from folly and into the wisdom that is Jesus Christ, and there is a specific form, where this call becomes existentially and personally felt. The second meaning is the diverse spheres of life in and through which Christians live out their faith in concrete ways. Of this there is a more general form, such as being a husband, wife, child, parent, citizen, preacher, etc., ‘in the Lord.’ And there is a specific form, where it refers to the actual duties each of us takes on in our concretely occupied places of responsibility ‘in the Lord’” (Vocation: Discerning Our Callings in Life, pp. 40-41).

Thus, for the Christian believer there is already the call to be a Christian. But there is also the call to be something else, to live into other callings that are just as divine as one’s call to be a Christian. And this is where one’s “job” fits into God’s economy. If X is my calling then I will hesitate (or, at least should hesitate) to see it only as a job to be regretted or a burden to carry until the weekend or my next vacation. Rather, it is God’s special calling on my life and therefore worthy of my best attitude and my best efforts. It is the task that God has given me to do. In the words of the Book of Common Prayer’s Post Communion prayer: “And now, Father, send us out into the world to do the work you have given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.” First and foremost we are sent out to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul and mind to love our neighbor as ourselves. But we are also sent out, I think, to do that work that God has called us to do by way of our other divine vocation; that is, to our particular callings by God to a special work, office or position. In other words, we are called by God to love and to live into both of, all of our vocations. Thus, today’s university students do not need jobs, they need vocations and may God call them and may they hear this calling.

Love Your Neighbor Enough to Speak Truth: A Response to Jen Hatmaker

By Rosaria Butterfield
The Gospel Coalition

If this were 1999—the year that I was converted and walked away from the woman and lesbian community I loved—instead of 2016, Jen Hatmaker’s words about the holiness of LGBT relationships would have flooded into my world like a balm of Gilead. How amazing it would have been to have someone as radiant, knowledgeable, humble, kind, and funny as Jen saying out loud what my heart was shouting: Yes, I can have Jesus and my girlfriend. Yes, I can flourish both in my tenured academic discipline (queer theory and English literature and culture) and in my church. My emotional vertigo could find normal once again.

Maybe I wouldn’t need to lose everything to have Jesus. Maybe the gospel wouldn’t ruin me while I waited, waited, waited for the Lord to build me back up after he convicted me of my sin, and I suffered the consequences. Maybe it would go differently for me than it did for Paul, Daniel, David, and Jeremiah. Maybe Jesus could save me without afflicting me. Maybe the Lord would give to me respectable crosses (Matt. 16:24). Manageable thorns (2 Cor. 12:7).

Today, I hear Jen’s words—words meant to encourage, not discourage, to build up, not tear down, to defend the marginalized, not broker unearned power—and a thin trickle of sweat creeps down my back. If I were still in the thick of the battle over the indwelling sin of lesbian desire, Jen’s words would have put a millstone around my neck.

Died to a Life I Loved

 
To be clear, I was not converted out of homosexuality. I was converted out of unbelief. I didn’t swap out a lifestyle. I died to a life I loved. Conversion to Christ made me face the question squarely: did my lesbianism reflect who I am (which is what I believed in 1999), or did my lesbianism distort who I am through the fall of Adam? I learned through conversion that when something feels right and good and real and necessary—but stands against God’s Word—this reveals the particular way Adam’s sin marks my life. Our sin natures deceive us. Sin’s deception isn’t just “out there”; it’s also deep in the caverns of our hearts.

How I feel does not tell me who I am. Only God can tell me who I am, because he made me and takes care of me. He tells me that we are all born as male and female image bearers with souls that will last forever and gendered bodies that will either suffer eternally in hell or be glorified in the New Jerusalem. Genesis 1:27 tells me that there are ethical consequences and boundaries to being born male and female. When I say this previous sentence on college campuses—even ones that claim to be Christian—the student protestors come out in the dozens. I’m told that declaring the ethical responsibilities of being born male and female is now hate speech.

Calling God’s sexual ethic hate speech does Satan’s bidding. This is Orwellian nonsense or worse. I only know who I really am when the Bible becomes my lens for self-reflection, and when the blood of Christ so powerfully pumps my heart whole that I can deny myself, take up the cross, and follow him.

There is no good will between the cross and the unconverted person. The cross is ruthless. To take up your cross means that you are going to die. As A. W. Tozer has said, to carry a cross means you are walking away, and you are never coming back. The cross symbolizes what it means to die to self. We die so that we can be born again in and through Jesus, by repenting of our sin (even the unchosen ones) and putting our faith in Jesus, the author and finisher of our salvation. The supernatural power that comes with being born again means that where I once had a single desire—one that says if it feels good, it must be who I really am—I now have twin desires that war within me: “For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do” (Gal. 5:17). And this war doesn’t end until Glory.

Victory over sin means we have Christ’s company in the battle, not that we are lobotomized. My choice sins know my name and address. And the same is true for you.

The Cross Never Makes an Ally with Sin

A few years ago, I was speaking at a large church. An older woman waited until the end of the evening and approached me. She told me that she was 75 years old, that she had been married to a woman for 50 years, and that she and her partner had children and grandchildren. Then she said something chilling. In a hushed voice, she whispered, “I have heard the gospel, and I understand that I may lose everything. Why didn’t anyone tell me this before? Why did people I love not tell me that I would one day have to choose like this?” That’s a good question. Why did not one person tell this dear image bearer that she could not have illicit love and gospel peace at the same time? Why didn’t anyone—throughout all of these decades—tell this woman that sin and Christ cannot abide together, for the cross never makes itself an ally with the sin it must crush, because Christ took our sin upon himself and paid the ransom for its dreadful cost?

We have all failed miserably at loving fellow image bearers who identify as part of the LGBT community—fellow image bearers who are deceived by sin and deceived by a hateful world that applies the category mistake of sexual orientation identity like a noose. And we all continue to fail miserably. On the biblical side, we often have failed to offer loving relationships and open doors to our homes and hearts, openness so unhindered that we are as strong in loving relationship as we are in the words we wield. We also have failed to discern the true nature of the Christian doctrine of sin. For when we advocate for laws and policies that bless the relationships that God calls sin, we are acting as though we think ourselves more merciful than God is.

May God have mercy on us all.

Rosaria Butterfield is a former tenured professor of English at Syracuse University and author of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (Crown & Covenant, 2012) and Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ (Crown & Covenant, 2015).