Jesus as the climax of history...

The more I walk through Scripture the more I see that Jesus is the center of everything that ever happened. I made this video several years ago, and we use it each year during our Christmas services. It is pretty basic, my video editing skills were even worse than they are now, but I never cease to be so moved by the message. I love the song, off of Andrew Peterson's Christmas Album which goes with the video - Deliver Us (Derek Webb is actually the one singing it).

Part of what makes Christmas so great is not just the supernatural aspects of it, but the humanity of a people long desperate for a Savior to come, long desperate for hope. Hope you like this :).

What craziness...

Okay, very soon I hope to be showing baby pictures and things like that. For all concerned, we are scheduled to get a picture of "pregnant Laura" next Monday, so hopefully she'll make it until then (we aren't due until the 25th). For a little while, this will be my last non baby post :).

I have been absorbed for some time in my last language for a while (Thank God!!). Biblical Greek has its quirks, but I am finding Biblical Hebrew is just as crazy.

Hebrew was originally, and still written today in Israel with no vowels. NO VOWELS! How crazy is that? Luckily for me, the Masoretes in about the 6th century wrote some vowels to help folks learn Hebrew, they are written above, underneath, or to the left of the consonants (Hebrew is read from right to left).

Once again I am humbled at the thought that God has maintained his word through means that seem so immensely complicated to me. It's rare that I look down at the Old Testament and think of it as a string of Semitic letters that originally had no vowels, and got taken through all kinds of transmission and translation before it made it to me. It would have been so easy for someone to give up at some point and not do the hard work to make Scripture accessible to people, but thankfully they didn't.

Through my own failings in language I see the dedication that it took to get God's message of love to me. In all my frustration with the tediousness of it, I hope to be happy about the fact that people came before us and did the work for us, and people today are still sifting through countless documents comparing and justifying what is there for our sake.

More thoughts on the Shack...

I think from what I have seen the overwhelming praise for the book has been the author's ability to write on dealing with hurt. I was pretty captivated for the first few chapters of the book when the story of his daughter is taking place. I've read an interview transcript from him, and Young has been through some unbelievable pain.

I could honestly say that I didn't have a problem with about 80% of the book. I wouldn't label myself with some sort of conservative label that would say that I would be out to get anyone with new ideas, or something like that. I actually read the book expecting to really be taught some great stuff, I hadn't heard anything bad about it from anyone, only praise.

I had problems with several things. I don't necessarily think that the author is trying to be deceptive, but at the very least I think that his portrait of God falls terribly short of what the Bible points to. To name a few:

1. The conversations that Mack has with Papa, specifically the headphone conversation in the kitchen over "West Coast Juice" scream the idea that God is somehow pleased in the overall efforts and emotions of people despite anything else. I can't find support for that. Everything that I see in the nature of God in the Bible is a complete opposite screaming of "the only thing I care about, and the only chance you have is to know me." I never see God delighting in the wrongdoings of people saying "they're just letting off some steam, and with good reason too."

2. Young espouses theology, even though he might not claim to do so, and much of it is wrong. His modalist portrait of all three persons of the Trinity having scars from the crucifixion is not Biblical. Yes, the mystery of the Trinity is not something that is easily explainable, but the Bible along with any creed of the church you want to look at shows clearly that while being one substance, God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not one person.

During a conversation with "Jesus" Mack is told by Jesus a series of things that reaches towards his humanity, and Young doesn't portray an emptying of glory and divine nature only, but "Jesus" talks about himself as only being used of the Father and having no power of his own. I don't think that is consistent with the Bible either. If Jesus was fully God and fully man, if a woman who grabs his cloak leaves him saying "I felt power go out of me", if he forgives sins face to face without any sort of asking permission of the Father, but by his own authority, how can he only be a human vessel?

During one of Mack's conversations with Papa, on page 120, Papa says "I don't need to punish people for sin. Sin is its own punishment...it's not my purpose to punish it, it's my joy to cure it." That is complete heresy, there's no excuse for that. It's not mistakable for something else, but that statement is so dangerous and anti-Scriptural it's not even funny. No doubt sin has consequences which are punishing, but you can not read anything in the Bible, anything, and support that, and to teach that sort of statement is to cheapen the gospel.

3. I can't help but see Young's portrait of God as well as just overwhelmingly demeaning, even though I know it is in an attempt to help his readers to understand the compassion of God and the personality of God. There are certain segments of the book that I think Young comes close to presenting a good picture, but he tries so hard to make God into what he thinks he must be like, that he leaves the true God somewhere far back on the road. We live in a culture that constantly tries to help people know God more simply, or create a sense of "Wow, I never thought that about God before!", that we don't try to be consistent with what the Scripture teaches, because it is far more rewarding to have people say nice things about us. We try not to, but Bruce Almighty shapes what we think about God, the Sistine Chapel shapes what we think about God, our Sunday School felt boards, shape what we think about God. I'm convinced anew after reading this book that we can't keep trying to draw God out based on what our own understanding of what he must be like because of our own experiences and thoughts on ethics, morality, and spirituality. I'm reminded of the Israelites at the foot of the mountain begging Aaron to create an image of gold for them because worshiping an invisible God wasn't working for them anymore.

This book is far too problematic for me to support, and I have to say that I think it is dangerous.

I've read Pilgrim's Progress several times. Eugene Peterson is crazy and I hope desperately mistaken to say that this book is the Pilgrim's Progress of our generation. If that is true, we are in trouble. Virtually everything in Pilgrim's Progress points me to an understanding of what Scripture teaches, not the author's own experience. Those two works are not even in the same universe with each other, and neither are Bunyan and Young.

The Shack: A Review

The Shack: William Young

In 2008 I was really excited to get to read a book that was fiction again. I had been forced to walk through loads of textbooks for Seminary, and I was really looking forward to a book that was recommended to me. The book that seemed to be all the buzz with 20-somethings was this one, William Young's The Shack.

After reading it, I could see why so many of my friends liked it. This book is an outside the box sort of approach at God, reminded me a little of a C.S. Lewis type attempt. Overall, I think we all love books that make us think things like "Wow, I never really looked at it that way before." Young is a great storyteller, the book was really captivating in a lot of places.

Overall though, I am going to have to give a mostly thumbs down to this book, I just wanted to give you some reasons personally.  Here are my thoughts:

The Positives:

1. Young is a great storyteller, and the way he speaks about depression, sadness, and emotion in this book are, for the most part, really well done. As he talks about personal loss, he does a great job of bringing you in, and touching on the kind of grief that accompanies really difficult circumstances.

2. Some of the messages on redemption and deeper faith have a lot of worth. While this book has its problems, it does touch on a deeper spiritual walk that is personal and real, as opposed to religious and distant. That is a really positive message to take away, I just wish that Young could have achieved that same goal while not portraying God as carelessly as he does.

The Problem Areas:

Voltaire once said that "God created mankind in His image, and mankind has been trying to return the favor ever since." In my opinion, that really sums up the root of the problems with this book.

1. Young seems to bring in the Trinity in a way that he thinks will be the most different to popular thinking. No doubt God is not white, No doubt God is not man in the same way that I am, no doubt when we see God someday we will find that he is different than we thought. Having said that though, we have so much given in the Bible about the nature of God. Young doing doesn't just miss the mark of what any preconception about God I would have is, he also misses any mark that I see Scripture setting for the nature of God. This is the same kind of "Bruce Almighty" mindset that "the true nature of God must be something that makes for snappy quotes, and new ways of thinking contrary to any previous ways of thought or precedent."

2. Young seems to try to make the point that anything that anyone would have ever done to try to please God or draw closer to Him was really a waste of time. This comes out in a number of scenes, one is the scene of "God" dancing to the beat of funk music. The problem is not because God is dancing, or because the music is funk music, but because the message underlying that whole conversation (you would have to read it) is something like "why did you ever try to listen to music or do anything that seemed to focus or honor me? If only you would have opened yourself up, and see the good in everything the way that I do no matter what kind of things people are saying, you would know who I am more fully than you do now." I could see a lot of people reading/seeing that and thinking "well I guess God doesn't care what I do." What the Bible seems to say is that God wants people to know him desperately. He rejoices in nothing else. He never seems to take joy in "the heart and emotion of people" in a way that makes that less crucial or important. 

3. Young espouses theology, even though he might not claim to do so, and much of it is wrong. Many people defending this book have said "he's not writing theology, it's a story." Actually, any time you write about God, you are writing theology, whether you want to be doing so or not. A few areas where things can be really misleading are:

One of Young's criticisms from the beginning was that his portrayal of God was "modalist." This is a term for the belief that God only exists as one form of the Trinity at a time. For example, in the book, God the Father has scars from the crucifixion. This helps to jog someones thoughts on the closeness of God in and with Himself (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) but it is incorrect and misleading. 

During a conversation with "Jesus" Mack is told by Jesus a series of things that describes his (Jesus') humanity, and I believe Young goes too far in trying to rob Jesus of His divine power. This is another historical discussion/argument within some points of church history called the kenosis doctrine (Just how much did Jesus empty Himself of when He came to earth?). The Bible talks about Jesus being emptied of His position, place, and glory (Phil 2) but not of His divinity or divine power.  Jesus was fully God and fully man. A woman grabs his cloak and He says "I felt power go out of me." Jesus forgives sins face to face without asking permission of the Father, but by his own authority. So yes, Jesus was and is submissive to God the Father, but we miss the fullness of the gospel if we simply try to say He was powerless and simply human while here on earth.

My biggest frustration was during one of Mack's conversations with Papa (God the Father). On page 120, Papa says "I don't need to punish people for sin. Sin is its own punishment...it's not my purpose to punish it, it's my joy to cure it." That is a major problem, and there's no excuse for that. No doubt sin has consequences which can be punishing, but that is dangerously misleading. In the Bible, Jesus speaks even more about hell than He does heaven. All of us face punishment for sin, and the forgiveness God offers through Jesus is the only solution.

4. Eugene Peterson said something like "this book has the capability to do for this generation what Pilgrim's Progress did for Bunyan's generation." I really like a lot of what Peterson has written, but this book, I think, is not even in the same universe as Pilgrim's Progress. I honestly have no idea why Peterson would say that. The stories are not similar, and even the allegorical style is not similar, so this book is definitely not a modern Pilgrim's Progress. Pilgrim's Progress deals with the nature of man, sin, salvation, trials, Biblical teaching, and amazing allegory. It never seeks to take away the glory and majesty of God to sell more books, or sound smart.  It was said of John Bunyan that "if you cut him he would bleed Scripture." I don't think anyone will say that about William Young. If you were curious, I'd encourage you to pick up a modern translation of Pilgrim's Progress and give it a read.

I am not on a campaign against this book/movie, but my hope is that no one would casually take some new understanding of God from this, because there is a very high chance that it would be wrong. Any human work of literature is like a rotisserie chicken - meat and bones. It's important to be able to tell the difference. In my opinion, there's more bones in this work than many other Christian fiction stories.  It's really popular now in Christian circles to say "if it promotes diversity and new understanding then it must be true." Instead, can we please have diversity, new understanding, and integrity at the same time? If you want to enjoy the Shack, just make sure you're also enjoying your Bible.

Greek Days...

Well, I'm one of the only guys I know that has a Greek life that doesn't include some sort of fraternity. Last semester I took what was probably the most involved course I have ever taken - Elementary Greek. I'm currently on the 6 year plan at Southern Baptist Seminary in KY (online). I love languages, and this was the strangest one yet. For the first time it's a non-Latin language (besides English I guess) which means I get to learn new letters and sentence structure. I'm still an apron strings novice, but I am beginning to see the payoff for delving into this.

I also think it is funny that because of the nature of the course, I haven't been taught how to say "where is the bathroom?" or "what time is it?" like in a Spanish course. But I guess if I were ever in Greece I could walk up to someone, and in a language that must sound the way that an Amish American speaks in terms of outdatedness, ask them "do you know the Lord of heaven who by his love has cleansed his children of all unrighteousness?" hahaha, good conversation starter.

We have just started going through 1 John, and I must admit that it has been refreshing to look at the passage from the original language. Things seem to come out that are harder to express in English. John literally writes in verse 5 of chapter 1 "and we proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness nothing/nowhere" with a double negative that is not taboo or contradictory in the Greek language, but instead is emphatic as to how holy God is.

Also in verse 6, as John says "if we say that we have fellowship with him and we walk in the darkness, we are lying and don't do the truth." Really challenging to look at and examine the truth as something we don't just believe, but are called to perform and be a part of, and to be in the truth or not being an active choice that we make.

I look forward to going on in 1 John, I've only accomplished 10 verses so far :). What an exciting and refreshing reminder that the message of God long pre-dates me, and will long outlive me, spanning languages and cultures I have never even seen.