The Odd Couple: The Unlikely Marriage of Postmodernism and Islamic Fundamentalism

I just got back from the gym and as I was sweating profusely on the elliptical trainer machine I became engrossed in a developing story on the television in front of me. CNN was covering the speech of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Columbia University. I watched with mild interest at first, expecting to find another example of the sophomoric pseudo-intellectual left-wing rhetoric for which Columbia is so distinguished. I was intrigued, even shocked to read the closed captioning of Columbia president Lee Bollinger’s introduction of President Ahmadinejad. (Check it out at www.cnn.com) My mouth was hanging open, not merely because of the strenuous cardiovascular workout that was taxing my out-of-shape physique, but because of the provocative nature of President Bollinger’s comments. Rather than a mild introduction, Bollinger challenged the Iranian president on central tenets of his fundamentalist ideology—from his call for the destruction of Israel to his aid and approval of terrorism to his denial of the Holocaust. President Bollinger ended his introduction by stating, "Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator," and saying very frankly that he did not expect Ahmadinejad to possess the “intellectual courage” to address the issues.

Ahmadinejad’s reply was a masterfully crafted piece of postmodern rhetoric sculpted to serve the purposes of fundamentalist Islam. He began by portraying himself as the victim Bollinger’s uncomplimentary remarks and the dominant ideology of the west in general. He then played to the conspiracy-theorizing presuppositions of the audience by telling them that the western power structures and media outlets were misinforming them in order to promote the agenda of the western imperialists, especially the Bush administration. Even as he was speaking, John Mayer’s conspiracy-minded Waiting on the World to Change was playing over the radio in the gym and I thought, “He’s got them in his pocket!” He even defended his denial of the Holocaust by asking, "If the Holocaust is a reality of our time, a history that occurred, why is there not sufficient research that can approach the topic from different perspectives?" (Read “the perspective that it did not happen”)

What irony! A radical Islamist…a man who supports terrorism and the state execution of children…a man who denies the very existence of homosexuals in Iran…a Holocaust-denying, civil liberty-crushing, jihad-advancing fanatic has found his niche—the American university! There he can play the victim, just like so many others in the academy. He, like them, is the victim of the white, male, Judeo-Christian, European metanarrative that has forced upon us concepts like the very freedom of speech that gave him his platform today. And what right do the western imperialists have to tell him that he can’t force his narrative on others, by any means necessary?

The Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Destruction of Inner Peace

“No Jesus, No Peace; Know Jesus, Know Peace”—Christian Bumper Sticker

The pursuit of inner peace is the great spiritual quest of our age. People feel alienated, not only from others and from the community as a whole, but from themselves. Modern psychology preaches to us a gospel of self-awareness and self-actualization. The self-help industry promises personal wholeness as a commodity that can be bought for a price and achieved in a few quick steps. Peace-seekers try everything from transcendental meditation to LSD to aerobics classes in their attempts at self-reconciliation.

The evangelical church has tried to exploit this spiritual quest as a platform for the Gospel. Pastors and authors and churches and Christian bumper stickers promise that Jesus brings inner peace. He will finally bring rest to the war that rages within your soul.

The problem is that the Gospel never promises inner peace. Nowhere do the writers of Scripture portray the Christian life as a tranquil existence that is permeated by a peaceful, easy feeling. In fact, the very opposite is true. The moment a sinner turns from his sin and vows allegiance to Jesus Christ, a war begins within the new believer’s soul. The Christian’s life is a battlefield on which flesh and Spirit wage a mortal conflict that will not end until the utter annihilation of one or the other (Gal. 5:17).

The Gospel is a message of peace. However, the peace promised is not internal but inter-personal. The peace of the Gospel is the peace with God which Jesus Christ has achieved by His substitutionary death and resurrection on our behalf (Rom. 5:6-11). This God-ward reconciliation has brought reconciliation between all who have experienced it, so that they are reconciled to God in one Body (Eph. 2:16). Thus, the Gospel brings us peace with God and peace with other people.

But while the Gospel is a message of peace, it is also a cry of war. While Christ’s death reconciles us to God and to our neighbor, it places us at bitter enmity with the Kingdom of Darkness out of which we have been called and the indwelling sin from which we have been liberated (Col. 1:13; Jas. 4:4; 1 Jn. 2:15-17). It couldn’t work any other way. It is the sin within us that causes us to rebel against God and mistreat our fellow man. Thus, we must choose either peace with God and our neighbor or peace with our own sinful desires. We cannot have both.

If we are to live the authentic Christian life, we will have to deny ourselves and our ungodly desires (Mt. 16:24; Titus 2:12), kill our own sin (Rom. 8:13), and go to war against our flesh. This is the Gospel of our salvation—a Gospel that brings us peace with God and peace with our brothers and sisters in Christ, but which sets us at war with the sin that abides within us. And thus we find eternal life not only in the proclamation of peace but in the declaration of war.

A Conservative Christian, right wing Republican (well, sort of), straight, white, American male responds to a Tree huggin’, peace lovin’, pot smokin’

I recently had the pleasure of celebrating my twenty-eighth birthday with a great group of friends at the Ohio River Valley Folk Festival in Madison, Indiana. It was a delightful weekend filled with talented musicians, story-telling, and way too much artery-clogging, cholesterol-raising, heart attack inducing carnival food.

Part of the beauty of the event was the wide spectrum of people represented. Young, old, black, white, hippies, maybe even a few yuppies. As often happens at music festivals some of the performers began to express their views on politics, society, and life in general. And as often happens, their views were quite different from my own.

The final act of the weekend was Todd Snider, a hilarious, creative, talented musician and story-teller who had us rolling with laughter. Todd is a self described “tree huggin, peace lovin, pot smoking, porn watchin, gay weddin, pro choicin, conspiracy minded, lazy a** (you fill in the blanks) hippie.” He is convinced that the problem with the world is “conservative Christian, right wing Republican, straight, white, American males.”

I was, of course, one of maybe five people in the crowd who fit that description, and while much of the exuberant response of the crowd might be attributed to free-flowing beer and herd instinct, I think Todd’s indictment struck a chord with his listeners. Indeed his view is the prevailing view that many in our world have of evangelical Christians.

We certainly can learn some things from what people like Todd say about us. We as evangelicals do have a history of racism and classism that we must overcome. And we may be too enmeshed with certain political parties.

However, what really makes conservative Christians unpopular is that we claim unapologetically to know and proclaim the one way to God—through faith in His Son Jesus Christ. Furthermore, we are not content to keep quiet about it. We proclaim it from the rooftops and in the marketplace and we refuse to tone it down or adapt to the demands of political correctness. This is terribly unpopular in our world. We are seen as religious imperialists who seek to force our faith on others. The world hates this.

But the world has always hated this. The Lord Jesus told us that they would (Jn. 15:18). The world crucified the Prince of Glory. Are we surprised that they call us dirty names like “intolerant,” or blame us for society’s ills? The fact is that all men in their natural condition reject the One True and Living God and instead make for themselves idols to worship. These idols may be statues of wood and stone, or they may be idols of pornography and pot, or they may be idols of money and power. It may simply be the idol of a Jesus who just accepts everybody and takes us all to heaven (or wherever). Society doesn’t care what idol you choose, just as long as you don’t force anyone else to worship your god.

As a Christian I fully recognize that I cannot force anyone else to worship Jesus. I couldn’t force you to accept the truth of Christianity if I wanted to. But there is coming a day when God will force you to acknowledge the truth of Christianity. He has raised Jesus Christ from the dead and has thereby declared that a day is coming when Jesus will judge the living and the dead (Acts 17:31). On that day, every knee will bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil. 2:10-11).” The issue is whether you will confess that now and be saved or whether you will confess it later and be damned. This always has and always must be the message of true Christianity. It is the message that causes the world to hate both us and our Lord, but it is the message that we must proclaim if we truly love the people of the world.

The Valley of Vision

This post is not original with me. It is not the espresso-induced musing of a restless mind. Rather, it is a source of unspeakable comfort to the restless mind and heart. This is a prayer entitled "The Valley of Vision," which can be found in a collection of Puritan prayers and devotions by the same name. I hope you find it a source of comfort and perspective in the midst of trials and temptations.

Lord, high and holy, meek and lowly,
Thou hast brought me to the valley of vision,
where I live in the depths but see thee in the heights;
hemmed in by mountains of sin I behold thy glory.

Let me learn by paradox
that the way down is the way up,
that to be low is to be high,
that the broken heart is the healed heart,
that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,
that the repenting soul is the victorious soul,
that to have nothing is to possess all,
that to bear the cross is to wear the crown,
that to give is to receive,
that the valley is the place of vision.

Lord, in the daytime stars can be seen from the deepest wells,
and the deeper the wells the brighter thy stars shine;
Let me find thy light in my darkness,
thy life in my death,
thy joy in my sorrow,
thy grace in my sin,
thy riches in my poverty,
thy glory in my valley.

Noumenal Became Phenomenal: An Epistemological Meditation on the Incarnation

Since the time of Kant, it has been commonly assumed that the noumenal world is unknowable and that human knowledge is limited to the phenomenal—what may be observed via sensory experience and historical observation. While this presupposition is itself suspect, it is not our intent here to debate that point. What we wish to address here is the position that states that because human beings can only access truth through the phenomenal world, then they can know nothing of the noumenal. At first glance, this might sound like an irrefutable argument. Human beings are limited by time and space. How then could they discern realities that transcend time and space? It would appear that their access to these truths is cut off. That is of course, unless there might be some way to access the noumenal through the phenomenal. But this would require that the eternal step into time and space—that the noumenal become phenomenal.

What if that actually happened? What if the eternal Wisdom stepped into time? What if the unrestrained Reality took on the constraints of a human body? What if Truth itself walked among us and spoke to us? Then could we not know the universal by means of the particular, the eternal by means of the historical, the noumenal by means of the phenomenal?

This is the fundamental claim of Christianity—that the eternal Logos has entered into history in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth, that the transcendent has become immanent, that the invisible God has appeared among us as one of us, and that this visible man has explained the invisible God (Jn. 1:1, 14, 18).

Bumper Sticker Theology: “Curb Your God”

Bumper stickers are an intriguing phenomenon. They range from cutesy to crude, from thought-provoking to ridiculous. In a society where every opinion is accorded equal plausibility, it is almost humorous to see the inanities that some people plaster all over their cars.
The point of a bumper-sticker is, of course, to say something, sometimes in a clever way, sometimes in a…um…not-so-clever way. I often find myself driving in traffic carrying on a running conversation with the bumpers of the vehicles around me.

The other day I saw a bumper sticker that read:

“Curb Your God
Fundamentalism: Ugly in Any Color.”

The sticker was intended to be a shot at religious fundamentalists, those whom our society labels as “intolerant.” We are told that we must curb our God, that we must tone down our message, that we must give up our antiquated ideas about absolute truth and morality.

The problem is that curbing God is the one thing we cannot do. The idea of a God who can be curbed is an oxymoron. To assume that one can tone down one’s god is to reduce one’s god. Thus, the worshipper assumes the place of the god while the god is reduced to whatever the worshipper wants him to be at that moment. The very idea of a curbed God is logically absurd, for the moment that we try to curb God, God is no longer God. We have set ourselves up above him and subjected him to our own whims and wishes. We have reduced God to our standard.

God is by definition “The One Who Cannot Be Curbed.” We may speak of hating God, of rebelling against God, of insulting God. But curbing God is something that we simply cannot do.

God is who He is regardless of whether we like it or not and He says what He says regardless of whether we believe it or not. He is not whatever we make Him out to be nor is His Truth whatever we find useful. He did not ask us for advice when He laid the foundations of the earth and He is not about to change simply because we find Him intolerant or antiquated or overbearing. We did not invent God or His Truth. God was what He was long before He created human beings and no amount of wishful thinking or politically correct dialogue can ever change that.

The Cell-Phone and the Demise of Inter-Personal Connection

We’ve all seen him, we’ve all heard her; perhaps we have been them. The woman nearly causing a traffic catastrophe because she is engrossed in some earth-shattering gossip; the man standing in line waiting for his double-shot latte apparently talking to himself, his sanity only evident when he turns his head enough to reveal the Bluetooth in his ear; the teenager calling or texting every casual acquaintance she knows simply to say, “What it do?” I am not one of those people who yells, “Hang up and drive!” I do not mind if people talk on their cell-phones or employ their Blackberries in whatever manner they deem appropriate, so long as they don’t run me off the road or scream so loudly that I think that they are yelling at me.

What does concern me, however, is the content of these conversations. Now, you might accuse me of eavesdropping, but in today’s world, you really can’t help being privy to the daily happenings of perfect strangers. So, if you don’t want me to know about your business, don’t talk about it in front of me.

As I was saying, what concerns me is the content of these conversations, or should I say, the lack of content. There is a disturbing trend in my own conversations and the conversations of others that I have unintentionally observed. That trend is the inverse relationship between the quantity of conversation and the quality of conversation. As conversation volume increases, conversation relevance decreases. The more we talk, the less we have to say.

What is at the heart of this problem? I don’t pretend to know exactly, but I can posit a guess. I think the problem is that our talking has replaced our thinking.

Ignore that text message for a moment and think about it. The more you talk, the less time you have for serious reflection. We use our communication devices as a means of escape from the real issues of life. If you are depressed or worried, you don’t sit there and try to solve your problem. You don’t deal with the issues that are confronting you. You don’t think about things like God or life or the meaning of the universe. You bring up the contact list on your cell-phone and start searching for a human voice to engage in some inane conversation about nothing pertinent whatsoever. You escape into the relative comfort of a temporary veneer of connectedness, then hang up the phone and muddle through until the next phone call, the next text message, the next e-mail. And all the while you are hoping deep down for a relationship based on something deeper than the latest American Idol vote, longing for a connection more meaningful than the score of the Yankees game, wishing desperately that you had something more to say than, “What it do?”