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Ministry Roundtable Discussion on the Pandemic with Challies, Heerema, Cosper, Thacker, and Schumacher

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Last week Matt Heerema (founder of Mere Agency and former web developer at Desiring God) organized a Zoom discussion where I got to talk about the global coronavirus shutdown with some of the leading thinkers in the church today.

It was a great discussion and the video is above. Matt summarizes it better than I could:

Weeks in to the global coronavirus shutdown, there have been numerous articles, interviews, think pieces, and a ton of speculation. I guess I’m late to the party. 🙂

I had the opportunity to sit down with five of the smartest people I know and ask them what they were thinking, feeling, reading, and wondering about during this time. We came out with a little over an hour of fascinating (to me) stuff.

Topics ranged from communion to “virtual church”, God’s sovereignty, to lament, economics, to digital privacy and data security. All that and more!

I hope you find it useful.

My guests were:

Jason Thacker – Associate Research Fellow and Creative direct at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Author of “The Age of AI”. You can find more of his work at jasonthacker.com

Tim Challies – Pastor of Grace Fellowship Church in Toronto, Ontario. Blogger at challies.com, and a speaker and author of multiple books.

Mike Cosper – Pastor at Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, KY. Director of Podcasting for Christianity Today, he’s also an author, speaker, podcaster, musician. Find him at his website (which looks like it needs an update 😉 mikedcosper.com.

Matt Perman – Director of Career Development at The King’s College, NYC, founder of What’s Best Next, and an author of a book by the same title. You can find more about him at mattperman.com.

Eric Schumacher – Associate pastor at Grand Avenue Baptist Church, Worship Songwriter, and author of Worthy: Celebrating the Value of Women. His site emschumacher.com.

Coronavirus and Your Job Search

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My full-time job is to help students at The King’s College launch their careers. So I’ve been paying attention to how this Coronavirus pause is going to be affecting their job search.

This is one of the most helpful articles I’ve seen so far. It’s concise and insightful. It’s from The Muse, which is one of the best career development websites out there.

So if you were already in the middle of a job search when this Coronavirus pause hit, this article can be of use to you. Or, if you have found yourself out of work because of the economic hiatus we are on, these may also be of use.

The article is called What Does the Coronavirus Pandemic Mean for My Job Search? Here is a fantastic except:

As companies move to remote work to fight the coronavirus pandemic and an increasing number of workers are being laid off or furloughed, you might be wondering if you should continue to send out resumes or just assume that no one is hiring for the foreseeable future. It’s true that economists are predicting a recession, but career experts say it’s best to keep networking and applying, provided you change your approach a bit to acknowledge these are uncertain times.

“Companies might not be hiring today, because they’re trying to figure out how to do business virtually, but they will be hiring,” says Danielle Beauparlant Moser, managing director and executive coach with bltCareers in Asheville, NC “The people who continue to relationship-build and share their ideas will be in a better position when companies start hiring.”

Was the Seahawks Final Play in the Super Bowl as Bad a Call as Most People Are Saying?

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With just one yard to go in order to pull ahead of the Patriots in the final seconds of the Super Bowl, most people have found the Seahawks call for a pass to be inexplicable. Why pass on that play when you can run the ball with Marshawn Lynch?

I don’t think the play was a good call. And, as a huge Patriots fan, I’m super glad things turned out the way they did.

However, when evaluating that play call after the fact I think that there’s a slight distortion that comes about due to hindsight. Here’s why.

If the Seahawks had only one play to get into the end zone, then passing instead of giving the ball to Marshawn Lynch would make little sense.

But the Seahawks had three plays left to score. So it could be argued that it wasn’t unreasonable to try a pass, when you are looking at this from the perspective of three plays, rather than just one.

In other words, due to the fact that the play failed, it’s easy to end up evaluating the situation as though this single play was to be their only chance to score. Of course, that’s how it turned out, but they didn’t know that. When you look at the situation from the assumption, which they had at the time, that they would have three opportunities, then throwing one pass play and then switching to the run can make a bit more sense.

Of course, that perspective doesn’t take into account the risk of throwing an interception that comes with a pass play.

And so, we are back to where we started: it was indeed a bad call, given the abilities of Marshawn Lynch.

My point, though, is just that it’s easy to assess this call in a way that accidentally implies the Seahawks knew they only had one play to get into the end zone. When you look at it from the perspective of thinking they likely would have three opportunities, it is at least a slightly smaller blunder than it can seem at first.

 

 

How Should We Respond to Ann Coulter's Insensitive Article on the Ebola Doctor?

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In response to Ann Coulter’s article on the ebola doctor, “Ebola doc’s condition downgraded to idiotic,” one person on Facebook said “If you remain a fan of Ann Coulter after reading this, you are as pathetic as she is.”

I understand his strong reaction, and disagree very much with her article, but the fact that she was willing to state her views so clearly serves one vital purpose: it forces us to think hard about what the Scriptures teach and helps us refine our understanding of the truth.

Coulter argues that those who go off to the developing world to serve Christ forget “that the first rule of life on a riverbank is that any good that one attempts downstream is quickly overtaken by what happens upstream.” Hence, “if Dr. Brantly had practiced at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles and turned one single Hollywood power-broker to Christ, he would have done more good for the entire world than anything he could accomplish in a century spent in Liberia.”

Further, “your country is like your family. We’re supposed to take care of our own first….Right there in Texas, near where Dr. Brantly left his wife and children to fly to Liberia and get Ebola, is one of the poorest counties in the nation, Zavala County — where he wouldn’t have risked making his wife a widow and his children fatherless.”

I think the best summary of Coulter’s point was made by a person on Facebook, who wrote: “Our neighbors start with those closest to us.”

Is that true?

Do Our Neighbors Really Start with those Closest to Us?

On the face of it, to say that our neighbors start with those closest to us sounds like common sense. But the surprise of the gospel is that in some sense Jesus was very much committed to countering that very notion in his teaching.

For example, Jesus himself left heaven and came to earth to save us. We were by no means his closest neighbors. We weren’t even in the same universe. Yet he came anyway. That is one of the things that makes the gospel so glorious. He didn’t have to come get us, yet he did.

Likewise, Jesus tells the parable of the shepherd leaving the ninety-nine (his closest neighbors) to go after the one (Luke 15:1-7). That is a risky thing to do! It is not at all about loving those closest more than those far away; if anything, those closest are actually put at risk.

And the parable of the Good Samaritan is about loving our enemies — whom most people at the time didn’t even regard as their neighbors at all. Though the issue wasn’t physical proximity, in Jesus’ day the common thinking was that people were decidedly not to love their enemies. That’s simply another form of the notion that our neighbors start with those closest to us — though with “closest” defined in relational terms rather than in terms of physical proximity. 

At the same time, the rich man in Luke 16 was condemned for failing to love the poor man who was right at his gate — not halfway around the world. And in one sense the Good Samaritan was indeed loving his closest neighbor after all, because he was serving a dying man he had come across right in front of him in the road.

How does this fit together?

Though it’s tough to figure out, I’d suggest something like this. When we encounter a need right in front of us, we are to meet it. In that sense, we are indeed to serve those closest first. But when it comes to meeting long-term needs (including relief of the poor in Africa), we are not commanded to always start with those most physically nearby. The issue becomes one of calling and gifting — where one can serve best — and making sure we don’t let the needs nearby become an excuse to keep us from meeting the sometimes much more challenging needs far away.

If the ebola doctor had passed by a man bleeding on the road on the way to serve in Africa, that indeed would have been a bad thing. But when faced with two large fields of great need (America and Liberia), it is right and appropriate to choose the one farther away.

Further, in relation to Coulter’s point that it would have had more impact for Dr. Brantly to serve people in America (and been less risky), the above passages show us that it is right to do this even if the people farther away are less influential and more risky to reach.

Which raises another issue, best summarized by a Facebook commenter as well: “If he went to Africa to try and help the sick, only to get sick himself, it does seem a little pointless.”

In other words, is what Dr. Brantly did pointless?

We’ve already seen that that can’t be true, based on the emphasis Jesus places on helping those who are indeed far away and even taking risks to do so. To this we could also add his insistence that we serve “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40).

But why wasn’t it wasteful for Dr. Brantly to go to Africa, only to catch ebola and have to be brought back at great expense?

Here’s another way to ask the question: Why does God commend taking risks to serve “the least of these”? And why does he commend that even when the whole attempt ends up costing way more than any results that we see?

Why does God operate this way?

I think the answer is: grace. God is a God of grace, and since grace is unmerited favor, it by definition cannot be clearly seen if the primary focus is on helping those who seem most influential. For then it looks like there are conditions — namely, how influential you are. To show manifestly and decisively that grace is grace — that is, without conditions of merit or influence or ability — God serves (and commands us to serve) those who seemingly have nothing to offer, even at great risk.

This, in turn, allows us to see those with seeming influence (in Coulter’s example, Hollywood power-brokers) in the right light as well — namely, as those who in fact do not have anything to offer of their own either, but rather who are just as dependent on God as those visibly in great need and without influence.

So God isn’t creating an us vs. them scenario where people of influence don’t matter but those of no influence do, or where people next door don’t matter but those 8,000 miles away do. Rather, he is doing exactly what it takes to make it clear that we are all equally and fully dependent on grace. 

That’s why we read “God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Corinthians 1:28-29).

Coulter’s Real Problem

In sum, the problem is not first of all Coulter’s pragmatic argument that helping influential people here in the U.S. is better because it will be more effective (as insensitive as that is).

The problem is that she is failing to recognize that when people like Dr. Brantly go help those who have nothing to offer in far away lands, it helps those of us in America as well. For it helps us see that we are all equally dependent on God’s grace. That’s the message America needs. It’s the message we all need to grasp to the core of our being, and something that can’t happen if we avoid helping the sick worldwide.

In this sense, then, Dr. Brantly’s going to Liberia is indeed far more influential for God’s kingdom than had he focused on helping turn Hollywood power-brokers to God. For it shows that God is not dependent on such power-brokers, and that those with influence in the world are not in any special category before him.

That’s the message of grace, it’s the message we all need to hear, and it’s exactly what Dr. Brantly has demonstrated in his life.

 

Accidental Post

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Lots of people have been discussing how Christians should think of Osama Bin Laden’s death. If you are subscribed in a reader, you might have received a post I was starting to pull together on that — but which was unfinished and just a collection of notes at that point.

John Piper has some helpful things to say on the larger issue that this is a sub-set of, and I had started pulling them together for a possible post. After copying in a couple of verses and a John Piper quote (but not yet the main one), I accidentally hit “post” instead of “save” (I’m doing this on an iPad [long story] and hit the wrong button).

Anyway, the post was very incomplete. It had one quote, but not the most helpful one. Sorry for the mix-up!

Here is the link to Piper’s sermon where he addresses the larger issue involved here: “The Pleasure of God in All That He Does.”

And here’s the very helpful section I was intending to quote:

I have commended a solution to you before and I will commend it again: namely, that the death and misery of the unrepentant is in and of itself no delight to God (Ezekiel 33:11). God is not a sadist. He is not malicious or bloodthirsty. Instead, when a rebellious, wicked, unbelieving person is judged, what God delights in is the vindication of truth and goodness and of his own honor and glory.

… those who have rebelled against the Lord and moved beyond repentance will not be able to gloat that they have made the Almighty miserable. Quite the contrary. Moses says that when they are judged, they will unwittingly give an opportunity for God to rejoice in the demonstration of his justice and his power and the infinite worth of his glory (Deut 28:63).

A Few Thoughts on the Fast Company Article, "What the Bible Got Wrong"

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In a recent article called “Infographic of the Day: What the Bible Got Wrong,” Fast Company writes:

The Bible was wrong. For evidence look to, well, the Bible.

Such is the conclusion of this stunning, provocative infographic, which maps contradictions in the Bible, from whether thou shalt not commit adultery down to the color of Jesus’s robes. Career skeptic Sam Harris commissioned the chart for his nonprofit foundation Project Reason, with graphic design by Madrid-based Andy Marlow.

Here are a couple quick thoughts, as they come to mind:

1. My Experience with Contradictions in the Bible

When I first got to college, I had begun to take my faith seriously and yet was encountering much opposition to the Bible in my humanities classes. So the claim that the Bible contradicted itself bothered me, and I looked into it. I went to the library and found the best books I could documenting so-called contradictions in the Bible, looked through them for the most challenging claims of contradiction I could find, and discovered through study and my own reflection that every single one had an answer.

Someone might say “that doesn’t mean much.” Well, maybe not. But my point is that as a mere freshman in college, I looked  deeply into the assertion that the Bible contradicts itself and was able to see the poor exegesis and method behind most of those claims. And even in the few challenging passages that weren’t so obvious on the surface, there were good answers.

The areas that skeptics tend to accuse of having the most contradictions are the four resurrection accounts in the gospels. Aside from the differences in the accounts actually being good evidence for their authenticity (as that is a mark of eyewitness testimony, and if the accounts were fabricated, their dissimilarities would have likely been ironed over), I even wrote a harmony of the resurrection accounts with my friend, Justin Taylor, showing that in no instance do any of the differences amount to actual contradiction. (You can also see a more narrative version that I did.)

My ultimate reason for accepting the inerrancy of the Scriptures, of course, is not the fact that I was able to find a resolution to every alleged contradiction. Rather, my ultimate reason for accepting the inerrancy of the Scriptures is that this is what Jesus taught, and Jesus can be trusted because he rose from the dead. I wrote an article on that as well. Here’s also an article I wrote on what inerrancy means.

2. On the Appearance of Contradictions in General

The next point worth making is that the appearance of contradictions is not a bad thing. Rather, it is a good thing because it stimulates thought.

I reject entirely the notion that “the contradiction is the hallmark of truth.” If two things really contradict one another, they cannot both be true.

But tension and the initial appearance of contradiction are something else altogether. They cause us to think harder about how the two truths fit together. They cause us to probe more deeply and come to an even greater understanding.

Which is why crying out “contradiction” when we see tension in the Bible is lazy and superficial. It leaves us with uncreative level one thinking, rather than bringing us deeper into a fuller understanding of the truth.

Here’s an example. One of the alleged contradictions the chart asserts is that the Bible teaches both that Abraham was justified by faith (Romans 4:2) and by works (James 2:21). The Bible does use that language:

Romans 4:2-4: For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. Now to the one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.

James 2:21: Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar?

So Paul actually calls Abraham ungodly here (amazing–really, really amazing if you think about it) and thus says that he was justified by believing rather than by works. “To the one who does not work but believes him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.” Incredible. That’s what I need, because like Abraham, I am no more righteous in myself than Abraham was.

But then James says “was not Abraham our father justified by works. . . ”

Looks like a problem. But if you look only at the words and stop there, you miss the really profound insight going on. A contradiction does not exist simply because Paul says “justified by faith” and James says “justified by works.” Rather, you need to look at what each author actually means. Their words look like a contradiction on the surface — which is what stimulates us to think. But they are only actually contradicting each other if Paul is intending to deny the very thing that James is seeking to affirm.

And that is not the case. If you look at it, James and Paul are both using the term “justification” differently. They don’t mean the same thing by “justified,” and therefore they are not contradicting one another when Paul says “justified by faith” and James says “justified by works.”

If you look closely at the text in James, for example, James is referring to a specific point in Abraham’s life: “when he offered up Isaac.” That happened in Genesis 22. But when Paul says “and Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness,” he is quoting Genesis 15:6 — many years earlier.

So James and Paul are both referring to different points in Abraham’s life — which points to some good clues not only in Romans 4 and James 2 themselves that they are each using the term “justification” differently, but also in the specific passages of Genesis that they are each alluding to. Paul — and Genesis 15 — are speaking about justification in the sense of becoming right with God. That must be by faith — and faith alone — because we are ungodly (like Abraham — which is really stunning for Paul to say, once again, as he is one of the most revered people in all of the Bible; and hence, if even Abraham was ungodly, then so are we). Because he was ungodly, he had no works by which he could be accepted by God. That’s what’s going on in Genesis 15.

But James is speaking about justification in the sense of the demonstration, or evidence, that we have become right with God. You see this in Genesis 22:1, where Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac is referred to as a “test” and in James 2:14-26, where the issue is what the indications are that one’s faith is real. This could be drawn out in many ways, but perhaps most interesting is James 2:22: “You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works.” The phrase “was completed” is the same phrase Jesus used in 2 Corinthians 12:9 when he said to Paul “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Did Jesus mean here “my power is made to be power” through weakness? No — his power exists all on its own and doesn’t need us to be fully powerful. Rather, the meaning is “my power is most shown to be powerful in weakness.” Christ’s power is demonstrated through our weakness. So also, when James says “and faith was completed by his works,” we see that his point in this passage is that works demonstrate faith.

Since he’s talking about the demonstration of faith — and since he’s talking about a point later in Abraham’s life, after he was declared right with God in Genesis 15 — we see that James is talking about justification in a different sense than Paul. James is talking about the demonstration of the fact that we are right with God — the “justification” of our justification, in a sense –, which happens through works. Our works are evidence that our faith is real, and thus function will function as evidence in the final judgment. But this does not mean we enter into a relationship with God through our works — that is impossible, since we are ungodly. Rather, the fact that we are right with God and have real faith is demonstrated by our works, as evidence.

And this is fully in line with the range of meaning of the word “justify.” Jesus, for example, uses the word “justify” in this sense when he says “wisdom is justified by her deeds (Matthew 11:19).” The meaning here cannot be “wisdom is made to be wise” through its effects. That would not make sense. Rather, the meaning is “wisdom is shown to be wisdom” through its effects. So Jesus is using “justify” here in the sense of “demonstrate.” Which is also how James is using it — he is talking about how we are shown to be righteous, whereas Paul is talking justification in the sense of how we are made righteous before God. The term itself can be used in either way, and you need to look at the specific context to know which one is in view.

The fact that our works function as evidence that we are right with God leads to an even deeper understanding of justification and the final judgment. It tells us that the kind of faith that justifies is not mere intellectual assent or a dead faith, but a living faith that entrusts oneself to Christ and will necessarily result in a life of good works. (And for some really, really profound insight on how works function as evidence, let me point you to John Piper’s excellent chapter on this in his book Future Grace — see chapter 29, “The Future Grace of Dying.”)

But the point here is: there are some really cool things about the doctrine of justification that we would have never seen if we just stopped at the mere words of James and Paul, declared “contradiction,” and left it at that. This is a small example of the mountains of profound insight that yield to us when we look at apparent contradictions as opportunities for learning rather than opportunities for sitting in judgment on the text.

3. Why God Inspired Hard Texts

The second point leads to my much briefer third point: These apparent contradictions are in the Bible on purpose. They are there on purpose in order to get us to think and thus in order to lead us to more profound insight.

The truths of God and the Bible are very great. Yet as humans we are continually tempted to settle for easy answers and stage one thinking. As some have said, “you rarely think until you’re confronted with a problem.” So God has deliberately made parts of the Bible hard, in order to lead us in to greater learning.

So when we see apparent contradictions in the Bible, the proper response is not to sit in judgment on the text. Rather, the proper response is to sit back in gratefulness and say “there is something amazing to be learned here.”

John Piper has an excellent sermon that goes in to much more detail on this, called Why God Inspired Hard Texts. I highly recommend checking it out.

John Piper is also simply a great example of what I’m talking about here in general. One of the great appeals of his writing is that he continually creates problems for us, and then solves them. For two of the best examples of how he does this, I would point you to Chapter 1 of Desiring God, “The Happiness of God: The Foundation of Christian Hedonism” (which can also be found online in sermon form) and Chapter 2 of The Pleasures of God, “The Pleasure of God in All that He Does” (which can also be found online in sermon form).

Conclusion

So, in conclusion, the assertion that the Bible contains contradictions matters a lot to me. As a result, I investigated it in great detail when I was first becoming more serious about my faith and, as a mere freshman in college, was able to see that no claim of contradiction ultimately holds.

However, the appearance of contradiction in many places in the Scriptures is there on purpose and by God’s design because this is the mark of any profound text and because it causes us to dig deeper, leading to far more profound insight.

Now, back to Fast Company’s article: I love Fast Company, and you see me link to them all the time on this blog. I don’t want to say to them: “stay away from religion — you don’t know what you’re talking about.” I don’t want to foster a dichotomy like that. But I do want to say: “before probing into matters of religion, make sure you get the facts right and think more deeply first.”

For more on this subject, see also Justin Holcomb’s helpful response over at the Resurgence.