Think Christian Articles

Man of Steel and the tiredness of Christ figures

2013-06-18T16:55:59Z

Posted on 06/18/13

The return of Superman in Man of Steel means the return of something that’s nearly as invincible: talk of Christ figures.

Never mind that he was created by sons of Jewish immigrants, Superman has surpassed the likes of E.T., Cool Hand Luke, Gandalf and Harry Potter to become the definitive, pop-culture Christ figure. A child sent from another world and raised by parents of this one? Who grows up to demonstrate miraculous powers? And saves the planet? Man of Steel even adds a shot of Clark Kent (Henry Cavill) in church with a stained-glass image of Jesus in the background. What more could Christians ask for?

A lot.

It seems to me that the practice of identifying Christ figures almost always brings more to the movies at hand than it does to our understanding of Christ. It adds religiosity and resonance (even if neither are intended), yet rarely informs our faith. As a theological exercise, Christ-figuring is a one-way street.

In “The Pedagogical Challenges of Finding Christ Figures in Film,” his contribution to Teaching Religion and Film, Christopher Deacy notes that focusing on Christ figures can be both superficial and misleading. He writes: “Classroom discussions would be more productively spent looking at wider debates between theology and film than ones that see cinematic characters as little more than ciphers whose existence is predicated upon the existence of the New Testament Jesus and who are accordingly not instrumental in their own right.”

And this isn’t only because Christ-figuring does a disservice to the movie character, which is Deacy’s main point. It also does a disservice to the character of Christ. If any figure who dies and returns; any figure who offers sacrifice in any way; any figure who comes from another world to do good, is a Christ figure, then how is Jesus all that different from so many of our movie heroes? At what point does Superman become less like Jesus and Jesus more like Superman? (Keep in mind that Warner Bros., the studio behind Man of Steel, even provided sermon notes for pastors titled “Jesus: The Original Superhero.”)

Every Christ figure will fall short in some way, but what’s commonly lost in these glib associations is the difference between sacrifice and atonement. And atonement, as Swiss theologian Emil Brunner notes in his book The Mediator, is the main point: “There is no other possibility of being a Christian than through faith in that which took place once for all, revelation and atonement through the Mediator.” At the movies, Christ figures will sacrifice themselves to save another – or maybe even all humankind – but they rarely do so to atone for the fallen state of others. If we take that away, what’s left?

Admittedly, atonement is hard to capture onscreen partly because it is an act that we can barely comprehend, let alone depict. Rather than capture that sense of salvific mystery, Christ figures pin Jesus down by focusing on more tangible traits: otherworldly powers, saving acts, flying. (Surely Jesus flew as part of the Transfiguration, right?)

Yet what we lose in this literalization is what American missionary Samuel M. Zwemer identified as the inexplicable crux of Christianity. “If the Cross of Christ is anything to the mind, it is surely everything – the most profound reality and the sublimest mystery,” Swemer wrote in The Glory of the Cross. “One comes to realize that literally all the wealth and glory of the gospel centres here. The Cross is the pivot as well as the centre of New Testament thought. It is the exclusive mark of the Christian faith, the symbol of Christianity and its cynosure.”

If you’re looking for Christ figures, then, look for the sign of the cross. Let’s not be too quick to replace it with an “S” on some guy’s chest.

(Both the Zwemer and Brunner quotes can be found in John Stott’s The Cross of Christ, an exceedingly helpful book in putting the notion of Christ figures into perspective.)

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All God’s critters? Even groundhogs?

2013-06-18T06:59:14Z

Posted on 06/18/13

All God's critters got a place in the choir

Some sing low, some sing higher

Some sing out loud on the telephone wire

And some just clap their hands, or paws or anything they got. (Bill Staines, “A Place in the Choir”)

June 6, 8:43 a.m. First groundhog of 2013 spotted ambling atop the garden retaining wall - just a few feet and a bit of wing-and-prayer fencing separating it from my recent plantings of lettuce and broccoli. The game is now officially on. Either the groundhog goes or my vegetables’ days are numbered.

As a general rule I love animals and can find it in my heart to love even the most ugly and warty. As a matter of intellectual assent, I concur with Bill Staines. But I cannot love a groundhog. Some think them cute with their chunky waddle and their clueless gaze. Perhaps for these they can be forgiven. But not for the way they nibble lettuce down to a mere nub in the ground or, even worse, the way they strip-mine in a single night every leaf and stalk from a row of broccoli plants.

Every year we get at least one groundhog in our neighborhood. In early May I pray a groundhog variation on the blessing for the Tsar from Fiddler on the Roof (“God bless and keep all groundhogs … far away from us”). My prayer is never answered. First appearance is mid-May to early June. From then until final disposition, my garden suffers regular predations.

It usually does end. One year the groundhog ended up road kill in the street two doors down. I wept a crocodile tear. Another year I borrowed a Havahart trap. It was too easy. Two minutes after baiting with an apple core, mission accomplished. But how to dispose? I teach environmental ethics, for goodness’ sakes. All animals have intrinsic value. They are God’s creatures and to be valued as such. So I loaded the groundhog-occupied trap in the trunk of our car and drove six miles out into the country. When I opened the trunk, the groundhog had crapped mightily all over. What a mess!

I released it in the largest woodlot I could find. Releasing it salved my conscience, but down deep I knew I didn’t really solve anything. Groundhog density at the release site was probably at saturation point. While the site was wooded, there were farms within a quarter mile. I solved my problem by making it someone else’s. Within two weeks another groundhog moved into our neighborhood. Serves me right.

Some might say that I should reconcile myself to sharing a bit of garden largesse with a few of God’s creatures. I do, at least with what grows well. In the gardener’s version of Murphy’s law, our produce yield is inversely related to effort. Our garden produces rhubarb and strawberries with us barely lifting a finger, but carefully tended tomatoes and zucchini and peppers and broccoli struggle to yield more than a few edibles.

I do share the strawberries. Chipmunks take a nip or two out of almost every one, but I don’t hate chipmunks. I just pare the gnawed area. There’s still plenty of untouched fruit to cover my breakfast cereal on June mornings. I appreciate the dainty appetite of your average chipmunk.

But groundhogs? I hope God loves them because I just can’t bring myself to. A friend just told me about a motion-detector sprinkler that shoots a jet of water at anything that moves in the garden. That could be fun, like Clint Eastwood in the garden patch. Go ahead, Punxsutawny Phil, make my day!

It’s a satisfying thought. But then reality hits. What are the odds that the groundhog gets blasted first versus the likelihood that I forget to turn off the water when I step outside to pick my breakfast strawberries and get blasted myself? I don’t think my ego could take being laughed at by a groundhog.

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Why Obama is like Bush (and both are like Pilate)

2013-06-17T07:22:50Z

Posted on 06/17/13

The recent revelations about NSA surveillance programs again have supporters of President Barack Obama asking: why are the policies of the Obama administration so similar to that of the George W. Bush administration? Especially with respect to issues like the war on terror, torture, Guantanamo Bay and use of drones, Obama appears to be Bush redux.

The irony is thick, then, as the script stays the same while the actors have changed. Democrats who decried Bush’s practices now stand with Obama. Republicans who were staunch defenders of Bush-era policies bluster about the Constitution now that Obama is continuing the logic and legacy of those policies. Christians should not be surprised at this development. If we pay attention to Scripture, we have reason to expect that individual political rulers are going to be molded by the larger powers and principalities in which they are embedded. This should disabuse us of the faulty notion that the primary way to “make a difference” in our society is to get an individual into a position of political power.

The Biblical narrative showcases the problems inherent with that kind of logic, especially in the confrontation between Jesus and Pilate in John’s Gospel. This passage illustrates Paul’s point that real wisdom and power appear to be foolishness to the rulers and powers of this age. It also illustrates how rulers and political factions are driven not by truth but by power.

Although Jesus appears before Pilate as a shackled prisoner, it is Jesus who is free and unshakeable, whereas Pilate is in bondage to the whims of the various political winds that are blowing. In this confrontation, Pilate appears to have misgivings about Jesus’ guilt. Those misgivings are overruled, however, by the force of the crowds on one side and the threat of Caesar on the other. The point of the text is not to absolve Pilate but to show that he valued holding on to power above all. Again, irony: no one is more powerless than the one who will do anything to maintain or gain power. This is what Augustine called libido dominandi, the “lust to dominate.” As Augustine points out, no one is more a slave than the ruler dominated by the desire to maintain power. No one is more a puppet than a king (or perhaps the king’s middle-management).

But lest we cast stones at our rulers, we have to see that we the people are just as fickle. At the climax of the Jesus-Pilate showdown, we get an ironic role reversal (an equivalent might be Nancy Pelosi sounding like Dick Cheney or al-Qaida suddenly sounding like Obama). Pilate echoes the adoring crowds of Palm Sunday and proclaims, “Here is your king!” Meanwhile, the Jewish crowd sounds like loyal Romans, “We have no king but Caesar!”

These role reversals expose our lust for power and our hatred for truth. The truth, Jesus says earlier in John 8, will set you free. And this is the freeing truth we see embodied in Jesus’ cross and resurrection: grasping after godlike power is a sure path to death, but descending to be a servant, even unto death, is a sure path to abundant life. Because we’re concerned with truth and real power, we should be less concerned about who sits in the Oval Office and more focused on who sits at the right hand of the Father.

With thanks to John Nugent and Ted Troxell, whose conversation helped spur this post.

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Holiness or happiness? The challenge of Before Midnight

2013-06-16T07:34:54Z

Posted on 06/16/13

What if you arrived at middle age to find that your most cherished dream had come true? Or your worst nightmare? Or both at once, like the two main characters in Before Midnight?

This is the third in a series of films directed by Richard Linklater and featuring the characters of Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke), following Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004). Watching Celine and Jesse over the years, viewers who are the same age as Delpy and Hawke may be especially susceptible to the way the story has unfolded; with each film they have been able to see the delights and distresses of their own current life-stage reflected and amplified in the dynamics of Celine and Jesse’s encounters. At least that’s how it has been for me.

In Before Sunrise, Jesse (an American tourist heading to Vienna to fly home the next day) and Celine (a French university student returning home to Paris) meet on a train in Austria. Their casual conversation doesn’t stay casual for long - they’re both eager to talk about the tangled messes of their interior lives. Jesse convinces Celine to get off the train with him and spend the night wandering the streets of Vienna, and all night long they wonder together about who they are, who they will become and how that becoming will happen. They long for happiness and fulfillment, and worry about making choices that will deprive them of both. As the night goes on, they also wonder what will become of their newfound friendship. At the last minute they agree to meet again in six months.

Before Sunset opens with Jesse at a book signing in Paris nine years later. He and Celine never did meet again as planned, but he has turned his fascination with their encounter into a very successful (and evidently not very fictionalized) novel. The publicity has caught Celine’s attention, and she surprises him at the bookstore. Again they walk and talk, their time together again limited by Jesse’s imminent departure. And again that time pressure squeezes all their hope for happiness and worry about not finding it out into the space between them. By the end of the film, one thing is clear: Jesse will not be going to the airport, will not be returning to his troubled life with his wife and son; he and Celine will not continue to be who they have become apart. What’s not at all clear is who they will become together. Is this the happiness they’ve been hoping for?

Move forward another nine years to Before Midnight, now out in theaters. Jesse and Celine, who now live together in Paris with their twin daughters, are ending their summer holiday at a writers’ retreat in Greece. We see them on a more complicated stage than before, in everyday life with other people. “There’s no room for spontaneity in our lives,” Celine complains. Their friends contrive to send the two of them to a nearby resort for the night, and as they stroll through countryside and village, we are back in familiar conversational territory.

Since their first meeting, both of them have obsessively wondered who they would be in middle age, and now here they are. Is this their dream, finding happiness with that once-exotic stranger? Or their nightmare, fulfillment denied as one’s life is defined by another? They thought that by now they would have arrived, but they are still becoming, and they don’t know what to do with that.

I wonder what would happen if they were to shift their goal, to see that (in the words of Christian writer Gary Thomas) the purpose of their relationship is not to make them happy, but to make them holy. Thomas suggests that, while there is nothing wrong with the thrill of romance, there is “a deeper meaning ... in the enforced intimacy” of committed love. Celine and Jesse wouldn’t use the language of “holiness” for this deeper meaning - their view of faith has more to do with pat answers than with continual growth - but are they courageous enough to commit to a life of ongoing, never-ending becoming? Are we?

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Let’s not do away with headship just yet

2013-06-14T07:19:22Z

Posted on 06/14/13

While Mother’s Day is one of the most attended worship services of the year (with pulpits gushing over motherhood), Father’s Day is one of the least. Can you blame fathers who prefer fishing or golfing over going to church and getting ragged on to step up and be a man, whatever that means?

Our culture doesn’t consider men as heads of their families anymore. On television, dads can be pretty goofy, and they go gaga over big toys. Their image in a show like Parenthood fares somewhat better, but for the most part the idea of headship has all but disappeared, discarded on an ash heap of ancient patriarchy.

The fact is, though, that headship is here to stay whether you believe in it or not. The proof is in the prisons, which offer a picture of what happens in the absence of headship. We know that 80 percent of inmates grew up without the consistent presence of a father in the home. Many witnessed a series of male figures with mom and have siblings with different last names. Some don’t even know who their dad is.

The correlation between having an absentee father and landing behind bars is too obvious to disregard. Growing up fatherless digs a deep, dark and angry hole in a heart, a heart that becomes ripe for criminal conduct.

We do believe that God adds a special measure of His grace to families whose dads are absent by no choice of their own. In any church there is an example of a dad who died and mom had to go it alone, but the kid turned out just fine. That extra measure of grace often comes from male role models in the extended family and in the church. Yet this does not change the fact that those who choose to go AWOL on their responsibilities cause dire consequences for the ones left behind.

Embedded in the structures of creation is the need for a father in the home. You can’t fight the structures of creation any more than you can fight gravity. When you operate contrary to the divine design, life won’t work right. No wonder so many families without fathers disintegrate into chaos.

Prison ministry reintroduces the creation order to prisoners and their families by professing the love of a heavenly Father. God's intention for the family is taught in Scripture, which is taught by the church through prison ministries. Crossroad Bible Institute, where I serve as president, teaches extensively on God's will for the family. Even before this, however, the church's ministries teach prisoners that there is a heavenly Father who perfectly and completely can fill that void left by an absentee father.

To be sure, the meaning of headship has gone through adjustments over time and across cultures, as it should. Every marriage needs to negotiate and balance the leadership and nurturing roles in accordance with gifting and opportunity.

But headship is here to stay, and we can make the most of it. Its clearest explanation is found in Ephesians 5:25, which says, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her.” Tyrants and serial freeloaders need not apply.

Instead of the prison picture of what happens without fathers, let’s imagine dads (imperfect as we all are) who embrace the spirit of Jesus and remain at their post. I wonder how many wives would object to that kind of headship and how many more kids could experience the love of their perfect heavenly Father.

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Stress and God’s built-in neuro-sabbath

2013-06-13T07:35:25Z

Posted on 06/13/13

Two months ago, a scientist from our congregation had a paper published in Nature Neuroscience, one of the world’s top neuroscience journals, on how our bodies deal with stress.

My first thought on hearing the news, was, “I want to preach on what she’s discovered!” In my mind, God had just spoken a new bio-parable, and I wanted to hear what He’d said.

So I met with the scientist, her researcher husband and my medical-school son to engage the neurological text. Our exegetical question was, “What does the specific stress-adapting nature of neurons in our hypothalamus uniquely say about how God thinks?”

We took our lead from Abraham Kuyper who once said, “[T]here can be nothing in the universe that fails to express, to incarnate, the revelation of the thought of God.”

Our first challenge was translating the neurological text from the original language (her scientific thoughts were not our thoughts). She came up with this paraphrase:

“By studying the brains of adolescent rats, I was able to uncover a brand new way in which brain cells communicate with one another during stress. I was able to observe how these cells in the hypothalamus can use substances - naturally produced versions of the active ingredients in painkillers like morphine (opioids) – as messengers to other brain cells. I found that opioids are made and released by cells to shut down communication lines. If you can imagine that during a stressful event, many brain cells begin to panic and yell at one another, opioids are used by these particular cells to lower the volume or hang up the phone so that neurons don’t become overwhelmed.”

God has built a stress-regulating mechanism into the very physiology of your brains.

Knowing that there would be times when stress would be overwhelming - up to your neck - he thought of a hypothalamic shut-down mechanism. A bio-grace that says, “This far and no more…” to stress. A physiological reminder that, “when you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you…” (Isaiah 43:2.)

God is a God who, knowing how much we could handle, made a way to save us.

For my sermon (which you can watch below), I started by connecting the idea of opioid-induced neuro-sabbaths to the sheltering ecstasy of times away with God. The brain’s way of lowering the volume by calming upstream stressors points to the God who holds all things, all bio-systems, all circumstance and all history. Sometimes God saves through a whole series of events that are quite outside of ourselves, that we have no control over.

I also connected the scientists’ joy of discovery with the epiphany the disciples must have felt when they finally recognized Jesus for who He really was (God’s mechanism of grace, His embodied hope for all stress, pain and suffering, the wisdom behind the universe). The scientist in my church discovered a mechanism that many great minds before her had long wondered about. The disciples saw what the prophets had longed to see.

It made me wonder if all of our moments of discovery were meant for this; a knowing of a way that leads to a knowing of the Way.

For a few moments, it felt like our little church community was surrounded by glory. The wisdom of Christ in the hypothalamus was illumining the wisdom of Christ in the prophets and gospels.

It was like Jesus was in the room.

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The place of consent in a Christian sexual ethic

2013-06-12T07:02:26Z

Posted on 06/12/13

I was surprised by the headline when I saw it last month: “Florida Teen Faces Charges for Same-Sex Relationship.” As I read more about the case of Kaitlyn Hunt, I discovered that the headline was misleading. The charges themselves are not about the gender of the parties in the relationship but their age. Hunt, 18, was dating a 14-year-old girl and Florida state law says that individuals under 16 years of age are not able to give legal consent to a sexual relationship.

As I thought about this case, I connected it with an article in The Atlantic about sexual ethics in sadomasochistic pornography. Author Conor Friedersdorf argues that consent is the ultimate arbiter of sexual ethics. If someone willingly performs a sexual act, no matter how degrading or inhumane, this is to be celebrated as the ultimate end of sexual freedom.

These two stories drove me to contemplate the ethics of consent and sexuality. Is consent really the proper arbiter of sexual freedom? What role, if any, does consent play in a Christian sexual ethic? Can we as Christians formulate a notion of sexual freedom that transcends and supersedes the so-called freedom of consent as the final arbiter?

As we wrestle with these questions they quickly become complicated. At what age is one able to give consent? How do other factors (socio-economic status, power dynamics, life history) affect one’s ability or inability to provide true consent?

Despite the complications, a few things come to mind for me as important elements in the conversation.

First, we must be careful before we decide for someone what they do and do not desire sexually. As much as my first instinct may be to lament the degradation of the image of God (which the Atlantic article captures in a fashion that nearly caused me to weep), when I began to read through the comment feed I was amazed by the number of female contributors vehemently defending their right to be treated with degradation. While we may mourn this, my hope is that we can hear what lies beneath such comments: a deep-seated desire to experience the gift of sexuality to its fullest. While we may believe that such formulations of sexuality fall short of sexual freedom at its best, can we set aside our discomfort and our grief to hear the God-honoring desire for intimacy?

Second, despite its complications, consent is an important component of a sexual ethic. Non-consensual sex is always wrong. Consider the number of times a television show features a character who, after finding his initial sexual advances rebuffed, grabs hold of his love interest, pulls her forcefully to his chest and kisses her passionately until she melts into his arms. Without thinking about it, we are buying into a sexual ethic that says that if a male thinks a woman secretly wants him, he has the right to push himself upon her physically. I suspect that we in the church need to do a much better job standing for consent and against the subtle attitude of “she wanted it.”

Third, we need to create a culture that not only celebrates a God-honoring vision of sexual freedom, but also gives people space to express their questions and challenges in living it out. For a host of reasons we are hesitant to talk about sexual ethics from the pulpit or in small groups. Sometimes we fear crossing the line into voyeurism; other times we simply don’t know how to have age- and maturity-appropriate conversations about sex in the church. Despite this near silence, many of us are surprised when our teenagers and young adults are unable to formulate a positive, God-honoring vision of sexual freedom. What would it take to make our churches a safe place to wrestle with the honest questions of sexuality?

Finally, we need to discern and celebrate a holistic vision of sexuality that goes beyond simply limiting sex to marriage. What does a vision of God-honoring sexual freedom look like to the single college student? To the divorcee? To the recently widowed? To a 14- and 18-year-old girl? What would it look like to formulate this vision of God-honoring sexual freedom in a way that is less about lines in the sand of what is and is not allowed in certain types of relationships, but focused more on the way in which sex and sexuality help us relate to God and to one another?

I suspect that answering these questions is not simply a matter of quoting a Bible verse or two on sexual purity. Instead, it would take a vision of sexual freedom that goes beyond lists of dos and don’ts. It would take pastors encouraging married couples to have sex. It would take ears willing to listen to those who are struggling to understand God’s vision for sex. Ultimately, it would take a vision of sexual freedom founded upon the intimate love of Christ for His church, His bride.

More importantly, I suspect that such a vision of sexual freedom would actually be far more freeing than simply giving consent.

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The swarming witness of cicadas

2013-06-11T02:29:16Z

Posted on 06/10/13

In his book Letter to a Christian Nation, atheist Sam Harris points to the 350,000 known species of beetles and remarks: “The biologist J. B. S. Haldane is reported to have said that if there is a God, He has ‘an ordinate fondness for beetles.’ One would have hoped that an observation this devastating would have closed the book on creationism for all time.”

To the contrary, such evidence of a wanton imagination does not belie but bespeaks a Creator.

I have pondered this copious creativity over the past few weeks as the mid-Atlantic region where we live has been overtaken, not by the beetles Harris so disdains, but by their entomological kin, Brood II cicadas.

While cicadas are a regular part of the seasons here, this particular species comes around only once every 17 years. They make up in intensity what they lack in frequency. While some areas have seen fewer of these visitors than expected, our neck of the woods has experienced near-plague proportions. In fact, their presence has illustrated - in a way the Sunday School flannel graphs of my youth never could - just what the plagues described in the Old Testament might have been like.

The local and national media tried to prepare us. They warned of the “loud, piercing racket” that would come after billions of bugs emerged from the underground bunkers where they’d lived for 17 years in order to shed their husks, shake their wings and sing for a mate over the course of their last few weeks of life. But nothing can convey the bizarre experience of actually living with these creatures (although the stunning time-lapse video below comes close and is well worth the seven minutes it takes to watch it).

The day they arrived, I had returned home from my morning run, turned off my Pandora and taken out my earbuds only to hear a loud, high-pitched whine, like the sound of a belt slipping in a far-off vehicle. As the noise increased, I kept waiting for the vehicle with the squeaky belt to pass by, but it never did. Then I thought perhaps the farmer next door was having trouble with a hay baler. But when I finally noticed all the holes in the ground at the base of the trees and the noise approached deafening - more akin to a spaceship hovering overhead - I realized that “the greatest insect outbreak on earth” was upon us.

We have lived with this hum - carried by the breeze like waves surfing from tree canopy to tree canopy - for nearly a month now. It is said to be one of the loudest sounds in nature. Fascinated, we have walked into the woods in the vain search for what we were sure would be a swarm of millions. Amid the constant din rises up the occasional cry of the lone, anguished lover, like that of a distant cat - or child - in distress. I have pulled weeds out of the flower bed, only to be startled by a loud bleat of protest from within the stalks.

Japanese scientists have invaded our friends’ yard after traveling here just to study the creatures. Single bugs helicopter into me during my daily runs. We pluck them like berries off the rosebushes and feed them to gleeful chickens - not out of animus toward the invaders but for love of the hens. Indeed the red-eyed, golden-winged insects, bigger than my pinky, don’t sting or bite or damage crops. They only sing, copulate and leave their discarded, decaying bodies on the ground where they nourish the trees they so lately ascended.

Our forester friend says that every 17th ring in the trees hewn down in this region show an extra spurt of growth.

This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.

Return of the Cicadas from motionkicker on Vimeo.

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Why Green Lantern is just as ‘Christian’ as Superman

2013-06-09T07:11:43Z

Posted on 06/09/13

They found Krypton! Just in time, too, since we have the new Superman movie, Man of Steel, right around the corner.

Last year, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, working with DC Comics, found a spot in the universe that fits the general parameters for the location of Krypton, Superman's home planet. It would be hard to prove, seeing as how Krypton blew up decades ago. You could go there and check it out if you want, though. It's only 27.1 light years away.*

I read a lot of comic books when I was a kid. Superman, Batman, Archie, Richie Rich, Little Lotta, Wonder Woman, Justice League, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, Supergirl. If it was in a comic book in the ’60s and ’70s, I probably read it at one time or another.

Superman was fine, of course. After all, he has all those great powers: flying, x-ray vision, super strength and more. Yet my favorite superhero of them all was Green Lantern. Not Superman, not Batman, but Green Lantern. You see, he had something neither of those other heroes had: Green Lantern was a regular guy.

Superman came from another planet. No matter how hard I tried, I could never be a person who came from another planet. Batman had brains, a great physique and a vast family fortune at his disposal. Even if I were as smart and as strong as he (and I'm not), that family fortune thing was never going to happen to me.

Hal Jordan, on the other hand, was a regular guy when one of the interplanetary members of the Green Lantern Corps crash-landed on earth and with his dying breath passed on the secret of being a celestial crime fighter, peace keeper and superhero: the light of the Green Lantern itself. Hal took up the mantle, taking the Green Lantern oath that appeared in every comic:

In Darkest Day, in blackest night
No evil shall escape my sight
Let those who worship evil's might
Beware my power, Green Lantern's light!

I could never be from Superman's planet, I could never muster all the personal and family resources Batman had, but I could always hope someone would come from far away and give me super powers of my own. Does that sound so unlikely? I don't think so.

One of the big things I like about Green Lantern is his oath and its focus on light - especially the unreserved assurance that no evil can escape that light. It's almost Biblical.

How can a superhero comic book be like the Bible? Well, Superman is often pointed to as a Christ figure, and those comparisons will certainly be revived when Man of Steel opens on Friday. Yet Green Lantern is an equally compelling reflection of Christianity.

Consider that our heavenly Father is the Father of the heavenly lights and that there is nothing His light cannot shine on:

Woe to those who go to great depths
to hide their plans from the Lord,
who do their work in darkness and think,
“Who sees us? Who will know?” (Isaiah 29:15)

If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. (Psalm 139:11-12)

Here's how all this plays out in the light of Jesus: He came to us from a place much further removed than the Green Lantern Corps' home planet (Ephesians 4:9-10) and He came in order to makes us like Him (1 John 3:2), to seat us with Himself in the heavenly realms (Ephesians 2:6). And all of this comes to us as a gift (Ephesians 2:8-9), free of any charge (Isaiah 55:1-2).

Gift means gift, and free means free. It's no comic-book story, but it is super.

_{*1.59307345 × 10¹⁴ miles. That's really far.}

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Stockholm, Istanbul and the danger in the secular divide

2013-06-07T17:59:47Z

Posted on 06/07/13

Stockholm and now Istanbul have burned in recent days, and the stories of riots are starting to feel tragically familiar. Xenophobia, never far from reactionary European sentiments these days, is blamed. So is religious fundamentalism. But there is something more basic at work too, something that North Americans know is also our problem. The solidarity and pluralism that was once the hallmark of North American society is buckling and Stockholm, as many welfare-state pundits have long opined, may well be our not-so-bright looking future.

What is urgently needed, with newcomers and strangers aplenty, is not a doubling down on the secular divide, but an invocation to bridge it, an invocation to invite people of wildly, often unsettlingly strange beliefs to find faith in our common life.

The truth of this urgency is well known by people in immigration: the globe is awash with religious conviction, and its communities penetrate borders, provinces and homes. Newcomers are disproportionately religious and one of the best ways to integrate newcomers is to build community atop the pillars of pre-existing ones. That’s how my parents became Canadians, when after World War II Dutch Reformed families welcomed them into their churches, into their schools and into their homes. Their religion wasn’t a pitfall; it held the promise of cosmopolitan, civic-minded engagement.

And this was not an accident. These communities intentionally cultivated this cosmopolitan ethos - cautious, at times obsessive, with being too insular, too cut off, from the common cause, the common good. That burden is not unique to the post-war Dutch Reformed, but neither is it obvious or easily taken up. The examples, both at home and abroad, are growing by the day of people who have come not to take up this ethos, but instead who spin into ever more insular psychographic clusters, apathetic and sometimes downright antagonistic to what we call our common life.

Rule #6 of the new book God’s Century states that to survive in the new world of global religion we need to accept that the more religion is suppressed and excluded, the more such efforts will be self-defeating, sometimes violently so. It has been suggested that including religious voices in public debate creates a kind of “free market” and that the most powerful religious ideas will end up imposed. But this is to get the problem so badly wrong as to think that by merely allowing the expression of a thing we must legislate it. What we need is the articulation of an “overlapping consensus,” something like what Jacques Maritain described in the writing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: we all agree on these rights, provided nobody asks us why. Not because the why is unimportant (it is decisively important), but because only in cultivating, in our communities and our homes, those deeper reasons can we hope to achieve a consensus around their practical expression.

Last month, some of us gathered at McGill University in Montreal to start nudging that conversation. The organizers called the gathering “Bridging the Secular Divide;” their instinct was that when people’s basic beliefs are aired out in public, together, common values can emerge. But without that airing, real dangers can and will manifest. That, in fact, is when the logic of competition, of winners and losers, takes precedence over mutual resonance, over overlapping consensus.

These aren’t universalists back slapping each other for their un-ironic parallel conclusions. These are real people of faith, of diverse and plural traditions, people who will disagree about the deeper reasons, but who believe that only in speaking about those deeper reasons will the substance of consensus emerge. That is a project badly needed today, a divide that must be bridged.

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Is that Lord’s Prayer graduation speech a form of faithbombing?

2013-06-06T16:52:28Z

Posted on 06/06/13

You’re familiar with photobombing – when someone unexpectedly appears in a picture as it is being taken. Is faithbombing next?

In an American society where religion is increasingly being removed from the public square, one recent high-school graduate protested his district’s move toward banning prayer from school events by ripping up his approved graduation speech and launching into a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.

Jon Acuff wrote about a similar phenomenon a few years back at Stuff Christians Like. He called it the Jesus juke: when someone inserts a suddenly holy comment in an otherwise casual conversation. Acuff cited three ways such impositions of faith are problematic, and his third point seems especially applicable in the case of this graduation speech: “I’ve never met someone who was ‘juked to Jesus.’”

Similarly, I’ve often wondered whether evangelistic movies operate in the same way. (Previously on TC, I’ve compared Seven Days in Utopia with Higher Ground to explain why movie altar calls rarely work). Do such efforts reach anyone who doesn’t already agree? Are they effective calls to Christ or antagonistic rallying cries for those who currently believe?

When discussing evangelism, Christians often say we’re “sharing the Gospel.” To share, it seems to me, is to gently offer, yet I’m not sure that’s what’s happened here. I’m less concerned with the motivations of Roy Costner IV, the high-school graduate (goodness knows I wouldn’t have wanted my decisions at 18 to go viral). I am, however, troubled by those who fiercely applauded him at the ceremony and others who have been championing him online ever since. The implication is that this is some sort of victory, a notch in “our” belts. But when we frame evangelism as warfare, it means there will always be loss.

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Giving up on Game of Thrones

2013-06-06T08:43:20Z

Posted on 06/06/13

Can art be good if it’s inherently opposed to a Christian point of view?

This is a question I’ve been wrestling with while watching HBO’s Game of Thrones, which wraps up its season finale on Sunday. Although I had been a loyal viewer of the series, I've given up on the show in recent weeks.

Game of Thrones is based on a popular, ongoing series of fantasy novels written by George R. R. Martin. Set in the fictional land of Westeros, Game of Thrones is the Bizarro World iteration of The Lord of the Rings. Both are set in somewhat similar lands, full of kingdoms and dragons and deep mythologies, but where the hope of redemption is a central element of The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones traffics in the desolation of beauty, the impotence of goodness and the unlikely proposition of redemption.

In C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series there was a white witch who ruled as queen; during her reign it was always winter, never Christmas. This is an apt description of Westeros, where a years-long winter is prophesied to strike soon. The truth is, Westeros is always in winter: horrific violence and torture rub shoulders with pointless nudity and graphic sex. People do horrible things to each other and a watching world shrugs. Game of Thrones is nihilism set to an epic scale. This is made abundantly clear in the first season, when the man we thought was our hero dies a traitor’s death. We realize that in Westeros, the truly virtuous are actually naive.

Yet the show is in some ways a masterpiece. The writing is great. The characters have a surprising amount of depth, even though there are dozens of them. And it’s hard to not care for this miserable kingdom, full of horrible people but also of good people futilely trying to fight them.

Perhaps the most surprising facet of Game of Thrones is its ever-present spirituality and mysticism. The proud and power-hungry in the capital of King’s Landing dismiss the rumors they hear of gods and miracles and approaching evil as vague superstitions of uneducated peasants. But the spiritual forces in Westeros are deathly real. The fastest growing religion in Westeros is the worship of the “lord of light,” who so far has resurrected a man several times and each time taken pieces of his soul. This figure has also caused his priestess to give birth to a demon-child assassin (a moment somehow more terrifying than that sounds) and demanded the murder of hundreds of people. The gods are angry in Westeros and indiscriminate in their wrath.

The scholar/theologian N.T. Wright once described secularism as an attempt to pave over the human desires for the transcendent. However, he argued, we can still see the human thirst for spirituality bubbling underneath, cracking the concrete and about to erupt. I think about this often when reading books, watching movies and televisions shows or visiting a museum. Art is (sometimes unintentionally) a way to see the weak spots in the concrete, and to celebrate them.

I wonder if Martin and his adapters at HBO feel the weakening too. In Game of Thrones the power-hungry materialists fight and steal and kill while the lord of light’s shadow stretches over the land. If this is how Martin sees the spiritual world then he’s not wrong - there is an evil that prowls about our world, he does masquerade in light and he does deserve a lower case “lord.” Unfortunately, so far, that’s the final word in Westeros.

And that as much as anything is why I gave up watching. I don’t need my art to be full of fluff and optimism, but I do need it to have hope. And no hope is possible while Westeros’ “lord of light” is in charge.

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The God-honoring freedom of the bikini

2013-06-05T07:35:48Z

Posted on 06/05/13

After announcing that indeed she would need a new bathing suit (or two) this summer, my 9-year-old said, “But remember, unlike you, I hate two-pieces. No bikinis!”

And something like a stab ran through my heart. How could my own flesh and blood say such blasphemy against perhaps the greatest - if most misunderstood and misused - bit of clothing ever invented: the bikini?

Granted, I understand how she might not prefer bikinis. Certainly I get that a bikini is not as conducive to the swimming and chasing and jumping and underwater handstanding my daughter is known to do at the pool for hours every day.

But hate them?

Certainly I understand that my daughter is not the only one to feel this way. Come summer, I know lots of folks for whom the very word bikini brings on the shakes. They’re immodest, they say. Too sexualized for Christian women and girls.

And in some cases, I agree. A string bikini tied over a 2-year-old’s diaper borders on creepy. I get that the bikini top over open-buttoned denim shorts at Six Flags is ick. And no: bikinis do not have a place serving food in bars or prancing across beauty-contest stages. These are instead travesties, misuses and abuses of the bikini’s God-honoring purpose in life.

Stay with me.

Bikini historians believe Louis Réard named his invention after the Bikini islands, where atomic bombs were tested. Réard apparently (and rightly) guessed his invention could rattle the world off its foundations a la the atomic bomb. And I believe bikinis have. Though not for the reasons many think.

Obviously, the bikini has “blessed” beach-going male folk, but the bikini has also been a blessing to women, never more so than when worn by women of all body types and stripes.

Although some bikini historians claim that Réard didn’t invent the bikini, as evidence of bikinis exists from ancient Rome and Minoa, still the female figure has spent much of human history either shrouded away or pushed and pulled, wrapped and floofed, in an attempt to make our bodies behave and conform.

But this all changed with the bikini. With its invention, women were given freedom to be women, to let our actual female shapes be seen as they are - nearly. To hearken back to Eden, to a time when we could be naked and unashamed.

When we bound into waves or lie under the sun's hot rays or jump into blue depths in bikinis, we declare our bodies to be enough - just as they are. And whether our bodies are taught or flabby, whether they're prime or well past it, standing confidently in a bikini declares our God-crafted bodies as beautiful and good. And in turn, we proclaim other women’s bodies are also good.

When we can proclaim this - in this world that has so long sought to shame women and our bodies - we worship God with our physicality. Not only because it’s a physical expression of the vulnerability and humility and grace we’re called to share, but because when more of our skin tingles at the touch of the stinging salt or crisp chlorine or warms under the sun’s baking rays, our bodies glory in God’s creation in ways they normally don’t and historically could not.

So, really, the bikini is both worship and witness in one itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny package. Rattling the world as it both glories in God’s goodness and reveals it.

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Why Christian homeschoolers should welcome government oversight

2013-06-04T07:29:38Z

Posted on 06/04/13

Iowa's governor recently signed into law an education bill that alters how homeschooling is monitored in the state.

Under the former system, called Competent Private Instruction, parents who wish to homeschool their children had to choose one of several ways the child will be evaluated:

The child meets periodically (and is periodically evaluated by) a public-school teacher.

The child enrolls in an accredited correspondence school.

The child takes a standardized test at the end of each school year.

The child prepares a portfolio of work that is evaluated at the end of each year.

The goal here was to make sure that every child in Iowa receives an education, including those being homeschooled. The new law replaces CPI with Independent Private Instruction, which eliminates the year-end evaluations. According to the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, a homeschooling advocacy group, under IPI homeschooling families need to provide information on the instructor and enrolled student if the local superintendent requested it but "would not need to comply with CPI requirements for those children, such as annually submitting a CPI form and evaluation results." Is this a good idea?

State representative Matt Windschitl thinks so. "As I'm home-schooling my children," he said, "it is my duty and my job to raise them to the best of my ability. It's not the government's job to do that."

Many Christians would agree with him. Children are "a heritage from the Lord” and parents are commanded to bring them up well. Training a child is truly the parent's responsibility, and while this can often mean using the resources society makes available, like the expert teachers provided through the school system, ultimately it is up to the parents.

However, Christians are also responsible for more than just our families. When Jesus was asked who our neighbor is - who we are commended to love as ourselves - He responded with the parable of the Good Samaritan. When we see someone in distress, we have a God-given duty to help if we can. With homeschooling in particular, children can be especially vulnerable because they often don't interact with adults outside their families. On rare occasions this can lead to horrific abuse; more often, the parent will simply get overwhelmed or will lose focus and energy as time goes on, and the child's education might suffer. Homeschooling parents are, for the most part, very dedicated and invest significant time in designing curricula and teaching their children. (I know several such people.) But in any large group you will have some bad apples. Programs like the CPI can play an important role in making sure no child falls through the cracks - even homeschoolers.

Where is the balance for you? How do we respect homeschooling parents' rights to raise their children as they see fit with the need to look out for the vulnerable? At what point should education – all education – be a community affair?

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True empathy amidst awareness overload

2013-06-03T17:28:04Z

Posted on 06/03/13

I wonder if it's a uniquely modern problem that we seem to be always exposed to terrible things that are happening elsewhere in the world or the United States. This spring the bombing in Boston occurred within days of a fertilizer factory explosion in West, Tex. Only a month later, a larger-than-usual tornado killed many, including school children, in suburban Oklahoma City. I experienced each of these tragedies - alongside others like the factory collapse in Bangladesh - with various levels of personal connection and various levels of emotional and intellectual fixation. It seems these kinds of events come to the forefront more often and I wonder how it relates to our spiritual lives.

I suspect that the problems and benefits of feeling alongside tragedies elsewhere are at least as old as print, but they’ve intensified as we have invented better and more efficient ways to know about what is happening around the world. The always-on nature of 24-hour cable news and social media means we learn about these events before much information is available, and they have the potential to overwhelm our attention.

On the one hand, I'm loathe to critique this state of being, because it allows us to pray for those who are suffering, to weep with those who weep, even if they are not nearby. On the other hand, I wonder if the dramatic suffering of a few in the national news overshadows the quieter suffering of those nearby, who can benefit more directly from our companionship in their sorrow.

This New Yorker article by Paul Bloom on “the case against empathy” gets at that problem. While a nation will mourn together for the children lost in dramatic events like Newtown, we cannot generate the same empathy and generosity for children who are underfed or undereducated elsewhere in the United States.

For Christians, I think we should be concerned about our tendency to care about dramatic national tragedies over everyday tragedies around us. We also shouldn’t let the sharp contrast these events create for everyday troubles deceive us into believing our own problems and those of others near us don’t matter at all.

I was reminded of this reading Jess Zimmerman’s tech advice column, in which she responds to a reader who feels guilty about sharing their personal problems on Facebook when others are posting about large-scale tragedies. Zimmerman notes that we should not use social media for whining only, but that we should also not be afraid to ask our own friends and family for emotional support, even when our problems pale in comparison to the headlines. I agree. As Christians and friends of people who might need our support, perhaps we can find better ways to talk about relative hurts, so that we neither dismiss small(er) problems nor diminish large-scale tragedies.

How do we participate in a culture of national and even international mourning - and contribute when we can to disaster relief - while still also being present for others whose problems are smaller, or more ongoing or more hidden? I don’t want to propose that we ignore national and international tragedies, but I do worry that their drama and shock might desensitize us to other areas where our empathy - and action - are needed.

What do you think? How do you balance concern for those far away with concern for those nearby? How do you keep in mind those who need our prayers but don’t appear in the nightly news?

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