Year: 2014

Copyright 2014 by Shea Oakley

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One of the arguments used to attempt to discredit biblical Christianity by its increasingly strident secular critics in the West today revolves around the idea that the Bible is inaccurate in its description of the world and its origins. The “New Atheists” of the 21st century are aggressive in their assertions that Scripture is not compatible with the scientific discoveries of the modern age.

Much has been written about this controversy on the Christian side, many by believers far more scientifically literate than I, and this piece will not primarily be an attempt to harmonize biblical accounts of nature and its beginnings with contemporary scientific theory. The bigger question for me is how we have come to a point in human history in which science, with its intrinsically changeable understanding of reality, has come to trump religious understanding of our existence in the popular mind. Today a majority of people in the “First World” seem to have accepted, almost unconsciously, the idea of looking primarily to science as the arbiter of ultimate truth. It strikes me as ironic that this continues to be the “default position” of the average non-religious or nominally religious person when we consider how many questions once considered permanently settled by science have turned out to be anything but.

Any scientist, at least any without a Secularist axe to grind, will admit that there have been necessary changes in thinking in various scientific disciplines ranging from Cosmology to Physics in recent decades, in some cases seismic changes. This is the inevitable result of new discoveries that have sometimes unexpectedly created questions about accepted thinking. Even something as revered as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity has not gone unchallenged by a new generation of Physicists. In fact in some scientific circles debate has become more than a little heated in recent years (including the area of Evolutionary Biology where assumptions accepted as “gospel” not long ago are increasingly under attack by contrarian Biologists who are anything but Intelligent Design advocates.) Yet, despite the discomforting fact that things thought settled in the canons of science can no longer be considered settled, scientific laypersons in the wider culture continue to rely on science as the only reliable arbiter of reality.

This begs the question of why at least those who do not have an agenda to reject religion wholesale aren’t re-evaluating their unthinking acceptance of the shakier dogmas of science. The answer, I think, can be found in the power that Secularists now wield in two places, academia and the media.

Educational indoctrination into the Naturalist worldview now begins in the earliest years of public education in the Western world and continues unabated through the college and post-graduate period in secular universities. The promotion of this worldview, most obviously seen in the canonization of Darwinian thought in the Biological Sciences, is now so ingrained as to be accepted almost without question by the vast majority of educated people. Meanwhile mass media continues to be suffused with messages that take the absolute reliability of “scientific laws” as a matter of course. This is particularly true in broadcast and print media which are more monolithically controlled, as far as content, than that which comes to us through the internet.

Many of us spend at least 12 years in school. Most of us spend our entire lives watching countless hours of television. It then becomes apparent why the prevailing Secularism, with its attendant near-worship of science, has control of the popular mind. Through academia and the media we are simply steeped in a pro-science, and often anti-biblical, way of thinking. The human mind is like a sponge, so why would this state of affairs come as any surprise?

When we add to this the tendency of a self-centered race to avoid the possibility that it is morally responsible to a higher power; it becomes all too clear why human beings have a vested interest in trusting in science over theology. Science generally does not call us to account for our individual moral lapses; both the Bible, and the God who inspired it, does. Science is, of course, not evil in and of itself nor is it usually inaccurate. It has much to tell us about the natural world that is useful, particularly when we apply that knowledge in useful forms of technology, but because of its malleable nature it is not a reliable guide for our existence. The fact that it continues to be used as such a guide in the modern world says less about science than it does about the wishful thinking of the fallen human heart.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
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Even during this yuletide season I’m not sure that we who call ourselves followers of Christ often give much thought to the supreme miracle that we are about to celebrate, the miracle that exists at the very center of our faith. The advent on earth of the universal God in human form is a mystery both unfathomable and blessed. We are all far the less if we do not take time at this season, or at any time of the year for that matter, to ponder the sublime reality of God becoming a man.

No other religion in the world puts forth the idea of a Supreme Being so willing to identify with His deeply fallen human creation as to literally become one of them. That He would do so out of love, because only such an “incarnation” would make possible our rescue from spiritual death, can become for us an incredibly sweet and compelling truth if we but ponder it for a while. It is mind-boggling, yes, but even though we cannot completely comprehend the full glory of our Lord becoming incarnate we can apprehend it in such a way as to open a door to one of the greatest and most transcendent blessings that we can know in our Christian walk.

Just think about it. We belong to a God who so loved us as to become one of us to make that “belonging” possible. What indescribable condescension must that have entailed for One who is infinite, eternal and uncaused Being? I once wrote that it is somewhat akin to a man becoming a flea to save a world of fleas, but that barely begins to cover the magnitude of the descent we now consider. It is truly the miracle of all ages.

But do not just use your intellect in your endeavor to experience the truth of the earthly advent of the Lord Jesus Christ, use your heart as well for this is also nothing if not an affair of the heart. How can our hearts not love Immanuel, “God with us”? Christmas testifies to the beginning of a new and profound opportunity for human intimacy with God, an intimacy with God as man. How can we remain unmoved by a Holy God, One “Wholly Other” as one German theologian once described his innate separation from us, becoming us? The mere fact of the Son of God becoming also the Son of Man is enough, in my opinion, to make Christianity the most compelling belief system on the planet. No one has a God like ours, no one, and it is Jesus, the God-Man who makes this so.

Perhaps the only thing more compelling than the Advent itself is the reality that the God who arrived on earth as one fully human over two-thousand years ago then proceeded to go to the cross and defeat death for what were now His fellow human beings as well as His creation. Contemplate that. He made us but, because of Christmas, he also died for us, as one of us.

But then that is a story for another Holy Day, a few months from now.

Copyright by Shea Oakley.
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There has probably never been a time or place in human history when and where it has been so easy to ignore questions of eternal existence as it is now in the West. Today we have so many temporal diversions offering every kind of false transcendence that literally millions have spent little or no time pondering the ramifications of what happens a moment after they die. We are diverted from such thoughts by the busyness of our Post-Modern lives, by obsessions with sex, money and power, by a mass-media that vies for our constant attention and by beguiling technology that eats up the leisure time we might otherwise spend on deep thought and meditation.

It was not always so.

For the majority of history most human beings knew lives that were tenuous at best and most often short by our standards. Mortality and want went hand in hand and death was not something easily pushed out of the mind by convenient distractions. It is really only during the past century that material and technological progress has created a so-called “First-World” in which so many live to an advanced age in comfort unknown to their ancestors. The very nature of life in past era’s put the stark fact of death before everyone’s eyes and people faced with death on a day to day basis have a much stronger tendency to wonder if their might be a better world coming or, for that matter, a worse one.

Of course religion had a far greater hold on people’s attention throughout those centuries, perhaps another result of their being more aware during those times of the temporary nature of life in this world. Beyond that the Judeo-Christian tradition dominant in the West taught that the God of the Universe had created humankind in His image and that part of that image included perpetual existence. This tradition also taught the concept that our actions and affiliations here on Earth during the time we were here would determine the kind of existence that would be.

Most theologically conservative Judeo-Christians, of course, still teach this concept today, but it seems that the popular mind isn’t too terribly interested in it. We are far too busy being entertained, pleasured and otherwise distracted and the idea that there might be a place called Heaven and a place called Hell, and that we might end up in one or the other forever, is just too much to think about.

(Of course we may not feel that way the day we get the bad report from the doctor or, worse, the moment the sudden fatal heart attack eliminates our ability to consider and perhaps change our final destiny.)

So no one likes to think about death and, today, fewer and fewer people in our part of the world consciously do. But now, as always, the wise still learn to number their limited days on this planet and they also do well in seeking the One who holds the potentially endless days beyond this life in the palm of His hands.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
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We live in an increasingly workaholic world today. With the triumph of free-market Capitalism on a largely global scale the material bounty available for human use has never been greater and neither has the frenzy of billions of people to gain access to it. In the United States alone worker productivity has greatly increased since the 1970’s. While a substantial proportion of that increase has come about through instrumentalities like the Internet some of it can be attributed to a workforce that is putting in more hours on the job than at any time since the end of the Second World War. With the advent of the 50-60 hour week an entire population of the “upwardly mobile” is spending a greater proportion of life at work than anywhere else.

For some the motivation for such drudgery comes from a more vital issue: simple economic survival. As general consumer inflation continues to rise, along with fuel and food prices, on a global scale more and more men and women are working long hours simply to put food on the table for themselves and their families. They are not so much driven by materialism as by simple necessity.

Whatever the reason for the decrease in leisure time, the bottom line is that a sizable number of people are living in a perpetual state of near-exhaustion. We work, it seems, for everything we have and we are tired. It is in this grim reality of a world of human worker bees that true Christianity once again offers a viable alternative that weary Secularists might want to consider.

The core of the Christian message is that we are saved from our present, problematic human condition by grace, the unmerited, and unearned, love of the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe. The Bible tells us that we can be given new life through grace, by faith, and not by works “so that no one can boast”. What this means, among other things, is that our existence does not need to be defined by self-effort in an ultimately futile attempt to earn the peace and wholeness that we instinctively, if sometimes unconsciously, crave.

When Christ told his listeners to come to him so that he might give them rest he was speaking to a generation living in an era when, like today, people were working long hours just to keep their heads above water. He was also presumably speaking to at least some who had more than others and were working for whatever riches the ancient world had to offer.

Those who receive Christ as Lord and Savior receive two great antidotes to 21st century workaholism. The first is the assurance that the God who provides for every living thing on earth will provide for their true material needs, even if they do not put in a twelve hour a day at the office. The second and infinitely greater gift is the knowledge that the existential security of their souls has been secured for both this life and the next. They no longer have to work for acceptance from the only One who really matters, the Being who gave them their existence and all that is truly good in their lives. Once this happens endless work is no longer the defining criteria of their reality, endless love and life are.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
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The search for meaning is the pre-occupation of the human race. We have an innate sense that there is some sort of “ultimate reality”, something that makes sense out of our existence. We consciously or unconsciously spend our entire lives trying to find an answer in the universe, a definition of who we are and why things are the way they are. It does not matter whether we are rich or poor, intelligent or simple, young or old; most if not all of us have a need to find out the meaning of our lives.

In our Post-Modernist age many of the old and not so old assumptions about where to look for this have been rejected. Post-Modern searchers, whether they know they are Post-Modern or not, tends to doubt reason, science, history, philosophy and theology as places to find absolute truth. This is the legacy of an age that is self-consciously multi-cultural and hyper-tolerant; in short, open to any and every kind of belief system or lifestyle as being equally valid. We have become a people who reject any creed that claims to be overarching and normative for all people at all times (what has come to be called a “meta-narrative”).

Today reality is, we say, what we make of it.

Inventing your own meaning for your life has a wonderful ring to it for those of us who live in the West. We have, after all, elevated individualism to the status of an undeclared civil religion. The idea that we are all masters of our destinies and captains of our souls, as the thoroughly Post-Modern poem Invictus tells us, is powerfully intoxicating to the citizen of the 21st Century West. We don’t trust anyone else to define us and human ego does its best to make sure that we do not want to get over that distrust.

But therein lays the rub. Something deep within us incessantly whispers that something is missing from our self-directed lives. We think our “freedom to be” is enough to ensure we find our bliss, but our deepest hearts tell us something else. The most self-actualized person on the planet cannot answer the fundamental question of “who am I?” and “why are things the way they are?”

This is because the answers to these questions lie beyond us. We have an existential itch we can’t scratch and the only One who can scratch it has been pushed out of our consciousness by a fashionable ego-centrism that we have been duped into thinking is good for us. Someone else must provide the meaning we cannot stop seeking, someone outside of ourselves and infinitely bigger; someone who is the Embodiment of true meaning.

Life is an absolutely unsolvable puzzle without knowing the One, who dwells outside our personal “reality”. Only He is the solver of all puzzles, the final answer to all questions, and He has a name. Without Him we will never know why we exist and what our ultimate destiny will be; and the answer to those questions are the only ones that really matter in the end.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
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A faulty perception pertaining to Christianity remains present in the West today. Many believe that the faith founded by Jesus Christ is first and foremost a white, European religion. While there might have been a time in history when this idea held some weight it was not true at the beginning of Christianity and it is certainly not true now.

Christ himself was, of course, a Middle Eastern Jew and the very first converts to what was then called “The Way” were either Middle Eastern Jews or Middle Eastern Gentiles. Because of the later development of Roman Catholicism many laypersons think of the center of the faith as Rome, but the city in which Christianity was founded and initially grew two millennia ago was Jerusalem, hardly a European town. It is true that Europe was one of the first areas outside of Israel to be exposed to the Gospel but early missionary journeys also embraced West Asia and North Africa. In fact the church flourished in these locales during the first few hundred years of its existence.

It is  also true that in the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Islam, and prior to the age of European exploration, the majority of adherents to the Christian faith were in Europe. It was during this period that white Europeans, for better or worse,  did dominate the church. But even then pockets of Christianity existed elsewhere in the world.

Today “elsewhere” is becoming the epicenter of the faith. The last half century has actually seen massive conversion growth on every continent except Europe and North America. The center of Christian gravity has shifted to what has become known as the “Global South” as hundreds of millions of people in Africa, Asia and South America have embraced the Gospel, often with the help of indigenous, not foreign, missionaries. Today the leaders of the largest segment of the Church are every color but white. In fact, of all the continents, Europe is the least religious in a general sense and particularly in regards to Christianity (judging by church attendance). The old designation of the Christian faith as “the white man’s religion”, if it were ever true, is simply no longer accurate in the 21st Century.

The idea that Christianity is racially and geographically bound to Western Europe has been a handy weapon in the hands of those who try to tie it to the darker side of that continent’s history. Those who believe that most of the world’s problems stem from some kind of “oppression gene” native to Europeans often attempt to link that supposed gene to what is perceived to be the white man’s religion. Unfortunately for them the facts simply do not support the thesis. Christianity now, more than ever, is a truly global religion and must be reckoned with as such.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
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A common criticism of biblically-faithful Christianity is that it is an inherently arrogant belief system. The core of this arrogance is believed to be the claim that the only way to God is through faith in Jesus Christ. It is no doubt true that in our Post-Modern, multi-culturalist world it seems the height of conceit to suggest that every other religion and philosophy has it wrong and Christianity has it right. From a purely human perspective, then, Christians do seem to be narrow-minded and narrow-mindedness has become perhaps the cardinal sin of a culture that sometimes stridently champions tolerance and choice as the true way to happiness.

I would even go so far as to agree with those who decry Christianity for its exclusive truth-claim, except for one thing: what if it is the truth? The claim that Christ is the only way truly is the height of arrogance, but only as long as we can be absolutely certain that this foundational tenet of Christian belief is wrong. If it isn’t wrong then arrogance has nothing to do with it. If the reality is that Jesus was, as he claimed, the Son of the only living God then we must grapple with what he said about himself and what Jesus of Nazareth said was clear: “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life and no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

If this claim represents reality then arrogance has nothing to do with those who hold to it. If this is reality then Christians who repeatedly attempt to tell those they know and love about this one way are acting not out of arrogance but out of the deepest possible concern for the souls of men and women.

The implication of Jesus being the only way to God is that any other road we are on apart from him is leading us to an eternity of separation from the source of every truly good thing we have ever known. I won’t get too much into the theology of Hell here except to say that the idea of cutting yourself off from the author and embodiment of love is a pretty good starting point for understanding the horror that Hell embodies. You simply do not want to end up in a place bereft of love.

In the light of this belief those annoying, seemingly arrogant Christians who are telling you things you do not want to hear might come to be seen in a different light. I cannot help but think of Holden Caulfield’s character in the seminal 20th Century novel “The Catcher in the Rye”. Holden sees his preferred destiny as being one who hides in the bushes near a sheer cliff and waits to jump out and catch lost children before they unknowingly walk off that cliff to their deaths. An Evangelical Christian is in many ways the embodiment of this character. We see the cliff and we see those we care about walking towards that cliff and we yell “STOP!” We don’t do this, God forbid, out of arrogance; we do it out of love, the same love that Jesus Christ showed us when He enabled us to see that he was ultimately the only way to avoid that eternally deadly fall.

Of course all of this is pure rot if Jesus isn’t who he claimed to be. But I, for one, would want to be very sure that it was rot before I rejected it out of hand, as is the custom of so many people today.

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Some people are not so much turned off by Christianity as intimidated by it. They know enough about the life of Jesus and the lives of those who sincerely love and follow him to know that the religion he founded involves great personal sacrifice. This is summed up in the idea that as Christ laid down his life for us we should be willing to lay down our own lives for others. For human beings who have an intrinsic and overriding tendency towards self-protection as well as self-aggrandizement, and that includes all of us, this idea does not come across as particularly attractive. We know, somewhere in our hearts, that to love others is a wonderful thing, but the suggestion that we do this to a degree that puts our own self-perceived wellbeing at risk seems impossible.

The hard fact of the matter is that it is impossible, at least in and of ourselves. When Christ asks his followers to do things like love their enemies, as he does on the Sermon on the Mount, he is asking human beings to do the naturally impossible. It does us no good to look at what Jesus asked us to do and then try to do it in our own strength. You might as well ask something to fall up instead of down.

The problem is that many who know just enough of the tenets of this belief system to know that radical self-sacrifice is innate to it have missed another equally important truth of the Christian proposition. The reason Christians can love in a way that goes beyond what is possible for others is because they have been on the receiving end of the inexhaustible love of God in Christ. It is this supernatural love which so changes and fills the human heart that those who are given it not only can, but truly want to lay down their lives for others. What is finite cannot conceive of emptying itself for the sake of another unless, and only unless, it has been filled with the infinite. We are profoundly finite apart from the vital connection with God that comes through faith in the Son of God, but once that connection is there we become partakers of a love so abundant and pure that the intense blessing inherent in receiving it actually makes us want to give it away.

What is humanly impossible ceases to be humanly impossible once the love of God is present and the love of God becomes present in everyone who truly receives Jesus Christ. It is in the sure and certain knowledge that we have tapped into this affection, and will never lose it, that we become able to love as we are commanded to in the pages of the New Testament. Self-sacrifice no longer seems like such a sacrifice when we know that whatever we give up for the sake of another is more than equaled by the unspeakable blessing of being in an eternal love relationship with the one who both created and redeemed us.

This is why we need not feel intimidated by what he requests of his children. His incredible love for us, in and of itself, makes what Jesus asks not only possible but deeply desirable as well. In relationship with the God of Christianity self-sacrifice actually becomes synonymous with joy.

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

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We live in an age in which the entire concept of personal responsibility has become suspect in the popular mind. This is especially true in the West where secular psychology has encouraged the idea that we are victims of anyone and everyone but ourselves. While psychology is not necessarily evil in and of itself what is evil is the tendency to use its legitimate observations on the effects of abuse as an excuse for moral license. This has led to a “Pop Psychology” that reacts to individual misconduct as something perhaps justifiable because the person involved in the misconduct was mistreated by someone earlier in life.

Of course this kind of assignment of blame for our wrongs to someone else is nothing new. Human beings have been blaming each other for the entirety of human history. It always appears far easier to put the onus for my bad behavior on someone else. What has changed is that our society is far more open to endorsing that kind of responsibility-shifting. It has been said that in contemporary Western culture “sin has gone mainstream”, but that only covers one aspect of the change in the ethical landscape. Beyond that behavior which is still considered morally repugnant is increasingly being excused by resorting to the proposition that someone else’s abuse of the perpetrator made it almost impossible for him or her not to do the perpetrating.

The problem is that by not holding people responsible for their actions we are weakening, perhaps fatally weakening, the ability for a civil society to continue. Two principles must be adhered to for a civilization to avoid self-destruction. The first is belief in a transcendent morality that is universal and applies to every person. The other is a corporate willingness to punish violation of that morality for the common good; to set an example for those who might otherwise reject it. When a people discard these principles the historical result is moral anarchy and the breakdown of civilization.

Of course there has to be an ultimate arbiter of the transcendent morality we speak of. In Judeo-Christian culture that Arbiter has been the God of the Bible. As we move towards what appears to be a “Post Judeo-Christian” culture it behooves us to ask a question vital to the survival of our society. That question is this: who or what do we expect to replace that God? Who or what do we expect to become the ultimate referential authority required to ensure that the rule of law, as it relates to personal responsibility, is enforced? The answer to that question will determine whether Western Civilization survives.

As a believer in the aforementioned God, and someone who is personally familiar with the pervasive influence and ultimately disastrous effects of blame-shifting, I hope the replacement we come up with isn’t the god of Pop Psychology.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

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What is the most compelling attraction of Biblical Christianity? For me it is simply this: the thought of a God who so loves us that He is willing to become one of us. Such an unfathomably condescending God, for me, is the only one worth knowing and loving above anything else in my life.

Christians believe that Jesus is neither God alone, nor man alone but someone who is both fully God and fully Man. Nothing in the scriptural description of Christ takes away from either His divinity or His humanity. Jesus performed miracles only someone with ultimate power over nature, in short, God, could perform. This same Jesus also was born and grew, ate and drank, worked and loved, lost and suffered, and finally died as one of us. The only difference between His essential humanity and ours is that he never did anything wrong. In that singular fact, His innocence from evil, is perhaps the greatest evidence that He was, and is, also God but a God who willed to become like us in every other way.

I find such a God to be incredibly compelling. If He was willing to become like me then I can relate to Him as something other than what one theologian called the “totally other”, a being so distant from His creation as to be alien to it. Such a distant God is found in the other two monotheistic world religions, but not in Christianity. You may level any number of accusations against this faith, but calling its God remote and uninvolved with human beings is one that is ultimately untenable. It is untenable because Christians worship a God who became a human being, admittedly one unique in all the history of our race, but still a human being.

Think about such a God. Any being rating the Name is, by definition, infinite, eternal and all-powerful and yet this Divinity so wanted to be known by us that He reduced Himself to taking on our form and living among us. It is as if we so cared for the fellowship of ants that we somehow made ourselves an ant and joined the colony.

I don’t know about you but because of this willingness on His part to so identify with me as to become like me, this God is the only One who touches my deepest heart. The God of Jesus Christ, who also is Jesus Christ, is not someone I can ignore, nor do I want to because He was willing to draw close to me to enable me to desire to draw close to Him. This is one of the most profound reasons, though certainly not the only one, why I have come to believe that He loves me and why I love Him, however imperfectly, in return.