November 2014 – sheaoakley.com

November 26, 2014 No Comments

Hope for the Exhausted

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.

November 19, 2014 No Comments

The Existential Itch We Can’t Scratch

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.

November 13, 2014shea No Comments

A White Man’s Religion?

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.

November 6, 2014 No Comments

Arrogance or Truth?

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.