Month: January 2015

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Some say that human beings need to take part in some heroic and genuinely dangerous quest to give their lives any true meaning in the end. Today the unconscious longing for such a mission is probably most obviously manifested in our popular entertainment, often in motion pictures like the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the eight films of the Star Wars series, or the three movies derived from the Chronicles of Narnia. In all these films a group of flawed protagonist’s band together on a quest to see ultimate good win out over ultimate evil. As we watch these Hollywood epics we often feel caught up in a sort of primal calling to involve ourselves in some similar but real journey. We feel the obligation to sacrifice our private interests for some greater communal good, and we actually desire it. We desire to play a significant part in a profound moral adventure.

It is, I submit, no co-incidence that two of the originators of the films mentioned, J.R.R.Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, were Catholic and Protestant Christians respectively. As for the creator of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, George Lucas has admitted that his own personal spiritual journey was the driving force behind his making of the Star Wars pictures. You see, epic quests require the presence of moral conflict and moral conflict requires something larger than Post-Modern Existential meaninglessness. If there is no such thing as right and wrong, then there is nothing to capture the human heart’s longings for ultimate meaning, and nothing to spur us on to pursue the risks involved in “saving the world.” This is true whether we are talking about the world of Middle Earth, Narnia, the Republic of Coruscant or, more importantly, the world outside the theater door.

The Kingdom of Self which dominates Western Civilization today kills the noblest impulses of a race made in the image of God, a race that is the crown of His creation and one that is also, according to the Judeo-Christian narrative, being fought over in a universal battle between real good and real evil. So much of what passes for culture today deadens our sense of being caught up in a battle worth fighting, a battle that “quest movies” point to through the cinematic use of compelling allegories. These celluloid flights of imagination wrest our hearts from slumber and inspire us to desire to sacrifice for a greater good than our own interests, if only for the 120 minutes we sit in the theater.

So, yes, we need films like these to help open our eyes to the fact that in “real life” we are serving either good or evil, life or death, God or the Devil. But beyond that we also must become willing to embrace our own very real and personal role in the actual ongoing cosmic battle, a non-cinematic conflict in which the price of cowardice and self-centeredness is our very souls.

by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

Contemporary Christians are fond of saying they “do not have a religion, but a relationship”. By this they primarily mean that real Christianity is not about human beings reaching up to God through ritual and effort, but rather about God reaching down to human beings in a relational way through his incarnation in Jesus Christ. There is, however a secondary meaning implicit in the statement. 21st Century Christians know that recent generations of Westerners have become somewhat anti-historical. Those born in the post-World War II era have been shaped by a society that has consciously or unconsciously thrown off hundreds of years of acculturated tradition in all areas of life. We are a people shaped by technological and cultural change unprecedented in human history. We are also greatly influenced by the “Throw-Away Culture” enabled by our similarly unprecedented mass affluence.

The result is a civilization addicted to the new and novel. This has tended to be accompanied by a rejection of things that come across as too tied to the perceived formality of the generations that existed prior to the present age. To them one of the most un-novel and formalized institutions of the older generations in question is the institutional Christian church.

When compared to other Christian faith traditions Evangelicals, by nature, tend to be innovators. Our spiritual ancestors, after all, include the Reformers of Western Europe and, in the case of U.S. Evangelicals, the founders of the numerous breakaway churches and religious movements that characterized the American nation’s early history. For this reason we, perhaps more than the members of any other present-day strand of world Christianity, tend to be sympathetic to the idea of “progressive innovation”, at least in regard to forms of worship.

Because of this sympathy Evangelicals today are in the forefront of the effort to make the church “relevant” to secular people who we feel cannot relate to the musical, liturgical and architectural modalities of other church traditions that pre-date the Modern and Post-Modern eras. Vast numbers of Evangelical churches have embraced everything from rock music to casual dress to cutting-edge technology in theatrically-inspired buildings in an attempt to come across as hip, contemporary and, perhaps most of all, comfortably “21st Century”. Millennia-old ritual is often out, MacDonald’s in the lobbies of Mega-Churches is in.

This brings us back to the expression I opened this piece with. “Relationship” is a far more contemporary sounding word than “religion” and that is one of the reasons contemporary Evangelicals like the “not a religion, but a relationship” catchphrase so much. To some degree we like it in just the same way we like our “non-churchy” churches. It is a statement about the evangelical impulse to meet people where they are in an attempt to bring them into our faith, in short to be culturally relevant.

So if you happen to be invited to one of our worship services and find yourself in what seems like a high-tech rock concert rather than St. Patrick’s Cathedral, with people dressed in T-shirts and jeans rather than suits, you will at least have some idea what the specific socio-cultural influences were that made it that way.

But I must confess my personal prayer is that the God we endeavor to introduce you to there will leave a far more lasting impression on your heart than the technology, music and casual dress does, because when it comes to matters of the Spirit the message still matters infinitely more than the medium.

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

If you know anything about Evangelical Christians you probably know that we are big on the Bible. In fact here in America we have even been called “Bible-Thumpers” as in “thumping” people over the head with the book in question. More sophisticated critics sometimes refer to us as “Biblicists” in the same way they refer to radical Muslims as “Islamists”, to differentiate between what they consider normally religious people and fanatics. Evangelicals, they say, are obsessed with Scripture and thus “Biblicists”; unlike other people who might wear a cross around their neck and attend a building with a cross on it from time to time, but thankfully don’t try to convert anyone. Many Secularists call such cross-wearers “Christians” and tolerate them because they aren’t very offensive to anyone.

(I do not mind being referred to as a Biblicist personally, if what you mean by that is that I take its truth claims seriously On the other hand if you are using the term pejoratively towards me; well, since my faith tells me to turn the other cheek I’ll try to do that.)

The fact is that the Bible, particularly the New Testament, is the only place people who sincerely want to be followers of Jesus Christ can find his story, his words and the words of those he appointed to introduce the faith to the world nearly two-thousand years ago. It is also the only place they can read the words, spoken through the prophets of the Old Testament, of the Being who Jesus himself referred to as his Father. The Bible and Christianity are thus really inseparable. Christian denominations that have disregarded scripture in an attempt to be more “progressive” and “culturally relevant” have, in a sense, cut off the very limb they once stood on. Perhaps this is why such denominations have, of late, been losing their adherents at an alarming rate. A watered-down, Bible-less, Christianity is somewhat of an oxymoron and just isn’t that compelling in the long run. Biblical Christianity is booming in many parts of the world. Maybe it is because people want the real thing or nothing at all.

Of course many Secularists think the Bible is a bad influence on people, what with its exclusivist claims and its tendency to call a spade a spade when it comes to human nature. Those who either do not believe in the existence of God or who would prefer to think of God as an amorphous sort of being who would never ask anything of the human race do not like this book. They find it offensive.

The bottom line is that it is offensive. It tells of a good God who has been betrayed by a race He created in perfect love and who decided to the use the free will He also gave them in love to spit in his face. It goes on to say that this loving God is also a holy God who cannot forever abide this unjustified rebellion and will someday rightfully judge every human being who ever walked the Earth.

So the Bible is offensive, at least to a race of self-centered rebels who do not want to admit their creator’s absolute claim over their lives. In fact many people would just assume the book and those who believe in it go away. The problem is that neither is going to happen anytime soon because the God of the Bible illuminates the way back to him in that Bible, through his Son, and some of us have caught on to the fact that this is a very good thing (in fact the greatest thing that has ever happened to us.)

Of course rather than hate us, and the book we so firmly hold to, it might behoove some of you who are reading these words to ask yourselves if maybe we aren’t onto something. At the very least you might want to pick up a copy of it and get a better idea of why we hold it in such high esteem and, who knows, you might even meet its ultimate Author in the process.