Month: March 2018

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Many Christians have written of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The number of words devoted to this event is likely only surpassed by the many accounts of His death. In a sense this seems unfortunate. It is not that His Passion is to be trivialized. The story of the cross is the story of the ages and it is certainly true that without Good Friday there would be no Easter. But for all its meaning the physical death of Christ was not as singular an event as His triumph over that death. All men die. Only one has returned to life…so far

In some sense it is futile to try to capture the full meaning of the Resurrection in words. No matter how much is written on the subject human beings will always fall short in trying to adequately communicate its implications. What happened outside of Jerusalem in a rich man’s tomb on that long ago morning in some sense defies description. Yet we who find our best expression of devotion in writing continue to try.

So many words come to mind when a believing heart considers Easter morning; strong words like victory, triumph and glory, softer ones like hope, joy and restoration. We find ourselves thinking about a frightened, deeply depressed band of disciples suddenly being delivered from despair by the One who was delivered from death. Their experience reminds us of the moments when we, too, have been rescued from the same kind of hopelessness by the Spirit given us by Jesus after He went to be with His Father…and ours.

We are also reminded of the hope of our own resurrection some day. The Easter story is one that tells us not only of a happening from the past but also one yet to come. The raising of Christ guarantees the raising of His followers when God brings down the curtain on the history of the world as we now know it. Easter is, in this sense, the ultimate prophetic event. For those who dwell in a world still fallen it generates a hope so blessed that it, too, is beyond the expressive power of words. This is the hope that flows with the contemplation of the stone being rolled away someday from our own empty tombs. It is what enables the Christian to go through the deepest of waters and come out on the other shore.

Perhaps it is in starting with the word “hope” that we best find a place to honor Easter to the extent it can be done so in writing. Christians are people of hope. Our Savior has been called “The Blessed Hope” and we who know Him rejoice in the ultimate reality of the phrase. It is at this time of year we are reminded of its meaning. Resurrection Day, and all it implies, speaks to us of why we are who we are and why we follow the One we follow.

The truth is that, whether it is in one word or ten thousand, we are always just scratching the surface when we write about the events of that morning. It was too great to be captured by our faculties, too wonderful to be grasped by the finite efforts of men. What happened was for us, but fully describing it remains beyond us.

Copyright 2018 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

The God who created the Universe is a determining Being with a determinate character. It is from this fixed, eternal, and perfect character that He decides what is and what is not, what will be and what will never be, the existence or non-existence of all things everywhere. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, there is not a single inch of the universe, and all that may lie beyond it, for which Jesus Christ cannot and does not, with utter authority and finality declare, “Mine.”

However your theology deals with the issue of determinism versus free will one thing is certain; the God of the Bible cannot, by virtue of His very nature, be called anything but ultimately sovereign over all there was, is, and ever will be in time. He is also, by that same nature, Master of all eternity, for He is the only truly infinite and eternal Being.

So how, you may ask, could free will ever exist if this is true? I would argue that either free will only appears to be free will (the Calvinist view) or God, in his sovereignty, also has the sovereign power to limit that sovereignty in some secondary way. By this I mean that, while He never gives up ultimate control over all things, He is able to choose to limit that control enough to create conscious beings who can decide to either do His will or rebel against it. If true this is something that God allows, but with a determinate purpose with a specific outcome in mind. What have been called His “active will” and His “passive will” both will lead, in a way that the fallen human mind will never be able to completely understand, to his purposes being achieved in the end.

Based on the brevity of my description of the Calvinist view as opposed to the one that allows for a kind of restricted, but actual free will, you might deduce that I am Arminian in my own theology. I would not go that far. There are elements of paradox (the ability of two seemingly opposite propositions to both be true simultaneously) in the idea of an absolute Ruler of all things who chooses sometimes to self-limit that absolute rule. In my opinion paradox is something that is apparent in many aspects of the Word of God. This is often true with things in the Scriptures that non-believers would call “contradictions.” Many of these can be shown to be non-contradictory simply by reading the entire Bible in its proper context. As for the rest I have found that the vast majority of these things are paradoxical, not contradictory (for the few things I have not yet found to be that way I trust that my limited, and sometimes warped, human reason is not to be trusted when dealing with a God who must, by definition, embody infinite perfection and absolute truth in order to be worthy of the title “God.”)

So, in the spirit of a view of the Word that embraces paradox I have, for many years now, described myself as a “Cal-minian.” What that, I’d like to think clever; conflation of the two great Christian streams of thought means is that I simply believe that our Lord may sovereignly choose to limit his sovereignty in the above-described secondary and specifically purposeful way. This strikes me as being the best answer to the conundrum that has plagued theologians for several millennia now. I think this is especially true when considering the ability of our First Parents, Adam and Eve, to make the choice they unfortunately made.

Of course I am not a trained theologian (or philosopher, for that matter) but this is my story and I’m sticking to it. I just happen to think it makes the most sense of things, both temporal and eternal. Also I must say that I have always found a strange and subtle comfort in embracing it. The existence of that comfort is not sufficient evidence of its truth but I’d like to think my, hopefully Holy Spirit, inspired reason adds much more “sufficiency” to the proposition.

Copyright by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Not too many years ago the New York area received its first Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) station. At the time I was happy to see it happen. Despite not always being of the highest quality, CCM has, at times in recent years, been the fastest growing segment of popular music in the United States. It’s potential for reaching the millions of un-churched people who live in the states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut is great. But after listening to the station a few times something began to bother me. The advertising and disc jockeys spoke constantly of how it was “safe for the entire family”. In fact the word “family”, in one context or another, was mentioned literally hundreds of times a day and it soon became apparent to me that single people were off the radar screen, at least as far as station promotion was concerned. This was a bit disconcerting to me considering that 41% of America is single, as I was at the time.

Fast-forward several months. One night I was at a fundraising dinner for the local chapter of a national youth ministry. The keynote speaker turned out to be an employee of the station in question. After the dinner I took the opportunity to speak to him about his employer’s tendency to play a song that might catch the ear of the average urban single, and then follow it with advertising that made that single person, perhaps from a family background just as soon forgotten, feel left out. His answer was to inform me that the target audience was 38 year-old Christian soccer moms! Then he told me to start my own radio station. I was speechless. Here was a broadcaster with a historic opportunity to reach perhaps 15 million people with what, in my opinion, is one of today’s more effective media-based evangelistic tools and they were purposely preaching to the choir!

This is an egregious example of how the Christian population in this country sometimes takes care of itself at the expense of the Great Commission. Now I did not completely write off this station. Apparently the evening broadcasts were less family-oriented. As for the rest of the time undoubtedly some New York area secular adults did not bolt after the song ended and the “Focus on the Family” rhetoric began (In fact a friend of mine once told me about one such man she knew who was a new listener and one whom she felt was being led to faith at least partially by the programming). But as a former New York area secular adult myself I can tell you with some confidence that more did bolt than didn’t. You see; healthy families are scarce here and that breeds a certain cynicism among those of us who survived childhoods molded by divorce, various kinds of abuse, and broken promises. We number in the millions and saccharine odes to the nuclear family are apt to make us twitch…and switch… stations that is.

Much has been written about the so-called “Christian Ghetto”. This is a term used to describe the separatist evangelical subculture that has developed in the United States over the past two-decades. We have a Christianized version of everything here, ranging from Christian dating services to “Christian yoga”. In fact some of our vaunted mega-churches resemble nothing so much as shopping malls, right down to an actual “food-court” in one such behemoth on our West coast. We may not want to be of the world but we apparently have little reluctance about copying and baptizing it. The result is a facsimile of many of the more banal elements of contemporary pop-culture in a supposedly more spiritual setting. This allows American Christians to enjoy the blandishments offered by our consumerist nation while still feeling comfortably set-apart.

I cannot help but wonder if we have ceased being salt and light in pursuit of this comfort.

This brings us back to the radio station ministering to the approximately 500 or so “38-year old Christian soccer moms” who live in its multi-million resident broadcast area. When I happened to run into the person from the fundraiser in a local restaurant a year or so latter I re-introduced myself and brought up the topic again. This time he ruefully commiserated with me about the tiny demographic his station was chasing, his tone of voice having a sort of “resigned to reality” flavor to it. Then he shared with me that he was now in station management! Once again I was speechless.

I can only assume that this man was not willing, or able, to challenge his bosses with what he himself implied to be true in his comments to me on both occasions, that catering to the saved is of higher value than meeting the unsaved where they live. As long as this kind of thinking holds sway, at this organization and at others like it across America, the “Christian Ghetto” will continue to exist and everyone outside that ghetto will be that much more likely to end up being un-reached.

By the way, if anyone out there has the 5 million or so dollars of start-up capital needed to create a new radio station here please let me know….