our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20)

I am a huge fan of Brooke Fraser, a young kiwi singer who is also an articulate and passionate Christian poet. In her spare time, she also gets access to clean water for dozens of impoverished communities in Ethiopia and advocates for Rwandan children. You know, that sort of thing.

I've been thinking recently of her "C.S. Lewis Song." In it, she does an astonishingly good job of condensing and putting to music one of Lewis' arguments for God, heaven, faith: namely, that our desire for something higher, better, more permanent, etc. implies the reality of the object of our desire.

Just as the ability to feel hunger and want food implies the existence of food, our longing for union with God, heaven, divine joy implies the existence of those things.

If I find in myself desires nothing in this world can satisfy,
I can only conclude that I was not made for here
If the flesh that I fight is at best only light and momentary,
then of course I'll feel nude when to where I'm destined I'm compared

In other words, it makes no sense for us to have an ingrained desire for something that has no objective reality.

I think atheists would agree: Yes, it makes no sense. It is senseless.

But it takes a lot of blind faith to believe in that degree of senselessness. I'll stick with the much more likely probability that the desire has a real relationship to the thing that can satisfy the desire.

And so if all our money and material comforts can't satisfy us, if success can't satisfy us, if even romantic love and family don't entirely fill up the hole in our hearts, it must be because the hole is God-shaped.

Of course, Lewis was taking his cue from St. Augustine:

"You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."

But maybe I'm most psyched by the fact that Brooke Fraser knows Lewis and likes him enough to write a song about one of his ideas. He would be well chuffed* to know that--in fact, I imagine he is.

My admiration has almost nothing to do with the fact that she is also stunningly beautiful...

* "chuffed" is New Zealand slang for "pleased and excited"

center of gravity

Some friends were recently talking on Facebook about an atheist's view of death. I thought I could sense an undercurrent of hostility (!) toward Christian faith for being preoccupied with "the afterlife" and therefore not really engaged in this life, this world. "The heavenly minded are no earthly good" kind of vibe.

But that's quite different from my understanding of the Christian faith. I wrote:

The center of gravity for my own faith and, I would argue strongly, of the gospel, is not "life after death" but rather the quality of living, character, and relationships in this life (though not bounded by this life). In other words, authentic human flourishing and growth in virtue. At the same time, I can understand in an age or society dominated by war, famine, and plague, why the accent might shift to "a better world after this one." And, as someone who works on a pediatrics oncology ward, the hope of heaven has never been so visceral to me as it is now. Still, Jesus said the kingdom of God is among you, in the here and now. Love calls us to the things of this world.

自分自身の信仰の中心は、そして福音の中心でもあると主張したいのだが、「死後の命」ではなくて、むしろこの世における生き方、人格、人間関係の質にあると思う。（まあ、この世でだけの話ではないけど）。つまり、まことの人間の繁栄と徳における成長に関わるものである。同時に、戦争や飢饉や伝染病だらけの時代、社会の中で、どうして「より良いあの世」への関心が高まるか分からないわけではない。なお、小児ガンの病棟に関わっている者として、わたしはかつてないほど、天国への望みを「はらわたで」抱いているのである。しかし、イエスが仰ったのは、神の国はあなたがたの間にある、今、ここで、と。わたしたちは愛によってこの世のことにこそ呼ばれるのである。

That last sentence is the title of an excellent poem by Richard Wilbur, a former poet laureate in the US. You can see him reading the poem here. And the poem itself is below. The story is about a man woken from a sleep in New York by the sound of a neighbor hanging laundry out to dry. The sleeper doesn't want to wake up and return to the world of the day-to-day, but he does, finally. "The soul descends once more in bitter
love / To accept the waking body." Because...

Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded
soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and
simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with
angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are
in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there
they are.
Now they are rising together in calm
swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they
wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal
breathing;

Now they are flying in place,
conveying
The terrible speed of their
omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now
of a sudden
They swoon down in so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every
blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on
earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising
steam
And clear dances done in the sight of
heaven."

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks
and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter
love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns
and rises,

"Bring them down from their ruddy
gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs
of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be
undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure
floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult
balance." 

suspicious

"So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot."
--GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 51

「一頭の像に長い鼻がついているのは、おかしな話である。でもすべての像に長い鼻がついているというのは、意図的なことに見えてしまう。」
―ＧＫチェスタートン『正統とは何か』

宇宙を見て「すべて偶然だ」と言える人は、僕より遥かに信心深い。偶然主義者ほど分別のない信仰を持つ人はいない。ただ、その信仰とは「神も仏もいない」という信条に基づいているだけである。

beginning of wisdom

"The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding." (Proverbs 9:10, Job 28:28, Psalm 111:10)

The "fear"--the awe-struck reverence, the tearful speechlessness, the uprushing, overwhelming desire to shout "YES!" in the face of the transcendent, absolute Really Real whose love and power course through the universe--the LORD--and, yes, even the gut-level terror--the fear of this LORD is the beginning of all wisdom.

This week, I had the flash of insight that this statement is objectively true.

What I mean is, I had always read this as a kind of exhortation: "You should fear the LORD, so that you can begin to attain wisdom." But that's not it. It's an objective description of reality. Fear of the LORD = beginning of wisdom.

In other words, an attitude of humility and receptiveness to the Absolute is itself the access portal to wisdom. It is the entryway to the deeper dimension of the ordered, grace-infused, outward-facing life that the Bible calls wisdom. Without which attitude, wisdom is simply inaccessible. Hidden behind a veil.

That's why a person can be smart but not wise.

A Christian may well be both ignorant and foolish. Sadly, a great many Christians today provide examples of this. I'm afraid I'm among them, more often than not.

An atheist, however, may be brilliant, but can never be wise (although the current crop of Walmart variety atheists generally fail to exhibit even much that could be called brilliance. More's the pity.).

On the other hand, a Christian may be unlearned, or simple, or lack an aptitude for reasoned argument, and yet be immeasurably wise, if she has taken into herself the fear of the LORD.

I think this is true of any God-fearer, actually. Both in the Church and beyond, the starting point of wisdom lies in the knowledge that I, as limited, finite, and insignificant as I am, am in a real, living, and utterly inequitable relationship with the Almighty.

I was mulling these things over when I came across the following from Chesterton, writing about Aquinas:

"The Fear of the Lord, that is the beginning of wisdom, and therefore belongs to the beginnings, and is felt in the first cold hours before the dawn of civilisation; the power that comes out of the wilderness and rides on the whirlwind and breaks the gods of stone; the power before which the eastern nations are prostrate like a pavement; the power before which the primitive prophets run naked and shouting, at once proclaiming and escaping from their god; the fear that is rightly rooted in the beginnings of every religion, true or false: the Fear of the Lord, that is the beginning of wisdom; but not the end.”

The fear of the LORD is the access point, the entryway. Beyond this point lies the experience of the forgiveness, the mercy, the love, the tender provision of the LORD. In other words, beyond this point we encounter the face of Jesus Christ.

we are not getting wiser

I've been reading Chesterton's little book on St. Thomas Aquinas.

It is enjoyable on many levels. Getting a clearer sense of the Angelic Doctor as a man. Getting a feel for the heart of his theological vision, which turns out to be earthy, world-affirming, revelation-enlightened commonsense.

And the pure enjoyment of Chesterton's prose. And the good, solid thrubbing he gives pretentious "leading lights" of his day, who are every bit as assinine and god-denying as the ones we're stuck with.

But the overall feeling I get from reading about Thomas at this point in history--as Japan slips into a radioactive morass, and America spends its way into collapse and irrelevance, and the Islamic world devours itself and anyone else who gets too near, and the heaps of murdered babies pile up in every "advanced" nation in the world--is that, as a human race, we are WAY MORE ignorant and banal and self-absorbed than we were 700 years ago. And boring, as only the truly demonic can be boring.

99% of the world population couldn't reason its way out of a wet paper bag and wouldn't even want to, and of the remaining 1%, most want to apply their thinking skills to the justification of evildoing.

I look around and find no reason to be proud of the time in which I live.

Am I missing something?

宗教かインテリアか

［いわゆるニューエイジ世界では、］全く努力のいらない、癒やし系の「個人的スピリチュアリティ」の環境を思う存分整えることができる。ただドリームキャッチャーや結晶、女神崇拝の書物、チベットのマニ車、ジョーゼフ・キャンベルやカール・ユングなど神話学のノンフィクション作品、踊り狂うナタラジャ像、ルーン文字を彫り込んだ牌の袋、ケルト風にぼんやりとした光に満ちているラファエロ前派のプリント数枚、アンデス山脈のパンパイプなどなど、こういうものを買って来ればいい。こうやって紐や価値のない石英結晶、安い線香、焼成粘土、低俗な装飾品、借り物の図像、不正な研究の山がどんどん積み重なって、宗教とインテリアデザインとの区別がつかない、という不思議な飽和点に到達するまで。
ー デービッド・ベントリー・ハート博士　（『無神論は妄想である』、24ページ）

[In the world of so-called New Age,] one may cultivate a private atmosphere of "spirituality" as undemanding and therapeutically comforting as one likes simply by purchasing a dream catcher, a few pretty crystals, some books on the goddess, a Tibetan prayer wheel, a volume of Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung or Robert Graves, a Nataraja figurine, a purse of tiles engraved with runes, a scattering of Pre-Raphaelite prints drenched in Celtic twilight, an Andean flute, and so forth, until this mounting congeries of string, worthless quartz, cheap joss sticks, baked clay, kitsch, borrowed iconography, and fraudulent scholarship reaches that mysterious point of saturation at which religion has become indistinguishable from interior decorating.
--David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions, p. 24

how's that working out for ya?

"At the end of the twentieth century--the century when secularization became an explicit political and cultural project throughout the world--the forces of progressive ideology could boast an unprecedentedly vast collection of corpses, but not much in the way of new moral concepts. At least, not any we should be especially proud of. The best ideals to which we moderns continue to cling long antedate modernity; for the most part, all we can claim as truly, distinctively our own are our atrocities."
--David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions, p. 222

「政治的、社会的「世俗化」という運動があからさまに浮上した２０世紀を振り返ってみると、進歩的イデオロギーの勢力が「自慢」できるのは史上空前のスケールの死者数ぐらいであって、新しい道徳思想はあまり出て来なかった。少なくとも、特に誇りに思える思想は。わたしたち現代人が今でも大事に抱いている理想は、「現代」に遥かに先行するものばかり。わたしたち自身が「できた」と言えるのは、残虐行為以外に殆どないのである。」
ー デービッド・ベントリー・ハート博士　（『無神論は妄想である』、222ページ）

me me me ism

"[The unconstrained freedom of the will], for many of us, is the highest good imaginable. And a society guided by such beliefs must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular 'moral metaphysics': that is, the nonexistence of any transcendent standard of the good that has the power (or the right) to order our desires toward a higher end. We are, first and foremost, heroic and insatiable consumers, and we must not allow the specters of transcendent law or personal guilt to render us indecisive."
 --David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions, p. 22

「大勢の人にとって［全く拘束されていない個々人の意志］がこの上ない理想となっている。そしてそういう理想に導かれる社会は、当然、ある特定の「道徳哲学」を暗にでも受け入れ、支持することになっている。すなわち、より崇高な目的のためにわたしたちの欲求の方向付けをする権力（や権利）を持つ、卓越した善悪の基準などは存在しない、ということ。わたしたちは何よりもまず骨の折れる、飽くことを知らない消費者であるから、卓越した法則や個人の罪悪感などという幻でわたしたちの自己決定力が弱められることを許すわけにはいかない。」
 ー デービッド・ベントリー・ハート博士　（『無神論は妄想である』、22ページ）

evidence, proof, and believing

I recently watched the 2005 movie "Proof". In it, Anthony Hopkins plays a brilliant but mentally disturbed mathematician, Gwyneth Paltrow his younger daughter, Catherine, who has cared for him at home for many years. The movie starts the week after the father's death, and jumps between past and present.

It's not a bad film. The elegant Paltrow acts with guarded intensity, so unrelentingly triste that her fleeting moments of happiness are like hot sunlight pouring through a crack in the storm clouds.

The older sister who arrives for the funeral and to settle Dad's affairs is played with utterly convincing annoyingness by Hope Davis (who, you will of course recall, played the French ticketing agent in "Home Alone")

The father's ex-student and Catherine's budding love interest, Hal, is played by Jake Gyllenhaal, who is just, well, annoying. Maybe if he showered and shaved... Twice...

Hopkins. Well, he just IS. Once you're Hannibal, you pretty much can never come back.

The title refers a mathematical proof that is discovered in a journal among Dad's belongings. It's so brilliant that the word "brilliant" is pathetically inadequate. It has to do with a really large prime number, I think, but for someone like me, they might as well be discussing various degrees of karmic enlightenment in tantric Buddhism.

Anyway, it's a really, really, really brainy mathematical proof. Ground-breaking.

Buoyed up by the false sense of intimacy and trust brought about by having sex with Hal during the post-funeral house party, Catherine reveals that she is the real author of the proof.

Now, here's where the second meaning of the title comes in, and what I found most interesting about this movie. Because there's no way to prove that Catherine is telling the truth. Her and her father's handwriting are virtually identical. And, Hal concludes, how could someone--a woman, no less--who dropped out of grad school (to take care of her father, but still) possibly possess the kind of mind necessary to achieve this supernova-level mathematical breakthrough?

Crushed by Hal's doubt, Catherine goes into an even darker spiral. She shuts down emotionally for a week.

During which time, Hal takes the journal to various math scholars to verify its legitimacy. And, in fact, it seems 100% on the up and up. Hal becomes convinced not only of the proof's validity, but also of Catherine's authorship (it apparently uses newer math techniques that Catherine's father wouldn't have mastered--what, is there a different way of writing "x" that I don't know about?)

Hal, convinced and excited, rushes back to find Catherine getting ready to move out of town with her sister. He tells her that he believes her now. She is not impressed. Here's the great scene:

CATHERINE: You think you figured something out? You run over here all pleased with yourself because you changed your mind? Now you're certain? You don't know anything! The book, the math, the dates, the writing...all that stuff, you just decided with your buddies. It's just evidence. It doesn't prove anything.
HAL: Okay, what would?
CATHERINE: Nothing. (Pause) You should've trusted me.
HAL: I know.

Do you see that? Isn't that the age old problem of faith? The Enemy (or a persistent atheist, for that matter) could use similar words to any believer or convert:

You think you figured something out? Here you are, all pleased with yourself because you changed your mind? Now you're certain? You don't know anything! The sacred book, the beauty of creation and its laws, the existence of the Church, the experience of God's love, the example of the saints, the fact of countless lives turned around...all that stuff, you just decided with your Christian buddies. It's just evidence. It doesn't prove anything.

What would prove the existence of God? What would prove the reliability of Scripture? The historicity of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus? The access we have to the Father through the Spirit of Christ even now? The forgiveness of sin? The validity of prayer?

Nothing. There is no proof of any of these things.

There's heaps of evidence. Reason is a friend to Christian belief. There is abundant evidence--but you can always find a way to rule evidence inadmissable. Hearsay! Subjective experience! Empirically unverifiable! Delusion! Coincidence! Fabrication! Wishful thinking!

But God says: You should trust me.

Finally, even after you have weighed all the evidence, faith still requires trust.

We trust in the self-revelation of God, because we accept that God is reliable. Because it is not in God's character to deceive.

We trust that the authors of scripture weren't just making it all up out of thin air.

We trust that the apostles tell it like it was, from slightly divergent standpoints, and were willing to be killed rather than deny what they knew to be true.

We trust that their witness was faithfully compiled and written down. (The evidence is VERY friendly to us at this point.)

And we trust that the Church for 2,000 years has more or less ably preserved this witness to the reality of the Living Christ in our midst, the wellspring of our healing, the source of our joy.

all out of bubblegum

My favorite line ever from a film is from an odd, low-budget (seeming) 1988 SF/horror flick directed by John Carpenter called They Live.

(Incidentally, They Live also has the longest fight scene of any movie I've ever seen).

The hero is a drifter who stumbles upon some high-tech sunglasses that allow him to see aliens that have infiltrated human society. Kind of like X-ray vision. You can't see the aliens without the sunglasses.

Anyway, the line. The hero walks into a bank wearing the sunglasses and holding a shotgun. He declares: "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum."

He then proceeds to blow away all the aliens. It's awesome. Check it out for yourself.

(I've always had the nagging feeling that the guy is actually just experiencing a psychotic break and there aren't really any aliens. But it's a great line anyway.)

That line popped into my head as I was reading the book by David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies.

The book came to my attention when it received this year's Michael Ramsey prize in Theology.

Hart is writing in part to unmask the popular historical fallacies used by people trying to tear down the Christian faith and replace it with the Grand Narrative of "modernism." He seems to have been goaded to the task by certain strains of atheism:

I can honestly say that there are many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than many forms of Christianity or of religion in general. But atheism that consists entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism. And it is sometimes difficult, frankly, to be perfectly generous in one’s response to the sort of invective currently fashionable among the devoutly undevout, or to the sort of historical misrepresentations it typically involves.

But, as evidenced in the quote above, it is Hart's rapier-sharp writing style as much as his thoughtful historical reflections that get me whooping with delight.

For example, Hart contrasts the erroneous assumptions and lack of rigorous engagement of the foaming-at-the-mouth "New Atheists" with their far more worthy predecessors in the early days: "genuinely imaginative and civilized critics, such as Celsus and Porphyry, who held the amiable belief that they should make some effort to acquaint themselves with the object of their critique."

He turns to Sam Harris's The End of Faith:

[This] is also a book that, in itself, should not detain anyone for very long. It is little more than a concatenation of shrill, petulant assertions, a few of which are true, but none of which betrays any great degree of philosophical or historical sophistication."

Ouch. That's gotta leave a mark.

Sometimes it's the driveby turns of phrase that pack the hardest punch:

• Rather than court absurdity, however...
• All of this, however, is slightly beside the point. Judged solely as a scientific proposal, Dennett's book [Breaking the Spell] is utterly inconsequential--in fact, it is something of an embarassment--but its methodological deficiencies are not my real concern here.
• In short, The End of Faith is not a serious--merely a self-important--book, and merits only cursory comment.
• If Harris's argument holds any real interest here, it is as an epitome--verging on unintentional parody--of contemporary antireligious rhetoric at its most impassioned and sanctimonious.
• This is one reason why the historical insight and intellectual honesty of Nietzsche were such precious things, and why their absence from so much contemporary antireligious polemic renders it so depressingly vapid.

Let's just say, there's a lot more where that came from. This is intellectual Mortal Kombat at its best.

Chesterton would be proud.

Anyway, I am enjoying this book, perhaps a little more than charity would allow.

Let me just say, I'm glad I'm not the one staring down Hart's barrel.