I don’t often share my spiritual insights, mostly because I have so few. But this came to me during my Bible reading today. For what it’s worth.

“Repentance” means turning your back on sin, and turning to God. This does not mean, as we imagine, a turning from adventurous living to conformist living. It means turning from a place where we feel safe, to the place where we are most afraid to go.

I’ve written before in this space about the Norwegian lay preacher Hans Nielsen Hauge. He was the founder of what some would call the “sect” I grew up in, our prophet and martyr, you might say. And yet, oddly, we rarely read anything he actually wrote. We concentrated on the Scriptures—and I like to think he’d have been pleased about that.

I’m also beginning to think it was, in certain ways, a good thing.

His opponents and critics accused him of being heterodox to Lutheran theology.

I’ll probably get in trouble for writing this, but I’ve been reading his works in the original Norwegian, and I’ve come to believe that, to some extent, his critics were correct.

I hasten to add that the error I think I see occurs in one of Hauge’s earliest books. It’s known that he mellowed his views in later years, and so I hope I may believe he amended his error (if I’ve understood him correctly). Continue reading A cautionary tale for the converted →

Artist Makoto Fujimura asks, “Has the concept of the ‘American Dream’ changed since the events of September 11, 2011?”

Christ Healing the Paralytic at the Pool of Bethesda, by Murillo.
I started committing poetry tonight (that’s a reference to the Norwegian movie, Elling, which I’ve reviewed here), but I stopped myself before it was too late.
I had this idea for a poem. I was contemplating the injustices of life, and it occurred to me (hardly an original idea) that sometimes injustices might be more just than we think. If I lack something in my life that I think I ought to have (can’t imagine what), the denial may be a mercy. Perhaps the responsibilities and concomitant sorrows that go with the blessings would be too much for me to handle.
I thought of writing a poem about the healing of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda (John 5:1-15), and imagined there was another lame man there, who did not get healed. He is very bitter about being overlooked. But then (I imagine) years later he sees the man who did get healed, having become an active disciple of Jesus, stoned to death under the Herodian persecution.
But then I thought, that’s too simplistic. I don’t really believe everything levels out that way. And even if it did, it would still be a kind of condemnation on the one who was not healed, saying that God knew he didn’t have the courage and character to suffer for Christ.
The actuality is, these questions are way too big for me. Any solution I could generate, however complex and comprehensive, wouldn’t come close to divine wisdom.
So my job is just not to be bitter.
I’m working on that.
In a possibly related story, I saw this article (via Instapundit) which discusses the ethical debate scientists are waging, over whether memory-suppressing drugs, if they could be perfected, would be medically defensible.
I’ll have to admit it—if they could come up with a way to target specific memories, I’d be very much inclined to take the treatment.
But I have trouble imagining a drug that would be specific enough to remove just the right bits, rifle-style, rather than taking out big chunks like a shotgun.

I remember it like it was yesterday, and I’m still not sure how to think about it.

I believe I was in sixth grade, so I must have been eleven years old. It was a tough year. The usual troubles at home, and my teacher, a forceful lady whose family had had some historical differences with mine (I have no evidence that that fact influenced her), had decided that the only explanation for the trouble I was having in arithmetic class must be laziness. She had made it her business to shape me up. She lectured me often in front of the class. She gave me special punishments. She’d made me one of her personal projects.

One afternoon when school was over, I was coming out into the entryway to the building. There were inner doors at the top of the wide steps, and outer doors at the bottom. Three guys were waiting for me outside the inner doors. They ringed me, blocking my way. “Why don’t you try harder at math?” they asked. Continue reading A moral problem →

As you may possibly have noticed, I am not known for my cheery, optimistic demeanor. Whenever I get together with Mark Steyn for brandy and cigars, he says to me, “Chill, dude. Things aren’t that bad.”

So if I counsel you not to despair, and to act on hope even when you feel none, you’ll know I’m speaking from conviction, if not from enthusiasm.

Today I was reading from the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 15, verses 42-43.

It was Preparation Day (that is, the day before the Sabbath). So as evening approached, Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council, who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body.

What struck me about this passage was the apparent futility of Joseph’s action. As a member of the Sanhedrin with suspicious connections to the Nazarene sect, in a city occupied by Romans, he had absolutely nothing to gain by bringing himself to the attention of the authorities on either side. The Rabbi was dead. Nothing could be done about that. Wouldn’t the prudent thing be to keep a low profile until feelings subsided?

But for some reason we can only guess at, Joseph went to the hated Roman procurator and ask for the body. Perhaps he went right into Pilate’s house, though that would pollute him ceremonially, since he was planning to handle a corpse anyway. It was a quixotic gesture, like a Confederate soldier flying the Stars and Bars in a city occupied by Federal troops. There wasn’t a thing to be gained by it, and much to lose.

But unbeknown to himself, he was participating in a victory he couldn’t conceive of.

When I read Two Years Before the Mast, I came across a sailor’s proverb, quoted by Richard Henry Dana. It’s passed into our language in abbreviated form since then– “Never say die, while there’s a shot in the locker.”

The moral of this story seems to be that we should never say die even when the locker’s empty.

My article on Norway is up at The American Spectator today. Link here.

Sad news (as if we needed more). John Stott has passed away, old and full of years as the Bible says (he was 90).

J.I. Packer remembers that Stott “in his younger days … was a brilliant and hard-worked student evangelist.” He was the chosen speaker for a considerable number of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s week-long evangelistic campaigns at British universities, particularly Cambridge and Oxford. These later extended to North America and throughout the Commonwealth. From these evangelistic talks came one of his best-selling books, Basic Christianity (1958), which has been translated into 25 languages and sold well over a million copies.

Billy Graham first visited England in 1946, and Stott met him while sharing open-air preaching at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. In 1954 he welcomed Graham for his 12-week Harringay Crusade, and the two became warm friends. Later on this friendship would be important to the Lausanne movement, but it is worth noting that it began through an active, shared commitment to evangelism.