12 Steps to Identifying Your Functional Saviors On this point, John Calvin wrote in The Institutes:

Every individual mind being a kind of labyrinth, it is not wonderful, not only that each nation has adopted a variety of fictions, but that almost every man has had his own god. To the darkness of ignorance have been added presumption and wantonness, and hence there is scarcely an individual to be found without some idol or phantom as a substitute for Deity. Like water gushing forth from a large and copious spring, immense crowds of gods have issued from the human mind, every man giving himself full license, and 60devising some peculiar form of divinity, to meet his own views.

Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion (2 Volume Set)

Following the attacks on New York and Washington D.C. and the failed attack that ended in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, many Americans darkened the doors of our churches, some for the first time in years. Now, as far as I am aware, church attendance has returned to pre-September 11 levels. Maybe it returned to those levels in 2002, I’m not sure.

This morning, I heard a good message from an Army general about the state of the world today, specifically related to radical Islam, and what Christians can do about it, if anything. He briefly mentioned that he wished more Americans would go to church in light of the Barna survey stating 84% of us claim to be Christians. But I suggest that many have gone to American churches and found no reason to return. What they found was self-referential moralism and messages on God helping those who help themselves or on love without morality being the path to true peace. Hope from the Creator of the world and Redeemer of the forgiven they did not find. They can get the self-help on their own.

A self-referential faith will not offer lasting hope. It will not understand how men can do evil things, and when faced with rage, addiction, adultery, and greed, it will offer only platitudes or rejection. It will not believe in the supernatural enemy we face, the Morgoth/Sauron-type character who stalks the earth looking for those who will believe his lies, those who will look inward and blame others for their pain or disappointment.

I fear this is the message many churches communicate in and out of the pulpit, even churches in which there are many genuine believers. They have missed the life-transforming gospel by focusing on their own efforts to better themselves and the world (thus the affection many have for political success). In doing so, they will tell non-believers that God will not accept them until they clean themselves up. They say they don’t care how broken or sinful they are, they had better present themselves as clean in church or God won’t accept them. Of course, God the Father, who knows everything from begin to end, will not reject the sick or the broken, the abusive or the abused. He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins when we repent of them, even when we repeatedly repent of them.

I wish it were true that 84% of Americans were genuine believers, but I’m afraid they claim that label out of mere cultural comfort, and if these are the ones going to 60-70% of American churches, I don’t worry that many people stopped after the fear of the attacks diminished. Perhaps there were a couple rescuers inside those frames meant at one time to reflect the glory of a greater kingdom, but maybe they had left too, tired of finding people who were unwilling to be saved.

The gospel is what our churches are meant to preach. It is not merely a pass for the bad stuff we do or a term for our 12 step self-help guide; it is divine liberation from the crushing bonds of sin and a new life of service on the Lord’s estate. The Lord asks us to believe who he claims to be in the Bible and live accordingly, grieving past failure, embracing future grace.

It is Labor Day, and (as every year) I had to go to work. So I shall pour forth my frustration on the Communists, whom I hold ultimately responsible for the holiday, and who have done me no good at all.

Grim at Grim’s Hall embedded this, the original recording of the South African song (“Mbube”) that became “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

Continue reading Labor Day counterrevolutionary post →

I don’t generally get into the Creationist/Evolutionist controversy. This is not because I don’t have opinions (or beliefs) on the subject, but because I don’t feel I have the necessary knowledge to contribute to the discussion. If I hear an intelligent Creationist, he sounds convincing to me. If I hear an intelligent Theistic Evolutionist, he makes sense to me too. (Atheistic Evolutionists won’t get a very sympathetic hearing from me. Sorry.) I am not a scientist nor the son of a scientist; it’s a fight I’m just not equipped to jump into myself.

But I have some observations about what a critic might call the meta-narrative. I mean the entire historical drama of the conflict between faith and science, which began in the Enlightenment and reached critical mass with Darwin.

It seems to me that, for people who are supposed to have all the answers, the Scientific Naturalists sure fail in their predictions a lot. Continue reading I dream of genome →

I heard an interesting piece of gossip at my class reunion last Saturday.

I don’t think anyone will be hurt by it. The news was more than a hundred years old.

The reunion took place at the farm of one of my classmates (we lived in a small town, and it was a small class. Smaller now). The town is Kenyon, Minnesota, not a famous place, but once a center of Norwegian-American settlement, made conspicuous once upon a time by the story I shall now relate.

Our host told us, “This farm once belonged to the first doctor in Goodhue County, Dr. Grønvold.” That was interesting.

Later another classmate, who knows I’m interested in history, told me, “You know, there was a big scandal here in the 1800s. That farm over there” (he pointed to a brick house about a thousand feet away) “is the Holden church parsonage. The pastor there was gone a lot, and his wife had an affair with the doctor who lived here.”

“B. J. Muus?” I asked. Yes, he said, that was the pastor’s name.

I’d read about the story, but never gave it close study. Now I’d stumbled across the living oral tradition, on the very spot, and it piqued my interest. So I read up about it. Continue reading It happened in Holden →