I feel like I have been a broken record lately. I am always coming back to the same themes, but I think they are important for such a time as this. I am finding that I am not alone. Just this weekend, David Platt, head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board, said:
“We have not gathered today, even on July 4th week, to celebrate our U.S. citizenship. That’s not what the church does because that’s not who the church is. The church doesn’t unite around an earthly citizenship. The church unites around a heavenly citizenship. “We have more in common with a Syrian Christian sitting next to us than an American atheist. Far more in common forever. Which is why when we gather as a church, we put aside national, even political differences.”
I strongly believe he is right. Following is an article with more details:
The head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board, David Platt, recently stated that churches in the United States are supposed to focus on Jesus Christ and not nationalism. Preaching at the Virginia-based McLean Bible Church on the Sunday before Independence Day, Platt focused his sermon on the issues of “God and government” and […]
“Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are the translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened….”
This quotation is from CS Lewis in a letter to Arthur Greeves: from The Kilns (on his conversion to Christianity), 18 October 1931. It captures the thought process of CS Lewis at the point in time when he was becoming convinced of the truth of Christianity.
If you have read much of what I write, you would easily notice that I quote and reference CS Lewis often. He resonated with me in my faith journey that began in college, and he continues to resonate with me.
He is cited by more diverse groups of people than any Christian thinker, perhaps, in the 20th Century. He had a unique way of approaching things from unique points of view, often pulling fresh ideas from the dusty tomes of ancient literature. His concept of myth and True Myth is one such point (though the source is actually JRR Tolkien).
Some might consider his frequent allusions to ancient, pagan myth heretical. Some might even confuse his love of pagan myth with New Age belief, but he flatly rejected the occult. He was orthodox in unorthodox ways, but his creative approaches to orthodoxy were refreshing and thought-provoking.
We don’t have to look any further than the ultra-orthodox, Apostle Paul, to find some common ground with CS Lewis. When Paul was in Athens, some Epicureans and Stoics he met in the marketplace brought him to the Areopagus to address an erudite Greek crowd. In that address, Paul referenced an altar inscribed “To An Unknown God” and quoted pagan writers when he said:
“in him we move and live and have our being”.
Acts 17:26 (quoting a line from Cretiga, by Epimenides of Knossos)
“For we are indeed his offspring ”
Acts 17:28 (quoting a line from Phenomena 5 by Aratus of Soloi)
Paul quoted the Cretan philosopher, Epimenides, also in Titus 1:12. Paul knew enough about pagan philosophy and poetry that he could quote from pagan works multiple times in his writings and addresses.
Paul quoted the pagan philosopher to express a spiritual truth about our lives in Christ, and Paul quoted the pantheistic poet, Aratus, to convey a theistic principle about God. (See Acts 17:22-28 – Quoting the Philosophers?) Paul connected with the people “where they were,” using language and references from the culture they understood to convey something about God.
Paul was well-read in the literature of his culture, and he used pagan philosophy and poetry to introduce people to the Gospel. This is exactly what CS Lewis does in in his own writing. Through his deep knowledge of pagan myth, he recognized strands of truth, and he recognized the difference between “man’s myth” and “God’s myth (the the “True Myth”).
In using the term, myth, Lewis is talking about story and narrative. Many stories and narratives convey a modicum of truth. CS Lewis observes that most myth from around the world contains some elements of truth, and Lewis insisted we shouldn’t be surprised by this – because truth is universal.
The difference between myth and True Myth, according to Lewis (and Tolkien), is that all other myth is a shadow of the True Myth. All myth is an attempt to shine light on truth. True Myth is the ultimate Light shining on the ultimate Truth.
All myth conveys truth through storytelling. True Myth isn’t just another story, though; it is “the” Story. It isn’t “just” myth, but reality, because “it really happened,” as CS Lewis said.
The True Myth is the Gospel. God, the Creator of the universe and everything in it, created man in His own image as His crowning creation. Then, God became a man, injecting Himself into His own creation, in order to communicate His very heart to us and to rescue us from going our own way by revealing the ultimate purpose for which God created us – to have loving relationship with God, our Creator.
“They [Adam and Eve] wanted, as we say, to ‘call their souls their own.’ But that means to live a lie, for our souls are not, in fact, our own. They wanted some corner in the universe of which they could say to God, ‘This is our business, not yours.’ But there is no such corner. They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives.”
The quotation is by CS Lewis in the Problem of Pain. As he notes, tt’s axiomatic that, if God exists, we are not God, and this isn’t our universe.
By “God” (capital G), what is meant is a “maximal being” – that is a Being having maximal qualities. Thus, we say of God that He would have to be all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, all-just, all-merciful, etc. All characteristics of which God is the standard find their greatest expression in God.
We are not talking about flying spaghetti monsters or Zeus-like personalities when we refer to God, capital G.
If such a God exists, and I believe this is more or less self-evident, than anything we call our own, including our own self-sufficiency, is mere illusion.
I find it interesting that many naturalists, like the late, great Stephen Hawking, agree that self-sufficiency is nothing but an illusion. We are all merely dancing to the tune of our DNA, says Richard Dawkins. Ravi Zacharias describes a lecture given by Stephen Hawking many years ago in which he eloquently laid out the evidence that we are determined (by natural influences) in everything we do. Hawking ended with the “uplifting” thought that, even though we have no control over anything that we think or do, we still feel as if we do – to which Ravi Zacharias says the audience audibly groaned.
For the naturalist, the conclusion, some say (like Hawking and Dawkins), is inescapable. We aren’t the captains of our own souls as we suppose, and our end is “predetermined” by naturalistic causes as our beginning and everything in between. Such a fatalistic view might be sufficient to undo us completely, but for our ability to imagine otherwise – even if it isn’t true – according to these naturalists. Some very small consolation!
For the Christian, however, we find our consolation in the very God whose existence belies our illusion of self-sufficiency and self-control. We find that this God made us in His image, which suggests we are made with some capacity for free will and self determination – even if it subsists within the sphere of God’s ultimate providence.
We find that God is loving and desires us to reflect Him and His love without coercion from Him. Even if our ability to govern ourselves is ultimately illusory, the fact that we believe we have this ability, is all that matters because believing it to be so, believing that we can choose other than we can, even if we can’t truly exercise this choice freely as God does, means that we can, nevertheless, reflect God’s love back to Him without coercion.
Love, after all, is not coerced. Love is the complete absence of coercion.
Though we may not be self-sufficient or self-controlling as we suppose, we can still reflect God’s love back to Him by virtue of the appearance (the illusion if you will) that we are or can be self-sufficient and self-controlling. Feeling as if we can deny God and go our own way, we freely exercise our will to submit to Him and to choose His way, and this act of love is genuine to the extent that we genuinely believe it and mean it.
Our focus should be on God, and our direction should be inspired by scripture with the help of the Holy Spirit to discern God’s heart, intention and direction for us in these modern times.
I recall a sermon preached back in the 1980’s in the church I attended at the time in New Hampshire. I don’t remember the scriptural passage or references, but I remember the gist of the message, and it has stuck with me ever since.
The gist goes something like this: As God’s people, we need to be informed and take our direction primarily from God and God’s will as revealed to us in the Bible with the help of the Holy Spirit. We are in the world, but we are not of the world, and we should be careful not to be influenced by the world in our thinking.
The key point that I remember, however, is that we can focus so much on trying not to be influenced by the world that we become reactionary to it. If the world goes right, we go left. If the world goes left, we go right. If all we are doing is being reactionary to the world, we lose our focus on God. In the process of trying not to be like the world, we allow ourselves to be defined by the world nevertheless.
If our direction is dictated by nothing more than going in the opposite direction of the world, we are no more directed by God than if we are going in exactly the same direction as the world. Either way, we are focusing on the world and allowing the world to influence our direction, rather than God.
The population of America is a changing landscape. What are the implications of that for us? What are the implications of that changing landscape on the immigration controversy that is going on?
So here’s a thought, but first, consider these statistics:
In 2016, in 26 states, the number of non-Hispanic whites who died was greater than the number of non-Hispanic whites who were born in those states, according to an analysis by the U.S. Census Bureau that was released last week. The 26 states were a diverse group in terms of geography and demographics, from Maine to Alabama to California. Nationwide in 2016, there were 0.98 births for every death among non-Hispanic whites, a rate lower than that of blacks (1.71), Asians (3.87) and Latinos (4.88).
I have seen numbers like these before on a national scale. We are tottering on the edge of population regression. People get married less, marry later, have fewer children, and these factors contribute to our population decline – at least among white Americans. Most European countries are well beyond us in this population regression cycle.
Navigating by Faith 