For Such a Time As This

Cupbearers for the King

What causes fights and quarrels among you?

James 4:1a

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.

 

Hebrews 12:1-2a

 

Nehemiah, cupbearer to the king of  Persia and loyal son of Judah, arrived in Jerusalem  ca. 445 B.C. intent on his mission to secure the city and its returning people by rebuilding the city walls. As the work proceeded, the neighboring enemies of God’s people ridiculed their work and plotted to stir up trouble against them.  (Neh 4, 6) Trusting in the favor of God, Nehemiah prayed that God would strengthen him for the task and succeeded in bringing the project to completion in only fifty-two days.

The work led by Nehemiah called the people into unity of will and action and proved a powerful witness of God’s power to Judah's enemies:“all the surrounding nations were afraid and lost their self-confidence, because they realized that this work had been done with the help of our God.” (Neh 6:16)

Like the Hebrews who trusted the Lord and worked against the odds to restore Jersualem, the church today has also been called as a covenantal people to testify to our neighbors about the glory of God. The hope we have in Christ should make us even bolder than they were in our obedience to God’s purposes, but we have sometimes taken too literally Nehemiah’s example and have sought to protect the Gospel by erecting walls around the church. Our self-seclusion from the world has had harmful effects both in our culture and on the church itself.

The Apostle James tells us that dissension in the church comes from the desires that battle within us, desires that are often inspired by our double-minded relationship with the world. Those of us living in suburban America can feel particularly caught between Christ’s call on our lives and the seduction of our culture. We are tempted by the material prosperity that surrounds us, by our desires for achievement and worldly success, by our hope for status among our neighbors, by the lures of sexual permissiveness and the ease of no-fault divorce. Properly motivatedto preserve our purity, we seek refuge behind church walls.

At first, it’s not a bad approach. We are sought out, welcomed, and we even begin to feel some warmth in fellowship, but our participation in the body often fails to deepen. We consider “church” something we do rather than a fundamental reorientation of our citizenship. When we “do church,” we try on our spiritual faces among the people of God, but we continue to mask our holiness before the world (and truthfully our spiritual faces are often the real masks we wear to hide our worldly countenances). After a time, especially if we have actually taken a role in ministry service, we begin to feel disillusioned. We discover that life even among God’s people is marred by sin. If we have not allowed the gospel to cut us deeply to the heart, and sometimes even when we have, we begin to wonder why God puts up with so much foolishness from those who call themselves Christians. Bound inside our church walls—walls too often erected as barriers from the world and made with bricks of fear and the mortar of pride—our hope in one another is strained and even our worship becomes anemic.

The dis-ease of so many Christians today reflects our upside-down view of the church. Our only cure is to penetrate to a deeper understanding of God’s plan for the church as his agent of cultural and spiritual renewal. The church, proclaims scripture, is God’s household, the pillar and foundation of truth. (1 Tim 3:15) It is to the church that Christ calls those who would be equipped to spread the good news. It is through the church that the means of grace are administered to a fallen creation that is being redeemed and restored. Though the church is a motley crew of fallen and broken people, it is also a communion of saints chosen to be God’s vehicle for transmitting the gospel.

As the Apostle Paul sat in a Roman prison he wrote to the Philippian church of his joy and confidence in their continuing testimony to the Gospel. “Conduct yourselves,” he wrote them, “in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ. Then . . . I will know that you stand firm in one spirit, contending as one man for the faith of the gospel without being frightened in any way by those who oppose you. This is a sign to them that they will be destroyed, but that you will be saved—and that by God.” (Phil 1: 27-28) The cure Paul prescribes for those living in “a crooked and depraved generation” is to “shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life.” (Phil 2:14-16)

The mission of our generation, like those of Nehemiah and of Paul, is to testify to God’s glory. In Nehemiah’s day this mission required building a wall of protection around the city. In Paul’s it meant not allowing the walls of prison to stop either his proclamation of the gospel or his encouragement of God’s people. What does this mission mean for those of us today trying to live a wholeheartedChristian life in the midst of suburban prosperity?

I believe that God is calling his people today to tear down the walls that prevent the world from seeing the hope of Christ within us. We must tear down the walls around our hearts and remove the veils from our faces so that God’s light might shine forth. We must begin to tear down the walls around our suburban churches and together—as one man—contend for the advance of the gospel in our communities and our culture.

As Christ’s body was sacrificed for us, so we in the suburban church must discover the sacrificial work to which we are being called in this generation. What mission is big enough to draw us out from behind the walls we have erected? What tasks are big enough that we, like Nehemiah and Paul, will be required to depend on God’s strength rather than our own? How can we join Jesus “outside the camp,” even in the affluent suburbs, confident that the gospel is needed to relieve the hidden pain of others and that it is capable of redeeming the culture around us? (Heb 13: 12-13) With such questions shared on our hearts and minds, we may find that we have less cause for quarrels and more reason to move forward with greater unity of will and action.

Let’s lift up our eyes and see the vision toward which God’s purpose is moving through history. There is a coming Kingdom around which stands the “great high wall” of God’s power and love, but because eternal light emanates from within this city, “on no day will its gates ever be shut.” (Rev. 21:25) We who are honored to bear the sacramental cup filled with the blood of the King should now be riding out in advance to tell how he bore the cup of wrath for us and now invites us to banquet with him where he serves the water of life. When we return, we shall ride back into the City bearing for the King the glory and honor of his nations, even of his suburbs.

 

 

The Role of the Church in the Culture

I wanted to pick up on a question raised in the Centurions online discussion forum as to "whether the Church belongs in the mode that it was in during the first three centuries, which was essentially building the church as an alternative structure to society."

My understanding thus far of our worldview studies is that the cultural mandate is of central and critical importance.  Being a fan of disestablishment for a variety of reasons theological and philosophical, I've wrestled a good bit with what living out the cultural mandate might mean in our American context, where we have unmade, largely in the name of freedom, the Christian establishment that prevailed through the middle and early modern ages.

On the plane ride home from the first Centurions residence weekend, I began working through some material by Jeff Jones et al from the Center for Church Based Training in Texas and found that he treats the role of the church quite eloquently:

"When the Church functions as it should, the world around it will not remain the same.  When the Church radiates God's glory, as in the first century, people outside the community of faith will be drawn to the Lord of the Church."

This is excerpted from a longer essay that explores how God's purposes through the ages are worked out through the church.  Jones writes:  "After Adam and Eve sinned, God's plan shifted from creation to redemption, redeeming all of creation by fully restoring his kingdom rule and redeeming humanity from the eternal consequences of sin.  Two words, redemption and rule, summarize his plan.  We see that throughout the Scriptures he accomplishes this plan by establishing communities of people, his people, who acknowledge his rightful rule and who are redeemed, fully reconciled to him.  His people serve both as a model and as messengers of the plan of reconciliation. . . . God's primary work today is the formation of his Church."

My studies (and my privilege to work toward these ends in my own church) are clarifying for me that my passion is for the health and growth of the Church.  As Jones puts it, "The presence of a healthy church is the most powerful evangelistic instrument in the world today."

I am discovering that where I may slip into unorthodox views on matters political I am often inclining toward the side of the freedom of the Church from the state and am often willing to sacrifice the influence of the Church to preserve its integrity, without which its influence will be a pale reflection of God's glory.

Does this consign the Church to be "an alternative structure to society?"  No, I rather believe that it positions the church as the only true "cult" from which a culture moving toward restoration and reconciliation can grow.  The Church is not to be apart from society (idolizing its role as the remnant) but to be integral in shaping society and serving as the soil and the vine from which God will bring forth a bountiful harvest. 

The questions of how the Church best influences society are best answered first by being the Church.  It is through community and communion in a Gospel-anchored church that we as Christians and citizens will be most likely to be equipped to discern faithfully where God is calling us to be witnesses to His glory in our times.

The Glory of Creation

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

 

T. S. Eliot

“Burnt Norton”

Every good and perfect gift is from above,
coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights,
who does not change like shifting shadow.
He chose to give us birth through the word of truth,
that we might be a kind of first-fruits of all he created.

James 1:17-18

 

Where is God when we need Him? We need at times to lift our eyes from the troubles of our own hearts and absorb the glories of the creation in which God has provided us our temporary home.

As I reflect on the wonders of God’s creation as I can view them from my desk, I am struck most by the volatility of the weather we experience in Indiana March. In any twenty-four hour sweep of hands around the clock face in March we may shiver in the winter deep or be kissed by a fleeting touch of spring hope. It is a mystery how the very fact of change can draw my thoughts to the unchanging character of God.

For an Alabama-born girl transplanted to the Midwest, the persistent winter snows in March suggest that our God is the set designer for a Divine Comedy in which a touch of March Madness will set a pick play for the howling winds that promise to bring April Showers and May Flowers. Comfortably sheltered from these biting winds, which are the merest wisps of the Divine Breath that spoke the world into existence, I spot a hearty crocus peeking its head into a fleeting sunbeam and am renewed with hope that He will soon allow Spring to burst forth in its full glory.

This briefest glimmer of hope is rewarded by the sound of geese slicing a noisy vector through the sky in the direction of North. The clouds part for longer than a moment to fill the window with a warming shaft of light, born on the sun eight light-minutes earlier. “And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.” As quickly again, however, the changeling sky casts once more the Shadow of the Fall, and instead of sunbeams there is rain streaking across the horizon. Rain replenishing the earth and reminding us that He alone is the Source of the Living Water that will cast our eyes beyond the fleet-footed dancing universe to the still point beyond the world where reigns our eternal, unchanging, just and merciful Father.

Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.. . . then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”  (1 Corinthians 15: 51-52, 54)

There, indeed, is God.

[Centurions Journal Observation, Week 6]

Freedom and Virtue? Can Christians Rightly Champion Markets?

In a provocative recent article for The New Republic E.J. Dionne calls for a rapprochement between liberalism and religion and penetratingly asks:

When TV networks and Hollywood exploit sex to make money, shouldn't liberals ask why it is that the very free market so revered by the right wing promotes values that the very same right wing claims to despise? The coarsening of the culture that traditionalist conservatives denounce is abetted by the very media concentration that economic conservatives defend. Why are liberals so tongue-tied in exposing this contradiction?

It would be a devastating question to many conservative Christians, who don't often answer well how we hold together our commitments to freedom and virtue.   The answer is deeply related to the way we understand the corrupting effects of original sin. Christian faith holds that original sin, the rebellion of the first man and women from divine order and ordinance, affected all humanity and thereby also touches all human institutions and culture. Because healing the effects of original sin can only be accomplished through divine grace, any utopianism about human society--or faith that mere social institutions can wholly redeem the brokenness of the world—is misplaced.

 Conservative Christians who embrace and defend market institutions must do so on very clear-headed grounds, viewing them not as redemptive institutions in themselves, but as a form of social arrangement that leaves individuals sufficiently free to strive for virtue, to voluntarily order their lives according to conscience. While this belief in freedom as a necessary component of virtue forms the foundation of our moral and social philosophy, conservative Christians may also cite a pragmatic dimension to our confidence in markets: history has demonstrated that markets, for all their imperfections, are usually a lesser evil than many other, usually more coercive and repressive, forms of ordering socioeconomic relations among people.

 The point that many progressives like to make against this view is that markets are embodied in marketing, which is merely a form of coercion by more subtle means. It is a point we should not dismiss lightly. Markets—or better put, the actions of individuals given the freedom of creation, expression, and exchange that markets enable—have indeed tended to coarsen private virtues and public morals. We might ask, however, whether this is intrinsic to market orders themselves or merely endemic because forces of “social liberation” have pressured for a radical secularization of the public sqare and Christians have too readily abandoned it?

Champions of public and private morality rooted in biblical truths remain free within the marketplace to advise, persuade, and otherwise promote a more refined view of human dignity and purpose, but they largely lost the field in the twentieth century. Far from endorsing the concentration of media in the big conglomerates, conservative Christians must create alternative centers of attraction and attention using the media of the present. Our homes and our churches should be beacons of hope, lit by a tranforming fire within but also radiating their light and warmth outward into the culture around them. Our messages must be winsome, charitable, and must above all speak in spirit and truth to the hope that is within us.

 In How Now Shall We Live? Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey describe the “cultural commission”: the mandate upon those redeemed by Christ “to fulfill our original purpose, empowered to do what we were created to do: to build societies and create culture….” (295) This work they term “restoration,” and it is instructive to contrast it with the “Social Gospel” movement of the early 20^th century, which sought to effect spiritual and cultural change primarily through statist means. As Dionne puts it,

 “They were prepared to use the state not only to regulate rapacious capitalists, but also the behavior of individuals. Their great experiment in this regard was Prohibition, which failed, but the link it embodied between self-improvement and social improvement endured in progressive causes from trade unionism to civil rights.”

 By contrast, Colson and Pearcey suggest that the redemption of culture (their own redemptive vision, of course, requires closer scrutiny than I can yet provide) must transpire from the inside out. “From the individual to the family to the community, and then outward in ever widening ripples. We must begin by understanding what it means to live by Christian worldview principles in our own behavior and choices.” (Colson and Pearcey, 308)

For now, we can observe with Colson and Pearcey that “how people live is determined more by their shared values, and this in turn is changed by patient persuasion and example.” (33) This enjoins upon us as individuals and as churches the task of discerning how our faith is best expressed not only in our private spheres (home and church) but in the public square as well. The task calls us to listen closely to the guidance of conscience and thus to ensure that our consciences are well formed, anchored by Scripture, instructed by the best of our traditions, and free to dwell today in spirit and truth.

 

[Centurions Journal Observation, Week 4]

People Are Good (?)

People are good.

This is the message promoted by the online auction company eBay in it's ad on the inside front cover of the February 2005 Reader's Digest. 

The ad continues:  "By our count, they've done the right thing more than 2.3 billion times."  In the fine print, we find that this count is based on the fact that "2.3 billion positive feedback comments have been left by eBay members."

In itself, the desire to believe that people are good is understandable, and it is in eBay's economic interest as a company that thrives on promoting cooperation and commercial transactions to foster people's confidence in people.  For a Christian whose anthropology holds that all people are touched by the Fall and thus incapable on their own of being "good," the eBay ad is jarring and points to one of the idols of our age that draws our attention away from the redemptive role of Christ in nature and history.

eBay's premise that "people are good" echoes Rousseau's confidence in human nature but combines it with a technocratic optimism that institutions can be created that can harness and amplify our "goodness."  [Rousseau objected that it was the artifice of social institutions themselves that corrupted human behavior.] 

In the same week that I saw this eBay advertisement, a close friend told me that she and her family had received death threats from an eBay user to whom one of her sons had given negative feedback.  While this episode is plausibly the rare exception of extreme abuse of the eBay platform, it is the case that disproves the proclamation that "people are good," and belies the universality of a worldview that espouses this view of human behavior.

Part of the challenge in speaking against the belief that "people are good"--beyond merely offering the counterfactual--is to distinguish "goodness" from mere "morality."  People do tend to do the right things more often than not, but the rectitude of their actions is often measured by a social standard of morality to which they conform for reasons of fear of legal redress or, more often even, out of a desire of good reputation.  eBay's feedback system is itself a use of technology to assist and accelerate the reputational mechanism of the eBay marketplace.

To measure what is truly good, however, requires looking to the transcendent standard of truth.  From the Christian's view, goodness is perfect conformity to God's commandments.  Taken in their most simply stated form: love God and love one's neighbor as oneself.   The rich young man asked Jesus, "Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?"

"Why do you ask me about what is good?" Jesus replied.  "There is only One who is good.  If you want to enter life, obey the commandments." (Matthew 19: 17)

Apart from the grace of Christ, none of us can attain to perfect rectitude, and even when living in this grace we are counted perfect but not made perfect in an instant.  The apostle Paul acknowledged his own struggles to "be good"--

I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature.  For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.  For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do--this I keep on doing. (Romans 7:18-19)

[Centurions Journal Observation, Week 2]

The Hours

Our course assignments include watching  and reflecting on several contemporary movies.  Here is my reflection on  The Hours (2002).

“And death shall be no more, death thou shalt die. Nothing but a breath, a comma separates life from life everlasting. Death is no longer something to act out on a stage with exclamation marks. It is a comma, a pause.”

 These lines come not from the 2002 movie, The Hours, but from the 2001 movie Wit,[1] a film that treats of similar themes of suffering, longing, and death but which stands in sharp contrast to the more popularly marketed and celebrated The Hours. Having watched The Hours, I was drawn to watch Wit again, and found it an articulate and deeply moving counterpoint to the disturbing emotional tones of The Hours. 

The Hours is an artistically crafted movie, compelling in its entwining of three stories that each feature a day in the life of a woman struggling with the meaning of human existence. The anchor of the film is Virginia Woolf, the acclaimed author who struggled with mental illness throughout much of her life but also left a literary legacy that influenced the shape of modern feminism and its effort to throw off the supposed constraints of traditional culture.

 The tales of two fictional characters come alongside the story of the suicidal Woolf. Laura Brown, a depressed young wife and mother, feels out of place and somewhat trapped in the romanticized utopia of 1950s suburbia. She is unable to participate in the happy glosses on life made both by her husband and her neighbor, and she contemplates suicide (in the midst of reading Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf’s novel that exposed the banal veneer coating the day of a woman of London society) and ultimately abandons her husband and two children.

 Laura’s son, Richard, whom we see as a child in the 1950s storyline wanting desperately to warm to the love of a mother who dwells in a world apart, appears grown-up in the third storyline as an award-winning novelist who is dying of AIDS. Richard is plagued by the hours he endures, constrained by his illness to watch life pass by on the streets below his window. His friend and youthful love, Clarissa, is a faithful caregiver, but their relationship is strained by the presence of other lovers and former lovers and their wistful memories of a day when they experienced the penetrating, but fleeting happiness of being in love. When Clarissa arrives to take Richard to the party she has prepared to celebrate his literary accomplishment, Richard declares that they have been as happy as two people could be and deliberately takes flight and falls to his death from an open window.

 The Hours is a moving film, but it moves one to the depths of human pathos in a way that is ultimately disturbing and pathetic. For Virginia, Laura, Richard, and Clarissa, life is something to be endured. Richard observes that Clarissa is always throwing parties to cover over the silence. For these characters, in the span between birth and death, when we return, as Woolf says to her niece, “to the place we came from,” there is little hope, only the hours to be passed, punctuated if one is lucky by the briefest moments of unassailable and haunting happiness. Death by drowning, overdose, or a crashing fall of ten stories are equally meaningless ways to exit life. And when we are dead, like the bird for which Woolf and her niece create a bier in the Richmond woods, we simply “look smaller.”

Contrast the themes of suffering and abandonment that tightly weave the lives of the characters in The Hours with the last months of life of Professor Vivian Bearing, the leading character in Wit. Vivian, an uncompromising scholar of English literature, is dying of late stage ovarian cancer and elects to endure a highly experimental and pernicious treatment regimen that, like Richard’s AIDS, slowly but steadily deprives her of her life and her literature. Much like Richard, Vivian experiences and comments upon the isolation of the dying and the slow moving hands of the clock, but ultimately she holds with tenacity and grace to the time she has remaining. “You cannot imagine how time can be so still,” she says. “It hangs, it weighs, and yet there is so little of it. It goes so slowly, and yet it is so scarce.”

 Richard’s hours weigh heavily on him and seem too many. There seems to be no redeeming the time, and his story ends with his dramatic suicide and his mother’s recognition when she arrives after her son’s death that there is no one left to forgive her for her abandonment of her family.

The last hours of Vivian Bearing’s life are infused and framed by the metaphysical poetics of John Donne, and her story closes not with abandonment but with her growing recognition of herself (reminiscent of the character development we find in C. S. Lewis’ Til We Have Faces). Her life with Donne culminates in the knowledge that his metaphysical struggles were not wit but truth, and she learns ultimately how to suffer and how to allow herself to need and receive human touch.  On her deathbed, Vivian is visited by her former professor, E. M. Ashford, who takes the frail body of her protégé to her bosom and reads to her Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runaway Bunny, explicating the text in professorial fashion as an “allegory of the soul.” Making the simple scholarly and the scholarly simple, befittingly bringing Vivian’s life full circle, Professor Ashford pours out the gospel of grace on her former student, pointing out that no matter where the soul hides, God can find it. Unlike Clarissa’s forlorn clinging to the dying Richard, Professor Ashford gives Vivian permission—“time to go”—and benediction—“flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” We see in the end Vivian’s body, definitely frail and smaller, but there is little doubt that her soul has swelled to a heavenly dimension.

 In the end, both movies leave the viewer with tears of compassion, but only one succeeds in penetrating the veil that separates life from everlasting life, allowing us to find in the last breath not depression and despair but a ray of hope that redemption has been accomplished.

[1] Directed by Mike Nichols. Starring Emma Thompson. Based on the 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Margaret Edson. HBO Films, 2001.

Toleration vs. Tolerance

Focus on the Family founder Dr. James Dobson was in the news this week for warning parents that many of their children's favorite cartoon characters are being enlisted in a campaign promoting diversity and tolerance that may also entail promoting acceptance of homosexuality as a sexual norm.

What Dobson said last week drew attention to the We Are a Family Foundation, which is promoting on its website  a Tolerance Pledge that reads as follows:

Tolerance is a personal decision that comes from a belief that every person is a treasure.   I believe that America's diversity is its strength. I also recognize that ignorance, insensitivity and bigotry can turn that diversity into a source of prejudice and discrimination.

To help keep diversity a wellspring of strength and make America a better place for all, I pledge to have respect for people whose abilities, beliefs, culture,  race, sexual identity or other characteristics are different from my own.

While affirming some principles that are consistent with a Christian worldview, such as the inherent dignity of every person (assuming this is what being a "treasure" means), the Tolerance Pledge also sheds light on the confusion in our culture today about the differences between "tolerance" and "toleration." 

This confusion is widespread.  Even President Bush, in an inaugural address that affirmed the existence and applicability of natural law in contemporary world politics, invoked the supposed virtue of "tolerance."   

In America's ideal of freedom, the public interest depends on private character--on integrity, and tolerance toward others, and the rule of conscience in our own lives.

Unfortunately, the concept of tolerance as it has come to be used can't bear the meaning the President intended for it to carry. The trouble is that while calling for positive respect for others, tolerance requires us to be largely indifferent to the content of character.  The tolerance being taught to our children as a virtue is a respect for others apart from and in spite of the content of their character.  It asks us to overlook failures of personal integrity and prohibits us from speaking truth in such a way as to pierce the conscience of those who seem to suppress their knowledge of the natural law in order to pursue without guilt their earthly desires. 

What President Bush should have said in his speech was that the private character of man in a free society requires toleration.   The concept of toleration is rooted in the historical context that gave rise to the very idea of free peoples and nations.   Toleration as a democratic principle emerged as a means of preserving the bonds of national unity and peace despite the prevalence of very real disagreements on points of religious doctrine.  It was a principle that ultimately paved the way for the separation of the church from the state during the American Founding era. 

Far from calling us merely to a bland respect for the man with whom we have deep disagreements, toleration urges on us a positive virtue of forbearance--not so that we might all live as we each deem right in our own eyes but so we can continue to discourse together in mutual pursuit of the truth.  Toleration calls upon us not to invade the life, liberty, and property of others, but it does not require us to abandon efforts to inform and persuade others through private and public discourse.

The very word toleration acknowledges the pain associated with enduring separation from our brother on points of conscience.  From the perspective of the We Are Family Foundation and other similar groups promoting diversity, tolerance is far from something painful but rather a matter for celebration.  As a foundation for celebrating our common humanity, which is not at all a bad thing to do, tolerance asks us not to love our brothers and sisters in truth but to sacrifice the value of truth for the sake of peace  This requires us not only to turn a deaf ear to what our own conscience whispers to us but ultimately to be truly indifferent about the care of our brother's soul.   

In this way, tolerance achieves at most a meaningless and toothless peace while removing the common foundation of our dignity as human beings "endowed by our Creator" with the capacity to pursue and know truth and to live in freedom under the guide of our conscience. 

Ignorance, insensitivity and bigotry have no place in a Christian's heart, mind, or actions, but casting our eyes upon the demands of a Higher Truth we must teach our children that tolerance is a weaker virtue than toleration.  In forbearance we must not only embrace truth, empathy, and integrity but also while naming sin humbly enter into the suffering of others even as Christ suffered for us.   Toleration points us beyond this day and demonstrates the confidence we have that God can pursue and redeem even those of us who most turn our back on him.

[Centurions Journal Observation Week 1]

New Beginning

I'm starting this blog as a space for recording reflections and journal entries while participating in the 2005 Centurions Program sponsored by The Wilberforce Forum.

The Centurions Program is developing and equipping an ongoing fellowship of Christian men and women trained by Chuck Colson and The Wilberforce Forum to restore our culture by effectively thinking, teaching, and advocating the Christian worldview as applied to all of life.

I have chosen the words of Mordecai to Esther as the motif for this blog:

"Do not imagine that you in the king's palace can escape any more than all the Jews.  For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place and you and your father's house will perish.  And who knows whether you have not attained royalty for such a time as this?   (Esther 4:13-14)

Ultimate salvation for the Jews, of course, did come from another, but Esther's example of courage stands out to me as a model for how we each are called at our own moment in time to witness with our lives to the Truth we know.  Several things stand out about Esther's example:

• Esther sought and submitted herself to the counsel of others. (Both from Mordecai and from the king's eunuch.)
• Esther depended on corporate sustenance of her spirit rather than merely on her own courage, entreating both all the Jews in Susa and her own maidens to fast with her.
• Esther exhibited resolve in the face of grave danger--to enter the king's presence unbidden was contrary to law and punishable by death.  (Can't we as Christians  be thankful that in Christ we may now "have confidence to enter the holy place" as well as approach any other seat of authority?!)
• Esther did not refuse her "journey to desire," to use John Eldredge's phrase.  Indeed, it was her humble petition that elicited the king's favor ("Bring Haman quickly that we may do as Esther desires.")
• Esther desired not merely to save her own life but to spare that of her people as well --her desire was not for her own pleasure but for the good of her people.
  

Thus the Centurions Program affords me an opportunity to seek counsel, to participate in a corporate journey of learning, to learn to speak truth with boldness, to revel in my own adopted status in the Royal Family, and to look into my own desires to discern the desires of the flesh from the desires of the spirit and to discover what God's call upon my life is at such a time as this.