The author of BeAttitude recently announced his "de-conversion" from the Christian faith.  Normally, such posts do not draw my attention as they all sound pretty much the same, much like Christian "personal testimonials" of conversion.  Funny how that is.  What caught my eye was the fact that this author claims in his profile to have been baptized and confirmed in the Lutheran church.  He's "one of ours," so this one hit a bit closer to home for me.

The post is not the usual triumph of reason over superstition nor does it have the typical broadside against believers.  It is really more like the last breath of the dying, a quiet sigh of resignation.  The last breath is always a sigh.  

The author lists his "Top 20" reasons for making the break.  In a word, they mostly deal with credibility - the credibility of God, of the Bible, of the Church, of Christians.  They are worth pondering, not for their profundity so much as for their ubiquity.  There are many people who quietly think these things.  Some of them occupy pews and pulpits.  Ask yourself, "How would I respond if my son, daughter, or best friend said these things to me?"  If your reflex is a 20-point refutation, you're starting off on the wrong foot.  A draw is the best one can hope for when arguing with a skeptic.

The skepticism of our age has had a cumulatively corrosive effect on faith.  I've seen it in my own people, especially our youth, and, to be quite honest, I experience it for myself.  There are times when I find myself kicking and screaming against faith.  I cannot by my own reason or strength believe.  I believe that.  Faith is a gift of God's grace, an orientation of trust worked by the Spirit who calls us by the Gospel.  I also believe that we can by our own reason and strength undermine faith by our own relentless questioning of things that cannot be fully answered to our satisfaction.

I trust my wife and believe her claim to love me.  Her actions support her claim of love, not as "proofs" but as consistent actions.  But if I continually question her love, demand further irrefutable proofs from her, and constantly approach her with an attitude of skepticism, I will risk two things.  First, I will endanger her love to me.  She will be hurt that I do not believe her words or trust her.  Second, I will destroy my love for her as I become consumed by my own skepticism when attempts to "prove" her love do not live up to my expectations for convincing evidence.

None of us is immune.  You can't read the Bible to any degree of depth without being aware of its difficulties.  You can't hang around with Christians for very long without being painfully aware of their foibles.  You can't spend any serious time in the church without encountering power grabbing institutions and bureaucrats, corrupt clergy, and a checkered past along with a spotted present.

There is a place for healthy skepticism, what Luther called the "ministerial use" of reason.  There is room in the life of faith for Mary's "how can this be?"  Jesus warned His disciples of deceptive signs and wonders, and His apostle John urged his hearers to "test the spirits."  We don't cry "it's a miracle!" every time we can't explain something, and we're rightly suspicious of weeping statues and beatific visions in the burn marks on a tortilla or the watermarks on the side of a barn.

Skepticism ceases to be healthy when it closes the mind and hardens the heart, when it sets the rules for evidence and becomes prosecutor, judge, and jury.  The skeptical mind is closed by its own set of presuppositions and untestibles.  Things like "There is no such thing as miracles" or "Matter and energy is all there is" or "The only way of knowing things is through scientific observation."  The believing mind turns out to be more open than the unbelieving, while a healthy dose of skepticism keeps one's brains from falling out on the floor.  Hardened skepticism, however, can best be described as a colossal failure of the imagination.

Kierkegaard said that faith and doubt must always coexist.   I cannot for a moment imagine Joseph looking at Mary lying next to him at night and wondering "Really?" just as I stand before the altar at Holy Communion and often wonder the same.  Faith in something that is promised and unseen will always have an element of uncertainty. It goes with the turf.  The question is whether we would have skepticism become the governing principle in our lives, which at least for me, would be like having a library filled exclusively with science textbooks. You won't find poetry or literature in the chemistry library.

Science can inspire awe and wonder, but it can't inspire trust much less love, charity or self-sacrifice. The slogan of the skeptic is "trust nothing and no one apart from the evidence."  In his published letter to his ten year old daughter,  Richard Dawkins tells her never to trust anything based on tradition, revelation, or authority but always to seek the hard evidence.  He concludes with this poignant paragraph:

  What can we do about all this ? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: "Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority, or revelation?" And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: "What kind of evidence is there for that?" And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.

He signs his letter with a tender "Your loving Daddy."  I have no reason to question his fatherly affections, but were Dawkins' daughter to take her father's sage advice, she would immediately respond to his "Your loving Daddy" by asking, "What kind of evidence is there for that?"

In a perfect world, the Bible would be a perfect book, logical and coherent, glowing with unearthly radioactive luminescence or something equally scary.  It would not be filled with ambiguities and contradictions and hares that chew the cud (Lev 11:6), but then, what would people in religious studies departments have to argue about? The church would be a perfect reflection of the kingdom of God on earth, and Christians would walk around with glowing nimbi hovering behind their holy heads like you see in the icons.   Talk about weird.  But when God deals with us through the ordinary and the mundane, we seem to pass it all off as beneath the dignity of a respectable  Deity.

We all have our pet notions of what a respectable holy book and God would be like if we had things our way.  Richard Dawkins likes to say that "a universe with a god would be a different sort of universe," which sounds really profound until you stop and realize that he thinks God is a delusion.  How can you speculate on a universe with a God when you deny the God in the universe you already have?  That's like saying that the Taurus would be a better car if it was built by Toyota, while not believing that Toyota exists.  How exactly is an n-dimensional being supposed to reveal Himself to our four-dimensional world except in four dimensions?  And wouldn't one reasonably except at least some measure of messiness around the revelatory edges?

As for me and my house, I'm running with the Jewish carpenter from Nazareth who died and rose again and called the shot three times in advance.  The record of Him is as credible as any other event in human history, regardless of what Bart Ehrman thinks.  One thing my healthy skepticism does tell me is trust no one in a "religious studies" department.  As for BeAttitude's Top 20, I've thought of most of them in my own skeptical  pilgrimage and can add a few more to the list.  Some are debatable; some dismissable; most we'll just have to ponder.  I choose to ponder these things in prayer, in the Word, and at the Lord's Table, trusting that at the close of the day and at the end of my days, I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to Him.

I guess sometimes you need to lose your religion in order to find Christ, or better, to come to the recognition that He has already found you.  It's kind of like admitting you don't know anything before you can learn something.  The nice thing is that the Father is always waiting to welcome his prodigal children with open arms and a party.

"Lord, I believe.  Help Thou my unbelief."

This distinction between God’s commands and His promises is to be numbered among the “Lutheran distinctives,” though Lutherans certainly hold no monopoly on it, and other Christians are often much better at it.  However, the Lutheran tradition has uniquely made this distinction an explicit part, indeed the very hermeneutical heart, of its doctrine.

The Law and the Gospel are the two impacts or activities of the Word of God as a sharp two-edged sword.  They are not two words but two edges of one Word .  Each edge reveals different aspects of God.  The Law reveals God’s wrath against humanity’s sin and His righteous judgment of the sinner; the Gospel reveals God’s mercy toward sinful humanity in Christ and His undeserved kindness toward the sinner for Jesus’ sake.  Each also reveals two different aspects of ourselves.  The Law reveals who and what we are in ourselves as sinners under the wrath of God.  The “gospel” reveals who and what we are in Christ as saints under the mercy of God.

As two sides of the one Word, Law and Gospel are indivisible.  “Antinomianism” and “legalism” result when Law and Gospel are divided into static, systematic categories, leaving open the possibility of having one without the other.  They partake of the same error in opposite directions.  One can no more speak Law without Gospel than one can speak Gospel without Law.    Apart from the other, both will be distorted.  Both Law and Gospel “are always together, and both of them have to be urged side by side, but in proper order and with the correct distinction” (FC SD V.15). 

The distinction of the Law and the Gospel is the paradoxical inner tension of the Word as it goes out into the world.  Like a guitar string pulled taut, the Word can be heard properly as the wisdom of God for salvation only as it is held in this dynamic inner tension.  This is also true for the hearer as believer, who is caught in the existential paradox of being simultaneously a sinner in himself under the Law and a saint in Christ under the Gospel.

The distinction of the Law and the Gospel is actually a “double reading” of the Word, like reading through 3-D glasses in which each eye yields a different perspective giving a stereoscopic view.  This explains how the Lutheran reformers could read Genesis 3:15 (the “protoevangelium”!) as a “frightful sentence” and the preaching of the passion of Christ “an earnest and terrible revelation and preaching of God’s wrath over sin.” We are initially surprised at this assessment because we are most inclined to read these as purely Gospel.  But viewed through the lens of the Law, the promise of God to make enmity reveals that there is no enmity between man and devil and that God Himself must act if we are to be saved.  Similarly, the Passion of Christ reveals the enormity of man’s sin that the Son of God Incarnate must die in our place.  

Ye who think of sin but lightly

Nor suppose the evil great

Here may view its nature rightly,

Here its guilt may estimate.  (LSB #451)

This is the theme of Paul’s letter to the Romans.  Pharisaic Judaism, in which Paul himself had been thoroughly schooled, read the Torah in the way of the Law as a “Torah of works” and not in the way of the Gospel as a “Torah of faith” and so missed the Christ at the center of the Torah.  The “righteousness of God” is understood only in a double sense - as the righteousness of God that stands in judgment against our sin, and as an imputed righteousness granted the sinner by grace through faith for Christ’s sake.

Practically speaking, what does this mean for us, whether as pastor preparing a sermon or as Christian reading the Bible? 

It means we do not sort passages of Scripture into a Law or Gospel bucket, like a fisherman sorting fish. We do not, as is the way of all “pietism,” delay the Gospel until we are sure the Law has done its job, nor do we presume that the Law has done its work and skip straight to the Gospel.  We do not preach conditional “If Law then Gospel” (“If you...then God will forgive you.”) or “Law but Gospel” (“You are a sinner but Jesus died for you….”).   We proclaim Law and Gospel (“you are a sinner and Jesus died for you”).  We allow the paradoxical inner tension of the Word to remain unrelieved and unresolved, as it must be, for the Word to accomplish its killing and making alive work in us. 

In this way, the writing of the holy prophets, apostles, and evangelists will be explained and understood correctly.

and from Jesus Christ the Father’s Son, in truth and love.  (2 John 3).

Our attempts to reach out to the other in a meaningful way fail when love and truth are rent asunder.  Divorced from love, truth becomes legal principle and a potential club to be wielded against another.  Divorced from truth, love becomes a self-indulgent feeling rather than a self-sacrificing act of the will.  Loveless truths are no more “right” than truthless love.  Loveless truth is without context; truthless love is without content.  In the Scriptures, one loves “in the truth” and “speaks the truth in love.”

The apostle Paul said that even if we speak in heavenly tongues, preach with prophetic power, and comprehend the mysteries of the universe and plumb the depths of all knowledge, even if we have mountain-moving faith, but do not have love, we are nothing.  In the Revelation, the congregation in Ephesus was sound in doctrine and practice, able to flush out the false prophets and heretics, but it lacked the love they once had for one another.  Such is the danger when truth and love come apart.

As “confessional" Christians we tend to be focused on the truth - pure doctrine, pure practice, pure confession.  And these are all well and good.  But we seem, at times, to lose our love, both for one another and for others, especially when we encounter those with whom we disagree.  We claim our truth is “loving,” but the objects of our "loving truth" remain unconvinced and unmoved.  I suggest it is not truth that has failed but love.

Love is patient and kind; not jealous or boastful; not arrogant or rude.  Love does not insist on getting its own way; it is not irritable or resentful.  It does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

When we reach out to the other in love we are put in a place of vulnerability.  Our claim to the truth might be challenged or even rejected.  We might become defensive, lashing out at the other instead of reaching out.  We might withdraw inward, seeking the safety of those who agree with us and who are “like us.”   Perhaps the thing that frightens us the most is that we may discover that our claim to the truth may not be as exclusive, our grasp as strong, or our knowledge as exhaustive as we had thought.  To reach out to the other in love is to be humbled.

Speaking the truth in love entails listening.  Love demands that we lay down our lives and our agendas in order to listen patiently - bearing, believing, hoping, enduring all things.  Unless we first listen, the truth we speak will not be a truth spoken in love, and therefore be nothing more than clanging noise.  We cannot know what it is like to be the other, but we can learn by listening, and our listening will chip away at the walls of our preconceptions.

I am learning - slowly and haltingly - to bring an empty head and an open heart to every encounter, whether a call, a visit, a conversation.  I do not carry a  little outline of pastoral wisdom or a Bible verse selected ahead of time for whatever need I perceive there might be.  I try to empty my head of every preconception that would get in the way of my hearing.   I bring only myself, the accumulated wisdom of a 52 year conversation with God in His Word, the promise that the Spirit will stir up whatever may be useful at the right moment, and a curiosity over what God has been doing before I arrived on the scene.

Listening doesn’t come easy to me.  Talk for me is a defensive wall that keeps me safely in control and keeps others from drawing too close.  But the walls that we build to protect ourselves from each other need to come down.  We need to drop our defenses.  We need to die to our preconceptions about each other and realize that we really don’t know each other.  All we know is that we are speaking to one for whom Jesus died.

Only then can we love in truth and speak the truth in love.

First a few notes about Matthew 5:28 itself.  The verb “to be” is a future indicative, not an imperative, though the future indicative can have imperative force.  It can be heard descriptively (“You will be perfect…”) or prescriptively (“You shall be perfect….”).  The same is true of the Ten Commandments, by the way, in both Hebrew and Greek (LXX)!  The adjective translated “perfect” “teleios” means whole, complete, undivided, unblemished (TDNT) (eg, see the LXX 1 Kings 8:61;11:4 of the undivided heart).  Jesus says to the rich young ruler, “If you would be teleios….” (Mt 19:21).  Finally, this passage has its parallel in the Torah at Lev 19:2 “You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy.”

Mt 5:48 is part of a greater literary unit called the “Sermon on the Mount” (ch 5-7) in which Jesus appears as the giver of the new Torah, hearkening back to Moses on his mountain.  Yet Jesus is a completely different covenant mediator than was Moses.  Where Moses began with commandments, Jesus begins with beatitudes, blessings (5:1-12).   Moses went up to God, but Jesus, as the Son of God incarnate, comes down to the people.  No one could come up to Moses’ mountain, lest he die, but with Jesus, even the crowds are invited to listen in.

Mt. 5:48 is the last verse of a section that begins at 5:17.  Jesus has not come to abolish the Torah and the Prophets (ie the Tanach, the written Scriptures), but to fulfill them.  In this section (5:17-48), Jesus challenges the rabbinic tradition (Talmud) of the scribes and Pharisees who had codified the Torah into 613 positive and negative commandments in an attempt to establish a righteousness by works.  The apostle Paul would later expand on this in his letter to the Romans wherein he argues that the Torah is properly interpreted as a Torah of faith in the promise and not a Torah of works, that a man is justified before God by faith apart from the works of the Torah.  The foundation of Paul’s teaching of forensic justification lies here in the Sermon on the Mount.

The rabbinic tradition, in its attempt to establish a righteousness of works, failed to deliver the goods.  “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (5:20).  The Pharisees played with the Law of God as though it were a toy poodle; Jesus unleashes a Doberman with fangs.  He expounds the Law on his own authority over and against the tradition (“You have heard it said...but I say to you”), much to the delight of the crowds who were accustomed to their teachers credentialing themselves by their rabbinic succession to Moses.  Jesus speaks out of His own authority.

Jesus delivers the proper understanding of the Law contained in the Torah.  Not only does the Law judge the action, as the rabbinic tradition held, it also judges the attitude and orientation of the heart.  Therefore, hatred of one’s brother in the heart is the same as murder (5:21-22); a lustful look the same as adultery (5:28).  No one is left unscathed; no one can be justified by the Law.  Anyone who would justify himself by his works under the Law, will be found wanting, as was the rich young ruler (Mt. 19:21).  You might say that Jesus uses the Law to beat the religion out of the religious, or more gently, as a pedagogue to lead His hearers to Himself (Gal 3:23-25).  If you think you can ascend the ladder of holiness to God by your commandment-keeping, think again.  If anyone nearly did it, it was the scribes and the Pharisees, and they fell far short.

The righteousness God seeks is whole, complete, unblemished, teleios.  This is not possible in ourselves, born as we are in sin.  It is only possible in Jesus Christ, who came to fulfill the Torah by His active obedience, keeping every iota and dot (5:18) and His passive obedience, becoming sin for us and suffering the consequences of our sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21).  In the sweet swap of our sin for Jesus’ righteousness, received through faith (that is, trust in the promise of Jesus’ blood), we have a righteousness that does indeed exceed that of the scribes and the Pharisees, a righteousness that comes through faith and not through the works of the Torah.

So back to our verse.  “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.”  As commandment, this is fulfilled in Jesus Christ who loved God and loved His neighbor wholly and completely as the unblemished Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  He is teleios for us all.  As gift and promise, Christ’s perfection is granted us as we are found in Him through baptismal faith.   “For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ” (Gal 3:27).  We are indeed perfect (in Christ), even as our Father in heaven is perfect.

Last week, the UN Human Rights Council approved a resolution that calls on nation states to limit criticism of religions in general and Islam in particular. Proposed by Pakistan on behalf of other Islamic countries, the resolution passed with the votes of 23 countries on the 47-member council. According to Freedom House, many of the sponsors and supporters of the measure have some of the poorest records of respecting freedom of speech and religion in the world.

Hmm.  First of all, I'm little confused over the vote.  23 out of 47 constitutes a majority in which number system?  Second, this resolution is clearly a nominee for this year's Tu Quoque award for the pot calling the kettle black, as the proponents of this resolution are among the most egregious violators of free speech and religious rights on the planet.  No surprises here.  Something tells me that Christianity is going to be declared an exemption on the religious endangered species list.  

Do we need a resolution on religious nice talk from the world's self-appointed Mommy?  Hardly.  Christianity, when it's running on all its Gospel cylinders and not trying to create some theocratic "Christian state," values personal liberty, free speech and the naked public square as conducive to the proclamation of the Gospel.  Unlike Islam, which must suppress its critics in its attempt to inaugurate world peace through subjugation, Christianity proclaims the objective fact of Jesus' gracious lordship through His reconciling death and bodily resurrection whether the nay-sayers like it or not.  In fact, the Gospel of Jesus Christ thrives where there is freedom of speech and religion.  After all, what has Light to fear of the darkness, or the Truth to fear of the lie?

A commenter over at Gene "Cranach" Veith's blog made an interesting observation:  The Book of Concord, with all its "rejects" and "condemns," is now contrary to a UN resolution.  I wonder if we'll see UN storm troopers at a Lutheran church near you.

Afterthought:  When are we going to send the UN packing to Brussels where it belongs?

Valentine’s Day appears to be one of those baptized paganisms.  Plutarch (that’s Mestrius Plutarchus who lived between 46 and 127 AD - for all you kids in public school) described the Roman festival of Lupercalia, which fell on Feb. 15th this way:

It was the “running of the bulls” meets the college streakers of the 70’s.  I’m a bit concerned about the “shaggy thongs,” but I digress unnecessarily.  You get the point.  Lupercalia was a pagan fertility festival. According to one source, on Lupercalia a young man would draw the name of a young woman in a lottery and would then keep her as a sexual companion for the year.  (And you thought Mardi Gras was bad.)  Pope Gelasius I (492-496 AD - that’s how long he was pope, not how long he lived) dumped a bucket of ecclesiastical ice water on Lupercalia for obvious reasons and declared February 14th to be the feast of St. Valentine.

So who was Valentine?  Well, you actually have three guys to choose from.  According to the New Advent Encyclopedia, my on-line source for all things Roman Catholic, there are at least three different St. Valentines in the martyrologies.  One was a priest at Rome, another the bishop of Interamna (modern Terni, in case you haven’t made summer vacation plans yet), and the third some guy in Africa that no one knows much about.  As the story goes, Valentine got in trouble with Emperor Claudius II, allegedly over Claudius’ prohibition of marriage for young men because he needed more soldiers.  (It appears that emperors, like their modern day counterparts, can never get enough troop strength.)  Valentine got tossed into prison, where, legend has it, he fell in love with the jailor’s daughter and wrote her a little love note on the way to his execution.  And the rest, as they say, is history.  Sort of.

The Roman Catholic Church bumped St. Valentine out of the canonical hall of fame back in 1969, but the Lutheran Service Book managed to squeeze him in on its list of Commemorations.  (I’m not kidding; it’s on page xii.)  Geoffrey Chaucer, the patron saint of computer spell checkers, is responsible for the first written association of Valentine’s Day with romantic love in his Parelment of Foules (1382) (that’s "Parliament of Fools" for those of you who don’t read old English on a regular basis):

Pardon the spelling, but that’s the way they did it back in Chaucer's day.  This was before Microsoft Word and the spell checker.  Just read it aloud, and you’ll get it, more or less.  On the day the birds search for a mate, somewhere in the middle of February, (which seems a bit chilly for avian romance, but hey, I'm not a bird), a letter of love was sent from a lover to his beloved.  And that, kiddies, was more than enough romance for Hallmark to turn the feast of St. Valentine into a multi-million dollar romantic dynamo.

As you can probably tell, my wife and I don’t invest heavily in the stock of romance.  We never did.  We both come from a line of practical people who didn’t have the time, energy, or money to engage in fantasy.  We prefer the long, slow simmer of marital love, seasoned over 17 years of life together with laughter, play, passion, friendship, respect, honor, and fidelity.  Romance may get the ball rolling in the beginning but it doesn’t have nearly enough mileage to get a couple through the long haul much less out of a ditch.  Don’t think we aren’t passionate about each other.  We are.  But passion doesn’t require roses and a box of chocolates to prime the pump.

Historically, people got married for really good reasons - political power, land, money, and a herd of sheep.  Marriages were generally negotiated between fathers and the couple more or less played the marital hand that was dealt them.  I know people who are in arranged marriages, and they seem to fare much better in the marriage game than most of the folks I know who married for romance.  It was the Victorians, with their lace and lavender, that brought romance into marriage, causing otherwise sane people to expect to be swept off their feet by someone with whom they share a bathroom every morning. 

Romance is a religion, holding out the prospects of perfection for a price.  It's a grand illusion that there is a special somone out there made just for you, a soul mate, your match made in heaven.  When you realize that the person you are married to isn’t that one, the absence of romance leads directly out of what might otherwise have been a perfectly serviceable marriage.  One of the things I hear all the time from couples in trouble is, “We need to rekindle the romance in our marriage.”  Hearing that, I know they are headed for disaster.  Romance is the last thing they need.  The pursuit of romance leads either to affairs or divorce court.  What the unhappy couple needs is a dose of maturity and the happy realization that life moves grandly on to better things after senior prom and the wedding day.  Enduring marital love consists in giving not getting, in faithfulness not fireworks.  The romantic mystery ends the morning he or she crawled out of your bed, which is precisely where all "romance novels" come to their end.

Walking by the local supermarket today, I noted the grim faced, determined young men dutifully clutching their bouquets of flowers, looking like St. Valentine on the way to his martyrdom.  I can only imagine what judgments await them at the close of the day.  As for me and my house, we’ll settle in to a nice home-cooked meal at our own banquet table and the easy ongoing conversation that is our marriage.  We’ll light a couple of candles, open a nice bottle of wine, probably a Cabernet, and raise a toast to St. Valentine, whichever of the three he may have been.  May they all rest in the peace of Jesus. 

I hope it’s true that St. Valentine went to his death defending marriage.  We could use more of that kind of passion today.