Lecture from non-Christian devalues message

I have to say that I am glad I have left Redeemer, left the awful judgments and hate. I am in the "secular" world, and I feel more love and acceptance here than I ever felt in my years at Redeemer. This article and responses to this article just confirmed for me my wish to not return to Redeemer, nor return to the "church". Instead I am enjoying living a life of love and modeling it after an amazing, radical, and loving God!

I have to say that I am glad I have left Redeemer, left the awful judgments and hate. I am in the "secular" world, and I feel more love and acceptance here than I ever felt in my years at Redeemer. This article and responses to this article just confirmed for me my wish to not return to Redeemer, nor return to the "church". Instead I am enjoying living a life of love and modeling it after an amazing, radical, and loving God!

After much prayer and time listening to the counsel of many Christians including all (and yes I mean all) the comments people have been gracious enough to write in response to the article, I am ready to respond.

Since Kevin, Leah, Ivan, Brandon, and several others have expressed their thoughts, I am finding that there is little left for me to respond to and almost all of the points I desired to make have been reiterated in the comments. However I would like to turn the focus to some misconceptions about me that have come up. Essentially, my intention is to remove myself from the equation and put the intended message in the forefront.

First, there have been several people who have made comments on my writing style and they are correct. Because of the choppy nature of the article, I think this has led to the misconception that I was writing a flaming, reactionary response to the Lewis lecture. This is a false, yet understandable, assumption as to my motives. In spite of my linguistic and grammatical short-comings, several people did manage to grasp an understanding of my true and sincere intentions. They talked about my desire to warn of the dangers associated with the lecturer being anti-Christian. In addition to his lack of faith, his focus on physical bodies and numbers were a sad representation of what the whole of social justice is about. I was expecting the discussion panel following the talk to address these issues; they did not.

It was my assumption that we all shared a desire for the Truth (God’s Truth) found only through the context of the whole Bible as the authority: the New Testament expanding the Old Testament and the Old Testament keeping our interpretation of the New in context. This is done so that we would not fall prey to ideas such as: ‘Jesus not being the judge on the last day’ or that ‘civil governments should not use the whole Bible to understand what just punishment is for wrongdoers’.

It was this assumption that led me to use rhetorical questions considering the judgment of God on sins (such as those quoted in Psalms like 58 and Revelations 21:8 and 22:15-16, etc) and the lack of mercy in allowing the wicked to flourish (see Psalm 10, 125, etc).

When I talked about concern for souls, preaching the Gospel and expecting social justice to follow on the heels of hearts turning to God, it would seem that I have been misunderstood as talking about the social gospel that is rampant in areas of Africa as well as North America. The gospel message is “sold” with promises of peace and prosperity and that life will be trouble free after you accept God. This sounds great to many in countries wracked with so many hurts and injustice; however it simply is not true. The Gospel I was thinking of is entirely different. Let me give you a few examples.

I went on a mission trip to the Dominican Republic to work on schools in Haitian communities and learned a lot about Christianity. Where I worked these people were not even considered to exist by the Dominican government and an entire family usually did not see $500 dollars a year. Despite this, I have never seen more happy Christians in my life. What I learned from the Haitians is that there is no need to have material goods or safety to be joyful in Christ. What I came away with was a desire for the way they lived: joy not because of their circumstances but rather in spite of them.

A second example comes from a friend who was 20 years old when our Lord took him home this past fall. He died of cancer in his intestines and when they lifted his 6’3” body off the bed, he weighed around 60lbs. I spent time with him in the week before his death. I know what starvation looks like first hand. He vomited every 10 minutes or less, could barely drink anything let alone eat and was in constant pain and full of sores because his skin was rubbing directly on his bones with no muscles to cushion it. Despite these things, just like the Haitians, he was satisfied. He was joyful because it did not matter what was happening to his body; he was a Child of God and that was enough. He did not see it at the time but his death itself was a ministry and God used his death to minister to more people than Asher had ever ministered to in his life. This is the kind of Gospel I am talking about sharing. It is a promise of joy of serving our Lord and Saviour; a joy started in this life and fulfilled in heaven. It is a promise that God is with us and does everything for our benefit and His glory (Romans 8:28, James 1:2, etc). It is not a promise that life’s troubles will decrease (rather the opposite is almost always the case) or we will get more food or the desires of our bodies – but we will get the desires of our souls.

This leads to another false assumption some have had about the intent of my article. I did not speak about how we are to care for the bodies of others, not because I don’t believe we should (by far the contrary!) but because Christians should know this well enough. Redeemer’s Social Justice Conference is an example of this.

The one section of my article I did intend to be emphatic about was the reaction to the use of God’s name in vain during the lecture. It was not intended to be a rebuke against the speaker personally – should we expect anything else from one who does not fear God? – but against us in our general response as Christians to it. Surprisingly, no-one seemingly disagreed with the rebuke for us Christians – except maybe those who threw out the whole article as hate literature.

There is an expressed concern by my readers that I hold myself a Pharisee among Christians. You can rest easy on that. I do not consider myself as more righteous; in fact if anything I may hold myself as less righteous. The reason is this: if we take God’s Word truly seriously, we discover very quickly through the Old Testament and even more in the New Testament that the standard God’s people are held to is extremely high. It is so high that we don’t like to think or admit how righteous we are called to be. There are two solutions generally used by my readers to address this problem.

The first is to make excuses for our actions and/or perform certain self-affirming good acts excessively to try to make up for our lack of ability. The result of this is that it looks really good on the outside and gives us an impressive resume in front of the church and the world, but it misses the point of the Gospel entirely; causing us to have the same rebuke Jesus constantly had for the Pharisees. If we are honest, all of us will admit before God that we do this to some degree or other; the question is whether we are humble enough to examine our hearts. People do good works and feel great things for God and yet when they are held to God’s standards, they attack the Christian by which it comes rather than examining themselves, repenting if they need it.

It is this way of looking at things that tries to minimize what sin is. We are so good at doing this in our culture that we have come to the point that we don’t even hate many sins. For example, adultery is something unfortunate and homosexuality is “mundane” as if it were simply a third gender. To not take God’s Word and the consequences seriously – both in this world and the next – leads to a cheapening of God’s mercy and grace. It is destructive to the Gospel message. Sure we are happy Christ died for our “mundane” sins and unfortunate mishaps, but that is about as deep as it goes. If we understand these things ought to get us killed, receiving God’s mercy for our sin takes on a whole deeper meaning. Call sin, sin and understand its consequences; only then the Gospel message sink deep in our hearts. Jesus said those to whom much is forgiven will love Him more. Why do we so often seek to love Him less?

There is a second way to deal with our failure to live up to Christ’s standard: humbly recognize that we cannot get close to God’s standard of holiness. It is to repent and acknowledge our sin and inadequate heart and fall on our knees before the throne of God, recognizing that it is only in the blood of Christ that we will ever be accepted into heaven as Sons of the Most High. This constant humbling, confessing and repenting will transform the way we live in all areas of our lives. What I am describing of course is the Gospel to the Romans, especially chapters 6-8. A Christian being presented with the standards of God does not even think to attack the other Christian as being holier-than-thou because he is concerned with his own lack of holiness. We compare ourselves to God our Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. We do not compare ourselves to the people around us or other Christians. We recognize that when a Christian is truly a Christian, he will also be examining himself before God and be welcoming of any correction he needs. It is in this spirit that I write and consider what is written.

If we take Jesus saying that ‘He does not condemn the adulteress’ to mean that the death penalty is taken away for homosexuality or any other sin, we have effectively undermined the civil government completely. The implication is that in a society run by Christians, there can be made no argument for civil authority to uphold righteousness and defend the cause of the poor and needy. How could a Christian magistrate judge according to a set of laws let alone punish thieves or murderers or any other offense? We could not justify police, judges, etc. Since we know that to live in such a society would be terrifying (anarchy always is), the problem must lie with how John 8:7 has been interpreted.

The context of John 8:7 is the Jewish religious authorities trying to get Jesus, another religious authority (and divine authority though they rejected that), into trouble with the Roman civil authorities for passing judgment that was only restricted to the civil authorities. Instantly we see that Jesus is not condemning the woman, which says little about the way we as Christians are to act in the job of civil magistrate. It does tell us a lot about how we are to view others as Christians however. Jesus did not come to show us how to make furniture, sell roses, run a company, or any other such occupation. He showed us how to live as Christians. As Christians we should examine scripture (Old and New Testaments) to determine the guidelines for the occupation we hold from the Bible and/or Biblical principles. Being a civil authority set up by God to punish evil doers (Romans 13:1-6) is no different. It is keeping with this distinction between the role of judge and Christian that the judgment of death penalty used to be pronounced with the accompanying statement “and may God have mercy on your soul.” Thankfully, God has given civil authorities more direct instruction (e.g. what justice is and what punishments ought to be) than He has given for many other professions. I say thankfully because of the very serious nature of their job.

If this troubles readers, please consider seriously and humbly this set of questions: was God unjust in the laws He set in the Old Testament? In other words, was God foolish and has learned better in the last few centuries? In other words, do we think that God’s justice changes? In other words, do we believe God changes? In other words, do we believe God’s Word? In other words, do we hold to God’s standards or will we be atheists (definition = against God)? I know this can be shattering to our understanding of God, and I hope it shakes us all up (it definitely shakes me up every time I think about it). We need to stop listening to the culture and our emotions. God is who He is and He tells us in His entire Word. Let us be honest and either humbly worship Him as King indeed and start trying to learn who He is instead of making our own gods or else reject Him and continue to make “gods” that suit our own personal ideologies.

While I was not expecting Lewis to be Christian or give a Christian’s perspective; I was expecting this of the panel. Thus the assumption that I was assuming Lewis would be speaking on our behalf is not true. It was because none of the issues I have already mentioned in my article were addressed at all that I found it necessary to remind us in an article.

So why is Redeemer hosting a non-Christian “specialist” to talk an issue in itself? Let us look at this briefly. Calvin is right in saying that ‘Truth is Truth wherever it pops up’. The quote also implies (in agreement with scripture) that ‘falsehood is also falsehood regardless of how it presents itself’ (including as masquerading as truth). Whatever was Truth in Lewis’ talk, should be listened to. The question that cannot be answered is ‘was there any Truth?’ The problem is that there was no-one in the auditorium able to determine the answer to this question. As a God-hater (for no one can despise one iota of of God’s Word and still love Him), Lewis also could not answer this question because his worldview (and here I show again the proper application of this word) colours everything he wanted to tell us. Regardless of what we wish to believe, Lewis was not after Truth (since that is only found in the fear of the Lord), but rather after whatever conveniently fits his worldview. Since the panel and we as listeners were unable to properly address Lewis’ claims, we cannot take anything he said as Truth. It is for this reason that I said it would have been more to our profit if a Christian spoke instead of Lewis.

If some are still confused or wish me to expand on any one point I would be delighted to oblige. I will try to check this blog every once in a while for this purpose.

Your brother in the saving blood of Christ,

Reuben

I read with enthusiam the numerous comments to Mr. Reuben Lindeman’s commentary to Mr. Lewis’s lecture. First, may I say that I am impressed with the courage displayed by Reuben to speak his mind before his peers and within the ranks of Redeemer. To all those who replied with measured and supported arguments with their names attached, again, may I pass on a note of encouragement for contributing to meaningful discourse. After reading many of the comments in response to Mr. Lindeman, I was of the impression that perhaps I had not read the same article. In many cases Reuben has “taken flak” where it hasn’t been deserved. For example, Reuben makes mention that the statistics used were manipulated to impress upon a particular agenda. I would have liked to have seen a specific example stated in Reuben’s article however, I assume by his statements that he inferred as much. To “see” into such implies one who is thinking and challenging what he hears; a commendable attribute for any individual. If Reuben’s statistical challenge stands firm, then what follows from Mr. Lewis logically falls flat...or at the very least flatter. Reuben then goes on to say effectively that God and His word in the Bible defines the standard by which we are to live. This would appear to be something that a Christian Institution of Learning would strive to impress on those who attend. Can we as Christians truly argue against that? So is homosexuality a sin or not? Surely it is if one believes the Bible. So are stealing, adultery, and lying. Nowhere do I read that Reuben believes homosexuality is a “special” sin deserving of death. He specifies that the government of Uganda should be supported in their efforts to uphold God’s law. In our land, if you have sex knowingly with AIDS and infect someone you can be convicted. In fact, are you not practically a murderer? I noticed very clearly that Reuben distinguishes the role of government in dealing with social justice and global health. He does not make reference to the individual response. These are two very different responses. Tim Bladoe makes an excellent commentary above. Is Reuben a medieval backwoods saddist? Not from what I’ve read. He simply holds a proper view of the role of government within a Christian populace. Next Reuben addresses the individual response. Never does he mention that we should ONLY share the gospel. Reuben states in his last paragraph, “At one extreme is the danger to declare the Gospel without concern for physical well being.” In fact he states the Biblical perspective of acting out the gospel out of love. It is from our “hearts”. Regarding Mr. Lewis’s cursing during the lecture, I must say Reuben is spot on. At some point in time you will stand before your creator and will give account to YOUR actions on that day. You can laugh at the joke, you can slander Reuben all you want here, but when Jesus looks you in the eye and gets the straight answer from you....what’s it going to be? Search your heart now. You will have no excuse then. Reuben challenges Redeemer in his last paragraph with his displeasure of having Mr. Lewis lecture on this particular topic. His point is clear, “Redeemer seems to focus on the other extreme: to be concerned about the physical well being without declaring the true Gospel.” Should this not be a concern to a Christian institution of learning? Nowhere does he say that we can’t learn from them, or that he’s better than them, or the like. I see simply that Reuben would like to see a biblical approach to difficult challenges. Mr. Lindeman, may I congratulate you for your courage to speak out on an issue close to your heart. Thanks for having the courage to attach your name to your thoughts. You would appear to be a man who diligently searches the scriptures for truth, has the fear of the Lord, and lives a life that flows from your convictions. Ivan Cyr

It was quite interesting to read all these comments which stemmed from Mr. Lindeman's controversial article. I believe there are too many which were written with heart and no head. It is important when presenting one's opinion to use both. However, truth is the most important thing that should be discussed and not opinion. First, let me present the issue on Christian love. There are two misconceptions that many people hold. One is that Christians love and don't judge; and the other is that Christians judge and don't love. Both of these are the two extremes of the seesaw. The balance brings harmony. Yes, Jesus said, "... love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." Matthew 5:44. We should love all men; however, it does not mean that we should love or support the sin that men do. If, for example, you knew someone that was a homosexual, the most loving thing to do would be to talk with him and point out to him that his lifestyle was a sin against God. You would not be shunning them nor taunting them but correcting them. For if one was heading for the edge of the cliff, would you not try to call out to him to save him from his dangerous path? Would that not be love? When Jesus was asked by the Pharisees whether the woman who was caught in adultery should be stoned, what did he say to the woman? He said, "I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more." John 8:11b Jesus does not condemn the woman (he forgave her); yet he does address her sin. The second issue is God's love, from which Christian love originates. God is a God of love; and God is a just God. He cannot stand sin, for He is sinless. God has given this unbelieving world a time of mercy for them to repent from their sins and turn to Him before each person dies at his appointed time. God's greatest act of love was sending His son to die to save sinners. But God will also perform His greatest act of justice, His judgement at the Great White Throne of God which is yet to come. Unbelievers will be judged by the perfect Judge according to their sins. Let us not remember one of God's attributes and forget another. Now, just because Mr. Lindeman is addressing Mr. Lewis' sin of taking God's name in vain and supporting abortion and homosexuality does not mean that Mr. Lindeman hates Mr. Lewis. He is doing all of you the favor of showing you how dangerous Mr. Lewis' worldview is. The third and last issue is how one's worldview influences how one thinks on every single area of life. Think of it in this way. We see the world through the eyes that God gave us at birth. Which lens are we looking through? Are we looking through God's lens or the world's lens? God is against sin (murder, committing adultery, taking His name in vain, disobeying authorities, etc.) ; the world is for sin, not against. Do you not see how opposite these lenses are? We are to look through God's lenses; but Mr. Lewis is looking through the world's lenses. Mr. Lewis could very well know a lot about social injustice and wish to do good for many; but he is supporting some of the most unjust acts. Abortion is killing a human being created in the image of God. Because of their lifestyles, homosexuals transmit and receive STD's. Where's the justice in all of this? Mr. Lewis is against God and is therefore against you. "If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you." John 15:19. Love the man but not the sin.

Here's what I once said in my Institutes: Therefore, in reading [non-Christian authors], the admirable light of truth displayed in them should remind us, that the human mind, however much fallen and perverted from its original integrity, is still adorned and invested with admirable gifts from its Creator. If we reflect that the Spirit of God is the only fountain of truth, we will be careful, as we would avoid offering insult to him, not to reject or condemn truth wherever it appears. In despising the gifts, we insult the Giver.... Nay, we cannot read the writings of the ancients on these subjects without the highest admiration; an admiration which their excellence will not allow us to withhold. But shall we deem anything to be noble and praiseworthy, without tracing it to the hand of God? (Institutes II.ii.15-16)