God's plan just fell apart, I guess

RealClearReligion - A Divine Call Won't Get You Votes

Michele Bachmann explained at the beginning of her campaign why she was running, "It means I have a sense of assurance about the direction I think that God is speaking into my heart that I should go."

And she is not the only one "called by God" to discover that apparently God didn't help her follow the call very well.

There is a certain way of speaking among evangelical Christians (not all, necessarily, but as a demographic) that uses divine call or revelation as a crutch to prop up what the speaker wants to do or persuade others to do.

Examples:

When I was a landlord, my last tenant told me that God had revealed to them that I was to allow them to break their lease early and with no penalty. My reminder to them that they had also told me when signing the lease that God had led them to rent my house was of no import. It's easy for God to change his mind when you change yours, yes?

A Baptist church member whom I have know for decades told me that one day the Sunday School superintendent walked up to him and said, "God has told me that you are going to teach our youth class!" To which the member replied, "God didn't send me that memo."

Which brings me back to presidential politics. The linked article also includes this nugget:

Herman Cain explained his call this way: "Whether that is ultimately to become the President of the United States or not, I don't know. I just know at this point I am following God's plan."

So Cain's campaign was a divine plan that apparently included public humiliation? (Actually, since the Lord "has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts," maybe so. The question for Cain is just where is he with the Lord now? And that's a question for all of us, too.)

There are three things I have learned about God's call:

1. I am not a messiah, only God is a redeemer, deliverer or savior. So I view very suspectly people who claim to be called by God to save the rest of us, whether religiously, politically or socially. The people whom I would say really are doing that, however slightly or greatly, have all been mortified that it they are God's instrument. Which leads to ...

2. The object God's call is to make more apparent the glory of God among people, not to exalt the hearer of the call. That means ...

3. God's call almost never corresponds, even remotely, with what you want to do. Hence, any specific desire that exists, however slightly, in your heart that a subsequent divine call seems so wonderfully to endorse is almost absolutely not the voice of God but of the Deceiver. God's will is rarely appealing, at first.

And so, at the cusp of this New Year, to be reminded of the Wesleyan Covenant of Commitment:

Commit yourselves to Christ as his servants. Give yourselves to him that you may belong to him. Christ has many services to be done. Some are more easy and honorable; others are more difficult and disgraceful. Some are suitable to our inclinations and interests, others are contrary to both.

In some we may please Christ and please ourselves. But then there are other works where we cannot please Christ except by denying ourselves. It is necessary, therefore, that we consider what it means to be a servant of Christ. Let us, therefore, go to Christ, and pray:

I am no longer my own but yours, O God.
Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will;
put me to doing, put me to suffering;
let me be employed for you, or laid aside for you,
exalted for you or trodden underfoot for you;
let me be full, let me be empty,
let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and with a willing heart
yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.
And now, glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
you are mine and I am yours.
So be it. And let this covenant renewed on earth be fulfilled in heaven. Amen.

Our impractical God

A homily for Christmas Day

We pride ourselves on being practical people, do we not? Americans have a particular susceptibility to the practical and pragmatic. I don’t say that as a criticism, by the way, since I am one of those people whose first question about a proposal is usually how it will work. I am reminded of the story of the time the Little Sisters of the Poor were going door to door in a French city, soliciting alms for old people. There was a house on their route that belonged to a wealthy and very vocal opponent of the church. One of the sisters said it would not be practical to call upon him for a donation and to this they all agreed.

All except one sister who knocked on the rich man’s door, anyway. He answered, she explained her request for a donation, and the man replied, grinning, “I will give you one thousand francs if you will have a glass of champagne with me.”

It was an embarrassing situation for the nun, and she hesitated. But 1,000 francs meant many loaves of bread or medicine for the poor. So she went inside. A servant brought the bottle and poured, and the brave nun emptied the glass. And then she said, "And now, sir, another glass, please – at the same price." She got it. Not so impractical to call upon that fellow after all.

Here are some some real, historical impracticalbilities.

Hail Cannons: In the late 19th century some Austrians devised a special gas-based mortar supposedly capable of preventing hail. By the year 1900, more than 10,000 hail cannons had cropped up across Western Europe. Given their popularity, it's a shame that the cannons proved useless.

"Goofybike:" In 1939, Charles Steinlauf made a bicycle to carry four people and power a sewing machine. Nuff said.

Jetpacks: James Bond flew one in the beginning of Thunderball, made in 1965, and jetpacks have not gotten better since then. You can buy the one on the right for $155,000, including training. But remember what the maker says: since it flies for only 33 seconds, you start looking for a landing spot the moment your feet leave the ground. And as for the flying cars we were promised 50 years ago, fuggidaboutit.

The Wright Flyer: December 17, 1901 – 120 feet in 12 seconds, 6.8 miles per hour, no more than 10 feet altitude.

France's SS Normandie

We all know the history of aviation after the Wright brothers took to the air. The significance of SS Normandie is less well known. It was launched by the French company GCT in 1932 and set a transatlantic speed record on its maiden passenger voyage. Setting that record was in fact the whole reason the ship was built. Yet its design was scoffed as impractical almost up to its launch.

Normandie was designed by a Russian emigre named Vladimir Yourkevitch, whose designs had been laughed out of court by the admirals of the Czar’s navy. Yourkevitch had been a junior naval architect then and was convinced that the key to speed for large vessels was a paunchy middle and an extremely pointed fore and aft. Yourkevitch persisted, his designs were tested but the Russian Revolution put an end to his dreams. He made his way to France where no naval work awaited him and he finally got a job on the Renault automobile assembly line.

Michael Anton recorded that after GCT announced it would build a ship to capture the record,

Vladimir Yourkevitch spent the closing months of the 1920s making a pest of himself with conduct that would, in our day, result in a restraining order. He wrote, he wired, and he called—with exasperating persistence—officials at CGT and the Penhoët shipyard, where the new French liner would be built. All his entreaties were ignored. Finally, he contacted an old friend from the Russian navy who had been welcomed into France’s military establishment. The officer got Yourkevitch a meeting.

The shipyard chairman, René Fould, barely concealed his disdain for Yourkevitch’s poverty, his lowly job, and his broken French. Still, he took Yourkevitch’s drawings and gave them to one of his engineers, expecting to hear no more of the matter. Weeks later, to Fould’s astonishment, the engineer reported that the Yourkevitch design principles were better than any he had seen. Fould convened his entire staff to confirm the result. They did.

To this day, Yourkevitch’s design principles are used on every oceangoing vessel launched around the world, including every American aircraft carrier in service. Vladimir Yourkevitch’s name is practically unknown by the public at large, but he was the most influential ship designer of the last century.

I have one more illustration of a supremely impractical thing.

It is Christmas and I come not to bury impracticability but to praise it. For when reading the passages of Advent and Christmas, it seems that God is not usually bothered by the practicability of his plans.

Luke 1.5-120

In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly order of Abijah. His wife was a descendant of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. Both of them were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord. But they had no children, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were getting on in years. Once when he was serving as priest before God and his section was on duty, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to enter the sanctuary of the Lord and offer incense. Now at the time of the incense offering, the whole assembly of the people was praying outside. Then there appeared to him an angel of the Lord, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified; and fear overwhelmed him. But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He must never drink wine or strong drink; even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit. He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” Zechariah said to the angel, “How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.” The angel replied, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.”

Luke 1.26-35

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.”

Now consider: Zechariah and Mary both know they are talking to an angel. Very impressive company, that; in fact, Gabriel had to tell both of them to calm down and not be afraid. Then the angel pronounces the most amazing news that could be imagine. To Zechariah, that he will have a son who will be a great prophet of the Lord. To Mary, she will have a son who will be the Son of God.

And both Zechariah and Mary immediately question the practicality of it all. “Not so fast,” they both basically say. “There are some practical considerations you have not considered!”

For Zechariah, he’s old and so is his wife. Mary says her prophecy is not possible because she knows there are certain, uh, steps that are required to have a child and she hasn’t taken them.

Zechariah and Mary are talking in person to an angel who tells them of God's amazing plans and therefore presumably isn't just making this stuff up – and all the both of them can say is, "Can't happen, won't work, you've got the wrong person."

Gabriel swatted these objections aside. "Nothing is impossible with God," he told Mary in verse 37. Immanuel, God With Us, is both impractical and improbable, seen from our perspective, and yet Jesus was born, God in the flesh. God willing, we will never be so practical minded that we shun God's plans, for our impractical God is not a God of practicalities, but of miracles.

Jesus, Joseph and the Marvelous Exchange

A homily for Christmas Eve

Matthew 1.18-25:

18 Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. 20But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 1She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ 22All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

23 ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel’,

which means, ‘God is with us.’ 24When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, 25but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

He was faced with a detestable duty. He was a man of compassion, even tenderness. But he was also a man honor, a man of stern code. His obedience to the Law was unwavering. The moment he learned that his fiancé was pregnant he knew that it was the end. The end, certainly, of their betrothment, and perhaps even the end of her life.

It was two millennia ago in the Roman-occupied land of Judea. The man was named Joseph. His fiancé was Mary. She was going to have a baby and it sure was not his. Compassion, honor and duty dueled within Joseph. He could not pretend there was no problem. She obviously had betrayed him. The whole town of Nazareth was watching.

Finally, Joseph decided Mary would have to pay the price for infidelity as his honor and the Law required, but tempered with mercy. Joseph determined to break his engagement to Mary and dismiss her from his life without fanfare, leaving her to fend for herself. It would clear the slate, restore his honor and was as least hurtful to the young woman as any just solution could be.
What the outcome might have been by Joseph’s plan we don’t know, because God revealed to him what was really going on, and Joseph changed his mind.

Joseph dreamed of an angel, who informed Joseph that Mary’s unborn child was of the Holy Spirit. The angel gave Joseph instructions: take Mary home as his wife and adopt Mary’s child as his own, giving him the name Jesus, an ordinary name then, meaning,“God helps.”

These things came to pass. In Joseph’s day, when a Jewish man gave a name to the child born to his wife, he was confirming the child as his own. Maybe others knew that Joseph was not the baby’s natural father, maybe they didn’t. It didn’t matter. When Joseph named the baby Jesus, he was also giving to Jesus his own identity, his own lineage. That is why Jesus could truly be said to be of the line of David, because Joseph was of David’s line and Joseph adopted Jesus as his own son. When Joseph named the child Jesus he was telling the world, “This child belongs to me, this child is my child.”

We give Joseph short shrift, perhaps because Joseph is treated somewhat cursorily in the Gospels. Mary gets a lot more play. Joseph never speaks. Joseph hears, Joseph dreams, Joseph acts and Joseph obeys, but not even one syllable of his speaking is related. Mary is the one with the speaking part. Her role is the most sought after in Christmas pageants.

Another pastor told me of one afternoon before the annual Christmas program, when a mother phoned the church office to say that her son, who was to play Joseph in the children's play, was sick and wouldn't be able to be there. “It's too late now to get another Joseph,” the director of the play said. “We'll just have to write him out of the script.” And they did. Joseph is easy to overlook and leave out.

In 1993, my wife played Mary in the Christmas pageant at our church. She got the part only because they needed our two-month-old daughter to play the baby Jesus, there being no other small infant in the congregation. Cathy and Elizabeth, Mary and Jesus, were a package deal, couldn’t get one without the other. But any guy off the street could have played Joseph. In fact, the pastor actually asked me, “Don, did you want to play Joseph or should I get a man from the choir to play him?” I said I would, but talk about feeling like a fifth wheel ... .

But more is going on with Joseph than is first apparent. A recurring theme of St. Paul is that Jesus' followers are adopted by God and made children of God, brothers and sisters of Christ. This should make us reconsider the significance of where Joseph fits in with God’s work. Joseph’s adoption of Jesus is highly significant.

What if Joseph had said no to the angel and had sent Mary away anyway? Can we imagine Jesus growing up in the home of an unwed, single mother, both Mary and Jesus therefore outcast from society? How would Jesus have conceived of God as his heavenly Father if Joseph had never taken on the role of Jesus’ earthly father? But father to Jesus Joseph was.

God adopts Jesus’ disciples as sons and daughters of God in the family of God. But first, God sent his Son to be adopted by Joseph into the family of mortals. Joseph affirmed on behalf of all humanity that God belongs with us, "God with us."

The symmetry of God being born into humanity and humanity thence being adopted to become, as Second Peter puts it, “partakers of the divine nature” is called the “marvelous exchange” in Roman Catholic catechism and theosis, or divinization, in the Eastern Church. It is to realize that God becomes one of us so that we may become like him, and so are perfected to live forever with God.

Theologian George Weigel explains, “God ‘exchanges’ his divinity for our humanity, thus enabling us to ‘exchange’ our weakness for his divine glory – the glory of which the angels sing to the shepherds of Bethlehem.” St. Paul proclaimed in Second Corinthians, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9).

This is possible because of the power of God, of course, but also because of the strength of Joseph. Joseph adopted the Son of God as the child of humankind, and through Christ God adopts you and me as children of God. This is a marvelous exchange indeed! Should we not see the symmetry of salvation and relationship – dare we say partnership – at work in the will of God and the obedience of Joseph? We see in Joseph’s story that we and God belong to each other in the one whom Joseph named Jesus, “God helps.”

Where is the ACLU when you need it?

Officially promoted by the Obama administration!

Heritage's blog, The Foundry: "Obama Couldn’t Wait: His New Christmas Tree Tax"

President Obama’s Agriculture Department today announced that it will impose a new 15-cent charge on all fresh Christmas trees—the Christmas Tree Tax—to support a new Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees.

In the Federal Register of November 8, 2011, Acting Administrator of Agricultural Marketing David R. Shipman announced that the Secretary of Agriculture will appoint a Christmas Tree Promotion Board. The purpose of the Board is to run a “program of promotion, research, evaluation, and information designed to strengthen the Christmas tree industry’s position in the marketplace; maintain and expend existing markets for Christmas trees; and to carry out programs, plans, and projects designed to provide maximum benefits to the Christmas tree industry” (7 CFR 1214.46(n)). And the program of “information” is to include efforts to “enhance the image of Christmas trees and the Christmas tree industry in the United States” (7 CFR 1214.10).

To pay for the new Federal Christmas tree image improvement and marketing program, the Department of Agriculture imposed a 15-cent fee on all sales of fresh Christmas trees by sellers of more than 500 trees per year (7 CFR 1214.52). And, of course, the Christmas tree sellers are free to pass along the 15-cent Federal fee to consumers who buy their Christmas trees

But wait! It's not actually a tax, you see:

Acting Administrator Shipman had the temerity to say the 15-cent mandatory Christmas tree fee “is not a tax nor does it yield revenue for the Federal government” (76 CFR 69102).

The 15 cents, you see, goes to a board, established by the SecAg, that promotes Christmas trees by "carrying out the program established by" the SecAg. No wonder OTB headlines it, "A Christmas Tree Tax? No, Just Good Old Crony Capitalism."

The problem here isn’t that the Federal Government is imposing a “tax” on Christmas trees, but that it’s doing so to finance a program that it shouldn’t be implementing to begin with. The reason that the Christmas Tree growers want a program like this is because natural trees have been steadily losing market share to artificial trees in recent years. ... It’s a choice consumers are making in increasing numbers apparently, and the natural tree industry obviously doesn’t like it.So, they decided to get the government involved in “promoting” natural Christmas trees. ...

Why, then, do we need a government program to promote their sale?

We don’t, of course, and in reality the government shouldn’t be involved in product promotion of any kind. That’s not their job, it’s the job of the industry itself. If tree growers want to create a promotional campaign, then they can do so through their trade association. This simply isn’t something that the government should be doing, especially for a product that is sold primarily in a domestic market. Instead of doing that, though, they lobbied the government to create a program to do it for them.

What we’ve got here, then, is another example of crony capitalism, with the government putting its finger on the scale to benefit the natural tree industry at the presumed expense of the artificial tree industry and, most likely, the taxpayers (that 15 cent a tree fee is unlikely to be enough to fund the program completely). That’s crony capitalism, folks.

This administration hardly originated crony capitalism but Obama et. al. have perfected it to a high art.

However, clearly this program is unconstitutional because it violates the First Amendment! As we all know, the government with its partner, the ACLU, has been waging a War on Christmas Trees.

Okay, snark off. Actually, there are all manner of industries that use the government to promote their businesses and this sort of fee is by far from uncommon - as even DefendChristmas.com reports, "Akin to similar programs that promote milk, beef and cotton, the new Christmas tree program will impose on U.S. domestic producers and importers an initial fee of 15 cents per tree." However, it is still accurate to describe the fee as a tax because it is remission of revenue to the federal government by force of law, spent for purposes that are spelled out in law and regulation, carried out by an executive department.

The ACLU's web site is not terribly informative about its stance on Christmas trees per se. It does say that the government must not be in the business of promoting one religion over another or of promoting religion at all.

I hardly think that a program to strengthen the natural-tree growers is an endorsement of Christianity itself.  So no Constitutional line has been crossed. That doesn't mean that the program is wise or desirable. That no one in the government had a second thought about implementing it only shows how deeply rooted these back-scratching programs are in our polity. That's the problem, not 15 cents.

The Tim Tebow Prophecy

"Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me" - Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 5.11.

NFL Analysts: Tim Tebow Hated Because of His Faith

Outspoken Christian athlete Tim Tebow, now the starting quarterback for the Denver Broncos, has been widely criticized by many in the media. NFL analysts are starting to admit that criticism, in large part, has been because of his faith.

''Inside the NFL'' analyst and former Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Cris Collinsworth concluded that much of the hatred against Tebow was based on his religious beliefs. Responding to a question from fellow host James 'JB' Brown, Collinsworth showed his disgust for Tebow's treatment: ''It's unbelievable, though, JB, that one of the best kids - just pure kids that's ever come into the NFL - is hated because of his faith, because of his mission work, because of the fact that he wears it on his sleeve, because of the fact that he lives his life that he talks about.''

This isn't the first time the issue has come up. Many sportswriters and fans have mocked Tebow and hoped to see him fail - in large part, his defenders have argued, because of his strong Christian beliefs. Other football analysts are starting to agree with that assessment.

NBCsports.com commentator Jelisa Castrodale argued: “The NFL's other backup-turned-starters don't generate this type of negativity.” And CBS analyst and former 49ers offensive lineman Randy Cross blamed the media for anti-Tebow coverage: ''People, especially the media, root against him because of what he stands for.''

After the twilight of the gods, only the devil remains

The death toll of atheism as state apparatus:

As the death toll mounts—as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia, and on and on—the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the millenarian ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression. An extraordinary accounting, this book amply documents the unparalleled position and significance of Communism in the hierarchy of violence that is the history of the twentieth century.

And it is the actual position of "American Atheists" regarding fundamentalist Christians that, "They don’t respond to lawsuits, letters, amicus briefs or other grass-roots campaigns and they must, must, must be eradicated."

Makes you wonder, in light of what atheists have done when they gained political power, what exactly does American Atheists mean when it writes that fundamentalists "must, must, must be eradicated."

Christians run for their lives in Middle East

Persecution of Christians in Muslim lands in the Middle East is rising, especially in Egypt, Middle East Forum reports.

A recent report indicates that unprecedented numbers of Copts, Egypt's indigenous Christian population, are emigrating from their homeland in response to the so-called "Arab spring":

The Egyptian Union of Human Rights Organizations (EUHRO) published a report today on emigration of Christians from Egypt, saying that nearly 100,000 Christians have emigrated since March 2011. The report, which was sent to the Egyptian cabinet and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), warned that this emigration has been prompted by the escalating intimidation and attacks on Christians by Islamists. "Copts are not emigrating abroad voluntarily," said Naguib Gabriell, the director EUHRO, "they are coerced into that by threats and intimidation by hard line Salafists, and the lack of protection they are getting from the Egyptian regime."

The report goes on to list a number of attacks on Copts and churches—including the killing of Coptic youth in Moqattam, the Imbaba and other church attacks—adding "Salafist clerics, who gained political influence after the January 25 Revolution, have become emboldened, calling Copts Dhimmis who have to pay the jizya (tax paid by non-Muslims to the state) because they are not first class citizens and can never enjoy full citizenship rights, or obtain sensitive posts."

Indeed, this boldness is a harbinger of things to come—and Copts know it, hence the emigration. Wagdi Ghoneim, a popular cleric and former imam in California, recently called Copts "Crusaders" on Al Jazeera—about the worst thing to call someone in the Muslim world—insisting that they do not deserve equal rights with Muslims in Egypt, because they are infidel dhimmis. Likewise, Abu Shadi, a top representative of the Salafis, told Tahrir News that the Copts must either convert to Islam, pay jizya and assume inferior status, or die. These are just a couple of examples of the countless Muslim leaders openly hostile to Egypt's native population.

Meanwhile, "Mosques Flourish in America; Churches Perish in Muslim World."

So how's that Arab Spring thing working out? Not too good.

Homily for Sept. 11, 2011

My homily this morning was entitled, "Where is the cross in violence?" You may read it on Scribd here.

The photo above was taken by James Nachtwey. Another frame of this scene plus many other never-before-published photos he took on that day, are well worth clicking to.

Clairvoyant science and the Deep Blue God

Can computational physics inform us of the foreknowledge of God? An Answer I call "Deep Blue Theism."

On July 1, my wife and I drove to Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn., to pick our daughter up from her completion of the Governor's School for Computational Physics. There are 12 Governor's Schools every summer in Tennessee at various state university campuses (see here). They are for "for gifted and talented high school students" who have just completed either their sophomore or junior years.

During the closing ceremony, Dr. Jaime Taylor, dean of the College of Science and Mathematics and professor of physics, explained briefly that a growing field in computational science is what he called "clairvoyant science."

"Clairvoyant science" is a term so new that Googling it in quotes yields only four results and none of them are relevant to what Dr. Taylor meant. Even so, almost certainly you are already familiar with clairvoyant science and encounter it frequently.

Dr. Taylor's example was Netflix. When he logs on to Netflix, he said, the site always recommends unviewed movies for him based on what he has already watched. This is a crude form of clairvoyant science.

My Netflix account does that, too, of course, but I would say that Amazon is much better at it because it encompasses many different products or services than Netflix and seems for me to do a better job at the clairvoyance part.

But Dr. Taylor's department carries clairvoyant science a step further. They have developed the computational skills to offer students a refined curriculum of classes based not only on what courses they have already taken, but on the grades they received. Furthermore, their educational clairvoyant science can predict, plus or minus one letter, what grade the student will earn in those courses.

Now, I would say that plus or minus a letter grade is a huge variance. I could achieve the almost the same accuracy just by predicting everyone will receive a B. But the point is that the computational methodology will only become evermore refined and accurate. One day it will be able to predict a student's grade not to within a letter, but within a point or two. And yet the computer model itself has no effect whatsoever on the determining the student's grade, of course, even though it "knows" what the grade will be.

This kind of technology helps us understand how God can know the future without predestining it. If we are to understand what does it mean to say, "God knows everything," it is critical coherently to invalidate the proposition that God's knowledge of the future necessarily predetermines the future.

When most Christians say, "God knows everything," they are imagining "everything" too narrowly. "Everything" in fact encompasses much more than they think it does.

Now put on hold hold for a moment the predictive ability of the implications of these computational methods and let's turn our attention to the game of chess.

Supercomputing and predictive ability

In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer became the first computer ever to defeat a world chess champion by beating Garry Kasparov, who held the title at the time.

On February 10, 1996, Deep Blue became the first machine to win a chess game against a reigning world champion (Garry Kasparov) under regular time controls. However, Kasparov won three and drew two of the following five games, beating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2 (wins count 1 point, draws count ½ point). The match concluded on February 17, 1996.

Deep Blue was then heavily upgraded (unofficially nicknamed "Deeper Blue") and played Kasparov again in May 1997, winning the six-game rematch 3½–2½, ending on May 11. Deep Blue won the deciding game six after Kasparov made a mistake in the opening, becoming the first computer system to defeat a reigning world champion in a match under standard chess tournament time controls.

Whether the tournament was actually a fair one is still disputed (just as IBM's Watson computer victory in Jeopardy last February was not really fair, either). Deep Blue was designed and programmed only for chess. It's strengths were its brute computing power and programming customized for nothing but playing chess.

It was capable of evaluating 200 million positions per second, twice as fast as the 1996 version. ... The Deep Blue chess computer which defeated Kasparov in 1997 would typically search to a depth of between six and eight moves to a maximum of twenty or even more moves in some situations.

Deep Blue could not predict absolutelywhat move Kasparov would make next, but it could calculate the hierarchy of possible moves in likelihood order because its database included the complete move sequences of 700,000 grandmaster games. Deep Blue simply outcalculated Kasparov. The wonder, perhaps, is not that Kasparov lost but that he lost so closely.

What if clairvoyant-science computational methods had been built into Deep Blue? Not only would the computer have been able to draw upon the record of 700K games to assess Kasparov's possible moves, it would have been specifically able to refine the likelihood of moves based upon Kasparov's actual play so far in that very tournament, not just the Russian's games among the database. Deep Blue would have learned as the games progressed, knowing more in, say, the third game than its vast database initially contained before the first game. Had that been the case, surely Kasparov's defeat would have been more pronounced.

However, even a computationally clairvoyant Deep Blue could not have exercised deterministic control over Kasparov's moves, even though as the game progressed and he steadily lost, his possible moves certainly did decrease in number.

Which simply means that the flow of such a game would be free, bounded only by the rules of the game, but the outcome would be certain. Deep Blue would win without question but Kasparov's moves would be his to decide. No move would be directly predestined by Deep Blue. Even at a game's end, when Kasparov might have been down to only his king, Deep Blue could not have predestined whether Kasparov would move his king one more time or simply tip it over and concede, though Deep Blue might have been able to offer very profitable advice to onlookers on which way to wager.

I am wondering whether a combination of clairvoyant science and Deep Blue analysis of enormous numbers of potentialities can provide new insights to understand what it means to say, "God knows everything."

My thesis is that God indeed does know everything, but that "everything" in God's knowledge is infinitely greater than theology has classically conceived and Christians have conventionally thought.

God's knowledge, human will and future events: the classical position

Classical theism is probably the dominant theology among most Western church people. In classical theism, God “is believed to have created the entire universe, to rule over it, and to intend to bring it to its fulfillment or realization, to ‘save it,’” wrote Langdon Gilkey in Christian Theology, an Introduction to Its Traditions and Tasks. However, classical theism is based on Greek philosophy at least as much as Scripture and perhaps even more. Most church people do not realize that classical theism's main claims about God - God's changelessness, power, knowledge and goodness - are derived from Plato and Aristotle as much (or more) than from Genesis through Revelation. The historical reasons for this are not relevant to this post; perhaps another time.

Long before the Protestant Reformation, Catholic Scholasticism developed Aristotelian formulations of God as absolute, changeless, eternal being or actuality. Tthe dominant theology of the RCC was that of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who had taught at the University of Paris. His theology of God derived heavily from Aristotle's development of the Unmoved Mover.

The idea of God's impassive immutability remained in the Reformation, though the Reformers, especially Martin Luther, revived Plato's philosophy to buttress their arguments, mediated via the writings of St. Augustine (354-430), who had been trained extensively in the Platonic school. The Reformers emphasized God’s sovereignty as unchallenged, his power as absolute, his knowledge as unbounded and God's character as wholly righteous and gracious. (This last point was of course affirmed by all sides.) Hence, the Protestant Reformation was almost as much a continuation of the centuries-old squabble between Aristotelians and Platonists as between Christian apologists.

God, the Reformers insisted, has absolute priority and sole decisiveness in events of the created order. Always known as powerful in the Jewish and Christian traditions, God was now understood as absolutely omnipotent, able to do anything God chose. This, of course, required that God's knowledge be unlimited, for the exercise of divine power necessitates that the deity be unrestrained in knowing just what he is exercising power about.

This connection inevitably led both Martin Luther and John Calvin to reject entirely the notion of human freedom. They both insisted (independently, they were not theological collaborators) that God's power cannot be divorced from God's will and that God's will cannot be divorced from God's knowledge. Hence, God's power = God's will = God's knowledge.

According to John Calvin in his book, Institutes of the Christian Religion,

All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God [who] so overrules all things that nothing happens without his counsel. Events are so regulated by God, and all events so proceed from his determinate counsel, that nothing happens fortuitously.

In Calvin's theology, human beings are inherently unable to make free choices. The world proceeds along a path preselected by God and has no role to play except to follow a divine script that is unchangeable down to the tiniest detail. In this view, human beings are puppets on God's strings. We are "free" only to do what God has already ordained to be our nature.

Though not a systematic theologian like Calvin, Martin Luther came to basically the same conclusion. Luther wrote in Bondage of the Will,

God knows nothing contingently, but that he foresees, purposes, and does all things according to his immutable, eternal and infallible will. This bombshell knocks ‘free-will’ flat, and utterly shatters it.

Classical theism, then, views the past, present and future as equally concretized in God’s knowledge. Thus, God’s omniscience equals his omnipotence, since unless God determines every detail of the world, something might happen that was not immutably known to God in advance. But a God who can be surprised, classical theism insists, is no God at all.

But this is a very narrow understanding of what it means for God to know something.

A closer look at God's omniscience

When the claim is made, "God knows everything," a faithful Christian or Jew would be hard pressed to say otherwise. There are ample Scriptural references of the knowledge of God. Psalm 139 is perhaps the most complete single reference, in which the Psalmist observes with wonder,

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

Yet to say, "God knows everything" begs, What is "everything?" This is the question that tripped up Luther. Having adopted the Platonic view that there is no difference between the past, present and future to God (a view that I don't think is very Scripturally supportable), which means that there is only an "eternal now" to God, Luther equated the "eternal now" with everything.

But that means necessarily that the eternal now can consist only of what is real. Consider the question, "Does God know Santa Claus?" Well, God knows our Santa Claus story and all its lies we tell our children every December. God knows the man who dresses up in a red suit and sits in the mall the day after Thanksgiving. But how can God know Santa Claus? There is no Santa Claus for God to know!

So: That which is not, is not knowable.

What then does it mean to say, "God knows everything?" It can mean nothing except that God knows everything that is knowable. This is possible only for God, of course, but the fact remains that the knowable is what is, not what is not. God knows the Santa Claus actor in the mall as a thing in itself because the actor is real in himself. God does not know Santa Claus as a thing in itself because Santa Claus is not real as a thing in itself.

Please note a distinction I am making. I might say with equal validity that God does not know my grandchildren because I do not (only yet, I hope) have any grandchildren. But my grandchildren, though they do not exist, do not exist in a critically different way than the way that Santa Claus does not exist.

I can envision a future in which I have grandchildren. I can also envision a future in which I do not. I do not know either future absolutely, but I know them both potentially (or as Luther would put it, "contingently"). And if I can know them potentially, so can God. Luther is thus so simply proved wrong: if I can know something contingently, then necessarily God does, too, else we are left with the stunning proposition that I can know something God cannot know.

Therefore: God knows contingencies (potentialities) as fully as actualities.

Though God does not know absolutely my grandchildren, because they do not exist, hence are not actualities, God does know the nearly unlimited permutations of possibilities of a future in which my grandchildren are born (or not). Since clairvoyant science helps us understand how God can foresee a future event - say, my grandson's first home run - without predetermining it, it is self evident that God can also know every possible alternative to that event, such as a groundout instead of a home run, or a walk, a ground-rule double, game called because of rain, whatever.

All of these things God knows contingently, to use Luther's word, because none of them have yet occurred. Because God knows every possible alternative as the future unfolds means that it is not necessary for us to postulate that whatever God knows must come to pass as the Reformers thought. Their concept of God's knowledge was far too narrow. God knows in advance not only the potentialities that will become actualities, God knows every possible alternative to each actuality. God conceives of what might not happen as fully as he conceives of what does happen.

God therefore cannot be "taken by surprise." No matter what happens, God has already fully foreseen it and is just as prepared for it as if he had directly caused it.

Back to Santa Claus. My grandchildren are potentially real as things in themselves while Santa Claus is not. Thus, my grandchildren are potentialities that may become actualities, while Santa Claus is not. God can envision and prepare for a future in which I have grandchildren. But this cannot be said of Santa Claus.

The Reality of Time

"Time flies like an arrow," goes an old joke, "while fruit flies like a banana." Because classical theism holds that God lives in an eternal now while human beings and indeed the entire created order exist within the arrow's flight of time, in which there is a definite past, present and future, then some thoughts about time are in order.

Both modern science and the Bible agree that the universe had a definite beginning in time. The universe is expanding. The predominant view among scientists is that the universe will continue to expand without ever stopping and then falling back together. That is, we have had the Big Bang but the universe won't have a "Big Crunch." Time is unidirectional, it has no "reverse." Time moves only forward.

It is within that structure of time that human being live, move and have our being. Classical theism holds that God is outside time. Yet if God is to interact with his creation then God must be able to operate within time's arrow; God must be able to enter into time's arrow as well as be apart from it.

That God interacts with humanity within time's arrow is well attested by the Scriptures. The movements of God within human history in the books of the Jewish Scriptures attest to it. Peter's sermon in Acts on the day of Pentecost also makes no sense unless God is accomplishing his will within human frameworks of time and understanding.

There are ample biblical passages that can reasonably be read to indicate that God either admits or implies that he does not know something because the arrow of time has not reached that point yet. That is, of all the potentialities God is preparing for, none have actualized as concrete events, hence are not knowable absolutely, only potentially. Here are examples, all using the NIV:

Gen. 2.19

Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.

The implication is that God did not know what names Adam would give the creatures.

Gen. 6:5-6

The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The LORD regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled.

Other translations say that the Lord "repented" that he had created human beings. The implication is that God did not know in advance how rotten people turned out to be, else why would he regret or repent of creating us? Why would he be troubled if classical theism is right - that everything always turns out exactly as God plans it?

There are many other places in the Bible where God repents of what he has done, for example, 1 Samuel 15, where the Lord repents that he had made Saul king of Israel. Again, if God exercises the meticulous control over creation that classical theism insists he does, then God must be repenting over things that he knew in advance would happen.

Deut. 8:2

Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.

This verse says that God sent the children of Israel into the wilderness to discover whether they would be capable of being God's people. Of course, the 40 years in the wilderness had another purpose, to teach the people humility before God. But is there not clearly the implication that at the end of the 40 years God would know something he did not know at their beginning? If the verse does not mean that, what does it mean?

Isaiah 5:2-4, in which Israel and Judah are the vineyard of the Lord (see v. 7)

He dug it up and cleared it of stones and planted it with the choicest vines. ... Then he looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit. 3 “Now you dwellers in Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. 4 What more could have been done for my vineyard than I have done for it? When I looked for good grapes, why did it yield only bad?

Clearly, God expected his chosen people to produce good fruit, but they did not. In this passage, God wonders what else he could have done for them and expresses puzzlement at why they turned out bad.

Can we take these and the many other passages like them into account and still maintain that God is in control of human and cosmic destiny?

Can we postulate that God does not know everything, past-present-future, absolutely and yet is still absolutely going to accomplish his cosmic purposes?

I think we can, and I think we can in a way that honors both the Scriptural teaching of human free will and still affirms that "God's power = God's will = God's knowledge."

The Clairvoyant, Deep Blue God

Having asked earlier how much more lopsided Kasparov's match would have been with Deep Blue had Deep Blue's programming included computational clairvoyance as well as database analysis, I am prepared to try to answer how we can affirm the (at least apparent) biblical teaching that God does not absolutely know absolutely everything in advance. So permit me to explain my premises.

Premise 1
"But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day" (2 Peter 3.8).

However within time's arrow God operates when dealing with his creation, God's understanding of time is nonetheless radically different from ours. God's "now" cannot compare to what now means to us mortals. As the Psalmist wrote, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain."

So we must be mindful of the fact that our own knowledge will always be woefully incomplete and our language inadequate to the task. But we must do the best we can, always in humility.

Premise 2
God knows everything that can be known and knows it absolutely. Everything that can be known includes all actualities and all potentialities. God's knowledge of what happened during the Exodus is just as certain as what happened on your last birthday. And God's knowledge of what is happening with the remotest hydrogen atom in the most distant galaxy is just as complete as what is happening in your mind while you read these words. But God does not know Santa Claus because Santa Claus is neither actual nor potential.

Premise 3
Because God's knowledge of the future includes all its potentialities, human beings really do have freedom to choose among multiple potential courses. The possible choices are neither unlimited nor unbounded. That is, our freedom is finite in potential and limited in actuality. Kasparov did have freedom to choose how to move his pieces, but only within the rules of the game.

"Choose this day whom you will serve," Joshua admonished the people before they crossed into the Promised Land. The choice is real, and so is the choosing.

Premise 4
Every event, no matter how minute, is influenced in passing from "potential" to "real" by three things:

A. Its antecedents in time, the past events that created the finity of possibilities. But the past cannot be the only influence because then there would be no novelty in the world.

B. The nature of the thing in question. This nature both opens and closes potentialities: things must be and become what they are but cannot be or become what they are not. There is freedom in the becoming, though. "Birds gotta sing and fish gotta swim," but they do not all sing or swim the same, even within the same species.

C. The will of God for each potentiality. In every event, no matter how minute, God is willing the event to its finest possible fulfillment. As the Isaiah passage above indicates, God's will does not always come to pass, at least not wholly or perhaps not yet.

Because God foresees every possibility, God's will is always active and always present. Not everything that happens is God's will, but God's will is present (hence, can be sought) no matter what happens.

This is a key point: Just as the more stuff you buy from Amazon, the more accurate Amazon predicts your next purchases, God learns as time passes, as the verses cited above indicate (and there are others). That is, God's "certainty" range of knowledge of future events is increasing while the "potential" range of his knowledge of future events is decreasing, enabling God to be more effective in shaping events as they transition from potential to actual.

Premise 5
God adjusts to circumstances as they become, which are not always as he intended. Example, Matthew 19, in which Jesus says to some men who had questioned him about divorce, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning."

The Law of Moses was a gift of God and explained God's will. Here Jesus says that God did not intend "in the beginning" that husbands and wives should divorce but permits it because of the intractability of human sinfulness.

God makes temporal adjustments to his will to account for the facts of creation. God's ends do not change, but his means for accomplishing them do, based on how creation's freedom plays out within the parameters God has set for it.

Shakespeare must have figured this out: "There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will—" (Hamlet, Act 5).

Premise 6
If there is anything that God does not know absolutely, as the Scriptures seem to indicate, God's knowledge of the future is infinitely greater than human knowledge of the present. Which is to say that even God's uncertainty of future events is indescribably superior to our certainty of past or present. Paul would seem to affirm this in 1 Cor. 1.25: "For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength."

No matter which possibilities of billions or more turn out to become reality, the "clairvoyant science, Deep Blue" God has already entirely foreseen them in all their permutations. Gregory Boyd put it this way in Satan and the Problem of Evil:

God perfectly knows from all time what will be, what would be, and what may be. And he sovereignly sets the parameters for all three categories. Moreover, because God possesses infinite intelligence, his knowledge of what might be leaves him no less prepared for the future than his knowledge of determinate aspects of creation. ...

Because he is infinitely intelligent, he does not need to “thin out” his attention over numerous possibilities as we do. He is able to attend to each one of a trillion billion possibilities, whether they be logical possibilities, what would be, or what might be, as though it was the only possibility he had to consider. He is infinitely attentive to each and every one. Hence, whatever possibility ends up coming to pass, we may say that from all eternity God was preparing for just this possibility, as though it were the only possibility that could ever possibly occur. Even when possibilities occur that are objectively improbable – and to this extent surprise or disappoint God – it is not at all the case that he is caught off guard. He is as perfectly prepared for the improbable as he is for the probable. [Italics added]

God has a will for the universe and everything within it. Yet everything within creation has a will, too, even if only a mechanistic one. Freedom is real but always exists and is exercised within the boundaries inherent in the created order. God, having created this order to begin with, is greater than it is. Nothing can happen in the universe that God cannot foresee, but to foresee is not to know absolutely in the sense that classical theism conceives of it.

Even so, from our human perspective perhaps it is a distinction without a difference except for a very critical one: we are not predestined at birth either to heaven or hell as the Reformers believed. Of all the freedoms we have to choose or not, there is only one that matters eternally. It is simply whether we will say yes to God. It is God's will that no one should perish (2 Peter 3:9) but we do have the ability to reject God's grace.

Just as Kasparov's choices of potential moves was diminished by the loss of every piece, eventually the universe's potentialities are narrowed until the only possibility that is left is the final fulfillment of God's will. Then it truly will be that "the old order of things has passed away" (Rev. 21).

The problems

Classical theism protects the unbridled sovereignty of God at the expense of human freedom and morality. While one might like to assert, "God is in his heavens and all is well in the world," the world is manifestly not well. The book of Job strikes directly to heart of the problem: if God is as classical theism describes him, why do the innocent suffer? Whence come war, disease, massively-destructive natural disasters and all the other evils of life?

In God at War, Gregory Boyd posits,

Assuming (rightly) that God is perfectly loving and good, and assuming (wrongly, I hold) that divine omnipotence entails meticulous control, the problem of evil ... becomes simply unsolvable.

Resolving the problem of evil is far beyond the scope of this post, but classical theism is unable to answer its basic conundrum: if God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good, then Job is right - God has some 'splaining to do. The usual approach, as Rabbi Kushner explained in his bestselling Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People, is to adjust one's concept either of God's power or knowledge in order to protect at all costs God's goodness. For if God is not purely and absolutely good, then we are lost. We would have no basis to trust God and while we should fear him there would be no reason to worship or love him.

My concept, rough as it is, of "Deep Blue Theism" avoids this conundrum, though certainly difficult questions remain. Chief among them is that Deep Blue theology must allow for God's direct intervention in human affairs and into individual human actions, of which there are many examples in Scripture (notably, for example, God's convincing Joseph not to send Mary away but to take her as his wife). If I allow for these and other Scriptural examples, why not allow for it all around?

Another problem: I have expressed that there are natural constraints on human freedom built into how we are created. In what sense, then, are we meaningfully free before God since God has already limited our freedom by the way he created us?

Finally, I wrote that "God's 'certainty' range of knowledge of future events is increasing while the 'potential' range of his knowledge of future events is decreasing, enabling God's will to be more effective in shaping events." If that is so, then we would expect the world to be conforming evermore to godliness. But that seems a hard claim to support empirically.

All this is to say, however, that human freedom in relation to God is difficult to understand. Classical theism does not even try and this is, I think, its fatal failing. Classical theism is all about God and not much about God's creation. But self-evidently, God is not about himself but about his creation - in the giving of the covenant at Sinai, for example, in John 3:16 and in Matthew 20.28, "the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." God is deeply and personally involved in the world in the most intimate ways possible to the extent that he is willing to accept that his will can be thwarted in order to preserve our ability to love him back (understanding that God's will can only be thwarted temporarily).

But a question lingers: Could God choose to exercise the meticulous, micromanaging control over every instant that classical theism says he does but that Deep Blue Theism says he does not? The obvious answer is yes, God could do that if God wanted, but an even deeper question is thereby provoked: would it be loving of God to do so? "Yes" is far from an obvious answer to that. Love is inherently relational. A puppeteer may love his puppets but most assuredly they do not love him back. Love desires willing responses, not robotic role playing. So no wonder that God advised his people, "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart" (Jer. 29.13).

1 John 4.8 says, "God is love." 2 Timothy 2.13 says that even if we are unfaithful to God (hence unloving), God remains faithful (hence loving) to us "for he cannot deny himself."

God is love. God cannot be not-God. Hence God cannot be unloving of his creation. And so, wanting each of us to seek him all our hearts, God does not close the future, but opens it to permit us to shape it along with him and all the attendant uncertainties that go along with that - and he cannot be or do otherwise, "for he cannot deny himself.

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Texting the preacher

Here is a release by the United Methodist News Service about a Methodist church in Missouri in which people text message to the pastor during the worship service, and he answers the questions then and there. But first, of course, the Youtube:



The article says,

[The Rev. Mike] Schreiner invites churchgoers to text him questions during his sermons, be it clarification of a point he made or some other topic.

“We’ve seen everything from, ‘Did Pastor Mike forget to shave?’ to things from John Wesley’s theology,” said Mitch Aldridge, Morning Star’s associate music director.

Aldridge collects the questions as they come in and forwards the most relevant ones to Schreiner’s onstage laptop.

The texts are anonymous, at least by the time Rev. Mike gets them.

Food for thought. Bill Easum once wrote that if the 1960s ever return, the mainline American churches are ready. The fact is that churches, as a group, are slow adopters of innovations, especially when they might affect worship. This is not altogether a bad thing since "innovative" and "faddish" are not easy to distinguish. at least not until some time passes.

But by now using multimedia in worship cannot be seen as a fad. If churches are going to reach and communicate with young people any more, multimedia is essential. Yet I'd wager that only a minority of congregations have such systems installed.

Personally, I think this idea is brilliant.

Pale Blue Dot

What's the most epic photo ever taken? - Quora

The answer is a photo of Earth taken from the edge of the solar system.

Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken from a record distance of 3.7 billion miles, at the edge of our solar system. It was shot and transmitted by the Voyager 1 spacecraft almost 13 years after its launch.

See also my Google Docs presentation on Genesis and the Origin of Life.

Israel to be invaded Friday. World to end Saturday.

What an interesting conjunction of events. First: "Facebook Groups Call for Mass Invasion of Israel on Friday."

The Third Palestinian Intifada on Facebook seems to have at least twenty different groups or pages, each with hundreds or thousands of fans. One group has 365,000 fans. According to Yedioth Ahronoth (YNet), these sites are now urging all Arabs to “rush the Israeli borders” after Friday prayers on May 20.

Look: This could be the work of one nerdy Palestinian in a basement in Ramallah. The fans could also be people who exist only in cyberspace.

But, these Third Palestinian Intifada websites could also be the work of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria, and the Palestinian Authority, all of which have problems of their own and for whom a diversion would be mighty fine. In fact, I think they are. Thus, this promised new aggression must be taken seriously and stopped in its tracks.

In any event, these Third Intifada facebook websites are suggesting that armed and unarmed hordes, masses, mobs of incited and hate-filled Arabs invade–“surge”–into sovereign Israel (as they have done for years to India.) The Indian press and police are too afraid to report it or to stop them. Israelis have no choice but to do so.

I do not think that the "surge" will be nearly as great at this piece's author, Phyllis Chesler, fears. But the turnout will still be high. There was, after all, a rehearsal held only a few days ago.

Palestinians rushed Israel's borders at Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza, which resulted in the deaths of 15 Palestinians and many more injuries.

The Israeli Defense Force was caught by surprise but was able to defend the borders. But the crowds got what they came for: heaping more bad publicity on Israel. Most of the international media dutifully complied.

Interesting event number two: Christian Premillennialism, a variety of "end times" lore, insists that Isarel will be invaded by mortal enemies and that to save Israel, Jesus will return in person. And he won't be nice.

Third: Harold Camping, founder of Family Radio Worldwide, with a wide listener base, says that God closes the book on human history this Saturday.

May 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. evangelical broadcaster predicting that Judgment Day will come on Saturday says he expects to stay close to a TV or radio to monitor the unfolding apocalypse.

Harold Camping, 89, previously made a failed prediction that Jesus Chris would return to Earth in 1994.

But the head of the Christian radio network Family Stations Inc says he is sure an earthquake will shake the Earth on May 21, sweeping true believers to heaven and leaving others behind to be engulfed in the world's destruction over a few months.

"We know without any shadow of a doubt it is going to happen," said Camping, whose Family Radio broadcasts in more than 30 languages and on U.S. and international stations.

So: invasion of Israel Friday? Second coming Saturday? I personally think I'll go long on oil.

A fellow named Hal Lindsey wrote a novel in 1970 called The Late Great Planet Earth, though the publisher presented it as "non-fiction." It sold many millions of copies. It was a highly imaginative account of why Lindsey thought the world would end in 1988. Lindsey’s fictional account of the end times had the Warsaw Pact invading Israel from the north and the Chinese army invading from the east, and the United States in the middle, defending Israel. Nuclear war followed, which would have killed every human being except for the direct, personal return of Christ to Jerusalem.

It didn’t happen, of course. The Warsaw pact is gone. For that matter, 1988 is gone, too, and we’re still here. Jesus hasn’t returned yet. The Late Great Planet Earth is in its forty-plus printing; not a word has been changed and it still predicts the end of the world and the second coming in 1988. The track record of everyone who has predicted the end of the world has been one hundred percent in error. One supposes, though, that eventually someone will get it right.

According to the 24th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, we cannot know when comes the end of the age: "You do not know on what day your Lord will come," Jesus admonished his disciples. So we should not even try to predict. Jesus will come in judgment at an unexpected hour. Keep spiritually awake, Jesus cautions, don’t be asleep. Followers of Jesus are to spend their time announcing the Good News and being the body of Christ in this world, not in apocalyptic speculation.

The real pity of Mr. Camping's May 21 prediction is not that it will be wrong, but that it has inexplicably received so much media attention. His is a fringe movement, not even a flicker on the Church-o-meter. So why does his forecast get such media attention? Well, it gives pop culture another reason to dismiss all the Church and all its teachings.

The pity is that so many people will think that Camping-ism is normative of the Christian faiths. But it is not a message of hope nor a position of confidence. Campingism - and "Left Behind-ism" generally - is a theology of fear, and poor theology at that.

Vigilance for the day of the Lord is a spiritual condition. It means that we remain open to what our relationship with God demands. Let God take us in judgment, for that judgment is liberation and freedom. Whenever judgment comes, we should live now in faith, staying spiritually awake. Our Lord will break into our ordinary lives with extraordinary power, even when we don’t expect it.

Update: Here is a convenient flow chart on whether you will be raptured Saturday.

Is Osama bin Laden in Hell for eternity?

Where would Dante or Rob Bell, or You, put Bin Laden?

Enter Dante. Hell, for him, was a place of contrapasso, of punishment that directly correlated with sin. False prophets have their heads twisted backwards so they cannot see the road ahead; a man who decapitated a head of state carries his own head around like an oil lamp. Where would Dante put bin Laden? Probably in circle seven, with the violent against neighbors: the murderers and war-makers who, because they wallowed in others' blood during their lives, are condemned to immersion in boiling blood forever.

Did Osama bin Laden go to hell or paradise? Obviously, devout Christians and Muslims will answer this question differently. I yield to blogging colleague Daniel Jackson on what an orthodox Jewish answer would be, if he reads this post.

At any rate, one of the big bestsellers these days in America is Rob Bell's book, "Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived." I have not read the book, but the title alone strikes me as rather presumptive - does Rev. Bell really claim to know truly the eternal fate of every person who ever lived? I make no such claim and don't see how anyone else can.

Basically, though, Bell promotes another version of salvation-universalism, a theology that one way or another, everyone will be saved by God at the end of the age, that all sins will be remitted and that regardless of one's religion or spiritual state at death, heaven/paradise is everyone's eternal destiny.

And this is another version of predestinarianism, the idea that our fates are sealed and that nothing we can do or fail to do can change that fact. God being God, after all, gets what God wants. In distinction, there is the theology of Arminianism, named after Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), which holds that God's grace is not irresistible by human beings, that God does not overpower decisions of the human will.

Bell's universalism is not a new teaching at all, as Bell apparently acknowledges. Universalists were found among the post-apostolic church fathers, including bishops. Ultimately universalism was debated thoroughly at an episcopal conference (well, more than one) and finally held to be heretical. And all its adherents were burned at the stake confessed they were in error and returned to their episcopal duties.

A work of universalist theology by a Methodist scholar is David Lowes Watson's, "God Does Not Foreclose: The Universal Promise of Salvation." This I have read, several times in fact (it sits on my bookshelf). I have known Dr. Watson for years and am willing to bet that its theological grounding is superior to Bell's but that may just be my Methodist bias showing. I find Dr. Watson's arguments compelling - but alas, not convincing.

Here is how I work through the topic.

Why you must crush the resurrection

The Telegraph: China seizes Christians in Easter raid.

Dozens of Chinese Christians were arrested on Sunday when police prevented an evangelical Protestant church from holding its Easter Sunday service, as the state continued its attack on protests against one-party rule. ...

Worshippers from the Shouwang, or "watch tower", church were taken away in buses, some defiantly singing hymns. Church leaders had issued a "fire and brimstone" cry for the congregation to worship outside the building even if it meant arrest and prosecution.
"The devil Satan has taken advantage of the authority God has granted to the national government and is seeking to destroy God's church," Pastor Jin Tianming wrote. "His devil's claws have finally been revealed. Satan get thee behind me!"
Up to 500 members of the Protestant house church movement, unregistered assemblies of worshippers that the government bans to prevent the rise of opposition, have been detained in recent weeks.

Mark Tooley on The American Spectator, "Celebrating the resurrection."

In his book The Resurrection of the Son of God, Wright wrote: "No wonder the Herods, the Caesars and the Sadducees of this world, ancient and modern, were and are eager to rule out all possibility of actual resurrection. They are, after all, staking a counter-claim on the real world. It is the real world that the tyrants and bullies (including the intellectual tyrants and bullies) try to rule by force, only to discover that in order to do so they have to quash all rumours of resurrection, rumours that would imply that their greatest weapons, death and deconstruction, are not after all omnipotent."