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An Accurate Picture Of The World

Jesus is the Logos. The Logos is a combination of truth, goodness, and beauty. Truth, goodness, and beauty are the references that give us a grounded Christian spirituality. That’s the True Horizon model — spirituality based on an accurate picture of the world. But what does a spirituality grounded in the real world look like?

More Than An Analogy

I have used an aviation analogy as a model for visualizing what it means to be spiritual. But an analogy is just a way to represent something real. And analogies can only go so far. Please don’t miss the purpose behind it. My point is simply that the culture has convinced too many of us that spirituality is disconnected from reality. That it is some free-floating source of emotional comfort. What I’m suggesting is that that is not what Christianity teaches. Christianity is grounded in the Logos. It produces a spiritual life that is attached to, and reflects, the real world.

Grounded In Truth

The dictionary definition of truth is “correspondence to reality.” In other words, if what you believe about something matches the way the world actually is, then what you believe is true. Again, truth doesn’t exist in our minds. To seek truth is to want to believe things about how the world is, not about how we would like it to be.

Christianity matches what we find in the world in several different ways.

Common Observations and Experiences

Here are a few things that every one of us can see when we look at the world around us:

Human life is inherently unique and valuable.

This matches our common experience of the human condition. We don’t need anyone to teach us to respect and value human life.

The universe we live in owes its existence to an external source.

The universe had a beginning that requires an explanation. This is a conclusion that both science and philosophy lead us to.

Lies and deception are destructive.

We see this all around us every day. No one wants to be lied to. Everyone recognizes the harm that lies can bring to us individually and as a society.

Evil repulses us. Goodness attracts us.

Remember, we are talking about a feature of reality here. This is not about how we know good and evil. It is about the fact that both exist.

There is an order, intelligence, and purpose to the universe.

There are laws of logic and mathematics that describe the universe. Our location in time and space is fine-tuned to an incomprehensibly unlikely level. There is a digital code more complex than any computer algorithm ever written that controls and sustains every form of life on the planet.

There are many more examples, but all of these are different forms of truth, goodness, and beauty. And here’s the point…

A Grounded Spirituality

Based on just these things, a grounded spirituality should:

Pursue a life that values other human life.
Recognize that we are created beings, not gods unto ourselves.
Make us truthseekers and truth-tellers.
Understand that goodness, and the morality it demands is not based on our feelings and experiences, but in the nature of the Creator who made us.
Stand in awe of the miraculous nature of our very existence.

And each of these holds three things in common:

We can learn them directly from our observations and experiences in the world.
We don’t need the Bible to know any of them.
They are perfectly consistent with Christianity.

This is what I mean by a “grounded spirituality.” It matches what the Bible says — and it is supported by reality itself.

Common Ground

Don’t misunderstand. When I say, “we don’t need the Bible to know any of them,” I am not diminishing the importance of the Bible in our spiritual life. I am simply pointing out that this gives us confidence that truth is grounded in the Bible — and that the Bible is grounded in the truth.

Both come from the same Source.

When we understand that, it gives us common ground for discussing spirituality with everyone. Whether they are a hardcore atheist or a spiritually disoriented Christian, they live in the same world as you and me. And we should love them enough to have the courage to confidently, but respectfully, help them re-orient their thinking.

Have You Thought About Marriage Lately?

Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Bob Perry

Have you spent much time thinking about marriage lately? You should. It doesn’t matter if a wedding is something in your future or in your past. It doesn’t even matter if you have no intention of ever getting married. The fact is that the institution of marriage is important to us all. Our culture has devalued it in many ways, but marriage is the foundation of a healthy society. For that reason, we all ought to contemplate the true meaning and value of marriage.

An Honor And A Privilege

My wife and I have been happily married for 33 years. When you’ve done anything for that long, it’s easy to think you have it all figured out. But in July, my son and his fiancé asked me to perform their October wedding ceremony. Suddenly, I found myself thinking about marriage nearly every waking minute.

It was an honor and privilege to take part in my own son and daughter-in-law’s wedding. But it ended up being more than that. Preparing what I wanted to say to them on such an important day became a powerful reminder for me about the eternal significance of marriage. The whole experience reminded me of some things I had been taking for granted for far too long.

The Grand Story

We are all part of that bigger story. It’s a story that began with a God who wanted to allow free-will beings to choose to follow him. He designed a world for that purpose. And when it was exactly the way he wanted it, he created two very different beings to begin multiplying and filling it. These two complemented one another in every way — physically, psychologically, and spiritually. So, God joined them together in the world’s first wedding.

Later, that same God chose to step out of eternity to implement his plan of redemption for all of us. And when he was ready to begin his ministry, he chose to show the world who he really was by changing water into wine … at a wedding.

We are told the story will eventually come full circle. The descendants of that first couple who have chosen to devote themselves to God forever are called the church. And the church will be joined together for eternity with Christ. The Book of Revelation refers to the church as the “bride of Christ.” Jesus is the bridegroom.

In other words, the Grand Story begins and ends with a wedding.

A Picture Of Eternal Life

It seems like God really likes weddings. That’s because every wedding is meant to be a small picture of the ultimate wedding. It is in that context that all of us should think about marriage.

The covenant of marriage honors the personal stories of individual men and women. But it does so in light of the Grand Story of God’s redemptive love.

When you think of it that way, you understand marriage as it was meant to be — a God-centered, submissive commitment for life.

God’s Spirit At The Center

Marriage should never be an agreement between two “needy” people who are looking for someone else to “fill up their tanks.”

Only the Spirit of God can do that.

Both the bride and groom must be people who have considered life’s biggest questions…together. They don’t have to agree on everything, but neither can they redirect worldviews that are on opposite trajectories. The Bible calls this being “unequally yoked.” It’s a picture that any ancient-near-east, agrarian listener would have understood immediately. Think of two oxen pulling a cart in different directions. It doesn’t work. It only leads to trouble.

With God at the center of the relationship, drawing closer to him can’t help but draw husband and wife closer to each other.

A Covenant Of Submission

To the world — and the culture we live in — nothing sounds more old archaic, ridiculous, oppressive, or horrific than the words of Ephesians 5:22:

“Wives, submit to your husbands.”

But that’s because the world has a short attention span. Three sentences later, Paul continues:

“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her …”

Do you want submission? There is no greater form of submission than for a man to offer up his own life for his wife.

But there’s more.

The sentence that leads into this passage says that we are to “give thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.”

This is not a one-sided submission. It’s not even a fifty-fifty proposition. Marriage is a covenant in which both parties agree to give 100% of themselves.

The Beautiful Fruits Of The Covenant

The Greek word for “submit” that Paul uses in this passage has its roots in a military term. It’s about surrendering your independence to be part of something greater. It’s all about grace, forgiveness, patience, and compassion.

It has all the features of an authentic friendship — constancy, transparency, and sympathy.

This covenant is nothing like the worldly promise too many see in their marriage vows — a promise of conditional love that feeds your happiness in the moment. Instead, it’s a love that will include painful days and survive hurt feelings. It’s a love that faces obstacles and tough decisions together. This covenant is for future, sacrificial love that doesn’t depend on circumstances.

How many marriages built on that kind of selfless bond do you think would fail?

The Power Of The Covenant

When you are enmeshed in an intimate, selfless relationship like that, both participants take on superpowers. You get two of them. First, you have the capacity to hurt each other’s feelings more deeply than any other person on Earth. Second, you have the power to heal, affirm, and build each other up more than anyone else ever could.

Married folks need to be forever aware of their superpowers. They have the capacity to make or break a marriage. Never get near the first one. And use the second one every chance you get.

The Purpose Of Marriage

Can you even begin to imagine the kind of society we would be living in if everyone took this view of marriage to heart?

When I say that, I’m not trying to paint some kind utopian picture of heaven on earth. The truth is that fallen human beings would still be involved. But the beauty of the marriage covenant is that it is a vehicle for tempering our sinful natures. Being committed to a lifetime of submission to another makes one a better person. I may not be a good man, but I know that I am a better man for having married my wife. Every aspect of our complementary nature forces me to be.

And that’s why marriage matters. It creates the building block of a stable, thriving society — the human family. Marriage is the cement that holds that society together. The union of a husband and wife is supposed to be a snapshot of the church’s ultimate reunion with its Creator. It builds communities that are focused on God. It makes us think eternally.

And that’s the kind of thinking we should all be doing.

The Importance Of A Balanced Faith

Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Bob Perry

It is very easy to get engrossed in all the arguments for God. People like me love to demonstrate the scientific and philosophical evidence for God. And there are good reasons for us to expose the ethical vacuum we create when we remove God from the culture. These are the kinds of things on which I focus a lot of time, energy, reading, and teaching. It’s good to know things about God. But people like me must also realize that knowing about God can become a distracting detour from the primary purpose of our lives — the pursuit of God. We have heads and hearts. And a balanced faith requires that we engage both.

One Wing, Won’t Fly

When I was in the Marine Corps, one of my best friends was involved in a mid-air collision. He was flying a Harrier that collided with an F-18 Hornet at a closure speed of nearly 900 miles per hour. His recollection of the impact was astounding. He vividly remembered seeing the left-wing of his Harrier twist and disintegrate after it contacted the left horizontal stabilizer of the Hornet. Time seemed to stop. And for a brief moment, he remembered thinking, “I may be able to fly this thing.”

AV-8B Harrier and F-18 Hornet — AV-8B Harrier & F-18 Hornet

His optimism was short-lived. As the thought was still echoing in his head, his airplane snap-rolled to the left. The sky became a swirling blur. He immediately reached for the ejection handle and pulled.

The team that investigated the accident estimated that in the short time it took him to recognize his plight, my friend’s Harrier had dropped several thousand feet. His jet was traveling more than 500 miles per hour when he ejected. A few minutes later, he was sitting in a life raft in the Atlantic Ocean eating Chiclets. Not a scratch on him.

I don’t know if my buddy’s story constitutes a “miracle,” but I do know this. Airplanes with one wing can’t fly.

Desiring God

The futility of trying to fly a one-winged airplane popped into my head recently when I began reading a book that has been sitting in my bookcase, untouched, for several years. John Piper’s Desiring God is a Christian classic and an eye-opening treat.

I have to admit my first reaction to Piper’s call to “Christian Hedonism” was negative. The word “hedonism” just sounds bad to me. But I would encourage you to listen to his entire argument. He makes a clear, biblical case for grounding our lives in the idea that:

The chief end of man is to glorify God

enjoying him forever.

Some of it is still sinking in. I have to consider it more deeply. And I have no intention of analyzing that concept point-by-point. I simply want to focus on the message that came through loud and clear to me. That there is an affective element to the Christian faith that people like me minimize to our own detriment.

The Touchy-Feely Church

To be honest, I have become jaded, even antagonistic, toward this notion. I have a natural aversion to the feelings-based thoughtlessness of the American church in general. History shows that many of the denominations that exist in America today were born during the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries. The emotional appeals of those “Awakenings” were relevant and proper. But they also helped to produce an anti-intellectualism in the American church. Today we live in its aftermath.

I believe and defend the claim that this trend is not only dangerous but unbiblical. Christianity has never been based on the mindless acceptance of a blind leap of faith. It has always been anchored in intellectual assent to the objective truth that Christ embodied. Faith is a thoughtful, willful decision. I have been convinced of that for a long time.

But then Piper hit me with this (p. 247):

“It is astonishing to me that so many people try to define true Christianity in terms of decisions and not affections. Not that decisions are unessential. The problem is that they require so little transformation to achieve. They are evidence of no true work of grace in the heart. People can make “decisions” about the truth of God while their hearts are far from him.”

Ouch.

You Need Both

This is something we know, but that is easy for someone like me to forget. A wooden, intellectually-centered faith is just as dangerous as an emotion-centered faith. Neither works by itself.

We were told to “love our God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength.” We don’t get to pick our favorite way to love our God. It takes our heads and our hearts working together in holistic unity. Piper again (p. 76):

“Truth without emotion produces dead orthodoxy and a church full (or half-full) of artificial admirers … On the other hand, emotion without truth produces empty frenzy and cultivates shallow people who refuse the discipline of rigorous thought. But true worship comes from people who are deeply emotional and who love deep and sound doctrine. Strong affections for God rooted in truth are the bone marrow of biblical worship.”

Put another way, a life of faith needs two wings to fly.

A Spectrum Of Faith

All of us are different. Some are driven more by feelings and emotions. Others by reason. But these shouldn’t be polarizing. As I have heard Greg Koukl put it, “emotion makes life delicious; reason keeps life safe.” We ignore either of them at our own peril.

Instead, they form the two ends of a spectrum of spirituality. A real and vibrant faith lies somewhere in the middle. When Christ told us that he came so that we “may have life, and have it to the full,” this is what I believe he meant.

So where are you on the spectrum? And what do you have to do to work your way toward the balanced life of faith that should be yours?

There’s More Than One Way To “Trust The Science”

Philosophy of Science, Theology and Christian Apologetics

I have made the case before that scientism is a dangerous belief system. And the COVID-19 Pandemic has done nothing but prove the point. In their response to the virus, many in power exhort us to “trust the science.” Listen to the doctors. Their wisdom should guide the trajectory of our collective futures. But accepting that view greatly depends on your understanding of what science is … and whose science you’re trusting. The truth is that science never provides answers to anything. Scientists do. And that means we not only have to know what branch of science they’re representing, we also have to trust the scientists’ judgment. Our leaders can make decisions using science as a tool. But we accept those decisions on other grounds. That’s because science is not the arbiter of anything. People are. We can’t just “trust the science.” We have to know how our leaders are using evidence, logic, and moral reasoning to reach their science-based conclusions.

Science -vs- Scientists

My point is that there is a vast difference between what science is … and what scientists say. The scientific data about this disease can tell us how to identify its DNA makeup, how it attacks our bodies, how transmissible it is, how long it lasts, how deadly it is, and how to create a vaccine to combat it. We can use that data to evaluate the threat the virus poses and generate statistical analyses from it. The science describes the physical and biological facts about COVID-19.

But scientists interpret that data. They analyze the statistics and suggesting measures to combat it. And those scientists have biases and opinions they bring to the table. Let me offer an example of what I mean.

The Scientists We Trust

During this pandemic, there is perhaps no one who we are being asked to trust more than Doctor Anthony Fauci. And let me be clear. I don’t envy his position or question his credentials. Fauci is a highly educated immunologist. He’s a brilliant man, probably the most qualified person in America to be in the position he holds. But he has also made some public policy statements about the pandemic.

When asked about restarting sporting events, for instance:

“The best way to perhaps begin baseball on TV — say, around July 4 — would be to get players tested and put them in hotels. Keep them very well surveilled … have them tested, like every week. Buy a gazillion tests. And make sure they don’t wind up infecting each other or their family.’”

So, Doctor Fauci endorses the continuous surveillance and monitoring of U.S. citizens. But there’s more.

As it pertains to social interaction during the crisis, Fauci was asked:

Interviewer: “If you’re swiping on a dating [hook-up] app like Tinder … or Grindr [its LGBTQ alternative], and you match with someone that you think is hot, and you’re just kind of like, ‘Maybe it’s fine if this one stranger comes over.’ What do you say to that person?”

Fauci: “You know, that’s tough … Because that’s what’s called relative risk … If you’re willing to take a risk — and you know, everybody has their own tolerance for risks — you could figure out if you want to meet somebody …”

Complicated Answers

Whatever you think of Doctor Fauci’s positions on the Bill of Rights or “relative risk,” one thing is clear. Neither of his answers has anything to do with a need to “trust the science.”

Fauci’s answers are a perfect example of the intersection of ideas that are in play. He is willing to accept the medical and moral risk of a hook-up, but not the risk of human suffering due to an economic collapse. The point is that these things are complicated, and not just because the science is complicated. The reality is that we are not only living with the opinions and biases of different scientists. We are also dealing with the intersection of different kinds of science.

Economics is a Science

Much has been written and said about the economic impact of shutting the world down for this virus. One Yale study shows that rising unemployment causes higher death rates. Another study reveals a link between unemployment and suicide. These are not hypothetical outcomes. The human suffering that will result from this shutdown may be more threatening than the virus itself.

If you’re a Christian, don’t be lured into denying this. And don’t accept the notion that to do so is to value your retirement account more than you value human life. As my friend, Scott Klusendorf argues persuasively, that is a false choice:

“Absent important qualifiers, ‘life over profits’ is moralistic reductionism masquerading as biblical ethics. Seen holistically, ‘profits’ are not just about money. Rather, wrapped up in our economic considerations are clusters of intrinsic goods, such as educating our children, providing for our families, giving to charity, building up our marriages, and pursuing Christian fellowship — all of which contribute to the common good.”

Political Science

On April 15, 2020, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy banned religious services in his state. Fifteen people were arrested as a result. It doesn’t take much thought to understand that this directly impacts both the right to assemble and the religious liberty that are guaranteed by the U. S. Constitution. When he was pressed on this issue, Murphy responded:

“I wasn’t thinking of the Bill of Rights when we did this … The science says people have to stay away from each other.” New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy

For those of us who value the Bill of Rights and the Constitution that enumerates them, this is not just an academic triviality. The whole point of those rights is that the government does not create them. God does. Our government exists primarily to protect them. And when it fails to do so, tyranny is the result.

If you have any doubts about the importance of that dichotomy, look at history. Tyranny crushes the human spirit. Liberty allows it to flourish. History is littered with the wreckage to human life that occurs when the powerful engage in the former.

Sociology is Science

Free market economics works because it is grounded in human nature. We are social beings. And we are meant to interact. Shutting off that aspect of what it means to be human also has devastating effects. When we are prohibited from interacting with other humans, it damages our souls. Anger and irritability run rampant. People are frustrated and short-tempered. Suicides increase.

There is a reason solitary confinement is considered such an awful punishment, even for the worst of criminals. And there are reasons infants deprived of human contact suffer long-term mental health effects or even death.

Defining Science

The dictionary defines science as, “a branch study … that gives systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation.” It comes from the Latin word scientia, which means “knowledge.” And that may be where the corruption of our thought about it began. Before the scientific revolution that supposedly led to our “Enlightenment,” there was another branch of science that no one talks about these days. It’s a branch of knowledge that is the key to understanding every other branch.

Theology.

The Queen of the Sciences

They used to call Theology the “Queen of the Sciences” for a reason. Theology identifies the Creator and sustainer of all things. But it does more than that. It makes the case that the mind of God is the basis for truth and reason. And that means His character undergirds every other scientific discipline.

How so?

All matter, mind, power, and morality have their foundation in the nature of God. And we are made in His image. So, it follows that our ability to reason and create are reflections of God’s character. Knowing that changes the way we understand everything else. In the doctrine of the Trinity and the eternal relationship between the Persons of the Godhead, we have the basis for love itself. It’s the model for all human relationships. And that means it is foundational to how we understand community, sacrifice, and cooperation.

If you want to have a robust view of chemistry, biology, anatomy, anthropology, psychology, sociology — you name the discipline — you must understand that theology ties them all together.

Today it sounds absurd to call theology a “science.” But that’s not because we’ve found something wrong with theology. It’s because we have accepted a corrupted and truncated view of science itself. We’ve limited it to matter, energy, space, and time. But we’ve lost our souls and spirits in the process.

Holistic Science

Today, we’ve bought the lie that our study of the physical world is the only way to know things. But there are other ways to acquire knowledge. And each of them includes reason and rationality. It is human beings who practice science every day, whether they think of themselves as scientists or not.

Yes, we need to respect the scientific data. But data doesn’t make decisions. People do. Those people must analyze the data within a holistic view of the world — a view that incorporates all of what it means to be human into the solutions to our problems. Medicine and immunology are not the only important disciplines in play. We need discernment. And that means including everything from our basic human nature to our interpersonal relationships to the makeup of our social fabric in the decision-making process.

“Trust the science” is an empty slogan. When you hear it you should ask, “Which one?” And realize you are listening to someone who holds to a sterilized view of the world.

The World On The Other Side of This Pandemic

Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Bob Perry

The world is an unpredictable place. But we pretend it isn’t. We like to envision our future and plan our steps, pretending we know how we’ll get there. But the stories we write for ourselves rest on assumptions about how the world works and our place in it. And those assumptions tend to be cheery ones. Most of us never include suffering or vulnerability in our forecasts, especially if we believe that “God is in control.” But when it all goes to hell, our illusions fade to black. The smiling facade vanishes quickly when life unveils our real gods. Our lives are changing rapidly and permanently right before our eyes. But the Church needs to take the lead in influencing the world we will face on the other side of this pandemic.

The World Descends

Between Sunday and Thursday of last week, I saw my own home state shut down all bars and restaurants. Inconvenient? Sure. But then I went to work.

I spent the next three days in hotels in Boston and San Francisco. Boston was a dark, rainy ghost town. There were empty streets and closed businesses in the city by the bay. No trolley cars in sight. You could hear birds singing in the eerie air downtown.

I met a British man in an elevator whose flight to London had been canceled. He had no earthly idea when, or how, he would be able to get home. And no one from his airline would communicate with him.

Salt Lake City, one of my airline’s major hubs, was rocked by an earthquake that closed the airport and caused massive flight diversions.

During the descent on our final leg home, we were informed that the eastern half of the Indianapolis Air Traffic Control Center was shutdown. Two air traffic controllers had tested positive for Coronavirus.

On Tuesday, my airline announced that it would park 300 airplanes and cut flying by 40%. By the time I got home, those numbers had changed to 600 airplanes and 70%.

In short, every time I landed somewhere, I was afraid to turn on my phone. In the space of three and a half days, I felt like I had become a character in a Stephen King novel. And as I write this, the details of this pandemic have only gotten worse.

Paradigm Shifts

In the space of just a few hours on the morning of September 11, 2001, we had a massive paradigm shift in this country. It led to economic calamity, war, and distrust. It’s hard to remember what life was like before that day. Today’s crisis may be happening at a little slower pace, but the consequences will be more severe. And some of them will be permanent.

Welcome to the new reality. The post-Coronavirus world is something few of us could have imagined even a few weeks ago. We’re still not sure what that world will look like. But we’re getting a glimpse.

New Reality?

The stock market is plummeting. The value of our retirement accounts have been cut by more than a third. Leaders are issuing edicts and manipulating “rescue” bills to gain a political advantage. Neighbors hoard food and supplies, depriving their neighbors of the same. “Preppers” are feeling vindicated. Opportunists are trying to sell vital products for obscene profits.

In each of these cases, we see the fruits of the gods who some folks really worship: selfishness, panic, fear, power, greed, and control.

It is an unfortunate reality that challenging times tend to bring out the worst in us. And it is a sad fact that some of that fruit comes from people we sit next to in church every week.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Children of a Greater God

We are free-will beings. And that means nothing is inevitable. We don’t have to accept the rotten fruit of the lower gods.

” … for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” 2 Timothy 1:7

The God of the Bible is a reasonable God. A selfless, loving, compassionate God. A God of mercy and justice.

We are made in His image.

The Church has faced catastrophes before. But instead of languishing with the lunatics of the lesser gods, it made the choice to reflect the character of its King. Here are some ways I can think of to do that. Feel free to add some more if you have them…

Empathize With the Younger Generation

If you’re older than 35 or so, think about the world you grew up in as a kid. It was carefree and mostly serene. You didn’t have to think about “adult things.” And your parents weren’t bombarded with outrage, politics, and flamethrowing 24/7/365 from the news. All you had to do was be a kid.

Now think about those who are under 30 years old. Realize that their lives have been bookended by catastrophes like 9/11 and the Coronavirus pandemic. Their view of the world is different than those of us who are older. Look at it through their eyes and have some compassion. You don’t have to be Pollyanna. Just give them something to be optimistic about … or at least try to understand why they’re not.

Serve Our Neighbors

Christianity exploded during the plagues and persecutions in the ancient world. And it did so precisely because Christians served those who most needed it. They comforted and cared for the sick and dying. This isn’t just a job for healthcare professionals. It’s a duty for us all.

We need to quit being the “takers” our culture encourages us to be. We need to be givers of whatever it is we are able to give.

And let’s be smart about this. Preparing to care for those in need includes caching medical supplies and equipment for future outbreaks like this that will come — instead of fighting each other to hoard things now. And it means retooling our country to produce our own medicine and other medical equipment here where we need it, not overseas where it’s cheap.

Demand Economic Restraint

The economic expectations we have come to accept as normal are reckless, selfish, and short-sighted. We borrow and spend too much. We save too little. Our leaders are more worried about the next election than the next generation. But they are like that because we demand comfort and security from them now. We have mortgaged the future so we can indulge ourselves in the present. And we do it on a national, congregational, and personal scale.

Imagine how different this crisis would be if businesses, churches, and families had conserved the financial means to weather this storm. And imagine what kind of world we will be leaving for our kids and grandkids if we don’t change our ways.

The World On The Other Side

The changes we are facing will be dramatic and long-lasting. There are things we will never do the same way. There are ways we will think about things that have been forever altered. But, since that’s the case, let’s make the world on the other side of this a better one. The circumstances will be challenging. But our response should be far different from the world around us.

If you believe Christianity is true, that means it applies to every aspect of our lives and to every situation in which we find ourselves. Economics and pandemics are no exception. Let’s use the rational minds God gave us to be smart, savvy, and sacrificial.

This kind of thing will happen again. If anybody should be ready to deal with it the next time, it’s the Church.

The Cure For Spiritual Disorientation

Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Bob Perry

I have made the case that the church is suffering from spiritual disorientation. There are many Christians who are flying through this life in much the same way as a pilot who is spatially disoriented. Like that pilot, they’ve lost all reference to the ground. And that’s a dangerous position to be in. The first thing a pilot must do to correct his situation is to find the true horizon. Grounding our faith is no different. And the horizon line of faith is truth itself. Truth, in all its forms, is the reference for a grounded spirituality. It aligns us with reality. The Greeks believed in an impersonal force that was the source of truth, goodness, and beauty. They called it the logos. But the Bible tells us that the Logos is Jesus himself. Aligning ourselves with the Logos is the only way to correct our spiritual disorientation.

Getting Aligned With The World

If you want to fly safely through the sky, you need to have a constant reference to the ground. That seems simple enough. If it’s a nice day, you can see the horizon line just fine. But if you’re in the clouds, you need another method. For that reason, a tremendous amount of effort has gone into designing cockpit instruments that display an artificial horizon to the pilot. But that line has to be trustworthy. It has to replicate the real one. We always need a way to be able to see the “true horizon.”

If the church wants to address its spiritual disorientation problem, it needs to make it a priority to invest in doing the same kind of thing. The church needs a way to stabilize its vision of reality. And the place to begin doing that is with the basics of reality itself.

The Ground You Cannot See

Apologists like me love to talk about the origins, design, archaeology, and the scientific evidence that points to the existence of God. We are known to make a case for God as the Creator, Designer, and Sustainer of the world. That’s great. We need to do all those things. In fact, Christianity is unique among the world religions in its ability to offer tangible evidence for its trustworthiness.

But if the church is going to be properly grounded, we need to go beyond that kind of evidence. We need to re-emphasize things that are vital to rational thought, but that our culture has corrupted. I’m talking about the features of our world that you can’t see, but that are just as real as the ground you walk on. The kinds of things you have to know and understand to think clearly about anything at all. I’m talking about the philosophical triumvirate of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

For thousands of years, thinking people have recognized each of these as objective features of the world. If you want to understand how we’ve gotten disoriented, you have to start with them.

Hijacking Objective Reality

Think about it. For thousands of years, human beings saw Truth, Goodness, and Beauty as objective features of the world. But they weren’t just things that existed outside of us. We understood that they were important and reliable because they were grounded in the nature of God himself.

But contemporary culture has hijacked each of them. It has relativized them. Told us they were things we could decide for ourselves. The results have been disastrous. But there is a way to fix it. And the first step in confirming the church’s true horizon is to put truth, goodness, and beauty back where they belong — as the unmoving reference points for all we do and think.

Truth Is The Essence Of God

Truth has always been central to the human relationship with God. The Prophets of the Old Testament lamented it’s passing.

Isaiah 59:14-15— “truth stumbled in the streets. Truth is nowhere to be found”
Jeremiah 7:28— “truth has perished; it has vanished from their lips.”

Jesus refers to truth more than 75 times. In the Book of John alone, he uses the double emphatic phrase, “Truly, truly I say to you …” twenty-five times. Truth was the reason he came to Earth at all:

John 18:37— “For this reason I was born, and for this reason, I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

Ultimately, he transformed our understanding of the nature of truth itself. He personalized it.

John 14:6— “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me …”

If we want our churches to be properly oriented, we have to defend the truth. We have to know that truth before it can set us free.

Goodness Is The Character Of God

Every one of us recognizes what C. S. Lewis put so succinctly:

“Across cultures universally, there are common principles that everybody knows and lives as if they are true.”

You can’t torture toddlers for fun. It is wrong to murder an innocent person. You shouldn’t steal your neighbor’s iPhone. Rape is wrong. We all have human rights.

Where do these ideas come from? As I have discussed elsewhere, the existence of these kinds of things points to the fact that there is a standard we all use to determine morality. Individuals cannot create that standard for themselves. It would lead to chaos. Neither can we agree on them by accepting the consensus of our communities. If that were the case, there would be no way to argue against the actions of the Nazis or southern slave owners. After all, they governed by the consensus of their respective communities.

There is only one other possible explanation for these kinds of things. There is an external standard that defines them. And the only other source of such a standard of goodness is the character of God himself.

Beauty Is The Reflection Of God

As my article, “A Mind For The Beautiful,” points out in great detail, the classic understanding of beauty was that it was a property of objects. Beautiful things displayed symmetry, order, balance, unity, and proportion. They gave the inference of design and purpose.

As an example, the Wright Brothers were not the first ones to build an airplane. They were the first to be able to control an airplane. That’s why you know about them today. And they were able to do that because they spent countless hours studying and cataloging the movement and structure of birds. They watched their feathers warp and twist. They observed how the birds set their wings before takeoff and after landing. In other words, they owed their unique success to their ability to replicate nature.

We don’t create beauty. We recreate it. Beauty is something we find in the world around us. The best we can do is mimic it.

The Divine Mind

As it turns out, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are each objective features of the world. They always have been. We do not create them. We discover them. They are foundational to reality itself. And they are what we need to know to properly orient ourselves to the world. They help form a true horizon.

Even the Greek philosophers knew this. They talked about truth, goodness, and beauty as elements of a concept they saw behind the orderly nature of the universe.

This concept was rich in meaning. It included reason, choice, reflection, and calculation. It explained the relational harmony between belief and actuality. The Greeks considered this to be some kind of impersonal force — a “divine mind.” And they had a name for it.

They called it the Logos.

The Impersonal Comes To Life

When the Apostle John begins his gospel, it is no coincidence that he does so with this Greek idea in mind. He makes it clear that the “force” is far from impersonal. In fact, he knows exactly who it is.

“In the beginning was the Word (“Logos” ), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life and the life was the Light of men.”

It turns out that Jesus is the Logos. He is the Divine Mind behind the universe. The foundation of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Jesus obliterated any notion that the spiritual and physical worlds are disconnected. He is the place where they merge.

If the church is spiritually disoriented, we know where to look to get ourselves right-side up.

As the God who became a man, Jesus showed us that he is our true horizon — the reference for where we should be living our lives. When we focus on truth, goodness, and beauty, we are really focusing on him.

He gives life meaning. He makes life safe.

Jesus — and the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty he defines — is the cure for our spiritual disorientation.

Seeking Shalom: A Case for The Way Things Ought to Be

Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Bob Perry

Sometimes defending God’s existence is easy. You don’t have to try to articulate some fancy philosophical or theological idea. And you don’t have to understand the intricacies of science. All you have to do is be a human being who observes the world in which we live. When you do that, there is no denying that something is drastically wrong. What we see around us is not the way things ought to be. Everybody from the most devoted religious believer to the most ardent atheist knows this. Our common human longing is for a world full of truth, justice, goodness, compassion, and charity. And while there are notable pockets of these things around us, they float in a sea of negativity and corruption.

The fact that everyone realizes this is proof of a powerful idea — that there must be some ideal kind of world we all wish we could experience. A place where things are the way they are supposed to be. And there is an old word the ancients used to describe a place like that. They called it Shalom.

Corrupted Culture

You don’t have to look hard to see a world gone mad. Just watch the news. Years ago, we had a plot by eight-year-olds to kill their teacher. A Google search of that topic today produces several pages of results.

We have researchers who have combined genetic materials to produce human-monkey hybrids — because they can. We have others who seek to push that envelope even further.

And speaking of messing with what it means to be human, how about the growing trend of men “giving birth”? Yes, you read that correctly. Freddy McConnell had a baby in England! Freddy is not really a man, of course. This is not debatable. But we live in a society that condones and patronizes those who demand that we all pretend otherwise, while actual women suffer the consequences.

We see video of people whose organizations generate profits by selling the body parts of aborted babies. But the culture and the courts find more fault with the journalists who expose this practice than with those who engage in it.

A World Gone Bad

Our world is filled with sex trafficking, wars, serial killers, terrorists executing Christians, pornography, oppression, and abuse. Our politicians and news media outlets lie to us. And, maybe most discouragingly, many of our most prominent churches and pastors seem more intent on accommodating the cultural madness than critiquing it.

All of these things make us cringe. Some are uncomfortably bizarre at best, malevolently evil at worst.

But there is a common theme here. Each of these is an example of a way human beings have corrupted the world. We are moral creatures. And we cannot help but recognize, and suffer from, the ramifications of our bad moral choices. The world we see is a reflection of our human nature seeking its own ends.

Crooked Creatures

In the second book of his “Space Trilogy,” Perelandra, C. S. Lewis’s main character, describes his encounter with an eldil — a term Lewis invented to describe something like what we might call an angel. When he first sees the eldil it appears to him as:

” … a very faint rod or pillar of light … [that was] not at right angles to the floor. But as soon as I have said this, I hasten to add that this way of putting it is a later reconstruction. What one actually felt at the moment was that the column of light was vertical, but the floor was not horizontal – the whole room seemed to have heeled over as if it were on board ship. The impression, however, produced, was that this creature had reference to some horizontal, to some whole system of directions, based outside the Earth, and that its mere presence imposed that alien system on me and abolished the terrestrial horizontal.”

Even though he couldn’t explain how, he could tell that the eldil was operating from some otherworldly frame of reference. And when compared to that, the Earth looked strangely crooked.

The Problem of Evil

In his own unique way, C. S. Lewis paints a picture of what we know innately. We recognize that our world is askew, even if we don’t know why. It’s the reason that the “problem of evil” is the most obvious — and most difficult — challenge to the existence of God. Those who doubt God’s existence point to the crooked, corrupted world and ask, “If there is a good God, and He created this world, how can it be such a mess?”

It’s a question that everyone — atheists included — asks. But the answer to that question doesn’t undermine the case for God’s existence at all. It actually does the opposite. We wouldn’t even be asking that question unless we had some intuition about its answer — some notion of a world gone right. But if God does not exist, there is no solution to this “problem” because there is no problem. The world is just the way it is and we suffer in a vacuum of meaningless indifference.

What Do You Mean By “Ought”?

The key is that everyone knows the world is “crooked” — that things are not the way they ought to be. When we say “ought,” we are acknowledging that there is an ideal kind of world in which everyone longs to live. Ought implies a standard of goodness — “a whole system of directions, based outside the Earth.” And that standard is moral perfection. It has to be.

God’s nature is that standard. And a world that reflects that standard is exactly the kind of world we long to inhabit.

If only we could find a place like that!

Shalom

In his book, Not The Way It’s Supposed To Be, Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. offers an insight that I have never forgotten about all this. He defines the Hebrew word shalom. If you’re like me, you may have seen that word translated, “peace.” But Plantinga goes into detail about why that simple definition of the word doesn’t cut it. Shalom is more than just “peace.”

“The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. We call it peace, but it means far more than mere peace of mind or a cease-fire between enemies. In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight — a rich state of affairs in which the natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.”

There was a time when we could have described the state of the world as shalom. But it didn’t last long. And when you’re living in a time like ours, shalom appears to be a phantom.

It’s not. It’s an ideal — a description of a place where every human being has always longed to live. And it’s a place that we will all be able to access again.

God Comes Down

God is a down-to-Earth kind of guy. He came down to Earth and took on human form once before. He experienced the pain and suffering of a world that is not the way it ought to be. But in doing so, He offered us a tangible foretaste of shalom.

And he’ll be back.

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away … I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself with be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’” Revelation 21:1-4

Shalom.

Don’t be discouraged by the world. There are good ideas that long to be brought to fruition. And there are good people who strive to uphold and defend those ideas both now and in the future. But, more than either of those, there is a good God who is the Author of shalom. Though it sometimes seems elusive, there is a hope-filled time that’s coming for all who choose to seek it. And with that future comes a promise of shalom, unlike anything we can even comprehend.

Living In A Post-Truth Culture

1. Does Truth Exist?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Bob Perry

I’ve made the case that truth, goodness, and beauty are objective features of the world we live in. Hopefully, you’ve found that to be interesting. But please don’t think this is just an esoteric triviality. It’s not. We are living in a post-truth culture. But it’s a place where the objective nature of truth, goodness, and beauty are deeply relevant. Our view of objective truth affects everything about how we live our lives. It’s the antidote to moral relativism. Truth matters. And understanding the profundity of that simple fact will revolutionize the way you interact with our world.

Here’s why.

The Assumptions of the Culture

Consider the three topics I’ve been talking about. And think about how you’re used to hearing about them:

Truth — “That may be true for you, but it’s not for me.”

Goodness — “Don’t impose your morality on me!”

Beauty — “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Despite thousands of years of human knowledge and experience, our contemporary culture has made every one of these subjective. Suddenly, they’ve each become things we decide for ourselves.

In fact, if you were to express the notion that anyone of these is not subjective, you would be considered arrogant. Oppressive. A Neanderthal who wants to impose your personal values on the rest of the world.

Who are you to do that?!

The World Turned Upside Down

This is cultural relativism. A place where we are supposed to accept the idea that everyone’s opinion about every topic is equally valid.

And remember that pesky definition of truth as: “correspondence to reality”? That’s out the window. The new normal tells us that our highest calling is to “be true to ourselves.”

But what does that mean, exactly?

Follow Your Heart

When your standard for truth and virtue is the person you see in the bathroom mirror, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see what’s coming. Feelings rule. You are encouraged to “follow your heart.” And following your heart means you evaluate reality based on emotion instead of reason and logic.

If it feels good, you do it.

“If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad …”

Sheryl Crow

Conforming to reality becomes passé. An archaic inconvenience.

But there is a problem with that. And the problem is that the “persistent belief in something that does not conform to reality” is called a delusion.

Our culture has elevated delusion to an art form.

Philosophy Is About The Real World

It turns out that the whole discussion of truth, goodness, and beauty is more than the hobby of navel-gazing philosophers. These things have real-world consequences. Ideas always do. Good or bad, we live in a world where those ideas will play themselves out.

And so, we see the consequences of bad thinking in our politics and in the family and community relationships on which our politics depend. We read about them in the news — and in the “fake news” generated at both ends of the political spectrum. We suffer the repercussions of denying reality in our economics. And our children and grandchildren will — quite literally — pay the price for those willful delusions.

Most of all, we see it in the glorification of sexual autonomy that has infiltrated every corner of our culture. Denying reality is at the core of issues like abortion, sexual libertinism, transgenderism, and same-sex behavior. Defending each of them is nothing but a persistent delusion.

Faith Communities Are Not Immune

The Church is most certainly not immune to the corrosive acid of bad thinking. The vacuous nonsense you can find in the Word-Faith Movement, Universalism, and so-called “Progressive” Christianity is proof enough of that. And every societal ill listed above has also found its way into the church.

But when you boil it all down, the problems we see in our culture are nothing new. In fact, they’re as old as mankind. The denial of truth, goodness, and beauty started soon after we came on the scene. The Fall of Man was simply the first instance where human beings made the free-will decision to exchange the truth of God for a lie. Since then, we’ve only pushed the limits of that futile exercise even further.

The good news is that the antidote to bad thinking has always been the same. Seek truth in all its forms. Then align your life with it.

The Church should never be a safe space for bad ideas. It must be a place where people are treated with gentleness and respect, but also a place where corrupted thinking goes to die.

Bethlehem To Bedlam

Jesus Christ, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Bob Perry

If Christmas is supposed to be about “Peace on Earth,” why all the chaos and stress at this time of year? It started when we, through an ironic accident of language, warped Bethlehem into bedlam. But the history of that change is incidental to what we’ve done since then. It starts every “Black Friday.” The truth is that God never promised us peace on Earth. But he did send a Savior to Bethlehem to offer peace between God and man. We can begin to reclaim the meaning of Christmas by first learning to turn bedlam back to Bethlehem.

Bethlehem Becomes Bedlam (Literally)

It all started back in 1247 when the Sheriff of London (a man named Simon FitzMary) founded a small monastery just outside the city. He dedicated it to serving the sisters and brothers of the holy order named “The Star of Bethlehem.” The monastery’s sponsoring church used the building to house and entertain the bishop and canons of St. Mary of Bethlehem. Soon, it became known as the Priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem.

By 1330, records show that the priory had become a hospital. And by 1403, some of its patients had begun to remain there permanently. When King Henry VIII later dissolved the Catholic monasteries in Britain, the city of London took over the hospital. In 1547 it was officially designated as an insane asylum. Soon, it became infamous for the brutal ill-treatment of those who lived there. People outside could hear the clamor, commotion, and pandemonium of the mentally disturbed patients inside. It didn’t take long for the locals to begin equating the name of the place with the chaos they heard emanating from within it. And because they spoke in a dialect that didn’t quite live up to the King’s English, their cockney pronunciation of Bethlehem came out as “bedlam.”

So, in a way that only human beings could contrive, the word we now use to describe lunacy and chaos actually has its source in the name of the city of Jesus’ birth.

What We’ve Made Christmas

The linguistic origin of “bedlam” is ironic. But the more modern way we have transformed Christmas from Bethlehem into bedlam is embarrassingly real. Though the madness begins earlier every year, “Black Friday” now marks the beginning of the Christmas season. In the past, that special day has come complete with mall shootings, annual brawls, and the frenzy we have come to expect both online and at our favorite retail locations.

The lunatics are shopping in the asylum.

Even people who aren’t Christians seem to realize that this madness is not “the reason for the season.” Jesus is. But the chaos in which we all participate is the reflection of a deeper flaw in the way we have come to celebrate his birth. We are complicit in turning what was supposed to be about the celebration of the birth of Christ into a consumer marketing extravaganza. And it started with the generous idea that we should give each other gifts.

Gift Giving Gone Haywire

There is some logic to the whole gift-giving idea we now associate with Christmas. God gave us the gift of his Son. The wise men (“Magi“) in the biblical story brought gifts to honor the newborn king. To memorialize those, we began giving gifts to one another. So far, so good.

But then we did something humans always tend to do. We took something good and corrupted it. Once we commercialized the gift-giving, the basement was the limit. Giving gifts became a form of worship. This year, the average American will spend about $920 for Christmas. That means that as a nation we spend over $1 Trillion. As a point of reference, the 2019 U. S. Defense Department budget was $652 Billion.

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like we might have overdone the gift-giving thing.

A Warped Idea Of Giving

The point of the Christmas story seems to be buried at the bottom of our shopping bags. Christmas is not about roasting chestnuts by an open fire. And it isn’t a time for Santa to reward the nice little boys and girls. It certainly isn’t about eggnog, or even so that we could have a special time to feel good about our families. These are all nice things. There is nothing wrong with any of them.

But they are not the heart of Christmas.

The incarnation — the second person of the Trinity becoming a real, live human being — was a one-way gift. It was a gift meant to offer peace with those of us who’ve turned Bethlehem into bedlam. It is a gift offered by a God who owed us nothing.

Peace Offering

The peace treaty was undeserved and unsolicited:

“An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone all around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David [Bethlehem] a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.’

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.'”
(Luke 2:9-14)

It was a peace treaty between heaven and Earth.

“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.” (Romans 5:1-2)

Despite what we’ve turned it into, these passages are not about our joy, or our giving, or our love, or our families. The focus is on God alone.

Back To Bethlehem

It is human nature to turn things that are supposed to be about God into things that are all about us. It makes us feel good to say that Christmas is our hope for “peace on earth.” But God knows that hasn’t proved true over the 2000 years since the first Christmas. World peace didn’t break out on that cold winter morning in Bethlehem. God came down in a human covering to offer the only possible way of reconciliation between His perfect moral goodness and the rebels who have been creating bedlam since the day they arrived on the scene.

We’ve been waging war with God. And Christmas is His peace treaty.

The joy comes in realizing that to be true. The giving and love come in mimicking the selflessness we witnessed in the gift He gave. That gift cost us nothing. Our families are the means by which we replicate and disseminate a love “for all the people.” The difference is important. Each of these things is impossible to celebrate appropriately unless we first make peace with our Creator and Savior.

“When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.'” (Luke 1:15)

Rethinking Christmas

This is not a naive call to boycott Christmas. It’s nothing more than encouragement to change our mindset and refuse to take part in the bedlam. Shop less. Contemplate more.

I’ve never seen it used as a Christmas card, but I can’t imagine a better representation of what we Bedlamites have made Christmas into than the fresco on the Sistine Chapel that Michelangelo titled, “The Creation of Adam.” In the most gracious act in human history, the Creator himself reached down to touch us in human form. And we appear only vaguely interested.

Look at the way God is stretching to reach out to the man – and at the way, the first Bedlamite halfheartedly reaches back.

May we all celebrate this Christmas by rethinking Michelangelo’s artful depiction of our state. “Peace on Earth” is a worthy goal. But “Peace with God” must come first. Christmas is meant to remind us of the subtle difference.

Yes, We Do Need to Put God in A Box

Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Bob Perry

“You can’t put God in a box.” It’s a popular saying within the Christian community. And it seems reasonable to say. After all, God can do anything He wants to do. Who would question that? I submit that every thinking Christian should question that … because it’s not true. God’s character does put him in a box. And our failure to recognize that creates a false — and therefore dangerous — picture of God. There is a box God needs to be in. And his character defines it.

God Cannot Do Whatever He Wants

God cannot do whatever he wants to do. If you think that sounds sacrilegious, you first have to understand that God cannot do things that are contrary to his nature. Before we can determine if God can do anything he wants to do, we have to first understand what that nature is. There are several elements to God’s nature but here are a few to consider.

God is Logical

God made an orderly universe. He built the laws of logic into our world and made it predictable. This is why we can communicate with one another. It’s the reason we can use science to understand how the world works. If God made the universe that way, it means that he must also be logical. It means that logic is an extension of his character. And that means God cannot do illogical things.

He can’t make a square circle, a married bachelor, or “a rock so big he can’t lift it.” This is an important point to understand as it relates to the rest of his character traits.

God is Omnipotent

God is all-powerful. But having supreme power doesn’t mean God can do anything. It means he can do anything that power can do. Being immeasurably powerful is what allows God to do miracles or create a universe as immense and complex as the one we see around us. But power does not allow God to do illogical, sinful, hateful, or unjust things. That’s an important distinction to make.

God is Goodness

God is pure goodness. He is “the final standard of good and all that God is and does is worthy of approval.” Because he is good, God is willing and able to demonstrate love in all its forms through mercy, patience, and grace. God loves everything he created. And since human beings are the pinnacle of that creation, God loves humanity in a way that we are incapable of comprehending.

God is Just

Justice occurs when someone gets exactly what they deserve. This can be positive or negative. We know that good acts deserve a reward and evil acts deserve punishment. And we know this intuitively. No one had to teach this to us. Even little babies demonstrate that they know it. All of us inherently value — and seek — justice. God is the source and embodiment of that idea. His character demands it. And since his character is morally perfect, any act of rebellion against that moral perfection — no matter how small — deserves to be punished.

God is Eternal and Self-Existent

God is not the type of being who needs a cause for His existence. The fact that anything exists at all means there must be a permanent, unmovable foundation that sustains it. That’s God. He is the foundation of all being. This is why the question, “Who made God?” is such a silly one. God isn’t the type of thing that you make. He upholds all reality at every instant but does not need to be upheld himself.

God is Omnipresent

The fact that God upholds all reality at every instant means that he is present everywhere. Always. He is not limited by time or space. Don’t get this confused with the ideas that God is everything. That’s pantheism. God’s omnipresence means that he is present everywhere in his creation but also distinct from it.

Putting Them All Together

There are plenty of other character traits that theologians use to describe God. If you are interested in digging more deeply into these kinds of topics, I suggest investing in a book on Systematic Theology. But considering the definitions I’ve briefly mentioned here, I doubt that anyone who takes God seriously would find them to be controversial in themselves. Our problems arise when we forget that God exhibits all these character traits simultaneously. All facets of his nature have to work together. He can’t exercise one if it violates another.

Theological Inconsistencies

Focusing on one aspect of God while ignoring another invites us to accept a false view of him. And many Christians unwittingly do this all the time.

“God showed up!”

When they have an emotional experience in worship, it is common to hear some proclaim that “God showed up today!” But God doesn’t “show up” anywhere. He is always everywhere. Don’t confuse the issue. God doesn’t need our praise to show himself. We need to praise him to remind ourselves of our dependence on him.

“God is so good!”

This is a common refrain to hear from someone who has just received good news of some kind. And while it’s great to acknowledge God’s blessings, it’s wrong-thinking to acknowledge them only when things are going our way. God is good regardless of our personal circumstances. It’s easy to express our love for him when things are good. But it’s imperative that we do the same when things are bad.

“Where was God when …?”

On the flip side, we seem to think God has gone missing when catastrophes occur. We assume that God’s omnipotence means he can and should destroy evil forever. But God made the loving decision to create us as free-will beings. He willingly limits his own power to give us the freedom to choose to follow him. And that means that no matter how powerful he is, God has created a world that allows us to make bad choices. The moral evil we witness all around us depends on our actions, not on God’s absence.

“God is love”

This idea is absolutely true. But contrary to the claims of the universalists and inclusivists among us, God is not just love. The idea that “God is love” is true as far as it goes, but there is more to the story. Ultimate goodness and love are different ways of describing God’s moral perfection. Being pure love and goodness means he cannot sin and he cannot lie. And that means he cannot allow moral imperfection into his presence. When our actions violate his moral law, his justice requires that there be consequences for our decisions. God’s character won’t allow him to accept whatever moral choices we make. This is a reality that often gets ignored by those who insist that a loving God would never allow us to be separated from him. The fact that God loves us does not mean he condones anything we do.

The Box God Needs to Be In

These are just a few examples of how our failure to keep God in the proper box leads not only to theological inconsistencies but to a corrupted view of reality itself. That’s what I mean when I say that we have to put God in a box. It’s a box defined by the sum total of all the elements of his character. Isolating our favorite trait is a bad idea because it doesn’t tell the whole story. And, as is always the case, accepting bad ideas leads to bad real-world consequences.

It turns out that we better keep God in a box. And we better understand how that box is defined. It helps us avoid most of the silly, false, and even dangerous ideas that have become all too common among Christians these days. It’s not always an easy thing to do. But being clear-thinking Christian demands that we acknowledge that God puts himself in a box. And we would do well to keep him there.

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More Than Two Stories Becoming One

The Grand Story

A Picture Of Eternal Life

God’s Spirit At The Center

A Covenant Of Submission

The Beautiful Fruits Of The Covenant

The Power Of The Covenant

The Purpose Of Marriage

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One Wing, Won’t Fly

Desiring God

The Touchy-Feely Church

You Need Both

A Spectrum Of Faith

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Science -vs- Scientists

The Scientists We Trust

Complicated Answers

Economics is a Science

Political Science

Sociology is Science

Defining Science

The Queen of the Sciences

Holistic Science

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The World Descends

Paradigm Shifts

New Reality?

Children of a Greater God

Empathize With the Younger Generation

Serve Our Neighbors

Demand Economic Restraint

The World On The Other Side

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Getting Aligned With The World

The Ground You Cannot See

Hijacking Objective Reality

Truth Is The Essence Of God

Goodness Is The Character Of God

Beauty Is The Reflection Of God

The Divine Mind

The Impersonal Comes To Life

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Corrupted Culture

A World Gone Bad

Crooked Creatures

The Problem of Evil

What Do You Mean By “Ought”?

Shalom

God Comes Down

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The Assumptions of the Culture

The World Turned Upside Down

Follow Your Heart

Philosophy Is About The Real World

Faith Communities Are Not Immune

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Bethlehem Becomes Bedlam (Literally)

What We’ve Made Christmas

Gift Giving Gone Haywire

A Warped Idea Of Giving

Peace Offering

Back To Bethlehem

Rethinking Christmas

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God Cannot Do Whatever He Wants

God is Logical

God is Omnipotent

God is Goodness

God is Just

God is Eternal and Self-Existent

God is Omnipresent