Today’s Sunday Share comes from pastor and apologist Tim Keller, who died on May 19 after battling pancreatic cancer. When hearing that news, it seemed appropriate to quote him in the blog, so the Sunday Share for this week is the extended quote below from Keller’s book, Making Sense of God:
“If you believe in Jesus’s message, you believe in a truth, but not a truth that leads to exclusion. Many voices argue that it is exclusionary to claim that you have the truth, but as we have seen, that view itself sets up a dichotomy with you as the heroically tolerant and others as villainously or pathetically bigoted. You cannot avoid truth claims and binaries. The real issue is, then, which kind of truth- and which kind of identity that the truth produces- leads you to embrace people who are deeply different from you? Which truth claims lead you to scorn people who oppose you as fools? Which truth claims lead to community? Which truth claims both humble and affirm you so that you’re not afraid of people who are different than you are, nor can you despise them? If I build my identity on what Jesus Christ did for me and the fact I have an everlasting name in him by grace, I can’t, on the one hand, feel superior to anybody, nor do I have to fear anybody else. I don’t have to compare myself with them at all. My identity is based on somebody who was excluded for me, who was cast out for me, who loved his enemies, and that is going to turn me into someone who embraces the Different.”
Among the various camps in the debate between creation and evolution is a set of ideas called intelligent design (ID). A key part of ID is “irreducible complexity,” a term that comes from the book Darwin’s Black Box, by Lehigh professor Michael Behe.[1]
In short, irreducible complexity argues that evolution by chance, without an intelligent designer driving it, is unreasonable because the multiple systems in a complex organism like a human body – circulatory, digestive, endocrine, muscular, respiratory, and so on – are all interdependent on each other. The circulatory system alone, with the heart pumping blood through an elaborate system of arteries and veins, is difficult to imagine developing by chance occurrence, but a chance evolution of that system alongside all the other parts it is dependent on is even more far-fetched. All systems evolving together in lockstep without failing is a much more difficult problem to explain scientifically without a Creator. The circulatory system takes what the respiratory and digestive systems take in and deliver it to the other systems that use it. Without the other parts, it has no function and cannot survive and further evolve.
However, my intent here is not to prove intelligent design, but to consider the apostle Paul’s words about the church as the body of Christ. In 1 Corinthians 12:12, he wrote: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” He continues that no part of the body can say it is not a part of the body because it has a different function than another part (1 Cor. 12:15-16), and also that no part of the body can say it doesn’t need all of the other parts (1 Cor. 12:21). Those who are in Christ Jesus cannot be divided.
Paul follows his description of the body with 1 Corinthians 13, a powerful statement on the supremacy of love, and in context a gentle rebuke to the idea that a body can survive as individual, unrelated units. In a human body, any part can only survive by serving the other parts. Even an organ as incredibly complex and important as a heart cannot survive if it decided to pump blood only for itself. Where would it get its nutrients? How would it flee from danger? As Paul wrote: “If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?” (1 Cor. 12:17). Even an organ as important as the heart is useless in isolation. It gets its very life and purpose by what it does for the body.
As Jesus said to His disciples in John 13:34-35 – “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
As the song says, they will know we are Christians by our love, and the church Jesus came to build is irreducibly complex. There is no appendix[2] in the church, which is the body of Christ.
[1] Behe, Michael. Darwin’s Black Box (1996). [2] While we commonly think of this organ as useless, God as our Maker didn’t put it there by accident.
Years ago, I saw a picture of a child suspended in the air, clutching the string of a single balloon, with the caption: “Faith isn’t faith until it’s all you’re holding on to.” It was a very simple picture, but it made me think: Where does this kind of faith come from? A faith that turns intellectual trust into action, especially potentially dangerous action?
One way is that we can learn it from others. I’ve read a lot of Christian apologetics – or writings in defense of Christian faith. Writers such as Josh McDowell and Ravi Zacharias were held in reverent awe by many in my college years, the logic being that “if someone that smart can be a Christian, it must be reasonable to believe!” While there is definitely value in learning from others, there is also the hazard of learning to trust our teachers (instead of our Teacher). Then when they fall, it hurts us personally and can damage our witness. We know what ended up happening to Ravi Zacharias[1].
There is also the testimony of the Bible. In the book of Hebrews, chapter 11 chronicles the faith of many in the Bible, and Hebrews 12:1 calls these our “cloud of witnesses.” We can learn a lot from these people, but they don’t just teach us facts about God. The writer of Hebrews adds that because of these witnesses, we should “lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”[2] He is our Lord, and these witnesses tell us to follow Him, not just be able to describe Him.
One of the best lessons on this comes from G.K. Chesterton, who is well-known for his arguments in defense of the reasonableness of Christianity. However, near the end of his book Orthodoxy, he says that he has a better idea: “And that is this: ‘that the Christian Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me tomorrow.’” Apologetics is not about winning arguments, but about growing our ability to trust Him and learning to explain that to others.
While we can learn from others and from the Bible to build up our faith, what God has done for us personally is the best testimony because it is the most real to us. Everything else is hearsay, as they say in court. We are all learning to let Him tell us where to go and what to do. To discern not only His truth, but His will, in the testimony of modern apologists and in the Bible. To make our own Ebenezers, or memorials to His faithfulness to us when we’ve acted in faith in Him, even if it meant holding on to nothing else. Therefore:
“Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!” – Psalm 34:8
The best way to know that He is good is to try for ourselves, even when it’s hard or doesn’t make sense. This has been the loose theme of this week’s posts, which will continue in the next post in the Psalms of Ascent series, hopefully tomorrow.
[1] If you don’t know, after Ravi died it was revealed that he had inappropriate relationships with massage therapists and others. A once-influential ministry ended up in tatters, and many of Ravi’s followers ended up embarrassed and wondering what to believe. [2] Hebrews 12:1b-2
Actual disaster footage. Viewer discretion advised.
A doctor friend of mine said there’s an inside joke that “if you put two bones alone in a room together, they’ll find each other.” I heard this after breaking my left collarbone in the summer of 2011. Even when I was young, I wasn’t a great athlete, but I did always hustle. So after a decade of not doing much athletically, I joined my work softball league and thought at least I would try hard and have fun. But when I hit a weak ground ball to the shortstop and decided to “hustle,” disaster saw its opportunity. The fields we played on were poorly maintained, with holes where the hitters stand. Instead of doing the smart thing and stopping after I tripped in this hole, I tried to keep running (because hustle!) and soon ended up falling hard on my shoulder with a loud snapping sound. The picture above is my actual X-ray from that night.
This isn’t a great memory, but it’s also a reminder of the miracle of healing. I had the option of surgery or just letting it grow back together, and I chose letting it heal. However, it didn’t “just” get fixed. It was by design and no accident.
My collarbone was broken clean through, with the two sides of the bone not even touching any more. I could feel them moving around independently. When I think about the millions of “decisions” the cells in these bones, interacting with the tissue around them, had to make to do something they’ve never done before, I have to be convinced something beyond my own anatomy and genetic history was at work. An impersonal evolution may have never seen these bones break in just this way before, so how did the bones know what to do? I certainly wasn’t aware of telling these bones what to do. They didn’t “just” fix themselves.
I can only credit the creative power of my Maker, along with David, who wrote: “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.” – Psalm 139:13-14
Everyday Miracles Miracles happen every single day in every human body, yet we often miss them or refuse to call them miracles. Maybe we do that because calling them miracles would mean we have to give credit to the power behind the miracle, and we’d rather not. Ever since Adam and Eve looked at God’s good creation and decided they’d rather make their own decisions, mankind has persisted in acting like bones that would rather grow apart than follow their Creator’s design. As a result, the world is broken into billions of personalities that don’t know how to connect, that don’t know how to knit agape love into the trillions of decisions they make, and interactions they have, each day.
We all have a choice in every moment: do we “just” do whatever we think is best and expect the right outcome to “just” happen, or do we look at nature and think that maybe the Person who knows how to make bones fix themselves knows how to guide our lives to the best outcome.
Our heavenly Father wants to knit us together once again, in a world that isn’t broken and where we aren’t broken. None of us are beyond repair, and our Maker will restore us if we let Him. Every human being in history has been bad at love, except One, and He is calling to every one of us to trust Him. “Just Do It” is not a good motto.
“Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD delivers him out of them all. He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken.” – Psalm 34:19-20
A long but worthwhile read for the weekend. Carl Trueman argues the massive change to attitudes about gay marriage and LGBT+ recently are symptoms of changes in attitudes about what it means to be a person.
Regardless of what you believe about these issues, this is for Christians struggling to understand, and love, this world that Christ died for. Trueman’s 6 suggestions for Christians and the church largely fall under what C.S. Lewis might call Mere Christianity, and applicable to many situations.
This was shared by my former pastor on his personal page. It took me a few days to find the time to read it, but I didn’t give up…
(Estimated reading time 20 minutes, but worth it!)
Driving Toward the Morning Sun 