Gospel.com Blog

Harry Potter, Transformers, and GI Joe may have dominated theaters this summer, but a number of interesting indie films have cropped up recently on DVD. Over at Past the Popcorn, Greg Wright interviews a trio of indie Christian filmmakers who have produced noteworthy films of late.

Each of the three filmmakers takes a very different approach to the art; it’s fascinating to read their thoughts on the various challenges inherent in creating art as a Christian. Should a Christian film be family-friendly? What additional pressures come into being when your art is being funded and supported by a church? Do moviegoers have misplaced expectations about Christian films? All good questions, and if you’ve ever grappled with the intersection of faith and art, it’s a conversation worth following.

Today is the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, and writers around the web are contributing thoughts and reflections about that fateful event and its aftermath. One such site is Relevant Magazine, which has asked a number of writers from the Burnside Writers Collective to share their thoughts on 9/11 and the effect it’s had on their spiritual lives. The reflections are short, honest, and thought-provoking.

What about you? Where were you on 9/11, and what went through your mind when you first heard the news? What does it mean to you today—is it just another tragedy (albeit a particularly horrifying one) among many that have struck the world before and since? Or has it had a more profound impact on your faith?

If we’re honest with ourselves, many of us do acts of justice out of a sense of guilt. We see ads on TV for a compassion ministry that reaches out to kids in the third world and feel bad for them. Then we realize we’re watching that ad on our fancy LCD Televisions and we start to feel those uneasy pangs of guilt. So we silence that guilt by donating some money.

Is that really justice?

Rick McKinley recently wrote an article over at Christianity Today called Why We Do Justice that explores the interplay between justice and guilt.

Here are his own words on the subject:

It is easy to see the victims of injustice as “those” people who have a need. We have a resource. We believe that if we use our resource to meet their need, our guilt will be removed. This means we have a need too—the need to not feel guilty. Are our efforts toward justice really about loving others, or are they about alleviating our guilt? Or perhaps we are both using each other to have our own needs met.

In truth, justice isn’t about guilt. Guilt is too easy. Justice is about God and what we believe about him. If we are going to move away from guilt-driven efforts, we must root our hearts and our imaginations in the deeply significant theology at the heart of the gospel. There is a question that we have to wrestle to the ground: How are we to see the “other”?

McKinley goes on to argue that when we practice justice born out of love we find instead of blessing others, we are blessed. He tells the story of a man named Bruce who served the homeless every Saturday. Through loving and learning from the men and woman he was serving he realized all of humanity is in need of God’s grace and mercy. He started seeing them as equals rather than as “others” and found himself blessed by them.

Have you had similar experiences? Have you gone to serve someone and found yourself the recipient of the blessing? Do you think that a guilty conscience can be a good thing when it comes to justice?

Has a work of fiction ever helped you to better understand a difficult story or ambiguous character in the Bible?

A great deal of fiction—Christian or otherwise—draws on characters and themes from the Bible. When we encounter a fictional character who’s been inspired by a Biblical one (Superman, for example), we can often gain extra insight into that fictional character by studying the Biblical character that inspired him.

But have you ever experienced the opposite—a situation where a fictional character or story element helped illuminate a Biblical character or event?

The First Things blog has an interesting post that explores what we can learn about Job by studying the fictional character Faust. The close parallels (and key differences) between Job and Faust provide us with a new angle from which to understand Job.

I’ve experienced this on occasion, most recently while re-reading Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. The main character is a priest and (highly flawed) Christ-figure of sorts. In the course of the novel, he interacts with and even helps a person who he strongly suspects will eventually betray him to his enemies… but he helps the man anyway, knowingly putting himself in danger. The priest’s thought process is complex, and he isn’t a perfect picture of Christ by any means, but the exploration of his attitude toward his would-be betrayer has influenced the way I read the interaction between Jesus and Judas. The Bible doesn’t tell us what Jesus thought and felt as he ministered to the man who would betray him to death, and so the insight from Greene’s novel provides some ways to ponder that question.

What about you? What fictional characters or stories have shaped the way you view certain people or stories in the Bible?

Sometimes, it’s easy to convince ourselves that quitting is the best option. Would it really be that bad if we were to break our diet? Would it be terrible to give up on a rocky relationship? Would it really hurt anybody if we just stopped reading the Bible?

In our best moments, I think we all know quitting difficult things just because they are difficult is never the best option. Yet, there’s often a very loud voice in our head screaming a panoply of reasons why we should reconsider those commitments.

Michael Hyatt—the CEO of Thomas Nelson, Inc.—articulates how he counteracts these thoughts in his post, What Keeps You Going When You Want to Quit. It really has me thinking about why I don’t give up on certain things, and why I have—possibly foolishly—quit others.

Here’s a brief excerpt:

What these same voices fail to tell you is that there is a distinction between the dream and the work required to obtain it. Everything important requires work. Hard work. And sometimes there is a long arc between the dream and it’s realization. That is where the work and the transformation occur.

In my experience, the thing that keeps me going is answering this question, “Why am I doing this?” I then try to remember the dream. “Why I am doing this hard thing that I am doing.” I try to get connected to the original vision, because that keeps me going when the going gets tough.

There are a few verses in the second chapter of Job that have stuck with me ever since I first read them. Job has just lost everything he owns and is covered in sores. Sitting destitute in the street, his wife comes to him and tells him to curse God and die. He amazingly responds, “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?”

Job’s wife has given up on the situation, and if we were honest, many of us would as well. We’d start to reconsider our commitment to a God that would allow such heartache. Yet, Job examines the situation and concludes that it’s not for him to judge his commitment to God based on his present circumstances. As Mr. Hyatt would say, he stayed “connected to the original vision.”

What about you? What keeps you going when times get hard?

For Sam Allberry, confessing that you believe in the Trinity is one thing, actually acting like it’s true is another.

Sam argues in his provocatively titled post, The Rise of Islamic Christianity, that it’s possible to hold to a stated belief in the Trinity, yet functionally act as if we are Unitarians. Unless we actively seek to involve Trinitarian thinking into our lives and community we’ll find ourselves in two predicaments:

1. Our view of church will become functional and not relational.
We will only meet to “do” things, and will not really see the point of meeting for merely social reasons. Our gatherings will become a matter of utility and not family….The minister will see his congregation as ‘clients’; his ministry as one of shunting people through the right programs. He will see himself as a professional ‘Bible teacher’. His people will feel handled rather than loved. The church will be the place to grow for a while in understanding, or at least in Bible knowledge, but will not be the place to find authentic Christian community.

2. Our aim for church will be uniformity and not diversity.
The Trinity shows us a God who is unity in diversity rather than unity in sameness. The Father, Son and Spirit are not interchangeable. They share an ontological unity, but function differently within the purposes of God. This lies behind Paul’s teaching on the variety of gifts found in the church in 1 Corinthians 12:4-6.

He continues to argue that acting as Unitarians leads to conformity of the worst kind. We won’t value the diverse gifts of the kingdom. We won’t even be able to act as the body of Christ because instead of celebrating the cornucopia of spiritual gifts, we’ll uphold one gift as the only true one.

In my mind, Allberry’s key point is that our belief in the Trinity is both an intellectual and a spiritual matter.

Some struggle with the intellectual aspect of the Trinity, it might never make philosophical sense, but they can readily trust in it by faith. For others, they have no problem intellectually believing it, it’s the faith part they have a hard time with. Either way, it should be patently clear to anyone who has tried to discuss the Trinity that it’s not an easy concept to grasp, but—as Allberry points out—it has profound effects on everything to do with our faith: how we read the Bible, how we interact with God, how we pray, how we live in community, etc.

Do you agree with Allberry? Have you seen how your beliefs (or other’s beliefs) about the Trinity effect interactions with other people? Can a nominal belief in the Trinity really lead to a dismantling of Christian community?

Do you struggle with any bad Bible reading habits?

I’m not talking about the bad habit of not actually reading the Bible (a battle every Christian I know has fought at least a few times in the course of their life). Rather, have you ever caught yourself reading the Bible in a misleading or counterproductive way?

Andy Le Peau talks about bad Bible reading habits and suggests that inductive Bible study is a good way to re-train yourself to get the most out of your Bible reading. He points out one example of bad Bible reading, described by Ajith Fernando at Koinonia: the habit of scanning through a large passage and picking out the handful of familiar, inspiring verses—ignoring the rest of the text, which may provide critical context for those inspiring bits.

I’ve certainly seen that bad habit in action, and have fallen victim to it a few times myself. Another bad habit lots of us commit is proof-texting—singling out a verse or two that appears to support an idea we like, without bothering to ask whether the verse, put in the full context of the complete passage, is really saying what we want it to.

What about you? Have you noticed any bad Bible habits taking root in (or even worse, being promoted by) the church today? How did you break out of your own bad reading habits?

Is traditional Christian apologetics still relevant when non-believers simply don’t care about Christianity? The Internet Monk suggests that ambivalence about religion is more common today than outright disbelief, and that apologetics arguments fall flat because the typical atheist today just doesn’t care about the Big Questions around which most Christian apologetics is built:

I’m convinced the game is not primarily about arguments any more. As grateful as I am for Tim Keller’s great book The Reason For God and his two hour presentations on You Tube, and as happy as I am that David Bentley Hart and others have convincingly demonstrated the fallacies of the new atheist arguments, the truth is that the contemporary atheist doesn’t plan to play a game of 21 with our NBA All Stars….

Atheism is just….easier. Occam’s Razor. Theism is too much trouble. It starts to sound like someone is trying to sell you something sight unseen. Isn’t your best move just to hang up the phone and ignore the call?

If true, this leads us to an interesting conundrum: what are Christian apologists to do if their audience no longer wants to engage them?

Meaningful debate requires two people, both of them passionate about their viewpoints. But as people actively disengage from religion and lose interest even in debating it, what’s a Christian apologist to do? An apologist’s first task is now to convince them that religion is worth talking about in the first place.

I’ve seen this trend in my own conversations with atheists and agnostics. Many just don’t seem to care. They don’t wake up every day intent on proving God’s non-existence or winning an argument with a Christian. They have too many other priorities to occupy their time.

What about you? Have you encountered people who just don’t care about religion, and if so, how did you respond? Is there value in training traditional apologists when many non-Christians could care less about their well-reasoned arguments?

The Lausanne World Pulse has recently published a new issue about the state and future of Bible translation. The other articles develop the theme further, with a focus on topics like the challenge of translating the Bible for non-reading audiences and empowering nationals to translate the Bible into their own language.

The overarching theme of these articles is that the sacred task of Bible translation is quickly growing beyond the boundaries of European and North American academia. Interestingly, this very topic came up this morning at a press conference announcing plans by Zondervan, Biblica, and the Committee on Bible Translation to release a new edition of the New International Version of the Bible.

I’ve always found Bible translation to be a fascinating topic—my limited exposure to Biblical Greek and Hebrew was just enough to give me a glimpse at what a monumentally challenging task it is to accurately translate ancient texts into modern languages while preserving their meaning and nuance. The Lausanne World Pulse articles document how much more challenging that task becomes when carried out across the hundreds of languages, dialects, and audiences who need to hear the Gospel around the world.