Elliot Ritzema

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  • March 2009: Books Read

    Once again, it’s the list that proves to you that I’m really doing something when I’m sitting around.

    1. Total Truth: Liberating Christianity From Its Cultural Captivity by Nancy Pearcey. I’ve heard about this book over the past few years, and since my church is going through the Truth Project (a DVD curriculum that trains Christians to have a biblical worldview) together, I thought I’d read a book about worldviews.

    This book has a lot in it. Pearcey studied under Francis Schaeffer at L’Abri, and you can see his influence in the way that she paints with a broad brush, surveying all of western culture. She writes that secularism has pushed religion (specifically Christianity) to the margins of society, and Christians ought to reassert Christianity as public, all-encompassing truth. She spends a particularly large chunk of the book dealing with Darwinism, saying that it has begun with science but seeped through the rest of society as its own all-encompassing worldview. Then she tells the story of how evangelicals became so anti-intellectual, and expresses her desire that the trend be reversed.

    This book also has a lot going for it. Many of her insights I thought were right on. I liked the fact that she went out of her way to be irenic when it comes to dealing with culture:

    Our first response to the great works of human culture – whether in art or technology or economic productivity – should be to celebrate them as reflections of God’s own creativity. And even when we analyze where they go wrong, it should be in a spirit of love.

    I also liked it that she does not seem to have been taken in by the false notion – so widespread among evangelicals – that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

    In fact, if there is one factor especially distinctive of the second [Great] Awakening, it is a surprising lack of critical distance from the political ideology of the American Revolution. – 274

    Instead of offering a distinctively biblical perspective on the current political culture, many evangelicals [during the Second Great Awakening] virtually equated spiritual liberty with political liberty.

    And this lack of critical distance, which has a 200-year history, continues.

    One area that I think Pearcey went astray was when dealing with Christians who believe in evolution. At the end of her chapter which makes the case for Intelligent Design, she claims that those who are theistic evolutionists are pawns of scientific naturalists (not her words, but I think her sentiments), allowing their beliefs about God to be shunted off to the private realm and only accepting as real the scientifically verifiable.

    I’m not sure that this is entirely fair to theistic evolutionists, one of whom (Francis Collins, the former head of the Human Genome Project) she quoted favorably just 13 pages before. It is far from evident that theistic evolutionists all experience God as an optional add-on, living their lives settled in the “naturalist’s chair” (as opposed to the “supernaturalist’s chair” that Christians ought to be in). Unfortunately, Pearcey doesn’t really deal with them directly. Pearcey says

    Christians are called to live out their entire lives, including their scientific work, from the perspective of the supernaturalist’s chair, recognizing the full range of reality. This is what it means to ‘walk by faith, not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7), with a day-to-day awareness of the unseen dimension of reality.

    I would like Pearcey to explain exactly how scientists ought to conduct scientific research through appeal to unobservable things. Pearcey does not seem to acknowledge that it is not just naturalists who have truncated the “range of reality” available to scientific investigation. Rather, science just deals with the observable. It isn’t atheists who came up with these rules. The bad guy here, it seems to me, is not the one who conducts science based on observable facts. The bad guy is the one who then claims that facts observable by science are all there is. Theistic evolutionists don’t claim this, and so I think Pearcey ought to be kinder to them. As it is, her brief (pages 203-205) dismissal of them is likely, unfortunately, to lead to misunderstanding and alienation within the body of Christ.

    Another area where I think Pearcey went astray is in her repeated insistence that Christianity is “objective truth.”

    To bring about a restoration of the Christian mind, we would do well to follow the Intelligent Design movement in challenging the Baconian model of autonomous or neutral knowledge in every field. We must reject the presumption that holding Christian beliefs disqualifies us as ‘biased,’ while the philosophical naturalists get a free pass by presenting their position as ‘unbiased’ and ‘rational.’ Most of all, we need to liberate Christianity from the two-story division that has reduced it to an upper-story private experience, and learn how to restore it to the status of objective truth.

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but Pearcey seems to contradict herself in this paragraph. First she says that the idea of “autonomous” and “neutral” knowledge should be challenged, and then she goes on to say that Christians should claim Christianity as “objective truth.” Part of the very definition of “objective” is that it is unbiased and neutral. Instead of trying to shout louder than naturalists that we are unbiased and rational, why not argue that naturalists are just as biased as we are, and that bias is inescapable in finite human beings? I think that this has a lot more potential to be fruitful, since it would be awfully difficult to argue that Christians are any less biased than naturalists. Bias is OK; it just needs to be taken into account.

    But I’ve rambled on enough. All in all, I thought this was a worthwhile book with a couple of weak spots. If a Christian wants to know what it means to have a biblical worldview, I’d recommend this book. I would also recommend that person to not stop there.

    2. John Stott: The Making of a Leader by Timothy Dudley-Smith. This is the first in a two-volume biography of the well-known evangelical leader John Stott. I’ve benefited a great deal from his writings, and when I saw this book in a used bookstore in Grand Rapids last December I snapped it up.

    It follows Stott from birth to approximately age 40, following him from his London childhood to his school days at Rugby, then on to Cambridge during WWII, theological studies at Ridley Hall, curacy at All Souls Anglican Church in London and finally his promotion and subsequent career as Rector of that church.

    A couple of highlights for me were reading about his “instinctive pacifism” as he was preparing to and beginning to study theology during WWII, and his deep concern for evangelism. Within his own parish he began training laypeople in evangelism and led regular Guest Services for outreach. Outside, he met and befriended Billy Graham during the 1950s, and even led a few university missions of his own, both in the UK and overseas. The book also spends some time on his lifelong interest in birdwatching.

    I enjoyed this book a great deal, and the pages flew by. The only thing I wanted more of was discussion of Stott’s theological shaping. There was some talk of why he was drawn to pacifism during his student days, but once he entered parish life there is much discussion of his actions and little direct discussion of his theological growth and deepening.

  • Truth Project 3: Anthropology (Who is Man?)

    This week, Del looks at the question of who man is, and weighs the answer Christians give against the answer secularists give. The answers given to this question directly affect the question of why there is evil. Del claims that Christians have a lot of answers to this question whereas the world does not.

    First Del looks at the biblical view of man (meaning both men and women), saying that it teaches man is both body and spirit, created in the image of God. The Bible also says that man has fallen from his original state by rebelling against God. There is a “cosmic battle” within man, between who we were meant to be and who we are. What man needs, then, is divine grace and redemption. God must save us.

    By contrast, our culture assumes that man is purely physical, is the product of impersonal forces, and is basically good. His need is not for redemption (since he is good, there is no need to be redeemed), but self-actualization.

    Del examines the implications of this philosophy, and concludes that since it is dependent on impersonal physical forces alone, it leads to a lack of free will and a lack of ultimate meaning in life. It also leads to a lack of differentiation between humans and animals. He quotes Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) as saying, “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”

    These differences play out in how people on each side view evil. For the person with a biblical worldview, evil comes from man’s fallen nature. For the secularist, evil does not come from human nature but from society and culture. According to Del, the question must then be asked, “Who makes society? Isn’t it human beings?” In the end, if man is basically good, there is no way to explain why evil exists. Then the question to the secularist can be pressed even further: “Why does evil bother you?” “Why do you feel bad about evil?” “Isn’t evil, as you describe it, simply the natural outworking of the evolutionary process?”

    Del closes with an interview with Theodore Dalrymple, who wrote a book called Life at the Bottom which chronicles the sad results of lives oriented around fulfilling our desires and putting ourselves at the center of our existence. Dalrymple states, “You don’t need to find yourself; you need to lose yourself.”

    In my view, this is the strongest “tour” so far. Del makes some very good points about the logical conclusions of a secular or naturalist view of humans, and illustrates a good evangelistic technique in pressing the secularist to come to terms with the deterministic, and frankly hopeless, conclusions of his or her philosophy. For the Christians in the audience, it represents a challenge to orient our lives with God at the center rather than our own selves and desires.

  • Sev and Shan Got Married!

    Yesterday Mary and I had the joy of attending Severin and Shandra’s wedding at the ferry terminal in Bellingham. It was great fun, and wonderful to have so many friends from Alaska, Regent and Bellingham gathered together in one place. May God bless their union and use them as a blessing to many others.

    Here are some pictures:

    Mary at the ferry terminal
    Mary at the ferry terminal
    The Wedding Party
    The Wedding Party
    Mary, Melissa and Brooke
    Mary, Melissa and Brooke
    Dancing (Music courtesy of Maggie's Fury)
    Dancing (Music courtesy of Maggie’s Fury)
    The happy couple exiting
    The happy couple exiting

  • Numbers 21:4-9 – Looking for Life

    Last weekend, Mary and I went down to Clear Lake, WA for me to preach at Community Covenant Church of Clear Lake. I had met the pastor there back in December at a gathering of local Covenant, and he sent out a general request for people to fill his pulpit during the month of March while he took some time off preaching. I responded, asked him what text he had planned on preaching from before he decided to take time off, and he said Numbers 21:4-9, the story of the brazen serpent in the wilderness.

    What follows is not the full manuscript. I’m still working out what feels most comfortable for me in sermon preparation, and while it worked for a while for me to write a full manuscript and then condense it into an outline, this time I just did a detailed outline.

    Numbers 21:4-9 – “Looking for Life”

    Introduction: Snakes and humans have always had a strained relationship. Snakes are always portrayed in movies and popular culture as villains. Today we’re going to talk about one snake that wasn’t a villain. We’re going to go through this passage, and then I’ll close with three areas of application.

    “From Mount Hor they set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way.”

    verse 4 and Background: The Israelites have come out of Egypt, met God at Sinai, sent scouts into the land, didn’t trust God, and were condemned to wander. They wander, Moses and Aaron make a big mistake and are condemned in ch. 20, Miriam and Aaron die (20:22-29), and they finally start to move toward the promised land. Then they are told by the Edomites that they can’t pass through, and they have to go toward the Red Sea. After wandering in the desert for 40 years, they’re finally starting to move. Now they’re backtracking (20:14-21), and they’re starting to grumble. Again.
    The word “Impatient” literally means “short.”

    “The people spoke against God and against Moses, ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.’”

    verse 5: Israelites had previously complained (in 14:2ff, 20:3-5). They had also previously complained about the manna (Num 11). This is the last time they did it.
    1. Grumbling is a sign of the passive, inactive bystander. Active people are too busy to grumble. (R. Bewes)
    2. Grumbling affects the way we see reality. When we grumble, we aren’t seeing things clearly. The Israelites said “there is no food,” but clearly there was food every day. It was miraculous food that God provided them with day after day, but they couldn’t see it for what it was because they had already decided to grumble and feel sorry for themselves.

    “Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died.”

    verse 6: Some translations say “poisonous,” and other more literal translations say “fiery.” Some commentators think that this is referring to literal fire, but most believe that “fiery” is a reference to the effect of the venom.
    The grumbling does not lead to provision of food and water, as it had previously, and we don’t hear about Moses interceding with God. What we hear about is judgment for their grumbling.

    “The people came to Moses and said, ‘We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.’ So Moses prayed for the people.”

    verse 7: The people, realizing their sin, ask Moses to pray for the Lord to take away the snakes. The Israelites are actually beginning to show some humility and responsibility.

    “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.”

    verse 8: God didn’t take away the threat, like the Israelites asked him to, and like he did earlier (Num. 11:1-3, with the fire consuming the edges of the camp, and 12:10, with Miriam’s leprosy).
    Why? Maybe because in previous episodes, the Israelite repentance has been short-lived. The Israelites have been complaining since leaving Egypt, and every time that God has provided for them, they just went back to complaining.
    This time, he doesn’t take away the threat, he provides a mode of healing. There seem to be echoes here of 2 Corinthians 12, where Paul asks God three times to take away his “thorn in the flesh.” Instead of taking it away, God tells him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”
    How many times do we ask for the same thing? We want God to take away the thing that gives us pain. Sometimes he does. But sometimes he has a different purpose, and we have to trust him. Joni Eareckson Tada broke her neck in a diving accident when she was 17 and was paralyzed from the chest down. At first, she hated her disability, she hated her wheelchair. But eventually, she came to believe that it was part of God’s plan for her. She has used her disability to become an advocate for others with disabilities. In one of her books she prays, “I know I wouldn’t know you … I wouldn’t love and trust you … were it not for this wheelchair.” We so often pray for God to just take away the things that threaten us and make us afraid. Sometimes God does take those things away, but other times he doesn’t take the danger away but instead provides a way to handle suffering.

    “So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.”

    verse 9: Moses makes a bronze serpent, and people look at it and are healed. How could looking at a snake heal somebody? We live in the 21st century. We know about medicine, and we know that this is not the way it works – even if a snake on a pole is the symbol of medicine (the Rod of Asclepius).
    But it isn’t the snake on the pole that saves people. It is the faith in the one behind it that saves. This isn’t some magic snake. The only reason it had power is that God chose it as his way of healing. God does this throughout Scripture. He asks people to do things they think are silly because he wants people to put their trust in him.
    Looking is the same as believing and committing. When they looked at the snake, they believed that the Lord would heal them, and the Lord kept his promise.

    2 Kings 18:4: The Israelites forgot this when King Hezekiah had to destroy the snake because the people were treating it like an idol: “He broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it; it was called Nehushtan.” (“piece of brass”)
    The Israelites forgot that God was behind the serpent, and thought that in itself the serpent was magical. This is a natural tendency that persists throughout history. People keep looking for a silver bullet. This is why relics were so important in the Middle Ages. This is why books like “The Secret” are popular even today. We do this because putting our trust in something magical, or even in our own efforts, is easy, but putting our trust in God is hard.

    For those of us who live after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, even after all this the brazen serpent may still seem like it’s far away and we can’t relate to it. Thankfully for us, Jesus refers to this story and shows us how to relate to it.

    John 3:14-15: “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

    Like the serpent, Jesus on the cross was the embodiment of both the curse and forgiveness of the curse. Snakes were the curse, and a snake was put up on a pole for all to see. Sin is our problem, and sin is put up on the cross for all to see. 2 Corinthians 5:21: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” The cross is a visible sign of human failure, but also of God’s love. We look to an instrument of humiliation and death for a cure for our own humiliation and death.
    Jesus’ being “lifted up” has a double meaning. First, he was literally lifted up from the ground. Second, he was exalted. Not afterwards, but while he was on the cross. This doesn’t make sense to the world. Deut. 21:23 says that anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse.
    Just like the serpent on a pole, there isn’t anything special about a man hanging on a cross. On the same day that Jesus died, two criminals were crucified with him. When Jews of that day looked at Jesus on the cross, they saw a blasphemer. When Romans of that day looked at Jesus on the cross, they saw a rebel and an insurrectionist. When non-Christians today look at Jesus on the cross, they see a good teacher, and they think it’s a shame that he had to die. But when Christians look at Jesus on the cross, they see something different. Just like the serpent on a pole, God decided that a man on a cross would be the means he would use to forgive and give life to people. It may seem silly to think that just looking and believing would give us life. But God works in the things we think are silly and foolish and humiliating.

    3 applications:

    Don’t grumble; look to God – Regardless of the cause of your suffering, grumbling is not the response that God wants from you. Phil 2:14 says “Do everything without complaining or arguing.” If you complain, you’re going to end up focused on yourself and will miss out on what God wants to show you in your circumstances. Also, grumbling becomes a lifestyle.

    Look to God and not just the snake – Stay focused on God. Sometimes Christians get distracted by good things. In the Middle Ages, it was things like relics from saints. Today, it might be 7 steps to a happier life, or giving money or time to a ministry so God will bless us, or trying to get rid of sin on our own just by trying harder. These things aren’t bad, but if we look to them instead of the Cross, they’re not going to give us life. This is always a problem. John Calvin said the human heart is an idol factory. Every generation of God’s people has its own set of distractions that will pull it away from God. But we must look to the Cross.

    Look to God in Jesus and believe – If you are not a Christian, I ask you to believe that he can forgive you and give you life, and accept that forgiveness and life from him. Even if you are a Christian, you may feel that there is some area of your life that God couldn’t possibly want to forgive you for. Or you may think that Jesus died on the cross for your sins, but this really doesn’t affect your life from day to day. I ask you to look to Jesus on the cross, and believe that he is there because he loves you and wants you to be with him. Believe that he, like that snake, was lifted up to give you life, and accept that life from him. Trust him with your life, and he will take away the poisonous snakebite of sin that affects us all.

  • Truth Project 2: Philosophy and Ethics (Says Who?)

    The second tour in the Truth Project examines Philosophy and Ethics. Del (in my review of the first tour, I called the presenter by his last name, Tackett, but I’m thinking that is a tad impersonal) starts out with a couple of Bible verses, one of them being Colossians 2:8: “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy.” One example of a hollow and deceptive philosophy, says Del, is Carl Sagan’s popular Cosmos series. In it, Sagan says that “The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” This statement assumes there is nothing outside the physical universe – what Del calls the “Cosmic Cube,” or “the box.”

    Del argues that modern philosophy has taken God out of the equation in its search for reality, and is therefore bound to fail. The philosophical “holy grail,” says Del, is the Universals, but all that we can directly observe are particulars. Del says that in secular philosophy, there is a gap between the tradition of Plato (which focuses on ideals, or universals) and the tradition of Aristotle (which focuses on particulars). Secular philosophy begins with particulars and tries to move to universals, which is not possible when you only look inside the box. God’s approach, according to Del, is to begin with universals (accessible through revelation) and move to particulars.

    The implications of naturalistic philosophy, because of its limitation, are that there can be no gods or purposive forces, no ultimate foundation for ethics, no free will, no life after death, and no ultimate meaning in life. The problem with Christians in America, says Del, is that we have been taken captive by this philosophy and don’t have a biblical worldview. The solution is that, according to Romans 12:2, we should be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

    Overall, I liked this tour. It set forth the issues clearly and simply and issued a clarion call for Christians to not be deceived by hollow and deceptive philosophy but be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Also, I think that it gives us a great starting place when dialoguing with people who have a naturalistic worldview. If secular philosophy leads inevitably to a loss of meaning and an inability to have an ultimate foundation for ethics, then a good place to start dialogue would be to push philosophical naturalists to accept the implications of naturalism. All too often, philosophical naturalists “cheat” in order to give their lives meaning. That is, they borrow ideas from Christianity that are not consistent with their stated worldview.

    I think, however, that Del misses an opportunity in this tour to show his audience how to interact with a secular philosopher. He tells the story of a freshman philosophy class that he was in at Kansas State where the professor told him, “You don’t have any way of knowing that the chair you’re sitting on is really real.” Instead of telling his audience how to start a conversation with someone like that, Del dismisses that statement by merely saying, “How foolish!” Instead of being dismissive, he would have served his audience (and any non-Christians they come in contact with) better by speaking with them about how to open a dialogue about the important things of life with someone who has been influenced by deceptive philosophy.

  • St. Patrick’s Breastplate

    The Chicago River
    The Chicago River

    Long before St. Patrick’s Day was an excuse to drink a lot and dye things green, it was a feast day celebrating the patron saint of Ireland, (Okay, maybe even then it was an excuse for some people to drink a lot). In honor of Patrick, here is a poem attributed to him, “Saint Patrick’s Breastplate.” When I was at Regent, we used to sing part of this (the part that is in bold below) in chapel from time to time.

    I bind unto myself today
    The strong name of the Trinity,
    By invocation of the same,
    The Three in One and One in Three.

    I bind this day to me for ever,
    By power of faith, Christ’s Incarnation;
    His baptism in the Jordan River;
    His death on cross for my salvation;
    His bursting from the spicèd tomb;
    His riding up the heavenly way;
    His coming at the day of doom;
    I bind unto myself today.

    I bind unto myself the power
    Of the great love of the Cherubim;
    The sweet ‘Well done’ in judgment hour;
    The service of the Seraphim,
    Confessors’ faith, Apostles’ word,
    The Patriarchs’ prayers, the Prophets’ scrolls,
    All good deeds done unto the Lord,
    And purity of virgin souls.

    I bind unto myself today
    The virtues of the starlit heaven,
    The glorious sun’s life-giving ray,
    The whiteness of the moon at even,
    The flashing of the lightning free,
    The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
    The stable earth, the deep salt sea,
    Around the old eternal rocks.

    I bind unto myself today
    The power of God to hold and lead,
    His eye to watch, His might to stay,
    His ear to hearken to my need.
    The wisdom of my God to teach,
    His hand to guide, his shield to ward,
    The word of God to give me speech,
    His heavenly host to be my guard.

    Against the demon snares of sin,
    The vice that gives temptation force,
    The natural lusts that war within,
    The hostile men that mar my course;
    Or few or many, far or nigh,
    In every place and in all hours
    Against their fierce hostility,
    I bind to me these holy powers.

    Against all Satan’s spells and wiles,
    Against false words of heresy,
    Against the knowledge that defiles,
    Against the heart’s idolatry,
    Against the wizard’s evil craft,
    Against the death-wound and the burning
    The choking wave and the poisoned shaft,
    Protect me, Christ, till thy returning.

    Christ be with me, Christ within me,
    Christ behind me, Christ before me,
    Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
    Christ to comfort and restore me,
    Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
    Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
    Christ in hearts of all that love me,
    Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

    I bind unto myself the name,
    The strong name of the Trinity;
    By invocation of the same.
    The Three in One, and One in Three,
    Of whom all nature hath creation,
    Eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
    Praise to the Lord of my salvation,
    salvation is of Christ the Lord.

  • We are All Canucks (sort of)

    I lived in Vancouver for four years, but never went to a Canucks game until yesterday. Mary’s boss is a season ticket holder, and he is kind enough to let his employees go to the games he can’t make it to. On Friday he asked Mary if she could go, so on Sunday we hoofed it up to Vancouver to see our first NHL game: the Canucks vs. the Colorado Avalanche.

    I did not grow up watching hockey, but I must admit it is a great sport to watch live. It’s fast-paced and exciting, and yet there are breaks between periods for you to get up and use the restroom or get something to eat. Also, I can’t speak for all arenas, but GM Place is small enough that everyone can follow the action, and it doesn’t seem like there are any bad seats. Mary and I were in row 22 on the lower level, right at one of the blue lines. We could see everything just fine, even the action at the other end of the rink.

    Also, it was an exciting game. The Canucks scored three goals in the first period, so everyone was feeling pretty good. Then the Avalanche mounted a comeback, the Canucks responded, and the game ended 4-2 Canucks. The players even put the extra effort to squeeze a fight in with 12.5 seconds left. Those guys know what the fans love. No wonder it was the 250th consecutive sellout at GM Place, a streak that dates back to 2002.

    Here is an article about the game from the AP:

    VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The Canucks couldn’t buy a win on home ice back in January. Now they can’t even give a game away in Vancouver.

    Kyle Wellwood, Alex Burrows and Taylor Pyatt scored first-period goals, and the Canucks overcame a bad goal early in the third to beat the Colorado Avalanche 4-2 on Sunday night. Wellwood had a power-play goal, and Burrows scored short-handed.

    Ryan Kesler had three assists, and Alex Edler added a power-play goal with 1:13 left as Vancouver matched a franchise record with nine straight home wins. The Canucks, celebrating their 250th straight sellout crowd, lost nine straight home games through Jan. 31, but haven’t lost at GM Place since.

    “It’s crazy, we couldn’t buy a win a month and a half ago, we always found a way to lose every game,” said Burrows, who also had an assist. “But we turned it around, and right now we have a lot of confidence in our own building.

    “That’s a good thing heading into the playoffs.”

    At the end of January, it seemed a stretch to suggest they’d even make it. Now, with a 14-3-1 overall record since snapping that skid, they’re up to fifth place in the tight Western Conference, and trail slumping Chicago by just two points in the race for home-ice advantage in the first round of the playoffs.

    With three more meetings in the final month of the season, finally being able to beat the Avalanche could have a significant effect on where the Canucks finish.

    Sunday’s win ended an eight-game (0-5-3), 16-month losing skid against Colorado.

    “They dominated us in games past and we wanted to do something about it tonight,” said Kesler after the Canucks also moved within five of Calgary for the Northwest Division lead. Vancouver has one more game left than the Flames.

    “We wanted to exclude ourselves from the bottom three or four teams that are fighting for a playoff spot,” Kesler added. “Now we’re trying to catch Calgary and Chicago. We have them worried about us now which is a good thing.”

    Ryan Smyth and Darcy Tucker scored for Colorado. The Avalanche were coming off consecutive wins against Minnesota and Edmonton that hurt both teams playoff hopes and moved Colorado a point out of last place.

    “Right now, it’s playing for pride,” said defenseman John-Michael Liles, who assisted on both Avalanche goals. “You don’t focus on being a spoiler, but if that’s the case down the road, obviously we’re trying to win every game. We’re playing for pride and playing for each other, and that’s all you can focus on right now. In the first period, we didn’t have that mentality.”

    Wellwood opened the scoring with a power-play deflection 2:50 in, his second goal in three games after going 21 without scoring.

    Burrows doubled the lead less than 5 minutes later with a brilliant short-handed effort. After Burrows hit the post on a breakaway from his own blue line, Kesler stole the puck again before Colorado could get back out of its own end and fed cross-ice to Burrows for a quick shot. Andrew Raycroft slid across and stacked the pads to stop him, but Burrows was alone with plenty of time to deposit the rebound into an empty net for his seventh goal in seven games.

    “He generates his own luck,” Kesler said of the hard-working Burrows, who recently moved from the third to first line and signed a four-year, $8 million contract extension. “He’s working hard and making that line go right now.”

    Pyatt converted Burrows’ pass to make it 3-0 just 2 seconds after another Colorado penalty expired, but Colorado got that back on Smyth’s power-play deflection — and 25th goal of the season — early in the second period.

    Tucker celebrated his 34th birthday with a gift from Luongo 14 seconds into the third. The goalie fumbled a dump in behind his own net and Tucker banked a shot from behind the net in off Luongo as he scrambled to get back in goal.

    “I think he just wants us to build character as we move forward and he’s doing a pretty good job,” coach Alain Vigneault said, laughing about Luongo’s second third-period breakdown in two games. “As a group for a guy that bails us out so many times, when a bad bounce goes against him we have to find a way to buckle down and get it done and we did again tonight.”

    Besides, Luongo didn’t consider it a bad goal.

    “It kind of took a funny hop off my stick and went out of my reach,” said Loungo, who finished with 18 saves and redeemed himself with a great glove stop off Paul Stastny on a power play a minute later. “I know you guys will like to talk it up as a bad goal, but I’ll consider it an unlucky goal.”

    The Avalanche lost defenseman Daniel Tjarnqvist when he was hit near the right eye by a slap shot midway through the second period. Tjarnqvist was escorted immediately to the locker room, leaving a trail of blood on the ice as he was helped off, and did not return to the game.

    “He’s going to be fine,” coach Tony Granato said. “Obviously, he had some stitches. He took a shot above the eye and he’ll be fine, but it took a while to stitch him up. We thought it was better to keep him out the rest of the way.”

    Raycroft, starting for the first time in five games after Peter Budaj won three of the last four games, finished with 19 saves.

  • Truth Project 1: Veritology (What is Truth?)

    There has been an unusually slow trickle of posts lately, for which I do not apologize. Real-life obligations trump blogligations for me, and there has been a lot going on in real life lately. But that said, let me try to catch up on this Truth Project review thing.

    On March 4 we watched the first Truth Project DVD at our church, and then split up into small groups to discuss it. My group was one of the smaller ones, with about eight people in it, with two more to join us when they return from out of town.

    The first DVD is called “Veritology: What is Truth?” Veritology is not a word that can be found in the dictionary; it’s a combination of the Latin word for truth, “veritas,” and the suffix “-ology” The viewer is introduced to Del Tackett, the presenter, who delivers the lesson in a lecture-style format in front of a group of students.

    The point of this “tour,” as Tackett calls it – the whole series – is to “gaze upon the face of God.” Tackett is not interested in the participant filling up his or her notebook with useful stuff, but wants total transformation for the viewer. He wants us to see Christianity as an all-encompassing worldview – a way of seeing all of life.

    After giving a brief introduction, Tackett asks his students why Jesus came into the world. After answering “no” to several suggestions (“to redeem us,” “to fulfill prophecies,” “to save the world,” etc.), he refers us to John 18:37, where Jesus says to Pontius Pilate, “For this reason I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.” Tackett then proceeds to show how important truth is to Jesus and to the biblical writers by pointing out several verses in which “truth” is mentioned. A few examples are John 1:17 (“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”), John 14:6 (“Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”) and I Timothy 2:3-4 (“This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”).

    Tackett then asks how people react to the truth, and the answer is that often they “turn aside to myths,” (2 Tim. 4:4), “suppress the truth” (Rom. 1:18), “distort the truth” (Acts 20:30) and “exchange the truth of God for a lie” (Rom. 1:25). Jesus said that he came to testify to the truth when he was on trial. The real trial, Tackett says, is truth vs. lie. There is a “cosmic battle” between truth and reality, on the one side, and lies and illusions on the other. Sin is deceitful (Rom. 7:11; 2 Thess. 2:10; Eph. 4:22; Heb. 3:13) and takes people captive (2 Tim. 2:24-26). There is a battle between truth and lies, and Tackett calls this a “battle of worldviews.” Today’s world is still struggling to answer Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” – and this question, according to Tackett, could well be the most important question that we and our culture must answer.

    Tackett then enlists the help of Ravi Zacharias, Os Guinness and R.C. Sproul to define truth. He also enlists the help of the 1828 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which defines truth as “conformity to fact or reality.” He alters this slightly to say that truth IS reality. By contrast, insanity is losing touch with reality and believing that lies are real. We all suffer, Tackett says, from common insanity: losing touch with reality. Our actions, Tackett says, reflect what we believe to be really real, and often we don’t act on what we profess to be real. The question Tackett leaves us with is, “Do you believe that what you believe is really real?”

    Positively, I thought that first, the DVD is extraordinarily well-presented. Focus on the Family has done a great job in packaging this product. Tackett is a winsome, likable presenter, and you get the sense in this first tour that he deeply cares for people, both Christians and non-Christians.

    Second, I think that Tackett presents his case very well. He relies heavily on Scripture for his discussion of truth, which is important when dealing with Christians, the intended audience. He frames the conflict that we face in our own lives, of truth vs. lie and reality vs. illusion, in a compelling way. Most of what Tackett says I don’t have any problem with at all.

    However, there are a few things about the first tour that rubbed me the wrong way. First, one of the earliest slides that Tackett presents is a compass. On the four ends of the compass are: Truth to the north, God to the east, Social Order to the south, and Man to the west. I found myself chafing against the idea that Truth is due north – it’s what we use to orient ourselves – and God is at another point of the compass.

    Second, I wasn’t sure I liked how Tackett responded to the suggestions of his students on why Jesus came into the world. I don’t think he was trying to be mean or dismissive, but nevertheless it came across that way. Perhaps, I thought when I watched it, this is because it is not really a classroom. Or rather, it is and it isn’t. It is a classroom, but it is also a recorded DVD lesson, and I’m sure Tackett had to move along with the lesson in order to keep it snappy and interesting. I’d like to think that if it really were a classroom, he would have come off as being less dismissive.

    Third, Tackett says that

    the truth claims of God are consistent and logical. They make sense. They work. And even in a fallen world, when we follow them, they lead to peace and prosperity and happiness.

    I think that following Jesus is the best thing we humans can do, but I would question whether this inevitably leads to “peace and prosperity and happiness.” It doesn’t seem to me that Jesus promised peace and prosperity and happiness in this world. If anything, he promised persecution to his followers (John 15:20, 16:33).

    Fourth, he states in the course of his lecture, “We think that postmodernism is so new. It’s not new at all! It’s the same old lie!” The problem that I have with this is that he has not given any indication of what he means when he says “postmodernism.” Making statements like this one, without defining terms, is bound to generate misunderstanding. I suspect that when Tackett says “postmodernism,” he means “relativism.” There are problems with equating postmodernism with relativism, but it would be helpful if he would at least make clear what he means.

    Finally, I agree with Tackett that truth is important, and I know that Jesus said he came into the world to testify to the truth, but I think that Tackett’s definition of truth has some problems. For one thing, the word “objective” kept creeping into his presentation. This threw up a red flag because I think the notion of objective access to truth and knowledge is a distinctively modern approach that is no more compatible with Christianity than its opposite: total subjectivity. Of course, when he uses the word “objective,” it is possible that he simply means “independent of the knower.” I would agree with this definition, though I think it would be best to leave out the word “objective” altogether. Overall, he is not clear what he means when he uses the word “objective,” and so I must caution against the idea of an objective knower. Tackett seems to be saying that there are only two choices when it comes to epistemology: objectivity or subjectivity. Instead, I would have appreciated it if Tackett had explored the third way of critical realism, which is a much more promising view of epistemology.

    Ravi Zacharias, in the course of the tour, defined truth as “that which affirms propositionally the nature of reality as it is.” This definition has problems both because truth is not exclusively propositional (I would say that the Bible is true, but it only partially consists of propositional statements), and humans should be humble about our access to reality as it is. Sin, after all, has affected our rational faculties and darkened our understanding. God says in Isaiah 55:9 that “as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Truth may well be conformity to fact or reality (or, as Tackett re-words the definition, simply “reality”), but then the question must be asked: which one of us has objective, exhaustive access to reality? I think that while Christians can have confidence that the Christian story is true, and that what God has told us about himself is true, grasping after the ideal of knowing objectively, of having a “God’s eye view,” will lead us right back into the dead end of modernity. It looks to me like Tackett is dealing with the problems he sees with postmodernity by trying to lead his audience back into modernity, which has its own problems.

    Even though Jesus said that he came into the world to testify to the truth, he also said that HE was the truth (Jn 14:6). Instead of focusing on exclusively propositional truth, I think it is time we stopped overlooking the personal dimension: Jesus himself is the truth.

  • Under Surveillance

    On the school bus that I drive, there is a camera mounted at the front that records everything that happens. The purpose of this camera is for drivers to find out what happens on the bus when he or she is looking at the road, and to protect the driver and students in case there is a disagreement about what happens on the bus. I’ve used it several times, mostly to find out who left food garbage lying under the seats or to find out who was at fault in a disagreement between students.

    It’s a strange thing to know that everything on the bus is being recorded, even when students aren’t on. I was thinking about this the other day when “The Final Countdown” was on the radio and I was singing along as I was driving to the elementary school. I thought it would be pretty embarrassing if there were ever a reason for someone to watch that tape.

    Usually, I try to come up with some sort of lesson that I can learn from these sorts of ruminations. I can’t think of one at the moment, other than to acknowledge that we live in an age of surveillance, where we are all watched more than ever before. I’m just glad, in this instance, that generally I am the only person who ever wants to watch these tapes, and even then I fast-forward them to focus on a particular event. It would be creepy if someone watched them every day.

  • February 2009: Books Read

    1. A Primer on Postmodernism by Stanley Grenz. This book was published 13 years ago, but it is still exactly what is needed to get people (especially Christians) up to speed on the philosophical developments that have been taking place in our culture over the last half century or so.

    For some in the church, postmodernism has become the boogeyman. It is a notoriously slippery concept to attach a definition to, and so often Christians will make it represent everything that is bad about our culture. This is uninformed, and does not in any way help us to relate to people who have been influenced by postmodernism. Grenz realized in 1996 that in order to preach the gospel in a culture, you had to do the work of understanding that culture, and so he sets out to show what postmodernism is all about. He begins by taking note of the many disciplines that have been affected by postmodernism, and attempts to show that postmodernism is, at root, “a revolution both in our understanding of knowledge and our view of science” (39). He then spends three chapters giving a history lesson: first he deals with the rise of the modern world, then the cracks in modern epistemology (theory of knowledge) that began to show in the 19th century, and finally the philosophers of postmodernism in the late 20th century: Foucault, Derrida and Rorty.

    He ends the book with a chapter called “The Gospel and the Postmodern Context,” which I found extremely helpful. Instead of saying, “Postmodernism is relativistic! Christians must have nothing to do with it!”, he says that in order to preach the gospel to a postmodern context, we must, yes, reject those things that are in opposition to the gospel, but we must also search for common ground. So, while Christians, according to Grenz, could not affirm the postmodern rejection of metanarratives, we must affirm the postmodern rejection of Enlightenment epistemology. Grenz writes that “in contrast to the modern ideal of the dispassionate observer, we affirm the postmodern discovery that no observer can stand outside the historical process” (166). We do ourselves and others a great disservice when we try and get back to the modern ideal of objectivity. When we do this, I think, not only are we deluding ourselves that we can be objective knowers, but we often make concepts more important than people. This is no way to present the gospel winsomely.

    The gospel preached to the postmodern world, Grenz writes, should acknowledge the shortcomings of modernity. It should be post-individualistic, post-rationalistic, post-dualistic, and post-noeticentric (that is, it acknowledges that our existence is about more than just accumulating knowledge). The gospel has gone out in every generation for the last 2000 years, and just like in every generation up to now, it needs to be articulated in a way that people (including postmoderns) can understand.

    2. Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! by Bob Harris. I took the Jeopardy! Online Test for the first time in January, and since then I’ve been thinking about Jeopardy! way more than usual. I have no idea whether they will contact me to do an in-person audition, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to read a book about someone’s experience on the show.

    Prisoner of Trebekistan is part that, but it is also part autobiography. It’s the story of Bob Harris, who became a 5-time winner on the show in the late ’90s, studied like crazy for the Tournament of Champions that year, lost big, then was invited back twice more: for the Masters Tournament in 2002 and the Ultimate Tournament of Champions in 2005. In the book, he reveals a lot about how the show works, and about his own study methods, but he also tells the story of his life during the 8 or so years that Jeopardy! and other game shows were a big part of it.

    I liked this book, and it was a quick read. The only thing that irritated me from time to time was that Harris seemed to be trying hard to be funny. He never met a metaphor he didn’t like, and there are many pages with three or four. Some of them I thought were good, like when he called Ken Jennings a nice feller with “the instincts of a pissed wolverine.” Others I thought should have been edited out to keep the narrative flowing.

    1. Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton. The associate pastor of my church gave this book to me, describing it as “a spiritual gifts inventory without the Spirit.” The main thrust of the book is that, instead of focusing on overcoming weaknesses, all people should discover their innate strengths and cultivate them. Everyone has strengths, and if people focus on using their strengths instead of becoming well-rounded, they can have “consistent near-perfect performance.” People who read the book can take an online test called the StrengthsFinder to find their 5 top strengths (out of 34). If they are managers, they can also learn from the book how to best manage a person with a particular strength.

    I think there is something to this idea. Everyone has God-given talents and abilities, and I think God intended people to use them and derive joy from them. But there is also one possible outcome of this idea that should be avoided, and here is where the “without the Spirit” part comes in. Just because we all have particular strengths does not mean we can avoid doing things that, if we are Christians, God calls everyone to do. For example, one of the strengths listed in the book is Empathy. Empathy was not one of my top five, so should I give up on trying to be empathetic? No, I don’t think so. I think that when God puts his Spirit in our hearts, we are enabled to change. We are not all given the same strengths and abilities, but when we are in step with the Spirit, we exhibit the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23). These things are available to everyone with the Spirit, no matter what his or her strengths are.