Friends: Meet Cliff.  Cliff’s awesome.  If you haven’t run into him on the internet, you might run into him on an American college campus explaining Jesus. Posting early this week due to MCA Fall Break. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #935

October 15, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

School Spirit, Part 3 – True Religion

By Bob Walters

“But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. Do this with gentleness and respect.” – 1 Peter 3:15

“What I am saying is true and reasonable.” Paul to Festus and King Agrippa, Acts 26:25

Over the past couple years Cliffe Knechtle has become something of a YouTube, internet, and college campus sensation with brief videos airing all over social media.

Ask Cliffe a hard question about Christ, the Bible, or religion in general, and right there, whether amid Christians or – quite frequently – a skeptical crowd on the campus square, he’s always prepared to provide true, reasoned, gentle, and respectful answers.

Whether it is a Christian school or even the lion’s den of the Ivy League, dialogues range from reassuring explanations to rebuttals of challenges.  My favorites are the arrogant, cynical, know-it-all undergrad philosophy majors who take the tone of patronizing this poor sap who actually thinks Jesus, salvation, eternity, the Bible, God, and the Holy Spirit are true. And, for questioners from other faiths, that God is the One True God. Cliffe immediately says things in reasoned ways I wish I could think to say.

Cliffe is fun to listen to. But an overnight sensation?  He has pursued his “Give Me an Answer” college ministry for 40-plus years, including television in the 1990s.

A gifted street preacher and apologist, Cliffe is also senior pastor of Grace Community Church in New Canaan, Connecticut, which was actually organized in 2001 around his Bible teaching talents. His books include Give Me an Answer (1986), Help Me Believe (2002), and Heaven Can't Wait (2005).

Turns out Cliffe and I are the same age, born days apart in May 1954. And, the church he pastors first met on Sept. 2, 2001, the exact date I first attended church as an adult … any church.  It’s what I call my “Awake Date.”  Maybe that’s why I like him.

Age 70, then, and Cliffe isn’t slowing down. Three weeks ago at the invitation of the Yale Christian Union, Cliffe (and son Stuart, a minister) spent six hours sharing with and being challenged by Yale students in Beinecke Plaza. Here is a five-minute clip of a discussion with a Jewish student about the Bible, morality, and modern values (LINK).

Video snippets of Cliffe’s encounters pop up regularly on social media.  His ministry has 719,000 subscribers on YouTube and 1.4 million followers on Instagram.

Cliffe won’t solve the entire problem of the Christian deserts that American colleges have worked so hard to become – officially and administratively – but ministries like his prove the Spirit moves in places where Christ’s truth is attacked.

And one more thing about the event at Yale … it was not a “school sponsored” event by an approved student body club.  ChristianUnion.org (LINK) is a ministry based in Princeton, N.J., that has a dozen chapters around the Ivy League and other schools. My guess is that “Christian Union” is on the more liberal side of the Christian doctrinal ledger: its website talks a lot about “transforming society” but not much about Jesus.

That’s a warning light, to me, but as long as Christian Union is willing to put Cliffe unmuted on the college green, the seeds of Christian truth are sown.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) prays the soil is fertile, not fallow. Come, Lord Jesus.

Friends: American academia may have kicked Christian clubs off campus or out of school, but Jesus isn’t that easy to get rid of.  The faithful persevere, spirits are revived.  See the column...   Blessings, Bob

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Labels: Christian campus ministry, Ephesians 2:2, father of lies, Isaiah 57:15, John 8:44, religious studies, revival, truth

Spirituality Column #934

October 8, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

School Spirit, Part 2 – Seeds of Revival

By Bob Walters

“For this is what the high and exalted One says – he who lives forever, whose name is holy: ‘I live in a high and holy place, but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.’” Isaiah 57:15

Last week I took the spiritual status of American university academia to the woodshed.  It has been an ugly thing the past 150 years as bedrock Christian theology classes have been largely replaced in colleges by soft-core “religious studies,” and detuned as the central fabric of society. “Higher” education? Higher than God?   

Yet … there is a glimmering light.  Christianity tends to be hard to get rid of. While universities have expunged Jesus from their curriculums – I mean the real, Son of God, Lord and Savior, Jesus, the way and the truth and the life of the Kingdom of God Jesus – no shortage of Christians and Christian missions are alive and well on campus.

Of all the ironies of Christianity – the King of Creation arrives as the humble, helpless child Jesus; His death brings our freedom; His resurrection assures our restoration, God’s Spirit animates our hearts for God’s Kingdom, God’s mysteries somehow seal our faith in love and truth – Church history teaches us that it is during persecution when Christian light burns hottest. From darkness comes revival.

As in: after Jewish leaders conspired to have Jesus murdered on the cross, His resurrected body and life lit the fire of faith in thousands … then millions.  After Romans persecuted Christians for two centuries, Emperor Constantine became a Christian.

Today, doctrinally true Christian clubs and ministries are largely banned on campuses whose administrations – and student bodies generally – place a higher value on individualism of identity, freedom for sins, and group-think than discovery of truth.

While we might wonder what is better than forgiveness of sins, or more individual than a personal relationship with Christ, academia frets that its secular, homogenized, “truth” will be challenged. Yet it is not truth; it is a false gospel of false uniqueness. 

God’s Truth, the truth that governs reality, is eternal. But Satan – as the “Lord of the air” (Ephesians 2:2) and “the father of lies” (John 8:44), - creates perennial temporal havoc.  Humanist philosophies and pagan gods/worship go back thousands of years across all cultures. Satan’s greatest enemy is the truth of Jesus Christ.

Campus ministries organized as “approved student activities or clubs,” have been mostly defenestrated by university administrators under their “anti-discrimination” policies (speaking of ironies).  But plenty of students have their “swords” – Bibles – with them, share in Christian fellowship with their sisters and brothers in the faith, and evangelize on campus not with argument, apologetics, and protest, but with “the hand and heart’ of service and kindness. That was the social model of the earliest Christians.

University sponsored/approved Christian clubs may be nearly extinct, but outside churches, ministries, and missions either amid or near college campuses love, support, and encourage faithful students. Among the most effective campus ministries nationally are the hundreds of Catholic parishes adjacent to colleges but controlled by the church and “energized by its theology of the body.” (LINK: The Campus Ministry Boom).

Jesus hasn’t left campus, even as campuses try to leave Him. More next week.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) repents, having once thought Christians were weirdos.

Friends: Christian faith and knowledge – along with truth, generally – have slipped off the radar screens of most American college and university curriculums. Next week ... seeds of revival. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #933

October 1, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

School Spirit, Part 1

By Bob Walters

“If the world hates you, keep in mind it hated me first …” John 15:18, NIV 1984

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.” John 16:13, NIV 1984

Our E91 pastor Rick Grover mentioned in a sermon a few years ago that his son had headed off to a Big Ten college that was, Rick offhandedly said – accompanied by a nervous chuckle – “one of the largest Christian mission fields in America.”

What he was saying was, his son’s faith would be challenged. We all understood.

Let’s not reveal or pick on that particular school because the modern university academy – in toto and nationwide, big or small – does indeed comprise arguably the largest, most hostile, unchurched, uncomprehending, unsympathetic, unfaithful, and unknowledgeable Christian environment in our nation. At least, that I can think of.

College USA is now Satan’s favorite playground; Jesus need not apply.

Consider the trajectory. Virtually all early American colleges were formed as seminaries or religiously sponsored schools. After the Civil War, Land Grant colleges popped up across the United States emphasizing science, technology, engineering, and math. Religion and philosophy were supplanted by the empirical sciences.

By the 1920s, smaller Christian schools bloomed as havens of Christian thought, truth, and doctrine. In the 1930s the philosophy of public education began to stray from its Christian grounding, and in the 1960s Christian prayer and the Bible – by act of the U.S. Supreme Court – were expunged from public schools and most public places.

On college campuses in the later 1960s and 1970s – those of us of a certain age well remember – were violent protests over Viet Nam, establishment politics and Watergate, not to mention far-reaching and enduring racial, sexist, and sexual tensions. 

In the past decade we have witnessed a “breathtakingly rapid sprint” (LINK) of identity politics through virtually all our institutions – not just colleges and public schools, but government, business, sports, entertainment … even many churches and ministries.

The Woke virus seemingly traveled faster than Covid.  Colleges whose earlier mission was to teach “expert competence” (LINK) in a recognizable and marketable skill now focus almost entirely on identity politics, victimhood, and the condemning of oppressors.

Engineering? Computer science? Health care? Law? Education? OK, we will educate you, the colleges say, but have your politics right, first. If you don’t? Keep your head down and your mouth shut.  How about a nice degree in Gender Studies?

I don’t think it is possible to overstate the pervasiveness of anti-Christian bias on most of today’s college campuses, who administratively and among the broadest swath of faculty evince an overt hostility against exactly what Christianity provides: the reality of God, the truth of Jesus, the presence of the Spirit, and the authority of the Bible.

Oh … and the correct interpretation of “Love God, and love others.” Love itself is not the God, or rather, god, that the identity-first crowd thinks it is.  Love is the truth of God’s intention and purpose for creating us in the first place: in His image holding us up to His standards.  God’s righteousness flies straight into the face of Woke humanism.

Welcome to college. 

But all is not lost. Next week we will examine some encouraging seeds of revival.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes Rick’s son majored in Law Enforcement, faith intact. P.S. – the LINKs embedded in the column are both to the following article, referenced in previous columns: The Age of Incomplete Religions | Joshua Mitchell | First Things

 

Friends: Humanity’s spiritual sin debt is settled in hope and sacrifice, while our modern spiritual social debt is mired in irresolution. The right hand needs to understand what the left hand is doing … and fast.  Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #932

September 24, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Debt Load   

By Bob Walters

“…forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Jesus, Lord’s Prayer, Matthew 6:12

In the beginning, there was debt.

With only barely-necessary apologies to Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning,” etc.) – whether considering Genesis 3, the Code of Hammurabi, Plato’s Republic, Jesus and Paul in the New Testament, or humanity’s march through history – we see justice, price, and the paying of debts as the “central consideration from the very beginning of human civilization … No agreed understanding of debt, no civilization.”

So asserts Georgetown political theorist Joshua Mitchell in his recent First Things article, The Age of Incomplete Religions. (Link below.)  Yes, Mitchell does a laudable, circumspect job of assessing the Christian, historical, and political ubiquity of debt in human interaction.  But his assessment of contemporary social debt, I think, is brilliant.

As we wonder and lament why so much of current western civilization makes so little sense, Mitchell’s description of the pervasive, incomplete religion of identity politics lays out a coherent and rational – if disturbing – description of debts and economies.

As sin debt is unpayable by us, so is our social debt to the perpetually offended.

While Jesus settled sin debt on the cross to bring forgiven believers back to God, the social debt charged to us by the identitarian left perpetually boils in a cauldron of hate.  It is not forgiveness that is sought or even on offer.  Just, agree … or be purged.

Mitchell makes the good point that long trusted, conservative political kill-shot descriptives like “Marxist,” “Communist,” and “Progressive” are now neutered.  Bernie Sanders’s Marxism, for example, isn’t the enemy; the enemy is Identity Politics.

On a fervored religious par with Christianity, this unpayable social debt of grievance-based politics is the incomplete religion about which Mitchell writes.  Christianity is complete because it divinely shepherds us into the eternal. Any number of social movements in history (The Terror of the French Revolution, for example) or today guarantee only a pious busyness in this life of inconsequential, self-made angst. 

Wokeness, LGBTQ, Critical Race Theory and the rest constitute an overall religion that offers no salvation and won’t follow one’s soul into the grave.  Or, maybe it will, but the religion itself is temporal and only of this world.  What happens next?

Let’s just say I’d rather be right with Jesus.

Mitchell tracks conservative confusion regarding this new “truth,” if you will, to previously understood human debt in three categories. One is the spiritual debt about which we are speaking, and the other two are economic and traditional debt.  Economic debt is about money; traditional debt is about what we owe our fathers (both Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, etc., and our parents). Conservatives understand them.

A Christian’s spiritual debt is vertical … it goes upwards to God.  Social debt, in a telling turn of phrase, goes sideways.  It is demanded by the all-virtuous “pure, mortal, innocent victim groups,” i.e., the liberal left, from “impure, mortal, transgressor groups,” i.e. the conservative right. Forgiveness is not on the table, but civilization is on the line.

Politically, and in light of the election, may I suggest we know left from right.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) highly recommends The Age of Incomplete Religions.

Friends: In this political season it is fairly easy to spot Satan’s work. Better run to Jesus, scorn the devil, and smile. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality column #931

September 17, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Cheerful Scorn

By Bob Walters

“The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to the texts of scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” – Martin Luther quote and epigraph to C.S. Lewis’s 1942 classic, The Screwtape Letters.

When I hear someone pray about “binding satan,” I reflexively and immediately spiritually go stand next to Jesus.  I talk to Jesus, pray with Him, trust Him, love Him, and entreat His peace, mercy, healing, wisdom, and grace on the prayer’s target issue.

What I try to do, in other words, is avoid talking, let alone arguing, with the devil.

C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, in 31 wickedly funny fictional missives from executive demon Screwtape to confused and incompetent junior demon Wormwood, splays open how best to tempt and control mankind into leaving our reliance on God.

Satan, you see, loves to argue.  And I posit to you this: America is in an intractable season of political argument, and Satan is having a heyday.

Perhaps our best Christian move is not to wade too far into the political muck because neither political party – if you read the article links I included last week – remains interested in forwarding the biblical Christian worldview. The Democrats strayed decades ago, and the Republican party at its convention this past summer generally offloaded, or at least softened, its traditional conservative and Christian aura.

As mentioned in those links, sixty-plus years of Republican-centered Christian political activism has brought large talk but few policies.  The idea of a “Christian fifth column” setting civic policy is a canard, i.e., it’s not there.  And the moniker “Christian nationalist” is a polemical chimera without meaning, as in, there is no “there” there.  It is a nebulous, debasing label invented for annoyance and argument, not clarity or truth.

These are indeed trying times for a believing Christian, but we may have been given an unexpected gift hidden within the political rancor and cultural upheaval of recent times. We are looking at a fifty-fifty U.S. presidential election where each side sees the other side’s candidate as Satan.  And without rehashing the news, perhaps we’ve learned at least this: Debate, alas, is futile. Maybe it is time just to be Christians.

It’ll be the hardest thing we’ve ever done, because Christians have long been cushioned from true activism by that with which we are about to be bludgeoned: a political system and culture now wholly disinterested in Christian influence.

What’s the cheerful part?  This: Jesus never told us to argue, Jesus told us to love God and love others.  He did not tell us, nor did he model for us, acquiescence to lies. He answered satan with scripture, the pharisees with truth, and disciples with love.

Our nation’s founders did not imagine a nation unmoored from Christ. As pointed out by Ronen Stoval in First Things (Link), Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 “saw in America not just a land of the free, but a land of the responsible … a place where liberty was always tethered to the common good. The founders understood that true freedom is not the absence of restraint, but the presence of purpose.” We are increasingly tethered to lies.

Stoval asks if we can reclaim our national moral compass. It’s a good question. Our challenge as Christians is to not lose our moral compass, and to not let the un-reality of identity politics – wokeness, LGBTQ, DEI, Critical Race Theory, climate and environmental bullying, intersectionality, perpetual grievance, and the like – govern us.

I’ll keep my joy in Christ, and cheerfully scorn the enemy where I find him. Sure, I’ll vote, but Christians need to focus on Jesus. The devil is in the political details.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) suggests these article links: The Screwtape Election and The Broken Promise of America, both from First Things. Also, the links mentioned are still live at the bottom of last week’s column.  Just scroll down.

Friends: I don’t think civil law against displaying the Ten Commandments, or for displaying them, is a good idea. But new wolves are roaming, God knows it, and Christians need to keep watch. Blessings, Bob

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Labels: civil law, Colossians 2:16, Matthew 7:15, Meg Basham, Republicans go soft, Sabbath, Ten Commandments, U.S. Election, woke funding

Spirituality Column #930

September 10, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

No Time for Sheep

By Bob Walters

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits.” – Jesus, Matthew 7:15

Back in June Louisiana’s governor signed into law a requirement that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom in the state.

I’m all for the Ten Commandments, but I winced that this became law. Please understand, I teach high school history and government at a Christian academy with a full-on biblical worldview, but to me this law smacks of mis-use of government power.

Christian faith has to be a voluntary, cultural, and loving thing. I often say that you’ll never argue the Holy Spirit into anyone, and I firmly believe that the Ten Commandments are not so much about pleasing God as they are about loving one’s neighbor. The Ten Commandments were part of God’s instructions to Israel as it wandered the desert as well as timeless, divine direction for functioning human society:

To wit: 1. Love God, knowing supreme truth and purpose exist, and 2. Love others, knowing we are, each of us, created in God’s image. Thus did Jesus boil down the Ten Commandments to the two “Greatest Commandments”: Love God, love others.

Yes, the Sabbath commandment (No. 4 of 10) changed with Jesus, who becomes our sabbath and peace and is with us all the time and everywhere.  The New Testament proscribes religious festivals or the sabbath (Colossians 2:16), but Jesus as Sabbath is a powerful glue that holds humanity in obedience and fellowship.

Or at least, He is if we let Him.  At the moment, most Americans don’t let Him.

We are in this fierce and weird U.S. presidential election being contested by two American political parties who, in case you missed it over the summer, have now both essentially abandoned Christian conservative values.  Didn’t get the memo?

The Democrats, of course, went off the ranch 60 years ago, championing the elimination of the Bible (1962) and Christian prayer (1963) from public schools and, over time, public spaces and public view.  Awful.  But this summer the Republicans off-loaded its thin slice of Christian moral mindset and is now playing the middle field of popular American morality of liberal abortion policies and buy-in for the gender agenda.

If you missed it, just listen carefully to what Democrats and Kamala Harris, Republicans and Donald Trump, and roughly 90+ percent of the media, are saying.

After these past 60 years, the current Republican command has realized that the Christian right has offered morality and talking points, but generally insufficient votes.

And America’s secular institutions across the board – corporations, academia, charities – and spurious social issue bullies – climate change, immigration, abortion, race, gender fluidity and the LGBTQ circus – have poured hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars into defeating Christian morality, sanity, and doctrinal cohesion.

Meg Basham’s new book, Shepherds for Sale, just out this summer, explains the Woke money pressure put on many of America’s largest churches and most prominent ministries.  There is a reason so many churches have gone wobbly on Bible truth and heavy on LGBTQ doctrine; illiberal lies are being bought and paid for … massively.

The wolves in sheep’s clothing are prowling, and it will be the doctrinally vigilant and Bible truth defending Christians who must cultivate Christ’s fruit – truth – on earth.

U.S. political parties have quit their posts; Christians need to stand with Jesus.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) will offer a more hopeful viewpoint next week. In the meantime read article, article, article, article, and Miracles of Stupidity. All great.

FYI: Here are the titles, in order, of this week’s column links….

Cultural Influence, Political Decline | Dan Hitchens | First Things
The Age of Incomplete Religions | Joshua Mitchell | First Things
The Myth of White Christian Nationalism by Kenneth L. Woodward | Articles | First Things

Great & Wonderful Days by J. Douglas Johnson | Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity
Miracles of Stupidity by S. M. Hutchens | Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity

 

Friends: Some sweet advice in a very unsweet environment from the daughter of my high school classmate Julie (Foster) Black: Slow to Listen ©Haylie’s Music 2024. Song link and column below. Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #929

September 3, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Slow to Listen    

By Bob Walters

“Take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry. For man’s anger does not bring about the righteousness of life that God desires.” – James 1:19-20

Anybody out there a little angry these days?  Anybody’s heart a little hard regarding politics, culture, public insincerities, and malignant media misdirection?

Take a worthwhile one minute and thirty one seconds (1:31), and listen to this song: LINK (also @hayliesings).

That’s Haylie Allcott, daughter of my Kokomo (Ind.) High School classmate Julie Black (then Julie Foster, KHS 1972) who has been married all these years to Gary Black.  Gary is the recently retired long-time pastor of Clayton (Ind.) Christian Church (1988-2023), where Julie served as its angelic-voiced worship pastor. It is clear Haylie picked up the family Holy Spirit talent and ran on ahead with it.  

Haylie’s song Slow to Listen hit me in the heart.  Yes, it’s more politics than worship, but I could barely speak after the first couple of times I heard the song. 

Mea culpa. That’s me she’s singing about.

Shift the narrative to Jerusalem two thousand years ago when religion and politics were blood sports.  Don’t you wonder how Jesus knew when to speak and act, not to speak and act, and always knew the truth clearly and distinctly from the lies?

Well, no, you don’t wonder, because He was Jesus.  In our current American political environment, I’ve discovered I’m not very good at listening first.  Though, in fairness, it’s not like I’m the only one committing that sin. I pray for grace and mercy.

Focused now more on Jesus, the church, religion, and doctrine, I’ve grown to some station of maturity in what I do and do not let upset me. Jesus always recognized truth because He was truth and is truth.  Life’s pedantic passions like politics can get the better of any of us, but Haylie’s message is one I deeply appreciate her sharing.  It is a right and timely – and beautiful – piece of artistic expression. It paints my heartache.

I’m not ashamed to say I’m actually OK with the political side I’m on in our very divided country.  But I am willing to take a deep breath and ask … always ask … “Am I the problem?” With the exception of Jesus, it’s the people who will never ask, “Am I the problem?” who most consistently are the problem.  But I’ll not apologize for freedom.

Jesus didn’t have to wonder if He was the problem, because He knew He was the solution to every problem humans have.  Our challenge in this life – well, one of the challenges anyway – is to seek truth, not the correct public opinion.  Haylie’s line “how quickly I forget that you are human” reveals perhaps the greatest of our modern sins.

I love the book of James for its Proverbs-like simplicity of advice written to Jesus-believing Jews scattered far from Jerusalem.  James also said “repent!” by which he meant, “Think about Christian faith, not Jewish Law.” It’s how I want to think.

I’m neither a musician nor a music critic, but I do sense the angelic in Haylie’s Christian heart, musical phrasing, talent, and poetic sensibility.

Unbeknownst to me, Julie – until a couple years ago we hadn’t spoken in 50 years – long ago at Milligan College became friends with Paul Blowers and then also with his dad, beloved East 91^st Street Christian Church minister – and my Christian writing mentor – Russ Blowers. That history combines to make the music even sweeter.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) doesn’t doubt his political positions, but could work on his charity and kindness. BTW, E91 Church celebrates 100 years this month (LINK).

Credits: Slow to Listen ©Haylie’s Music 2024, also @hayliesings

(Special P.S. to our high school peeps: Haylie sounds – and looks – just like her mom.)