Spirituality Column #380
February 25, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

I find it fascinating and comforting to learn how much intellectual horsepower has been dedicated to Christianity over the past 2,000 years.

It starts of course with Jesus Christ himself, moves on to disciples like Luke and John, to the Apostle Paul, proceeds to second century doctrinists like Origen and Tertullian, to Athanasius, to the church fathers east and west, to John Chrysostom, Augustine, Maximus and so many others.  The unbroken line of intellect and faith includes scholars, bishops, archbishops, Popes, emperors, rebels, monks, martyrs, philosophers, preachers, missionaries and so many others who have been loyal to the Trinity, the faith, the Bible, the Church, and the fellowship of all believers.

Today’s hip, modernist culture seems wholly unaware of the overwhelming intellectual wealth that tracks Christianity on a provable, consistent, faithful line back to the living, breathing days of Jesus.  The Bible in some quarters is mistakenly regarded as a discontinuous book that reaches over history to a legend of long ago, allowing us to define – culturally and politically – what we want Jesus to be today.

But Jesus Christ reaches straight through the heart of history.  His body and blood are as real today as when He was crucified, buried and resurrected.

Admittedly, it’s not been all smooth sailing.  Many religious figures through the years have made it difficult to enjoy the simplicity of Jesus because they have made such a muddle of trying to define Jesus.  Doctrines, dogmas, creeds, concepts, systems, legalisms, disciplines and liturgies have been created trying to define the undefinable – the living, loving, servant-hearted, death-defeating, God-glorifying eternal salvation that Jesus Christ brought to a fallen, groaning, dying world.

It’s easy for Christians to sweat the wrong details, stumbling over doctrines only to wind up worshiping or reviling a religious idea instead of focusing on the reality of Christ.  Are you Roman Catholic or Orthodox?  Protestant or Catholic?  Calvinist or Arminian?  Do you prostrate yourself in sin and shame, or praise God for His grace and love?  Do you prefer pipe organs or guitars?  Where do you stand on tribulation, end times and rapture?  Is Hell real?  Are abortion and gay marriage the church’s business?

The main thing above all is Jesus Christ.  But after offering a robust “Amen” to freedom in Christ, we’ll start a church-rattling Sunday school brawl over a concept, like whether we can lose our salvation.  We insist on definitions, but the Bible plainly says we can’t define God (Isaiah 55:8), and that innocent, uncomplicated faith in Christ is the key to God’s Kingdom (Matthew 18:1-4).

Christ himself – not a doctrine, concept, or rule – is our peace (Ephesians 2:14).

That’s a detail worth sweating.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) encourages knowing Jesus more than knowing doctrines.

Spirituality Column #379
February 18, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

Social media, with its unbridled global connectedness and two-way open road of mass-communicated random neural firings, had a birthday of sorts recently.

Facebook turned 10 years old.

After Mark Zuckerberg’s brainchild went live in 2004, Smartphone technology emerged broadening the reach and intensifying the frantic immediacy of several killer messaging apps.  Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and others put portable, global, creative and instantaneous connectedness at our fingertips 24/7/365.

A recent newspaper commentary surveyed the upsides and downsides of social media’s interpersonal and community communications explosion.  The writer concluded he is “optimistic that a connected humanity will find a way to uplift itself.”

That gave me pause.  We don’t need Facebook or “killer apps” to uplift humanity.  Jesus Christ did that 2,000 years ago.  And is still doing it, eternally.

In 2007 I wrote a column regarding community formation and faith (link: Big City, Big God Problem) citing an erudite piece in The Economist magazine (May 2007) reporting that for the first time in human history, fully half of the world’s population lived in large cities.  In 1900, large-city global population was just 13 percent. Now it’s beyond 50 percent.  It follows that people in closer proximity to each other would provide opportunities for spiritual communication, including productive religious proselytizing.

While that starts to make sense, The Economist report differs.  The observed tendency in dense, urban populations is that God typically is shuffled to the sidelines.  As more people live in closer proximity to each other, other priorities overtake religion as society’s cornerstone of community formation.  Things like arts and culture among the wealthy and surviving squalor among the poor replace divine worship.

God, on average, seems to do best one-on-one out in the country.

As much as we Christians want to evangelize and share the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ with our online neighbors, the noisy presence of constant, competing human communications distorts and displaces the personal mystery and wonder of God’s eternal love, Christ’s eternal sacrifice, and the Holy Spirit’s presence in our daily lives.  People tend to worship what they see and attend to the needs they feel.

The internet and social media, perhaps the greatest community formation technologies in human history, provide unprecedented access to Bibles, teaching, preaching, commentary, and everything else one could possibly need to learn about Christ.  But knowing about Christ isn’t the same as knowing Christ.  The overwhelming secularism of social media doesn’t secure connectedness in the Kingdom.

But I wonder: if Jesus had a Facebook page, would you friend him?  And as for Twitter, consider how many times Jesus commands, “Follow me.”

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) counts 21 “Follow me’s” in the ESV.  Jesus, though, requires more than a click.

Spirituality Column #378
February 11, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

Spirituality Column #377
February 4, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

"Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.” – G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1905

Almost 110 years ago Christian apologist and British essayist G.K. Chesterton whimsically railed against society in his book Heretics, pointing out that contemporary thought had most things backwards when it came to right and wrong.

Things we ought to know are right – the love of Christ, the sanctity of marriage, the innocence of children, the obligation of hard work, the personal responsibility of political freedom, the truth of the Bible, and reflecting the servant-hearted love of Christ in our dealings with others  – are declared wrong.  Heresy becomes orthodoxy, and vice versa.  Opposites attack the truth.

Chesterton’s England was overtaken by made-up morality of the moment put forth by the academic, economic, political, artistic and media elite.  Sound familiar?

Among the  great intellectual issues Chesterton described were the growing primacy of Darwin and Evolution displacing God’s Creation, the marginalization of the Church, the general disappearance of the population’s day to day common Christian faith, Marxism and the nascent menace of early communism, the precursive imperialist aspirations of Germany which would soon result in two world wars, and the “progressive” view of truth – much as it exists today – that believes true liberty means being free from the responsibility of concrete behavioral ideals.

Chesterton noted Henrik Ibsen’s maxim, “The Golden Rule is that there is no Golden Rule.”  We had a way of saying it in the 1960s: “If it feels good, do it.”

Here in America, things did change dramatically in the 1960s.  That decade saw the ouster of school prayer, ascendance of global communism, Viet Nam, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the broad emergence of “The Pill” contraceptive, civil rights tension, and a complete overhaul of popular music – the language of the times – on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.  The 1970s with legalized abortion, and then homosexual normalization over the decades, has us in a cultural place today Chesterton would easily recognize.

I don’t see where “Progressive thought” – the systematic lie of convenient and libertine personal preference favored over sovereign God’s enduring absolute truth – has helped mankind progress at all.  Progress for mankind was Jesus Christ on the Cross; that restored relationship with God.  The Old Testament tells us of God, Creation, and Humanity, and the New Testament tells us the truth of divine love, our sin, forgiveness in Christ, and the everlasting glory of God.

Society resists truth that glorifies eternal God and embraces fiction that glorifies temporal man.  No wonder the world seems so strange … still.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) remembers watching the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show Feb. 8, 1964, 50 years ago.

Spirituality Column #376
January 28, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

“You are cutting the wood against the grain, using the tool for a purpose it was not intended to serve.” – C.S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays

Lesser known than his renowned ability to explain Christianity is C.S. Lewis’s stature as one of the world’s first and great professors of English literature.

Prior to the 1900s plenty of literature existed – English and otherwise – but its study was not deemed worthy of the highest levels of academia.  Philosophy, law, theology and natural science had ruled the academy for centuries.  Literature was valued only as it might illuminate one of these more respectable disciplines.

That changed through the first half of the 1900s with Lewis at the forefront.  In 1942 Lewis wrote the still-definitive commentary on John Milton’s 17th century classic “Paradise Lost.”  A decade later, he wrote the definitive survey “16th Century English Literature.”  But his academic career was nearly derailed by his fame as a Christian apologist, publishing what his Oxford and later Cambridge literary colleagues dismissed as academically unserious “popular books.”

A brilliant student and then a philosophy and theology instructor at Oxford in the 1920s, Lewis (1899-1963) as a child had struggled through the early death of his mother and the distant, non-compassion of his father.  Then came the trauma of World War I trench warfare as a British soldier.  Though raised a pious Irish protestant, these challenges took their toll and Lewis slid into atheism.

It would be 1929 before Lewis came to Christ as, he famously said, the “most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England.”  After years of doubt, Lewis became intellectually overwhelmed and convicted that “God was God.”

Perhaps those years as a non-believer were key to Lewis gaining the faith and perception that would lead him to write the game-changing Christian descriptives Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, A Grief Observed, The Chronicles of Narnia, and several others.

Lewis wasn’t a Bible expositor.  He described the faith it took to understand the Bible in terms of the Creator God, the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the abiding of the Holy Spirit and the Trinity’s relationship both within itself and humanity.

While there is certainly great literature and poetry in the Bible, Lewis the expert in literature cautioned against isolating the Bible in the literary realm. He described the Bible as a religious book “so remorselessly and continuously sacred that it … repels the merely aesthetic (literary) approach.”

The Bible, Lewis observed, “demands to be taken on its own terms.”

And the Bible’s terms are God’s, which when properly read are not negotiable.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) found the Bible impossible to understand before coming to faith in Christ, the key that unlocks the Bible.

Spirituality Column #375
January 21, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters


But no.  Acceptable truth is relative truth, the province of smart folks – editors, professors, administrators, politicians, activists, entertainers, cultural icons, scientists – who find God’s existence unproven and God’s truth mere superstition.  They insist empirical knowledge generated in human brains supersedes faith and must command dominance over the dangerous, outdated, disproven machinations of the Bible.

This is the tyranny of the biblically uninformed, not the blessing of the intellectually superior.  This is the misdirection of those who see in the Bible faux stories, myths, and legends – untrue and entirely open to modern man’s most convenient application or denial.  This is the dark, cynical, mischievous insincerity of those who reinterpret social structures favorable to modern, self-serving thought, never seriously considering the possibility that God’s truth once remains God’s truth forever.

The Bible tells of branches and vines and fruit and the Kingdom of God.  Properly understood, John 15 makes it plain that separating ourselves and our truth from the Bible separates our entire society from God, from Jesus Christ, from the Holy Spirit, and from their holy, unwavering and unending trustworthiness.

The Bible’s stories, myths and legends reveal truth larger than mankind.  Always.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is floored when those who do not believe in the Bible are positioned in the media as experts on the Bible.  It’s a fool’s exercise, like pontificating on the baseball rulebook without ever witnessing a game.

Spirituality Column #374
January 14, 2014
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

I suppose I’m as politically and socially opinionated as anyone I know.

And I know some very opinionated folks.

But let’s explore how God’s truth is distinct from and superior to human opinion.

For starters, nothing frosts someone who has an opinion more than someone else who has the truth.  And nothing is more commonly troublesome in human relationships than confusing opinion with truth.  All kinds of religions are full of all kinds of people with all kinds of political and social opinions, and certainly all kinds of opinions about the religion itself.  Even non-religious folks have strident opinions about religion.

People form opinions based on available human information, which has the nettlesome short-coming of variable translation depending on a person’s viewpoint, experience, and temporal interest.  Plus, human information is always changing.  Moving target or not, we mistakenly think energetic and clever argument reliably pins down truth.  Hence we argue, often pointlessly, but with gusto nonetheless.

God’s information, on the other hand, does not change.  His truth is both the end of the argumentative line and the beginning of inarguable, eternal love.

The Christian faith starts with Jesus Christ being the truth that never ends.  He doesn’t merely tell the truth, He is the truth.  God is love, Jesus is the truth, and the Holy Spirit informs our souls.  One can legitimately harbor an opinion as to whether this is the best way to describe the Trinity, but that Jesus is God’s truth transcends opinion.

Jesus instructs us to worship God the Father in the truth (John 4:23) and that we will know the truth through His teaching (John 8:31).  Jesus the author of truth asserts that the truth will set us free (John 8:32), and tells us He is the truth (John 14:6).  Jesus prays by God’s truth (John 17:17), and constantly says, “I tell you the truth … .”

I tend to be in prima facia agreement with people who say religion is an opinion because there are so many human shadings to church life and faith doctrines.  It’s unavoidable that any church full up with human beings will be full up with opinions, while any church that is full up with God will be full up with truth.

Honestly, or perhaps I should say, in my opinion, that is a church we would rarely experience because that would be the exact church of the mind of Christ.  Humanity isn’t there yet.  But we go to church, pray often, read scripture and serve others in humility, all in order to encounter the only truth unhindered by earthly opinion.

And that is Jesus Christ.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) finds that airing one’s worldly opinions darkens one’s ability to illuminate Christ’s truth.