Four months and ten days shy shy of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the word at this hour is that Osama Bin Laden has been killed and that the U.S. military (or CIA) is in possession of his body. I had to smile when I saw the tweet of the political humorist “IowaHawk”:

US has Osama’s body? Good, now we can pour the foundation for WTC II.

This is obviously good news, and for many reasons. Nevertheless, it’s a shame it took so long. It’s unfortunate, in my view, that George W. Bush didn’t get to announce this news before he left office. But it is a great blessing that this nation will not have to mark the tenth anniversary of the attacks on New York and Washington knowing that one of the key architects of those attacks is alive and at large.

And it is some consolation knowing that Bin Laden has surely lived a miserable existence over the last nine years–living in caves and underground bunkers and constantly on the move and scanning the skies in fear of a predator drone strike.

By the way, for understanding of the origins of Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood, the best source remains Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower.

Death ultimately puts every person’s faith and theology to the test. Today, Osama Bin Laden’s belief system has collided with the reality of eternity. I suspect it did not fare well.

I apologize for the extended radio silence. I’ve been so caught up in anticipation of the wedding that I fell off the grid altogether. And of course by “the wedding” I mean the NBA playoffs and the NFL draft.

It seems I did hear something about some wedding taking place in one of those formerly great, formerly Christian countries back East. I wondered out loud on Twitter this morning if there were going to be any pranks at the royal wedding reception. For example, Prince Harry could do that thing where you challenge the groom to remove the garter from his bride’s leg, blindfolded, but silently replace the bride with a grandmother. Ribald hilarity ensues. The bonus in this case would be that the grandmother is the Queen of the British Empire.

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Flew to Denver and back yesterday. The city looked beautiful with clean, clear air affording great views of a fresh dusting of snow crowning the mountains to the west.

The purpose of my visit was to meet with the wonderful folks at Marilyn Hickey Ministries. It was my first opportunity to meet the ministry’s namesake and I was delighted to do so. Marilyn will be 80 years old on July first, but she possesses more energy, vitality and drive than many people half her age. She co-hosts a daily television broadcast and still travels the world teaching and praying for thousands. In fact, she is heading to China in a few weeks and is scheduled to do a series of meetings in Pakistan this fall and can’t wait to get back there. Yes, Pakistan.

I remember a good friend of mine passing me Marilyn Hickey cassette tapes back in the early ’80s. Those teachings became a key part of my spiritual journey. So you can imagine how delighted I was to meet her yesterday. And how gratifying it was to find her every bit as gracious, warm and real as I had imagined she would be.

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In the past I’ve linked to a wonderful site that features the letterhead/stationery of famous people, companies and creative enterprises (see here and here). I popped in this evening just to see what was new. Here are a couple of my favorite new additions to the impressive collection at Letterheady.com.

Here is Charles Schulz personal letterhead from 1958:

This is Gene Autry’s personal stationery (1949):

And on a day in which British royalty is on the minds of many, here is the “mourning” stationery of Britain’s King Edward VIII (1936) who took the throne following the death of George V.

By the way, you may recall that Edward didn’t reign long. He abdicated the throne in order to marry the already-twice-married American socialite Wallace Simpson. It was a royal wedding of a different sort.

Let’s wind this up, shall we?

In the previous three posts (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) I have tried to lay the groundwork for a fresh way to think about what is widely called God’s “sovereignty.” I’m going to try to build on that foundation now, even though I’m strongly sympathetic to the comment made by regular reader “Ted” who, after the first post, wrote:

I’ve personally jettisoned the word “sovereign” from my theological vocabulary. It’s been misused so often and for so long that there is always the possibility of being misunderstood. It’s not even in the Bible, unless you happen to be reading a modern translation such as NIV or NLT that have added the word some 300 times.

The typical believer’s conception of God’s sovereignty lies somewhere between the powers displayed by Jim Carrey’s character in Bruce Almighty and Samantha Stevens on the old sitcom Bewitched.

But as I pointed out in the previous post, this view doesn’t account for Mankind’s God-granted freedom to choose, nor the self-limiting nature of God’s character in light of His legal grant of stewardship and dominion to Man. This creates that apparent paradox I mentioned before.

What’s more, those who believe that God is always getting His way and that every outcome has been predetermined by God, find themselves without much incentive to pray. (I’ll address this issue directly before I close.)

I believe the biblical path out of that paradox is to make a distinction between what I call God’s “Macro Sovereignty” and the concept of “Micro Sovereignty.” I’ll try to explain in fewer than 1,000 words.

The typical evangelical Christian on the street assumes God is behind every event in her day . . . That He is either the direct cause of the event or that He “allows” the event because it fits into His plan for her life. This is what I call “micro-sovereignty.”

This theology usually emerges after a tragedy. Well-intentioned believers offer it in the form of  comfort to themselves or others after something heartbreaking has happened:

“His ways are higher than our ways.”

“You just have to believe this happened for a reason.”

And my personal favorite:

“God wanted you to be able to minister to other people who have had this same horrific thing happen to them.”

Sound familiar? I trotted some version of these out myself on more than one occasion back in my younger days. Usually the recipient of this brand of comfort is too polite or grief-shocked to challenge that logic with something like:

“Hold on. So, God arranged for my kid to get hit by a drunk driver because He’s allowing other people’s kids to get hit by drunk drivers, too? But wait, He wouldn’t need me to minister to these grief-stricken parents if He didn’t “allow” those kids to be killed in the first place. Right? So… seriously… what the heck.”

There’s another logic problem confronted by holders of the micro-sovereignty paradigm:

Why pray? Seriously.

If God is getting His preferred outcome at the micro level every second of every day, what is the point of praying? Why did Jesus, after the disciples requested a clinic in effective praying, instruct them to pray: “Father . . . May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”?

Why would Jesus repeatedly say, “Ask the Father . . .” “Whatever you ask the Father in my name . . .” “Ask what you will . . .”?

Some micro-sovereignty-ists have attempted to come up with an answer to that question. As I heard a preacher on the radio say a few months ago: “Prayer doesn’t change God. It changes us.”

That sounds quite lofty and spiritual and profound when you first hear it. Then you think about the implications and it falls apart.

Of course, prayer doesn’t change God. That’s a red herring. The question is, does prayer change “things.”

This view is basically saying that prayer is the spiritual equivalent of running on a treadmill: You don’t actually get anywhere but it’s good for you.

An Alternative View

What if God’s sovereignty is the “macro” variety? What if God’s micro-sovereignty is limited . . .  by his grant of free will to Man; His delegation of legal stewardship rights and authority to Man; and most of all by his own righteousness and character.

As I suggested in the previous post, God is self-limited by His own character–His just-ness preventing Him from violating the spiritual legal structure upon which He framed the universe and placed Man within it.

Nevertheless, the Bible is clear that God is moving History (capital “H”) toward an end of His choosing. He has both foreknown and foreordained the way everything winds up. His intellect and power are so unimaginably vast that he can process the free choices of 7 billion human inhabitants, the effects of a fallen creation, and the activities of a rogue, outlaw enemy and still accomplish His plans and purposes in the earth and faithfully fulfill the promise of Romans 8:28 to every believer.

What a mighty, extraordinary God who can do that!

Adopting the paradigm I outlined above causes much of the paradoxical confusion and contradiction described in the previous three posts to evaporate. And it causes many previously mysterious passages of the Bible to suddenly make sense.

Why pray? Because God needs us to pray. Our asking God to move isn’t an empty or meaningless exercise. It opens legal/judicial windows through which He can move provision, power, and outcomes. It is the revelation behind Charles Wesley’s admission:

The longer I go in this faith, the more convinced I am that God does nothing except in response to believing prayer.

The Cornerstone of our Faith

God is all powerful but doesn’t care about the people of Japan, and therefore they’re suffering. Or, He does care about the people of Japan, but is not all powerful. Which one is it?

If you’ve hung with me through all four of these marathon blog posts, I suspect you know how I would respond to that challenge. I would say,

“Mr. Bashir, your use of the term “all powerful” indicates you have a common but cartoonish conception of God’s latitude to act in a fallen, broken world. But I can assure you that He cares desperately about the Japanese people. There’s no message in the earthquake and no lesson in the tsunami.”

God delivered His message on a barren hillside outside of Jerusalem roughly 2,000 years ago. Those with ears to hear, hear it say,

“Oh give thank to the Lord, for He is good. And His mercies endure forever.”

In two ridiculously long previous posts, (Part 1 and Part 2) I’ve written about the way tragedies such as the tsunami in Japan tend to generate a corresponding tidal wave of arm-chair theologizing about God’s sovereignty.

I won’t re-trample the ground I’ve already covered other than to quote something I said in the previous post about most people’s conception of God’s sovereignty:

This Hollywood view of God as having unlimited freedom of action on the earth and in History–the belief that everything is happening just as God has ordained right down to the granular level of the child molestations that are almost certainly taking place in various places around the planet as I write these words—is shared by most American Christians who simply haven’t thought too deeply about these questions.

To hear many Christians talk about God’s sovereignty, you get the impression that Romans 8:28 contains a period after the word things, i.e., “And we know that God causes all things.”

Of course, there is no period there. The verse says, “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” That’s something very different.

One of the unique characteristics of us humans is our capacity for cognitive dissonance–that is, the ability to hold two completely incompatible and conflicting beliefs simultaneously. Thus it shouldn’t surprise us to observe that most evangelical Christians will answer a robust “Yes” to both of the following questions:

Does God give humans free will . . . the ability to choose or reject God’s expressed will?

Does God’s “sovereignty” mean that “everything happens for a reason” and that God either causes or permits every event at every moment in every place on earth as part of His plan?

A little bit of logical thought will reveal that both propositions cannot possibly be true.

I’m convinced a flawed, simplistic view of God’s sovereignty is robbing believers of much of the motivation to pray and the ability to pray effectively. Even worse, it’s needlessly causing entire generations of people to dismiss Christianity’s message of a loving God who sent His Son to die for a sinful world. (See Martin Bashir’s question for Rob Bell in Part 1.)

I was a debater back in my college days and therefore know how to argue two different sides of a proposition. If pressed, I could easily cite scripture to support either one of the above questions.

On one hand, there are dozens Bible verses and stories that make explicit Man’s freedom to reject God’s will and go his own way. “Choose this day who you will serve . . .” Joshua challenged the Israelites. Jesus Himself said:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling. (Matthew 23:37)

On the other hand, many scriptures speak of God’s infinite power to produce His desired outcomes. He “declares the end before the beginning.” (Isaiah 46:10) Indeed, Paul devotes the entire ninth chapter of Romans–in the course of trying to help the church at Rome know how to think about the Jewish people–to declaring that God gets what He wants.

So which is it?

Yes.

I’m satisfied that a proper, biblical understanding of how things currently work in the universe can reconcile this seemingly irreconcilable dilemma. (And do so without requiring either cognitive dissonance or just throwing one’s hands up in the air and saying “It’s a paradox!”)

As I hinted in one of the previous posts, making sense of all this requires an understanding of three things:

1. Free Will (and God’s corresponding stewardship/dominion mandate to Man over Creation)

2. The Fall (of both Man and Creation)

3. God’s Self-Limiting Righteousness

It would take a book to completely unpack these three elements (and I may just write that book someday) but in short, the Genesis account shows us God legally (covenantally) delegating authority, rights and responsibilities to Man over the earth:

God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)

This is a delegation of stewardship authority accompanied by a dominion mandate.

This takes us to the second reality–The Fall–which subjected both Mankind and all of Nature to some pretty ugly effects. Since that day, lots of bad things have been happening on this planet. Many of those bad things are the product of evil choices made by fallen people. Other bad things are the result of a curse-wracked creation groaning for a form of redemption and restoration itself.

So WHY, after things got so horribly fouled up . . . God being God and all . . . did He not immediately jump in and hit the “Undo” button? Or the “Fix It” button? Or simply blow the whole thing up and start again? The answer lies in the third item on that list above–God’s Self-Limiting Righteousness.

God is holy, righteous and, above all, good. Given His character, He could not possibly create a universe built upon righteous law and principle and then toss all that aside when those laws got inconvenient. That’s something I’d do.

God, on the other hand, initiated a multi-thousand year plan to bring about the restoration and renewal of both Man and Nature (chronicled as the Bible’s “scarlet thread of redemption”.)

It was a plan that scrupulously followed the rules and laws established before the very beginning. It was a brilliant plan that didn’t violate God’s delegation of authority and dominion to Man.

There’s an old Philisophy 101 brain teaser that asks, “Can God make a rock so big, He can’t move it?”

The truth is, nothing can limit God except his own character. God is self-limited by His goodness and just-ness. That is why there is no period after the word “things” in Romans 8:28. God does not “cause all things.” But He is so smart, so powerful, so unimaginably creative, that in spite of all the bad things put in motion by our choices, an outlaw enemy, and a fallen creation, God still “causes all things to work together” for our good. He’s that smart.

I had hoped to finish this saga with this post. But I have a little more to share. I want to put all of this together and apply it to how we, God’s people, should approach prayer and deal with heartache.

But that will have to wait, for I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

{Read the fourth and final installment here.}

A swarm of socialists, anarchists, “students,” and random ne’er-do-wells took to the streets of London this week to smash, loot, burn and assault–all to express displeasure and general grumpiness about the British government’s attempts to restore some fiscal sanity and sustainability to the economy there.

Put simply, the British economic car is hurtling toward a cliff (as are most other national cars that have succumbed to creeping socialism and swelling entitlements over the last 50 years.) The current Tory government was elected by a majority of British voters to at least apply the brakes if not turn the car around. And in response to a tap on the brakes, the above-mentioned groups have responded as expected.

Yes, the violent anarchists are only a small subset of the teachers, firefighters, nurses (who in socialized Britain are government employees) who descended on the city in the hundreds of thousands. But they are all united in their profound wrong-headedness.

As with the riots in Greece, Spain and Italy over the last year–these protests serve to validate what conservatives and libertarians have been warning about for decades, going all the way back to Barry Goldwater and Bill Buckley in the ’60s and even earlier to Paul Harvey in the ’40s and ’50s.

(By the way, I know of a great book that brings you the timely wisdom of Paul Harvey plus his fascinating story–coming in softcover in June!)

Paul Harvey warned about a encouraging a sense of entitlement and fostering dependency on messianic government:

Well sir, when that early pioneer turned his eyes toward the West he didn’t demand that someone else look after him. He didn’t demand a free education. He didn’t demand a guaranteed rocking chair at eventide. He didn’t demand that somebody else take care of him if he got ill or got old.

There was an old-fashioned philosophy in those days that a man was supposed to provide for his own . . . and for his own future. He didn’t demand a maximum amount of money for a minimum amount of work. Nor did he expect pay for no work at all. Come to think of it, he didn’t demand anything.

That hard-handed pioneer just looked out there at the rolling plains stretching away to the tall green mountains, and then lifted his eyes to the blue skies and said, “Thank you, God . . . Now I can take it from here.”

That pioneer spirit isn’t dead in our country . . . it’s dormant, it’s been discredited in some circles, driven underground . . . but it isn’t dead. It’s just that a few seasons ago politicians, baiting their hooks with free barbecue and trading a Ponzi promise for votes, begin to tell us we don’t want opportunity anymore, we want security. We don’t want opportunity, they said, we want security. And they said it so often we came to believe them.

We wanted security. And they gave us chains. And we were “secure.”

Harvey wrote those words a few years after Harry Truman took over for FDR. Nevertheless, even FDR was opposed to public employee unions and “collective bargaining” for government workers.

All of which brings us to Wisconsin–where the very economic future of our nation is being fought out by proxy. In Madison, the rage is somewhat more controlled, but there has been enough union thuggery, muscle-flexing, intimidation attempts and even death threats against Republican legislators to make all the liberal hand-wringing about “civility” after a nut-case shot an Arizona congresswoman seem at once cynical and farcical.

When a critical mass of people in any society begin to believe they are entitled to certain levels of government largesse, and when a generation of citizens arise who have been trained to believe that government power can trump the laws of supply and demand–setting the prices of everything from bread to medical care–riots are inevitable.

In Europe, government regulation of business has almost made labor unions superfluous. The entire populous has come to adopt a union mentality. In Wisconsin and in other bankrupt states, the choice is being made as to whether to continue on the road to European decline, or to reverse course toward an American renaissance of pioneering spirit and self-reliance.

Update:  IowaHawk tweets:

Instead of ‘anarchists,’ call the London rioters what they are: shock troops for the Nanny State-Union Complex.

And:

Same message in London riots as in Madison. “Elections, shmelections. Keep forking it over or we burn the mother down.”

At the close of the post below titled Tragedy: The Mother of All Bad Theology, I wrote:

I believe this pervasive and flawed view of God’s sovereignty keeps most Christians from praying as often and as effectively as God intended. And I suspect it is turning a whole generation of Postmodern young people away from God.

In the time between writing those words and writing these, a video of MSNBC’s Martin Bashir interviewing Pastor/Author Rob Bell has gone viral on the interwebs. You may have heard buzz over the last few weeks about Bell’s just-released book Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.

Immediate controversy about the book served to generate tons of advance buzz. The publisher has to be thrilled. People who hadn’t read anything except the proposed title were discussing it or condemning it. Now that it’s out, it’s hovering at #3 among all books currently moving on Amazon.com.

I don’t intend to address the central controversy surrounding the book (at this time, anyway). I mention it only because the opening question Bashir asked Bell strikes at the heart of the what I do want to tackle:

Bashir frames a question that encapsulates the age-old “If God is good . . .” problem of evil thing.

Bashir says:

Before we talk about the book, just help us with this tragedy in Japan. Which of these is true.

God is all powerful but doesn’t care about the people of Japan, and therefore they’re suffering. Or, He does care about the people of Japan, but is not all powerful. Which one is it?

Here Bashir does a pretty clever job of concisely summarizing the logical conundrum that has plagued thinkers for centuries and, in recent years, caused hundreds of thousands of young people raised in Christian homes to abandon the faith of their parents.

As a parent of late-teens and twenty-somethings, I’ve heard my girls talk about numerous friends at their Christian school and Christian college who were questioning everything about their faith as a direct result of grappling with this “if God is sovereign”–“problem of evil” thing.

For decades, media mogul Ted Turner pointed to the slow, painful death of his sister when he was a boy as the justification for his agnosticism and hostility to Christianity. (In recent years he has softened his rhetoric and apologized.)

If There Is a Loving God . . .?

Nevertheless, an entire generation of postmodern individuals are traveling the same road of logic. They say, “You Christians tell me that God exists and that He loves all mankind. Have you looked around? Reconcile mass starvation, human trafficking, and tsunamis with your concept of God.”

As with Bashir’s question posed to Rob Bell, there is a certain logical tidiness to the question. The problem is that all logical constructs stand upon some presuppositions (i.e., assumptions, premises, or “givens”).

A logical argument can actually be air tight, but if only one of the assmuptions underlying it is false, sound logic leads you to a false conclusion. For example:

If one assumes that the earth is flat, it is quite logical to be nervous about sailing too far in one direction, lest one fall off the edge.That’s sound logic built upon a flawed assumption. The insidious thing about presuppositions is that they tend to remain buried in our worldview–unexamined and unquestioned.

The fact is, the very reason that we have liberals and conservatives; Republicans and Democrats; Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly; Jersey Shore and Jerseylicious–is not because half the population is irrational or crazy. In the vast majority of cases, two people who disagree are both reaching logical, reasonable, positions built upon differing, largely unexamined presuppositions they hold to be true.

The “Bruce Almighty” Model

Underlying the doubts of most postmodern skeptics is a key assumption about any being in the role of “God.” The assumption is that God gets exactly what He wants in every spot on earth in every second of every day. This is what Bashir meant when He used the term “all powerful.”

The vast majority of Americans–Christian and otherwise–assume the answer  is “Yes.” This is basically the American, pop culture, Hollywood sitcom concept of God–pulling all the strings, hands on all the levers, including the levers of human action and choice.

In the movie Bruce Almighty, Jim Carrey’s title character gets to become “God” for a couple of weeks. As a result, he finds himself with the power to make anything happen he desires, including the power to take control of a rival’s body and force him to make a fool of himself on camera.

This Hollywood view of God as having unlimited freedom of action on the earth and in History–the belief that everything is happening just as God has ordained right down to the granular level of the child molestations that are almost certainly taking place in various places around the planet as I write these words–is shared by most American Christians who simply haven’t thought too deeply about these questions.

We’re taught that God is “sovereign.” And, as the Bible makes it clear, He is. But most of us go on to define that sovereignty in the cartoonish Hollywood terms described above.

This view fails to properly build upon three fundamental presuppositions:

1. The Fall
2. Free Will
3. God’s Self-Limiting Character

In my humble view, the neo-Calvinists have a good handle on point one. And their Arminian brethren across the aisle have an important grasp on point two. But I haven’t heard anyone significant properly (in my view) articulate point three.

What does all that mean? I’ll explain in Part 3 of what is rapidly evolving into a dissertation (or perhaps a down-payment on my next book.)

{Read Part 3 here.}

Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds) says:

“Personally I think a WAITING PERIOD FOR AN ABORTION is no more reasonable than a waiting period to buy a gun.”

Not a surprising position for a libertarian. And I’m in the libertarian’s corner most of the time. But the difference in this case is that if you change your mind about buying a gun, you can always return it.

A gun can be confiscated if a crime is committed. It can be thrown away. Or sold. In other words, it’s a revocable decision. There is an undo button.

As millions of remorseful women can attest, there is no “Undo” button for an abortion.

As those who follow me on Twitter already know, I made a quick trip to the highlands of Central Mexico Friday morning–returning this afternoon.

The bougainvilleas are in full show-off mode. The jacaranda trees are still blooming purple. The air at the 6,000 ft. plateau that is the state of Guanajuato is clean and clear.

The project that takes me there must remain confidential but I can’t resist boasting that yesterday I enjoyed a grilled tuna steak (about an inch-and-a-half thick) that had recently been line caught off the coast of Mexico by some fishing buddy of my host named Barron Hilton (yes, that Barron Hilton.) Delicious.

I know I owe you Part II of the “Bad Theology” post below. Stand by. I’ll get to it shortly. (I know you’re beside yourself with expectancy. Take deep breaths and distract yourself with basketball.)

Each of Job’s friends had an elaborately constructed theological explanation for the epic crap storm they had just watched their friend go through. They argued their hypotheses eloquently. The presented them forcefully. But at the end of the book, we find God Almighty lining them up, verbally pulling their pants down, and drawing the word “LOSER” on their foreheads with a Sharpie.

God was apparently insufficiently impressed with their theological arguments.

From then until now, spiritual and/or religious folks have been irresistibly drawn to to making sense of tragedy (Mr. Moth, meet Prof. Flame. Flame . . . this is Moth. You two should get together.)

This is on my mind because it’s been a very tough week for a few people close to me and for about 127 million folks very far away.

Our pastor’s long-time administrative assistant died quite suddenly a few days ago. We’d known Judy for pretty much all of her nine-year tenure as the administrative hub of one of the fastest growing churches in America. In excellent health, she picked up a nasty strain of E.coli in something she ate. This led to a cascade of catastrophic health events that ended in her passing away in less than a week.

At pretty much the same time, a young man at my daughter’s high school, a senior, active in his church and a worship leader in his youth group, died after having spent a couple of months in a deep coma resulting from some sort of aneurysm.

Luke, like Judy, was a good person. Bad stuff happened to them. And as I write, bad stuff on a massive scale continues to happen in Japan.

Tragedy tends to bring out the armchair theologian in many. And I understand why. For one thing, it’s when we’re most likely to hear people impugning God’s character. We hear people uttering questions like “If there is, as you Christians claim, a benevolent God in charge of the universe, how is it that he allows things like this to happen?”

Or we hear others using the opportunity to reject our faith altogether. My daughter tells me several of her fellow students at her Christian school announced this week that they no longer believe in God because of what happened to Luke.

Now we like God. And we have chosen to align ourselves with His cause. And we want others to come over to the cause as well. So when people start talking trash about Him, we tend to rush to His defense.

On top of this is another very human tendency, rooted in our insecurities, to feel personally rejected when someone rejects the thing upon which we’ve built our entire lives.

Our reaction tends to be to rush in and passionately defend our choice by defending God. We can’t resist the urge to become God’s PR agent–explaining him and improving His image.

Of course, this requires addressing thorny theological issues like The Fall, the nature of God’s sovereignty and how it comports with Man’s free will. These are questions with which Christendom’s best minds have been grappling since the first century.

But faced with a doubter or a skeptic pointing to tragedy, few believers can resist rushing in to explain it all in two minutes or less.

Here’s the problem with all that. First of all, God is not insecure. His self-esteem is not fragile. And He’s been handling rejection with grace and patience for quite a long time now. Sometimes, when the doubters and fist shakers get really fierce and fiesty, God finds it amusing (See Psalm 2:1-2).

Furthermore, doubters and pointy-headed skeptics are rarely won over by intellectual arguments (although Paul attempted this at Mars Hill with mixed success.) The Bible makes it pretty clear that our primary weapons of persuasion are these:

Love. And Power.

Our trouble is that the brand of Christianity most of the American church displays right now is somewhat deficient in one or both of these commodities.

Finally, I think most Christians have a deeply flawed, overly-simplistic view of God’s sovereignty to begin with. Which means that when they go to explain tragedy to doubters and cranks, they simply don’t know what they’re talking about.

I believe this pervasive and flawed view of God’s sovereignty keeps most Christians from praying as often and as effectively as God intended. And I suspect it is turning a whole generation of Postmodern young people away from God.

“So Davey,” you’re probably saying, “enlighten us. Where has most of the Church gone wrong?”

Well, this post has run on long enough. So the answer, dear reader, must wait until my next post!

{Click here to read it!}

So, Mrs. Blather and the daughter unit have this show that they love to watch. Eventually they got me pulled into it too.

Castle is implausible but fun. The female NYC detective is, naturally, Vogue-cover beautiful. And for some reason, a crime novelist is allowed to be her partner and solve murders with her every week and will-they-or-won’t-they romantic tension carries everyone along.

So a couple of weeks ago a special two-episode story has a plot to set off a dirty bomb in Manhattan unfolding. The story line gives us some Muslim immigrants from a Middle Eastern country as suspects. But wait.  As it turns out, they’re only suspected because we’re all bigots and xenophobes.

Your actual bomb plotter turns out to be this guy:

He is ex-military. Special forces. And he and some of his buddies who served together in Afghanistan are going to set off this dirty bomb because, according to the words Castle’s writers put in his mouth, they are “patriots.”

Ironically, the same week that this episode aired, police in Lubbock, Texas uncovered a plot by a real guy who is working on building a real dirty bomb. It was this guy:

His name is Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari and he is an engineering student from Saudi Arabia.

So we have two worlds. The world of Hollywood writers in which the only terrorists are U.S. soldiers who speak of patriotism and honor. And the real world, the one you and I have to live in.

After watching this episode, I tweeted: “Is there a writer left in Hollywood with the courage to write a drama in which the would-be terrorist is Muslim?”

I think I know the answer.