Everyone knows you don't talk about politics and religion. But I've never been a big fan for agreeing with what everyone knows, so here's a blog about both.
I've noticed in my post-college years more and more young, evangelical Christians who are NOT, by any means, Republican. In fact, many of them resent the fact that the Republican party, with often very un-Christian actions and views, claims the name and votes of their religion. These young evangelical Christians are less concerned about pro-life and anti-gay marriage stances than about issues of social justice and poverty relief, among others.
I foresee two possibilities for the future of the Republican party as this group grows, both in numbers and age.
1. The Republican party may, within a generation or two, no longer be able to count so strongly on the evangelical vote as more and more of these young evangelicals become politically and socially active.
2. On the other hand, this group consists primarily of young, single or recently married folks. In other words, people who don't have a lot of net worth or family to protect and provide for. It could be that as they develop wealth and families, they begin to fear the loss of these things, and will find themselves voting more in line with the party that claims to protect these things.
What about you? Have you experienced this apparent growth of more liberally minded Evangelical Christians? Are you one of them? Do you think my characterization is fair? What aspects of your faith inform your politics?
Are you a more "traditional" evangelical Christian who votes Republican? What aspects of your faith inform your politics? Do you think my characterization of you is fair?
Why might it be a good thing for more liberally minded evangelicals to increase in number? Why might it be a bad thing? Why might it be a good thing for evangelicals to continue their support of the Republican party? Why might it be a bad thing?
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Creating Languages
Every so often, it strikes again - that quiet, persistent urge to exercise what Tolkien called the "Secret Vice". It started, as so many such things do, in the days of my no-social-life-outside-of-school adolescence. I would lock myself in my room and go through page after page of titillating material. I was creating my own language.
Inspired by the example of J.R.R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings trilogy had by then become my favorite novel, and by that exotic, tempting leather-bound copy of Latin Grammar I had found and perused at my great-aunt's, I entered innocently into the world of toying with powerful forces I had yet to understand. But they had begun their work of slow seduction, and it wouldn't be long before I became more machine than man, bent on galactic domination...well, perhaps that's an exaggeration. Nonetheless, I had found my calling.
What impressed me about my first introduction to Latin, from that battered book on my great-aunt's shelf, was that here was a language which expressed perfectly well with suffixes what we had to use often clunky permutations of word order to say. I wondered, could there be still another way to express the relationships between words in a sentence? And while we were at it, what about the sounds of a language? These were the two revelations that provided the basic structure of my language, which I originally called Kirkian, from my middle name, eventually settling on a name from within the language, Paijodd, the "high speech".
I wondered if it were possible to use a completely new and different way of defining the relationships between different words. I made it so by deciding that nouns would have a different form to show whether they were related to other nouns or to verbs. There would be suffixes that could be added to these basic forms to specify the relationships further. In this way, a noun inflected to show relationship to the verb could cover all the basic functions (subject, object, indirect object, etc.), and even take on some adverbial meanings. On the other hand, a noun inflected to show relationship to other nouns could show adjectival meanings, possession, or simply form compound words.
The different forms for these nouns are based on the other part that fascinated me: sounds. I thought it would be neat if consonants with the same place of articulation (like b, p, v, and f, for example) alternated their manners of articulation (that is, b means something different than p) to indicate different meanings or grammatical functions. So that's how it works in Paijodd. Final consonants change to indicate different meanings or relationships.
Fricatives (like v and f), for example, indicate plurals. A voiced consonant (such as b, singular, and v, plural) indicates that the noun is related to the verb, while the remaining two (unvoiced - p and f) consonants indicate that the noun is related to other nouns.
There's one more aspect of sound that fascinated me, though: vowels. I always liked English irregular verbs like run, which changes its vowel in the past tense, to ran, so I wanted something of that in Paijodd. To that end, it is not only final consonants that indicate the noun's relationship to its verb, but the vowels in the final syllable of the word as well. To create rules for this, I arranged the possible vowels in Paijodd into a hierarchy. In noun base forms, the vowel moves down in the hierarchy to indicate relationship to a verb, or stays the same as the base form to indicate relationship to another noun.
To make this all a little bit clearer, let's look at an example. Take the word sabb, which means "war". The two forms would be:
seb- = related to a verb, and
sap- = related to a noun.
seb- shows the vowel e, which is below a in the hierarchy I devised, and the voiced final consonant b. Together these sounds show that this word is related to the verb.
sap- on the other hand, shows the original vowel, a, unchanged from the base form, sabb, and the unvoiced consonant p, which IS changed from the base form, together indicating this word's relationship to other nouns.
To these would be added suffixes making the precise relationship with the other part of speech a little clearer. To round out our example, let's just take the suffix -ía, which has a meaning like with or of. Thus, it can express how someone did something in the verb-related form: Sebía sem eós, "He came with war" (in order to make war or by making war). Further, in the noun-related form, it can show possession: Sapía égg, "the war's end".
I could outline the entire grammar, of course, but this is just a taste of it, and only meant to explain which aspects fascinated me about the prospect of creating a language and why. For me, it was primarily the notion of creating an entirely new and unique way to express the relationships between words in a phrase or sentence, as well as the use of different but related sounds to change the meaning or function of a word. It was these titillating bits of the language-that-could-be that knocked me off of my feet, and kept me locked in my room for hours, afraid that someone might walk in on me any minute!
Inspired by the example of J.R.R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings trilogy had by then become my favorite novel, and by that exotic, tempting leather-bound copy of Latin Grammar I had found and perused at my great-aunt's, I entered innocently into the world of toying with powerful forces I had yet to understand. But they had begun their work of slow seduction, and it wouldn't be long before I became more machine than man, bent on galactic domination...well, perhaps that's an exaggeration. Nonetheless, I had found my calling.
What impressed me about my first introduction to Latin, from that battered book on my great-aunt's shelf, was that here was a language which expressed perfectly well with suffixes what we had to use often clunky permutations of word order to say. I wondered, could there be still another way to express the relationships between words in a sentence? And while we were at it, what about the sounds of a language? These were the two revelations that provided the basic structure of my language, which I originally called Kirkian, from my middle name, eventually settling on a name from within the language, Paijodd, the "high speech".
I wondered if it were possible to use a completely new and different way of defining the relationships between different words. I made it so by deciding that nouns would have a different form to show whether they were related to other nouns or to verbs. There would be suffixes that could be added to these basic forms to specify the relationships further. In this way, a noun inflected to show relationship to the verb could cover all the basic functions (subject, object, indirect object, etc.), and even take on some adverbial meanings. On the other hand, a noun inflected to show relationship to other nouns could show adjectival meanings, possession, or simply form compound words.
The different forms for these nouns are based on the other part that fascinated me: sounds. I thought it would be neat if consonants with the same place of articulation (like b, p, v, and f, for example) alternated their manners of articulation (that is, b means something different than p) to indicate different meanings or grammatical functions. So that's how it works in Paijodd. Final consonants change to indicate different meanings or relationships.
Fricatives (like v and f), for example, indicate plurals. A voiced consonant (such as b, singular, and v, plural) indicates that the noun is related to the verb, while the remaining two (unvoiced - p and f) consonants indicate that the noun is related to other nouns.
There's one more aspect of sound that fascinated me, though: vowels. I always liked English irregular verbs like run, which changes its vowel in the past tense, to ran, so I wanted something of that in Paijodd. To that end, it is not only final consonants that indicate the noun's relationship to its verb, but the vowels in the final syllable of the word as well. To create rules for this, I arranged the possible vowels in Paijodd into a hierarchy. In noun base forms, the vowel moves down in the hierarchy to indicate relationship to a verb, or stays the same as the base form to indicate relationship to another noun.
To make this all a little bit clearer, let's look at an example. Take the word sabb, which means "war". The two forms would be:
seb- = related to a verb, and
sap- = related to a noun.
seb- shows the vowel e, which is below a in the hierarchy I devised, and the voiced final consonant b. Together these sounds show that this word is related to the verb.
sap- on the other hand, shows the original vowel, a, unchanged from the base form, sabb, and the unvoiced consonant p, which IS changed from the base form, together indicating this word's relationship to other nouns.
To these would be added suffixes making the precise relationship with the other part of speech a little clearer. To round out our example, let's just take the suffix -ía, which has a meaning like with or of. Thus, it can express how someone did something in the verb-related form: Sebía sem eós, "He came with war" (in order to make war or by making war). Further, in the noun-related form, it can show possession: Sapía égg, "the war's end".
I could outline the entire grammar, of course, but this is just a taste of it, and only meant to explain which aspects fascinated me about the prospect of creating a language and why. For me, it was primarily the notion of creating an entirely new and unique way to express the relationships between words in a phrase or sentence, as well as the use of different but related sounds to change the meaning or function of a word. It was these titillating bits of the language-that-could-be that knocked me off of my feet, and kept me locked in my room for hours, afraid that someone might walk in on me any minute!
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Why am I a Christian, anyway?
Discussing my thoughts about Dawkins arguments in my last post naturally begs this question. And I would like to share briefly how I became a Christian, and more importantly, what keeps me going, in spite of the obvious challenges that being of a curious, analytical mindset raises.
First, I became a Christian at the age of fourteen, or at least that's when I made it my own, and chose to follow Christ for myself, not just because it was the way I had been raised. I made the decision at a moment of crisis when, confronted with ideas from other religions, I realized I needed to decide what I believed. Although I respected the idea of constant searching for truth from Eastern traditions, I felt that Christianity had the most cohesive argument of any religious system I was familiar with at the time: it explains where we all came from, why things don't seem right in the world, and what the God who created it all has done and is doing about it, and what will become of everything in the end.
Created by a Holy, just God in His image, man sinned and was separated from the creator. Man's sin is so pervasive that he cannot earn forgiveness on His own, because God's holiness and justice cannot be attained by man. Yet God is also loving and merciful, so He sent Christ to die on the cross, thereby satisfying the justice of God, while allowing Him to extend His love and mercy to man. But man must accept it in order to escape the justice of God.
That still makes more sense to me than any other belief system out there. But what really keeps me going in Christ is the growth I've experienced in all the years since, the experience of living the Christian life. Thinking Christianly about world issues, consttantly seeking to grow and learn more, and to deepen my relationship with God through Christ, as well as to take action and actively love people as Christ loves them are all the reasons I still find Christianity to be the most satsifying, freeing, and enjoyable experience of faith.
First, I became a Christian at the age of fourteen, or at least that's when I made it my own, and chose to follow Christ for myself, not just because it was the way I had been raised. I made the decision at a moment of crisis when, confronted with ideas from other religions, I realized I needed to decide what I believed. Although I respected the idea of constant searching for truth from Eastern traditions, I felt that Christianity had the most cohesive argument of any religious system I was familiar with at the time: it explains where we all came from, why things don't seem right in the world, and what the God who created it all has done and is doing about it, and what will become of everything in the end.
Created by a Holy, just God in His image, man sinned and was separated from the creator. Man's sin is so pervasive that he cannot earn forgiveness on His own, because God's holiness and justice cannot be attained by man. Yet God is also loving and merciful, so He sent Christ to die on the cross, thereby satisfying the justice of God, while allowing Him to extend His love and mercy to man. But man must accept it in order to escape the justice of God.
That still makes more sense to me than any other belief system out there. But what really keeps me going in Christ is the growth I've experienced in all the years since, the experience of living the Christian life. Thinking Christianly about world issues, consttantly seeking to grow and learn more, and to deepen my relationship with God through Christ, as well as to take action and actively love people as Christ loves them are all the reasons I still find Christianity to be the most satsifying, freeing, and enjoyable experience of faith.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Response to Dawkins
Dawkins spends a great deal of time early in The God Delusion explaining the concept of NOMA, that is, “non-overlapping magisteria.” This simply means the classic argument that science and religion are two different things, addressing completely different issues. I agree with Dawkins that this is not actually true. The interests of science and religion often overlap and address the same issues, not the least of which being the whole question of how and why we got here in the first place. But Dawkins argument against the NOMA position is simply that religious propositions can and should be testable by science.
He uses the example of an experiment on the effects of prayer, conducted by the Templeton Foundation, which found that there was no measurable difference between patients who were prayed for and those who weren’t – at least if they didn’t know they were being prayed for. The ones who knew they were being prayed for actually did worse, perhaps, Dawkins muses, due to a sort of “performance anxiety”. Dawkins argues that this is one way that a specific claim of religion could be tested, and was. Therefore, he believes, science can be used to prove or disprove religion, or at least certain claims thereof.
But what he fails to understand in criticizing this position is the reason it is invoked by people of faith. He assumes, due to his own bias as an intellectual and a scientist, that NOMA is intended to keep science from messing with the sacred, probably because as soon as it does it will blow it out of the water. So fear, in Dawkins view, is the chief motivation. He is especially cheesed because whenever something comes to light as a result of scientific inquiry that seems to support religious positions, the religious seize on it and trumpet it far and wide in the hopes of proving themselves right.
I see it differently. I think the NOMA position is rather an acknowledgement that there is a fundamentally different and opposite assumption at the basis of each position. Science asserts that human reason is capable of understanding everything (at least eventually), while religion asserts that human reason can’t. Although I have yet to finish the book, Dawkins keeps coming back to this point, and it really is that simple: science emphasizes reason, religion emphasizes faith. I found this thoroughly disappointing. If I wanted such an uncomplicated argument, I could have gone to any fundamentalist church – there’s at least five within walking distance of where I sit this very moment, thanks to my home being in the oh so wonderful South.
You see, ultimately I disagree with the NOMA position precisely because I don’t think it’s true that science and religion never overlap. And in spite of his attempt to say that NOMA is untenable, when we find out the main point of his argument, Dawkins ultimately ends up using it himself, if it can be restated in the way I have restated it: that science trusts in reason and religion trusts in faith. So Dawkins cannot truly undermine the position of faith because he cannot understand it.
He fails to understand it because of all the abuses and failures of religion that he sees. And they are many, nor is he unjustified in pointing them out. He argues that the “God hypothesis” is ultimately no more than an excuse for intellectual laziness, as it encourages people to be content with lack of understanding. This, unfortunately, is true, but it seems to me a horribly un-Christian position to take, for reasons I will explain below. Dawkins also, inevitably, points out the horrors that have been carried out in the name of religion, which, also unfortunately, are many. But again, these are abuses of religion, and by no means endorsed by God.
Rather than taking the NOMA position, I advocate a position of overlapping but distinct magisteria. That is, while science and religion can and should address the same issues, they do so in entirely different ways, and based on entirely different, opposing assumptions, as we have seen. This is a position the religious can more easily take than the scientist, since they have no problem with co-existing but mutually exclusive phenomenon.
Here’s how this point-of-view would work, on a practical level. Christians would pursue the sciences with just as much skepticism and objectivism as the staunchest atheists in the field, even if that means operating under or even endeavoring to prove evolutionary theory. They would do so for the most religious of reasons: bringing glory to God. You see, God gave us our human intellects for the same reason He fashioned the heavens and the earth and administers all the laws thereof: to bring glory to His name. The chief way He does that, and the pinnacle of all creation, its very reason for existence is to bring humanity into relationship with Him. Thus, the intellect exists chiefly for us to contemplate the profound mystery of God. One way we do that is by contemplating His creation, and it is indeed, as Dawkins would argue, lazy and in fact irresponsible for us to say “God did it” and thereby stop asking questions about it. That does not challenge us to grow closer to God, nor to understand Him at a deeper level. It leaves our relationship with Him stagnant, when it ought to be dynamic.
He uses the example of an experiment on the effects of prayer, conducted by the Templeton Foundation, which found that there was no measurable difference between patients who were prayed for and those who weren’t – at least if they didn’t know they were being prayed for. The ones who knew they were being prayed for actually did worse, perhaps, Dawkins muses, due to a sort of “performance anxiety”. Dawkins argues that this is one way that a specific claim of religion could be tested, and was. Therefore, he believes, science can be used to prove or disprove religion, or at least certain claims thereof.
But what he fails to understand in criticizing this position is the reason it is invoked by people of faith. He assumes, due to his own bias as an intellectual and a scientist, that NOMA is intended to keep science from messing with the sacred, probably because as soon as it does it will blow it out of the water. So fear, in Dawkins view, is the chief motivation. He is especially cheesed because whenever something comes to light as a result of scientific inquiry that seems to support religious positions, the religious seize on it and trumpet it far and wide in the hopes of proving themselves right.
I see it differently. I think the NOMA position is rather an acknowledgement that there is a fundamentally different and opposite assumption at the basis of each position. Science asserts that human reason is capable of understanding everything (at least eventually), while religion asserts that human reason can’t. Although I have yet to finish the book, Dawkins keeps coming back to this point, and it really is that simple: science emphasizes reason, religion emphasizes faith. I found this thoroughly disappointing. If I wanted such an uncomplicated argument, I could have gone to any fundamentalist church – there’s at least five within walking distance of where I sit this very moment, thanks to my home being in the oh so wonderful South.
You see, ultimately I disagree with the NOMA position precisely because I don’t think it’s true that science and religion never overlap. And in spite of his attempt to say that NOMA is untenable, when we find out the main point of his argument, Dawkins ultimately ends up using it himself, if it can be restated in the way I have restated it: that science trusts in reason and religion trusts in faith. So Dawkins cannot truly undermine the position of faith because he cannot understand it.
He fails to understand it because of all the abuses and failures of religion that he sees. And they are many, nor is he unjustified in pointing them out. He argues that the “God hypothesis” is ultimately no more than an excuse for intellectual laziness, as it encourages people to be content with lack of understanding. This, unfortunately, is true, but it seems to me a horribly un-Christian position to take, for reasons I will explain below. Dawkins also, inevitably, points out the horrors that have been carried out in the name of religion, which, also unfortunately, are many. But again, these are abuses of religion, and by no means endorsed by God.
Rather than taking the NOMA position, I advocate a position of overlapping but distinct magisteria. That is, while science and religion can and should address the same issues, they do so in entirely different ways, and based on entirely different, opposing assumptions, as we have seen. This is a position the religious can more easily take than the scientist, since they have no problem with co-existing but mutually exclusive phenomenon.
Here’s how this point-of-view would work, on a practical level. Christians would pursue the sciences with just as much skepticism and objectivism as the staunchest atheists in the field, even if that means operating under or even endeavoring to prove evolutionary theory. They would do so for the most religious of reasons: bringing glory to God. You see, God gave us our human intellects for the same reason He fashioned the heavens and the earth and administers all the laws thereof: to bring glory to His name. The chief way He does that, and the pinnacle of all creation, its very reason for existence is to bring humanity into relationship with Him. Thus, the intellect exists chiefly for us to contemplate the profound mystery of God. One way we do that is by contemplating His creation, and it is indeed, as Dawkins would argue, lazy and in fact irresponsible for us to say “God did it” and thereby stop asking questions about it. That does not challenge us to grow closer to God, nor to understand Him at a deeper level. It leaves our relationship with Him stagnant, when it ought to be dynamic.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Reflections, Part One: Islam and Christianity
With the inflammatory actions of a small, but vehement local church, I think this topic is vitally important. What is the reality of Islam and the beliefs of its practitioners, and how do they compare to Christianity and the words of the Bible? That's what I hope to answer here.
God
From my year spent in Turkey, one thing I learned about Islam is the very high view they have of God. Part of the argument against God being incarnate in Jesus Christ is that God is too holy, too far above mankind to lower Himself to become one of us. But there is a profound irony in this high view of God, which I will expound upon in the section on salvation. On the topic of Jesus unity with God, the Bible says many things, including the words of Christ Himself:
Jesus says:
John 10:30 “I and the Father are one.”
John 14:9 “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”
And in Paul's epistle to the Phillipians, we read:
2:5-7 “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”
Prayer
The Muslim conception of prayer is vastly different from the Protestant Christian understanding. It is repetition, and must be done in the same way, every time. When I went to the doctor, I chatted with one of the nurses for a while, who asked if I was a Christian. He said it must be hard for me, since there were no churches in the city, so I couldn't go anywhere to pray. As a Protestant, I have no need to go to a church to pray. I can pray anywhere and everywhere I am, and at any time of the day, not only the five times prescribed by Islam.
More importantly, the nature of prayer for us as Christians is actual communication with God. It is the chance to offer worship and thanks to God, and bring my problems or the concerns of life to Him. And though I have never physically heard Him speak, He does answer our prayers, whether through His word, His people, or His provision for the needs we bring to Him.
For examples of what prayer is, we can look to the prayers of Christ Himself, recorded in all four of the Gospels. Any look at these will show that prayer is an intimate, personal encounter with God. And the entirety of the Psalms, long before the incarnation of Christ, are examples that demonstrate the same thing. David, in the Psalms, was sometimes brutally honest with God, even accusing Him of failing to fulfill His promises. And though we can pray the Psalms or the prayers of Christ, and many of us do, those are not our only options. Prayer is a way of drawing close and growing intimate with God, something it does not do in Islam, if I understand it correctly. But of course, how can one be intimate with a God who is so far above and beyond mankind?
Salvation
Here is where the irony of Islam's high view of God, which I alluded to earlier, comes in. Muslims and Christians actually agree that God is great, and beyond human comprehension, even, if things worked the way they should, beyond human access. And yet Islam maintains that simply performing the actions that God revealed through the Quran – profession of faith, fasting, prayer five times a day, charity, and pilgrimage. But if God is so high and great, beyond human access, how can these simple actions impress Him?
Christians say they can't. For us, even the much more elaborate system of laws laid out in the first five books of the Old Testament are not enough. Even a person who kept every detail of these laws to the letter would still deserve damnation. God is too Holy to be impressed by human actions, no matter how well-intentioned. As Paul writes:
Romans 3: 20 “For by the works of the law no human being will be justified in His sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.”
In fact, he argues that all the laws in the Old Testament do is condemn us the more!
Romans 4:15 “For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression.”
We cannot be saved by following the law, but only by the sacrifice of Jesus. In the same section of Romans, Paul argues that it was not Abraham's following the laws of God, but His faith that made Him righteous.
Romans 4:13 “For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith.
That it is only by faith in Christ is further made clear in Paul's letter to the Ephesians:
Ephesians 2:8-9 “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
Islam still seeks salvation through faith. It can be said of every religion (including Christianity at times in the lives of individual believers as well as particular types of it), that religion is humanity's attempt to reach God. But only bible-based Christianity argues that instead, God has come to reach man.
Community
Finally, on the topic of community of believers, my experience with Islam remained sadly silent. Certainly, believers form communities whatever their religion, and the doing of good works necessarily involves community. However, I have seen no evidence that the concept of community is inherent in the faith.
It is in Christianity. Ephesians is again an excellent source to point to in examining the role of the community in Christianity. It is full of metaphors of the body of Christ, and even suggests that Jesus' work of salvation was meant to draw us into a community. I think it is clear from the Bible that God's plan of salvation from the beginning of time was to save a people for Himself – in other words, to redeem a community of believers in Him. Jesus summed up the commands of God from the Old Testament in just two:
Matthew 22: 37 “And He said to them, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”
I think Islam would have no problem at all with the first one, given their appropriately high view of God. And though they would likely not say the second one is wrong, I know of nothing in their own writings that compares. It seems that, for a Muslim, the most important thing is one's own relationship with God.
But Christianity was never meant to be experienced alone. The work of salvation itself is a community affair.
So, there are similarities in the two religions, particularly in the understanding of how great our God is. But really, I have to argue that Christianity has an even higher view of God's greatness: if only the work of God Himself (incarnate in Christ Jesus) is enough to earn God's favor, while all works of man are “like filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6), Christians seem to believe that God is even higher and more beyond the access of humanity than Muslims. This only makes the access purchased through Jesus' blood the sweeter and more intimate, allowing prayer to be so much more than mere repetition. And it is an integral part of the Christian experience that we live in a community of believers. That is in fact the purpose of attending church. Not to recite meaningless prayers, nor even to experience the intimate prayer that only Jesus' death and resurrection permit to us. The church is where we go to connect to God through His people. We do that in part through prayer, yes, but also through collective worship, reading of the word, and just plain and simple fellowship – just hanging out with people who are as close as brothers and sisters because of our shared experience with the transforming power of Christ.
This is a fairly good summation of what I have learned from a face to face encounter with Islam. Feel free to comment, and especially is I've gotten something wrong, please correct me!
God
From my year spent in Turkey, one thing I learned about Islam is the very high view they have of God. Part of the argument against God being incarnate in Jesus Christ is that God is too holy, too far above mankind to lower Himself to become one of us. But there is a profound irony in this high view of God, which I will expound upon in the section on salvation. On the topic of Jesus unity with God, the Bible says many things, including the words of Christ Himself:
Jesus says:
John 10:30 “I and the Father are one.”
John 14:9 “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”
And in Paul's epistle to the Phillipians, we read:
2:5-7 “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made Himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”
Prayer
The Muslim conception of prayer is vastly different from the Protestant Christian understanding. It is repetition, and must be done in the same way, every time. When I went to the doctor, I chatted with one of the nurses for a while, who asked if I was a Christian. He said it must be hard for me, since there were no churches in the city, so I couldn't go anywhere to pray. As a Protestant, I have no need to go to a church to pray. I can pray anywhere and everywhere I am, and at any time of the day, not only the five times prescribed by Islam.
More importantly, the nature of prayer for us as Christians is actual communication with God. It is the chance to offer worship and thanks to God, and bring my problems or the concerns of life to Him. And though I have never physically heard Him speak, He does answer our prayers, whether through His word, His people, or His provision for the needs we bring to Him.
For examples of what prayer is, we can look to the prayers of Christ Himself, recorded in all four of the Gospels. Any look at these will show that prayer is an intimate, personal encounter with God. And the entirety of the Psalms, long before the incarnation of Christ, are examples that demonstrate the same thing. David, in the Psalms, was sometimes brutally honest with God, even accusing Him of failing to fulfill His promises. And though we can pray the Psalms or the prayers of Christ, and many of us do, those are not our only options. Prayer is a way of drawing close and growing intimate with God, something it does not do in Islam, if I understand it correctly. But of course, how can one be intimate with a God who is so far above and beyond mankind?
Salvation
Here is where the irony of Islam's high view of God, which I alluded to earlier, comes in. Muslims and Christians actually agree that God is great, and beyond human comprehension, even, if things worked the way they should, beyond human access. And yet Islam maintains that simply performing the actions that God revealed through the Quran – profession of faith, fasting, prayer five times a day, charity, and pilgrimage. But if God is so high and great, beyond human access, how can these simple actions impress Him?
Christians say they can't. For us, even the much more elaborate system of laws laid out in the first five books of the Old Testament are not enough. Even a person who kept every detail of these laws to the letter would still deserve damnation. God is too Holy to be impressed by human actions, no matter how well-intentioned. As Paul writes:
Romans 3: 20 “For by the works of the law no human being will be justified in His sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.”
In fact, he argues that all the laws in the Old Testament do is condemn us the more!
Romans 4:15 “For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression.”
We cannot be saved by following the law, but only by the sacrifice of Jesus. In the same section of Romans, Paul argues that it was not Abraham's following the laws of God, but His faith that made Him righteous.
Romans 4:13 “For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith.
That it is only by faith in Christ is further made clear in Paul's letter to the Ephesians:
Ephesians 2:8-9 “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
Islam still seeks salvation through faith. It can be said of every religion (including Christianity at times in the lives of individual believers as well as particular types of it), that religion is humanity's attempt to reach God. But only bible-based Christianity argues that instead, God has come to reach man.
Community
Finally, on the topic of community of believers, my experience with Islam remained sadly silent. Certainly, believers form communities whatever their religion, and the doing of good works necessarily involves community. However, I have seen no evidence that the concept of community is inherent in the faith.
It is in Christianity. Ephesians is again an excellent source to point to in examining the role of the community in Christianity. It is full of metaphors of the body of Christ, and even suggests that Jesus' work of salvation was meant to draw us into a community. I think it is clear from the Bible that God's plan of salvation from the beginning of time was to save a people for Himself – in other words, to redeem a community of believers in Him. Jesus summed up the commands of God from the Old Testament in just two:
Matthew 22: 37 “And He said to them, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”
I think Islam would have no problem at all with the first one, given their appropriately high view of God. And though they would likely not say the second one is wrong, I know of nothing in their own writings that compares. It seems that, for a Muslim, the most important thing is one's own relationship with God.
But Christianity was never meant to be experienced alone. The work of salvation itself is a community affair.
So, there are similarities in the two religions, particularly in the understanding of how great our God is. But really, I have to argue that Christianity has an even higher view of God's greatness: if only the work of God Himself (incarnate in Christ Jesus) is enough to earn God's favor, while all works of man are “like filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6), Christians seem to believe that God is even higher and more beyond the access of humanity than Muslims. This only makes the access purchased through Jesus' blood the sweeter and more intimate, allowing prayer to be so much more than mere repetition. And it is an integral part of the Christian experience that we live in a community of believers. That is in fact the purpose of attending church. Not to recite meaningless prayers, nor even to experience the intimate prayer that only Jesus' death and resurrection permit to us. The church is where we go to connect to God through His people. We do that in part through prayer, yes, but also through collective worship, reading of the word, and just plain and simple fellowship – just hanging out with people who are as close as brothers and sisters because of our shared experience with the transforming power of Christ.
This is a fairly good summation of what I have learned from a face to face encounter with Islam. Feel free to comment, and especially is I've gotten something wrong, please correct me!
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Top Ten Things I Will Miss About Turkey
10. Baklava
9. Music: Bağlama and guitar duos in every Teahouse.
8. The Bazaar
7. Buying dried apricots and figs from street vendors
6. The food!
5. The dancing
4. Çay
3. Travelling: Ancient, Classical, Byzantine and Ottoman ruins all over the place!
2. The language.
1. İnsanlar: My friends, co-workers, Ahmet the taxi driver, Ramazan and Suleyman the shopkeepers at the market, Mustafa one of their sons, and all the random people who come up to you to practice the six words of English they know!
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
One Last Trip
This past weekend I went with two of my co-workers to Mersin - or rather, Kız Kalesi, to be precise, a town near Mersin, named for the amazing castle floating out in the middle of the ocean a few yards from shore. The trip was amazing, and the timing of it couldn’t have been better, at two weeks before I leave the country. And I enjoyed the company of my friends Duygu and Selda.
We left at 1 AM Saturday morning, switched buses in Mersin, and arrived at about 7:00 AM I think. We slept until about 10, after the late night travel session, then spent the entire day at the beach. It was scorchingly hot and I got burned pretty bad, but it was sooooo relaxing and the water was the perfect temperature. I enjoyed the uniquely Turkish institutions of selling simit (a fresh baked roll of bread formed in a circle) as well as tea and coffee on the beach. The guys walk around with trays of simit or canteens of hot water with tea and instant coffee mix, which you can buy for about a lira each. Only in Turkey!
After dinner, we watched some of the world cup match that evening (Paraguay vs. Spain, Spain won), with the intention to go back out afterwards, but during the match, we all just fell asleep. We did get a chance to walk around in the evening before that, however, which was nice, but nothing out of the ordinary or notable happened. We did stop to buy magnets featuring aerial pictures of the castle, though.
On Sunday, along with one of the Zirve University staff folks, the head of security, in fact, who was also in town, joined us for a day long boat tour. This provided great views of the castle, swimming in coves, and a rather lively dance party on the boat. There was one cove in particular that had an awesome underwater cave on the other side of some overhanging rocks. You duck your head under and swim forward a few feet, and when you come back up for air, you’re inside an awesome cave, with the light from outside coming through an opening in the rock wall and bouncing off the water to reflect on the other walls. After that, we went back to our hotel, got showers, and met up with the security man, who gave us a ride home. On the way, we dropped off another passenger, who lived in Karamanmaraş, a city famous for its ice cream, which, in spite of it being after midnight, we made sure to sample. We arrived back in Gaziantep the same hour we had left - 1 AM.
Taking this trip at this time proved more perfect than I could have realized (especially since I had originally wanted to go two weeks earlier). But I’m now in my last two weeks in Turkey, finishing class this week with exams next week. And due to this trip, instead of thinking about all the negative things and the problems we’ve had with the administration’s decisions, the cultural differences in running a university, and the mundane grind of working every day, I’m thinking about the good things about this country: the amazing places like Kız Kalesi, the amazing people like Duygu, Selda, and Hacer Bey, and the memories I have of all the trips I’ve been able to take since being here. And that is a great attitude to have while finishing up. It’s even got me thinking that I have to come back to visit - but I don’t want to ever work here again, if I can help it!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)