depravity

Unworthy Ministers of a Liberating Gospel

Posted on by Ryan Ellington

ChristCleansing

Christ cleansing a leper by Jean-Marie Melchior Doze, 1864.

Days come when I wake up in the morning and cannot talk myself into feeling worthy to lead any ministry in any capacity. Weeks of fighting hard against your own sinful habits and tendencies mean next to nothing to you in the hours and the days following a massive, messy collapse. Those are the moments in which you will want to give up – to throw your hands in the air and say, “I’ve always known I wasn’t cut out for this, and here is the proof.”

So you’ll probably do something incredibly unhealthy. If you’re like me, you’ll employ the fake-it-till-you-make-it method of dealing with your own unworthiness. Rather than allowing yourself to feel the weight of your sin and then allowing yourself to be healed by the grace of God, you will suppress both the pangs of crushing guilt and the peace of experiencing God’s ongoing forgiveness. Rather than offering yourself freshly to Jesus, you’ll ‘give God a few days to cool down’. And if you’re in any sort of leadership position in the Church, you’ll put on your best “I’m doing fine” face and carry on doing the work of God without the Spirit’s guidance.

I remember just how messed up I am every time I speak condescendingly to my girlfriend and watch the sense of security with me disappear from her eyes. It is crushing to realize that you are the kind of person that makes others feel unsafe. I remember just how not-holier-than-anybody I am every time I make the conscious decision to take the easy rather than the ethical course of action when nobody is watching. And if the conversations I’ve had with other believers are an accurate representation of the norm, everyone is like me.

Not everybody’s sins are the same, but everybody’s sins are equally crippling. Whether you’re a porn addict or an emotional terrorist or just kind of a jerk, your sins are crippling. And if, like me, you’re tasked with leading others in ministry on a regular basis, the crippling effects of your constant moral failure can eat you alive.

The lie that we believe, that dominates our lives, is that we are uniquely jacked up. Because we can only know other people to a certain degree, it’s an easy lie for the enemy to sell. While I can’t plumb the depths of anyone else’s depravity, I know my own far too well to trust myself with anything. And so it goes with everyone.

But the gospel poses an uncompromising challenge to the pervasive lie. Namely, that everyone, everywhere, is supremely, nauseatingly jacked up. If the Biblical narrative is true, then I can assume with confidence upon meeting anyone that somewhere beneath the human face they put on, a terrifying darkness is present. We just domesticate our actual-jacked-up-ness well. At our best, we are all one push away from collapsing back into utter debauchery.

Let me put it another way. Nobody is that well adjusted. Time and intimacy reveal the cracks in the asphalt of everyone, and all it takes is to look closely at someone for a moment to see how remarkably fragile they are. We have a threadbare righteousness.

That means you don’t have to feel like damaged goods when your actual-jacked-up-ness shows its ugly face. And if you’re someone tasked with leading others as a minister of the gospel, it should remind you that you’re leading a flock of jacked-up redeemed people as one after their own heart. You’re going to sin, and then you’re going to be numb for a while, and then you’re going to be hit like a train with the fact that you’re completely unqualified for the job of “spiritual guru”. In that moment, cling to that conviction. Because it’s true. Your real-life depravity completely disqualifies you from wearing the “spiritual guru” hat. But understand that it’s a joyous disqualification, because ‘spiritual gurus’ have nothing to offer people who are ‘crooked deep down’.

Instead, be a ‘wounded shepherd’, selling a story of good news for criminals like yourself.

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Time Isn’t The Key To Evolution, But Design May Be

Posted on by Ryan Ellington

Destruction_of_Leviathan

“Destruction of Leviathan”. 1865 engraving by Gustave Doré

Historically, the Christian religion has understood the world to be something like the stage upon which the drama of cosmic history plays out. Although there has been a diversity of understanding within Christian tradition regarding the nature of the world, it could be generally summarized by saying that it consists in both physical, observable creatures and objects and spiritual, non-observable creatures and objects. Those things which are physical and observable can be seen either plainly (with the naked eye) or under the proper circumstances (i.e. bacterium, microbes; with the proper equipment). Those things which are spiritual and non-observable can only be seen by being revealed.

The many Christianites have never been ambiguous regarding this matter: God and the world are not one-and-the-same. Although the Biblical worldview posits that God actively engages the world, it is postulated with equal clarity that the Creator is not a creature. Such pantheistic theories of God’s “oneness with the universe” are not only theologically problematic; they are nonsensical. Theism alone, Christian or not, can make sense of the universe. How? The relative orderliness of the universe – now, I said relative orderliness – is unlikely to have been achieved in the approximately 15 billion years since the hypothesized “Big Bang,” and the complex and functional creatures that operate within said world likely would not have formed unguided in the span of the approximately 4 billion years since life began, if I understand correctly. Time isn’t the answer to evolution. Design may be.

The sheer existence of the world demands a catalyst. The Bible itself does not actually teach Creation ex Nihilo (creation out of nothing) with any clarity, but creation ex nihilo is philosophically inevitable, and that means that means that a catalyst is also philosophicaly inevitable. More specifically, the relative orderliness of everything demands that it was a conscious catalyst. Nevertheless, amidst the order is a cruel chaos that pervades every corner of existence. The “problem of evil” doesn’t actually go far enough in diagnosing the depth of the universe’s brokenness. It’s not just that “bad things happen to good people.” The whole machinery of the universe runs on suffering. The balance of the ecosystem is contingent upon the innate violence of the creatures therein. As it is now, the world can only run if things die, and often. This phenomenon is well illustrated in this David Attenborough quote:

“I think of a parasitic worm that is boring into the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, that’s going to make him blind. And are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child’s eyeball? Because that doesn’t seem to me to coincide with a God who’s full of mercy.”

David Attenborough’s reaction to the apparent cruelty of the world is more-or-less universal. The phenomenon grates against a moral sense that is so deeply ingrained in humanity that we cannot think past it. We cannot transcend our sense of morality; we can only think in terms of it. Even those who have sought to develop a philosophical system that negates the objectivity of moral truth claims in order to prevent oppressive coercion do so ought of a perceived moral obligation to prevent oppressive coercion. Hence, given the innate moral sense with which specifically human creatures are endowed, it would seem that our conscious catalyst has an agenda. He is doing something, and the world is the stage on which this something is taking place.

The idea that there exists a conscious catalyst who has an agenda for the world alleviates more-or-less all of the objections brought against macro-evolution by its detractors, both religious and irreligious. That does not mean that macro-evolution is true, and that fact that it does not mean that macro-evolution is true does not, itself, mean that macro-evolution is not true. It only means that theistic evolution, specifically within the context of the Christian faith, is a remarkably coherent system. The problems that plague non-theistic incarnations of macro-evolution do not plague theistic evolution. And the philosophical problems raised by theistic evolution are summarily met when theistic evolution is coupled with a specifically Christian worldview.

The relative orderliness of the world ought to be expected given the Christian doctrine of design. The cruel chaos that pervades the evolutionary process ought to be expected given the Christian doctrine of the Fall. Moreover, the meta-narrative of macro-evolution is rendered meaningful, because the conscious catalyst’s agenda means that the cruelty of existence is not the result of nature’s indifference but of creation’s rebellion, it is what Ancient Near-Eastern mythology referred to as Leviathon, which the catalyst Himself has entered into history as a Jewish carpenter to reconcile to Himself.