John Oswalt - The Centrality of Holiness

From the Henry Center:

In many views of salvation, especially Protestant ones, holiness is often marginalized. It is seen as a desideratum, but only as a somewhat incidental state procured by the Cross, to be realized as a reality at death. This view is the result of an inadequate understanding of the relation of the Testaments to each other. It is clear in the Old Testament that the achievement of holiness as a replication of the character of Yahweh in this life is the fundamental issue. The writers of the New Testament assume that this is still the issue, so do not restate it. Rather, they move on to consider the ways in which the Incarnation and the Atonement of Christ address it. This is especially clear in the Gospels and the Epistles. The failure to recognize these truths is one reason for the observed lack of distinctly Christian character in our contemporary society.

What Happened to James?

James the Just, 16th-century Russian icon.

What happened to our Lord’s brother, James?  James was known for his unbelief.  Then, years later, he is known for being on his knees praying.  Before I get to James, let me ask you these questions:  what happened to the sociopath David Wood?  What happened to Saul, the Pharisee hunter of Christians?  What do these questions have to do with Jesus’ resurrection?

David Wood’s dog is hit by a bus and dies. His mother is terribly upset. David is not. It is just a dog.   A few years later his friend dies.  He feels no sorrow.  He sees how others are feeling and senses maybe he should feel sorrow.  David is separated from his feelings.  He cannot empathize with others.  He is diagnosed a sociopath.  On top of this, David is an atheist.  Right and wrong do not matter to him.  One day David’s life comes into focus.  He brutally attacks his father and beats him with a hammer until he thinks him dead (he wasn’t).  He is imprisoned for ten years.  David is now a missionary, reconciled with his father, and has an earned Ph. D. from Fordham University.  What happened to him?

Before I answer this question and the one about James, consider the question about Saul. What happens to Saul, the Pharisee hunter of Christians?  Saul is a contemporary of Jesus’ apostles.  He is a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin.  From the age five Saul is educated in the Old Testament law.  At age of thirteen, he studies Scripture under the Jewish scholar Gamaliel. Gamaliel is the Alan Dershowitz Harvard law professor of the day.  He prepares Saul to teach the law. Saul becomes so zealous for the law he surpasses his Pharisee peers.  He kills for the Law. 

In fact, Saul takes a leading role in bullying the church.  He goes to Christians’ houses.  He hauls them – even women – to prison.  Saul says, ‘I was violently persecuting the church of God’…I ‘was trying to destroy it’ (Gal 1: 13).  He takes cool satisfaction in the stoning of preacher Stephen.  He holds the coats of others to throw their stones. (Acts 8:1)

Then, something happens suddenly.  People say, “He who formerly was persecuting us is now proclaiming the faith he once tried to destroy?” (Gal 1:23)”Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem…?” believers ask (Act 9:21). He now goes by the name of Paul.  He testifies in the synagogues Jesus “is the Son of God”.  He argues Jesus is the Messiah. (Acts 9:22) What gives?  How could one so passionately against Jesus turn so for him?  This brings me to James.

What happened to James?  In 2002 an archaeological discovery was made.  A first century ossuary box was uncovered.  An ossuary box contains the bones of a deceased person.  This box has this inscription on it, ‘James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.’  Whether it is authentic is still being studied.  No matter, Jesus of Nazareth had four brothers, one whose name was James.  Not much is known about James. James is the biological son of Joseph and Mary. He, his brothers, and mother Mary travel with Jesus early in Jesus’ ministry.  But Jesus does not win him over.  Conflict arises between Jesus and James and his brothers.  They do not believe him.  They think anybody can claim to be a Messiah and get away with it in the rural countryside.  “If you do Messiah works, show the world”. Prove yourself before the watching world.  Do your miracles in D.C., not in Tight Squeeze!  Do out- in- the-open miracles. Jesus goes to his grave with his brother James a skeptic.

But then what happened to James?  The next thing you hear James is on his knees praying.  Ancient testimony says James is frequently found on his knees begging forgiveness for people; his knees are as hard as a camel’s.  After his brother’s crucifixion, he is with his mother Mary and Jesus’ disciples in the upper room.  James is now called “James the Righteous”, the leader of the Jerusalem church.  Because of this, James is stoned in 62 AD.  What happened to James? Once a skeptic …now a martyr. 

Here’s the answer:  Take Paul first:  Paul sees the bodily risen Jesus Christ.  At midday when traveling to Damascus a light shines on him.  The light is brighter than the sun and encircles him.  He hears the Voice speak to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 26: 14) Paul asks, “Who are you Lord?”  “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” (Acts 9: 5) Paul testifies, Jesus “appeared also to me.”  “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” Paul asks (1 Cor 9:1).  Seeing the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ instantaneously turns Saul around.  The resurrected Jesus turns Saul into Paul. 

What happened to David Wood?  In prison he runs into Randy, a Christian. Randy articulates his reasons for believing in Jesus.  It makes David’s unbelief seem silly. David wants to refute Randy’s faith. So, David begins reading the Bible. Jesus’ bodily resurrection bothers him.  Why would the disciples risk death to testify to the resurrection if they didn’t believe it? He also reads in the Bible Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life”; the Son of God can set you free.  David knows he has many psychological, spiritual, and moral disorders.  He cannot help himself. Who could? Only Jesus, the One God raised from the dead, can. 

What happened to James, our Lord’s skeptical brother?  The apostle Paul tells us: Christ “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures…and then he …appeared to James…” (1 Cor 15: 7) Our risen Lord Jesus appears to James!  To his own brother the risen Lord reveals himself!  Jesus Christ shows himself visibly, bodily to James and to Paul; this is the game-changing event that overturns them both. Not hallucinations; delusions; mental dreams; a myth; a lie, a conversion disorder, or any combination thereof.   Jesus appears bodily, visibly!  Our risen Lord turns James the skeptic into James the Just!!  He transforms Saul into Paul.  The meditation on Jesus’ bodily resurrection in concert with the risen Jesus Christ radically changes David Wood the sociopath into David Wood the missionary.  For what else would they have endured and kept true through insults, ridicule, rejection, mockery, beatings, suffering, and martyrdom: Paul beheaded, and James stoned. 

Do you too know the risen Lord Jesus?  He says to you, “Look at me. I stand at the door. I knock. If you hear me call and open the door, I’ll come right in and sit down to supper with you.” * 

*Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona’s book, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus and David Baggett’s Moral Apologetics testimony of David Wood have been instrumental resources for the above.                                     

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Tom is currently a retired Elder in the Virginia Annual Conference. He has pastored churches in Virginia, California and England. Studying John Wesley’s theology, he received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from the University of Bristol, Bristol, England and his Master of Divinity degree from Asbury Theological Seminary. While a student, he and his wife Pam lived in John Wesley’s Chapel “The New Room”, Bristol, England, the first established Methodist preaching house. Tom was a faculty member of Asbury Theological Seminary. He has contributed articles to Methodist History and the Wesleyan Theological Journal. He and his wife have two children, daughter Karissa, who is an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, and, John, who is a recent graduate of Regent University. Being a part of the development of their grandson Beau is a rich reward. Tom enjoys a good book by a crackling fire with an English cup of tea. His life text is, ‘Jesus, confirm my heart’s desire, to work and speak and think for thee’.

Lord’s Supper Meditation – Between Heaven and Earth

A Twilight Musing

Every observance of the Eucharist is a recapitulation of the Incarnation.  That is, it reaffirms the wonder of God’s infusion of physical things with spiritual purposes.  The original manifestation of this divine work was, of course, the creation of the universe (see Gen. chapter 1).  God reached out from His absolute, non-contingent Being to bring the material world into existence.  In doing so, He proceeded from the general to the specific, beginning with an undifferentiated mass, “without form and void,” over which the Spirit of God hovered.  He then proceeded to give every segment of His creation its own identity and spiritually determined function, distinguishing each stage from what went before by a process of separation.  He began by separating “the light from the darkness” and “the waters from the waters.” The next few days, He brought dry land out of the waters and generated vegetation “according to their own kinds.”  The sun and moon and stars were to “separate the day from the night.”  Animal life, like plant life, was each “according to their kinds.”    This perfect merger of the physical and the spiritual was culminated in humankind, who, though made of “dust from the ground” (Gen. 2:7) received the “breath of life” (i.e., the Spirit) from God.  Humans (the First Adam) were made distinct from all other creatures by being created in the image of God and being given authority over and responsibility for all the rest of creation (Gen 1:26-27).

But the First Adam fell from the perfectly blended state in which he was created and was plunged into a creature of disordered material that had to be reinfused with God’s Spirit in order to live.  God then implemented a long, tortuous process of what might be called “re-creation.” Once again God proceeded from the general state of chaos brought about by sin to bring fallen humankind a renewed awareness of what they had known intuitively in the Garden of Eden, which was the perfect merger between physical and spiritual realities.  In order for that Eden to be restored, God’s process would establish the necessity of physical redemptive sacrifice (going through a death to achieve renewed life), with the ultimate sacrifice being made by the Second Adam, the very Son of God, through Whose death all of God’s original purposes for the world would be realized.

Thus it is appropriate, as we partake of the Lord’s Supper, to contemplate how God over the ages worked a second time to extend an emanation of His absolute, non-contingent Self into the material world in order finally to present the New Adam, God Himself residing in physical human form.  In doing so, He once again proceeded from the general to the specific, beginning with the chaos of fallen humanity and revealing more and more of His remedial commands, from the discipling of the Patriarchs, to the Mosaic Law, to the painful process of refining His people in the fires of captivity, and culminating in the merger of heaven and earth in the person of Jesus Christ.  Our ingesting symbolically the substance of our perfect Lord Jesus reaffirms that with Him we stand restored to that perfect balance of material and Spirit that God originally intended for the capstone of His creation.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

Sometimes Losing is Good

He who loses his life for My sake will find it. (Matthew 10:39)

Have you ever felt lost in a crowd? You look around and see the people, hear the sounds, feel the hustle and bustle of life around you…and yet, you feel lost. You are caught in the flow of everything beyond yourself, and for a fleeting moment you don’t know where you are or where you fit-in amid the cacophony of life all around you. You’re not alone, but you feel lost.

It’s a surreal feeling, the feeling of being lost to yourself…lost when you are with others but still out-of-sorts with who and where you are at that moment. An odd experience of self-awareness that leads you to viscerally sense the gravity and big-ness of everything around you…and the small-ness of yourself. Read that last bit again. An odd experience of self-awareness that leads you to viscerally sense the gravity and big-ness of everything around you…and the small-ness of yourself.

Would you believe this is what Jesus wants for your life? Does it seem odd to consider that Jesus is possibly closer to you than ever when you feel the most lost and unsure of yourself?

You are unsure of how you connect to everything and everyone around you, and feeling, well…lost to yourself. And yet, it’s at that moment that the door for a divine encounter presents itself to you. When you feel lost even to yourself, it is then that you can step through – step out of – yourself and into God’s presence. You experience it for just a moment at first, and then a little longer, until you finally realize that being lost to yourself is really the key to finding your true self and to living in God’s presence.

It is through the door of losing yourself, and only through that door, that you will find the identity God desires for you. A desire which is rooted in His love and purposes, and drips with abundance of mercy, grace, and healing. What you and I lack in ourselves, we find when we lose ourselves to Him. We may feel lost in the crowd, but losing ourselves may just be – is – the first step to finding God.

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Dr. Thomas J. Gentry (aka., TJ Gentry) serves as the pastor of First Christian Church of West Frankfort, Illinois, the Executive Editor of MoralApologetics.com, and Executive VP of Bellator Christi Ministries. Dr. Gentry is a world-class scholar holding 5 doctorate degrees and 6 masters degrees. Additionally, he is a prolific writer as he has published 7 books including Pulpit Apologist, Absent from the Body, Present with the Lord, and You Shall Be My Witnesses: Reflections on Sharing the Gospel. Be on the lookout for two additional books that he will soon publish. In addition to his impressive resume, Dr. Gentry proudly served his country as an officer in the United States Army and serves as a martial arts instructor.

Nothing Is Strong

“The Christians describe the Enemy as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong.’ And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them.” (Screwtape to Wormwood, Letter XII)

In his comments on this quote from C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Walter Hooper explains that the phrase, “without whom Nothing is strong” was appropriated by Lewis from the Collect for the Fourth Sunday in Trinity found in The Book of Common Prayer. Hooper writes, “Note the two possible ways of interpreting ‘nothing is strong’: (1) There is nothing that is strong; (2) Nothingness itself is (evilly) strong. For Hell, a negativity itself is positive.” What Hooper offers in his commentary on the double entendre carried by this phrase is insightful, for it captures the true spirit of Lewis’s pointed insight revealed through Screwtape as he counsels his nephew Wormwood concerning one especially useful strategy to employ in the effort to keep his Christian charge away from a true life of piety and devotion while moving him ever closer to an eternal existence in Hell. The strategy? Keep the Christian focused on nothing of lasting significance. If the Christian can be diverted headlong into explicit sin, all the better; but short of such an outcome, Hell’s power also reaches to the depths of the believer’s soul if Worwood “can make him do nothing at all for long periods…keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say [as one of Screwtape’s charges did on upon arriving in Hell], ‘I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.’”

Friends, I fear this same strategy is enjoying great success today among many in the Christian ranks and especially among apologists. How easy it is to spend enormous amounts of time, precious time, flitting from this curiosity to that topic and have nothing to show in return. Sure, the curiosities and topics may be interesting and even relevant to some broader Christian cause, but ours is an era awash in a sea of information in which we may swim and swim without ever coming ashore. We forget that the vast waters of apologetic content available to us are not an end in themselves but only the means. Sadly, we often swim in circles as we flail about, inebriated by curiosity-run-wild in undisciplined minds. We do so to our own peril and at the expense of any genuine and lasting effectiveness in conducting our mission as ambassadors for the Christ who would plead to the world through us to be reconciled to God. The enemy of our souls is not bothered in the least by an apologist who knows a little bit about a lot of things but never focuses on anything. He prefers we stay an inch deep and a mile wide as we buy into the pernicious idea that we have to know a little something about everything before we can do anything of importance in defending the gospel and sharing our faith. When this happens to us, nothing is strong.

I share this concern not as a dour critic but as one who has sometimes been all too willing to follow along Screwtape’s proposed path of “doing nothing at all for long periods…staring at a dead fire in a cold room.” I may not actually spend my time looking at a dead fire, but I can easily give away minutes, hours, even days to perusing a social media feed or binge watching the latest Netflix series. All the while my primary calling lays quietly to the side and my time dwindles away until nothing is left. When that happens, the enemy wins another battle and grows bolder in his attempts to win the war.

My solution? First, I call myself to repentance for allowing nothingness to become strong. Second, I resolve to heed Scripture’s call to “redeem the time” (Eph. 5:16) by disciplining my mind and guarding my moments so that God’s purposes for me receive my best thoughts, time, and energy. Third, I commit to build a holy boundary around my life that keeps out those distractions that the enemy loves, even if it means “unplugging” from certain seemingly essential media and other pursuits. Fourth, and finally, I resolve do all in my power to become the nagging threat to the darkness that I am redeemed to be by the power of Christ within my soul. There is, after all, nothing more important than that.

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Dr. Thomas J. Gentry (aka., TJ Gentry) serves as the pastor of First Christian Church of West Frankfort, Illinois, the Executive Editor of MoralApologetics.com, and Executive VP of Bellator Christi Ministries. Dr. Gentry is a world-class scholar holding 5 doctorate degrees and 6 masters degrees. Additionally, he is a prolific writer as he has published 7 books including Pulpit Apologist, Absent from the Body, Present with the Lord, and You Shall Be My Witnesses: Reflections on Sharing the Gospel. Be on the lookout for two additional books that he will soon publish. In addition to his impressive resume, Dr. Gentry proudly served his country as an officer in the United States Army and serves as a martial arts instructor.

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I am Samson (Judges 14)

Lucas Cranach d.Ä. - Simson bezwingt den Löwen

Samson. Aaah, Samson.

In Judges 14 he comes off the page to me as a larger-than-life contradiction. Read it. I suspect you’ll see it too.

Samson is a true enigma. A man used by God who also appears to use God. At least that’s what it looks like to me. His details in this chapter baffle me, starting with telling his parents to "get her for me" when he decides he wants a wife from the Philistines. Then the tearing apart of the lion, the eating of the honey, the posing of the riddle, the manipulative tears of his wife, the killing of 30 men, and finally Samson gives his wife to his best man. Again, Samson baffles me. 

But then I have to ask why he baffles me. Why do I struggle with Samson?

Is it his insistence on what he wants, even when it is driven by what appears to be a simple lust of the eyes? But I am just like him sometimes. I see with my eyes only, then expect those around me to give me what I want. I am Samson.

Maybe it is the way that God's purposes are working out in Samson, even though the details of his life leave me wondering at times if he even knows God? Then I hear the echo of my own life in that very description...God working through me though sometimes my life does anything but point to Him. I am Samson.

Perhaps my struggle with Samson is the way the power of God flows to and through him even when his choices cause others to suffer? He can't keep his secret from his wife, so 30 men die as a consequence. Yet, I think of the times I preach or teach or counsel--God working through me in each instance. Then I go home and have no patience with my family. I yell at my wife. I justify my selfishness as a matter of collateral damage in service to Jesus. Others suffer as God uses me. I am Samson.

Yes, I am Samson. At least sometimes I am Samson. The funny thing is that the longer I live the more I realize that I can be Samson...I have been Samson...I am Samson, and even still I want to be someone else. I want to be more like Jesus and less like Samson, and that's a good thing. Perhaps a bit simplistic or naive, but still a good thing. Actually, what is good about it is that I see myself in Samson, but I also see God in Samson.

To be sure, Samson's foibles and frailties are his own...his contradictions are his and nobody else's, but those moments of wisdom and power and justice...those are God's. Samson shows me God through his brokenness, and I am grateful. I see the same thing happening in my life. I am Samson.

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Dr. Thomas J. Gentry (aka., TJ Gentry) serves as the pastor of First Christian Church of West Frankfort, Illinois, the Executive Editor of MoralApologetics.com, and Executive VP of Bellator Christi Ministries. Dr. Gentry is a world-class scholar holding 5 doctorate degrees and 6 masters degrees. Additionally, he is a prolific writer as he has published 7 books including Pulpit Apologist, Absent from the Body, Present with the Lord, and You Shall Be My Witnesses: Reflections on Sharing the Gospel. Be on the lookout for two additional books that he will soon publish. In addition to his impressive resume, Dr. Gentry proudly served his country as an officer in the United States Army and serves as a martial arts instructor.

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 12

Now we arrive at a chapter by Tony named “You Reap What You Sow: How I See Bart’s Deconversion.” In this chapter Tony talks about the way a series of decisions by Bart contributed to his deconversion. This is of some comfort to Tony, who periodically feels guilty for Bart’s decision, but then Tony remembers that Bart’s decisions are his own. Tony’s reflections also serve as a partial response to Bart’s own depiction of his deconversion we just got done discussing.

Bart chalks up his deconversion to God’s failure to show up and make himself known. Tony disagrees, invoking the notion of Peter Berger’s “plausibility structures” to remind us that what we do and don’t believe are often highly dependent on what is affirmed to be reasonable by those most important to us. When the dominant culture goes contrary to a set of beliefs, maintaining a countercultural support group is vitally important to sustain those convictions.

Tony gives church camp as an example of how plausibility structures work, which is a good example for me. I grew up attending camp meetings, and to this day I testify to their power in shaping my convictions in deep ways. My wife and I, partially to pay homage to my deep debt to church camps, wrote a book about the history of a camp meeting in Michigan.

As a sociologist, Tony is not averse to adducing such examples as an example of “social construction.” As a philosopher rather critical of, say, a constructivist meta-ethic, I’d be less inclined than he to use such language. But he’s surely right about certain sociological dimensions that are relevant to sustaining beliefs. Even Tony admits that plausibility structures provide only the conditions wherein a particular belief system becomes and remains viable. And as Charles Taylor explains, ours is now a secular age in which particular traditional religious convictions can no longer be assumed the default.

Tony points to an array of Christian convictions and how exotic, foolish, and unintuitive they may seem to the modern mind. Here I think he may overreach a bit by talking about how Christians from the start have “celebrated” the fact that their views don’t align with modern science. Having been rereading Plantinga’s Where the Conflict Really Lies, I find Tony’s language here more than a little unfortunate. Plantinga argues quite convincingly that the conflict between Christianity and science is superficial, but the concord deep (and just the opposite for naturalism). The conflict comes up between faith and the naturalistically inspired theological or metaphysical add-ons to science that are not a proper part of science.

Admittedly Christian revelation goes beyond reason, but it never goes contrary to it. These distinctions matter quite a bit.

Regarding Bart’s decisions that served to undermine his faith, Tony adduces several examples. When Bart stopped participating in a local congregation on a regular basis, Tony grew concerned. When Bart eventually began asserting that some people are unable to be saved or transformed in any meaningful way, Tony became even more alarmed. Here Tony poignantly quotes a Russian existentialist philosopher who said that when someone stops believing in the capacity to grow and change and engage in noble and worthwhile pursuits, that individual eventually loses faith in God as well. To lose sight of the divine presence in even the lowliest person is the beginning of atheism. And the reverse is true as well: to lose faith in God is to lose faith in people. This is why, Tony notes, the Great Commandment is so closely tied to loving our neighbor.

Bart’s inner city ministry had to mightily wear on him, but I think Tony’s all the righter that without a strong inner spiritual bulwark fortressed by community Bart’s loss of faith eventually was no big surprise. And the point is just as spiritual as sociological. Christian fellowship and community are a means of grace, and without them spiritual starvation is inevitable.

When Bart’s preaching changed to no longer include the power of God to forgive and change, that was another huge warning sign. Tony knows firsthand how his own preaching can help sustain his own convictions. This dialectic relationship between our words and actions is “praxis,” and a powerful force in our life of faith.

Near the end, Tony’s chapter becomes especially interesting. He sums up his analysis by saying that who and what we become is ultimately the result of a long series of decisions that we make for ourselves. “I think I am a Christian not only because God has chosen to love and save me but also because I have freely chosen to trust His Word and do His will…. I affirm our dignity as those who freely make the most important decisions that determine our nature and destiny.”

I wholly agree, though I’ve noted some hyper-Reformed proclivities in Tony’s words before. So what does he mean by “freely” here? Compatibilist freedom? Such that we make the “choice” but we couldn’t have done otherwise, but, owing to God’s grace, we are doing what we want to do? If so, I think the latter may well be something of a necessary condition for freedom, but not a sufficient one. Or maybe Tony means libertarian freedom—still requiring God’s grace, but with the ability to turn down God’s gift?

Tony seems convinced that whatever his operative conception of freedom is, it’s enough to hold Bart responsible for taking the steps he did that led to his move away from God. He says to do otherwise is to disrespect Bart’s independence as an adult or deny his dignity as a human being.

Tony keeps praying for Bart, of course, but then adds something simply fascinating in the last paragraph.

Secular as he is these days, his exegesis of Ephesians 2 is still right on the money. However we take care of it, our ability to believe—and therefore our ability to believe again—is always a gift from God. Therefore, rather than praying for Bart to soften his heart or change his mind or reopen his Bible or go back to church, I pray instead that the Holy Spirit will somehow dramatically overwhelm him the way Saul was overwhelmed on the road to Damascus, restoring his ability to look beyond the wisdom of the wise and see that the foolishness of God is ever so much wiser.

Although I agree we should certainly pray that God would do such things with unbelieving loved ones, Tony’s claim that Bart has a right understanding of Ephesians 2 is stunning to me. We discussed at length in our last installment why Bart was quite wrong on Ephesians 2. Does Bart have the ability to say no to God’s overtures of love or not? Tony just got done affirming he did, and then, like Bart, laid it at God’s feet! What was the point of the chapter, then?

Tony’s lack of nuance and careful distinctions here is deeply disappointing. Either he should have said more to avoid patent inconsistency, or he really did just make clear that his theology is problematically Reformed and the only conception of freedom he believes in after all is compatibilist. To say there is a tension, though, between that last paragraph and what came before is an understatement. There appears to be simply plain contradiction.

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and director of The Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Baptist University. Author or editor of about fifteen books, he’s a two-time winner of Christianity Today book awards. He’s currently under contract for his fourth and fifth books with Oxford University Press: a book on moral realism with Jerry Walls, and a collection on the moral argument with Yale’s John Hare.

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Do You Follow?

I once read a quote, I think it was from Martin Luther but I cannot be sure, and the gist of it is that one of the most important things to help you grow as a Christian is to find a teacher and follow them, read them, learn from them, become so familiar with their thought that you find yourself thinking like them. Obviously, Luther wasn’t simply talking about following Jesus (which is a given, I think). Rather, he was talking about mentors, those we give the sacred place of influencers in our lives. In Luther’s case, he was particularly fond of William of Ockham (1285-1347), the Franciscan philosopher and theologian he referred to as mein lieber meister, “my dear master.” Truly, Ockham’s influence was profound for Luther, and it is unlikely that anything he ever wrote or said was untouched by him.

As an apologist, I try to take seriously Luther’s encouragement. While I don’t necessarily follow Ockham, I have found that I need key influencers in my life, substantive teachers from the past and present to help shape and form my soul to better understand, live, and defend my faith. Bearing this in mind, I’d like to share with you three of my apologetic mentors, hoping that you consider them for yourself. I suspect their names are known to most, especially those who regularly follow MoralApologetics.com. You will notice that the first two are men from the Christian past, important figures for their influence on the study and practice of apologetics. The third is a contemporary philosopher and apologist, and the weight of his influence on me is hard to calculate, but it’s immense. In discussing each of these men, I will share what I deem the three most important lessons I have learned from each thus far in my journey.

My first apologetic mentor is Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the important Roman Catholic thinker dubbed the Angelic Doctor. My first serious engagement with Aquinas was through the lens of the late Norman Geisler’s work, who was arguably the greatest Thomistic evangelical to date. I also had the privilege of earning a master’s degree in philosophy from Thomist scholars at a Roman Catholic college, and I wrote the thesis for that program on Aquinas’s argument from gradation of being. From Aquinas I learned: 1) faith and reason are the closest of friends, and far from enemies: 2) taking the time to learn an opponent’s position is just as important as being able to answer it; and 3) never lose a sense of wonder for God’s great goodness amid the study of His particulars. On this last lesson, I find Aquinas’s reported mystical experience near the end of his life, an experience that led him to stop writing, to be just delightful as a reminder to look beyond my learning to the Source of knowledge. When pressed by his brother friar, Reginald, about why he stopped writing his Summa Theologiae, Aquinas replied, “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.” Amen, Thomas. Amen.

My second apologetic mentor is C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), who described himself as something of a dinosaur. As a literary scholar, philosophical adept, and apologetic popularizer (a compliment, by the way), I am drawn repeatedly to the well of Lewis’s writings for insight, comfort, and nurture. From Lewis I learned: 1) think broadly and write narrowly, never attempting the one without the other; 2) learn to see segues to the divine in everything, for everything (and everyone) is a means of seeing and hearing God’s voice; and 3) the world always needs apologetics, especially when everything but apologetics seems apropos. I take this third lesson from Lewis from his commitment to deliver the radio talks that would later be compiled into Mere Christianity at a time when his island home of England was under attack by Nazi bombers as the world was plunging into a terrible war. Lewis’s answer to the cry of his time? Heartfelt, brilliant apologetic engagement. Indeed, Lewis. Indeed.

My third apologetic mentor is Dave Baggett, author of numerous erudite and timely books, founder of MoralApologetics.com, and director of the Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Baptist University. My relationship with Dave began when he was my professor, and it has since flourished and grown into what I consider among the rarest blessings in my life. This delightful friendship aside, what Dave has taught me thus far about apologetics, and specifically moral apologetics, comes down to three things: 1) the fabric of all existence is interwoven with moral clues revealing divine commands issuing forth from God’s intrinsic goodness which makes moral transformation possible and morality rational; 2) learn to argue without being argumentative, and abductive arguments are usually the best way to do this by making a winsome case and keeping a genuine relationship with your interlocutor; and 3) at the center of all that matters in the world is God’s love, and this is a non-negotiable. It was Dave who taught me that God not only loves me but He also even likes me. Thank you, doc. I needed to hear that.

What about you, friend? Are you teachable? Who are your traveling partners along the apologetic road, your mentors, your influencers? You need them. I need them. We all need them. Do you follow?

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Dr. Thomas J. Gentry (aka., TJ Gentry) serves as the pastor of First Christian Church of West Frankfort, Illinois, the Executive Editor of MoralApologetics.com, and Executive VP of Bellator Christi Ministries. Dr. Gentry is a world-class scholar holding 5 doctorate degrees and 6 masters degrees. Additionally, he is a prolific writer as he has published 7 books including Pulpit Apologist, Absent from the Body, Present with the Lord, and You Shall Be My Witnesses: Reflections on Sharing the Gospel. Be on the lookout for two additional books that he will soon publish. In addition to his impressive resume, Dr. Gentry proudly served his country as an officer in the United States Army and serves as a martial arts instructor.

The Case for a Personal God from Morality: Guilt

The Case for a Personal God from Morality: Guilt[1]

 The universe and everything contained within it is either the result of a personal God (or gods) or a non-personal essence, force, or set of natural processes. Ultimate reality is either personal or non-personal, and everything within the universe flows from one or the other. This leads to the question: What best explains the observable data in the universe, such as cosmological constants, DNA, human personality, and morality? Are these things the result of a personal God or a non-personal essence, force, or set of natural processes?

 Although this article cannot reasonably tackle all of these data points (cosmological constants, DNA, human personality, and morality), it does look at one particular component of morality—namely, guilt—as evidence for the existence of a personal God. In what follows, we will examine the personal nature of guilt, how guilt points toward a personal God, and the connection between these matters and Christian theism.

The Personal Nature of Guilt

 Guilt is a nearly universal experience that involves painful feelings of remorse following a moral failure of some sort. What about the nature of guilt: is it personal or non-personal? Generally speaking, non-personal rules and principles, such as mathematical formulas, do not elicit feelings of guilt within individuals; only when one human person has wronged or harmed another person (or group of persons) in some way does guilt arise. As John Henry Newman avows, “Inanimate things [such as rules and principles] cannot stir our affections; these are correlative with persons.”[2] Similarly, H. P. Owen posits, “Why should the failure to enact [values] engender guilt? I can betray a person and I know that I deserve the guilt I feel. But I cannot see how I could betray values if they are impersonal.”[3] Likewise, R. Scott Smith notes,

 [W]hen we experience moral failing, we often feel guilt or shame. However, it does not make sense to feel that way in light of some nonspatial, timeless abstract entity with which we cannot even interact. Instead, we have those feelings in the presence of a person. This view does not make sense if morals are just abstract principles that do not have some connection to us.[4]

Presumably, as Newman, Owen, Smith, and others suggest, it would be odd to feel guilt before an abstract, impersonal moral code.[5] Therefore, there is reason to think that the moral code is personal.

How Guilt Points Toward a Personal God

There are many occasions where guilt can be explained solely in relation to human persons. However, there are times when no human person is in view and one still feels guilty. For instance, individuals sometimes feel guilty for failing to use their talents and abilities properly, and other times when persons experience guilt when they sense that they have wasted their lives.[6] Additionally, there are times when the person who has been wronged is no longer around to confer forgiveness, and still other occasions when the wrong seems to be so grievous[7] that no human person seemingly has the authority to offer forgiveness.[8]

In situations like these, before whom is one guilty? It becomes increasingly understandable that many would suggest nothing less than a personal God who bestows such talents and abilities to human persons. As J. P. Moreland says, “[I]f the depth and presence of guilt feelings is to be rational, there must be a Person toward whom one feels moral shame.”[9] Moreover, who is in a position of authority (besides God) to offer forgiveness in moments like these? For these reasons, if the cause of conscience and the One before whom humans are ultimately guilty cannot be completely accounted for in the visible world, then perhaps when individuals fall short they have not merely broken a rule, but rather, as A. E. Taylor claims, “insulted or proved false to a person of supreme excellence, entitled to whole-hearted devotion.”[10]

Christian Theism

In a previous article, I suggested that the moral value of justice gestures in the direction of a personal God, and that on the Christian view, God is intrinsically personal and therefore accounts powerfully for the personal nature of justice (and the personal nature of morality in general). In this article, I claim that the personal nature of guilt provides further evidence not only for the existence of God, but of a God who is personal. Here, the beauty of Christian theism is that God does not leave us floundering in our guilt; rather, he makes a way (through his Son, Jesus Christ) for us to be forgiven (of our sins and guilty state), restored (in right relationship to him), and ultimately transformed not only into better people, but into new people (2 Cor. 5:17).

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Stephen S. Jordan (Ph.D.) is currently the Campus Pastor at Liberty Christian Academy in Lynchburg (VA), where he previously served as a high school Bible teacher for nearly a decade. He is also a Bible teacher at Liberty University Online Academy, an Associate Editor at www.moralapologetics.com, as well as a Senior Research Fellow and curriculum developer at The Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Baptist University. Prior to these positions, Stephen served as a youth pastor in North Carolina for several years and taught courses at a local Seminary Extension for a year. He possesses four graduate degrees (MAR, MRE, MDiv, ThM) and a PhD in Theology and Apologetics. His doctoral dissertation was on the moral argument, where he argued for the existence of a personal God from morality. Stephen and his wife, along with their four children, reside in Goode, Virginia. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his family, being outdoors, fitness, sports, reading, and building relationships with people over good food.  

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[1] Portions of this article adapted from my unpublished doctoral dissertation at Liberty University.

[2] John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London: Burns, Oates, & Co., 1874), 109.

[3] Interestingly, immediately after this quote, H. P. Owen boldly claims, “Personal theism gives the only explanation by affirming that value-claims inhere in the character and will of God. In rejecting them we do not merely reject an abstract good; we do not merely reject our own ‘good’ (in the sense of our ‘well-being’); we reject the love which God is in his tri-une being.” Admittedly, this may be moving a bit too fast here, but it is interesting to consider how Owen invokes the Trinity in order to explain the personal nature of value-claims and the guilt one experiences when failing to keep them. H. P. Owen, The Moral Argument for Christian Theism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1965), 80.

[4] R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge: Overcoming the Fact-Value Dichotomy (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 317. More directly, H. H. Farmer claims, “[Sin] is something through which a man is set against God, the word God standing not for an impersonal Moral Order or Creative Life Force, nor for a man’s own Better Self, nor for the Totality of Social Ideals, but for the Eternal as personal will which enters into relation with the will of man in a polarity or tension of personal relationship.” H. H Farmer, The World and God: A Study of Prayer, Providence and Miracle in Christian Experience (London: Nisbet & Co., 1933), 173.

 [5] Paul Copan, True for You, But Not For Me (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 1998), 62.

[6] This usually occurs later in life or when one is on his or her deathbed.

[7] Similar to the way A. E. Taylor describes the indelibility and dirtiness of guilt, Lewis explains one’s response to grievous actions in this way: “Much, we may feel, can be excused to human infirmities: but not this—this incredibly mean and ugly action which none of our friends would have done, which even such a thorough-going little rotter as X would have been ashamed of, which we would not for the world allow to be published. At such a moment we really do know that our character, as revealed in this action, is, and ought to be, hateful to all good men, and, if there are powers above man, to them.” C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2001), 51.

[8] David Baggett and Marybeth Baggett, The Morals of the Story: Good News About a Good God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2018), 180.

[9] J. P. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1987), 88.

[10] A. E. Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist (London: MacMillan and Co., 1951), 207.

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 10

Having devoted several blogs to Bart’s opening salvo in the Campolo book, I now move on to Tony’s description of his own background and Christian conversion. Admittedly this will be a bit of an easier installment for me to write, because where I may demur from Tony here and there, it will be by only a little and not a lot.  

Tony was raised in a strong Christian home, and doesn’t much remember a time when he was an unbeliever. Before getting into subsequent developments in his narrative, he makes a point of emphasizing that his faith today “remains grounded in personal experience” that began as a kid. “I’m still a fairly good Christian apologist, but at the end of the day, I have to admit that the primary foundation of my faith is not what I know, but rather what I feel. As Blaise Pascal once observed, ‘The heart has reasons that reason will never know.’” 

I think I understand the import of what he’s getting at here, but admit to a bit of ambivalence over the way he puts it. He seems to press the parallel between knowledge and reason, on the one hand, and between the heart and feelings, on the other, whereas I’m inclined to think the picture of how things actually go doesn’t lend itself to quite so neat a demarcation. I suspect knowledge involves both the head and heart, as it were, and certain deep experiences, which may (or may not) involve our emotions, can fall within the category of rationality broadly construed. William Wainwright and William James (and ever so many others, including Pascal) have pointed to a phenomenon like passional reason—an integrated amalgam of reason and emotion, of experience and rationality. In my work in moral apologetics, owing to the ineliminably experiential aspect of morality, there’s an almost constant blending of cognitive and affective dimensions. 

I don’t mean, though, to belabor what is perhaps more of a semantic concern than anything else in this case, but I retain at least a bit of worry that it might be or become more than that—if not in Tony’s case, surely in others whose operative understanding of reason leaves no room for affective, relational, aesthetic, moral, or interpersonal factors, or who associate feelings with nothing but unreliable, non-veridical emotions. My view is, truth be told, probably not too distant from Tony’s, but I might have tried avoiding a misunderstanding here by not referring merely to feelings, but to, say, “heartfelt and well-evidenced beliefs of deep ingression.” But then again, that’s just dang wordy. (Much of what he has to say, incidentally, likely also comports with a Reformed epistemology paradigm.) 

Time and again Tony is reticent to move the discussion into apologetic territory. I don’t presume to know exactly why, but I suspect his heart generally seems to be in the eminently right place. He wants to keep the discussion warmly personal and relational and not allow it become a merely intellectual exercise to try winning an argument. But of course this is just where predicating apologetics on a model of passional reason and an expansive rationality can avoid its becoming what Tony wants to avoid. 

One more word about this passage. In the context of discussing how the Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are his disciples, Tony writes that by “the grace of God I have been given the gift of faith.” Surely our capacity for faith is a gift, a provision made possible by God’s grace, but as I’ve mentioned before I think it’s unfortunate to take from this important truth anything like the notion that those with faith have been given the gift and those without it have not. Gifts presumably can be rejected. Of course here my theology is a distinct departure from Calvinism, but it’s an interpretation that I think bears up best under critical scrutiny and exegetical analysis, and avoids the utterly unpalatable implications otherwise (an issue we have discussed and to which we will return). 

It was during high school that faith came alive for Tony even more. In through this part of his story he shares a touching account of his ongoing and growing relationship with God. Then he wonders how folks like Bart, who no longer believe in God, are able to handle their guilt. As a social scientist, Tony is aware of how, say, Freud thought guilt, after suppression, emerges from the subconscious in the form of phobias and neurotic behavior. But for Tony the Christian faith offers a much more effective solution to guilt via God’s grace and forgiveness. 

When I discuss the performative variant of the moral argument, I have taken in recent years to do more than address what John Hare calls the “moral gap” between the best we can do and what we are called to do—by morality or God. I back up and first discuss our need for forgiveness, then for moral change, and finally for moral perfection, and then emphasize how Christian salvation provides for all three: justification for our forgiveness, sanctification for our moral transformation, and glorification for our moral perfection. This is one of those junctures where moral apologetics, it seems to me, lends itself impeccably well not just to an argument for theism per se, but Christianity in particular. So I resonate with Tony here quite a bit in this strong emphasis on divine grace at every step of our journey. 

Then he shares how his vision of what his Christian vocation was to be expanded in the ensuing years, as he became increasingly cognizant of his call to fight for social justice, “changing the world from what it is into what Jesus called the Kingdom of God.” Although I admit to finding such language a bit grandiose, I don’t want to be dogmatic in eschewing it too quickly. Surely we are called to pray for God’s will to be done in this world, and for his kingdom to come. And we are indeed called, all of us, to fight injustices, feed the hungry, and promote love. Too often evangelicals, at least as popularly conceived, can fall into the trap of holding too small a view of what salvation looks like in this world. If we neglect the least of these, we are neglecting Jesus himself. It’s an important reminder that there is some special sense in which God identifies with the poor and needy, oppressed and marginalized.  

Still, a danger of overly politicizing this looms, if we assume the means by which these tasks are done are centrally political. Surely on occasion this is true—Wilberforce’s lifetime political mission is a marvelous example. Still, politically liberal professing Christian believers can fall into the trap of lionizing the Democratic party every bit as much as certain conservative Christians can do so with the Republicans, and this is no small worry where Tony is concerned.  

With what realistic expectations can we expect to see a “reconstructed society” here in this world? Surely strides can be made; the evangelical view of sin arguably brought slavery to its knees, for example. Christian convictions and principles functioned at the foundation of the Civil Rights movement, women’s suffrage, and a whole range of social improvements. Paul Copan has done a nice job in years past chronicling such historical twists on the moral argument. But the idea that we can expect to see God’s kingdom ushered into this world prior to the eschaton—save for within the church itself—strikes me as a bit naïve. The temptation to assign a kind of primacy to political solutions has been a temptation of the church since her inception.  

So after admitting that he had come to see his faith as a call to be involved in a revolutionary movement that can transform the world into the kind of society God wants it to be, Tony anticipates my sort of objection by denying he is motivated by anything like utopian idealism. He admits his ultimate hope resides beyond the grave and not here and now. And sure enough, Tony’s always been an interesting figure in this way by conjoining his liberal political proclivities with orthodox theology—at least until his change of mind on homosexuality, previously discussed. 

Tony’s chapter touches briefly on a few more interesting issues, but since they will come up again later, I’ll defer discussing them until then. One last point for now: Tony notes the way Bart’s inspired by certain of life’s realities, what Maslow might call “peak experiences.” Then he adds this: “It just might be that what Bart has really rejected is not God, but rather the way so many of us Christians usually talk about God.” 

Tony has a point here, although he’s tempted, I think, to overly press it and let Bart off the hook too quickly. It wasn’t just the way others talked about God that might have contributed to Bart’s departure; I’ve argued that some of his own bad theology mistakenly made him think that he had to depart from the faith. But the larger point for now is even more important: not every ostensible rejection of God and Christianity is likely a pure rejection of the true gospel of Christ. I suspect, as Tony intimates, that on occasion and perhaps not infrequently what is getting rejected is something of a garbled version of the truth, a twisted conception of Christianity, a warped view of God.  

Of course we are not the judge; it’s a bit beyond our pay grade, but this is, I think, a good reminder for us to bear in mind: the importance not to presume to know more than we do as we observe the spiritual pilgrimage, stumbles, and struggles of others. This is why coming alongside of them and listening carefully and attentively to what they have to say can often prove more than a little illuminating. 

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and director of The Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Baptist University. Author or editor of about fifteen books, he’s a two-time winner of Christianity Today book awards. He’s currently under contract for his fourth and fifth books with Oxford University Press: a book on moral realism with Jerry Walls, and a collection on the moral argument with Yale’s John Hare.

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Resolved: Grow in Moral and Theological Virtue

It’s that time again. Get ready. Here they come. With pen to paper or fingers to keyboard the lists of New Year’s resolutions will issue forth, and even though many resolutions will not survive the month of January, the impulse to make them is a good one, I suppose. After all, who doesn’t want to do better, to make a change, to lose that weight, write that book, finish that project, or whatever? Who doesn’t resolve to grow in the year ahead? I do, and I suspect you do, too. Well then, here’s a proposed resolution for 2022 that all of us, especially the Christians, can and should put at the top of our lists. Let’s resolve to grow in virtue in the new year, to make 2022 “The Year of Virtue,” if I might be so bold!

What is a virtue? A virtue is what may be described as a stable disposition of the soul, a guiding principle that permeates all a person’s thoughts and deeds. While not everyone may be able to define a virtue with this type of technical specificity, we all know what it looks like when others are virtuous and when they are not. Virtue is attractive, even if we don’t always understand how or why. On this point, it will help to remember that we find virtue attractive and we are able to be virtuous because we are made in the image of God, and He is virtue. He’s not just virtuous, though that is certainly true, but He is virtue, and all our understanding and gravitation toward what is virtuous reflects our being made in God’s image and having a sense of the divine permeating the very fabric of our souls.

To help frame the discussion of virtues a bit more, consider two types of virtues: moral and theological. Moral virtues are the stable dispositions of the soul that all persons, Christian and non-Christian can develop by virtue of God’s common grace in the areas of temperance, prudence, justice, and courage. When we think of temperance, we think of self-control, of the practice of moderation in all things—not too much and not too little of what is good and right. Prudence is like wisdom, the right use of knowledge to the betterment of the person and the society. Justice is that sense of and commitment to what is right, what is righteous, just, and fair. Courage is the ability to face fear and continue to move forward in an endeavor. To be sure, courage is not the absence of fear but the determination to not let fear paralyze and control. These moral virtues all intertwine in relationship to each other, so that, for example, the temperate person is prudent, and her expressions of justice are infused with courage.

How, then, can the moral virtues grow? Of all the possibilities I know, I believe one is most important in this regard. Even in the lack of an abundance of any of the morally virtuous dispositions of the soul, even when courage is small or prudence is hard to identify, a person who exercises what little they have of the virtue will grow in that virtue. Think of a baby’s first steps. They toddle along and fall, first a half step followed by a tumble. Then another full step, a fall, a cry, another attempt, and finally the baby is walking. Though the first step wasn’t a full or stable one, it was an attempt and it led to the next and the next and the next. That’s how moral virtues grow, one feeble choice at a time. Failure gives way to forward movement, and the virtues grows stronger and inspire and sustain each other along the path to human flourishing and happiness. This is true of all persons, as all have the capacity for moral virtue by divine endowment.

What about theological virtues? These are unique to Christians, with capacity for their cultivation given by the grace of God in salvation and infused over time through participation in God’s ordinary means of grace (such as worship, Scripture reading, prayer, fellowship, spiritual disciplines, and the like). Paul lists the theological virtues in 1 Cor. 13:13, declaring that “now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” Notice that Paul states that faith, hope, and love “abide,” which is to say they live and remain in the believer even when other special manifestations of the Spirit’s gifts may dissipate or disappear in the outworking of God’s salvific plan. These three remain in the believer, with potential for growth as stable dispositions of the Christian soul now and into eternity. Love is the greatest, which is to say it is the primary or controlling theological virtue (just as prudence may be thought of as the greatest or primary moral virtue), and together faith, hope, and love grow and increase together to help Christians become more like Christ, more theologically virtuous as they “work out [their] own salvation with fear and trembling” to accomplish their calling as having been “created in Christ Jeus for good works” as a result of having been “saved by grace through faith.”[i]

I hasten to add that as Christians grow in theological virtue they are going to grow in moral virtue, which will in turn influence their growth in theological virtue. All of this is possible through the goodness of God and His commitment to seeing each believer realize their full potential in Christ. That’s what love looks like, after all. It desires the best for its recipient, and Christians are their best when they are morally and theologically virtuous. That’s how we can represent Christ to the world, to be His living epistles, His icons of virtue and goodness.

We come again, then, to our resolutions for the start of 2022. Join me, brothers, sisters, in resolving to grow in moral and theological virtues. Let’s make 2022 “The Year of Virtue” for the sake of a world in desperate need of God’s goodness and mercy as revealed through His virtuous people.

[i] Phil. 2:12; Eph. 2:8-10.

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Dr. Thomas J. Gentry (aka., TJ Gentry) serves as the pastor of First Christian Church of West Frankfort, Illinois, the Executive Editor of MoralApologetics.com, and Executive VP of Bellator Christi Ministries. Dr. Gentry is a world-class scholar holding 5 doctorate degrees and 6 masters degrees. Additionally, he is a prolific writer as he has published 7 books including Pulpit Apologist, Absent from the Body, Present with the Lord, and You Shall Be My Witnesses: Reflections on Sharing the Gospel. Be on the lookout for two additional books that he will soon publish. In addition to his impressive resume, Dr. Gentry proudly served his country as an officer in the United States Army and serves as a martial arts instructor.

The Moral Argument(s) and Christian Theology, Part II: Sanctification

The first installment of this series covered forgiveness. To be made right or reconciled with a holy God involves forgiveness for the many ways in which all of us fall short. More than this is required, but such forgiveness is an ineliminably important part of this process. Mercifully, because of God’s provision in Christ, forgiveness is available for those who seek it.

Another part of a reconciled relationship with God has to do with the next step or stage of salvation—still tied to the theology of “justification,” but usually more associated with what theologians call “sanctification.” Intimate and organic connections obtain between justification and sanctification, but rather than offering an exegetical analysis, we are using these categories as a way to connect the parts of Christian salvation with aspects of the moral argument. After our conversion to Christ, we are still left with a moral gap—the space between where we are morally and spiritually, on the one hand, and where we need to be, on the other. We have a long way to go. That gap needs to be closed. To be forgiven without being changed leaves too much undone.

Another way to put it is like this: we need more than our sins to be forgiven; we need our sin problem itself to be taken away. A documentary concerning the issue of nutrition and physical health I saw a few years ago may be helpful here by way of analogy. One of its basic claims is that doctors do not really produce health. About the best they can do is remove some barriers that impede and stand in the way of health. What actually produces health is the properly functioning body—a healthy immune system, a body, properly treated and fed, doing what it was meant to do.

This is most clearly seen when it comes to chronic diseases. Doctors and pharmaceutical companies cannot fix such problems. What they can do is provide medicines that help alleviate and manage certain symptoms and make life more comfortable for the patient, even while the affliction persists, managed to one degree or another. Although medical practitioners are rather limited in what they are able to do, the body is remarkably resilient in its ability to ward off diseases, recover from various injuries, and heal itself. This is why proper nutrition and exercise are so important, because they enable the body to do what it does best. Chronically undernourished or sedentary bodies eventually become impaired in their ability to perform their proper functions.

The point of the documentary was well made: there is a crucial difference between genuine health, on the one hand, and merely improving conditions, on the other, however much a blessing the latter can be. Another fitting analogy would be the distinction between pulling out a weed versus killing its root. The former is at best a temporary fix; the underlying problem will recur until the latter step is taken.

A similar distinction holds in the arena of morality. One option is merely to deal with symptoms, settling for marginal moral improvements, avoiding hurtful consequences by our actions. True achievement of integrity, virtue, and holiness, though, requires considerably more. In light of what seem to be some deeply entrenched patterns of selfishness and moral weakness endemic to the human condition, we need powerful resources to meet the moral demand and effect the needed change in our character.

Benjamin Franklin once tried to do this on his own, setting himself to the formidable task of achieving moral perfection. In “Arriving at Perfection,” an excerpt from his Autobiography, he wrote about his plans to conquer all imperfections that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead him into, but “I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined. While my care was employ’d in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason.”

Immanuel Kant recognized that we fall short of what morality requires, and so he said we need to have moral faith: the belief that the moral life is possible. But in light of our moral malady, this requires radical transformation. Can we be transformed? This is a second great existential moral need, after forgiveness. Perhaps owing to his Lutheran upbringing, Kant was quite sure that human beings have a deep moral problem, a tendency to be curved inward on themselves, an intractable ethical taint, a deeply flawed moral disposition in need of a revolution. Kant saw clearly that the moral demand on us is very high, while also recognizing that we have a natural propensity not to follow it.

Malcolm Muggeridge once said that the depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact. In Kant, the parallel suggestion seems to be not just that we happen to fail to meet the moral demand, but that our failure is inevitable. We have a problem, one too deep for us to solve on our own. Humans are not essentially good. We are broken, deeply broken, and need to be healed at the root, not merely the symptoms removed. Like Clay Jones puts it, all of us are born Auschwitz-enabled—the people responsible for such unspeakable atrocities of history were not, as human beings go, preternaturally bad people. They were garden variety human beings who, when certain circumstances presented themselves, behaved deplorably. All of us have that hideous potential. Moral ugliness lurks in each of our hearts. There is something in need of radical fixing deep within us. We need major moral surgery.

The moral standard remains obstinately in place, but because of our moral weakness, corrupt characters, irremediable selfishness, intractable egoism, and the like, we are unable to meet that standard. An axiomatic deontic principle is that “ought implies can” in some sense, and yet we seem to be obligated to do what we simply cannot. How can this make sense? Augustine offered the crucial insight: God bids us to do what we cannot, in order that we might learn our dependence on Him.  We cannot live as we ought in our own strength alone, but we can by God’s grace, with divine assistance.

So, even without sugarcoating our brokenness, there is great hope. Christianity says the needed resources for transformation are available. Although we cannot meet the moral demand on our own, God himself has made it possible, if we but submit and allow Him to do it through us. It may well require a painful process, but it is possible.

Having started his book Mere Christianity with talk of the moral gap between what we are and what we ought to be, Lewis then explained his reason for doing so. His explanation is telling. The passage can be found in his concluding paragraph of Book 1:

My reason was that Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. … It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor. When you have realized that our position is nearly desperate you will begin to understand what the Christians are talking about. They offer an explanation of how we got into our present state of both hating goodness and loving it. They offer an explanation of how God can be this impersonal mind at the back of the Moral Law and yet also a Person. They tell you how the demands of this law, which you and I cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how God Himself becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God.

God can do more than merely ameliorate the symptoms of our chronic moral malady. In the face of our urgent need to become not just better people, but new people, and our desperate need for a revolution of the will and for radical moral transformation, the death and resurrection of Christ is indeed “good news.” This issue of transformation, again, is the theological category of sanctification. Just as God answers our need for forgiveness, God’s grace in sanctification answers our need for radical moral transformation.

By the way, biblical holiness is not just individual, but social. And here one like Paul Copan has done us a great service by bringing a historical twist to the moral argument. He has shown how historically it has been Christ followers who were largely responsible for such significant social advances as building orphanages, arguing for the inherent dignity of the handicapped and infirmed, fighting for women’s suffrage, standing against foot-binding, and so forth. This investigation gets into historical contingencies, but it remains an important empirical consideration, one that brings to mind John Wesley’s refrain that there is no holiness without social holiness.

Having discussed our need for and God’s gracious gift of both forgiveness and transformation, next time we will discuss a third deep existential and spiritual need, namely, to be morally healed completely, saved to the uttermost.

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

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Moral Apologetics & Christian Theology

For some while now I have had the thought that it would be worthwhile to explore the connection between moral apologetics and theology. I have had occasion to touch on this matter here and there, but never anything remotely exhaustive. It remains in my mind a project to pursue for later—resonances of the moral argument(s) with such theological categories as ecclesiology and Christology, eschatology and soteriology, pneumatology, theological anthropology, and theology proper. In this short piece today, I’m going to just tip my toe in such a project by using something of a traditional four-fold distinction that cuts across a variety of theological concerns.

From the earliest chapters of Genesis we find that what gets broken and is need of being set right are the following facets of our existence: ourselves, the creation, our relationship with others, and our relationship with God. John Hare’s forthcoming book on theistic ethics—the third in his trilogy (after The Moral Gap and God’s Command)—is structured in a similar four-fold way: specifically, the unity we seek in life, with the creation or environment, with other people, and with God. And R. Scott Rodin’s excellent book on the steward leader similarly couches the discussion in terms of four areas in which leaders foster robust health: in the self, with others, with creation, and with God. Categories of self and life might seem different, but since I see the biblical discourse of life primarily in terms of the abundant, kingdom life for which God designed each one of us, it seems to me that they are inextricably linked. So let’s quickly canvass each in turn.

In terms of the self, and the sort of life for which we were made, there are three conceptually distinct aspects to our salvation. There is justification, which puts us right with God; this largely involves our forgiveness for falling short. C. S. Lewis said the key to understanding the universe resides in recognizing that there’s a moral standard and that we fail to meet it. This introduces the need, first, for our forgiveness, and according to Christian theology God has made provision for our forgiveness in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The second dimension of salvation is sanctification, the gradual process by which we are not just forgiven, but actually changed and transformed into the likeness of Christ. This introduces what John Hare calls the performative dimension of moral apologetics—how we can cross the gap between the best we can do, morally speaking, and the moral standard. If we are obligated to meet the standard, but are unable to do so on our own, Augustine thought that this was to show us our need for God’s grace to be changed. The culmination of salvation is glorification, the point at which, by God’s grace, we are entirely conformed to the image of Christ; we are made perfect, altogether delivered from sin’s power and consequences. Christian theology thus makes sense of our need for forgiveness, our need to be changed, and ultimately even our desire to be perfected.

Immanuel Kant’s argument for the afterlife was predicated on his thinking that a “holy will” was the province of God’s alone, and that it would forever reside beyond our reach. We would thus need eternity to approach it asymptotically (ever closer but never there)—because it’s a process that will never be completed. He was both right and wrong, I think. Contra Kant, Christian theology says that we will indeed by God’s grace be entirely conformed to the image of Christ, so there is a destination at which the regenerate will arrive. But I suspect he was right in an important sense to think of our eternal state as involving more of a dynamic picture than a static one. Once glorified, our growth won’t cease; indeed, completion of “the good work within us” will mark the chance for us to live as we were fully intended with all the obstructions removed.

Sometimes there is debate over whether morality will go away in heaven. My guess is that morality in Kant’s sense certainly will; talk of rights and duties will pass away. But they will be replaced by something far grander—gift and sacrifice, as George Mavrodes would say. Or think of rights and duties as the mere anteroom in a grand castle or cathedral that represents morality. Life in that place will be as it should be: life among its towering spires, where self-giving love is the norm. We are told, in fact, that the glory to come is something so wonderful we can scarcely imagine it.

Lewis sometimes likened the whole quest of morality to a fleet of ships. This fleet must consist of vessels that are individually seaworthy. It must function cooperatively, with all vessels navigating their ways without crashing into one another. And this fleet must have a destination. The first and third requirements—individual seaworthiness and reaching a destination—are closely connected to the individual’s moral trajectory. By God’s grace we are made seaworthy: we find forgiveness for our invariable shortcomings, grace to be radically transformed, grace by which to find meaning in life and our vocations of purpose, and grace ultimately to become the wholly distinctive expressions of Christ God designed us to be.

Lewis’s middle requirement in the fleet example pertains to not bumping into others, and this is the second of the aforementioned four theological constraints. In fact, nowadays, morality is often deflated in the minds of many to pertain just to this feature of ethics, but in fact it is only one of the four parts. Morality rightly understood and practiced does indeed lead, in general, to more harmonious relations with others; this is one reason why Christ followers are called to be ministers of reconciliation. Indeed, this is arguably also part of the goal or telos of humanity: that the barriers of fellowship between people would be removed and we would learn to love another and forge deep relationships of mutual care with one another. Indeed, in Christian theology, after the most important commandment, which we’ll get to in a moment, the second most important command is that we love our neighbors as ourselves. And we are pretty much told that we can’t discharge the most important command without taking the neighbor-love command with dreadful seriousness. The communal aspects of sanctification remind us that the implications of morality are not a simply individualist affair; waging war on systemic evils, promoting justice, feeding the poor, opposition to slavery—all of these are aspects of the moral life expansively and communally construed. Paul Copan is especially effective at highlighting this historical dimension of the moral argument by chronicling a myriad of ways in which Christians have traditionally led the way in women’s suffrage, building orphanages, opposing foot-binding, and the like.

In terms of the third theological category—unity with creation—two salient connections with moral apologetics immediately come to mind, namely, moral duties we have to care for the creation of which we have been made stewards, and treatment of animals as the sacred creatures they are. In his Lectures on Ethics Kant tried to spell out how our duties to animals are rooted in our obligations to fellow human beings, writing that if a man treats his dog well, regularly feeding and watering it and taking it for walks, this man is probably going to be kinder in his dealings with human persons. This is why Kant says, “We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals…. Tender feelings towards dumb animals develop human feelings towards mankind.”

Although that is likely true, I can’t help but be a bit dissatisfied by this analysis alone. It seems sounder to say we have an obligation to God to treat his creation properly, which includes animals, and it’s even more pressing we treat animals well because they are capable of feeling pain. It’s almost become cliché to remind us all that dominion isn’t domination. Intentionally and needlessly inflicting pain on animals, for example, is cruel disregard for God’s creation—and a sin against God. We should care about the experience of animals and want them not to suffer needlessly, and not just for instrumental reasons. I count the inability of a number of naturalist accounts to justify believing we have obligations toward animals a deficiency—even if it’s true that animals don’t have rights (a question on which I’m currently agnostic).

Elsewhere I have repeatedly made it clear that I’m eminently open—with N. T. Wright, John Wesley, and C. S. Lewis—to the idea that we will see animals in heaven. It’s not a nonnegotiable conviction of mine, but it’s a reasonable inference, I think, if we take seriously the notion that the work of Christ redeemed the entirety of the created order, of which animals are a vital part. It is actually quite illuminating to peruse the full range of biblical teachings about the animals.

Fourthly, finally, and most centrally, Christian theology gives pride of place to reconciliation with God—and not just reconciliation, but a relationship of all-consuming love for and relationship of intimacy with God. Since there are principled reasons to think of the ultimate good in personalist terms (as nothing less than God himself) and the ultimate good for us in such terms as well (nothing less than the beatific vision), I can’t help but think of the telos of humankind and the culmination of salvation in the Christian order of things through the lens of Goodness itself. The deontic family of terms, discourse about what’s obligatory or permissible, might well pass away when all things are made new, but the Good and the Beautiful will be on full display and to be enjoyed forever. That Christianity teaches that the most important commandment of all—a necessary and eternal truth—is love of God with all of our heart and soul, mind and strength, puts this dimension, this unity, this relationship at the core of reality.

Morality here and now involves just the first, fledgling lessons in learning the dance steps of the Trinity. For this reason Lewis once wrote these words: “Mere morality is not the end of life. You were made for something quite different from that…. The people who keep on asking if they can’t lead a decent life without Christ don’t know what life is about; if they did they would know that ‘a decent life’ is mere machinery compared with the things we men are really made for. Morality is indispensable: but the Divine Life, which gives itself to us and which calls us to be gods, intends for us something in which morality will be swallowed up.”

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

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Moral Apologetics and Biography, Part III

In previous installments I have spoken of three experiences from my past—from my childhood, in fact—that shaped me as a moral apologist. These were the following: being raised in the holiness and camp meeting tradition, watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and seeing a poignant television commercial about a relief organization’s work in an underprivileged part of the world. All of those experiences were what we might call positive ones—inspiring me to think about what moral goodness is, what it looks like, and what it feels like.

Not all of the experiences that shaped me, though, were positive. Like all of us, there were also plenty of negative experiences from my past, so today I’m going to share one of those in particular. It is an especially difficult chapter from my past to share. It is the source of a fair amount of shame, because it was no small moral infraction.

More than once I had the opportunity to put a stop to a particular kid getting bullied. He was an easy target, not a physically strong boy, and in various ways an outlier, just not fitting in. Although more than once I had a strong impulse to reach out, to protect him, to include him, to befriend him, I did not. And on more than one occasion I actually saw him getting cruelly bullied and did nothing about it. I have thought about this many times since then, and I am still ashamed for not doing the right thing.

In fact, my resounding silence and abject failure to do the right thing was actually doing the radically wrong thing. My failure to act was wicked, and the reason, I’m convinced, I felt guilty about it is because in fact I was guilty. The feeling was indicative of a deeper problem, tracking the reality of an objective condition. I knew to do right and failed to do it, and in so failing I did something unspeakably awful. I know that now, but I knew it then, too.

In his Confessions, Augustine shared with laudable transparency his own painful childhood lesson in depravity. The example seems trivial—stealing pears—but the key to grasping its import is understanding that beneath its garden-variety nature lurked something far more sinister. He elaborated like this:

I wanted to carry out an act of theft and did so, driven by no kind of need other than my inner lack of any sense of, or feeling for, justice. Wickedness filled me. I stole something which I had in plenty and of much better quality. My desire was to enjoy not what I sought by stealing but merely the excitement of thieving and the doing of what was wrong. There was a pear tree near our vineyard laden with fruit, though attractive in neither [color] nor taste. To shake the fruit off the tree and carry off the pears, I and a gang of naughty adolescents set off late at night after (in our usual pestilential way) we had continued our game in the streets. We carried off a huge load of pears. But they were not for our feasts but merely to throw to the pigs. Even if we ate a few, nevertheless our pleasure lay in doing what was not allowed.

Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart. You had pity on it when it was at the bottom of the abyss. Now let my heart tell you what it was seeking there in that I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.[1]

Of course all human beings have their redeeming characteristics and moral strengths—each of us is made in God’s image, after all. We are far from being as bad as we can be. Still, only after recognizing our need to be forgiven—our having fallen short of the moral law, both our draw and repulsion to the good, our love and hate of shame, our indulgence of darkness, our taste for wickedness—are we able to apprehend just how good is the good news of the gospel.

In an essay called “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Dock, C. S. Lewis identifies salient features of those in his generation, and his analysis is perhaps even timelier today. Among such features was skepticism about ancient history and distrust of old texts; another one—most relevant for present purposes—was that a sense of sin is almost totally lacking. Lewis writes that

Our situation is thus very different from that of the Apostles. The Pagans … to whom they preached were haunted by a sense of guilt and to them the [g]ospel was, therefore, “good news.” We address people who have been trained to believe that whatever goes wrong in the world is someone else’s fault—the Capitalists, the Government’s, the Nazis’, the Generals’, etc. They approach God Himself as His judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether He can be acquitted for creating such a world.

In attacking this fatal insensibility it is useless to direct attention (a) To sins your audience do not commit, or (b) To things they do, but do not regard as sins. They are usually not drunkards. They are mostly fornicators, but then they do not feel fornication to be wrong. It is, therefore, useless to dwell on either of these subjects. (Now that contraceptives have removed the obviously uncharitable element in fornication I do not myself think we can expect people to recognize it as sin until they have accepted Christianity as a whole.)

I cannot offer you a water-tight technique for awakening the sense of sin. I can only say that, in my experience, if one begins from the sin that has been one’s own chief problem during the last week, one is very often surprised at the way this shaft goes home. But whatever method we use, our continual effort must be to get their mind away from public affairs and “crime” and bring them down to brass tacks—in the whole network of spite, greed, envy, unfairness, and conceit in the lives of “ordinary decent people” like themselves (and ourselves).[2] 

In class I sometimes ask how best to address this ubiquitous notion nowadays that none, or at least hardly any, of us are deep sinners in need of forgiveness. It is a challenging situation to confront, but very often a prominent part of our current context. Perhaps one way is to talk about one’s own failures, rather than our neighbor’s. For another, Lewis directed folks to consider their chief sin of the previous week. Yet another approach might be to reframe the question like this: Ask folks to consider the biggest mistake they ever made, and then ask them what went into that mistake. Specifically, is there, in their resultant regret, any moral element? That may edge people closer to considering their moral failures.

Of course, for Christians encouraging such reflection, the point is not to put people under condemnation to leave them there, but to share the news of liberation from guilt and reconciliation with a loving God anxious to save them to the uttermost. Not the false liberation of defiantly denying, or simply failing to recognize, one’s guilt, but the true freedom that comes from knowing the truth.

I also hope one day I run into the man who had been that bullied boy, and tell him I am sincerely sorry for my wretched cowardice and complicity in cruelty.

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

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[1] Saint Augustine, Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 29.

[2] C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1970), 95-96.

Moral Apologetics and Biography, Part I

When I was in graduate school, a very good teacher of mine once suggested that I “purge the personal” from my work. It was generally good advice, which I tried to follow, and I was appreciative of his insight. It is indeed often best to do so as we strive to write about a topic objectively and dispassionately. But when it comes to moral apologetics, it is not always easy or even possible for me and others to do so at a distance, and sometimes it does well for us to consider some of the reasons why.

So in series of short posts I intend to discuss moral apologetics and various ways in which it has reverberated in my life and the lives of others. This is important, I suspect, for several reasons, one of which is this. In order for something like morality to be taken as importantly evidential in a person’s life, something about morality must seem especially striking. Unlike a geometric proof that need not engage one’s affective or imaginative sides (though for some it may), the moral argument, to have purchase in a person’s life, likely requires a requisite prior experience of goodness. Likewise with an aesthetic apologetic, requiring enough prior experience of beauty. Goodness and Beauty are quite analogous in this way, which makes a great deal of sense if anything in the vicinity of Plato’s view is right that they are practically flip sides of the same coin. Both of these “Transcendentals” are deeply experiential realities.[1]

The anecdotes in this post, then, are designed to illuminate an aspect of moral apologetics that logically and often chronologically precedes close examination of a formal moral argument. These are the sorts of experiences that prepare the ground, as it were, make fertile the soil of our hearts and minds to hear the argument and feel its force. Perhaps the reason why some remain largely unmoved by the moral argument is that they lack the requisite experience of goodness, and as a result the argument lacks purchase for them. In the same way some raised without a loving father in their life have a harder time believing in a loving Heavenly Father—while, interestingly, some with missing or unloving parents naturally gravitate to a loving God like a ravenous man to a delicious meal.

Acknowledging the contours of our personal stories is not the same as reducing questions of evidence to psychology. It’s rather simply to apprehend how various aspects of our past have helped shape us, sometimes giving us eyes with which to discern what’s there, and sometimes serving as blinders or obstructions impeding our vision. Just as good intellectual habits make more likely our acquisition of truth, and a rule of reason is a bad one that prevents us from discerning truth and evidence that are really there, likewise our formative experiences can either help or hinder our quest for reality.

In my own life story, three episodes in particular stand out as shaping my vocation as a natural theologian and moral apologist. One is that I was a child of the holiness tradition. To this day I can still smell the sawdust trails of camp meetings from my earliest years. We often attended more than one camp meeting a year, and any summer season I now experience bereft of a visit to camp meeting strikes me as emaciated somehow. A few years ago Marybeth and I wrote a history of a camp meeting in Michigan I attended for many years, and it started like this:

Eaton Rapids Camp Meeting has touched my life profoundly. One of my earliest memories, in fact, was looking high into the air at the windows near the top of the tabernacle. It was after an evening service, if my faint memory serves, and I must have been herded back to the main auditorium after the youth service was done. People were milling about and darting in various directions. I still recall seeing some tables set up with various advertisements (likely from Bible schools and the like) at the back of the tabernacle, and the outstanding impression I experienced at that age was the sheer enormity of the structure. It was simple but elegant—it seemed well-nigh ornate to me—with doors propped up all around its perimeter. Its capacious wooden canopy was enough to mesmerize my imagination for quite some time. I am guessing I was around five or six years of age. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was smack dab in the center of a vintage piece of classic Americana. This was camp meeting, in Eaton Rapids, Michigan, and it was, to my best guess, 1971 or 1972.[2]      

Camp meeting shaped my soul. I had been taught many of the same things in church, of course, but camp meeting was like church on steroids, and it drove home a great many lessons. God is love, for example—essentially, perfectly love—and God desires the very best for each of us. He loves us enough to send Jesus to die for us. God does not merely want us to believe in him, or treat him like a miracle dispenser to bail us out of trouble. He want us to know him, find our vocation in him, and love him. God’s grace is sufficient for us, and enough both to forgive for our committed sins, and deliver us from our condition of sinfulness.

Longtime Asbury College president Dennis Kinlaw once wrote that even our good deeds, done for Christ and in his strength, can be tinged with self-centered self-interest that permeates the depths of our psyches and defiles even our best. “This raises the question of a clean heart and of an undivided heart full of the love of God…. That is why the experience of a clean heart and of a perfect love for God is often described as ‘a second work of grace.’ The identification of this need in the believer’s life and the provision in Christ for a pure heart is the special mission of the camp meeting.”[3] 

When Kinlaw was in his nineties, Marybeth and I went to visit him in Wilmore and were able to pummel him with questions for a few hours. Still sharp as a tack, he regaled us with stories as college president, presiding over the famous 1970 revival at Asbury, pastor, professor, administrator, camp meeting preacher. He was an eminently impressive person, just brilliant, but something about him struck me as particularly interesting. He didn’t point to his tenure as college president as central to his identity, nor his PhD in Old Testament from Brandeis, but to an experience he had as a thirteen year old boy at Indian Springs Camp Meeting in Georgia. In the twilight of his life, with the benefit of all the hindsight afforded a 90-year-old man, he pointed to those altar experiences he had as a boy, when he met God in person—under the preaching of another longtime Asbury college president, its founder Henry Morrison, no less—as what was at the heart of who he was. More than anything else from his experiences, that was what he saw as defining him.

My next post will discuss a second feature of my childhood that softened my heart and opened my mind to the moral argument.

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With his co-author, Jerry Walls, Dr. Baggett authored Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. The book won Christianity Today’s 2012 apologetics book of the year of the award. He published a sequel with Walls that critiques naturalistic ethics, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning. A third book in the series, The Moral Argument: A History, chronicles the history of moral arguments for God’s existence. Dr. Baggett has also co-edited a collection of essays exploring the philosophy of C.S. Lewis, and edited the third debate between Gary Habermas and Antony Flew on the resurrection of Jesus. Dr. Baggett currently is a professor at Houston Baptist University.

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[1] Readers are strongly encouraged to listen to David Horner’s remarkable talk “Too Good Not to be True,” accessible here: https://www.moralapologetics.com/wordpress/video-too-good-not-to-be-true-the-shape-of-moral-apologetics-david-horner.

[2] David & Marybeth Baggett, At the Bend of the River Grand (Wilmore, KY: Emeth Press, 2016), xi.

[3] Ibid., 265.

The Withered Hand

Here recently, emotions come on me like an Imperial Star Destroyer out of lightspeed.  I’m good one minute, and the next I need to sit down and deal with the lump in my throat.  No warning, no spinning thoughts, no sleepless nights, no nothing.  Boom.  The Empire is there to destroy me.

Until COVID hit, everything seemed to be going swimmingly. Job was going alright, the kids are growing, my wife still likes me.  From a stage-of-life standpoint, I had challenges that I needed to face, but those challenges gave me hope and energy.

Then, well, COVID. 

I’m an introvert, so spending days upon days by myself is what I like to call pretty neat-o. I teach English, so I basically read and write for a living.  I love teaching, but I’m usually pretty exhausted by the end of a class or two. And I’m even one of those very annoying people who got even more accomplished without the constant distractions and, well, people. During COVID, I got stuff done. Good stuff.  Stuff I deeply believe that God wanted me to do and was pleased with me for.

So, why was I miserable? 

Well, as I write this, I have no idea. I’m a rather positive person, so being miserable is new.  I’m not one to sing “Everything is Awesome” wherever I go, but I might hum it under my breath.  I can usually see an opening, a light.  In my world, things are rarely ever hopeless.

As my emotional pit deepened, I tried everything to understand and deal with the incredibly strong, powerful emotions I was feeling: I took walks, I sat on my deck, I worked, I hung with family, I tried to control them with schedules I came up with, I presented them with my over-the-top expectations for their behavior, I did it all. . .

I still felt miserable.

When I was growing up, there was a very common song that we sang, with this lyric: “Every day with Jesus is sweeter than the day before.”  Without offering any commentary on the song, I will say that, here recently, this has certainly NOT been my experience.  Some days with Jesus are better, but some days aren’t.  I was taught that the promise of salvation and the hope of eternity was enough for any rough day I might encounter.  But here I was, during a time of tremendous grief and stress (worldwide grief and stress, mind you) being crippled emotionally.  Seriously, I should have been doing great, but every day seemed tougher than the day before.  And I believe Jesus was with me on this.

So, I went to the elders at my church (I’m one of them), and I told them how I was feeling and that I needed professional counseling. I wouldn’t say they knew it was coming, but none of them seemed surprised, either.  They’d seen me, over the previous handful of years, survive a couple strokes and then talk about the changes that ensued: my job, my marriage, the kids, the works.  To this point, I had done whatever I thought was wise so I could heal.  We bring everything to our meeting: confessions of sin, frustrations over jobs, parenting challenges, even finances.  Nothing, really, is off the table. 

They listened and prayed that God would help me in this.

Then, just like my quick-appearing emotions, it came to me.  The miracle where Jesus healed the man with the withered hand. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke each has an account of this particular miracle. Jesus was at the synagogue on the Sabbath. Jesus asks the man to show everyone his hand. I asked myself: everyone knew about this guy’s hand, right?  He’d been seen at the synagogue, probably more than once. This guy probably wasn’t there by accident, and I’m guessing he was a regular fixture there. The context is clear, too: Jesus asked the man to show his withered hand so that everyone could see what he was about to do. 

Yet, I wonder: was there a small part of that bit of theater meant for the man? To be sure, the rest of the scene deals with the reactions of the religious folks and the crowd.  But Jesus ignores all of them to make that request. I imagine Jesus looking at the man, and everyone else kind of disappearing for that moment: “stretch out your hand.” Did the man do it immediately? Did his hand shake? Did he have a queasy nervousness before he did it?

This man had lived his life with this withered hand, and I’m sure he’d lived his life around it, too.  There wasn’t a blue-collar/white collar divide. He couldn’t pick up a desk job because he couldn’t work a manual labor trade.  Everything was a manual labor trade, and he had to get on with life if he was ever going to live.  He had to cope.  Nothing was going to change.

I think, in some way, Jesus was showing that this man was going to be healed, but he also required the man to show his withered hand to show everyone else that he needed healing. He wasn’t ok. The man’s life was as bent as his hand, and he needed to look at it again, so Jesus could do something about it.  Too often, I live my life that way: working around and over the places in my life where I must simply face the fact that I need healing. 

Being overly optimistic while ignoring the difficulties of a particular situation is a guide  for living a half-life or no life at all.  In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins interviews Admiral Jim Stockdale, where they discuss Stockdale’s torture while he lived as a POW in the concentration camp dubbed “The Hanoi Hilton” in Vietnam.  During the interview, Stockdale described the personal discipline it took to survive such a brutal—and long lasting—lifestyle.  His description for what it takes to succeed has taken on the name “The Stockdale Paradox”:  “You must never confuse the faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.”

It’s strange to say it, but I believe one key weakness that I’ve been living around is that I’m too positive.  I haven’t looked at the difficulty in my life, as easy as my life seems to be, in comparison to, say, Jim Stockdale’s torture.  That’s why I’m not making that comparison.  I’m actually comparing myself to the men who, according to Stockdale, didn’t make it.

I’ve been looking at everything in the world, due to COVID (sickness, death, anger, financial ruin, frustration, arrogance, all of it), and I find myself quickly imagining how things would be when all of this is over. That, friends, is deadly. In fact, Stockdale claims that the people who died quickest in the Hanoi Hilton were the ones who were the most optimistic—they imagined getting out by Christmas, then by Easter, July 4, and so on.  According to Admiral Stockdale, they died of a broken heart.

But my approach to my own pain, is not just a symptom of humanity, it’s very much a symptom of the brand of Christianity I find myself in, the brand of Christianity that is quick to paper over pain and hardship in favor of a “God is in control!” statement or a “He’s coming back soon” encouragement or even an “I see God working” prophecy.  In his book Recapturing the Wonder, Mike Cosper describes this brand of the Christian life: “Many pastors and writers paint a picture of the Christian life that is much more akin to a Thomas Kinkaid painting: everything bathed in amber light, flowers blooming even in the snow, everything peaceful and picturesque.”

In contrast to that picture, Jesus demands to see what’s broken or hurting or not working anymore.  As my wife says, “you have to reveal it before you can heal it.”

But Jesus himself, at different times in his life, asked for evidence of the pain that people around him suffered.  He knew about that pain, so it must have been for the benefit of the person who needed to be delivered.  Of course, even as he asks to see the withered parts of our lives, Jesus personifies the reality that we will prevail.

Preaching and Apologetics?

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Series Introduction:

What does a pastor’s preaching have to do with apologetics, if anything at all? Some conclude that the two are separate activities, that preaching is preaching, and apologetics is apologetics. However, as T. J. Gentry’s forthcoming series “Pulpit Apologetics” will argue, preaching and apologetics not only can go together, but should, and every pastor has an obligation to learn to bring apologetics into the pulpit. In this series the general relationship between preaching and apologetics is considered, as well as the special connection between preaching, moral apologetics, and abductive argumentation. Further, as a practical offering to those seeking to better unite preaching and apologetics, a model of sermon preparation will be developed for both negative and positive apologetic concerns. The series will feature a new installment every Friday. Don’t miss it!

Preaching and Apologetics

Sheila’s friend, Mary, invited her to a special Sunday evening service at her church designed to answer questions about the Christian faith for skeptics and seekers. As a curious non-Christian, Sheila was intrigued by the invitation and decided to attend one of the services. Mary’s pastor began each message at these services with a question about Christianity, and the night Sheila attended the question was, does God really exist? As Sheila listened to the message, the pastor explained that each person has an innate sense of what is right and what is wrong, and that this innate sense of morality is a clue to God’s existence. Sheila was challenged by the message and, though she did not respond to the brief gospel invitation offered at the end of the service, she did promise to attend again with Mary. The preaching Sheila heard offered answers to questions about God, and she began to seriously consider the claims of Christianity.

Raised in a Christian home, John regularly attended church and other activities, including participating in his youth group and actively sharing his faith in Jesus. Upon graduating high school John enrolled as a commuter student at the local state university and, as part of his course of general studies, took a course in cultural anthropology. His professor was an atheist and an outspoken critic of religion in general, especially Christianity, and soon the professor’s challenges led John to wrestle with profound and persistent doubts about the existence of God and the reliability of the Bible. Thus, when John’s pastor began a series of sermons on why the Christian worldview makes sense and the Bible can be trusted, John found answers to his doubts and his faith was strengthened. The preaching John heard helped him find reasons to believe, and he grew as a disciple of Jesus Christ.

What do these examples of preaching have in common? Though the primary purpose of the preaching in Sheila’s instance was to make a compelling case for Christianity to skeptics and seekers, and the primary purpose in John’s instance was to strengthen a disciple’s faith, both messages involved apologetics. However, is this a legitimate role for preaching, whether to those who are already Christians or to seekers and skeptics? Is there a nexus—a central link or connection—between apologetics and preaching for discipleship and evangelism or are these separate activities?

Preaching is a fundamental and regularly occurring expression of a pastor’s work within most congregations, both in terms of evangelism and discipleship. Wayne McDill concludes that “of all the tasks to be done in ministry, preaching is surely one of the most important.” Paul the apostle admonished his young protégé, Timothy, who was also a pastor and mentor to other pastors, to “give attention to…exhortation” (1 Tim. 4:13), to “Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching” (2 Tim. 4:2), and to “do the work of an evangelist” (2 Tim. 4:5). In these directives to Timothy, Paul describes the centrality of the pastor’s role as preacher—to exhort, teach, and evangelize. Haddon Robinson explains that the pastor’s call to preaching is so significant because “through the preaching of the Scriptures, God encounters men and women to bring them to salvation…and to richness and ripeness of Christian character.”

Yet, amid the prevailing post-modern and post-Christian milieu in much of the world, the audience to which the pastor delivers his message is increasingly ignorant of and unsure of the veracity of even its most basic elements. According to J. E. White, 23% of adults in the United States consider themselves as having no religious affiliation, and nearly 19% of adults claim to be former Christians. Add to these statistics the widespread veneration of philosophical and religious pluralism and one begins to recognize the challenge today’s pastor faces when standing in the pulpit and proclaiming the Christian message. As White aptly states, “It’s simply a cultural reality that people in a post-Christian world are genuinely incredulous that anyone would think like…well, a Christian—or at least, what it means in their minds to think like a Christian.”

Further, it is not difficult to see that God’s greatness and goodness are under attack directly and indirectly in various challenges presented by antagonists of the Christian faith. If God is great, the skeptic asks, then why are there so many examples of slavery in the Bible, and why would He order the slaughter of Canaanite women and children? If God is good, the struggling Christian wonders, then why did individuals kill thousands of innocent people in the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and why did an earthquake kill thousands in India? These are challenging questions that strike at the very heart of God’s character, and the Christian message offers answers that reflect sensitivity to the issues and assurance regarding God’s greatness and goodness. Preaching can and should help with these challenges to God’s character.

Thus, it seems reasonable and practical to conclude that preachers should expect to engage in various forms of apologetic encounters—helping answer challenges to belief posed by unbelievers while also helping strengthen the faith of believers. What a pastor should do and what a pastor can do, though, are not necessarily the same when it comes to apologetics, and this reveals a fundamental problem: Pastors may have little knowledge of apologetics in general, and less in how apologetics relates to preaching. For those pastors who do have knowledge of apologetics, they may not know how to integrate apologetics into their ministry of preaching in a holistic manner that avoids turning sermons into dense apologetics lectures or trite and simplistic messages lacking relevant depth and substance.

What, then, is a pastor to do concerning apologetics and preaching? The answer to this question provides the impetus for future articles in this series. In the next installment we will consider further the general rationale for the nexus of preaching and apologetics. Until then, remember that Peter’s command to “sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet. 3:15) applies to everyone, including those who preach.

Three Poems on the New Year: Perspectives on Time

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          The measurement of time is so ingrained in our society that we take it for granted.  On a daily basis we have schedules that mark the beginning and ending of assigned or chosen tasks.  On a larger scale, we track the progress of each week, month, or year.  Our annual celebration of the transition from one calendar year to another invites a summary and evaluation of what has been accomplished or merely taken place in the past year.  In a more personal way, we celebrate birthdays as milestones in the progress of our lives.  Underlying all of this measurement of time is an awareness that we humans, along with our social and political institutions, have limited lifespans.  We are all on the path to death.

          It has not always been so.  When God created the Earth to be an environment for living things, especially for his ultimate creation, human beings, there was no sense of limited life, and so no need to measure time.  But all of that changed when Adam and Eve chose to disobey God, thereby incurring the promised penalty of death.  Very quickly after the two of them were banished from the timeless Garden of Eden, the narrative about their offspring began to be marked by the passage of time: how many years between the births of their children and how old each person was when he died.  How different the human and divine perspectives on the passage of time had become.

          I have imagined in “Adam’s first New Year” how he might have ruminated about his new perception of the passage of time on the anniversary of his and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise. In this monologue, Adam, though keenly aware of the sad new world he and Eve have brought about, realizes that God is still with him, transcending His own edict of judgment, just as He had done earlier when He clothed the just-realized, sin-conscious nakedness of the pair. 

Adam's First New Year

Adam paced the field

Made rough by tilling,

Unwilling ground since God

Withdrew His Presence from it.

The sun itself, now cyclic,

Gave only partial beams

To warm the stubborn soil.

"No need in Eden's bounds

To think of ebb and flow,

Of patterned change

Which gives us markers

For the progress of decay;

But now each day reveals

That something more of what we were

Is lost,

And nights accumulate

Until the sun comes back

To mark the point where death began.

"That day, I made a world

Where beginnings add up to ends,

And cycles are incremental.

Can God be heard in such a place?

Can timeless Love be found

Where time feeds hateful death?

I know only that breath,

Though shortened now,

Is still from Him;

And though I sweat for bread,

He feeds me yet."

            The next two poems show the same paradoxical way that God goes beyond our

time-limited understanding of the flow of events.  He sees without the restrictions of past, present, and future.

Tying Up Loose Ends

Accumulating year-ends is a purely human occupation:

Piling up tinsel monuments

And stacking shards of shattered plans.

Only the illusion

That things which matter have beginning or end

Spurs mortals to wrap up one year

And open another.

Celestial perception

Tolerates imperfection,

But gently urges us not to mistake

Our clocks for absolute.

We will accept, then,

The fragmentation of experience,

And search for the splices of God

By which the worst of the past

And the promise of the future

Are always joined.

           

            Finally, I offer a poem that reflects the perversity of our fallen wills in opting so often for the immediate, but temporal, pleasures of our mortal world, rather than the eternally significant treasures of God’s grace.

Bankrupt

Borrowed time

Is what we all live on.

Profligate spenders,

We purchase the gauds and trinkets

Of Vanity Fair.

We prefer our own

Purchased pain

To the gift of suffering

Which is beyond our means;

Our own indebtedness

To the solvency of Grace.

Kyrie eleison,

Christe eleison!

Lord, have mercy!  Christ, have mercy!  Grant us the eyes of eternity.

Mailbag: Thoughts on Saving the World

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In a literature class this semester, we read Misha Nogha’s “Chippoke Na Gomi,” an intriguing and provocative science fiction story exploring the repercussions of atomic weaponry and the responsibilities we have to each other. It’s a weighty tale whose pathos pulls at the reader’s heart strings and reminds us of the interconnectedness of the human race, that the harm imposed on others will not—cannot—stay contained. For those readers already predisposed toward empathy, the story’s charge to care for the world can feel overwhelming, which was exactly the case for one of my students. What do we do, she asked me, seeing the world in such need of help and knowing ourselves unequal to the task? I’m grateful that she asked the question because it gave me the opportunity to wrestle with it myself. Here are a few of the thoughts I shared with her, posted here with her permission:

What you bring up is so important and crucial to wrestle with. We can’t let go of either conviction—that the injustices of this world must be rectified and that there’s only so much we can do to fix them. But putting those two realities side-by-side seems to create an intractable problem—the world’s ills will not abate, nor will our resources to solve them suddenly increase exponentially. I think sometimes the response, then, is either to become callous to the problems of the world (understandably so, if only for sanity’s sake) or to run oneself ragged, attempting to care for any and all comers (this, too, is understandable because otherwise it feels like we’ve abdicated our humanity and failed to take seriously the demands of justice).

Neither option is desirable or, truth be told, even tenable. What do we do then? Are we stuck always having to choose between our humanity and our sanity? I think what’s important to keep in mind is that while justice—for all, not only for some—must be served and while we as Christians must participate in that process, the full enactment of that justice is not dependent on us. It is God’s to fulfill, his redemption to enact.

If you’re wanting a biblical reminder of this truth, the Sermon on the Mount might be a good passage to revisit, especially Matthew 6:33: “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” We long for heaven, for a world redeemed; your empathy, I think, taps into the truth that human beings are infinitely valuable and deserve so much better than this world and other human beings can offer (themselves included). But such empathy must be tempered with an awareness of our creaturely status, as we are as much in need of redemption ourselves as those other creatures we long to see restored and valued rightly.

The good intention of loving others and wanting to help them can easily be twisted into pride and self-reliance. The better way is to surrender yourself to God’s will, your love of others and unique insights about suffering to his service, and your gifts and talents to his purposes. He will use you as he sees fit; it may take a little time to find your specific calling among the many worthy tasks before us (and, especially relevant for your question, among the many, many needs of this world). Some helpful resources along those lines include this Andy Crouch article, Kevin DeYoung’s Just Do Something, and Tim Keller’s Every Good Endeavor.

I do think ultimately, though, it’s absolutely essential to keep in mind that the promise of salvation, for redemption of the world, is God’s to give and to fulfill. I think sometimes, if we’re honest with ourselves, that might be a bitter pill to swallow because doing so absolutely requires us to face our own pride and delusions of grandeur. But it’s good to do—to be honest with ourselves about those impulses—because only then can God expose that hidden hubris, camouflaged though it is in something good, allowing us to confess it and surrender it to him.

Train Up Your Wizards in the Way They Should Go (Part III)

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It’s a memorable moment, but again, Neville—like Hermione—has been prepared for such a time as this; the courage he displays here has been built through earlier decisions and courageous acts. Even if the stakes were smaller then, they were nonetheless challenges to be overcome. A memorable training ground for Neville’s stand against Voldemort, for example, was his earlier stand against his friends stopping them from leaving the common room in order to prevent punishment to the whole house. For this act, he is rewarded with ten points for Gryffindore, as Dumbledore announces, “There are all kinds of courage. . . . It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to your enemies, but just as much to stand up to your friends.” Crucially, Neville challenges his friends out of a pure heart, not for selfish reasons. Courage is not to be confused with rash and dangerous action; it is instead principled action in the face of fear. For this reason, C. S. Lewis elevates courage above other virtues: “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” Neville stands up to his friends because he loves them. Love being the motivating virtue for all the others and the most important of all the virtues practiced by the characters and taught by the series.

I think, in fact, that what most attracts readers, what accounts for the Harry Potter phenomenon is this simple yet profound truth: that love will, in fact, save the world. But, and here’s the kicker, love costs. Love is no insubstantial, sentimental thing; it is tough as nails and powerful—it requires force and a humble, courageous act of will. For, as Plato has argued, the virtues truly are unified—they support and reinforce one another to enable us to become the people we ought to be. The education Harry Potter offers is to recognize the value of humility, courage, and most importantly love and to steel us to embrace the cost and to impress deeply upon us that that cost is worth the reward. This pattern—of a desperate situation, a dramatic self-sacrifice, and a hope affirmed through that sacrifice—runs throughout the book and appears both in the overarching narrative and the smaller stories that make up the whole. Through these depictions, Rowling is training her readers to see beyond the immediate and to recognize the even deeper reality of a world ruled by justice and redeemed by love. Individual enactments of humility, courage, and love are inseparable from justice and love’s ultimate triumph. In the soil of Rowling’s books the reader’s moral imagination can grow alongside those of the central characters. Not only is love what is being taught to these characters (and readers) as they grow up; it’s the catalyst for their learning.

In this summer’s popular documentary, Fred Rogers reminds us that “love is at the root at everything, all learning, all relationships, love or the lack of it.” The arc of Harry’s story highlights this deep truth. As powerful as the series’ climax is—where Harry surrenders himself to Voldemort to save his beloved friends and professors—it could never have happened if it weren’t for his mother’s sacrificial act to protect him from Voldemort as a child. And I don’t mean this in the obvious way—that Harry would not have lived were it not for his mother’s protection. I mean it in the way the book makes clear—Lily Potter denies herself in favor of her son, finds courage to stand up against an implacable enemy despite the overwhelming odds that he will prevail, and plants deep within her son a knowledge of love’s power that cannot be shaken; Harry loves well because his mother first loved him. As Dumbledore explains to Harry: “Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand, it is love. He didn’t realise that love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign ... to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever. It is in your very skin.”

Even still, Harry must grow into that love, step by step and choice by choice. He does so with the encouragement of loving mentors and pseudo-parents. Dumbledore, especially. As a precursor to Harry’s self-sacrifice in Deathly Hollows, Dumbledore allows Snape to kill him. That Dumbledore took this step gave force to the encouragement and support he offers Harry at King’s Cross Station. Pottermore elaborates on this important scene in the following commentary that’s helpful for underscoring how Dumbledore’s character is simultaneously formed and revealed through his actions:

[D]espite the faults, despite Dumbledore perhaps not being the perfect wizard Harry thought he was, never before has Dumbledore seemed more heroic. For men and women are not born great. They learn greatness over time – from experience, from mistakes. Dumbledore looked at his deeds, at his flaws, and he had the wisdom to confront and overcome them; he fought the greatest nemesis there was: himself. . . . Who better to teach the next generation of wizards? Who better to face Lord Voldemort? Who better to send Harry on his way from King’s Cross station, with one last piece of wisdom: “Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all, those who live without love.”

The wisdom Dumbledore offers Harry is wedded to his practice; more importantly, it has grown out of that practice. And Harry has learned well, as he goes out to surrender to Voldemort. It’s a beautiful picture of someone who has embraced and embodied the moral education of these many years. It’s one that resonates with readers, as sales and the popularity of the books and its ancillary products shows. But what readers do with that story matters just as much as the story itself. Have we embraced our own moral education inspired by these books? William James reminds us that without putting what we learned through literature into practice, the experience is the opposite of educative; it is utterly self-indulgent:

The weeping of a Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coach-man is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale. . . . One becomes filled with emotions which habitually pass without prompting to any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition is kept up. The remedy would be, never to suffer one's self to have an emotion at a concert, without expressing it afterward in some active way. Let the expression be the least thing in the world -speaking genially to one's aunt, or giving up one's seat in a horse-car, if nothing more heroic offers - but let it not fail to take place.

Rightly read, good literature—the enchanted and non-enchanted varieties alike—habituates our hearts and minds outwardly, to practice humility, bolster our courage, and embrace love. We can—and I think should—lament our current state of affairs, how the worst of times are at present being instantiated: the bitter rivalries, the no-holds barred angry rhetoric, and the general sense of despair. We also can—and dare I say must—fasten our present hopes to the eternal verities that will not disappoint. Good stories can show us the way.