Michael Scott, Osama and the End of... Some Things.

So, the world is changing.

Michael Scott has left The Office.

Osama Bin Laden has left the world.

I'm about to say goodbye to Moody. (Not quite the same)

The hard thing about change sometimes is that it's not... quite... complete. Take Michael Scott for example. The hardest part for me about watching Steve Carell's final episode of The Office is that I knew that this week's episode was coming. I'm sure it'll be funny. I'm sure it'll keep me interested in watching the show. Even though it won't be the same, this Thursday will prove that The Office can go on without Michael Scott. It might not be as funny but it can and it will go on. Steve Carell was a big part of the show but this proves that he was not the show itself.

Osama Bin Laden is dead. If you're looking for how you should be reacting to his death I can point you to 1000 other blogs. (As always, Kevin DeYoung's is worth reading) The reason Bin Laden has found himself in this blog is that even though his death is a victory in the War on Terror, it is not ultimate victory. He may have been the figurehead of Al Qaeda but he was not Al Qaeda itself. It may be weakened but it will go on. No death of one person will take down that terror organization and the fight will still go on.

I was visiting Moody for the last time before graduation a couple of weeks ago and saw something that caused me to stop in the middle of the sidewalk. The gas station next to Moody, the one that has the suspect looking Subway on the inside of it that has fed many a Moody student on Sunday nights was changing. It had been a Citgo for my entire time at Moody... but was now a BP. Now, other than to people who know something more about gasoline than where to put it in the car, the change really doesn't make that much of a difference. To me it served as a sign that the city of Chicago was surviving, was moving on, was changing without me.

We may not say it out loud but many of us, myself included, hope that our presence in this world is indispensable. We hope that our impact is great enough on those around us that they simply need us to stick around. The fact of the matter is that the show will go on without us. We are not irreplaceable.

Now, you might be asking yourself, "Why are you talking about this? I was sitting here enjoying my bowl of cereal and you're talking about how useless we are!" The reason I'm calling attention to our unimportance is that it is only because of God's grace that He allows us to have an impact in the lives that we do. He has also given us a limited amount of time to make that impact. What will you do with the opportunity that you have been given? Steve Carell spent 7 years on The Office making people laugh. Bin Laden's influence was an evil, negative one but it was one that cannot be overlooked.

I hope that as I leave Moody I can look back and see that I used the opportunity to build relationships with the people around me.

I hope that I can see that had an influence in the lives of others.

And I hope that I remember.... that it is only at His leisure I serve.

Rob Bell and the Mirror of Erised- My review of Love Wins

"Yes and no," said Dumbledore quietly.  "It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. You, who have never known your family, see them standing around you. Ronald Weasley, who has always been overshadowed by his brothers, sees himself standing alone, the best of all of them. However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge or truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible." 

-Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone          

Writing a review of Love Wins weeks after it seems to have been reviewed to death might seem pointless. It might even come off as narcissistic. I hope it doesn't. I'm writing this review for three reasons. First, not everyone is taken in by the blogosphere. Not everyone has the time or desire to read reviews or read blogs all day but have stumbled upon this one. Secondly, everyone has a unique voice. Nothing I say here hasn't already been said, but I hope I say it in a slightly unique way though. If you're looking for the most in-depth review, Google "Kevin DeYoung" and you'll find his 20 pager. Finally, maybe you're still unconvinced that Rob Bell is saying what he's saying in Love Wins. I hope that this review spins a new light on the matter for you and that the purpose and message of his book becomes clear.

Before I jump into the book I want to just say a bit about Rob Bell. I don't hate Rob Bell. Some might dispute that but I just claim that I've recognized his trajectory on this issue for awhile now. I've met Rob Bell personally. He wouldn't remember it but we met at a minor league baseball game a couple of years ago. It was immediately evident that he loves his family. After seeing interviews with Bell I believe that he genuinely loves his church and that he desires for people to know Christ.

Desire is not enough though. Love Wins paints a different portrait of the Christian faith than Scripture does. I know that that's a bold statement to make but I'm going to focus on three of the main issues of the book and I hope you'll see where I'm coming from.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Bell paints a picture of hell in his book as a present reality rather than a separate, future destination. He makes this claim by separating the idea of hell into simply what Jesus had to say on the matter. Bell owes it to the reader to spend more than half a page covering the New Testament references to hell. Yes, he mentions the other uses in Scripture but it is from Jesus' words that he gets his foundation. The word Jesus uses is "Gehenna" and it refers to the burning trash dump. Bell uses the phase to point out that Jesus was talking about a place where things were burned away. Thus, hell is an experience. It is not a pleasant experience but it's the experience we have when we "choose our story over God's."

Yes, Bell is right about Gehenna being the burning trash dump. How did we get the idea of hell out of that then? It's because Bell doesn't paint a large enough picture. Besides ignoring other references to the lake of fire or of judgment, Gehenna  would immediately have brought images to the minds of the people listening to Jesus that are a bit more vivid than an uncomfortable life circumstance. In the Old Testament period, Gehenna was the place where Baal and Molech worshippers came and sacrificed children. In the New Testament, it is referred to in Mark 9:43 as an unquenchable fire. Jesus did not have uncomfortable circumstances in mind when he used this word.

God is love... and He is just.

So, does Rob Bell believe in hell? Yes. Does he believe that you have to stay there? No. He spends a great deal of time explaining that it is God's desire for everyone to be saved. Which is true. It's not all that's true though. It's also true that Romans chapter 1 lays out pretty clearly that we, unless we have been justified by Christ, are a people that naturally suppress the truth of the Gospel. We choose hell. Rob Bell wouldn't disagree with that but he can't imagine that God would not allow people an escape route once we get there. The problem is that we wouldn't choose the escape route, even if there were multiple chances at salvation. We choose our own path. We exchange the truth of God for a lie. We will always choose hell. God sending His grace upon us is the only way we seek after God.

Bell argues that since God wants everyone to go to heaven, if He is as great of a God as we like to say He is, He's going to get what He wants. Bell fails to mention that God also seeks justice. He is holy and He cannot stand sin. His wrath is completely deserved because we are a people of sin. Rather than focusing on the fact that some may never escape His holy wrath, it should leave us speechless that any of us escape it. Bell's downfall is that he doesn't recognize how deeply sinful we are. He might not be doing that intentionally but it's evident in every single page of Love Wins that Bell has a much higher view of man than Scripture does. God is great because He shows mercy to anyone. He's not under any obligation to show mercy to everyone.

"There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved."

The third problem with Love Wins is that Bell is intent on leaving the door open for people to come to Christ by an avenue other than Christ. He uses the example of Paul referring to Christ being present in the rock that gave Israel water as an example that Christ can manifest himself anywhere around us. Besides missing Paul's point in referring to that rock (that Israel had the presence of God with them but still chose idolatry) Bell takes his point to the extreme. Never coming out directly and saying that people can be believers in Christ without actually knowing about Him directly, he still makes his point about Christians thinking they have the market cornered on Jesus.

I could argue with that point by pointing out that it can't be supported by Scripture but even at a more basic level, it isn't logically possible. One faith system cannot say something completely opposite of another faith system and both of them be true. The law of non-contradiction is the technical term but I think if we're all being truthful with ourselves we know that to be true. Yes, people in other faith systems do commit good deeds. Yes, many of those people are faithful to their convictions. This is well and good but if  they didn't believe that Jesus Christ is  the only way to salvation, if they didn't believe that it is only by His grace that they can be saved, then they believed in something other than the Gospel. They believed a lie.

The Mirror of Erised

I opened this review with a quote from Harry Potter. Besides being a shameless attempt to look well-read, I couldn't believe how well this quote fit this entire situation. I believe Rob Bell is doing his best to love and serve Jesus Christ. I believe that he wants people to know Christ. I believe he wants to free people from the hurt they may have experienced by the church in the past. I also believe that he sees Scripture as he wants to see it, not like it actually is. Yes, his view would solve the hard issue of those who never hear the Gospel. Yes, his view would comfort those who have had loved ones die without knowing Christ. Love Wins does not give us truth though.

Bell paints a picture of a faith that is based entirely on his idea of what love should look like. It doesn't paint a picture of reality, either of Scripture or of humanity. The truth is that hell is a terrible place that each of us has chosen for ourselves unless we put our faith in Christ. And it is eternal (Daniel 12:2, Matthew 25:46). The picture he paints isn't acceptable because it gets the core of the Gospel wrong. And I have to root for truth.

I do not root for hell though. If something good has come out of Rob Bell and Love Wins, it is that it has pushed me to live like I believe hell is a real place. That means being serious about seeing people come to faith in Christ because at the end of all things Christ will win, both with love and with justice.

And I want as many people to be on the winning side as possible. 

A Loss of Perspective

I can't decide if this is in the series of posts on Civil Discourse or not. We'll say not.

I'm about to start reading Love Wins by Rob Bell soon and I'll have a review done ASAP. There are already a 1000 reviews out there already but I was reminded the not everyone goes around reading reviews of bloggers that they don't know so a review from me could still serve a purpose. This isn't that review even though it's on a related issue. I want to raise a question:

Have we lost the ability to know which issues are essential to the Gospel and which issues are non-essentials?

This issue came to mind when in the midst of all of the reviewing of Love Wins and charges of universalism going on I saw an interesting response from someone. This person is someone I respect and I know loves Christ and serving in His Church. His response to the controversy was to post a link to a blog. This blog came to the conclusion of all of the universalism hubbub that it was a sign of a split in the Evangelical church.... between legalists that cared about attacking anyone different from them and progressives that wanted to love their surrounding communities.

Uh... really?

I can safely say that both my friend and that blogger missed the point of the debate completely. I think I know why they missed it though. The most interesting part of the Martin Bashir/Rob Bell video that went viral last week (YouTube it if you missed it) was that Bell admitted that this book was largely a response or working out a reaction to the way he was raised. I think that my friend and the blogger are doing the same thing.

I think we all do the same thing to an extent.

Many who grew up in the American Christian world can remember what their churches stood against when they were growing up and most of the time it resembled either a Republican platform or petty differences much more than it reflected Scripture. What kind of music you listened to, what translation of the Bible you used, what kind of clothes you wore were the issues that drove the debate for many in the past. Many of us would love to run away from that past and be Christians that are not forcing people to take on our extra-Biblical convictions when they come to Christ.

Augustine probably didn't say this but he's credited with saying: "In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, love." We're finding out that in the past we quarreled and shut out people over the non-essentials. We aim to correct the problems of the past. The problem that some come to is that they not only correct the problems of the past, they over-correct. They don't want to disagree or debate or call out any position. They basically treat every issue as a "non-essential."

Why is this a problem? It's a problem because what happens when we refuse to stand against false teaching, when we refuse to say that anyone is wrong, we project a Christianity that will not be appealing to anyone outside the church. Why would anyone want to be part of something where two people can say completely opposite things about the core of the Gospel and neither side cares? We think we're showing love but we're actually showing that there's no substance to what we have to offer.

To close, there is one issue left. How then do we determine which issues are essential to the Gospel and which issues are non-essential. How do we keep from overcompensating from a past where every issue was essential to a world where none of them are? I won't aim to frame orthodoxy in the space of a blog but I do think we can look at some conclusions that the reformers came to.

Salvation is by faith alone, by grace alone, in Christ alone. Scripture alone is our final authority on what God has to say to us and we live for the glory of God alone. 

Regardless of where Rob Bell stands on the issue, universalism is much too serious a strike against the core of the Gospel to be considered a non-essential. We should we wary of shifting to a world where we no longer stand for those core truths in the name of unity.

If that's the case, what are we unified about?

Cheesy Bumper Stickers and Christian Irony

This is the 2^nd in a series of 3 or 4 on Civil Discourse.

Anyone who knows me personally knows my affinity for sarcasm. It was a major shock to me when I studied in the South for a year that sarcasm was not the major mode of speaking for some people. I often use sarcasm to poke fun at things that seem ridiculous but are trying to be taken seriously. I run to it so often that people that don't know me well enough don't even realize that I'm trying to be sarcastic. I was recently referred to as “obnoxiously arrogant” for saying that I didn't like The King's Speech now that it was popular to like it. I was trying to make a point about the people that actually say that sort of thing but instead came off as a jerk. Oops!

I'm not alone in this love of irony, however. You only need to take a look at the popularity of things like The Onion or The Daily Show to recognize how irony has taken a hold of the millennial culture. Everything and everyone is open to ridicule.

Irony sometimes pops up when I don't expect it though. A group of us were visiting a church on the east side of Michigan last weekend and I found myself poking fun at some of the building setup by making jokes about Jesus throwing over the cash register outside of their gift store or cafe because it accepted Visa and MasterCard. I had to stop myself when I realized that if the pastor we were meeting was standing behind me I would have died. Literally.

Well, maybe more figuratively.

It would have been close.

The church in the 21^st century has found a similar love for ripping on things with a sarcastic tone and the target is often the church itself. Just how entrenched is this attitude in Christians today? Brett McCracken writes in his book Hipster Christianity: “If you are a Christian of a certain age (let's say 21-50) and you grew up in the Christian church (especially in the eighties or early nineties), you probably love making fun of the evangelical subculture.” McCracken specifically points out that this is a trend in response to the commercialization of the Christian culture, especially as a “Christian version” of every popular area of pop culture hits the shelf of the local Christian bookstore. Recognizing how the consumer mindset turned Christianity into a profit margin has created a jaded generation towards much of the American Church in general.

Need proof? Just take a look at bumper stickers.

I can't tell you how many churches I've been to where the sermon apparently needed to be enhanced by dedicating a lengthy amount of time to making fun of Christian bumper stickers. Are we really helping anyone by making fun of these bumper stickers? Or making fun of chrome fish on cars? Or t-shirts that look like a corporate logo but say something spiritual instead?... or WWJD bracelets?

It's not wrong for us to try and be relevant but I'm really not sure that Jesus would be ok with us openly mocking the factions of Christianity that are less in touch with culture. Yes, the lame way that we often try to catch up with culture 10 years too late should be talked about. We should do our best not to hinder the Gospel with out of date methods. I'm not sure irony is the best venue to address that though. Here's why:

When we openly mock other parts of the Church we are mocking His Bride.

Some of the most mild-mannered of my friends have dropped profanities or taken swings when those that they loved were mocked. Why should be expect Christ to care any less for His Church? Brett McCracken writes that “The chorus of 'we want Jesus but not the Church' represents a trend in Christianity toward what one recent author called 'decorpulation'-- not the cutting off of the head (Jesus) but the cutting off of the body (the church).” We should try and be relevant to our culture but it can't come at the expense of neglecting or abusing the Body of Christ.

We are called to love the things that Jesus loves... and that especially includes His Church.

Even those who are unhip.

Civil Discourse: An intro to the blog

So, I really wanted to open this blog by starting a short series of posts on civil discourse. I'll go into the specifics in later posts but basically there's a need for issues to be able to be discussed in Christianity without throwing "opponents" under the bus. We're culturally wired to be constantly trying to get ahead of each other, even if we're on the same team. Wide receivers in football are continually complaining about the lack of throws they are receiving, regardless of how the team is doing. In this economy, people do whatever they can to look better than other people applying for a job. Friends make fun of their "friends" just to get a laugh.

Christianity needs to be viewed more like a team working to make each other better for the success of the whole rather than a group of individual opinions fighting for personal traction.

I resisted writing a blog for a long time because I'm too prone to pride and narcissism as it is. It's too easy to base the worth of what you have to say on how many people respond to it. Frankly, that's why I made the URL "thejoetimmerblog." Well, it's also easy to remember but I hope that the over-the-top name helps me remember that I write because I can, not because I deserve to be heard. I write to the honor and glory of Christ and hope that once and awhile I say something that might be useful to someone reading it.

Too many blogs get started and stop shortly after because no one is reading it. I can't promise that I won't get tired of writing on a regular basis but I think I'm ok just writing for God's glory. I know He'll use it to mold me into who He wants me to be regardless of the number of views I get. If you look at my Facebook statuses or tweets you can see I'm not always funny or thoughtful... but baseball players get paid to hit the ball 30% of the time so I'm ok with falling short of perfection.

Civil discourse is the name of the blog. This is both because of the opening series posts and because I hope that regardless of what I'm writing about, the title reminds me of how I should be writing it.