Charge to the Minister
Ordination of Brian Warfield
April 11, 2012

Brian, I am honored to have this opportunity to participate in your ordination service. I have often wondered where students have ended up, and to what kind of ministry they were led. Facebook has changed that. Now I generally know even more than I wanted. Sometimes, I’m surprised to hear that a former student is now on a church staff, or that someone else is not pastoring somewhere. Sometimes, the proper response is not surprise, but sadness, especially when gifted young ministers feel compelled to leave their own tradition because there is no place there for them to serve. In this case, though, I felt a deep sense of pleasure when I read that one of my best students was being ordained by one of my favorite churches.

You have asked me to deliver the charge to the minister. A charge is a kind of challenge that is laid before you, something for you to keep in mind as you walk this path on which God has led you. So, I now charge you to remember these three things.

First, remember that the questions are quite often more important than the answers. Too many sermons are answers to questions that no one is asking. As such, they are vain, empty, and useless. One of the most common causes of failed ministries occurs when a minister is called to a new church, and begins proclaiming answers before asking enough of the right questions. Answers that come too quickly tend to show a lack of respect for the question, which is taken to be a lack of respect for the questioner.

Jesus understood the importance of questions. When he was asked, “Who is my neighbor?” he replied, after a story, with another question, “Which one of these was the neighbor?” Understanding comes not when we are force-fed answers, but rather when we are equipped to answer our own questions. Before that, though, we need to learn how to ask the right questions. That is one of the most valuable things that a minister can do for a congregation.

Finally, there are some questions for which there are no sufficient answers. Jesus’ cry from the cross is one of those, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When in the presence of such suffering, the right response is not to provide answers, but, with fear and trembling, recognize that the ground upon which you are standing is holy ground.

The second thing I’d like you to remember is that Kingdom growth is not the same thing as church growth. I remember having a conversation with someone when we were starting NorthHaven, our church in Norman. He asked me a question that I wasn’t quite sure how to answer - “What is your market?” At first, I laughed and replied “Liberals.” The more I think about the question, the more it disturbs me. If we treat the church as a marketplace, we shouldn’t be surprised that people are engaging in comparison shopping. We have failed to make disciples, instead we are making customers. And in the back of my mind, I hear Jesus’ words in the temple: “You shall not make my Father’s house a house of trade.”

The heart of the problem is that we have made church growth the ultimate goal. And when we do so, the church tends to become something that God never intended. Sometimes I wonder just how much of what we do in church today has anything to do with being the church described in the New Testament. In Acts 2, we get a glimpse of the church as it’s described in the New Testament. Daily activities include taking care of each other, sharing meals, and praising God. Everything, interestingly enough, except for evangelism as we now understand it. Yet, the Scripture says that the Lord daily added to their number.

Church growth is wonderful, but it shouldn’t be the goal. To make it the goal is to run the risk of compromising the Gospel. The easiest way to achieve church growth is by preaching what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” When tempted, think back to chapter 6 of John’s Gospel. After Jesus proclaimed a difficult teaching, John said that many of his disciples left him. It is a poignant scene when Jesus turned the twelve, and asked “Do you also wish to go away?” Making church growth the criterion of a successful ministry is to adopt a model of ministry that would make Jesus’ ministry on earth a failure.

The goal of church growth is going to church. The goal of kingdom growth is being the church, a community of love, the place where the kingdom of God has come into the world.

Finally, keep this in mind - remembering where you came from is more important than knowing where you’re going. Although we’re confident in our ultimate destination, none of us knows what intermediate stops we will have along the way.

Why are we here? Why is ordination important? Not so that you can minister. If you had not already shown that you were ministering to those around you, this church would have never considered ordination. We are not a sacramental tradition, so we do not believe that any special grace will flow to you today. So, why do we ordain you? My friend and colleague, Kevin Hall, likes to quote Spurgeon as saying ordination is the laying of empty hands on an empty head. I’ve read some of your academic work, so I’m confident that it is not an empty head that we lay hands on today. Still, though, why is this important?

Paul’s letters to Timothy give us a clue. 1 Timothy is primarily instructional. It’s about taking care of the business of the church. Things are good, let’s get down to work. 2 Timothy, though, has a different tone. After the salutation, Paul writes:

Recalling your tears, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self- discipline.

What events prompted this change of tone? Why does Paul think it necessary to remind Timothy of the faith of his family and of the time of his ordination? I suspect that it’s because Timothy is experiencing one of those times in ministry that we all have. There will come a time when this thought comes to mind. It has happened to me, and I’m sure that it has happened to many others. The thought is this: “The only mistake that God ever made in history is calling me to ministry.” When that thought comes, remember this day.

You need to be ordained for the same reason that Jesus needed to hear the voice of the Father at his baptism, saying “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” The memory of that moment may have been exactly what Jesus needed when it came time to face the trials that lay ahead. Ordination is important for those times that you don’t think that you are up to the task, when you don’t feel that you have the right skills or the right words. When that time comes that you cannot seem to believe in yourself, remember that today, a church, the Body of Christ, believed in you. That my friend, is surely enough.

Amen

I want a church that includes fussy kids, old liturgy, bad sound, weird congregants, and…brace yourself…painfully amateur “special music” now and then.

Why?

Well, for one thing, when the gospel story is accompanied by a fog machine and light show, I always get this creeped-out feeling like someone’s trying to sell me something. It’s as though we’re all compensating for the fact that Christianity’s not good enough to stand on its own so we’re adding snacks.

But more importantly, I want to be part of an un-cool church because I want to be part of a community that shares the reputation of Jesus, and like it or not, Jesus’ favorite people in the world were not cool. They were mostly sinners, misfits, outcasts, weirdos, poor people, sick people, and crazy people.

May we have a community filled with Jesus’ favorite people.

Disciple: “Is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened?”

Teacher: “As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning.”

Disciple: “Then of what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?”

Teacher: “To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.”

You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

There are some properties such that, if the parts of something have those properties, then the whole thing will also have them. An example is weighing more than ten pounds. If every piece of a wall weighs more than ten pounds, then the entire wall must weigh more than ten pounds. On the other hand, weighing less than ten pounds is not like that. If each part weighs less than ten pounds, there is no guarantee that the whole weighs less than ten pounds. When we attribute a property of the parts to the whole, and that property is not one that can be so attributed, then we commit the fallacy of composition.

The fallacy of division involves wrongly attributing properties of the whole to the parts. Our previous example, weighing more than ten pounds, can be used to commit the fallacy of division.

God’s forgiveness falls like rain but yet we can barely squeeze out a drop for each other.

This quote from Annie Hagans, a student in Introduction to Philosophy last year, prompted an interesting discussion on Facebook yesterday. What does it mean to forgive someone? To what extent are we obligated to forgive?

As I wrote recently, everything in existence is permanently impermanent.

I detect shades of Heraclitus here.

Question: is this a paradox? Answer: probably not, unless Rhone is committed to the belief that nothing at all, even impermanence, is permanent. It is a good opportunity to do some analytic philosophy, though.

What is permanence? Is it a real property, or is it a derivative analyzed in terms of the real properties of an object? What’s the status of self-predication; must permanence itself be permanent? If there is nothing in existence that is permanent, then does that mean that abstract objects (numbers, sets, etc.) do not exist? Does that commit us to something like subsistence for abstract entities? Does permanence mean simply that an object always exists, or does it also mean that an object never changes? If the first, then most, if not all, theists would reject the claim that nothing in existence is permanent. If the second, then we would have to at least reject the doctrine fo the immutability of God.

Here’s my first attempt to symbolize permance, attempting to say that that an object is permanent just in case for any property that the object has any time, it has that property at all times.

The survey:

The survey was mailed to 2,450 randomly selected adults above the age of 18 years in Sweden during the spring of 2004; the overall response rate was 45%.

The main answer distribution:

How bad an action is, from an ethical point of view, depends primarily on:
5.3% How bad the consequences of the action are for myself
62.7% How bad the consequences of the action are for other people and for society  17.5% The extent to which the action infringes upon someone else’s natural rights
10.6% The extent to which the action violates what is natural
3.7% The extent to which the action violates Christianity according to the New Testament in the Bible
0.3% The extent to which the action violates the rules given by any other religion (such as Islam or Buddhism)

It would be interesting to see the full report of the survey and results, although I’m not sure that I’m interested enough to pay for a copy. The choices seem too limited from an ethicist’s point of view. The first two options force a choice between radical egoism and radical altruism, but most people are neither. The options don’t discriminate between various kinds of consequentialism in that none specify any particular consequences, such as happiness or welfare. It’s also difficult to know how a Kantian should respond. So, it could be that the majority of people don’t fit into any of those categories, but feel for various reasons that the second is the one that is closest to their position.

Latin Text of the Ave Maria

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.
Benedicta tu in mulieribus,
et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,
ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

There is no god and that’s the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion died out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

There is a lot to think about here. Keep in mind that I haven’t read the book, but have only seen this single paragraph. Here are my initial thoughts in no particular order.

The argument seems to be this: imagine that a body of belief were somehow completely eradicated from human minds. If humans were somehow to replicate this body of belief, then such replication would be evidence in favor of its truth. Failure to replicate the body of belief would be evidence in favor of its falsity.

Now, as I often say in class, it’s a bit more complicated than this. First, science itself is not a body of belief. It is instead a method of producing beliefs. So, the proposal must be not to “wipe out science” but instead to eradicate all belief in and memory of all propositions that we consider part of science, that is, claims in physics, biology, chemistry, etc. Then, we should ask if these beliefs would eventually be replicated.

I assume that Jillette requires only that current scientific beliefs be replicated. There’s no reason why he should require Galen’s ideas about physiology and anatomy or Aristotle’s physics to be replicated, since they are false. Why believe that current scientific beliefs would be replicated? I guess because Jillette assumes that they are true. Now, only the most radical antirealist would assume that nothing in current science is true, so I’ll grant that we have good reason for believing that at least much of current science is in fact true. How much of current scientific beliefs is true, though? Surely not all of it. As Newtonian mechanics was eventually replaced with relativity theory and quantum mechanics, might there at some point be another theoretical framework that replaces current physics? There’s no reason to think that everything science asserts now is true, so there’s no reason to think that it would be exactly replicated. So, what is true of religion is also true of science - “There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense.”

So, if we won’t demand exact replication in science, then we shouldn’t demand exact replication for religion either. Does that mean that those religious beliefs that would be replicated then should be considered true? I don’t find it difficult to believe that the belief that a god exists would find its way back into the human psyche, along with other beliefs about the god’s role in causing the universe to be, the demands that the god makes on humans, etc.

I suppose that the reply would be that these are individual religious beliefs, what must be replicated is a system of religious belief, and that there’s no reason to believe that any current system of religious thought would be replicated. Surely though, there are bodies of religious belief that could easily be replicated. Some minimal deism, for instance, is very likely to be replicated.

There is reason why one would think that, if scientific knowledge were somehow eradicated, that we would come to discover those scientific truths again. That is because we think that the method of science is truth-conducive. That is, the scientific method, in the long run, will produce true beliefs and eliminate false beliefs. This is something famously argued by the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914).¹ Now, that doesn’t mean that every use of the scientific method produces true belief or eliminates false beliefs. Some people may just not be very good scientists. In other cases, the particular scientists may be very good, but simply have some false background assumptions.² The particular beliefs that are true, though, would be replicated if science is truth-conducive. So, would religious beliefs be eventually replicated if they were eradicated? That depends on the means by which such beliefs were produced. If religious beliefs are formed by a truth-conducive method, then there is every reason that they would be. What could be the method that produced my religious beliefs? One possibility is that God gave them to me, and surely that’s a truth-conducive method.

So, in the end, Jillette’s argument begs the question. That is, he hasn’t given us a successful argument that religious belief is false because religious belief would not be replicated. Instead, if he argues successfully for anything, it is that religious belief would not be replicated if all religious belief is false. I grant that the conditional is true, but I haven’t been shown any reason why I should grant that all religious belief is false. If one paragraph was this thought-provoking, I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the book.

Gracious Father,

We gather here in this place to celebrate the day the world changed.
On that day, one who was pure spirit became incarnate;
The eternal Word became clothed in a frail human body;
That which no human had ever touched was laid by a gentle mother’s hand into a simple manger;
The eternal and timeless now had a beginning;
The infinite became finite;
On that day, God became human.

While still in the garden, we began to build a wall;
A wall that separated ourselves from you;
A wall which we built, but could never tear down.

You tore down the wall when you brought your firstborn into the world,
and said to that babe in the manger,

“You are my son; this day I have begotten you.”

You have spoken to us in many ways, through the prophets, through the beauty of nature, and through the voice of conscience.

On that first Christmas day, though, you spoke has you had never spoken before.

Lord, here we are,
Help us to listen,
Help us to hear.

Amen

Bayes’ Theorem

I have to admit, it’s much better than anything I could do with HTML. I’ll have to work on the vertical line in the conditional probabilities. It needs just a bit more space to be easily legible.

UPDATE

Davide Cervone suggested below that I use \mid instead of \vert. Here’s how it looks with \mid:

Bayes’ Theorem

For comparison, I rendered both formulas with the application LaTeXiT and saved them as png files.

Here is the formula using \mid:

Here’s the same formula using \vert:

I think I prefer \vert In LaTeX, notice that there is some space between the vertical line and the letters next to it, but not too much space. When MathJax renders the same formula, that space is removed by the extra slant to the letters. In other posts, I’ve taken out the extra slant using \textrm, but that’s not very convenient.

Using \mid for MathJax looks like a good solution. It’s easy enough to change occurences of “\vert” to “\mid” with a quick find and replace.

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

Another version, equally good, that is often attributed to Chesterton is

Stop making your religion a theology and start making it a love affair.

He who has whittled
A cabin for the snail
Has also carved our names
In the palm of his hand

May you experience the beauty of Advent, even during the stress of finals week.

1. Kant and Reid represent two very different approaches to the problems presented by Hume. Briefly explain Hume’s position on our knowledge of the external world. Compare and contrast the ways in which both Kant and Reid tried to resolve the problem. Which approach do you think is best? Why?
2. Explain the major components of Kierkegaard’s thought. In what ways does Kierkegaard represent a radical shift in early modern thought?

Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life by Frank Burch Brown (Oxford University Press, 2003).

Art in Action by Nicholas Wolterstorrf (Eerdmans, 1980).

Art, Modernity and Faith, 2nd ed. by George Pattison (SCM Press, 1998).

For many of those that hold the position, cultural relativism is motivated by a belief that we should be tolerant of the moral beliefs of other cultures. Most of the time, this is expressed in a way that is simply inconsistent, that is, given that there are no objective, universal moral truths, we ought to be tolerant of the moral beliefs of other cultures. Unfortunately, one cannot consistently assert both that there are no objective, universal, moral truths and that we have a moral obligation to be tolerant, especially since our culture is often intolerant.

Options for the Relativist

Even though relativists often are inconsistent, they need not be. Here are some ways that that one could try to assert a consistent relativism:

1. When the relativist asserts that we ought to be tolerant, the assertion should not be understood as a moral claim. Instead, it should be understood as a pragmatic claim. That is, we ought to be tolerant, not because we are morally obligated to, but because it is in our best interests as a way of minimizing conflict.
2. We shouldn’t adopt relativism because we have a moral duty to be tolerant, of course that is inconsistent. Rather, once our culture comes to realize the truth of cultural relativism, we would naturally come to adopt an ethic of tolerance. Then, it would be true that we ought to be tolerant, since it would be part of our moral code.
3. When the relativist claims that we ought to be tolerant, she means simply that tolerance is a good. There is no need to understand this as a claim that tolerance is a moral good. A good is simply something that is worth pursuing, and there are several reasons why tolerance would be something worth pursuing.

Tolerance Only to a Point?

I have argued elsewhere that tolerance is not as good as one might think, since it implies an attitude of superiority toward the one being tolerated. Even so, I think it is psychologically impossible for relativists to adopt an attitude of genuine tolerance toward the moral beliefs of cultures that are radically different from our own.

For example, an Afghan woman reported that she was raped by her cousin’s husband two years ago, and she was subsequently sentenced to twelve years in prison (see CNN’s coverage). At first, it was reported that she would be released if she were to agree to marry her attacker, but authorities later said that the marriage was not a condition for her release. Even so, the imprisonment of a rape victim, who was then forced to care for her child in prison, is an unconscionable action according to most cultural relativists. That is, there are cultural beliefs and practices that should be changed, not simply tolerated.

So, what moral beliefs should be tolerated? I suspect that the level of tolerance would be highly correlated with the degree of similarity to our own moral beliefs and practices. That is, the relativist would maintain that we ought to tolerate the beliefs and practices of other cultures so long as they are not too different from our own.

That, however, is neither tolerance nor relativism. Instead, it is simply a thinly disguised moral realism.