Breaking Up is Hard to Do

In a previous post, I spoke at length about the significance of marriage and its implications for me as a man. Despite this, we live in a culture rampant divorce where one-third of people who get married eventually divorce, a rate that is shared between Christians and non-believers alike. This bothers me. And I don't think I'm the only one who shares that opinion.

A strong view of marriage and divorce was taught by Jesus, even when it wasn't popular. God hates divorce, plain and simple. If I want to be biblical in my views, then, I need to agree with him.

When I say that, however, I need to be very careful not to let any one misinterpret that sentence, and think I said that God hates divorced people. I didn't say that. And if you're one of those people who had to leave a marriage because of an abusive or adulterous spouse, I particularly feel for you, because you're the victim. For other cases, yes, the Bible calls it sin. But (big shock here, folks), I have sinned too -- my sins just aren't quite so visible.

Having said that, though, I want to get back to the original point of this post, which was to explore the reasons why God would be so strongly pro-marriage and anti-divorce. While I certainly don't claim exclusive access to the throne of God on this topic, here's a couple of thoughts that might explain what He's up to:

• Guys aren't terribly relational. Even the highly-interactive ones like me could just shut down and refuse to tell anyone anything deeply personal. Having my wife around forces me to relate, and that's good for me.


• Marriage is good for kids. Fathers hear this: regular child support payments aren't enough. Your sons need to see what it takes to be a man, and your daughters need to know how to relate to a man. Deal with it.


• Marriage is one of those images on earth that are supposed to show us how God relates to us. If we break up a marriage, we imply that God might cut us off -- and that's not how he works.

This last item is a delicate subject, and perhaps one of the more controversial points I have expressed here. It is a popular conviction that people can believe in Christ, become a Christian, and later fall away and stop believing. I just don't see it. From what I can see, salvation is a concept embedded in eternity; if God can see that we won't be saved on the Last Day, we never were, even if people thought we were.

From a perspective of marriage, however, God has a distinct advantage over us. That is, He knows our hearts, and He doesn't start a bad marriage. The rest of us make mistakes, and sometimes we have to live with the result of those mistakes. And despite what MasterCard says, "for the rest of us, there's grace."

The Three Circles

A friend asked me to clarify the difference between essentials, convictions, and preferences, which I will attempt to do here. First, a picture to cover my first thousand words of explanation:
These circles represent three different categories of personal opinion. Since I have previously defined convictions as requiring grace from us, I should probably clarify how I decide what those things are.

1. If the issue is necessary for salvation, it's essential. The question I would ask is, "Can someone not believe this and still go to heaven?" If not, it's essential.


2. If the issue is related to doctrine, it's a conviction. The question I would ask is, "Can I legitimately say I don't care, and still base my beliefs on the Bible?" If not, it's a conviction.


3. Other opinions are preferences by default.

An example of an essential would be the divinity of Jesus. An example of a conviction would be the role of women in the church. An example of a preference would be styles of music to use in worship. Even though most believers would, I think, agree with the examples I have just given, there will certainly be differences of opinion on which issues fall into which circles, especially when dividing between convictions and preferences.
Differences between believers can be sustained, however, if we hold an attitude of grace towards one another. I am bold enough to believe that I am correct in my beliefs, but not so arrogant as to believe that I can't be wrong. Recognizing this fact, I depend on the grace of God to cover my human limitations. If I am unwilling to show the same grace to others, I find myself a wicked servant; and that is one prospect that terrifies me.

When does grace become stupidity?

I just made it back from my trip, and right away my friend E asked me one of those hard questions for which this blog was born. He expressed to me quite elegantly the need for strong doctrinal statements on a number of topics -- that certain beliefs were what we might call "essential" to the Christian faith. I on the other hand, considered these same topics to be "conviction" areas -- that is, issues that it is important for us to believe, but on which Christian believers might legitimately disagree while still considering one another to be "saved."

This distinction is important because essentials are things we don't back down on, whereas we need to have grace towards one another on conviction issues. I am big on grace; I consider it to be absolutely vital to my Christian walk. Since I teach teens in our church, however, it is particularly relevant that E has challenged me with this question, which I paraphrase below:

When does grace become stupidity?

The intent of this question is to divine where I draw the line on doctrinal issues; am I willing to let someone believe something I feel to be wrong, simply because I don't think it's essential to salvation? To be honest, my answer surprised me: grace became stupidity when God decided to save me.

I am old enough, and have seen enough of my own sin, that I have no comprehension why a holy God would want anything to do with me. In human terms, then, saving grace is "stupidity" -- it makes no sense. This sounds insulting to God, though, so perhaps I should call it "outrageous." Let me proclaim, therefore, that all grace is outrageous. If there is even one good reason why God would be good to me, I would deserve it, and it wouldn't be grace. That doesn't mean I'm not saved by grace, it simply makes my salvation outrageous.

If you have ever been wounded in the church (or even without) by rejection from other people, I strongly recommend Philip Yancy's book What's so Amazing about Grace? If we're honest with ourselves, I think we'll find that salvation makes no rational sense, nor do any of the small mercies we receive in our lives. That is grace. And I am persuaded that Christian believers can do more to spread the gospel by demonstrating that grace towards others than we ever could do through preaching and teaching alone.

Perhaps there are others whose callings in Christ require them to challenge mature believers to deeper faith. Perhaps we need people like E to force us to think hard about everything we believe, and not just a few essentials. Even so, I am still so overwhelmed by the grace of God that I can not imagine a need to preach anything more than Christ crucified and risen again (for me? For me!!).

Standards of Evidence

It looks like I have a few minutes before I run out to Supercomputing 2008, so I guess I'll raise one of the "big problems" for which I first started this blog: the need for faith.

Depending on whether you're primarily Reformed or Methodist in your soteriology, we may disagree to the extent to which free will plays a role in our decision to follow Christ, but I think it is generally agreed that at some point it is just that: a decision. The problem I have is not with the decision, which I think is correct, but the quantity of evidence we find necessary to make that decision.

In business, I teach Six Sigma, and generally expect my students to demand a 95% confidence in the evidence used to back up any improvement efforts they make. This level of confidence is certainly not a universal requirement; in Physics, I understand that 99%+ confidence levels are typically required.

My "beef", however, is that confidence levels like that aren't generally available to me in real life. Whether we're talking about the origins of man, the reality of miracles, or some other question of faith, we find that the evidence is is never sufficient to give me that elegant 95% confidence level.

Saying this is probably going to irritate some of my fellow believers. I hear from people all the time about a sequence of events that persuades the speaker beyond a shadow of a doubt that what they say is true. Generally, I will often agree. Despite this, however, I find an annoying lack of hard proof; if someone really doesn't want to believe, they aren't forced to do so.

More and more I'm finding this to be true: that God goes out of his way to not force us to believe. Think about it: how hard would it be for Him to raise a dead man again like he did for Lazarus? I'm not talking about someone drowning in icy water for a few hours: I mean well and truly dead. He did it in a time when people would be impressed, but not overwhelmed; and today, when real proof would overwhelm skeptics, he doesn't do it.

This is just a brief thought for now, as I have to fly (literally); but as I find more examples of God's frustrating decision not to prove things absolutely, I'll send them your way. Stay tuned.

On the Nature of Truth

Ah, irony. It would appear that one man's philosophy is another man's spam, as I have somehow been identified as a spam blogger before I even managed to write my first blog entry. How's that for efficiency? In any event, it segues nicely into a discussion of the question raised by Pontius Pilate at Christ's arraignment, namely, "What is Truth?"
( John 18:38 )

As an engineer, I'm expected to deal regularly with scientific truth -- where the question is what can happen. People measure scientific truth by testing it. That is, we test the implications made by a theory, and if we can reproduce the predicted results, we say that the theory holds.

If we assume, however, that all truth is scientific in nature, we miss the point. History, for example, is not reproducible -- instead of being interested in what can happen, it is more interested in what did happen. This difference in orientation is only a problem when we attempt to use the scientific method to prove a historical event.

When I get a few moments, I hope to discuss this difference both as it applies to biblical history and the origins of the universe.