What's Love....Got To Do With It?

I read this morning in the paper that December is the month where the greatest number of proposals for marriage occur.  Many would think that February and Valentine's Day would be the number one month for proposals, but according to the article and a quoted professional proposal planner December is five to six times more active in terms of interest in her services.  A jewelry businessman also stated that diamond engagement ring purchases were 50 to 60 percent higher in the month of December due to the expressed intent to propose marriage.

Now many would say without thinking that two people are in love and with Christmas, the winter wonderland some experience, the gift giving, family gatherings and the like that it is just a natural time to pop the question.  What I thought about, however, was deeper than the location, time of year or method of proposal.  From whence did love come?  We speak about love quite a bit - in music, with regard to foods we find particularly appealing, vehicles or new electronic gadgets we purchase and utilize and others.  We say we love many things, and in point of fact before proposing there has usually been an exchange of the very phrase "I love you" on numerous occasions.  But i'm not even talking about the statement of love, or the idea that love is a part of our every day lives.  What i'm concerned with is where did the whole concept of love come from in the first place.  We must preface the entire question with the understanding that love is a term that connotes more than just physical intimacy.  When we speak of love and marriage there is an implicit understanding of forever, of something that lasts, of giving of ourselves to another, of sacrificing for someone else.  Where did that come from?

It is hard to see from an evolutionary standpoint how it would ever have arisen.  For furthering a society, procreation is a requisite, and for safety it is well appreciated that gathering in groups is better for survival than going it alone.  It seems quite counter-intuitive to hold to a belief that the flourishing of human existence is maximized by sacrificing and suffering with another. It seems much more reasonable to hold to some sort of physical intimacy with whomever one chooses to be the best mate and more of a communal sense of responsibility toward rearing children.  No one particular set of parents, a group of adults all sharing in the responsibility of making each child the best possible specimen for the next generation of more advanced evolutionary bi-products.  Complex sociological concerns are not really the point of the post, but do bring light on the importance of the question.  If love as a complex set of emotions that drive human behavior away from the most beneficial evolutionary circumstances then it should be cast away lest humanity be passed over by another more capable of discarding such unnecessary notions.

Unless of course love is the ultimate expression of human existence.  What if love is actually the pinnacle of humanity, the core of what really makes human beings what they are?  As it turns out, my personal devotions for this month have me in the book of 1 John.  In the fourth chapter, and verse 4 it reads, "Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God."  Wait, love comes from God?  The source of the pinnacle of humanity was imparted to us from our Creator?  Yes, it seems the only way to understand what love is, why it is so important when it seems to contradict human flourishing it to understand that it comes from God.  Not only do we find in 1 John the source of love, we also see what it is to love (an example for our benefit and use in copying behavior that expresses love).  See here chapter 3 and verse 16, "This is how we know what love is: Christ Jesus laid down his life for us.  And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers."  So here we have an action and an imperative.  Christ died for us, therefore we ought to lay our lives down for others.

This is repeated in Chapter 4 verses 7-12, "Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.  Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.  This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.  This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us."

More tomorrow on 1 John and love, but I hope we will all be spurred on to think carefully and deeply about what it means to love, the origin of love in human existence, and how we ought to display love in our own individual lives each day.  Knowing God and atoning sacrifice are central here, as clearly read in the last verses, which will be a great topic for tomorrow...

A Cascade of Errors

It's amazing how some mechanisms in the human body work.  Blood clotting is one example that has always struck me as nothing short of miraculous.  Seemingly the whole system had to be in place from its onset because of the "cascade" effect of thinning and thickening required for a cut on the human body to heal over without either bleeding out or seizing up.  In some instances in human thought, however, the cascade effect is obvious and just as disturbing and the blood clotting mechanism is fascinating.  In an article in our local paper today originally published by the McClatchy News Service, author Shawn Lawrence Otto has written a book about the lack of scientific discussion by political candidates (particularly presidential candidates) in recent history. You can link to the article here. 

Mr. Otto begins innocently and correctly enough by postulating that there is a necessity in an efficient government  for a well-informed electorate.  He states that "Without the mooring provided by the well-informed opinion of the people, governments may become paralyzed or, worse, corrupted by powerful interests seeking to oppress and enslave."  He also plumps for decisions to be made on information based in factual reality.  Beyond these opening points, however, there is a cascade of poor reasoning.  He goes on to suggest that politicians in general, and the Republican party in particular, have jettisoned all acknowledgement and reference to science in making policy decisions due to the influence of religion.  He states that the Republican party has "gone anti-science" partially due to the fact that "evangelicals got involved in politics."  So apparently for those belonging to the Republican party, there is a pre-requisite or at least an overwhelming pressure to be "anti-science" because the party is "pro-evangelical."

My nature prior to my conversion to Christianity was to be sarcastic to the extreme.  I fight against the continued temptation to be snarky and sarcastic in any thought process or discussion.  In this instance I will go with a measured response only laced with sarcasm pointed directly at the idea just posited, not at Mr. Otto personally.  To wit:

"So the idea is that those who have a cogent and internally consistent answer for the four most important questions in human existence; those of origin, meaning, morality and destiny, and have among their ranks a host of the most prominent names in many of the most important scientific discoveries in human history, and have a good reason both to engage in the discovery of new empirical physical truths and an explanation for the ought of the usage and temperance of use and distribution of new discoveries should be expelled from the discussion because those who are politicians by career take advice from their advisors and political constituents policy decisions with an emphasis on scientific data less than would be deemed necessary by those who choose for their careers fields in the scientific - is that correct?"

It just seems so blatantly ridiculous to even bring the evangelical view into the discussion in the first place.  It seems the spectre of "separation of Church and State" raises its head to choke off serious consideration of deeply important topics any time politics and government is involved.  Of course science is important and should be considered as the data is available on policy issues in which science comes naturally to the fore.  However, it seems wildly irresponsible to accuse evangelicalism as the primary source of a lack of drive to enact laws relative to global warming (or climate change as it has now been articulated).  What I find most ironic is the charge that the one area of human reasoning that can even speak about the morality of laws being adopted, the only realm that can make decisions of ought that would hold abuse and corruption in check (namely the Christian world and life view) is summarily discarded because of its stand against science, which is in itself a complete misrepresentation and misapplication of any reasonable Biblical position.

I guess i'm just continually flummoxed by the inability to recognize that one recognize that science is absolutely critical for making empirical evaluations for the physical issues experienced and influencing all of humanity and that science must be tempered by religion because of its complete impotence with regard to the metaphysical and moral issues that run hand in hand with any scientific discovery.  The Bible is not a science textbook and was never intended to be such, and science has been and will continue to be fruitful in making amazing discoveries relative to the make-up and intricate workings of the universe we inhabit, but science cannot and will never be able to stand alone in providing any information whatsoever as to how we ought to engage in or properly utilize that information within the interpersonal reality of human existence.  It seems inevitable that the two must not be put at odds with one another, but rather be inextricably tethered, else monstrous results be manifest.

My First Present This Year

After five years of study, a year of writing and finalization of editing, I am now excited to say that I have received advance copies of my book (In, Not Of - Christian Relevance in 21st Century America) and can announce that the book is available in stores.  Clicking on the picture to the right will link to the Barnes & Noble website, and the book is also available through Amazon.com and can be obtained through any major book seller and Christian Bookstore.

I hope this book will be an encouragement to believers and an effective challenge to skeptics as it provides a brief but extensive overview of apologetic arguments for the existence of God, the God of the Bible as the One True God, and the authority of scripture and the divinity of Christ.  I hope it will be a challenge to believers and skeptics alike as it discusses at length the disconnect between an overwhelming ascription to Christianity in the United States and an equally overwhelming prevalence of non-Christian behavior actually lived out.  I hope it will be thought-provoking to all as it develops the Christian worldview as it relates to four essential topics of our day in comparison with other possible belief systems and incorporating current events and the arts.

In any case, it is a present come a few days early for me as I was able to put my hands on the fruit of that labor and see the physical manifestation of what the Holy Spirit had coalesced in my mind over many years of study and internal wrestling with many ideas.  I hope that God is glorified in the work, that all who are meant to read the book will find it both an encouragement and a challenge, and that the Lord will see fit to bless me with other topics on which to write as this experience has been one of the most trying yet rewarding of my relatively short life.

Understating the Case

December 14 and dateline Geneva, the Associated Press has published a story entitled Physicists close in on elusive subatomic particle in which praises are being sung for the real possibility that the Higgs boson will soon be discovered.  Richard Higgs is attributed with postulating the existence of a subatomic particle that explains the existence of mass in the elements that make up the atom.  Equations in physics that have been used and work out in the real world (i.e. correctly and accurately explain observed behavior) assume that electrons, for example, have mass.  Frank Wilczek said, "Since the equations have worked so brilliantly now for decades, it's really nice to dot the i's and cross the t's."  A theoretical physicist at FERMI has explained the Higgs boson this way:

"What hides the symmetry between the weak and electromagnetic interactions? That is the question we hope to answer through experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. When the LHC is commissioned, around the year 2005, it will enable us to study collisions among quarks at energies approaching 1 TeV, or a trillion (10¹²⁾electron volts. A thorough exploration of the 1-TeV energy scale will determine the mechanism by which the electroweak symmetry is hidden and teach us what makes the W and Z particles massive.

"The simplest guess goes back to theoretical work by British physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s. According to this picture, the giver of mass is a neutral particle with zero spin that we call the Higgs boson. In today's version of the electroweak theory, the W and Z particles and all the fundamental constituents--quarks and leptons--get their masses by interacting with the Higgs boson. But the Higgs boson remains hypothetical; it has not been observed. That is why particle physicists often use the search for the Higgs boson as a shorthand for the campaign to learn the agent that hides electroweak symmetry and endows other particles with mass.  Chris Quigg in Scientific American 

So the quest that is stated to be coming to a head is actually finding the correct range of possibility and nailing down with some certainty the existence of a theoretical particle that explains why equations in physics actually work. Chriss Quigg says elsewhere in the same paper "Over the next 15 years, we should be able to find a real understanding of the origin of mass. The interest lies not just in the arcana of accelerator experiments but suffuses everything in the world around us: mass is what determines the range of forces and sets the scale of all the structures we see in nature.

This is very exciting stuff. Human beings able to "see" subatomic particles that explain the mass of all the structures we see in nature. Not it must be noted that there are other theories if all the supercollider experiments do not show the Higgs boson. The two most well accepted both assume there is not one single particle, but a number of as yet undiscovered sub-atomic particles that are associated with known particles. Supersymmetry assumes several Higgs bosons, while dynamical symmetry breaking assumes the Higgs boson is a composite that is made up of multiple constituents that will need to be discovered once the Higgs boson itself is observed. In any event, the use of supercollider technology to experiment at high energy ranges allows for discoveries at the subatomic level with great expectation for remarkable results.

As interesting as all the physics and possible discovery is the statement made by physicist Howard Gordon of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York when he said, "It's hard to find, not because it is especially tiny, but because it is hard to create." I would say that a decade of construction and research into a 17-mile tube charged to 1 TeV (trillion electron volts) would classify as hard. The really funny thing about this comment is that all this effort has gone in to discover the range in GeV within a range of statistical certainty the Higgs boson might exist within to declare it has been observed. Not really creation at all, is it. The Higgs boson is also called the "God particle" as it is hoped to explain why anything in this universe has mass and why after the Big Bang everything slowed down instead of just racing outward to infinity and all we know never came to be as we know it.

Supposing a range with statistical certainty is achieved such that the Higgs boson is "observed", or multiple Higgs bosons are "observed", or a whole range of new particles and their possible constituents are "found" what physics still cannot tell is where the first elements necessary to produce the "Bang" came from, nor why knowing any of these things matters (why there is something rather than nothing). Science is completely impotent regarding these matters. We certainly aren't creating anything, as all the elements and particles already exist and are "waiting" for us to observe them. We also continue to find more and more intricate interaction between elements and particles in science whether it be in particle physics, microbiology or other field of study. We know an astronomically detailed and complex series of particles and elements work independently and in concert with others in ways we cannot yet fully describe or understand but which must be so for our tests to even be performed in the first place. We should be excited about how far we have come in such discoveries, we should be amazed that even at the level of observation now possible there is still so much we do not know and must theorize about, and we should be humbled that there is no good reason for any of it to be this way and yet we are capable of participating in such exploration. As complicated and detailed the scientific discoveries will continue to be in the future we must remember that all these observed particles, elements and particles came from absolutely nothing (no energy, substance or potential) and the sum total of all scientific discoveries provides no meaningful answers to even the most basic questions of relationships between the discoverers and anything else in existence.

We need not pursue a "God particle", but the God who created all things and who holds all things together, and who provides a reason for human existence, a purpose for our existence, and the possibility of relationship with the One who is sovereign over all we observe and understand. Let us not understate the case, nor let us discover in vain.

Paying the Price

It was reported in the news cycle a short while ago that the British Embassy in Iran came under fire, and similarities were drawn as memories were taken back to the capture of American embassy workers years ago.  Those captured embassy workers were held captive for over a year.  I thought about this recently as I was asked if I felt that biblical texts concerning a ransom being paid should be taken literally.  It we are supposed to take that sort of idea literally, then to whom was the ransom paid?  In other words, to whom was God Himself beholden?

My short answer is an emphatic yes, a ransom was literally paid.  I can say that with confidence and still completely deny that God was beholden to anyone.  How can I say that without contradicting myself?  I'm so glad you asked.

ransom - 1. the redemption of a prisoner, slave, or kidnapped person, or captured goods, etc. for a price.  2. the sum or price paid or demanded.  3. a means of deliverance or rescue from punishment for sin, esp. the payment of a redemptive fine.  4. to redeem from captivity, bondage, detention, etc. by paying a demanded price.  5. to release or restore on receipt of a ransom.  6. to deliver or redeem from punishment for sin.


The reason that there is no contradiction with holding to a literal ransom is that the idea that we are held hostage by another party and that the only thing God can do is pay them off for our release is not accurate and is not the only usage of the term ransom, and therefore simply does not apply.  What is clear from scripture is that sin leads to death.  God tells Adam and Eve in the Garden that in the day they eat of the fruit they will surely die.  We are told explicitly that the wages of sin is death.  We are told that all men, all women are sinners, whose hearts are desperately wicked, incapable of any good thing, that we are all of us slaves to sin.  We are told that God's wrath is against all those who sin.

What is explicitly clear in scripture is that we have a gravely serious problem, namely that we are deserving to have the wrath of God levied against us (and rightfully so by our volitional disobedience and life contrary to the purpose for which we were created) as those who are slaves to sin.  We are enemies of God and can do nothing about it ourselves.  God's Justice and Holiness demands that this wrong be made right.  To suggest that God simply overlooks our acts is to deny His perfect Justice and Holiness.  But isn't God supposed to be Loving and Gracious and Merciful?

For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance - now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant. (Hebrews 9:15)


One would rightly read the above passage and ask, "For what reason?"  When Christ came as high priest o the good things that are already here, he went through the greater and more perfect tabernacle taht is not man-made, that is to say, not a part of this creation.  He did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves; but he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, having obtained eternal redemption.  The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean.  How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God. (Hebrews 9:11-14).  Jesus died, His body broken, His blood shed to deliver, rescue, redeem us from the punishment of sin we deserve.  Death is the wages of sin, and death was the price to redeem.  Christ paid that price, and therefore was literally a ransom for us so that we might have the spirit of sonship, an eternal inheritance.  The bible describes what we already know, that there is no greater love than if one lay down his life for another; especially if the life is laid down for those who are enemies.  God is Love.

To say that Christ was not a ransom because God couldn't remain God while being required to pay someone else off to buy us back is foolishness because it is a complete misunderstanding and misreading of the clear and explicit teaching of scripture.  To deny that Christ died, or that His blood was shed for efficacious reasons is to diminish His Grace and Love as well as His Righteousness, Justice and Holiness.  Is the situation exactly like a hostage situation, no, but Christ literally gave His life as a ransom just the same.  In short, where the Bible is clear and explicit we need not seek after some other meaning.  It is enough to acknowledge the fullness of the Truth, not suppress it, and be forever grateful and determined to live a life wholly committed to glorifying God who is perfectly Holy, Just, Righteous, Gracious, Merciful and Loving based on His Sovereignty and how much He loved us while we were yet in our sins.