Plymothian

I believe that the shift from Coke-the real thing to Coke-make it real was a significant commentary on the shift in our culture from modernism to post-modernism. As the following press-release illustrates, a diverse cross-section of coca-cola consumers show that a post-modern definition of reality prevails.  It is not an external, objective, universal reality anymore folks!

Atlanta, January 14, 2005 – Coca-Cola is introducing a series of uplifting commercials that shows how the brand’s universal appeal is part of the real experiences that people live everyday.

“Make it Real,” the next evolution of the successful “Coca-Cola… Real” campaign, was developed through conversations with a diverse group of consumers about Coca-Cola and what it means to be real.

“People told us that by being part of real, optimistic experiences, Coca-Cola lifts their spirits in ways that go beyond refreshment,” said Randy Ransom, senior vice president, Coca-Cola Brand Business Unit, Marketing, Coca-Cola North America. “The ‘Make it Real’ campaign shares the values of Coca-Cola with a contemporary audience through relatable moments and shows that drinking an ice cold Coca-Cola is the simplest way to ‘Make it Real.'”

There are times when I have been shocked by how hard Americans push themselves.  Slow down!  Where did ‘Blessed are the busy’ come from?  I see in people here a drive to do everything that is humanly possible in a twenty-four hour day. 

I used to be a bit like this socially.  I used to stay out all night with my friends, going up to Dartmoor and traveling down to Devil’s Point near Plymouth, England.  The next day, in my college classes, I couldn’t function.  I remember trying so hard to understand what Dr. Adrian Thatcher was trying to tell me about the existence of God, but I would keel over as soon as I left the class.  In one P.E. class I arrived without my kit and so I curled up on the gym mats and went to sleep.  In retrospect I am glad that the gym teacher asked me to leave her class.   I wasn’t learning a thing.  Are you sleeping enough?  What is your theology of rest?

Mike Milco tells me that sleep deprivation is a strong indicator and contributer related to depression.  I understand that a crazy mind can lead to no sleep, but also no sleep can lead to a crazy mind.  We talk about our bodies being a temple of the Holy Spirit, and so we don’t smoke or chew tobacco.  Many Christians don’t drink alcohol.  However, they will pile on the pounds and deprive themselves of sleep.

Regular sleep habits and a daily routine are essential aspects of wellness.  I am not saying that we should condemn each other over these issues, I am saying that we should examine and improve our own behavior.  The zombies that I see in America are the product of overwork, poor eating habits and a mindset that thinks 6 hours is a full night’s sleep.  Our values are wrapped up with performance.  It is a materialistic society that attributes worth by quotas and measures meals by quantity rather than quality.

Do you have a routine?  Do you have self-control?  What beliefs or desires control sleep deprivation?  I know that for me, I might choose to spend and evening at the Theatre in Chicago and also plan an early church meeting the next day.  I don’t want to disappoint my wife by cancelling the date at the theatre, and I don’t want to disappoint my church.  I am guilted into unhealthy living.  However, I am not the victim because I am a sentient being who could make a choice.

Not everything that is good to do is good for me to do.  Why do I make poor choices regarding sleep?

Do you really want to be a zombie?

Response to ‘Religions don’t deserve special treatment’ by AC Grayling

(A link to his article is provided below)

It is agreed that in our postmodern societies all truth claims are presented as equally valid, including the naturalism that AC Grayling espouses.  I think that, in America at least, it is often humanism that is ‘protected by custom and in some cases law against criticism and ridicule.’

In British academia and American public schooling atheists claim ‘respect, special treatment, and many other kinds of immunity.’  They use a corrupted understanding of the seperation of church and state to their advantage.  I have experienced personal insults and mud-slinging by academics who would not add support to their argument but retreated into snobbish superiority by throwing out comments like, “no-one thinks like you anymore…. That is a great answer for the 14^th century …” or my personal favorite, “you moron!”  The last comment was thrown at me in debate at Exeter University by Dr. Elizabeth Stuart.  Retreating behind these personal attacks and having no works by conservative thinkers like William Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland, or R.C. Sproul in the library (as was true of the University College of St. Mark and St. John) gives little credence to naturalist, humanist or liberal claims that they have considered the thought of evangelicals.  Theology, according to Anselm, is ‘faith seeking understanding.’  This shows a balance between faith and reason.  We Christians acknowledge what we believe and seek to examine our beliefs and make sense of them.

The blind Scientism of many is shocking.  They do not see that they too hold beliefs.  If we dig down to the root of those like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris they start with basic presuppositions.  Even Nietzsche acknowledges that we all come from our own perspectives in arguments.  What is particularly offensive about naturalists is that they assume that their unfalsifiable presuppositions of faith are actually scientific in nature.  With these uncritically held assumptions they build bastions of secularization which take the belief of humanism into the world with the religious fervor of any crusade.  Scientific, naturalistic, humanism falls pray to its own critique of “believing something by faith is ignoble, irresponsible, and ignorant and merits the opposite of respect.”  I have so much respect for humanity that I support AC Grayling’s right to write on the web.  Apparently his proselytizing on behalf of humanism is immune from his own critique.  I could ask him to play by his own rules and shut up, but I won’t.

Using the term ‘believers’ to mock those of faith implies that there are people who do not believe anything.  No one really functions that way.

Christians often desire the non-interference of Atheists (many atheists wrote sycophantic accolades at the foot of Grayling’s article) in their neat and tidy world.  I believe that is unrealistic.  However, to banish Christian thinking to the private sphere is to ignore the precedent of the very real lives of Jesus and the Apostle Paul.  Christians can’t withdraw with integrity and submit to that kind of dictate.  We must be in the public marketplace defending the faith.  We must dialogue with Muslims and Atheists to understand the common ground, folly or ignorance of rival truth claims.  If we diminish and disappear it must not be behind closed doors.

Christianity, if it is true, is true for everyone.  Islam, if it is true, is true for everyone.  Secular humanism, if it is true, is true for everyone.   Ironically many relativist post-modernists believe that their views are true for everyone – strange.

I find it interesting that Grayling assumes that human individuals deserve respect.  Why?  If we are not given worth by someone worthy of bestowing it, as Christians believe, what right does one species have over another to attribute to itself some worth?  Why not eat each other?  It seems that the worth of an individual can not come from an objective, scientific perspective.  It seems a statement of unsupported philosophy (and not science) to attribute value to shared humanity.  This value appears in Grayling’s article out of a vacuum.

Historically, I see the virtues that Grayling wants (he lists them in his article) arising out of religious thinking.  Historically, I see that Hitler takes nihilistic atheism to heights not even The Inquisition could hope to rival.  Of course, those who adhere to the writings of their faiths find little support there for unquestioned power structures, but the underlying presuppositions of everyone have an affect on their public lives.  We can not live in a world where presuppositions of any system go unexamined. 

You’d think that the atheists more than anyone would hold their assumptions up to question.  Instead they have taken hold of communities and closed up shop.  In America we see the catch-22 of peer review halting serious consideration of intelligent design.  There is a very public stance of faith in a certain view of history, albeit natural history, which does not allow supernatural explanations for phenomenon or a designer behind the intelligence held in our genes.  I have read Dawkins and seen him invent time for the improbable and start with Darwinist assumptions that read anthropomorphic intentionality into a selfish gene.

I hold the right for atheists to take their faith-stance of atheism into the public sphere and to live a life which is consistent with their beliefs.  If such a thing is possible!  I do not understand why that tone of superiority is allowed to continue among atheists in Britain so that they stand without cogent opposition and pronounce judgment on society as if their philosophical assumptions were science.  Christians should do some more study.

If it is superior to believe in current ideas, why is AC Grayling so five minutes ago?  We have passed modernism and moved into the times of Baudrillard, Derrida, and Lyotard.  His views are still largely in the age of Dawkins, Russell, or even Locke.  If beliefs that we used to hold about humanity, science, virtues and universality can be dusted off by Grayling and held as true, why not go back 2000 years or more?  Why is everything that current thinkers think offered as a progression?  Is it not possible to regress?  Religious pluralism was all the mode, but the incompatibility of competing truths has forced us to question that. 

I predict that we are just about to shift in Hegelian fashion from relativistic, postmodern pluralism to national identities.  We are shifting that way already with the debate about free speech.  We are defending it in Britain, Denmark, Holland and the USA based on nationalistic arguments: “The way of democratic freedom is free speech.”  So we see a belief in democratization that is akin to the ‘leap of faith’ that Kierkegaard is accused of.  Why is democracy right?  How do you know that?  Have you looked at the history of Pakistan?  When has Pakistan been least stable?  How did Rome maintain its strength?  How did it lose it?  Do these lessons teach us anything about our values?  Is history really a series of footnotes to the present?  Plato suggested a Philosopher King and saw democracy as part of a descent into tyranny.  I see a descent in the heart of man that wants to be free of a moral conscience.  It wants a reason to justify hedonism in the privacy of its own home.

In public debate no quarter should be given to Christians, and no quarter should be given by Christians.  Let truth prevail.

In Teaching Redemptively, Graham points out that we have two kinds of beliefs.  He calls them controlling beliefs and professed beliefs.  Christians in modern America will check off a list of beliefs that conform to Christian ideals but not live by them.  It would be good for us to examine our actions and ask whether they truly communicate biblical truth.  Where do the actions of the children we serve come from?  Why are some children acting with entitlement, arrogance, and a confidence rooted in self?  Why do other children act with thankfulness, humility, and confidence rooted in God?  What do they believe?

Look at your behaviors and those of your children and trace it back to a belief.  That is what we are attempting to do in Christian schooling.  In identifying the errors in the mind, we are able to correct action at the root (Romans 12: 1 and 2).

Above:  Professor A.C. Grayling who writes a tyrade against faith in The Guardian’s Comment is Free section.

In my class at Moody I assign groups different worldviews to research.  I have a naturalist group which includes Richard Dawkins.  One of the students in class must research Dawkins and tell us what he thinks about life.

When we were in Oxford last year there was a large Dawkins display.  He offers comfort to atheists who want to be sure that when they die it is all over.  The metaphysical presuppositions that he builds on are assumed absolutes with weak philosophical bases.  The article that Bill, a student of mine, sent to me highlights the seriousness of modern Darwinism and the threat that is still very real from Naturalists in a post-modern world.  It is written by A.C. Grayling (above), but reflects views of those like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ac_grayling/2006/10/acgrayling.html

Please read the article and leave a comment.

Death (Axiology)

I was beginning to think that Americans could only stomach comedies.  By comedy, I mean movies that end happily.  I know a number of people who hated The Breakup, with Vince Vaughan and Jennifer Aniston just because people can’t stomach a movie in which the couple stay broken up.  The Departed was truly a tragedy of Shakespearian proportions and that is what I liked about it.  It showed the true connections between sin and death in a way that might have made Flannery O’Connor take notice.

Kelli and I dashed through the rain to our local two screen movie theatre and bought two tickets at $5 each to see a first run movie.  It’s ridiculously cheap to go to the local cinema, compared with the $9+ elsewhere.  We snuggled down with our cheap popcorn and drink to watch a movie that was fast-paced, true to life and thought provoking.  It is not recommended for the faint of heart, the young, or those who think that all art should be G-rated.

The characters are Irish and proud of the fact that they are Irish and from Boston: we see racism, blind ambition, lies, betrayal, violence, sex and drugs in the suburbs of that city.  ‘The Departed’ refers to the words spoken and written over the graves of the Catholic cemetries when characters in the movie are buried.  You feel, in the tense action of the movie, that each character is not far from death.  When each one dies, there are no long speaches by the villains, no explanations by the ‘good-guys’, just reactions that are consistent with the characters and their values.

The villains seem to be looking out for number one, they pursue pleasure, they climb on the backs of those around them.  There is some honour among thieves.  As Jesus once said, talking of Satan’s kingdom, “a kingdom that is divided can not stand.” However, in the police force and the underworld there is division caused by rats.  Somehow we justify the lies told to the mob by the police informant, but we condemn the lies told to the police by the mobster rat.  Both series of lies bring them to death. 

I question whether evil can be overcome with evil.  Is there another way to infiltrate a mob, to bring it down without deceit and trickery?  There are plenty of lies in the movie and none of them leads to a positive conclusion.  The values that pragmatism forces on American law enforcement results in death.  I wish that I could say that it was death of innnocents.  It is not.  Most of us would rather pretend that espionage was not a game of deceit.  We would prefer to think that intelligence is gathered honorably.  Is there a case for sinning for a good cause?  Are there times in our fallen world when we will be reduced to choosing which of two wrongs we must choose, because the consequences of doing right are too awful to allow?

We wish for the redemption of the undercover cop.  He wants out.  He wants to reform.  He wants his life to be normal.  I wonder why the character didn’t just run away across the world.  Are we stuck in patterns that result in death because we lack the creativity or motivation to lay hold of a new life?  He is stuck.  He is stranded in a cycle of sin and fear which ends abruptly when he seems on the point of redemption – but his own redemptive plan leads him to trust the untrustworthy and he is suddenly shot through the head and his story is over.

All the characters are flawed.  All the characters are real.  Money tempts the the corrupt and the cops to their death.  Vainglory draws cops to an imagined life the learned from TV.  Drugs and sex draw pleasure-seekers deeper into corruption.

There is no man-made path to redemption – sinful decisions do result in death.  We have all sinned and we all get what is coming to us.  When payday comes, it is death who comes after us.  Sin is a dark disease for which there is no human cure.  When pressured, poor, and desperate we become the banshees and goblins that we wish we were not – but who we truly are.  Like the witches who peel off their beautiful facades to reveal the warty nose and the green skin that is more truly them.  The ugliness of our self-righteousness is stripped away under pressure.  The Departed shows us naked and we should know that there is a condition in all of us that without divine aid leads to death.  Death is holy.  Death is righteous.  Death is just. 

Let mercy triumph over justice.

“No-one could live as though death did not exist.  Like others from his time, Donne kept a skull on his desk as a reminder, memento mori.”  (Philip Yancey, Soul Survivor)

I was once a Goth.  I think that those who know me know this fact.  I listened to Bauhaus, dressed in black and had my friends accuse me of  performing a ‘dying duck act’.  I think that it was the cover of Black Sabbath’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” that took me in the direction away from Rock and into Goth.  Goth seemed to reinforce my love of Roman Polanski’s “Macbeth” with its dark setting and graphic violence adding weight to the words:

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The mortality of man cannot be ignored.  It should be embraced.  We should think that it is given to man once to die, and then the judgment. But America dismisses thoughts of death and dying,  hiding them in ways that other cultures do not.  Around Halloween, America displays a picture of death that is horrifying and repulsive. 

I went shopping for a skull at Gurnee Mills.  There was a shop that had skulls set up for Halloween and I went inside.  Most of the skulls had blood pouring from the eye-sockets or wore a frown, a snarl or a wicked grin.  They weren’t a simple reminder that we die and decay, these were fiends from the abyss chasing me down to suck out my soul.  As I searched the store it became increasingly obvious that these were shock items, stocked alongside questionable games and sexy lingerie.  

I found another shop with a skull with bright, red, flashing eyes.  It was displayed with a scythe.  Nice.  So here is death hunting me down again. At the foot of Death there were spiders with skulls for heads and boney legs.  Each one of them looked malevolent and bent on evil.  Is death evil?

I picture my father.  He has been dead for a few years now.  As he died he became thin and yellow.  The gaunt face seemed to show flesh retreating to reveal the skull.  We burned his remains at the crematorium.  Yet, the thought of his skeleton laying beneath the ground would have cause me no pain.  The bones would have been a reminder to me that this is where we go.  We would have set up a headstone remembering his life.  But my father was ready for death.  He died thanking God for his beautiful life.

Young people need to see death as they do in Pakistan.  My neighbor was publicly displayed for two days afer he died when he fell through a roof.  They put ice cubes at his head and his feet so that fans could blow cool air over them and down the length of the yound man’s lifeless body. I was eighteen and would walk past the body and the wailing each day.  I thought, “This will be you, Peter Worrall.  Are you ready?” 

I want a skull.  Just a normal skull.  I want to have it in my office so that I can remember that I do not live forever.  I may then treat each day like it was my last – I know that I would suck the marrow from each passing hour.

To live is Christ to die is gain.

A Holistic Conclusion

Christian educators have a duty to study natural and special revelation.  They must seek to show the connections that exist between God, all knowledge and all wisdom.  The important distinction I would make is that the world is already integrated.  It is not up to the educator to manufacture interface between Faith and Learning.  Faith and Learning are essentially unified.  It is up to the Christian to show the integration in each discipline that already exists.  It is the duty of the Christian educator to creatively inspire the student to see the world as God’s world and all truth as God’s truth.

Bringing together Our Faith and Our Learning

The Ontological Perspective

From an objective and eternal perspective no division can ever occur between theology and other disciplines in the academy.  Everything is theological.  And, as Anselm says, “Theology is faith seeking understanding.”  The verb is highlights the essence of truth and knowledge finding its generation in God.  By way of analogy, in The Silmarillion Tolkein helps us to see that man and Satan (Melkor) do not create truth or knowledge; they pervert it or destroy it. God alone is the author of truth.  So, in essence faith and learning are integrated.  Why then, must we explore an integration of Faith and Learning?

The Historical Perspective

Through history we have seen that mankind has exercised a God-given ability to explore concepts and know the truth.  Romans tells us that from the beginning God made things plain through natural revelation; in other passages we find that God made known the truth through Scripture and the Truth’s embodiment in Christ. 

From the inception of Christianity there has been a tendency toward division.  The division of Faith and Learning has been one area that Satan has used to marginalize the church of God.  Tertullian complained, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” It seems that there are those who believe that by faith we transcend logic, knowledge and truth in its universal usage.  In The Renaissance there were many Christian thinkers who had a unified view of the world where the truths that they understood as extra-biblical were not a surprise to the mind of God.  However, the church’s opposition to scientific investigation, especially in cosmology, created a rift between the church and academia.  In the time of The Enlightenment the rift became a chasm.  Theologians like Schleiermacher were on the cutting edge of bringing Christianity into the scientific age – but they did it by opening the door to demythologizing and skepticism. We see a high view of man dominate anthropology and a low view of sin enter the common psyche.

Christian scholarship was undermined by the revivals of North America which emphasized emotional responses to impassioned deliveries, rather than careful investigation of truth claims.  In the face of new ideas like Darwinism and Marxism, Christians responded by refusing to engage in debate and forming a separatist Fundamentalist enclave.  Faith was to be practiced in the private sphere of life; learning was for public life.  Theology was relegated to a hobby and an opiate for the weak. 

The Modern and Post-Modern Dilemma

Christians today do not put enough time into studying theology.  I recently visited an evangelical church where a pastor publicly declared that they had no theology.  Christians no longer know how to think christianly about truth claims.  Academia has been dominated by the Modernist and Post-Modernist world views so that many Christians read the Bible with Naturalistic or Relativistic worldviews rather than reading the world with a Christian world view.  We see students who believe that many contradictory assumptions about a passage can be held at the same time.  We see students who tenaciously hold onto the opinion that a verse can mean what they want it to, when their interpretation contradicts millennia of Christian Scholarship.  What should we do to reassert that ‘all truth is God’s truth’?

The Integration Solution

Integration of Faith and Learning is more than living a Christ-centered life before the students.  A housewife, CEO or truck-driver should do that.  The peculiar task of Christian educators is to show how the knowledge of their discipline is rooted in the revelation of God.  This is more than illustrating theological concepts.  An example of this misapplication would be that 2+2=4 so we can always depend on God.  Despite the fact that 2+2 does not equal 4 in modular arithmetic, the truths here are parallel but not necessarily connected.  Integration relies on the necessary existence of God.  Nothing else in the universe is necessary.  Because all truth claims in every discipline relate to the nature of God, the rigorous academic has a duty to show the connection.  With our 2+2=4 analogy, it would be good for the academic to show that 2+2 is a concept that is generated in the mind, which is disproof of some basic naturalistic worldview assumptions – specifically, that the origin of all truth is external. 

My wife and I went to a local French restaurant last night.  We sat down at a lavish table, and had fresh hot rolls handed to us by a waiter each time we asked for one.  I ordered a crab soup, a cabbage salad, lamb, and a chocolate cheesecake.  We talked about art, theatre, my wife’s writing assignments for her classes.  I remember thinking how grateful I was to live in America.  I could pay for the meal and leave a tip with no fear of my bank account running dry.

We were too tired to go to the local movie theatre, so we came home and ordered Syriana on PPV.  My wife snuggled up and fell asleep after about thirty minutes and I watched the tale of oil, business and terror unfold.

I know that the movie was based on a non-fiction book.  I also know that I teach in an environment that would see a movie like this and dismiss it as leftist propaganda.  As an educator, I believe that we need to engage with the world and see what it is doing.  As I read in Teaching Redemptively yesterday Christians are called to “encounter and transform the world, to be salt rubbed into a rotten world to prevent decay, not to self-righteously watch the “meat” rot.”(p.71)  There is something rotten in the oil business, something rotten in terrorism, something rotten in imperialistic attitudes – I think that we can call it sin.

It was early in the movie when I felt the rush of hearing a language that I was familiar with but not being able to understand what the people were saying.  I lived in Pakistan for 3 years and so I recognise Urdu when I hear it.  I immediately started to make connections in my head:  Pakistanis in the Gulf;  Terrorism;  England;  London bombings;  Students (talib ilm)who go to Pakistan and study Islam in schools (Are the schools called madrasas, or is that a curry?).  I watched as these Pakistani muslims got fired because of a Chinese takeover of their refinery or well and I knew where the movie was headed.  I think any of us could connect the dots.  However, I felt the sympathy and the anger that the film was trying to evoke.  After all, we are allowed to hate China – they’re communists.

The cycle of greed and hate continued and spun out of control.  Syriana depicts an America that is little more than a fascist state run by dictators with money – maybe you could call it an oligarchy.  Dictatorships installed and maintained by America and Britain in the Middle East need to be maintained and destabilized so that they keep paying the west.  Overt violence is perpetrated by frustrated, disenfranchized Muslims.  Covert violence is perpetrated by greedy, oil-thirsty Americans.  If any of this is true, I don’t condone it, but one thing shone out with purity and innocense.  The Muslim terrorist cell had unquestioning faith.  I think that it was meant to evoke sympathy, and I would have balked at such a cheesy ploy if I hadn’t lived in Pakistan myself.  I have envied Pakistani Muslims their faith in Allah.  When I was teaching in Gujranwala in 1988 I taught a class English.  We had discussions that invariably turned to religion.  I crossed a line by drawing a distinction between Mohammad and Jesus.  I said that Jesus was sinless and Mohammad had sinned.  The class went deathly quiet.  The oldest member of the class quietly stood up and said to me calmly, “Mr. Peter, class is over or else we will have to hurt you.”  After that my mostly Muslim class filed out quietly.  What struck me most was the unity and depth of conviction that they had in their faith.

It seems that in our post-modern times the solution to the conflict of faith is to pretend that we are all saying the same thing.  Muslims and Christians both have faith.  The playing field is leveled by saying, “Everyone has faith in something. ”  Even nihilists believe in the irreducable particles of physics (well some do).  Though faith is the same trust, the object of trust is different.  I look at the struggle of my faith and the certainty of the Muslim’s faith and a shock thought flashes through my mind.  “What if I am wrong?”

The Muslim and the Christian who know their faith know that they can’t both be right.  Either Isaac or Ishmael was the chosen son of Abraham; Either the Koran or the Bible is correct on this point.  Either Jesus died on the cross to save us fromour sins, or he was replaced by Judas because God does not let his prophets die.  There are logical dichotomies that seperate us.  Tolerance should not be the postmodern suspension of logic, it is the agreement to disgree.  It is the ability to walk away from the person who is telling you that your road leads to hell and to love them. 

In the face of Muslim faith, I am forced to ask “Am I right?  Was Mohammad really sent to pull libertine Christians, Jews, and polytheists back to the truth of the Fear of God?”  I lay staring into the blackness of my pillow and thought it through.  How do I know?  Jehovah?  Allah?  Jesus?

If radical Muslims are correct in what they believe or think, it follows that actions founded firmly in correct belief would also be correct.  Any Christian who has read Joshua’s invasion of Canaan has to agree with this.  We believe that God did tell Joshua to kill every last man, woman and child in Jericho.  If Ai had a word for barbarian terrorist, they may have felt that they had repelled a people worthy of that name when Israel failed in their first attack.  What justifies religious action is being right.  The righteousness of God was shown in the terror of the actions he condoned.  It was as right for God to slay the Philistines through Israel as it is for us to put a man in jail for stealing.  Compared to the unsurpassed righteousness of God we all deserve destruction.  If this line of revelation and righteous destruction continued unbroken, I could accept a prophet like Mohammad who charged around The Arabian Peninsula sanctifying Mecca and offering a choice of repentance or the sword.

However, the revelation of God in the Injil (New Testament) is not corrupted.  We have peace with God through Jesus.  God’s righteous requirements of death and destruction are fully met in the horific death of the sinless one.  One died in place of the many.  Jesus was fully self-conscious with regard to his mission.  The grace that mankind does not deserve came in the form of a Jewish man.  He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and offered the choice to become his followers.  Now, it is true that grace and peace do not eminate from countries like America and Britain that some claim to be Christian.  However, those who truly follow the way of Jesus are peacemakers.  The founder of Christianity brought an olive branch of mercy that triumphs over justice.  The truth of this stands in opposition to a call back to a cowering distance from God and an uncertainty of salvation.

I was able to sleep and whisper into my pillow, “Thank you for grace.  GRACE.  Grace.  grace.”  And I slept in peace hoping that one day I would have faith worthy of a Muslim martyr.