It’s the question that gets asked any time there is a tragedy, any time the world experiences something awful and heart-breaking, any time there is a painful experience. The question is not new; it’s been asked since the beginning of time. Page after page has been written attempting to the answer the question satisfactorily, psychologically, theologically, but the fact that books continue to be written on the question shows that few are satisfied with the answers given thus far.

But what if the point is not so much about the answer, but about the question? Philip Yancey, in his new book “The Question that Never Goes Away” points out that while many in scripture ask “Why God,” God never gives a direct answer, and neither does Yancey. And yet, the repetition of the question throughout Psalms and the rest of Scripture demonstrates that God has heard the question, even inspired the question in the Bible, but has chosen not to answer. “Why, God? Why, God, are you not answering my question of “Why, God?” What is the point of a question that we know God hears, even affirms, but does not answer?

1. The question assumes brokenness

We ask the question when something unexpected takes place. Few ask the question “Why, God” when a drug-addict overdoses. We assume we know the answer to that scenario. Rather, we ask the question when tragedy strikes, when an unexpected death occurs, when something other than the norm takes place. We have assumptions as to how our lives will go, idealistic thoughts to be sure, but we have the expectation that we will all die in our beds in old age having led good, full lives. But how do we explain the people killed by drunk drivers? The drunk driver died for their own poor choices, but why the others? The devastation seems so random, so inexplicable. Good families, loving parents, young children, all killed by someone else’s act of stupidity. Cancer and other sicknesses strike young children who are supposed to be young and carefree. These are what cause us to ask “Why God?” And the very fact that we ask the question shows that we have an intrinsic understanding that this is not how it is ‘supposed’ to be. We have an innate sense that this world is broken and messed up. In a word, we know that the world is fallen. This evil was not “supposed” to happen. When we ask “Why God?” we are agreeing that this world is tainted and corrupted, cursed and disordered by the ravages of sin. This is not Eden; this is not paradise. What this is is not what should be.

2. The question assumes an answerer

Those outside of Christ ask the question, but they assume that someone has the answer. They ask because they assume that there even is an answer! And there is; it’s even an answer they already know deep down: whatever prompted the question shouldn’t have happened; it isn’t right. This world isn’t right. And yet, even knowing that the world is not right, even knowing this world is messed up and corrupted by sin, we still ask the question because we assume that the one who has the ability to answer the question has the power to change it. We ask not just so that we will know, but so that the one who is ‘responsible’ for this will do something about it. Even those who lack faith in Christ ask the question because they believe someone or something knows “why” and can do something about it! Their question even reveals the assumption that the one in control would care enough to do something about it. Otherwise, what’s the point of even asking?! And the great news of the Gospel is that there is someone who knows, and He has done, is doing, and will do something about this problem of evil!

3. The question assumes an answer we will agree with

So then why doesn’t God give me the answer? We admit what God has said: this world is corrupt. We even know that He has the answer. So why no answer? And to be honest “all things work out for good” is not that big of a comfort in the midst of the tragedy. Try telling any father that his daughter was tragically killed so that the father could grow spiritually. Thanks a lot, God but I want my daughter back. The reality is that we know that there is an answer and we know who has it but He is not giving it. And the truth is, we know that the answer is not one we would like. I have six children, but if God told me that one of them had to die so that every person in Africa would come to faith in Christ, I guarantee you I would say “no” without a moment’s hesitation. We ask “Why, God” because we really think that God is going to give us an answer we will agree with. How do you Job would have felt if God told him that all that tragedy happened because God had a wager going with a fallen angel? I guarantee Job would not have liked the answer. In the midst of the tragedy, when we cry out “Why, God” why someone assume we would like the answer if God gave it. But that’s not true at all because we are as affected and broken as our world! Knowing “why” will not make us feel better.

What we are really saying when we ask “Why, God” is either “This hurts, God” or “I disagree, God.” The solution to both of those is faith. Faith that admits this world is broken, and only God holds the answer. Faith that admits I disagree with what God is doing because this hurts. Faith that hopes in the future when this pain is gone, when the world is remade in perfect order. Faith in that time when we will be able to look back on it all and not only understand, but also agree. Until then, we ask the question “why” in pain and in faith that there is an answerer, and one day, we will not only agree with the answer, we’ll worship the answerer for it.

Robert George says there are a lot of Muslims who love their neighbors, and we need to make common cause with them. He’s right! But how?

I find it completely plausible that in his personal interactions with the people he describes, George has encountered forms of Islam that both preach and practice love for neighbor. But that sort of Islam does not appear to have achieved a high level of public, institutional expression in the United States. Indeed, it is a reliable guideline that the larger and more prestigious an Islamic organization is, the more frequently it is quoted or featured in the major media, and (above all) the more money it has, the fewer degrees of separation one seems to find between that group and organized terrorism, or at minimum organized ideological networks that openly preach and practice hatred of neighbor. While there are individual voices standing against these organizations, for most of us there is no practical path to build alliances with “Islam” so long as these are the voices of individuals and not organizations. Those of us who have not had extensive personal experience with Islam (of any kind) are left without many practical options for making common cause.

This situation is, of course, a by-product of many decades of careful network-building and ruthless squelching of internal dissent by the militant enemies of civilization, funded by oil money. I would therefore submit for consideration the following proposition: that the first and most practical way most of us can make common cause with Muslims who love their neighbors is by doing more to oppose those who hate their neighbors. To do so is neither for nor against Islam, but it is emphatically to be for Muslims.

Few have suffered as much at the hands of Islamic hate groups as Muslims who refuse to participate in their hate; the reasons for this are obvious. Standing up to these oppressors is not only the right thing to do for its own sake, it is the only way to create space for the emergence of high-profile institutions representing an Islam that preaches and practices love of neighbor. The emergence of such institutions is, in turn, the only social condition within which most of us will be able to make common cause with that sort of Islam.

Moreover, this course of action does not require us to get involved in complex theological disputes. We need not resolve the question of whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God (on which the divines of the Second Vatican
Council, as quoted by George, seem to be in some tension with passages like I John 2:23), or to what extent love for neighbor is at home with or at odds with “authentic” Islam, to know that the jackboot of the bloodthirsty oppressor ought to be removed, posthaste, by force if necessary, from the neck of the innocent.

Finally, it has the merit of being something that we have some idea how to do. Islam that preaches and practices love for neighbor is something that most of us do not have much opportunity to come into direct contact with. But we know, more or less, who the oppressors are, and it doesn’t take much imagination to think of ways we could be more effectively opposing them – if we decided that were something we have some responsibility to be doing.

Image HT

At the website ThinkProgress, whose politics are exactly what you’d expect, Alyssa Rosenberg says the marriage of Beyoncé and Jay-Z makes “the case for marriage that conservatives can’t make”:

Rather than posing choices between these various elements of her life, or acting as if the math that leads up to having it all is impossibly complicated, Beyoncé is an argument that a great, mutually supportive marriage can be a context that makes all of these things easier to pull off.

And that’s what makes Jay-Z’s appearance on stage with Beyoncé at the Grammys so lovely. Mrs. Knowles-Carter doesn’t need her husband with her to dominate a performance space. But she chose their duet. And what we got was a performance that’s explicitly about what a good time they’re having together. Everyone else might get to look at her curves–a reminder that dressing up and showing off doesn’t have to end after marriage, either–but  Jay-Z’s the one who gets to look a little goofy checking her out in wonderment that she’s his, the one who actually gets to touch. She gets to own the stage by herself, first, and Jay-Z shows up when the song requires his presence, at which point Bey cedes the stage to him before taking it back. There’s time for them both to shine. And at the end, Jay-Z throws his arm around his wife and squeezes her, and her head inclines towards his shoulder: there’s room for mutual pride and tenderness  here, too.

This may not be the vision of marriage conservatives intended to try to promote. And it’s absolutely a more aspirational, exciting good than the idea that marriage will discipline wayward men or provide support for women who can’t manage economically on their own. But if conservatives want to sell Americans on marriage, maybe they have to talk more about the bliss half of wedded bliss, to think about the desire part of making marriage desirable. And maybe the entertainment industry that Douthat’s singled out as the enemy of  marriage has something to add to the case for marital happiness. If marriage is a product that conservatives desperately want to sell, the smartest thing they could do right now is to hire Beyoncé and Jay-Z as a product spokescouple.

In his daily email (subscribe!) Jim Geraghty zeros in on “This may not be the vision of marriage conservatives intended to try to promote” and demands to know:

Why not? Is there some conservative argument against “mutual pride and tenderness”? Quotes like this make me wonder if the writer knows any conservatives, or at least any married conservatives.

But I’m afraid Rosenberg is more or less right, at least for the moment. The problem is this part:

Everyone else might get to look at her curves–a reminder that dressing up and showing off doesn’t have to end after marriage, either–but  Jay-Z’s the one who gets to look a little goofy checking her out in wonderment that she’s his, the one who actually gets to touch.

That is the part “conservatives” cannot advocate, at least for the moment. This is because, historically, almost all forms of “conservatism” have included a broad commitment to civilized standards of sexual modesty. Many of them have risen even higher than “civilized” to something roughly approximating a Christian standard.

There are three things to note here. One is that Rosenberg’s progressive vision can accommodate all of the most basic structures of marriage. She refuses other restraints that are needed for humane sexuality, but at least she accepts the restraints that constitute marriage itself (that is, the formation of the household unit). There is great hope for a cultural outcome other than all-out war between advocates of marriage in its natural form and advocates of complete individual license. There is a lot of ground to build compromise upon.

The second thing is that, right now, the possibility of compromise is precluded because Rosenberg is convinced that the disagreements we really do have must necessarily drive us absolutely apart. She can’t see the common ground because for her, anyone who believes in the higher standard of behavior that “conservatives” and Christians have upheld (in their different ways) must be an enemy.

Third, the conservative Geraghty doesn’t see what about Rosenberg’s account would set her crosswise with “conservatives.” This may be a sign of a larger movement on the right away from civilized standards of sexuality on such matters as modesty and (you’ve already seen where this is going, no doubt) other issues like homosexuality. I don’t want to say it definitely is, but we should consider the possibility. As Christians increasingly flee political engagement and (concurrently) “conservatism” redefines its identity in a manner more conducive to political victory in the new cultural landscape, it may be that “conservatism” will stop placing a high priority on the broader scope of sexual mores. A pro forma gesture in the direction of these mores might survive such a change, but it wouldn’t matter.

There is no possibility that “conservatism” will cease to champion the family unit as essential to the future of our civilization, and there is much hope that an alliance with progressives can built that would re-establish the core structures of marriage and household as pillars of a shared culture. But this may come at the cost of the culture (left and right) permanently accepting the lowering of broader sexual mores.

Christians should help cultivate common ground on marriage, but they should also watch out that they don’t become captive to “conservatism,” which may not be able to embrace such a compromise without simultaneously moving in the wrong direction on broader sexual mores. I don’t know if it’s possible to simultaneously work to promote common ground on marriage and work to prevent “conservatives” from lowering their sexual standards. I hope it is. But either way, Christians need to be entrepreneurial about finding other avenues besides politics to infuse the highest kinds of sexual life into the culture.

Not depicted: Satanism

Jonah Goldberg writes today about a case that was already on my radar. Oklahoma has a monument to the Ten Commandments near its statehouse, and a Satanist group has petitioned the state to add a statue of Baphomet:

“The statue will serve as a beacon calling for compassion and empathy among all living creatures,” Lucien Greaves, a spokesman for the Satanic Temple, said in a prepared statement.

And unlike the Ten Commandments, Baphomet would serve a public function:

“The statue will also have a functional purpose as a chair where people of all ages may sit on the lap of Satan for inspiration and contemplation.”

The press release includes an artist’s rendering in which smiling children sit on Satan’s lap and gaze up at his grim, more or less blank-faced visage.

This is clearly a stunt, intended to expose the hypocrisy of current constitutional law on public displays of religion. In this, it succeeds brilliantly. The current state of the law really is ridiculous; the only way to conclude that it is not rampantly hypocritical would be to argue that it is now so incoherent and irrational that it really could not rise to the level of something as coherent as hypocrisy. Say what you want about total chaos, it’s not hypocritical.

What we need is a policy that simultaneously recognizes three truths:

1) Religion is one of the fundamental components of human life, and in particular it is one that cannot be walled off into a separate compartment. The structures of civilization (political, economic, familial, etc.) cannot be legitimate if they are not moral, and they cannot be moral without being intimately tied to religion.

2) Unity in religion is neither expected nor necessary for society. We can agree on the basic moral premises of society, which are necessary for a shared life and shared institutions, without agreeing about everything metaphysical.

3) Nonetheless, not everything that is called a “religion” is equally consistent with the moral agreement we need to share a life, a civilization and its institutions.

It is the third point that is the most uncomfortable for us now, but we cannot escape it, as the Satanists are reminding us in Oklahoma. (Actually the Satanist group is headquartered in New York, and I wonder if that will not have some bearing on the outcome of the case.)

Satanism is nothing if it is not a rejection of the moral assumptions that underlie the shared institutions of our society. Believe in one God or twenty gods or a vast divine force, but you can’t affirm the foundations of American civilization if you think the purpose of life is to please yourself.

The fact that the Satanists dare to invoke “compassion” shows how the freedom to make up the meaning of words for yourself is right at the heart of this problem. Our institutions urgently need to recover the moral courage to have a point of view about what concepts like compassion do and don’t mean.

Eisenhower said in 1952 that “our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” That does point to how this failure to find a way of distinguishing religions without giving up on religious freedom has been an unsolved problem in American history. On the other hand, read the full statement and you’ll see that the problem was never as bad as all that:

And this is how [the Founding Fathers in 1776] explained those: ‘we hold that all men are endowed by their Creator…’ not by the accident of their birth, not by the color of their skins or by anything else, but ‘all men are endowed by their Creator.’ In other words, our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply-felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion with ‘all men are created equal.’

Read that last sentence again: It must be a religion with “all men are created equal.”

This does not mean we must conclude, as Locke did, that those who deny the moral foundations of a free and virtuous society have no right to advocate their view. However, at the very least, religions and viewpoints that are at war with the moral foundations of our culture should not enjoy equal rights to public recognition.

We cannot make the public square neutral by stripping it of all religious symbols; neither can we make it neutral by welcoming them all indiscriminately. We cannot make the public square neutral at all. What we can do is make it welcoming of all who affirm our moral foundations.

My father is Senior Pastor of a church located in the Holy Land. No, not Jerusalem…Green Bay, Wisconsin. When I was growing up in Green Bay, I grew accustomed to hearing my former home town described in Biblical terms, taking it all as good, tongue-in cheek fun. My father has often said that the largest church in Green Bay, Wisconsin is Lambeau Field, where the NFL Packers play, and that each Sunday 70,000 faithful followers gather to worship their gods. Sadly, there is quite a bit of truth to that notion that goes beyond sarcastic humor. Many years ago when I attended a pre-season Packer game, the music to “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” played as Brett Favre ran onto the field. I give the benefit of the doubt to the public announcer that he simply thought it was nice music and did not recognize it as a reverent hymn, but the truth is that many in Wisconsin have an exaggerated view of the Packers as the demigods of society who can do no wrong (as long as they beat Da Bears). In many ways, the Packers have the highest pull on Wisconsinite hearts as people skip church for Packers games or to tailgate at Packer games beforehand. Even among dedicated church goers there is often an obvious checking of watches to make sure that the service ends before kickoff.

But Wisconsinites are apparently not the only ones. Just this past Sunday, a pastor in California actually cut his service short so that he could watch the game. You can see the entire service (less than 1 minute) here. This website posted the video because they found it funny. I simply find it sad. Even sadder are the voices of the parishioners in the background who find the situation funny and a great blessing that they too can see kickoff. Is it any wonder why our society thinks of Christians as a joke? We have given the impression that our priorities on a Sunday are the same as everyone else: football comes first.

I’ll be the first to admit that I love football and I love to watch the Packers play. I am not an extreme Sabbattarian; but Sunday is not the Packer’s Day, it’s the LORD’s Day. The commandment clearly states to “honor the Sabbath Day.” So what are we saying to our culture, to our children, when football takes priority over the Worship of God? What does God think of our worship when it must end in time for kickoff? And it’s not simply football. We rush out of church for lunch, to beat other church’s to get a good table at the local restaurant or to get in line at the buffet, to hurry home to get a nap or to get to something else we have planned. Are we truly honoring the Sabbath Day when our priorities shift away from worshipping God? Are we truly communicating the greatness of the God we serve when we shorten the worship of Almighty God to watched overpaid men throw around the pigskin? Our actions speak louder than our words.