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Ask Theophilus: Faithfulness

STUCK IN THE STICKS

Dear Professor Theophilus:

I am a small town university student who desperately needs a strong church family. I have been going to a church here for four years and have not found anything biblically wrong with it. However, I find myself extremely dissatisfied. After four years of attending, I have not been able to develop any strong relationships with anybody there. There is nobody there with whom I feel like I can share my struggles. From an outsider's point of view, the church has many cliques which are extremely hard, if not impossible to break into. Is this a common issue in the modern church, or is it just me not trying hard enough to establish relationships in the church? It is very depressing to go to church every Sunday and put on the happy face that people want to see. I don't want to run every time there is trouble, but isn't church somewhat about fellowship, family and relationships? I'd like to switch churches, but I'm pretty sure that isn't the answer either. Thanks for your help.

Reply

I get it. Really. Post-Everything State University, where I teach, is in a fast-growing city with a population of one million plus, but for part of each year my wife and I live in a town in the Appalachian mountains with a population of 2,500. I don't have roots there, but Mrs. Theo does. Just for that reason, the people there are warm and friendly to me. Without her, I'd be a foreigner. I call her my green card.

Still, I think you're missing several pieces of the picture. Small town folk are certainly more suspicious of outsiders, but in another way cities are much more cliquish. In a small town, everyone knows everyone. You can't help coming in contact with people of every kind. In a city you see more kinds of people, but you get to pick and choose. So you really come in contact only with people like yourself.

Another piece you're missing is that not all of your expectations for the Church come from Christianity as such. Here's the Christian part: In every place and every generation, the Church should be a community in which people encourage each other to live the life of faith. But there are lots of different ways to have a supportive community. Bavarians won't express community quite like Italians. Generation Y won't do it quite like Generation X. Men in my father's generation had their own ways of encouraging each other, but they would have been scared to death if someone had said "May I share my struggles with you?" To them that wouldn't have sounded like the language of the household of faith. It would have sounded like the language of therapy.

If you really can't break into your congregation, then maybe you should switch. Before leaping to that conclusion, though, try these ideas.

First, talk with your pastor. Explain to him that you understand that people see a lot of college students pass through. The people in the congregation know you aren't among them to lay foundations. From their point of view you're here today, gone tomorrow, like a traveling salesman. Explain that even so, you and a lot of other college students would welcome a closer connection with the congregation during your four years in town. Mind you, don't just drop another responsibility in his lap. Instead, ask him whether he would be willing to work with you to get something along these lines started. Several churches I know encourage families to sponsor college students — to include them in some of their activities and develop relationships with them.

Second — and this is more important — learn to understand how the congregation itself understands community. In some congregations, it begins in social contact. People introduce themselves at the front door or in the fellowship hall, and it takes off from there. Maybe that's what you're looking for. But to mention just one other way it happens, in other congregations community begins in the ministries. People get together to teach the children, feed the hungry, or decorate the altar, and it takes off from there. It's much less me-centered. That's really better.

Peace be with you,
PROFESSOR THEOPHILUS

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO YOUTUBE

Dear Professor Theophilus:

I'm a freshman at a Christian university. I was raised in a Christian family, but I've always been somewhat skeptical and questioned my faith. When I was 15, I finally got baptized and pretty much accepted Jesus and His existence. However, just a few days ago, my faith went back down possibly further than it was before I became a Christian. It happened when I watched this movie on YouTube. The whole point of the first 30 minutes of it is that the Bible is all plagiarized from other religions. I also researched that theory on the Internet, and there were a lot of things that said that. There was a play that was written around 500 B.C. that was almost identical with the story of Jesus. Part of me wants to ignore it and continue to be a Christian, but that theory just makes so much sense, and there's so much evidence that supports it. Please watch the movie, do the research, and tell me what you think about it.

Reply

If this is your first exposure to anti-Christian propaganda, you must have led a sheltered childhood. At least once a year, usually before Christmas or Easter, someone pulls a new scam. Someone supposedly discovers the tomb of Jesus. Or that there was no Jesus. Or a new "gospel." Or the "real" story of how Christianity came to be. Most of the new scams are old scams with new packaging, and so is the one that you mention. It last circulated in the 1920s and 30s, but it was old even then.

The argument about Christianity "stealing" from pre-Christian religions contains several logical errors. One is the fallacy of similarity: "If Y resembles X, then Y was caused by X." A variation is the chronological fallacy: "If Y came before X, then Y was caused by X." But why should we be surprised that some Christian rites, Christian symbols, and elements of the Christian story are found in non-Christian or even pre-Christian religions?

Take the rite of baptism. All humans bathe to wash off dirt. Should we be shocked that a purification ritual involving water should have occurred to many others besides Christians? It would be more surprising if it hadn't. Yet if you look closely at what Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and the Greek mystery religions have actually believed about liberation from sin, you won't find the same idea.

Take the symbol of the cross. A line across another line is an easy mark to make. Should we be scandalized that the cross has been used as a symbol by many others besides Christians? It would be more surprising if it wasn't. But the Norse used it to represent the sun god, the Indians used it to represent the medicine wheel, and the Egyptians used it to represent eternal life. Only the Christians used it as a reminder of the atoning death of Jesus Christ on a Roman device used to torture criminals to death.

Or take the story of death and rebirth. All sorts of things in human experience suggest this idea, especially the crop cycle. Seeds are planted, they sprout and grow, but then they are harvested and ripped apart. The seeds lie still in the cold ground, but in spring they sprout again. Should we be shaken to learn that many religions should have stories of dying and rising gods? It would be more surprising if they didn't. The funny thing is that the more one studies these stories, the more one is struck, not by their similarities, but by their differences. In fertility religions they simply are about the crop cycle. In other religions they are connected with ideas about the underworld. The most striking difference is that the dying god in all those other religions lived "once upon a time." Only Jesus lived in actual historical time, in a verifiable time and place, surrounded by witnesses. As C.S. Lewis put it, for once it really happened. Surely one of the things that helped the progress of the gospel was that they had imagined something like this before. Not just like it, mind you. Christ was not a crop god. He was not a god of death. He was the One of whom the prophet Isaiah had spoken centuries before: "Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed."¹

Don't get me wrong. In some cases Christianity has borrowed from non-Christian sources, but the borrowing was a good thing, not a bad one. There is a quotation from pagan philosophy in the opening of the gospel of John,² and there are quotations from pagan poets in the Acts of the Apostles.³ If a pagan said something true, why not? Wasn't that too by the grace of God? Everyone knew where these quotations were from; it was no secret. Or consider another kind of borrowing. If you were a missionary who found himself among converts who in their old pagan days had celebrated winter solstice with evergreen trees, would it make better sense to tell them, "Now that you are Christians, you must give up that beloved custom"? Or to tell them "Now that you are Christians, you may keep your Yule trees if you wish, but use them with a different meaning"? I think the latter. After all, our goal in spreading the gospel shouldn't be to destroy pre-Christian culture, but to redeem it.

A final word. Don't be so gullible about things that you see on YouTube. It's a comic book medium. I know "a lot of things say that." There are a lot of flying saucer cults too.

Peace be with you,
PROFESSOR THEOPHILUS

THE RIGHT TO BE AT WAR WITH MYSELF

Dear Professor Theophilus:

I read something in Office Hours about homosexuality. Your article was nice and thought provoking. It enlightened me to share God's provision and law not only from the Bible, but even from Creation.

But do you then reject the human right every person has within himself to live with his own ability? If a person comes and tells you that he is not at all interested in the other sex, thinks only about the same sex, and has been this way from childhood, how would you respond to him?

Reply

I don't know which Office Hours column you read, but the topic comes up often. If I wrote about it as often as readers ask me about it, I'd write about nothing else. It's not easy to find something about the subject that I haven't said before.⁴

But I'll try. You speak of a "human right." Presumably that means a right someone has just because he is human. But a human — whatever the state of his desires — is a being who is made in the image of God. And what does the creation story tell us about that image? According to Genesis 1:27, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."⁵ Did you notice the language? Man, the image, is male and female together. We aren't the image of God apart from each other, but in partnership with each other. Alone we are incomplete, unbalanced, fragmentary.

That doesn't mean that everyone has to have sexual intercourse; not everyone is called to marriage. But surely it tells us that sex which rejects the other sex, the other side of the image of God, is profoundly disordered. For our sexual desires to be bent backwards on themselves is a misfortune. By all means we should have friendships with the same sex, but we shouldn't imagine that sexualizing them makes them better.

"From childhood," you write. I'm suspicious of stories in which people say "I've been this way since birth." We project into our childhoods all sorts of things that aren't there, and the best research on the subject suggests that a predisposition to same-sex desires has a lot more to do with something missing from the relationship with the parent of the same sex than it has to do something missing from the genes. But suppose it were about the genes. Would that make a difference? Would it be kind to tell a person with an inheritable predisposition to drunkenness, "Go ahead and get drunk"? I think that would be cruel. With all compassion, we should tell friends who suffer from alcoholic compulsions, "I understand that you may have to work harder to resist your desires than other people would, but that is what you need to do. Drunkenness destroys us. We were made for something higher."

C O F F E E  S H O P

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How do you think we can best defend the Bible's validity?

Join the discussion!

You know, this isn't just a homosexual problem. Some heterosexuals say they can't help hooking up, cheating on their wives, or having sex with kids. Maybe its true that they can't help wanting to. If our actual inclinations are at war with our natural inclinations, if our hearts are riddled with desires that oppose their deepest longings, if we demand to have happiness on terms that make happiness impossible — then there is one thing that we need. Here's a clue: It isn't getting our way.

Peace be with you,
PROFESSOR THEOPHILUS

If you have a question you'd like Professor Theophilus to consider for this column, please send it to asktheo@trueu.org. Please note, all questions selected for "Ask Theophilus" may be edited for clarity and privacy, and become the property of Focus on the Family.