Wayne Schuller’s Blog

It’s not a movie, but it asks questions about masculinity and is hilarious:

IT Crowd – Series 3 – Episode 2 – “Are We Not Men?”

This man was a prophet – this speech to Harvard graduates in 1978 is a powerful condemnation of Western pride in the middle of the cold war. His commentary on materialistic self-destruction seems even more apt 30 years later. His Christian faith points the way out of the burden of humanistic modernism.

Various quotes:

Truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.

In the process [of achieving Western prosperity], however, one psychological detail has been overlooked: the constant desire to have still mroe things and a still better life and the struggle to obtain them imprints many Western faces with worry and even depression, though it is customary to conceal such feelings.

Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes, based, I would say, on the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man’s noblest impulses.

The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people’s right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

On journalism: How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one’s nation’s defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: “everyone is entitled to know everything.” But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.

But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening.

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.

However, in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God’s creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century’s moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century.

We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.

• OIC – MUSLIM STATES CONSIDER INDEPENDENT HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION
• UZBEKISTAN – PERSECUTED CHRISTIANS EXPERIENCE A FRESH WAVE OF SEARCHES AND ARRESTS
• EGYPT – FIRST CONVERSION CERTIFICATE ISSUED TO A CHRISTIAN CONVERT
• TAJIKISTAN – NEW RELIGION LAW THREATENS FURTHER PERSECUTION
• IRAN – TWO CHRISTIAN WOMEN ARRESTED FOR FOLLOWING THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS
• NIGERIA- EASTER PROCESSION SPARKS VIOLENCE BY MUSLIM ONLOOKERS
• SRI LANKA – CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION CONTINUES AS CIVIL WAR RAGES IN SRI LANKA
• PAKISTAN – SUSPECTS CLEARED OF RAPE OF CHRISTIAN GIRL

Some observations on Dawkins’ shiftiness…

The way he chose to defend himself, through insults and sneers which tried to cover his tracks as he attempted to retreat from what he had said, furthermore merely emphasised his notable reluctance to address the many arguments of substance against his pseudo-scientific attack on religion which were made by John Lennox on the grounds of scientific reason and accuracy – arguments which Dawkins most tellingly chose to ignore altogether. Instead, he went for what he thought were the soft targets — a credulous Irish Christian and a ‘dreadful woman’ journalist – and substituted smears and jeers for proper debate.

via The Spectator.

Gran Turino is one of the great ‘manhood’ movies of recent years.

It raises all the right questions – and points you to the cross of Jesus Christ.

All beautifully told.

This is an Australian document summarising evidence based research on health valuing of gender complementarity and unhealthy risks of non-biblical lifestyles.

I have physical copies if anyone wants one.

http://www.gendermatters.org.au

I’m really looking forward to this documentary of the book tour and debates between Hitchens and Wilson.

I loved the written debate they had in CT, now available in book form. I have a huge amount of respect and praise to God for Douglas Wilson, his thinking and ministry across a wide range of fields.

This looks like it will be a kind of neutral documentary (I hope) that you could watch with anyone and discuss the issues with.

Collision: Christopher Hitchens vs. Doug Wilson.

Context: Ridley Evangelistic Mission Team in Tasmania, during 2002. Doorknocking the local area with a survey about peoples beliefs and views.

U = us (myself and fellow Ridley College student). H = him (early retiree age man). This dialogue is obviously not verbatim, but a summary of the gist of the discussion. Whenever I say ‘etc etc’ I mean he talked for a long time on that topic.

U: Hi we’re from C Anglican Church, and we’re doing a survey in your local community…

H: Survey? Survey? What is your sample size? Do you know the formula for working out an ideal sample size? Do you know how unaccurate your survey is?

[Wow he jumped down my throat with this! Short exchange ensues. He was grumpy and adamant on bagging our survey, he wouldn’t listen to the fact we weren’t planning on generalising the results – so his formulae didn’t apply. I've studied university level statistics too.]

U: What do you think of Jesus?

H: Jesus, well we don’t really know a lot about him. As he spoke Aramaic and we have no Aramaic texts from him, so we have no accurate records.

U: Well actually the most common language in the Roman empire in the first century was Greek.

H: No it wasn’t. The Romans hated the Greeks. The Romans spoke Latin and the Jews spoke Aramaic.

U: Actually that is not quite true. The linga franca was Greek, even among Jews. This is evidenced by widespread use of the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament that Jesus used.

H: Anyway, the New Testament documents were corrupted over time. etc etc.

U: What evidence do you have of that?

H: Well all our texts are at least third century. Marginal notes became included in the main text and were taken as part of the original document… etc etc.

U: Well actually there are thousands of extant NT manuscripts with very close correlation much earlier than 3rd Century. They are available in libraries around the world, mostly Europe. The differences are mostly trivial, we have an accurate NT text. I have a copy of the Greek New Testament in my car, I could demonstrate the reliability for you, it has lists of the textually questionable verses. There are not many.

[He changes topic at this point. This happened many times in the conversation.]

H: The OT is even worse. The Jews were not very good at transmitting texts.

U: What evidence do you have of that? There is quite good evidence that the Jews took their texts very seriously. Consider the quality of the 1st C texts found at Qumran, they verified the quality of the OT texts we have been using since the 9^th Century.

H: Qumran is a big coverup. With all the politics we don’t know what they found there. Well church history is all about power struggles. How about Henry the 8^th? Etc etc.

U: So what do you think of Jesus teaching?

H: Oh I actually don’t mind his teaching, it’s quite good to love one another.

U: But Jesus actually said that was secondary. He said the most important thing was to love God with your heart, soul, strength and mind.

H: Well I think even Jesus got it wrong on that count. How can you believe in an omnipotent God? How could an omnipotent God use something as crappy as the church? Omnipotence is a joke.

U: I’m working hard to consider the claims of Christianity critically and looking objectively at the evidence. That’s what I am doing at Theological College. Are you really considering the evidence?

H: Well why don’t you speak to your lecturers and ask the really hard questions? I think you’ll find it doesn’t all fit together. Ask your lecturers the hard questions and don’t stick your head in the sand.

U: I will and I do. I’m not into sticking my head in the sand. Thanks for your time.

It is easy on recollection to repaint the discussion in my favour. In reality he wasn’t even close to being convinced on any topic. He held the upper hand in most of the conversation, he talked the most, he felt he was informed and I was a naïve gullible Christian. He was fairly patronising in that sense. I was trying to be respectful as I was interrupting his gardening, though I sensed he enjoyed the intellectual engagement of the conversation.

I didn’t actually get to the gospel with this man. The closest I got was talking about Jesus says the most important thing is to love God. Everything else was apologetics.

I felt that he was hiding behind a cloak of intellectualism. He had some half-truths that he used to dismiss the credibility of Christianity. Although he does need to hear the gospel, there are many intellectual obstacles in his way. Given more time and a less controntational situation, I would have enjoyed asking him more personal questions about his own involvement with Christianity and Christians, and how he came to form such anti-Christian attitudes.

This is a “what if?” post – I am not an economist nor the son of an economist:

What if the global financial crisis is the beginning of the end of Western consumerism?

All idolatries are self-destructive ultimately. We should not be surprised.

So are Western Christians ready with an alternative that we’ve been living all along? Or are we shuffling pews in our chapel on the McTitanic?

What new idolatries will fill the void? I expect the idolatry of greed to resurrect itself in new forms – most of them violent.

But what if God in his wisdom decides to answer our prayers for financial justice by bringing the first world societies down to third world levels?

No-one expected that when we started praying for the Millenium Development Goals – not even Bono and Rowan Williams combined will be able to save us.

What if?

Ridley graduate and vicar of Healesville, Tim Anderson, has put together a great piece for the Herald Sun:

I was so proud of my church members who returned to the wreckage of their burned houses bringing food for any wild birds or animals that might have survived the blaze.

We have a God who understands our pain from the inside.

The scandal of Christianity is this: that when God took on human form, he suffered agony and an unjustified and cruel death.

Whatever our pain we can bring it to God, confident that God knows exactly what we are going through.

Jesus already went through it and conquered it — that’s the Easter story.

Questions posed to heaven in Victorian Bushfires | Herald Sun.

The whole family and a bunch of people from church went to the prayer and protest rally for the murderous proposed abortion bill. I reckon about 4000+ people there. There were more than you can see just on these photos, but it was quite big.

There were lots of kids and babies and prams. Josiah and Jemima were asking lots of questions. We tried to be as clear as we could – we were there to protest the government allowing and encouraging thousands of babies to be killed in their mother’s tummies. .

More photos on my flickr page.

Theism.

In 2004 the atheist world was rocked by the news of one of the most important defections from its ranks in recent times. The world’s leading atheist, Antony Flew, announced that he was no longer an atheist, but a theist. This of course sent shock waves through the anti-theist camp, since they had long been claiming that rational and reasonable people only choose unbelief, whereas believers can only be regarded as stupid, gullible and deluded. It is pretty hard to describe Antony Flew in those terms. Indeed, given his credentials, this is an amazing book about an amazing intellectual about-face. For over 50 years Flew was the number one proponent of atheism. And as a world class scholar with over 30 books on philosophy in print, he was one of the twentieth century’s most imposing intellectual figures.

A review of There Is a God. By Antony Flew. » Bill Muehlenberg’s CultureWatch

Yes I’m a fan of the Greek New Testament and textual criticism (what pastor isn’t?), this was an exciting read…

Thus, Tirana was housing at least seventeen manuscripts unknown to western scholarship and as many as thirty-four! Since the dawn of the 21st century, an average of two or three Greek New Testament manuscripts is brought to light each year. A cache of 17 to 34 manuscripts is a remarkable find, regardless of the age and pedigree of the manuscripts.

Bible.org: Greek New Testament Manuscripts Discovered in Albania

Well spoken, Jim Wallace.

Lateline – 20/02/2008: Gay marriage debate – Tony Jones talks to Jim Wallace and Bob Brown

There is some important work being done over at the Gospel Coalition.

A particular work I recommend is the very good article by Graham Cole: “Do Christians Have a Worldview?”

There are many different topics and hobby horses bandied about under the heading of “the Christian worldview”. Graham shows how to do the “worldview thing” properly.

Professor Yu’s dedication in the field of neo-natal medicine and his services to religion in his capacity as an Anglican Deacon has earned him the title of Member of the Order of Australia, in this year’s Australia Day honours.

Congratulations Victor! Unfortunately this ABC article fails to discuss anything about his gospel ministry as an Anglican deacon. The praises of men mean nothing, but God is much glorified through his faith and witness in saving the lives of countless premature babies and in his own preaching of the gospel to inner urban Asian migrants.

Neo-natal specialist recognised in Australia day honours list – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Constantine Tischendorf was an “Indiana Jones” style searcher for treasures of ancient Biblical manuscripts. He was passionate about finding better copies of the Bible about making them available to the church – he devoted his life to traveling the world on this task. He discovered an Eastern Orthodox convent in the Middle East that were throwing out ancient biblical parchments to stoke their fires! He managed to convince them to let him have some of them, and he kept the location of the convent a secret. On another visit a monk showed him a secret in his closet: a full manuscript set of the Greek Old Testament, a full New Testament and other early Christian literature, all dating from around the 4th century! In his own words:

Full of joy [on seeing the manuscripts], which this time I had the self-command to conceal from the steward and the rest of the community, I asked, as if in a careless way, for permission to take the manuscript into my sleeping chamber to look over it more at leisure. There by myself I could give way to the transport of joy which I felt. I knew that I held in my hand the most precious Biblical treasure in existence–a document whose age and importance exceeded that of all the manuscripts which I had ever examined during twenty years’ study of the subject. I cannot now, I confess, recall all the emotions which I felt in that exciting moment with such a diamond in my possession.

(read the full exciting account)

Tischendorf had to negotiate carefully for the release and publication of this discovery. Actually he did a fair bit of dodgy deal making to secure the manuscripts. Since then the value of ancient manuscripts is well known and nearly all are carefully stored in museums and libraries around the world, with facsimile (photographed) copies publicly available for researchers. “Codex Sianiaticus” was sold by the athiestic communist government of Russia to the British government in 1933 for 100,000 pounds. In historical and archaeological terms this is an absolute bargain.

In 2005 they began an important digitization project of the codex. I did read somewhere that afterwards they are planning to redistribute parts of the codex to the various parties involved in it’s history: the British Library in London, St. Catherine’s Monastery of Sinai, Leipzig University Library, and the Russian National Library in St Petersburg. At the time it struck me as awfully politically correct, such a thing of beauty should be kept in one place. I hope it is not true.
This kind of manuscript discovery explains why the quality of Bible texts has increased over 2000 years of church history, not decreased, as many people naively claim.

November 21, 2007 Postscript:

I can’t find the article I read online a few years ago that suggested they were going to redistribute parts of the codex after the digitization project. So I’m not sure this is true (text above modified). It appears that the Sinai monastery found a room with other parts of the codex in 1975, which explains the pieces they currently own. Futhermore, according to the recent cover article in the Nov/Dec 2007 Biblical Archeology Review, the St Catherines claims the “burning of the parchments” story of Tischendorf is part of his deception in order to steal the codex! They even have a signed receipt from Tischendorf claiming that the codex was merely on loan. It sounds more like an Indiana Jones adventure all the time.