Paul Burkhart

Channeling my inner stereotypical-broken-hearted-teenage girl, I went to WaWa last night to pick up some Ben & Jerry’s (Stephen Colbert’s “Americone Dream”, in case you were wondering.  I’ve written before about the spiritual experiences both  B&J has brought me.). I had just gotten off work and was about to head home, pig out, and catch up on some TV. I pulled in, got some gas, and then pulled up to the side of the actual store to get my ice cream.

I saw the usual poor guy sitting on the pavement on the side of the building asking everyone that passed by for their spare change. The usual little battle happened inside my mind: Oh God, I’m going to get asked for money aren’t I? Okay, what walking path can I take that keeps me just far enough away from him that he doesn’t actually ask me. I’d rather say nothing than have to say no and feel bad later. Ah! What am I thinking! Stop it, Paul! Why are you so heartless? This is not the Gospel. Serve him.

So I got out of my car and I walked right by him. He didn’t even talk to me like I was expecting. I stopped myself and turned around: “Hey man, can I grab you something to eat?” “Sure. Thanks, man” “What do you want?” “Oh, just anything’ll be fine.” “No; whatever you want.” “Well, an Italian hoagie would be nice.” “How big?” “Classic” “What do you want on it?” “Everything.”

I went in excited. I got his hoagie and got him some water. I also got myself some water, a little wrap, and my ice cream. I went back out and sat down next to him: “Here ya go. What’s your name?” “My name’s Kenny, but everyone calls me Kenny G.” “Can you play an instrument?” “That’s the f–ed up thing about it. No, I can’t.” “Ha Ha. That’s awesome. So what’s your story?”

I pulled out my wrap and ate along side of him while he told me his story. Kenny went to school and got certified to be a home care nurse. One night, he “drank too much, got in a car”, and ended up going to jail for a couple of years. While he was in, Pennsylvania passed a law forbidding any certified nurses convicted of any felony from practicing (or something like that). So when Kenny got out, his certification was useless and he couldn’t find a job. He hasn’t been able to find steady work for the pat couple of years. He spends many nights on the street, although some nights he can stay at a friends house, but his friend is a hardcore drug addict and pretty much spends his days lying on the floor of his place on the verge of a drug overdose. While he was in prison, his wife divorced him and remarried. He said:

“Man, some people look back on their lives and they think ‘oh, if I only knew what I know now I would change this part of my life, or that part of my life.’ Lots of people think that they’ll go to school for something else, or they’ll not do a certain bad thing they did in the past. Me? Man, I just wish I was still married to that girl.“

I started to cry along with him as he told me all this. We then had an exchange I’ll never forget for the rest of my life:

“Man, Kenny, I’m so sorry. Life hits us so hard some times. I don’t even know what to say.”

“It’s all good, man. He never does any of this to hurt us; only to make us stronger.”

“Really? You really believe that? Like, way down deep, i know you think that, but do you really feel it?”

“I have to.”

“Because, Kenny, I’ll be honest with you: I believe in God, I love Jesus, and I believe He’s good, but sometimes there are just some things and some people’s stories I just can’t seem to fit into that.”

“I know. But He’s gotten me this far. I just wish i could rest.”

We continued sharing stories for another twenty minutes or so. He thanked me, stunned for the the dinner and conversation. “Man, nobody does this,” he said; I replied, “Bro, I don’t do this! Thank you for letting me. Really. My soul needs this. You’re serving me by just letting me break bread with you. What good is it being blessed with a new job if I can’t bless other people?“

“That’s sounds real nice,” he said.

“I wasn’t the first to say it.“

We ate together, shared together, and then ended the night by holding hands, praying, and crying together. My hope and prayer was that God would draw very near to Kenny and give him rest; that He wouldn’t just give Kenny peace through his internal experience with Him, but also through external things as well, showing Kenny that He loves Him and died for Him and cares about him and his good. And I thanked God that I wasn’t just feeding Kenny, but I was feeding and talking with Jesus himself through Kenny.

I don’t write this to exalt myself, because I am the least likely person in the world to have done this. I hope that anyone reading this right now may also pray for Kenny, his ex-wife, and his job situation. I also write this to give those other “least likely people in the world to do this” some hope and encouragement that there is grace enough for us all to share our lives with people in ways that can only be explained by an encounter with the Gospel.

Sorry things have been so slow this week on the blog.  I’m still trying to find my rhythm for writing while I have this new full-time job.

As of late last week, I am the newest writer for the blogs at Patrol Magazine. Patrol is a great site putting forward some of the best writing available on culture, the arts, and spirituality from the perspective of post-everything twenty-somethings. I am the Thursday contributor to “The Scanner” section of the site. The Scanner is the place for “daily culture, media, views, and blather.” Today, my first article went up. Here’s the link:

Poetry is the Only Thing That Can Save Atheists, Says Other Hitchens Brother

I’m really excited and grateful to have the opportunity to contribute to one of my favorite sites. Like I said, you can see my writing every Thursday there on Patrol Magazine. As I continue writing, you can see all of my articles here.

Does anyone have any ideas for future posts?

[Art above: "The Last Judgment" by Rogier van der Weyden.  Just read the article.  It'll make sense.]

[photo by az. from Flickr]

Last night, I went swing dancing.

And it was amazing.

I hadn’t gone ballroom dancing (of any kind) in a while. I used to do it a lot more. Ever since middle school, I’ve been a pretty good dancer (believe it or not). In high school for a summer, I was even part of a community dance troupe, so I’ve done most all of the throwing girls in the air over my shoulders, around my back, and catching them in mid-jump — you know, all that stuff. At one point I was picked out of my school choir as one of the few people that would do the “more advanced” swing dancing moves in front of the choir in a concert we gave. There I did all the pulling girls between the legs and wrapping them around the back and all that. In college, many Friday nights were spent at Dancespace, where we would get lessons in ballroom dancing and then dance the night away. It would usually be my group of a handful of us college kids and a bunch of senior citizens. It was awesome. Our particular crew usually consisted of me, several girls that were very inexperienced in dancing, and a few guys that were super shy and not very good who were talked into going against their wills.

This was a perfect storm for my arrogant and prideful heart. I started using this as a way to create a pedestal I could place myself upon and then receive the affirmation of one of my main idols–women. In that particular context, I could dance with girls and BS my way into looking like I not only knew what I was doing, but I was also far more of a man and leader than the other guys we went with. I was completely blind to this until one of my best friends (who is an amazing dancer) refused to dance with me on one of these evenings. Upon further interrogation, she told me: Paul, it’s just not fun dancing with you. You just seem like you want to show off! Dancing is such a prideful thing for you.

After that night, after being angry at her at first, I realized she was right. And so I stopped dancing. It wasn’t really on purpose. I just sort of quit accepting invitations to go. Since the Spring of 2007 I haven’t been ballroom dancing (except for a Contra dance last year, but that’s different). I haven’t gone because that feeling of arrogance in me has become such a hated thing for me. And I know when it’s coming. And I’ve just been scared of abusing anytime I went dancing. I didn’t know if I could trust myself.

But last night, as my two friends were talking me into going, I didn’t remember this little abstinence I have been conducting. I went ahead and went dancing and it wasn’t until about half-way through the night that I realized it. And something was different this time. I felt more free and joyful than I ever had dancing in the past. It was incredible. It was actually freeing to not have to pretend I was awesome at the dance. It was such a joy being humbled by girls I had never met trying to give me tips on dancing better. The whole night was just fun. I could actually get out there with pure motives not trying to impress anyone or allure anyone into my need for affirmation and security. It was one of the best nights I’ve had in a long time.

But not just because of the dancing. Going dancing last night was a spiritual experience for me. After walking my friends to their car, I walked back to mine by cutting through the campus of the University of Pennsylvania — one of the most gorgeous campuses in the country — and taking in the entire cool and misty night. And I worshipped. I prayed to God and knew He had been pleased to see His creation of the human form moving and joining with his creation of music. I felt that beauty had intermingled with Beauty that night, and through God’s growth and sanctification the past few years, I was actually able to partake in it — for the first time, perhaps. I was allowed to join with Beauty itself and feel the pleasure of a God who was dancing along with us, awash with the grace dripping from every note.

And the World to come was tasted. And it was good. Very, very good.

Sorry.  I know this is lame.  But, I was organizing some of the files on my computer and I ran across this proposal I wrote last year to the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture for an article.  It didn’t get accepted, so I never wrote the article.  I thought I’d go ahead and put it up though to see if you all have any thoughts on this topic, or if you’d like to see this article written anyway.  Feel free to leave some comments at the bottom of the post.

In the midst of the culture wars, deep philosophical shifts are challenging old ways of thinking. As a culture of post-modernity encroaches upon ground that was previously held by religion, the presuppositions of all faiths are being challenged by new, competing ideas. Religion charges post-modern culture with Relativism — a tenet that religion claims is unsustainable. This critique is not without validity: no philosophy can stand for long that admits its lack of foundation, and does not recognize a need for such epistemological certainty. The relativizing of post-modernity will surely collapse under a generation of those disillusioned by its inability to deliver that which it has no principle nor authority to deliver.

And yet, with equal vigor and voice, the culture of post-moderns counter-charges religion with an absolutizing which they feel has no principle nor authority to claim as certain. Regardless of post-modernity’s own merits, it has revealed, correctly I feel, lapses in the philosophical sustainability of the current presuppositions that religion, namely modern American Evangelicalism, are based upon. It has shown that the traditional defense of Evangelical authority to claim absolute truth is ultimately circular: that it itself is the absolute truth so it can declare that which is such. The truth of this statement notwithstanding, it is philosophically and practically untenable in a post-post-modern world. A new principle by which to understand religion’s place in a post-modern culture must be realized.

It is then my contention that a proper synthesis of Absolutism and Relativism must take place in the form of a principle of Contextualization. Surely this is how the Christian church, before Evangelicalism, functioned in its own right. How else could the church’s treatment of slavery, for example, shift from the apostle Paul to William Wilberforce, and yet theological orthodoxy remain the same all the while? How does the Christian faith evolve, playing off of the culture it finds itself in, while never changing the foundation upon which it stands? This paper will explore these questions and attempt to develop a principle where both faith and pragmatism may meet, and in the process, perhaps help bridge the battle lines of the culture wars forged in the name of truth.

UPDATE: I just realized that perhaps, in many ways, I may have already written this article without even knowing it.    The article “A Theology of Ethics, Truth, & Contemporary Applications” that I wrote for Reform & Revive magazine, in fact, may very well answer many of the questions I raised in this proposal.  If this piqued your interest, head on over there, read the article and see if it addresses things satisfactorily.

I help lead a home group for the South Philly Liberti campus. In our home groups we usually further discuss the sermon from Sunday and try and see what bearing it might have on our everyday life. As most everyone knows, I have started my new job now and had to work last night so I wasn’t able to attend the home group. My co-leader and I tried GChatting to help prepare, but we ran out of time, so I shot him this very last minute email (that he wasn’t really able to read through) summarizing all my thoughts.

The email is mainly trying to place this past week’s message in the broader context of our current series “Lent For Everyone“. The first week, we looked at Jesus’ temptations in the desert to show us how we are meant to live life here and now in the “desert” of history — after our freedom from slavery but before the Promised Land (Mp3). The second week of Lent Jared preached on how the God of Christianity  is unlike any other god we make, because of his Covenantal character, and how He does not demand that we bound ourselves to Him, but rather He commits Himself to us (Mp3). This past week we heard God in Isaiah 55:1-9 invite us toward the gift of repentance, and in that find life (Mp3). In our home group, we’ve been talking about these ideas and how our sins reveal the true nature of our hearts. Now with that background, here’s the email:

In light with what we’ve been talking about in our home group, if sin is the betrayal and revelation of a wrong heart-belief about God, it also means that sin happens when we are attributing that correct belief to something else that’s not God. This is because we are by nature worshippers. We will worship something as good, sovereign, loving, affirming, strong, and secure. If it’s not God (as betrayed by our sins), then it will be something else.

For example: I get super angry at traffic. Something in me is not believing that God is sovereign even over that time. Instead, I am believing that I am the one that is sovereign and it is MY sovereignty that is being frustrated in that moment. Every other car around me is, in effect, “sinning” against my “divine self” so I get angry and prepare to pour out my “just wrath” on them in my heart. The belief: God is not sovereign. I am (or at least deserve to be).

These things that we put that kind of trust in are called idols.

Where are these idols? The desert; here in this time between past and future. How do we fight them? By trusting that we are who Christ has purchased us to be. How do we know we can trust this? His covenantal nature. He has bound himself to us in a shocking way so that we might know who He is so we can trust who we are so as not to listen to the whispers of the idols all around us. And these idols, at all times, are whispering their own invitations to spend resources we do not have to seek life where there is none to find.

Here in this text (Isaiah 55:1-9) we find not only a God who invites us, but a God who doggedly pursues and has given us every resource to hear Him, know Him, and come to Him. We see that the response He demands of us is simple and consistent: hear and come. All through the chapter are variations of those two themes. In order to come after hearing we must trust what we have heard. This is what my old pastor calls “intelligent repentance”.  Repentance is not just “oh that’s bad, I need to stop.” It’s doing the deep heart work of figuring out what these idols are whispering to us–what are the nature of their invitations; and what’s more, why we actually end up responding to them. Repentance is inclining our ear to what God has said about Himself, His Son, His people, and His world and bringing ourselves, by faith, in line with who we truly are. Trusting He is Who He says He is, trusting we are who He says we are.

Read the entire chapter 55 of Isaiah. After the nine verses of our text this week are some of the most beautiful promises in Scripture: God’s word is faithful. It is effectual. It has a purpose. It accomplishes that purpose. It brings joy. It brings worship. It causes fruit to be borne and a name for God to be made in us. And lastly, it is an everlasting sign that God speaks to us as His people, and His people will not be cut off. And so we can trust. We can rest. We can run. We can incline our ear and come to our Father freely and purely. Not because of what we’ve done or realized, but because of who He is.

So let’s learn to recognize those seductive whispers of the idols that steal our joy from God. Learn the whispers and forsake those things–even good things–that rob our deepest longings for God. Let’s learn these whispers well not just for ourselves, but so that we can help others know them as well. It is part of our privilege as Christians to expose how our brothers and sisters are not trusting some part of who God is and help them see the idols that they are trusting. It’s messy. It hurts. But it leads to freedom and rest. So, “let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience” (Hebrews 4:11)

In other words, let us repent.

Have a good week, Home Group.  I love you and am praying for you all.

The other day I posted an article on how Roman Catholics look at Scripture. When I originally wrote it, it was far too long to post online in its entirety. Therefore, I cut out some chunks, that I’d like to post now. They are mainly on how I believe the current landscape is in typical Evangelicalism in America. I know I’m using broad strokes to talk about these things, but I assure you, this mindset is still very strong, especially in the South. Here it is:

Oh, the Bible. It’s the lifeblood of the Church. It’s our backbone. Why? Well, the logic goes like this: there’s a God who’s so far beyond our understanding that we can know nothing of Him unless He reveals it to us. That’s what Christian believe the Bible is–the revelation of God. This may sound fairly simple–and it is, in one sense–but in some areas, this truth of Scripture sometimes brings more confusion and disagreement than clarity and insight. Because, let’s face it, it’s difficult to grasp that the God that is SOOOO beyond our understanding revealed himself through–of all mediums–a book? And what’s more: this book? It’s tough to read many (most?) parts of the Bible and think “this is the revelation of GOD.”

I think this is true for a few reasons. I think our contemporary brains, conditioned by Post-Enlightenment forces, just function in a way that is not most beneficial to us for reading the Bible. We approach this book with a systematic-scientific mindset thinking that the revelation of God must be in a very clear point-by-point way only to open it and find… a story? The Bible is not very immediately satisfying to the Post-Enlightenment modernist. Another reason is that, in this scientific “theory of everything” kind of world, we don’t allow much room for mystery. Every question of the Bible needs to have an answer. Every perspective on a particular doctrine must be catalogued and understood. Terms like Inspiration, Revelation, Incarnation, and the like must evoke clear and concise images and definitions in our heads; not the ambiguous i-sort-of-get-it-and-can-maybe-explain-it-to-a-child-but-it-still-messes-with-me-if-i-really-think-about-it sort of way that most all of us experience (if you don’t, something’s wrong).

One last reason I’ll mention here for our misunderstanding of how God reveals Himself in Scripture: the Evangelical Church. In its response to the Enlightenment, Evangelicalism has adopted those ground rules and assumptions that undergird modernism, namely, that Truth must be something that has a one-to-one correlation to things in created reality, therefore making science and history the only vehicles for this Truth. Christians historically, on the other hand, have believed that Truth is anything with a correlation to Ultimate reality–God Himself–thus making so many things a vehicle for truth: poetry, children’s stories, myths, fiction, art, and sacrament. But, most of the Church still has that former assumption when approaching Scripture, so this creates some interesting conflicts with the rest of the world when talking about things like:

Inerrancy.

This is a little word that has caused so many problems in the Protestant Evangelical Church. It means, at its simplest level, that the Bible contains no “errors”. What does that mean? Most of the modern Western American Church seems to think it means that the Bible is first and foremost a history and science textbook–that for it to be “True” it must have that precise correlation to created reality I talked about earlier. And I get this sentiment, I do. I was raised with it and I understand how it’s seen to be the most faithful approach to Scripture. And you know what? If someone is going to err, I’d rather they err on putting the Bible on too high of a pedestal, rather than too low of one, even if I think it is ultimately misguided and potentially harmful to life of the Church.

This has built an ethos in the Evangelical Protestant Church that keeps causing problems for the American Church. A professor was kicked out of my seminary a couple of years ago for saying Genesis 1 was in the literary form of a “myth”. There are “Creation” museums all over the place. In Texas, they are changing science textbooks. God knows how many people think Obama’s “the Antichrist”. Protestants are continually growing increasingly polarized from the rest of the world, becoming less and less “in it” because they feel like their assumptions and conclusions about the Bible are being challenged from every side. They are becoming more irrelevant to the current discussion on nearly every front because of these assumptions.

Roman Catholics can help us. They show us that the Bible’s fundamental purpose is to give us all that is necessary for our salvation. It is ultimately a Religious book. It is the testimony of witness of all that God has done in History to bring salvation to the world. The Bible itself does not save. It is not divine. It contains the witness of the acts and person of the One that does save, and it is through hearing, from the Bible, of the nature and character of this One and his Deed (the Cross) that we are thereby saved. The Bible, therefore “speaks to man in a human way.” This means that God employed the full range of literary styles and genres to convey this to us, because we are fundamentally people of story–or selfhood is primarily based upon narrative before anything else.

Therefore let’s look at the Bible accurately as the trustworthy book it is, for that which it was sent for.

Oh, the Bible. It’s the lifeblood of the Church. It’s our backbone. But there’s so much we don’t get, and the culture both within and without the Protestant Church hasn’t helped. In its response to the Enlightenment, Evangelicals adopted the ground rules and assumptions that undergird modernism, namely, that Truth must be something that has a one-to-one correlation to things in created reality (as opposed to Ultimate Reality–God Himself), therefore making science and history the only vehicles for this Truth. This has caused so many problems with the rest of the world when talking about a little doctrine: Inerrancy which means, at its simplest level, that the Bible contains no “errors”. What does that mean?

Catholics can help us answer this. I fear that Evangelicalism is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the current discussion on nearly every front because of these improper assumptions about Scripture.   Catholics, though, were having these discussions in the Middle Ages! They have largely already dealt with the things that we Protestant are only now encountering issues with. This gave them a foundation that let them maintain intellectual and biblical credibility in light of the Enlightenment and now modernism. Here’s what they say about Scripture in the Catholic Catechism:

In order to reveal himself to men, in the condescension of his goodness God speaks to them in human words: “Indeed the words of God, expressed in the words of men, are in every way like human language, just as the Word of the eternal Father, when he took on himself the flesh of human weakness, became like men.”

And on the idea of Inspiration and Inerrancy, the Catechism says this (emphasis mine):

“To compose the sacred books, God chose certain men who, all the while he employed them in this task, made full use of their own faculties and powers so that, though he acted in them and by them, it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more.”

“[We] acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.”

In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm, and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their words.

In order to discover the sacred authors’ intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current. “For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression.”

This has given the Catholic Church the freedom to fully embrace the findings of science, psychology, and other fields that Protestants have notoriously removed themselves from. Far too often American Evangelicalism, on the other hand, is far more satisfied with keeping its distance by staying in its safe suburbs, participating in single-party political radicalization, throwing money at the people that are actually “called” to do “that kind of work”, and insisting that people should just “have the freedom to fail and then pull themselves back up” (thank heavens God didn’t treat us that way!).

This also gives them a fuller idea of how God is made manifest in the mundane, leading them to be able to manifest God through the mundanity of their own lives in service of others: loving the poor, caring for the sick, and helping orphans. If your view of the Bible is as an object far from God in which he just deposited knowledge, then that’s how you will engage the world–as a far object that just lobs spiritual “truths” at people. But, if you believe that God actually came, inhabited, and incarnated Himself into the messiness of this world in both Word and Deed such that He might communicate Himself to people and bring redemption, then, perhaps, you might find the freedom, joy, and satisfaction that comes from pouring your life out in love for others.

Catholics can help us. We would do well to listen. They have been modeling it to us for hundreds of years. We can debate their various interpretations of texts and doctrines, of which I disagree with many, but I don’t think it would benefit us to ignore their basic views toward Scripture, in fact, doing that has already hurt us greatly. I’ll leave with this last quote from the Catechism that summarizes all of this so beautifully:

Still, the Christian faith is not a “religion of the book.” Christianity is the religion of the “Word” of God, a word which is “not a written and mute word, but the Word is incarnate and living”. If the Scriptures are not to remain a dead letter, Christ, the eternal Word of the living God, must, through the Holy Spirit, “open [our] minds to understand the Scriptures.”

Holy Spirit, open our minds to view Your Word rightly.

[This post is part of my on-going series "Catholics Aren’t Crazy"]

[journal entry dated 2/28/10]

Father? Daddy?

I’m so f—-ed up. That’s just the best phrase for it. It’s Lent. It’s only a week in and I’ve already broken my fast several times. Why? Why can’t I just…stop?

(Okay, I get it.)

The point of giving something up for Lent is not to just “give something up”. At the heart-level it’s supposed to be a sign of devotion to You. That’s what it is at heart. And you know our hearts, Daddy. You know they’re weak. You know they’re willing. I’m willing Father, I’m just so f—-ing weak…

Ha!

I sound like “high-school Paul” all over again with those old Christian flavors of angst and “emo-ness”. I suppose there’s a place for him somewhere in my walk with You. But what is it? I’m not quite sure. But I don’t think he’s supposed to be here right now.

I’m secure. I’m loved. I’m Yours. I’m pleasing to You. I’m approved.

Ah, that knowledge escapes me so easily! I’m able to hold it in my mind and believe it in my heart for only a few blissful moments before it escapes me in the fog of doubt and insecurity selling itself as “realism”.

I’m secure. I’m loved. I’m pleasing to You. I’m Yours. I’m secure. I’m approved. I’m pleasing to You. I’m Yours.

Oh Lord, have mercy. Christ have mercy. Oh God, make haste to help me. Oh Lord make speed to save me. Oh God make haste to help me. Oh Lord make speed to save me.

Teach me Your Beauty. No–join me to Your Beauty. Let me know it. Let me know you, Beautiful One.

I’m loved by Beauty. I’m secure in Beauty. I rest in Beauty. I’m loved by Beauty. I’m approved by Beauty. I’m pleasing to Beauty.

I belong to Beauty.

Many of the long-time readers of this blog have been able to follow the drama that was my post-seminary job situation (I had a job, then I didn’t, then I sort of did). But, as most of my Facebook friends now know, as of Wednesday I finally was able to move into the full-time spot at my work that I was originally hired for about 9 months ago. Hindrances both internal to the company and external led to me only having the part-time evening weekend position at the company. Until now. Now I am officially a Psychiatric Rehabilitation Counselor.

The position is at this amazing company called Project Transition. It is a community-based recovery program for people with moderate to severe mental health and substance abuse issues.

The program itself takes place in an apartment complex. When a client gets admitted, they are placed in an apartment with two other members of the program. I am assigned about 5 or 6 of these “members” and I basically get involved in every part of their life, trying to help them in their recovery towards being reintegrated into society. We have a team of psychologists, psychiatrists, wellness specialists, and addictions counselors that they meet with regularly. They have groups they attend each week. I am the one that coordinates all of this for them, establishing treatment plans, seeing their implementation, and having weekly counseling sessions with each of my members. I am the point person for their doctors, parole officers, investigators, case managers, lawyers, insurance reps, and the like. I also get to lead one of those groups they have to attend. The group I’ve been assigned to lead is the weekly Men’s Group. Exciting, to say the least.

I firmly believe that everyone is broken; we all just where I brokenness differently. And in this job I get to have the privilege as one of those broken people to dive deeply into the lives of hurting to people to try and bring hope, healing, and some sort redemption to them. I couldn’t ask for more.

So, I just wanted to give this little update. I got the “You’re hired!” call at 8:37 on Wednesday morning. They then asked when I could start. I was in there that same day at 10am. That may help explain my drop in blogging. I still have big ideas and articles on the works for this blog, and have every intention of still blogging.

Please pray for me. I’ve already been helping in the admission of the first member of my case-load and I can already sense my desensitization to her story. I don’t want to be that guy. Please pray that I would be strong and effective in this position and that I wouldn’t limit myself in how far I would go in seeking wholeness for the people in my care. Pray that the necessary administrative things go smoothly. It’s way too easy for me to lose track of things like training, benefits, and various other requirements in the midst of trying to focus on my case load. Pray I go to bed early. Pray I budget my money well and give it away freely. Pray that I’m given wisdom on the timing of possibly moving into the city fairly soon. Pray I find time to blog, write, record, and dream. Pray that my Mac will start playing well in the all-Windows office.

Thanks for all of your words of encouragement in this time of waiting, praying and (lots of) blogging. So much has changed all at once in the past few weeks; some painful things and some wonderful things. But all of it together is as clear of a marker of a new chapter in my life as any other period. I pray I do this well.

Yesterday I wrote about how Catholicism views the idea of torture and how a possible response to it and it’s socio-political effects can be found in the Eucharist.  That article was written because the idea of Torture has come front and center in the political discourse once more.  For those not keeping track of the current political climate concerning the previous administration, John Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley that was given the charge by the Bush administration and the CIA to define the nature and limits of “enhanced interrogation techniques“. He along with Jay Bybee authored the famous “torture memos” which gave legal justification for the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and other techniques in order to get information from suspected terrorists.

Last year, the Office of Professional Responsibility wrote a report finding the two men guilty of professional misconduct and recommended the Justice Department do a full investigation. Ealier this month, both Bybee and Yoo were officially cleared of all wrongdoing in the eyes of the Department of Justice. Further, the DOJ strongly suggested that no further investigation nor disciplinary action from the bar should be sought. Last week the Department officially closed its investigation. Yesterday, the top ethicist of the Department of Justice said that not only did Yoo and Bybee do nothing criminal, but neither did they even act unethically. (Full summary of the metanarrative of all of this can be found here.)

As would be expected in such a story: Yoo feels “vindicated“; Conservatives feel justified; Liberals feel angry. All of this recent discussion in the past few days inspired me to return to an interview from last month that Yoo gave to Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. The full, unedited interview really deserves your full viewing. Part 1 has Yoo offering a historical context to our nation’s philosophy and use of torture. Part 2 and Part 3, though, are the most fascinating as Yoo offers his justifications for his “extreme” views on Presidential powers. He also outlines these ideas much more fully in his recent book Crisis and Command.

And you know what? I think it makes sense. I think Yoo and Bybee just may be right about the Constitutional powers offered the President in times of war. The basic argument goes, as summarized by this exchange in the interview, something like this:

STEWART: This book, Crisis and Command, basically says [that] from George Washington on up, the framers wanted the Executive to have immense power in war-time; and when the Commander-in-Chief makes an executive decision based on national security, he has enormous lee-way. Is that correct?

YOO: That’s right. And this comes and goes so that in periods of peace-time the President’s should become a smaller office and that the Congress and the Supreme Court check it…. I guess my final bottom line in all this — and I’ve struggled with this throughout Crisis and Command — is that in the end, it is still good for us to have the President able to make those good decisions even at the cost of sometimes having Presidents who make the bad ones; that it’s worth it for our system to be able to have a Lincoln or an FDR, even if the price is to have someone like a Nixon. Or, in your mind a — you know — Bush; or in Republican minds, Obama, right?

This makes sense to me. I can see the presence in the Constitution of enormous powers granted to the President in times of crisis (Executive Orders, anyone?). Remember, as Yoo says, our best and most revered Presidents are those that have done radical things in times of crisis or war. Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus for rebels. Franklin Roosevelt put Japanese Americans in the internment camps. Washington pushed his powers to the limit during the early years of this nation as we were stabilizing ourselves after the Revolution. Heck, even the Emancipation Proclamation was issued during the Civil War under the authority and justification of these same war-time powers that Bush used to allow torture.

Therefore, I agree with Yoo’s final assessment that the Constitution does indeed grant legal powers to the President to do what Bush did. It was legal. It may have even fallen within the technical limits of being “ethical”. But I refuse to believe it was moral. It is not. The moral justification for torture is usually derived from a form of Utilitarianism that says that the suffering of another to save many is ultimately moral. This is wrong and no Christian should hold to this. Torture is immoral and despicable. Christian ethics is NOT utilitarian.

Looking at Jesus, one has to come to the conclusion that he was anything but a utilitarian in this way. He seemed to do things in the least “effective” way; and indeed, this is built within the entire ethos of the Christian faith. To achieve eternal life on our behalf, Jesus died; to find one’s life, we must lose it; to be exalted, we must humble ourselves; and to bring the most benefit to the most people, we must be more willing die and suffer violence ourselves than exert it on others. Jesus Christ did what was best to serve not the highest quantitive good but the highest qualitative Good, namely His Glory, with the knowledge that in the service of this Good, all of humanity would be served.  And sometimes, to accomplish this, he did things in a way that defied all normal logic of “effectiveness”.

Practically, Christians should therefore be more willing to serve than be served; more willing to die than kill; and more willing to be tortured than endorse torture. What does this mean on a national level? Well, this is yet one more reason why there can be no such thing as a “Christian nation”.  A nation has the God-given right to seek the security and comfort of its citizens. Christians, on the other hand, are called to cast off that security and comfort in the radical service of others. I make no claims that martyrdom and radical self-sacrifice should be national policy. But the individual Christian should never endorse or speak in favor of such a thing as torture, nor should they obey any commands of their earthly authorities requiring them to do so. The Christian should acknowledge that a government has the right and freedom to bear the sword, but the Christian does not.

I’ll end by asking you to consider these lines from Derek Webb’s song “A Love That’s Stronger Than Our Fear” from his album The Ringing Bell:

What would you do if someone put a gun to your head
and ask you to tell them a lie?
What would you say if you were pushed that way
to betray yourself to keep yourself alive?
Is life worth so much?

There’s got to be a love that’s stronger than our fear
of everything being out of control
everything being out of control

What would you do if someone would tell you the truth
but only if you torture them half to death?
Tell me since when do the means justify the ends
and you build the kingdom using the devil’s tools?
Can time be so short?

There is a day that’s been inaugurated but has not yet come;
that we can proclaim by showing that there’s a better way.

Let us show the world there is a better way.

What do you think?  Should Christians defend the use of these techniques?  If not, should they push the government to adopt the same principles?