Getting Off Time's Big Ride

Time is the big ride that nobody gets off.

But wouldn't be cool if we could?

In the recent film, Edge of Tomorrow, Tom Cruise plays a soldier who suddenly gets the ability to reset the day. Think Groundhog Day, but with violence instead romance driving the plot. With each recurring day the soldier uses his increasing knowledge of what's happens next to plan his moves, enabling him to accomplish the otherwise impossible.



The film was inspired by video game storytelling, specifically the way games allow you to make mistakes that are fatal to your in-game character then bring your character back to life at an earlier point in the game and, hopefully having learned from your mistakes, try again.

This game mechanic allows video gamers to simulate what theologians call foreknowledge. Within the closed system of the game time moves in one direction, but with the ability to get off that ride and try again as often as necessary the gamer is able to gain what to her in-game character would be knowledge of what will happen before it happens. That's foreknowledge, and it is generally considered, though theologians debate exactly how it works, to be one of the attributes of God.

Godlike power is part of our attraction to video games and time travel flicks. Getting off time's ride through unlimited death and resurrection while everyone else is forced to remain means you can get a look at the destination and control how we get there. That's intoxicating because in real life we worry that our destiny is largely outside our control.

Video game storytelling speaks to our spiritual need to believe our lives are part of a greater story that calls for us to invest ourselves in a struggle for the good. But video games also exploit that need by addicting us to the sensation of wielding unstoppable power, thereby tempting us to see ourselves as a timeless beings among lesser mortals, justified in manipulating their actions to serve our goals. (The video game, Braid, explores this conceit.)

But after we've turned off the console and are laying in bed, the fact remains that our real life failures are permanent. While we may claim we regret nothing, it's hard to know what our lives are going to mean when our part in time's ride is over.

New Year's is almost here. No one's getting a do-over of 2014; no one gets to skip what happens in 2015; and no one knows what the price of oil will be by the time 2016 rolls around.

What you can do is choose where you'll look for direction on the journey. The way I see it that boils down to two options.

You can choose the video game option and leverage what power you have toward the outcome you want. Or you choose to believe there is an Author of our story who loves the characters in it and is bringing it to a conclusion that will end well for those who come to trust that love.

As they say in video games, "Choose wisely."

This article was originally submitted for the Clergy Comments column of the Fort McMurray Today (December 26, 2014).

Monster Energy Drink Is Anti-Christ: A Case Study In Occult Epistemology

First, if you haven't already, watch the video embedded above. It's blowing up on the internet today.

Second, ask yourself whether you think it might be possible that, aside from any health effects, you're putting yourself under the power of Satan if you drink Monster.

If your answer to the above question is yes, you might have an occult epistemology.

What is occult epistemology, you ask?

1. Occult: Pertaining to hidden knowledge of supernatural power
2. Epistemology: The philosophy of how to attain knowledge.

Occult epistemology teaches that there are two levels of knowledge. The lower level is the knowledge that can be gained by observation and reason through the normal and boring disciplines of history, science, philosophy, etc. The higher level of knowledge that leads to supernatural power is not laid open to ordinary observation and disciplined reason but is layered on top in a system of secret symbols that only the initiated can interpret.

The modern occult movement of the 19th century looked back to the ancient mystery religions for this knowledge. One of those religions was Gnosticism, a blending of mystery religion and Christianity. Gnosticism means something like "knowledgeism", because the Gnostics taught that a system of hidden spiritual knowledge through symbolism was necessary for salvation from the material world.

The word heretic as we use it today, was created to describe Gnostics. They were heretics because they preached salvation through secret knowledge instead of salvation through Jesus.

Today we not only have a modern expression of ancient mystery religions known as the occult, we also have a modern expression of Gnosticism—Christian conspiracy preachers who teach attainment of spiritual power through secret knowledge of hidden symbols. They purport to warn you against the occult, while at the same time adopting occult epistemology in order to explain its power.

When conspiracy teachers blend Christianity and occult epistemology they end up with two levels of spiritual knowledge. The first level is the knowledge you get from ordinary theology—comparing scripture with scripture, studying the original languages, thinking through the teachings of the Bible—that's open for anyone to study. That's probably enough to get you to Heaven, but you still might get fooled by the Devil if you don't know what he's secretly up to. So you need to advance to that second level of hidden knowledge that is only available through an extra-biblical system of hidden symbols, which only the initiated can understand.

Once you accept the premise that spiritual knowledge can be gained through this system of hidden symbols, you're swept up into a hidden world of mysterious powers, remarkable secrets, and high-stakes conflict. It's like being on a spiritual drug, and once the buzz wears off you want some more. None of it does anything to bring your heart closer to Jesus, and you end up trusting in your knowledge about the inner-workings supernatural power to save you from Satan.

So what can you do if realize you've fallen for occult epistemology?

1. Recognize that true spiritual knowledge starts with Jesus, and Jesus doesn't hide this knowledge but lays it open (apokalupto) in His Word: "There is nothing covered up that will not be revealed, and hidden that will not be known" (Luke 12:2).
2. Get close to Jesus. Instead of studying conspiracy theories, spend time in prayer. Not only will you get true spiritual knowledge, but you'll be protected from the Devil. No one accidentally ends up under demonic power by drinking a beverage with "666" hidden on it or watching a music video with Illuminati symbolism. The real danger is in choosing to focus my heart's desires on something other than God (1 Peter 5:8-10). In that light, conspiracy preaching holds a more subtle danger than popular entertainment, because you think your heart is close to God when the reality is far from it.
3. Study the symbolic system of Scripture. The Bible is replete with ritual, typological, and apocalyptic symbolism. God uses it to communicate spiritual truths that are too profound for simple explanation. Nowhere in Scripture are we encouraged to look to a hidden knowledge outside the Bible to interpret the symbols in the Bible. Rather, the Bible provides its own interpretive keys, which are not hidden and available only to initiates, but open to all.

I believe occult epistemology is the Devil's counterfeit to distract us from the symbolic system of the Bible while fooling us into thinking we can have a measure of control over supernatural power. The symbolic system of scripture is deep enough to sustain a lifetime of study, but it has a simple message: God is in control, put your trust in Him.

This post was revised, expanded and posted to SSNet as a commentary for the Adventist Adult Bible Study Guide for the week of January 17-23, 2015. That version was crossposted on ADvindicate.

Mrs. Jesus?

This article was originally submitted for the Clergy Comments column of the Fort McMurray Today (September 21, 2012). 

For people who study ancient documents, Egypt is what South Africa is to diamond cartels or what Nashville is to country music fans: the gift that keeps on giving. Egypt has had a thriving literary culture since the dawn of history. But it was blessed with two other gifts that have made it a treasury of ancient documents that has yet to be exhausted—papyrus, an easily produced and sturdy kind of writing material; and a dry climate in which papiri (papyrus manuscripts) can survive relatively intact for hundreds of years.

So it was no surprise when, on Tuesday, a Harvard professor announced a new papyri fragment discovery. It was not even necessarily surprising that the papyri was about Jesus and was dated to just 250-350 years after his death (assuming it isn't a forgery, a question that may never be resolved [The manuscript has been dated to between the fifth and ninth centuries AD]). Those finds happen every year. No, what revved a routine papyri discovery into a media headline was the fact that in the fragment Jesus is talking about his wife.

Most people know that Jesus isn't supposed to have a wife, which was part of the attraction to The Da Vinci Code. The curious thing is that nowhere in the Gospels (the four volumes in the New Testament that record Jesus life) is it positively stated that Jesus didn't have a wife. The gospels have Jesus interacting with other family members, such as his mother and brothers, but make no mention of Jesus having a wife or children. Thus it is generally assumed he didn't.

But to conclude on this point is to miss the larger controversy, because this most recent papyri fragment is the latest in a series of discoveries that have challenged the status of the New Testament as the exclusive source of reliable information about Jesus. For example, a series of "Gnostic Gospels" have been discovered, which chronicle events not found in the four Gospels of the Bible, and cast Jesus' life and mission in a radically different light. At issue is not so much the question of whether Jesus had a wife, but which ancient documents have a trustworthy record of his life, if any at all.

Against this slide toward agnosticism, the weight of the documentary evidence we do have about the life of Jesus speaks volumes. We have by a few orders of magnitude more ancient copies of the New Testament availabe to us today than we have for any other ancient text. That speaks to the value and validity that those who originally received those writings placed in them.

It should come as no surprise that there were competing accounts of Jesus life in circulation in the centuries following his death. But copying manuscripts by hand was both time consuming and expensive. What counts in assessing Jesus historically is the effort people who read the various accounts were willing to put into copying and spreading one version versus another.

So when a story about a single ancient manuscript saying something sensational about the life of Jesus breaks in the media, remember that single manuscript is what most people who were around and cared judged as unworthy of the effort of transmission. What counts is the boring discovery of another group of New Testament papyri, too routine to be covered in the media, because that's what more people who were in the best position to know thought was worth preserving for us.

On "A Year Without God"

In our reality TV generation there is class of writers who set out to experience for you that which you can or will not for yourself. Tim Ferriss tries out life hacks, so you won't have to do self-improvement the hard way. A. J. Jacobs, the self-declared human guinea pig, does that which you're either to conventional or lazy to do—like cheating at poker with Google Glass or reading the entire Enclyclopedia Britanica, respectively. For his bestseller, The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs tried to carry out surface meaning of all the rules in the Old Testament. Blogger Rachel Held Evans rode his coat-tails into The Year of Biblical Womanhood, because it wasn’t fair that women should be excluded from test-driving Ancient Near Eastern customs in a 21^st century world.

So in some ways it was not a surprise when a recently resigned Seventh-day Adventist pastor, Ryan Bell, came up on my Facebook feed, just as 2014 rolled in, announcing that his new project would be A Year Without God (with book at the end). What was surprising to me was the way Ryan's year-long experiment with atheism was picked up by US and international media, including an interview on CBC's “Q.”

What's uniquely fascinating about Ryan's project can be best seen in opposition to what came before. Ferriss, Jacobs, and Evans become your human guinea pig in order to convert you to their value system. Whether persuading you to always take the quickest shortcut to accomplishment or that the Bible is a culturally-conditioned artifact that needs to be interpreted through the lens of enlightenment humanism to have modern moral relevance, their experimentation is grounded in fundamental presuppositions about reality.

By trying on atheism for a year, Ryan is throwing presuppositions out the window. He avoids the question of ultimate reality—God—by rejecting identification as athiest, theist, or agnostic. So if you ever wondered where you'd end up were you to rid of all your preloaded beliefs and approach reality as a blank slate, Ryan Bell is your guinea pig. He doesn't want to persuade you about anything. He only wants to live as if God doesn't exist for a year and see if there's any difference between that and the way he was living before.

Except it's not really possible to remove oneself completely from fundamental assumptions. Ryan's assumption is that God, if God exists, is like an exercise program, in that you can go off and on and evaluate effectiveness by noting relative differences. But what if instead God is more like a person, a person like Ryan Bell. If I were to remove myself from Ryan's influence for a year to see if that makes a difference in my life, I would likely conclude that he's good to have on my feeds but not essential and easily replaced with others. And I suspect that the assumptions and methodology behind Ryan's Year Without God are leading him toward an inevitable conclusion: God's nice if you want God, but you can do just fine without.

A personal God wouldn't be like Ryan or any other person in one critical respect: If God is real, you can't take a year without God, because God is what sustains you. You can only end-up choosing to ignore God, and thus reality. So if you want to know whether a personal God exists, you need to reach out for the purpose of getting to know to God, and let God show you if God is real.
This article was originally submitted for the Clergy Comments column of the Fort McMurray Today (February 28, 2013).