That would be one large (and odd-shaped) piece of paper.

Why do dogs wag their tails?

Why don’t more people speak French?

What is yeast? (I mean, I know what it is, but I don’t know what it is!)

How does a child acquire language?

What will I eat for dinner?

There is so much I don’t know, and I live most of my life as if it doesn’t matter that I’m as ignorant as I am. Because it usually doesn’t.

I don’t know the chair will hold my weight. But I believe it will.

I don’t know my wife will love me next year. But I believe she will.

I don’t know the sun will rise tomorrow. But I believe it will.

These beliefs, and a million others like them, go unnoticed throughout my day. They lead me to do things like sit down, have children, and save money.

Every moment of every day, I live by faith—in the chair, in my wife, in the movements of the planets. I don’t realize this is the case most of the time, but it is. Since I am not omniscient—since I don’t know everything—I must live by faith. Faith is the necessary (and natural) state of the human creature.

Many pit faith against reason in our day. This is unreasonable. We cannot be forced to choose between faith and reason. We must ask ourselves instead how much faith we ought to put in reason.

Human reason has limits. The question is where I think those limits lie. And whether there is Someone beyond my reason worth trusting.

Browne was complicit in judicial murder because he regarded witchcraft as a real thing, because it was in scripture and in the news reports – when we praise his sweet reasonableness, we need to remember its limits.

Hold on. “Judicial murder”?

Since we “know” there is no such thing as witches, Browne was not only mistaken to believe in their existence, but he has blood on his hands for failing to have the perspective to question the prevailing wisdom of his day.

Shall we count the ways in which you and I have blood on our hands for failing to question the prevailing wisdom of ours?

Because Western culture elevates the freedom of the individual as the highest good, we are moving in moral directions that Browne’s society would have found appalling. We can now see glimpses in the modern West of a move toward the acceptance of infanticide in the name of individual choice. Euthanasia is legal in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg, and assisted suicide is allowed in Washington, Oregon, and Switzerland. Drone warfare has given us the power to kill without emotion or humanity.

All of these moral choices would lead a witchcraft-believing society’s collective jaw to drop. Where 17th century England believe its spirituality was a convincing explanation of the world, we in the modern West have given ourselves to an unmitigated reason that has no justification other than that it is reasonable. Their Spirituality led to religious wars and executing witches. Our Reason leads to robotic wars and executing the most vulnerable among us.

Ultimately, the reason we don’t believe in witches is not because we know they don’t exist (some people in our culture today claim to be witches). It is because we live in a time and place in which witches are implausible. Our culture has said witches don’t exist, therefore, we disbelieve in them.

That isn’t a reason. It is inertia. We don’t know our cultural assumptions are better than our forbears. We assume they are. That is not an argument. It is laziness.

Most of us don’t have a reason not to believe in witches. We simply let society tell us we don’t need to think about it. What other unexamined assumptions lead us to live the way we do? And if unexamined, are they worth having?

AP ran a story recently featuring Sarah Lauro, professor of English at Clemson University who specializes in “zombie studies.” According to Lauro, the recent fascination with the undead in pop culture comes from the population “feeling disempowered.”

“If you were to ask the participants, I don’t think that all of them are very cognizant of what they’re saying when they put on the zombie makeup and participate,” she said. “To me, it’s such an obvious allegory. We feel like, in one way, we’re dead.”

She contends that this cultural frustration is connected to our tough economic times. I believe it goes deeper than that.

In his “10 Essentials for Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse,” John Horner Jacobs tells us we will need things like running shoes, a baseball bat, plenty of water and granola bars, and a defensible position if we hope to outlast the undead onslaught. His 10th essential for survival is the most fascinating: in order to survive the zombie apocalypse, Jacobs writes, you have to have an “object of affection.”

Why? To reaffirm your humanity. To give yourself something to live for. In the midst of running from and bashing the skulls of countless zombies, you’ll need a purpose. A goal. A reason to keep on going.

And the closest thing we can get to the transcendent in our culture is sex.

I think Lauro is right to say that the interest in zombies stems from cultural malaise. And I think Jacobs is right that in order to survive something as awful as a zombie apocalypse one needs a reason to live.

Rather than economics, our malaise stems from a lack of transcendent purpose in Western post-industrial society. The modern story does not satisfy the human heart, and so, for cultural catharsis, we’ve turned to zombies. But the Modernistic Zombie doesn’t eat our brains; it eats our souls. 

In the next post, I’ll explain how.

1. Get Grounded in the Gospel: no gospel, no mission.
2. Learn Your City’s Story: how can you tell people to follow Jesus if you don’t know them.
3. Engage in the Life of Your City: no one will know you love your city if you aren’t a vital part of it.
4. Discern Your City’s Idols: what do people follow instead of Jesus?
5. Retell Your City’s Story with the Gospel: idols don’t satisfy; show people how the gospel does.

Um recently co-wrote a book with my friend Justin Buzzard called Why Cities Matter. There are great insights like these throughout.

This chart provides a breakdown of some of the key truths and tools for gospel saturation. These are the hooks on which to hang our understanding and application.

This is a lot like the Christian life.

We are that water, unable to change color on our own apart from Jesus’s work in us. We aren’t changed all at once, but over time as the gospel permeates our lives. And as the Spirit works the gospel into us, we are changed, made completely new, unrecognizable to our former-selves.

This gospel-driven change starts with faith. We are called by Jesus to “believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15), putting our trust in him and all that he has done. When we believe the good news of Jesus, we are led to think the right things about who we are and who God is.

This drives us to hope in the promise of the gospel. Knowing by faith that we have been redeemed, we are led to hope—not in the things of this world—but in the future work of Christ to recreate us and the entire cosmos (Rom. 8:18-25; 1 Pet. 1:13). We can live free from fear, knowing that our future is secure, that our “life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3). We can want the right things, not that which is fleeting or contrary to the will of our Father, but that which we know truly satisfies.

Faith in Christ and hope in God’s promises sets us free to love, to live in light of the gospel. Love is not emotive, but active. Empowered by the Spirit, we can do the right things, obeying God’s law in all areas of life, because we know that love fulfills the law (Rom. 13:8-10).

Like that glass of water was progressively permeated by color, so the entire Christian is ultimately transformed by the gospel of God’s grace. It starts in our heads (faith), flows to our hearts (hope), and extends to our hands (love). That is gospel saturation.

Is there life on Mars? Or Alpha Centauri perhaps?

Of course, that “neighboring” star is about 25,662,600,000,000 miles away; a human spacecraft could get there by about this time next century. This puts it far outside the reach of human exploration (unless you put a baby on board a spacecraft and made sure he lived to be 100, and then could ensure he’d be fit enough to do anything worthwhile after 100 years of being cooped up in an interstellar metal container).

Interestingly, the Economist writer still holds out hope “that a sufficiently committed and luxuriantly financed group of scientists could send a probe there to take a closer look.” We couldn’t send a person, but we could maybe send a robot a century into outer space.

I read this article and couldn’t help reflecting on human finitude. We kick against our own limitations, look out longingly into the heavens and dream about subjugating the cosmos. We clutch after control of this world, the heavens, our own lives, each other. Yet, the more knowledge we obtain of the created Order, the more humble our position in the universe appears to be. We are but dust. Still we insist on puffing out our chests whenever we discover that which lies trillions of miles beyond our grasp.

Most of us can hardly fathom traveling to our own moon, which a few of our race have done. We can but dream of traveling beyond our own solar system to planets light years away. In the face of my own limitations, my thoughts are drawn to the One who holds “all authority in heaven and on earth” (Matt. 28:18), who “upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3).

Jesus is the Word through whom all things were made (John 1:3), who “stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in” (Isa. 40:22). Alpha Centauri B is a light fixture in Christ’s heavenly ceiling. Someday that mere light bulb will burn out along with its created satellites, yet the “word of our God remains forever” (Isa. 40:8).

To many, this is a terrible thought. Most of us would rather live out our days under the pretense that we posses some control of our world—and of our own lives. Christ’s gospel says, that, not only are we not in control, but we do not have to be. He, the Eternal God, has come to us in grace, not judgment. He has taken all judgment upon Himself in order to liberate us from fear. After all, perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18).

If ever there were a Being worthy of entrusting our lives to, it is Jesus. The heavens are His tent, the planets His footstool, the universe His playground. Alpha Centauri B may have no created life near it, but Christ is life and the One who fills all in all (Eph. 1:23). “Blessed are all who take refuge in him” (Psalm 2:12).

“Art is spiritual—it uses physical materials, but it’s a spiritual quest, and the artistic mission has a spiritual goal. But nothing in the ideology or language of current academe—from Berkeley to Harvard—permits anyone to say that.”

She’s onto something. She’s talking about art here, and sees quite clearly that it is a spiritual endeavor. Were she to hang onto this insight tenaciously enough she’d realize that everything is spiritual.

Check out the full interview here.

(RT: White Horse Inn [which calls Camille Paglia a provocateur. The French teacher in me can't help but correct them: guys, it's provocateuse].)

The program.

Jeremy. Leading worship.

Toby. Praying.

Me. Talking.

Some of those who came.

Please keep us all in prayer! Plant team meetings start in October!

God sees it all.

Throughout, David rapidly changes perspective, one minute speaking of his own troubles, the next of every nation on the earth. Whether God is being called on to deal with David’s personal enemies (9:3) or kingdoms and empires (9:5-6), God is seated upon his throne (9:4, 7-8). The might and power of the Most High is taken into full account as he seeks justice on the earth and in his circumstances.

But then suddenly, “the Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed” (9:9), and the psalmist has reminded us again that God is concerned, not only with the judgment of kings and generals, but with the preservation of the lowest of the low. We’ve gone from the heavenly throne room to the gutter without so much as a conjunction. And while such things are so far apart in our minds, the Lord is intimately aware of the details of both.

He can confidently pray, “Be gracious to ME!” (9:13), because “the LORD has made himself known” (9:16), in judgment toward the wicked (9:15-17), but in mercy and grace toward the poor and oppressed (9:18). David humbles himself before the Lord, acknowledging his spiritual poverty, and taking comfort in God’s love toward the needy.

His prayer to God at the end to “Arise!” (9:19) is a request that God set everything right, in the entire world as well as his own personal situation. God has no problem setting his gaze upon the whole universe and your innermost thoughts all at once. His camera can catch both angles without trouble.

Am I humble enough to acknowledge this? To let God be great and over all things, but over my life as well? Failure to humble myself before him puts me in the camp of the wicked who will be judged. Humbling myself before the Lord in faith identifies me with my meek and humble Savior who came as one of the oppressed so that he could be enthroned on a cross and then in the heavens to judge the whole world. Christ is my refuge if I humble myself and recognize my spiritual poverty, my desperate need for him and his riches. And when I realize his promise to remember the needy, I can’t help but join in singing, “I will be glad and exult in you; I will sing praise to your name, O Most High” (9:2).