Last year on nearly this same date I wrote a blog post titled “Look Out, It’s Be Kind to God Week!” The following are the opening sentences to that piece:

"Well, batten down the hatches and get your survival gear out because it is 'Be Kind to God Week'--the annual media full-court-press to discourage Christians is in full swing. You see, every Easter and Christmas the national media takes it upon itself to present what appears to be exciting new revelations about Christianity or Jesus, usually presented using classic Christian art, which is slyly designed to propagate a faith-deflating message. The typical headline goes something like this: 'The Real Jesus Finally Uncovered.' Then the message goes something like this: 'Jesus wasn’t what Christians have always believed him to be.'"

Last year’s Easter offering was the Gospel of Judas and the year before that was the Gospel of Thomas. The mass media and secular culture are seemingly always looking for the “magic bullet” that will kill its horrible enemy—Christianity. This year’s offering is the almost 40 year old discovery in Jerusalem of a tomb containing the remains of a family with people named Joseph, Mary and Jesus (among others). Okay, what I have done is assemble a bunch of reasons as to why this is another media-hyped-up pile of nonsense intended to grab headlines, make a fast buck and discourage Christians. I gathered much of this from a lively post and debate on Ben Witherington’s blog: http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2007/02/jesus-tomb-titanic-talpiot-tomb-theory.html

1. Joseph died before Jesus came into his time of ministry. Jesus and his family lived in Nazareth as all gospels attest. Joseph would have been buried in Nazareth or Bethleham. He would have had to be exhumed and moved to Jerusalem to be in the Talpiot tomb. Jerusalem is where those who crucified Jesus lived. Does such a thing make any sense?
2. The names Joseph and Jesus (in their Hebrew form) were two of the most popular Jewish names in the first century. Others have calculated that at a minimum 225 men lived in Jerusalem as contemporaries of Jesus with the same name who had fathers named Joseph.
3. The typical way that one reasons regarding these things is that since we don’t have any evidence from any source that Jesus was married or that he had a son (claimed by this theory) we would, therefore, assume that the common names on the ossuaries refer to another family. Essentially, Cameron and Discovery are saying, we believe Jesus was not resurrected so this must be his tomb.
4. Reputable archeologists that have worked on the tomb including respected Israeli archaeologist Amos Kloner who first examined the tomb strongly disagree with the Cameron interpretation (“without any proof whatsoever”). Kloner flatly states that, “The documentary filmmakers are using it to sell their film.”
5. The name “Matthew” appears on one of the ossuaries. There was no known close relative of Jesus named Matthew.
6. The name “Martha” appears on one of the ossuaries. There was no known close relative of Jesus named Martha.
7. To accept the Cameron interpretation one must believe that the gospel writers were frauds and that Mary and James who lived on after Jesus’ death participated in the fraud.
8. We know from Eusebius that James was buried near the temple where he was martyred (thrown from the temple) and a stone monument was erected in his memory. The monument was a destination for Christian pilgrims. The place of the monument and the location of the ossuary tomb (Talpiot) are nowhere near each other.
9. Why would Christians be making a pilgrimage to the tomb of James (which held his remains) if there was a tomb holding Jesus’ remains?
10. If the bones of Jesus were also in James’ tomb (along with James) or in another tomb in Jerusalem, why would Christians be making a pilgrimage to visit the remains of the one whom they believed was their risen savior? This would violate their faith.
11. Christian tradition supported by some physical evidence notes that Mary was taken by the Beloved Apostle John with him to Ephesus where she died. Today, there is stone house from the first century with restorations from 7th century on the top of a hill five miles away from Ephesus, where it is believed that Mary spent her final years. Also, Ephesus has the earliest church in the world dedicated to Mary.
12. In the first century, the Talpiot tomb site was a sheep field well outside the city walls of Jerusalem. What would possess the family of Jesus to bury themselves there while James was buried in Jerusalem?
13. The Roman and the Jewish leadership would have loved nothing more than to have produced Christ’s ossuary, which--according to this theory--was right there in the Jerusalem area for everyone to see. Does this make any sense?
14. The Talpiot tomb has people who should not be there (Joseph, Matthew, Martha and a second Mary) but who are there, and people who should be there but who are not there (the brothers Simon and Judas and the sisters of Jesus).

Don’t be dismayed, with this year’s “Be Kind to God” offering, the archeology is on the side of the Christian faith.

Well if you haven’t noticed, there is a huge brouhaha boiling in the worldwide Anglican Communion that has spilled out on the mass media in the last couple of weeks. It started on February 15th when seven primates from what they call the Global South (theologically conservative bishops from Africa and elsewhere who have joined forces to expand their influence within the communion and counter liberal-leaning Anglicans) refused to take Holy Communion with the presiding bishop of the American Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori. This took place at a five-day meeting of three dozen leaders of the Anglican Church gathered in Dar es Salaam, Tunzania. The meeting ended with a directive issued by the Anglicans giving its Episcopal branch less than eight months to ban blessings of same-sex unions or face a reduced role in the Anglican Communion.

The Anglicans also set up a separate council and a vicar to assist conservative Episcopalians in the U.S. who have been alienated by the Episcopal support for gay clergy and the blessing of same-sex unions. This, of course, is a striking check on the authority of Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori. It is helpful to keep in mind that Episcopalians represent just 2.3 million of the 77 million Anglicans in the world. The balance of power and authority have swung to the Global South where traditional Christian teaching is highly valued.

On February 21st Schori issued a statement where she asked all sides in the fight over the Bible and sexuality to “forbear for a season” until the Anglican Communion can find a “compromise.” “Each party in this conflict,” she said, “is asked to consider the good faith of the other…for the sake of the greater whole.” It is somewhat doubtful that the Anglicans from the Global South are interested in compromising on what they consider to be a bedrock biblical/moral issue.

These Dots Connect

In my recent post I shared Dinesh D’Souza’s thesis that Islamic terrorism is driven by Muslim resistance to the agenda of the Cultural Left. He notes that not only Muslims but traditional societies throughout the world are struggling with the American cultural deluge. He believes that there is a growing animosity in developing and third-world countries against our pop and elitist cultural imperialism. It is seen as outrageous, destructive, and dangerous to children and families. The Islamic radicals, therefore, only represent the tip-of-the-spear of those who wish to fight a counterattack against the Cultural Left’s degenerate values.

The bishops from the Anglican Global South are again showing Americans that the “two-thirds world” is willing to fight moral degeneracy and they have thrown a life-line to conservative Christians in the Episcopal Church.

This underscores that it may be possible for conservative Christians in the U.S. to join forces with moderate Muslims, Global South Christians, and other people of different faiths to cripple the Cultural Left’s agenda and take the wind out of the sails of the Islamic Jihadists.

One of the great mysteries is how—literally, how—God created the universe from nothing. Since we have nothing in our own experience that is comparable, it is hard to grasp how God could cause all things to exist from absolute nothingness. The bible says in Hebrews 11:3 “By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.”

Clement of Alexandria said:

“Human art, moreover, produces houses, and ships, and cities, and pictures. And how shall I tell what God makes? Behold the whole universe; it is His work; and the heaven and the sun and angels and men are the works of His fingers. How great is the power of God! His bare volition was the creation of the universe. For God alone made it, because He alone is truly God. By the bare exercise of volition He creates; His mere willing was followed by the springing into being of what He willed.”

Okay, but can we pierce behind the mystery a little further? Yes, we can—if we will allow a little medieval theological reasoning. Let’s allow Thomas Aquinas go at the topic one idea at a time from his work Summa Contra Gentiles, Book Two: Creation, Ch. 19. He starts by saying:

“But nothing having the character of matter is prerequisite to creation; nor for the accomplishment of His action does God as agent lack anything which might accrue to Him afterwards through movement, because He is immobile,…”

The first concept that Aquinas offers is that matter cannot be the "prerequisite to creation.” In other words, if matter is what is created, then it cannot precede its own creation. The second concept is a little more difficult to grasp. Aquinas notes that God, as the agent of creation, cannot gain anything from the creation of the universe nor can it be the cause of any change (movement) in Him. In short, the creation of the universe did not come about because of some big process of change over time or within God. He continues:

“It therefore remains that creation is instantaneous. Thus, a thing simultaneously is being created and is created, even as a thing at the same moment is being illuminated and is illuminated.”

This third concept is drawn from the first two. Aquinas concludes that the creation of the universe must have been instantaneous. This would mean that—properly speaking—there was no change from nothing to something. It would be better to say, there was God and then there was God and the universe. Of course, we speak of creation from “nothing,” but in reality, the universe existed in God’s essence as an “exemplar” and God, as such, thought of it as existing in what we would call a certain time and place and it was so. There was no succession, it just was. When the universe came into existence is when time and motion began. Basil the Great in Homilia I in Hexaemeron, V explained that this beginning was “the beginning of time.”

See, the old guys were pretty smart.

I believe there is a new convergence of thought developing amongst conservative Christians that is slowly breaking onto the national consciousness. Yesterday, February 9, Irshad Manji the author of the best selling The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith appeared on the cable-news-commentary show hosted by Glen Beck. He gave a full hour to interviewing Ms. Manji. Additionally, she will appear on a full-length documentary on PBS in mid-April. Ms. Manji is calling for moderate Muslims to resist Islamic extremists through a more peaceful and thoughtful interpretation of the Koran.

Then, again last night, C-SPAN ran its three-hour in-depth interview with Dinesh D’Souza who has just written a provocative book titled The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. Mr. D’Souza is an immigrant from Pakistan and also a committed Catholic. D’Souza maintains that the war on terror and the culture war are not distinct and separate but are one and the same. He is calling for conservatives to realize that the Left is allied (indirectly) with Islamic extremists in an effort to defeat the war on terror. He believes that conservatives must do two things: 1) work to curtail the Left’s attacks on religion, family and traditional values and 2) persuade moderate Muslims around the world to cooperate in resisting the extremists. D’Souza summarizes is strategy by saying “to defeat the Islamic radicals abroad, we must defeat the enemy at home.” D’Souza is a resident scholar at the prestigious Hoover Institute at Stanford University. His book is well documented.

D’Souza’s central insight is not new; it is just that it has been overlooked. He maintains that the extremists are not against modernity, or science or democracy. They are not upset because of colonialism or the Crusades. They are upset, as Bin Laden stated in one of his Letters to America, that the U.S. is the “fount of global atheism” and is imposing its depraved morality on the rest of the world. Ben Laden’s critique has been totally ignored. In 2005 the American Movie Channel (AMC) broadcast an hour-long documentary titled “Hollywood and the Muslim World” (it is still available for rental) in which its producers posed a simple question throughout the Muslim world, “Why is there so much animosity against the United States.” The uniform response from top to bottom was that Muslims are upset with our aggressive attempt to foist the Left’s cultural agenda (think of Planned Parenthood and “Will and Grace”) on traditional Muslim societies. D’Souza notes, “Muslims in Indonesia and Egypt and Pakistan don’t see ‘America,’ they see the face of American popular culture that is projected by our television and movies and music. They see the dimension of America that in their view corrupts the innocence of children, and undermines the family, and promotes homosexuality as a normal way of life. In fact, this is the America of the cultural Left. What the Left considers ‘liberating,’ much of the world considers a scandalous assault on modesty and decency.”

What both D’Souza and Manji are asking is for conservatives and Christians to stop attacking Islam and Muhammad and lumping all Muslims in the same camp with the extremists. Specifically they are calling for traditional Christians and traditional Muslims to work together to defeat the agenda of the cultural Left. This has already been happening in the United Nations and some other international forums to block liberal efforts to declare abortion as a right under international law. There is an opportunity for people of different faiths to agree on moral issues and form an international coalition to stop the imposition of these wicked and bogus “rights” on cultures that do not want them. There is much more that can be done; however, the main point is that this joint effort would do much to assist moderate Muslims to de-legitimate the extremists and take the wind out of their sails.

As a Christian pastor I am personally exploring the possibility of working with Muslims. Our church is launching a strong trust into the Middle East and our missionaries there have reinforced the importance of building this kind of alliance.

I am sure you have heard the stereotypical story of how medieval theologians were obsessed with how many angels could “dance on the head of a pin.” You probably thought they were a bunch of nut-cases. However, here are two things to be aware of: 1) no one to my knowledge was ever concerned with the specific question about angels and pin heads; 2) yet, it is a very interesting question. The answer of course is that angels—properly speaking—do not take up any space because they are spiritual beings. But, this is not the subject of this post. The subject is angels and passions.

A passion is the “movement of the sensitive appetite when we imagine good or evil” (Aquinas). In other words, when I imagine chocolate-peanut butter ice cream, I have a movement of a sensitive appetite. Literally, my saliva glands kick into overdrive and my stomach starts to get that “gimme, gimme” feeling. I’m sure you know what I am talking about even if you don’t like chocolate-peanut butter ice cream—which is un-American. This whole movement of my appetites is a transformation within my corporeal nature (my bodily nature). Okay, you say, big deal—so what? Well, angels don’t have bodily natures; they are incorporeal beings also known as spiritual beings. This means that they do not have sensitive appetites and passions. Hence St. Augustine wrote (DeCiv. Dei ix. 5): “The holy angels feel no anger while they punish…, no fellow-feeling with misery while they relieve the unhappy: and yet ordinary human speech is wont to be ascribe to them also these passions by name, because although they have not of our weakness, their acts bear a certain resemblance to ours.”

But, you ask, don’t the angels love God and rejoice when sinners are saved? Yes, they do. These, though, are not—strictly speaking—bodily passions. In their basic natures, love and joy are simple acts of the will. Biblical love is not sentimental, Oprah-ized feelings. Biblical love is a decision to do good toward another person. Likewise, joy is not a sappy sentimental feeling. Joy is a willful delight in that which is good—the highest good being God Himself. By the way, Christians would do wonders for their spiritual growth and would also stabilize their own emotional lives by properly understanding love and joy. Both joy and love are essentially intellectual appetites (acts of the will). The angels have both love and joy without the bodily passions that often accompany our experience of these two things. Therefore, it is true, as Augustine said, the angels can punish without feeling anger and relieve suffering without feeling unhappy for those who are in a misfortunate situation.

Acts 12:7-8 Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone in the cell. He struck Peter on the side and woke him up. "Quick, get up!" he said, and the chains fell off Peter's wrists. 8 Then the angel said to him, "Put on your clothes and sandals." And Peter did so. "Wrap your cloak around you and follow me," the angel told him.