Georgetown Evicts Evangelical Groups

Georgetown University just kicked six campus ministries off campus.

Campus Ministry Removes Affiliates — The Hoya (campus paper)
Georgetown Rejects Evangelical Groups — Inside Higher Ed (college news blog)

Chi Alpha was among the groups banned. Pray for God’s peace and wisdom to attend the leaders of the group as they decide what to do next.

At Stanford we are fortunate to have a very strong relationship with the Deans for Religious Life. However, the news from Georgetown is a reminder that this isn’t the only possible state of affairs.

Paul was very wise when he reminded Timothy to pray for his imperial overlords.

“I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone—for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.”
1 Tim 2:1–2, NIV

I often tell students that this is the foundation of a separation of church and state. We want the government (and any other bureaucratic bodies) to leave us free to worship without onerous oversight or regulation — because external involvement never works out to our advantage in the long run.

In any event, my prayers are with those just booted from Georgetown (and with the Chi Alpha folks in particular as several of them are close friends).

Suckerpunched…

I was bitterly disappointed at the reference section at Berean Christian Store in San Jose. I had gone in with a coupon figuring I’d pick up a sweet and expensive commentary at reduced rate. After scouring the commentary section I concluded that there was not one single commentary in the store worth owning.

It made me very, very sad. I hate to be one of those ministers who is always whining about how Christian book stores are dumbing down the faith, but I was almost sick inside at the low quality of the books on offer.

As I was on my way out, I noticed Breaking The Missional Code was for sale. Since I had a coupon and the book had been recommended to me by several friends and I didn’t want to leave bitter at the store, I picked it up.

It’s an easy read and I was generally appreciative of their thoughts (especially their warning to the rapidly swelling missional networks to not neglect traditional missions in favor of church planting), and I was almost done with it when I got suckerpunched at the end.

A recent development in church planting is that of planting churches on or near college campuses. Leaders are discovering that when churches are planted on campus they are more strategic at reaching unreached and disconnected people on the college campus. They represent a shift from college and campus ministries that focus on those who already embrace the faith to that of planting the gospel among those who have never or seldom heard.
Breaking The Missional Code, Ed Stetzer & David Putman p. 232
emphasis added

I feel vaguely slandered…

I think perhaps the authors misunderstand what campus ministries do. And they also overestimate the ability of churches to thrive on the college campus — some campuses are very reachable that way and others are not. It’s a tool in our toolbox for reaching collegians, not a replacement toolbox.

Overall, it’s a good book if you haven’t read anything about leading your church to engage the culture before. Otherwise you might find it repetitious. And libelous. 🙂

What Is The Internet?

A friend recently asked me what the internet was. Evidently there are some strange theories floating around out there, such as the one Jon Stewart mocks in this clip:

So I gave her an explanation and she said she thought some other non-technical friends might appreciate it, so here it is.

Your computer has a few key components — a CPU, a hard drive, RAM, and an Operating System. Everything on your computer is completely obedient to your Operating System.

If you have two or more computers in your house, you can set up a network between them. When you set up a network, you’re basically adding additional components to your computer. But these additional components are obedient to different Operating Systems than your own.

So your Operating System has to ask the other computer’s Operating System for permission before it does anything like read a file from the other computer’s hard drive.

To set up a network, you need to tell the computers two ground rules: what “language” to speak with one another and how to find other computers on the network.

The Internet is the largest network of computers ever created. There is a standard language (TCP/IP) and a standard way to find other computers (the unique IP address that every computer on the internet is assigned).

Whenever you log in to a wireless network, for example, you are assigned a temporary IP address that any computer on the internet could use to talk to you. Permanently-connected computers such as webservers get permanent IP addresses.

So when we talk about the internet, we’re really talking about every computer in the world that has a legimitate IP address and knows how to talk to other computers using TCP/IP.

As a language, TCP/IP is too generic to be useful for most of the tasks we are interested in. So there are additional dialacts called “protocols” which computers can use to do things like view web pages.

To view web pages, computers talk using HTTP — Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. That’s what the http:// in front of a web address is all about. To upload or download files computers use FTP — File Transfer Protocol.

There are a lot of different protocols.

So when you type http://news.google.com/index.html into your browser address bar, what’s really happening is that your Operating System connects to the Internet using TCP/IP and asks a more significant computer what the IP address of news.google.com is.

Then it uses HTTP to talk to the Operating System of the computer at that IP address and asks for permission to read the file index.html. The remote Operating System uses HTTP to answer “Sure” and then passes the file along. Your computer then displays the file in your browser.

And that’s essentially what the internet is and how it works.

Stanford Grads In Unexpected Places

As someone raised Episcopalian I tend to feel sorrow whenever I read about the Episcopal church in the news. The global Anglican communion is doing okay, but the American denomination has really jumped the tracks since I was born.

In case you haven’t heard, the Episcopal Church in America just elected its first female primate ever — Katharine Jefferts Schori. That’s not the source of my sorrow — I firmly believe in the ministry of women (as does my denomination).

Here’s where the sorrow comes in: she’s apparently an advocate of ordaining openly gay priests and bishops. So her election was sort of a slap in the face to the worldwide Anglican communion, a significant portion of which seems prepared to write Ichabod over the door of the Episcopalian church.

After the usual sigh that escapes my lips when seeing the Episcopal church in the headlines, one detail leapt out at me: Bishop Schori graduated with a degree in biology from Stanford in 1974. Thanks to purgatorio for putting that information where it caught my eye.

Those darn Stanford alumni–they just keep showing up in the news. Sometimes for good and sometimes for bad, but always making a difference.

Things Which Interested Glen Last Week

Things I bookmarked last week on del.icio.us.

Disclaimer: these links are posted automatically using the excellent yawd hack and are merely things that were interesting enough to bookmark for future reference–I may or may not agree with the views expressed by the linked pages. In fact, I may not have even read them yet.

Some Gal Walking Through One Of Our Videos

I’m always amazed at how putting videos online has exposed Chi Alpha to people who would never otherwise darken the door of our gatherings. For example, this gal was walking through the background of an interview I did with Dr. William Lane Craig and noticed herself when later watching the video. She then blogged about it and it got back to me. What a small and crazy construct the internet is…

Anyway, I should mention that she curses in this post. If you prefer not to read profanity then just skip reading the link and trust me that she mentions the video and links to the Chi Alpha @ Stanford website.

Alas, she seems to have been unpersuaded by Dr. Craig’s arguments.

Some Thoughts On Jesus and History

An article in the Stanford Daily today caught my attention: Jesus Never Lived, Speaker Says.

My first thought was a bit carnal — how come our events don’t get the same coverage in the Daily? We almost certainly draw more people (as when Dr. Bill Craig lectured on the existence of God to a crowd of hundreds) and our views are certainly controversial (God exists, Jesus is God, sin is real, salvation is possible, etc).

My second thought was more focused: I should respond to this. I hear more and more students talking about the existence of Jesus as though there is some real controversy, so I shouldn’t let this pass without comment.

Now I wasn’t at the talk, so I don’t know exactly what the speaker said. All I know is what the article claims the speaker said. He could have been considerably more effective at making his point than the article seems to indicate. This isn’t, strictly speaking, a critique of the speaker so much as a reflection on the whole notion of Jesus being a make-believe person.

According to the article, there are two clues that Jesus never existed:
1) Paul didn’t talk about the details of Jesus’ life
2) The stories about Jesus sound pretty amazing.

So Paul didn’t talk about the details of Jesus’ life in his letters. I find this unsurprising given that I, an ordained Pentecostal missionary, rarely do so in my own letters. Even when writing letters devoted to theology I rarely talk about Jesus’ life the way that the speaker seemed to assume that Paul should have:

“Paul never discusses Jesus’ family, his deeds, where he went or where he came from,” Carrier said. “He never discusses any of his confrontations with the authorities, nor any disputes about what he taught. He says Jesus became flesh, was crucified and buried, but he never says when or where or positions these events in any historical context.”

I rarely bring up these details because they are assumed to be the background for the conversation, in much the same way that I rarely mention the details of George Bush’s life when discussing his politics. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in or am unaware of the fact that he has daughters — it just means that I don’t always consider them germane.

To insist that Paul should have mentioned such details as evidence that he believed Jesus was a real person seems quite arbitrary to me, especially given that he mentions Jesus by name 198 times with absolutely no indication that he’s referring to a made-up individual. No one would argue that I don’t believe in George Bush on such grounds, and so I don’t see why we should think that this is evidence that Paul didn’t believe in Jesus.

As to Jesus’ life sounding pretty amazing — ya think? That sort of seems to be the point. The claim that Jesus was God in human form almost requires that certain amazing events occur throughout his life. So I sort of scratch my head when the guest lecturer says:

“Jesus conforms so closely to the criterion of a mythic hero the probability that he was a mythic hero increases substantially,” he said. “There are 22 features that have been identified by scholars that are commonly shared by many mythic heroes. They can be ranked with a score according to how many features they have. Jesus clearly scores at least 19 out of 22.”

…

Jesus scores higher on this scale than almost all other heroes, including Hercules and Romulus, Carrier said. Only Oedipus scores higher.

“Jesus competes for second place only with Theseus and Moses,” he said. “Everyone who scores more than 11 on this scale is most likely mythical. No historical figures who accumulated some of these features by chance or legend, such as Alexander the Great or Augustus Caesar, scores even as high as 11.”

Well of course he scores quite high. That’s like pointing out that NBA players are tall and athletic. How do you think they score all those points? Jesus being extraordinary is simply evidence that he was extraordinary. Whether he was extraordinary by not existing or extraordinary by being God is the question the guest speaker wished to address — but his argument does nothing to tip the balance.

Against these feeble arguments stands the scholarly consensus that there was actually a man named Jesus. Why is there such a consensus? Because in addition to the Bible, there is plenty of external evidence that Jesus lived. For example:

There’s a very helpful (although incomplete) article summarizing these and other extrabiblical sources about Jesus which includes a discussion of the reliability of the Josephus text.

I think the reporter was wise to include this disclaimer the guest speaker offered:

Despite this evidence, Carrier was quick to point out that this is just a theory.

“We need to go out and interact with the community and see if it stands up to the evidence,” he said. “I’m not here declaring that this is absolutely true and it would be foolish to deny it. We’re not at that stage yet.

“The normal procedure is to assume that a person who is claimed to be historical is historical,” he continued, “unless there is a reason to doubt it. I believe this is an appropriate principle. For example, merely lacking evidence is not enough of an argument for someone not existing historically. You need actual evidence for them being mythified.”

I am still awaiting such evidence.