Shallow grace and a truncated religion

The following letters were sent to a couple of writers of a Christian magazine I subscribe to. I left out names because I'm not sure what is legal to print without someones permission.


Dear Mr. O
Thanks so much for your article, "Class Without Rooms." I well remember taking an Old Testament class in college, thinking that we were going to study the Old Testament from a literary perspective (it was a literature credit). It turned out to be simply a running monologue of one derogatory comment after another from the professor who was determined to persuade us that the Bible was all nonsense. Of course we were all young, inexperienced, plastic-thinking students whose primary concern was to get a good grade. How I wish I could go back to that class with my present knowledge and maturity and challenge the inept arguments and unsupported assertions of that professor!
My son is 14 and I am already thinking how to best serve his post high school academic needs without wasting his time and my money by enrolling him in a college whose objectives are to indoctrinate rather than educate. I'm glad to hear about on line education and I will certainly be considering its possibilities.
I found your article to be relevant and timely. I thank your for it and I thank you and all the people who make - magazine possible. It is a refreshing oasis in the midst of the amoral, nihilist, and secular beliefs that produce most magazines. God bless you all.

Sincerely,
Sharon Henning


Sharon,

Thanks. For your son in several years, consider online education but also look into the few colleges that(are) not propaganda mills. The King's College, New York City, where I'm now provost, is one.
M
(I looked up King's College on the web. Although my sons interests lean toward technology, it looks like an excellent liberal arts school that will equip young people to confront secular worldviews with intelligent arguments as well as deepen their own knowledge and faith. I recommend looking into this school for any believer seeking degrees in politics, philosophy or economics: http://www.tkc.edu/abouttkc/aboutnyc.html)


Ms. S,
I wanted to drop you a brief note to tell you how much I appreciate and agree with what you said in your article, "Control that Tongue". I get frustrated with professing Christians that believe the Christian experience is all about God loving us but don't understand that it is also about us loving God.
If we love the Lord with all our hearts, minds and souls, we gladly and ardently wish to live a life of obedience to Him. I believe the fallacious thinking that causes people to interpret grace as a license to sin without consequence is due to an ignorance concerning what the Bible says. (My people die for lack of knowledge Hosea 4:6).
I also believe that many professing Christians have filled their minds with ungodly thinking due to what they are reading and viewing on TV and other media, it seems their consciences have been seared. As long as I'm preaching, let me frankly say that our society has heretofore made it comfortable for many to claim to be Christians without risk or sacrifice to themselves which might explain why many worldly people enjoy calling themselves Christians. I've always thought that if great persecution comes to American Christians the only good thing to come of it will be that unsaved people will stop calling themselves Christians because the price will be too high.
Well, so much for brief and I hope I did not come across as overly negative. Your article really struck a chord with me. Thanks for writing your article and God bless you and your family.

Sincerely,
Sharon Henning


Dear Ms. Henning,

Thank you for that "preaching." It hit the spot. Sounds like a page from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's books.
Quite an insight you have there about what would happen if persecution ever hit the country.
Blessings.


It is encouraging to know (of) people who have an uncompromising faith. Today at lunch I got into a "discussion" with a colleague about the inerrancy of the Bible. She started explaining the meaning of "666" based on what she heard on a TV show. I began to tell her that the Bible said something different. She interrupted me to say that the Bible was subject to each person's interpretation. I maintained that the Bible is not vague or unclear and is not any one's guess as to its meaning. She insisted it was and she wasn't going to argue with me because it would be like arguing with the pumpkin that was the centerpiece for our table.
This lady is attending a large Southern Baptist church and has been going to a weekly Bible study there. I happen to know many people who go to that church and I know that it is a conservative denomination and that the official position is that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. I would like to ask that woman to go ask her pastor's opinion about interpreting scripture. Maybe I will, but I'll have to wait until I can do it out of love because right now I'm too angry.

Last night at BSF we were learning about the history of the Samaritans. It seemed that they liked to pick and choose which part of the Bible they believed in as well. (They only accepted the first four books.)The study observed that they (the Samaritans) had a "truncated religion because they had a truncated Bible."
That's what many people have today. This isn't court of law so I'll presume motives. If what the Bible says is any one's guess than we don't have to do what it says. We can live however we feel like and still feel spiritual about ourselves.
Pretty shallow grace if you ask me. In fact it's not grace at all, it's deception and it's going to lead people down the same road to judgment and condemnation as an unbeliever.

What is man?

My friend, Lisa and I were in our tent reading. We had taken our sons camping out in Glen Rose and had spent the day walking around the park, going to the river to see the dinosaur tracks and visiting the Creation Museum. All in all it had been a good day. It started to drizzle in the afternoon and began raining hard enough that we had to retreat to our tent where we spent the rest of the afternoon reading the books that we had purchased from the Creation Museum. These books were wonderful and brought out the beauty of God's creation, filling me with a deep sense of how awesome God is.
Eventually it became too dark to read so we just lay down on our pads. Derek and Ethan had already fallen asleep. Around 11:00pm that night a couple in the next tent started talking. They had actually been talking in the background the whole time we were in the tent but because we had been reading we hadn't been paying much attention. Now that we were ready to go to sleep, we couldn't help but hear them. That and the fact that they were getting loud.
It was obvious from their slurred speech and the content of their conversation that they had been on the razzle for awhile and now it was taking effect.
The couple was a man and a woman, maybe married or not, and they began to have an argument. It went something like this:
“You know you paid me a hundred dollars to -”
“I did not pay you a hundred dollars to-”
“Yesh you did! You wanen a pay me hunerd dollars to-”
“I di' no'. I ne'er ash you for hunner' dollarsh....!
This went on for what seemed like hours. As I lay there, a captive audience, listening to this drivel I began to think of God as the Author of creation.

When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars,which You have ordained,
What is man that you are mindful of him?

I began to reflect how God, our Creator, has made our brains with such infinite complexity and man (some men) have chosen to drink themselves so incoherent that they can hardly string two or three words together to form a semi-cohesive sentence.

And the son of man that you visit him?

Then I got to thinking about others who don't kill off their brain cells with alcohol but never develop the potential of their minds out of intellectual laziness. They'd rather feed it with what I call “media baby pap” by what they read, watch on TV and listen to on the radio.


For You have made him a little lower than the angels
And You have crowned him with glory and honor.

And the busyness. So much running around there's no time to stop and reflect. No time for philosophy. How does the poem on my mother's refrigerator go?

No time, no time to study
to meditate or pray
yet much time for doing
in a fleshly, worldly way
No time for things eternal
But much for things of earth
Things important set aside
For things of little worth.
Some things, it's true are needful
But first things must come first
and what replaces God's own word
Of God it shall be cursed.

Being a childen's leader in BSF is exhausting. There's the 6:30am Leadership meetings on SATURDAY MORNINGS! (5:00am on Fridays once a month, like this week). And, of course, the Bible study itself on Monday evenings. Wow. What a commitment! God should be so grateful (tongue in cheek).
But then there are the rewards. The rich, ever deepening intimacy with the Creator of the heavens and the earth. And the development of my intellect. People don't talk about that, as though that shouldn't be an objective in our Christian living. Well, it may not be an objective but it certainly is a consequence of spending time sacrificially studying God's word, praying and fellowshipping with fellow Christians. God made our minds. He took delight in doing so. What He makes is good. Is it not both a privilege and a duty to glorify God through using all He's given us, including developing our ability to think on higher planes?

Dear God, I thank you for your generous gifts, including my mind. May I use it to the best of my ability according to Your will and purpose. In Jesus' name, Amen.
(Scripture: Psalms 8:3-5)

Grace, grace and more grace

I've reprinted a letter I sent to my sister.


Hi Shawna,
Phyllis just sent me the photos of Derek and me. I now know that you were being nice in saying I "looked different" on the horse and horses "make people looked squished down".
What you were doing is trying to find a polite way of saying, "What's up with Sharon's big ol' pot belly?"
Good night! How much weight have I gained?!
I don't think I look like that in the mirror. And don't try reasoning that photos distort someone's body because there's nothing to compare it to. I was on a horse, for goodness sake! I have got to lose more weight.
So I guess the last laugh is on me. There I was making fun of the chubby women rodeo riders when all along you were on the line listening to me thinking, "hmm...maybe she without cellulite should throw the first stone."
Well, I've been ill these last two weeks so I'm not working out for a little while.

On a more worthy subject: BSF is going really well although I think we have not been without Satan's attack. First, Iris, one of my co-children's leader, left all her notes at home so she had to adapt her discovery lesson.
Then there was me. I had to do the closing activity which is basically to get the kids to memorize next week's scripture. I took the scripture to school and, with the aid of the deaf ed interpreters, learned how to put the scripture into sign language as a memory aid to make the lesson more interactive and interesting. For the record the scripture was:

"No one has seen God, but God, the one and only
who is at the Father's side, has made Him known." (John 1:18)

I had it so beautifully prepared. So simple yet just a lovely visual representation of God's word. I get to the Bible study that night, rarin' to go only to find out I had the wrong Bible lesson. The scripture I was supposed to teach the children was actually:

"Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of His disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name." (John 20:30, 31)

Well, well, well. Did I teach the kids and adults how to use American Sign Language to recite scripture? Nope.
Did I throw a bunch of English words together and sign John 20:30-31? Yep. Did God enable me to use sign language to enable every one to learn and memorize the scripture? Yes, He did. As I was going through the activity, God kept reminding me that the object was not to teach these children sign language but help them to memorize the assigned Bible verses and I can say with satisfaction that we all had the scripture memorized in fifteen minutes. Not only that but we could sign the verses without speaking, which actually looked pretty cool.
Do we serve a great God who's love everlasting assists us in the minutest details of our lives? Yes! Yes! and Yes!

One thing our teaching leader at bible study said was that Jesus' death on the cross was not only to cover our sins but to pour grace in our lives every day and every moment. Grace, grace and more grace. Grace covered me Monday night at Bible study. That is my wish to each reader out there.
May you have God's grace. Grace, grace and more grace.

The Secret Holocaust Diaries

The Secret Holocaust Diaries are the memoirs of Nonna Bannister. Nonna grew up in a wealthy Russian family with ties to the Tzar at an unfortunate time. The Bolshevik Revolution took place some time earlier and Stalin had come into power while Nonna was still a young girl. As living conditions worsened, her father, Yevgeny, sought an escape for their family. So when the Germans invaded Russia in 1941 he kept his family in their residence even though Stalin had ordered all Russians to move farther east. While this decision would mean being labeled as traitors by the Russian government, Yevgeny hoped that the Germans would provide an escape from a regime that was destroying its own people. (Nonna describes going to church with her grandmother and walking past hundreds of people lined up outside the building begging for food- part of Stalin's Holodomor, genocide by starvation that took up to 8 million lives.)
As it turns out the Germans did provide a way out of Russia but in a horrible way. Yevgeny was brutally murdered by German soldiers and Nonna and her mother, Anna, were taken away in cattle cars to German slave labor camps. (She also had a brother but he was taken away to join the Russian army earlier and she never learned of his fate.) Sadly, Nonna was the only one to survive; she and her mother were separated when Anna was taken to a concentration camp for attempting to rescue a Jewish baby from German guards. Her death there is too grievous for me to write here.
After the war, Nonna eventually made it to the United States and settled in Tennessee, marrying a nice southern man and leading a “normal life”. All her nightmarish experiences are kept hidden away in a trunk in the attic. In her old age, Nonna showed her husband her diaries, written in several languages and with the help of him and Christian publishing editors her story was translated into English and put in book form. Her request that it not be published until after her death was honored.
As terrible as her experiences are, Nonna does not fail to infuse her story with the love and joy she knew while with her family in Russia and she clings to those cherished memories of her beloved parents and brother throughout the horror that she endured at the hands of two despots. What also never falters is her Christian faith. It is interesting to see a stout Orthodox Russian eventually join a Southern Baptist church and if she were alive, I would love to ask her about her opinions of the two drastically different denominations.
Nonna Bannister's story is as heart rending as it is gruesome; nevertheless, hers is a story that must be told and preserved.

More bookmarks

I am feeling little under the weather. Friday started at 5am with a Bible study, I'm now in Children's leadership for Bible Study Fellowship-an international Bible study that is the best study of God's word that I've ever been in; then straight to school. After school, I had to drop Derek off at swimming while I raced to work out, then back to get him and friends to take them to Team Impact at 7pm.
Saturday I had to clean my dirty house. I woke up Sunday morning with a pounding headache and have spent most of the day in bed. Hopefully, after consuming huge amounts of Vitamin C and Airbourne I will make it through tomorrow-especially since it is the first night of BSF and I'm giving the Bible lesson. For those of you who pray, we need more teaching leaders, we have children on a waiting list.
So I'm just listing a few more of my bookmarks without explanation. I am currently reading, "The Holocaust Diaries". This book is about a young Russian girl who belonged to a wealthy Tsarian family, how their life changed under Stalin's regime and how they eventually ended up in a German slave labor camp. I've only read half so I will review it next week.

Book reviews: Two different perspectives on life under the Nazis: In My Hands; On Hitler's Mountain

I have seasons of interest. Lately I have developed an interest in things pertaining to the first half of this century and the world events that took place.
The books I have been reading are nonfiction accounts of different people's lives during World War II. I have also bought, but not yet read, a book on the rise of Communism in Russia. I don't know why I have developed an interest in such events except that I am striving to gain an insight in how people come to be in countries where all their freedoms and rights are taken from them and they find themselves living under the regime of a totalitarian government.

My questions are: Do people freely hand their freedoms over to despots? Are they deceived into doing so? Do they find themselves pulled under by a current that's too strong to swim against? Is it apathy? Desperation? Can we recognize the symptoms if it happens in our own country? Do the writers of these memoirs now possess insight as to how things came to be in their country and how it can be avoided in the country they've immigrated to (all the writers I've read so far have immigrated to the US)?

Finally, as those of you who know me, I am Christian and have an unashamedly Christian viewpoint. That will be obvious from my reviews. On the chance that there are people reading my blog that do not share my faith, please do not jump to the conclusion that my personal angle must be biased. Any viewpoint is from the angle of that individual's personal beliefs. Therefore, my opinion of secular viewpoints are that they are no less biased, but simply from a stance that God doesn't play a key role in our lives while I know Him to be the Entity that gives meaning and purpose to all things.



Into My Hands by Irene Opdyke

The first book I've read was a wonderful, riveting account of a young Polish girl's experience of the Germans invading her country. I read this book in two days because I could not put it down.
Irene Opdyke vividly recounts the innocence of her childhood, the happiness of her family as she grows up and trains to be a nurse. While at the hospital one day, the Nazis invade her town and life as she knows it is over. She doesn't get to go back home. Instead, she and the other hospital staff find themselves running for their lives and hiding in a forest for the night. The next morning one of the Polish generals comes to them and, rather than giving them the comfort and solace they were hoping for, announces that Poland no longer exists as a country and that they are now a part of Germany.
Can you just imagine that? You go to work in the morning little knowing that you're not coming home again? Not because you died but because there is no home to go to. You no longer even have a country.

Irene doesn't see her family for three years. In her efforts to escape the Germans she is apprehended by the Russians where she is forced to work as a nurse in one of their hospitals. Eventually she makes it back to her hometown and because she is lucky enough to look and speak German, she is given a job as housekeeper of an SS officer.

Now here's the really good part. While she keeps house for this feared Nazi officer, she is simultaneously taking care of eleven Jews in the basement of his house.

What I particularly like about Opdyke's narration is that she has no one-dimensional good and bad guys. Yes, she meets with and suffers at the hands of some monstrous, Russians and Germans; but she also meets Russians and Germans who are capable of compassion and kindness. Such as the German cook in the hotel occupied by the Nazis who, with a knowing eye, gives Irene several coats when she asks for just a couple for "her sister and herself".

Opdyke recounts her horrific experiences in a way that causes you to vicariously partake of them. Not a bad thing for most of us sheltered Americans.




On Hitler's Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood by Irmgard A. Hunt

This book is also very interesting for what it reveals. Several things stuck out for me. One, Irmgard Hunt tells of how Hitler attempts to replace the Christian religion with Nordic and Celt beliefs because the latter are more "authentically German". For instance, during the Christmas and Easter holidays, the German people are encouraged to practice the ancient pagan customs that Christian missionaries had imposed "Christian meaning" to such as winter solstice and fertility rites in the spring rather than celebrating Christ's birth and crucifixion/resurrection.

According to Hart, what she and the Germans around her were most aware of was their own hardship and deprivation. She claims they were ignorant of the holocaust and the concentration camps. Given that she was very young during much of it and also that she lived near Hitler's compound it is possible that she and the people of Berchesgaden were more sheltered from the nightmarish realities that other German citizens must have known about.

What I value about this book is the insight it reveals in how a people could allow someone like Hitler to rise to power in the first place. We can understand some of the reasons through the lens of time. For one, the first World War had left the German nation utterly destitute and desperate. Initially, Hitler seemed to improve the economy and for a time things got better. Then, however, as Nazi Germany started invading its neighbors, Germany was soon sunk back into poverty as WW II took its toll. Hart never explains how the average German reasoned the need for war in the first place. Were they led to believe that they were the ones being invaded? How did they become persuaded to fight in a war when no one was attacking them? This is never made clear nor does Hart ponder it herself- at least in this book.

She does make clear how the blind devotion to Hitler and the almost brainless unquestioning obedience to anyone in authority affected the German citizens. I would like to read something that explains how they came to think like that.

Overall, this book does not draw me into the sufferings of the people as does Opdyke's book, except at the beginning when Hart describes the harsh conditions her grandparents and mother have to endure in the aftermath of WWI.

Interestingly enough, in reading the question and answer section at the end of the book, Hart believes the same thing could happen in the US if "fundamental religionists" are allowed into power. My question to her is, how do you define fundamental religionists, and what do you fear they can do?"
She also expresses a fear that these "fundamentalists" are trying to make "targets of hatred" out of terrorists and Moslems in the same way that Hitler made targets of the Jews. Now what the heck does she mean by that? For one, the Jews were not a threat to Germany. Terrorists are a threat to the security of our country. Has she already forgotten 9/11?

All of this calls to mind that someone can live through something as profound as a totalitarian regime but possess no insight as to how it can be prevented again when their own secular ideologies shape their thinking. If you read her biography at the end of the book, you'll know what I mean.
Overall, it was an interesting read and I still recommend it although I think there must be better sources of information of life under Hitler out there.

Never Enough Bookmarks

I guess I'm being lazy. School is back in session and once again I'm coming home exhausted with just enough energy to make myself a cup of tea and read a book on my back porch. I'm currently reading a fascinating book entitled, "On Hitler's Mountain". It is a first person narrative of a women who grew up in Berchtesgaden near Hitler's Obersalzberg while he was in power. It gives a unique perspective from an average German citizen's point of view during Hitler's rule and how they were deceived, or allowed themselves to be deceived by him, until they could no longer deny the monstrosity they unleashed upon themselves and the world. I haven't finished so I'll have to tell more later, so far it's a worthy read.
What I have here are my different bookmarks. I never have enough bookmarks.