Culture
Larisa Kline
Two thrillers that don’t quite hit the mark.
Idris Elba in 'No Good Deed'
Christianity TodaySeptember 19, 2014
“Un-scary, un-sure of its theology, in-consistent in its methods” are the words Crosswalk’s Shawn McEvoy uses to describe the newest Christian thriller/suspense The Remaining. The film is an alternative to the upcoming Left Behind reboot coming out next month. McEvoy sums the film as one that “hopes to offer a ‘Christian horror’ thrill with a message via another take on the Rapture and those it, um, leaves behind.” Despite its decision to tell a familiar story without changing much of the story, McEvoy believes the movie’s biggest problem is its struggle between pleasing horror film lovers and Christian moviegoers. The film teeters between the two audiences and makes a major (in McEvoy’s mind, bad) decision not to show the monsters it hypes up: “This film may have the weight of Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions behind it, but a big budget it does not.” The Washington Post’s Mark Jenkins agrees with McEvoy completely, saying The Remaining is “a low-budget, low-impact attempt to rewrite the Book of Revelation as a horror flick.” Interestingly enough, Jenkins believes the “fundamental problem” with the film is the actual story. He notes, “The movie relies on the instinctual human fear of death, but its message is that dying is a promotion.”
Fans of Idris Elba (most famously known for the BBC’s Luther) and Think Like A Man’s Taraji P. Henson might have been looking forward to No Good Deed, but Crosswalk’s Christa Banister wonders why the talented actors “would sign up for something so dreadful.” Even though the average horror story causes audiences to roll their eyes at the protagonist’s stupidity, Banister says the only way to make it through the entirety of the film is to suspend your disbelief. “For whatever reason, the writers made sure every single woman tosses her usual feminine intuition to the wind once they encounter the elusive Colin Evans (Elba).” One of the biggest disappointments Banister noticed was the absolute ridiculousness of the story; unfortunately, “in the absence of unique ideas, filmmakers resort to a big, fat plot twist no one could've predicted.” Variety’s Dennis Harvey agrees that “despite competent performances” by Elba and Henson, “the dialogue and situations in Aimee Lagos’ script are too routine to create much excitement.” In an extremely short review, Harvey brushes aside No Good Deed as “dullish and forgettable.”
Larisa Kline is an intern with Christianity Today Movies and a student at The King’s College in New York City.
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Interview by Katelyn Beaty
That’s the mystery the Gender Parity Project, whose results debut this weekend, sets out to solve.
Christianity TodaySeptember 19, 2014
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One striking finding of the Gender Parity Project—the largest study to date of women leading evangelical organizations (nonprofits, not churches)—is that the men in such organizations identify as egalitarians. At least when it comes to women leading in society, writ large. Janel Curry, provost of Gordon College, and Amy Reynolds, professor of sociology at Wheaton College, found in their two-year study (funded by the Imago Dei Fund) that 93 percent of the men surveyed agreed with the statement, “Men and women have freedom to pursue their gifts and callings without regard to gender roles. Men and women should share leadership roles within society.”
So why do women hold 21 percent of board positions, 21 percent of paid leadership positions, and 16 percent of CEO positions in the evangelical organizations surveyed (about half the number of women leading nonprofits broadly)? Curry and Reynolds posit that, while a few organizations explicitly say they want only male leaders, or belong to denominations that do, the problem may be that most organizations say nothing at all. “At one point we tried to look at mission statements and strategic plans . . . and it was amazing how few clearly state whether leadership positions are open to both men and women,” says Reynolds. “Given the different views in the evangelical world on this, we found that fairly troubling, that you could not find that information out.”
Still, Curry and Reynolds say that most nonprofits surveyed want more women leaders, if for pragmatic rather than theological reasons. “When we went to the Christian Leadership Alliance (CLA) conference, there was really no defensiveness about this issue,” says Curry. “The response was, ‘Give us the tools. Tell us what we need to do to help women move into these positions.’ ”
The study itself doesn’t provide the tools, but it does identify a structural gap—and, Curry and Reynolds hope, provoke more organizations to be explicit about wanting women leaders. They spoke with managing editor of CT magazine Katelyn Beaty about their study, whose findings are being presented today at the Religion Newswriters Association conference.
To gauge the gender breakdown of these organizations, you used Form 990 data (tax forms), which asks organizations to list employees making more than $100,000, as well as board members and other key employees. Why use this metric to gauge something as broad as leadership?
Reynolds: We know that the measure of leadership we have is just a proxy for the measure we would ideally want, but we were most interested in having a study that measured as close to a full set of evangelical populations as possible. And since we knew we wanted 1,500 different organizations, we were looking for something that would be the same across them, which is what led us to the 990 data. On the 990, the leadership it lists is that over $100,000 [paid leadership positions] and board members. We also tried to code out non-leadership positions. But we went with that because we wanted a way to operationalize it, that we could do the study five years in the future and use the same metric, and use the same metric across organizations.
Curry: The $100,000 mark was merely there because the 990 tax form uses that, and we tried to compensate for that by looking at other data, because there are some religious traditions that would be paying less than that, so we tried to get them into the study.
The reason for looking at leadership positions is that there have been quite a few studies done on the gender climate of organizations and how women move up. But there really has not been something among the evangelical population about actual women who are in leadership, and factors that led to their success, their being able to be there.
You sent the survey to 425 organizations, and you wanted to ensure that the organizations were part of a larger evangelical umbrella group, such as the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). From those 425 groups, you received 698 responses from men and women representing 135 organizations. Which groups and which people responded the strongest?
Curry: The people who were asked to respond were those in the top 3 tiers of leadership in those organizations. So the survey asked somebody in the organization to identify the top three layers of leadership, so that was the group that filled out the survey.
Reynolds: Because the top leaders knew this was a survey aimed at issues of gender in leadership, they nominated more women than men. But actually with the survey, we had more than 40 percent of the people nominated being women, so that reflects organizations wanting to give us the names of all women that could maybe be conceived of in the leadership realm.
Curry: This reflected almost a misunderstanding, that men in leadership weren’t being asked to fill it out, so we had to clarify that both men and women were being asked to fill it out, because it’s an issue that affects both of them.
Women in leadership is not a women’s-only issue.
Curry: Exactly. And I would say that’s the tipping point that we’re at. I do think men are starting to understand and become vocal on behalf of women because they need the skills of women. Everybody’s skills and gifts are needed in order to achieve the mission.
Reynolds: The best response rate was among the CCCU—more than half of those organizations responded. The other groups—development groups, student ministries, large ECFA organizations with budgets over $10 million, and ECFA groups with budgets under $10 million—were more similar to one another, with about a quarter responding.
Which type of evangelical organization tends to be doing the best when it comes to gender parity? The worst?
Reynolds: In the nonprofit sector in general, women do better in smaller organizations—as the size of the organization goes up, the number of women in leadership goes down. We find that same dynamic in our study, but if anything our numbers don’t look as different as they do in the nonprofit world at large. So the largest nonprofits we looked at, while they aren’t doing very well, we don’t see that same degree of variation where the budget seems to be this key part of the story.
The group that stands out—student ministries, 15 of them, and these are just ministries that are part of the ECFA—their numbers are lower at every level.
That surprised me because of how many women leaders I can think of in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF).
Reynolds: They are the exception. They are the ones that have done well.
Curry: That’s because at the very top level, Alec Hill is a spokesman for women, and IVCF is clear that they are supportive of women in leadership. That’s one of the things that we found out, or a best practice, if you want: For an organization to be quite explicit about its view, whether it’s a complementarian or an egalitarian view.
Reynolds: So many people we surveyed experience a mismatch between their own views on gender and leadership and other leaders’ views. At one point we tried to look at mission statements and strategic plans of a subset of these organizations, and it was amazing how few clearly state whether leadership positions are open to both men and women. Given the different views in the evangelical world on this, we found that fairly troubling, that you could not find that information out.
You found that about 1 in 4 (24 percent) of all organizations surveyed have no women on their boards. Similarly, among the organizations whose 990s do list their top 3 paid leaders, more than half have no women in top positions. What accounts for organizations having a complete absence of women on their boards and among top leaders?
Graph Note: It is harder to assess variation among the number of paid employees. Of our sample of over 1,481 organizations, only 387 had at least 3 paid top leaders listed on their 990 forms. Of those, 56 percent (over half) have no women holding those top positions (while 12 percent had 40 percent-plus females on their paid leadership).
Reynolds: Some of these we could tie to groups that are associated with a denomination with specific views about which gender should hold leadership roles, and they have all men on the board, so it seems intentional. But most of these groups in the ECFA, it’s not actually clear what their theology is. So it’s hard to tell, is it on principle, or is it because it just wasn’t a priority? It’s probably some of both, because we’re finding that the boards that have a high number of women on their boards are often very intentional about that. But we haven’t parsed out how many are because they don’t really care, or because they do care and that’s how they want it—women or no women.
Curry: It’s easier to see the pattern in terms of who does have women, especially in the CCCU, because you have institutions that are affiliated with certain Christian traditions. For example, Wesleyans (Free Methodists), the Church of God, the Anabaptist tradition, tend to have more women in leadership. It’s interesting how important that denominational heritage is, because the schools are not always on the liberal end, and they might be culturally very conservative, but somehow that tradition has carried on, that it’s more of an option than within other traditions.
I was struck by the graph that gauged complementarian vs. egalitarian views on family, church, and society. I wasn’t surprised to see that more women than men supported women’s and men’s equal roles in the family and church. What seems surprising is that nearly all men and women surveyed hold an egalitarian position when it comes to women’s roles in society: “Men and women have freedom to pursue their gifts and callings without regard to gender roles. Men and women should share leadership roles within society.” What does this finding portend for the gender parity you hope to see?
Option 1: “Men and women have freedom to pursue their gifts and callings without regard to gender roles. Men and women should share leadership roles within [family/church/society].”
Option 2: “Distinct gender roles are ordained by God, with men and women serving in ways that complement one another. Men should hold distinctive leadership roles within [family/church/society].”
Curry: It raises the question as to whether we’re losing women’s leadership gifts to the society at large, because it’s more acceptable for them to use those leadership gifts in the society than in the church. . . . for example, you see evangelical women running for political office, and that seems to be acceptable. We also wondered if the number of women leaders were low in student ministry because that work more closely aligns with church.
It's unclear whether leadership in evangelical organizations would fall under “church” or “society” leadership.
Reynolds: The University of Denver put out a 200-page report last year on women’s leadership across many sectors, and nonprofits is a sector, and religion is a sector, where they just look at churches. But the reality is, there are a lot of evangelical nonprofits, and nonprofits are a place where the church is very active in the world. But it doesn’t really get studied because it’s not seen as religious, but they are obviously different from regular nonprofits—the boundary between church and not-church is blurred. Part of the reason we separated this question out is that we wanted to see if people were consistent in their views about church and society. I was struck by how different the men are in their views on family/church and their views on society. I thought that society number would have been lower—I was surprised that when it comes to that society level, most men and most women supported women in leadership.
What did you find out about how leaders’ attitudes on women in leadership corresponded or didn’t correspond with their own churches?
If we run those numbers on the organizational level, 28 percent of women say they have more progressive views on gender than their churches do. But a similar number, 30 percent of women, say they have more progressive views about women in leadership than their organizations do. A book called Evangelical Christian Women (2003) reported many of these women are leaving the church, because they’re kind of told they can lead, perhaps they’re given a leadership position, but it’s clear there are mixed feelings about whether they should exercise it, and so they exit the church, and some even exit the faith. Many of the people involved in this study were passionate about it because we don’t want to lose women from the church. When we look at this finding, when over a quarter of women say they are in places where they have different views about how they can exercise their leadership gifts than others around them, do they just stay [in those organizations] for 40 or even 10 years?
Curry: When we presented at the 2014 CLA conference, there were many people saying, “We want women to come and they won’t.” So we want to know, what are the barriers both psychological and structural that keep them from stepping up?
Janel, you wrote in a column last week, “The study is not about empowering women but rather about fostering institutional change.” What’s the difference between the two?
Curry: Organizations, whether they are led by men or women, realize that they just need everyone’s gifts at the table, and ask how they can structure their institutions in order to make that happen. In the past, when it’s about women, it’s about making women assertive, but it’s all about women somehow trying to get in. I think it’s a more faithful view to say, “God calls us all. How can we structure our organizations to use everybody for his mission?”
In the article you noted that the male leaders of big-name evangelical organizations—CLA, ECFA, but also World Vision and IVCF—are pushing more urgently for widespread institutional change. Is this actually a new shift? Is this different from what you’ve seen from these organizations five or ten years ago?
Curry: I sense that it is. When we went to the CLA conference, there was really no defensiveness about this issue. The response was, “Give us the tools. Tell us what we need to do to help women move into these positions. What are the barriers, tell me, because I’ve asked them, and some won’t do it, and I know I need them.” At the CLA meeting, you see more women who are the head of missions organizations because they are the right person for the job, not worrying about whether it’s a woman or not, but, “This is the person that has the skills that we need at this point in time.” So that kind of urgency: “Let’s not let the fact that it’s a woman get in the way of getting the person we need to lead the organization.”
Janel, you mentioned that one "best practice" is for organizations to explicitly state their views on women in leadership. Beyond this, what are other best practices evangelical organizations might use if they want to draw a greater number of women leaders?
Curry: Being very intentional about board composition is important—it starts at the top. And men being advocates for women—their champions—in moving them up. Often we think about maternity policy, but when it comes to moving women into leadership, it may be different elements to best practices.
How might you respond to the charge that gender parity is really about political correctness, and that organizations should instead seek the most qualified candidate, regardless of gender?
Reynolds: I don’t see our project as being about [political correctness] at all. The reality is that the very low numbers of women leaders in these sectors—most dominated by women in their staff—suggests that institutional realities make leadership opportunities more available to men than they do to women. We want to help organizations encourage all people to use their gifts to build the kingdom. There are lots of organizations that want to see more women in leadership, and a primary goal of our work is to help them do that.
I would reject the assumption that more men are in leadership because they are more qualified, and sociological evidence shows that in the secular world, women also face a number of institutional and cultural barriers that hinder them from becoming leaders.
As you see women holding more leadership positions in these organizations, do you anticipate some men reacting negatively, even if silently, evidenced in a drop in attendance numbers or job application numbers?
Reynolds: There are a number of evangelical organizations that will still want men only to be in leadership. Those are still going to exist, and the purpose of our study is not to tell those organizations that they are wrong. The point of the study is for people who want more women in leadership to be able to facilitate that.
Curry: What you see in society at large is more partnership, not women dominating or men dominating, but more partnership. If Christian organizations don’t have more women in leadership, it becomes out of sync with society and starts to seem strange. But you can always get an imbalance and have too many women and not men. It’s about needing everybody.
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Study: Where Are the Women Leading Evangelical Organizations?
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Pastors
Daniel Darling
An Interview with Peter Greer and Chris Horst
Leadership JournalSeptember 19, 2014
Today we hear from Peter Greer and Chris Horst. Greer is president and CEO of HOPE International. Horst is the vice president of development at HOPE International. Together with the support of Anna Haggard, they coauthored Mission Drift and Entrepreneurship for Human Flourishing. We talked about what it means to stay focused on the mission God has for you and how easy it can be to drift away.
1) As an organization, you faced a crossroads at one point where you were forced to choose between a large donor and your core values. You ultimately chose to reject the funds and stay true to yourmission, but it was not without some serious soul-searching. What ultimately lead to your decision?
Several years ago, a large foundation offered us an ultimatum: We’ll fund you if you tone down the “Christian stuff.”
Cash-strapped, we really wanted to make this work, but this was when we began actively researching "drift." Ultimately, we decided to turn down the funds because we began to recognize how small decisions—when compounded over time—lead to "mission drift." We might have figured out a way to broker a deal with the donor while still protecting our core identity, but concluded this situation had real potential to pull us away from our full mission.
Researching mission drift, we discovered how we already had opened the door to drift through our hiring practices, and metrics, among other decisions.
2) Nonprofit organizations, especially evangelical ones, are constantly facing these kinds of decisions. You say in Mission Drift that it is not necessarily what happens in that moment of decision but a series of decisions and systems leading up to that moment that decide if a organization will stay true. Can you explain?
One hypothesis in Mission Drift is that small decisions matter. In physics, a theory for drift exists. The second law of thermodynamics states that in the natural order of the universe, things degenerate, rather than come together. For example, when a frying pan is taken off the stove, the energy of heat will diffuse in the air, leaving the pan cooler. Unless more energy is added—someone puts the frying pan back on the stove—it will lose its heat and return to room temperature.
We found that to be the norm within organizations, businesses, and in people’s personal lives. Particularly with parachurch organizations, walking the line of being faithfully, distinctively Christian is a daily challenge. If you are not intentional about small decisions, you will experience drift.
3) It seems some organizations stay on course long after their founder is dead, while others begin the eventual drift from their original mission. What keeps an organization on track for the long haul?
One of Harvard’s founding documents states: “To … consider well that the main end of your life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ.” At one time, Harvard’s purpose was to equip their students to share the gospel. We’re not here to challenge what Harvard is today. We’re here to contend with what Harvard is not.
Here’s the reality: mission drift is the natural course for organizations. Though pervasive, mission drift is not inevitable. Along our journey we have discovered several organizations—like Compassion, InterVarsity, Cru, among others—staying "mission true." What sets mission true organizations apart? First, we discovered that mission true organizations believe that mission drift will happen unless they safeguard against it. Even more important, they believe that a Christ-centered identity is worth protecting.
4) Some organizations stay true to their values, but ultimately become ineffective and irrelevant. How do healthy organizations marry principle and performance?
Mission true organizations understand how to distinguish their mission from their means. Consider the contrast between one organization that drifted from its original mission to one that stayed mission true. A man named George Williams started a Bible study in 1844 for displaced young men on the streets of London. These Bible studies became a movement known as the Young Man’s Christian Association (YMCA). But along the way, the YMCA substituted its mission—to share the Gospel—for one of its means: fitness centers. We love the YMCA, both the song and the fitness center, but in many communities where the Y works in the United States, it no longer has the same mission.
Contrast that with Young Life. In the early days Young Life ministered to high school students with evangelistic barbershop quartets. Men in pinstripes singing in four-part harmony wouldn’t capture the imaginations of today’s teenagers. Instead Young Life has taken to cell phones and social media. But they haven’t forgotten why they exist: today they still proclaim Christ to students. Though their means have changed, they continue to remain faithful to their core purpose.
If you are not intentional about small decisions in your personal goals, marriage, and business, you will experience drift.
5) If you could give Christian leaders one piece of advice as they lead their organizations in the 21st century, what would that be?
Today, Christians recognize the importance of Good Samaritanism—there’s been a rise of those advocating for justice, poverty alleviation, and education. But have we forgotten that our most precious asset is the gospel message, one that brings reconciliation, hope, and redemption?
We must not forget that we are not just world-class humanitarians or educators or urban ministers or philanthropists or business leaders, but we are Christians. We must do good, but we must not forget we have good news to share. Unless we proactively integrate this conviction into the practices, policies and operations of our organizations, it will slowly and assuredly fade.
To better assess the prevalence of drift and what keeps organizations mission true, we have created the Mission Drift Survey (available here), which faith-based organizations can take to better understand their susceptibility to drift.
Daniel Darling is vice-president of communications for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Activist Faith.
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An Unintentional Drift of Mission
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Culture
Review
Timothy Wainwright
A potentially great Liam Neeson vehicle gets marred by some very poor taste.
'A Walk Among the Tombstones'
Christianity TodaySeptember 19, 2014
Atsushi Nishijima / Universal Pictures
A Walk Among the Tombstones, the sophomore directorial outing of veteran screenwriter Scott Frank, is almost a good movie. It’s got a sense of humor and suspense. It’s aware. It’s intelligent.
It also takes a few bizarre turns, some in damningly poor taste.
Tombstones, adapted from the novel by Lawrence Bock, begins in the New York City of 1991. NYPD Detective Matthew Scudder (Liam Neeson) is enjoying the breakfast of champions: a cup of coffee and two shots of whiskey. An odd beige sweater and wispy, writhing facial hair complete this portrait of a troubled man. Suddenly some gangsters walk in and start shooting. He shoots back.
Cut to New York City, 1999. Private Detective Scudder has shaved. He’s in AA now, and slices his steak with the side of his fork. It’s a nice routine—until he gets an unusual case. Millennial drug trafficker and Nabokov-reader Kenny Kristo (Dan Stevens) says that someone murdered his wife, and needs Scudder’s help getting revenge. Scudder at first doubts the quest—he’s unlicensed, he’s no angel, but killing? For a drug dealer? Not at his age. But when Kristo reveals the total depravity of the crimes committed by men we will come to know as Ray (David Harbour) and Albert (Adam David Thompson), Scudder can’t refuse to help.
The movie well-crafted: bullets fly with a crisp cacophony; the music is vintage, pleasantly mysterious. There’s some great dialogue (“What gave me away?” “Everything. You’re weird, Jonas.”) Also, Frank is making strong choices from the director’s chair. There has been an undeniable trend in recent years—perhaps because so many directors cut their teeth on commercials and music videos—towards frenetic filmmaking, with shots that last only a few seconds before jumping to another angle and an over-reliance on close-ups. In contrast, half of Tombstones seems to be wide shots, with a measured editing pace. Liam Neeson can walk from the background to the foreground of a shot without seven different angles and close-ups on his feet being spliced in.
Neeson himself is in great form. This film lets him showcase his considerable talents as the archetypal film father, hopeless with computers but good at killing giant spiders (or drug dealers or terrorists), with one of the best deadpans around. And Tombstones is not just Liam Neeson Rescues a Missing Person VI. One great moment: “I bet all the corruption got to you, huh.” “Not really. It would have been hard to support my family without it.” The line doesn’t exactly shine on the page, but he owns it.
There’s a lot to like in this movie. This is why it’s such a shame that the whole thing was ruined by a few minutes of footage. Moments of sickening, unjustified sexual violence towards women soil the film—make you cringe and de-immerse you in a way that’s hard to recover from. It’s torture porn, plain and simple. Specificity would be overrated here. Let’s just say that it goes beyond a good old fashioned severed body part or two and wanders into a far darker realm. (This complaint is coming from a guy who likes horror movies, by the way.)
It’s a shame that just a few minutes of footage manage to sour the whole movie. Take away those scenes and you have the best Neeson vehicle since Taken. And it’s smart! Tombstones clearly wants to say something. The main character is devoted to AA, but he’s helping drug dealers from criminals who have it out for drug dealers. The idea of addiction and recovery is never far. It certainly is the only time I’ve seen a final shoot-out juxtaposed with someone reciting all the Twelve Steps out loud.
In short: it could have been good. But with the random, gratuitous sadism, A Walk Among the Tombstones is like a dinner guest who, between many good conversations, throws a plate against the wall or pokes you with a fork. Despite the charm, you won’t be inviting them back.
Caveat Spectator
Lots of swearing (the whole range), lots of blood, women are tortured and ravished and their remains are strewn across New York City. 1991 Liam Neeson has a scary haircut.
Tim Wainwright's writing has been featured in The Atlantic, CT, and RealClearMarkets. He tweets here and blogs here.
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A Walk Among the Tombstones
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Liam Neeson in 'A Walk Among the Tombstones'
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Liam Neeson in 'A Walk Among the Tombstones'
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Dan Stevens in 'A Walk Among the Tombstones'
Dylan Demarsico
What does joy look like, and from where does it come?
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We tend to think about what God is like in relation to us. God is love because he loves us despite our sin. God can be angry because he hates to see sin destroy the people he created. But are God’s so-called emotions entirely dependent on us and what we do? Does not God have a life within himself? Of course. In Proverbs 8—a passage that extols wisdom—we see a surprising picture of what was going on within the Trinity before sin ever entered the world.
The apostle Paul reminds us that Christ is the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24). So it’s not much of a theological stretch to recognize Christ in Proverbs 8, a famous passage about wisdom:
According to some scholars, rejoicing is a conservative translation of the Hebrew word sachaq. More accurate would be laughing or playing. We’re understandably reluctant to ascribe laughing and playing to Almighty God. Still, you can see for yourself in any Hebrew lexicon what the word means—and subsequently what God and wisdom were doing when they created the world: laughing and playing.
The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works,before his deeds of old. . . .I was there when he set the heavens in place,when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,when he established the clouds aboveand fixed securely the fountains of the deep,when he gave the sea its boundaryso the waters would not overstep his command,and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.Then I was constantly at his side.I was filled with delight day after day,rejoicing always in his presence,rejoicing in his whole worldand delighting in mankind.(vv. 22, 27–31, emphasis mine)
But let us note: God’s laughter is no joke. He contains such force and infinite energy that when he plays, living solar systems are painted on the canvas of creation.
When I tell others about the laughing God creating the cosmos, I usually hear, “Oh that’s cute; that would be great to teach in the children’s ministry.” But I am not talking about a laughter that is cute or silly, but one so powerful and mighty it creates entire oceans, and holds them together with astounding energy and pressure.
If you had witnessed this transcendent Being–in-Three-Persons letting out roaring laughter as he played, thus creating the universe, you probably would have shouted and cried out with joy. That is exactly what the angels did. “Where were you,” the Lord scolds Job, “when I laid the earth’s foundation . . . while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4, 7).
We sing worship songs about the “fullness of joy” in God’s presence (Ps. 16:11, ESV) and an “inexpressible and glorious joy” (1 Pet. 1:8). But how does that joy express itself? And from where does it come? Is it our joy? Or is it God’s joy? Obviously it is both God’s and ours. But clearly its source is the playful heart of God. And Proverbs 8 gives us a delightful picture of what it looks like. It looks like a Father and Son laughing and playing as they make the skies and seas and everything that inhabits them.
In Psalm 104 we read about God’s capricious creativity:
How many are your works, Lord!In wisdom you made them all;the earth is full of your creatures.There is the sea, vast and spacious,teeming with creatures beyond number—living things both large and small.There the ships go to and fro,and Leviathan, which you formed to frolic there.(vv. 24–26, emphasis mine)
God makes creatures whose main purpose, it seems, is to play. This is one reason some theologians conclude that the basic activity in the restored heaven and earth can be described as play. How so? One aspect of play is that it is non-compulsory. As theologian Fred Sanders says, “The commandment ‘Thou shalt play’ is an incoherent one. . . . We have God’s permission to play.” The kingdom of heaven will be a place in which we will gladly, in freedom, live as God wishes us to live. “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free,” wrote Paul in Galatians 5:1. And as Jürgen Moltmann put it in his Theology of Play, “If man knows himself to be free and desires to use his freedom, then his activity is play.”
In an unpublished essay on the Trinity, Jonathan Edwards discussed the “Infinite Happiness of God,” arguing that God’s joy and happiness reside within himself. He didn’t create the world in order to make himself happy. He was already bubbling over with unbounded pure happiness within the gleeful fellowship of the Trinity. And so the universe was born out of the laughing joy of God.
Meister Eckhart seems to have grasped this biblical truth, prompting him to say, “In the heart of the Trinity, the Father laughs and gives birth to the Son. The Son laughs back at the Father and gives birth to the Spirit. The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to us.”
It might also be said that the source of God’s anger against sin is that it stifles joy and laughter—that is, our rejoicing with God. Joy is what he intended for us from the beginning, and the reason Christ died for us, that we might restored to fellowship with him, that we might play for eternity with him. Zechariah’s vision of what it will be like for Israel to return from exile might picture life in the kingdom of heaven: “The city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing there” (8:5).
Our God, then, is dead serious about joy, and the joy of the Lord is not something trifling. It’s a playfulness that created and sustains the universe, a laughter that guides history to its glorious end.
Dylan Demarsico is a writer in Los Angeles, California, working toward his master of divinity degree through Liberty University.
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Belden C. Lane
Why is God so elusive sometimes?
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My children are long past the age of taking delight in childhood games, but I remember hours in years past playing hide-and-seek together, even though it was a game they never quite learned to play according to the rules. In fact, I used to worry about my son. For years I couldn’t get him to understand that he shouldn’t yell “ready” when he’d found a good hiding place; that only gave it away. He was missing the whole point of the game, I explained. One wants to hide well! Only later did I come to realize that from his perspective, I had missed the whole point of the game. The most fun comes, of course, in being found! Meister Eckhart expressed this mystery well when he said that “God is like a person who clears his throat while hiding and so gives himself away.” Even God—perhaps especially God—discovers the highest joy in hiding only so as to be found.
This simple truth reveals a fault that cuts through much of our mistaken thinking about God as Deus absconditus. Too often we associate the “hiddenness of God” with a fearful sense of obscurity, inaccessibility, or remoteness—as if the divine inscrutability were an end in itself. We lose the playfulness involved in this truth. Looking upon God’s act of masking or veiling as a means of protecting the divine majesty from prying human eyes, or as way of protecting us from a grandeur too terrifying to perceive, we forget that God’s hiding is rooted first of all in divine compassion. God hides not only to protect, but also to draw us in love.
God’s elusiveness serves a longing for relationship. Hiding, therefore, can become an act of playful teasing—a blithe form of seduction, God’s way of inviting us to the place of surprised encounter. God as Deus absconditus is never far removed from God as Deus ludens, a God revealed in playfulness. God disguises himself, hiding in a manger, his majesty veiled upon a cross, so that we might irresistibly be drawn to a grace far closer than we ever imagined.
The Jewish tradition tells a story about the first Lubavitcher rebbe, Schneur Zalman, the founder of one of the most vital of today’s Hasidic communities. His young son once came running to him, crying inconsolably. Between huge sobs, he managed to say, “Father, I’ve been playing hide-and-seek with the other children. It came my turn to hide, but after I found a good place, I sat there in the woods for hours waiting for the others to find me. No one ever yelled into the woods to tell me to come out. They just left me there alone.” His father put his arms around the child and held him close, rocking him back and forth. “Ah, my son,” he said, “that’s how it is with God, too. God is always hiding, hoping that people will come to look for him. But no one wants to play. He’s always left alone, wanting to be found, hoping someone will come. But crying because no one seeks him out.
What is this mystery of God’s great compassion, wanting so much to draw us to God? Like others, I too often shrink back in fear. I’m reluctant to embrace a God of hidden majesty. Yet I’m surprised again and again to find myself sought out more lovingly than I ever dared to hope by what I first had feared. Francis Thompson discovered the playful, grand conclusion to his own lifelong flight from God in being found by that from which he’d fled. At the end of his great poem on being sought by a love too fierce to withstand for long, he speaks with incredulous joy:
Halts by me that footfall;Is my gloom, after allShade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?“Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,I am He Whom thou seekest!Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.”
For him, it was as if Christ, the Hound of Heaven, had finally shouted out in reckless abandon, “Olly, olly, oxen free!” and the hiders had come from behind every bush and nearby tree, running safely home to outstretched arms. This, at last, is the meaning of God as Deus absconditus, the truth which Luther found so important in his own theology of a gracious God.
When my daughter was very young, one of her favorite tricks in playing hide-and-seek was to pretend that she had run away to hide, and then come sneaking back beside me while I was still counting—my eyes shut tight. She breathed as silently as she could, standing inches away, hoping I couldn’t hear. Then she’d take the greatest delight in reaching out to touch home base as soon as I opened my eyes and began to search for someone who’d never even left. She was cheating, of course, and though I don’t know why, I always let her get away with it. Was it because I longed so much for those few moments when we stood close together, pretending not to hear or be heard, caught up in a game that for an instant dissolved the distance between parent and child, that set us free to touch and seek and find each other? It was a simple, almost negligible act of grace, my not letting on that I knew she was there. Yet I suspect that in that one act my child may have mirrored God for me better than in any other way I’ve known.
Still to this day, it seems, God is for me a seven-year-old daughter, slipping back across the grass, holding her breath in check, wanting once again to surprise me with a presence closer than I ever expected.
“Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself,” the prophet once declared (Isa. 45:15, RSV). A playfulness as well as a dark mystery lie richly intertwined in that grand and complex truth.
Belden C. Lane is professor emeritus of American Christianity at St. Louis University. He is the author of The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring the Desert and Mountain Spirituality (Oxford, 1998), from which this article is excerpted and condensed with permission.
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Rick Destree
What’s a bird doing flying above Mt. Everest?
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You’re a mountain climber, and you have just scaled the highest peak in the world, Mount Everest. The air is so thin here you need an oxygen tank to breathe. You look out over the panorama beneath you and realize that no living creature, under its own power, can be higher than you are at this moment. But suddenly you hear a honking, and a flock of bar-headed geese fly over your head on their annual migration.
What? There are birds flying over Mount Everest? It’s true. An ordinary-looking goose lays claim to the title “Highest-Flying Animal.” This tenacious bird actually migrates over the Himalayan mountains! They carry no food or water, no extra oxygen, no winter survival gear—yet there they are, higher than any creature should be.
The dapper bar-headed goose (Anser indicus) is a migratory bird that breeds in Central Asia (southeast Russia and western China) but travels to India and northern Burma for the winter.
It navigates the air over the Himalayas at 30,000 to 33,000 feet (5.7 to 6.25 miles). The oxygen concentration at this height is a little more than one-quarter that of sea level—not enough for kerosene lanterns to burn, helicopters to hover, or people to breathe. Yet this goose remains fully conscious and faithfully flies over the Himalayas twice each year, a journey which takes just hours. (An ascent of Mt. Everest usually takes a climber days or weeks, depending upon weather.)
The anatomy of the bar-headed goose includes larger-than-normal wings, lungs that inhale greater-than-normal amounts of air, and blood containing a special type of hemoglobin that carries higher-than-normal levels of oxygen to its tissues and organs.
This bird was also designed to produce a lot of heat when it flies. The constant radiation of body warmth and the goose’s down feathers prevent ice from forming on the bird’s wings, which would potentially ground it.
With a little help from tailwinds, the bar-headed geese make the trip from Tibet to India—more than 1,000 miles—in a single day. By using tailwinds, the geese capitalize on weather that would pulverize lesser creatures. These geese are powerful flappers with huge wings that are pointed to reduce wind resistance. They can fly over 50 miles an hour on their own power, and they really move if they can add the thrust of 100-mile-per-hour tailwinds. Able to gauge and correct for drift, bar-headed geese can even fly in crosswinds without being blown off course.
Why don’t they just fly around the mountains or snake their way through using river valleys, like the majority of the other migratory birds in the Himal region? It’s hard to say from a biological perspective. Theologically, however, it’s another testimony to the marvelous works of God.
The Psalmist prayed, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (139:14). He could have added, “I praise you because the bar-headed goose is fearfully and wonderfully made.” He did say that, sort of: “Your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”
Rick Destree is director of His Creation.
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The Editors
Right now there are over 60,000 people overhead.
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When God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens” (Gen. 1:20, ESV), he probably knew these soaring creatures would inspire imitation. It took a few centuries, but now flight seems as common and mundane as crossing the street.
It may be common, but it is hardly mundane. Aviation is a human creation that suggests the glory of man, that creature made a little less than the angels (Ps. 8:5). Yes, a little less: angels are said to be able to fly with their own wings; humans have to use specially-built craft.
Today those craft are a wonder of technology. A Boeing 747 is made up of 6 million parts. The engines alone weigh 4.5 tons each—and yet they only account for 5 percent of the weight of a fully loaded plane on takeoff. To withstand the landing weight of a fully-laden jumbo jet, airport runways have to be between 2 and 4 feet thick.
This massive piece of steel can not only get off the ground, but also reach a top speed of almost 600 mph. How powerful do these engines have to be? Let’s just say that in May 2000, a chartered jet carrying the New York Knicks basketball team taxied out too close to a line of cars parked on the tarmac; the blast from the taxiing jet flipped head coach Jeff Van Gundy's car into the air and over three other cars, completely demolishing it.
Such power does not come without cost. The 747 burns about 12 gallons of fuel per minute when cruising. Seems like a huge waste. And yet most of today’s aircraft are 70 percent more fuel efficient than jets of the 1960s.
When it comes to computer technology, the 747 is a dinosaur compared to the 777. The former has only 400,000 lines of computer code written into its flight systems; the latter has over 2.6 million.
So, yes, the aircraft itself is a wondrous thing. But so is the airline transportation industry. At any given hour, there are over 60,000 people airborne over the United States. To do that, planes are constantly taking off and landing all over the country. At Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, for example, that happens every 37 seconds, or about 100 planes an hour. The busiest commercial airport is Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, with nearly a million takeoffs and landings a year, moving 260,000 passengers daily.
That being said, relatively few people are doing all that flying. Only 5 percent of the world’s population has ever been on an airplane. Perhaps people like businessman Tom Stuker skew these statistics. In 2012 he was recognized for logging over a million miles on United Airlines. At that point, he’d flown more than 13 million miles as an independent consultant and sales trainer. The phrase “frequent flyer” is too prosaic to apply to him.
So, from the miracle of flight to the wonder of moving all these people every hour, well, as Lauran Paine Jr. put it in a Sport Aviation article, “If you are bored flying, your standards are too low.” This thing we created called commercial aviation is one of the wonders of the world.
The Psalmist may have wistfully prayed, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest” (Ps. 55:6, ESV), but we can actually do it.
Wonderful aviation links:
- Real-time map of the planes in the air
- All the planes over your head right now
- North Atlantic flights visualized beautifully
- European flights visualized beautifully
- San Diego landings and takeoffs
- Five hours of airplane landings captured in 30 seconds
- Time-lapse that makes jumbo jets look like toys
- Airplanes leaving light trails in the night sky
—The Editors
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Links to amazing stuff
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Spooky Light Particles
“We are still getting to grips with the properties of photons and it seems that they don’t experience distance in the same way as we do.” So says Michael Brooks in this piece on photons, which can be light years apart and yet have some unexplainable “cosmic connection.”
Walk in the Light—Up to a Point
The Bible tells us to walk in the light, but apparently we don’t want to do that for too long. At least literally speaking. Apparently “our brains and bodies cannot cope in a world without darkness.” Such is the argument of the article “The End of Night” on light pollution on our planet. Enjoy this issue’s long read.
The Incredibles
We’re talking about Christians here. Not because they are superheroes or people of superior morals. This classic by A.W. Tozer points out the many apparent “contradictions” of the Christian life. The faith, he suggests, is less about logic and more about lived mystery.
Slow Life
An amazing close up video of Great Barrier Reef animals. Definitely worth three and a half minutes of your time.
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Culture
Review
Jonathan Merritt
A film that re-imagines the story of Solomon with uncommon artistic integrity.
Ali Faulkner and Alan Powell in 'The Song'
Christianity TodaySeptember 19, 2014
City on a Hill
Sandwiched between two major studio productions about biblical legends (Noah and Exodus) is an independent film about the rise and fall of the ancient Hebrew king, Solomon. While The Song lacks the artistic depth of Noah and the presumably jaw-dropping special effects of Exodus, it may have more heart and real-world value than either one.
Also unlike its “Year of the Bible” counterparts, The Song recasts its characters in modern context. Solomon is reimagined as a modern-day singer-songwriter named Jed King (Alan Powell) who struggles to make a name for himself apart from being the progeny of his famous father, a renowned country music star (aptly named “David King”). In the midst of an identity crisis, Jed stumbles into a romance, courtship, and marriage to Rose (Ali Faulkner), a vineyard owner’s daughter.
The young couple has a “perfect” wedding night and storybook start—complete with poetic voice-overs drawn from the Song of Solomon. But after Jed writes a hit song for his new bride and is catapulted into the national spotlight, things get all Ecclesiastes. The pursuit of his thriving career leaves Jed wanting more. And the more he finds fame and success, the more he loses himself and his true love.
One of the glaring weaknesses of this film is the absence of even a single A-lister. In a year when biblical films feature a pile of notables, this film risks being overlooked. This gamble is apparent in a few awkward “rookie moments,” but is tucked away in mostly authentic, emotional performances. Overall, what the film lacks in pedigree it makes up for in honesty.
From drug and alcohol abuse to an extramarital affair with a sultry fellow performer (Caitlin Nicol-Thomas), Jed’s character wrestles with the meaning of meaning in a way that will make fans of faith films shift in their seats. But this risk turns out to be The Song’s greatest strength. It is willing to “go there,” to address the messiness of love and life without leaving all the tough stuff on the cutting room floor.
As executive producer and pastor Kyle Idleman said, "I think the church often hides under the covers, so to speak, when it comes to the issues of love, sex, and marriage, and by doing so popular culture continues to shape how we think about these subjects. It seems like it might be good for [the church] to step back and ask the question, 'How's that workin' out for us?'"
Like Idleman, I prefer a PG-13 flick that walks headfirst into a difficult conversation than a unrealistic, G-rated family film that tiptoes around a tough issue any day.
Religious audiences may also be surprised to find that there is little overtly spiritual content in this “faith film.” With the exception of one subtle and almost ill-placed reference to “someone who loves you enough to die for you” by Powell’s character during a performance at the “American Roots Music Awards,” all God-talk is limited to sparsely-placed narration quoted from biblical poetry. Secular audiences will probably never catch the subtle scriptural nuance woven into the script and soundtrack. Only the biblically literate will catch the cleverly hidden nods to the story of King David and Bathsheba, the “rose” of Sharon, and dozens of subtle references contained in the lyrics of Jed’s songs. (Look for Solomon’s famous judgment to “split the baby,” and the romantic language of Song of Solomon in “The Song” Jed pens for his wife.)
If you want a heavy-handed evangelistic tool along the lines of Courageous or Fireproof, save your money. This film is not that.
Rather than convert audiences, The Song seeks to convince them that they are not alone in their troubles. Which is why I suspect most viewers will see themselves in this story. The husband who’s guilty of straying; the wife who chooses her children over her marriage; the son or daughter searching for his or her own identity; the strong woman who refuses to be abused; the pursuit of success and notoriety at the expense of all else—and, of course, the hope that redemption is possible amidst the muck and mess that life inevitably drags through all of our front doors.
By blending together Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes, The Song gives us something very Proverbs-like. It forces audiences to ask probing questions about life and love. It grapples with timeless, tough topics without pulling punches. But, most of all, this film reminds us that pursuing anything outside of the Source of true meaning is—as both Solomon and his modern counterpart say—“a chasing of wind.”
Jonathan Merritt is senior columnist for Religion News Service and author most recently of Jesus Is Better Than You Imagined (FaithWords).
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The Song
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Ali Faulkner and Alan Powell in 'The Song'
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Alan Powell and Caitlin Nicol-Thomas in 'The Song'
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'The Song'
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