Chariots of Fire; Shantung Compound; Abuse and Healing

It was in January 1982. At this time I was in seminary doing doctoral work in Dallas, we had two young boys and Kay was pregnant with our third son.  I started hearing about a new movie that I had to go see. This struck me as strange in a couple of ways. First I was getting this recommendation from other Christians and from church as well as from classmates. Why was the strange? 28 years ago in Dallas the Christian community was still very very conservative and generally looked at film from a very skeptical perspective. At that time Evangelicalism was still just emerging from the culture denying attitudes of fundamentalism. Why were Christians who were generally averse to films recommending this movie? The movie itself had a strange name, Chariots of Fire. As I heard the title what came to mind were visions out of Ezekiel's prophecies. But the movie was supposed to have some kind of a Christian theme about it. As I dug deeper I learned that one of the main characters was named Eric Liddell, a young Christian Scotsman who had competed in the 1924 Olympics in Paris and had in fact won a gold medal.

Needless to say Kay and I went to see the movie. It was truly inspiring. I have seen it several times since the initial screening and never cease to be amazed by the depth of character and the courage displayed by Eric Liddell. For those of you who don't remember (or are maybe too young to remember), the movie opens at the funeral of one of the major characters, Harold Abrahams and then the story is told in flashback. At the end of the film we see the credits of what it was that Harold Abrahams accomplished during his life. His accomplishments were impressive particularly in light of the fact that he was Jewish in a very Anglican University. After listing Abrahams impressive accomplishments the next screen informed us that Eric Liddell and become a missionary to China where he died in a Japanese internment camp in 1945. His epitaph was "all Scotland mourned."

Several years later in my first year of teaching at Simpson College in San Francisco, I was using Millard Erickson's Christian Theology as my major textbook. In the chapter on the nature of sin Ericsson quoted at length from the book Shantung Compound written by Langdon Gilkey. I was so impressed by the quotes that Erickson lifted from Gilkey's work that I bought the book and read it. The book is the true story of Gilkey's experience in a Japanese internment camp in China during World War II.  Gilkey was at that time a young liberal optimistic professor of English who had recently graduated from Harvard University with a degree in philosophy. Gilkey tells us that he viewed the internment at the Shantung (Weihsien) Compound as a grand experiment.

 During the war he and the other expatriates in China were rounded up and placed into an internment camp. Although told that the camp would provide every comfort of Western culture he soon discovered that the only thing Western about it was that it was located on a former Presbyterian mission compound. In this small compound, about the size of one city block were housed several thousand Westerners. These were by and large the best of society, Americans, Brits, Australians, businessmen, diplomats, educators, professionals (bankers, lawyers, doctors) as well as monks and missionaries (and hookers).

As I said he viewed this as a grand experiment because the people were by and large good people. They were educated. They were religious. They were moral. They represented the best of society. As an optimistic young liberal Gilkey saw this as an opportunity to create the ideal society. The book is about Gilkey's education in human nature. What is so fascinating is that by the end of the book we see that his optimism is gone. Simply his own experience brought him to something close to an orthodox understanding of original sin. This was not because of cruelty from the Japanese captors. Unlike the Japanese prison camps where soldiers were starved, tortured and worked to death, in the internment camp four Japanese merely guarded the walls and left the internal administration of the camp to its inhabitants.

What he observed was the interaction of the “good” people in the camp.  Particularly sobering for me is that Christian missionaries do not come off well. As a group they were aloof and self-righteous. They came up with pious sounding rationale for their self-serving behavior. They would not associate with the “sinners,” lest they be polluted. The two significant exceptions were the Salvation Army missionaries and the Jesuits.  The Salvation Army people were dedicated to service, including doing all the dirty jobs, such as cleaning latrines, that no one else would touch. The Jesuits receive special mention because of their ability to mix freely with the “sinners” and not be affected by the sin.

About two thirds of the way through the book Gilkey describes the work of a younger missionary from Scotland who took it upon himself to organize and minister to the young people of the camp. The teenagers had nothing to do and as teenagers will, were getting into trouble. He had a tremendous effect on the morale of the high schoolers. But to everyone's dismay he was struck down and died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. That man was Eric Liddell.

All this has been brought back to my attention this past week. I have taken the forgiveness class (Freedom to Love Again [freedomtolove.info]) that I wrote last summer for EduPlex Ministries and have repackaged it as a seminar. For the past three Sunday evenings I have given this seminar at a small Baptist church in the Bay Area.

This past week as I was wrapping up the three-week series an elderly gentleman (whom I will call Frank)  who had been there every week (and with whom I have had an acquaintance for about 10 years), was taking issue with the whole idea that we can find a measure of spiritual emotional healing by forgiving those who have injured us. He insisted that there is no real healing this side of heaven. Frank is a man who has been a pastor for much of his adult life and is now retired. He insisted that the only way that we can see any meaning to suffering is to view it as a result of the sovereignty of God. He also is quite resistant to the current emphasis among contemporary theologians on God's love, mercy and forgiveness.

Last Sunday night all pieces fell together. I discovered that as a child, Frank was an MK (missionary kid) who grew up in China. His parents sent him away to mission boarding school when he was four or five years old. He shared with me that at that school he was beaten with canes every day and, in his own words, "that wasn't the half of it." He went on to tell me that he had been one of the internees in the Shantung (Weihsien) compound. He insisted that the fact that he was removed from the missionary school to the compound was his salvation from the hell of torture that he underwent daily at the school. He said that all his life he has borne the emotional scars of the abuse he suffered at the hands of the Christian school authorities. He survived by stuffing his emotions and memories deep into his subconscious. But in recent months the events have come back to haunt him again and again and again.

Tragically the only avenue he had for survival was holding onto the fact that God is sovereign and righteous and he repays those who do evil. He grew up in an era when it was not permissible to open his heart to anyone. Because of this he remains spiritually and emotionally in great pain to this day.

In the mid-1980s when I was first teaching at Simpson College there was a great controversy in the Christian and Missionary Alliance (of which Simpson College [now University] is a part) about requiring that children of C&MA missionaries be separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools. Paul Young (author of The Shack) was one of those C&MA MKs (missionary kids) who was sent away to boarding school and there, suffered years of abuse. Recently the C&MA has concluded an investigation of conditions in the schools to which the MKs had been sent and they offered a formal apology for the abuse that they had been forced to endure.  Lest you think I am singling out one group here, this same dynamic has been repeated in other mission schools where children of missionaries from various different agencies were sent because conditions (not necessarily mission board policy) did not allow the parents to oversee the education of their own children.  One of my high school friends, the son of Overseas Crusade missionaries in South America, was sent to a mission school. There he too suffered abuse.  He never recovered from the pain; he became a drug addict and died in his early 40s.  

Abuse unaddressed, whether it be emotional, spiritual, physical or sexual, leaves lifelong wounds (I will not call it scars, because scars imply healing of some sort).  Despite Frank’s protestations that there is no healing this side of heaven, and that all such talk is just psychobabble, my experience of seeing and working with  abuse victims up close and personal over the past fifteen years tells a different story.  I know that substantial healing can take place.  I have watched victims of sexual abuse move from a place of being totally consumed by the pain, to a place where they are again functional human beings who are no longer bleeding emotionally, but have come through a healing process and have seen God work in marvelous ways in restoring them to spiritual and emotional health.

Unfortunately, the healing has usually come apart from a church context.  Both Philip Yancey as well as Henry Cloud and John Townsend have made the sobering but profound observation concerning alcoholics:  in AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) people look worse but get better, whereas in the church people tend to look better, but get worse.

Is the church missing something important here?  I for one think so.



Invictus 

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade.
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley

Kay looked at me the other day and asked me if I knew that since 29 October I have been away from home 23 nights. (That doesn't include the week long getaway that she and I had the beginning of December) I knew life had been crazy the last month or so but I hadn't realized how crazy that it has been. I was in Sofia, Bulgaria for twelve days teaching two classes… The Trinity, and Patrology (the theology of the early church fathers). After just two nights at home I was off for a five-day conference in Phoenix. After another two nights at home I was off for two days in Redding teaching at Tozer Seminary. Then the week after Thanksgiving it was off to Redding again for another two days at Tozer. And include during this time two more days teaching a class for Tozer Seminary in Sunnyvale here in the Bay Area and a few evening classes at Koinonia .

All that to say during the past month and a half I have hardly had time to think let alone write. But this evening I had an experience that has impelled me to the keyboard. Kay and I just got back from watching Invictus, the new film from Clint Eastwood starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon that tells the story of Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black President and his vision of using the Springboks (South Africa’s rugby team that had functioned as a symbol of apartaid and oppression to the country’s blacks) as a vehicle to unify the severely racially fractured country in its quest to win the World Cup in 1995. The story itself is historically accurate.  But rather than be a dry description of those happenings nearly fifteen years ago, it brings to life those events in quite an amazing way.  The story the film tells is nothing short of gripping. (Note: As Hollywood does regularly, the film takes some liberty with the historical details of the story.)

News reporter Alexandra Zavis who was in South Africa during these events writes:

Of all the improbable images I carry in my head from covering those first heady days of South Africa's new democracy for the Associated Press, this one stands out. The film "Invictus," directed by Clint Eastwood and based on a book by journalist John Carlin called "Playing the Enemy," captures this extraordinary moment when history really was made on a sports field.

LA Times, December 15,2009

As you may know, I love film. In fact I have taught classes in seminary on Theology and Film on several occasions. The power of film is the power of the story to incarnate truth. And Invictus does just that.

As you probably know Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison in South Africa labeled as a terrorist for his work in opposing the apartheid system that oppressed not just the blacks but all who were not racially pure with full European ancestry. Early in his career he took Gandhi’s non-violence as an example (BTW Gandhi got his start in South Africa). 

Ecclesiastes 7:7 observes: “Surely oppression drives a wise man crazy, and a bribe drives a person mad.” So it was for Mandela.  As the pushback from the government came bringing more repression, he became convinced that non-violence would not prevail.  He and his group began targeted bombing of critical facilities, being careful to avoid human causalities.  The Government labeled him a terrorist. Arrested and imprisoned, he suffered beatings, boredom, and depravation as he lived in a 6x8 foot cell, and broke rocks for labor.  During this time he also read and thought.

In 1990, with apartheid unraveling Mandela was released from prison and became the leader of the anti-apartheid coalition of groups dedicated to end the hateful system.  It was he who led the negotiations that ended apartheid in South Africa, and he who became the nation’s first democratically elected black president.

As he took the reins of power fear shuddered through the white minority who feared a bloodbath of revenge.  But Mandela had grown over the decades.  He had learned that the way to victory, the way to unification, and the way to healing was not through revenge, but through forgiveness.

This type of forgiveness is not conditional on apology, for an apology would never be offered.  It is an act of free unconditional grace. Where revenge is foresworn and the damage is borne by the one who has been hurt.  We say that grace is free and unconditional, but there is also a pain in grace.  In his latest blog Baxter Kruger speaks of the “pain of grace.”

“To be gracious is to hurt,
for it is not merely to wink at a problem,
but to enter into it and bear it personally,
to endure it, in love and mercy and patience.”

Mandela personified grace, healing and reconciliation.  He practiced what he preached.  As a result of his example and influence South Africa set up the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission in an attempt to heal the abiding wounds of Apartheid. “

Witnesses who were identified as victims of gross human rights violations were invited to give statements about their experiences, and some were selected for public hearings. Perpetrators of violence could also give testimony and request amnesty from both civil and criminal prosecution.

The TRC, the first of the nineteen held internationally to stage public hearings, was seen by many as a crucial component of the transition to full and free democracy in South Africa. Despite some flaws, it is generally (although not universally) thought to have been successful. [Wikipedia, sv  “Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa)”]

Recently I have been studying deeply issues of forgiveness, abuse, injustice reconciliation, and the person of God and the work of the Holy Spirit in the world. As I sat in the darkened theater and watched the images and heard the dialogue I was overwhelmed as these themes wove themselves together as the story unfolded. In a very real sense Invictus became a lens that focused these themes together in sharp relief.  As we walked out of the theatre I turned to Kay and said “I sense the fingerprints of the Holy Spirit are all over that film!”

Over the past several months I have been heavily involved studying and reflecting anew on the person of God. I became convinced over 20 years ago that our western understanding of the trinity had departed from the understanding articulated by the early church at the Council of Nicea and the explication given by Athanasius and the three great Cappodician theologians: Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus.  It was they who unpacked the implications of the pre-incarnate Son being homoosias (of the same substance/being) as the Father. Contrary to the Greek concept of God as a passionless, detached “unmoved mover,”  the early fathers understood that the Trinity stood at the center of any Christian understanding of God and that the three persons, Father, Son and Spirit were in a dynamic relationship of love.  Some of the fathers spoke of this relationship as a magnificent divine dance.  God is fundamentally tri-personal existing in a life of self-giving love.  As the Apostle John flatly states, “God is love.”  And while it may be self-evident, I will say it anyway: “Love, by definition, demands relationship!”

I am heartened by stirrings of the reassertion of this reality within evangelicalism. Within the past couple of months the book The Misunderstood God: The Lies Religion Tells Us About God, by Darrin Hufford was released.  Hufford’s thesis is that if indeed God is love then the apostle Paul’s exposition of the nature of love in 1 Corinthians 13 should give us some profound insight into the nature and being of God. (A corollary of this would seem to be that God in his Trinitarian fullness is the source of love seen in his creation.)  Similarly Andrew Farley’s The Naked Gospel: The Truth You May Never Hear in Church explores related themes from a slightly different perspective. (Both of these books are written on a popular level rather than in technical theological jargon.)

Forgiveness is something we all talk about as being foundational to Christianity. (Foundational to forgiveness is love.) The first Bible verse that many of us learned states: “For God (the Father) so loved the world, he gave his only-begotten Son (i.e. His unique and eternal son with whom He was in face to face relationship for all ante-mundane eternity) so that everyone who believes in him will not perish (or be lost) but have eternal life (participation in the very life of the Trinity).”  Love is foundational to forgiveness; forgiveness is vitally wound up in justification by faith alone.  To vastly oversimplify it, we are declared “not guilty” by God because of the sacrifice of Christ—we stand forgiven, totally, forever and unconditionally! 

If we are honest, while we cling to the fact that we are forgiven, we are ourselves not good at forgiving others.  Oh we don’t have much trouble brushing off minor offenses but those who have betrayed us and inflicted damage?  Here we do not want to forgive, we want justice, or better yet, revenge.  Yet refusing to forgive, however imperfectly, keeps our souls from healing and perpetuates hatred and violence.

During the past several years I have been confronted with injustice and oppression in an up close and personal fashion as I have ministered in Bulgaria.  We as Americans think of racial oppression in terms of the Black-White divide in American culture (or maybe the apartheid of South Africa).  I have witnessed the oppression of the Roma people (gypsies) in a manner reminiscent of the ghettos in which the Jews were for centuries placed in Europe.  Jewish ghettos in Europe were not an invention of the Nazis; rather they were instituted centuries ago during the Renaissance by Christian political authorities who marginalized Jews because of their non-Christian beliefs.  The Gypsy people too are historically non-Christian who migrated westward from the Indian sub-continent about a thousand years ago.  As a people group they settled mainly in Eastern and Central Europe and remain unassimilated to this day.  The song “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” popularized by Cher in the early 70’s reflects the majority population attitude toward them to this day.  In Bulgaria, under Communism, the government erected walls around gypsy communities to further separate them from the larger population. The Roma people in Bulgaria are largely illiterate to this day, and it has only been in the past couple of decades or so that the gospel has begun to penetrate these closed communities. Bulgaria specifically and eastern and central Europe generally stand in need of racial, cultural, and economic reconciliation and justice.  I have seen a few glimmers of hope in Bulgaria, largely through the ministries of Care For All.

This past semester I taught a class on “Christian Perspectives in Contemporary Culture.”  One of the themes the class focused on was justice, not justice in the court system but justice in the economic, political and racial sense—the goal is full reconciliation.  I had the class read John Perkins work With Justice for All: A Strategy for Community Development.  Perkins has been a pioneer the establishment of justice in rural Mississippi, an area where racial hatred and oppression survives to this day.  In telling the story of his escape to Los Angeles and a better life, his conversion to Christ, and his call back to Mississippi he challenges his brothers and sisters in Christ to take the call for justice seriously as a vital implication of the gospel (a theme which we find prominently in Scripture but which somehow falls pretty much on deaf ears in the American evangelicalism).  Perhaps this is because we think of the gospel in terms of witnessing rather than understanding the gospel as being about the inexpressible  love of the Father, Son and Spirit for their creation and God’s passionate heart that has accomplished reconciliation through the person of Christ. 

As Paul says, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting people’s trespasses against them, and he has given us the message of reconciliation..” (2 Cor. 5:19 NET) or as Eugene Peterson puts it in The Message, “God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing.”



Bulgaria Update-2009

Past years I have been able to give you updates as I was ministering in Bulgaria.  This year has been quite different.  As you who have read these updates over the past several years, you know I have taught in Star Zagora, a small (pop. about 75,000) city in central Bulgaria whose claim to fame is that it is the oldest city in Europe.  I have taught at the Theological College which is about ten years old and is sponsored by the Church of God.  A chief thrust of their ministry is toward the Gypsy population.

This year was very different.  While the Church of God still maintains the school in Stara Zagora they are in process of moving the center of their educational ministry to Sofia, the capital, with a population of about 3 million in the greater Sofia area.  Many of their classes are held in conjunction with the other theological faculties associated with the University of Sofia.

My classes (I taught 2) were held at the Assembly of God college campus located about 20 miles north of downtown in a residential area.  The look and feel of the institution is very different than in Stara Zagora.  The buildings are old—well over a century and the plumbing is primitive (e.g. don’t flush the toilet paper because it clogs the system!).  The local culture of the college is far more reserved than in Stara Zagora, and the only people that spoke English (more than a few phrases here and there) were my translators.

The week started off slowly—I was suffering both jetlag and from a cold that was affecting my mental clarity and my voice.  That evening I started on the antibiotics my physician had given me before I left in case I got sick.  By the next day I was doing much better.

The first class, Dogmatics (what we call Systematic Theology in the US)  lasted until Wednesday noon.  We surveyed the development of Trinitarian understanding as well as the subjects of Man and Sin. My translator, Tanya is one of the faculty members who teaches Old Testament.  She did quite well but struggled with some of the theological terms.  (Theology and OT have different technical vocabularies.)  Wednesday afternoon through Friday . 

Tanya my translator for 1/2 the weekThe second class was Patrology (the thought of the early church fathers up till about A.D. 600). I covered the major figures  and then the students expressed a real interest in Christology (the doctrine of the person of Christ),  so I switched gears and covered the development of Christological understanding up through the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451.  My translator was Kostadin, Tanya’s husband and acting Academic Dean of the College.  He was far more comfortable in his role and we developed a good rapport .

As the week progressed the students warmed up and began to ask many questions—this opened up the opportunity for some lively and probing discussions of theological issues that tied directly into their ministry situations. I am always hesitant to say too much in a cross-cultural situation lest I  transgress cultural mores. But the nature of the questions demanded a frank openness that would “let the chips fall where they may.” 

The questions were both illuminating and troubling.  Illuninating, in that it gave a look into the mentality of the Bulgarian Church in a way I had not seen in Stara Zagora—there the pastors were mostly gypsies who had been believers for just a few years.  Here we were looking at a protestant church culture that was generations old.

From the discussion I learned that the protestant community is stuck in an authoritarian system that mirrors the larger culture.  Pastors on the whole are not open to training the next generation of leaders.  The system is one which is locked in a survival mentality and is not looking toward growth.  I suspect that this comes from the four decades that Bulgaria spent under communism where the church literally struggled to survive.  (In talking to Dinko he reminded me that while communism lasted forty years, Bulgaria itself has been insubjection for foreign powers for centuries.)  But the change in the political situation has not changed the survival mentality. 

There is a mentality undergirded by a perfectionistic theology that is more concerned with outward appearances and abstaining from "sinful" practices than with embracing the grace and freedom offered by the gospel.

There are those actively working to break this mentality.  Our good friend Dinko Zlatarov has founded a church in Sofia where he regularly challenges the prevailing mentality of self-righteous legalistic churchianity.  Likewise Dinko’s brother Stefko has founded a new church in Stara Zagora that looking to inculcate grace into the community.  But from the sample I have seen, their perspective is the exception rather than the norm.

Kostadin and Tanya, Dinko and Petia, and Stefko all represent a new hope for the Bulgarian church—please keep them in your prayers.

Love it, or hate it after a year and a half it is still ranked #2 on the New York Times “Bestseller List “in the Paperback Trade Fiction. This is an incredible feat for a book that the author wrote as a Christmas present for his children with no plans to publish.

Regardless of its weaknesses, The Shack has struck a raw nerve with the Christian public and even in the wider culture.  As a piece of fiction it strikes at the heart of issues that many of us struggle with, and offers a perspective that is born out of the author’s own personal struggles.

The Shack raises the deep gut-wrenching questions of life, questions many of us dare not reveal to anyone that we even ask: questions of God, His goodness, His justice and the like.  As I have looked in depth at the story I see five major questions/themes that through the narrative:

•     What is the nature of forgiveness?  Why do we find it so difficult?

•     How do we deal with the personal pain caused by sin and evil that we have suffered and has become a part of our very identity?  Is it possible to let go or be freed of this weight we carry around?  The image that comes to mind here is from the film The Mission.  At one point as part of the condition of becoming a Jesuit  monk Robert De Niro’s character, Rodrigo Mendoza, drags the armor and weapons of his former life as part of his penance,.  These are tied to him by a rope. He crosses rivers and climbs mountains dragging the symbols of his past.  One of the monks cuts the rope and the weight tumbles down the mountain into the raging river below.  Rather than being grateful for being set free, he goes down the mountain and reattaches the weight and continues on the difficult journey. Rodrigo Mendoza’s past, the past from which he seeks release, has become so much a part of him that he cannot let it go—it has become a key part of his identify.

•      Who is God? The refrain from the Bette Midler song  “God is watching us, God is watching us from a distance,”  gives a lyrical picture of the vision of the person of God that most of us imagine.  But, is He the stern and distant Judge that looks down over the balcony of Heaven  keeping tabs of our crimes and misdemeanors?  This is a dominant theme in our western theological tradition that goes back to Augustine (5^th century) and Tertullian (3^rd century).  Interestingly this is not the view of the early church, especially the view of those such as Athanasius who were instrumental in forging our doctrine of the trinity as expressed in the Nicene Creed.

•      How can we assert the goodness and omnipotence of God in light of evil and suffering in the world?  This is a problem philosophers and theologians have wrestled with for millennia, and one that has become acute in the wake of the Enlightenment.  It still remains in great debate today. 

•      How do we relate to God?  Clearly Scripture portrays God as holy and just.  We speak of grace but the issue of sin, as breaking the Law of God, is ever before us.  If God is so holy that he cannot look at sin, how is it possible to know him in any real way?   

These are the questions.  To address them I am in process of writing five online courses through EduPlex Ministries (EduPlex.org) .  The series is entitled Beyond The Shack.  The first course was released last week, the rest are on target for release over the next three months.  Below are the course descriptions from the EduPlex website.

These courses are offered in two formats:

1. Coached: you and a group of students meet online to process the material with a professional life coach.
2.  Independent Study: you as the student interact with the material on your own
   
   

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BEYOND THE SHACK Course Series

Beyond the Shack is a revolutionary, high impact, life-changing experience that engages the student in a deep and satisfying emotional connection to God:  beyond rules, guilt and pain into relationship, joy and power!  An exhilarating journey of discovery!  A remarkable integration of teaching, coaching, social interaction and contemplation!  The unique integrated coaching takes you beyond knowledge to actual experience of deep spiritual truth.

Course 1 - Freedom to Love Again
                     Pain & Guilt: Neutralizing the Poison

When others hurt us, abuse us or commit horrific crimes against us, where is God in all of this and how could he possibly ask us to forgive?  Forgiveness: Possible or Impossible? addresses the theme of forgiveness in The Shack book by William P. Young, and highlights the three distinct types of forgiveness, commonly taught as one.  The course teaches common forgiveness myths, the dangers of premature forgiveness, and explains how to experience true freedom from those who have hurt us.  If you are still feeling wounded by another, then this course is especially designed for you.  Experience healing and a new freedom of your heart as you develop a loving and lasting relationship with God and others.

Student Comments:  "I really liked the interaction with the other students on the conference call and was surprised at how fast a bond began and people started opening up."  "I liked the fact that there were seasoned staff on the call to ask the questions and keep the group on track."

Special Introductory Price, Limited Time Only!
          Basic Course $29
          Course with coaching $59

Now Available!  

Course 2 - Breaking the Chains that Bind
                     Escaping the Past That Defines You

When abuse is experienced, whether it be verbally, physically, sexually or even spiritually, it can result in entrenched feelings of fear, guilt and shame.  If left unaddressed, abuse sets the victim up for repeated cycles of frustration, failure and addiction.  In this The Shack study, we expand on the themes of healing the hurts of our lives. 

Are you living with a great sadness because of how others treated you?  To what extent has your past negatively affected your identity?  How do you identify abuse and its influence in your life?  The course features outstanding personal stories of people impacted by abuse.  Hear the personal story of William P. Young’s childhood of abuse and how he learned to cope and survive conditional love.  Discover and experience God’s unconditional love for you, regardless of your past or present.  Discover your new identity that breaks the chains of the past, and releases you into a future of joy, peace, and success.  This course will be a great encouragement in your life!

Special Introductory Price, Limited Time Only!
          Basic Course $29
          Course with coaching $59

Available late October 20

Course 3 - Who is God, Really? "I'm Not Who You Think I Am"
                     The Triune God and Loving Relationships

Picture God in your mind.  What does He look like?  What face do you place on God?  An angry policeman?  An absentee father?  A puppeteer with you at the end of the strings?  These and many other false concepts about God can keep us trapped in a cycle of relating to God through unhealthy motives.  Do you relate to God in fear, guilt and shame?

There is a better way!  This course teaches on the nature of God as being both deeply personal and forever loving.  The following topics are discussed:  How does our relationship to our parents—especially our fathers—impact our understanding of God?  What are the boxes into which people place God?  Is your box too small? Why the Trinity is critical to your understanding of your greatness.  How Christianity is different from all the other religions of the world and its implications for daily life.   Learn the surprising discovery of C. S. Lewis and how it changed his life forever.

Special Introductory Price, Limited Time Only!
          Basic Course $49
          Course with coaching $79
Available November

 Course 4 - If There is a God, Why So Much Pain and Suffering?
                     Making Sense of Pain in Our World

Do you find yourself asking God, “Why did you let this happen?” Coping with a personal tragedy and loss becomes compounded when sorting out God’s role in the midst of our pain and confusion.  If He is so loving and all-powerful, then why did He not stop the circumstances from occurring?  These are the questions asked by the main character in The Shack book by William P. Young. 

This course highlights the themes of pain, and asks the tough questions of God.  Will it ever get better?  God’s role in tragic events and losses is examined, and the student is equipped to process his or her own journey with helpful ideas and insights by those who have personally traveled down that road.  Those who take the coached version of the course will find it to be much more helpful in processing this material.

Special Introductory Price, Limited Time Only!
          Basic Course $29
          Course with coaching $59

Course 5 - Walking in Paths of Joy and Freedom
                     Forget the Rules; It’s About Relationships

Do you find that your relationship with God and others is more defined by rules rather than giving and receiving within loving relationships?  Is it hard for you to extend grace and mercy when people mess up or fail you?  Is God only a great lawgiver and judge or is He one of continual forgiveness and the God of second, third and seventy chances? 

This The Shack study is designed to help students learn how living just by the rules of life can actually rob you of the true value and joy of life.  You will learn the incredible power of a grace-filled life and how it can transform your relationships into those of deep feelings and affection for others.  Walk in joy and true freedom, and a profound sense of well-being – just as God intended.

Special Introductory Price, Limited Time Only!
          Basic Course $39
          Course with coaching $69

Available early February 2010

Charles Hodge  

During my seminary career, although I majored in New Testament, I spent much time studying, particularly Historical Theology, and more particularly Reformed Theology in America. (In fact I went on to do my Ph.D. in Historical Theology.) Although I studied at Dallas Seminary, considered the bastion of Dispensationalism I did not buy wholly into the system. Instead I fell in love with the Princetonians: Charles Hodge, A.A. Hodge and particularly B.B. Warfield of whom it has been said had the theological mind of a Charles Hodge and a Wm. G.T. Shedd rolled into one. It is also said that after Jonathan Edwards, Warfield was the greatest theological mind ever produced in America. Warfield particularly had a razor-sharp mind and studied the positions of his theological opponents so he knew what they believed better than they did. As a result he could spot weaknesses in his opponents’ positions a mile (or more) away. He did not resort  to name-calling, nor did he twist his opponents positions wB. B. Warfieldhen involved in argument. Rather like Irenaeus the great second century opponent of Gnosticism thought the best way to discredit an opponent’s position was to give it a full exposition, working out the hidden assumptions and propositions. When this was done the opponent’s position would fall under its own weight, as discredited. I loved the logic and the clear thinking and the closely integrated system. In short it was supremely rational. The Princetonians also had a reputation for a warm personal piety (See Andrew Hoffecker, Piety and the Princeton Theologians).

Twenty-five years ago, when I was just starting my career as a Professor of Theology and I was doing research for my Ph.D. dissertation I traveled to New York City to read the Briggs Papers housed in the Library of Union Theological Seminary across the street from Colombia University at Broadway and 122^nd I spent two weeks pouring over Briggs’ personal correspondence. Charles A. Briggs was Warfield’s great theological opponent in the 1880’s and 90’s with whom he battled over the question of biblical inerrancy. During my research,  I discovered a darker side to the Princetonian tradition. That darker side involved an absolute devotion to the Westminster Confession as the pinnacle of theological achievement that could never be improved upon. Charles Hodge boasted that a new idea never arose at Princeton. Warfield, although a much better theologian than Hodge never wrote a systematic theology because he believed that his mentor’s Systematic Theology could not be improved upon. They adopted a mentality which Briggs labeled orthodoxism "Orthodoxism assumes to know the truth and is unwilling to learn; it is haughty and arrogant, assuming the divine prerogatives of infal­libility and inerrancy; it hates all truth that is unfamiliar to it, and persecutes it to the uttermost." St., near Harlem.

I also discovered a deep dichotomy between the head and the heart. Charles Hodge, as representative of the Princetonian position, displayed a great antipathy for any emphasis on the subjective nature of Christianity. At one point he stated: "The idea that Christianity is a form of feeling, a life, and not a system of doctrines is con­trary to the faith of all Christians. Christianity always has a creed. A man who believes certain doctrines is a Christian." (Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review 29:693.) This stress on the objective nature of the Faith has led to the charge that Princeton was rational­istic in its approach to Christianity. Numerous historians and theologians have contended that the Princetonians compartmentalized faith and life. For example, C. R. Jeschke states of the Princetonians:

 The strict compartmentalization of formal theology and the life of piety that came to prevail at Princeton reflected in part the growing irrelevance of traditional modes of thought and inherited statements of faith for the needs of the church in a rapidly changing world. The fact that Hodge and his colleagues, like most of their contempo­raries, were unaware of the sickness in the theological body, only permitted the condi­tion to worsen, and heightened the reaction of the patient to the cure, when its true condition was finally diagnosed. ("The Briggs Case", p. 56.)

Back to my discoveries in the Briggs papers, it was here that I saw the practical outworking of the Princetonian position. Briggs’ uncle, Marvin Briggs who had studied at Princeton Seminary had been soured on the whole mindset that surrounded the Princetonian pre-commitment to the Westminster Confession. Charles Augustus BriggsWhile studying in Germany he writes to Marvin, "I have one course . . . on System­atic Theology which seems to be your detestation. However the subject is treated differently from what you had at Princeton. Prof. Dorner goes back to the Bible as his first step . . ." (B. T. 1:27). Several months later he wrote: "It is unfortunate for you that you were educated at Princeton where there is an incarnation of doctrine and everything is looked on from that standpoint. Here in Germany . . . everything is looked upon from a scriptural standpoint. The only difficulty is there is too little reverence for Scripture as the Word of God and too great an exaltation of human reason as arbiter over it" (B.T. 1:42. Underscoring original, italics added). Later in the same letter he characterized Princeton's system as "pernicious."

 I also discovered that while the Princeton theologians themselves were able to maintain a warm personal piety with their commitment to the system, the graduates of Princeton were not. it is not too much to say that many even among the Old School read only the theological material of the Princetonians. This fact contributed to a cold creedal orthodoxy among a significant contingent of the Old School with its stress on pure doctrine. Even the great Greek grammarian Basil L. Gildersleeve, himself a Princeton graduate, decried the “baleful influence of Princeton” stating that there was from there “very little hope of a generous vivifying force” (Letter from Gildersleeve to Charles Augustus Briggs, Briggs Transcripts, 5.470 (Twelve ledger books hand-copied by Emilie Grace Briggs comprising a transcription of Charles Briggs’ personal correspondence, Union Theological Seminary Library). Many letters from Princeton grads were in Briggs’ correspondence. What comes through the written lines is a cold rational commitment to truth which touched the head but bounced off the heart.

 Why is this important for us today? Because we see the same spirit within the academic wing of evangelicalism. We see theology that has reduced the truth of God to timeless abstract propositions. A theology that puffs up the knower with pride that he or she is committed to the truth, and even reduces love as another proposition to be parroted rather than a relationship to be experienced.