Trinity - Mystery Math and the Holy Spirit

Current in Carmel - #12 - Trinity
Spirituality column / January 30, 2007

Mystery Math and the Holy Spirit
By Bob Walters

“Seven” may be the Bible’s perfect number and “Twelve” its perfect consensus, but “Three” creates the mystery of Communion.

The Holy Trinity – God the Father, Christ the Son, the Holy Ghost – is God in three persons, not three gods. One God, three manifestations … confounding mathematics.

Three divided by none is one.

Why three? Three is the smallest number for a community. The Trinity teaches the importance God places on community, and provides the key clue into our personal relationship with God.

Ever been to a church that serves communion – the Bread and the Cup? It’s not just a light mid-morning snack. Christ become human – His body and blood – is our physical and spiritual communion with God, through Christ Jesus who physically became us, in the Holy Spirit who reveals God to us.

The Trinity is not mentioned in the Bible, yet God, Christ and The Holy Spirit are clearly the key players of God’s New Covenant. Augustine, a north African universalist Christian in the fifth century, congealed the Biblical manifestations of God into what has been known ever since as the Trinity. Augustine unmistakably saw the Holy community of three as God’s call to our relationship with Him.

Three? One? “The Trinity Are?” “The Trinity Is?”

Fear not. Ever notice, while there is great order in nature, nature has no perfect geometric shapes? The earth is round but not a circle. A tree trunk is straight but not a line. A trillion hexagonal snowflakes fall and no two are alike. Squares and triangles are mathematical specifics, not God’s natural order.

Struggling with the math of the Trinity? Maybe God’s purpose wasn’t about specifics, but instead about relationships … like the one He wants to have with each of us, and the ones we’re supposed to have with each other.

Walters, a Carmel resident, can be reached at rlwcom@aol.com. He is relieved there is evidence God didn’t create math.

Koran Oath, Episcopal Split

Current! In Carmel - #11 - January 23, 2007
Koran and Cathedrals

Founding Fathers not only ones who flinched
By Bob Walters
Here are a couple thoughts on recent news involving religion.

Oath on the Koran: I wonder how many Middle Eastern mullahs flinched Jan. 4, 2007, when Minnesota congressman-elect Keith Ellison was symbolically sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives on a Koran, promising to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America.

Plenty of people here flinched, that’s for sure.

Here is what I find curious. The Koran, the Holy Book of Islam, does not separate religion and government (church and state) the way the Bible does, nor does it offer freedom outside the holy writings.

So, swearing allegiance on a Koran to the freedom-based tenets of a law-based government document (largely conceived by Christians), even in a symbolic photo op, seems more than curious. I would suspect such an act borders on Islamic heresy.

The fact that it was Thomas Jefferson’s Koran intensifies the oddness.

Jefferson championed religious freedom and the separation of church and state, yet is widely regarded as the least religious of the founding fathers. There is nothing to indicate Jefferson believed the Koran any more than he believed the New Testament (which he personally rewrote to remove its supernatural elements - the Jefferson Bible). He would have studied either book as a skeptic, not an adherent. Jefferson, who Islam would consider an infidel, certainly had neither Ellison's demonstrated religious zeal nor Islamic obedience.

Jefferson did, however, in 1801 send U.S. Marines to "the shores of Tripoli" to militarily stop Islamic pirates along the Barbary coast from raiding U.S. shipping and kidnapping for slaves the Christian sailors.

Funny, Ellison didn't mention Jefferson had considered the "Mohammadon" beliefs and actions, and concluded war was the best response. Maybe that is what Jefferson wrote about in the margins of that Koran Ellison was sworn in on.

Personally, I don’t care if an elected official desires to be sworn in on a cookbook – it’s the person’s heart that matters, not the book – but I’m with the Mullahs in wondering what a Holy Koran is doing at a U.S. government swearing-in ceremony.

U.S.-type religious freedom and Islamic religious obedience just aren’t cut from the same cloth.

Muslims know that; most Americans don’t. Jefferson - very obviously - did.

Those Fun-loving Episcopalians: Speaking of our founding fathers, America’s traditional Anglican-Episcopal Church has been torn asunder in recent years, straying from the holy faith and toward the popular culture. Last month, it cost them big time.

Citing doctrinal revisionism, the vital and growing American Anglican Church departed the ever-dwindling Episcopal Church. Not surprisingly, the liberal-leaning media is missing the story on this one.

Orthodoxy is the issue, not gay bishops and women’s leadership. By orthodoxy we are talking about the basic doctrines of the Christian faith, like the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of a divine Christ, which in some quarters of the Episcopal “faith” have morphed from infallible truth into disposable matters of opinion.

Exit the believing Christians. John Yates and Os Guinness wrote a brief but stunning defense of the Anglican departure, available online. I found it by Googling “Episcopal Guinness”. The article, which appeared Jan. 10, 2007 in the Washington Post, is available on various websites.

Historical note - It was The Falls Church congregation in Falls Church, Va., that led the exodus away from the Episcopalians. That was George Washington's church.

Walters, a Carmel resident, does not own a cookbook. Contact him at rlwcom@aol.com

Judgment Day? That's a matter of opinion

Spirituality Column #10
January 16, 2007
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper

Judgment Day? That’s a matter of opinion
By Bob Walters
Author of Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

The most crippling “doctrine” visited upon Christianity is the one that suspends individual judgment. Atheists and postmodernists love it.

You know the line … “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” and its several iterations in the Gospels of Mathew (7:1), Luke (6:37) and John (7:24).

This truly great advice, directly from Christ, is one of the most dangerously misapplied verses in all scripture. Non-Christians and misguided Christians wield that line against believers, and against the absoluteness of God’s truth.

Judge not. I mean, you wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, would you? All that God stuff doesn’t give you the right to judge me!

Well, judge this. Suppose I’m a drug dealer. You had better have the right to judge me; not for my sake, but for yours. “Judge not” doesn’t mean you can get away with being blind.

Here’s a news flash: without judgment, you die. Without judgment’s first-cousin discernment, you can’t know God. Without God, there is no right and wrong.

Judgment, really, is how we survive. Discernment is how we know God. That’s why God gave each of us a brain, for judgment and discernment.

Even an atheist who shouts down Christian judgment will ignorantly “judge” the “wrongness” of a Christian holding the “opinion” that God exists, that Jesus is the Christ, and that the Holy Spirit abides with us. That same atheist won’t see his own wrongness of heart, emptiness of head … nor the plank in his own eye.

You are the one with mush for brains, you silly Christian believer! An atheist’s highest belief in the universe is the sovereignty of his own intellect.

If that were the case (thankfully it’s not), I’d wonder about the universe.

Postmodernism is a big word but easily defined. It means this: absolute truth does not exist and your own opinion is sovereign. Right and wrong are in the eye of the beholder. I don’t remember ever meeting anyone who actually said he/she was a postmodernist, presumably because the position is so morally vapid, intellectually unsound and, in general, just plain silly. But they are out there. Everywhere.

Judgment is inconvenient and un-postmodernist, but very Christ-like. Think Christ wasn’t judgmental? Better read the New Testament again and this time, pay attention. He IS the Judge, and the Truth, and the Light, and a lot of other stuff.

Atheists can’t fathom God, and postmodernists can’t fathom truth. God the empty promise, and truth the matter of opinion, are what you get when judgment is absent.

Love God and love others, but for heaven’s sake, show some judgment.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is not a drug dealer.

Christian Salesmanship: Oh Lord, won't you buy me ...

Column #9
January 9, 2007
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper

Christian Salesmanship: Oh Lord, won’t you buy me …By Bob Walters

I get the creeps when I see Christian salesmanship (some call it evangelism) focused on either sin or prosperity.

Both miss the point terribly, but are understandable sales tactics because they are global concepts.

Sin – everybody has it. Prosperity - everybody wants it.

God, the Bible teaches us, isn’t all that interested in either.

Sin certainly has a theological basis. Christ came from God for our salvation, and preached fervently against the sins which separate us from our relationship with God the Father Almighty.

God’s not that interested in our sin because He doesn’t dwell on our past; guilt has no place in the Kingdom. Satan, on the other hand, has nothing except our past sins and our current guilt to fulfill his lowly aim of controlling us in order to spoil that Godly relationship Christ died for.

So when I hear a Christian selling Christ on the basis of our awful sins that He died for, the Christian is selling the disease (guilt), not the cure.

What’s the cure? That’s easy: Love, and faith in Christ.

God’s power is love and faith; Satan’s power is guilt and fear. Class dismissed.

The Prosperity Gospel, the health and wealth doctrine so tremendously popular today (especially on TV), has preachers selling salvation in a gold box. If your relationship is right with Jesus, they preach, if you pray right and live right, Jesus will reward you with the desirable spoils of this life. You’ll get your best life right now.

That is dangerous baloney. If you “believe” in order to get something material, then what you have isn’t faith. What you have is greed. And your faith is going to take a beating when you lose your job or your health. God isn’t in that stuff; He’s in your heart.

In the Old Testament, God made the Jews His Chosen People. They strove for righteousness with earthly works to win God’s favor. Popular “Capitalist Christianity” finds its scriptural basis in the Old Testament, before the coming of the Messiah.

In the New Testament, in Christ, God’s favor is already won … for eternity. Not only does the New Testament not teach the prosperity gospel (not without a good yank, tuck and a twist, anyway), it very clearly points out the specific perils of wealth (Matthew 19:16-30). Nowhere does it say wealth is bad, certainly; only dangerous. And nowhere does it say being rich, smart, good looking and healthy are a measure of virtue.

Virtue, it teaches, is in your heart, not in your hand. Salvation, it promises, is in your faith in Christ, not in things. Forgiveness of our sins is wonderful, but God’s promise is that we will eventually forget our sins, because He already has. (New Year’s note – Why not go ahead and forget your sins? Satan will have a harder time getting to you.)

Health and wealth? They are false gods. You may have noticed that everybody dies, and there are an awful lot of going-to-glory Christians who will leave little behind.

For God’s love, Christ erased our sin and laid up our real riches in heaven.

Sell that.

Walters, a Carmel resident, has lost faith in most TV preachers.

Hope or Hell in 2007? It's your future

Spirituality Column – #8 – January 2, 2007
Current! In Carmel newspaper

Hope or Hell in 2007? It’s your future
By Bob Walters

Hope, as we see the word in the Bible, is always about the future. Even when scripture refers to hope in the present or past, it is in one way or another talking about a future fulfilled, a desire denied, or an aspiration abandoned.

Tomorrow can be a rough ride.

With 2007 still stretching another 363 fresh tomorrows before us, for what do you hope in the New Year? What do you think you will find?

Here’s some good news. Satan isn’t there yet; he does not work in tomorrow. He works in our past and, when temptation triumphs, in our present.

How do I know Satan is in the past? Because our sin is in our past. We haven’t sinned in the future yet. That’s why Satan’s power resides in our past.

Hell is when you expect Satan, instead of Christ, to be in tomorrow.

Christ is our hope for the future because God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit – the Trinity – are eternal; They are already in tomorrow. Satan isn’t eternal, but he does have perfect knowledge of our past and, with temptation and guilt, uses our past as a constant weapon against us.

While Satan may well visit each of us each of these next 363 tomorrows of 2007 and beyond, we know that in the very end, our past goes away and Satan goes with it. Even in this life, when our past goes away, Satan’s grip slips. But Satan’s persistence is never far from us.
There is a wonderful, all-purpose prayer from the Orthodox church, called the Jesus Prayer, that I love to pray when Satan shows up:

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.”

We may not be able to dispatch our fallen nature, but we can work to dispatch Satan by focusing on Christ. Satan will try to come back, but Satan can’t threaten us from the future. He knows our weaknesses from our past and tempts us today.

Tomorrow – our hope -- is up to us.

I think the purpose of our life on earth is no secret and pretty simple … love God, and love others. What makes everything so, um, interesting, is our sin.

The only way to prevent sin is to perfect our relationship with God. I think we all know that isn’t going to happen in this life, but we try. And we always have the hope of tomorrow, where God, Christ and the Holy Spirit already reside.

Satan will only get there because he rode along with us. Hope only makes sense when Christ, the promise of our future, is in the equation.

So here is a question for the New Year: are you going to ride with Christ, or is Satan going to ride with you?

Either way, you’d better buckle up.

Walters, a Carmel resident, hopes his airbag deploys. Contact him at rlwcom@aol.com.