Scandalous Grace (part 1): the Background

The Fixer- Pearl Jam Video!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj-sFIHQWLY

One of the audacious assumptions of the Bible is that humanity is made reflecting the attributes and personhood of God. It is against this backdrop of moral credit, spiritual life, and relational depth that its corruption emerges so heinously. Christopher Hitchens is a prominent writer and debater of the New Atheism and among other things a prolific columnist for Vanity Fair. He basically says that if he is anything like the image of God, then God is uglier than he had originally thought. With an heir of humility he simultaneously degrades and promotes himself. It's really pretty brilliant. Why? Because he's saying he is too human and to represent Someone who is supposed to be so great. Therefore, he punts- so to speak, on the image bearing idea from the Bible so that he can also excuse the existence of any Biblical Divinity.

Close, but no cigar Hitchens. As Augustine once wrote, "A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently." Chris's got a silver tongue that makes you feel stupid for believing anything contrary to what he says, just because the way he says it sounds so smooth. Nevertheless, I agree with the bishop on this one: smooth speech doesn't equal true content (although pop-culture might lead you to that conclusion). Christopher, like all of us, is a walking illustration of someone who has the capacity for greatness, but has gone wrong in so many ways. His assessment is logical insofar as it goes. Unfortunately it doesn't take into affect the Great Corruption: the Fall. This scene in our human drama is most despised, but without it we will never make any sense of our Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide predicament. To date, no mythology, world religion, or evolutionary epic makes better pragmatic sense to me than the True-Tall-Tale from Genesis. For all its enchanted trees and talking snakes, I find it harder to believe anything else.

We are spoiled creatures. Man is greater than the animals. And because he is greater, he is also worse. He's humbled and made of the same material, but exalted and capable of transcendence, philosophy, relational intimacy, magnanimity, and infamy. He is so beautiful and so tragic; adept for genocidal atrocity and the exalting into divine status of the same human thing- ourselves. We are enamored and repulsed by each other at once. This is what Francis Schaeffer called the "manishness" of men. The fact is test-worthy and sufficiently evidenced; humankind is both wonderful and terrible.

You can hate it- and I do, but it's the air we breathe. You can never escape the ecstasy of human beauty, nor the grotesque disfigurement of our race. You see it in the mirror: eyes with infinite desire and the closed system of your body with all its finite limitations. So are we doomed to discontent? Are we hopelessly sick? Or will the prozac and playboy medications continue to plague our search, "to try and find a cure for the pain (Jon Foreman)"?