It’s been a beautiful day this Sunday—thanks to fossil fuels.  We’re actually snowbound, the snowfall having transitioned from a standard weather system last night to one of Michigan’s unique “lake effect” events today.  So the snow amount has doubled since the 8 inches we received on Friday.  But the wind is now the big issue.  With sustained winds at 25 mph and temperature at about 9 degrees, the windchill is around 15 below.  Wisely, most churches canceled their services for the day.

My outdoor experience today, other than shoveling the walk and tending the bird feeders, has been vicarious: spending a few hours with John Muir in Yosemite.  So like our furnace, my old recliner has gotten a good workout.  I’ve had a workout as well—cognitive and affective: a Christian who loves God’s creation cannot spend much time with Muir and not be challenged intellectually and touched emotionally.

When Muir had become nationally known through his published journals, sometimes his father, Daniel, would hear about one of his son’s harrowing mountain experiences in the local paper before he received a letter from him.  Daniel would have been able to accept risks to his son’s life and health if he had been a missionary, but not a naturalist. On one such occasion, he wrote a stern letter back to his son:

I wished I had not seen [the newspaper report]. . . . Had I seen it to be God’s work you were doing, I would have felt the other way, but I knew it was not God’s work, although you seem to think you are doing God’s service.  If it had not been for God’s boundless mercy, you would have been cut off in your folly.   All that you are attempting to show the Holy Spirit of God gives the believer to see at a glance of the eye, for according to the tract I send you, they can see God’s love, power, and glory in everything, and it has the effect of turning away their sight and eyes from the things that are seen and temporal to the things that are not seen and eternal, according to God’s holy word. . . . You cannot warm the heart of the saint of God with your cold icy-topped mountains.  O, my dear son, come away from them to the Spirit of God and His holy word, and He will show our lovely Jesus unto you, who is by His finished work presented to you, without money and price. . . . And the best and soonest way of getting quit of your writing and publishing your book is to burn it, and then it will do no more harm either to you or to others. [Emphasis as it was in the original letter.]

Teddy Roosevelt and Muir

What a sad letter for us to read from our vantage point, knowing that Daniel Muir had beaten his son mercilessly,—often for no good reason—had forced him with a whip to memorize Scripture, had compelled John and his brother to work from dawn until dusk to maintain the farm while he sat in the house reading Scripture and writing tracts, and showed them a Jesus who was anything but “lovely.”  That John Muir retained his faith in a loving Creator is a wonder.

How sad too that Daniel Muir somehow missed the meaning of God’s great discourse with Job, how after hearing Job and his miserable “comforters,” like the elder Muir, pompously claim to know how God works His ways with man and nature, the Creator took Job on a vicarious tour of the wonders of His creation in order to compel the patriarch to understand that the natural world is what John Calvin, Daniel’s mentor theologian, called “the theater of God’s glory,” and that it has meaning and purpose that transcend both our understanding and our self-centered utilitarianism.

Knowing of John Muir’s bitter experience with the “church” of Daniel Muir, we can at least have a better grasp on John’s avoidance of formal Christianity.  From Yosemite, John wrote this in a letter to his more sympathetic brother, David:

I have not been at church a single time since leaving home.  Yet this glorious valley might well be called a church, for every lover of the great Creator who comes within the broad overwhelming influence of the place fails not to worship as they never did before.

May we not fail to learn something important to our faith from the very different “churches” of Daniel and John Muir.

See you outdoors!

Dean

Last evening I plopped into our old recliner and picked up another of my used-book finds: The Wilderness World of John Muir, a collection of accounts from Muir’s journals and books.  I was soon captivated.  Here’s an account I enjoyed of one of John’s experiences in Tennessee:

Once I was very hungry and lonely in Tennessee.  I had been walking most of the day in the Cumberland Mountains without coming to a single house, but in crossing a dark-shaded stream whose border trees closed over it like a leafy sky, I found the frail Dicksonia [a southern hemisphere tree-fern very rare at that latitude] that I had looked for so long, and the first magnolia, too, that I had ever seen.  I sat down and reveled in the glory of my discoveries.  A mysterious breathing of wind moved in the trees, and the stream sang cheerily at every ripple.  There is no place so impressively solitary as a dense forest with a stream passing over a rocky bed at a moderate inclination.

Feelings of isolation soon caught me again among these hushed sounds, but one of the Lord’s smallest birds came out to me from some bushes at the side of a moss-clad rock.  It had a wonderfully expressive eye, and in one moment that cheerful, confiding bird preached me the most effectual sermon on heavenly trust that I had ever heard through the measured hours of the Sabbath, and I went on not half so heart-sick, nor half so weary.

Although I have read many snippets of John Muir’s writings, I am feeling compelled to dig much deeper into this man’s thoughts to see what he might teach about the tension that evangelicals have in seeking to reconcile the truths of God’s general revelation (His works) and His special revelation (His Word).  Muir is ideal for such a study, since his father was an outspoken, but cruel, Christian fundamentalist who believed that the natural world and its creatures were gifts to mankind to use as we wish and that to study the natural world instead of the Bible was sinful.

This thinking was common among many of the Christian pioneers of the upper Midwest.  For instance, after a great slaughter of passenger pigeons near the Muir farm in Wisconsin—for pigeon pies—one of the children said, “It’s awful like a sin to kill them.”  Muir goes on: “To this some smug, practical old sinner would remark, ‘Aye, it’s a peety, as ye say, to kill th’ bonnie things, but they were made to be killed, and sent for us to eat as the quails were sent to God’s chosen people when they were starving in the desert.’” [Ironically, the world's last passenger pigeon and John Muir died within four months of each other in the fall of 1914.]

John Muir went on to question that purely utilitarian view of God’s creation in many ways over the following decades, much to the displeasure of his father, Daniel, who to his dying day sought to turn John from celebrating the wonder of God’s creation to preaching the Gospel to the lost—as though one had to be sacrificed for the other.

So I’m making a New Year’s resolution early: to, in part, use the year 2009 to learn more from the life of John Muir and his struggle with the twisted form of Christianity demonstrated by his father. Along the way, I will likely share a bit with the friends of WOC.

See you outdoors!

Dean

Because the earth is an object of worship for many of those given to New Age beliefs and other modern forms of pantheism, it’s logical for them to demonstrate devoted concern for the earth. That’s all they believe they have that is worthy of their reverence. Many of these individuals have followed the natural path of paganism illustrated by the apostle Paul: “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen” (Rom. 1:25, NIV). There is a world of difference, however, between those who care for creation because they believe the earth itself is divine and those who care for creation because they honor and worship the divine Creator and desire to obey Him.

It’s good to keep in mind that it’s only natural for those who worship the creation to want to care for it—and to be disturbed by those who don’t care about it or for it. Pantheism (believing that God is everything or that He is the impersonal force that inhabits everything) is significant today among non-Christians concerned about the degradation of the earth’s environment. In fact, forty years ago Francis Schaeffer warned the evangelical community that if we did not begin to address these real crises, the philosophy of the environmental movement would come to be based on pantheism. He was already voicing that concern when the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire (in June of 1969—because of extreme pollution by flammable liquids dumped into the stream by careless industries). This shocking event sent many non-Christians into a search for a philosophy or worldview that would address the abuse of our environment because, sadly, they did not find it in the Church where it should have been evident.

Chuck Colson in his book The Body told us that, “we should be contending for truth in every area of life. Not for power or because we are taken with some trendy cause, but humbly to bring glory to God. For this reason, Christians should be the most ardent ecologists.”

Christians should be able to demonstrate to those who have fallen into the error of neo-paganism and pantheism that the Christian faith provides ample support for creation stewardship. Foundationally, Christians care because earth stewardship has is our responsibility of service to God. Further, many followers of Christ who are outspoken advocates of creation care—”good earthkeeping“—have had significant opportunities to reach non-Christians with the truth of the Gospel—providing them with the fundamental reason for environmental concern: respect for and obedience to the One who created the earth. I’m convinced that many “earth worshipers” might be drawn to the message of the Gospel if more believers lived out the meaning of the Gospel in all its aspects—including respect and care for the Creator’s handiwork.

This was taken from the Articles page—from the article Questions Christians Ask About Environmental Issues.

See you outdoors!

Dean

We’ve had a beautiful December this year—with snow either falling or fallen since the first day of the month.  I say, “If we have to have winter, let’s have it with snow!”  Some of the snowfalls have been of the mesmerizing sort: the air filled with giant flakes ambling downward tipping and twirling slow enough that you can follow one flake from sky to touchdown.

It was during just one of those snowfalls several years ago that a thought suddenly overwhelmed me: materiality is the miracle. What I was blessed to understand is that we are living in the miracle.  If God is all, is spirit, did create and is creating and sustaining, then the ultimate reality that makes our existence possible is the spiritual realm, which we cannot see.  The material world that we do see—feel, hear, smell, taste—is God’s persistent miracle.  Hence for a material being to ask if miracles are possible is really a ludicrous question.  Our senses are the material gift of our Creator that allows us to know in a limited way just one small part of a reality so far beyond comprehension that our reactions to it must chiefly be humility and wonder.

It’s this truth that is the motivation for this blogsite and the chief reason we don’t get into the debate on how and how long ago God created the material world.  For more that forty years I argued and debated and debated and argued—mostly with other Christians—about what the Genesis account of creation was telling us about the scientific fashion of God’s creation work.  I was convinced, of course, that when the arrogant and self-centered ungodly person denies the Creator but is awestruck by His cosmos, he is led, as Paul tells us in Romans 1, into idolatry—to worshiping the creation instead of the Creator.  What I didn’t see, however, is that when Christians pretend that we know how and how long ago our Creator did it, we too are proud and can easily fall into a sort of “righteous idolatry” of the material world.

Frankly, I believe if anyone, Christian or non-Christian, ever claims he knows anything more than an inkling about God’s creation miracle, he ends by adding speculation to ignorance and calling it knowledge. For that reason I’m not much interested anymore in the “Great Creation Debate.”  I’m just going to be content to merely celebrate the miracle and wonder of His Creation and follow William Blake’s advice:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

See you outdoors!

Dean