Imagine a world where war and other horrors have been raging for centuries across the land.

Already nearly everyone has been afflicted with suffering and disease. And even for those few who are untouched by the battles between the land’s rich ruling despots and poverty-stricken peasants, envy, violence and racism dominate.

In the Killing Fields outside the main city of the rich rulers, death is the only reigning king. Bodies are littered in all the crags and holes torn in the earth by near-magical battle forces. Others lay dying, begging for food, water and shelter, and protection from further attacks.

You and others know of a Secret Power that is their greatest hope.

The mightiest Wizard in all the land has promised to work through you. Why? He is appalled at men’s inner wickedness that has given rise to these horrors. That is why this most powerful of all wizards has gifted you and others with this task: go to the Killing Fields, and to the cities, find the hurting and the dead, and heal them.

This power is of a different and mystical kind. It will work most effectively on not the wounded, but the dead. If applied to the dead bodies, whom some strange twist of “destiny” has favored, it will awaken them. They will come back to life. They may love, laugh and live again. They will be eternally grateful to the Wizard whose gift has brought them to life and saved them from death. Ultimately they will live forever, free of the consequences of evil and suffering.

So you stride onto the Killing Fields. But rather than coming first to the dead bodies, you kneel beside those who are wounded and begging for help. Why? Despite the secret power to raise the dead, the wounded are crying louder. Their needs seem worse. And after all, the secret power will only work on some of the dead bodies anyway; you don’t know which ones.

With elixirs, food, water and blankets, you do your best to make the wounded comfortable. Though many of them die despite your efforts, those who do get better go on to be grateful for your help, and maybe even help others. But someday they will die anyway and never have a chance at new life. Meanwhile in the Killing Fields, the slaughtered dead stay dead forever. You never even tried to let the Wizard’s secret power of regeneration work through your deeds.

And with that, this fantasy metaphor is complete, and perhaps by now, thoroughly transparent.

Wounded flesh, hearts of stone

This past Monday, people across America gathered in streets, churches and more to pay tribute to the late civil rights and religious leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As a local journalist, I cover these events every year, and am re-led to consider King’s influence on people’s beliefs.

On that morning, a speaker at one such regional event commented on what he said was King’s commitment to preach the Gospel above all else. “Before I was a civil-rights leader, I was a preacher of the Gospel,” King said later in his life, according to the speaker. “This was my first calling, and it remains my greatest commitment.”

That profession was also evident in an earlier letter King wrote to the girl he liked, Coretta Scott (whom he later married). He told her he had finished reading the 1888 American “utopia” novel by Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887, which apparently Scott told him about.

“I welcomed the book because much of its content is in line with my basic ideas,” King wrote.¹ He went on to describe his own opposition to overt Marxism and Communism, yet saw benefits in socialism — he believed capitalism began with noble intentions, but had “outlived its usefulness.” King praised many of Bellamy’s points, with caveats — including what he saw as Bellamy’s failure to temper his idealism with realism, in this case, a Biblical truth:

Bellamy with his over optimism fails to see that man is a sinner, and that he is give [sic] better and economic social conditions he will still be a sinner until he submits his life to the Grace of God. Ultimately our problem is [a?] ² theological one. Man has revolted against God, and through his humanistic endeavors he has sought to solve his problem by himself only to find that he ha³ has ended up in disillusionment.

Yes, “doctrine-cop” types such as me can complain about some of this, such as that King didn’t mention that God’s grace is not just something you submit to, but receive through faith, all as gifts from God Himself because of the sacrifice of His Son for His people. But altogether, praise the Lord, King got it right!

Still I wonder why, a few paragraphs later, he proceeded to write:

Let us continue to hope, work and pray that in the future we will live to see a warless world, a better distribution of wealth, and a brotherhood that transcends race or color. This is the gospel that I will preach to the world.

Thus I ask: did King, whatever he may have said about the Secret Power, end up incidentally bypassing it in favor of treating the wounded before the dead?

Regardless of how he started out, was his message drawn away from the Gospel of Grace to a “gospel” of societal prosperity, racial brotherhood and “better distribution of wealth” — hoping to heal sins’ wounds, but in effect ignoring the deadness of humans’ hearts?

And, though King may have believed in Christ’s true Gospel, the “power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16), what is the legacy of most civil-rights successors?

Today, are civil-rights activists, more socially “liberal” Christians, poverty workers, politicians, stepping over the dead bodies, and urging Christians to be just as “progressive” as they are by downplaying humans’ spiritual death and instead focusing on the surface wounds of sin?

No one would ever deny the need to promote understanding between people groups, and combat segregation laws and other evils resulting from dead human hearts. Yet for Christians, we have enough workers to treat the suffering and the dead. It’s said that former generations have too often stepped over the wounded. Let us not now overcorrect and ignore the dead.

(Next week in part 2: true help for Haiti, and the need to reject society-prosperity “gospels.”)

Christmas time is here again! Hurray! This makes for wonderful memories and gifts, both past and present, time spent with family and friends, all while celebrating Christ’s birth. And, of course, Christmas makes for some interesting issues to discuss here.

Christmas has been a part of my life for as long as I’ve been able to remember anything. There has never been a time that I don’t recall those shining lights, gifts, potpourri, red and green, Advent candles, Nativity scenes, the Christmas tree, and yes, even the anticipation of gifts left overnight Christmas Eve by some magical mythical figure in a red furry suit.

All of it was happy. It brought my family together with traditions and memories, whether past or being created. Altogether, it was so good, and such a picture of God’s grace.

Then came an annoying Phase of mine, in my early teens. It was a Phase of Snarkiness.

I’m not sure how long it lasted, maybe less than a few weeks. But I think it started when I found out the Truth About Santa Claus.¹ Based on that, along with my being sort-of, er, subconsciously impressed by all those Spiritual homeschooling families who didn’t have Santa come to the house, I began to wonder: was it really right and Spiritual to have a Christmas tree? And wasn’t Santa Claus a lie?

Sigh. If time travel were ever invented, I would go back and probably be just as obnoxious now as I was then, while lecturing my obnoxious self. Some of what I would say would be based on this week’s Wednesday column, about a Bible passage being misused about Christmas trees.

Yet I wonder if even those assumptions derive from broader, worse views about the nature of objects, as compared to the nature of humans.

Robbing Paul to pay Pelagius

Naturally, after that column, I got to thinking about the connection between Christmas trees and Pelagianism. (I would like to stress that I don’t normally do this. Maybe it’s just that I have a lot of pent-up amateur-theologian-style energy that would otherwise be spent on, say, seminary.²)

That connection also has to do with two separate reactions to this column’s title. Is this a good title, or a bad title — by which I mean sinful? If I were saying it angrily, using God’s name in vain, it would be bad. But the way I mean it now is literal, and in a right context: Hug a Christmas tree, for God’s sake! And I’m using His Name, for God’s sake, literally — not in vain.

Similarly, is a Christmas tree good, or bad? Answer: it depends on how you’re using it. Are you using it as a vain thing, or with Godward purpose? That depends on one’s heart.

That’s where Pelagianism can interfere. That way of thinking, originated by a British layman in the fourth century, claims that humans aren’t afflicted with a sin nature from Adam’s and Eve’s sin. Instead, we must almost repeat their decision in our choices, with a neutral nature.

The most extreme view of this isn’t much different from a non-Christian who would claim people aren’t basically good or evil, but neutral: what causes sins is our environment.

Pelagian assumptions are rampant in some Christians. Among those would seem a spinoff notion that things in the world can be evil. That skews the Bible’s teaching that it is not humans who are neutral; objects are. And objects are not naturally evil; humans are. Jesus said that putting something into one’s body, such as food, doesn’t cause evil or defilement; real evil comes from within (Mark 7: 14-23). Paul told the Corinthians that meat cooked in honor of idols is neutral, because God is the only real God; an idol doesn’t exist and is a nonissue.³

So I have started to wonder: how many Christians have this kind of objects-as-evil view when it comes to movies? Or music? Or Santa Claus, or Christmas trees, or celebrating Christmas at all?

Did I have that view in other ways when I was growing up? Absolutely I did. I even made little self-righteous lists of things that were Good and things that were Bad.⁴ The Bad things included Batman, Barbie dolls, and Ninja Turtles.⁵ The list of Good things included — included —

Hmm, come to think of it, I never had a list of things that were Good. That might have helped.

I wish I had known better at the time — I think even a child could understand this — that things by themselves are neither good nor bad. This week I thought about this even more because of a little word study about the Hebrew term hebel. It means “vanity,” something pointless, useless. All is hebel, the author of Ecclesiastes would have said. And in Deuteronomy 32:21, God doesn’t just say that idols are vain, He says they are vanities. It’s the same word.

It is not the statues, poles, trees, whatever, that cause evil. People cause evil, misusing things.

If I had known that more when I had my little I-wonder-if-Christmas-things-are-evil Phase, it would have saved me a lot of trouble. Instead of letting other Christians send those guilt vibes my way (even if they didn’t mean to, they didn’t do much to prevent that from happening), I would have felt sorry for them, that they couldn’t enjoy these symbols of grace.

Christ is born, hug a tree

Still, it turns out that without creating a time-paradox of trying to grow myself up in retrospect, I grew up (at least in that way) anyway. Thank God, I matured past those faux-adult, faux-spiritual, should-I-be-“holier”-than-thou attempts — at least in this specific respect.

Years later, one of the first things I planned to ask my special friend, during our dating⁶, was how she and her family had celebrated Christmas.

And I couldn’t help but be thrilled at her responses. They put up lights outside. They sang carols and played Christmas CDs real loud, decorating indoors. Even Santa Claus had come to her house. They had a Christmas tree, and loved it all, while celebrating the birth of the newborn King Who does, and will, bring His people joy.

Like my family, they had enjoyed these symbols of God’s grace, so different from subtle views of performance-driven Christianity. And they learned even more later about His specific grace.

Two years after that discussion, we’re married and celebrating our first Christmas together. Joyously we began playing Christmas music on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. We budgeted for decoration items, including outside lights, indoor candles, ornaments, tinsel, garlands. At the local megastore we found the perfect artificial Christmas tree on sale. Elated, we bought it.

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, with Christmas music playing and instant French-vanilla cappuccino steaming, we unpacked that first tree and put it together. We strung lights, hung ornaments, enjoyed the time together. We rejoiced in Christ’s birth and His gifts in our lives — even while not thinking specifically about the Christmas story. We shared in that experience and, no doubt, made memories for years to come, to share with family, present and future.

And yes, when we’d finally put it together, and turned all other lights off and the tree on, with its colorful glows sparkling, I even hugged that Christmas tree — for God’s sake.

Thank Him for making objects, even Christmas trees, that by themselves are worthless and vain, but with His grace can be used for His glory. And thank Him even more for turning me, a worthless object of His wrath (Ephesians 2: 1-10), into someone who can show His glory too.