“QUESTION AUTONOMY!”

The slogan, “Question Authority!” captured many young minds in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its popularity rose with the Hippie Movement’s protest that political ties to business interests were fueling the Viet Nam War. Despite that logical suspicion, their historical gesture of turning their backs on society, through counter-cultural behaviors, did not make them truly independent. Symbolic autonomy cannot quench hunger and thirst or provide shelter and warmth. Even to “beg, steal or borrow” shows dependence and betrays the claim of autonomy. John Donne is still right: “No man is an island.”

This epic “Hippie” departure from the social status quo shouted another appeal: “Make love, not war!” But it was a new kind of love — a “Free Love” that questioned the authority of accepted moral standards and replaced them with those of “The Sexual Revolution.” Urged on by The New Morality’s denial of absolute moral truth, sexual promiscuity spread like wildfire and free love began changing modern Western thinking about human sexuality.

The voices proclaiming autonomy did include a qualifying addendum — “Do your own thing, as long as no one gets hurt.” But that tacked-on safety clause was generally ignored, as people pursued “sexual freedom” without restraint. Unwed pregnancies skyrocketed. Abortions and single parents multiplied. Unstable relationships became a norm. Many more children now grew up in homes without the balancing bond of couples committed to the challenging work of marital love.

The so-called “sexual revolution” only resuscitated the old morality of free lust. Real love is not free, nor is it just a good feeling. It’s a moral choice, a self-denying behavior, a lifestyle bound to others. To adopt this new idea of “free love,” people had to question and reject the authority of the Bible, which gave us love’s true definition: “God is love,” (1 John 4:8). But the ultimate authority of the Creator’s love was also qualified by another definition: “God is light,” (1 John 1:5). Divine Love’s caring creativity is simultaneous with divine Light’s perfect truth. Humans, made “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27), find their significance, purpose and direction only by following God’s lead in creative caring and truthful living. Our true identities — our authentic selves — must forever be subordinate to the life-giving Source of love and light, or we’re spiritually dead.

If we accept the Bible’s definition of God as “light” and “love,” we must also accept how it defines us. From the beginning, we were created to be servants. Bearing the image of our Maker, we were equipped to serve in a variety of ways: 1) reproducing and filling creation with more images of God (Genesis 1:28a); 2) serving as governing representatives for Him (Genesis 1:28b), 3) cultivating and protecting His creation (Genesis 2:15); 4) building a human knowledge-base by categorically naming what He had created (Genesis 2:19); and 5) doing these duties in the context of loving marital union (Genesis 2:24).

All these dimensions of being servants were to be performed in the context of a relationship with the Ultimate Servant, God Himself. After creating the universe, God continued serving as its ongoing Sustainer. That job required an even more energetic, personal involvement after His chosen human representatives failed in their leadership role by choosing the disaster of autonomy over the safety of His authority.

God’s servant nature of caring creativity united to enlightening truth bountifully expands forever, while the self-limiting attitudes and activities of human autonomy become ingrown: 1) parents raise children to image themselves rather than God; 2) servant leadership erodes into tyrannies of self-will and personal power; 3) caring for creation is lost in controlling and exploiting it; 4) pride enthrones knowledge as a god, making science its temple; and 5) marriage devolves from an organic union to a contract easily dissolved by changed feelings.

Painting by Albert Edelfelt

God demonstrated the full extent of Love’s willingness to serve by His personal commitment to repair the tragedy of human autonomy. When His Son became one of us, Jesus exemplified servant leadership by stripping down, as a slave would, to wash His disciples’ feet. He told them to do likewise (John 13:14-15). God made it unmistakably clear that His kind of love was not just in attitude or word but in deed. He said, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many,” (Mark 10:45). How far did Love go in serving us? All the way to the Cross! Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends,” (John 15:13).

The Cross wasn’t the end of God’s incarnational strategy. Christ’s death and resurrection redeemed His failed human project. But now, the Leader of human servant leadership is God Himself. As the Father lived in Jesus, so Christ now indwells His followers. Instead of doing Kingdom work in one isolated body in Palestine, Jesus has been living and serving around the globe in multiple billions of human bodies. In Christ, God’s original plan for us — to image Him as a growing community of body-spirit beings, blessing creation with loving, God-directed service — has become our restored destiny.

Autonomy is a boring alley leading to a dead end. It’s also a self-deception. No one got here on their own. We rely on so many things we ourselves did not invent. We learn by standing on the shoulders of preceding generations, and the knowledge discovered on our own always seems to increase what is unknown. We don’t know the future, can’t agree on the past, and enjoy the present only through good health, which is often out of our control. We claim to know the facts, but they keep changing. We deceive ourselves by saying, “well, it’s true for me anyway,” when we’ve altered our “personal” truths a dozen times in the last decade. We claim to be truthful, loving people but regularly fail at honesty and compassion. If such a distinctive background allows us to say, “I’ve got this…. I can make the best decision for myself here,” then we’re fooling ourselves. Autonomy is worse than a bad joke! Don’t question divine authority! Question human autonomy!

While we don’t know with certainty all realities, all situations, all circumstances, with all their interactive relationships and contingently interwoven possibilities, God does. We don’t perfectly know others or even ourselves, but God does. We can’t get near loving ourselves as deeply as God loves us. So, which is more logical: to submit ourselves to the direction of perfect Love guided by omniscient Wisdom or to follow our own imperfect love, further handicapped by a limited human knowledge of everything? The logical reply is a no-brainer, yet often we trust and follow our own judgment, when God is pointing us in the opposite direction. This makes our confident autonomy a sad form of insanity!

Autonomy distrusts the idea that “God has a wonderful plan for your life.” Here’s an even more accurate statement: “You are a wonderful part of God’s plan.” Why do I express it that way? It’s because God created you specifically. There’s no one who ever lived, is now living or will someday exist who was, is or will be exactly like you. You are unique, and so is everyone else that descended from the original union of Adam and Eve’s DNA. The fantastic diversity of personality and giftedness in all of human history was not canceled by the sinful failure of our first parents. They left Eden disconnected from God, but still retaining their nature as servants and still propagating offspring with individually unique abilities to serve.

"Come, Follow Me" by Brent Borup

Autonomy keeps that unique servant-leadership potential, inherent in all of us, from being fully realized. We can only find the fullness of our true servant selves in union with the Supreme Servant Who made us. Creation now, and “the new heavens and the new earth” yet to be (Isaiah 66:22), will be uniquely blessed by your special contribution of service… or not. If “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good indeed,” (Genesis 1:31), then the potential for humanity’s entire future was all “very good.” But by allowing us to choose or reject His will for us, God put the ball in our court. Either we become the true serving selves He intended for His wonderful human plan, or we don’t. We can repent of our autonomous ways and surrender our autonomous selves to the saving work of Christ, or we can maintain the delusional, distracting, diabolical deception of human autonomy.

I pray that everyone reading this, who has not done so already, will stop doubting the divine authority of Perfect Love and Eternal Light and start questioning the illusion of autonomy. Finding and exploring our real identity as God’s servants, created to serve eternally alongside Him, is an endless journey of joy with ever-expanding horizons. The call of Jesus — our Servant God Who became our Human King — is authoritative and redemptive. The creative adventure of everlasting servant leadership begins with our obedient personal response to His call to us: “Follow Me.”

CREATIVITY AND BEING

Several things in life can launch a search for ultimate meaning. Two facets of that search are the quest for identity (“Who am I?”) and the discovery of purpose (“Why am I here?”). Our human tendency to create is an excellent doorway for entering that search and exploring the answers to those two questions.

The fact that toddlers naturally become amateur creators, before ever pondering questions of identity or purpose, partially answers both questions. If human creativity is inborn, it points toward an answer to who or what humanity is. This relationship of creativity and being is best illustrated in a two-step process experienced by very young humans.

In the first step, when infants start recognizing that their hands belong to them and can function under their control, they start moving and manipulating other objects in the world, things that they learn are not a part of them. If babies could articulate this profound lesson philosophically, they might say, “I and the world around me are not synonymous. I can do things I want to it, and it can do things to me I don’t want. Ouch! That steel pole is hard!” This is why only adults who forget childhood wisdom pretend to lose their personal identities in pantheism: “I and the metal pole am ONE. The lump on my head from running into it while meditating must be maya, just an illusion....”

The lesson children learn naturally is profound, because it verifies their existence, their being. Descartes was close, when he said, “I think, therefore I am.” But his idea needed the help of later existentialist philosophers who said, “I do, therefore I exist.” A positive response to the question of individual being, “Do I exist?” is easily demonstrated by a small child: “See that toy block. Watch! I’m putting it on top of another one. There, see? Who did that? I did! I exist! I am!" Such young logic lays the “am” groundwork in the question “Who am I?” But the “who” of individual identity needs further definition. This leads to the second step.

Manipulating the world, through moving toy building blocks around, is rudimentary creativity. As humans grow, they become more skillful at it, utilizing other media. Architects stick with blocks, but get more sophisticated at stacking them. Painters keep improving in how they push wet pigment around; sculptors, in how they shape clay or stone; writers, in how they shuffle words into poetry, plays, prose, and political speeches. Thoughtful observation of this creativity in almost every example of human work makes it obvious that no one arranges building blocks in exactly the same way. We may imitate other creators, but there’s always some personal uniqueness, even in how we copy them.

While the search for identity may last from the cradle to the grave, the effects of it outlives us, as we touch others with our personal uniqueness and individual creativity. The truth crystallized in John Donne’s “no man is an island” means that, as individuals, we are making history now and will remain a part of history afterwards. Our creativity is important; it counts. But counts for what? Why is it important? What’s the purpose? “Why am I here?”

Perpetual “Why” questions on youngsters’ lips can drive parents crazy. In this world where “no man is an island,” they see myriads of creative works by other individuals. “How” questions may gain answers about the way things were made or their manner of operation, but kids go on to ask, “What’s it for? Why was it made?” These questions seek the goal, the purpose, the objective. Human works of creativity—sometimes alone but more often in a concerted effort—are meant to accomplish or provide something. Creative work says, “I’m not just unique as a person, but my individuality makes an important contribution.”

This two-step process in simple, youthful logic offers one possible explanation for Jesus saying, “Let the little children come to Me... for of such is the kingdom of heaven,” (Mat 19:14, NKJV). Their little feet are on the right track. If our individual, purposeful creativity points to ultimate meaning, then there must be a Creator with personal individuality Who has an important purpose for all of His massive creativity in this gigantic universe.

The One whom the Bible calls “Maker of heaven and earth” has personally identified Himself by the name “I AM.” Our human identity crisis ends when we allow the great “I AM” to answer our question, “Who am I?” Basically His answer is: “You are an image of Me. You are My image-bearer.” Our significance as individual creators finds ultimate meaning by trusting that our Creator,  the Maker of all things, individually designed each one of us exactly as He did. “Why are we here?” Our unique, purposeful creativity is a result of His. And when our discovery of His unique, purposeful creativity ends our search for ultimate meaning, it will open us up to an eternal exploration of that meaning. Then we’ll answer Descartes and the other philosophers. “I am, therefore I think! I am, therefore I do!”

I want to conclude with a poem. It’s a favorite of mine, and never seems old or boring to me. You see, everything I’ve said above is not hypothetically contrived but authentically realized. God made me on purpose, and within that purpose was poetic creativity. More than that, He has let me know numerous times that I’m writing for Him and for others, and not just for myself. As far as I'm concerned, that immortalizes my creative effort. So I never tire of it myself or tire of sharing it with others. See if it speaks to you:

CREATOR

Someday you’ll compose a song or sing one very well,
Feel a thrill of satisfaction in a tale you tell,
Draw a picture, paint a portrait, shape a lump of clay,
Plan and build a dream-house, act a part within a play,
Plant a lovely flower garden, set a gem in gold,
Cut and piece and sew an outfit new and sharp and bold,
Tinker to invent a gadget saving people time,
Write an essay or a story set in prose or rhyme,
And, while feeling fresh fulfillment where you have achieved
In the goal of each ambition by your mind conceived,
You will pause when all about you birds are singing, too,
Wind is whistling, stars are shining, everything you view
Whispers softly hints behind them of a happy Mind,
As if all that is around you stands both sealed and signed
By a Person, Great Designer, One you imitate
When you follow yearnings to be skillful and create.

— David L. Hatton, 2/22/1992
(from Poems Between Darkness and Light ©1994, 2014)

EarthEarthEarthEarthEarth!

The title isn’t a typo. Read it again, with new capitals and strategically placed dashes…

eart—He art—Heart—Hear the art—h!

When merged together consecutively, the word “earth” spells repetitions of the phrase:

“He art, He art, He art,”

or the word:

“Heart, Heart, Heart,”

or the imperative sentence:

“Hear the art, Hear the art, Hear the art.”

As far as I know, this spelling trick with our planet’s name works only in English, and it’s not something I came up. The interesting story of how I learned of it often comes to mind when I look at the painting I did using this word-play.

In January of 1996, I acted upon a growing desire to learn art by enrolling in an elementary drawing class at a local community college. I ended up taking one each semester, a total of 11 art courses over a five year period.

In the last weeks of a “color theory” class, we were given a very regulated painting assignment for our final. Except for tints and tones, it was to contain just 3 colors. Only 3 sheets of letter-size paper could be used, taped together in any arrangement we chose. And the painting had to contain some form of lettering. I had trouble coming up with an idea for it. But one night shift I got some help from a patient I took care of in labor and delivery.

The previous nurse on the PM shift gave me a fairly straightforward report. It was this patient’s first pregnancy, and she wanted to try delivering without an epidural. For that reason, she’d requested to move to an “ABC” (alternative birth center) room, where she could shower and move more freely about the room to cope with her contractions. An ABC room was soon to be available....

But my dear coworker neglected a “biggie” in her report, which I discovered upon entering the room. As part of her way of dealing with labor, my patient was laboring in the nude. After making sure she didn’t mind having a male nurse, I began to work with her as I would with any other patient.

Most moms don’t labor totally naked, but the sight of bare body parts was as normal in my OB job as it was in the figure drawing class I’d taken at the college. Both healthcare and that specific art class can help a person see nakedness with new eyes. They heighten awareness and appreciation of our anatomy’s “fearfully and wonderfully made” beauty, rather than treating nudity in terms of sex appeal, which is the ongoing obsession of our depraved culture. Nursing and art didn’t dull my vision; they healed it.When I saw this patient’s lovely pregnant form fully exposed, I began imagining the challenge of capturing it on paper in charcoal or pastel.

My way of keeping my nursing care human-friendly was to try having normal social conversations with patients and their families. That’s how I discovered that my patient was an artist. When I shared my own love for art, she gave me a wonderful gift: “EarthEarthEarth.” She explained how running the word “earth” together spells those three things: “heart,” “he art,” and “hear the art.” Immediately, I envisioned the possibilities of using this in my art assignment.

Much to my teacher’s consternation, I was the first of his students in this assignment ever to cut up my three sheets of paper and paste them into a polygon. It was the only shape I could make to fit the circular nature of my project while staying within his limit of 3 sheets of paper. He also chided me for choosing the primaries for my 3 colors, but I told him my composition needed them.

I wanted my art-piece to preach, and I think it did by displaying Earth’s dependence on the Triune Godhead. God is Creator: “HE ART!” God is Lover: “HEART!” God is Teacher: “HEAR THE ART!”

The magnificent beauty of creation came from the mind and hand of an Almighty Father. The gracious redemption of Earth’s wayward human population came from the bleeding heart of God’s loving Son. The call and counsel for us to see and enjoy the divine artistry of Earth’s Designer come from the Holy Spirit. All Three Members of the Trinity are personally connected with the story of Earth, and Earth itself, as a uniquely designed and carefully placed planet, points to our need for personally connecting with its Triune Creator. (addendum) Some months after posting this blog article, I wrote a poem about it.... EARTH, EARTH, EARTH

He Art, He Art He Art He Art,
before . . . behind our earthly start,
when—by His strong creative hand
that formed the sea and motherland—
He sculpted dust for lasting worth:
He Art, HE art made EArtH EartH Earth.

His Heart, His Heart, His Heart Heart Heart,
seeking a world that fell apart,
pursuing souls who breathed His breath
to rescue them from realms of death—
re-image them by second birth:
His Heart, Heart Heart for eartH earth Earth.

Now Hear the Art . . . yes, Hear the Art,
Who sings, a course divine to chart!
Inspiring Guide for human tales
blows living breeze to hoist our sails!
His wind instills artistic mirth:
O, Hear the Art call eArtH EartH Earth!

Lost children of this groaning Earth,
return and find your pristine worth
as portraits of the Triune Love
in Father, Savior, Spirit Dove:
re-taste what Life and Light impart
from He Art, Heart, and Hear the Art!

— David L. Hatton, 6/28/2016

THE MIRACLE GOD

Perhaps, because so many of us grew up playing make-believe games and controlling what we imagined—whether teddy bears, dragons, paper dolls, or invented companions—we wrestle with the concept of a real God: the Creator, Ruler, Judge. A real God would have ultimate control. His very existence could demolish our comfortable mental castle of retreat from personal failures and mistaken choices. For this reason, some of us try warding off this real Deity from attacking our fantasy world by using such magical phrases as: “I can’t accept a God like that!” or “My concept of God is. . .” (and each fills in the blank with what he or she wants).

Those familiar with C. S. Lewis know that in his younger years he was a skeptic. He doubted God’s existence and certainly could not accept the Triune Deity revealed in the Bible. But his philosophical journey of dealing honestly with logic led him to face the real God. That confrontation toppled the castle walls of his agnostic dreams or illusions of less “threatening” gods. When he finally bowed his knee in allegiance to the true, living God, Jesus Christ became his King.

Some who read Lewis become infuriated at how his logic gnaws away at their dysfunctional fantasies about God. That was his purpose: to dismantle their comfortable, make-believe worlds just as divine truth stripped away his own escapist imaginations. One such effort was his book Miracles. The following passage¹ from it may lure you to read the whole work. But the quote serves to conclude the brief point I’m making and to reinforce it by stating it even more clearly. . . .

Men are reluctant to pass over from the notion of an abstract and negative deity to the living God. I do not wonder. Here lies the deepest tap-root of Pantheism and of the objection to traditional imagery. It was hated not, at bottom, because it pictured Him as man but because it pictured Him as king, or even as warrior. The Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He will not pursue you. There is no danger that at any time heaven and earth should flee away at His glance. If He were the truth, then we could really say that all the Christian images of kingship were a historical accident of which our religion ought to be cleansed. It is with a shock that we discover them to be indispensable. You have had a shock like that before, in connection with smaller matters—when the line pulls at your hand, when something breathes beside you in the darkness. So here; the shock comes at the precise moment when the thrill of life is communicated to us along the clue we have been following. It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. “Look out!” we cry, “it’s alive.” And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back—I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with Christianity. An “impersonal God”—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘Man’s search for God’!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He found us? 

So it is a sort of Rubicon. One goes across; or not. But if one does, there is no manner of security against miracles. One may be in for anything.

_____________________

1. C. S. Lewis, Miracles (Macmillan: New York, 1978), pp. 93-94.

“WILL YOU SURVIVE?”

The human survival instinct doesn’t tell us why we ought to survive; it’s just there, helping us do it. If we got here by the almighty chance of Mind-less evolution, the survival instinct functions only to insure that we live long enough to pass on our genes and protect our young till they can do the same thing. Afterwards, if evolution could care, it would care less about our personal survival. Despite that, the instinct keeps working anyway, with or without an evolutionary permission.

But if God is the Author of the human survival instinct, it changes the whole picture. Once we recognize a Divine Mind behind it, we can rationally envision that the instinct serves higher purposes than mere reproduction. It quietly assures the value and significance of human life itself, both to mated couples anticipating parenthood and to veteran spinsters and bachelors with no progeny at all. In its psychological dimensions — which material theories of evolution have always been ill-prepared to address — the instinct entertains a hope for the survival of personal identity itself.

Those without faith in an afterlife may interpret this psychological hope as finding its fulfillment merely in the memories of friends and family members who outlive them. But such a hope is short-lived. When those who knew us also finally die, their memories will die with them. Unless we become popular artists, well-known authors, or encyclopedia material, subsequent generations won’t even remember our names. If mine, engraved on stone in some cemetery, is noticed by future passers-by, one in a thousand might think, “I wonder who David Hatton was.” Even if they were curious enough to do research and find out, their knowledge about me would not be “ME,” anymore than the things I’ve created or written are "me." A deep, personal examination of this instinct reveals that the hoped-for survivor is the self.

There’s one other dimension of this psychological hope that deserves consideration: our ambitions. Our desires to create and accomplish and explore, taken together, are bigger than this life can contain. It seems that all of us leave this world with unfulfilled longings: things we wished to have, or dreamed of doing, or hoped to see. We die in the midst of wanting to know more about everything, trying to investigate new realms of knowledge and information. We depart with long lists of unkept New Year’s resolutions for embracing new virtues or adopting new habits. This life just doesn’t seem long enough or large enough for us to fit in all the changes, all the adventures, all the new horizons we would like to experience.

The survival instinct points us beyond, urging us to hope for the ultimate manifestation of all these ambitious longings. It tacitly promises their accomplishment, not by our last will and testament to the loved ones we leave behind, but by the “YOU” and the “ME” who personally dreamed the dreams. It whispers in our hearts the hope of an afterlife, where we will be forever involved in learning and doing and growing.

AFTERLIFE

The growth of our dreams
and our ambitious schemes
To accomplish still more as we age
Are proof, while alive,
that our souls must survive:
Life on earth only turns the first page....

— David L. Hatton, 5-24-2013
(from Poems Between Birth and Resurrection)

(See also the essay on my website called, “Life after Death”)

THE SUPERSTITIOUS FAITH OF EVOLUTIONISM

I just finished an exceptional book, Anatomy of Movement, written by a French dancer-turned-physiotherapist. Its pages helped me visualize that dimension of the musculoskeletal system most often skimmed over by anatomy books: the dynamics of movement. This intelligent woman’s review of virtually every aspect of human mobility inspired my praise for the awesome craftsmanship of our Creator. How sad that she herself repeatedly attributed this marvelous interplay of bone, joint, ligament and muscle to an evolutionary series of cosmic accidents.

I’m not criticizing her any more than I would a parrot for mimicking its master. A powerful educational oligarchy groomed her to speak only the language of its sacred dogma, or to suffer political and academic shame. She’s a smart lady, but a victim of religious superstition.

Let’s be realistic. Darwinian evolutionism is not and can never become science. It’s merely a philosophy based on faith in presumptively interpreted archaeological data. Evolutionists freely exploit their position in the scientific community or their tenure among the academic elite to claim “science” as the basis of their beliefs. This not only deceives the gullible minds of a modern world, but prostitutes real science by trivializing the scientific method.

Evolutionists know that their belief system depends on a large array of unproven hypotheses. Not one of their proposed “guesses” are capable of ever qualifying as a legitimate scientific theory. In any discussion of orthodox science, intelligent evolutionists are obliged to confess this. Yet that fact doesn’t stop their bold preaching from textbook pulpits that evolution “developed this” anatomical marvel or “created that” physiological mechanism. Why can’t they just be honest and say they proclaim Evolution as Creator—or get really honest and admit they believe that Chance or Accident is God?

When evolutionistic faith sees similarities in the anatomical and physiological data of life on Earth, it claims that an infinitesimally long series of reproductive accidents brought forth all this biological diversity from a single ancestral cell. Theistic faith looks at these similarities and deems them compositions by the same Divine Artist. Evolutionists have called such belief in an invisible personal Deity “superstition.” But a small group of heretics have arisen from among them to challenge the academic status quo with the very same accusation. These disobedient scientists are using their brains and seeing Intelligent Design (ID).

A media well-catechized to parrot Darwinian faith has done much to slander ID scientists. But the obvious won’t go away, and that’s why these critically-thinking rebels dared to break from the pack in the first place. They saw the gross superstition in imagining that time and chance could produce the trillions of intricate complexities that comprise biological life on our planet.

Keep rolling a thousand mindless dice for a billion years. What are the odds of them all coming up “snake eyes”? Even if they finally did, what you’ve got is not the whole eyeball, folks, but just the retina. Yes, and that little bit of realism is not something evolutionists like to discuss. The enormous stretch of the imagination for the accidental production of the whole human body becomes hilariously preposterous. One biochemist converted to faith in ID when he realized that the statistical possibility for a linear series of necessary accidents to evolve the hemoglobin molecule would be one chance out of the number of atoms in the known universe.

The ID scientist is like an astronaut who lands on a planet and finds a strange but beautifully crafted vehicle resting on a plain not far from a dormant volcano. He tells his fellow astronaut that there must be intelligent inhabitants. The evolutionist is like the first one’s partner. After examining a nearby lava bed and finding the vehicle composed of the same volcanic material, he calls the first astronaut superstitious and says that the volcano must have spat that thing out. When the first questions the chances of that happening, the second dodges by saying, “Well, I don’t see any intelligent inhabitants around . . .do you?”

It’s way past time for atheistic evolutionists to give up their “scientific” hoax and confess their hypocrisy. Academic pushers of evolutionism have been calling theistic believers in a Creator “superstitious” long before ID scientists ever came on the scene. Yet all along these atheists knew they couldn’t offer a single example from the real world that illustrates how Nature's elaborate complexity could have arisen by chance from simplicity. Meanwhile, theists—and now ID scientists—have at arm's reach millions of human designs in everyday life that illustrate how an Intelligent Mind stands behind the fine-tuned sophistication of anatomical structure and physiological process actually involved in biological life.

People, wake up. Isn’t it obvious by now which group of believers has been religiously bowing its knee to Superstition?

(For my own testimony about leaving evolutionism when I discovered it took too much faith to accept, read “Journey to the Center of My Heart.”)

SEX IS CENTRAL TO GOD’S SALVATION PLAN

Evangelical pulpiteers can shout louder than ever about sexual morality, but most are still reluctant to frankly address the physical aspects of human sexuality, even at a time when society desperately needs to hear a Christian voice. Why this characteristic shyness about sex? Believers have no biblical warrant for it. Such a squeamish attitude certainly didn’t come from our Maker. Neither in Scripture nor in orthodox Christian theology is there even a shred of support for our long history of embarrassment about the body’s sexual nature. In fact, a careful review of the Bible itself—done in the fear of God and not in the fear of tradition—will actually show that our reasons for avoiding the anatomy of gender and its physiological purposes in sexuality are not only unscriptural but may have heretical roots.

Why not boldness rather than bashfulness in our approach to sex? Christians, of all people, should be so open about the physical wonders of human gender and reproduction that it makes the world’s treatment of these subjects seem prudish in comparison. We owed it to the Designer of the human body to have developed such expertise and excellence in the realm of sex education that secular authorities would resort to us for in-depth informational and audio-visual teaching materials, rather than vice versa. In this crucial area of stewardship, the church has not only failed our Lord but left a promiscuous modern society to flounder in a more diabolical degree of sexual confusion than history has ever known.

Why didn’t we take our cue from God’s Word in this area? The very first words God uses to state how humans reflect His image are not the commonly assumed aspects of personality (ie., reason, emotion, volition, etc.), but physical gender! (Re-read Genesis 1:27, and if you don’t say “Ouch!” you’re in theological denial!) Yes, He did equip us rationally for the task of governing creation, but His very first command to us in Genesis 1:28 was what? To reproduce!

If God’s very first words about His purpose for humans—that is, procreativity from sexual union between complementary genders—aren’t sufficient to gain our attention, maybe we’ll listen to His last words. There’s someone who joins the Holy Spirit in the last few sentences of Scripture (Revelation 22:17) to invite sinners to salvation? It’s “the Bride,” the Church, the corporate “wife of the Lamb.” The present symbolism of gender and sexual union ultimately find fulfillment in our spiritual union with Christ the Bridegroom. But until then, God has placed marriage as the Bible’s bookends for the redemption story, and right in the middle of it all is an erotic drama portraying just how sensually passionate He means for His symbolism to be (Song of Songs)! If both temporal and eternal marriage have such centrality in God’s mind, where have our minds been? When it comes to dealing with the fleshly dust from which God fashioned sexual body parts and their physical union, it’s obvious that our minds have been in the gutter.

Far from honoring the human body and it’s gender distinctions as sacred ground, we’ve religiously depicted them as avenues of temptation and lust. Our confident legalisms and manmade scruples to insure purity and morality have basically pornified the body! By redefining our physical forms and our sex organs as obscenities, we’ve paved the way for pornographers to defile that which was meant to be part of our Trinitarian Maker’s Self-portrait. With a prudish brush we’ve painted a lewd image of the sexuality through which God intended to proclaim His message of redemption. If this theological error is not sin, then missing the mark has lost its meaning!

Sexuality wasn’t created as an end in itself. It was intended, first, to image the Trinity’s unity in divine love and cosmic creativity through marital love and human procreativity. The sexuality of our complementary genders was meant to prophetically display the future one-flesh union we will enjoy with the incarnate Son of God, our Bridegroom. Why have we neglected or ignored these aspects of God’s emphasis on sexuality in Scripture? Perhaps they would have been more easily recognized, if Christian minds had not been culturally mesmerized through early Gnostic influences that heretically despised the material world and the physical body. But just as heretical, and even more blinding, has been the Protestant church’s wholesale religious embrace of the false standards of Victorian prudery.

It’s way past time for Christian repentance in this area. The need for reformation in the church’s view and treatment of the body’s gender and sexuality has never been greater nor more urgent. Embarrassing as it may be for Christian leaders to confess to bowing down for so long before the idol of cultural Victorianism—difficult as it may be for the average believer’s mind to be purged of the rituals of such idolatry—we can still return to the healing Word of God. The truth in Scripture about our bodies and their gendered sexuality has the power to set the church free from an unholy prudery and to equip saints with the transforming message our sex-obsessed, gender-confused, marriage-deforming world needs to hear.

[For an even more thorough critique of our failure to deal properly with the human body and its sexuality, I challenge you to read my doctrinal paper on this subject: “Incarnational Truth about Humanity’s Sexual Nature (Doing Body-friendly Theology Free from Gnostic Prudery).”]

HEALTH OUTSIDE THE BOX

A belief that our Creator is also our Sustainer has implications for bodily life sometimes overlooked by an incarnationally weak theology. In spite of abundant Scriptures about God’s practical concern for humanity's physical needs, evangelicals often succumb to Gnosticism’s heretical emphasis on spiritual life alone. One result of this theological error is a disregard for God's gracious care for our bodily health through nature.

When illness confronts believers, this lack of faith in natural remedies often leads Christians to entrust their ailments to the latest TV drug advertisement. They doubt that creation itself might offer them any help. In fact, this trend of unbelief tends to consecrate the medical industry as God's chosen gatekeeper of healing grace. But here’s a logical question: Did all prior generations miss out on the Creator’s grace? Did God have to wait for the development of modern medicine so that He could really meet human health needs?

As an RN, I work with modern therapies and appreciate today’s advances in technology. I also witness how pride of knowledge blinds some medical people from seeing and thinking outside their box. God does work inside the walls of their box, even more than they know. But, in keeping with His character, He infused into creation itself, from the very beginning, much that supports the health and healing of humanity.

Many of today’s alternative healthcare modalities were first discovered by the trial and error of our ancient ancestors. Therapies that didn't really help were often associated with practitioners seeking fame or wealth, which are the same motivations in much of the business of medicine today. The ones that did work well still do. They were always natural and free, and still are.

I’m not calling for an exodus of believers from medical care, but I’d like to see God’s people theologically emancipated from the slave market of drug companies. I’m urging Christians to put a proper view of their Provider into practice when it comes to health, and that means being open to what He has already provided for health maintenance in His creation.

God built human bodies to heal themselves. So, the effectiveness of any natural healthcare method is in how it supports or enhances that process. The book that helped me to start thinking “outside the box” was Return to Nature by Aldoph Just. He wrote of sun, air, mud, and cold water bathing, as well as massage therapy, natural diet, and loose clothing. My further study found most of his ideas validated by the research of modern times. I will mention three areas.

One is sunbathing. In his amazing book Sunlight, Dr. Zane R. Kime reports a myriad of natural health benefits gained from judiciously exposing skin to the sun. Because of Just’s book, I’d already started full-body sunbathing in the seclusion of our backyard. Dr. Kime’s research motivated me to stick with it. As my skin tanned, I stopped getting so many colds and sore throats. Vitamin D was strengthening my immune system. I felt as if the sun’s rays were charging my body’s battery. It’s an awesome sensation, and it’s free.

Another is skin contact with the earth. The testimonies reported by Just seemed honest, but my scientific mind had trouble accepting them until recently, when my wife started reading me the book Earthing (get the book, or at least Google “earthing” or “grounding”). We electrically ground our houses, but synthetic-soled shoes usually keep us from grounding ourselves. Rarely do we go barefoot on grass or moist soil. Yet electron-hungry free-radicals in our bodies can steal electrons from healthy tissues causing an array of chronic inflammations. The earth is an endless source of electrons that quench the activity of free-radicals faster than eating anti-oxidant-rich foods or supplements. Lately each morning, I try to ground my whole body on a wet sheet as I sunbathe. It’s starting to alleviate the arthritic pain I’ve been having in my elbow. Try this free therapy yourself. It can’t hurt, and it may help!

Then there’s wearing loose or minimal clothing. The bare-skinned air-and-light baths suggested by Just were coupled with a call for wearing non-restrictive clothing to improve circulation and get more air to the skin. Dress can be toxic to health, as women who wore the once fashionable corset so painfully learned. But the brazier—the remaining vestige of the corset—continues the toxicity. The authors of Dressed to Kill – The Link Between Breast Cancer and Bras show how this restrictive belt around female chests congests circulation and slows the lymphatic system’s natural work of carrying away toxins and wasted material from breast tissue. It's a setup for cancer. Removing the bra allows lymph to flow naturally and perform its tissue-cleansing work, just as God designed it to do. This book's research is in the “no-brainer” category, but why does our culture brainlessly ignore it? Is it that we’re brain-washed by a medical mindset to think of treating disease with drugs rather than with prevention?

These are just examples of an abundance of natural practices built into creation that can help us stay healthy. If they don’t motivate you to do your own research, as I've done, listing more of them won't help. My purpose is to get you to be honest with your theology. If you believe in a good and gracious God Who cares about your body, as well as your soul and spirit, then start putting your faith into practice. Cease to be a skeptic about finding His grace for health and healing in the natural world that He created. Educate yourself in the alternatives.

ART IS A TEACHER

Art is not just a skill but a teacher. When I began art courses in 2006, I started seeing things differently. I noticed shapes and arrangements, colors and tones, lines and curves, schemes and designs, everywhere around me.

One night in the hospital, I caught myself staring at the typical row of skin creases around one of my patient’s armpits where her pectoralis inserted beneath the deltoid. I was suddenly fascinated and wanted to capture on paper an area of the body I’d seen for decades without noticing or appreciating its uniqueness. The same was true for other parts of the naked anatomy, but especially the structures of the face: eyebrows, noses, lips, jawbone angles, ears, hair; all were more interesting now. Art had given me renewed vision, awakening my eyes to see more of what I'd been looking at without really seeing.

Because my mind is steeped in theology and logic, it was easy to see another dimension where art is a teacher. In meditating on humanity’s bent toward creativity, I saw how artists, even in their most innovative moments, are essentially imitators. All human art is an imitation of the artistry within creation. Even the abstract artist selects and recombines the same lines and forms and colors, even the randomness, which have always been resident in nature. This teaches us something about God and something about ourselves.

After I’d been taking art classes for a few years, I wrote this poem:

ARTIST

Paint clouds that really rain
And noisy, running streams,
Or birds that can take flight
And sing beyond your dreams,
Or sculpt a lovely nude
That wakes to your embrace . . .
If not, then praise the Artist
Who made the human race.

— David L. Hatton, 10-20-2009

Today, in thinking more about the theological lessons of art, I finished another similar poem:

DESIGNERS

We’re designed to be designers
By the Maker of the skies.
When they copy nudes and nature,
Artists often plagiarize.
Praise the Artist of creation,
When you render earthly art.
Our designs are mere reflections
Of the great Designer’s heart.

— David L. Hatton, 12- 27-2012

Human artists and their compositions provide a powerful, extra-biblical proof that we are made in the image of the Original Artist.