- Editor’s Note -

Why We Celebrate?
by Jordan Monge ’12

- Opinions -

Out of This World. Right Here.
by Jihye Choi ’14

- Features -

Death’s Last Supper
by Michael Legaspi

Salvation from What? Penal Substitution vs. Christus Victor Models
by Nikhil Mathews ’08

He is Risen: A Defense of the Historicity of the Resurrection
by Jordan Monge ’12

- Biblical Exposition -

The (Mis)application of 2 Chronicles 7:14
by Andrew Garbarino ’13

The Unity of the covenants
by Jacob Pritt ’13

- Books & Arts -

Review of Christ as Creator: Origins of a New Testament Doctrine
by Nick Nowalk

- Poetry & Fiction-

Mercy
by Maria Xia ’11

Praise Be Worthy of the Day
by Christopher Hopper ’13

Mission Report
by Stephanie Wang ’13

- Last Things -

Christ Will Come Again
by Chelsea Carlson ’13

- Editor’s Note -

Do Everything
by Jordan Monge ’12

- Opinions -

Christian Politics of Discourse
by Christopher Hopper ’13

- Features -

Shaking Hands with the Devil
by Richard Millett ’60

Dialogue with the Devil
by Gleb Sidorkin

- Biblical Exposition -

Rethinking Paul on Marriage & Singleness
by Nick Nowalk

Gender, Submission, and Ecosystems of Abuse
by Richard Beck

- Books & Arts -

Review of Contemplative Vision
by Jordan Monge ’12

- Poetry & Fiction-

Cold Music
by Anne Goetz ’11

Goose Chase
by Patrick Spence ’12

Delineations
by Stephanie Wang ’13

Wash Me Clean
by Ebone Ingram ’12

- Last Things -

Humility and Hope
by Tony Shen ’12

Click image above for a PDF.

- Editor’s Note -

God and Politics
by Cameron D. Kirk-Giannini ’11

- Opinions -

The Lost Virtue in a Land of Politics
by Jordan A. Monge ’12

The Crumbling of the Protestant Work Ethic: One Nation, Under God?
by Roshni Patel ’13

Suspense and Substance: An Apology for Detective Stories
by Anne Goetz ’11

- Features -

Modern Moral Philosophy and the Goal of Religious Neutrality
by John E. Hare

An Apologetic Primer on the Problem of Free Will and Divine Foreknowledge
by Cameron D. Kirk-Giannini ’11

- Books & Arts -

Review of UnChristian
by Chelsea Carlson ’13

- Poetry -

Redemption is too Sweet a Gift
by Jordan A. Monge ’12

- Last Things -

His Kingdom Come
by Ruirui Kuang ’12

But this isn’t the God of the Bible. In this text, we have a God who is constantly in conversation with humans and an active participant in the events in their lives, both as the subject and object of influence. He is sensitive to the sighs of His creations, touched by their griefs, and affected by the consequences of their actions.

Consider the events which unfolded in the midst of perhaps the greatest crisis of King Hezekiah of Judah’s reign. One day, while Hezekiah lay bedridden, God told His prophet Isaiah to go to Hezekiah in his bedchamber and tell him the outcome of his illness. The news of impending death could not have come at a worse point in Hezekiah’s life. At this time, Jerusalem was in imminent danger at the hands of the king of Assyria, and Hezekiah still lacked an heir. If he died, who knows what havoc and confusion the Israeli nation would be thrown into, without a descendant of David to lead them?

Hezekiah turns his face to the wall in despair. He bitterly weeps out the following prayer, “Remember, O Lord, how I have walked before you faithfully and with wholehearted devotion and have done what is good in your eyes.” His prayer is answered — before the prophet Isaiah even left the middle court of the palace. This is significant because it shows that immediately after Isaiah left him alone, Hezekiah turned to God, and immediately after Hezekiah uttered the last word of his prayer, God responded through Isaiah. “I have heard your prayer and seen your tears,” God says to Hezekiah. God took the human time to listen to Hezekiah’s lament and then displayed a cosmological efficiency by acting in the micro-second after a finished prayer.

After God heard Hezekiah’s prayer, He reversed the prior sentence of death and gave Hezekiah 15 more years to live. He also swore to Hezekiah that the mortal enemy of the Israelites, the Assyrians, would not take Jerusalem. Three years later, Hezekiah’s wife, Hephzibah, gave birth to a son. And seven centuries later, Hezekiah’s descendant Joseph married the mother of Jesus. God used Hezekiah’s seed to bring about the birth of His own Son.

Admittedly, God does not answer in this expedient way in most instances. There are times in a person’s life when serious faith through long, arduous nights seems unrewarded and even mocked by the unanswering air. On the one thousandth utterance of the same desperate plea, a weary pilgrim fraught with the burdens and sighs of one thousand nights begins to doubt either the power of his own prayers or the ability of God in answering them. Are our groans short of the bitterness and gravity of Hezekiah’s? Or is God truly uninterested in the state of our affairs? No wonder there are many who resort to a classical theist God of inaction, immutability, and invulnerability to explain his seeming absence.

But this view of God is not equal to the God of Hezekiah and of the Bible who plays an alternately effectuating and responsive role. A counterview to the problem of an apathetic God asserts that, because He is omniscient and knows what’s best for us, we should allow God room to answer “No,” or, “Wait.” God knows which of our desires are good and which are stumbling blocks, and God, like a father, desires to give to his children only the gifts which are good for them. God also knows when we are unready for a specific fulfillment of prayer and waits for us to grow and mature into readiness before He hands us the inheritance we have been asking for.

This is the rational answer, at least, but it may not be immediately emotionally or spiritually satisfying. We can reasonably intellectualize that God must be an ever-present being, but we do not always feel that He is eternally acting with our best future in mind. Even when we are told that God does strain his ears to hear our weeping and does send answers to our tears, we may still have doubts about the sufficiency of those answers, especially when they are so different in timing and shape than what we envision. How can the answer, “Wait,” be satisfying to us who live in the present? How can we emerge from another uneventful hour spent on our knees to say that it is good to be the supplicant?

Perhaps we can find the answers to these questions when we shift our attention away from ourselves and onto someone in a similar situation, someone who may be able to provide complete empathy and solid support, if not a perfect solution. Let’s look to the Son of God, our sympathizer, and there we shall find that even the prayers of God’s own Son were not always answered according to the Son’s wishes. They were, however, always answered with deference to God’s sovereignty. The first of two last requests Jesus made of God his father was that his Church would be one. He lifted his face toward heaven and literally pleaded with God, over and over again. “That they may be one…That they may be one…” Later that night, in an obscure garden, Jesus would pray another prayer three times right before his arrest: “Abba, Father, take this cup from me.” Jesus is still patiently waiting for the first prayer to be answered. But the response he got to his second prayer was simply, “No. My will is thus.” If Jesus, our paradigm, had to contend with these unwished-for responses from God, perhaps they are the rightful answers to some of our own invocations, and, like Jesus, we should not be fazed by their lackluster appearance or brand God as coolly impassive.

Having recognized that God’s will was not to take away the pain of Judgment, Jesus bent his will to the will of His Father and carried the Cross to Calvary. As a result, God was killed in the act of taking on all the pain and blame of the fault-ridden actions of His creation. The Godhead was torn asunder as Jesus descended into Hades because of our sins. Classical theism takes the divine characteristics of the Christian God, transcendent, self-sufficient, and eternal, and paints an incomplete picture of Him, because classical theism forgets this — God is vulnerable in his relationship with his creation. With Christ’s ascension and conquest of death, we have a God who is utterly affected by our actions.

________________________________________________________________________

Ruirui Kuang ‘12, a History concentrator living in Mather House, is the Assistant Design Editor of The Ichthus.

Risking his standing with the religious establishment, Christ preached radical teachings that confounded the Pharisees.  Gambling his image with society, he frequently crossed cultural and social taboos to eat with the lowest of the low, teaching his followers to do the same.  By investing in twelve uneducated Galileans who were prone to failure, Jesus, fully human, risked his own expectations and patience.  And ultimately with Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, he risked and gave his life for us sinners.  From the life of Jesus Christ, we see what true boldness looks like—a willingness and readiness to risk all aspects of our lives for the sake of the Gospel, fully confident that the sovereign God reigns over our actions.

There is a great difference between a professor teaching military tactics and the field commander leading his men against the enemy.  The boldness of Jesus is manifest in his entire life, not merely his words.  Jesus lived with those to whom he ministered.  He shared his entire life with them, eating with sinners and tax collectors (Matt. 9:10) and sitting down with adulterers (John 4).  Investment and risk go hand-in-hand—one’s investments reflect the risks that one is willing to take.  Jesus certainly possessed the wisdom and power to be a famous and popular teacher.  Yet Jesus’ foremost investment is not in his popularity or image.  Jesus chooses to live a humble, impoverished life among the sinners that he sought to save.  To teach with great wisdom or to give grand displays of power would bring no risk to Jesus.  Instead, he lives boldly by patiently investing his life in relationships, risking disappointment, betrayal, and sorrow.  His model of ministry actively engaged in risk because he sought to invest in broken and sinful people.  Through Christ, we see that the God of the universe is bold enough to take on flesh, exposing himself to all the risks brought forth with life surrounded by sin.

The greatest risk and the greatest evidence of boldness in Christ’s ministry is his willingness to form meaningful relationships.  A televangelist may boldly preach the gospel to millions, yet form relationships with none.  The man at a busy subway station may boldly distribute tracts to hundreds of travelers, yet a printed tract does very little in terms of relationship.  Relationships simply cost more.  They take time and energy and are unpredictable.  Rather than explain to people who he is, Jesus connected and invested in people in order to show them who he is.

Before ascending to heaven, Jesus does not command us to preach from afar, but rather He commands us to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19a).  The purpose of evangelism is not merely to make converts, but disciples.  The word matheteuo is a command to make learners, people who will be trained by other Christians.  Jesus devoted time to teaching the Twelve, explaining his parables and challenging their faith (Luke 8:9, Matt. 14:29).  The Apostle Paul invested so much in Timothy that Timothy became like a son to him (Phil. 2:22).  In the Great Commission, we are commanded to invest in relationships for the purpose of maintaining lifelong growth in Christ, and such an investment carries heavy risks.  Actively seeking to reflect Christ and advance the Gospel in our relationships in the face of rejection or disappointment demonstrates a constant and internalized boldness.

Given the centrality of building relationships, where do we see Christians act boldly on campus?  Perhaps a student goes out on a limb and invites a friend to church, at risk of introducing an awkward dynamic to a friendship.  Some may take small stands for the faith in conversations with classmates or professors.  The particularly bold may loudly preach the gospel open-air during campus outreach events. Actions such as these mean very little in isolation.  What would be the point of engaging in a “bold Christian event” once a year, but then avoid risks the rest of the year?  Jesus knows the state of our hearts, and it is that internalized boldness that matters.  At the same time, it is better to engage in a modest act of boldness than to do nothing at all.  The simplest solution for feeling reluctant to be more vocal about Jesus amongst friends, for example, is to go out on a limb and take a small stand for the faith.  There is no easy way around doing something—one simply must do. As these small stands become habitual, this will naturally lead to the development of an internalized attitude of boldness.

A natural consequence of a bold life is that people will notice. As Jesus began his ministry in Galilee, “a report about him went out through all the surrounding country” (Luke 4:14).  A woman who fought her way through a crowd because she believed that just by touching Jesus’ robe, she would be healed (Luke 8:46).  Five thousand men followed Jesus as He traveled around the Sea of Galilee because they recognized Jesus as a healer (Mark 6:32).  Even a centurion knew of Jesus’ reputation for healing, asking Jesus, “Say the word, and my servant will be healed” (Matt. 8:7).  Clearly, Jesus became well known during his ministry as a great healer and a teacher with authority. This image of boldness naturally follows His actions.

In considering what it means to be bold, from the condition of our hearts to the decisions we make, we cannot underestimate importance of faith—the confidence that God reigns over our actions.  We can be bold because we know that the One who calls us to be bold now sits on a throne in Heaven.  We know that our hope is in Christ and that He is and will be victorious.  Because of the redemptive work of Christ, we have nothing to fear, freeing us to be bold.  We also cannot emphasize the importance of being filled with the Spirit.  The love of Christ enables us to sustain even the most difficult relationships.  The wisdom that comes from the Spirit enables us to act appropriately.  The Spirit also supplies us with the courage to even act at all.  We cannot be bold without the sustaining love of Christ, perfectly expressed when He died for us.  I just pray that we would be bold enough to live for Him.

As the famous verse goes, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Phil. 4:13, NKJV)

________________________________________________________________________

Tony Shen ‘12, a Neurobiology concentrator living in Quincy House, is Special Projects Coordinator for The Ichthus.

The standard responses to the problem of evil focus on the third part of the equation, God as all-good.  In order for good to exist there must also be evil.  Good would not make any sense or have any meaning without the absence of good with which to compare it.  Moreover, moral evil is the result of human free will, which is necessary to show the full glory of God. God is glorified when God’s creation voluntarily chooses God.  Evil is an unfortunate consequence of the path to a higher good.  Another response claims that evil is the training ground for the good.  We learn from bad things and become better and more mature humans as a result.  The journey towards our final unity with God depends on our moral training through experiencing and reacting to evil.  Yet one more response asserts that the good is beyond our conception.  God sees all.  God is behind all things.  Everything happens for a reason and fits into God’s grand design.  What might seem evil to us might be good from the perspective of God.  Our role is to grin and bear it.

Liberal theologians in the 20^th century asked whether there was not another way forward.  Perhaps instead of solving the problem of evil by re-examining what we mean by good, we can address the problem of evil by reconsidering our notion of God as all-powerful.  These thinkers assert that our common conception of God as transcendent and eternally unchanged owe far more to Greek philosophy than to the Bible.  The God of the Bible is not unaffected by human action.  The God of the Bible seeks out relationship with humanity.  There is a certain symbiosis between God and creation.  After all, God makes a covenant with Abraham.  God chooses Israel to be God’s own people.  Abraham negotiates with God to avert the destruction of Sodom if there are only ten good people in the city.  God speaks through the prophets to warn Israel of destruction and to call the nation back into proper relationship.  In the New Testament, one of the defining aspects of Jesus’ relation with God is its intimacy.  Jesus calls God “Abba” or Father.  Christians believe that God’s Word became incarnate in Christ in order to restore relationship and reveal God more fully to humanity.  None of these portraits of God present God as unchangeable and atemporal.  God changes over time; God evolves alongside creation and in relationship with creation.

This untraditional view of God and God’s relationship with creation is supported by a particular reading of Genesis 1.  The standard translation of the first verse of Genesis reads, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.”  Yet, more recent translators, including the highly respected Jewish Publication Society and the translating committee of the New Revised Standard Version, opt for a different reading.  The NRSV reads, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters” (emphasis added).  The key word is “when.”  If you read these first verses as one sentence and if you make the first verse a dependent clause, then the beginning lines of Genesis argue for pre-existent matter.  God’s role in creation is not to create something out of nothing, but to order the “formless void” into something intelligible.  God is not absolutely powerful.  Matter existed before God.  For certain liberal Christians this creation myth contains an important theological lesson: God is not the only force in creation.

All of this reasoning leads to interesting conclusions when you begin to reconsider the problem of evil.  If creation is not wholly dependent on God, then an earthquake does not have to be “an act of God” but can be simply two tectonic plates rubbing against each other without any inference from God whatsoever.  Cancer does not have to be a result of the will of God but can be merely the mutation of an oncogene.  You also no longer have to say that human evil derives from a mythical “fall” in some past time.  If God is all-good and if God created everything out of nothing, then the original state of nature had to be likewise all-good.  You must posit a fall from that original state in order to justify evil in God’s all-good creation.  In the liberal scheme that I have outlined, you no longer have to invent some pre-historic fall, which becomes theologically problematic when you try to make it into a pure myth.  Instead, you can claim that creation, of its own, seeks chaos; it seeks to return to its original state of “formless void.”  God creates order and invites humanity towards the way of God, which is the way of love.  God desires a relationship with humanity, but humans have the free will to say no.

The great benefit of this system is that it maintains the fundamental goodness of God above all else.  God is good without question.  God does not will your son or daughter to die of cancer or some freak accident.  God did not sit by and let the Holocaust happen.  God did not curse the people of Haiti with an earthquake because of a two hundred year old pact with the Devil.  God is love and God works to bring order and goodness to creation.  God is the one “in whom we live and move and have our being” and not some absolute monarch who rules over all of the universe, rewarding friends and punishing foes. Jesus instantiates the love of God for us.  Jesus does not compel us but invites us into fellowship with him, just like God.  Whether or not you agree with this view of God, it is at least worthy of consideration.
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Reverend Jonathan Page is the Epps Fellow at Memorial Church and a Chaplain to Harvard College.

The Zoo encircled both of us.
          paths curved as his horns had curved:
Well, there are stranger Animals,
          By stranger Loves conserved.
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Patrick Spence ‘12, a Classics concentrator living in Currier House, is the Poetry and Fiction Editor of The Ichthus.

Our finitude is palpable. We see it in the mangled bodies of victims of war and natural disaster; we smell it in the acid-sweet stench of sickness and the stuffiness of declining years. We experience it firsthand in our own foolishness and immorality and in the mistakes of the ones we love. We are born into it, and we die of it. It colors every day of our lives, the dim glass through which we view our world.

Moreover, the horrors we encounter in our finite existences seem indiscriminately distributed. The righteous suffer while the evil slip away unscathed. Wealth wrongfully acquired brings countless advantages, but virtue counts for little to the poor. Not even after years of waiting are we sure to get our just deserts. And yet God, we say, is omnipotent, omniscient, and good.

Thus Job’s lament: Why, God? Why, if you are good, do you permit such horrors? Our theme for this issue is the question — Where is God? How do we reconcile the pervasiveness of evil with the Christian conception of a powerful and benevolent Deity? How do we understand the Bible’s insistence that God has commanded the deaths of entire nations, including civilians? Can a loving God truly be behind such stories? Or do these considerations count as evidence against Christian faith?

We certainly cannot hope to settle these questions within a single issue of The Ichthus. But we are confident that in the pages that follow, we have gathered together a collection of writings that can offer both believers and non-believers an invaluable entrée into the ideas employed and positions defended by Christian thinkers in today’s academy. We are especially pleased to feature contributions by celebrated Notre Dame philosopher Peter van Inwagen and Harvard’s own Tyler VanderWeele, a biostatistician and member of the faculty of the School of Public Health. Both offer timely additions to Christian scholarship at Harvard and elsewhere.

I invite you to join us in our corporate reflection and discussion of these important and difficult issues. We sincerely hope that God will reveal to us His truth and character, so that we may see clearly for the sake of the Church and the world. But even if philosophical clarity is not forthcoming, we will still rejoice in the opportunity to proclaim God’s final answer to the evils of this world, which is Christ in us, the hope of glory.

Many blessings now and in months to come,

Cameron D. Kirk-Giannini Editor-in-Chief

Click image above for a PDF.

- Editor’s Note -

Job’s Lament
by Cameron Kirk-Giannini ’11

– Opinions –

Benevolent, But Not Omnipotent
Jonathan Page

What is Boldness?
Tony Shen ’10

The Vulnerable God
Ruirui Kuang ’11

– Features -

The Inspiration of the Hebrew Bible and the Morality of God’s Commands
Peter van Inwagen

Credit to the Poor: Microfinance and the Christian Faith
Tyler VanderWeele and Kenneth VanderWeele

– Books & Arts -

Review of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God
Chelsea Carlson ’13

– Fiction & Poetry -

Goodhue
Albert Chen ’11

Zoo
Patrick Spence ’12

Jonah
Jeremy Pollacks

- Last Things -

On Lamentation
Jordan Monge

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Eboné Ingram ‘12 is a Molecular and Cellular Biology concentrator living in Winthrop House.