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War and Peace

Because the remembrance of Christ's birth represents God's effort to reconnect with man, the Christmas season is often seen as one of peace. At the same time, anyone living here knows that it is also a controversial time of year due to the effort to represent all religions. There is perhaps no time of year, in fact, when the battle between worldviews is most visible. It's as though this little baby, by entering our world, started a war that rages to this day.

Indeed, he did. Christ told us that he "did not come to bring peace, but a sword," and looking at our history and at contemporary U.S. culture, it is plain that men and women have waged intellectual warfare for or against the Christian message (and more broadly in the recent past, for or against any claim to truth). Keep in mind that the following narrative does not represent what has been seen as a war between science and religion. This is an oversimplification of the interaction between science and faith. In fact, there have been (and continue to be) many scientists who are also men of faith, and who have seen science as a looking glass into God's creation.

There have been challenges to Christianity, however, whether the challenging parties have expressed themselves in scientific or philosophical terms. The Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries planted the seeds for an intellectual movement called the Enlightenment, whose proponents waylaid both church (especially Catholic Church) and state authority, and whose trust and optimism in man rested in the ability of science to bring us incredible social progress. With this movement as a backdrop, the eighteenth century then saw increasing skepticism and a wearing away (though not a loss) of faith. Christians stood toe-to-toe with ideologies starkly opposed to some of the assumptions of the faith, including the positivist view that the only true knowledge was that which could be observed directly. Around the same time, Charles Darwin codified and popularized a developing (or evolving :-) ) concept of human origins; and while the Enlightenment ideals like faith in man's progress were themselves challenged as World War I demonstrated the destructive power of misusing scientific knowledge, so was birthed a new worldview that had until recently been accepted among many academics as a viable concept: postmodernism, whose proponents asserted that there is no absolute truth. Return, now, to the present day, and you begin to see how cultural sensitivity can mix with opposing notions of truth to set the stage for battles over Christmas trees.

If you look closely, however, you begin to see something else, that perhaps there is something to this historical figure who in three short years managed to spark a movement of people who believed that he was who he said he was: God. While in my own circumstances, there have been seasons of doubt and skepticism that God truly did come to "seek and to save the lost," I have seen him at work in ways both corporate and personal. Corporately, I was able to observe God at work in Haiti among orphans now well cared-for because of the love God had instilled in the hearts of their surrogate parents. It was something I hope to see again someday, perhaps soon. I have, more personally and more recently, also seen God change the heart of a family member who had professed atheism, and I have seen God change my own heart where before there had-- in turn-- been hopelessness and stubbornness.

These events cannot be hard and fast evidence for Christ's message. Indeed, they are expressions of faith. What I do know, however, is that we must all make a choice as to whom we will follow, to whose voice we will listen in this world filled with megaphones blaring separate claims to truth. Whether we are aware of our choices or not, who we follow will then determine who we become.

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