A Genuine Tough Guy? Check out Jesus

I grew up in Detroit and almost every guy I know from there likes to pretend that makes him something of a tough guy. “Detroit: where the weak are killed and eaten.” It’s a bumper sticker I’ve seen in Florida where I live now. I’ve never seen it in Detroit.
Despite what you may have heard, there are many well-to-do areas in metro Detroit—just as there are in places like Philly and Chicago. I actually did grow up in a pretty tough blue-collar neighborhood. Learning to fight was part of the maturation process for young males, even if you were a church-going Christian.
But the dangers of my neighborhood were nothing like those Jesus faced. In his day if you didn’t have status, if you weren’t in with the in-crowd—meaning the Romans—you had no rights. The occupiers could pretty much do whatever they wanted to you.
Jesus talks about it near the end of his Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel and offers a formula for how a genuine tough guy who is also a man of peace stands up to abusers. Because the Romans didn’t want to encourage actual revolt, they put a limit on how they pushed around the locals. A soldier could grab any citizen and force him to carry his burden for a mile. No “thank you” or compensation required. It was a humiliation and showed the Jews who was boss. Jesus explained how to get even: When the mile is up, you say, “hey man, that was nothing—a walk in the park. I got another mile in me easy.” You’ve just killed two birds with one stone: first, you’ve told the oppressor “you can’t hurt me,” and second, you’ve saved some other poor soul from being the next victim.
In the same chapter Jesus says if someone, again meaning a Roman soldier or maybe a collaborator, strikes you on the right cheek, let him give you a shot to the left cheek too. The point here was that since most people are right-handed, a smack to the right cheek would be a back-hand—which is how someone would show they saw you as a weak underling—another humiliation. In saying give him the left cheek too, Jesus is saying stand up to the abuser in a non-violent way by saying “go ahead dude, smack me with a forehand—I’m as good as you and not a bit afraid or humiliated.”
Sometimes I get the impression every American male is trying to prove he’s a tough guy from Detroit, Philly, Chicago or the Bronx. It’s how we end up in unnecessary wars, or justify turning our backs on the weak. You want to see a real tough guy? Check out Jesus.

Faith Should Flourish in Postmodern Era

Here’s a question, a bit of advice, and a sales pitch from Christianity Today’s online newsletter: “Is faith intellectual suicide? Many scholars, scientists, and the average person you pass on the street would like to think so. Equip yourself with resources on the relationship between faith and science and the battle for faith in a postmodern culture.”
That’s a nice try but a mile-wide miss by the conservative Christian journal. Apparently, although conservatives love to use the term, they don’t understand “postmodern.” The postmodern era isn’t a threat to faith but an era of opportunity.
A brief history lesson: first came the pre-modern era, which ended just a few hundred years ago. Answers to life’s puzzles came from mythical and mystical sources: legend, belief, ancient documents, intuition and, of course, God. Science had a toe-hold but not a foot-hold. Just ask Galileo. Then came the modern era in which we came to believe our puzzles could be solved, our ultimate questions answered beyond a doubt. In the modern era science and experimentation were kings. We believed there was a single right answer to things, not a group of equally virtuous possibilities.
The post-modern era returned mystery to our attempts to understand the world around us. Some would say it began with the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in the 1960s. Kuhn reveals that science’s answers are not absolute or permanent, but work for a while only because we assume a certain set of beliefs to be true. He calls them paradigms. A well-known example is the paradigm of an earth-centered solar system. Under that paradigm, Ptolemy developed charts for the movement of the sun and stars which allowed sailors to navigate quite effectively—even though the basic assumptions were incorrect. But instead of realizing our limitations, the “modern” thinker, convinced of scientific “truth,” looks at the replacement paradigm and says, “Now we have the final answer.” Kuhn shows us that each new paradigm also is destined for eventual failure. Mystery re-enters the equation.
In the postmodern era, science and faith can flourish side-by-side. We can believe in scientific explanations for what we see, while knowing intuitively the universe contains wonders beyond our knowing. This is not intellectual suicide, but intellectual freedom.