Advent-ure 2021 December 21: The Messiah Would be Called out of Egypt (Bloviation and Bulverism)

The Bible tells us not to love the world or the things of the world. In the Old Testament, God chided the Israelites for trusting in worldly powers for their sustenance. In Isaiah 31, He offers strong words for trusting in one of those specific powers:
1 Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, And rely on horses, Who trust in chariots because they are many, And in horsemen because they are very strong, But who do not look to the Holy One of Israel, Nor seek the Lord!
2 Yet He also is wise and will bring disaster, And will not call back His words, But will arise against the house of evildoers, And against the help of those who work iniquity.
3 Now the Egyptians are men, and not God; And their horses are flesh, and not spirit. When the Lord stretches out His hand, Both he who helps will fall, And he who is helped will fall down; They all will perish together.

We can ask ourselves: to whom do we turn for help?  The world offers its ideas, its advice, yet the wisdom of this world is futile compared to the wisdom of God. The Bible contrasts the spiritual person with the natural person and calls us to seek spiritual solutions to the challenges we face. We are directed not to love the world and to develop a worldview that is centered on Christ - He is our help; He calls us out, to be distinct and reliant on His love and truth.

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The timeline of the earthly life of Jesus was telegraphed for us in the Scriptures, including details about his birth (which I will cover tomorrow) and specifics about His death. Through our reading of the Old Testament prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, we get a clear picture of what He came today. 

Yesterday, I highlighted the Scripture that pointed to Herod's effort to eliminate his perceived rival by taking the lives of young children in and around Bethlehem.  But, the life of Jesus could not be extinguished - He and His family went to Egypt, where they were preserved in safety until God called them out. In Hosea 11, there is a reference to another step on that journey, which includes our Day 21 
reading in the Faith Radio Advent Guide, "25: A Christmas Advent-ure." In that chapter, we read these words:
1 "When Israel was a child, I loved him, And out of Egypt I called My son.
2 As they called them, So they went from them; They sacrificed to the Baals, And burned incense to carved images.
3 "I taught Ephraim to walk, Taking them by their arms; But they did not know that I healed them.
4 I drew them with gentle cords, With bands of love, And I was to them as those who take the yoke from their neck. I stooped and fed them.

Certainly, this refers to how God called His chosen people out of captivity in Egypt, but we find another meaning in Matthew chapter 2, where we can read:
13 Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, "Arise, take the young Child and His mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I bring you word; for Herod will seek the young Child to destroy Him."
14 When he arose, he took the young Child and His mother by night and departed for Egypt,
15 and was there until the death of Herod, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying, "Out of Egypt I called My Son."

Egypt represented the antithesis of Israel and the ways of God, yet in the midst of Egypt, God gathered and forged a nation of the people whom He had chosen.  In Egypt, He sheltered His Son until the time when He was directed to return to Israel.

We have to determine if we are going to follow the ways of Egypt or follow the way of Israel - to follow the world or follow the Word.  And, that includes how we regard our brothers and sisters in Christ. It has been one of my goals to boldly state that the Church should be leading the way in showing people how to relate to one another, and the Church should be unified, not divided.

Unfortunately, division has become too much of a way of life in the Church today, and when you consider the incredible work of Christ that we can celebrate in this season of the year, we can recognize that we have more common ground that can unite us than divide us. With the advent of worldly philosophies that demonize people that see spiritual matters in a different light and separates people by outward appearance, such as skin color, we end up falling short of what God has intended.

Our work becomes short-circuited when we engage in generalizing groups of people and regarding them as "the enemy."  A well-known Christian pastor named Kevin DeYoung shared his observations in a recent piece at the WORLD Magazine website recently.  He brings this indictment:

Over the last five years, a specific type of political and sociological complaint has emerged. We might call it the “here’s what’s wrong with white evangelicalism” jeremiad. If a typical jeremiad denounces a community “for its wickedness” and laments the morality of that society “in a serious tone of sustained invective” then scarcely a week goes by in which white evangelicalism is not subject to a sustained jeremiad, often by those who count (or once counted) themselves a part of white evangelicalism.

He goes on to warn against the dangers of calling out one particular group of people, attributing sinister motives and assigning blame to that group for its damage to the name of Christ:

If the jeremiads simply lamented bad behavior and bad ideas that would be one thing. There are plenty of both in the church. But the complaints go a (big) step further and mean to indict an entire ism and deconstruct an entire movement. The arguments are less about what white evangelicals have gotten wrong (that is assumed) and more about why they believe such bad things. This is where theories about Southern culture or political partisanship—or, from other writers, patriarchy and toxic masculinity—come into play. Of course, the why questions are not entirely off-limits, but they are much harder to prove and degenerate quickly into markers of out-group and in-group identity.

Of course, there was reaction and counter-response, such as a tweet from a Minnesota pastor who said that when he saw the reactions, "all I can think is "It's Bulverism as far as the eye can see.'" A Nashville pastor called the DeYoung article as "needed," and expressed his hope that it would "deter" people from "continuing in their 'white evangelicals' trope and bulverism."

Bulver-what?  Do you mean "bloviation," a term that came out of the vernacular of Bill O'Reilly?  No, this is "bulverism," described in a piece at The American Conservative by Brad Littlejohn.  He writes, 

Bulverism, coined by C.S. Lewis, is that ubiquitous logical fallacy that consists in the charge, “You’re only saying that because you’re a _____...”

He says that the worst forms of it "...begin by observing some set of correlations (people who believe X are also more likely to believe Y), and then construct a label to describe that correlation. Then, they turn around and propose that this label is the cause of the beliefs it describes, thus confusing correlation and causation and at the same time reasoning in a circle."

Lewis states in a piece called, Bulverism, according to Wikipedia:

You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it "Bulverism". Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father—who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third—"Oh you say that because you are a man." "At that moment", E. Bulver assures us, "there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall."

Believers in Christ should not immediately jump to conclusions and characterize the motives of a person just because he or she belongs to a certain people group. By looking at each other and making inferences based on demographics, we buy into Satan's plan to divide us as believers. You can't assume I will act a certain way because of my gender, my race, my nationality, or any number of factors.  

Social media amplifies this tendency to rush to judgment.  It seems that often, when there is a disagreement on principle, you have those that make a straight line to race and gender, and by so doing, do not weigh the quality of the arguments. Quotes are taken out of context and opinions are dismissed out of hand.  Perhaps during this Christmas season, we can reject the ways of the world, that would teach us to jump to conclusions, and appropriate the ways of Christ.  We can reject the worldliness of Egypt and embrace the other-worldliness of the Lord, who instructs us that we are in the world but not of it.