BEING WITH FRIENDS

Tonight I am left reflecting on a particularly pleasant evening with friends. 

Kate and Storly are the ones who introduced Haiti to Melissa and me back in 2010, turning our lives upside down for the following decade.

For this I will be forever grateful.

These days - 14 years later - we live just a couple of miles apart in this town of Columbus, Indiana, allowing us to stay in regular contact. Our youngest works side by side with their youngest at the local ice cream parlor. Kate and Melissa get together sometimes for coffee. Storly and I get together sometimes for lunch.

This evening the two of them invited us over to their house for some Haitian food followed by the community 4th of July fireworks. We had rice and beans and creole chicken and fried plantain and even a little pikliz. Melissa and I contributed some corn on the cob and blackberry pie.

What a feast. 

This was followed by card games and ping pong and conversation. 

When the sky went dark around 9:30, Storly brought out a ladder and we all climbed up on their roof to enjoy the best view of the fireworks we could have asked for. 

It was magical.

It made me homesick for Haiti. And it wasn't just the food. It was the unrushed, play-it-by-ear, simple pleasures of being with friends.

Just being. 

CALVINISM ON THE SPECTRUM

In the course of my weirdest hobby - consuming YouTube debates over Calvinist doctrines - I recently came across a young YouTuber who wears his Calvinist doctrine like a badge of honor.

I mean, even more than your average Calvinist does.

His videos frustrated me. Although he often came across as incredibly intelligent, he made really poor arguments in favor of the 5 points of "TULIP" and seemed incapable of fully grasping his opponents' perspectives. His temper would flare on occasion and he would fling politically incorrect slurs at his challengers. 

I sometimes engaged him in the comments section of his videos and he told me Scripture is "objectively obvious" - there was no need to dive into the Greek or Hebrew or even spend any time examining the context of a passage. If you were born again and could read English, you could read any Scripture passage and instantly grasp its meaning.

If God said in Romans 9, "Jacob I loved and Esau I hated" then that's what it objectively means: God hated Esau. It's there in plain English.

And if you didn't "get" that, then you were probably not born again. 

There was no use in speaking of Biblical idioms, the Old Testament context from which Paul was quoting, or the fact that Jacob and Esau represented two nations from the time they were in the womb.

None of that mattered because the Bible says plainly that God hated Esau. 

In our back and forth in the comments section he often repeated his conviction that I myself was a "God hater" since I didn't accept the doctrines of Calvinism and I was denying what the Bible objectively said. 

I thought this was particularly dangerous ground for a believer to occupy since, in effect, he was saying salvation wasn't dependent on faith in Christ alone - but also on a proper understanding of certain doctrines. But I couldn't get him to see the problem with that!

Finally, this evening the lightbulb went on in my head and I decided to ask him a straightforward question: 

"Are you on the spectrum?"

His response came quickly and bluntly: "Yeah, big time."

And suddenly I found myself utterly uninclined to debate with him any further. If he finds comfort inside the harsh contours of Calvinism, who am I to argue?

I would have never picked a fight with this guy in real life.

The internet so easily twists communication and social interaction, blinding us to each other's humanity. 

AN ANALOGY OF THE SOUL

The YouTube algorithm served me up a video offering a refutation of Hell as eternal conscious torment. The presenter was a pastor named Daniel Wilson who has about 550 subscribers - I don't know anything else about him, but I thought he made a decent and concise argument.

What really caught my attention, though, was a thought-provoking analogy Wilson used to answer a question I have had for years:

What is the difference between our soul and our spirit? 

Are those terms synonymous or do they indicate two different aspects of human existence? If they are different, in what way do they differ?

"Soul" and "spirit" are two different terms in Greek. 

In Matthew 10:28 Jesus says, "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell."

"Soul" here is the Greek psuche.

Whereas "spirit" - as in "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" (Mark 14:38) - is the Greek pneuma. 

Granted, from what I can tell, most uses of pneuma in the New Testament refer either to the Holy Spirit or to "unclean spirits". But it is clear that man has a spirit as well. Stephen's last words are a cry to Jesus to "receive my spirit" (Acts 7:59).

So it seems clear that psuche/soul and pneuma/spirit are not synonymous in biblical thought. 

Back to Pastor Wilson's analogy ...

Wilson says the human body is like a lightbulb - it is the part of us made of physical substance. The spirit which God breathes into us is like the electricity coursing through the lightbulb. 

The soul, then, is the magic of "light" which results from the combination of bulb and electricity, body and spirit.

What do you think? Does that make sense?