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This past week the Los Angeles Times ran a brief obituary of the distinguished English scholar Antony Flew (1923-2010). Flew was a high-profile academic philosopher noted, even among impressive peers, as an exceptional intellect. After service in the Royal Air Force during World War II, he studied at Oxford and there participated in weekly meetings originally organized by C. S. Lewis. The author or co-author of more than thirty books, he is best known for his rigorously logical arguments against the existence of God.

However, this champion of atheism began to waver in his convictions later in life. The possibility that the planet’s delicate ecosystem might be the product of mere chance seemed increasingly improbable to him, and in the end, and without any intellectual slippage, he had crossed over to the other side of the divide over God.

His brief obituary also mentioned that he was the son of a Methodist minister, and as a teenager had abandoned belief in God after wrestling with the problem of evil. Flew’s father died years before his son saw the light, and never lived to see the unlikely turnaround in his brilliant sons’ heart and mind. It’s a reminder that everyone is on a lifelong journey, and it’s never over ’til it’s over. Sometimes waiting fathers and mothers, and other loved ones, may even dare, like Abraham and Moses and a host of other saints, to die in hope. We may not always get to see the rest of the story.

In a televised interview this past week Mark McGuire (Big Mac), one of major league baseball’s greatest home run hitters ever, admitted something he’s never been willing to admit before, even during a United States congressional hearing. He finally conceded that during the time he was setting all his hitting records as a St. Louis Cardinals he was also using steroids—a substance banned by the league and dangerous to any user’s long-term health. Yet his “confession” felt deeply unsatisfying to most people who watched it; the missing ingredient was compunction.

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Last week a friend phoned me to describe a bumper sticker she had noticed on a car in the parking lot of a local mall. Playing off a familiar query, it posed this question: “What would Jesus bomb?” It’s a disturbing question because few of us can imagine the Jesus who blessed little children, and chose for himself to absorb violence rather than dish it out, would ever give a thumbs-up to fully armed commandos in camouflage. But it’s also in some ways an irritating question, because it does not seem to acknowledge the complexities of living in a fallen world.

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Last week we set off for a brief vacation up at Yosemite in California’s Sierra mountain range. On the way up, in the wickedly hot central valley around Fresno, we stopped into a Borders bookstore for some light reading material, and I came across what looked like an interesting collection of short stories. Even better, the volume was on sale that day. But I wasn’t prepared for what it contained.

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My newest son-in-law, who is military, gave me a book to read for Father’s Day. It’s a best-selling novel entitled Lone Survivor (2007). Given the circumstances I decided to read it right through. Turns out it is the dramatic story of a covert Navy SEAL operation into the mountains of Afghanistan, via a nighttime helicopter drop, to take out a particularly dangerous Taliban leader. More to the point, it’s the story of how the whole thing went horribly bad. The narrative is provided by Marcus Luttrell, the only survivor—his survival itself something of a miracle. There’s a moral to the story.

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A remarkable letter of apology, signed by the chairman of the board of directors of the Christian & Missionary Alliance, was printed in the February 2009 issue of Alliance Life, the denomination’s official magazine. The board acknowledged “its deepest regrets for the significant trauma” experienced by vulnerable children of missionaries, and apologized contritely for decades of failure by Alliance leadership to recognize, acknowledge and stop abuse at the Alliance’s mandatory boarding schools for missionary children. After decades of damage control, and attempts to sweep the scandal under the rug, the new board has courageously (and biblically) come clean.

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The new movie Gran Torino (2009) is a remarkable exclamation point to the Clint Eastwood film genre. From memorable earlier films like Dirty Harry and Unforgiven, we are accustomed to witnessing grim vigilante violence that poisons the avenger and leaves little room for hope. We are familiar by now with Clint Eastwood’s steely eyes, lined face, laconic speech, barely-suppressed rage and tortured soul—the very things that have made him an American cultural icon. Who would have guessed that Eastwood, now in his 70s, would go theological on us?

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The scandalous Ted Haggard, recently ousted president of the National Association of Evangelicals, has resurfaced. You’ll remember him, no doubt, as the Colorado mega-church pastor whose secret meth-addled trysts with a homosexual prostitute finally came to light a couple of years ago. His devastated church removed him from office, but gave him a full year of severance pay, and asked him to cooperate with a “restoration” process that involved being accountable to some national-level religious leaders like (for awhile, anyway) James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Evidently the process did not go very well, and finally unraveled.

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This is a sad day for the evangelical movement. The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) just tossed Richard Cizik overboard. A more apt metaphor might be that some biggies in the NAE, who had been stalking him for a while, finally nailed their target. Charles Colson responded to the news of Cizik’s departure with this: “I’m not surprised. I’m sorry for him, but I’m not disappointed for the evangelical movement.” I’m not surprised either, but I’m sorrier for evangelicals than I am for Cizik. Richard can hold his head high; I’m not sure we can.

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We have entered the Advent season once again. The Sunday before Advent was the final one in the annual church calendar—Christ the King Sunday. The whole cycle culminated in a celebration of Christ’s final victory and glory. It ended on a high note. But now with Advent it starts up all over again. We begin at the beginning. The story we rehearse is a journey toward glory, but it gets there only by way of Good Friday, the cross and suffering. In biblical imagery it is the Lamb that is upon the throne—the one who suffered and died was vindicated by God and now has a name that is above every name.

But Advent is a reminder that the one who became King of Kings began his journey as a child—as one without power or clout, as a dependent who was obliged to submit to earthly parents during his growing-up years. The story begins with the Eternal Son’s acceptance of the identity and place of a child. The first Adam hit the deck running as a mature adult, but the second Adam—the one who symbolized a new beginning for humanity—began not as an adult, but as an infant, a dependent.

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