The commentators are still letting Pat Robertson have it over his suggestion that somehow Haiti had the destruction coming because of that nation’s “pact with the Devil.” And Robertson deserves the criticism. Much of the negative commentary, however, doesn’t get at the real problem with Robertson’s theology of Satan. I’m sure the Devil is happy with what has been happening in that desperate country. What Robertson does not realize, however, is that Satan’s “pact” there is many-faceted. And this distorts his understanding of how God deals with Satan’s tactics.

It has been said that Haiti is 95% Catholic, 5% Protestant—and 100% voodoo. The percentages in that assessment may be a bit off, but there is no question that voodoo-ism is a major reality in Haiti’s culture. And, given my theology, I’m sure that this pleases Satan.

But the Devil also works in other ways as well.  Haiti has long been held in the grip of an oppressive political system that  has fostered one of the worst economic systems in the world. The poverty of Haiti is beyond comprehension to those of us who live with the comforts of a place like North America. All of that too must make Satan happy. In politics and economics too, we wrestle with principalities and powers.

Haiti’s desperate political-economic misery grieves the heart of Jesus. My wife and I heard that message in a poignant way when we visited Haiti in the early 1980s. We were traveling in a van with some Christian Reformed relief workers on the route from Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haitien. It was a hot day, and the road was rough. At one point, driving through some hills, we pulled over to get some water from a spring at the side of the road.

It seemed like a remote spot, but suddenly a group of six children appeared. They spoke pleadingly to us in Creole, obviously asking for money. We had been told by our Christian Reformed hosts not to respond to those requests. Wherever we had gone in towns and cities,  we were surrounded by pleading faces and outstretched hands, and we had learned simply to shake our heads and move along.

That’s what we attempted there at the side of the road, but one young man—a boy about 11 or 12 years old—would not let us dismiss them so easily. He had detected that one of our hosts spoke Creole, and he stood tall in front of his group of friends and launched an oration, passionately gesturing angrily toward our group. Our host listened carefully, and then at a certain point smiled, reached into his pocket and gave the young man some money to distribute to his friends.

“What happened there?” I asked the Christian Reformed relief worker when we closed the doors of our van. “The kid preached a brief but eloquent sermon to me,” he said with a grin. “He said that his priest had been teaching them that Jesus cares about the poor, and that those who refuse to respond to the needs of the poor are not friends of Jesus, but are agents of the Devil.”

I wish Pat Robertson could hear that kind of sermon from a Haitian kid. It would give him a clear picture of how Satan is at work in Haiti and what it means to line up with the cause of Jesus. God is indeed upset about Haiti’s “pact with the Devil.” But sending earthquakes to make life even worse for kids like those we met at the side of the road is not God’s way of countering the work of his Enemy.

I watched the “Jurassic Park” movies. At least two of them—I’m pretty sure I did not see the third, and I probably won’t  go back to catch up.  If I weren’t a grandfather I would not have gotten into it at all.

In retrospect, though, I can see that what I originally endured simply out of a sense of intergenerational duty has helped me to think more clearly about the future of theological education. Let me explain.

In a conversation I partcipated in a while back, focusing on the relationship of theological schools to local churches, one young “emerging church” pastor offered the firmly expressed opinion that  “seminaries are quickly becoming dinosaurs.” What he clearly meant to say by this is that seminaries are becoming increasingly  irrelevant to the ministies of the churches, to the point that we will soon be extinct.

That really  does not fit what I learned from the  “Jurassic Park” films.  The dinosaurs did not increasingly become “irrelevant.” They did not start off strong and then gradually become weaker, until they finally just all died off. They were fearsome creatures until very end. Only a major cataclysm could kill them off. And if any of them happened to survive on some remote island somewhere, they are still strong and scary creatures—that’s the Jurassic Park message.

Ironically, then, Fuller Seminary is something like a dinosaur. Not that we are scary, but we are strong. We are not gradually weakening. If we are going to be done in, it will have to be because some cataclysmic outside force decides to target us.

That raises the question, of course, of what makes theological education strong. If seminaries were to weaken “internally,” to the point of approaching extinction, what would be causing that weakening? I think the answer is obvious: we would be cutting ourselves off from our vital connection to the church of Jesus Christ.

Alan Wolfe, the Boston College sociologist, once remarked to me that what he sees as Fuller’s unique character—and he said this as one who has spent time on our campus, but as a visitor from “outside” the Christian faith—is that we maintain both strong scholarship and at the same time have a lifeline to what he called “grassroots evangelicalism.” He went on to say that one of these is eventually going to have to give. We will either move in an exclusively scholarly direction, disconnected from the front lines, or we will dumb it all down in our efforts to stay in touch with the grass roots.

Either one of those moves would be a disaster. We would deserve to become extinct at that point. If there were a Jurassic Park for surviving seminaries in that scenario, no one would want to make a movie about it.

Although it is not exactly a Christmas hymn, the words (and tune) of “In Christ Alone” were going through my head often during this Advent season, especially the opening lines of the second verse:

In Christ alone, who took on flesh
Fullness of God in helpless babe.

I agree with N.T. Wright, who recently wrote that this is clearly one of the best—I think simply the best—of  the newer hymns. But I also agree with Wright’s proposed revision of one word in that second verse. Instead of saying that “The wrath of God was satisfied” on the Cross, it should say that God’s love was satisfied.

In the past I would have resisted that kind of suggestion. And I am still not prepared simply to give up on any notion of Christ’s suffering the divine wrath on our behalf as our substitute. But it was the discovery of a comment by St. Augustine that checked me theologically on this subject.  It wasn’t at that moment when “we were reconciled unto Him by the blood of His Son that [God] began to love us; but He did so before the foundation of the world…”

Significantly, Augustine says this in commenting on John 3:16—a fact that embarrasses me a bit. In all of my years of speaking about the atonement as if somehow God was angry with us until the Son suffered on the Cross,  I never explicitly made the connection to John 3:16, which I memorized almost about the time that I learned to talk: “For God so loved…that He gave His only begotten Son.” It was the love of the triune God that sent Jesus to the Manger and to the Cross.

With Tom Wright I cast my vote for a revision of that one word in an otherwise marvelous hymn!