WenatcheeTheHatchet

"The Wounds of Discovery" is coming along nicely

2012-01-31T03:19:00.000-08:00

What I originally planned to be a mere three parts has grown into six parts, the sixth part to be done shortly. I feel pretty good about how it has been turning out. I think I may have outdone myself with this new segment. You really can't go wrong writing about the classic Batman villains and it's equally hard to go wrong writing about classic villains depicted by Batman: the animated series. Well, Hugo Strange could have been better and, let's face it, Bane was not really a classic Batman villain twenty years ago. But, with those vital historical caveats aside, BTAS gave us some of the most compelling versions of the Dark Knight's foes of the last two decades.

And, as Bat-fans know, when you have a hero defined by his villains as strongly as Batman is it's important how you develop them and what they are about. When you've done that there is then the challenge of making sure that after getting to the heart of the villains you don't forget the important stuff about the hero who stops them. It is this, more than any other set of considerations, that has made BTAS the classic television show it has become.

So now that "The Wounds of Discovery" has grown into six parts it feels more natural and effective. My hope is you'll enjoy it. If I've done my work well you can appreciate the ideas I'm working through even if you've never watched an episode of Batman: the animated series in your life. My hope, of course, is that if somehow this is the case you'll go and watch at least one or two episodes. If you come to these essays appreciating BTAS and the rest of the DCAU I hope you'll find it enjoyable and thought-provoking. This week Part 4b of "Wounds" should probably be going up and I begin to get into the heart of why I've called this series Batman: the Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire. I can't think of a better title for a series of essays about this wonderful show.

I do have other bits of news to share here this blog a bit later. I'll have links for new Mockingbird essays as they pop up and this year I'll have some news about musical stuff.

HT Kinnon: comment from Scot McKnight on NeoCalvinism and NeoPuritanism and ...

2012-01-31T00:36:00.000-08:00

http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/the-mark-driscoll-fiasco-what-the-latest-flap-teaches-us-about-the-neo-reformed-movement/comment-page-1/#comment-373700

2. On Driscoll representing the NeoPuritan group. We probably need to distinguish the movement/group from its leaders, and see the ordinary participants — say, in TGC or T4G — as diverse and more pastorally and local church in orientation. Driscoll represents the theology of its leaders but his brash and crude edges clash dramatically with the sanity, care, caution and focus of the Puritans. So, to me, he is an outlier who, because of his charisma and strength of influence, can’t be ignored by the NeoPuritan leaders but who surely vexes them with his over-the-top sexual angst and desire to talk in crude and strong ways about it.

Yeah, Mark Driscoll is not the kind of guy who would have ever come up with a book like Puritan Richard Sibbes' The Bruised Reed. In fact if anything Driscoll's anti-typological anti-allegorical take on Song of Songs just suggests that he's only Reformed or an admirer of Puritans to the extent that if he name-drops them often enough (and shares that old saw about Puritans setting up church discipline on a guy who didn't want to have sex with his wife as much she wanted sex (and by now we know why he'd find that story compelling thanks to confessions in Real Marriage)) people will think he's in the same team. After about ten years of this it's going to be tougher to insist against all evidence that he's a Puritan or Reformed so much as a Baptist TULIP. But if this is seen for what it is then suddenly Mars Hill will come off not like an up and coming church that isn't an institution, it will come off more like Calvinist Baptists 52.5

Maybe someday there will be an article about the guy that resembles the article I read in Slate years ago about Howard Stern, "The Shock Jock in Winter". For now it's becoming more evident that Mark Driscoll is no longer young, will probably always be restless, and is not even especially Reformed.

reblog: "I see things", cessationists, prophets, and recovered memories

2012-01-31T00:05:00.000-08:00

I spent months researching different ways of understanding Deuteronomy as a foundational text for guiding a discussion of cessationism/continuationism on the subject of Driscoll's 2008 claim to "I see things". The more I began to study the matter the more I began to realize the charismatic/cessationist debates ultimately has nothing to do with gifts the apostle Paul did not bother to define. Paul cared more to have love be the guide through which gifts not only operated but emerged. Notice that Paul spent a a good bit of space talking about spiritual fruit and bracketed spiritual gifts as a manifestation of spiritual activity.

More to the point, the cessationist/charismatic debates in the last century are not really about what Paul seemed to be talking about but about the foundation for institutional authority in contemporary ecclesiology. Do we build a church as an institution upon a confessional tradition or out of the power of a charismatic personality? It is entirely possible for even a person who is formally a cessationist to essentially be a charismatic personality whose sayings and writings and activity completely shape the church.

Thus, paradoxically, a pastor who is formally a cessationist in doctrine can still lead and organize his church around the force of his personality and his partisans in a way that demonstrates that the foundation of his church is, in a beautifully ironic way, charismatic. In case Christians forgot this obvious point, "charismatic" does not always default to a theological position regarding pneumatology!

But that's enough for now. I'm still just re-linking to some writing and thinking I did last year, after all. And here you go:

http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=21320258&postID=6333630757729422683

Because it's worth posting again, from The Book of Common Prayer

2012-01-30T10:01:00.000-08:00

Almighty God, you proclaim your truth in every age by many voices; Direct, in our time, we pray, those who speak where many listen and write what many read; that they may do their part in making the heart of this people wise, its mind sound, and its will righteous; to the honor of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

SotteVoce at a comment on Internet Monk discusses MH community groups.

2012-01-30T10:00:00.000-08:00

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/thoughts-on-church-discipline-and-relational-wisdom#comments

Check out comment from SotteVoce January 27, 2012 at 3:36pm

Here is the excerpt that has stuck with me:
I think the problem that we see here is that the church, in taking over the formation of small groups, is trying to force community and intimacy among its people, which is impossible. Intimacy and trust simply cannot be coerced. I would not say that deep “confessions” were actively sought out by the groups that I have attended, but there is a kind of unspoken pressure in that environment to unburden yourself of anything and everything, because sharing secrets can foster intimacy in the right environment (not to mention it gets you attention). Unfortunately, in the wrong environment, it can lead to power trips, emotional blackmailing, and escalated incidents ... .

... it’s pretty easy to convince young people looking for something “authentic” and “real” that they need to be honest to the point of oversharing in order to have real spiritual fellowship. (I believe it is a natural outgrowth of the blatant emotional manipulation that is frequently employed in youth groups to get young people to open up and act spiritual.) “We’re your friends and your mentors, you should let us help you.” Except that in these situations, your “friendship” was systematically manufactured for you by a bureaucracy and all but forced upon you instead of developing through shared experience and fellowship.

There have been some awkward confessions I have heard in Mars Hill community groups, which I will not repeat. Sad and troubling confessions, confessions where people went out on a huge limb and shared things that were very real, very full of hurt, and very risky to share. Unfortunately these were done in settings where absolutely no one had the competence to speak into those situations.

One of the things a friend and I discussed about Mars Hill community group--no, various friends and i have discussed this--is that you can't manufacture intimacy and affection. In my time at Mars Hill there was basically only one community group where I simultaneously felt welcome and liked. I was in some groups where I didn't feel welcome and was not liked. I have been in some groups where I was liked be a few folks but didn't quite feel welcome.

I was in some settings where I felt welcome and liked and yet there was this weird, inexplicably awkward pall over everything. It was as though just when people were becoming truly at ease and getting to know each other the group leader would steer everything toward yakking about the Driscoll sermon. Or a group leader might share this and that about community and friendship and the air in a room would just die when someone admitted they not only voted for Obama but liked his policies. Then someone would mutter something about socialism. I didn't vote for Obama, mind you, but I don't have to spell this out, do I?

I've been in settings where someone shared a testimony that touched me a great deal. I realize, looking back, that the person shared a testimony a few weeks after in a group discussion a few folks at the group talked about how family can help you get through rough times and be there for you. I said something that nearly killed the mood of the room and said, "That's true, but family can do more to destroy and discourage you than anyone else, too." Everyone except one person looked awkward. That other person looked me in the eye as if to say, "You and I are the only two people in this room who know what that means." Later that person shared a testimony.

If my saying that thing that made the room feel awkward made that ONE person feel safe sharing a hard testimony then I believe that was the right and honorable thing to do. Fortunately in the setting this did not fall into dead air because there was real friendship and community. But it was part of another group in which we had all grown to love each other. I can't really describe that kind of connection except to say that though most of us see each other at most one or two times a year there is a strong affection and bond as though the months or even years had not really changed anything.

Now obviously that is the kind of friendship and mutual affection a church WANTS a community gruop to develop but in many cases a community group falls short of successfully manufacturing the semblance of that. In a setting like Mars Hill I think the most common cause for the failure to attain this affection is simple--too many people want the group to be where things get heavy, deep and real. There's no eagerness to kill an entire evening on things that are light, shallow and fun. I felt connected to people talking about the Bible or about sermon talking points, yes. But I also felt stronger connections watching Scrubs episodes or discussing Gene Kelly movies with the women in a CG while some of the guys either pretended they didn't know what was going on or really didn't know what was going on. I liked these people enough that I put up with Family Guy. Now if you know me and know how much I hate Family Guy that can tell you how much I like these people!

You can't manufacture that no matter how many coaches you set up or groups you put together. It happens or it doesn't. Part of how it happens is that people who work together have often learned how to play together. Think of it this way, in our society people date, do tons of fun things together and as that moves along they begin to work together, build lives together, get married. Think about how children play and learn to exercise their minds and relational tools to grow into becoming functioning, working adults. There is a life cycle to a friendship and to a fellowship. In many cases it has seemed that a community group has been erected so as to jump straight into adulthood when there has been no childhood period of play. The child, if you will, can be put into a cotton mill to work the machines for production.

I look back with some sadness realizing that some of the most heartbreaking stories shared in community groups were ones where people badly needed to be able to share what had been done to them and I and the rest of the group were completely inadequate to say anything. I didn't feel I could speak up because if I shared something it would be the wrong thing or the wrong kind of encouragement. I also felt that if I shared something about why my heart went out to someone it would compromise the trust of someone else whose trust I did not want to compromise. In other cases I just realized I could not understand where that person was coming from so I said nothing and just prayed.

There's a difference between sharing something very hard to share because you've had enough fun with friends you can share the serious stuff and sharing something very hard because you've heard the talk about how "things are real here" or "things won't leave this group" and feeling a need to share because you've been primed to believe that confessing the heavy, deep and real stuff is okay because everyone says they want to do that. They don't usually do it, though, at least in my experience. When they do the blank expressions and awkward looks leave a person feeling as though it was better to have not said anything.

The sad thing is that should you happen upon a small group where real affection and trust has developed and you end up in other groups you begin to realize how far short other groups fall. They're not falling short because other people aren't obtaining friendship and intimacy necessarily it could be because you are like a child who has to learn how to play before you can go to work. Of course, sometimes it's that the group trying so hard to be heavy, deep and real doesn't realize that because they aren't taking time to be light, shallow and fun they end up just being awkward, perfunctory and fake. Awkward and heavy are not the same and fake isn't just about not being honest it's about the moment where honesty is met with an emotional vacuum that reveals that these people weren't really ready to grasp what you shared from your heart.

Not that I'm necessarily against community groups. I could try to say something pious and trite about being the change you want to be or being that kind of person but the race is not always to the swift, nor victory to the strong, nor wealth to the wise but time and chance happen to them all. To the extent that Christians try to manufacture intimacy and fellowship in a way where it won't matter who is in the group it will be the degree to which it shows.

HT Phoenix Preacher: Mark Driscoll & Church Discipline

2012-01-30T08:28:00.000-08:00

http://phillyflash.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/mark-driscoll-and-church-discipline-is-it-biblical-or-abusive/

Normally I have no keen interest in podcasts and don't listen to podcasts. I make exceptions however, such as for this podcast. I hadn't planned on blogging about this (as I blogged earlier) but I have been following enough other blogging on the subject and reading enough comments that I do feel somebody should say the stuff I'm about to say. I'm going to discuss what concerns about Mars Hill discipline "should" be getting discussed in light of Andrew's story. I am also going to discuss why I have not blogged about some of this stuff and why I have not made comments of the sort other people have. There are folks who have commented here in the past whose comments display an approach I avoid for reasons I'm going to explain at some length.

As I blogged at some length at various points here, Mark Driscoll's Christian porn take on Song of Songs will be the sort of thing to help unmarried Christians become aware of techniques, positions, and ideas they will have not have heard of before. Driscoll's defense of "If I don't talk about it all your kids are gonna learn about it from porno anyway" is not a particularly viable defense. It certainly didn't make sense ten years ago when he said it in a sermon you probably won't even be able to find; it makes less sense now if Mars Hill is as gung-ho on home-schooling and web-filtering as I imagine they might be. It will mean that a generation of Martian kids are more likely to find out about anal sex being possible from a Driscoll book or a sermon than from official porn. Note I used the word "official" there.

I agree with the sentiment that if a guy like Mark Driscoll spent months extolling the wonders of wifely stripteases and holy blowjobs as the literal and only viable reading of Song of Songs; and then is incensed that impressionable and horny 20 somethings end up trying these things out because they lack self control; that a man like that is either a complete idiot or is not being honest about inevitable implications his teaching will have in a church that has reached into ten thousands.

When marriage is touted as the proof of true adulthood by a man who is capable of putting singles in a double bind by saying they're idolizing marriage if they feel lonely without someone and yet that they're idolizing independence if they don't to marry because they have other things to do this is the kind of blatant double bind that, should people end up having sex, is not a huge shocker. As I've blogged various times here, in Martian martial theology the only person who isn't in this double bind forever is whomever happens to already BE married. The rest can often end up being what my blogging friend Mara Reid has called the "sucks to be you" gender gospel.

I'm following the stuff related to Andrew and have not done much to blog about that. I have, however, made some comments here and there. The controversy surrounding Andrew's discipline contract is an occasion for people outside Mars Hill to ask whether or not, if the things Andrew shared are true, that discipline at the Ballard campus has not at some point been tainted by any one or all four of the following miscarriages of discipline in Andrew's case:

1) nepotism
Andrew was engaged to a pastor's daughter. When he admitted to cheating on her I don't see how nepotism wouldn't kick in. In fact if Andrew had not been engaged to a pastor's daughter it's hard to know that any of this would have gone down the way it did.

2) conflict of interest
Andrew was disciplined by campus pastors who would be in a conflict of interest if the pastor whose daughter Andrew was engaged to and had cheated on had any say in the disciplinary proceedings

3) double standard
Any word in the shunning document about the pastor's daughter? The public notice about Andrew scrupulously avoided mention that "a member" with whom Andrew was involved in "unrepentent sexual sin" was a pastor's daughter

4) simple retaliation
I don't think I have to explain this one.

These are all risks that anyone who read what Andrew shared with Matthew Paul Turner would legitimately be concerned about given what Andrew related about the disciplinary proceedings he was told he had to be part of.

Seeing as spouse and offspring information about campus pastors has been pretty well scrubbed off of Mars Hill websites when folks used to trumpet that information in prominent campus pastor profiles it does at least suggest the possibility that Mars Hill leaders somewhere have put together that members of the press or bloggers could put these things together and wonder if Andrew ended up being railroaded despite having done everything right by confessing his sins.

Newsflash to some folks, not saying you did something is not the same as deliberately lying about it. A dad angry about his daughter being betrayed by a fiance with whom his daughter was sexually involved is going to make that dad apt to assume the worst if he wasn't aware of what was going on--this could be the case if the fiance admitted to sexual activity the pastor's daughter never mentioned. IF that's what happened (and I'm not saying this is what actually went down) it wouldn't even be the first time a dad at Mars Hill retroactively made every effort to slam an emergency brake on a relationship his daughter was in with a man where he hadn't pieced everything together yet. This is my way of saying that the odds of a pastor avoiding a conflict of interest, the temptation to retaliate, or to exercise a nepotistic double standard in church discipline in the kind of case Andrew describes is not possible unless the dad in question defers to others. Andrew not saying earlier he was sexually active with a pastor's daughter during his engagement to her is not necessarily active deceit and even if it was that would only be possible to sustain if the daughter went along.

I've already written at some length about what I observed at Mars Hill that led me to believe disciplinary procedures were, let me put this discreetly, ad hoc and frequently done without any regard to the significance of procedural precedent. Don't shun the unrepentant adulteress who pulls the "I've never been a Christian card" do shun the fired pastor who objected to the by-laws.

Now I know people in the past have come here and shared (almost always anonymously) conspiracy theories and the "true" explanations about what happened to this or that person. Well, I have not been a fan of those. Anyone can post an anonymous comment. My educational background is in journalism. You'll notice that even though I have a pen name (because it sounds cool to me) I have made no secret of who I actually am here. Back in the unmoderated Midrash I was the only person who used my actual name. Full actual name, not a shorthand like PastorMark. I may say stupid stuff but I am willing to admit I said stupid stuff on record.

Something that happened in 2007 after the firing controversy was that somebody leaked stuff to the press. That somebody created a press release. A whole bunch of Martians assumed that somebody ELSE had to be responsible. That somebody was (and is) a friend of mine. The reason I take the tone and approach I do to blogging about Mars Hill is I was trained to approach things as a journalist. I was taught that there are times when the real story is not what everybody is writing about but what nobody is writing about. I was also told that you should not assume that anonymous sources or people who only want to speak off the record can be trusted.

If the story is real, if the story is legit, and if the story needs to be told do not take shortcuts by way of anonymous tippers who in all likelihood have their own agendas. Be willing to slog through obscenely large amounts of publicly accessible information to put the story together. Use an anonymous source as an absolute last resort and only if you are sure that the story of the anonymous source fits information you are able to obtain through other means.

A little backtrack into the history of the press and the Nixon administration. For decades the press had a self-congratulatory love affair with itself for having taken down the Nixon administration. That's not exactly what happened. Disgruntled people within the Nixon administration took down the Nixon administration and made use of the press to do so. There was a synergy at work. The Nixon administration fell apart through the momentum of its own graft. In fact people who suggest that there are Watergate like elements to this situation are right. Someone inside Mars Hill cared enough about Andrew to keep him in the loop. Andrew THEN went to Matthew Paul Turner. All the same, that things have been off can be observed through just about any rant Driscoll makes.

If Mars Hill is on a course for disaster we don't have to keep looking for the secret or "real" story built off of people who won't speak on record. The story of the things going wrong in Mars Hill theology or procedure is, in its way, staring us all in the face and within publicly accessible documents and statements. "I break their nose" for instance. "If I weren't going to end up on CNN" for instance. We can see it even in the curious case of shredding William Young while urging us to wait and see with Jakes.

That the case of Andrew was leaked does not surprise me any more than that the firings of Paul and Bent were leaked. However, as a blogger I am not the kind of person who will just blog out everything I have learned. I've seen first hand how a friend's life became more unhappy than it already was because Mars Hill members assumed the worst about him and would not listen to me when I pleaded with them (and non-members) to NOT view my friend this way.

In other words I've seen people act like complete assholes in anger and outrage about Mars Hill and not realize that how they reacted was perpetuating wrong-doing against people already harmed by disciplinary processes at Mars Hill. This is not abstract for me, one of my friends got screwed over not just by a disciplinary procedure at Mars Hill but even by the blowback that came from people assuming he had to have leaked things to the press when he didn't. Your words, both their content and their tone, will have consequences in the lives of people you probably aren't thinking about.

If some people think I have been overly cautious it may be because I really am overly cautious, but I take my approach because I have seen just a few too many people hurt by amateurs who don't understand the significance of what it means to violate the privacy of already hurt people by going to the press. Let me put it as scandalously as possible so that this can be more clearly articulated--if a person has been raped how much good do you think it may do the victim to go out and announce the person has been raped to the press if we're in a cultural context in which victims get blamed?

There's a lot I haven't blogged and probably never will blog because I know what "on the record" means. Now if you're someone who wants to blog or comment about something to do with Mars Hill and disciplinary abuse and you use a pseudonym, okay. I honestly do get that. But if you want to claim to have inside knowledge while simultaneously refusing to go on record or say anything concrete you're a coward. Period. There's no qualifying that. I'm not saying there's no legitimate reason to be afraid for your reputation, mind you.

If you're only willing to take the posture of someone who knows the real deal but won't use your real name or go on record as you insist people believe your anonymous comments on blogs, well, I've already seen my friends' privacy violated by assholes like you. You'll have to do better than that. Bent Meyer has just shown you what "better than that" looks like over at The Wartburg Watch if you need an example.

You don't know, watchblogger or anonymous commenter, whether or not your desire to vent your anger won't inadvertantly hurt the cause and life of someone who has already been hurt by this institution. Using already hurt people as props to win your crusade can still be secondary abuse. Don't be so quick to vent your spleen that you inadvertantly sacrifice those people on the altar of your crusade. I've already seen this done to one of my friends and I don't want to see it happen again.

And this is why, crazy as this may sound, Andrew's case is encouraging to me. Someone who is a MH member cared enough to share with Andrew that he was being declared an unrepentent sinner by a campus machine. Andrew then had the freedom to break his story to Matthew Paul Turner. Someone cared enough about Andrew to have more real regard for his privacy than an entire campus system. Now people can understandably believe that a church willing to treat Andrew that way may "deserve" to have something leaked (amen) but it should be (and was) Andrew's decision to share the story. Compared to what went down in 2007 this is still terrible but in one crucial respect it's a step up and a step in a better direction.

Bent Meyer posts on The Wartburg Watch about being fired from MH in 2007

2012-01-29T19:46:00.000-08:00

Before you read the news peg link read this first:

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=445277

THEN read this, not before:

http://thewartburgwatch.com/2012/01/27/mars-hill-and-mark-driscoll-under-scrutiny-while-another-painful-story-emerges/#comment-35184

Bent Meyer on Sun, Jan 29 2012 at 06:06 pm

I am one of the men fired the day of Mark’s rant about two elders he felt needed to broken noses. Someone asked what has happened since that day.

I am happy to say, the next Sunday my wife and I attended another Church with far better expository teaching and a community that authentically and generously helps the marginalized.
I also finished my master program and have a private mental health practice serving the Seattle and Eastside area. This was a very good and satisfying result.

Regarding, whether I spoke up or not. I have not been silenced by any direct or implied threats of retaliation. It is clear that the one who possess the air waves controls the content and spin of a story, so there was not much to be done.

I thought a lot about how I would response and just what my motives would be. I chose not to be lured into a public argument through the Seattle Times asking me for a blow by blow description of the events I have documented. I have a tendency to keep material for years and years.
I did prepare my narrative, including supporting documents for members only to read who came to me for explanation. They had to agree, never to disclose any of it to the media. These people have been honorable. As best I know, none have. By doing this I opened up myself to their scrutiny and possible rebuke. I have received nothing but kindness and support.

As to my motives, I want Mark’s best. In my opinion he is a very troubled man. He is caught in his own hell. The consequence, of course, is the influence he has on others, which is mixed.
He, Lief Moi, and Mike Gunn, together the founders of Mars Hill Church, sent out to focus on those that were young, upwardly mobile and future leaders. They wanted to position themselves to influence their faith decisions and their life choices. This is a lessen for many church leaders to learn from and choose for themselves.

The downside is Mark’s pathology shows up in ways that are impulsive, aggressive, irascible, shut off from effective relational influence, and most apparent not respectful and submissive to no one, though he claims otherwise.

I have hoped and still hope for something short of him destroying himself would bring about substantial change for this every increasing population of worshiper. Some have fretted there will be a great loss of Christian’s with the demise of Mark and/or the Church. I don’t think so. The church the comprises all of us will survive. The chaff will be blown away, but the church will remain.
I would speak a caution to all of us. There is much to be learn for the Mars Hill phenomena. Don’t dismiss the hunger and openness to be influenced represented in those ages 18 through 30. Invent content that is useful and distribute it freely on the web. Always incorporate creatively some explanation of the gospel at the end of every teaching session with an invitation to do business with Jesus.

Even though Mark’s portrayal of masculinity is more like a comic book superhero and women as needing to be protected and rescued his focus on young men coming into manhood richly is important. Absent fathers is epidemic. Think about what it is that has caused them not to attach to their families. Mark comes at it from the standpoint of duty and responsibility, which is mechanical, missing other primary questions, Why do some many men not attach to their families? Why do they abandon family so easily? Mark uses shame and intimidation as the means of gaining compliance, which has the appearance of working, but is not transformative in the long run, or creates other issues of abusive relationships related to power and control. In many men, the tendency is understood in the short saying, “Monkey see monkey do.” Don’t over react, young men need to mature.

I feel like I need to give attention the needs of women with equal if not more space, since women are marginalized and silenced in so many ways. But, I will leave that for another time.

I hope this will satisfy the primary curiosity of those who wonder what has happened to me. I will say, the other elder fired at the same times is a good friend and doing well.

***
This is the very real Bent Meyer. Beyond that words are pretty much failing me so I'll post and link. I'm going to need a few hours or maybe even a few days on this one.

But for now I can manage to write out this much: to the best of my knowledge this is the first time any man who was fired from being a pastor at Mars Hill has made a public statement on the record about having been fired from Mars Hill.

iMonk: Hard Talk II--Defending Dissent

2012-01-29T01:05:00.000-08:00

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/imonk-classic-talk-hard-ii#more-28114

After all, since this is something Michael Spenser wrote at Internet Monk and I've been reading Internet Monk since, I dunno, ten years ago, I'm linking to it. I have a feeling we may be sharing similar thoughts about the necessity within evangelicalism to give room for dissent. It'd be an irony that evangelicals whose roots emerge from what was considered historic and necesary dissent of the abuse of church power would now themselves represent the same kind of self-preserving and self-justifying misuse of power in the very churches where leaders would decry Papists as holding wrong doctrines. Well, when Israel became the divided kingdom which of the two groups faithfully and always served the Lord? Yeah, that's right, neither of them.

Now my own assessment of the prophetic role is going to come off as substantially less exalted than what others may have suggested. This is not because I consider prophets unimportant but because I have begun to appreciate the significance of Deuteronomy 16-18 that many people using "prophets" as a basis for defending their own authority tend to skip over; the prophet was a role provided within the Torah as an ad hoc committee role to adjudicate issues that the Torah did not cover in case law. In other words the understanding much of the time was that the majority of life within Israel did not require a prophet to be consulted all the time.

It is true that prophets often played a critical role but that is because we have written documents from prophets whose work got canonized. This is not the same as looking to Deuteronomy 16-18 to get some idea of what was considered a normative role for a prophet. Some of the most important prophets (Elijah, Nathan and Huldah) in the history of Israel and Judea did not write anything down. They were also not necessarily critics. They could, however, be construed as policy advisors.

The prophetic job was to advise a king whether to go to war because a military situation came up that the Torah didn't address. The prophetic role as to assist in adjudication of an unusual case that was not adequately adressed by case law in the Torah. The prophetic role was also to challenge Israel to be obedient to what was revealed and to not digress into the worship of other gods on the one hand nor to the neglect of obedience and faithfulness while professing a nominal faith on the other. The role of the prophet prescribed in Deuteronomy 18 was not to "write books of the Bible". Eschatological prophecy is not even on the table there, despite the fact that many, many Christians assume it must be.

There's a difference between a later Christian gloss on a passage in the Torah and what the passage was originally actually talking about. We can get to the Christian appreciation of Jesus as the ultimate prophet when we read Deuteronomy 18 but before we skip straight to the big old meaning with the indefinite article we need to properly come to terms with the definite article that doesn't have a capital letter in it, and with indefinite articles. Any old preacher can claim to be a prophet because he preaches but that does not make him a prophet, it makes him more like a priest. If the preacher fields theological and ethical issues that are not directly dealt with by the Bible then, sure, he's started to play a prophetic role.

When Paul urges people to seek the higher gifts he doesn't write this as though there was some one and done litany of Spirit-given super-powers you get for life. His corretion to the Corinthians assumes that they knew who had the gift of tongues and who had the gift of interpreting tongues. He also assumed that there was an ability to acquire the better gifts. When we consider that the fruit of the spirit is pretty prosaic it might also suggest that the gifts of the spirit may be roles we grow into and take for occasions rather than lifetimes; roles that can be informed by those things that out of love we do for the church/Church.

Paul's instruction about the spiritual gifts has often been misused by cessationists and charismatics who are bickering about whether these gifts are really available now and what that is supposed to say about which of the two teams can make the greatest claim to legitimate institutional power. Paul skips past that and doesn't bother to define the spiritual gifts contemporary Christians debate about. He provides a few general guidelines and, famously, says "And now I will show you a still better way."

When Paul says to earnestly seek the better gifts he does not describe the gift very clearly, what he does describe clearly is the role the gift of service plays in a community. In other words, cultivate the fruit of the Spirit and love your fellow believers and this will in itself constitute seeking to embody such gifts as Paul enumerates. Pursue love of Christ and of neighbor and the spiritual gifts you actually need will take care of themselves for two reasons: 1) the fruit of the Spirit that grows in your life will prepare you for service and 2) the role you are able to play by the cultivation of that fruit in seeking to love the Lord and your neighbor will be something the Spirit takes care of without you having to constantly fret about it.

You don't need to really ask yourself "Is what I am doing prophetic?" or "Is what I'm doing the gift of healing?" or "Is what I'm saying a sign of the gift of exhortation?" The gift of healing may not be something as flashy as laying hands on someone and healing their illness. A gift of healing may be something such as a providential giving that allows someone who is going blind to see. A person who plays a prophetic role does not have to always be speaking in oracles with King James English like, "Thus sayeth the Lord", a person who plays a prophetic role does not need to know he or she is doing so. But a person who considers, as the prophet Jeremiah did, that the lying pen of scribes has transformed the Scriptures themselves into a lie can perform a prophetic role without having to display some kind of superpower. Yes, we're told about floating ax handles and parting seas and all that but we all know that the real Christian life is far more prosaic and we can forget that there was a more mundane concern in ensuring a floating ax handle was rescued.

At the end of days I would rather be in a position to wonder when I did anything like speaking in a prophetic way or bringing the gift of healing to someone when the Lord speaks than to boast in the things I was sure I did in Jesus' name only to discover He says "I never knew you." The world has been full of self-appointed prophets but what the Church may need are more accidental prophets, prophets who speak not because they want to or can't think of better things to do with their time, but who through providence and eagerness to love and serve the body of Christ bear the fruit of the Spirit and live the role when needed rather than thinking of it as some permanent vocation.

Do you think Amos was a full-time prophet? No, he tended sheep and dressed trees, right? Prophets did do ordinary things, too. There were some people who played the role of prophets as formal cabinet advisors to a king or priest in Israel but there were, we know this from Amos alone, some prophets had day jobs and only spoke when it was necesarry, when seeing the corruption of leaders and self-appointed spiritual authorities grew too be too much and they spoke against corruption and wickedness.

How could there be corruption and wickedness in the Christian community, you ask? We all know the answer of course, but the need for a prophetic activity is that all too often we assume we're the ones who get to play that prophetic role for that other sinner rather than consider that God may have appointed that other sinner (of all people!) to speak in a prophetic way to us. Schlatter was right to observe we do not lessen our share in evil by condemning evil in others yet the history of prophets has often been that though they, like Isaiah, recognize they are sinful folks with unclean lips, God sends them to speak up anyway. Tricky thing is that we may not recognize them when they speak to us because we're so sure they can't be legit. Unsurprisingly, there were religious leaders and advocates who said the same thing about the greatest prophet, weren't there?

An observation from Adolf Schlatter

2012-01-28T23:12:00.000-08:00

"A gap between faith and obedience occurs only when the message of God is replaced with a doctrine about God."

Romans: The Righteousness of God, p 11

renting and ownership

2012-01-28T19:52:00.000-08:00

“Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else’s property, who will give you property of your own?"

There are some people who assume that if you own something you will care for it more than a rental. There are some people who assume that if you invest a dollar in a private or public firm that it will be more carefully spent than it would be at a non-profit or a government office because the recipient of the investment knows that dollar does not belong to him or her. The assumption is that mere renters are not as responsible. The assumption is that borrow money can't be spent as shrewdly. The assumption is that people will only do their best work if they are doing it just to please themselves.

Yet the parable of the wicked steward exists. How could that be possible? Why is the punchline of Jesus' most challenging parable to say this, "If you have not been trustwory with someone else's property, who will give you property of your own?" If the axiom that owners are more responsible than renters why did Jesus tell a parable in which things are reversed and He says that if you can't be trusted with something lent that you aren't responsible enough to own?

HT Dan at City of God: Ian Hugh Clary--"Shoot an Elephant"

2012-01-28T01:16:00.000-08:00

http://ianhughclary.com/2012/01/25/shooting-an-elephant/

I have to link to this simply because anyone who can simultaneously refer to Driscoll and Jakes and The Elephant Room 2, and do so by way of a justifiably famous George Orwell piece is a blogging genius. These are the sorts of puns and literary allusions that make blogging and reading blogs fun and downright literary. I may not be writing as much here as I'm writing off-line but a blogger can still link.
Kudos to Dan at City of God for bringing it up where I could spot it. May all the City of God folks have a good weekend, too, while I'm at it.

Mockingbird touches on the Law of Indie Cred

2012-01-27T23:23:00.000-08:00

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7490324/chuck-klosterman-tune-yards
http://www.mbird.com/2012/01/another-week-ends-indie-law-the-new-marriage-killer-futurizing-fear-apatheism-damsels-in-distress-george-lucas-and-downton-abbey/#comments

This happens all the time. It now seems super-funny that so many people once believed Arrested Development was among the most important bands of the early 1990s. The idea of anyone advocating the merits of Fischerspooner now seems totally ridiculous. It somehow seems crazy that Cornershop was previously viewed as luminous, even though their songs still sound good to me. It’s just an impossible problem: We always want to reward art for being innovative, but most artistic innovations are not designed to hold up over time. They exist as temporary reactions to other things happening within the culture. And that means they will seem goofy and dated when the culture changes again. [emphasis mine]

The Klosterman article is a funny read because the excerpt quoted above is a footnote. Specifically footnote number 2 but, more generally, that there are footnoes in a piece that barely breaks 1,000 words. Leave it to a music critic writing about indie music to throw just two footnotes that contain enough words to equal a quarter of the length of the body of the article itself!

Of course depending on the musical idiom there's an emphasis on tradition rather than innovation; or it may be that the fact that pop band after pop band pretty much all blur together the way Vivaldi's concerti kinda sound the same because he was composing by way of the Baroque equivalent of the Xerox machine .Perhaps the funniest way to put this is that in classical music or art music we all know J. S. Bach is arguably the pinnacle of Western art music and yet how many real formal or stylistic innovations did he actually introduce?

Yeah ... see, it appears that a person can go down in history as the greatest music genius of the last five hundred years and have not introduced, at any practical level, a single innovation in the form and content of music like pioneering sonata allegro form or stuff like that. Of course Bach knew he was working within a tradition and came from an intergenerational dynasty of professional musicians. Haydn pioneered some great innovations in musical form but who is more popular for developing and running with Haydn's innovations? Mozart and Beethoven, that's who.

What indie rockers don't discover because they don't necessarily immerse themselves in the history of pop music is that it actually doesn't pay to introduce the big innovations that get remembered by a name or a code. Why? Well for the classical nerds reading along let me throw out phrases like clausula vera or Alberti bass. Yep, those are practically the classical equivalents of "power chords" or "twelve bar". Musical innovations that can be remembered by name and stick around end up being, you guessed it, forms and cliches.

Most artistic innovations are finding ways to repackage and rebranding old hat stuff in a way that's clever enough that you don't necessarily spot how old hat it is. Now if you're a jerk about things like Boulez often was you can say Schoenberg was dead and that he expanded harmony without making any corresponding innovations in rhythm or other things. And if you like Boulez' compositions even more than his conducting then, well, whatever. Who am I to tell you how to spend your disposable income?

yeah, I know of it

2012-01-27T18:40:00.000-08:00

If you've wondered if I've heard about the formal response I know it exists but boilerplate non-informative press release stuff I recognize when I read it. I didn't read the chapter as it wasn't anything I didn't already know.

Now I know some blogs have exploded with moral indignation and outrage about this boilerplate and I submit it is because of the Driscoll chapter attached more than anything Holcomb wrote and published. What Holcomb wrote and published is, frankly, pitiable boilerplate press release tofu. I can't read it as an indictment of deceit or stupidity on Mr. Holcomb's part. It's just non-informative boilerplate. If anything I pity the man for being in a position to have to put his name in a by-line under that. Wouldn't the impersonal collectivist writing style of The Economist that I just read have no need for a by-line? Why does some hapless pastor have to have his by-line tied to that?

I "might" write something but I don't feel any particular need to write about that stuff right now. Perhaps I should explain.

I'm scheduled to get new lenses for my glasses for the first time since cataract removal surgery. For newbies to my blog I had a cataract in one of my eyes (the one that didn't have a macular detachment). Being able to see clearly out of both eyes is important, after all. Thanks to snow in the previous week I haven't exactly been out and about when my best option is public transit.

I am juggling two writing projects that are, how do I put this, of more earthly good to me than blogging about other things. One you may have already seen some links to this week. Those essays on Batman: the animated series are not writing themselves! The second I'm keeping more under wraps because it's still early in the production and revision process. In any case I trust you'll get what I mean.

I'm still hunting for a regular day job and scoping out job leads.

I have been ironing out more details and jots and tittles toward publishing one of my compositions. I have not blogged about that because I don't see a reason to. During this time I have not stopped composing or networking with musicians.

So while I do appreciate that folks are concerned about "you know what" there is a time to for everything and wisdom consists, in part, of knowing when to write and not write about something. For me there are just more pressing things to write and pursue. Ergo my earlier posting of a prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. With all due respect and prayers and concerns for the various parties involved I've got a few things going on.

xkcd 1002

2012-01-27T00:50:00.001-08:00

http://xkcd.com/1002/

Oh, and I'm throwing in this one, too.

http://xkcd.com/999/

Here's something from the Book of Common Prayer for bloggers

2012-01-27T00:44:00.000-08:00

Batman: The Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire, part 4a just went up

2012-01-25T16:38:00.000-08:00

http://www.mbird.com/2012/01/batman-the-agony-of-loss-and-the-madness-of-desire-pt-4a/

So "The Wounds of Discovery" (i.e. part 4a) just went up on Mockingbird. This is good news for two reasons, it shows I've finished some new stuff and that Mockingbird is back up and running. This is exciting for me as this year is the 20th anniversary of one of the finest and most important cartoons in American childrens' entertainment in the last, well, twenty years.

This is even more fun for me than when I collected my thoughts for the tenth anniversary of The Powerpuff Girls. I know I might be getting most of my traffic by blogging about "that" place and "those" subjects so I feel like I should mention that if you come here you may find some massive rambles on cartoons you may have never heard of (like my ramble on Eureka Seven as an anime exploring child abuse from earlier this month. Or you might end up seeing me write a bunch of stuff that covers music by Ferdinand Rebay (you've been warned that's coming); or I might finally get to my career overview of the d'Amore Duo and discuss what I think of the duo's role in the admittedly rarified realm of chamber music for oboe and guitar. And, of course, I'll blog about "that" church and related topics just as I'll link to Mockingbird or Orthocuban or the Boar's Head Tavern.

Oh, yeah, I kinda forgot to mention I'm a fellow at the Boar's Head Tavern now. Much thanks to Fearsome Tycoon and J. S. Bangs for suggesting I be a fellow at the Tavern but particularly to Fearsome because he's been the strongest proponent of that. Now might be a good time to note that just because I use a pen name doesn't mean I'm trying to be anonymous. And, uh, it also does not mean I came from Wenatchee. I'm originally from Oregon with a background in the Assemblies of God and went to a little school by a canal. That means I have three things in common with Gordon Fee. Isn't that awesome?

Ahem, anyway, "The Wounds of Discovery" are going up on Mockingbird and I hope you enjoy the essays.

HT Phoenix Preacher: Rachel Held Evans on "Evangelical Celebrity"

2012-01-25T15:44:00.000-08:00

http://rachelheldevans.com/reflections-evangelical-celebrity?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RachelHeldEvans+%28Rachel+Held+Evans+-+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

... Praying whatever is in my heart and head is good in small doses, but structured prayer is the only way to truly transcend my selfish ego. There is nothing like greeting the morning with a prayer intended to remind you of your own mortality—“Teach me to number my days, that I may gain a heart of wisdom”—to put that deadline or that interview into perspective.

Structured prayer, particularly the offices, reminds me that God is bigger than my cause, bigger than my ministry, bigger than my “tribe,” bigger than me. It reminds me that, today, there are sparrows falling from trees and planets coursing through space, that a great cloud of witnesses has come before me and will come after me, that I have sinned by what I have done and what I have left undone, that all I really need is my daily bread, that, with or without me, the glory of God persists, “as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.” ...

***

I'd add a comment if I thought I had any comments to add.

BHT: Are we seeing pride going before destruction?

2012-01-24T22:38:00.000-08:00

http://boarsheadtavern.com/2012/01/24/are-we-seeing-pride-going-before-destruction/

http://matthewpaulturner.net/jesus-needs-new-pr/mark-driscolls-church-discipline-contract-looking-for-true-repentance-at-mars-hill-church-sign-on-the-dotted-line/
http://matthewpaulturner.net/jesus-needs-new-pr/mark-driscolls-gospel-shame-the-truth-about-discipline-excommunication-and-cult-like-control-at-mars-hill/

That someone from Mars Hill has gone public about a discipline contract does not surprise me. It disappoints me but does not surprise me. I am not in a position to be sure that this person named Andrew is telling the whole story. I'm not sure there's any thing that can certainly be discussed beyond some rudimentary points. One is that someone finally felt that Mars Hill disciplinary procedure is problematic enough to decide to go public. This may not mean the person who did this has good motives but if we account for divine providence it may not be necessary to be certain of every detail. This does not necessarily give us an assurance the anti-Driscolls are right more than the pro-Driscolls.

On the other hand, now might be a time to share that a discipline contract, whatever its merits in a specific case, does not seem like a huge surprise to me. The reason I think it is important to finally say something in public about this controversy, whether Andrew was "truly repentant" or not is because when I left Mars Hill one of the things I shared was that I was concerned that if things didn't change in the way Mars Hill approached church discipline and pastoral counseling a disaster could be down the road. I wasn't sure what form the disaster would take if it happened but I felt that it was going to come from two things: 1) a case in which discipline was unusually stern and 2) a case in which the sternness of the discipline was part of a sequence of events in which disciplinary precedent made the stern action seem arbitrary or out of proportion to the offense. Well ... it's too early to tell for sure but it's "possible" that moment may have arrived. I sincerely hope not but as I just said it's a bit early to tell.

Now shunning errant members whose errors were real or simiply imagined began earlier than 2011 or 2012. By now the 2007 firings of Paul Petry and Bent Meyer are not that hard to look up. The coverage initially done by Seattle alternative paper The Stranger was actually pretty fair. I don't say this because I like reading The Stranger. I only read The Stranger for about as long as Chris DeLaurenti was writing a column about the local classical music scene. But I can truthfully say that the coverage was, particularly coming from them, fair minded and fairly accurate in my opinion. The material was also leaked to the Seattle Times (if memory serves). So the coverage of the firings goes back for years.

And it was during that time that folks at Mars Hill were urged to shun the fired pastors and only speak to them if we were going to urge them to repentence. One of these men was my neighbor and I consider him a valuable friend. I've met his kids and like his kids. I was not going to then nor would now stop associating with a brother in Christ and a friend. Yet a friend of my friend once asked me to pray for him years ago because he was being considered as a candidate for church discipline for having been seen with this man who was supposed to be shunned ... even though the person who reported this to a pastor at Mars Hill was at the same social event! I began to put together that if I wanted to spend time with my friend and not get flak from Mars Hill leaders simply not renewing was a good way to do this. After all, if I wasn't a member how could I get flak for hanging out with people I'd been told by Mars Hill leadership to shun? There was no case against me.

And by letting my contract get cancelled out by elder fiat and not renewing I was convinced of another thing. After renewing my membership contract for years and then not renewing it after it was voided by elders I came to this conclusion, if the "covenant" was ended it was not by me. A covenant you have to renew every few years isn't a covenent unless we're talking short-term marriages in some place like Sweden. This means that if the covenant was nullified it was not by me but by the elders. I.e. in the plainest possible language I was not the covenant breaker, they were, and that gave me no incentive to renew what was really a contractual relationship in which I was obliged to give money to them and had no voting rights in the church and no practical appeal should a church disciplinary issue come up. I'd read the by-laws, I'd worked out the unlikelihood of any significant changes in the doctrinal statement. And I had seen how the culture of the church had decided to ostracize a fellow believer on grounds that I had not found adequately convincing.

I am not against church discipline, in case anyone might wonder that. There is a time and a place for confession of sin and for repentence. There are times and place for confession of sin that are not just individual but corporate.

Let me put it another way, when I didn't renew I didn't renew out of concern for the lack of accountability for what appeared to be arbitrary applications of church discipline. I was asked to shun two men I respected who did not seem to have done anything close to being as bad as a serial adulteress whom I was asked to NOT shun because she said she wasn't even a Christian and since the pastors agreed with her the whole membership thing and discipline didn't apply.

Why, then, was I asked to shun a man who was my neighbor and who had befriended my family when there was no clear explanation that what he did was even close to being as bad as what the adulteress did? Surely I was not the only person to point out that this presented a huge problem of consistent disciplinary precedent. When I made this point to elders I got zip. One elder trotted out the old saw "When dad and mom are having an argument the kids don't need to know what's going on." So when dad and mom live off the tithe checks given by the children they don't have to explain why dad decides to fire mom? But I blogged about this in the past.

What ended up happening during that time was I ended up in a place where friends who I saw spending time together every week were no longer speaking to each other. They'd speak to me but not to each other and this went on for years. When any of these two groups had any overlap in a social activity there'd be awkward silence (and in several ways that still happens). I was stressed out at work and stressed out because of family conflicts that Mars Hill people had made much worse rather than better and I was seeing my Mars Hill circle of friends circle wagons in what looked like a disaster.

I was going to use a compouned word starting with "cluster" but in deference to some PG language for this post I'm refraining. All my friends in and outside Mars Hill know by now that this is how I've fielded both sides and I stand by it. The 2007 controversies were a shameful fiasco that nobody in the church or out of it can entirely live down. At a practical level my entire social life was integrated into that church so seeing all that stuff happen was so bad it was sort of like watching family members going through a divorce. I began to believe the smart money bailed out before the firings happened. If you're reading this you know who you are already.

After I'd decided to not renew my membership I kept attending for several months because most of my best friends were there and a lot of them still are. Of course with a lot of them being married or being parents I hardly got to see them anyway. I even kept giving to the campus I attended for a time. But a friend of mine preached some sermons on Jonah in later 2008 and the sermons were convicting. They were convicting because of a simple question, is there something you sense God wants you to do that you don't want to do because it feels too risky or inconvenient or scary? I began to think it through and realized that, yeah, that was actually where I was at. It's one of those strange ironies for me that I believe God used my friend's sermons to convict me that it really was finally time to move on to a new church home.

Friends of mine have told me that my peaceful, amiable transition out of Mars Hill without bad blood and with mutual respect and affection was pretty much a miracle, particularly given what I actually shared on my way out. Well, if so, God is very good and I am fortunate. I have made some trenchent criticisms of Mars Hill but I have not done so with an eye to demonize them even if they have demonized others. They are fellow believers and I want the best for them.

To put it in old school Pentecostal/spiritual warfare terms, I love the people at Mars Hill who share life with me and I pray for them regularly. I do, however, hope that what might be called Mars Hill the principality will be broken. For as long as the top brass don't want to admit that what they're gunning for is becoming, in essence, a Calvinist Baptist complementarian denomination I will be comfortable saying they need to stop hiding from themselves. If by twenty years there are more than a dozen churches and tens of thousands of members with a goal to have an intergenerational impact what do these people think they're doing? "Not" making an institution?

But though I was blessed to leave on the best possible terms and have remained friends with my Mars Hill friends and love spending time with them when I can; I have been disappointed to hear that a lot of people had much worse experiences. Sometimes I have wondered if the new blood may be bad blood and bring bad blood with it. I'm not sure, but I did begin to hear about redemption groups and about how if there was any sin in your life it was a "worship problem" and how the idea was that everything comes down to idolatry. If you worshipped yourself into a mess you were going to worship yourself out of it.

Well, the confessions of the Driscolls in Real Marriage were sobering and in some ways they have some bearing on a controversy about church discipline and accountability. This will take some time so bear with me if you're even still reading this. It turns out all this time Driscoll was extolling wifely stripteases and holy blow jobs he was unhappy with his wife, not realizing that she felt uncomfortable about sex due to a history of sexual abuse and (probably) because of her husband's way of approaching sex. Now I have read excerpts in which Mark Driscoll said that in the end the thing that cured his moodiness was frankly more frequent sex and that's what he needed. Do I need a larger context for that? Is there really a larger context for understanding the flat declaration that more orgasms for Mark Driscoll equaled a stabilized mood?

If a guy who is part of a redemption group, accountability group, or community group at Mars Hill sat down one night and said to the people in his group, "You know, I've got these struggles with moods and the only thing that makes them go away is having sex more often." how do you think guys in that group might react to this man? Might the man be told sex was his idol; that he was using sex as a drug to stabilize his moods; and that he needed to repent of his sin of making sex a god and using his wife to make himself feel better? The people I've met at Mars Hill over the years would seem to be the sort to actually say that. He would probably be told that using orgasms as a kind of mood-stabilizing drug suggests a problem, wouldn't he?

But if Mark Driscoll states plainly in Real Marriage that the only cure for his moodiness was more frequent sex this goes with no remark other than to defend him?

It gives a curious spin to this ...

http://pastormark.tv/2012/01/04/9-reasons-real-marriage-is-for-singles

Nine reasons Real Marriage is for singles, huh? The Driscolls say to not copy them. Heh, that probably goes double for singles, right? If an unmarried person struggles with depression or moodiness then Mark Driscoll's self-diagnosis that the moodiness goes away with more orgasms might not be the best practical methodology for single people who aren't married! There are a few Christians I've met where if they heard someone say they need orgasms to stabilize their mood that this sounds like the symptom of a straight up sex addict. No ifs, ands or buts.

Now what if Driscoll ends up in a situation comparable to what Mars Hill pastor Bill Clem went through, with a wife who was slowly dying of cancer? The chemo treatment was severe, so severe sex was not an option for a long, long time (as in she eventually died and sex wasn't on the table). Clem gave a sermon years ago in which he said guys who think self-control and self-denial about sex are only for single people will be in for a huge shock if they get married (and stay married). I had a chance to work with Bill a little in a ministry and, honestly, I like the guy. I appreciated his openness and his humility. If Mark Driscoll needs more frequent sex to stabilize his moods God help the Driscoll clan if Grace ends up with an illness that makes sex impossible because at that point Mark Driscoll could become impossible.

For people who never got any counseling at a church like Mars Hill you may not be aware that there are things you may be asked to sign called waivers. The things that get waived are stuff like:

1. That this is actually professional medical, psychological or legal advice
2. That this is actually confidential (it's not, they reserve the right to inform law enforcement if what you share turns out to be a matter of breaking a law)

What this means, in essence, is that if you're a regularly giving church member you're obliged to give financial or warrant a talking to but you have no voting rights as a member about things like the appointment of deacons or other matters of church polity at a local level. You have also been given a situation in which to get a counseling session with a pastor you will likely be asked to sign waivers that indemnify them against legal liability for whatever advice they may give you. They are not required to certify competence in mental health, medical knowledge, or the law and in a non-denominational setting there is not even any need for academic credentialing in theology or the study of biblical literature.

You have basically tithed for what is considered binding in terms of spiritual discipline within the church but that at a purely legal level might as well be entertainment. Should it happen that a pastor decides what you have shared should become public knowledge throughout the church, well, we've just been notified of that, haven't we? If you were asked to confess to some sin that you regularly struggle with as a part of the membership application process you may come to the conclusion, as a friend of mine did, that what this amounts to is leadership having ammunition for a database so that if at some point you dissent from leadership there's something to hold over your head. If the tables are turned and you were to ask the people in authority over you if they have any recurring sins would you get an answer?

And if after all this you go to a pastor for counsel in a church setting like what I saw at Mars Hill what you may get is someone who might be listed as a "biblical living" pastor so there's no misunderstanding about competency. As Steve Hays put it over at Triablogue years ago the tricky thing about "biblical counseling" is that it will only be as good as the exegesis brought to a situation by the nouthetic counselor. It is not always clear that those nouthetic counselors are competent exegetes. Some of them are but in the case of a church like Mars Hill what you could get is someone who was appointed to be a "biblical living" pastor whose formal education may have stopped at high school, or an undergraduate degree in business, and who pleads the Holy Spirit and maybe the approval of Mark Driscoll. I think a thinking man or woman will be forgiven by both God and men for deciding those qualifications just aren't good enough.

When I left Mars Hill one of the very sincere cautions I passed on was that I was concerned about both the competence and good will of "pastoral counseling" as it had been practiced at Mars Hill. It wasn't all terrible counsel. In fact some of the best personal counsel I've gotten in my life were from Mars Hill pastors. But I have to add this huge, huge caveat, the two pastors who gave me the best advice gave me that advice having known my family for years and having known me fairly well over the years. In other words they "led" out of love for me that was personal as well as pastoral and for the people in my life they knew I was having trouble relating to at the time. And they were not guys who were officially listed as "counseling" or "biblical living" pastors. They frankly didn't need to be. Years of that thing called actual fellowship gave them the tools and mutual love gave them a basis from which to give actually wise counsel. As an axiom goes many people who pay for therapy wouldn't have to if they had good friends.

But it seems that for a lot of people they weren't even close to this fortunate. They didn't get counsel from pastors who actually gave a crap about them. They didn't get counsel from pastors with any competency in mental health or biblical literature that was demonstrated beyond fitting the preferences of a leadership panel. Particularly in the wake of the 2007 firings the default mode a lot of campus pastors took was to assume that if anyone had any trust issues with elders of any kind that was a sin issue that sprung from pride. I have written enough about my concerns about the truncated hamartiology I saw at Mars Hill I won't bore you with the details. Search the blog for a term as arcane as hamartiology or distaff spellings and you'll find that.

Now the question Jason Blair asked over at the Boar's Head Tavern was this, "Are we seeing pride going before destruction?" In light of all the "I stand by what I said" and "I'm a Bible teacher" Driscoll has been doing the answer that question could be "yes". How bad will that fall be? It depends on how unwilling some people at Mars Hill are to concede that maybe how they've handled things at almost any critical juncturewas bad. Not just concede that how they handled things was bad but to make restitution. Make restitution would mean publicly admitting to error and having hurt people. It would mean establishing a basis for internal and external accountability.

It might mean doing something besides spinning the failure of a capital campaign as far back as 2005 into a claim about good stewardship when the situation was they hadn't adequately researched zoning requirements before purchasing what was supposed to be Ballard campus #2, that one Driscoll mentions in Reformission Rev. It's very easy to go easy on folks who admit to mistakes but if you don't admit a 1.5 million purchase was not the shrewdest move, well, it becomes tougher to show some leniency, especially if along the way you start doling out "discipline contracts".

For every Driscoll drone who talks about Mahaney or Piper mentoring Mark Driscoll please stop taking that idea seriously. Mahaney's on the other side of the country and last I heard isn't even necessarily attending his own church. People say Driscoll is "teachable" because he's got the kinds of pastors whose names sound cool when you name-drop them to show some enthusiasm for him. This is not the same as actually being mentored. A mere stamp of approval isn't enough, a mere few words about not adequately expressing Christ's love for the church only gets him to change his tone for about three sermons. When someone outside Mars Hill tries to point out where Driscoll is going off the rails we see the way things went with John MacArthur. I have made my lack of agreement with MacArthur on all sorts of things plain but I respect that he said something. But the trouble is that when serious criticism of Driscoll as a biblical scholar and exegete comes from a conservative like John MacArthur or liberals like Soott Bailey or Robert Cargill the Driscoll fan base circles the wagons and sheer charismatic authority is cited.

By now it is impossible for Driscoll's fanbase to say that critics are just liberals in favor of a hippie queer Jesus or fundamentalists who are upset that Jesus told knock knock jokes to hookers. No, what both liberals and conservatives have started articulating is that Mark Driscoll puts himself and his interpretation of certain texts above scripture while claiming to "just preach what's in the Bible". When confronted about this he just doubles down and says "I'm a Bible teacher and if you disagree with me I'd be glad to discuss this with you."

Want to schedule an appointment with Robert Cargill or John MacArthur, Mark? It seems that by MacArthur's account of things Driscoll has not been that eager to have that discussion. To go by what Driscoll told Thor Tolo years ago if any pastoral folks are uptight about his take on Song of Songs that's because they're looking at porn. I doubt MacArthur would appreciate being told that if he's objecting to Driscoll's handling of Song of Songs it must be because he's looking at porn. Team Pyro has already spent some time suggesting that if anyone's seeing porn it's Driscoll in his visions.

IF there's a crash it could be a disastrous crash but it may not be the worst thing that could happen. The worst thing could be no crash for years and years. King Saul had success at every turn for quite a few years and then the downward spiral into paranoia, madness, and cruelty began all while people still referred to him as the annointed, God's chosen leader for the time. Just because God tells you to specifically do something doesn't prove in itself you know Him. Even Judas was on the same team as Jesus, to pick a New Testament example. We cannot be certain that success proves Driscoll's legit anymore than it proves Benny Hinn or Todd Bentley or Paula White or T. D. Jakes or Rick Warren or John MacArthur is automatically legit.

While gays in Seattle have waited for Mark to be caught at a gay bar and others assume a sex scandal is in the works I would cautiously propose that the real scandal has already been slowly taking shape, the lack of competence and good will displayed by the counseling pastoral arm of the denomination. I don't say that lightly and I don't speak as someone who had no experience. I have felt for years that if there were a disaster brewing at Mars Hill it would be about exactly this topic, church discipline and how the top down approach often lacks mercy and can seem arbitrary.

That someone has finally come forward about church disciplinary procedures that seem abusing and controlling does not surprise me. Honestly, right now that I'm blogging about it I'm surprised it took this long. I would have thought something would have shown up earlier. I would have thought anyone who'd simply read some of the waivers they'd have to sign to even get counseling from Mars Hill might have started putting together that what it amounts to is a tithe-based form of entertainment without an assurance the pastor who counsels you is necessarily up to the task.

You may find yourself in a position where a counseling pastor assumes the worst about you and your associates; gives advice that fractures relationship; and then when asked to simply explain the basis for his counsel stonewalls you. You might discover that some vital piece of information that could have ameliorated a longstanding conflict was not brought to your attention because some pastors decided you just didn't need to know something that made all the difference in the world toward a reconciled relationship because it happened to come from some people who decided to leave the church. If they left the church that meant they were only after control.

Then you might have to decide if you had to take the risk of going against that counsel and finding someone else to step in and help seek some reconciliation after a pastor or two have decided that's not on the table. And if you do that, God willing, you'll find some of those folks have a change of heart and are sorry about the earlier advice and glad that reconciliation happened. If you haven't figured out that I wasn't speaking hypothetically I might as well say I was not speaking hypothetically in this paragraph and the one before it.

So, no, I'm not the least bit surprised that someone finally felt a need to go public about Mars Hill church discipline or pastoral counseling. I got some terrible as well as terrific counsel from Mars Hill pastors in my time there. In consideration of the love I have for my pastoral friends who gave the wonderful counsel in the past I did not wish to blog much of the terrible counsel. And even in one case where some counsel I got wasn't so good that got patched up very nicely! I, too, was an asshole so if someone gives me well-meant advice that doesn't work out, that's still on me and finally not them. Love covers a multitude of sins, a godly man can overlook an offense. If someone gets something grievously wrong but I know I love them and they love me I can roll with that. If there is a lack of clear competency good will sure helps.

But in other cases there were situations in which there was neither a demonstration of competency nor good will and that did make things messy for me. Naming names is not important, sharing that this news that is shocking to other people is not to me is what I've been sharing. I don't know if I should have shared this earlier but I feel like I should share this now. I don't want Mars Hill to head for a disastrous fall but if disaster is unavoidable I would rather one or two guys have to eat the whole flock of crows than for the whole people to be forced to eat crow because a man or two persists in unentreatibility.

I do really love the people at Mars Hill and still pray for them but that doesn't mean the institution can always outrun the full consequences of ill advised policies and decisions. I don't know what the future holds, I've been meditating on Ecclesiastes enough to know that. When times are good be happy and when times are bad know that God has made one as well as the other so that no one can find out what the future may be. If Mars Hill is getting flack for its disciplinary sternness I'm sorry to see this both for those harmed and for those who perpetuate the harm. I can't speculate about the future.

I can, however, in good faith and in all honesty say this, that when I finally felt I needed to leave Mars Hill back in 2008 I warned at least some of them about this very issue that's become a talking point now. I warned that if there wasn't some circumspection and introspection about the basis and practice of church discipline, going right down to one's practical theology of sin, that a disaster was on the horizon. Whether or not anyone considered my advice is now completely moot.

D. G. Hart offers a suggestion on why neo-Calvinists make terrible CCM

2012-01-24T20:34:00.000-08:00

http://oldlife.org/2012/01/contemporary-cosmic-christology-and-contemporary-christian-music/

... For neo-Calvinists distinctions between creational and redemptive spheres when considering aesthetics is a form of dualism and a sign of infidelity because it denies Christ’s lordship over all things.

The frustrating aspect of those who are so eager to blur distinctions between the religious and the secular, between the eternal and the temporal, is that they are long on inspiration and short on qualification. What I mean is that someone could plausibly read Kuyper on the effort to integrate the church and all other walks of life as an endorsement of contemporary Christian music.

If I may provide a musician's perspective on this perhaps the way to illustrate this point is to put things this way: in "classical" church music and worship there is no prohibition against learning new styles, assimilating them into a liturgical setting where they are useful, and measuring the appeal of the style over against its practicality in a liturgical setting. If no one ever did this in any churches we would not have gained the Bach cantatas, Luther's hymns, anthems by Tallis, and so on.

There was not necessarily in any of those epochs a need to go out and deliberately court the contemporary because each epoch of Church music was contemporary in its own way in the Western Church. There were debates about whether Bach's Matthew Passion was acceptable since it borrowed heavily from the forms and idioms of opera but the piece still got performed and it's still a masterpiece of sacred choral literature in the Western tradition. At one point, however, it was "new" and contemporary. Other musicians and musicologists have already spent time explaining how the "high" and "low" distinction we have seen in popular and concert music was not as great in the 19th century or earlier periods as it has become since then; the 20th century saw an almost complete break between academic and popular styles. About that I will have plenty to write later.

What I'm trying to get across is that the whole idea of even bothering to keep up with popular styles at all is a uniquely 20th century business cycle procedure rather than one in which culture necessarily springs forth in an organic way. Step back and look at popular music not at the surface level of production values or compression or audio engineering; look at it beyond the perspective of regional popularity and instead look at it in terms of the nexus of musical form and text setting and you'll begin to discover that there have been no significant innovations in popular music at all in the last sixty years.

A lot of the core ideas for forms and setting approaches emerged within folk music and the Tin Pan Alley tradition. And while in the minds of partisans who conflate aesthetic and cultural norms rock music is not playing for the Man, it is, probably more so than even chamber music would be these days if you consider the millions or billions at stake. As Frank Zappa put it, if you were a rock musician and you sold 20,000 copies of an album they'd sniff at you and consider you a failure whereas if you sold 20,000 copies of classical music you'd be a hero. Marketers have a strong need to sell different styles as different based on demographic appeals but musicologists have been noticing that the barriers between, say, white and black popular music have been more fluid than marketers have at times been interested in dealing with. In a similar way, a composer like Haydn could appeal to a broader audience in his life than he likely will now. He did play in street ensembles after all.

But in contemporary Christian music there may not often be a whole lot of bringing the past into the present and adapting the present options back into what is musically useful. We may see, instead, in the neo-Calvinist scene particularly, a case where a bunch of ambitious guys want to be a "Christian" version of Radiohead or whatever band is current. Musicians in churches of this sort are urged to find out what is going on in contemporary music and name-dropping is important to establish street cred. That was what I noticed at a church I used to be part of. In the church I'm part of now the question is thankfully more prosaic and important, "Can you play this?" Yes, yes I can and I'd be happy to. The need to know new bands isn't important if you're playing the old standards, even if you're playing them in new ways. I look forward to the possibility of playing some more, actually, but first I'll need to get my glasses fixed up.

Scott is in fine form over at Scotteriology with "God Loves Australia"

2012-01-24T19:53:00.000-08:00

http://scotteriology.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/god-loves-australia/#comments

Australia is in no rush to let Todd Bentley bring his "fresh fire" into the country. They don't all come from the US of A now, do they?

well parts 1 through 3 of "The Wounds of Discovery" are done

2012-01-24T18:05:00.000-08:00

After months of delays due to holidays and eye surgery the next installment of Batman: the Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire over at Mockingbird should be going up. At least parts 1 through 3. "The Wounds of Discovery" should start going up some time this month.

Every time I think the next part in this project writing about Batman: the animated series should be easier than the last I keep being wrong! I don't want to spoil things in advance but I've been excited to have even parts 1 through 3 done. Parts 4 and 5 (with a possible 6, depending on how 5 turns out) are still in the works. If you read the introduction you may remember I opened with a passage from Ecclesiastes that says, "Better what the eye sees than the wandering of desire." Well, dear readers, you can anticipate a few more passages from Ecclesiastes and maybe a proverb or two to show up for Part 4.

I know for some people who don't look at cartoons as a serious art forum considering the human condition it won't make sense to tie passages of Hebrew wisdom literature to a superhero cartoon. Well, so it goes, I can't help that. But I hope that if you read my essay on a certain Batman villain you'll appreciate why I open with the proverb that says, "Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him" and if you know your Batman lore you will probably have figured out which Batman villain best fits that description! I'm looking forward to "The Wounds of Discovery" getting done and to the new parts going up on Mockingbird. M-bird is temporarily down, though, so it may take a little time for the essays to go up. Meanwhile I can assure you that at long last I've got some more writing done.

It's only fitting that this year, the 20th anniversary year of the show, I'm able to write about what makes the show great. It truly is a classic show that changed childrens' entertainment in ways I hope to show in future essays. If it seems staid and slow-moving now I hope that what I wrote in Cartoon Nostalgia, Cartoon Revolutions laid a foundation from the perspective of a child of the 1980s on how revolutionary Paul Dini and Bruce Timm's creation was in the land of kids' shows. In fact when I get to writing about Two-Face I'll have a chance to explain that even more. But for now, tune in this month for "The Wounds of Discovery" over at Mockingbird.

End of advertisement for the day. :)

legacy is always mixed

2012-01-23T19:13:00.000-08:00

This is a simple, essential observation shared over at Phoenix Preacher since you know who passed recently (and if you don't know who don't sweat it). What this means in that more famous case is that a late-in-his-life revelation reveals a legacy to be tained in a terrible way. Does this mean the overall legacy is only evil? Well ... consider what your own legacy is, or in a more blunt way, if you have one. How do you know? As I have written a few times at this blog God could by some providence kill all your children, destroy your belongings, and leave you with a spouse who sincerely believes the kindest thting to tell you is to "bless" God and accept death. And that's before your friends dogpile you and say it had to have been your sinful ways that caused all the trouble. The recently deceased was not Job so far as I know but if we take seriously the ways in which we err it would be tough to say he was Stalin, too.

We don't even know what our legacies will truly be in the end. Ecclesiastes warns that our legacy in the end is to be forgotten, all our greatest feats, however modest they might be, swallowed up by the passing of time. If that is how it is what is a legacy? Well, a lot of people choose to have a very literally living legacy in the form of children. Then again that's always a mixed legacy, isn't it? Children grow up and then don't always become exactly the person you hoped they'd become. They might change religions (to no religion, for instance).

Or they may not change religions in any official sense but they may change political parties or change in some way that you wouldn't have anticipated or approved of. Maybe a child comes out of the closet in the commonly understood sense. Maybe the kid becomes a Calvinist or the wrong kind of Republican, the kind that concedes that sometimes Democrats are actually not evil incarnate even if you don't agree with them. Sometimes your kid bewilders you by getting into stuff you don't get.

Some kids bewildered parents by getting into rock and roll they didn't like. I put off my parents a bit by getting into jazz and of an old sort they didn't quite appreciate. One of the things I recall about my maternal grandmother from my 20s was that I started getting into the music of Duke Ellington. My parents didn't get the fascination and found it odd. My grandmother smiled when she heard I was getting into Duke's work. She said, "You're starting to like the music I liked to listen to when I was your age." I made a point of trying to relate to people older than me and get some idea where they were coming from. I like to think that liking the music my grandma liked was in its way more subversive and non-conformist than other people in my generation who for reasons I still don't understand, liked Nirvana. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is pretty much Boston's "More Than a Feeling" in a minor key.

Even within a single family a legacy will be perceived differently from one person to another. Were it not for my maternal grandmother I simply would not have become a guitarist. I have occasionally pondered whether in many ways I have taken after my grandmother more than my mother on a few things. It's hard to know how to explain that in a blog entry that I'm improvising. Certainily I am the cumulative result of the parenting methods of my parents and yet during my teen years I got used to extended family scenarios and the most long-standing such scenario was living in a house with my siblings, my mom and stepdad, and grandma.

While it seems the majority of family do not necessarily look back on that period as a very positive one it has been one of the favorite periods of my life. It had it's stresses and troubles but I liked my grandmother. I loved my grandmother would be more accurate, if conventional. She died almost a decade ago and there are times when I miss her, times when I consider she had an ability to get a whole bunch of us who descended from her to have an easier time hanging out with each other. One relative of mine confided to me that with grandma dead it was going to be that much harder to get through some family events because, honestly, grandma was the person in the family he liked most. It's not that I don't love my family members but I could sorta understand how grandma played a vital role in keeping some people in the family on more than the most perfunctory speaking terms.

Years ago when I got one of those patriotic spams about the Greatest Generation it dawned on me that if I had the option of emulating a generation it wouldn't be the Baby Boomers if I could help it. If I were to choose to be like my parents' generation or my grandparents' generation I realized I wanted to be more like my grandparents' generation if that were possible. Not just the bit about fighting the Nazis, either, living with the reality that a bunch of people made stupid fiscal and other policy decisions that all came home to roost. I guess put that way, if the economy tanks as badly as some people fear it may then looking to a generation that weathered the Depression seems smarter than looking to the generation that dropped acid, protested Vietnam, and then became yuppies in the Reagan years. While the Baby Boomer generation would like to accept credit for "changing the world" which generation still had a lot of people in political and social and economic power guiding policy? Hmm ... . Legacies, as the axiom goes, are mixed.

Drew G. I. Hart remarked in the wake of the Rob Bell fracas that the battle between the Piper fanboys and the Bell fanboys was essentially about who would get the 20-35 white boys who will go on to become tomorrow's establishment. I think this was an accurate assessment. I realize it may be terribly cynical to say that but that's what I think, I think D. G. I. Hart is right about that. I also think D.G. Hart is right to point out that in the post Cold War America we have the Reagan coalition has long since fallen apart. Thus we get various Republican sympathizers debating whether or not Ron Paul makes sense of Gringrich makes sense and all that stuff.

But there's something else D. G. I. Hart wrote that intrigued me. He mentioned that despite the rhetoric of emergent generation church leaders there aren't even as many token blacks and other non-white theologians around as from Billy Graham's generation. That's a fair point to raise. In fact it might be a point that Keller made reference to about John Stott's passing. If the Stotts and Grahams did more than the Bells or Driscolls to actually reach out to non-white theologians and thinkers then the "new" generation of evangelicals congratulating themselves on getting things right may be getting some things right at the expense of other things. Neo-Calvinists like to think they're a formidable movement but they are still not growing as fast as Pentecostals, are they?

To make a merely polemical point for folks to think about, what if the older evangelicals had their problems but in their way did not pick the path of least resistence? For instance, maybe Francis Schaeffer was really odd and weird. Yet he seems to have had an influence that goes beyond even just Frank Schaeffer marketing himself as I'm-not-my-dad during election run-ups. Schaeffer's legacy has not been all good but it has not necessarily been all bad and yet the temptation for partisans is to go one way or the other. Just look at his son Frank, who has at various points in the last forty years been a partisan trying to benefit from alternately praising and damning his father's interest in political concerns after shoving him into a sphere he was reluctant to enter.

But what is clear now, decades after Francis Schaeffer's passing, is that he has had an influence. In many cases that influence can be observed in obsessive talk about a "Christian worldview". I've grown tired of that even though I was a huge fan of such talk in my teens and earlier twenties. I left that behind not because I have found it to be of no value but because it is in the end nothing more than a starting point. Unfortunately many Christians use that starting point not as a foundation for actually going out and doing something so much as critique of what others do. It is the treacherous path of the fuzzy line between "engaging culture" and consumerism; between "engaging culture" and a kind of criticism that is either a mercenary attempt to evangelize (which, I suppose, will have its place since Paul did it, too) or a blanket dismissal of something that may shine a light on what is going on with people.

A lot of people in their twenties may not fully realize how much they're copying people in their 40s just as people in their forties may not realize how much they are copying people in their 60s. If we only think of legacy as linear or reactionary or cotninuationist we miss out. There's no reason I can't look to things my grandparents' generation said or did and favor that over things my parents' geenration did. But at this point I'm just rambling and running out of steam.

a curious vow ...

2012-01-23T16:55:00.000-08:00

http://joyinthisjourney.com/2012/01/mark-driscoll-converts-men-to-arminius/
Sometimes an idea can have the compelling or admirable motivation on its face. yet still end up with the stupidest result, a result that is paradoxically born out of the motivation. The stupidity of the result casts a curious backward light on the exact nature of the motivation that spawned the problematic thing. Thus we get to this.
http://pastormark.tv/2012/01/16/men-will-you-vow-to-lead

"... and my grandchildren will worship the same god as me because my children will worship the same god as me."

And here I thought Mark Driscoll actually read Ecclesiastes 5.

Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong.
   Do not be quick with your mouth,
   do not be hasty in your heart
   to utter anything before God.
   God is in heaven
   and you are on earth,
   so let your words be few.
   A dream comes when there are many cares,
   and many words mark the speech of a fool.

When you make a vow to God, do not delay to fulfill it. He has no pleasure in fools; fulfill your vow. It is better not to make a vow than to make one and not fulfill it. Do not let your mouth lead you into sin. And do not protest to the temple messenger, “My vow was a mistake.” Why should God be angry at what you say and destroy the work of your hands? Much dreaming and many words are meaningless. Therefore fear God.

Notice something there? Don't delay in fulfilling your vow. How and when will you know your grandchildren worship the same God as you? How do you know you'll have grandchildren? Not even paedobaptists are that confident! If you make a vow that cannot be fulfilled unless your grandchildren worship the same God as you does that sound like a smart vow to make when as yet you don't even have grandchildren? Does it sound like a vow about which you can say you did not delay to fulfill it?

Now the Scriptures do say to teach your children and your descendents and all that. But there's no guarantees. You can do your best and your son or daughter could end up an atheist. You can do your best and you could have a grandchild who renounces the faith. You might have a grandchild renounce the faith precisely because of the kind of Christian you are. You can't control for these things.

In the early days of Mars Hill I read some people seriously convincing themselves that Samson's parents dropped the ball and THAT was the reason Samson was a stupid, faithless horndog so much of the time. Really? Didn't we get told in the book of Judges the husband wanted to hear what the man told his wife and he got told, "Listen to what I told your wife?" If anything Samson's parents were precisely as dutiful and attentive to the will of the Lord as Samson was not. Yet at least one or two guys I came across in the early days at Mars Hill had put together some silly magic formula that said Samson was raised badly. That was not his problem.

By contrast, considering the miserable end of Saul the Benjaminite, the first king of Israel, and given how he disregarded the Lord you might think he'd raise terrible kids who didn't have regard for the Lord or were bad people. Yet Jonathan turned out pretty well and did not display his father's lesser traits.

In the last few weeks I ended up having some back and forth and some misunderstanding with Matthew over at City of God. It happens and some of it came from points I think could have been clearer on Matthew's and some of it has to do with my realizing I have a few visual handicapts. Fortunately things got talked through.

I'm glad the discussion happened because along the way the topic was about what kinds of promises a man leading a family can reasonably be expected to keep. Matthew brought up a series of passages that, it turns out, ever so conveniently dovetail with things I've been reading in the last week or so. So, here's another passage about people taking stupid oaths, this time from Leviticus 5.

... if anyone thoughtlessly takes an oath to do anything, whether good or evil (in any matter one might carelessly swear about) even though they are unaware of it, but then they learn of it and realize their guilt— when anyone becomes aware that they are guilty in any of these matters, they must confess in what way they have sinned. As a penalty for the sin they have committed, they must bring to the LORD a female lamb or goat from the flock as a sin offering; and the priest shall make atonement for them for their sin.

There are some oaths that are so impossible to fulfill there's no value in making them.

The my-me-my-me-my-me-my-me-my-me-my-me juggernaut in this vow gets tedious. Not only is this relentless use of the passive voice something that doesn't seem to fit a manly man, it is doubly passive. At two different levels this is foolish. The first is that the passive voice is passive, which is weak writing, but it is what the passive voice points to that is more profound and terrible.

But the second is worse in that each subject in the vow is the passive recipient of what the oath-taker determines will happen. The passive voice indicates that the church will be served by this oath-taker. How? Who gets to decide that? The wife will be loved, served, and prayed over. Who determines that? How does a person know the goal has been reached? The wife will speak up (unless she's supposed to be a submissive and respectful type, depending on how the husband may choose to define that in some circles (sarcasm warning there). There is at least some wiggle room for negotiation here.

But as for the child and grandchild who "will" worship the same God. Why? Because the oath-taker says so. Notice, however, that in no circumstance can the oath-taker establish that his (and it's always going to be a "he" here folks) will love and serve in such a way that it will necessarily be construed as such by the recipient of the action. This vow sounds wonderful and inspiring to people who will then participate in a group hug or whatever, it sounds pretty to someone who says the words but we're all fallible and "true to you" frequently ends up being "true to you as I understand truth."

As Proverbs puts it the heart knows its own sorrow and no other shares its grief. The heart is also deceitful above all things and beyond knowing. This means you don't know how your self-assessed obedience and faithfulness to God will be perceived either by those you vow to serve or by God. It's fine to vow in the active voice to love and serve your wife. The passive voice is all wrong at every level. You don't know whether the things you say or do that you are most proud of or anxious about are things that actually don't matter so much to your spouse.

When I read my blogging friend Wendy's recent post about overcoming the burden of a silly and impossible wifely requirement she'd put on herself she said that her husband had to explain to her "Honey, I don't NEED that!" She found that what she was worrying she had failed to do was not even something her husband was worried about. Some oath-taking man who resolves to love and serve his wife will not necessarily love and serve her in a way that will be perceived or received as being loved and served.

Let's rewrite the whole fiasco:

I will serve my church
I will love and serve my wife and family
I will instruct my family in the ways of the Lord
I will seek to live by Word of God and model the love of Christ
And pray that by God's mercies they may testify to His greatness to future generations
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be forever.

See? You can make a promise like this and not even necessarily make it a vow but a discipline of the heart. That's finally in a form that I could consider. There's nothing about the form of the original I can condone because the passive voice takes on theological implications all by itself that are terrible even if I pretended the last line about grandchildren wasn't in there.

The passive voice for every construction means little more than that, having satisfied yourself that you have kept your vow, you have kept it when it is actually your wife, your child, your church that have some say in the matter. To make a vow in the passive voice sense laid out a la the Real Marriage poster is to make a vow that is impossible to keep. No one in their right mind should even make it. You can vow to instruct your family in the ways of the Lord but you cannot, I repeat, cannot control the outcome.

If you've made some insipid passive-voiced self-congratulatory vow like the one referred to above with it's "My X will be Y by me" then repent. At least reformulate the vow in the active voice with the understanding that your best is not necessarily ever what's going to lead your children to Christ. Your children may become Christians despite your flaws and they may reject Christ precisely because of your most concerted efforts to win them to Christ.

And here's the thing, Samson's parents were faithful. They did as the Lord's man instructed them. They prayed and were obedient and Samson was still a seflish and violent thug. David was a man after God's own heart and consider how Amnon turned out? What about Absalom? What about Adonijah? Even Solomon, the better of the lot, how did he turn out? David's love and regard for the Lord did not prevent Absalom being killed by Joab, did it? If we want to insist that David dropped the ball as a parent let's consider that the reality is that despite doing your best you can still fail. Parenting, as with any enterprise in life, will go better with wisdom but comes with no guarantees and with no refunds. Did Adonijah or Solomon turn out okay? How did Tamar's life end after she'd been raped by one of her siblings?

When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other. Therefore, a man cannot discover anything about his future. This must inform our understanding of what kinds of vows we should and should not make. A vow to your husband or wife is understandable. A vow about a child? Not so much. A vow about a grandchild? Dude, wait until you HAVE grandchildren before you consider vows that involve them. Nobody knows the future, especially when they are confidenta bout it. I thought I had a lifetime job lined up at a respectable non-profit and here I am in month 27 of the job hunt. I thought I had a sure thing. I was wrong and now I'm here blogging about it.

When Jesus said to make no vows He was saying to not break your word and to be truthful. Having to swear an oath comes from the evil one if you're so inclined to not keep your word you have to vow something. Let your "yes" be yes and your "no" be no. In other words, you don't have to make some vow that says that people WILL passively be the recipients of whatever awesome things you plan to do and be; when asked if you will love and serve people and if you promise to do these things you could use those two words that somehow pop up in marriage ceremonies, "I do." Then you go do those things, however hard or easy they may be.

I just don't get how a guy can publish a vow like this vow having ripped on William Young over The Shack. A vow that says a guy's grandchildren will worship the same God is just off the reservation. I would advise anyone wanting to make such a vow to rethink the entire wording of the thing and think through why he would take such a vow. Peer pressure and conformity are not good reasons. Guilt over how you have treated your wife or children are not necessarily good reasons. King Saul was great at confession yet terrible at repentence. Saul, for that matter, made a stupid vow that would have called for the death os his son Jonathan.

There is a form of piety that is terrible in its deception and I would ask any married guys to think twice and thrice about taking any kind of vow just because some megachurch pastor (who says he gets visions of people being molested in real time, and belittles entire nations of believers as cowardly) would encourage you to buy his book to improve your marriage and urge you to make a vow. The vow may be made with the best intentions as best you understand yours but the heart is still deceitful above all things.

If you're married, you know what? You made that vow already and now you just need to seek the Lord and work at keeping it. The simplest reason I would discourage anyone from taking some new vow is that this new vow you might be thinking of, it's just a slipshod reworking of the natural implications of the wedding vow you took when you married. Now if you feel guilty that you haven't kept your vow as you should it's good  to feel remorse and regret for that. Don't, however, make some new vow out of that guilt, especially not a vow that, as worded on some poster, is impossible to keep. Pray the Lord can help you keep the vow you already made and get help from as many fellow believers as may be available. If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions some of the signposts are pious vows made along the way. Don't be hasty to utter anything before God.

speaking of Atanas Ourkouzounov ...

2012-01-23T12:53:00.001-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/user/ourkouzounov

Here you go. Knock yourself out. There's some fun stuff on this channel.

Here's an ensemble I'd like to plug for

2012-01-23T12:49:00.000-08:00

http://www.arpeggioneduo.com/Arpeggione_duo/Welcome.html

I own the CD Falls Flyer by the Kachian/Klemp Duo. Though the duo no longer exists Christ Kachian is busy with Arpeggione Duo, a cello and guitar duo that has been busy for a while and has three CDs. I highly commend Falls Flyer and hope to pick up the Arpeggione Duo recordings when, erm, I have money for that! Along the way I ended up writing a sonata for cello and guitar for them. There is a lot of wonderful music for cello and guitar around, particularly since the dawn of the 20th century, but there can always be more advocacy for this music. So I want to do my part, such as it is, and urge you to go check out this duo's webpage and listen to some of their music. Sonata of the Wanderings by Jan Friedlin is a fine, ambitious piece, just to mention one specifically.

For their 2011-2012 concert tour they're tackling Atanas Ourkouzounov's Tanzologia, which very literally rocks! It's a wonderful duet and I would urge you to hear it however you can. Since Atanas' recording on KLE with the Ourkouzounov Ensemble is out of print and you probably can't dig it up anywhere the Arpeggione Duo taking this golden little piece on the road is exciting. I don't know of another guitarist-composer out there doing more for the cause of chamber music by writing it then Atanas Ourkouzounov. If there are other more prolific composers of chamber music who happen to be guitarists I don't know of them right now and, in any event, Atanas is still my favorite. It's my blog, I get to have my biases, eh?

Orthocuban: did the church fathers address slavery?

2012-01-23T11:52:00.000-08:00

http://www.orthocuban.com/2012/01/did-the-church-fathers-address-the-issue-of-slavery/#respond
http://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2012/01/church-fathers-and-slavery.html?

Super short version, post-Constantinian Church Fathers did start speaking against slavery pretty quickly either to condemn it outright or say that though it was a social evil it was one that had to be tolerated though not approved of. Gregory the Theologian, bishop of Nazianzus, spoke against slavery in the 4th century CE. Orthoduck briefly notes that for those who think Jesus and the Church have against them that they did not condemn slavery just haven't read enough patristics yet. In a post Constantinian setting where the Church Fathers didn't have to wonder if they were going to get reamed for speaking up against the institution Church Fathers started condemning owning people as property. Perhaps some people didn't notice the part where "kidnappers" or "slaver traders" were condemned in the NT documents?

Anyway, this can be considered the monthly semi-scheduled link to Orthocuban now that I'm thinking of it. :)

Is Elephant Room 2 a stunt waiting to happen? is this possibly a rhetorical question?

2012-01-23T09:17:00.000-08:00

Driscoll said we should reserve final judgment until, well, until he gets to moderate some kind of discussion with Jakes about whether Jakes is still a modalist. Reserve final judgment? Well, if we want to play the pious game only God gets to decide that, right, so that's what would have been good to point out.

Now I'm going to admit to being cynical here. Driscoll is simply not the only person to have ever heard that "maybe" Jakes has a modalistic view of the Trinity. It's not as though the Christian Research Institute and other groups and researchers haven't discussed Jakes' background in Oneness Pentecostalism in the last, oh, twenty years. Of course if you spent your teens and earliest twenties connected to Pentecostalism like I did you might be more alert to this stuff than a jack Catholic would have been so it's understandable not everyone would remember this stuff even if they heard or read of it.

All the same, asking us by way of a website to withhold final judgment until Elephant Room 2 and that since Jesus died for us the least we could do is ... get on a plane? Heh heh heh why I don't disagree with that. That is, in fact, the least you could do because having your assistant book a flight so you can go somewhere isn't much, not in terms of mental effort. If Driscoll plans to eviscerate Jakes for modalism then I won't feel bad for Jakes but there have been earlier opportunities to do this. This does not have to be a theological boxing match on the order that Dead Men was supposed to be ten years ago. By the way, the guy who made the case for infant baptism didn't do a bad job. I'm not 100% committed to infant baptism nor am I against it. Compared to modalism it's a lower level issues, isn't it?

So if by Elephant Room 2 Mark decides to hammer Jakes one of two things will happen. Jakes gets shown up to be a modalist and Mark gets to be a theological superhero praised on the order of being some new Spurgeon or Athanasius (which might make him feel pretty good about playing an important role in global Christianity). Or if it turns out Jakes isn't all that modalist Mark gets to be there for the coming out party of Jakes' formal orthodoxy. It's a can't lose scenario.

Since Mars Hill's core appeal is ostensibly to young men and at a practical level to a lot of white young men should the fur fly and things get unfriendly Driscoll doesn't have a ton to lose, the predominantly white neo-Calvinists that are drawn to him anyway won't have to consider that there's more than just a theological dispute that may end up at the heart of an Elephant Room meeting of the minds. Even from the earliest days some family and I wondered if the "counterculture" Driscoll kept talking about was only really a counterculture if you considered middle-class American white suburban life to be the ideal counterculture to Seattle. I've never been sure that it really is, and I've never been sure that the so-called counterculture Driscoll has urged Christians to embrace is a counterculture at all. It could be an edgier version of underwriting the American dream.

Not that the American dream is necessarily always, only, and ever a terrible thing but it's not the only way to live. There's plenty to be said for financial and social stability. It's okay to enjoy reading books and loving to read books. But as Halden Doerge put it a few years ago, there can come a point where collecting books and reading thousands of them can constitute its own form of consumerism. Other bloggers more on top of things than I have remarked about how the internet has made a whole generation or two of us knowledge junkies.

If knowledge puffs up we are a generation primed to be puffed up faster than any generation that has existed before us in the course of human history.This has nothing to do with choosing to be uninformed or informed and everything to do with whether or not we are vigilent to cultivate even a modicum of humility. When we have the opportunity to consider the fact that of the writing of books there is no end and that knowledge always grows far beyond what we can grasp we can let that humble us and give us opportunities to be grateful to learn or we can consider ourselves more on top of things than the next person and live accordingly. Too many self-appointed discern-o-bloggers tend to land in this second category, as do a few too many preachers. When Paul resolved to know nothing except Christ and Him crucified we know that this did not mean he couldn't quote Greek poets or philosophers.

Something along the lines of what Paul was getting at is that we should be willing to associate with the lowly. There's the social, political, and ethnic implications of that. It may be that in your neighborhood or my neighborhood there's only so many lowly folks you may run into but some of the apostolic admonition is more basic than telling you to hang out with the down and out. We're admonished to be willing to hang with anyone and not just a pet group. It'd be fun to hang out with writers and artists and musicians and intellectuals and talk about policy and music and literature and all that, but if I hang out with electricians and their kids and play board games that's fun, too. The electrician with a wife and a few kids has a vast wealth of experience, wisdom, knowledge, and friendship I value as much (or more, really) than the relationship I might have with folks in a blogging circle. Both kinds of relationship are precious to me these days, all the more seeing as I'm about to end month 27 of a hunt for steady work.

To the extent that it is possible the pursuit of knowledge as a way to serve others is a wonderful thing. You generally will not fail to benefit from this quest yourself but if you can make yourself useful along the way it helps others. If you pursue knowledge to establish yourself and your reputation you might do that but a weakness that can come with that is that somewhere along the way you may reveal that you got into this venture for yourself. While it remains to be seen how things will go down in the Elephant Room 2 there's little of me that ultimately cares how it goes down. Megachurch pastors talking about how they do their business will "probably" not effect my life as much as whether Christians here in the Puget Sound area are willing to help me network job leads or get some new glasses.

That is to say that there are treasures stored up in heaven and there are victories that have a more temporal value. Jesus warned to not do your good works for the praise of men or you have received your reward. Because plenty of people have taken issue with Jakes' theology in the past a venue like the Elephant Room may present a monstrous temptation to people who go to it and people who pay money to watch a bunch of guys ramble about things that won't effect their own lives.

Does that mean theology doesn't matter? I'd be the last person to say that seeing as I have relatives who are Eastern Orthodox, at Mars Hill, are not attending church, or are Pentecostal while I myself am Presbyterian. There's pretty much no family event in my life, ever, where I'm not constantly considering what might be helpful or divisive in a family social event depending on what theology is or isn't brought up in casual conversation. I used to want to discuss and debate these things all the time. Obviously I still like to discuss and debate things a lot of the time.

I guess what I'm trying to articulate is that one of the things that I began to learn over ten years connected to Mars Hill is that there's a lot of stuff a person can be proud of being part of that turns out to be nothing more than the reinvention of the wheel. This often comes because an impressionable guy in his twenties doesn't realize, per Ecclesiastes, that most of it all has been said and done before. In the case of the core teachings of the Christian faith it has also been done better before, in most cases incomparably better. The most Driscoll will pull off is a Cliff Notes' version of Athanasius.

Best case scenario if Jakes is a modalist and needs to get thrashed it's been done before. About all that we get out of it amounts to a pay-per-view dog and pony show. A few rock star pastors get to feel good about having engaged with big issues that matter while not much changes in the trenches. The thing about people who think wars are won by the air war is they know jack about actual military history. Nobody has ever won a war through aerial bombardment. Boots have to touch the ground and it's the boots touching the ground that get things done. In fact if boots don't touch the ground one of the great axioms of 20th century conflict kicks in, "If it flies, it dies." Why do you think we've switched so steadily to drones ... or were some of you folks talking about "air war" paying attention?

Which, ironically enough, may still totally fit! The air war is increasingly being done by remote control, by gamer types whose abilities become relevant to a new approach to recon work. The knights of the air stuff won't go away completely but as air superiority technology has evolved in the last century (keep in mind that aerial combat is not even truly a century old yet, at least not until 2015) that the rules of engagement change even as the core tactics and concepts don't. We are potentially arriving at a more remote control air power. This not only true of the military that does actual fighting, it may also be true of evangelical/neo-Calvinist leadership. The air war may increasingly be done by way of the ecclesiological equivalent of pilots sending out drones through whom they wage their part of the air war.

An event like the Elephant Room 2 may just highlight this by anachronistically going back to the dueling pilots of a century ago. What people may not realize about those old fighters like the Red Baron is they knew their role was fairly insignificant. Want to know what the real point of the air war was? To control intelligence gathering operations and mapping procedures that guided the infantry and artillary movements in the ground war. If war is what is pursued when diplomacy by other means has failed the air war is what happens when propaganda and information gathering have not quite done the job and you need to compensate for a possibility that the other team has made more progress than you want them to.

By now I've probably stumbled upon my point by way of discovery, air wars do not win real wars and air wars in American Christendom are simply not the same as shared lives. If the Elephant Room is air war it is perhaps simply guys talking about how the air war should be conducted on the assumption that, why yes, strategic bombing does change the course of military campaigns. Except that it doesn't, not without things like army and navy folks going and getting things done. If Jakes is a modalist and Driscoll throws down will this impact how many church members Jakes has? No. If Jakes isn't a modalist and Driscoll says he's a brother in the Lord will this change anything? It will be business as usual. Of course either way it will work out fine for Mark. He's got nothing he can possibly lose. But whether or not this does anything meaningful to advance the kingdom of God is not exactly an issue. Ten years ago I would not have said anything this jaded but a lot can happen (or, perhaps as importantly, not happen) in ten years.

a bit of news about the comic/film Persepolis and things like arson and trials

2012-01-23T08:06:00.000-08:00

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2012/01/comics-a-m-persepolis-trial-resumes-amid-uproar-in-tunisia/
http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2011/10/comics-a-m-persepolis-airing-sparks-protests-in-tunisia/

Satrapi's comic is a well-made and compelling comic book. I don't happen to have either the comic or the film on me at this point because I've lent those out to friends but if there's a reason to consider watching a movie based on an autobiographical comic by an Iranian woman who grew up during the days of the Iranian revolution and the deposition of the Shah ... well, you don't really "need" a reason, do you? The film got released in America the same year as Brad Bird's Ratatouille (and Satoshi Kon's Paprika for that matter) and all three animated films are absolutely wonderful in remarkably different ways. But Persepolis is the one I'd encourage you to see in light of news that it's getting flak.

a few thoughts about Tim Keller's eulogy for John Stott: HT Phoenix Preacher

2012-01-22T19:06:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3WkR0LPCxM&feature=player_embedded#!

I could write any number of thoughts about this eulogy Keller gave for Stott but I will try to keep this fairly short.

Keller remarked that we should be cautioned by Stott's cultural learning curve. Stott spent years (and probably decades) coming to a fuller understanding of Christianity not merely as a Western but a global fellowship. Keller warns that if even a man like Stott took years to become fully aware of cultural blinders how much more cautious should Americans be?

Keller went on to remark that although Stott was not what we'd call a brawler he did not avoid having that famous falling outwith Lloyd-Jones. He did not end up avoiding controversies, controversies younger evangelicals have, as a rule, not even been aware of. Keller made it clear that he was not convinced that in every controversy Stott was involved in he did not believe Stott always landed on the right side of a given issue. Of course, at a eulogy we're not in a position to discuss such disagreements at length; it's no surprise Keller did not linger on the issues on which he believes Stott got things wrong. The caution is that if even Stott could not avoid serious controversy we must remember that we may be embroiled in controversy ourselves.

I never heard Stott preach myself and have only read some of his work but a remark by Keller about Stott's approach to expository preaching sticks with me. About the Scriptures Keller remarks:
"You don't NEED to make it relevant, as people have said for years, it's alive and active and a two-edged sword."

I have blogged in the past about a danger we can face as any sort of Christian but particular in settings where we may be teaching. We must remember that there is a difference between explaining what a biblical text says (aka "contextualization") and what is ultimately the contextualization of ourselves with a biblical text as a pretext for an agenda that is finally our own. Having spent time reading sermons by not only Lloyd-Jones but also John Donne in the last four or five years I have begun to appreciate Keller's observation about expository preaching here. There is a lot that passes for expository preaching that is not strictly proclaiming what the biblical text says but includes a parade of funny or sad or touching stories about the pastor's life or wife or children or this or that observation about some social or cultural artifact that will often be meaningless even within a few short years.

If I am presented with an opportunity to learn why a festival mentioned in the Gospel of John takes on significance for rituals of water or rituals of lights on the one hand or an opportunity to hear an anecdote about some kids which do you think I am more interested in? If you guessed the facts about ancient Israelite customs and feast days and how they inform the context in which Jesus is shown speaking in the Gospel of John you would be right. No offense but I don't know your kids or your brother-in-law and though meeting them may truly be a pleasure should it happen if you stick with what's n the biblical text and don't try too hard to bring in your personal life to illustrate the point I'll get it.

In fact if anything less you and more Bible means I've got more of a shot at understanding the gist of the text because your life is only an open book to you, God, and the people in your closest social circle. And that's fine, by the way, but I realize having heard Keller's remark on Stott's expository preaching that a lot of supposedly expository preaching evangelical pastors are far more busy preaching themselves than they are preaching the biblical text! I don't care about you, buddy, I care about the Father, Son and Spirit. I mean, sure, I probably will really care how you're doing and people who have met me and interacted with me have been surprised how long I can remember a seemingly small or off-handed comment about a family or professioanl situation. I'm just saying that the opportunities for this are best saved for some place other than a sermon.

Personalizing anecdotes in ostensibly expository sermons can actually be a kind of deception. Let me explain how and why. They create the illusion that social space has collapsed when it really hasn't. In media theory (dreaded media theory) there's something called a constructed mediated reality. In other words it's not real but if it has been well-made it will look, feel, sound, and seem real. It will convey an intimacy that does not exist. This can inspire people to remember things from the sermons that involve more stories about the pastors wife or kids or the pastor's opinion about a movie or a book than about the core of the text the pastor was preaching from. You are tempted to believe that you actually know something about the pastor as a person.

Yet the whole point of the personal anecdote or interlude is not, let me repeat that, is not to invite you into the private or social life of the pastor. The whole point of the personal anecdote is to illulstrate the point about the text the pastor is making. If it happens he or she has shared an anecdote which also gives you an insight into his or her life and character then, okay, that happened, but the real point was to hook you into an understanding and application of the text. I'm not saying this is necessarily bad in itself.

Yet from the Lloyd-Jones and Donne sermons I read I came to realize that it is perfectly acceptable to not have any personal anecdotes through the vast majority of expository preaching. Donne can even follow a formula such as discussing the literal reading of the text, the application of the doctrinal point of the text, and then close with a spiritual or typological aspect of the text when applicable. And along the way do we learn stories about Anne? Do we hear about kids? Do we get references to contemporary literature? Well, sometimes, but Donne was casual in throwing out Hebrew and Latin terms and then immediately translating them for the layman.

An advantage of Donne's preaching in his day that may seem like a disincentive to read him now was his willingness and his eagerness to preach a single sermon at multiple levels of complexity. He would preach for the highest academic level and preach to the lowest practical concern in any given sermon. And somehow he managed to do this without having to make a habit of talking about pets or sharing anecdotes about pop culture from his own time in a quarter of any given sermon. Now, centuries later, people still have an incentive to read Donne's sermons as they do with Lloyd-Jones.
By not seeking the kind of cultural engagement and relevance evangelicals now prize these old school Protestants obtained something better, having said and written things significant enough to merit attention forty and four hundred years later.

There are many sorts of preachers who would claim to be expository preachers who are more apt to give running commentaries about a text or even use the text as a pretext to make a running commentary about issues and concerns that have little to do with the text. Is it bad to have pop culture or other references in a sermon? Well, no, even Keller uses a variety of literary or artistic references in sermons. But I've appreciated that these digressions only serve the point to reinforce the actual point of the sermon, which is expounding on the text. Certain other preachers who have shared anecdotes or cultural references have not always done that so much as share stories and digressions that move away from the text and toward some topic that is at best tangentially connected to what a real expository sermon would do.

Well, that's my not-quite-planned ruminations on Keller's eulogy for John Stott. HT to Phoenix Preacher for linking.

HT From Bitter Waters to Sweet: Link to a South African Christian on what's wrong with purity balls

2012-01-22T06:10:00.000-08:00

http://biblicalpersonhood.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/whats-wrong-with-purity-balls-one-virgins-perspective/

10) The pledge is an uninformed and forced promise

Many of these girls do not understand what they promise, and the possible consequences. Even the older girls are often home-schooled and so isolated that they have no idea what normal relationships work like in the 21 century.

Moreover, she often has hardly any choice in the matter. Everyone in the worlds of some of these girls pressures her to make this pledge, would treat her as a slut if she does not, and would later blame her if she does not keep it.

... In conclusion, a wise father will protect his daughter from making vows she does not understand, and which God does not want her to make. ...

Hmm, is that "biblical"?

Numbers 30:3-5
“When a young woman still living in her father’s household makes a vow to the LORD or obligates herself by a pledge and her father hears about her vow or pledge but says nothing to her, then all her vows and every pledge by which she obligated herself will stand. But if her father forbids her when he hears about it, none of her vows or the pledges by which she obligated herself will stand; the LORD will release her because her father has forbidden her.

I guess so. If obedience is better than sacrifice than seeking to be obedient to the Lord despite failure may be a whole lot wiser than making a pledge that, studies have shown, ends in failure.

This blog post I linked to was written by a South African Christian woman. Lately I read that a certain preacher said South African Christians were cowardly. That doesn't fit anything I have known of South African Christians I have had the pleasure to befriend. I've strenuously disagreed with one or two of them of the years ... but cowardly is the last word I would use to describe them!

If purity balls are becoming normal for home-schooled Christians then I'm glad I only ever attended public school.

Now here's a little rumination on Ruth

2012-01-21T01:47:00.000-08:00

http://bigbible.org/sansblogue/bible/ruth-and-romance/

I stumbled upon this blog of Tim Bulkeley's through my various readings at Scotteriology. In the hands of some teachers Ruth is presented as a case study on dating and marriage. You can't possibly imagine who might have done that? Well, never mind then. That's not important.

Now this is fun, and here's something that I found fascinating. Ruth is billed as a love story, a story of mutual romantic love. Bulkeley remarks that as sweet as it may be that it really is in there that's not the main point of the book. Consider, particularly, the second paragraph I quote regarding Boaz' affection for Ruth. I'll emphasize it for good measure.

... However, I do not think the book of Ruth is about love. It’s about חֶסֶד hesed (an amalgam of faithfulness to family or covenant relationships and great kindness). This virtue was a primary family and social value in Ancient Israel. Love was a luxury, but חֶסֶד hesed was what made the world go round.

So, did Boaz “fancy” Ruth? Probably – notice how he assumes that any of the young (and he is not young, so appreciates the value of youth) men of the village would have wanted to marry her (Rt 3:10). Why? She was a foreign (strike one) widow (strike two) who was childless after ten years of marriage (strike three). Boaz has to be imputing his own motives to them ;) Did Ruth “fancy” Boaz? Perhaps – notice how she teases him in the field (Rt 2:10,13)! But that’s not what the story is about, it is about the much more significant issues of חֶסֶד hesed.

There is a love story in the Bible (at least in the Song), but Ruth is not it, even though it may allow its heroes to experience love as well.

You see, dear reader, those bolded points. Ruth was really the last sort of woman an Israelite would choose to marry. A widowed Moabiite who had never had children despite ten years of marriage would NOT be the prime candidate for an Israelite marriage. Deuteronomy 23:3-5's prohibition against Moabites entering the assembly of the Lord it would appear Ruth, as a woman, didn't quite count under this prohibition, particularly as she was obviously a proselyte.

Still, she could hardly have been considered the most eligible bachelorette in the village as things stood and Boaz, to marry her as kinsmen redeemer, would be doing so to continue the line of Elimelech. The nearer kinsmen redeemer wanted to preserve his own familiy legacy and could not marry Ruth without compromising his own inheritence. Yet we know of Boaz because he chose to marry Ruth. As I have blogged with amusement and seriousness over the years we must be cautious and careful about how, when, where, and why we bandy about a concept like "legacy".

It was "legacy" and "a name" that inspired people to go to the Valley of Shinar, after all. And it was to preserve and pursue a legacy that a kinsmen redeemer did not marry Ruth the widowed Moabite who had borne no children in ten years of marriage. And, really, who could blame the nameless fellow? It was simply not that awesome a deal for him to fulfill a levirate responsibility for some dude named Elimelech who went to Moab with his family and ended up dead.

Yet Boaz in taking Ruth as his wife not only had sons whose names gave him a legacy, the old man obtained a legacy better than just plain old sons and daughters, he became part of the lineage of David and ultimately of Christ despite not necessarily being aware that in simply playing the role of kinsmen redeemer he was entering into this legacy. Perhaps the most beautiful and amusing irony may be that Boaz simply loved a younger widowed woman and was not imagining that his legacy would be what we read about. The man who was consciously looking after his own legacy doesn't even get a name while the man who chose to continue the line of Elimelech (by marrying Mahlon's widow) was the ancestor of David. The nameless man looked after his legacy and Boaz is celebrated for his character. Now there's an irony to mull over.

D. G. Hart--Speaking of Leithart and Language

2012-01-21T00:44:00.000-08:00

http://oldlife.org/2012/01/speaking-of-leithart-and-language/

... In the haste to assert that Christianity goes all the way down and claim a victim status for believers who live under oppressive secular governments, Federal Visionaries, transformationalists, and neo-Calvinists make the world safe for thinking that Christians are so different that they speak in ways that other people can’t understand. In other words, they pave the way for those Christians who really do think they have a Christian language — Pentecostals.

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Well ... Doug Wilson did have Mark "charismatic with a seatbelt" Driscoll over for a conference recently. Hart may just have a point there. And even if he doesn't this is a very fun punchline for me.

just because ...

2012-01-20T22:16:00.000-08:00

http://www.homestarrunner.com/trogdor.html

Something to kill some time if it's snowy where you live or you have nothing else to do.

about the voice of Bane in the Dark Knight Rises trailer

2012-01-20T21:06:00.000-08:00

I don't understand why so many people think that Tom Hardy's Bane is as hard to understand as Kenny McCormack from South Park. Just throwing that out there for pretty much no reason.

Cinemagogue tackles Underworld (and other films and shows)

2012-01-20T21:03:00.000-08:00

http://cinemagogue.com/2012/01/17/enter-the-underworld-review/
http://cinemagogue.com/2012/01/18/the-underworld-evolves/
http://cinemagogue.com/2012/01/20/the-underworld-rises/
http://cinemagogue.com/cinemagogue-catalog/

Some of the film presentations from the early, early days aren't listed (Akira, Dracula 2000, Magnolia, Profit, Perfect Blue, or Rope for instance) and some more recent presentations about the Lonnie Frisbee documentary aren't in the catalog. But all the same the catalog is still a pleasingly comprehensive survey of all the films and TV shows James has discussed or written about over the years serving in ministry at Mars Hill.

I mention James' site because I like it and because James and his wife were the people who showed the pilot Justice League at one of their parties. James and his wife are also, not coincidentally for me, the first people I ever met in my life where they threw parties that don't suck. No offense to people who invited me to parties earlier intended, and I've met other folks in the last ten years who throw great parties. It's just that in my life the first people I met who threw awesome parties have been Harlemans. I stand by that. I've been very happy and honored to know them over the last decade and hope for the best for the future of cinemagogue and James' work there. Feel free to peruse Cinemagogue and I hope you have fun with it.

the double down

2012-01-20T17:47:00.000-08:00

http://kinnon.tv/2012/01/the-interview-was-it-of-the-undisciplined-or-undiscipled.html#comments
Jim Jacobson on January 19, 2012 at 7:16 pm said:

Mark does readily confess his failures, but then he goes and doubles down on the same things. He should say what the bible says on sexual things in my opinion. Where it is silent, he should be as well. That would take away about 50% of what he has to say.

Of course this is just a celebrity variation. Admitting to a mistake is hard and what we often prefer to do is not even admit a mistake. Actually, admitting to not understanding something or not having communicated something in a clear way is difficult, too. In such situations the temptation is to double down. Not only did I not make a mistake or lack for clarity in what I was saying or doing I'm going to make sure I double down just to prove you wrong. It's tough to admit that something seems unclear whether because I didn't track what was stated or that what I stated didn't come across. The risk of doubling down is that this can create a spiral in which it's safer to stand by what I said then to set that aside with the goal of reaching a shared understanding. I don't mean agreeing on everything, far from it, I mean something more mundane, simply getting each other in a discussion.

Communication is not a contest even when the goal of communication is to persuade. Effective communicators remember this even if they do not always accomplish this. The goal, and this may be idealistic of me, is to gain mutual understanding. If I talk with you and we don't get each other than once we finally understand each other, even if we don't agree, communication has been successful and we can move on to other points of discussion. If I talk with a politically liberal friend and we don't agree on X but we do agree on Y I want to proceed from Y so that there's some chance we can discuss our way to some agreement on Z.

As Bill Buckley put it decades ago, though the liberal and conservative might disagree on the how of policy and on the why of government they can still agree on the what. This was, in short, why Buckley considered the Randian approach problematic, because it introduced a combative definition of government that, if accepted, would change the nature of discourse. Now if you think Buckley was totally wrong about that that's not exactly what I'm discussing. I trust you know I'm simply using Buckley's point as an example. If a liberal and a conservative disagree on how the government should play its role in society they did, at least (forty years ago or so) still broadly agree on what the job of the government with respect to the citizenry actually was. That times and thoughts have changed I'll take as a given so nobody feels like spamming me about that.

The kind of mentality and discourse I would like to avoid, having seen more than a bit of it, is summed up in "I love you but you're annoying" discourse. There are two reasons. The first has to do with that word "annoying". Years ago when I was on the moderated Midrash someone posted a remark and someone wrote "I love you in Christ but ... ." The fellow who posted the remark asked, "I see this `I love you in Christ but ... ' stuff. What does that mean? I replied, "It means someone's saying they find you annoying." That's as close to the words I wrote as I can recall. It's not necessarily a nice or fair thing to say but it is blunt and direct. There are times when "I love you but you're annoying" has a place. That place is not necessarily outside a continuing relationship. It is also not even particularly appropriate within a continuing relationship.

Then there's the second, more important reasons. Relationships do not thrive so much in the setting of "I love you but ... " regardless what word follows "but". Were Jesus to relate to us in this way, well, you get the idea. Husbands and wives, if they want to stay married, can't afford to live that way. If the setting is an interview as a public figure with a professional journalist then there's no context for "I love you but ... "for anything. It merely becomes a rhetorical flourish like talk of friends who are conveniences.

There's no point in pretending we love people we don't love in the common usage of the word. But this does not mean we don't have the opportunity to be patient, kind, gentle, hope-filled, considerate, and so on. Communication is not simple simply because we take it for granted. It does not become simple even if, say, we got a degree in communication. It does not become simple because it isn't simple. Any discussion operates at multiple levels of perception and meaning.

It is possible for a person to discuss something at level A while another discusses at level B. The person at level B is not necessarily at level A but if a person does not communicate at level B this does not make a person more effective as a communicator. For instance, if an adult explains something to a child and the child does not understand the adult could decide, "He's just a child so he can't get these things." Maybe that's true, but that does not make the adult a competent communicator simply for deciding that. The adult has still failed to communicate to the child. That failure won't be a moral failure or an intellectual failure, of course, but it is still a social failure and a communication failure that will, at length, have moral and intellectual significance if the adult does not find some way to learn from the situation. What happens next, ideally? Well, heh, to quote a certain Amy Grant song love (real love) will find a way. ;-)

Yet Mark Driscoll happens to be a case study of how we may not want to approach all of these things, whether in public discourse or private life. There is an opportunity to learn from Mark Driscoll's communication as a negative example, something which is a very biblical thing to do. As Jacobson has observed, the man will apologize and then double down. The pattern is this, he may apologize for how he says something but he will double down on what he was saying later on. It's the difference between saying "I'm sorry about what I said because it was wrong and I hurt you", for instance, and saying "I'm sorry you were offended by what I said and maybe I should have said things in a more winsome way." For the already convinced the latter reads as though it should be received as the former.

Now beyond this there are substantical implications and consequences to a man like Mark Driscoll being selectively strict constructionist. I could write at some length about this but I don't feel like doing so right now in much detail. For now I will merely note that a strict constructionist permission of sex act X because it is not explicitly condemned vitiates the possibility of condemning social scenario Y when it, too, is not directly and explicitly condemned by a biblical text. Doubling down is only a good move if you really understand what cards you're playing and to be honest I'm not always sure Mark Driscoll knows what cards he's really doubling down on.

In other words, if Mark wants us to accept that anal sex is all good in the hood because the Bible doesn't directly condemn it then he has concede that if in ancient times there was not direct condemnation of a guy like Jacob wanting Leah and Rachel to participate in a three way that it wasn't condemned. Was that totally icky? Yes (sorry about that). Was that unnecessary? Not if we seriously attempt to address the problem of Mark Driscoll's selective strict constructionism about biblical prohibitions on sexual activities within marriage. A man like Driscoll, so apt to employ reductio ad absurdums, sometimes needs to be the recipient of what he doles out to others. The Bible does not explicitly condemn stay at home dads any more than it explicitly prohibits anal sex so if Driscoll wants to play the "I'm a Bible teacher" card and invoke a selectively strict constructionist take on what the Bible prohibits he should think through what this kind of position and method entails.

... and it just dawned on me what a terrible pun is in that last sentence.

Jared Wilson: Shepherd the flock you've got, not the one you want

2012-01-20T14:58:00.000-08:00

http://gospeldrivenchurch.blogspot.com/2012/01/shepherd-flock-that-is-among-you.html

Not that I'm a preacher or anything, but I agree. One of my music teachers gave me some advice as a composer that sounds similar, write music for the musicians you actually know, not the ideal musician you want. Of course with musicians and pastors the difference may be this--there comes a point where instead of just asking someone else to do something you have to also be willing to do it yourself.

Oh ... wait ... never mind. That's not a difference at all. ;-)

at last, some progress

2012-01-20T03:43:00.000-08:00

I've completed parts 1 through 3 of, erm, part four, aka "The Wounds of Discovery". When DZ suggested I tackle writing about the DCAU it had not dawned on me that I'm basically writing a book's worth of criticism and analysis of superhero cartoons helmed by Paul Dini, Bruce Timm, and company. But so it has been. Parts 4 and 5 need to get written and there's a bunch of other stuff I want to tackle, too, that I keep alluding to but not actually discussing here.

The title is turning out to be an exercise in dry irony as my examination of different villains is revealing that these thugs and schemers don't actually discover anything about their own broken moral compasses. But their maladaptive reactions to injuries and insults real and imagined certainly helps them discover that they want things they are willing to pursue in villainous ways.

A memorable villain often wants something that is good but for a bad reason or is willing to use terrible methods to obtain that good. It is axiomatic that a great villain thinks he or she is actually a hero. I've tried knocking out parts 4 and 5 but this has been a very challening series to work on even if I discount the off-line/real world distractions of holidays, family events, eye surgery, job hunting, recovering from eye surgery, and the continuing process of getting a musical work published.

But I'm more out of steam than I thought I would be and here I was going for another writing marathon. So much for that. Now there's the process of a hundred visions and revisions before the taking of toast and tea and all that.

Priestly Rants--two links on Jonah

2012-01-19T19:15:00.000-08:00

http://priestlyrant.com/on-being-jonah/2509.html
http://priestlyrant.com/on-going-east-to-nineveh/2516.html

I think just the links will suffice here. I could write a bit about the significance of sermons on Jonah in my life but that would take a while and I'm hoping to conserve my writerly momentum for other topics. Perhaps I can write more about Jonah later or perhaps just these links will suffice.

Link: Guitar & Lute Issues: Matanya Ophee on Performance Practice of 19X guitar music

2012-01-19T18:35:00.000-08:00

http://www.guitarandluteissues.com/Performance/performa-eng.htm

A fun article, at least for me. That Segovia was a great performer and a powerful personality does not necessarily mean that at all points he was the truest interpreter of music by Sor. There's audio and score samples in case you're worried there won't be anything but words and more words about music.

HT Phoenix Preacher: Jenell Williams Paris responds to Mark Noll

2012-01-19T07:18:00.000-08:00

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/januaryweb-only/responding-to-mark-noll.html
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/the-evangelical-mind-today-40

I could write a thousand or so words on this but I'm just linking, again. If I'm going to be writing thousands of words right now I've got other subjects to write about. I've been making some happy progress on "The Wounds of Discovery" and have some other writing to get to. Being snowed up in Seattle would be pretty terrible if I had a normal job and had to use public transit all the time. But for a job-hunting free-lance writer ... the snow's not so bad and weekly meal plans are handy.

But after a marathon of writing several thousands words in the last ten hours (not all of which has actually made it on to this blog) now might be the time to get some shut eye.

HT Mere Orthodoxy: We are All Witnesses

2012-01-19T06:19:00.000-08:00

http://www.mereorthodoxy.com/witnesses-singleness-kingdom/

Merely linking to this will suffice for me now.

Theology for Women: Wisdom vs the Law on womens' issues

2012-01-19T06:18:00.000-08:00

http://www.theologyforwomen.org/2012/01/wisdom-v-law-on-womens-issues.html

http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/confessions-of-a-conflicted-complementarian

Once again Wendy has articulated a theme I have come to appreciate more fully as I get older and keep reading the Bible. Wisdom is not the same as the law. While Wendy may be discovering this as a wife and mother I have discovered it as an unmarried man. There are many people who try to teach wisdom as though it were law (Law).

Wisdom is not Law and if anything a huge chunk of the Wisdom literature teaches this. Does Ecclesiastes teach that we are even that good? That which is crooked cannot be made straight, that which is lacking cannot be counted. The race is not to the swift nor victory to the strong nor riches to the wise but time and chance happen to them all. Yet how many people talk about 'biblical' principles of financial success (a.k.a. `stewardship')?

How many people believe, down to the soles of their feet, that Job really was disciplined by God for having fear in his heart or nursing some unjustifiable attitudes toward the Almighty? Does God Himself say about Job to Satan, "He has not rejected me even though you have incited me to punish him without cause?" Well ... see because of original sin Job really deserved to be in Hell and so what God did was holding back. Never mind what God said after all.

Then there's Song of Songs. This is poetry in which beauty is placed at such a high premium that translating the poem is a challenge. Given all the debates about what the poems are even supposed to mean we may have to set aside the whole thing about erotica this and typology that and consider that maybe the reason the poems got canonized was because of something English translations can't convey, beauty. That beauty certainly would have a difficult time coming across if Song of Songs were transformed into a marriage equivalent of a user's guide to Windows Vista. Don't forget to run as Administrator on this stuff or the programs won't work.

And then there are the Proverbs themselves. I have written enough about how the book introduces us to its theme by remarking on how the goal is to instruct the naive in wisdom and to give the wise insight into riddles. We may lean too much on the former and not enough on the latter. The fear of the Lord is beginning of wisdom and this means we trust and do not lean on our own understanding. Humans are a riddle that humans can never fully figure out.

Orthocuban on the power of stubborn small-mindedness in large groups

2012-01-19T06:04:00.000-08:00

http://www.orthocuban.com/2012/01/comic-with-cute-definition/

When Father Orthoduck was in basic training, he remembers a drill instructor giving us some advice. He said that the Army has a rule book. As long as you follow it, you will not get in trouble or be court-martialed. But, if you break the rule book, two things can happen, one bad and one good. If you break the rules and you win a great victory, they will give you a medal and re-write the rule book. If you break the rules and either something goes wrong, or you do no better than if you had followed the rules, then they will throw the rules at you and court-martial you. The lesson was obvious, you had better follow the rules.

HT: J.S. Bangs: The Road to Dongguan Pier

2012-01-19T06:03:00.000-08:00

http://jsbangs.com/2012/01/17/the-road-to-dongguan-pier/#comments

A linky link for those who might want to read it.

snow toons

2012-01-18T22:29:00.000-08:00

Over the years I have been writing off and on about cartoons. I have written about Pixar films that I own and enjoy. I have been writing about the DCAU (aka Timm-verse) and am even now refining "The Wounds of Discovery" this week as part 4 of my Mockingbird series Batman: the Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire. I have every episode of the Powerpuff Girls and watch it even if my nieces aren't with me. Though I don't like Scooby-Doo I shall never begrudge Frank Welker his meal ticket and Shaggy is admittedly one of the most enjoyable voices in the history of toon'dom. The voices of Megatron and Bumblebee have surely paid their dues to the natural fact that cartoons are their own art form.

Got Wallace & Gromit. I've got Coraline. I made a point of seeing The Nightmare Before Christmas because no self-respecting fan of animation can have missed what was arguably one of the most important stop-motion animated features of the last twenty years. Got Miyazaki films. I've got Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue with plans to one day pick up Paprika. I've picked up Grave of the Fireflies though I don't have the emotional energy to watch it probably more than once a decade! I managed to pick up Night on the Galactic Railroad on DVD. I was one of a few people who saw what was probably one of the only legal showings of Oshii Mamuro's Angel's Egg presided over by the director himself. I await the opinion of friends about Persepolis. In sum, when I at times drop hints that I'm a cartoon nerd here and elsewhere trust me that I'm not bluffing.

I am also, I admit, kind of snobby about cartoons, too, which is why when I became completely hooked on Psalms of the Planets (aka Eureka Seven) my nerd ego and snob ego took a few hits along the way. Some people have rightly described the series as what you might get if Neon Genesis Evaneglion had pink explosions and swirling rainbows. Ha! When my brother told me about the premise of the show, that people operated mecha that ravelled around on flying surfboards I replied that this sounded like the most lame-ass premise for an anime in the history of anime. My brother merely replied that, be that as it may, the show was still worth watching. He wanted me to at least sit through the first five episodes before passing a final judgment. Okay, so I did.

The characters were all stock, the music was often goofy in the way that J-pop is ... well, you know. There were all sorts of maudlin bits about the power of belief and having dreams. It was the sort of thing where thematically it was making me bristle with the remorseless sentimentality, gooey music, and the beginnings of what looked like a standard-fare emo romance as a certain friend of mine put it at the time. Yep, all there. So why was it that by the end of episode 5 I decided to keep watching? The hazing episode (episode 6) had lots of deliberately awkward and forced humor that on first viewing not only wasn't winning me over but was grating. The central character, Renton, seemed self-involved, self-pitying, and more than a little annoying. Yet he also had this embarrasing naivete and trust that, I hate to admit this, I remembered having a bit of in my own earlier teen years. The character was embarrassing to watch because he sorta reminded me of me from about that age.

But over episodes 6-10 I began to realize that there were hints that this was a wind up for some reveal. That Eureka was not human was obvious within the first two episodes. Anyone could have figured that out. That tossed off characters remarked that Renton's heroes were basically just a bunch of worthless mercenaries, traitors, criminals and thugs was the sort of thing that seemed unimportant in the first few episodes. By episode 10-12, however, the show had tipped its hand. An earlier moment where a 14 year old girl makes the huge mistake of disciplining a 5 year old girl who ran off by slapping her in the face was played for laughs at first but soon enough the series revealed that what was played for laughs early on was priming us for learning how and where these characters learned to relate to each other like this.

And that was what hooked me on the series because the "how" and "where" turned out to be the series theme--what was billed as an action-adventure romp dealing with mecha and flying surfboards turned out to be the pretext for exploring how intergenerational and culturally engrained child abuse is sustained, justified, and assimilated by the recipients and perpetrators of said abuse. When Eureka considers that she deserves to be pelted with food stuffs because she was "a dog for the military" she doesn't stop to consider that there might, possibly, have been anything wrong with adults making her kill hundreds and thousands of people. She just accepts that she did kill those people and deserves some punishment for it.

When Renton discovers that his childhood hero Holland Novac turns out to be an emotionally distant, short-tempered child abuser the let down isn't just a let down, it's almost stomach-churning. I began to realize that the characters who were annoying to me because of the tropes they fit into had, by a weird writerly amalgalm, been revealed to be characters who were tropes not "just" because they were story cliches (though, surely, they are) but the back story each character got helped to explain how each character's otherwise rote traits sprung in part from their being consigned certain roles they didn't ask for.

And along the way stock characters were revealed to be stock in part because they were hiding from themselves. The initially stand-offish and "cool" Holland is soon revealed to be pathetic, insecure, and prone to compensate for his insecurity by beating others. The initial impression of his girlfriend Talho as a petty, mean, vindictive woman dressing on the lesser side of modesty turns out to be one of the few characters with an almost strangely consistent moral compass in the series' narrative universe.
As I became hooked on the show and watched all fifty episodes I began to realize that despite the rampant sentimentality and the maudlin aspect of it all I was drawn into the show anyway. I now hesitate to suggest the series because some six years later I can say, intellectually at least, there are plenty of other anime out there that are more "important".

But at another level I would say I hesitate to recommend Eureka Seven to just anyone because if I did so I would have to do something that is a bit "politically correct" by some measures, I'd have to include the caveat of "trigger warning". That is to say that the series directly shows or implies pretty much every conceivable form of abuse and neglect an individual or social unit can possibly afflict upon a child. If the scenes of Renton's hero Holland kicking him off a platform in a rage are disturbing the things in the backstory of a supporting character like Anemone, if you let them sink in, are simply horrifying. Call me squeamish but I can't even bring myself to write about those things on this blog. It is to the credit of the creators of the show that they decided to imply and telegraph rather than unload all of that stuff on the viewer.

The otherwise rank sentimentality of a cartoon in which a character chooses to love someone and help him stops being a merely sentimental trope if a character chooses to save someone who has punched him in the face, kicked him in the stomach and tossed him off a platform, insulted him, and abandoned him, and breaking a dozen or so promises along the way. The series moves along and shows us that if one of the good guys is a short-tempered child abuser the bad guys are not necessarily better for including an affable husband and wife team of mercenaries who are kind and sweet yet in the midst of that even more cruel and callous then the child abuser.

The show Eureka Seven ends on a happy and remorselessly sappy note with a "love conquers all" motiff. By the time the series wraps up all the gooey sentimentality reaches its apotheosis in such unabashed treacle I don't know how anyone could have written the ending that way without laughing. Yet, for some reason, it still "works". Why? Well, perhaps the best way to attempt explaining this is that if even across religious and secular cultural divides we humans could agree that love hopes all things, believes all things and endures all things then Eureka Seven forced its central characters to endure enough misery (often self-inflicted and even more often inflicted by the people they love and trust) that the profession of mutual love does not seem cheap by the time it is finally expressed.

When I express my abiding cynicism and skepticism about evangelicals pontificating about how evangelicals don't look into depicting "the tortured beauty of the Cross" I think it's because too many evangelicals look at the cross as an abstraction, even when they attempt to somehow "make it real". It's because the effort of "make it real" is part of a rhetorical procedure in which there is an obvious goal. The goal is to make you feel bad about your failures enough that you make a decision for Christ or rig up the pious water works. It can't be real in that setting because you know you're being played and if you don't you'll soon have your suspicions. Maybe evangelicals would be better at exploring how love endures all things in the arts if we endured almost anything at all in our day-to-day lives. I don't mean inconvenient streetlights, obviously. But enough of that digression.

Not everyone who uses or abuses children will ever repent but by the end of the series one of them does. One of the things that sticks with me about the series is that a supporting protagonist like Holland can recognize that he has killed too many people to atone for those killings. He also recognizes that the way he used and abused the children who had been put in his care was wrong and decides that even if he can't stop walking a path where he has to kill to do the soldierly work that is about all he's good at, he can at least kill so that the kids he has taken on to his cause don't have to. Holland turns out to be the metaphor for an abusive father or father figure who experiences remorse and repents of his abusive ways.

By way of natural digression this leads to the question of why Holland would be a child abuser. His girlfriend and (spoiler alert) eventual wife Talho figures it out long before Holland does, Holland finds it easier to "run away" from his own overwhelming sense of failure by taking out his anger on a child than admitting what he was trying to do was a failure. By the end of the series, despite Holland's best efforts everything he attempted to do turned out to be a failure in terms of what his goals in the formal narrative were. But in the emotional arc of the series he has stumbled upon salvation by being capable of feeling remorse. He may have lost the battle he was fighting but by refusing to place victory over human dignity or a willingness to concede utter defeat and failure he ends up still being one of the heroes of the series.

By contrast, his older brother and nemesis literally gains the whole world at the expense of his own soul and chooses to destroy everything in a bid to, as he sees it, atone for human failure to preserve its own dignity. There's still that happy ending but I don't feel like spoiling everything. Dewey Novac creates a team of children trained to kill without hesitation or regret and who are excited to help him orchestrate the death of tens of millions to right the wrongs of a dynastic regime that put its own convenience and power above truth and principle. Trouble is that Dewey does not recognize that his own pursuit of principle and truth is even more cruel and destructive.

There are also a few asides and implied activities of Dewey I don't really feel like getting into. My brother endured the film follow-up and let's just say that if the series had the good sense and good taste to avoid spelling out obviously what an alert viwer can put together the film made the grievous mistake of telling and removing all doubt. There are times in which taking the high gothic horror approach of hinting, suggesting, and implying is far more effective than the low gothic horror route of just having a "gotcha" moment where the monster shows up and you smack the audience in the face with the ugly stuff.

The series never refrains from seizing every possible moment of positively eye-rolling sentimentality or garish humor. In fact whole episodes are practically built on seizing every possible moment and then forcing in several impossible ones! But, as John Woo once told an American journalist, it could just be that in Asian story-telling the melodrama has never fallen out of intellectual or cultural fashion. It was maudlin and is maudlin, it's saccharine in all sorts of places and yet when the show is dark the show is unremittingly dark in ways that stick with me. I guess that's what the Dostoevsky and Kafka fan in me found intriguing about the show. The show wasn't going to show us the best and brightest without dragging us through the worst and darkest, often by dragging us through the worst and darkest of even the most sympathetic characters.

I don't know if I feel like explaining every last personal detail but the first time I managed to watch the whole series was in late 2007. The show had been broadcast in the U.S. on Cartoon Network enough that my brother and a friend of mine told me about it. The show ended up on DVD and I began to catch up on the show. By now long-time readers of the blog probably don't have to work too hard to figure out what was going on in later 2007. That was merely a side story to other more personal things that involved some family difficulties that at that time were on-going and some very big stresses I had at my job.

Without getting much more detailed by the time I got to episodes 42-46 I was at a point in my life where I was emotionally drained and this was around August 2007, I think. The cumulative story lines and character arcs all came together in a moment where through happenstance or providence the series hit every raw nerve I had at the same time so hard and fast I had no emotional defenses for it. I managed to watch the episodes and found them compelling story-telling one weekend and then a whole day later the cumulative effect of the story-telling hit me and I had a three hour long melt down.

Three hours is a long time to have an emotional breakdown. It was quite unlike anything I experienced in my life before or since. The significance of it is something I have left in the domain of close friends and some (though not all, or even most) family members. In fact I'm sort of at a loss to explain it now, even five years or so after it happened. It's possibly the height of embarrassment for a person to admit to having a three hour melt-down triggered by watching a cartoon but there you go. It happened to me and I had no idea such a thing was even possible. In terms of snob appeal or intellectual credibility I don't know if anyone on earth would want to admit to having a meltdown triggered by such a cartoon and the personal significance is something that, frankly, I think would be impossible to share. As Proverbs puts it the heart knows its own troubles and no other shares its grief (or joy, depending on which translation/reading we're working from).

When I end up snowed in during the winters I drift toward stuff like The X-Files or Eureka Seven or Batman: the animated series. There's probably some thematic reason for that but I don't feel like writing about that at this point. This blog entry is quite long enough.

text and context

2012-01-18T20:16:00.000-08:00

http://townhall.com/columnists/thortolo/2008/03/06/the_gospel_according_to_mark_driscoll/page/full/

... When the Lord isn’t talking to this man, kiddingly called a short-fused drama queen by his wife, his critics are blogging about him. Some of the sharper barbs make it difficult for Driscoll to hide the hurt.

When asked why a few of his pastoral peers got worked up over his recent series of sermons on the joy of sex within marriage, Driscoll popped back “because they’re looking at porn.”

No laughter. No chuckle. Not even a smirk. Just a stunned radio host and a few thousand listeners who probably couldn’t believe what they’d just heard from this very misunderstood father of five.

The above article was published in March of 2008 before The Peasant Princess began and after the Scotland sermon on Song of Songs from November 2007.

Let's consider "because they're looking at porn" for a bit. No doubt some of them are and some of them were. But what about John MacArthur? What about John Piper? If these men took issue at any point with certain aspects of how Mark Driscoll interpreted Song of Songs in either style or substance would Mark Driscoll legitimately have a basis to say that pastoral peers taking issue with his handling and interpretation of Song of Songs could only be doing so because they were (or are) looking at porn? This is the kind of response that is nothing more than a personal attack. If anything that Mark eventually decided the 2007 Scotland sermon should get taken down because it offended some fellow believers might be construed by some of those pastoral peers as a concession that maybe, sometimes, kinda some of those pastoral peers with some criticisms might have kinda, sorta had a point and that dismissing them as porn junkies wasn't the only possible way of interpreting their concerns about Driscoll's teaching. Or not.

The Real Marriage sermon series and book tour is gearing up and so there's plenty of time for other people to find out if things have changed. If Mark has had a change of heart about sex as a god, though, it's impossible to glean this from his decade-long insistence that Song of Songs 2:3 refers to oral sex. One would think that if one had made a god of sex and idealized marriage that repenting of this might completely re-educate and re-inform a pastoral exegesis of a text but that isn't what happened, at least not in the case of the most controversial interpretations of Song of Songs that Mark Drisscoll continually stands by. There may be little liberty as to what constitutes masculinity in a "biblical" domain for Mark Driscoll but there is a great deal of liberty in the bedroom for those willing to use it. It would seem that what the Bible does not explicitly condemn in sexual conduct in marriage is free for us to enjoy just so long as a man isn't a stay at home dad or the woman earns more money than he does even though neither of those things is explicitly condemned or forbidden in the scriptures that I can recall.

Mark has a history of doing this sort of thing, this "they're looking at porn" kind of defense, a history long enough that as regrettable as a great deal of the personal attacks on Mark Driscoll's character have been if Mark were observing this sort of ruckus in connection to some other preacher he might connect some dots and suggest that there is a point where you reap what you sow. For that matter it's not just Driscoll critics who have, at times, said the man has some character flaws. Observe what Mark's own wife has said about him in the Thor Tolo piece linked above.

If Grace regrets saying her husband is a short-fused drama queen, and if she regrets telling Mark he's Elimelech (listen to the first Ruth sermon from 2007 if you're curious about that and I've written about this elsewhere on this blog) then I'll understand she regrets saying things that ended up in the public where she made fun of her husband's short-temper, drama queen ways, and propensity to assume he's got such a great plan he doesn't have to pray or consider whether God is really behind it. That's not me taking Mark Driscoll out of context, that's referring back to a sermon Mark preached in which he described an unpleasant truth about himself his wife told him straight.

Have certain folks and particularly ex-Mars Hill members sometimes had a field day ripping on Driscoll in public? Yes. Is it unfortunate that sweeping generalizations, reductio ad absurdums, and ad hominems are getting thrown about by Driscoll critics with abandon? Yeah ... but name me the one good, young evangelical Bible teacher from Britian that is known the world over. You can't, and that's a problem. And the problem, the real problem is, that after fifteen years of sowing this kind of seed how exactly do Mark Driscoll and his fans manage to be this surprised by the harvest? What makes the adversarial reactions of anti-Driscoll bloggers so frustrating for me is that when they attack him at a personal level and assume the worst about him we can see what they're doing, they are responding to Driscoll's worst rhetorical flourishes and personal attacks with Driscoll's worst rhetorical flourishes and personal attacks. Folks, this is not the way to make a case that a person has gone off the rails.

I'm an unabashed nerd so here goes, when Captain Kirk is about to say or do something stupid who has a better chance of talking him out of it? Dr. McCoy or Spock? Often Spock. Kirk needs both McCoy and Spock on his team but he needs Spock to point out "Captain, that is illogical." A Dr. McCoy could hear Kirk say "The results and numbers are on my side" and say, "That's not proof that what you've done is the right thing." But it takes a Spock to point out that, in fact, here and there are the cases where the results showed that the premise is false, that the results don't prove the method right, they just prove the other people got lucky and that the Captain should not presume on results from the past as proof that something in the present is justified.

If a Mark Driscoll says "Look at my results [my numbers]" the measured response is not merely to say "Numbers aren't everything" because in Driscoll's mind that admits defeat. The response is to say, "Well, since Joel Osteen has better numbers than you he's the better pastor if your argument is actually true." We know Mark Driscoll has pilloried Joel Osteen from the pulpit. It just remains to be shown that when Mark defends his ministry by looking to sheer numbers as results that any one he has denounced in the last ten years who at some point had bigger numbers and more of a draw than him could legitimately say the exact same thing. How can big numbers be proof that Mark Driscoll's doing the right thing but it can't be taken as proof that Joel Osteen is doing the right thing? In fact Ben Irwin points this out right over here:

http://benirwin.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/shock-jock-pasto-meets-the-full-but-not-so-manly-might-of-the-british-empire/#comments

But even if, for the sake of discussion, we assume that the huge numbers are actually a sign of divine favor this is not the end of the matter. If a Driscoll wants to tell a British Christian that the results derive from the core difference in approach how do we know this is not, at root, a Corinthian fallacy. Paul had recurring credibility issues with the Christians in Corinth because he was considered a lesser speaker and thinker than super-apostles, and his authority was sometimes questioned by those who were drawn to form factions. Paul wrote to warn against the factionalism that was characterizing the Christians in Corinth where some were saying, "I am of Peter" and others were saying "I am of Paul" while still others were saying "I am of Apollos." There are a lot of people today who are saying "I am of Mark Driscoll" and others who are against that. This is not how it should be.

And as to the numbers themselves, consider this. Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth he mentioned this:

For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?

What does Mars Hill have that it did not receive? And it if was received on what basis can Mark Driscoll boast about it to a British journalist as though it were not received as a gift? How did it become a boasting point in which Mark Driscoll could say that if we look at his numbers and the numbers in British churches that we look at what the obvious variable is for the difference in numbers? How is this really a nobody telling everybody about Somebody when that nobody is telling another nobody what a somebody he is for the results he's obtained? The catchphrase can begin to feel as telling and caculated as, well, a catchphrase. A catchphrase sounds cool when Bruce Willis says it before he kills somebody but it's not necessarily the sign of a shepherd but an action hero, isn't it?

There are people who have begun to put together that Mark Driscoll says odd stuff on record, stuff that cannot be dismissed as merely being taken out of context. Mark has attempted to do some damage control on making sweeping statements about British pastors that he hopes will alleviate any concerns from his fan base that he might have said something foolish. Not everyone will let him off the hook, frankly there's no reason he should be let off the hook. I don't think people need to inveigh about how he shouldn't be in ministry.

On the other hand, there comes a point where how you treat people and relate to people in public discourse sets a precedent in which they can (and often will) return the favor. If you sow a particular seed of speech over a fifteen year period and the harvest emerges harvest time is not the best time to complain about the kind of fruit you're seeing in your farm. If the nobody who wants to tell everybody about Somebody finds it aggravating that things he said six years ago are "taken out of context" he should just remember that if there is anything good that has happened through Mars Hill that's all Jesus and if there's anything bad in Mars Hill that's him. It's what he advised members to consider over the years and it's not bad advice.

HT Mockingbird: Kathryn Schulz On Being Wrong

2012-01-18T16:48:00.000-08:00

http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html

When Schulz asks, "What does it feel like to be wrong?" she gets answers such as, "Embarrassed". Then she explains that these are not answers to the same question. These answers are answers to the question, "What does it feel like to realize you're wrong."

It is possible to go on for quite some time being wrong but never feel wrong and to, in fact, be certain that you're right.

http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_don_t_regret_regret.html

well, it snowed in the Emerald City

2012-01-17T17:57:00.000-08:00

Last time we got a big snow storm in Seattle I nestled into my computer desk and watched that X-Files episode where Mulder and Scully are in that episode tribute to Carpenter's The Thing. It was a fun episode and there was nothing quite like being snowed into the neighborhood to make me feel like watching an episode from the first five (actually good) seasons of The X-Files.

Might have to watch "Tooms" this time.

evangelicals, poetics, and sex

2012-01-17T16:31:00.000-08:00

http://www.mereorthodoxy.com/ct-washington-post-evangelicals-sex/
Some links from Matthew Lee Anderson with a handful of quotes

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/evangelicals-too-sexy/2012/01/13/gIQAMqx5vP_blog.html

As religion reporter Mark Oppenheimer wrote way back in 1999, “America is in a golden age for Christian sex manuals.”

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2012/01/the-poetry-of-sex
from Peter Leithart
... Christians today often read the Song as lusty celebration of sex. Some try to wipe away the prudish poetry to peep at the sex acts of Solomon and his Shulammite. Such an approach simply projects contemporary obsessions into an ancient text. It assumes that we already know what real sex is. We have outgrown romance and now know that sex is no more than a clash of bodies and an exchange of fluids. There is no magic, no mystery, only friction, only technique. Reading the Song as disguised pornography reinforces and sacralizes the sexual confusions of our age.
Even as an erotic poem, the Song has much to teach. Robert Alter observes that in much of the world’s erotic literature, “the body in the act of love often seems to displace the rest of the world.” By contrast in the Song, “the world is constantly embraced in the very process of imagining the body. The natural landscape, the cycle of the seasons, the beauty of the animal and floral realm, the profusion of goods afforded through trade, the inventive skill of the artisan, the grandeur of cities, are all joyfully affirmed as love is affirmed.” Solomon is no courtly lover who abandons the world and all to chase after his bride. When he turns from the world, he rediscovers his world in her. That insight alone is enough to justify the Song’s inclusion in the wisdom literature.
The poet John Donne would later transform this poetic elision of lover and landscape into, "Oh my America, my Newfoundland. ... how I am blest in thus discovering thee!"

When Donne wrote that poem the New World was still being explored and discovered in all sorts of ways. Perhaps Donne's metaphor has lost all its power now that we can buy topographical maps of almost any detail in America now? We can work out the annual rainfall per state and know the cash crops of each particular region. There's even a weather channel or two and we can use satellites and GPS to navigate all sorts of places. America, perhaps, has ultimately risen to the occasion of completely demystifying the metaphorical force of an English poet's use of America as a metaphor through evangelical instructors on sex and marriage.

Psyblog writes about anticipatory regret as a guide to decision-making. Ouch!

2012-01-17T02:19:00.000-08:00

http://www.spring.org.uk/2012/01/the-amazing-power-of-regret-to-shape-our-future.php

The odd thing is that some psychologists argue that anticipated regret may be stronger than the actual regret we would feel if our choices don't work out.

Anticipated regret is such a powerful emotion that it can cause us to avoid risk, lower our expectations, steer us towards the familiar and away from new, interesting experiences.

Anyone ever been on a job hunt longer than two years? Then you know what this feels like!

hands down the best satire of beauty products I have ever seen

2012-01-16T18:12:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKz1WgyFAcw

Thanks to the non-blogging Totoro Man for spotting it.

Carl Trueman: On Media and Messages

2012-01-16T18:06:00.000-08:00

http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/01/on-media-and-messages.php

A few years ago, I was on a panel discussing the Puritans. A member of the audience asked if I could provide `a few bullet points' to summarise Puritan theology. My mind immediately went to those passages of John Owen and Richard Baxter where they give the reader the fifteenth point of the seventeenth qualification of the twentieth application of a doctrine or passage. `No, I'm afraid I can't.' I replied, `The Puritans were not bullet point people in the modern sense.'

Of course these days there are pastors who love providing a few mere bullet points to some door-stopping book like William Gurnall's The Christian in Full Armour. If I were trapped in Seattle on a cold night without gas or electric heat and had to keep myself warm then if I lit the unabridged Gurnall book on fire it would probably keep my feet warm for maybe five to ten minutes, a while for a ream of paper anyway. I've seen a summary of Gurnall's teaching that spanned 120 pages but not a few bullet points. And this, mind you, is just one Puritan. J. I. Packer gave a roughly ten hour overview of the Puritans for anyone who'd really want the "a few bullet points" version.

Amusingly enough Trueman links to the following article with a fun title. PG-13 language alert for the readers here.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/james-delingpole-never-apologise-never-explain-and-you-have-109-characters-left-6286606.html?origin=internalSearch

Never apologise, never explain. And you have 109 characters left...

We can all sympathise, I am sure, with the predicament of Diane Abbott MP last week. "White people love playing 'divide & rule'. We should not play their game," she tweeted. Put under pressure to clarify this, she hastily explained: "Tweet taken out of context. Refers to nature of 19th- century European colonialism. Bit much to get into 140 characters."

Yep, we've all been there. There you are wanting to tweet a nuanced disquisition on ethnic communities under the white 19th-century imperial hegemony and, damn it, Twitter's wretched character limit has gone and cut you off before you've barely begun.

... For ever since that "pretty straight kind of guy" Tony Blair arrived on the scene, we have come to take it almost for granted that when our politicians swear blind they're telling the truth, they are lying through their teeth. And that, of course, when they claim they've been quoted out of context, they meant every single ugly word.

Mockingbird: Neophilia: why new is never enough

2012-01-16T17:22:00.000-08:00

http://www.mbird.com/2012/01/neophilia-why-new-is-never-enough/

Ha! I was checking the Mockingbird site as I was wrapping up my last entry to see if there was anything new to read. I'm savoring the various levels of irony in that. Turns out what they were posting about neophilia tied in with what I just wrote about my personal journey of discovering that the things I thought I was working on that could be new are not that new and how Rebay's work is being recovered. More on Rebay later. I'd love to write about my impressions of his music but I have other things to be writing.

The excitement of the not-new

2012-01-16T17:17:00.000-08:00

Long-time readers of this blog may be interested in or utterly bored by my occasional ramble on "classical" music. If you come to the blog for stuff about Mark Driscoll or about what happened to Lief Moi then I understand that's the sexier set of terms in a search engine than, say, Anton Diabelli's guitar sonatas or a question about how such and such articulation markings on an English horn may have been selected by Castlenuovo-Tedesco for his Ecloghues. That's all fair. And if you're into the former and not the latter you probably just skip out entirely on blog posts reflecting on how the art of contrapuntal writing in choral literature by Tallis or Byrd or Palestrina would inform a guitarist trying to complete 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar.

I hope to write in a way that skips the sea of technical minutae and instead write about the process of discovery I have made over the last ten years. One of the things about history is that history is a sea you cannot possibly navigate in its fullness no matter how swift or big or broad you may think your mind is. In other words, when Koholeth wrote there is nothing new under the sun this was a warning to those who thought they were so innovative they sincerely believed they were doing something no one had done before. Is there something new? See it has already existed in times past.

When I began working on my giant cycle of sonatas for guitar, woodwinds, strings, and brass I had the impression no one had even attempted such a cycle before. Well, a guy in his twenties can be forgiven for not knowing anything about the fifteen chamber works for guitar composed by Ferdinand Rebay! I have only been introduced to Rebay's works within the last few years thanks to some of William Feasley's recordings, particularly the d'Amore Duo CDs I still intend to write about this year. Rebay was able to publish arrangements of Beethoven and Korngold and was a prolific composer but he lost his teaching position in the Anschluss and died in poverty and forgotten. It has only been since about 2005 that his works have started getting even some attetnion again.

Only scholars of the most esoteric and specialized knowledge would have had any idea that Ferdinand Rebay even existed, let alone have heard his music. What this means at a personal level is that a big lifelong project I've had of composing a cycle of chamber works for guitar and assorted instruments is not new. Even back when I thought it was possibly without precedent this merely proved that not only I but a majority of classical guitarists just didn't have enough history in hand to realize this was not the case. Fortunately the impetus and inspiration to create music does not require that one ever be innovative!

When I began working in 2007 on a cycle of 24 preludes and fugues it was because it seemed like a fun project. I had not heard of such a cycle being composed before but I could not bring myself to believe that in the centuries of the guitar's existence that no one had even considered such a project. In time I was introduced to Castelnuovo-Tedesco's 24 preludes and fugues for guitar duet. I also discovered Igor Rekhin's cycle for solo guitar. Neither composer could be called a guitarist and so I thought, well, this means I might be the first guitarist to tackle such a project ... which seemed odd considering how many thousands of guitarists there are who must be better than me. And last year I read Koshkin has finished his cycle, which makes him the first guitarist to compose a large contrapuntal cycle in the history of the instrument.

Now if my ego were inextricably tied to doing something no one had done before I and the rest of us would all be miserable people indeed. I had a friend in college who remarked in frustration about a fellow college student of ours, "He writes about sex like nobody has ever discovered sex before." Well, okay, you know but as the axiom has it, everyone has a first time. We know that doesn't literally mean everyone of course but you get the idea. Something may be the most mundane and provincial thing on earth but for a person who has never had sex before and is in love sex appears to be a big, big deal. A person who has never ridden a bike before won't care that millions and millions of people have ridden bikes before.

There are freedoms, opportunities, and experiences that are not new and ultimately will not be new that may be new for us precisely because someone who has come before us fought the battles and undertook the struggles to make what is, for us, a still ultimately mundane experience to be normal, even as pedestrian as it must be to be taken for granted and not perceived, in its way, to be a miracle.
I am able to see because countless men and women refined the procedures of cataract removal surgery and scleral buckling to a point where I can read despite having had a very nasty cataract in one eye and a macular detachment in the other. I have benefited a great deal from not having to be the first patient to have needed such care! There are times when there is something new under the sun and you don't want to be involved in that unless it is the accidental necessity of what ends up being called history.

There are many ways in which we can regard the past. One is to only ever regard the past as full of human evils that must be transcended. This is a resolutely foolish and useless way to see history and people. You will never ultimately transcend the foibles and fallacies of previous generations even if you pierce through the veil of their cognitive biases and uncover ways to overcome those. You are the offspring of that generation, after all. You will still have cognitive biases and shortcuts of thought. You will still make some horrible mistakes based on almost inexcusably terrible oversights, underestimations, overestimations and accidents of historical blindness.

Another is to consider the past brilliant and worthy of preservation but in this case you are not preserving the past, you are looking to the past and reading yourself into it. The people who often seem most likely to do this, of course, are the people who are convinced of their power to change history now. Think of any number of Republican candidates who will try to sell themselves as continuing the legacy of Reagan these days. Consider any number of Democrats who would attempt to convince us that Camelot will return. Or, to be a classical guitarist about it, how many guitarists who I'm sure you've never heard of before have released press copy talking about how so-and-so carries on the great tradition begun by Segovia.

It probably goes without saying that I don't consider either approach to be very wise. There is a way to embrace the past without overlooking its horrors just as there is obviously a way to consider the new not only with some caution about how new it truly is but to consider that the new may not always be good. The new that is pursued is usually pursued, in the end, for some old reason that a lot of people could agree upon. That's the thing even about the truly new, the truly new when it comes, pleases us for the oldest of possible reasons.

Tall Skinny Kiwi: The English Church that went up a mountain and came down a hill ...

2012-01-16T16:30:00.000-08:00

http://tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com/tallskinnykiwi/2012/01/the-english-church-that-went-up-a-mountain-and-came-down-a-hill.html

Worth it just for the cartoon alone. The dry joke about why more people are actually coming to church is well worth the laugh it should bring you if you don't take your ideas of church (and the reasons you tell yourself people should be attending yours) too seriously.

HT: Practical Theology for Women: Tebowmania as the worst of American Christianity

2012-01-15T23:54:00.000-08:00

http://www.theologyforwomen.org/2012/01/much-of-tebowmania-represents-worst-of.html

Can't improve on this recent blog post by Wendy over at Practical Theology for Women.

"in context" is not just about paragraphs on a page

2012-01-15T21:11:00.000-08:00

I have noticed that when the situation of Ted Haggard comes up Drisccoll and his supporters say he gets taken out of context. He never talked about the Haggards. Yes, this absolutely true given what I saw published at the time. Driscoll critics need to bear this in mind and abandon the canard that Mark Driscoll said Ted Haggard hired a male prostitute and did drugs because Gayle Haggard had let herself go. There are far, far too many lazy people who have run with this canard and I fear that no matter how many times I may attempt to correct that it won't matter. People committed to thrashing Mark Driscoll via blogging will just keep doing that.

But it's no less true that when the situation of the Haggards was made known Mark Driscoll took time to say that some pastor's wives really let themselves go. And what was the context for mentioning this observation that had nothing whatever to do with the wives of pastors who "let themselves go?" Oh, that's right, the Ted Haggard scandal. In other words, even if Mark Driscoll wants to have his cake and eat it, too, he can say the remark was taken out of context in terms of paragraphs and bullet points but the context in which the statement was made was still in response to the news about Ted Haggard having spent time with a male prostitute and taking drugs.

So, unfortunately. it is only at the most woodenly literal level that Driscoll can say his statement was taken out of context. There is, as I hope to illustrate, a significant difference between a literary context and a historical context. Bible scholars must surely grasp this as necessary to understanding what a biblical text and a biblical author are getting at. Yes, in a purely literary context Driscoll said nothing about the Haggards and wives letting themselves go as having something to do with gay prostitutes and drug use.

Yet in historical context his statement could not have been taken out of context if he had never used the downfall of Ted Haggard as a pretext for deciding to "take one for the team" (which team was that?) and make a remark about sexually unavailable pastor's wives. A man who spends so much time telling guys they need to think about legacy, you would think, would have thought about this a bit more.

If he had exercised some self-restraint in that hour this quote about wives who really let themselves go wouldn't be around to be taken "out of context" at a purely literary level five or six years later when the historical context has remained fresh in the minds of anyone who bothered to read what Driscoll published.

Mark Driscoll may comfort himself with the idea that his critics keep taking things he says out of context and if he wants to keep thinking 1,000 members "left" when their memberships got cancelled in late 2007 and they were asked to "renew" then it makes sense that he could decide that a question about something like "wives who let themselves go" is "out of context" because it was connected to Ted Haggard and that was taken out of context. After all, what Mark Driscoll has told us is true from a certain point of view. If we were given the opportunity to interview the 1,000 members who didn't renew their membership they might provide a different story than the rather vague one Mark Driscoll shared with the Gospel Coalition about members who "left".

As for the remark about the wives who let themselves go it's small consolation that Mark Driscoll did not happen to speak to the situation of the Haggards. It doesn't matter that he didn't speak to that situation. He still used the Ted Haggard moment as the occasion to "take one for the team" and say a lot of pastor's wives really let themselves go. They put on weight, are not sexually generous (maybe I should rephrase that as "visually generous" but some guys that are married and pastors may be blind).

There seems to be something Mark Driscoll doesn't always get, that context is not just retroactive but cumulative. The trouble with a guy like Driscoll saying he's taken out of context is that the most problematic stuff he says is usually something that is problematic even when taken in context. Why, exactly, did Ted Haggard's revelation of drug use with a male prostitute become the opportunity to even mention that some straight male pastors felt trapped in their marriage to wives who were not satisfying them in the bedroom? As the downfall of a Haggard goes remarking on the wives of pastors that aren't Ted Haggard is a non-sequitur. Even those of us who were at one point very happy Driscoll supporters were scratching our heads wondering, "Why on earth did he just publish that!?"

Well, thanks to the abundant sharing of the Driscolls it seems now we may finally know. Real Marriage gives us a new context in which to understand the things Mark Driscoll has said and published in the past and the remark in the wake of the Haggard scandal about wives not being sexually generous is no exception. To go by the confessions in chapter 1 of Real Marriage it would appear Mark wasn't just thinking about other pastors who at some point felt trapped in a marriage to a wife who wasn't being sexually generous. He may have been remembering how wanting in sexual generosity his own wife might have been at the time, possibly even the day he decided to "take one for the team".

Here's a bit of unsolicited advice from one communications major to another. There's this thing called "on the record" and it means that what you say in the public sphere gets remembered. There's this other thing about the concept of "in context". If you're a professional minister "in context" does not merely mean that sentence B is considered in light of sentence A and sentence C. It means statements are considered in the broader context of your life in ministry, particularly if you end up being a public figure. If you said something in public five or six years ago about wives letting themselves go and then this year publish a book admitting you resented your wife for not being sexually generous the problem is that the new book provides a new context for understanding the old quote.

And now "in context" means that what the Driscolls admitted about their marital history sheds a new light on how and why Mark Driscoll would, on the event of Ted Haggard's downfall, seem curiously concerned about straight male husbands who were pastors who had wives that had them "trapped" in the marriage and let themselves go or were not sexually generous lovers. That concern (even if we agree it is a legitimate one) had pretty much nothing to do with a man hiring a male prostitute and taking drugs. As such, the only way to make sense of why a married man like Mark Driscoll would choose that strange occasion to "take one for the team" about sexually ungenerous wives may, at length, have finally been given some context by Real Marriage.

Mark Driscoll and the poker tell

2012-01-15T20:37:00.000-08:00

http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/01/a-poker-tell.php

I see Mark Driscoll has had a go at my old country. Well, not really. Only foreigners really talk of 'Brits.' Those of us from the UK never think of ourselves in those terms: we are English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish, especially during the Six Nations. To have a go at the old country, you have to be a bit more specific, I am afraid.

I am surprised at the offence his comments have apparently caused. I cannot speak for the Celts, but the English take a certain pleasure in being hated and rubbished by everyone else. The nation -- like the man -- who has no enemies has, after all, no honour. Nevertheless, there is one quotation which is worth noting:

"Let's just say this: right now, name for me the one young, good Bible teacher that is known across Great Britain. You don't have one - that's the problem."

Notice the three important elements of this sentence: the definite article, 'young' and 'known across Britain.' The Great Man, youth and fame: not high on the list of Paul's priorities; and three basic elements of celebrity culture.

A bit of a poker tell, is it not?

a haiku

2012-01-15T19:42:00.000-08:00

Today I got a
fortuneless fortune cookie.
Have I no future?

Link: J. S. Bangs reviews Destiny Disrupted

2012-01-15T19:30:00.000-08:00

http://jsbangs.com/2012/01/10/review-destiny-disrupted-a-history-of-the-world-through-islamic-eyes/

Self explanatory here and it's a concise overview of a book that might interest folks.

HT Jim West: Who Were Those Demon-possessed swine?

2012-01-15T17:01:00.000-08:00

http://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/who-were-those-demon-filled-swine-anyway/#comments

HT Practical Theology for Women: Esther providentially subverts stupid and wicked men

2012-01-15T00:23:00.000-08:00

I've linked to this intriguing post from Wendy at Practical Theology for Women. But the problem is the link is a bit wonky right now and won't lead you to the text. I also can't tell if there won't be another link that pops up by the time I link to a general site.

I have no commentary to add to what Wendy has written except by adding an emphasis that isn't in her original. You'll know it when you read it.

http://www.theologyforwomen.org/2012/01/how-should-christian-women-who-value.html

Thursday, January 12, 2012
How Should Christian Women Who Value Submission Think of Vashti and Esther?

I've spoken in times past of my concerns about the things some complementarians say that I think actually undermine the position. As a Christian woman, I have learned to strongly value the words help, submit, and respect—at least when those terms are used the way God intended when He used them first in His Word. The more I embrace these words in my home, the more annoyed I get with teachers who are sloppy with the terms and sloppy with Scripture when trying to defend these concepts. And one place we do that is with the story of Vashti and Esther in the Old Testament.

So I ask the simple question, how SHOULD women who are IN Christ and IMAGE BEARERS of God read the book of Esther? Well, first, the way I've worded the question sets me up as an authority that I am not. Second, it sounds like you are obligated to agree with my analysis, but that's not true either. As I often say, this blog is just a lecture to myself, so I'm really only answering the question how should this Christian woman (me) who values submission think of Vashti and Esther. Maybe I'll say something here that the Spirit causes to resonate with you, and that's good too.

There are a few principles that help me navigate the story of Esther. First, I must remember with any story in Scripture the very great difference in DESCRIPTIVE and PRESCRIPTIVE passages. Many, many times in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, we are given stories without commentary that we are not ever intended to embrace as examples to us. Don't cut up your concubine and spread her remains around the camp of those who murdered her. And please don't kill your daughter as a sacrifice just because she's the first one to walk out a tent after you make a vow to God. It's not a good idea to lay down in the middle of the night at the foot of the bed of a man whose attention you are hoping to land. And we don't prescribe that all widows move in with their mother in law and marry their husband's cousin just because the book of Ruth describes that scenario.

Second, Scripture is the best commentary on itself. We know from Genesis 2 that woman was created to be a strong helper in the image of God. That certainly reflects on Esther—she was strong for the children of God, helping to protect them by potentially sacrificing her own life to get the ear of the king. We also know from Genesis 3 that the curse among other things is that man oppresses woman (see here and here). Well, boy howdy, that certainly reflects on the story of Vashti and Esther. There is no indication of any virtue in the king towards women in that story. God's people are basically in captivity and the king demonstrates no faith in God. He's not the worst of kings, evidenced by the fact he didn't kill Vashti. But he's obviously feared—Esther keeps the fact she is Jewish secret from him at the start. And he is willing to wipe out an entire people, male and female, based on Haman's flimsy reasoning of their threat to his kingship. The king has a harem and concubines. There is nothing about him that reflects virtue or goodness.

In terms of Ephesians 5 and wifely submission, Esther does submit, but not to the king. She submits to Mordecai, who is neither her husband or father—when he says don't tell the king you're Jewish, she doesn't. When Mordecai encouraged her to defy the king's orders by approaching him about sparing the Jews, she does. In the end, there is nothing about Esther's story that can be reasonably construed as having anything to do with wifely submission in terms of Ephesians 5. [emphasis mine]

Here is what Esther teaches us as Christian women who value submission.
1) Nothing about submission.
2) Everything about the sovereignty of God.

Esther is a beautiful book, much like Ruth, on God's supernatural moving behind the scenes to preserve His people, particularly the line of the Messiah. To this end, Vashti's refusal is as much a part of God's sovereign plan to move Esther into the place where she could advocate for God's people as Esther's promotion to queen.

If you want to understand what God prescribes about help, submission, headship, and respect, don't read Esther for advice or example. However, the book of Esther has much to teach us about our sovereign Father in heaven who wrote a story before time began and declared it FINISHED on the cross. When we face uncertainties in life, the same God who is never mentioned in Esther is the same one flying under the radar at times in our life. He holds it all together though, and His plan will be accomplished:

Colossians 1: 16 For by him (Jesus) all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together

HT Jared Wilson: Bearing with one another ...

2012-01-14T18:24:00.000-08:00

http://gospeldrivenchurch.blogspot.com/2012/01/bearing-with-one-another-on-giving-and.html

Every writer needs an editor. You can't truly edit yourself. You may think you can and you may even be good at editing but if you think you don't need an editor you're probably still wrong unless your self-editing brings you regularly to the point where you reject an idea. T. S. Eliot, some scholars have noted, was in key ways the kind of poet he was because of the material he decided wasn't fit to print. Eliot demonstrated that you can become a remarkably important poet despite publishing a surprisingly small body of work compared to some other poets from the same time.

One of the things an editor can (and must) do is to sit down and read what you've written. An editor I worked very well with years ago explained the writer/editor relationship in the following way--as a writer I may be positive that I have said X and that I wrote exactly what I meant to say but the editor knows writing and knows where I'm coming from enough to plainly but tactfully indicate that what I have actually written is not X but Y. A lot of what is intended as criticism in discerna-blogging anchors itself to the assumption that if a person wrote and published X then X could be the only possible meaning. Having been a writer myself at different points in my life and having had my work published in a tiny handful of newspapers I've worked out that this is not the case and that it is the failure to make this rudimentary observation that has led not only discerna-bloggers but preachers to often fail to address things in more charitable (to say nothing of accurate!) ways.

The temptation to say the wittiest and swiftest thing in the moment of heat rarely ever produces any light. As the makers of an Emmy award winning show once joked with more than a little confession, you never actually win the Emmy by going for the Emmy. A lot of discerna-blogging and preacher responses to criticism all amount, in many cases, to going for winning the Emmy. Maybe this metaphor is an attempt to squeeze blood from a turnip but it often seems that preachers and bloggers have been trying to win some kind of Emmy.

It is important to read with some sympathy and it is important to write with some consideration. Have I said what I was really aiming for? Sometimes criticism is not an indication that what you were trying to say was wrong, it can be an indication that what you actually said is not at all what you thought you said. One of my music teachers gave me some advice about composing and scoring that has stuck with me and the advice was this: your job is not to be understood, your job is to not be misunderstood. The point is not that I write a piece of music that the musician likes, it's that I write my music in such a clear way and with enough command of idiom and technique that there's no way that musician will play the wrong notes if the musician is competent. There can come a point where the composer can complain about the imcompetence of musicians but there can come a point, if capable musicians say the score is sloppy, unclear, and that the music doesn't seem to make sense that this may not mean the composer's magnum opus is altogether bad. It may mean the score was sent to the musicians with too little work done to make it clear.

HT Tall Skiinny Kiwi on reasons to not plant a church

2012-01-14T17:50:00.000-08:00

http://tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com/tallskinnykiwi/2012/01/9-reasons-not-to-plant-a-church-in-2012.html#more

2. The measurement criteria of the church planting project, focusing on numbers of attenders and momentum of new church launch, is too narrow, too shallow, unholistic and ignores more vital measurable signs of a transformed society in its various spheres (economic, environmental, social, impact outside the church environment, etc).

Some folks I know locally have discussed a creepy implication of exactly reason 2 with respect to African missions and evangelism. How, exactly, is it that the boom in missionary outreach to Africa has yielded such huge numbers of conversions and yet, a couple of generations later the places that have the highest ratio of confessing Christians have the highest rates of HIV infection and the highest number of orphaned children? If the Christianity Westerners exported to Africa has been nothing more than a franchise model for correct doctrinal confession and a private pietism informed by American style civic religion then our missions work to Africa and charitable work may have left them far worse off in real economic terms than if we'd left them to heathens.

Then again, perhaps there's a kind of Christian faith and practice that leaves a lasting impact. I consider now something Fearsome Tycoon remarked over at the BHT, that if you look at the non-Anglo Protestant missionary activities those groups don't seem to have cast off a Christian confession whereas if you look at the groups that were the targets of Anglo Christian missionary work how many of those groups will identify as Christian? Stuff to mull over. Certainly it may warrant consideration that a lot of groups that think they may be "contextualizing" the Gospel (TM?) may have contextualized a white Anglo-culture and a franchise model that does not necessarily lead to long-term changes.

But I'm rambling about things that I admit I'm not necessarily informed about. It's my friends from Africa who have begun to discuss how a lot of how Western missions and evangelism got practiced in Africa has not led to enough lasting change. Does it mean the African Christians aren't "real" Christians or could it mean that the kind of Gospel Westerners brought to them was such a truncated Gospel it did not lead to any transformation in ethics or culture? I'm not sure but since I'm on another rambling spree I'm throwing this out for consideration.

A short overview of D. G. Hart's From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin

2012-01-14T17:23:00.000-08:00

Hart's book is short and easy to read, well, it's easier to read if you haven't had the reading interrupted by cataract removal surgery but you could have guessed that. I wrapped up the book a week ago and found it a helpful discourse on the history of conservative thought in American politics in the 20th century and how evangelicals who, despite imagining they have played a significant role in conservative thought and policy since the Reagan administration, have an overall history of not being conservative in any meaningful way. An enjoyable polemic for me, not because I don't consider myself conservative but because I've come to realize that if I have leaned toward traditionalist conservative ideas and I'm around anti-communists then that could explain some things.

More to the point, Hart's book has helped me understand a bit better how certain conservative relatives have reacted to me as though I were another college-educated flaming liberal and maybe not even a Christian because I didn't back Bush 2 in the 2000 election and thought Sarah Palin was a miserable excuse for a Hail Mary last-minute electoral move on the part of the McCain campaign back in 2008. That post World War 2 conservatives have included traditionalists, libertarians, and anti-communists may be the work of Captain Obvious but as a choir director used to tell some of us in the college choir days, never underestimate the obvious.

So to suggest at some length that the Reagan coallition ultimately has been unable to last since the end of the Cold War may "seem" obvious but it is a point that evangelicals, particularly, can seem to have overlooked. Reagan happened to galvanize a trio of interests that have since demonstrated they would not have fit together otherwise. Neo-conservatives with their committments to foreign policy and traditionalists will not agree with libertarians. Anti-communists who have shifted their anti-communism to anti-Islamo-fascism will commit to the kind of powerful government force that works against a libertarian impulse to keep big government out of my business. How could big government legitimately not wire tap you if your business involves import and export? It becomes a matter of potential national security. If liberals happen to have a problem of clinging to policies that conservatives consider damaging and radical liberals have, despite this, embraced ideas that are intenrally consistent even if they have a history of crashing and burning in the real world and even of being deployed in hegemonic and imperialistic ventures as much as they claim conservative ideas have.

I admit my interest in the book has been personal even more than academic. I have wanted to know how it could be that a man who has not voted for a Democrat and has even read The New Criterion at any point in his life could still be called by a family member a college-educated flaming liberal. Hart's book has helped me get a better sense of the historical, theological, and social movements within conservative politics and evangelicalism that have helped me get some idea how this paradoxical denigration can happen within a family.

Hat tip to Mere Orthodoxy for mentioning Hart's book and for the recent book title reference in a comment about marriage in Western Christendom. It has been a very pleasant surprise that there are books getting mentioned that are in my local city library. I may be unemployed but it's nice that city librarys in big secular liberal states still have such books available for check-out ... libraries that might not exsit if certain types of self-described conservatives had their way. As a fellow conservative friend of mine joked, some people may consider city libraries to just be another brand of socialism. I consider it to be an alternative to consumerism. I don't need to buy thousands of books if I can check them out from city libraries.

Two intriguing links from Mockingbird

2012-01-14T17:07:00.000-08:00

Molly Worthen reviews The Annointed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/books/review/the-anointed-evangelical-truth-in-a-secular-age-by-randall-j-stephens-and-karl-w-giberson-book-review.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=books

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/books/review/the-anointed-evangelical-truth-in-a-secular-age-by-randall-j-stephens-and-karl-w-giberson-book-review.html?_r=2&pagewanted=2&ref=books

The observation that evangelicals want to have it both ways is simple enough but it bears repeating. We want to have our cake and eat it, too. We'd like to have the intellectual chops to be at the grown up table in academia but then also be able to throw all of that off and hang out in our own circles.

The battle between cessationist and continuationist approaches to pneumatology and ecclesiology can be considered in light of such a tension. American Christians have two competing traditions that establish a foundation for church structure and authority. One is the charismatic authority of a, well, charismatic leader (whether that leader is charismatic in the Christianese sense or a hardcore cessationist). Another is the institutional authority that derives from committee-created chartering documents.

People don't want a "dead institution" because that seems to have no power or attractional element and there is an aversion to formalism and tradition in American folk spirituality. Yet the risks of the charismatic leader are nothing less than arbitrary despotism, nepotism, and other forms of injustice in which the accountability at the top has nothing to do with the expectations of accountability that flow relentlessly down to the bottom.

The institution has stability and yet it lacks the kind of glory that many want to participate in. If you've met adult converts to Orthodoxy or Catholicism you may notice that there's a kind of glory that is relocated away from individual leaders (broad-brushing here, I know, but bear with me) and toward institutions. There are still cult followings and partisan mash-ups in these traditions but they happen, it seems, in a setting where the debate is whether this or that star really holds up the ideals of the institution. In Protestant-land this also happens but what is more common today in terms of coverage is which super-star has the best street cred or school cred and "gets it".

By way of a digression something I've seen on the blogosphere lately is a question, the question is, if a person isn't able to preach on a topic until he has his ducks in a row how will he ever teach on the subject? That's a fair question and an answer to the question steps back a few paces. Let's consider that sometimes people will confess to a series of failings or sins that change our perspective of them. Further, the person may confess these things in a setting where they explain that though they struggled with this and that issue they had "no one" they could turn to at the time because all the people they tried turning to had moral failure in their lives or had ideas that seemed really "unfair".

If a man takes this approach then there may be good reasons for it but there is a risk that such a man is, well, not to put this too delicately, a kind of quasi-Donatist. If you are only willing to confess to a sinless person then there's Jesus but in the flesh and blood world we live in where is "accountability" there? If in reality you feel free to confess only to Jesus and not to anyone who could hold you accountable how is that "confess your sins one to another" that James talks about? If you took the liberty to not confess to people who you decided weren't fit to confess to or take advice from because of moral failings then if you deign to teach on subjects about which you yourself have so often been a failure this runs a risk, of being a self-abnegating praxis once it is applied consistently not just as your rule for yourself but the rule others follow for you as you demonstrate it by example.

John Horgan reviews The Folly of Fools.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/books/review/the-folly-of-fools-by-robert-trivers-book-review.html?_r=3&ref=books&pagewanted=all

Trivers calls deceit a “deep feature” of life, even a necessity, given genes’ brutal struggle to prevail. Anglerfish lure prey by dangling “bait” in front of their jaws, edible butterflies deter predators by adopting the coloring of poisonous species. Possums play possum, cowbirds and cuckoos avoid the hassle of raising offspring by laying their eggs in other birds’ nests. Even viruses and bacteria employ subterfuge to sneak past a host’s immune systems. The complexity of organisms, Trivers suggests, stems at least in part from a primordial arms race between deceit and deceit-detection.

Our big brains and communication skills make us master dissemblers. Even before we can speak, Trivers notes, we learn to cry insincerely to manipulate our caregivers. As adults, we engage in “confirmation bias,” which makes us seize on facts that bolster our preconceptions and overlook contradictory data. We wittingly and unwittingly inflate the qualities of ourselves and others in our religious, political or ethnic group. We denigrate those outside our in-group as well as sexual and economic rivals.

Hmm, this last bit reminds me of the laments of nice guys that the nice guys finish last. Maybe they do but maybe, as some women have at times noted, these "nice guys" do not realize they are not nice guys at all. Does this justify the "jerks" being jerks? Nah, but it might mean that in the arms race between deceit and deceit-detection once you've obtained the physical, social, financial, intellectual, and emotional resource you want then you stop worrying about whether or not you got this because you deserved it and focus on defending the legitimacy of what you have as deriving from the quality of your character and not, as Ecclesiastes warns us, a providential luck of the draw.

Peter Lumpkins, Real Marriage footnotes, and redaction

2012-01-14T15:02:00.000-08:00

http://peterlumpkins.typepad.com/peter_lumpkins/2012/01/real-marriage-is-mark-driscoll-fudging-in-the-footnotes-by-peter-lumpkins.html
http://peterlumpkins.typepad.com/peter_lumpkins/2012/01/real-marriage-is-mark-driscoll-fudging-in-the-footnotes-part-ii-by-peter-lumpkins.html

Peter Lumpkins has spent a little bit of time considering the possibility of textual redaction in the footnotes of Mark and Grace Driscoll's book Real Marriage, and considers whether or not the footnotes have not, in some cases, done a bit of interpolation in one case and excision in another.

If the Driscolls (or mainly Mark) like to throw in footnotes they're welcome to. Adding a word here and cutting a word there that changes the meaning of some footnotes backing up some of the claims that the Bible endorses certain acts warrants some attention.

This wouldn't be the first time Driscoll has effectively made up something that doesn't fit the primary or secondary materials to get a point across. The most easily documented claim was that the Targum Neofiti dates from the 2nd century BCE and that it shows some Jews read the Bible, believed what it said, and affirmed a Trinitarian formulation of Yahweh. Uh huh. So it's not an entirely huge shock that Mark Driscoll (because it's unlikely Grace has stumped for this over twelve years) has stuck with his citation and case for oral sex to be in Song of Songs since he got that idea about a decade ago.

The thing is that most people don't pay attention to those small details. They pay attention to the big picture and Driscoll knows people pay attention to the big picture. So factual errors, misrepresentation, and bluffing aren't important or the people who focus on these small but sometimes telling errors as indicative of problematic patterns are, well, told these things are petty. So if 1 Timothy 5 is habitually conscripted to say stay at home dads are in sin rather than focusing on the passage's discussion of widows, well, we're invited to not fret about it or people say that the whole thing is spot on because Mark Driscoll is going for an axiom or praxis we agree with.

Citations and statistics aren't the end of every discussion. Sometimes they are just the beginning. A citation to a "respected OT scholar" doesn't always lead to that citation proving the preacher was citing the scholar accurately. Citing a commentator like Joseph Dillow does not in itself prove that Dillow knew what he was talking about. If I cited Mark Driscoll authoritatively as having established that the Targum Neofiti taught the Jews believed Yahweh was a Trinity even before Jesus was born I do two things: 1) I prove that I trust a guy who has no idea what he's talking about but speaks authoritatively as though he has done meaningful study on a topic 2) more importantly, by shoe-horning an anachronistically Christian gloss on even this allegedly pre-Christian targum I have just trivialized the centuries of theological debate church fathers did about apostolic writings to arrive at the doctrine of the Trinity. A guy like Driscoll can just pretend that the Church Fathers and Athanasius didn't have to do any real leg work to arrive at the Trinity because, hey, the Targum Neofiti was here!

Except that it wasn't around until some centuries AFTER the time of Christ. So if I invoked Driscollian authority about a targum I would be embracing two different levels of stupid, really three. Sadly if Mark Driscoll would have us believe 1,000 members left during the 2008 Doctrine series as Mars Hill tightened up doctrinal requirements there's no evidence of more stringent demands on the part of Driscoll to make accurate quotes, citations, or historically compelling arguments about targums. And the reality was that everyone's membership was cancelled out and people were asked to renew at that point. It's all a matter of one's point of view. Either 1,000 members "left" as Driscoll sees it or 1,000 members simply didn't continue renewing their membershp as they had in years past. As Ben Kenobi told Luke, "What I have told you is true, from a certain point of view." And for folks within that point of view, of course it's true, and because it's true in the important parts then fudging some footnotes isn't important.

Gaslighting (HT to Becky Garrison over at Bill's blog)

2012-01-14T14:35:00.000-08:00

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/power-in-relationships/200905/are-you-being-gaslighted

If, as some people say, there are five love languages does this mean there are five different ways of gaslighting people?

Matthew Lee Anderson on Real Marriage--a lesson that we should not underestimate the obvious

2012-01-14T02:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.mereorthodoxy.com/real-marriage-review-pt-1/
http://www.mereorthodoxy.com/real-marriage-review-pt-2/

I've made it clear (despite links from other bloggers that seem to have misunderstood what I have been writing) that I not only have not read all of Real Marriage but don't feel a need to. I have no reason to doubt other people will be genuinely helped by the book in some way. I have written earlier on this blog about how I have found the confessions from chapter one depressing, particularly as someone who was actually part of Mars Hill from about 1999-2008.

But I love reading (and writing) analysis and criticism. You know what I mean (or should), the kind of analysis and criticism that is not "critical" in some pejorative sense but in the academic sense. I like to think through connections and ideas and theme. I loved threading G. K. Chesterton's observations about the lunatic from Orthodoxy into C. S. Lewis' observation about Eros as demon in The Four Loves to arrive at "Heart of Ice" and its depiction of Mr. Freeze in Batman: the animated series. The best criticism is not an exercise in pedantry but a journey of discovery.

So tonight I turned to Matthew Lee Anderson's review of Mark and Grace Driscoll's Real Marriage and stumbled upon a moment of discovery. There was something I was unable to put together about what I found depressing about the chapter and it's not necessarily something the chapter may indicate about the book as a whole. No, Anderson gets to something that I realize describes my impression of the majority of public teaching Driscoll has done that I could remember from my Mars Hill days, all those years hearing Mark say stuff from the pulpit that retroactively has taken on significance with some confessions.

But first I will note a few things out of Anderson's order for reasons that I hope are clear by the time I wrap things up.

Let me pick a specific problem that I think stands out. They rightly acknowledge that the effects of pornification on our culture and our views of sexuality. As they put it, “young people are increasingly likely to consider that which is pornographic to be normative sexuality” (143). Very true, and aptly put.

Yet there is no acknowledgment that the acts described in the infamous “Can we _______” chapter have been brought to the mainstream by the very pornographic culture we’re decrying. We might call it a genetic fallacy and say that the act’s okay, despite the culture that is normalizing it. But given Driscoll’s (and my own) interpretation of Romans 1 and homosexuality, that won’t pass muster. Culture and the acts they sanction are more interrelated than we realize, and if the tree is rotten the fruit might be questionable too.

The Driscoll’s are surprisingly unconcerned with the pornification of the marriage bed, and don’t quite seem to realize that the questions themselves might be coming from a people whose imaginations have been stunted. It’s occasionally worth challenging the premise of questions in order to reach beneath the surface and understand the problematic forces at work in our evangelical culture of sexuality. That the Driscoll’s do not is nothing if not a missed opportunity.

This is, to be very plainspoken, one of the things that eventually came to bother me even while I was a member of Mars Hill. If the acts the Driscolls describe in the infamous chapter have been brought to the mainstream by the very pornographic culture the Driscolls warn against on what basis do people discern that they are within the realm of Christian liberty?

Driscoll’s definition of lust seems to, well, miss the mark. He detours a whole lot of Christian history and witness describing lust as disordered or inordinate desires

Anderson goes on to explain that this is a problematic definition of lust at its base. He spends time discussing that the problem with lust is not simply the object of the desire but the nature of the desire itself so far as sexual desire goes. Now I have heard a pastor or two make a case that lust/idolatry can and does spring from a disordered desire but this association was not one restricted merely to sexual lust.

In many passages in Scripture lust and adultery are descriptions of an impulse to non-sexual sin and as ways of talking about idolatry. When I was at Mars Hill I saw some on-line discussions about whether or not it was even POSSIBLE for a person to lust after their spouse. The idea was that since lust was defined simply as sexual desire that was impure that, no, this couldn't be true. I, the single, never-married virgin proffered a drastically different way of discussing lust. If "lust" is more globally connected in the biblical documents with idolatry and adultery is also associated with spiritual infidelity then it can be the easiest thing in the world for a person to lust after a spouse as though one were lusting after another god.

God does not condemn lust for anyone that a person may have for a person who is not one's spouse, God condemns all lust as idolatrous. It just so happens that some lust involves sexual idolatry and this can happen within a marriage. But not all lusts that are idolatrous are adulterous in the most literal sense. Some of us realize we can have a lust for what may be useless theological debates and don't always resist temptation like we should. Well, I speak for me, not you. If you feel like going back to a concordance some time and finding some lust that God says is totally awesome and liberated and free and without shame you can get back to me and give me the chapter and verse sometime.

But what Anderson mentions in part two of his review of Real Marriage that haunts me, now that I have read, it is this:

At the end of it, we may have seen the “truth about sex, friendship, and life together,” but it’s not clear we’ve seen the beauty. And therein lies a significant shortcoming.

This is what I find haunting, the realization that after hearing maybe a decade of sermons from at least one Driscoll touching on marriage and sex it has dawned on me that I've never heard anything that made marriage sound beautiful. Driscoll can keep telling us it's beautiful (much more on this shortly) but that isn't the same thing as drawing out the actual beauty he says is in real marriage of Song of Songs.

If at this point Driscoll says that says more about me than his preaching or teaching I can just agree, and then ask: "Well, you've got one of the older love poems in the history of world literature. You keep saying it is frank without being crass. Yet if after ten years all you can wring from the poetry of the Scriptures are techniques and positions; a book full of lists of bullet points and grids about what is and isn't right to do in marital sex; various statistics backing up sweeping assertions that are sometimes true; and then you round things off with advice about a five year plan ... is it actually my fault I missed the bit where there might be some beauty and poetry in there?" Well, maybe there's the tortured beauty of the cross that we evangelicals are so loathe to explore ... .

It's the instruction manual that has one level of meaning and a practical application with bullet points. It's the instruction manual that is first of all concerned with getting from point A to point B properly with the fewest digressions. It's the instruction manual that lays out from the lesson plan where you should by year 5 if you've passed all your exams.

It's the poem that can be enjoyed for thematic fluidity and even frivolity. It's the poem that can revel in something that doesn't even mean anything but sounds pleasing. It is the poem that invites swirling levels of meaning and association, nuances and images that take on different meanings at different times when the same poem is read. It is the poem that alludes with a wink and subverts with a pun. It is the poem that can elude and allude with the esoteric and opaque just when you think you have grasped the plain and only meaning of the text. To borrow a line from some poet I'm not sure Driscoll has read, it is the poem that is free to not mean but be.

While form can follow function in the arts, as in architecture, when a chapter has a title like "Taking Out the Trash" could that not signal to us that some of the art or poetry at stake has a certain functionality like the beautiful ivory-toned lines of a well-functioning toilet with a sturdy toilet seat that has a fascinating seat cover that was created by, I don't know, the Rembrandt of toilet-seat cover art? Such an artist must exist, really, and who could deny in the moment of dire need that a toilet can become, in that urgent moment, the most practical and necessary and, yes, beautiful of all domestic works of art? But it has an art and beauty you don't bother to consider even when the thing functions as it should. And when it doesn't function as it should you curse its failure.

Mark Driscoll once joked that as members of the church body go he was (at least sometimes) the colon so perhaps Mark Driscoll is precisely such an artist for such a time. But perhaps this, if true, confirms Anderson's concern. To continue with my mundane metaphor, the art of the toilet is a domestic necessity for the Western church yet the toilet is, well, apt to be stained by those very things for which it has been appointed to be eliminator, always carrying with it the whiff of toxins and human byproducts unless it is itself scrubbed free of that debris.

Perhaps the observation of both sympathetic and unsympathetic critics is something as prosaic as this, if Mark Driscoll is the toilet of evangelicalism whose goal is to flush out all the waste that does not constitute the true Christian evangelical faith who, exactly, cleans the toilet? Let's run with the supposition that Driscoll is the colon of the body of Christ as he has joked and this is a necessary role. When does the colon need an enema? When does the toilet need to be cleaned? Are we supposed to believe that Driscoll is a self-cleaning toilet? Is his wife a functional pastor? But in marriage the two become one so this is still, at bottom, a self-cleaning toilet. Let no one volunteer to clean the toilet that cleans itself. The consequences could be dire. If Mark Driscoll had never once referred to himself, even in jest, as the colon of the body of Christ I wouldn't have even thought of any of this.

It may be some of the critics have circled listlessly around certain observations they have not been able to make, perhaps, because the discovery is too prosaic for the words they want to use. Perhaps they do not truly have words prosaic enough to meet the prosaic discovery on its prosaic occasion? Perhaps some only see the stereotype and missed that perhaps the Driscolls sincerely aspired to the gestalt. Anderson remarks that the grittiness of the first chapter finds its resolution in a paragraph. To wit, we must say the paragraph of resolution must be, as in any best-selling contemporary evangelical book, a pedestrian deus-ex-machina.

As Mark Driscoll said so tersely about his relationship to Grace in a service about a decade ago, "We broke some rules, but God is faithful." Duly noted but that didn't convey to me that there is poetry or beauty in marriage then anymore than a book seems to be conveying that beauty to even sympathetic readers now. Driscoll has tended to be stronger about saying what we have been freed from than explaining what we are freed to do. If anything what we are freed to do often ends up, in his hands, transformed into a "have to" no matter how many times he reminds us it's supposed to be a "get to".

But perhaps this sums things up for me as I've mulled over precisely why I found chapter 1 of Real Marriage depressing when I read it. It's not just the grim realization that the high flown homilies on sex from the pulpit did not match the bitter and prosaic reality of the Driscoll's real marriage. It's that there was no beauty in the presentation Mark Driscoll did on those Song of Songs sermons all those years. There was no poetry because there was in the end nothing more than poetry as a pretext for prose.

Driscoll, as he's been so keen to tell us, is a man with a communications degree from a top tier academic program in America. He has been inspired by stand up comedians, who traffic in stereotypes, generalizations, hyperbole, and statements backed by vehemence of expression rather than delicacy of observation or juxtaposition. The public speaker is enjoined broadly as follows:

Tell them what you're going to tell them
Tell them
Tell them what you told them

And this Driscoll does quite well.

But what are poets and storytellers so steadily admonished to do? We all know this one. Show, don't tell. The Driscolls are both communications majors from a top tier university, as Driscoll is so pleased to have told us lately, but it seems that they utterly lack any poetic impulse since they are so busy telling us in various ways what the poetry is talking about they're not showing us much more than that they're telling us stuff.

They do not, when I stop to think about it, even trust that a divinely inspired poem can show us enough of what we need to know for them to not tell us in an entirely new book what they say they have learned from that old book. Whoever wrote Song of Songs really needed those Docent group statistics. They've shown us how bad their marriage was and then comes the "working through core issues" and statistics about people you shouldn't be like. But perhaps by that point the use of the erotic poetry of scripture has become nothing more than a pretext for an agenda, an agenda that is so literally more prosaic than the poem could be in its worst translation we are compelled to ask what the point of introducing poetry into the discussion served to begin with.

So the goblet of the moon becomes the vulva. The lover whose body seems one with the natural world, as it is one with the beloved through poetic juxtaposition and a physical and emotional bond, becomes someone who wants to try out some new positions and some brand new moves. The person who whispers "Set me as a seal upon your heart" really wants to get down to the practical business of the five year plan to reverse engineer life with you and plan out the right Christmas memories for the kids this year.

Over the last ten years nobody had to tell me the Driscolls have a power for draining the beauty from poetry, they've shown us over those ten years that they'd rather tell us what the poem means than to let the poetry show us how delicately yet eagerly it eludes and alludes. Anderson's review has caught my attention. He has shown me something ten years of Driscoll sermons can't quite tell--there are things about draining the beauty and mystery from erotic poetry that even a virgin can figure out if someone can just show him how it happened.

Internet Monk: What is a Song Good For?

2012-01-13T20:40:00.001-08:00

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/what-is-a-song-good-for

I'm going to reframe a statement from one of Paul's letters in a way that I hope may inspire some thought.

No style of music is off limits for a Christian listener or a Christian musician but not all styles of music are liturgically useful or practical.

HT Phoenix Preacher: Geoff Surrat on five scary trends that could shipwreck the church

2012-01-13T20:40:00.000-08:00

http://geoffsurratt.typepad.com/inner_revolution/2012/01/five-scary-trends-that-could-shipwreck-the-church-pt-1.html
http://geoffsurratt.typepad.com/inner_revolution/2012/01/five-scary-trends-pt-2-worship-worship.html
http://geoffsurratt.typepad.com/inner_revolution/2012/01/five-scary-trends-pt-3-worship-worship.html
http://geoffsurratt.typepad.com/inner_revolution/2012/01/planting-pandemic.html
http://geoffsurratt.typepad.com/inner_revolution/2012/01/five-scary-trends-pt-4-pastor-praise.html

an update on Batman: The Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire

2012-01-13T19:26:00.000-08:00

For those of you who read parts 1 through 3 of the above-mentioned series I've been writing about Batman: the animated series for Mockingbird, fret not (if you were fretting at all). I still have this project on the table and since 2012 marks the 20th anniversary of this revolutionary and classic childrens' program I will do my best to write about the series

You might have put together that the pending part 4, "The Wounds of Discovery" has been even tougher for me to write than part 3 ("Heart of Ice, Heart of Wrath"). As I mentioned here I only made the breakthrough I needed to finish part 3 by searching for a C. S. Lewis book and grabbing a G. K. Chesterton book instead. Well, eye surgery and other off-line concerns have slowed down the completion of part 4 and part 4 is, I must confess, remarkably challenging.

In the past I had many a fellow nerdy colleague with whom to discuss ideas for such essays. I could brainstorm, bounce ideas off of people, mull things over, and this on a regular basis. There's nothing like 26 months of no job and rarely seeing such nerdy friends to slow down the brainstorming process. Life has a habit of happening, and sometimes life slows you down. Beyond the huge interruption of cataract removal surgery there have been the matters of belated family holiday celebrations; the continuing search for something like a normal day job; and a recent writing project I've been tackling that involves having to watch what amount to think tank presentations that I have been able to tackle but not without the help of some caffeinated beverages. Oh, yes, and the matter of getting my guitar sonata in f minor further along the path to getting published.

I finished D. G. Hart's book on evangelicals and conservative political thought and though I'd love to write about it I'm no longer sure I'm going to. I had some personal interest in taking up the book and its subject but because the subject is personal I'm not sure I want to blog about it any longer. There are some things to be worked out in a thought-out way in public settings such as a blog or a book.

But there are some things that are sufficiently personal that they do not warrant being blogged about or being transformed into a book that is used to promote a set of ideas and formulas (while being presented as though it were NOT a set of formulas). I'm going to remain vague about things because there are some things to be worked out without dragging things into the public sphere. If I were to cast about for a counterexample that has impressed upon me the importance of this principle I probably don't have name it if you've read more than two posts at this blog.

But I can be specific about "The Wounds of Discovery". I'm half-way through and excited about what I have finished, and want to finish the second half and get to parts 5 and 6 this year.

I haven't forgotten that I'd like to write some more about chamber music for guitar and I've got a CD by the d'Amore Duo I'd love to write about. But since odds are very high you've never heard of them before I want to try to give an overview of this oboe/guitar duo from their three commercial recordings and perhaps discuss oboe/guitar literature at a broader level. I am also mulling over writing something about a composer whose works for guitar have languished in obscurity for decades that are getting a small revival, a composer whose work I learned about thanks to one of the d'Amore Duo's recordings. But I'm trying to save that for another time. After all, if this blog mentions cartoons and classical guitar and I don't get to it I'm missing some of my favorite subjects!

Mark Driscoll, William Wallace II, and Pussified Nation part 269, another nation

2012-01-12T17:57:00.000-08:00

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/mark.driscoll.takes.aim.at.the.cowards.in.the.british.church/29159.htm

http://pastormark.tv/2012/01/12/a-blog-for-the-brits?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+pastormark+%28PastorMark.tv%29

And here I was just discussing street cred today. There's more than one kind of cred to be invoked in public discourse and Mark Driscoll just played from another kind.

What we have here, folks, looks like a fantastic centrifuge full of centrifugal spin. Mark assures us he got a communications major from a top tier American university. So much for street cred when it's time to take down a journalist. We're going from the blue collar kid who falsfied id to get his first job and lived behind a strip club to the worldly-wise educated college grad who can see through the facade of a fellow communications/media wizard and get at the real issues. Now is the time to mention that both Mark and Grace Driscoll have communications degrees from one of the top programs in the United States and we saved the British from Hitler, by the way. ;-)

British journalists married to women pastors are going to have agendas. So far, so obvious. Driscoll's team has given us nine reasons why singles should buy his book on Real Marriage. That Mark Driscoll even has a website called PastorMark TV speaks of his having an agenda that is so obvious he's put his name on it. What Driscoll is providing here is simply counterspin to the first spin and in neither case am I inclined to take either seriously. So a liberal British egalitarian journalist married to a woman pastor shows up with spin when Mark and Grace thought this was going to be an interview about, oh yes, the book they're promoting.

Can't a megachurch pastor promote nine reasons single people should buy his book in peace without having some liberal egalitarian journalist grilling him about controversial statements he's kept making over the course of fifteen years? Mark spent a whole conference hanging out with Doug Wilson even though he doesn't agree with Wilson about the Confederacy and the Civil War or the subject of the continual availablity of spiritual super-powers to Christians. If Driscoll could do that for a few days surely he can withstand an hour with a liberal egalitarian journalist married to a woman preacher who is uncomfortable with substituionary atonement.

I'm not a liberal UK Christian and don't land where they land so I'm not going to land there. But I am also a communications major and do not take Driscoll's polemic seriously because I've discovered how he basically made things up about the Targum Neofiti and turned the book of Nehemiah into a typology about himself. I do not at this point trust him to be the straight shooter to set the record straight just because some liberals don't agree with him. Some liberals are, frankly, more responsible scholars than Driscoll is. I don't have to be a liberal to note this.

A blog post for the Brits is a rerun of the two things William Wallace II has been doing for a while now. First there's the ad hominem (the liberal British egalitarians who don't feel comfortable with penal substitutionary atonement basically aren't Christians anyway, so there) and a slightly less obvious reductio ad absurdum (if there aren't young men preaching in a red-blooded way then there might as well be NO men in the UK preaching the real Gospel right now because preachers who are actually Mark Driscoll's age in the present don't count). Okay, but your agenda is selling your book, Mark. Spin on top of spin is just more spin. Going to Australia and telling them they're pussies isn't that different from saying in an interview that the British are pussies for not having a new Spurgeon.

Exactly why there has to be a new Spurgeon 20-something rock star evangelical pastor is not explained, rather it is assumed. It's smarter to say people in the UK should pray for a new Spurgeon because that's a sounder prayer request than writing something like, "Pray that the UK gets its own Driscoll." But who says God wants there to be a new Spurgeon or Driscoll for the UK? Was the apostle Paul in his 20s when he began his preaching career? How would we know this? If by Driscoll's estimation an either widowed or divorced guy transformed the world with his preaching, teaching, and epistles that make up most of the New Testament why would it matter that the UK lacks a 20-something evangelical rerun of his favorite preacher? Answer, it doesn't actually matter but Driscoll wants us to believe it should matter. Maybe preachers who are functionally Calvinist Baptists but don't want the denominational label just have a tunnel vision in which Anglicans and Presbyterians don't count.

A guy who has spent fifteen years saying things like "I'm no pansy ass therapist" to media outlets shouldn't be shocked if reporters who have agendas dredge up past controversial statements. A communications major should know this already. So the interview was an hour long and adversarial. Who has included adversarial statements about Twilight and Avatar and egalitarians any given hour's sermon from the pulpit every Sunday and have for more than a decade? And we're supposed to feel for this guy and his wife after they've pontificated about the sinfulness of stay at home dads? Meh.

Something to consider now is that Mark Driscoll has not only played worldly wise school cred for himself by invoking his communications degree from a top tier American institution, he's done this for Grace Driscoll, too. The humble housewife with five kids card has been taken out of play for today's polemic. Now she's the media genius who is her husband's equal who knows how to see through the agendas of reporters. Problem is this is a double edged blade that means we are tipped off that Grace Driscoll is able to spin with Mark and promote books, too. If you're shrewd enough to see through spin and know when an agenda is being pushed it's because you know how the rules of the game work and have been playing it yourself. She is officially co-opted into a media juggernaut otherwise known as Mars Hill and Driscoll has made it clear she has the credentials for it. I'm going to assume Grace knew this meant, among other things, occasionally running into an adversarial journalist. If she's willing to say on record that stay-at-home dads have sin issues then welcome to the public sphere. You can't go back.

So a liberal reporter from the UK feels uncomfortable with penal substitutionary atonement. Back in 2005 Driscoll preached a whole series of sermons discussing all the other wonderful understandings of the atonement Christians can and should embrace and even mentioned a book by, of all people, a British theologian named John Stott. There are other understandings of the atonement around which Christians can meet and agree. Mark should know, seeing as he preached a christus exemplar sermon back in 2005. Suggest that christus exemplar takes on new, deeper, and more beautiful significance if you embrace with that the penal substitutionary view and emphasize that if you reject one and accept the other you are short-selling the significance of the Cross. He did that once, back in 2005. As smart as Driscoll is implicitly and explicitly telling us he is it apparently didn't cross his mind to make the simple move I just outlined. Thinking on your feet may just be tougher to do if your goal is to promote a book and somebody comes with "an agenda" that is actually different from promoting the book.

But for the sake of today's polemic make sure to emphasize the liberal reporter with an agenda is uncomfortable with penal substitutionary atonement and is egalitarian to ensure the ad hominem is complete. "Pussified Nation" rolls on and now we're invited to appreciate that it's the Brits who are pussies because they don't have a William Wallace II of their own.

Since Driscoll's a communications major who studied in one of the top tier programs in the United States he'll remember some tricky concepts like "on the record" and "public figure" and "public record" and "internet". This could let him remember that once something goes on the record you could get asked about it at any time even if you've pulled down the sermons; shut down the unmoderated Midrash; or dredged up intimate details about your marriage in a published book. It's out there now and if you don't want to get asked about it by adversarial journalists there was always the option to have not broadcast it in a mass media venue.

Just because I'm not a liberal Christian doesn't mean I can't identify spin in response to spin. Nine reasons singles should buy Real Marriage? Who is Driscoll kidding? If Mark Driscoll wants to sell himself as the evangelical Dan Savage he shouldn't be surprised when not all evangelicals jump on the bandwagon and he should be even less surprised when non-evangelicals are even less sold on this publicity campaign. I would have thought a communications major would have worked that out over the last two decades.

Slate: The End of Cred--officially about gangsta rap but potentially about rock star pastors

2012-01-12T16:27:00.000-08:00

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2012/01/rick_ross_rich_forever_the_teflon_don_isn_t_who_he_says_he_is.html

Something puzzling happened in the face of this exposé—the hip-hop equivalent, one might have thought, of a James Frey moment. Ross’ rap-world prestige only grew. On his solo debut, from 2006, he had seemed something like the Stone Temple Pilots to Young Jeezy’s Pearl Jam: a likable-enough instrument of record-label market-cornering. Like Jeezy, Ross commanded a gritty drug-slinging persona and matched it with a blunt, unfussy rapping style—gruff voice, magisterial slowness, abundant repetition, minimal wordplay—that doubled as ostensible proof of his authenticity. The absence of artfulness implied the absence of artifice. But whereas Jeezy had laid the groundwork for his major-label debut over several years with mixtapes and independent releases, building buzz from the ground up, Ross seemed to arrive from out of nowhere, and he was easy to dismiss as a one-hit sound-alike, rushed to airwaves to capitalize on the popular coke-rap tren.

There are superstars who slowly and steadily emerge through decades of honing a craft and honing a vision and there are others who after just a few years of focusing on a single thing explode on to the scene. In rap this dynamic seems to take place one way, while in megachurch preachers it occurs in another way.

For instance, there are a megachurch pastors who become famous less for any one thing than for a more comprehensive approach to the overall work of pastoral activity and consideration of Scripture. A Spurgeon, for instance, is not known for one set of sermons or ideas, is he? A D. James Kennedy may be remembered for being conservative but not necessarily for a single memorably articulated message. A Benny Hinn will get known for "the annointing" and healing services. A Jesse Jackson will get known for his political activism. A Todd Bentley will get known for "fresh fire". A Mark Driscoll is known as "the cussing pastor" (even though this is not actually accurate) and as the sexpert pastor (as Real Marriage continues to establish despite the salvo in chapter one, no less,where Mark admits he spent a large amount of time in his marriage resenting his wife's frigidity and neither realizing he played a role in her feeling unable to trust him or that she had a history of sexual abuse)

But Ross’ success in the wake of the Officer Ricky scandal is more than a story of artistic improvement. It also demonstrates that hip-hop audiences have changed their valuation of street credibility from the requisite it once seemed to be to something far more fluid.

The stable fan base of Mark Driscoll even in the wake of his confessing he didn't live up to his pulpit spiel about a vibrant and unshackled sex life, may be a Christianese version of the gap between the posture of the gangsta rapper and the reality of the professional entertainer's normal life. So after a decade of preaching about Song of Songs like this was what was implicitly happening in his own marriage it turns out that this wasn't the case at all with the Driscolls. Oh well, the gangsta rapper may have been shown to have not been living the life he rapped about but that's not important, the rap is still compelling, right?

The megachurch pastor street cred rap may be the reverse of the gangsta rap street cred in chronology and social/ethical trajectory ... but it may be that both come together to form a grand Moebius strip that plays out across white and black American pop culture. The evangelical equivalent of street credibility may be as fluid now in its way as street credibility in gangsta rap may be more fluid now than it was twenty or thirty years ago. It's not that the reality has to fit the stance or the posse in every single detail. Thou doest have to say the magic words exactly, in theory, but in the end what we get is the reply from gangsta rappers and rock star pastors that, "Maybe not every tiny little syllable but, basically, I said `em. Now send me home."

Now if you read my relatively recent blog post about the different approaches to sonata allegro form taken by Sor, Giuliani and Diabelli you would understandably conclude I have neither a strong interest in, nor any significant knowledge about, rap or R&B and this would be right. Other than Cee Lo Green I admit I haven't remembered much of anything from rap or R&B that I've heard in the last ten or fifteen years. But there are times when I like to read about styles of music I don't usually listen to when there's an interesting cultural commentary element to it. Jonah Weiner's commentary on the shifting nature of street credibility as a foundational element to the personae of gangsta rappers seems to quite naturally bleed of the streets into the pulpits of megachurch rock-star celebrity preachers. Carl Trueman was right to bring up what he called the aesthetics of plausibility.

So if Mark Driscoll admits in a book deal confession/marriage manual he spent maybe a decade not getting the sex he so ardently preached about from 1999 through maybe 2007, so what? The book is called Real Marriage, we know it's about a real marriage because that letter L is tilted off to one side to tell us from the cover this is going to be vulnerable and real. If we don't know Driscoll from Bob Barker that dangling letter L will make sure to spell things out before we even open the book.

Gangsta rappers and rock star pastors ... some potentially interesting overlap.

evangelicalism is a world without eunuchs ... or is it?

2012-01-11T22:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/guest-post-quiet-desperation/comment-page-1#comment-621831

If there is a segment of Scripture about which virtually no evangelical would shout, "That'll preach" these days, Isaiah 56, with its poetic discourse about eunuchs, could well be one of them. Women who blog about faith and sexuality and singleness have often (and we know how often if we've read even three such blog entries) about the plight of singleness. There will also be some not altogether puzzling hand-wringing about "it is not good ... to be alone." This shall often be followed by "wait on the Lord's timing."

This is where I say we get to the eunuchs because whereas women can look to the passage on Isaiah about the barren woman and indirectly apply that to single women today as a form of hope for marriage in this life a castrated royal servant has absolutely ZERO chances of a family "legacy". Even though Jesus said some were born eunuchs, some were made eunuchs by men, and others made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of God you will not find evangelicals, as a rule, preaching about eunuchs. The whole point of the eunuch was his physical condition is not the kind of thing that could get reversed.

Thanks to the marvel of modern medicine it is possible for a man to get snipped and then unsnipped. There's an episode of Scrubs in which Dr. Cox gets snipped, then unsnipped and then snipped again. It's a comedy, of course, but the joke hinges on the reality that the medicine is practical in our time. If you were living in the time of Haydn there was basically one approach to making a castrati and it had a high failure rate and as the boys who bled to death often discovered, this was an utterly irreversible procedure! A barren woman could hope against hope that maybe a pregnancy could take and her husband could pray that things worked out. In the ancient world a second wife might be taken up to make sure there was an heir to spare. But if your testicles were crushed so you could serve in a royal functionary job ... well ... that wasn't exactly something where your situation was going to change.

There are some passages in scripture that only make sense when you've gotten old enough and widely read enough to have any idea why the passage is significant. Let me broadbrush things a bit from my own experience. When you're a fifteen year old high school boy in America you can read Isaiah 56 and the prophet's discussion of eunuchs and have absolutely no idea what a eunuch is or why that's significant. You might have "book learning" about what a eunuch was but you wouldn't be in a position to appreciate what it would actually mean.

Isaiah 56 opens with a blessing on eunuchs. "Let not the foreigner ... "leads into "Let not the eunuch say `I am a withered tree'." The eunuchs who hold fast to the Lord will receive a monument and a name better than sons and daughters. There is much to consider about this but I want to move on to the second part of the chapter.

Isaiah 56 closes with a denunciation of the watchmen and leaders. These men are described as dogs who cannot bark and who only eat and sleep and accomplish nothing but seeking their own advantage. The leaders are as bad, paying no heed to the flock and spending their days drinking alcohol and talking about how tomorrow's celebration will be greater than today's. If you ever want to tackle a 20th century poetic rumination on how Isaiah may have come across to his contemporaries go dig up the poem about Isaiah by Canadian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen. It's a worthy read.

Now maybe when people are in their 20s and are sexually frustrated they can imagine that they just have to hold out for the right person or they just go for it with whomever happens to be close by. The idea that they will turn 30 and not have found "the one" or have lost their virginity may simply not occur to them. Still less may it occur to them that whether or not they die virgins is actually not really all that much in their control. They don't know what eunuchs are and the potential of being a eunuch in a less literal way because of circumstances they can't control simply doesn't occur to them. Women in evangelical settings who aren't finding themselves "pursued" may be aware of this but this hardly means that men who have asked out various women only to get shot down haven't thought about it.

But if we consider Isaiah 56 for a while which of the two groups of men would it be better to be? The eunuchs with the Lord's favor or the watchmen who are mute and lazy dogs and the leaders who take no heed (not unlike the evil shepherds mentioned in Ezekiel 34 from an exilic setting now that we're on that subject). There is good news for the eunuch and some very bad news for the watchmen and the wicked shepherds, the spiritual leaders and guardians of God's people. Where the barren woman is promised by the Lord through Isaiah to have more children than she who bore them, the eunuchs are promised that if they remain steadfast to the Lord they will have a monument and a name better than sons and daughters.

When is the last time you heard a preacher discuss the blessing promised to the eunuchs by the Lord through Isaiah? When is the last time you heard someone even bring up the passage, let alone attempt to see how the situation of the eunuch might have anything like a correlation to the experience of men in contemporary society? Some stuff to consider.

HT Mockingbird: When is low church a little too low?

2012-01-11T15:18:00.001-08:00

http://www.mbird.com/2012/01/are-you-low-church/#comment-12776

"As a dream comes with many cares ... so a nightmare can emerge from existing worries

2012-01-11T12:36:00.000-08:00

As a dream comes when there are many cares, so the speech of a fool when there are many words.

Now while a person may subscribe to the necessity of considering both parts of this verse in light of claims made by Mark Driscoll to get dreams from God revealing sexual infidelity years ago on the part of Grace I am not going there. No, where I'm camping out today is in the first part of the verse. I know a few bloggers and reviewers have considered with some horror Mark Driscoll's assertion that he had a dream in which a revelation was given to him that in the early months of his dating relationship with Grace she was sexually unfaithful to him. Now setting aside that Mark himself had been a serial monogamist Driscoll recounts in Real Marriage that all his women were sexually unfaithful to him while he was faithful to them.

The analogy in Ecclesiastes 5:3 is predicated on the connection between the foolishness that comes from much speech (i.e. a stupid vow before the Lord in the broader literary context) and the connection that exists between a dream and brooding. It was understood in ancient societies that dreams could emerge from worrying about something a long time. While Mark Driscoll seems confident that the dream of Grace's unfaithfulness from the dating years was a revelation it is possible to take a more prosaic approach to such a dream. By Mark's own account all his previous women cheated on him. A nightmare in which even his own wife turned out to be unfaithful to him does not need a supernatural explanation even if we simply run with the simple observation of Ecclesiastes 5:3. The dream could still feel like a revelation given the overall faithfulness of his wife and I certainly would not wish to diminish the shock of such a dream or that it had a foundation in actual relational problems. However, I would stop short of saying such a dream, even if I had it myself, as necessarily being a supernatural revelation from God. Why?

Well, the short and overly broad answer has to do with the overall biblical witness about dreams from the Lord. They tend, overwhelmingly in fact, to be cases in which a dream warns of a future disaster to be averted at a personal or national level (often both). Abimelech feard death because the Lord threatened to kill him for taking Abraham's wife. Joseph had dreams in which he saw he was ruling over his family and though the dreams came to pass he unwisely shared the dreams and caused resentment. Pharoah had a dream, as did two of his servants, and Joseph interpreted the dreams as referring to upcoming events. The positive outcome for one of Pharoah's servants became the ground from which Joseph made an appeal for his release from prison. This, in turn, permitted him to interpret the dream of Pharoah so as to anticipate a famine and establish policy that permitted the safety of people in the region.

I could go on, of course, but it will suffice to say that dreams of warning from the Lord as actually described in the Bible tend to warn of a problem that is about to occur, not about sins committed by one person against another years or even decades prior. Without intending to diminish the significance of an unusually nasty nightmare Mark Driscoll describes I simply don't have to jump to the conclusion that the dream was a "revelation" simply because it turned out Grace had done what Mark dreamed about. As Mark Driscoll might say of another's dream, "Maybe it was bad pizza." That was Mark's way of fielding questions about the possibility that an unusual or disturbing dream might be from the Lord. It might be possible but in practice it would be better to err on the side of finding another explanation first.

In the case of Mark's own nightmare his earlier praxis of caution and skepticism would seem apt. We can propose, in a very prosaic way, that given Mark's anxiety about the sexual unfaithfulness of all his prior girlfriends that it's not shocking that at some point in his marriage he might have at least one nightmare that even Grace was not faithful to him. It is not necessary to appeal to a divine origin for the dream when a natural explanation is not only equally plausible but particularly when the natural association between persistent worry and a resultant dream is affirmed as a normal process even within the scripture itself.

It isn't beyond providence that even such a natural dream can't take on a significant role, it's just a potential case of being over-eager to retroactively give a dream a divine status because the content of the dream happens to correspond with what turns out to have taken place. If the author of Ecclesiastes heard Mark Driscoll describe the dream that gave him the "revelation" about Grace the author himself might not say "Maybe you had bad pizza." he might say, "Well, of course you might have a nightmare like that since that was the nightmare you lived out with all the previous women you were with, right?" As a dream comes from much brooding ... .

By extension, given the anxiety such a dream caused Mark Driscoll it is not entirely surprising that in pastoral counseling roles he might read this anxiety into counseling others. Recovered memory therapy has evolved along such a well-established script that secular psychological research, cognitive research, and medical practice have established how wildly unreliable and misleading it is. At the risk of putting it in overly simple terms something as traumatic as being abused would be something you remember even if at the time it occurred you may not have thought of it as abuse. Long-term memories of events earlier than the age of about four are now considered to be almost completely beyond possibility. Actually a child even at the age of six may not remember something. I found this out when I took one of my nieces to see Star Wars in Concert and, a year later, she didn't remember that she went with me and my brother. Oh well, the important was she had a huge amount of fun at the time. :)

I have already written at length about the "I see things" clip as a thing in itself and in the context of the four hour presentation Mark Driscoll gave on spiritual warfare from 2008. Since the statement about the dream/revelation about Grace's unfaithfulness from the earliest months of their marriage got published in Real Marriage this year it constitutes, obviously, a new claim of a divine revelation. It may be useful at this point, then, to urge some caution about Driscoll's claim to have a supernatural revelation by way of a dream because in pastoral settings early in the church when someone would talk with him about a weird or disturbing dream he would urge caution.

Do you want to know how I know this? ;-) I, dear reader, had a very weird and troubling dream and ended up talking with him about it and his caution seemed like a useful warning at the time. So you can think of this as me belatedly returning the favor of urging some caution about assuming a deeply troubling dream must automatically be a divine oracle. In this case the caution is not "Maybe it was bad pizza" but, "Even Scripture says that the stuff that bothers you over your life will be stuff you dream about." This 'may' be a revelation in as much as a man had a nightmare that corresponded to the reality of waking life but it can also simply be a nightmare born out of the pattern the man was largely aware of and anxious about in waking life without having to also be a supernatural revelation to boot.

more than a month has gone by since surgery

2012-01-09T20:49:00.000-08:00

I hope to not need cataract removal surgery again, or at least for a very long time. I could write a bit about the experience, though I'm not sure it would be for the faint of heart. The part where in the preparation for surgery I got various doses of anesthesia culminated in two needles. One punched through the base of my eye with a drug to kill pain and something to shut down the muscles around the eye. The other, though my eye was dilated to the extreme, seemed to be a needle that punched through my pupil to insert a drug that would shut down my optic nerve.

After a macular detachment and getting cataract removal surgery I have come to realize that I never have need to take hallunagenic drugs. An old high school buddy was mortified to discover the things he saw dropping acid were things I saw with a retinal detachment while in his case the explanation was the roasting of his brain cells.

Things have been healing up nicely. I can still see the incision made in my eye if I move an eyelid and adjust my gaze. No photos of the surgery or its aftermath. Almost too bad. I kind of wish I had photos of me after my scleral buckle operation but my family declined. I said, "This looks kinda cool. I almost look like Two-Face this way." My family agreed, which was exactly why they never took photos because they didn't agree with "This looks kinda cool." Oh well, such is life, huh?

When I wrote some friends and family to describe what eye surgery was like in more detail they said it came off as grim and scary. I thought what I was writing was funny but perhaps the humor was dehydrated. I am altogether glad that the surgery went well and I can see out of both eyes about as clear as one could hope to given my circumstances. It sticks with me that the field of medicine that has permitted me to see is a practice that is not even a century old. Obviously I'm not referring to cataract removal surgery. J. S. Bach underwent cataract removal surgery and it went ... badly.

I take some amusement from the realization that I have spent a few years working on a big contrapuntal cycle where the work was slowed down and interrupted by some problems that had to be dealt with by eye surgery. If all it took to be a good composer was sharing J. S. Bach's eye trouble late in life then I'm overdue to be a good composer! Of course that's obviously and naturally not how things work out. At least one opthamologist has suggested Bach may have had a retinal detachment. I'll have to consider that speculative for now. I know that a detachment can be a risk in cataract surgery and that Taylor, though widely lauded in his day, had methods that were terribly sub-par. After all, Bach did die after two operations. I'm grateful the surgeons who helped me out were centuries ahead of John Taylor in every respect! I should probably be able to finish my contrapuntal cycle but can't imagine it holding a candle to Bach's work even on his worst day.

You don't realize how automatically your tear ducts respond to stimuli until you decide to cut four red onions in a cooking project and the tear ducts in one of your eyes ... don't ... quite work. Normally cayenne pepper plays a substantial role in any of my cooking. I eased back a bit in the month after surgery. You don't have to make too many guesses why.

I'm going to take a little digression here to consider the miracles Jesus performed. N. T. Wright in his book Jesus & the Victory of God discussed how Jesus' healings restored people who were marginal citizens to an ability to live, work, and worship when they had been barred from participation. If you go back and peruse the laws there were any number of physical defects that could limit where you could go and who you could be with. There were also things that made you ceremonially unclean or unclean in a more blunt way, the way that had you outside the camp to prevent the spread of communicable disease and leprosy and all that.

So while Jesus preached the good news and provide eternal life we can't skate past the economic significance of Jesus healing a man blind from birth, or a leper, or a man who was crippled for decades. People with disabilities, and particularly extreme disabilities, can find it challenging to find work and keep working even today. Imagine how things would go two millenia ago if you were an otherwise healthy man who got a cataract. In our day cataract removal surgery is a "relatively" simple affair despite it being a very invasive type of surgery. If someone spends an hour cumulatively durgging up a third of your face before inserting an ultrasonic drill into your eye that's invasive!

Some friends of mine have discussed what has to be considered a failure of missionary work in Africa. The failure is not that nobody converted to Christianity. No, the failure could be considered that the places where the greatest missionary success occurred in the last fifty years now have the highest incidence of HIV infections and the highest proportion of orphans in a given population. If Jesus preached "good news to the poor" then exporting Western style Christianity, let alone American style Christianity, seems to have had some disastrous effects. I could attempt to field what kind of "Christianity" Americans and Westerners exported to Africa but that should properlly be saved for some other time.

What I do want to round up with is an observation that the healings Jesus performed were on people who would have been poor, in many cases, because they had physical deformities and troubles that fenced them out of normal society. Hearing about "eternal life" was not necessarily the only reason people flocked to Him. They heard He cured people. A person born blind who is able to see is able to work in ways that weren't possible before. A person crippled for decades would not be in a position to work. We live in a society in which people with disabilities can work jobs.

Rewind back two millenia and imagine what a bum leg could do in an agrarian society. In a society such as ours that takes medical breakthroughs for granted we will tend to want to camp out on the "spiritual" and doctrinal implications of Jesus' healing work as a sign that He was God, from God, and teaching the truth. We do not necessarily appreciate that the evangelists may have been explicitly linking physical healing with good news being preached to the poor as a unified campaign. The physical freedom to work the kinds of jobs you could not have done before is still good news for the poor. Is that a problem because that leads to "works"? No, not unless you're such a Pharisee about "works" that you paradoxically have to shift attention away from an obvious implication of Jesus' life and work, that there is a freedom to work for the blind and deaf that would be able to lift them up ever so slightly from being poor.

Yet there are Christians who can take a rather dim view of the medical profession. I don't wish to get into all the reasons for that but it will suffice for me to have implied the various reasons why I don't hold to that view myself. Jesus healed the blind and the blind were able to stop being beggars. Eye surgeons have kept me from going blind and that has helped me (though not lately, I must admit) spend many years being gainfully employed. It's not the fault of eye surgeons the job market is sketchy. The physical healing that is part of the good news being preached to the poor goes beyond just words like "Your sins are forgiven." Jesus Himself said that anyone could say "Your sins are forgiven." but to prove that He could truly do so He physically healed a man.

Able-bodied people so often take that ability for granted they may not always appreciate the significance of bodily limitations. Some may discover this at some point and lean toward an open theism in which God has a handicap so He seems more relatable when what is going on is that they are facing down aspects of mortality. Others may go in another direction, discussing the spiritual significance of Jesus' teaching being the core of His message while forgetting the economic significance of Jesus' healings. If Jesus had taught He was the Way, the Truth, and the Light and yet healed no one would this have been good news preached to the poor?

Would such a Jesus who was unable to heal but preached what Jesus is shown preaching in the Gospels have garnered a following? Well, maybe but given the claims attributed to Jesus by the evangelists Jesus would have been killed a whole lot faster. Or Jesus would have been an ineffectual nobody. Atheists, of course, have at times pointed out no third-hand independent evidence for Jesus exists but I'm not here to go into those various rabbit trails. I'm here simply considering a problem in attempting to frame Jesus' life and teaching in a way that can overlook what the evangelists are implicitly telling us about the nature of the good news preached to the poor. As James put it in his epistle, if you see a brother in need and in poverty and say "Be well fed, and keep warm" what good is that? If Jesus had said "I am the Way, the Turth, and the Light" and healed no one what kind of light, way, and truth would He have been?

Now that I have had two different kinds of eye surgery on two eyes I've had some time to mull over how the healings of Jesus sometimes seem to be a springboard for at least some Christians jumping straight from the healings to Jesus being God. The bit about good news to the captives and good news for the poor ... that's a nice theological abstraction to share from the pulpit. That good news for those captive in the frailties of their own bodies and good news for those made poor by those frailties is not simply a matter of saying, "Oh, well, believe on Jesus and after you're dead you get a resurrection body." Jesus did something. We, as Christians, should be willing to do something, too, if it is in our ability. I here refer not to supernatural means, obviously, but to a disposition to help those when we are able. We may have to be careful about how, when, how often, and the like, but nobody said discerning those times would be easy.

I don't intend this as a political or economic statement but American Christians who would like to talk about the spiritual significance of Jesus' healings and only assess that in purely doctrinal terms may forget that Jesus was giving people the power to work. I'm biased, yes, because I'm unemployed and because I've had vision troubles that have precluded me from certain types of work. So I'm not going to pretend I don't have an agenda. If Jesus' healings gave people in His day physical restoration that would let them work I'm going to steer you toward an understanding of what that could mean now.
Good news for the poor" may not be "economic justice" in the way the left or right might use the term, but if I recast things by noting that the physical healings Jesus performed had economic consequences in the lives of those He healed that might at least be something to think about.

Readings from an Epiphany service, Ezekiel 34 and John 10

2012-01-09T19:07:00.000-08:00

The word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel; prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Woe to you shepherds of Israel who only take care of yourselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock. You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and when they were scattered they became food for all the wild animals. My sheep wandered over all the mountains and on every high hill. They were scattered over the whole earth, and no one searched or looked for them.

“‘Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the LORD: As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, because my flock lacks a shepherd and so has been plundered and has become food for all the wild animals, and because my shepherds did not search for my flock but cared for themselves rather than for my flock, therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the LORD: This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am against the shepherds and will hold them accountable for my flock. I will remove them from tending the flock so that the shepherds can no longer feed themselves. I will rescue my flock from their mouths, and it will no longer be food for them.

“‘For this is what the Sovereign LORD says: I myself will search for my sheep and look after them. As a shepherd looks after his scattered flock when he is with them, so will I look after my sheep. I will rescue them from all the places where they were scattered on a day of clouds and darkness. I will bring them out from the nations and gather them from the countries, and I will bring them into their own land. I will pasture them on the mountains of Israel, in the ravines and in all the settlements in the land. I will tend them in a good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel will be their grazing land. There they will lie down in good grazing land, and there they will feed in a rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I myself will tend my sheep and have them lie down, declares the Sovereign LORD. I will search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, but the sleek and the strong I will destroy. I will shepherd the flock with justice.

“Very truly I tell you Pharisees, anyone who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber. The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.” Jesus used this figure of speech, but the Pharisees did not understand what he was telling them.

Therefore Jesus said again, “Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who have come before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep have not listened to them. I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep. So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it. The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.

“I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me—just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen. I must bring them also. They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd. The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”
Rather than bother to expound upon these texts I'm going to just let them be their own thing. Their cumulative substance should "probably" speak for itself.

Not to be outdone, Ed & Lisa Young have their Sexperiment coinciding with Real Marriage

2012-01-09T12:02:00.000-08:00

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/and-in-this-ring
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/virtue-and-the-limits-of-vulnerability#more-27479

Perhaps the most troubling thing about "authenticity" is that we continue to discover that even the ostensibly authentic reveals itself, at length, to be part of an affectation. The heart is deceitful above all things, and who can understand it?

HT Internet Monk: Christian sex toys

2012-01-06T23:21:00.000-08:00

Christian movies, Christian rock, Christian fiction ... Christian sex toys.

If American Christians market "Christian birth control" then the only thing the condoms could be branded as would be "Hedge of Protection". That would cover birth control AND the spiritual warfare fad, too.

HT Jim West: German Hercules--Martin Luther's scatology and the controversy over cussing pastors

2012-01-06T21:39:00.000-08:00

http://und.academia.edu/DanielleMeadSkjelver/Papers/1061661/German_Hercules_The_Impact_of_Scatology_on_the_Image_of_Martin_Luther_as_a_Man_1483-1546

Danielle Mead Skjelver wrote the following in 2008 about Martin Luther's use of scatological language and vulgarity. Since everything old is new again, especially in neo-Calvinist land I figured I'd link to this article. Not that there's some kind of contemporary public figure within Christian circles by whom the use of scatological humor is a way of establishing masculinity and virility in public settings ... .

HT to commentary on Internet Monk: Books & Culture reviews Real Marriage

2012-01-06T21:35:00.000-08:00

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2012/janfeb/realmarriage.html?paging=off

What Real Marriage has going for it, in the end, is the only thing it doesn't share with scores of other marriage books: Mark Driscoll. Driscoll has preached the book's content, he tells us, in "England, Ireland, Scotland, South Africa, Australia, India, and Turkey" and has talked personally to "hundreds of thousands of couples." The author's bio reminds us that he is "one of the world's most downloaded and quoted pastors." He pastors the "2nd most-innovative church in America." The hype in the press release isn't, ultimately, about Real Marriage; it's about Mark Driscoll.

Happy to report that Cinamagogue actually has some new content lately

2012-01-06T20:59:00.000-08:00

http://cinemagogue.com/

After what seemed like roughly a year of almost no activity writing about film (for them, at least) my friend(s) over at Cinamagogue are actually writing stuff again.

Did you think I WOULDN'T link to this xkcd?

2012-01-05T20:10:00.000-08:00

http://xkcd.com/999/

You probably didn't, which is good, because here I've just linked to it. This is totally a variation on the Calvin's dad pattern from Calvin & Hobbes, which is just "one" reason it's funny.

Guitarist Nick Cutroneo has launched his new site

2012-01-05T18:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.nickcutroneo.com/

Nick has launched a new site in 2012. I know I haven't mentioned him on this blog before but Delcampers will know we've both spent some time over there. I know I've written a few things about a preacher up in these parts but I still like to write about classical guitar and classical guitarists and I want to steer you to Nick's new site.

Mark Driscoll and his fanboys

2012-01-05T18:50:00.000-08:00

So Real Marriage comes out this month and wagons are already being circled. The folks who find him repulsive find him repulsive. The people who find him a hero still find him a hero. I'm still frequently ambivalent and critical but remembering the things I have, yes, admired about the man.

Something that has stuck with me in the last few days is this--Mark has repeatedly said God told him to do X, Y and Z. I can run with that, actually, but just because God told Rebekah Jacob would become greater than Esau did not justify Rebekah's deceit or Jacob's trickery. I don't have to constantly doubt whether God actually told Mark Driscoll to be a pastor to point out that even within the Bible we get narratives in which how person X decided to personally fulfill what God said was going to come about turned out to be the most sinful means of getting from point A to point B possible.

By extension, Driscoll fanboys conflate Driscoll's results with the assumption that how he got those results reflect a godly character. They don't, results are just indicative of unmerited favor at best and at worst a mixture of dumb luck and a communications major knowing how to play people.
Some of the troubling stuff about the confessions from the Driscolls aren't the marital problems themselves. Those things seem fairly mundane compared to marital strife stories I've heard. No, the trouble is that if Mark Driscoll was preaching wifely stripteases and holy blowjobs WHILE he was resenting his wife for not giving these things to him in the marriage it's a hypocrisy issue. First of all it's not even remotely clear on exegetical grounds Song of Songs extolls wifely stripteases or holy blow jobs. Second of all, it would be true especially if those things WERE in the text but even more so if they weren't, that Driscoll did not implicitly set himself as the master of the biblical text who knows this stuff because he's learned by doing, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, which is what he actually did in essence over a six to eight year period.

Then there's the Driscolls' famous bit about stay-at-home dads having denied the faith and being worse than an unbeliever. The hypocrisy here is even more troubling. If Mark Driscoll was personally convicted of a sin against his wife by that famous passage, okay. But how he has handled the text in the last decade and how Grace has blithely co-opted that suggests that no exegetical work or thought about literary/historical context of ANY KIND got done. If a pastor has denied the faith and become worse than an unbeliever by having a wife who out-earns him and is carrying the financial burden of the family then Mark Driscoll should have been ousted as an apostate somewhere around the year 2000! He's not a hypocrite because of normal marital problems that, frankly, would not have in themselves disqualified him from ministry. He's become a hypocrite because he does what Paul Martin has described as preaching "too close to the lesson" without conceding in public that some of his most famous public moments of teaching a "lesson" turn out to have been lessons that were wildly inaccurate and not based on exegetically defensible claims.

The Targum Neofiti teaching fiasco should be proof enough to Driscoll that if he's excited about something on a given week the LAST thing he should do is immediately translate that personal enthusiasm into a sermon. It is this propensity that I find troubling and that Driscoll apologists seem least interested in. As long as Driscoll preaches a view of masculinity they like within a sufficiently Trinitarian format they will overlook how weak his handling of actual texts can be. Not NT texts most of the time, but OT texts.

That's a long way of saying the confessions of the Driscolls make them come off as hypocrites not because they necessarily did stuff the Bible says would have actually disqualified Mark Driscoll from ministry, but because Mark Driscoll's own knee-jerk interpretations and applications mega-phoned from the pulpit make his confessions turn him into a hypocrite. A pastor who doesn't have sex with his wife as much as he'd like isn't a hypocrite if he just privately works on those issues. He becomes a hypocrite if he preaches from Song of Songs multiple times with a Monty Python style nudge, nudge and wink, wink talking about oral sex and different positions as though he knows the score when in reality he resents his wife for being frigid. THAT is where the hypocrisy comes from and what makes it sad is that if Driscoll hadn't had a history of preaching "too close to the lesson" he could have avoided ALL of this backlash.

Driscoll fanboys don't realize that Mark basically deserves this kind of backlash. If you're blind and groping forward and people see this they don't hold it against you if you know you're blind. If you claim to see and they can see that you don't see clearly then you stop being an object of sympathy and start being annoying. That the Driscolls have been able to publish Real Marriage by now is because despite Mark claiming he was convicted by 1 Timothy 5 of having denied the faith and become worse than an unbeliever when the chips were down he deciced the most practical pastoral application of this idiosyncratic interpretation of Scripture was to ... keep his job and wait until he got a salary.

Yet some Driscoll fans can wonder why some critics find the confessions of the Driscolls' problematic. IF the Driscolls had just kept their heads down and their mouths shut from the pulpit and the public sphere between roughly 1998-2006 on sex in marriage or financial burdens then their confessions via bookdeal would not come off as quite so mercenary to critics and would not reveal them to have been hypocrites during the times when Mark was preaching oral sex while resenting that his wife wasn't giving him any.

My hope is that the Driscolls will chill out on some patently legalistic ideas they have on marriage and gender that, once they drop them, will make them seem much less hypocritical for having spent a decade extolling what they didn't live up to that is not actually in the Bible. If they hadn't been stumping for X for so many years they wouldn't be coming off as hypocrites for having failed at X for much of their marriage when X isn't even that clearly spelled out as "biblical" teaching.

Try to imagine how differently Mark Driscoll's ministry might have looked if instead of hearring a voice and going out to start doing all that stuff as fast as possible he actually waited several years, worked on learning things, and slowly started building his marriage and understanding BEFORE jumping into pastoral stuff. Driscoll fanboys have seemed to reach a conclusion that because it WORKED that basically how Mark Driscoll jumped into things must have been a godly way to do it. I was there long enough to have come to a different conclusion. If I hadn't come to a different conclusion I wouldn't have ended up being Presbyterian is one way of putting it. But I can also say, fortunately, that the Christians at Mars Hill are vastly more than the sum of the weirdness of the Driscolls.

Dostoevsky wrote once that the easiest thing for a guy in his twenties to do is to die for a cause. He can lay down his body and life in a flash and think nothing of it. It comes easily to him. But if you ask that man to spend five years of his life reading books, studying, learning from old men, and doing this instead of going out and being a man of action .... well, then you'll find that young man often considers that a fate WORSE than death! Perhaps Mark Driscoll was, per Dostoevsky's observation, simply the archetypal young man more willing to go do than to learn. Yeah, he's told us how he'd read at least a book every day but by now I want to suggest that reading volume isn't the same as reading comprehension. Thanks to Paul Martin's carefully thought-through blog entry I would say the thing the Driscoll camp needs to do more and more is to not preach so close to the lesson, to get time to figure out if the lesson has been learned and if the lesson is even true.

I probably need to keep saying this, I hope to provide a constructively critical approach to Driscoll rather than the fawning praise of fans or the vitriol of adversaries. I'm not going to complain about Mark's approach to the Trinity even if I think Scott Bailey and Robert Cargill were absolutely right to show that Driscoll just made up a trinitarian gloss on the Targum Neofiti. If it seems this blog has often specialized in stuff where I differ with Driscoll that's because the stuff where I don't differ with Driscoll is so utterly pedestrian I haven't seen fit to note that we agree on the Nicene Creed, we agree on the essential problem of the cessationist position on exegetical grounds, we agree on the value of Christians having an agreement that primary and secondary doctrinal concerns need to be kept that way.

I would say that where I've come to differ is in my belief that the gospel of Markulinity has, over the last decade, been shown to be more primary than it should be in Driscoll's public discourse. Masculinity I'm fine with, Markulinity needs an overhaul and the confessions in Real Marriage not only do nothing to dissuade me of that, they offer yet more proof that my reservations about Markulinity were even more well-founded than I imagined.

But congratulations to Mark and Grace Driscoll for going the distance for decades and raising five kids. Whether or not I ever have reason to take any Driscoll teaching on marriage seriously ever again I am glad they have gotten their marriage to survive. It will be interesting to see how my unmarried associates at Mars Hill end up feeling about the Real Marriage series. It sounds like the Driscolls are ever so slightly less prone to thinking of single people as sub-human and second class now. Maybe.

a personalized meditation on multiculturalism in food

2012-01-05T16:47:00.000-08:00

Sometimes multiculturalism is putting srirachi sauce on a Polish sausage with Swiss cheese. I know there's more high-flown conceptions and executions of multiculturalism, and I know some people think multiculturalism represents everything destroying America. But you know what? This polish sausage tastes pretty good.

A composer interested in writing a work for violin and piano? Hilary Hahn is looking for some submissions

2012-01-05T03:07:00.000-08:00

http://www.hilaryhahncontest.com/
My favorite violinist happens to have a contest going. If you're feeling ambitious and support what Ms. Hahn does give this a shot. I am VERY interested to find out what Penderecki has come up with for her! That's my little plug for this.

HT Phoenix Preacher: Driscoll comes up with 9 reasons Real Marriage is for Singles

2012-01-05T02:21:00.000-08:00

http://pastormark.tv/2012/01/04/9-reasons-real-marriage-is-for-singles?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+pastormark+%28PastorMark.tv%29

1. Real Marriage Is about Biblical Relationships in General
I'm going to pass anyway. Last I checked I have this awesome book about biblical relationships in general called the Bible.

2. The Study Guide Includes Material for Singles
Oooh! I should not only buy the book but the study guide, too? That's a reason to buy the book?

3. You’ll Probably Be Married One Day
My mom keeps hoping on this one but even she would tell me this does not constitute a reason to buy your book. That haircut story was instructive, though. Now I know that if a wife gets a haircut that favors her being a mother instead of a wife that's some kind of marital treason.

4. Real Marriage Will Help You to Counsel Others

Some of your friends are probably dating, thinking of getting married, engaged, and/or married. Just because you’re single, doesn’t mean you don’t have wisdom to share with those friends regarding relationships. Paul and Jesus were single, but they still talked and taught on marriage. Real Marriage will help equip you to give good counsel to friends regarding their relationships.

Just because I'm single doesn't mean I don't have wisdom to share with couples about relationships? If you've ever actually set foot in a Mars Hill service or a Mars Hill community group there may not be an LOL large enough for this one. It would appear that the sales pitch is that if I buy this book THEN I will have wisdom to share with people. Why earlier this week I shared Paul's review of real marriage and it was kinda short.

5. You Will Understand Your Family Better
As in, "This book will let members at Mars Hill or Driscoll fans figure out how their parents sinned against them by being bad parents and how the Driscolls are the better alternative"? That's how it's worked out in people I've known at Mars Hill over the last decade. I don't know if I'd endorse this.

6. You Can Investigate Your Idols of Independence and Dependence
So if you DON'T want to be married that's an idol of independence and if you DO want to be married that's an idol of dependence. The solution prescribed in both cases has implicitly been, "You should grow up, shake off adultescence, and get married." I think I worked that out from Driscoll sermons at some point over the last ten years. It's like equestrian medicine where everything gets worked out with a handy shotgun.

7. Real Marriage Will Help You Deal with Sexual Sin
Maybe, but it could put ideas into my head about sexual techniques and positions I've never heard of before that I don't want to know about and could cause even more avenues for temptation for me. Has Mark gotten over the need to say stuff on the level of, "Hhaving sex with a condom is like asking a guy to eat a steak with a latex glove on his tongue?" I don't need to find out.

8. Learn How to Live a Full Life As a Single Person
Because nothing will help me live a full life as a single person like buying a book on marriage from the Driscolls? And if I decide that maybe a lifetime without marriage or sex is the better option for me will you stop saying that guys like me are boys who can shave who are stuck in adultescence and aren't real men? Couldn't I just live a full life as a single person without reading this book?

9. You May Find a Spouse
Oh, of course this makes sense! Because 3x3=9! I ... I ... just can't possibly argue against THAT reason!

Now I must buy it! Oh, wait, I've got no job and no money. Oh well, c'est la vie.

Too bad, the buttons for quick purchases of the book at Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble were ... just ... right ... there ... at the bottom of the article.

time for this month's semi-scheduled monthly HT to Orthocuban

2012-01-05T01:37:00.000-08:00

http://www.orthocuban.com/2012/01/on-syphilis-and-science/

Hey, I may be Presbyterian and all but I've enjoyed reading Orthocuban and I've got Eastern Orthodox relatives. Orthoduck is always worth reading for me even if I happen to be Presbyterian.

If the new favored theory is that syphillis developed in the New World and made it back to Europe then if Europeans were busy screwing and screwing over Indians in the Western hemisphere ... well, you can work that out for yourself. No need for me to finish the joke with the actual punchline, eh? If this turns out to be true then, well, American Indians can joke that the white folks from Europe may have screwed them over but BOY did it cost them!

HT: Kerux Noemata

2012-01-05T01:27:00.001-08:00

http://preacherthoughts.blogspot.com/2012/01/learning-from-old-men-first-driscoll.html

This has been one of my fears for Pastor Driscoll through the years. I think he has tended to write “too close to the lesson.” Even this latest book, if I read the chronology right, seems to say that all the good things he is directing us to do are things he has really only applied in his marriage in the last 3-4 years.

A very legitimate fear indeed! What can happen when a guy like Mark Driscoll preaches something "too close to the lesson" is that he'll preach it and then, one and two years later, actual scholars will demonstrate that he learned the wrong lesson at best or that he made up something to make himself look cool and knowledgeable at worst. Or did lazy second-hand speculation because the week before his sermon somebody sent him something he didn't bother researching more detail.

This is, it turns out, exactly what Mark Driscoll did with what he supposedly learned about the Targum Neofiti The infamous excerpt begins at minute 23 into the sermon where Driscoll credits his exciting discovery to something Gerry Breshears sent him that week.

http://marshill.com/media/doctrine/trinity-god-is
This from the Doctrine series sermon Driscoll preached on Mar 30, 2008. I happened to be there, actually, so I can verify this one firsthand even if the video clip and audio weren't conveniently available to link to. Driscoll said, "I learned something this week that I did not know."

... or maybe he learned something that week that wasn't actualy true. See below for commentary from Scott Bailey and Robert Cargill.

http://scotteriology.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/mark-driscoll-as-scholar-and-exegete/

... Second, targum Neofiti is commonly dated in the second century CE! That’s significantly later than Driscoll argues. In fact, undercuts most of his argument. ...

His opening salvo that there was some Jews who believed in the trinity because “they read the Bible and took it at face value” is so wrong, on so many levels, before he goes into his mistake laden sermon, that it’s quite surprising to me this has not been taken off of the internet.

http://robertcargill.com/2010/12/17/how-not-to-read-the-targums/

So what then is Targum Neofiti doing here by adding this word בחכמה “b’hakmah” (“in/with wisdom”)? Answer: it is attempting to harmonize the claim in Genesis 1:1 that says בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”) with Proverbs 8:22, where in a tribute to wisdom, the Bible claims that God created wisdom first, before the rest of creation (“The LORD created me [wisdom, cf. Prov. 8:12] at the beginning of His course, as the first of His works of old”). Targum Neofiti is attempting to reconcile the natural question of precisely what was actually created first: wisdom (Prov. 8), or the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1)? The answer offered by the authors of Neofiti was quite clever: God created the heavens and the earth in/with wisdom.

Ooops. Looks like what Driscoll learned about the Targum Neofiti turned out to be wildly inaccurate. If anyone imagines that Scott Bailey and Robert Cargill are just liberal scholars I have a friend or two at Covenant Theological Seminary and one of them told me that Driscoll's handling of the Targum was a gross misappropriation of the Targum. Now I would get OPC folks saying a PCA seminary is a bit too liberal but as I've been saying here for years, not everyone who disputes something Driscoll has said in a sermon is 1) theologically liberal or 2) necessarily opposed to every last thing that comes out of the man's mouth.

Still, Paul Martin's comment about a pastor teaching "too close to the lesson" is apt. So apt that I wanted to quote his blog entry and take a stroll down memory lane to help illustrate why Paul Martin's fear about Mark Driscoll writing "too close to the lesson" is so well-founded.

HT Scotteriology: Todd Bentley update

2012-01-05T01:27:00.000-08:00

Preachers who say they heard God speak in an audible voice to marry so-and-so don't always stay with their spouses. Just ask Todd Bentley

http://westernstandard.blogs.com/shotgun/2009/03/todd-bentley-marries-woman-whom-he-had-extramarital-affair-with.html
http://westernstandard.blogs.com/shotgun/2008/10/the-faith-heale.html

http://ricksmiscellany.blogspot.com/2008/09/signs-and-wonders.html
http://ricksmiscellany.blogspot.com/2008/09/does-forgiving-mean-forgetting.html
http://ricksmiscellany.blogspot.com/2008/09/tales-from-todd.html

HT Mockingbird: Marilynne Robinson on the Bible

2012-01-05T01:26:00.000-08:00

http://www.mbird.com/2012/01/marilynne-robinson-on-the-great-problem-of-christianity-and-the-failure-of-russia-and-mississippi-and-the-bible/

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/books/review/the-book-of-books-what-literature-owes-the-bible.html?_r=4&pagewanted=all