http://www.reformation21.org/articles/the-price-of-everything.php
Carl Trueman manages to summarize things well. I don't know if I would say it's exactly cynicism and pessimism but realism to observe that most things trumpeted as major game- changing and history-changing events aren't. Wait a minute ... does that make me a pessimist and a cynic? It might.
To see the value of the historian's cynicism, one need only look at the bombastic rhetoric which permeates the modern world. Mainstream news media rarely let a week go by without some reference to a `defining moment' or a `watershed', yet most of this is simple hyperbole. Even 9/11 which was meant to have changed the world forever has not had much of an impact upon most of us. Those affected by the tragic loss of loved ones and those who have military connections would be obvious exceptions; for me, the only time I really feel the impact is in the slight indignities and extended time now imposed as I pass through airport security. Far less is the election of a particular individual or party to power a `defining moment,' given the global forces that really drive national economies and domestic policies.
Yet this hyperbole continually rears its ridiculous head in the church. Some years ago, Phyllis Tickle likened Brian McLaren to Luther and the Emergent Church to the kind of paradigm shift that happens only once a millennium. The amazing thing was not that she said this; in a world shaped by the continual escalation of sales rhetoric, this kind of language is to be expected in advertising. No. What was truly amazing was that people actually took her seriously, friend and foe alike. Such people are in urgent need of help to stop them saying or believing things that are very, very silly and absurdly self-important
It is true that we manage to inflate our importance the importance of events that have happened to us. We can cast relatively mundane events in terms that give cosmic scope to things that are really local in their immediate import. In crucial ways this can even be said of events in scripture. Compare David's account of God rescuing him in 2 Sam 22 and Ps 18 to what David actually did between 1 Sam 16 and 2 Sam 1. He kept himself blameless? Might need some unpacking there. I think I have some guesses as to why the Psalms can be tough for some Reformed preachers to preach. How do we account for David declaring how blameless he is when we look at his multiple wives of political alliance and convenience? How do we account for David being so confident he's blameless when we can see that he killed so many people and shed so much blood? Liberals can just chalk this up to David being a bloodthirsty deceptive cretin who claimed divine approval of anything he did. But if we go back and look at all the events David could be taken to describe in 2 Sam 22 and Ps 18 we can see that the actual events, in the global scope of things, can be seen as far more prosaic.
So even though there's a lot of what Trueman says I totally agree with I want to ask if maybe we've got ourselves a challenge as Christians. David presents some interesting challenges for us. David was both a king and prophet, as the apostle Peter noted on Pentecost. Yet he seems to have been habitually guilty of various sins we would never consent to let continue in contemporary church life. Yet David confidently said he was blameless. Now I'm aware of imputed and imparted righteousness discussions and justification and so forth. What I'm wondering about for this blog post is David's capacity to speak hyberbolically about the importance of events that arguably did absolutely nothing in themselves to change the course of history. I agree we as Christians should not spend so much time trumpeting people as being more important than they are but it would seem that gushing with praise is something we can't resist doing with the things and people we like. You know, maybe a Pointer Sisters reunion wouldn't be such a bad thing, Carl. Not that I like them personally but it would not be the sacking of Jerusalem if it happened.
In popular culture we love to invest apocalyptic hyperbole to all sorts of mundane things. Justin Bieber is one of the horsemen of the apocalypse and all that. So how much can we fret about apocalyptic hyperbole from fellow believers if we can see even David, who contributed so much to the scriptures by way of what he wrote and what was written about him, seems to have been spectacularly prone to this habit himself? Arguably apocalyptic hyperbole is one of the literary legacies David has given us (even if we assume, from a cynical rationalist perspective, that David didn't really write anything attributed to him within the scriptures). It's one thing for us in the neo-Reformed camp to wave all this off as David being a whiny emo boy as I've heard some new Calvinist pastors do, it's another thing to actually contend with the significance of this impulse in David's work.
Part of the historian's task is to see how much we repeat ourselves despite our claims that we won't make the mistakes our forebears made. When we know this is a temptation in each age of believers it won't prevent us from succumbing to its temptation entirely but we can at least be humble and remember that our hope is not that we will somehow change the world but that we serve the true King.
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