Have I been cynical to have suspected that the people running the church I call home are simply sinners who bumble their way through things and are at least as reluctant as I am (and not less) to avoid admitting to a dumb-ass mistake here and there?
When I first came to the church there was some discussion about how it was a people and not a place. Now conversation seems to have implicity shifted toward a place where community happens and not the people from whom that community will (or, just as importantly, potentially won't) ostensibly spring. Getting plugged in means signing up, finding a place to serve, and helping the mission. If the mission is Christ, cool, but I have found out steadily, inexorably over the years that I'm not gifted in the usual "evangelism" methods of Christians in the United States. In fact I'm the kind of Christian you probably won't discover is a Christian until you're already in the church and happen to come across me or happen to come across in some other setting where I don't avoid saying what my confession of faith is but don't seek to beat people over the head with it either. In an older time of my church's history this might have been dubbed lifestyle evangelism. ;) A secularist might say that i'm a Christian who minds his own business and knows a few things about Messiaen and anime along with the Bible.
But is it cynical to suppose that churches will invariably distort or even destroy the Gospel as a message of hope in Christ Jesus? I don't care what the confessional alignment is or what the formally stated doctrines are, it seems as though we are destined to muck it up in presentation. How is it that a holy, loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God would be so eager to reveal Himself through such stupid, venal, selfish and self-deluded pieces of living dust? That is something I don't really understand. But I am starting to understand that the people who think they are doing God a favor are as a rule the people He is most angry with. The people who do not invoke Him to prove they are right seem more likely to understand His mercy. "Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more" is not something I have heard all that clearly from people in His Church, regardless of confessional alignment. So is it cynicism to rest in the rather dreary supposition that "Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more" is simply not something I'm going to hear from Christians as a whole, brothers and sisters in Christ?
Whoever has been forgiven much loves much, and whoever has been forgiven little loves little. It feels as though we can be so eager to tell people how much they have sinned so they can understand how much they have been forgiven. Jesus can say that but can we? Jesus doesn't tell the woman how much she sinned, only that she was forgiven. Something about these stories resonates with me, we don't need to come to Christ telling Him how much we've sinned not because we shouldn't confess, but because coming to Christ is the confession, and Christ knows our sin. Do we as Christians think that we have to play the role of Christ or the Spirit to tell people who have offended us how much they are guilty before God? I've found myself tempted to that all the time and I don't speak because I don't feel I can speak from that position, though sometimes out of sheer frustration I wish that I could.
So appropos of no transition, the multi-site church is a microdenomination. There is no practical, meaningful distinction between a multi-site church that has five or six campuses and a denomination. If you have multiple locations with a common doctrinal and liturgical practice, and any kind of executive leadership that makes decisions while the other pastors have the option to vote for or against particular points of doctrine it's not THAT different from a denomination. It's not even THAT different from the Roman Catholic Church since not just any bishop can make a proclamation about this or that doctrine but the pontiff can speak on behalf of all the bishops together. The jibe about Protestants having a pope at every pulpit has a kernel of truth to it. after all.
But why sell this as a multi-site church rather than a denomination? Seems simple enough, the mainline denominations in the United States sold orthodoxy up the river or embraced a strain of fundamentalism and both at their various stages of development waged culture wars to get the society around them to go the way they wanted. The religious left went this route in the 19th and early 20th centuries while the religious right tried to take back the Eisenhower era without paying attention to Francis Schaeffer from the 1980s on out. On either side of the coin the denominations bungled the battle for the culture (which is something both sides deserved, handily).
If you want to transform culture for Christ or use Christ to transform culture (because when your church is led by run-of-the-mill sinners only Jesus Himself knows which is which) and realize that movements in American Christianity have fizzled out by shooting for the moon then you avoid the word most often historically linked with such movements, denomination.
But a key difference DOES exist here. In a denominational hierarchy the leaders have paid their dues at the level of the local campus and moved on to serve as shepherds for the denomination/movement. What they no longer do is have any real day-to-day involvement with people in local churches under their jurisdiction. Someone preached a sermon about this kind of problem a few years ago in Seattle, actually. Anyway, what happens in a denominational structure is that if Pastor A leads the denomination and Pastor B is at church building Q then Pastor B does the preaching at building Q because Pastor B is, well, the pastor there. In the multi-site church Pastor A does all the preaching everywhere whether or not he or she has any meaningful connection to building Q, knows its members, or even attends. For the sake of direction within the denomination the advantage of this is that the denominational leader can speak to the entire network on any given Sunday.
The disadvantage to this is the contextualizing the Gospel to individual congregations has completely vanished. It not only doesn't happen but can't possibly happen. That task could ostensibly be delegated to the various pastors who administrate those campuses but if they are not preaching to their own flock are they pastors in the traditionally understood sense of the word? Veer away from the Protestant praxis a great deal and I could say, yeah, they are. An overseer or a bishop may not necessarily share anything new to his or her flock. But knowing how the teaching of Christ applies in a specific congregant's life evaporates. The pastor of a multi-campus church runs the risk of having no involvement in the actual flock.
Now in a denominational paradigm this is precisely what I would not only expect but encourage since the goal of a denominational/movement leader is to equip OTHER LEADERS, not the flock at each campus. That's a biblically defensible pattern we see in Scripture. The apostle Paul instructs leaders at various churches how to deal with situations they face with their flesh and blood congregations. Paul would visit churches he planted for quite some time and preach and teach there and immerse himself in the lives of that particular group of believers.
The risk of a multi-site church that uses video feed is that what is contextualized may not be Christ but simply the lead pastor, who as a de facto denominational leader may have no idea what is going on in the various flocks he is teaching on Sunday because he's never actually at those locations immersed in the lives of those he ostensibly might shepherd. Practically the solution would seem to be to let the local bishops do their work (i.e. local pastors of whatever monikor we may propose).
Once a multi-site church extends beyond a single city we are firmly outside any biblically viable explication of what the local church looks like. A huge urban area that includes a few adjacent cities could still count but beyond that it's no longer viable to say the Church of Western Washington where before you could have said the church in Olympia or the church in Bothell. The church in Bothell and Aberdeen stops being a single church in terms of biblical precedent and becomes two churches ... unless we're talking the Church in which case we're getting catholic. Or, at a more pragmatic level, a denomination.
And in the denominational network that's what we see happening, treating two different locations as unique expressions of the Church universal and of the denominational network in particular. Pastor Billy and Pastor Bobby at Hazard county live on either sides of the county but they know their congregations and take them through the Word as seems best. Or Bishop Matt and Bishop Mason have the lectionary prescribed by the denominational leadership and they go through that and tailor a short message that adds a personal touch to a liturgical paradigm whose goal is not individual application but universal application by joining churches across time and space in worship of Christ. Most Protestants don't seem to take that approach but some of them do (i.e. Anglicans and Lutherans, if memory serves).
But in a multi-site church something seems potentially out of place. The de facto denominational leader can have his or her sermon piped out to multiple locations and enjoys the privilege of the role that a pastor would have in a denominational network without the corresponding responsibility before both Christ and the denominational leadership to account for how he or she has shepherded the flock of Christ given into his care. It's like you get to kiss your girlfriend but you don't have to marry her is the potential risk involved.
By analogy, the pastor at a multi-site church has the power to speak as though a denominational leader without the responsibility of shepherding any flock at all, a task that can now be conveniently delegated to the pastors at individual churches. And because the organization is a "multi-site church" and not a denomination a figurehead status is retained in which the denominational/multi-site church leader has the role of being the Pope and assembly of cardinals, kinda, while not ever being in a position to administer a sacrament like officiating a wedding or participating in communion with his or her own flock.
Conversely pastors who are tasked with the role of preaching and teaching in other settings (i.e. a denominational network) are essentially put in a position where they have the responsibility of ensuring things run smoothly but have limited opportunities to speak to their congregation. This is not necessarily all that is entailed in being a church leader, though. If being a church leader were just about talking to people from the pulpit anyone with a blog could be a pastor, and almost anyone with a blog seems able to think he or she IS a pastor.
But if the model reveals a risk of having privileges without responsibilities someone else gets the other side of the pancake, having responsibilities without any corresponding privileges, or potentially having privileges that are abdicated by someone else. So, you're married to your husband or wife but you don't get to kiss them, that's what the matchmaker gets to do because the matchmaker set you two together.
So it could potentially be with a pastor at a multi-site church and site pastors. A denominational structure would allow the denominational leader to speak to the local leaders who could then apply the vision of the leadership at a local level while being able to shepherd individual flocks in a way the denominational leader is incapable of accomplishing. In this setting a pastor at an individual church can participate in communion and conduct weddings and funerals, all things that are part of the lifeblood of the local congregation that the denominational leader or primary teaching pastor of a multi-site church simply doesn't participate in anymore.
Other people, naturally, could beg to differ, and do so vehemently. That's cool. That's what the internet is for. If anyone reads this blog at all I would be somewhat amazed. Rather abstract and potentially detached ruminations on the "multi-site church" as a euphemism for what is historically a denomination might not interest anyone else, which may be just as well. But it's a concern of mine because I feel that sometimes you have to call a spade a spade. There have been times in the last year when I've heard "multi-site church" bandied about as though that were somehow magically not a denomination.
Okay, maybe I grant that, but I also propose that denominations have distinct advantages when they are actually set up. For one thing, accountability goes both ways. No one can get to the top of the denomination without jumping through the appropriate hoops, hoops agreed upon by the rest of the leadership at every level of the organization. No one can get to the top without having been at the bottom. More importantly, no one can get to the top from the bottom in a very short order and then rewrite the entire system to suit his or her ends because the denomination transcends him or her. For Eugene Robinson to have been installed as head of the Episcopalian church in the United states the entire denomination had to shift that direction, not just Robinson.
A relatively young church that grows to denominational proportions or quasi-denominational structure doesn't have that opportunity to curb any unwitting or intentional cult of personality issues because organization has been essentially ad hoc and organizational communication has not been consolidated--it has, in a phrase, grown up with the personality around whom the cult has somehow managed to grow. As Franky Schaeffer put it (not that I'm going to go Orthodox because I'm sure the Orthodox have had this problem, too) Protestant churches that grow quickly usually do so because of a charismatic personality more than consistent teaching. Take away the popular preacher and replace it with just going through Scripture and attendence dips dramatically. Having attendence dip dramatically when that occurs might be a sign that people are coming for Preacher John and not Jesus. The people who show up even if Preacher John takes a vacation for a few months? THOSE people are probably there for Jesus.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
stealth legalism
The church I have attended for years may have finally abandoned what I have considered one of its most pernicious forms of stealth legalism over the last five years, the evangelical Protestant fad of courtship that seemed to permeate the 00's. If spiritual warfare and recovered memories became fads because Peretti published some dime novels on the subject (and to be fair, I don't blame Peretti at all, just point out that his work is the touchstone in the Christian subcultural ghetto) then I Kissed Dating Goodbye was probably the touchstone for the next fad, courtship.
Now there is nothing wrong, at all, with engaging in spiritual warfare and recognizing that there are principalities and powers. But many books written on the subject of spiritual warfare had no exegetical foundation and promulgated absurd theories about spiritual warfare like cutting soul ties and other things that were really backdoor injections of what might as well be called old-fashioned sympathetic magic. You have to physically cut the soul ties here on earth with your arms and put on the armor of God with you own hands for them to be established in the heavenlies, more or less. I wonder how many divorced men of the cloth ended up writing books about the Jezebel spirit during the 1990s. Perhaps they just assumed the Jezebel spirit was dominating because they were Republicans who didn't like Hillary. I never liked her either but let's face it, the Jezebel spirit doesn't have to become a fad within a fad.
And if the spiritual warfare fad seemed to be a lot of flash and not enough substance where Christ is concerned we at least have scholars within the vale of Christendom like JEffrey Burton Russell or Susan R. Garrett who dug into the actual scholarly background of the topic. Scripture talks about the Enemy so we have something in Christ to talk about.
Then we get to dating and courtship and the blinders went on. That most men and women in the Bible did not go about marriage in exactly the same way we do in the United States seemed to get ignored. Men take wives and women are given in marriage. Okay, so soemone gets a mail order bride for Isaac and he takes her to be his wife. Doesn't sound like the byzantine rituals of courtship I began to hear proposed at my church. In my crankiest moments I simply surmised that this was a giant conscious driven rearguard action in which my pastors were wanting to make sure that the flock didn't sin prior to and in marriage in the ways they had. When one of my pastors said of himself and his wife six years ago "we broke some rules, but God is faithful." I knew he was confessing to fornication, something I could easily discern the second he said that because I know a thing or two about pastoral euphemisms. Other people were astonished, three or four years later, when said pastor broached the topic without euphemism. He said that he was a hypocrite who didn't even practice what he preached about dating and courtship.
So, if that's so, then does that invalidate a person from speaking what Scripture says? No, of course not. BUT (and this is a very big one) if you didn't live by the standard you preach for dating and courtship and it's NOT CLEARLY DEFENSIBLE IN SCRIPTURE then, yeah, you are a hypocrite. More concerning to me about the courtship fad at my church was simply that it focused chiefly on the avoidance of sin and not the following of Christ. Some prominent members of the church had something to gain from the fad, though, in as much as that they had daughters they wanted to protect and the fad of courtship playeed into their personal philosophy and praxis. And it was not, in principle, a bad thing.
The thing is, though, that sinners are sinners, and sometimes there's sin all around. A dad may want control that he can't have because God is sovereign. If his daughter falls in love with a man he doesn't approve of there's no amount of retroactive decision-making he can do to undo that decision. A father isn't just a father and has a life apart from family, so that means that he could be sufficiently immersed in church planting or the day job and not realize that his daughter has become emotionally enmeshed with a young suitor that he didn't approve of or perhaps didn't even realize had become as close to his daughter as previously thought. If there is anything I observed about my parents it's that the temptation to say you saw something coming consoles you retroactively when you've discovered there's nothing you can do about it.
And I understand a pastoral concern that young Christians not go about sinning so telling people in the Emerald City that they should get permission from the woman's father obviously means the family and woan are treated with respect. That part is totally cool. If you advocate a position like that because you want to retain control, though, how do we know that isn't a basically idolatrous impulse? If you're doing something to protect your children, cool, but even that can be abused as the basis for exerting control over other people even to a point that can't be legitimately defended. I'm not a parent so I don't know how tempting it must be to decide to control the world for the sake of a child. I just know that I've lived just long enough to see that control attempt to get exerted and wondering if it was action done in faith or action done in an attempt to avoid what God has providentially brought about. Sometimes we make decisions with unforeseen consequences, like spending time away from daughters, and then are tempted to take it out on someone who is not really connected to that decision.
Fortunately in the handful of cases I know about the parents and children involved handled things in a pretty good way in the end and things worked out. I'm just not sure about other families. There is a certain amount of humility that is required for this stuff to work and the humility angle of things didn't come across even from the people who ostensibly got their courtship system to work, let alone the people who had never tested it in their own families.
And I can excuse and understand courtship in a context like my friends' because they preached it having actually pulled it off, give or take a few bumps in the road, and considered it a valuable approach across generations. I'll take Eric Clapton's advice on playing blues before I'll take Marie Osmond's advice because Clapton figured out how to do it himself.
Now, as I ramble, the thing that struck me about courtship as a fad at my church is that there was nothing more going on than cherry-picking the pastors' favorite parts of old Mediterrenean courtship rituals and splicing them into the favorite parts of contemporary dating rituals. Courtship rituals proper, are flexible and span millenia, so even the contrast between courtship and dating can be seriously overplayed. Courtship as a method can be abused, too. A daughter can use her father as a way to snub suitors for so long as it is convenient and then pull leverage or jettison the agreement once Mr. Right shows up. In that case the daughter invites and then abuses the confidence of her father for her own ends and becomes a manipulator, which is unfortunate. On the other hand, if a father abdicates any interest in who his daughter spends time with he doesn't have the right to get indignant at his daughter's choice or behavior if he simply gave her a blank check for years. It's a volatile setting in which both parties can refuse to accept responsibility for their own sinful conduct and relational patterns but want to hold the other side accountable for their respective error.
Really, it's a wonder anyone gets married at all. The level of rational judgment that has to be suspended in order to get a marriage to even happen, let alone work over decades, continues to startle me. It seems as though God designed men and women to get horny enough that they suspend rational judgment ... which may just show my own disposition about viewing marriage as a noble but essentially terrifying institution in which lives are bound to lives on the basis of not very rational-appearing emotional bonds.
My church went through this courtship fad with people advising that older single women getting into their fifties could, say, find a married couple to submit to to supervise their relationships. The absurdity of a couple in their early 30s overseeing the possible suitors of a woman in her early 50s should speak for itself but I heard this seriously proposed. I mention these things now only because the fad, it seems, has come and gone.
But it feels emblematic of how churches that profess salvation through Christ alone have myriad ways in which a backdoor works theology gets promoted in practice. When I heard Ruth presented not once but twice as a manual on how to get married rather than a revelation of the kindness of Christ in giving a Moabite partnership in the people of God I felt depressed. Here we had a little book that could point us to Christ being trotted out as a marriage-how-to, with Boaz being held up as the sugar daddy all Christian guys should aspire to be. Where was Christ in all this? Hard to find, that's where. Admitting, practically, at the outset that a whole ministry developed partly to stem the possibility of the flock committing the same sins as the pastors isn't putting the best foot forward. That's how it came across to me.
The thing is that fads are inevitable. The winds of doctrine are not always heresies but closet legalisms and antinomianisms that are not recognized for what they are. My church took such a liberated view of alcohol they didn't respect other Christian organizations that were weaker on that subject and got themselves disinvited from further collaboration. I saw friends and fellow church members rationalize this behavior on the grounds that it should have been made clearer, which was nothing more than justifying their own sin with respect to their hosts. We're not supposed to use our liberty in Christ to sin and that includes sins against brothers and sisters in Christ. If my brother isn't cool with alcohol I won't drink even if I have the liberty to do so.
Conversely, libertinism in one respect may be justified by a compensating legalism, and I feel lately that a libertine view of alcohol was compensated for by a legalistic view of dating and courtship. "Dating is sinful" was practically how it came across, with presentations on how "date" was a euphemism for hiring a prostitute so don't date. But as the years went by more questions came up about what TO do. The reply was that people want rules.
Yeah, precisely, because if for years singles get told what they're NOT supposed to do they start wondering what IS permissable. Not everyone gets that whatever is not forbidden is allowed. Not everyone gets the married/engaged mantra of "it's all much simpler than you're making it out to be." It tended to be the married and engaged people who laid out the most rules! And it all smelled of some kind of retroactive ass-covering approach. If a guy fondled his girlfriend before he got married and felt guilty about it he might suppose the guy bears all responsibility for physical boundaries. If that's advice on exercising self-control it's advice not tested in living and seems like an over-reaction on the basis of one's own guilty conscious. In that case guilt is great before the Lord but not great as a means from which to advise people who may not have that particular struggle. Some guys might need to be told that touching a woman isn't necessarily bad (provided it's not "that" sort of touch, I suspect we all would surmise).
This year I heard one of my pastors explain that courtship is A method and not just THE method for marriage to happen. He said that Christian dating was possible and was perhaps not something the church emphasized as much as it could have in the past. No shit! But I have to say at this point that it's unfortunate that the singles were told to relax and not take things so seriously. For years the pastors were scaring the crap out of singles who wanted to avoid sin by laying out what was sinful and now singles get told to not worry so much? Weird, and unfortunate. If parents tell a child he can't have maple bars because sugar is poison and poison will make him sick then how does the kid react when his parents tell him one day that he needed to not be so worried about maple bars? Does he keep trusting the high-flown rhetoric of his parents at that point or does this attitude on the part of his parents betray, at some level, a betrayal of trust, especially when he discovers his parents have had no problem eating maple bars.
The inverse of stealth legalism is a kind of stealth antinomianism, cheapening categories of biblical thought while pretending to uphold them. My pet peeve in this respect is a membership "covenant" that is simply a contract. A covenant is binding for life on the two people who enter into it. It is something established once and for all, not something we are asked to prayerfully consider renewing. From the beginning I have felt my church has utterly cheapened the real significance of covenantal relationships by preferring the word "covenant" to "contract", the latter being the more honest and defensible term.
Do a husband and wife prayerfully talk to each other about how they should consider whether or not they want to renew their covenant this year? Do they ask each other to be in prayer about whether or not they will financially, emotionally, spiritually, or physically support each other? Do they discuss whether they will renew their covenant and take care of their children together? Renewing vows is a symbolic gesture that affirms that the original vow was never broken. Calling a membership contract a covenant bungles the significance of covenantal relationships. To say that the contrast between a contract and a covenant is that one is conditional and mutual and the other isn't misses the point. Functionally a covenant and a contract are not so different. What's different is the invocation of God. A contract can be entered into by two parties and both parties may fail but since neither invokes God both parties can be as good or bad as their word. When God establishes a covenant it doesn't matter how faithful the other party is.
And this is where church membership comes in. I don't think a covenant is a meaningful term to be used in a contract drawn up regarding church membership. If the rights and responsibilities of church membership change at any time to any degree then what I signed is not a covenant but a contract, a contract my church leaders have seen fit to revise. I can happily sign a contract if that is what it is called but if it is called a covenant then does God participate in a covenant whose terms constantly change? That I'm not so sure about. I'm not sure that church leaders calling something a covenant whose terms and conditions to be fulfilled by both parties changes over the last seven years is necessarily really a covenant. This is what I mean by stealth antinomianism. Biblical categories are invoked and then cheapened by how they are used. In the other context, stealth legalism, the absence of what Scripture says on a topic is filled with things that are meant to prevent sin. They don't prevent sin. In the contrasting case the strength of biblical terminology is invoked but cheapened. This member "covenant" that can be renewed cheapens the thing it invokes, and is in some sense a stealth legalism, too.
Legalism invariably cheapens the thing it professes to protect because it is protected not for the sake of those who would truly benefit from it but for the sake of those who feel they have it and want to make sure that all comers who would participate have to jump through hoops, hoops the legalist may not have gone through himself or herself. As Jesus put it, they ask people to lift burdens they themselves would not lift a finger to move.
We all have our own temptations toward legalism or antinomianism. Obviously I am tempted to kill tons of time on the internet, time that is well and truly gone.
I'm glad my church seems to have gotten over the fad of courtship but the thing about membership covenants still concerns me. I'd have no problem signing a contract if I'm told that what I'm signing is a contract because I know that's exactly what it is. But please don't call it a covenant if I have to renew it every year. The covenants God established are one-time deals. They are not up for renewal, they are not up for negotiation or revision. The terms don't change just because we've been around a few years. God doesn't downgrade what He promised us and He can't upgrade beyond the gift of Himself. If a church changes the terms of a "covenant" that doesn't seem to reflect the unchanging nature of God or His covenants. That's why, all things being equal, I prefer the term contract.
I'm gloomy enough about human nature as a whole that I don't suppose anywhere Christians gather will be free of this sort of thing. I have friends and family who aren't part of the church anymore and that's cool, but I also acknowledge somewhat gloomily that the pet legalisms and antinomianisms of my friends and family will not be any different simply having made a change of venue.
If my church no longer embraces the courtship fad there may yet be another fad that has to be contended with. The multi-church site as a euphemism for avoiding the term denomination might be the next wave. Years ago we were told that the church had already become a megachurch after rather high-flown rhetoric about limiting service sizes to just 120 people because a group larger than that becomes impersonal. And yet a few years ago we were apparently cheerfully told that said church was already a megachurch and people could leave if they didn't dig that. A similar cycle of denial and retroactive "well, duh" seems to await us on the issue of being a denomination. It's plain as day to me and has been privately verified by some people whose assessment I trust but publicly the tune is that a denomination is not what we are.
There is nothing new under the sun but each generation seems to revel in its desire to reinvent the wheel. "Look", they say, "we invented the wheel."
Yes I can see that.
"It has spokes!"
Yeah, some wheels have them.
"It looks cooler than anything ever that has come before."
Well, uh, not really.
"What do you mean?"
I've seen some pretty good wheels elsewhere.
"Our wheel is better."
It can't be a better wheel, it's a wheel.
I hope no one cheapens their own marriage by claiming theirs is better than someone else's but I know it happens. I don't get how that works, since I've never been in a relationship, but I just can't see how comparing your marriage to another marriage is anything but either coveting or judging. There must be some middle ground but I would hope the middle ground is not "Thank God I don't have a shitty marriage like THOSE people" but "Thank God for my spouse and may You grant me the grace to love that person in even a dim reflection of Your love."
It's another thing that I've seen in my church over the years, a kind of Pharisaical "Thank God I'm not at X." Even people who have left the church display this spectacularly bothersome trait. If I compare myself to a person then, sure, I can fool myself into thinking, "Well, at least I'm not as bad as that guy." But if I compare myself to Christ I can see that I need to be saved. Honoring Christ doesn't become a matter of being better than someone else but recognizing that there is no one better than Christ and all others are sinners, no matter how good they think they are or how good I may think they are.
The things we invest our time and money in are whisps of dust. It's all meaningless in itself. It doesn't matter how big the churchI call home may grow to be, if it is not about Christ then it is nothing but a sick joke. If I am asked to renew a covenant that should have always been a contract for years I guess I can renew the contract but I suppose it would be nice, to say nothing of ideal, to ask why a covenant seems so flimsy as to have to be prayerfully renewed every year with a giving statement.
If we have gone through the book of Ruth as a marriage instruction manual more than as a description of Christ working to bring into His flock a descendnt of incest who was barred by the Law from participating in God's people we're not seeing how God extends mercy beyond the Law in the Old Covenant. We get a presentation on the rules for how to get married when the marriage was, in some sense, against the rules. The paradox that Christ, as Lord of the Sabbath, can heal on the Sabbath and keep working for our benefit and His glory is something that can be easily missed, especially by the people who think they are doing the most to humbly consider all those details.
Now there is nothing wrong, at all, with engaging in spiritual warfare and recognizing that there are principalities and powers. But many books written on the subject of spiritual warfare had no exegetical foundation and promulgated absurd theories about spiritual warfare like cutting soul ties and other things that were really backdoor injections of what might as well be called old-fashioned sympathetic magic. You have to physically cut the soul ties here on earth with your arms and put on the armor of God with you own hands for them to be established in the heavenlies, more or less. I wonder how many divorced men of the cloth ended up writing books about the Jezebel spirit during the 1990s. Perhaps they just assumed the Jezebel spirit was dominating because they were Republicans who didn't like Hillary. I never liked her either but let's face it, the Jezebel spirit doesn't have to become a fad within a fad.
And if the spiritual warfare fad seemed to be a lot of flash and not enough substance where Christ is concerned we at least have scholars within the vale of Christendom like JEffrey Burton Russell or Susan R. Garrett who dug into the actual scholarly background of the topic. Scripture talks about the Enemy so we have something in Christ to talk about.
Then we get to dating and courtship and the blinders went on. That most men and women in the Bible did not go about marriage in exactly the same way we do in the United States seemed to get ignored. Men take wives and women are given in marriage. Okay, so soemone gets a mail order bride for Isaac and he takes her to be his wife. Doesn't sound like the byzantine rituals of courtship I began to hear proposed at my church. In my crankiest moments I simply surmised that this was a giant conscious driven rearguard action in which my pastors were wanting to make sure that the flock didn't sin prior to and in marriage in the ways they had. When one of my pastors said of himself and his wife six years ago "we broke some rules, but God is faithful." I knew he was confessing to fornication, something I could easily discern the second he said that because I know a thing or two about pastoral euphemisms. Other people were astonished, three or four years later, when said pastor broached the topic without euphemism. He said that he was a hypocrite who didn't even practice what he preached about dating and courtship.
So, if that's so, then does that invalidate a person from speaking what Scripture says? No, of course not. BUT (and this is a very big one) if you didn't live by the standard you preach for dating and courtship and it's NOT CLEARLY DEFENSIBLE IN SCRIPTURE then, yeah, you are a hypocrite. More concerning to me about the courtship fad at my church was simply that it focused chiefly on the avoidance of sin and not the following of Christ. Some prominent members of the church had something to gain from the fad, though, in as much as that they had daughters they wanted to protect and the fad of courtship playeed into their personal philosophy and praxis. And it was not, in principle, a bad thing.
The thing is, though, that sinners are sinners, and sometimes there's sin all around. A dad may want control that he can't have because God is sovereign. If his daughter falls in love with a man he doesn't approve of there's no amount of retroactive decision-making he can do to undo that decision. A father isn't just a father and has a life apart from family, so that means that he could be sufficiently immersed in church planting or the day job and not realize that his daughter has become emotionally enmeshed with a young suitor that he didn't approve of or perhaps didn't even realize had become as close to his daughter as previously thought. If there is anything I observed about my parents it's that the temptation to say you saw something coming consoles you retroactively when you've discovered there's nothing you can do about it.
And I understand a pastoral concern that young Christians not go about sinning so telling people in the Emerald City that they should get permission from the woman's father obviously means the family and woan are treated with respect. That part is totally cool. If you advocate a position like that because you want to retain control, though, how do we know that isn't a basically idolatrous impulse? If you're doing something to protect your children, cool, but even that can be abused as the basis for exerting control over other people even to a point that can't be legitimately defended. I'm not a parent so I don't know how tempting it must be to decide to control the world for the sake of a child. I just know that I've lived just long enough to see that control attempt to get exerted and wondering if it was action done in faith or action done in an attempt to avoid what God has providentially brought about. Sometimes we make decisions with unforeseen consequences, like spending time away from daughters, and then are tempted to take it out on someone who is not really connected to that decision.
Fortunately in the handful of cases I know about the parents and children involved handled things in a pretty good way in the end and things worked out. I'm just not sure about other families. There is a certain amount of humility that is required for this stuff to work and the humility angle of things didn't come across even from the people who ostensibly got their courtship system to work, let alone the people who had never tested it in their own families.
And I can excuse and understand courtship in a context like my friends' because they preached it having actually pulled it off, give or take a few bumps in the road, and considered it a valuable approach across generations. I'll take Eric Clapton's advice on playing blues before I'll take Marie Osmond's advice because Clapton figured out how to do it himself.
Now, as I ramble, the thing that struck me about courtship as a fad at my church is that there was nothing more going on than cherry-picking the pastors' favorite parts of old Mediterrenean courtship rituals and splicing them into the favorite parts of contemporary dating rituals. Courtship rituals proper, are flexible and span millenia, so even the contrast between courtship and dating can be seriously overplayed. Courtship as a method can be abused, too. A daughter can use her father as a way to snub suitors for so long as it is convenient and then pull leverage or jettison the agreement once Mr. Right shows up. In that case the daughter invites and then abuses the confidence of her father for her own ends and becomes a manipulator, which is unfortunate. On the other hand, if a father abdicates any interest in who his daughter spends time with he doesn't have the right to get indignant at his daughter's choice or behavior if he simply gave her a blank check for years. It's a volatile setting in which both parties can refuse to accept responsibility for their own sinful conduct and relational patterns but want to hold the other side accountable for their respective error.
Really, it's a wonder anyone gets married at all. The level of rational judgment that has to be suspended in order to get a marriage to even happen, let alone work over decades, continues to startle me. It seems as though God designed men and women to get horny enough that they suspend rational judgment ... which may just show my own disposition about viewing marriage as a noble but essentially terrifying institution in which lives are bound to lives on the basis of not very rational-appearing emotional bonds.
My church went through this courtship fad with people advising that older single women getting into their fifties could, say, find a married couple to submit to to supervise their relationships. The absurdity of a couple in their early 30s overseeing the possible suitors of a woman in her early 50s should speak for itself but I heard this seriously proposed. I mention these things now only because the fad, it seems, has come and gone.
But it feels emblematic of how churches that profess salvation through Christ alone have myriad ways in which a backdoor works theology gets promoted in practice. When I heard Ruth presented not once but twice as a manual on how to get married rather than a revelation of the kindness of Christ in giving a Moabite partnership in the people of God I felt depressed. Here we had a little book that could point us to Christ being trotted out as a marriage-how-to, with Boaz being held up as the sugar daddy all Christian guys should aspire to be. Where was Christ in all this? Hard to find, that's where. Admitting, practically, at the outset that a whole ministry developed partly to stem the possibility of the flock committing the same sins as the pastors isn't putting the best foot forward. That's how it came across to me.
The thing is that fads are inevitable. The winds of doctrine are not always heresies but closet legalisms and antinomianisms that are not recognized for what they are. My church took such a liberated view of alcohol they didn't respect other Christian organizations that were weaker on that subject and got themselves disinvited from further collaboration. I saw friends and fellow church members rationalize this behavior on the grounds that it should have been made clearer, which was nothing more than justifying their own sin with respect to their hosts. We're not supposed to use our liberty in Christ to sin and that includes sins against brothers and sisters in Christ. If my brother isn't cool with alcohol I won't drink even if I have the liberty to do so.
Conversely, libertinism in one respect may be justified by a compensating legalism, and I feel lately that a libertine view of alcohol was compensated for by a legalistic view of dating and courtship. "Dating is sinful" was practically how it came across, with presentations on how "date" was a euphemism for hiring a prostitute so don't date. But as the years went by more questions came up about what TO do. The reply was that people want rules.
Yeah, precisely, because if for years singles get told what they're NOT supposed to do they start wondering what IS permissable. Not everyone gets that whatever is not forbidden is allowed. Not everyone gets the married/engaged mantra of "it's all much simpler than you're making it out to be." It tended to be the married and engaged people who laid out the most rules! And it all smelled of some kind of retroactive ass-covering approach. If a guy fondled his girlfriend before he got married and felt guilty about it he might suppose the guy bears all responsibility for physical boundaries. If that's advice on exercising self-control it's advice not tested in living and seems like an over-reaction on the basis of one's own guilty conscious. In that case guilt is great before the Lord but not great as a means from which to advise people who may not have that particular struggle. Some guys might need to be told that touching a woman isn't necessarily bad (provided it's not "that" sort of touch, I suspect we all would surmise).
This year I heard one of my pastors explain that courtship is A method and not just THE method for marriage to happen. He said that Christian dating was possible and was perhaps not something the church emphasized as much as it could have in the past. No shit! But I have to say at this point that it's unfortunate that the singles were told to relax and not take things so seriously. For years the pastors were scaring the crap out of singles who wanted to avoid sin by laying out what was sinful and now singles get told to not worry so much? Weird, and unfortunate. If parents tell a child he can't have maple bars because sugar is poison and poison will make him sick then how does the kid react when his parents tell him one day that he needed to not be so worried about maple bars? Does he keep trusting the high-flown rhetoric of his parents at that point or does this attitude on the part of his parents betray, at some level, a betrayal of trust, especially when he discovers his parents have had no problem eating maple bars.
The inverse of stealth legalism is a kind of stealth antinomianism, cheapening categories of biblical thought while pretending to uphold them. My pet peeve in this respect is a membership "covenant" that is simply a contract. A covenant is binding for life on the two people who enter into it. It is something established once and for all, not something we are asked to prayerfully consider renewing. From the beginning I have felt my church has utterly cheapened the real significance of covenantal relationships by preferring the word "covenant" to "contract", the latter being the more honest and defensible term.
Do a husband and wife prayerfully talk to each other about how they should consider whether or not they want to renew their covenant this year? Do they ask each other to be in prayer about whether or not they will financially, emotionally, spiritually, or physically support each other? Do they discuss whether they will renew their covenant and take care of their children together? Renewing vows is a symbolic gesture that affirms that the original vow was never broken. Calling a membership contract a covenant bungles the significance of covenantal relationships. To say that the contrast between a contract and a covenant is that one is conditional and mutual and the other isn't misses the point. Functionally a covenant and a contract are not so different. What's different is the invocation of God. A contract can be entered into by two parties and both parties may fail but since neither invokes God both parties can be as good or bad as their word. When God establishes a covenant it doesn't matter how faithful the other party is.
And this is where church membership comes in. I don't think a covenant is a meaningful term to be used in a contract drawn up regarding church membership. If the rights and responsibilities of church membership change at any time to any degree then what I signed is not a covenant but a contract, a contract my church leaders have seen fit to revise. I can happily sign a contract if that is what it is called but if it is called a covenant then does God participate in a covenant whose terms constantly change? That I'm not so sure about. I'm not sure that church leaders calling something a covenant whose terms and conditions to be fulfilled by both parties changes over the last seven years is necessarily really a covenant. This is what I mean by stealth antinomianism. Biblical categories are invoked and then cheapened by how they are used. In the other context, stealth legalism, the absence of what Scripture says on a topic is filled with things that are meant to prevent sin. They don't prevent sin. In the contrasting case the strength of biblical terminology is invoked but cheapened. This member "covenant" that can be renewed cheapens the thing it invokes, and is in some sense a stealth legalism, too.
Legalism invariably cheapens the thing it professes to protect because it is protected not for the sake of those who would truly benefit from it but for the sake of those who feel they have it and want to make sure that all comers who would participate have to jump through hoops, hoops the legalist may not have gone through himself or herself. As Jesus put it, they ask people to lift burdens they themselves would not lift a finger to move.
We all have our own temptations toward legalism or antinomianism. Obviously I am tempted to kill tons of time on the internet, time that is well and truly gone.
I'm glad my church seems to have gotten over the fad of courtship but the thing about membership covenants still concerns me. I'd have no problem signing a contract if I'm told that what I'm signing is a contract because I know that's exactly what it is. But please don't call it a covenant if I have to renew it every year. The covenants God established are one-time deals. They are not up for renewal, they are not up for negotiation or revision. The terms don't change just because we've been around a few years. God doesn't downgrade what He promised us and He can't upgrade beyond the gift of Himself. If a church changes the terms of a "covenant" that doesn't seem to reflect the unchanging nature of God or His covenants. That's why, all things being equal, I prefer the term contract.
I'm gloomy enough about human nature as a whole that I don't suppose anywhere Christians gather will be free of this sort of thing. I have friends and family who aren't part of the church anymore and that's cool, but I also acknowledge somewhat gloomily that the pet legalisms and antinomianisms of my friends and family will not be any different simply having made a change of venue.
If my church no longer embraces the courtship fad there may yet be another fad that has to be contended with. The multi-church site as a euphemism for avoiding the term denomination might be the next wave. Years ago we were told that the church had already become a megachurch after rather high-flown rhetoric about limiting service sizes to just 120 people because a group larger than that becomes impersonal. And yet a few years ago we were apparently cheerfully told that said church was already a megachurch and people could leave if they didn't dig that. A similar cycle of denial and retroactive "well, duh" seems to await us on the issue of being a denomination. It's plain as day to me and has been privately verified by some people whose assessment I trust but publicly the tune is that a denomination is not what we are.
There is nothing new under the sun but each generation seems to revel in its desire to reinvent the wheel. "Look", they say, "we invented the wheel."
Yes I can see that.
"It has spokes!"
Yeah, some wheels have them.
"It looks cooler than anything ever that has come before."
Well, uh, not really.
"What do you mean?"
I've seen some pretty good wheels elsewhere.
"Our wheel is better."
It can't be a better wheel, it's a wheel.
I hope no one cheapens their own marriage by claiming theirs is better than someone else's but I know it happens. I don't get how that works, since I've never been in a relationship, but I just can't see how comparing your marriage to another marriage is anything but either coveting or judging. There must be some middle ground but I would hope the middle ground is not "Thank God I don't have a shitty marriage like THOSE people" but "Thank God for my spouse and may You grant me the grace to love that person in even a dim reflection of Your love."
It's another thing that I've seen in my church over the years, a kind of Pharisaical "Thank God I'm not at X." Even people who have left the church display this spectacularly bothersome trait. If I compare myself to a person then, sure, I can fool myself into thinking, "Well, at least I'm not as bad as that guy." But if I compare myself to Christ I can see that I need to be saved. Honoring Christ doesn't become a matter of being better than someone else but recognizing that there is no one better than Christ and all others are sinners, no matter how good they think they are or how good I may think they are.
The things we invest our time and money in are whisps of dust. It's all meaningless in itself. It doesn't matter how big the churchI call home may grow to be, if it is not about Christ then it is nothing but a sick joke. If I am asked to renew a covenant that should have always been a contract for years I guess I can renew the contract but I suppose it would be nice, to say nothing of ideal, to ask why a covenant seems so flimsy as to have to be prayerfully renewed every year with a giving statement.
If we have gone through the book of Ruth as a marriage instruction manual more than as a description of Christ working to bring into His flock a descendnt of incest who was barred by the Law from participating in God's people we're not seeing how God extends mercy beyond the Law in the Old Covenant. We get a presentation on the rules for how to get married when the marriage was, in some sense, against the rules. The paradox that Christ, as Lord of the Sabbath, can heal on the Sabbath and keep working for our benefit and His glory is something that can be easily missed, especially by the people who think they are doing the most to humbly consider all those details.
Monday, May 12, 2008
TommyMertonHead presents a puzzle
http://www.boarsheadtavern.com/archives/2008/05/12/1160625.html
I submit that a possible answer to the "Why?" may be Mark Driscoll.
A little digging around through Driscoll's sermons and books suggests strongly that if Driscoll has made friends with Piper, Mahaney, and Dever in the last few years and has been working hard to distance himself from the emergent church by rhetorically aligning them with the doctrinally errant tendencies of liberal/mainline Protestants that all the pieces more or less fall into place. If Driscoll is one of the possible threads that ties all the points brought up by the Tavernites together then TommyMertonHead may have an explanation for why Together for the Gospel (which he calls Together for Calvinism) are obsessed with the emergent church. Driscoll preached this year about how the emergents are basically advocating stuff that's heresy and how he was friends with people in that movement before they began to move in a direction that was patently not orthodox.
Driscoll is based in Seattle where, when spirituality seems popular with educated leftists with religious backgrounds look for spiritual expression, the most logical options are not Calvinist views that lean politically conservative. This means that of the ostensibly low/"non" liturgical church movements in the Puget Sound area competing to get the kids who grew up and got tired of traditional denominations the biggest competition will be the church that resembles Mars Hill in style but differs in substance. Mars Hill used to be labeled "emergent" or part of the emergent movement. I think that the more dismissive claims that Mars Hill was a fundamentalist Protestant church disguising itself to itself as taking a post-modern approach is probably far more accurate, though this is not necessarily a claim that Mars Hill is thereby terrible. But the label of emergent stuck long enough by association that Driscoll has a compelling reason to work against having that label continue to stick in anyway.
Place him in the historical moment where older Calvinists are reaching for a generation (i.e. 20s to 30s) who do not necessarily come from that theological tradition of Calvinism and the need to get the intellectually curious who might not otherwise by Christians on board has a kind of social capital investment to it (and that's not necessarily bad, either). Church traditions that do not take a systematic, analytical philosophical approach to spirituality (like Pentecostalism, or Orthodoxy, or to some extent mystical trends in Catholicism (as opposed to the Thomistic stream)) may not appeal to American males who may take an instrumental and perhaps even faintly rationalistic approach to shopping for spirituality.
Driscoll has talked about how his main target is to get the young men, to get them for Jesus and that this can transform the culture. One of the main competitors to get younger white males with intellectual tendencies into something resembling a church would be the emergent movement, not least because Driscoll was friends with some of the leaders in that movement. Now that their theologies have been observed to be as obviously different as they are there's a sort of theological shopping equivalent of figuring out who the real Buck Rogers is.
So, in recap by way of specific points by Tavernites, here are the points where Driscoll might be the connecting thread:
Who is friends with Dever, Piper, and Mahaney now?
(per TommyMertonHead's question about T4G)
Who has been distancing himself for years from the emergents and describing them as heretical and embracing the theological failures of the mainline Protestant/liberal denominations and preached a whole sermon about it earlier this year?
(per Adam and Randy's points)
Who has been advocating multi-site churches as a new trend in implicit contrast to old denominational structures which he has been critical of from the pulpit?
(per Spike's comment on the denominational ecosphere).
Who has said from the pulpit that the battle to engage the culture and transform it for Christ will be won by the side that has the most babies in a cultural setting where children are not generally born? (per Spike, again)
Who has said for years his goal is to get the young men? To get them to love Jesus, get jobs, get married, and make babies? Who has also joked that his church is a fertility cult?
(per Jason Blair's point)
Who said last year that by getting Christians "upstream" the culture can be transformed by young men and women who can become culture-shapers for Jesus?
(per Alex Arnold's point)
Obviously even if Driscoll ends up being a common thread through each of these points there are plenty of others but Driscoll has the most personal reasons and the most personal connections to T4G for a group of older white guys to focus on repudiating something that arguably isn't any more important than anything else that isn't Calvinism. If the evidence is circumstantial (and I grant that it is) the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming enough to fool me into thinking there is at least correlation if no causality.
I submit that a possible answer to the "Why?" may be Mark Driscoll.
A little digging around through Driscoll's sermons and books suggests strongly that if Driscoll has made friends with Piper, Mahaney, and Dever in the last few years and has been working hard to distance himself from the emergent church by rhetorically aligning them with the doctrinally errant tendencies of liberal/mainline Protestants that all the pieces more or less fall into place. If Driscoll is one of the possible threads that ties all the points brought up by the Tavernites together then TommyMertonHead may have an explanation for why Together for the Gospel (which he calls Together for Calvinism) are obsessed with the emergent church. Driscoll preached this year about how the emergents are basically advocating stuff that's heresy and how he was friends with people in that movement before they began to move in a direction that was patently not orthodox.
Driscoll is based in Seattle where, when spirituality seems popular with educated leftists with religious backgrounds look for spiritual expression, the most logical options are not Calvinist views that lean politically conservative. This means that of the ostensibly low/"non" liturgical church movements in the Puget Sound area competing to get the kids who grew up and got tired of traditional denominations the biggest competition will be the church that resembles Mars Hill in style but differs in substance. Mars Hill used to be labeled "emergent" or part of the emergent movement. I think that the more dismissive claims that Mars Hill was a fundamentalist Protestant church disguising itself to itself as taking a post-modern approach is probably far more accurate, though this is not necessarily a claim that Mars Hill is thereby terrible. But the label of emergent stuck long enough by association that Driscoll has a compelling reason to work against having that label continue to stick in anyway.
Place him in the historical moment where older Calvinists are reaching for a generation (i.e. 20s to 30s) who do not necessarily come from that theological tradition of Calvinism and the need to get the intellectually curious who might not otherwise by Christians on board has a kind of social capital investment to it (and that's not necessarily bad, either). Church traditions that do not take a systematic, analytical philosophical approach to spirituality (like Pentecostalism, or Orthodoxy, or to some extent mystical trends in Catholicism (as opposed to the Thomistic stream)) may not appeal to American males who may take an instrumental and perhaps even faintly rationalistic approach to shopping for spirituality.
Driscoll has talked about how his main target is to get the young men, to get them for Jesus and that this can transform the culture. One of the main competitors to get younger white males with intellectual tendencies into something resembling a church would be the emergent movement, not least because Driscoll was friends with some of the leaders in that movement. Now that their theologies have been observed to be as obviously different as they are there's a sort of theological shopping equivalent of figuring out who the real Buck Rogers is.
So, in recap by way of specific points by Tavernites, here are the points where Driscoll might be the connecting thread:
Who is friends with Dever, Piper, and Mahaney now?
(per TommyMertonHead's question about T4G)
Who has been distancing himself for years from the emergents and describing them as heretical and embracing the theological failures of the mainline Protestant/liberal denominations and preached a whole sermon about it earlier this year?
(per Adam and Randy's points)
Who has been advocating multi-site churches as a new trend in implicit contrast to old denominational structures which he has been critical of from the pulpit?
(per Spike's comment on the denominational ecosphere).
Who has said from the pulpit that the battle to engage the culture and transform it for Christ will be won by the side that has the most babies in a cultural setting where children are not generally born? (per Spike, again)
Who has said for years his goal is to get the young men? To get them to love Jesus, get jobs, get married, and make babies? Who has also joked that his church is a fertility cult?
(per Jason Blair's point)
Who said last year that by getting Christians "upstream" the culture can be transformed by young men and women who can become culture-shapers for Jesus?
(per Alex Arnold's point)
Obviously even if Driscoll ends up being a common thread through each of these points there are plenty of others but Driscoll has the most personal reasons and the most personal connections to T4G for a group of older white guys to focus on repudiating something that arguably isn't any more important than anything else that isn't Calvinism. If the evidence is circumstantial (and I grant that it is) the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming enough to fool me into thinking there is at least correlation if no causality.
Friday, April 18, 2008
tissue regeneration for soldiers
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=49610
If this works for veterans of the current war it would be nice to extend it to veterans of earlier wars.
If this works for veterans of the current war it would be nice to extend it to veterans of earlier wars.
Monday, April 14, 2008
It's old but I have to post it.
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6068&var_recherche=Gibran
Never did care for the guy and so I found this perhaps too hilarious for my own good or anyone else's. I may have even posted this before but who reads this blog so much as to know? At any rate, here it is.
Never did care for the guy and so I found this perhaps too hilarious for my own good or anyone else's. I may have even posted this before but who reads this blog so much as to know? At any rate, here it is.
Monday, April 07, 2008
An election year sonnet
In all the steady hand of Providence
guides well except if, this election year,
the party I love lacks preeminence.
Then I will cry out with many a tear,
"My God, my God, why did you forsake me!
The person I want in office has lost!
In your wrath have you forgotten mercy?
Have it on me and not the foolish host!
Did you break your promise to do my will
That was given `ere the day I was born?
Or did my requests lack a prayerful skillthat
You listened not, and I am forlorn?
In all things Providence can only be
The stuff that should be convenient to me!"
guides well except if, this election year,
the party I love lacks preeminence.
Then I will cry out with many a tear,
"My God, my God, why did you forsake me!
The person I want in office has lost!
In your wrath have you forgotten mercy?
Have it on me and not the foolish host!
Did you break your promise to do my will
That was given `ere the day I was born?
Or did my requests lack a prayerful skillthat
You listened not, and I am forlorn?
In all things Providence can only be
The stuff that should be convenient to me!"
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Christ and sacrifice, Christ and the heart
... and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.
These two passages have been on my mind lately less because I have thought of them specifically than because of the thing they tell us about God. What is striking about John's writing is that (despite the claims of some of the more jittery Calvinists, the universal scope of the work of Christ is emphasized by the apostle who is often the favorite of Calvinists who would elide this statement into a defense of particular atonement. It would be more honest and frightening to say that while one aspect of Yahweh's character is strikingly consistent other aspects of His character are unknowable. We know that the offer of salvation must really meaningfully be offered to all but what we do NOT know is who the Lord may damn.
This is significant because Scripture is more clear that Christ sacrificed Himself for sinners than about who amongst sinners will refuse Him, rightly because it is not our business to know who is beyond the redemption of Christ and because it is not even our place as individuals to presume to know who is or isn't in Christ because of our personal assessment.
We know that while we were sinners Christ died for us and this tells us something significant about the nature of Christ's sacrifice, obvious thought it may be to point out. Christ sacrificed Himself for us from the fulness of His own self and not based on our deserving that sacrifice and not even on the basis of our receiving salvation due to some form of election. The reason this has to be said is because regardless of what one's views about the election of saints or sinners, regardless of one's estimate of who can receive and accept the offer, any side can presume that they are the measure of Christ's offer, they can decide who receives Christ's mercy. One Christian may suppose that the assent to this set of particular doctrines is necessary, another may suppose that being tied to this particular group of believers is necessary and while both are necessary in their own rights to determine one's inclination toward Christ these are not the same or sufficient as the consideration of all these things with spiritual fruit and love for one's neighbor.
If we are to love as Christ then we can lovingly sacrifice ourselves for people who might not seem to be worthy of the sacrifice. The sacrifice of Christ was made to offer us mercy and perhaps this was why Christ rebuked his adversaries on earth
For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.
These words of Christ are challenging because we can persuade ourselves that because of our sacrifices we are serving Christ. We could simply be serving ourselves. And if we sacrifice only for those we consider worthy of the sacrifice we do not have the heart of Christ, who sacrificed Himself for us even though we did not deserve that mercy. Yet it is freely given to us. And God through the Psalmist reveals to us that He has no need of our sacrifices. There is nothing we can deprive ourselves of or offer to the Lord that adds anything to His nature.
We can be like Cain and offer a sacrifice that merely builds ourselves up rather than reflects a heart of love toward Christ and our neighbor. This was at the heart of the man who dared to ask Christ "And who is my neighbor?" The man understood the command to love God and love his neighbor as himself, he wished only to ask if there was a qualification for who his neighbor was because he wanted to justify himself. Christ took away that justification by revealing who the man's neighbor truly was, the one the man refused to recognize as his neighbor, the one the man refused to extend kindness to. When Christ extends his hand to the people we despise He reveals that He offers redemption to those that we would not offer ourselves to. We would prefer to protect our heart and our possessions where Christ emptied Himself. I would prefer to sacrifice only for those who deserve the sacrifice if I could help it but the Lord can thwart my understanding of who deserves what. In fact Christ once told His disciples
"Suppose one of you had a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, 'Come along now and sit down to eat'? Would he not rather say, 'Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink'? Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.' "
We have only done our duty. There is nothing we can offer as a sacrifice to Christ because even if we have done so how is it a sacrifice to simply obey the master? If we love our enemies as we love ourselves, if we sacrifice ourselves for people who we would not think deserve that sacrifice then we have not offered a sacrifice to Christ at all, we have only done our duty. Only Christ can make a sacrifice of love that is not commanded, all others are inherent in the command to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. If we die for our neighbor whether he is an enemy or a friend, we have simply done our duty. This will never commend me to Christ if I do this, whose sacrifice for me is greater than the entire race of mortals can repay. If I sacrifice out of love of Christ and neighbor the sacrifice is not valuable because it has any value in itself but because Christ works it in me.
Christ is a warrior who sacrificed Himself for His mortal enemy, who fought the devil and sin for the sake of the very sinners who condemned Him to death. Christ is a soldier who died for the enemy's sake, for us, who sacrificed Himself for the sake of people who refused to acknowledge even His sacrifice. If Christ died for the sins of the whole world then He died for those who will never acknowledge His kindness or even acknowledge that He exists. A sacrifice offered freely out of love for people who will scorn even that is a sacrifice that is truly thankless. This is what is so piercing about Christ's words, He reveals that He can remove the reward of gratitude we expect from Him and from men for the sacrifices we would offer.
If we make our sacrifices so as to obtain respect from God or men then we are making those sacrifices for our own pleasure and not out of love for Christ and our neighbor. We will have received our reward and most of us do not receive even that. Haven't we all had a parent complain to us that we don't appreciate the sacrifices they have made for us? :) A parent who speaks that way to his or her child is not speaking of real sacrifice at all, but of the appearance of sacrifice which is used as a means of control, as a means to extort loyalty and respect.
Christ did not do this in making His sacrifice but we, like this parent who points to a sacrifice as a means of demanding respect, think that our sacrifices ought to be recognized by the Lord. He won't recognize them not because they have no value as sacrifices but because they are not done out of His love. If I sacrifice myself only for the people who love me how am I better than an unbeliever. If I sacrifice myself because Christ's love enables me to sacrifice myself for people who consider me to be nothing then it is more like Christ, and only like Christ if the Spirit of God works it within me.
it seems that in every generation people believe that sacrifice is needed and that today's ungrateful generation knows nothing of it. And it's always true, but it is also always true that too often we condemn others for not making sacrifices we have made that were really sacrifices embarked upon with the goal of personal convenience in mind. I certainly have to say that I have sacrificed things with a consideration of my own happiness, which vitiates the very nature of the sacrifice.
If I sacrifice money for the sake of family I am sacrificing something for what I consider to be the better of two things. If I sacrifice friends to obtain a wife I am simply saying that one is less valuable than the other rather than making a sacrifice for the sake of someone else. The reason our sacrifices in themselves don't make us right with the Lord is because we cannot make a sacrifice that gives, we can only make a sacrifice that reveals where our heart really is. We sacrifice in a way that says this is valuable and that is not whereas Christ offers Himself as a sacrifice that says it is all valuable, valuable enough that for these things He is willing to die.
Our sacrifices reveal our selfishness, not our selflessness, especially if at any point we believe that anyone is unworthy of the sacrifices we make. Those are the people for whom Christ sacrificed Himself, a sacrifice greater than any we could possibly offer.
Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.
These two passages have been on my mind lately less because I have thought of them specifically than because of the thing they tell us about God. What is striking about John's writing is that (despite the claims of some of the more jittery Calvinists, the universal scope of the work of Christ is emphasized by the apostle who is often the favorite of Calvinists who would elide this statement into a defense of particular atonement. It would be more honest and frightening to say that while one aspect of Yahweh's character is strikingly consistent other aspects of His character are unknowable. We know that the offer of salvation must really meaningfully be offered to all but what we do NOT know is who the Lord may damn.
This is significant because Scripture is more clear that Christ sacrificed Himself for sinners than about who amongst sinners will refuse Him, rightly because it is not our business to know who is beyond the redemption of Christ and because it is not even our place as individuals to presume to know who is or isn't in Christ because of our personal assessment.
We know that while we were sinners Christ died for us and this tells us something significant about the nature of Christ's sacrifice, obvious thought it may be to point out. Christ sacrificed Himself for us from the fulness of His own self and not based on our deserving that sacrifice and not even on the basis of our receiving salvation due to some form of election. The reason this has to be said is because regardless of what one's views about the election of saints or sinners, regardless of one's estimate of who can receive and accept the offer, any side can presume that they are the measure of Christ's offer, they can decide who receives Christ's mercy. One Christian may suppose that the assent to this set of particular doctrines is necessary, another may suppose that being tied to this particular group of believers is necessary and while both are necessary in their own rights to determine one's inclination toward Christ these are not the same or sufficient as the consideration of all these things with spiritual fruit and love for one's neighbor.
If we are to love as Christ then we can lovingly sacrifice ourselves for people who might not seem to be worthy of the sacrifice. The sacrifice of Christ was made to offer us mercy and perhaps this was why Christ rebuked his adversaries on earth
For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.
These words of Christ are challenging because we can persuade ourselves that because of our sacrifices we are serving Christ. We could simply be serving ourselves. And if we sacrifice only for those we consider worthy of the sacrifice we do not have the heart of Christ, who sacrificed Himself for us even though we did not deserve that mercy. Yet it is freely given to us. And God through the Psalmist reveals to us that He has no need of our sacrifices. There is nothing we can deprive ourselves of or offer to the Lord that adds anything to His nature.
We can be like Cain and offer a sacrifice that merely builds ourselves up rather than reflects a heart of love toward Christ and our neighbor. This was at the heart of the man who dared to ask Christ "And who is my neighbor?" The man understood the command to love God and love his neighbor as himself, he wished only to ask if there was a qualification for who his neighbor was because he wanted to justify himself. Christ took away that justification by revealing who the man's neighbor truly was, the one the man refused to recognize as his neighbor, the one the man refused to extend kindness to. When Christ extends his hand to the people we despise He reveals that He offers redemption to those that we would not offer ourselves to. We would prefer to protect our heart and our possessions where Christ emptied Himself. I would prefer to sacrifice only for those who deserve the sacrifice if I could help it but the Lord can thwart my understanding of who deserves what. In fact Christ once told His disciples
"Suppose one of you had a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, 'Come along now and sit down to eat'? Would he not rather say, 'Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink'? Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.' "
We have only done our duty. There is nothing we can offer as a sacrifice to Christ because even if we have done so how is it a sacrifice to simply obey the master? If we love our enemies as we love ourselves, if we sacrifice ourselves for people who we would not think deserve that sacrifice then we have not offered a sacrifice to Christ at all, we have only done our duty. Only Christ can make a sacrifice of love that is not commanded, all others are inherent in the command to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. If we die for our neighbor whether he is an enemy or a friend, we have simply done our duty. This will never commend me to Christ if I do this, whose sacrifice for me is greater than the entire race of mortals can repay. If I sacrifice out of love of Christ and neighbor the sacrifice is not valuable because it has any value in itself but because Christ works it in me.
Christ is a warrior who sacrificed Himself for His mortal enemy, who fought the devil and sin for the sake of the very sinners who condemned Him to death. Christ is a soldier who died for the enemy's sake, for us, who sacrificed Himself for the sake of people who refused to acknowledge even His sacrifice. If Christ died for the sins of the whole world then He died for those who will never acknowledge His kindness or even acknowledge that He exists. A sacrifice offered freely out of love for people who will scorn even that is a sacrifice that is truly thankless. This is what is so piercing about Christ's words, He reveals that He can remove the reward of gratitude we expect from Him and from men for the sacrifices we would offer.
If we make our sacrifices so as to obtain respect from God or men then we are making those sacrifices for our own pleasure and not out of love for Christ and our neighbor. We will have received our reward and most of us do not receive even that. Haven't we all had a parent complain to us that we don't appreciate the sacrifices they have made for us? :) A parent who speaks that way to his or her child is not speaking of real sacrifice at all, but of the appearance of sacrifice which is used as a means of control, as a means to extort loyalty and respect.
Christ did not do this in making His sacrifice but we, like this parent who points to a sacrifice as a means of demanding respect, think that our sacrifices ought to be recognized by the Lord. He won't recognize them not because they have no value as sacrifices but because they are not done out of His love. If I sacrifice myself only for the people who love me how am I better than an unbeliever. If I sacrifice myself because Christ's love enables me to sacrifice myself for people who consider me to be nothing then it is more like Christ, and only like Christ if the Spirit of God works it within me.
it seems that in every generation people believe that sacrifice is needed and that today's ungrateful generation knows nothing of it. And it's always true, but it is also always true that too often we condemn others for not making sacrifices we have made that were really sacrifices embarked upon with the goal of personal convenience in mind. I certainly have to say that I have sacrificed things with a consideration of my own happiness, which vitiates the very nature of the sacrifice.
If I sacrifice money for the sake of family I am sacrificing something for what I consider to be the better of two things. If I sacrifice friends to obtain a wife I am simply saying that one is less valuable than the other rather than making a sacrifice for the sake of someone else. The reason our sacrifices in themselves don't make us right with the Lord is because we cannot make a sacrifice that gives, we can only make a sacrifice that reveals where our heart really is. We sacrifice in a way that says this is valuable and that is not whereas Christ offers Himself as a sacrifice that says it is all valuable, valuable enough that for these things He is willing to die.
Our sacrifices reveal our selfishness, not our selflessness, especially if at any point we believe that anyone is unworthy of the sacrifices we make. Those are the people for whom Christ sacrificed Himself, a sacrifice greater than any we could possibly offer.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
some local coverage on the Airbus/Boeing/DOD battle
http://seattleweekly.com/2008-03-19/news/is-airbus-bird-too-big.php
More coverage (a la local reaction to) on the subject of the big tanker deal that Boeing is disputing. The gist of the dispute is that the bigger plane creates untold infrastructure costs at taxpayer expense for a plane that has characteristics that were never initially part of the deal As it were, Boeing thought the Air Force was asking for a sturdy pickup truck and believes it got duped when the Air Force changed its mind half way through and decided, "Nah, I want a MONSTER truck.
So the case could be described as one where Boeing is protesting on the basis of the parking spaces that have to be modified to even fit the monster truck.
More coverage (a la local reaction to) on the subject of the big tanker deal that Boeing is disputing. The gist of the dispute is that the bigger plane creates untold infrastructure costs at taxpayer expense for a plane that has characteristics that were never initially part of the deal As it were, Boeing thought the Air Force was asking for a sturdy pickup truck and believes it got duped when the Air Force changed its mind half way through and decided, "Nah, I want a MONSTER truck.
So the case could be described as one where Boeing is protesting on the basis of the parking spaces that have to be modified to even fit the monster truck.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Crazy for God, media postscripts
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/obamas-minister-committe_b_91774.html
Now this puzzles me because in the Huffington post Frank says
We Republican agitators of the mid 1970s to the late 1980s were genuinely anti-American in the same spirit that later Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (both followers of my father) were anti-American when they said God had removed his blessing from America on 9/11, because America accepted gays. Falwell and Robertson recanted but we never did.
In his book, on page 299 of Crazy for GodFrank writes:
Falwell, Robertson, Dobson, and others would later use their power in ways that would have made my father throw up. Dad could hardly have imagined how they would have help facilitate the instantly corrupted power-crazy new generation of evangelical public figures like Ralph Reed, who took money from teh casino industry while allegedly playing both sides against the middle in events related to the Abramoff Washington lobbyist scandal.
Later on Frank describes his dad as seeming very uncomfortable around the likes of Robertson and in other parts of the book goes so far as to describe how his dad thought the current leaders of the religious right were "not like us" or "not our kind of people".
So if Frank goes so far as to say his father virtually thought these people were idiots or not of the same spirit in his book, what's with the description of Falwell and Robertson as followers of his late father?
Now it may just be me but it seems like Frank is trying to have it both ways. He's trying to rehabilitate his father in Crazy for God as someone who would have been appalled at how the religious right handles things but in Huffington's forum seems to be writing as though the people that he himself recounts his father as thinking were weird at best were followers.
Then again, Frank doesn't have a history of really writing books that rely on rational argument and he particularly has no history of handling anything in terms of nuanced analysis. Not too difficult to see why some people thinks Frank is a bit off. It's not what he writes in any individual setting that makes it seem odd how extreme he gets, it's more the cumulative effect of his output.
Frank believes that writing means he can be honest. But I am afraid I have to ask how honest it is to present his dad in such different lights to different audiences based on what group his is denouncing at any given publishing date. There's not even a mention in the Huffington post entry that Frank believes his father would not have approved of how the religious right handles things now. Of course Frank's main point is that when he and his father denounced America they were regarded as heroes while liberals or putative liberals who denounce America are regarded as traitors.
Trouble is, this is not that new. It's not even that special. Liberals have been talking about how Reaganism destroyed America and took America away from real Americans. Frank is still part of the problem and not the solution, or perhaps it would be more realistic to say there is no solution for the kind of problem Frank's polemic is included within. I stand by my observation that Jesus was crucified by a bipartisan committee. I was prepared to give a fairly generous assessment of Frank comparing his new book to his old book but his other writings have reminded me that he's still a hot head and can be pretty condescending to people he doesn't like, and he can be awfully selective about how he presents a case. Well, it's not like we didn't know this about him all the way back in Addicted to Mediocrity so I guess it's not so much a surprise as an unpleasant confirmation that the character traits that make him frustrating obviously have stuck around. I suppose that would be true of anyone, though, wouldn't it?
Perhaps what Frank should argue is that the hypocrisy in anti-government agitation is really when the political party making the complaint goes from feeling at a loss for power to having power. What Frank should argue is not about Jeremiah Wright but that if people consistenly held to the idea that people have the right to overthrow unust government that we have to realize the real risk involved, that the "right" to overthrow the government that does not deliver what we think God requires of us goes both ways, both left and right.
But neither party complains about the abuse or lack of separation of powers while their party has dominance, which is one of the more serious things to consider. Frank would have a better argument for his position if he made this appeal. The Republicans who endorsed calls for deposing unjust government twenty years ago have to recognize that double edged sword they want to wield. Frank's rhetoric goes both too far and not nearly far enough.
Now this puzzles me because in the Huffington post Frank says
We Republican agitators of the mid 1970s to the late 1980s were genuinely anti-American in the same spirit that later Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (both followers of my father) were anti-American when they said God had removed his blessing from America on 9/11, because America accepted gays. Falwell and Robertson recanted but we never did.
In his book, on page 299 of Crazy for GodFrank writes:
Falwell, Robertson, Dobson, and others would later use their power in ways that would have made my father throw up. Dad could hardly have imagined how they would have help facilitate the instantly corrupted power-crazy new generation of evangelical public figures like Ralph Reed, who took money from teh casino industry while allegedly playing both sides against the middle in events related to the Abramoff Washington lobbyist scandal.
Later on Frank describes his dad as seeming very uncomfortable around the likes of Robertson and in other parts of the book goes so far as to describe how his dad thought the current leaders of the religious right were "not like us" or "not our kind of people".
So if Frank goes so far as to say his father virtually thought these people were idiots or not of the same spirit in his book, what's with the description of Falwell and Robertson as followers of his late father?
Now it may just be me but it seems like Frank is trying to have it both ways. He's trying to rehabilitate his father in Crazy for God as someone who would have been appalled at how the religious right handles things but in Huffington's forum seems to be writing as though the people that he himself recounts his father as thinking were weird at best were followers.
Then again, Frank doesn't have a history of really writing books that rely on rational argument and he particularly has no history of handling anything in terms of nuanced analysis. Not too difficult to see why some people thinks Frank is a bit off. It's not what he writes in any individual setting that makes it seem odd how extreme he gets, it's more the cumulative effect of his output.
Frank believes that writing means he can be honest. But I am afraid I have to ask how honest it is to present his dad in such different lights to different audiences based on what group his is denouncing at any given publishing date. There's not even a mention in the Huffington post entry that Frank believes his father would not have approved of how the religious right handles things now. Of course Frank's main point is that when he and his father denounced America they were regarded as heroes while liberals or putative liberals who denounce America are regarded as traitors.
Trouble is, this is not that new. It's not even that special. Liberals have been talking about how Reaganism destroyed America and took America away from real Americans. Frank is still part of the problem and not the solution, or perhaps it would be more realistic to say there is no solution for the kind of problem Frank's polemic is included within. I stand by my observation that Jesus was crucified by a bipartisan committee. I was prepared to give a fairly generous assessment of Frank comparing his new book to his old book but his other writings have reminded me that he's still a hot head and can be pretty condescending to people he doesn't like, and he can be awfully selective about how he presents a case. Well, it's not like we didn't know this about him all the way back in Addicted to Mediocrity so I guess it's not so much a surprise as an unpleasant confirmation that the character traits that make him frustrating obviously have stuck around. I suppose that would be true of anyone, though, wouldn't it?
Perhaps what Frank should argue is that the hypocrisy in anti-government agitation is really when the political party making the complaint goes from feeling at a loss for power to having power. What Frank should argue is not about Jeremiah Wright but that if people consistenly held to the idea that people have the right to overthrow unust government that we have to realize the real risk involved, that the "right" to overthrow the government that does not deliver what we think God requires of us goes both ways, both left and right.
But neither party complains about the abuse or lack of separation of powers while their party has dominance, which is one of the more serious things to consider. Frank would have a better argument for his position if he made this appeal. The Republicans who endorsed calls for deposing unjust government twenty years ago have to recognize that double edged sword they want to wield. Frank's rhetoric goes both too far and not nearly far enough.
Crazy for God, the end of the journey
I finished it this week and overall am glad I read it. I think that what most Protestant critics of the book seem to overlook is that Frank cheerfully admits he remained an asshole for years after he converted to Orthodoxy (and obviously some people must think he still IS one to go by some of the net reactions I have read and heard about).
So, what do I think (as if you care!)? A solid read. Sloppier than Frank's other book that I read (Addicted to Mediocrity) but it's the kind of sloppiness that is forgivable because I feel like he actually wrote this book. Addicted to Mediocrity had a sort of anonymous ghost-written aspect to its literary style that suggested too much of a committee based sense of outrage, which is in some sense what Frank feels has been endemic to evangelical Protestantism.
I DO wonder if Frank may be emblematic of the adult evangelical convert in the very narrow sense that he feels that evangelicalism was full of bullshit. Yet he introduces a huge caveat near the end of the book that he's not angry with all of evangelicalism past, but with what it has become in the present, a happening he takes some blame for. More blame than perhaps he deserves but the conscious is a strange thing in terms of what it condemns and excuses within us.
And having grown up reading Francis Schaeffer books or J. I. Packer books and other evangelical authors I would say I agree with Frank. The problem with evangelicalism is hardly a matter of what it WAS but what it IS. Does this mean I should give up on evangelicalism? No, not any more than Catholics or Orthodox or Anglicans should abandon Christianity just because of wrongs their denominations have done. To abandon a church because of what I don't get out of it is no less consumeristic than to seek a church because I'm not getting what I want from the one I'm at. Hardly means I'll be happy with everything at the church I'm at, but then I reconciled myself to the reality that all the branches within the tree that is the body of Christ have rottenness in their limbs.
Frank writes a bit about how he discovered that his attempts to get somewhere in Hollywood failed, utterly, and that he forsook all that he believed in as an artist just to get by. When he writes about how he was tempted to re-convert to evangelicalism to drum up money for his family and decided against it is it wrong to agree with him that it was wise not to do that? I could be tempted to look down on him for admitting to professing beliefs he didn't hold but we have all been tempted to affirm things we don't really believe to get by and get along and some people, I guess, must actually do it. These confessions help to explain a nagging sense I had from Frnak's earlier evangelically based books that something just didn't seem right. Frank eventually figured out what that was.
I guess I'd blog more but I'm not sure what else to blog. I'm making some editorial adjustments to some music scores this weekend. I still haven't gotten around to blogging about some of the music and anime related stuff I wanted to blog about but life happens, of course, and it's better to blog on the whim than with too much intent. Perhaps as thoughts come to me (or IF they come to me) I'll blog more about Crazy for God later.
So, what do I think (as if you care!)? A solid read. Sloppier than Frank's other book that I read (Addicted to Mediocrity) but it's the kind of sloppiness that is forgivable because I feel like he actually wrote this book. Addicted to Mediocrity had a sort of anonymous ghost-written aspect to its literary style that suggested too much of a committee based sense of outrage, which is in some sense what Frank feels has been endemic to evangelical Protestantism.
I DO wonder if Frank may be emblematic of the adult evangelical convert in the very narrow sense that he feels that evangelicalism was full of bullshit. Yet he introduces a huge caveat near the end of the book that he's not angry with all of evangelicalism past, but with what it has become in the present, a happening he takes some blame for. More blame than perhaps he deserves but the conscious is a strange thing in terms of what it condemns and excuses within us.
And having grown up reading Francis Schaeffer books or J. I. Packer books and other evangelical authors I would say I agree with Frank. The problem with evangelicalism is hardly a matter of what it WAS but what it IS. Does this mean I should give up on evangelicalism? No, not any more than Catholics or Orthodox or Anglicans should abandon Christianity just because of wrongs their denominations have done. To abandon a church because of what I don't get out of it is no less consumeristic than to seek a church because I'm not getting what I want from the one I'm at. Hardly means I'll be happy with everything at the church I'm at, but then I reconciled myself to the reality that all the branches within the tree that is the body of Christ have rottenness in their limbs.
Frank writes a bit about how he discovered that his attempts to get somewhere in Hollywood failed, utterly, and that he forsook all that he believed in as an artist just to get by. When he writes about how he was tempted to re-convert to evangelicalism to drum up money for his family and decided against it is it wrong to agree with him that it was wise not to do that? I could be tempted to look down on him for admitting to professing beliefs he didn't hold but we have all been tempted to affirm things we don't really believe to get by and get along and some people, I guess, must actually do it. These confessions help to explain a nagging sense I had from Frnak's earlier evangelically based books that something just didn't seem right. Frank eventually figured out what that was.
I guess I'd blog more but I'm not sure what else to blog. I'm making some editorial adjustments to some music scores this weekend. I still haven't gotten around to blogging about some of the music and anime related stuff I wanted to blog about but life happens, of course, and it's better to blog on the whim than with too much intent. Perhaps as thoughts come to me (or IF they come to me) I'll blog more about Crazy for God later.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
reports of Luther's rehabilitation by Rome are amiss
http://insightscoop.typepad.com/2004/2008/03/vatican-sets-th.html
British journalism on religion being what it was I couldn't be sure they knew their head from their behind ... and sure enough ... . Not that there aren't great writers on the subject of religion from the UK ... but I haven't come across any journalists on the topic (I'm including you Mr. Hitchens and I'm sure you don't care what I think).
British journalism on religion being what it was I couldn't be sure they knew their head from their behind ... and sure enough ... . Not that there aren't great writers on the subject of religion from the UK ... but I haven't come across any journalists on the topic (I'm including you Mr. Hitchens and I'm sure you don't care what I think).
Boeing formally protests, EADS plans to buy an American company, possibly in defense industry
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/354573_tankerprotest12.html
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/354498_eads11.html
Formal protest from Boeing. Meanwhile, it's of note that EADS, or someone at EADS, has leaked the news that the company is considering purchasing a company in the United States and possibly in the defense industry. Since the euro is in better shape than the dollar now is considered a good time to acquire some overseas companies (i.e. we're overseas for them). So, if EADS were planning to buy an American company with a background in weapons or military tech what would they get? Notrhrop/Grumman? I don't know but I got the impression after the McDonald Douglas/Boeing merger almost a decade ago that the game in aerospace tech has gotten small and only huge players can play anymore.
I guess my question at this point is that given our active involvement on multiple fronts should the United States let this happen in terms of business? If we are in a wartime economy then wouldn't it stand to reason that certain things would be good to not have on the market? My hunch at this point is that whatever EADS considers getting isn't going to be Lockheed Martin.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/354498_eads11.html
Formal protest from Boeing. Meanwhile, it's of note that EADS, or someone at EADS, has leaked the news that the company is considering purchasing a company in the United States and possibly in the defense industry. Since the euro is in better shape than the dollar now is considered a good time to acquire some overseas companies (i.e. we're overseas for them). So, if EADS were planning to buy an American company with a background in weapons or military tech what would they get? Notrhrop/Grumman? I don't know but I got the impression after the McDonald Douglas/Boeing merger almost a decade ago that the game in aerospace tech has gotten small and only huge players can play anymore.
I guess my question at this point is that given our active involvement on multiple fronts should the United States let this happen in terms of business? If we are in a wartime economy then wouldn't it stand to reason that certain things would be good to not have on the market? My hunch at this point is that whatever EADS considers getting isn't going to be Lockheed Martin.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Some Souther Baptists say we should take climate change seriously
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080310/southern_baptists_environment.html?.v=1
There's an old joke that two rabbis will have three opinions. I wonder if it may also be said of Baptists. The Dobson connected rejoinder is not too suprising. Basically the news is that, potentially, even religious conservatives may come around to environmental stances. That this should even be news seems curious since pretty theologically conservative Protestants spoke out on environmental issues decades ago (e.g. Francis Schaeffer) but I suppose it speaks to the times that this is the kind of news item it is.
There's an old joke that two rabbis will have three opinions. I wonder if it may also be said of Baptists. The Dobson connected rejoinder is not too suprising. Basically the news is that, potentially, even religious conservatives may come around to environmental stances. That this should even be news seems curious since pretty theologically conservative Protestants spoke out on environmental issues decades ago (e.g. Francis Schaeffer) but I suppose it speaks to the times that this is the kind of news item it is.
Boeing vs the competition continues
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/354416_tanker11.html
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/354341_eads10.html
Ah, so Northrup/Grumman/EADS gets the deal and we have some coverage about how Airbus to help build the A380 superjumbo planes and local workers couldn't read the manuals because they were printed in the wrong language.
Ah ... the joys of having anything for the United States built with any involvement of a European consortium of companies that don't really have a history of getting along.
I would have hoped that the disastrous attempt at building a joint main battle tank venture we tried with Germany in the 1970s would have told us something. The reason we have the Abrams and they have the Leopard 2 series goes something like this--imperial vs metric measurement system, left vs right orientation in schematic drawings, smoothbore 120 mm vs 105 mm gun that's not smooth-bore, depleted uranium vs tungsten ammunition for armor-piercing rounds ... and, really, do I need to go on? Thirty years ago and a scrubbed collaboration probably indicates something.
Now, theoretically, having EADS and affiliates working on lesser levels than overall design might make a difference but the more I see covered about this situation the less surprised I am. Boeing and Airbus have been duking it out for a while now so Boeing seriously considering protesting the award of the tanker deal to Northrop/Grumman makes sense. I suppose Northrop/Grumman might want something besides the B2. I'm rusty on major military procurements these days but Jack's company hasn't exactly been rolling in contracts ... or I'm just amazingly rusty on department of defense procurment and research and development. Yeah, I suspect that explains it all right there. :)
I don't even know why I'm trying to follow this, actually. Maybe it's that it involves a presidential campaign and Boeing suits have more than hinted that they think McCain is somehow responsible for carting part of a major military contract to a company collaboration that includes companies that aren't in the United States. Protectionism? Maybe, but the consortium members are part of NATO (not that being part of NATO ever seemed to mean much of anything since it seemed like our working assumption was that the United States would have to do a good chunk of fighting.
Ah, well, it's tough to blog about this too much. The story is still breaking news after all.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/354341_eads10.html
Ah, so Northrup/Grumman/EADS gets the deal and we have some coverage about how Airbus to help build the A380 superjumbo planes and local workers couldn't read the manuals because they were printed in the wrong language.
Ah ... the joys of having anything for the United States built with any involvement of a European consortium of companies that don't really have a history of getting along.
I would have hoped that the disastrous attempt at building a joint main battle tank venture we tried with Germany in the 1970s would have told us something. The reason we have the Abrams and they have the Leopard 2 series goes something like this--imperial vs metric measurement system, left vs right orientation in schematic drawings, smoothbore 120 mm vs 105 mm gun that's not smooth-bore, depleted uranium vs tungsten ammunition for armor-piercing rounds ... and, really, do I need to go on? Thirty years ago and a scrubbed collaboration probably indicates something.
Now, theoretically, having EADS and affiliates working on lesser levels than overall design might make a difference but the more I see covered about this situation the less surprised I am. Boeing and Airbus have been duking it out for a while now so Boeing seriously considering protesting the award of the tanker deal to Northrop/Grumman makes sense. I suppose Northrop/Grumman might want something besides the B2. I'm rusty on major military procurements these days but Jack's company hasn't exactly been rolling in contracts ... or I'm just amazingly rusty on department of defense procurment and research and development. Yeah, I suspect that explains it all right there. :)
I don't even know why I'm trying to follow this, actually. Maybe it's that it involves a presidential campaign and Boeing suits have more than hinted that they think McCain is somehow responsible for carting part of a major military contract to a company collaboration that includes companies that aren't in the United States. Protectionism? Maybe, but the consortium members are part of NATO (not that being part of NATO ever seemed to mean much of anything since it seemed like our working assumption was that the United States would have to do a good chunk of fighting.
Ah, well, it's tough to blog about this too much. The story is still breaking news after all.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Crazy for God on a short hiatus
Not that I haven't enjoyed reading the book and found it illuminating, but I'm juggling a few other projects, too. Since the blog title indicates a yen for non-Spanish classical guitar music I might as well 'fess up and say that sometimes writing new music for guitar is more interesting than blogging.
Way more interesting, especially given some of the stuff I've managed to write lately. So it's not that I plan to abandon my likely rarely read blog, but artistic life takes precedence over blog life every time. I'd rather be an accomplished composer and musician than an accomplished blogger, all things considered. Not that I can't blog up something but there's enough bloggers out there.
Actually, to touch on that matter for a moment, part of why I feel many of the critiques of Frank Schaeffer's books end up being so daft is precisely because they're liable to, effectively, blog about it. Even though I respect Os Guinness' right to sound off on the strengths and weaknesses and the rights and substantial wrongs of Crazy for God as Frank published the book ... the very fact that the rebuttal/reprimand/interpretation is happening within the same context steals the thunder, or gives it away. I don't mean for Guinness' comments, which I thought were still insightful, I mean bloggers who bloga bout Frank Schaeffer not having the right to say this or that about his dad when they say without qualms any number of things about him. Romans 2, bloggers, go read it.
For my part, I don't have any compelling interest in either assuming everything Frank wrote is true (especially since he dumped a huge disclaimer at the front of the book for me and other readers) or false, which is more than I think some bloggers have managed to do regarding their own work.
I want to give Frank the benefit of the doubt, that he is writing in good faith and that even where he seems wonky that I would ask him to give me the benefit of the doubt. I don't have to believe everything he tells is the truth to trust that his intent is to tell the truth as best he understands it and admits that how he perceives things may be wrong. It's foundational to any honest communicative enterprise.
Of course the difference here is that in a book by the time everything gets fact-checked and people get a chance to ask you what you mean (if ever that arrives) so much water under the bridge has flowed, so many feathers are ruffled, and so many egos may be bruised that it's harder to step back and say, "Well, uh, what I was trying to say was X and not Y." So Frank can, understandably, be stuck with a few things in there that now that the book has gone to print he may change his mind about a few years later.
Even Augustine of Hippo published a book called Retractions. I can't vouch that he retracted diddley or squat, actually, as I haven't read that book of his, just Confessions and a decent chunk of City of God (which, trust me (those of you who've read the book) can be a startlingly small part of said book).
If Frank changes his mind I'm sure he'll write a book. That is, in the best sense of my understanding of this book's scope, the whole point of Crazy for God. Christopher Hitchens once wrote a long article recounting Winston Churchill's acidic ways, his cruel views on race and class and involvement in military matters in foreign lands. Hitchens painted this unflattering portrait with a particular rhetorical and historical point in mind. Churchill was not a hero because he was a good man or because he spent much of his life holding what Hitchens would consider good or right views. Hitchens' point was more this--that when the chips were done and the fate of millions upon millions was at stake Churchill changed his mind and changed his mind all the way, all the way enough to decide that the National Socialists needed to be stopped regardless of the cost.
At the risk of making an absurd comparison that invites the legitimate chard of Godwin's law, I invoke Churchill precisely because Frank seems to, in his own way, invite that precedent. Frank is writing a lengthy apology for playing his part in founding, shaping, directing, and promoting the Religious Right that he believes (obviously) has betrayed the principles and best qualities of his father and his father's legacy; capitalizing on those things for the sake of raw and unmitigated political battles; and transforming Francis Schaeffer from a real flesh and blood man who loved God and his family into an evangelical Protestant's variation of an idol.
So, there you go, my probable violation of Godwin's law indirectly by invoking WInston Churchill as written about by Christopher Hitchens (probably in the Atlantic Monthly some six or seven years ago and since the Atlantic Monthly is on-line and you don't have to pay money to search the archives anymore someone can go spend some time looking that up and telling me how full of crap I am for blogging about an article that may just possibly have not been written in the Atlantic Monthly by Christopher Hitchens about Winston Churchill). Go ahead, prove me wrong, that is, after all, part of what blogging is about. In any event, the analogy seemed useful for some reason so accept it for what it is, an analogy. It's partly to show that Schaeffer's comments can sometimes seem a bit overboard. Then again, the comments of the Religious Right and Left can be pretty overboard.
I wonder if the prophets of old were simply preparing the way for highly charged political rhetoric. Seems like it sometimes. But now, truly, I digress.
See, I ended up blogging about the book anyway. One of these days I'll have to blog about something like music or something else again.
Way more interesting, especially given some of the stuff I've managed to write lately. So it's not that I plan to abandon my likely rarely read blog, but artistic life takes precedence over blog life every time. I'd rather be an accomplished composer and musician than an accomplished blogger, all things considered. Not that I can't blog up something but there's enough bloggers out there.
Actually, to touch on that matter for a moment, part of why I feel many of the critiques of Frank Schaeffer's books end up being so daft is precisely because they're liable to, effectively, blog about it. Even though I respect Os Guinness' right to sound off on the strengths and weaknesses and the rights and substantial wrongs of Crazy for God as Frank published the book ... the very fact that the rebuttal/reprimand/interpretation is happening within the same context steals the thunder, or gives it away. I don't mean for Guinness' comments, which I thought were still insightful, I mean bloggers who bloga bout Frank Schaeffer not having the right to say this or that about his dad when they say without qualms any number of things about him. Romans 2, bloggers, go read it.
For my part, I don't have any compelling interest in either assuming everything Frank wrote is true (especially since he dumped a huge disclaimer at the front of the book for me and other readers) or false, which is more than I think some bloggers have managed to do regarding their own work.
I want to give Frank the benefit of the doubt, that he is writing in good faith and that even where he seems wonky that I would ask him to give me the benefit of the doubt. I don't have to believe everything he tells is the truth to trust that his intent is to tell the truth as best he understands it and admits that how he perceives things may be wrong. It's foundational to any honest communicative enterprise.
Of course the difference here is that in a book by the time everything gets fact-checked and people get a chance to ask you what you mean (if ever that arrives) so much water under the bridge has flowed, so many feathers are ruffled, and so many egos may be bruised that it's harder to step back and say, "Well, uh, what I was trying to say was X and not Y." So Frank can, understandably, be stuck with a few things in there that now that the book has gone to print he may change his mind about a few years later.
Even Augustine of Hippo published a book called Retractions. I can't vouch that he retracted diddley or squat, actually, as I haven't read that book of his, just Confessions and a decent chunk of City of God (which, trust me (those of you who've read the book) can be a startlingly small part of said book).
If Frank changes his mind I'm sure he'll write a book. That is, in the best sense of my understanding of this book's scope, the whole point of Crazy for God. Christopher Hitchens once wrote a long article recounting Winston Churchill's acidic ways, his cruel views on race and class and involvement in military matters in foreign lands. Hitchens painted this unflattering portrait with a particular rhetorical and historical point in mind. Churchill was not a hero because he was a good man or because he spent much of his life holding what Hitchens would consider good or right views. Hitchens' point was more this--that when the chips were done and the fate of millions upon millions was at stake Churchill changed his mind and changed his mind all the way, all the way enough to decide that the National Socialists needed to be stopped regardless of the cost.
At the risk of making an absurd comparison that invites the legitimate chard of Godwin's law, I invoke Churchill precisely because Frank seems to, in his own way, invite that precedent. Frank is writing a lengthy apology for playing his part in founding, shaping, directing, and promoting the Religious Right that he believes (obviously) has betrayed the principles and best qualities of his father and his father's legacy; capitalizing on those things for the sake of raw and unmitigated political battles; and transforming Francis Schaeffer from a real flesh and blood man who loved God and his family into an evangelical Protestant's variation of an idol.
So, there you go, my probable violation of Godwin's law indirectly by invoking WInston Churchill as written about by Christopher Hitchens (probably in the Atlantic Monthly some six or seven years ago and since the Atlantic Monthly is on-line and you don't have to pay money to search the archives anymore someone can go spend some time looking that up and telling me how full of crap I am for blogging about an article that may just possibly have not been written in the Atlantic Monthly by Christopher Hitchens about Winston Churchill). Go ahead, prove me wrong, that is, after all, part of what blogging is about. In any event, the analogy seemed useful for some reason so accept it for what it is, an analogy. It's partly to show that Schaeffer's comments can sometimes seem a bit overboard. Then again, the comments of the Religious Right and Left can be pretty overboard.
I wonder if the prophets of old were simply preparing the way for highly charged political rhetoric. Seems like it sometimes. But now, truly, I digress.
See, I ended up blogging about the book anyway. One of these days I'll have to blog about something like music or something else again.
Saturday, March 08, 2008
Boeing backers blame McCain for loss of deal
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/354300_mccaintanker08.html
No comment at this time as I have errands to run and a friend to visit but here's something to read through. Blaming presidential candidate McCain for losing the deal to Northrup/Grumman with EADS as part of the project interests me but I'll have to get to this later. Following the nature of major military procurements and how competition works in practice is something that interests me. So many parts of aircraft get assembled here from stuff really built overseas that part of me thinks Boeing's take is kinda odd. It's not like we can't find out that deal-rigging has never happened in an industry with this much money at stake but it could get Boeing in trouble as much as they'd like McCain to get in trouble. Then, of course, I certainly don't know the details. But this could become an interesting story if there's any actual story to it, though I'm not sure I want it to be or that I'll follow it if there's more details.
No comment at this time as I have errands to run and a friend to visit but here's something to read through. Blaming presidential candidate McCain for losing the deal to Northrup/Grumman with EADS as part of the project interests me but I'll have to get to this later. Following the nature of major military procurements and how competition works in practice is something that interests me. So many parts of aircraft get assembled here from stuff really built overseas that part of me thinks Boeing's take is kinda odd. It's not like we can't find out that deal-rigging has never happened in an industry with this much money at stake but it could get Boeing in trouble as much as they'd like McCain to get in trouble. Then, of course, I certainly don't know the details. But this could become an interesting story if there's any actual story to it, though I'm not sure I want it to be or that I'll follow it if there's more details.
there's more than one kind of shark out named after a household pet ...
Don't know exactly where Michael Spencer of Internet Monk fame found this but it caught my eye, I mean, how couldn't it?
Thursday, March 06, 2008
The Pope to rehabilitate Martin Luther?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article3492299.ece
Pope Benedict XVI is to rehabilitate Martin Luther, arguing that he did not intend to split Christianity but only to purge the Church of corrupt practices.
Pope Benedict will issue his findings on Luther (1483-1546) in September after discussing him at his annual seminar of 40 fellow theologians — known as the Ratzinger Schülerkreis — at Castelgandolfo, the papal summer residence. According to Vatican insiders the Pope will argue that Luther, who was excommunicated and condemned for heresy, was not a heretic.
Cardinal Walter Kasper, the head of the pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said the move would help to promote ecumenical dialogue between Catholics and Protestants. It is also designed to counteract the impact of July's papal statement describing the Protestant and Orthodox faiths as defective and “not proper Churches”.
The move to re-evaluate Luther is part of a drive to soften Pope Benedict's image as an arch conservative hardliner as he approaches the third anniversary of his election next month. This week it emerged that the Vatican is planning to erect a statue of Galileo, who also faced a heresy trial, to mark the 400th anniversary next year of his discovery of the telescope.
The Pope has also reached out to the Muslim world to mend fences after his 2006 speech at Regensburg University in which he appeared to describe Islam as inherently violent and irrational. This week Muslim scholars and Vatican officials met at the pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue in Rome to begin laying the groundwork for a meeting between the Pope and leading Muslims, also expected to be held at Castelgandolfo.
Cardinal Kasper said: “We have much to learn from Luther, beginning with the importance he attached to the word of God.” It was time for a “more positive” view of Luther, whose reforms had aroused papal ire at the time but could now be seen as having “anticipated aspects of reform which the Church has adopted over time”.
The Castelgandolfo seminar will in part focus on the question of apostolic succession, through which the apostles passed on the authority they received from Jesus to the first bishops. After the Reformation Protestants took the view that “succession” referred only to God's Word and not to church hierarchies but some German scholars have suggested Luther himself did not intend this.
Luther challenged the authority of the papacy by holding that the Bible is the sole source of religious authority and made it accessible to ordinary people by translating it into the vernacular. He became convinced that the Church had lost sight of the “central truths of Christianity”, and was appalled on a visit to Rome in 1510 by the power, wealth and corruption of the papacy.
In 1517 he protested publicly against the sale of papal indulgences for the remission of sins in his “95 Theses”, nailing a copy to the door of a Wittenberg church. Some theologians argue that Luther did not intend to confront the papacy “in a doctrinaire way” but only to raise legitimate questions - a view Pope Benedict apparently shares.
Luther was excommunicated by Pope Leo X, who dismissed him initially as “a drunken German who will change his mind when sober”.
***
Wow, give any church enough time and they change their minds, like shifting from the 1 Enoch take on Gen 6 to the Augustinian position., for instance. Martin Luther getting rehabilitated by a pope is something I never thought I'd see, even if I have a hunch there's more than a little political gamesmanship in it.
Pope Benedict XVI is to rehabilitate Martin Luther, arguing that he did not intend to split Christianity but only to purge the Church of corrupt practices.
Pope Benedict will issue his findings on Luther (1483-1546) in September after discussing him at his annual seminar of 40 fellow theologians — known as the Ratzinger Schülerkreis — at Castelgandolfo, the papal summer residence. According to Vatican insiders the Pope will argue that Luther, who was excommunicated and condemned for heresy, was not a heretic.
Cardinal Walter Kasper, the head of the pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said the move would help to promote ecumenical dialogue between Catholics and Protestants. It is also designed to counteract the impact of July's papal statement describing the Protestant and Orthodox faiths as defective and “not proper Churches”.
The move to re-evaluate Luther is part of a drive to soften Pope Benedict's image as an arch conservative hardliner as he approaches the third anniversary of his election next month. This week it emerged that the Vatican is planning to erect a statue of Galileo, who also faced a heresy trial, to mark the 400th anniversary next year of his discovery of the telescope.
The Pope has also reached out to the Muslim world to mend fences after his 2006 speech at Regensburg University in which he appeared to describe Islam as inherently violent and irrational. This week Muslim scholars and Vatican officials met at the pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue in Rome to begin laying the groundwork for a meeting between the Pope and leading Muslims, also expected to be held at Castelgandolfo.
Cardinal Kasper said: “We have much to learn from Luther, beginning with the importance he attached to the word of God.” It was time for a “more positive” view of Luther, whose reforms had aroused papal ire at the time but could now be seen as having “anticipated aspects of reform which the Church has adopted over time”.
The Castelgandolfo seminar will in part focus on the question of apostolic succession, through which the apostles passed on the authority they received from Jesus to the first bishops. After the Reformation Protestants took the view that “succession” referred only to God's Word and not to church hierarchies but some German scholars have suggested Luther himself did not intend this.
Luther challenged the authority of the papacy by holding that the Bible is the sole source of religious authority and made it accessible to ordinary people by translating it into the vernacular. He became convinced that the Church had lost sight of the “central truths of Christianity”, and was appalled on a visit to Rome in 1510 by the power, wealth and corruption of the papacy.
In 1517 he protested publicly against the sale of papal indulgences for the remission of sins in his “95 Theses”, nailing a copy to the door of a Wittenberg church. Some theologians argue that Luther did not intend to confront the papacy “in a doctrinaire way” but only to raise legitimate questions - a view Pope Benedict apparently shares.
Luther was excommunicated by Pope Leo X, who dismissed him initially as “a drunken German who will change his mind when sober”.
***
Wow, give any church enough time and they change their minds, like shifting from the 1 Enoch take on Gen 6 to the Augustinian position., for instance. Martin Luther getting rehabilitated by a pope is something I never thought I'd see, even if I have a hunch there's more than a little political gamesmanship in it.
Monday, March 03, 2008
someone tries to ask Benny Hinn a question during a healing crusade
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/preacher-who-can-make-215-million-a-year/2008/03/02/1204402273545.html
Figured out too late that if you're sending in a stunt person who claims to be healed that the actor has to be super excited about their healing and not nonchalant. :) Does this mean Benny Hinn is the real deal? Well, I personally doubt it since I was taken to one of the crusades years ago and the Benny Hinn placebo effect didn't kick in for me but that Hinn thinks he is a Christian doing the Lord's work I'm n0t all that inclined to doubt, which is what makes him creepier to me. But what all this DOES mean is that Hinn and his crew are shrewder than some would be investigative journalists give them credit for.
Figured out too late that if you're sending in a stunt person who claims to be healed that the actor has to be super excited about their healing and not nonchalant. :) Does this mean Benny Hinn is the real deal? Well, I personally doubt it since I was taken to one of the crusades years ago and the Benny Hinn placebo effect didn't kick in for me but that Hinn thinks he is a Christian doing the Lord's work I'm n0t all that inclined to doubt, which is what makes him creepier to me. But what all this DOES mean is that Hinn and his crew are shrewder than some would be investigative journalists give them credit for.
Saturday, March 01, 2008
chapter 57 of Crazy for God
If there is a thesis statement or a central premise to Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of The Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take it All (or almost all) Back then perhaps chapter 57 is where the thesis statement finally appears, somewhere around page 347 of the 408 page book (not counting the index).
Yes, this would seem to be relatively late in the game to reveal the topic sentence.
Frank opens up with a statement that he considers abortion to be an unmitigated tragedy, still, decades after Roe vs Wade. He goes on to explain how the pro-life leaders in the Christian Right like Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson, have played Christians for suckers, using a single hot-button issue as a way to manipulate and rouse political support and sustaining their hold on power.
Frank holds Bush 2 accountable for the deaths of Christians in Iraq, who he believes were in better conditions prior to the war than they have been since. In fact Frank seems to believe the hypocrisy of Bush 2's administration is essentially intolerable.
Frank lays at the feet of Roe vs Wade the blame for three decades of terrible leadership from both political parties who jumped on this decision as the rallying cry for their respective teams. If there had been some moderation on either side to allow for something beyond a strictly binary decision, Frank seems to believe, politiccs in America wouldn't have become the sharp delineation of Religous Right and Secular Left it has become in the last two or three decades. And I think in one sense he's right, he's right that for years the secular left and mainstream media didn't take anything said by evangelicals seriously and for years abortion really was essentially a "Catholic issue" (which was why Francis was so loathe to jump into the political fray and address the issue until Frank, by his own account, cussed his dad into taking a stand on the issue).
As Frank puts it seemed like the requirement of ideological purity on abortion and any number of single-issue political topics) led both parties to prevent the development of any intelligent, pragmatic, and competent political leadership. Left in the wake of this is a series of ideological litmus tests, loyalty oaths, and partisan loyalties that reveal very little about applied principle and more about idology. Politics becomes less about the implementation of policy for the public good and more about the implementation of policy to reward those who fight over policy. This is a relatively old observation since complaints of this sort were rumbling in the United States in a few corners when I was a kid twenty years ago.
There are a handful of statements I admit to not quite getting from Frank. Frank seems to recognize some hypocrisy inherent in either side--the pro-life side opposes abortion but supports the death penalty and the pro-choice side supports abortion and opposes the death penalty. Ironically the Catholic position of the last decade or so seems to often oppose both abortion AND the death penalty and even war in a few cases. Personally I distrust the role and right of government to kill or sanction the killing of citizens without a warrant based on defending the citizenry. War as an act of self-defense I can understand because it is a matter of defending your own people from attack, but killing your own people pre-emptively because they are not wanted or killing them because they are considered too unsuitable to deserve life is bothersome to me and I don't think either should be done lightly.
Now the thing Frank says that seems to clearly indicate how he feels and thinks is something I will quote briefly:
page 349 from Crazy for God:
If it had been the other way around and the left had championed the unborn, perhaps against corporate medical industry interests, or in the name of euqality--or because of the lessons taguht by the rise of the eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s, or because of being queasy over a recently slave-owning society once again deciding who was more equal, even more human "legally" than others--my father would have been embraced as a religious leader on the left. And if Dad had been allied with the left, it would have ultimate been a much better fit for him--and for me.
That Frank notes how evangelicals ignored his father's passion for conservationism and environmentalism is easy to establish earlier in the book and that Francis was undoubtedly more broad-minded and inquisitive than most evangelicals and fundamentalists on the arts is something that ought to be universally agreed upon.
But the idea of Francis Schaeffer as a hero to the religious left? That's an amazingly big what-if. I don't see how given Francis Schaeffer's approach to epistlemology worked, let alone how he actually interpreted a great deal of modernist art, music and literature, that such an alternate reality would be possible. Schaeffer was bold enough to embrace, digest, absorb, and interpret a lot of 20th century culture but at the end of the day he was decidedly old-school in his interests and passions. This isn't bad, but it's the kind of thing that in the long run would have made him a hard-sell as a leader amongst the religious left. To the religious left of the 1960s was he something other than an irrelevant sideshow. Frank obvi0usly loves his dad and I think this love for his dad may cloud his perceptions when he goes so far as to suppose that if the left had championed the opposition of abortion that his father would have been a hero to the religious left. It was the religious left that Francis had been partly reacting to all along and Frank himself seems to even know this better than anyone.
If I were to fault the book it's not because Frank reveals that Francis and Edith were fallable human beings who loved the Lord, it's not even that their zeal for the Lord made them crazy because the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men. Nor is the fault of the book that the Religious Right is a movement that has done some terrible things or even done nothing much at all because that is the provence of any political movement, having a terribly mixed track record. I've been wondering for two decades when the Republican party will actually implement smalle rand less invasive government instead of simply claiming that's what they stand for. No, if I were to fault Frank's book it's that he gets to his real point so late in the book that I can't quite say I've experienced the "joy in the journey". His life was no doubt interesting but then so was mine and that doesn't mean I ought to write a memoir about it.
Given the pithy title and the lengthy subtitle I was hoping Frank would, uh, get to the point less than fifty pages away from the end of his book. And his point seems to be not only that he regrets playing a crucial part in forming the Religious Right (okay, I grant him that, I guess) but that if things had gone the other way his dad could have been a leader of the religious left. Okay ... sure I suppose ... but at that point would we even be talking about the religious left of the Western world that rose up in the last two centureis? Soemhow I doubt it.
Of course by eliminating a strictly scriptural approach to knowledge of Christian ethics and practice you can jump to the other side of the Proestant/Catholic/Orthodox divide but the political and historical reality is that Francis Schaeffer couldn't have done that based on his personal convictions. He was far too Prostetant. Would the Francis Schaeffer who seriously believed Billy Graham had compromised the Gospel by working with Catholics have REALLY become a hero to the religious left? Not likely. Did Francis have any interaction with non-Protestant Christians? Here I simply profess my ignorance because it is easy for Protestants to forget that left and right political debates happen within Catholic and Orthodox circles, too. God's kingdom every where has been divided since the time of Solomon's death so it's hardly a surprise that claims of unity are often a facade or mere optimism in the face of reality.
Still, what I appreciate about Crazy for God is that overall Frank seems to be able to admit in the crudest possible terms what evangelicals and really many Christians of every stripe and people of every stripe seem reluctant to admit. He doesn't just say "I'm not perfect [but I'm better than these other people]." He sometimes seems to lack the directness needed to say, "I helped contribute to the destruction of civil discourse in America and helped lay the foundation for nutjobs like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell to polarize discussion of politics and religion in America." He seems to be TRYING to say that but doesn't quite say it directly, but then maybe he's going for the indirect approach.
But what he does manage to say often, even if indirectly is "I screwed this up. I screwed up pretty much everything and some of that was because of my parents." But a lot of it, he knows, was simply because he was an asshole and he seems to recognize that getting the nickname "the little shit from Switzerland" was deserved, at some level.
I am almost doen with the book and I have no less respect for Francis Schaeffer now than when Is tarted reading Frank's book. I actually have more respect for Frank now than before when I had only read his books from fourteen years ago, tripe like Addicted to Mediocrity that seemed to brazenly use his father's name to plug for political battles that were deeply problematic. Christians so often forget that the Jesus who came to redeem the world said His kingdom was not of it. Frank's memoir is an awkward reminder to me that many Christians willfully ignore this saying of Jesus. It's not that we can't get involved in politics but that what unites us is Christ Himself, not the subsidiary things that we often put at the front alongside Christ.
We are too often tempted to decide that someone is in Christ or not based on political and social views. Not that these aren't important, but I can relate to some of what Frank writes about. If you have been in a position where family have told you that you're not really a Christian, perhaps, if you didn't vote for the Republican or Democrat they told you you must vote for then in some sense Frank's memoir can be read asn apology from a man who willingly and zealously persued that sort of spirituality, that definition of how spirituality ought to inform politics. Whether it's refusing to spend time with Christians because they are Republican and therefore stupid or potentially deciding that a fellow brother in Christ is guilty of treason for opposing the current war the moral outcome is the same, we end up being guilty of judging our brother and thus break the law. And it's so damned easy to do we can often not recognize that we're doing it.
So whether or not I agree with everything Frank has written I think I appreciate him more now. The odds that Francis Schaeffer could have been a leader on the religious left seems like wishful thinking of a very high order but if that's what Frank feels and believes, oh well. It's his book. He can say what he likes.
Having felt for years, even more than a decade, that Francis Schaeffer has been cherry-picked and retroactively edited to serve as a tool for the religious right that doesn't want to engage cultural, historicla, and artistic issues with a heart toward evangelism and service but toward political and social control while using the appearance of political martyrdom as a means to mask their play for control I feel that in some sense Frank has revealed that the Francis Schaeffer I sensed in his famous books (Francis') was still the same Francis that was father to Frank. That probably doesn't make sense but since Frank has written things that don't make sense to me it won't surprise me that I write things that won't make sense to anyone else.
All this is to say is that Frank's memoir reminds me of what I have felt for a long time, that there is a big difference between the actual Francis Schaeffer who lived and died and loved the Lord, and the Francis Schaeffer bill of goods we have been sold by Christian culture warriors who professed admiration for him but in some sense finally used him. If Frank's memoir debunks the elements of Francis' legacy that make him useful to culture warriors then in that respect Frank has done us immeasurable good by the grace of God.
And of course the thing is that I'm not quite done with the book. I'm not anticipating too much else popping up in the next fifty pages but I'll keep reading.
Yes, this would seem to be relatively late in the game to reveal the topic sentence.
Frank opens up with a statement that he considers abortion to be an unmitigated tragedy, still, decades after Roe vs Wade. He goes on to explain how the pro-life leaders in the Christian Right like Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson, have played Christians for suckers, using a single hot-button issue as a way to manipulate and rouse political support and sustaining their hold on power.
Frank holds Bush 2 accountable for the deaths of Christians in Iraq, who he believes were in better conditions prior to the war than they have been since. In fact Frank seems to believe the hypocrisy of Bush 2's administration is essentially intolerable.
Frank lays at the feet of Roe vs Wade the blame for three decades of terrible leadership from both political parties who jumped on this decision as the rallying cry for their respective teams. If there had been some moderation on either side to allow for something beyond a strictly binary decision, Frank seems to believe, politiccs in America wouldn't have become the sharp delineation of Religous Right and Secular Left it has become in the last two or three decades. And I think in one sense he's right, he's right that for years the secular left and mainstream media didn't take anything said by evangelicals seriously and for years abortion really was essentially a "Catholic issue" (which was why Francis was so loathe to jump into the political fray and address the issue until Frank, by his own account, cussed his dad into taking a stand on the issue).
As Frank puts it seemed like the requirement of ideological purity on abortion and any number of single-issue political topics) led both parties to prevent the development of any intelligent, pragmatic, and competent political leadership. Left in the wake of this is a series of ideological litmus tests, loyalty oaths, and partisan loyalties that reveal very little about applied principle and more about idology. Politics becomes less about the implementation of policy for the public good and more about the implementation of policy to reward those who fight over policy. This is a relatively old observation since complaints of this sort were rumbling in the United States in a few corners when I was a kid twenty years ago.
There are a handful of statements I admit to not quite getting from Frank. Frank seems to recognize some hypocrisy inherent in either side--the pro-life side opposes abortion but supports the death penalty and the pro-choice side supports abortion and opposes the death penalty. Ironically the Catholic position of the last decade or so seems to often oppose both abortion AND the death penalty and even war in a few cases. Personally I distrust the role and right of government to kill or sanction the killing of citizens without a warrant based on defending the citizenry. War as an act of self-defense I can understand because it is a matter of defending your own people from attack, but killing your own people pre-emptively because they are not wanted or killing them because they are considered too unsuitable to deserve life is bothersome to me and I don't think either should be done lightly.
Now the thing Frank says that seems to clearly indicate how he feels and thinks is something I will quote briefly:
page 349 from Crazy for God:
If it had been the other way around and the left had championed the unborn, perhaps against corporate medical industry interests, or in the name of euqality--or because of the lessons taguht by the rise of the eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s, or because of being queasy over a recently slave-owning society once again deciding who was more equal, even more human "legally" than others--my father would have been embraced as a religious leader on the left. And if Dad had been allied with the left, it would have ultimate been a much better fit for him--and for me.
That Frank notes how evangelicals ignored his father's passion for conservationism and environmentalism is easy to establish earlier in the book and that Francis was undoubtedly more broad-minded and inquisitive than most evangelicals and fundamentalists on the arts is something that ought to be universally agreed upon.
But the idea of Francis Schaeffer as a hero to the religious left? That's an amazingly big what-if. I don't see how given Francis Schaeffer's approach to epistlemology worked, let alone how he actually interpreted a great deal of modernist art, music and literature, that such an alternate reality would be possible. Schaeffer was bold enough to embrace, digest, absorb, and interpret a lot of 20th century culture but at the end of the day he was decidedly old-school in his interests and passions. This isn't bad, but it's the kind of thing that in the long run would have made him a hard-sell as a leader amongst the religious left. To the religious left of the 1960s was he something other than an irrelevant sideshow. Frank obvi0usly loves his dad and I think this love for his dad may cloud his perceptions when he goes so far as to suppose that if the left had championed the opposition of abortion that his father would have been a hero to the religious left. It was the religious left that Francis had been partly reacting to all along and Frank himself seems to even know this better than anyone.
If I were to fault the book it's not because Frank reveals that Francis and Edith were fallable human beings who loved the Lord, it's not even that their zeal for the Lord made them crazy because the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men. Nor is the fault of the book that the Religious Right is a movement that has done some terrible things or even done nothing much at all because that is the provence of any political movement, having a terribly mixed track record. I've been wondering for two decades when the Republican party will actually implement smalle rand less invasive government instead of simply claiming that's what they stand for. No, if I were to fault Frank's book it's that he gets to his real point so late in the book that I can't quite say I've experienced the "joy in the journey". His life was no doubt interesting but then so was mine and that doesn't mean I ought to write a memoir about it.
Given the pithy title and the lengthy subtitle I was hoping Frank would, uh, get to the point less than fifty pages away from the end of his book. And his point seems to be not only that he regrets playing a crucial part in forming the Religious Right (okay, I grant him that, I guess) but that if things had gone the other way his dad could have been a leader of the religious left. Okay ... sure I suppose ... but at that point would we even be talking about the religious left of the Western world that rose up in the last two centureis? Soemhow I doubt it.
Of course by eliminating a strictly scriptural approach to knowledge of Christian ethics and practice you can jump to the other side of the Proestant/Catholic/Orthodox divide but the political and historical reality is that Francis Schaeffer couldn't have done that based on his personal convictions. He was far too Prostetant. Would the Francis Schaeffer who seriously believed Billy Graham had compromised the Gospel by working with Catholics have REALLY become a hero to the religious left? Not likely. Did Francis have any interaction with non-Protestant Christians? Here I simply profess my ignorance because it is easy for Protestants to forget that left and right political debates happen within Catholic and Orthodox circles, too. God's kingdom every where has been divided since the time of Solomon's death so it's hardly a surprise that claims of unity are often a facade or mere optimism in the face of reality.
Still, what I appreciate about Crazy for God is that overall Frank seems to be able to admit in the crudest possible terms what evangelicals and really many Christians of every stripe and people of every stripe seem reluctant to admit. He doesn't just say "I'm not perfect [but I'm better than these other people]." He sometimes seems to lack the directness needed to say, "I helped contribute to the destruction of civil discourse in America and helped lay the foundation for nutjobs like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell to polarize discussion of politics and religion in America." He seems to be TRYING to say that but doesn't quite say it directly, but then maybe he's going for the indirect approach.
But what he does manage to say often, even if indirectly is "I screwed this up. I screwed up pretty much everything and some of that was because of my parents." But a lot of it, he knows, was simply because he was an asshole and he seems to recognize that getting the nickname "the little shit from Switzerland" was deserved, at some level.
I am almost doen with the book and I have no less respect for Francis Schaeffer now than when Is tarted reading Frank's book. I actually have more respect for Frank now than before when I had only read his books from fourteen years ago, tripe like Addicted to Mediocrity that seemed to brazenly use his father's name to plug for political battles that were deeply problematic. Christians so often forget that the Jesus who came to redeem the world said His kingdom was not of it. Frank's memoir is an awkward reminder to me that many Christians willfully ignore this saying of Jesus. It's not that we can't get involved in politics but that what unites us is Christ Himself, not the subsidiary things that we often put at the front alongside Christ.
We are too often tempted to decide that someone is in Christ or not based on political and social views. Not that these aren't important, but I can relate to some of what Frank writes about. If you have been in a position where family have told you that you're not really a Christian, perhaps, if you didn't vote for the Republican or Democrat they told you you must vote for then in some sense Frank's memoir can be read asn apology from a man who willingly and zealously persued that sort of spirituality, that definition of how spirituality ought to inform politics. Whether it's refusing to spend time with Christians because they are Republican and therefore stupid or potentially deciding that a fellow brother in Christ is guilty of treason for opposing the current war the moral outcome is the same, we end up being guilty of judging our brother and thus break the law. And it's so damned easy to do we can often not recognize that we're doing it.
So whether or not I agree with everything Frank has written I think I appreciate him more now. The odds that Francis Schaeffer could have been a leader on the religious left seems like wishful thinking of a very high order but if that's what Frank feels and believes, oh well. It's his book. He can say what he likes.
Having felt for years, even more than a decade, that Francis Schaeffer has been cherry-picked and retroactively edited to serve as a tool for the religious right that doesn't want to engage cultural, historicla, and artistic issues with a heart toward evangelism and service but toward political and social control while using the appearance of political martyrdom as a means to mask their play for control I feel that in some sense Frank has revealed that the Francis Schaeffer I sensed in his famous books (Francis') was still the same Francis that was father to Frank. That probably doesn't make sense but since Frank has written things that don't make sense to me it won't surprise me that I write things that won't make sense to anyone else.
All this is to say is that Frank's memoir reminds me of what I have felt for a long time, that there is a big difference between the actual Francis Schaeffer who lived and died and loved the Lord, and the Francis Schaeffer bill of goods we have been sold by Christian culture warriors who professed admiration for him but in some sense finally used him. If Frank's memoir debunks the elements of Francis' legacy that make him useful to culture warriors then in that respect Frank has done us immeasurable good by the grace of God.
And of course the thing is that I'm not quite done with the book. I'm not anticipating too much else popping up in the next fifty pages but I'll keep reading.
first they did it with Jesus, now J.S. Bach
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/tayside_and_central/7270795.stm
I'd love to know how the CGI replication 250 years later is more the "real person" than the portraits painted in Bach's lifetime. I love me plenty of CGI movies and even I can't go so far as to say the CGI image looks more like a real person.
This must be why the world has French post-structuralists.
I'd love to know how the CGI replication 250 years later is more the "real person" than the portraits painted in Bach's lifetime. I love me plenty of CGI movies and even I can't go so far as to say the CGI image looks more like a real person.
This must be why the world has French post-structuralists.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Emergent Islam?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7265021.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7264903.stm
Some journalists and authors have noted that Islam has never had the equivalent of what might be called the Reformation, the development of a Protestant type movement, which some believe may explain why Islam has retained a militant and violent aspect similar to the violence and racial isolationism often endemic in European Christianity for centuries. Now whether or not that is the case in either situation (or the extent to which it is true and historically verifiable) is hardly something a blogger who has a modicum of a life has any reason to write about.
But that Islam picked up a variety of traditions that are not necessarily inherent to Islamic belief that involved cultural syncretism is something I've come across here and there. Muslim views about women did seem to change after contact with Indian cultures and some have argued that the chauvinism and misogyny that sometimes appear may be less a sign of inherent Islamic views than culturally assimilated views from adjacent cultures. A similar argument could be made that early Christians did not endorse the kind of slavery that white American Christians often endorsed prior to the Civil War. And of course there's a niche market and niche element in historical research that points out that racism was at least as bad or worse in the North. So in that respect noting progressive elements within Islam suppressed by militant groups is not surprising to learn about. We Christians have similar stories within our own history.
In terms of framing this in the broader context of wars of religion then it may be the sometimes labelled new atheists would prefer this all goes further than reform to the elimination of religion entirely. That such a world is imaginable simply proves that such a world is imaginable. We are all tempted to wish for a land ruled as a single-party state, our party. This gets me thinking of some comments by Frank Schaeffer in chapter 57 of Crazy for God that I'll blog about later.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7264903.stm
Some journalists and authors have noted that Islam has never had the equivalent of what might be called the Reformation, the development of a Protestant type movement, which some believe may explain why Islam has retained a militant and violent aspect similar to the violence and racial isolationism often endemic in European Christianity for centuries. Now whether or not that is the case in either situation (or the extent to which it is true and historically verifiable) is hardly something a blogger who has a modicum of a life has any reason to write about.
But that Islam picked up a variety of traditions that are not necessarily inherent to Islamic belief that involved cultural syncretism is something I've come across here and there. Muslim views about women did seem to change after contact with Indian cultures and some have argued that the chauvinism and misogyny that sometimes appear may be less a sign of inherent Islamic views than culturally assimilated views from adjacent cultures. A similar argument could be made that early Christians did not endorse the kind of slavery that white American Christians often endorsed prior to the Civil War. And of course there's a niche market and niche element in historical research that points out that racism was at least as bad or worse in the North. So in that respect noting progressive elements within Islam suppressed by militant groups is not surprising to learn about. We Christians have similar stories within our own history.
In terms of framing this in the broader context of wars of religion then it may be the sometimes labelled new atheists would prefer this all goes further than reform to the elimination of religion entirely. That such a world is imaginable simply proves that such a world is imaginable. We are all tempted to wish for a land ruled as a single-party state, our party. This gets me thinking of some comments by Frank Schaeffer in chapter 57 of Crazy for God that I'll blog about later.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
I really do love to read First Things every so often
http://www.firstthings.com/blog/2008/02/28/john-mccain-will-not-be-left-behind/
Can't help but share the caveat about Wright as a good Bible teacher with some political views I'm not sure I agree with. Then again, he's Anglican ... what can I say? Actually, plan to get more on the matter of Anglicans later since Guinness mentioned that John Stott's question about the Schaeffer family was whether it would be a family dynasty (bad) or a family that brought others into the ministry circle at the highest decision-making levels (good). I'd venture to say that setting aside an question about Frank's objectivity the simple fact that Frank could even make any kind of career out of his father's name and legacy answers the question in the first category at least where Frank was concerned. But that is another musing for another time.
And FT link us up to the latest from Hal Lindsey. As The Door put it ... Planet Earth, Still Ticking. "Politically Incorrect, Prophetically Correct" ... right.
http://hallindsey.org/
Can't help but share the caveat about Wright as a good Bible teacher with some political views I'm not sure I agree with. Then again, he's Anglican ... what can I say? Actually, plan to get more on the matter of Anglicans later since Guinness mentioned that John Stott's question about the Schaeffer family was whether it would be a family dynasty (bad) or a family that brought others into the ministry circle at the highest decision-making levels (good). I'd venture to say that setting aside an question about Frank's objectivity the simple fact that Frank could even make any kind of career out of his father's name and legacy answers the question in the first category at least where Frank was concerned. But that is another musing for another time.
And FT link us up to the latest from Hal Lindsey. As The Door put it ... Planet Earth, Still Ticking. "Politically Incorrect, Prophetically Correct" ... right.
http://hallindsey.org/
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Os Guinness' assessment, pre scheduled outage
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2008/002/1.32.html
He mentions a few things that do seem patently obvious to me, that Frank as the family runt was, even by his own account, able to manipulate or outmaneuver his parents so as to get what he wanted. That Frank can lament that he was subject to neglect or abuse as a child can still mesh easily with Guinness' account of Frank the spoiled little hellion. After all, the capacity for distortion is equally possible from either side. It's not as though Schaeffer's book doesn't display a bit of self pity, or a lot, actually. When Frank writes that there's a particular power a son can wield over a father he seems a little too proud of it and how he used it even as he seems to set the tone through the book of somehow regretting turning his dad toward the Dark Side of Republicanism and politics. Apparently saying you're sorry for being a highly politicized right-wing asshole who used your dad's reputation to get what you thought you wanted isn't simple enough. Not that I don't think there's NO value in the book but at some level what Frank could have been clearer about was what he doesn't say so far, about 66% of the way through his book.
Since there's a scheduled Blooger outage at 6pm PST I will just choose to blog about this more later.
He mentions a few things that do seem patently obvious to me, that Frank as the family runt was, even by his own account, able to manipulate or outmaneuver his parents so as to get what he wanted. That Frank can lament that he was subject to neglect or abuse as a child can still mesh easily with Guinness' account of Frank the spoiled little hellion. After all, the capacity for distortion is equally possible from either side. It's not as though Schaeffer's book doesn't display a bit of self pity, or a lot, actually. When Frank writes that there's a particular power a son can wield over a father he seems a little too proud of it and how he used it even as he seems to set the tone through the book of somehow regretting turning his dad toward the Dark Side of Republicanism and politics. Apparently saying you're sorry for being a highly politicized right-wing asshole who used your dad's reputation to get what you thought you wanted isn't simple enough. Not that I don't think there's NO value in the book but at some level what Frank could have been clearer about was what he doesn't say so far, about 66% of the way through his book.
Since there's a scheduled Blooger outage at 6pm PST I will just choose to blog about this more later.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Unlike some of my fellow Protestants ... I actually read First Things
Not too often lately, but once in a while. :) Their website takes forever to load up from my computer here at home.
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=981
I find it amusing that this is happened. I could explain why but if it's funny to you it's because you already get it and if you don't, well, it's not that funny anyway.
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=981
I find it amusing that this is happened. I could explain why but if it's funny to you it's because you already get it and if you don't, well, it's not that funny anyway.
church swap
http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/02/25/religion.survey.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories
Unsurprisingly most "converts" to evangelicalism may not be the completely unchurched but those who were raised Protestant. Protestantism is such a remarkable grab bag of doctrinal ideas that there's almost something for anyone who would, generally, like to claim Jesus Christ is both God and Lord and containing within Himself what we would tend to call hypostatic union.
The group listed as "no affiliation" where religion is concerned is growing, not a surprise.
But it has seemed as though most conversions within Christendom are just church swap situations. If someone converts from Protestantism to Catholicism or from Protestantism to Orthodoxy or from Orthodoxy to Lutheranism then for those converts, by all means, they trust they have converted to the one true Church from where ever they left. But in terms of tbe "mere Christianity" factor no conversion of any kind has taken place, people merely take sides in internecine bickering that is so typical within the divided kingdom of Israel (i.e. the Church since Christ's coming). So if some are Samaritans and some are Judeans they're all in Israel. It's the number of people who are taking no affililation with any religion that would be the unchurched, and the truly unchurched would potentially represent the most difficult group for evangelism because the worldly benefits of the Gospel in this day and age can't be appealed to. Not "worldly" in the biblical use of the term as a pejorative, but of this age in a more mundane sense.
For instance, if we were to appeal to this or that Christian tradition as appealing to "real" men we've got a problem. Any other variation within the Christian tradition could make the same claim and then there's the question of what constitutes a "real" man? Some real men like beer, some real men like wine, and some real men don't drink. In the same way some real men are Catholics, some real men are Protestants, and some real men are atheists or whatever else they profess or don't profess. At some point, perhaps not very far into an attempt to prosyletize the convert, doesn't it seem that we are eventually selling a pet dog on the basis of, "This dog will poop in your house just like any other domesticated animal will"? What a great selling point? Real men are real sinners, after all.
And real men seems to be what many churches DON'T want. As I'm reading through Crazy for God it's interesting to read Schaeffer's undoubtedly biased but still interesting comments about Francis Schaeffer's disdain for Calvinists as arrogant, self-impressed jerks who would rather obsess about doctrine than reach out to real people. If there's even a kernel of truth to this then I can surmise why Calvinists aren't fond of the book, and it's not as though they have no reason to be. Knocking Francis Schaeffer off the pedastal evangelicals have put him on is only problematic where their idol worship and appropriation of the life of a flesh and blood man might be concerned. The idea possibility that in today's evangelical culture Francis Schaeffer might be denounced as a long-haired environmentalist hippie doesn't seem to be seriously considered but the seeds of such a possible state are there if you read his work carefully.
That Frank feels responsible for turning his dad back to his more fundamentalist roots ties into this Pew stuff. Sometimes a person can start in one path spiritually, veer off into another, and then returns. Instruct a child in the way that he should go and when he is OLD he will not depart from it. But there are all sorts of diversions and deviations that happen, and it doesn't meean the child will end up where the parent hopes he or she will. I'm not too close to where my parents would have wanted me to be theologically, in my aesthetics, or politically. On the other hand, I think that my parents and I understand each other more than we did years ago.
As yet, almost two thirds to three quarters of the way through the book Schaeffer does not really discuss his jump to Orthodoxy. The sense I get at this point in the book is that at some level he acknowledges that his writings from his nominally evangelical period were at some base-line level a sham. He takes this to mean that he turned his dad toward founding the Religious Right and that if Francis Schaeffer had known how his work and legacy would have been used he would have been very upset if he were still alive today to see it. It's not really something that can be proven even by Frank Schaeffer himself and to some degree the point is not the least bit useful for its factual accuracy or likelihood, since it's what might be called a huge example of a counterfactual.
But it is useful as a springboard for contemplating whether there is a difference between how evangelicals appropriate the life and work of Francis Schaeffer now and what the aim of Schaeffer's work was in his own heart and mind. Tim LaHaye invoked Schaeffer here and there in Battle for the Mind, a book a relative ran by me and LaHaye impressed me as someone who could quote Francis Schaeffer and still not seem smart, much like a professor at a university once quoted Dostoevsky and still, somehow, managed to sound like a total rube and a bureaucratic shill all at the same time.
But in some sense Frank seems to admit that what he did was basically turn his father's legacy into a brand for political activism, activism that began in a very sincere way that devolved into a jade and self-regarding, self-pitying turn. It wouldn't surprise me if Frank looked back on Addicted to Mediocrity and would simply agree with my assessment that it was a mediocrity.
What comes across as I read through the book more is the peculiar sense that in some way Frank feels he wasted his life on things that weren't important and that in some way he betrayed his own life's dreams and the best things about his family. If so then it takes some bravery to confront that you've wasted your life in your own eyes. Interestingly, he doesn't really seem to "turn to Christ" about this stuff, probably because his intended audience seems to be secular. This is not a book that seems to be written merely by a man raised to be a believer to believers but also to the liberal secularistts he once battled so often. He more or less impugns the liberals of the United States for choosing to ignore the nascent Religious Right until it was so well-established that there was nothing left to do but freak out. I think he's right about that. Choosing to ignore Christians who are culturally and politically conservative until they've actually formed the Religious Right as we know it now was amazingly stupid. The answer now is not to freak out about how eager they are to reshape culture and society because in this respect the Religous Right is simply doing what the newer Left elements wanted to do in the 1960s, except for wanting to turn the clock backward. But in essence both sides want to turn the clock backward to either the time of Reagan or the time of Kennedy. It's still a complete breach of the wry observation of the Preacher--do not ask yourselves, "Where are the good old days that were better than these?" because it's stupid to ask that kind of question.
Surreptitiously lurking throughout the pages of Crazy for God Frank seems to be letting us know in small ways that he knows this. the subtitle explains how he helped to found the Religious Right and lived to take all (or most) of it back.
Unsurprisingly most "converts" to evangelicalism may not be the completely unchurched but those who were raised Protestant. Protestantism is such a remarkable grab bag of doctrinal ideas that there's almost something for anyone who would, generally, like to claim Jesus Christ is both God and Lord and containing within Himself what we would tend to call hypostatic union.
The group listed as "no affiliation" where religion is concerned is growing, not a surprise.
But it has seemed as though most conversions within Christendom are just church swap situations. If someone converts from Protestantism to Catholicism or from Protestantism to Orthodoxy or from Orthodoxy to Lutheranism then for those converts, by all means, they trust they have converted to the one true Church from where ever they left. But in terms of tbe "mere Christianity" factor no conversion of any kind has taken place, people merely take sides in internecine bickering that is so typical within the divided kingdom of Israel (i.e. the Church since Christ's coming). So if some are Samaritans and some are Judeans they're all in Israel. It's the number of people who are taking no affililation with any religion that would be the unchurched, and the truly unchurched would potentially represent the most difficult group for evangelism because the worldly benefits of the Gospel in this day and age can't be appealed to. Not "worldly" in the biblical use of the term as a pejorative, but of this age in a more mundane sense.
For instance, if we were to appeal to this or that Christian tradition as appealing to "real" men we've got a problem. Any other variation within the Christian tradition could make the same claim and then there's the question of what constitutes a "real" man? Some real men like beer, some real men like wine, and some real men don't drink. In the same way some real men are Catholics, some real men are Protestants, and some real men are atheists or whatever else they profess or don't profess. At some point, perhaps not very far into an attempt to prosyletize the convert, doesn't it seem that we are eventually selling a pet dog on the basis of, "This dog will poop in your house just like any other domesticated animal will"? What a great selling point? Real men are real sinners, after all.
And real men seems to be what many churches DON'T want. As I'm reading through Crazy for God it's interesting to read Schaeffer's undoubtedly biased but still interesting comments about Francis Schaeffer's disdain for Calvinists as arrogant, self-impressed jerks who would rather obsess about doctrine than reach out to real people. If there's even a kernel of truth to this then I can surmise why Calvinists aren't fond of the book, and it's not as though they have no reason to be. Knocking Francis Schaeffer off the pedastal evangelicals have put him on is only problematic where their idol worship and appropriation of the life of a flesh and blood man might be concerned. The idea possibility that in today's evangelical culture Francis Schaeffer might be denounced as a long-haired environmentalist hippie doesn't seem to be seriously considered but the seeds of such a possible state are there if you read his work carefully.
That Frank feels responsible for turning his dad back to his more fundamentalist roots ties into this Pew stuff. Sometimes a person can start in one path spiritually, veer off into another, and then returns. Instruct a child in the way that he should go and when he is OLD he will not depart from it. But there are all sorts of diversions and deviations that happen, and it doesn't meean the child will end up where the parent hopes he or she will. I'm not too close to where my parents would have wanted me to be theologically, in my aesthetics, or politically. On the other hand, I think that my parents and I understand each other more than we did years ago.
As yet, almost two thirds to three quarters of the way through the book Schaeffer does not really discuss his jump to Orthodoxy. The sense I get at this point in the book is that at some level he acknowledges that his writings from his nominally evangelical period were at some base-line level a sham. He takes this to mean that he turned his dad toward founding the Religious Right and that if Francis Schaeffer had known how his work and legacy would have been used he would have been very upset if he were still alive today to see it. It's not really something that can be proven even by Frank Schaeffer himself and to some degree the point is not the least bit useful for its factual accuracy or likelihood, since it's what might be called a huge example of a counterfactual.
But it is useful as a springboard for contemplating whether there is a difference between how evangelicals appropriate the life and work of Francis Schaeffer now and what the aim of Schaeffer's work was in his own heart and mind. Tim LaHaye invoked Schaeffer here and there in Battle for the Mind, a book a relative ran by me and LaHaye impressed me as someone who could quote Francis Schaeffer and still not seem smart, much like a professor at a university once quoted Dostoevsky and still, somehow, managed to sound like a total rube and a bureaucratic shill all at the same time.
But in some sense Frank seems to admit that what he did was basically turn his father's legacy into a brand for political activism, activism that began in a very sincere way that devolved into a jade and self-regarding, self-pitying turn. It wouldn't surprise me if Frank looked back on Addicted to Mediocrity and would simply agree with my assessment that it was a mediocrity.
What comes across as I read through the book more is the peculiar sense that in some way Frank feels he wasted his life on things that weren't important and that in some way he betrayed his own life's dreams and the best things about his family. If so then it takes some bravery to confront that you've wasted your life in your own eyes. Interestingly, he doesn't really seem to "turn to Christ" about this stuff, probably because his intended audience seems to be secular. This is not a book that seems to be written merely by a man raised to be a believer to believers but also to the liberal secularistts he once battled so often. He more or less impugns the liberals of the United States for choosing to ignore the nascent Religious Right until it was so well-established that there was nothing left to do but freak out. I think he's right about that. Choosing to ignore Christians who are culturally and politically conservative until they've actually formed the Religious Right as we know it now was amazingly stupid. The answer now is not to freak out about how eager they are to reshape culture and society because in this respect the Religous Right is simply doing what the newer Left elements wanted to do in the 1960s, except for wanting to turn the clock backward. But in essence both sides want to turn the clock backward to either the time of Reagan or the time of Kennedy. It's still a complete breach of the wry observation of the Preacher--do not ask yourselves, "Where are the good old days that were better than these?" because it's stupid to ask that kind of question.
Surreptitiously lurking throughout the pages of Crazy for God Frank seems to be letting us know in small ways that he knows this. the subtitle explains how he helped to found the Religious Right and lived to take all (or most) of it back.
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