Removal of T.D. Jakes, Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer and others Pastors Removal of T.D. Jakes, Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer and other Pastors from the ...An organization has been granted a Federal Hearing on the same subject by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Washington , D.C.
Their petition, Number 2493, would ultimately pave the way to stop the reading of the gospel of our Lord and Savior, on the airwaves of America . They got 287,000 signatures to back their stand! If this attempt is successful, all Sunday worship services being broadcast on the radio or by television will be stopped. This group is also campaigning to remove all Christmas programs and Christmas carols from public schools! You as a Christian can help!
We are praying for at least 1 million signatures. This would defeat their effort and show that there are many Christians alive, well and concerned about our country. As Christians, we must unite on this.
Please don't take this lightly. We ignored one lady once and lost prayer in our schools and in o ffices across the nation. Please stand up for your religious freedom and let your voice be heard. Together we can make a difference in our country while creating an opportunity for the lost to know the Lord.
Please, if you don't wish to participate, return this email to whoever sent it to you so they can at least keep this email going or forward it to some one you know who will wish to participate. Dr. Dobson is going on CNBC to urge every Christian to get involved. I hope you will sign and forward to all your family and friends.
Please press forward, CLEAN UP THE MESSAGE, and forward this to everyone youthink should read this. Now, please sign your name at the bottom (you can only add your name after you have pressed 'Forward' or you have cut and pasted the text).
Don't delete any other names, just go to the next number and type your name.Please do not sign jointly, such as Mr. & Mrs., each person should sign his/her own name. Please defeat this organization and keep the right of our freedom of religion.
Aah, this old rotten nugget got revived. Not only has this recent variation of spam gotten debunked by the FCC but also by Focus on the Family.
http://family.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/family.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=489&p_created=1037383326
http://ftp.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/Religious.html
But guess what, folks? It gets better. The names like Jakes and Meyer come up but the bit of news you may not have heard lately is that if this spam hits you and includes names like Jakes, Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer, Paula White, or Benny Hinn then the connection you may be sensing is not banning religious broadcasting from the airwaves. That sucking sound is more likely to be this:
http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/265440.aspx
http://www.woai.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=122ad339-7b66-433c-81e2-e5e60862ed01
Yep, that's right federal investigations of fraud and misappropriation of funds. I suppose some might say "how dare they?" So if you get something like the above, if you feel so inclined, direct the senders to some of the news of the day, like investigations into possible criminal behavior. It's not about stifling freedom of speech or religion, it's about allegations that crimes have been committed by mass-media-using churches. In the late 1980s the scandals were about sex like Baker and Swaggart. This the problems are money and how preachers may feel entitled to help themselves form the abundance they get from the flock. Even if a few of these preachers get shut down the Gospel will not be harmed. I mean, really, how could it be harmed?
Monday, May 19, 2008
Sunday, May 18, 2008
lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, or just the boastful pride of life
Something I am contemplating lately is that at my church there's a tendency to bottom-line sins to the boastful pride of life rather than explore how things are fueled by the lust of the flesh or the lust of the eyes. Just finished a summary on Puritian writings on spiritual warfare and it's interesting that the Puritans don't bottom-line things in that way, despite the fondness of my church's leaders here and there for Puritan writings. The boastful pride of life seems to be described more in terms of the acclaim and prestige that is craved, the unmerited praise and applause of other men, seeking to have glory and renown in the world. In other words, to be considered a person or force to be reckoned with.
I am wondering lately if at my church a failure to distinguish between these categories outlined by the apostle has created problems in our ability to address sin. If the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes are reduced to the boastful pride of life then this reductionist methodology not only eschews millenia of Christian tradition across confessional lines but it does not even retain consistency with the Puritan legacy I have heard praised at the church. The boastful pride of life is most likely to be a temptation for the leaders and not necessarily the led, though this enticement of the flesh and the enemy could come from any quarter to anyone at any level in a flock.
If we are undisciplined with alcohol or sex or food that is obviously a lust of the flesh. If we crave the newest and best this or that then we are coveting, lust of the eyes. It seems a person can be very strict with himself on the lust of the flesh but cave in before the lust of the eyes, coveting things he doesn't need as a sign of status or comfort. But the pride of life is not quite the same as these other two because it seems as though the prize is importance imparted by others, to "be somebody", somebody of formidable account. The lust of the eyes doesn't care if I'm important or not, it's just a matter of my wanting what I think I deserve.
But lust of the eyes and the pride of life can intertwine. If someone wants to have the right things to be respected the two sinful impulses intertwine when godliness with contentment is, as Scripture says, great gain.
Still, it's ever so tempting to blame others before yourself because it's easier to blame someone for making you wish you were, say, married, than to admit you're coveting something. It's easier to blame someone for making you feel inadequate about your knowledge or possessions when if you didn't covet what you don't have you wouldn't mind that you have only what you have.
But to bottom line sin as though it were just one or the other atomizes our nature. We are neither merely flesh nor merely spirit.
What's unfortunate about what at least seems to be a failure to distinguish between the three worldly impulses is that it seems like it wasn't really all that long ago that we went through the Johannine epistles. They are short, simple works the repay continued visitation. I suppose that would stand to reason, since they got canonized. To use a possibly faulty analogy, I sometimes worry that churches and people that fail to distinguish between the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life boil things down to pride and that this is like saying that any time a person coughs it's a sign of a spiritual flu. It might be, but it might be a sign of a cold, or of a much more destructive illness. The cough by itself can't be taken as the only symptom of the spiritual ailment.
To extrapolate a bit, I have found it interesting that we are not really told why Moses was so unwilling to be sent by Yahweh to speak to His people. I have considered that that absence may be there so that when we read Moses' unwillingness to go we read ourselves into his place. Where one guy sees false humility I might see outright stubbornness. The guy who insisted on false humility was so certain about it and so certain that the text backed him up that I began to suspect a certain amount of false humility from him (this was a fellow who, in a completely different on-line context once told me he wanted to actually win a theological argument for once, which to me speaks volumes about why he kept seeing false humility in Moses while I saw Moses as a disobedient bastard who just didn't care if Israel was languishing because he just didn't really want to go).
Which is to say that I really think God provides gaps in the failures of some saints so we can see our failures in them. We don't seem to do this. In fact the book of Job devotes a great chunk of time to people presuming that Job had problems because of his sin and ironically being rebuked by God for not speaking the truth about Him. There comes a point when our reading theological and moral error on to other people may only be a sign of our own failure, not the failure of the other person.
Perhaps, just perhaps, that might be why the apostle writes that we should consider other people as better than ourselves, not because they aren't sinners, but because we may be too quick to impute our own sins to others rather than see them in ourselves.
And coming full circle, it may be easy to read the boastful pride of life on to someone else's life when they may be struggling with the lust of the flesh. Everyone struggles with all three worldly impulses but not all in the same way. I think the gist of the passage is probably to encourage self-diagnosis through prayer, reflection, and study of the Word, not to exclude confession and discussion with brothers and sisters in Christ, obviously.
I am wondering lately if at my church a failure to distinguish between these categories outlined by the apostle has created problems in our ability to address sin. If the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes are reduced to the boastful pride of life then this reductionist methodology not only eschews millenia of Christian tradition across confessional lines but it does not even retain consistency with the Puritan legacy I have heard praised at the church. The boastful pride of life is most likely to be a temptation for the leaders and not necessarily the led, though this enticement of the flesh and the enemy could come from any quarter to anyone at any level in a flock.
If we are undisciplined with alcohol or sex or food that is obviously a lust of the flesh. If we crave the newest and best this or that then we are coveting, lust of the eyes. It seems a person can be very strict with himself on the lust of the flesh but cave in before the lust of the eyes, coveting things he doesn't need as a sign of status or comfort. But the pride of life is not quite the same as these other two because it seems as though the prize is importance imparted by others, to "be somebody", somebody of formidable account. The lust of the eyes doesn't care if I'm important or not, it's just a matter of my wanting what I think I deserve.
But lust of the eyes and the pride of life can intertwine. If someone wants to have the right things to be respected the two sinful impulses intertwine when godliness with contentment is, as Scripture says, great gain.
Still, it's ever so tempting to blame others before yourself because it's easier to blame someone for making you wish you were, say, married, than to admit you're coveting something. It's easier to blame someone for making you feel inadequate about your knowledge or possessions when if you didn't covet what you don't have you wouldn't mind that you have only what you have.
But to bottom line sin as though it were just one or the other atomizes our nature. We are neither merely flesh nor merely spirit.
What's unfortunate about what at least seems to be a failure to distinguish between the three worldly impulses is that it seems like it wasn't really all that long ago that we went through the Johannine epistles. They are short, simple works the repay continued visitation. I suppose that would stand to reason, since they got canonized. To use a possibly faulty analogy, I sometimes worry that churches and people that fail to distinguish between the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life boil things down to pride and that this is like saying that any time a person coughs it's a sign of a spiritual flu. It might be, but it might be a sign of a cold, or of a much more destructive illness. The cough by itself can't be taken as the only symptom of the spiritual ailment.
To extrapolate a bit, I have found it interesting that we are not really told why Moses was so unwilling to be sent by Yahweh to speak to His people. I have considered that that absence may be there so that when we read Moses' unwillingness to go we read ourselves into his place. Where one guy sees false humility I might see outright stubbornness. The guy who insisted on false humility was so certain about it and so certain that the text backed him up that I began to suspect a certain amount of false humility from him (this was a fellow who, in a completely different on-line context once told me he wanted to actually win a theological argument for once, which to me speaks volumes about why he kept seeing false humility in Moses while I saw Moses as a disobedient bastard who just didn't care if Israel was languishing because he just didn't really want to go).
Which is to say that I really think God provides gaps in the failures of some saints so we can see our failures in them. We don't seem to do this. In fact the book of Job devotes a great chunk of time to people presuming that Job had problems because of his sin and ironically being rebuked by God for not speaking the truth about Him. There comes a point when our reading theological and moral error on to other people may only be a sign of our own failure, not the failure of the other person.
Perhaps, just perhaps, that might be why the apostle writes that we should consider other people as better than ourselves, not because they aren't sinners, but because we may be too quick to impute our own sins to others rather than see them in ourselves.
And coming full circle, it may be easy to read the boastful pride of life on to someone else's life when they may be struggling with the lust of the flesh. Everyone struggles with all three worldly impulses but not all in the same way. I think the gist of the passage is probably to encourage self-diagnosis through prayer, reflection, and study of the Word, not to exclude confession and discussion with brothers and sisters in Christ, obviously.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Alaynzer's The Theologian's Fallacy
http://www.alanrhoda.net/blog/2008/05/theologians-fallacy.html
A few modifications can help tailor this interesting blog entry to the specific case mentioned.
A variation on question 3:
Is it possible that you could be mistaken about your Trump, concerning its status as a source of absolute and infallible Truth?
The variation that I think is pertinent is "Is it possible that your Trump does not solve the problem you want it to solve simply by you invoking it?"
Christians can invoke the inerrancy of Scripture to solve a problem Scripture was not provided to solve. While Christians can surmise that abortion is bad and that rape is bad these are not so unequivocally spelled out in Scripture that Christians can use the Bible as a trump card on that point. The way stories of rape are presented in Scripture shows us that it's wrong but if we literally followed some of the legal parameters prescribed for rape in the Torah, for instance, we'd inevitably let rapists go free, and the Bible simply doesn't speak to child abuse at all, except to Western modern minds providing the rather grim assessment that if you beat your child he will not die and you will drive the evil from his heart!
Question 3 gets to an important point, which is "Why do you feel obliged to pull your Trump card here on this issue?" Why is it important to end discussion with your trump card right now?
For some people the Trump isn't going to be Scripture and its inerrancy, it might be some variation of interpretative tradition. I would submit that both have some significant problems in as much as we can verify simply from Augustine and Jude alone that in the earliest and most critical stages Christian tradition was still a bit malleable. We don't all subscribe to what Driscoll once dismissively called the "seed of Chucky" interpretation of Genesis 6.
Of course this gets to Driscoll's personal variation of the trump card, his interpretation of a biblical passage from the pulpit or public setting, which basically amounts to "This is what the text says so you can't argue with it." It's not that the biblical text really indisputably says that because here have been centuries of discussion and interpretation, but Driscoll has been able to read books and books by Wayne Grudem on spiritual gifts and still come down on the side of cessationism from the pulpit for reasons that (six years later I hasten to add) I still don't understand. Sometimes the trump card is not Scripture itself but what we are able to do with Scripture or what attitude we take toward it.
Other people read Scripture all their lives but ignore basic things like exegesis. If they feel that Scripture says that this or that will come to pass for them in their lives personally then that's exactly what Scripture is there for. That there is an element of sympathetic magic in treating Scripture like the world's best fortune cookie doesn't spring easily to mind for folks. It's something I've been tempted to do myself, to be honest, because it's one of those negative legacies from a Pentecostal background. Even Augustine himself had one or two moments where he did this so I suppose I should say that it's not ADVISABLE but God can providentially use it. :)
The essential gist of the Theologians Fallacy is that theologians of any stripe invoke their trump card to avoid having to squirm, which is precisely what God probably wants them to do. Invoking the Trump so you don't have to squirm in the face of an unpleasant reality God permits in His universe might mean that you want to trust in something besides God, whether it's traditions or words or evidences that aren't Him. Of course it's by faith that we trust that God even exists anyway, but we want more assurance than faith that our lives aren't meaningless. Hope does not disappoint, unless we've so downgraded our understanding of hope that it's more like a lucky guess.
Job's comforters invoked their trump card throughout the whole book, that Job had to be wrong, and God said that what they said about Him was not right. The whole book of Job seems to have been written to warn us that there are times when we are tempted to use the Trump card and discover that we're invoking our Trump, and not really the Lord.
A few modifications can help tailor this interesting blog entry to the specific case mentioned.
A variation on question 3:
Is it possible that you could be mistaken about your Trump, concerning its status as a source of absolute and infallible Truth?
The variation that I think is pertinent is "Is it possible that your Trump does not solve the problem you want it to solve simply by you invoking it?"
Christians can invoke the inerrancy of Scripture to solve a problem Scripture was not provided to solve. While Christians can surmise that abortion is bad and that rape is bad these are not so unequivocally spelled out in Scripture that Christians can use the Bible as a trump card on that point. The way stories of rape are presented in Scripture shows us that it's wrong but if we literally followed some of the legal parameters prescribed for rape in the Torah, for instance, we'd inevitably let rapists go free, and the Bible simply doesn't speak to child abuse at all, except to Western modern minds providing the rather grim assessment that if you beat your child he will not die and you will drive the evil from his heart!
Question 3 gets to an important point, which is "Why do you feel obliged to pull your Trump card here on this issue?" Why is it important to end discussion with your trump card right now?
For some people the Trump isn't going to be Scripture and its inerrancy, it might be some variation of interpretative tradition. I would submit that both have some significant problems in as much as we can verify simply from Augustine and Jude alone that in the earliest and most critical stages Christian tradition was still a bit malleable. We don't all subscribe to what Driscoll once dismissively called the "seed of Chucky" interpretation of Genesis 6.
Of course this gets to Driscoll's personal variation of the trump card, his interpretation of a biblical passage from the pulpit or public setting, which basically amounts to "This is what the text says so you can't argue with it." It's not that the biblical text really indisputably says that because here have been centuries of discussion and interpretation, but Driscoll has been able to read books and books by Wayne Grudem on spiritual gifts and still come down on the side of cessationism from the pulpit for reasons that (six years later I hasten to add) I still don't understand. Sometimes the trump card is not Scripture itself but what we are able to do with Scripture or what attitude we take toward it.
Other people read Scripture all their lives but ignore basic things like exegesis. If they feel that Scripture says that this or that will come to pass for them in their lives personally then that's exactly what Scripture is there for. That there is an element of sympathetic magic in treating Scripture like the world's best fortune cookie doesn't spring easily to mind for folks. It's something I've been tempted to do myself, to be honest, because it's one of those negative legacies from a Pentecostal background. Even Augustine himself had one or two moments where he did this so I suppose I should say that it's not ADVISABLE but God can providentially use it. :)
The essential gist of the Theologians Fallacy is that theologians of any stripe invoke their trump card to avoid having to squirm, which is precisely what God probably wants them to do. Invoking the Trump so you don't have to squirm in the face of an unpleasant reality God permits in His universe might mean that you want to trust in something besides God, whether it's traditions or words or evidences that aren't Him. Of course it's by faith that we trust that God even exists anyway, but we want more assurance than faith that our lives aren't meaningless. Hope does not disappoint, unless we've so downgraded our understanding of hope that it's more like a lucky guess.
Job's comforters invoked their trump card throughout the whole book, that Job had to be wrong, and God said that what they said about Him was not right. The whole book of Job seems to have been written to warn us that there are times when we are tempted to use the Trump card and discover that we're invoking our Trump, and not really the Lord.
Friday, May 16, 2008
a short story
One day a husband and wife were having an argument. They were arguing about whether to stay in the house they lived in or move to a new one. Their three children were waiting in the stairway with baited breath, wondering what was going on. One of the children finally stood up and said, "Dad, Mom, why are you fighting?"
Dad said, "We're having a discussion, son. It's not important for you to know all the details. Go upstairs and play."
So the three kids went upstairs but they didn't play, they simply listened from the upper floor. There was not much they could make out except that the argument was continuing.
Then the children heard their father say to their mother, "You're fired. You're my wife and their mother until the end of the month and then you have to go."
The wife packed up her things and left. The children came down when they heard their father's words and asked what was going on. The father said that when mom and dad have an argument the children don't need to know all the details and that Mom just got fired and they'd be getting a new, better mom.
One of the children objected, got up, and ran out the door after his mother. The other two children sat down with their father, who thanked them for their loyalty, asked them never to associate with their mother again, and thanked them for the checks they wrote him to support his work as their father and asked them to be more generous so that by an increase in his allowance he could buy them a better house and find a new mother for them who would be a better mother than their mother had been. This the remaining two children cheerfully agreed to.
The first mother had long since gone outside and was lamenting her fate. Was she fired because she said what she thought, the thing that she thought had made her ex-husband want to marry her to begin with? Some neighboring kids had seen her leave and one said to the other, "Look, the guy fired his wife. What an asshole. We never liked either of them anyway so that's just what they deserve."
But the kids were nothing more than strangers who simply saw what had happened and did not understand its meaning. Who could understand how a dad who lived off the money of his children would fire their mother and offer a minimal explanation? The children could simply not give money or recognize that a father who could fire his wife could fire his children, too. But since they had not renewed their contracts as children yet it remained to be seen if this lack of renewal was construed as being children until further notice or not being children at all until the contract was renewed. This gave the children some cause for bewilderment. It is a bit strange to imagine a father who has children as his on a contractual basis but stranger things have been known to exist.
All in all, it is a mysterious situation.
Dad said, "We're having a discussion, son. It's not important for you to know all the details. Go upstairs and play."
So the three kids went upstairs but they didn't play, they simply listened from the upper floor. There was not much they could make out except that the argument was continuing.
Then the children heard their father say to their mother, "You're fired. You're my wife and their mother until the end of the month and then you have to go."
The wife packed up her things and left. The children came down when they heard their father's words and asked what was going on. The father said that when mom and dad have an argument the children don't need to know all the details and that Mom just got fired and they'd be getting a new, better mom.
One of the children objected, got up, and ran out the door after his mother. The other two children sat down with their father, who thanked them for their loyalty, asked them never to associate with their mother again, and thanked them for the checks they wrote him to support his work as their father and asked them to be more generous so that by an increase in his allowance he could buy them a better house and find a new mother for them who would be a better mother than their mother had been. This the remaining two children cheerfully agreed to.
The first mother had long since gone outside and was lamenting her fate. Was she fired because she said what she thought, the thing that she thought had made her ex-husband want to marry her to begin with? Some neighboring kids had seen her leave and one said to the other, "Look, the guy fired his wife. What an asshole. We never liked either of them anyway so that's just what they deserve."
But the kids were nothing more than strangers who simply saw what had happened and did not understand its meaning. Who could understand how a dad who lived off the money of his children would fire their mother and offer a minimal explanation? The children could simply not give money or recognize that a father who could fire his wife could fire his children, too. But since they had not renewed their contracts as children yet it remained to be seen if this lack of renewal was construed as being children until further notice or not being children at all until the contract was renewed. This gave the children some cause for bewilderment. It is a bit strange to imagine a father who has children as his on a contractual basis but stranger things have been known to exist.
All in all, it is a mysterious situation.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
evolving backwards has always been an option
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/363263_oddfish16.html
I suppose Stephen Jay Gould couldn't have asked for a better example that evolution has no inherent direction ... or it may be that the function is preserved despite the direction of evolving in "reverse".
I suppose Stephen Jay Gould couldn't have asked for a better example that evolution has no inherent direction ... or it may be that the function is preserved despite the direction of evolving in "reverse".
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
why the Church is not really based on capitalism. :)
http://gospeldrivenchurch.blogspot.com/2008/05/thank-you-kairos.html
"Warning: If you treat your church like a business, you will treat other churches like your competition."
Nothing more to elaborate on this particular point, really.
"Warning: If you treat your church like a business, you will treat other churches like your competition."
Nothing more to elaborate on this particular point, really.
Rapture Ready ... I might just have to pick this book up with such interesting reviews
http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2008/05/daniel-radosh-rapture-ready-adventures.html
As Slavoj Žižek has observed, the logic of late capitalism presses towards the commodification of a niche identity for its own sake; the Christian merchandise I buy is not itself the desired commodity, but it is merely an ephemeral signifier of the real commodity, which is my identity as a particular sort of Christian. In this case, the product I am really purchasing is radically non-material, wholly spiritual; I am purchasing religious meaning and belonging, religious “community” (since the merchandise allows me to participate in a specific market niche). Here, any neat separation between my “faith” and my “consumer culture” is simply fictitious. To change the latter simply is to change the former.
This is the part where, though I'm not really a Marxist, any variation of potentially Marxist critique fits because I think Marx correctly diagnosed the social and economic problem of his era. Reformed people buy Reformed stuff, Orthodox people buy Orthodox stuff, Pentecostal people by Pentecostal stuff, Catholics buy Catholic stuff. The wallet speaks to one's identity just as much as one's identity speaks to one's wallet. What plays out as "I must buy an American car" becomes "I must buy things that show that I am this or that kind of Christian, a real Christian rather than a fake one."
This is the sort of thing that I don't struggle with at all any more .... that I know of! If I enjoy South Park I watch South Park with the proviso that I don't watch it at all with Christians whom I know are uncomfortable with the show. But like other people (I guess) I struggled with the feeling that my wallet was at some level supposed to reflect that the stuff I liked was sufficiently "Christian". Nah, more to the point, I got flack from parents (one in particular) for a few years telling me I should stop reading "trashy novels" and start reading "good, Christian literature". Somewhere Fyodor Dostoevsky, I hope, had a good belly-laugh for that kind of response. Somewhere, I imagine, Kafka might have another rueful smirk. Takahashi probably has no idea any of this is going on and is the better for it. I don't quite know what Austen would think.
The thing that seems most apparent from someone like Frank Schaeffer is a sense of betrayal of principles. There is a sense in which he could have been said to have appropriated Christ to transform culture and his own father, at least by Frank's way of thinking. I still think Frank is living in a dream world if he imagines his father could have somehow been a hero to the Religious Left. That involves a Bizzaro world of almost inconceivable proportions but that world MUST exist in Imagination Land somewhere!
I grew up in a basically Christian family where national and spiritual identity blurred, a lot. As my own walk with the Lord the idea that I saw myself as a Christian first and as an American citizen second (or possibly third) did not always settle well with the parents, not least when I said that some aspects of Marxist thought were not actually crazy ... just Marxist APPLICATION (which totally is crazy). But even conceding that a critique of late capitalism, say, could apply to Christian identity to all Christians in the West is not something I'd run by my parents as a point for conversation because they've taken me to a Benny Hinn crusade or commended Frank Perretti's books. It's encouraging to read that Perretti has more or less moved on from that stage of writing. It's also interesting to read about how one of the stars of that period confessed to having written the book out of a lot of anger.
A lot of Christians in the United States who aligned evangelical were angry in the 1990s. The Republicans had lost the highest office in the country and Clinton was being described as possibly the Antichrist, ready to institute martial law on behalf of the United Nations possibly any day now. There was a level of paranoia that permeated this subculture that soured me on that whole approach more than a decade ago. To have actually said so would have gotten me in more trouble with my family who still had that approach than I (or my brother) wanted to bother with. Holding to scriptural infallibility rather than inerrancy was not to be spoken of.
Someone could say to me that this was a sign of suppressing my real identity as a Christian on the basis of going along to get along. Yeah, you could say that, but I took it more as a sign of being loving and not being an idiot. I didn't want to upset the apple cart of a family member's faith by suggesting that there are textual variants or manuscript issues on minor points of doctrine when those family members had hitched their wagon to word-for-word inerrancy (and some of whom still do). My brother and I have found ourselves in the interesting situation of having some family members come ar0und to some ideas that we have held for more than a decade that we didn't talk about because we didn't feel like getting scolded for not being orthodox enough. In light of recent family developments I'd like to think that some of the potential scuffles won't even have to happen now, though I also hope that my choosing to remain a Protestant doesn't become an issue for conflict.
Ever since my college days I have figured that if a person acknowledges Christ alone as Lord, Scripture as the most reliable and necessary pointer to Christ, and acknowledges that Christ can save anyone who believes, then confessional delineations of the sort Americans often care about on any side of any divide should be mooted. This is the type of minimalist Christianity advocates all around dislike. I have sometimes heard the rather rare but memorable complaint that the Gospel is not enough, one need's culture. One already has whatever culture God provides so that always struck me as an absurd desire but it makes sense to want to see how being a Christian actually looks where you live.
Still, it's not as though Jesus didn't cover that one, seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added unto you. It's just a matter of trusting that Jesus said that and that He spoke the truth. Not easy to understand or implement, but also beyond any point for negotiation or doubt in terms of one's individual walk as a disciple of Christ. If I follow after Christ and need a culture I'll get that.
To not take that approach, to assume that I have to build a culture or choose a culture for myself that compensates for what Jesus can't provide me risks the potential of being an idol, which is where things come full circle on the "Rapture Ready" variations in Christianity, whatever their stripe. In the absence of feeling as though I can participate in the culture around me, or perhaps in the absence of feeling as though being a Christian somehow "gives" me a culture, I can pick whichever cultural legacy I want. I could pick my father's culture or my mother's culture but neither have ever appealed to me. Both are so fundamentally corrupted by generations of sin and misery that I don't think either side would have me embrace those cultural legacies and I wouldn't choose to. I don't need to deny that my dad was American Indian, that my Mom comes from Okie stock or that my stepdad's family has Arkansas born Adventist background but I also don't have to just pick one of the above as somehow "the" culture that reflects me or ignore the others out of favoritism for one or the other.
On the other hand, ever since by grace I saw the stream thy flowing wounds supply, redeeming love has been my theme and shall be til I die.
The remedy to this quagmire seems relatively simple, mix and match. I like Rich Mullins songs so I own an album by Rich Mullins. I like Stevie Wonder, so I own Stevie Wonder albums. I like choral music by Arvo Part so I own that. I own music and books by artists and authors who would be considered nominally outside my formal confession of faith. I don't think stuff outside that millieu is "trashy". I'm also at a point in my life where I can relax knowing that everything is a mere vapor. The things we consider culturally important now or timeless now are not timeless. There will come a time when no one knows or cares who Shakespeare is. It's no reason not to appreciate Shakespeare now, of course, but it is a way to ensure that what is "timeless" is seen for what it is, something that will pass away when that which is perfect comes.
It is fascinating how artists and theologians are so eager to issue manifestos, most of which mean very little except to those who issued it. Even one of my long-time heroes wasn't above issuing a Christian manifesto. We can't improve upon the manifest we already have, we could do a better, more consistent job of sticking to it, not least because it has been provided for us and we got to rubber stamp it even though it's not necessarily our own, despite coming about (paradoxically) through our own fallible hands.
As Slavoj Žižek has observed, the logic of late capitalism presses towards the commodification of a niche identity for its own sake; the Christian merchandise I buy is not itself the desired commodity, but it is merely an ephemeral signifier of the real commodity, which is my identity as a particular sort of Christian. In this case, the product I am really purchasing is radically non-material, wholly spiritual; I am purchasing religious meaning and belonging, religious “community” (since the merchandise allows me to participate in a specific market niche). Here, any neat separation between my “faith” and my “consumer culture” is simply fictitious. To change the latter simply is to change the former.
This is the part where, though I'm not really a Marxist, any variation of potentially Marxist critique fits because I think Marx correctly diagnosed the social and economic problem of his era. Reformed people buy Reformed stuff, Orthodox people buy Orthodox stuff, Pentecostal people by Pentecostal stuff, Catholics buy Catholic stuff. The wallet speaks to one's identity just as much as one's identity speaks to one's wallet. What plays out as "I must buy an American car" becomes "I must buy things that show that I am this or that kind of Christian, a real Christian rather than a fake one."
This is the sort of thing that I don't struggle with at all any more .... that I know of! If I enjoy South Park I watch South Park with the proviso that I don't watch it at all with Christians whom I know are uncomfortable with the show. But like other people (I guess) I struggled with the feeling that my wallet was at some level supposed to reflect that the stuff I liked was sufficiently "Christian". Nah, more to the point, I got flack from parents (one in particular) for a few years telling me I should stop reading "trashy novels" and start reading "good, Christian literature". Somewhere Fyodor Dostoevsky, I hope, had a good belly-laugh for that kind of response. Somewhere, I imagine, Kafka might have another rueful smirk. Takahashi probably has no idea any of this is going on and is the better for it. I don't quite know what Austen would think.
The thing that seems most apparent from someone like Frank Schaeffer is a sense of betrayal of principles. There is a sense in which he could have been said to have appropriated Christ to transform culture and his own father, at least by Frank's way of thinking. I still think Frank is living in a dream world if he imagines his father could have somehow been a hero to the Religious Left. That involves a Bizzaro world of almost inconceivable proportions but that world MUST exist in Imagination Land somewhere!
I grew up in a basically Christian family where national and spiritual identity blurred, a lot. As my own walk with the Lord the idea that I saw myself as a Christian first and as an American citizen second (or possibly third) did not always settle well with the parents, not least when I said that some aspects of Marxist thought were not actually crazy ... just Marxist APPLICATION (which totally is crazy). But even conceding that a critique of late capitalism, say, could apply to Christian identity to all Christians in the West is not something I'd run by my parents as a point for conversation because they've taken me to a Benny Hinn crusade or commended Frank Perretti's books. It's encouraging to read that Perretti has more or less moved on from that stage of writing. It's also interesting to read about how one of the stars of that period confessed to having written the book out of a lot of anger.
A lot of Christians in the United States who aligned evangelical were angry in the 1990s. The Republicans had lost the highest office in the country and Clinton was being described as possibly the Antichrist, ready to institute martial law on behalf of the United Nations possibly any day now. There was a level of paranoia that permeated this subculture that soured me on that whole approach more than a decade ago. To have actually said so would have gotten me in more trouble with my family who still had that approach than I (or my brother) wanted to bother with. Holding to scriptural infallibility rather than inerrancy was not to be spoken of.
Someone could say to me that this was a sign of suppressing my real identity as a Christian on the basis of going along to get along. Yeah, you could say that, but I took it more as a sign of being loving and not being an idiot. I didn't want to upset the apple cart of a family member's faith by suggesting that there are textual variants or manuscript issues on minor points of doctrine when those family members had hitched their wagon to word-for-word inerrancy (and some of whom still do). My brother and I have found ourselves in the interesting situation of having some family members come ar0und to some ideas that we have held for more than a decade that we didn't talk about because we didn't feel like getting scolded for not being orthodox enough. In light of recent family developments I'd like to think that some of the potential scuffles won't even have to happen now, though I also hope that my choosing to remain a Protestant doesn't become an issue for conflict.
Ever since my college days I have figured that if a person acknowledges Christ alone as Lord, Scripture as the most reliable and necessary pointer to Christ, and acknowledges that Christ can save anyone who believes, then confessional delineations of the sort Americans often care about on any side of any divide should be mooted. This is the type of minimalist Christianity advocates all around dislike. I have sometimes heard the rather rare but memorable complaint that the Gospel is not enough, one need's culture. One already has whatever culture God provides so that always struck me as an absurd desire but it makes sense to want to see how being a Christian actually looks where you live.
Still, it's not as though Jesus didn't cover that one, seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added unto you. It's just a matter of trusting that Jesus said that and that He spoke the truth. Not easy to understand or implement, but also beyond any point for negotiation or doubt in terms of one's individual walk as a disciple of Christ. If I follow after Christ and need a culture I'll get that.
To not take that approach, to assume that I have to build a culture or choose a culture for myself that compensates for what Jesus can't provide me risks the potential of being an idol, which is where things come full circle on the "Rapture Ready" variations in Christianity, whatever their stripe. In the absence of feeling as though I can participate in the culture around me, or perhaps in the absence of feeling as though being a Christian somehow "gives" me a culture, I can pick whichever cultural legacy I want. I could pick my father's culture or my mother's culture but neither have ever appealed to me. Both are so fundamentally corrupted by generations of sin and misery that I don't think either side would have me embrace those cultural legacies and I wouldn't choose to. I don't need to deny that my dad was American Indian, that my Mom comes from Okie stock or that my stepdad's family has Arkansas born Adventist background but I also don't have to just pick one of the above as somehow "the" culture that reflects me or ignore the others out of favoritism for one or the other.
On the other hand, ever since by grace I saw the stream thy flowing wounds supply, redeeming love has been my theme and shall be til I die.
The remedy to this quagmire seems relatively simple, mix and match. I like Rich Mullins songs so I own an album by Rich Mullins. I like Stevie Wonder, so I own Stevie Wonder albums. I like choral music by Arvo Part so I own that. I own music and books by artists and authors who would be considered nominally outside my formal confession of faith. I don't think stuff outside that millieu is "trashy". I'm also at a point in my life where I can relax knowing that everything is a mere vapor. The things we consider culturally important now or timeless now are not timeless. There will come a time when no one knows or cares who Shakespeare is. It's no reason not to appreciate Shakespeare now, of course, but it is a way to ensure that what is "timeless" is seen for what it is, something that will pass away when that which is perfect comes.
It is fascinating how artists and theologians are so eager to issue manifestos, most of which mean very little except to those who issued it. Even one of my long-time heroes wasn't above issuing a Christian manifesto. We can't improve upon the manifest we already have, we could do a better, more consistent job of sticking to it, not least because it has been provided for us and we got to rubber stamp it even though it's not necessarily our own, despite coming about (paradoxically) through our own fallible hands.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
contemplating the semantics and potential application of multi-site vs denomination
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.
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.
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.
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