by their fruits?

http://gospeldrivenchurch.blogspot.com/2008/08/osteen-esque-entitlement-and-knowing.html

I never had any interest in Osteen's preaching and teaching. I would hear some folks say he's not evangelical and that what he teaches is heretical. The little that I heard of Osteen didn't impress as being heretical in every respect, but heresy is never usually heretical in EVERY respect. It's heretical in one aspect. If you were to say that God the Son is both fully human and fully man but that God the Son's divine nature could not and did not feel any pain then that would rupture the unity of hypostatic union and you'd be a heretic, basically. To argue that God the Son did not feel pain on the Cross is the sort of thing that makes a mockery of Scripture and also reveals (potentially) a desire to have a variation of Docetism (there's another name for it but I'm not so theologically geeky today as to feel like using the term).

And sometimes heresy is revealed not so much through direct actions or statements as the implications and actions taken in light of that conviction. If you decide that you don't have to tell someone they've sinned against you and that they have to recognize their sin, well, that's hardly heresy, but it's disconcerting because you might have to, you know, obey Jesus' teaching and tell that person they've sinned against you.

But as the Osteen trial may suggest, the not telling people stuff may often consist of what we consider ourselves entitled to that we are not entitled to. As a single man I know that any number of single people feel entitled to be married at some level. Personally I figure any woman who would take me as husband material has a problem and perhaps it's best that I say this in a pseudonymous post so that any woman who might have entertained me as a remotely viable candidate for marriage will be less likely to read this part where I say that, regretfully, she must be ignorant as to my true character or a bit crazy.

As no doubt two-million other people on the blogosphere have blogged, here's the quote from Osteen that will be blogged around the world for possibly a generation.

"You feel that you're entitled to the favor of God ... to do things other people can't do," McKamie said."All of God's children are," Osteen said.

As Peter Gabriel's satirical character put it in the eponymously titled song,
"You're not one of us!"

Okay, for those who don't know how to read Webdings, it means:

"You're not one of us!"

If Osteen and his wife have that kind of attitude that says they don't have to clean up their own mess because the flight attendent is there that's unfortunate. Suing the Osteens for a tithe of their value is reprehensible. The allegation of assault withstanding it's just ridiculous and it speaks badly of our society as a whole that this is a suit that happened and made the news but it's trebly shameful because it involves a minister who some Christians have defended as being a real minister of the Gospel and a public trial gets under way and under oath Osteen says stuff to the effect that Christians are entitled to ignore or break any codes of conduct they want as a sign of God's favor. For me the unsettling thing is that this is not the best way for Osteen to be a witness to Christ. The Gospel doesn't seem like it's likely to get promoted any further by this. This is the part where the Osteens could consider Paul's admonition, "Why not rather be wronged?"

Now is Osteen really a heretic or preaching a false Gospel? I know people say that but what bothers me about this case is that Osteen DOESN'T HAVE TO BE A HERETIC OR A FALSE TEACHER TO DEFAME THE GOSPEL. Most people who defame the Gospel are not obviously heretics but are standing on their soap boxes for what they believe to be God's revealed truth. A person may start off on a path loving God with good influences but end in tragedy, idolatry, and self-regard.

Joash is the most sobering example I can think of. He began well,trained by the high priest of his day. He rebuked the priests as a group for failing to tend to the house of God (they were apparently either not collecting money or merely collecting it for their own ends and some scholars think embezzlement may have been afoot). Joash rebuked the priests and the high priest particularly repented and took action. The idols during this time were not taken down and some of the devoted things were stolen and made into idols. Things made for God for use in the temple were stolen and made idols. That could be a whole allegory, if you will, about what this may mean in every day Christian life where things created by men to serve God's people are appropriated and made idols. Almost any church could, by way of allegory, be this sort of thing stolen from the temple and taken by people to be an idol. Perhaps that's too Augustinian an approach! Never mind!

But after the high priest died the nobles of Judah bowed low to Joash and he listened to them. What did they want. Why, to worship idols of course! They wanted a bit more leniency on things and because the were such amazing boot-lickers in how they made their case Joash listened to them. The son of the high priest who trained Joash in the ways of the Lord objected. He declared to Joash and Judah that God had forsaken them because they had forsaken God. Joash had Zechariah the high priest murdered. Zechariah's murder is the end of the line in celebrity martyrdom from Jesus' lips in the New Testament. So while Joash started off well his end was shameful. He gave away things from the temple to pay tribute to an invading army and personally ordered the murder of the high priest. Finally Joash was assasinated by his own servants!

A note to pastors, it does not matter how well you start off, your ability to give way to idolatry because your underlings tell you what you want to hear can happen at any time, and is likely to happen when you have removed yourself from the influence of those who brought you up in the ways of the Lord. Consider the example of Joash. Who would be the high priest whose absence from your life would be a sign of danger that you are going off course? The key is not to make sure you don't lose that person but to acknowledge now that we serve God with accountability, not the accountability of people who are hundreds or thousands of miles away in spirit or in truth, but people who know us so well that they can rebuke us and we can rebuke them as needed based on shared lives together. The high priest and the king lived in Judah

The sense of entitlement starts out small. We break rules and procedures meant for everyone because we're the exceptions that can be made because whatever we're doing is important enough to breach the norm for. As long as we see the action as justified for whatever reason we think we're in the clear. We may have broken a command of God with regard to our brother or sister in Christ or an unbeliever along the way, but that's okay, because we did it for the right reason. The greatest treason in T. S. Eliot's lexicon may be to do the right thing for the wrong reason but most of us aren't at risk for that. Most of us do the wrong thing for the wrong reason and tell ourselves we did it for the right reason because we have self-justifying hearts.

That's what I find sad about the Osteen case, that that's what seems to be happening all around. As the apostle might have put it, to have these sorts of cases at all is a sign of defeat for you. Yes, it is, even if Osteen really "isn't" a believer or really is preaching heresy, because the name that is being defamed will still end up being Jesus'. That makes me sad. For the world at large we can't shake it off by claiming that he's not one of us, in the eyes of the world it is enough that he claims to be a minister of Jesus.

awesome, how not to preach parables

http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-not-to-preach-parables.html

The Dark Knight

Well, for the five of you who read this and remember my little treatise on how Superman, Batman, and Spiderman are the three superheroes (Batman excepted) who show a vestigial link to Judeo-Christian ethics by honoring father and mother, refraining from killing when it is in their power, and all that ... you can more or less fairly ask why I haven't written a big treatise on The Dark Knight.

Bear with me, I'll get there. In fact I plan to see it at least one more time with an eye on how Nolan is continuing a streak of presenting us with protagonists who are capable of huge amounts of delusion. This capacity is a bit muted in Batman because, well, he's Batman, but there are things about the film that as a long-time Batman fan with strong ideas about the character sort of disappointed me, though only near the very end of the film.

But, see, I don't feel like getting into it yet since it's, what 3am? My niece wants to see this and now that I've seen it I can say "NOT UNTIL YOUR FOURTEEN!" At least.

But for now I'm just mentioning that I've seen it. The few friends of mine who haven't seen it aren't likely to read this and read the spoilers because this is my uber-geek outlet. Such as the eventual examination of child abuse as the big theme in Eureka Seven. Woo-hoo! Don't let the mecha or the emo romance fool you, folks. Eureka Seven is all about child abuse and how it manifests across generations and is rationalized. I suppose if I tried I could connect this to The Dark Knight but I won't bother.

surprise!

I heard a certain preacher (won't say who) preach their first decent sermon in maybe a year ... maybe two. Pleasantly surprised, very pleasantly so. It's amazing how much a preacher's sermons pick up in quality if he or she, you know, actually speaks from the words of our Lord. Hope it happens more and more often.

worst preacher ever championship at scotteriology

http://scotteriology.wordpress.com/2008/07/31/worst-preacher-ever-championship-bracket/

http://scotteriology.wordpress.com/2008/08/02/worst-preacher-ever-copeland-vs-osteen/

http://scotteriology.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/worst-preacher-ever-crowder-vs-robertson/

Somehow it seems like the list of candidates skews toward charismatic/TBN types. To be fair it seems that if we go this route an unfortunately skewed sample results. We need to consider that all kinds of mainlines get ignored.

Still ... I thought just the people I had heard of were bad.

I have to wonder about the term "preacher" here. Do retired priests like John Shelby Spong count? Maybe he was a great preacher but I found his influence on theology to be, well, awful.
Then again, Spong has more a reputation as an author than a preacher.

Tracking this could be interesting.

http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/funnyquotes/a/patrobertson.htm

I'd have to say #8 is particularly insane. My dad was a member of the Quinalt tribe (though he may have pissed off everyone in the tribe by now for all I know) and I'd have to say there's no way evangelicals in America (if Robertson even technically counts as one is not something I'm sure about) are being treated worse than American Indians have been treated by evangelicals no less.

#7 Orlando is its own nation? Did Benny Hinn get included in that warning?

Like I was saying, keeping track of this could be interesting. I still think more mainliners could be included. Bad preachers and theologians aren't just in America, after all, even if our bad preachers are easier to find and insist on a public voice.

Tron 2? Seriously?

I knew Disney had changed after they dropped Eisner and acquired Pixar. And then Pixar proved me wrong by making movies that were both weirder and cooler than I expected them to make. Ratatouille was amazing and WALL-E is not as amazing as that but it's still pretty fun, far more fun than I imagined and almost avant garde in some ways. My brother called it Pixar's take on Angel's Egg (let the reader who is an anime nerd understand and the rest of the world wonder what on earth I'm blogging about).

But Tron and The Black Hole were precisely the kinds of movies Disney stopped making after Eisner took over. Now argue whether or not they SHOULD have been made, I suppose, but it seems as though Disney is shifting back toward a curious and possibly good direction.

Then again, I'm hearing rumors of a Pirates 4. Pirates 2 and 3 were terrible and 3 was exponentially bad for having Chow-Yun Fat play fourth fiddle to Bloom, Knightley, and Depp. Okay, Depp's good and Chow can support him ... but, dude, Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightley!? What's with that. It didn't help that they had even less chemistry on screen than Brandon Routh and Kate Bosworth. So little chemistry that the little tyke who is born at the end of Pirates 3 is literally inconceivable based on the lack of chemistry the characters have had.

Oh well ... it's not like I'm planning to watch Pirates 4 when it comes out.

Solzhenitsyn dead

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080803/ap_on_re_eu/obit_solzhenitsyn

Nothing much to add, really.

pastors, ordination, being "bought" and validation of ministry

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/the-bought-me-and-im-glad#comments


I do believe that congregations are commanded in scripture to set aside their leaders and I see the wisdom in commending that ordination to other congregations as a reason to consider a man worthy of recommendation. Of course, I wish my tradition took some aspects of ordination more seriously, as we are famous for laying hands on teenagers and people who don’t understand the Gospel at all.


But there’s one aspect of ordination I really do appreciate on a very personal level. When a congregation ordains you, they are setting you aside to serve them, yes. But they are also saying, “He belongs to us. We bought him, and until he proves himself unworthy of our confidence, he’s ours. Even when he leaves, he can still come back and know we signed his papers.”


My uncle was a pastor for almost fifty years, and he built one of the largest churches in our community in his day. But I remember that he always talked about his first church- the church that ordained him- as special. He didn’t brag about the big church when he needed to remember who he was; he recalled the country people who “bought” him as a young pastor, and took on the task of being his first church.



http://jesusshaped.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/where-is-jesus-part-3/


But what we cannot do, at least in my view, is claim to be dispensing Jesus ourselves, or to be directing God’s promises as if Jesus were a substance. We can’t point at the front of the church and tell people to come to a place, or do a ritual or express worship in a certain way and speak as if the presence of Jesus appears as a result.


I will explain why I link these two quotes in a bit, even though their relationship seems self-evident and self-explanatory.


This intrigues me because depending on how the nature of church government the congregation doesn't ordain anyone at all. In an elder-ruled church the elders alone decide who is ordained and what constitutes being called. It is common in charismatic and Pentecostal churches to refer to seminaries as "cemetaries". The old saw is that the church isn't "alive", whatever that may mean. Not that there aren't dead and dying churches but sometimes I believe "alive" means nothing more than "I like this" in a church.


As a pure platform for pondering, when Paul wrote to Timothy not to lay hands on people too quickly and thus participate in their sin could Paul have been writing that no one should be too quickly ordained for ministry? It might be included in that admonition. Spenser's observation that his denomination has laid hands on teenagers and people who don't understand the Gospel. Perhaps we have too many pastors in the world, men and women who have been installed as shepherds who do not really have a heart for shepherding so much as for preaching and teaching? The three are not necessarily the same. A person may be a gifted church plant and a terrible shepherd. This doesn't mean that the person isn't called or gifted by God to plant churches and preach the Gospel, but it may mean the person shouldn't have a shepherding role or be an overseer/presbyter in the sense of having substantial administrative power (or responsibility).

It's that ordination is recognized by others and not just the self that interests me. When Paul first met Christ it validated him as an apostle but he recognized that if the other apostles found fault with the gospel he preached it would be a problem. Paul's ministry was not purely self-validating, it was validated by apostolic agreement as to his calling and the recognition of the body of Christ that the man who formerly killed and persecuted Christians was preaching about the way.

I hear about the folks who think seminaries are cemetaries but overall I'm not sure I buy it. As Dostoevsky put it in his great novel, young men are willing to die for causes they believe in but that's the easiest sacrifice for them to make. Ask them to spend five or six years of their burning hot youth in tedious study and isolation and that for a task that may be thankless and you'll see how quickly their ardor cools! One of the advantages of a long and tedious ordination or pastoral installment process is that it helps weed out people who are unfit or don't want the job. So how long should that process be? Probably long!

A pastor once said the problem with denominations and seminaries is they tend to call the trained and that churches need to train the called. That is something I agree with, though I note that even within this perspective the argument is that the called should be trained. But how do you actually recognize that someone is called? If it were that simple to determine who is really "called" to ministry then wouldn't we not be at the point where people joke that seminaries are cemetaries? And don't we still have the paradox that people whose calling is self-identified and self-validated end up in ministry?

At the point that pastors have to be fired or defrocked the denomination plays a crucial role. They have to decide that someone is unfit for ministry and they have jumped through enough hoops to reflect the doctrines and practices of the church. In non-denominational settings this is a more mercurial, dicey prospect. In a congregationally led church, obviously, the congregation can decide to fire a pastor. In an elder led church the congregation is essentially there to pay the leadership to make whatever decisions the leaders think fitting without respect to the will of the members. It could be construed, in cases where things may not be ideal, as a somewhat parasitic relationship in as much as that pastors can ask for money to make decisions the congregation may not understand or be made privy to.

Of course provided the decisions are brilliant this isn't a problem. I have of late come to appreciate that an advantage denominations have is that there is a multidirectional level of accountability. A church leadership team that goes astray will lose parishioners or members. Members who stray may be barred from community. In a healthy church this accountability will be omnidirectional. In an unhealthy church leadership is beholden to the congregation to the point that the Gospel gets compromised or the Gospel gets compromised by leadership who push for goals or agendas that are not central to the Gospel.

In an indepedent, non-denominational church this can be problematic for the simple reason that if all the elders at said church hold each other accountable they may still be blind to their own flaws as a leadership team or, even if they have no flaws as a leadership team (and here I insert a respectful "as if") the congregation's flaws become issues. A godly king in Israel would still be noted as permitting the idolatry of the people. One or two kings started off great but went astray after losing key guides, becoming marks for the praise and acclaim of local nobles and getting buttered up to permit local idolatries to bloom again.

Which is to say that a church like this that has no external accountability will become unhealthy, supposing itself to be on the right path when it may not entirely be on the right path. A church without internal accountability will go off the rails but internal accountability is not enough, external accountability is needed. This can come in various ways but perhaps the best macro-level example of this is the denominational system, however it may work out. Rather than think in terms of how "dead" denominations are, think about how many centuries have elapsed for those churches to get to this "dead" state. That's a long time. Consider the life and death of a single non-denominational independently led church? If such a church dies in a city and no one is there to note it's passing did it happen? Yeah, but it is unmoored from the very history it may have been founded to preserve. Note, I'm not really arguing that all churches have to be denominationally linked, I'm just noting that for my church background it was easy to rip on denominations for reasons that now seem a bit loopy.

The least credible argument against denominations for me now is the idea that they install people who aren't called. Years ago iMonk posted an article by a pastor who wrote that if you don't wake up in the morning and think to yourself, "Woe is me if I don't preach the Gospel" then you shouldn't be a pastor. I'd say I agree with that and even that may not indicate what KIND of pastor you ought to be.

I'm thinking lately about one of these nondenominational pastor-run churches. If all the pastors are self-nominated and they as a group ordain each other isn't there some risk that they may mess something up as a group? Is there sufficient internal and external accountability in such a setting? I hope so, I really do, but I have doubts because some of the craziest stuff that's happened in American religion happened in these sorts of settings where the nobles, as it were, bowed low to the king of a spiritual empire and that led the king to go off the rails. Perhaps the first rule of spiritual submission to Christ is never believe your own hype. The first person to do that ... well, we Christians know who he is. It's a risk in even the best of settings, which calls for plenty of prayer.

If a pastor gets fired from one of these churches where everyone is self-nominated and is installed by people who are self-nominated are there sufficient external checks? Do there need to be any? If that pastor gets fired by a community who have the same sort of self-validated calling the fired pastor has then what becomes the basis for removal? Definite sin? I hope so. Disagreements about the nature of bureaucratic procedure? Not quite so sure about that one. For me the conundrum is that this group of leaders consists of self-appointed leaders who appoint each other. There's a feedback loop of affirmation and agreement. It may have a risk to it is what I'm saying.

Each system has its problems but the more time goes by the less I am persuaded that the alternative to denominations does a better job of keeping out people who decide they are pastors because it would be a cool thing to do. The reason for the "cool thing to do" might be for the acclaim, for being called "pastor" or for not having to work that much during the week and speak for forty minutes or something like that. The reason might even seem to be a great reason. Jesus said let no one call you "Father" or "rabbi" but there's a principle at work that goes beyond that. You can want the acclaim and respect whether or not you have the title. You don't have to actually BE a pastor to have that problem. If you think that just because you're you that you deserve respect and esteem you may have the same spiritual problem without having the formal title that, in worldly terms, would at least warrant the formal signs of respect.

Well, I'm running out of steam. PErhaps I'll ponder this via blog entry later, perhaps not.

HT to iMonk, yet another screed on the feminization of American men

http://www.cbmw.org/Blog/Posts/The-Feminization-of-the-American-Male-From-Top-to-Toe

The quintessential problem of a review like this even existing is here, the money quote:

Men reading Glenville's book will only be encouraged in their sinful tendency to look out for themselves. If men are focused on such trivial things as dry skin and pampering themselves with long baths, it will be all the more difficult to expect them to lead, provide, and protect. There may be a day when Lowes and Home Depot have entire aisles dedicated to moisturizers and skin creams for that weathered carpenter. There may be rows of scented bubble bath for that overworked mason. ...

The money quote for me is not where Spenser puts it, it's earlier. So Stinson declares that men reading Glenville's book will only be encouraged in their sinful tendency to look out for themselves? Really? Would that include Stinson only being encouraged in his sinful tendency to look out for himself having just read the book and making this declaration of his about the book, too? All right, let's go with that. Let's suppose that it's not mere rhetoric that prompts Stinson to dread a day when Lowes and HOme Depot will have entire aisles dedicated to moisturizers and skin creams for carpenters, or scented bubble bath for overworked masons.

Let's suppose that Stinson is actually afraid this is going to happen and ask him why? Is this stuff to be feared because it is to be feared or because it is to be feared if applied to men? IF to men should women have these products for themselves? Why? None of it is promoting of godliness is it? If in the Song of Songs the woman praises the smell of her man is it the stink of body odor she's praising? Not really. Does America have the kind of blue collar or sweat-shirted economy Stinson assumes? In some places, but not all. How do we know that Stinson's vision of masculinity has anything to do with Scripture? If a man follows all the hygiene advice it may not be a sign of being selfish.

This is where the concept of worship as encompassing all of life comes back to bite Stinson in the butt. Skin care as a stewardship issue could mean you use moisturizers. Stinson treats as a purely vanity or humility issue what can legitimately be a health issue. If you have dry skin it can crack and be susceptible to infection. Not that I've personally had to worry about it but I have family who had to deal with the issue. A moisturizer isn't proof that someone isn't a man. That's about as dubious as saying real men don't wear earplugs because they can handle noise, if we're going to deal with this sort of polemic about masculinity and stereotypes at the level it deserves.

The reason this sort of screed seems so stupid and paranoid is that it presumes a monolithic culture on the topic of masculinity. If the poles happen to be Hugh Grant and Sylvester Stallone neither alternative seems that awe-inspiring to me. Stinson frets that if Christians keep following the culture this or that will happen but that whole rhetorical dread is based on an assumption about culture that is simply absurd. Which culture? The world in its pejorative definition in Scripture is frequently identified as "the nations" in the Psalms. The corrupting influence is not monolithic but manifold. Stinson's polemic doesn't account for this and distorts the biblical record. Surprise.

Clearly we're not looking at an actual book review but an editorial screed that uses the existence of a book as a pretext. If moisturizer for men is a sign of destroying masculinity maybe Stinson could explain why. Nah, why do that when he can write about how the book is a sign of an assault on masculinity in America. What if masculinity in America has been broken for generations? The whole line of thinking that this or that line of spirituality appeals to real men, or that real men are defined by this or that is moot. A man could display all the godly traits Stinson wants a man to have AND STILL FOLLOW THE HYGIENE ADVICE in Glenville's book. Yep, really. I don't even have to have read the book to observe this possibility. Stinson's polemic is based on a false dichotomy.

Sure, masculinity is distorted in American and Western culture and the Hugh Grant/Sylvester Stallone polarity pretty well sums it up. If Stinson buy sinto one extreme in response to the other then the balance is missing.

What can happen regularly in these sorts of polemics about what constitutes "real men" is that it becomes a digression on WHICH law defines you rather than the Gospel. Stinson's screed frets about the outward trappings of what is or isn't masculine that the actual character traits he wants to see become insignificant. He doesn't even write an actual review of the book to let us know what its overall contents are. What exactly is promoted in the book that is unhealthy? Skin care? That's unhealthy? Really? Would the skin care advice in Glenville's book be considered unhealthy and terrible if given to women? If so then should skin care just not be an issue? If not then doesn't that say a lot about suppositions about masculinity and feminity that suppose that women should be concerned about having soft skin but men shouldn't? Why would it be godless for men to want soft, healthy skin but not for women?

Reflection on InternetMonk's essay on the church as insitution, blind loyalty, and naive criticism

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/what-will-it-be-for-the-church-blind-loyalty-or-naive-criticism#comments





One of the things I have come to appreciate now that I'm 34 and tried doing the fellowship thing apart from any church is that it doesn't work, not really, and not for very long. I could see valid criticisms of the church right and left from friends and family and I often heard the argument, "I can get fellowship by spending time with Christians outside of any formal setting." I bought that whole way of thinking for a while and maybe it really works in some settings, but ...





I heard someone once say she wasn't into organized religion for a few years. This could often be a valid criticism ... but it could equally often be a sign that the organized religious institution she was attending wasn't getting her what she wanted. If she wasn't acknowledged as having a more or less prophetic right to tell the pastor whether he was annointed or doing something important she tended to lose her ardor for that pastor's leadership. It's not that the critiques were groundless in themselves exactly (but sometimes they probably were), it's that she had something to get out of being listened to that may have compromised what she could have said. In other words, it's tougher to think of the pastor or other believers as better than yourself if you're constantly desiring to be the person who is respected and listened to because you're you then you're guilty of having the same problem many a pastor has.





Now don't get me wrong, I do think fellowship can happen apart from church settings but there are things that don't tend to happen. More to the point, there are things that people who pull out of churches say DOES happen that don't. Corporate worship and prayer, for one. I know, people can tell me that these things happen but if you factor out families (more on this later) and factor out spin-offs associated with churches it's not that common to have home church/alterna-church gatherings that last long. One reason is simply that if they last long and are effective witnesses to the Gospel they are likely to become churches. Another reason is that if they don't they are not about the Gospel but about the pet theological, cultural, and political goals of the people involved.





But at a more basic level I came to realize over ten years that these home-churches or alternatives to institutional church don't work because they abdicate or ignore the very things that they supposedly get apart from church. Basic stuff like corporate praise and worship of the Lord, corporate and individual confession of sin, prayer for the sick, helping widows and orphans.





Maybe one man or woman can do all these things and not attend a church but a perso nwho does that is being part of the church and paradoxically is likely to draw people to themselves. If not, then a person who sings and studies and discusses Scripture; a person who sets aside time to help the poor and powerless; a person who confesses sin and hears confession of sin; a person who prays for the sick and a person who annoints with oil if functioning like a bishop/overseer/pastor or has someone in his/her life that fulfills that role. We are made both for submission and for leadership and the trouble with the alterna-church role is that either it fails utterly to do or be what the church ought to be herself, but often in succeeding as an alternative simply proves itself what Jesus originally designed it to be, which takes all the force out of the criticism.





If the Church is the bride of Christ doesn't saying that the institutional church isn't where church happens effectively saying that no one who has put on the wedding dress is the bride? It's not like the bride is all that awesome now, I know, but the Church is not just about me and Jesus. Even long-time married people go on dates. It feels almost as though the problem with finding "church" apart from a church is that it's like being married but refusing to have date night because you can get the conversation, friendship, sex, parenting, and all those other things in other contexts apart from going on an official date. Sure, but husbands and wives go on date nights anyway, right? I just find it strange that what people understand in the natural realm of things seems so invisible in the realm of fellowship with God's people.





If you want to sing praises to the Lord, confess and repent of sin, share with the people whom you are able to share with, gather in the name of Christ with two or three believers, you CAN do all these things without officially being linked into a local church, but I have to ask if by doing all those things you aren't already doing church so to speak. And I have to ask if you can't do these things in the context of a church, or rather if you haven't made a church in the context of doing these things. Churches as institutions didn't come about because someone decided to make an institution one day in Jesus' name.

It seems like either churches become graveyards of spiritual movements or they aren't movements at all, but God has a history of working with wayward and lost people. If Jesus let His people divide before His coming I can see Him easily letting them divide after His ascension before His return.

So, sure, churches as institutions mess things up but to say they are dead is to forget that where two or three gather in His name, He will be there. The problem with saying that churches aren't what Jesus came to establish is that if you go that far you're calling Jesus a liar at some level. Jesus didn't say that the Church He established, and the apostles never said that the individual churches were all that awesome. Christ's message through the apostle to churches in Revelation are full of stinging rebukes but also of encouragement, and the recognition from Christ Himself that those pathetic bands of Christians who tolerated Jezebel or who were lukewarm were churches, churches that belonged to Him, churches dealing with persecution and confusion. This doesn't mean any of them were without flaws, and it doesn't mean that people can't have fellowship and confess sin and publicly proclaim the kingship of Christ in some alternative they imagine to what they consider the unfixable local church.

But that hardly means that such a criticism of the local church or denominations is really solving anything. Scripture is replete with men like King Saul who clearly saw what his own problem was and was not saved by that knowledged. Knowledge in itself is not power, at all. Knowledge can bind you, too. I'm not even going to bother getting so geeky as to explain the conundrum at the end of Watchmen, besides after two decades the comic book is going to be a movie anyway. The thing I mention in it is that you get these people at the end where knowing what is really going on makes them guilty of either not stopping it or accepting it. At best the one person who doesn't compromise is destroyed. Perhaps, for the sake of silliness, I could proffer that as an allegory about people who are confronted with problems in the church. Some go along to get along, some attempt to stop it and are destroyed, and others attempt to stake out a position where they don't compromise but they only destroy themselves because they don't have an alternative that actually works, they simply refuse to accept what is.

My musings here are not abstract. I got dragged to home fellowships and alternatives to organized religion by my parents. I recall one group met in Portland and I recall being prayed for and some fellow was praying the Spirit would take control of me. I felt like I was being suggested to get "slain in the Spirit" and the guy assured me no. I think this was the place where some self-announced prophet from South Korea came and visited and talked about how (this was around 1992) God revealed to him that California would sink into the sea by 1997 because of its wickedness. Hmm ... last I checked California is mysteriously still on the map! So much for that prophet.

Another home fellowship I was impelled to attend was out in the middle of nowhere in Oregon (for those of you who have been reading from the beginning you know I originally hail from Oregon). After about six or seven CCM choruses there was a brief discussion of some part of an epistle and the conversation quickly ranged toward theories that black, unmarked United Nations helicopters were practicing secret operations inside the Oregon borders. Some middle aged guys swore that this was what they saw and that the U.N. and the Clinton administration were planning on suspending the COnstitution and the Bill of Rights and getting ready to declare martial law. Women were talking about how they liked Rush Limbaugh but that he often gave them a critical spirit. .... uh, yeah.

So I don't recall us visiting that group more than once or twice. The strange irony to all this was that a few years ago when I talked with my mother about how she and my stepdad had compulsory church attendence I went along with because I didn't feel like being disagreeable (I was referring to college years when so long as I was under their roof they insisted I had to go to the church they went to, where ever they decided "the annointing" was) my mother said that they always picked churches on what I and my siblings liked. Really? I never in a billion years would have chosen to go to "the church that rocks", and I wasn't the one who was leaping to befriend some skeezy teenagers who were scoping out my sister. My parents insisted I should make friends at the church. It didn't matter that I had nothing in common with them and had no interest in getting to know them--that just meant that I needed to acknowledge that all Christians need to have in common is being Christians (true) and that I should work at being friends with them (still wouldn't do it). Eventually my stepdad proferred the rather pragmatic advice that if I didn't like the way some teenager leered at my sister I should hang out with the guy just to make sure he didn't misbehave. Okay, that was finally the argument that worked on me so I hung out with the loser.

For someone who grew up in churches that were "dead" or not "alive" I get the desire to abandon all churches or "organized religion". I have heard people say they don't even like the word "church". But guess what? Jesus used it and if you claim to love Jesus at some point you will come to love His people, even if they treat you like shit. You don't redefine who God's people and who the "real" church is around how you have been hurt because the moment you do that you are like the legal expert talking to Jesus and asking, "And who is my neighbor?" wanting to justify yourself. It is a matter I am contemplating regularly, obviously. There are many bad churches, institutions that have severe problems, but beyond a point that is tough to pin down it looks like Judah and Samaria and when Jesus came to visit them both He had both blessing and rebuke for them.

I have seen why it's tempting to bail on churches or the idea of formal church but unless you are a brilliant social networking who is actively seeking to confess your sins to others and also need little help to have your own sinful patterns pointed out to you having friendships within a group that formally meets to praise the Lord isn't all that bad. Of course it won't really do you any good if you run that group because if accountability isn't mutual and loving it's not accountability by any stretch of the imagination. I don't mean accountability in that you sign some waiver that lets people kick your ass as though that's what it meant and nothing more.

James 5 says we should confess our sins to one another. That means if I sin against you and I don't know about it, talk to me. If I don't repent, find some other people who can make the case more saliently. IF you sin against me I should be able to talk to you. If we don't talk to each other than brothers or sisters in Christ can help out. If I won't listen to you but insist that you should listen to me, or if you insist that I should listen to you but you won't listen to me, that's the sort of relational rupture that is hard to fix precisely because it is (if we're both Christians) in the church. Alternatives to church often fail, utterly, at this sort of mutually confessional relationship. In fact it was in home fellowships that were crazy (and I grant many aren't) that I heard from a woman that she translated "Abba" into "Daddy". So this became occasion for her to very proudly and confidently said, "Daddy said my husband and I should move to town X and start a business there." This woman eventually made off with a bunch of money from aforementioned home church and left her husband and hasn't been seen or heard from in a while. Another fellow who led the home church that met in Portland got divorced a few years later.

One of the objections to institutional churches is the abuse and misuse of authority but it is actually PRECISELY this thing that is most likely to be abused by people who are critics of "organized religion" or the "institutional church". They also frequently feel as though they are the victims of such pastoral or institutional abuse, not realizing that they may carry within them the seeds of the same penchant for abuse of spiritual authority or wanting to refashion the nature and definition of who God's people on earth "really" look like in more or less a similar way to how their abuser did.

Paradoxically I am starting to feel that the "dead" churches have the advantage here. You have to jump through so many hoops to get ordained as a minister in a denomination you better be fairly sure it's what you're called to do and you have to give up years of your life to get certified and approved. If you just nominate yourself to be a spiritual leader because you think it's a good idea you have pre-empted a whole litany of tasks that denominations would make you do. Even if you think a year is a long time or a year and a half, it's not long compared to four years of divinity school, apprenticing, getting reviewed by a denominational network, and finally getting installed with the understanding that you'll get moved if they don't think you're up to it.

the slow death of congregational singing? reflections on road maps, texts, and musical form

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/riffs-the-briefing-on-the-slow-death-of-congregational-singing

http://matthiasmedia.com.au/briefing/library/5175/


http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/tom-schwegler-why-contemporary-music-makes-congregational-singing-difficult#comments

Excerpted from post:

1. The rhythms are, generally speaking, more complex. A lot of praise choruses have syncopations that don’t come naturally to many people, especially older people who have not immersed themselves in CCM. Getting comfortable with those rhythms often takes more time than is available during a worship service. If the praise team has to rehearse in order to be “in sync”, what chance does an unrehearsed congregation have?

2. The “road map” of the songs is more complex. Contemporary worship songs have all sorts of “bridges” and (frequently ad lib) repeats that most hymns lack. It’s harder for a novice to figure out where the song is going, let alone guess what it’s going to sound like when it gets there.

3. Most of the instruments don’t play the tune. In a traditional worship setting, the accompanying instrument (piano or organ) always plays the melody, and a good accompanist will emphasize the melody above the harmony notes. In a typical praise band, the guitars are playing chords, and the drums merely reinforce rhythm; there may be a keyboard and/or other instrument playing the melody, but they are probably outnumbered (and possibly outgunned) by the guitars and drummer(s).

This creates the need for the inevitable team of vocalists, who must, of course, be miked so that they may be heard over all of the electronic, amplified instruments. If the sound man is not particularly judicious, the result can be a blasting contest which drowns out the singing; if the vocalists mistake themselves for performers and start embellishing the tune, there may still not be any pattern that the congregation can easily follow.

It is, of course, quite true that many organists have drowned out their congregations over the years. But at least they were playing the tune when they did it, and everyone could hear what the tune was (possibly to the exclusion of their own thoughts…).

I'm going to be very blunt and say that having been at Mars Hill for years these three are emblematic challenges to a CCM style. I totally appreciate the idea of doing completely homegrown music so as to avoid copyright issues but I also know that MH has long abandoned its confident claims that in the coming technological age to come traditional copyright will be irrelevant and everyone was encouraged to use the special open copyright method. Ha ha ha. Well, couldn't just dumping things straight into the public domain work? Do what Woody Guthrie did and register the copyright with the Library of Congress so you always get credit for it and then publicly announce to the whole planet that anyone can sing it as much as they want. THAT, my friends, is a way to secure yourself as a pop folk legend (notice I very carefully phrased that sequence of words!)

Observations 1 and 2 are crucial. Certain rhythms tend to permeate certain cultures. When you start investigating music from central Europe you start finding rhythmic patterns that are dizzying if all you're used to is the duple and triple patterns of much Western music. You can acclimate yourself to 7 and 5 and uneven divisions of 9 or 12 over time but it requires a great deal of thought and training. What seems easy to musicians writing a piece (believe me, I continually learn this) may seem terrifying to non-musicians and even other musician's whose conceptual millieu is far from your own.

I mean, to just use myself as an example, I worked out a fugue with an essentially 11/4 subject in a fairly upbeat allegro with a subject and two countersubjects. I findi t challenging to play but easy to conceive of ... but I fess up that I've been working toward finishing thisp iece over the last decade. Something that seems effortless may be the sign of a master (big hint, not me) such as when Gene Kelly does his title thing Singin' in the Rain. HE makes it look easy but if you try to do it yourself you'll find out otherwise.

And the road map, ah, I could spend a lot of time on the road map. In songs it's always good to have a formula and stick with it. The development of formula in song form surely comes from the need to make a song memorable enough to keep singing it. My own impression, for what little it is worth, is that a lot of contemporary songs have rudimentary structures, musically speaking.

The real problem of teh raod map in contemporary christian music is not that road map itself, which is usually bonehead, but that there is no clear connection between the musical road map and the road map of the text. What can often happen is that a vernacular, modern setting of a text or hymn takes the text and sets it up musically in a way where if you were to attempt to explain how the melody and harmony of a song's structure reinforces the implicit or explicit narrative of the text you'd be stumped.

For instance, it's not as though there is any obvious narrative arc to the melody in "Be Thou My Vision" is there? Well, actually, you could argue there is one. THe same tune repeats over and over but the text rises and falls in a pattern. Be thouh my vision o Lord of my heart starts low and rises up to the third of the scale. The second line starts on the second scale degree (literally) and rises up to the fifth (dominant). The third and climactic line rises to the sixth scale degree and the highest sustained tone (not the highest tone, the highest tone of notable length or recurrence) and falls down to the lowest point where we have "I thy true son". This is the kind of melodic line that produces an implicit narrative. God the Father is a whole octave above me, the true son. The fourth line stabilizes the range.

So even though the chords and melody repeat over and over again within each refrain in the text the melodic and harmonic materials reinforce the narrative implicit in each segment of the text. Amazing Grace, of course, is the same way. What doesn't necessarily happen in the average CCM song is this kind of melodic/harmonic narrative.

Add to this lack of a road map a penchant for syncopations geared more toward performance than for the best sort of mob singing and it's not hard to see why a lot of songs both old as well as new just don't cut it for congregational singing. It has to be said that the attrition rate of old hymns is a lot higher than most people may think. I've looked through many a hymnal in churches over the years you know what? 90% of the musical time is spent on at most 10 percent of the hymns in the hymnal. Why? Because a lot of the old hymns don't have a decent road map either! Not defending CCM so much as pointing out that this mysterious thing called the road map is vital to songs and if I understood it better myself I'd be able to write more songs than one or two songs every few years that I'm not sure I'd share with the outside world.

I think part of what makes things challenging in a lot of churches is that ideally it would be awesome to sing Scripture more but our Western idiom doesn't lend itself as easily to the near-Eastern poetic forms and concepts as readily as we sometimes think. The Psalms have a certain elegance and form to them that is idiomatic to Hebrew that English doesn't have. It's not for nothing that many great settings of biblical texts in the vernacular have had to replicate the effect rather than the literal wording. To the extent that King James English has stuck around it is because it more than others has maintained a certain element of poetry. But I think a better solution than King James is to suggest that Christian musicians not just study music but also poetry. Not June and moon rhyme stuff. I'm talking more like immersing yourself in John Donne, T. S. Elliot, Herbert, and others. And SCripture. To translate the idiom of Scripture into vernacular you have to master not one vernacular, so to speak, but two. Just mimicking synthetic parallelism in a biblical text may not be the right thing to do.

One of the things I discovered in composing a vernacular and a Latin setting of the Magnificat is just how drastically my approach had to be even when using the same text. For English it became more important to have a through-line. There is so very little that repeats in Mary's song that a straight setting of the text from start to finish is impossible. It would be impossible to follow and even the best composers have, I think, erred in not introducing a bit more repetition in some otherwise solid settings. In a pop idiom my solution was to make the opening lines a repeating chorus that preceded each verse--my soul will magnify the Lord, and my spirit rejoice in God my savior. Repeat a total of two times. The rest of the text in large chunks was then able to present itself as REASONS for each new level of rejoicing--God's kindness toward His humble servant; God's punishing the proud and wealthy and elevation of the humble and weak (this last part becoming a handy excuse for a very necessary bridge); and then revealing how all these things were thematically fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham. The bridge that served purely musical variety purposes earlier could then be brought back as a coda on the Gloria Patri.

Yeah, all very complex. My hope, however, is that by composing the music in an admittedly complex way with a chorus, verse, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, verse, bridge (coda) that I was doing justice to the complexity of the thoughts in the text and using repetition to reinforce what was, despite the textual complexity, a thematically simple conceit. God has given us reason to rejoice by fulfilling all His promises through the child He gave to Mary. So, yeah, I'm using my own song (which you've never heard, trust me) as an example of what seems necessary for groking the road map of a particular song with a Christian text. It seems that in writing any song you HAVE to let the text guide you before you guide the text.

In the case of Scripture this is even more important. How and when you repeat something should be based on how central a text is to the theme of the biblical passage. In the case of the Magnificat it's easy, you let Luke's poem of Mary do the work. The theme throughout is rejoicing in the Lord and that leads you inexorably through how each refrain is a reason to rejoice in the Lord. In a text like, say, 2 Timothy 1:9-10 the thing would be completely different. Or if you set Jeremiah 10:24 as an interlude in a Kyrie. Yes, in case you're wondering, I picked all those because I set those texts.

Even in complex settings of biblical texts the road map should be simple. Binary forms, ternary forms, at most a modified Tin Pan Alley form of aaba at a macro-level with digressions in the middle. But the musical form should REINFORCE the text rather than work against it or have no bearing on the text. If I picked, say, a Team Strike Force song like the setting of the biblical text "Wake up O Sleeper" I could point out how the rambling within a melodic sixth works because the musical punch line of "Wake up o sleeper" jumps out of that sixth to complete the octave and move on up a little higher (hat tip to Mahalia required here). It's a song that has an awkward range written by a guy who sounds like a 12-year old boy but it still works because the range is still just a little over an octave and the musical road map matches the road map of the biblical text. This is a rather unusual example but it's an example of a song that is understandably popular at the church I'm at. Hey, even I like it and I suspect some people might think I'm a full-blown musical snob ... which I pretty much am I guess.

So all that is to say that this idea about a musical road map has intrigued me. Musical structure and its use to delineate textual and extra-textual symbolism fascinates me. If music is a language then what is the nature of musical symbolism? How does musical symbolism work in connection to the more commonly understood symbolic communication we live by, spoken language. When music and spoken word reinforce each other the results are songs that get passed down across generations. When they don't reinforce each other or work against each other we get smooth jazz hits that go in one ear and out the other. Or we get really, really, really awful contemporary Christian music.

reading and memorizing the Bible

As I peruse the Boar's Head Tavern I notice discussion of reading and memorizing Scripture or what devotional/quiet time stuff is done. Mine is sporadic. The whole concept of whether or not Protestants have their own Romish sacramentology is an intriguing topic I may yet return to but here I am concerned with the more mundane questions of how a person reads the Bible or gets through it.

Never done a "get through the whole Bible in a year" plan. Never interested me. Never interested me to formally get through the entire Bible cover to cover. The Bible was never written to be read in that way so I don't see any need to read it that way. The Bible was not written to be memorized by chapter and verse in the way we moderns tend to think of it. The author of Hebrews is content to say "somewhere it is written" without naming chapter and verse or author but he knows the text he is citing.

Not that I'm not a Protestant but I grew up in church settings where knowing chapter and verse and remembering atomized bits of Scripture as proof texts or points for reflection seemed, not exactly the norm, but tempting. There was always some punk kid who would go up and share his memory verse before the Sunday school set and after naming the reference that the kids' ministry leader would not necessarily recognize off the top of his head proudly say "Jesus wept". Eventually that kids' ministry leader knew that verse backwards and forwards ... maybe even bothered to learn it in Greek.

When I was in high school I worked at vegetable canneries ... and worked in vegetable canneries through much of college. Lacking the SPanish skills needed to converse with most of my co-workers, and having utterly spent any conversational opportunities with the Watchtower society old lady I had easily settled into a custom where during my short breaks and lunch break I would read the New Testament. Started in Matthew, read up through Jude, and skipped Revelation. My reason for skipping Revelation was that I didn't feel like any benefit came from reading it because of so many competing ideas about what this or that passage meant, whether or not this or that was the Mark of the Beast, whether the Beast was the European Union or Syria or whatever the latest fads in freakish dispensationalism held at the time. Hey, I was Pentecostal for sure and even a dispensationalist/futurist at the time but I didn't feel up to read Revelation so I stopped at Jude. I did mention much earlier in this blog that I once began rewriting a song I wrote years ago because I had shifted my views on eschatology. I am SO not kidding when I said that then or now.

But setting that aside as an aside, I read through the New Testament more or less dozens of times in my high school and college years. Full scale immersion in a book is a better way to remember it than focused memorization in my experience. You can be so busy memorizing you don't think about what the text means. We don't memorize things like songs because we have some instrumentalist/utilitarian goal in mind. We memorize songs because we love those songs. We play them over and over again until it's part of who we are, until without really thinking about it we can pull up a phrase or a line. Scripture is supposed to be like that, that you can just pull up something from Ecclesiastes or the Psalms at the mention of a phrase. It doesn't prove you're holy or anything ... but it is the sort of love for Scripture that I hope any Christian can have. It's not knowing what John 7:1-5 is in terms of verses, it's more like (I hope) that you know where to find it if you need to review it and you remember where it is in the gospel narrative and what Jesus said and did.

An informal yardstick for me is if as soon as someone mentions a biblical text and they use it out of contet you start being cautious that is a negative yardstick for how to tell you've been immersed in Scripture (i.e. noticing when other people are just proof-texting). A more positive use would be, oh, something like singing songs based on that text. Yeah, I betray my being a composer adn a musciian there but God DID command Moses to write a song to help aid in memorization of His deeds, right?

Protestant church membership as a form of sacramentalism

http://www.boarsheadtavern.com/archives/2008/07/16/1862389.html

This link to a post on the BHT explains itself.

But it's fun to cogitate on the statement since Piper is eager to express that church membership is a blood-bought, life-sustaining, faith-strengthening, joy-preserving means of God's mercy to us and urges folks not to cut themselves off from this blessing. As TommyMertonHead put it, bring this up next time a Baptist says church membership doesn't become a form of sacramentalism.

Really? I'm sure it's a serious statement but if membership sustains my life, strengthens my faith, and preserves my joy it must be a special membership because I don't know if I would say that's generally true of church membership as I have experienced it. It tends to be more along the lines of people need to draft a budget and if they know who the official members of an organization are they get people to sign contracts that say they pledge X amount of money to budget for expansion and development. That's a bit more of how church membership comes across to me. There are certain intangible benefits, I guess, but none that in themselves actually require membership. If I were to subscribe to transubstantiation or real presence or something like that then, sure, it would be a very big deal to be a formal member. If communion were closed it would be an even bigger deal but the sorts of churches I have attended would never go that route, either of them.

The case Protestants make for sacraments while claiming to not make a case intrigues me. Marriage and child-bearing become sanctifying sacraments because if the woman is saved through child-bearing then that isn't a soteriological conceit but a description of a sanctifying process. So if marriage and parenthood is not meant to make you happy but to make you holy then does this inhere in the nature of the nature of the state itself? Are husbands and wives and those who become parents made holy or do they simply have the opportunity to be made holy through what they suffer or accomplish, as seems more likely? If similar things can be said for church membership then it would seem that church membership has much to speak for itself ...

Except that I'm not so sure I'm that kind of Protestant at this point. Criteria for assessing whether or not a person is even a Christian can take a long time. Ancient gatherings of believers would sometimes make converts wait up to two years before formally accepting them. It wouldn't be so simple a matter of as not wanting people to know Christ as to ensure that someone was really a believer and not someone bringing down the imperial force on the local church.

I wonder if in some ways it is necessary when one becomes part of a commmunity to be aware of the flaws as well as the strengths of that community. I have family who recently decided they couldn't afford to stay in Montana. There are no jobs for them that amount to much in that region. This was not something that was necessarily researched or worked out before the move to that region. Sometimesz you make a calculated risk taht doesn't turn out to be worth it or the dream job is not what you thought it was. Or the dream location or community has within it the seeds of its own demise. The sporty car with a big engine and speed isn't the car to be buying groceries with, puttering around town.

Mostly I admit to feeling a bit snide about the Piper comment, not out of any disrespect for PIper as such but just out of the bemused observation Michael Spenser shared, that Protestants can sure talk like Catholics sometimes.

This is Thomas Kinkade?

http://www.paintinghere.com/UploadPic/Thomas%20Kinkade/big/NASCAR%20THUNDER.JPG

This sheds a new and curious light on Kinkade's idiom. Suddenly everything retroactively makes sense!

I better not get started.

a review of one of Driscoll's newer books caught my eye

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/outofur/archives/2008/07/new_christians.html

...

I found one book insignificant and the other inflated.


Let’s start with the insignificant. I admire Mark Driscoll for doing significant stuff. He’s planted a thriving church in a place where it’s tough to do ministry and helps lead one of the more successful church planting networks around (Acts 29). I cracked open Vintage Jesus anticipating something important. Based on the title, I expected Driscoll to pop the cork on an enduring theology that over time increases in flavor and potency. But the book was more flat Coke than fine wine.


I did not find Driscoll’s book very interesting. About a third of the way through the book, my mind traveled back a decade to my first week of seminary. As a preaching newbie in need of guidance, I checked out an old, small book on preaching that started by saying something like, “If your sermons are not interesting, you’re missing something because God is infinitely interesting.” The notion that conversations about God should be interesting resurfaced as I read Vintage Jesus and caught myself muttering, “Yeah, yeah, yeah… so what?”


I did not expect some new theology from Driscoll, since that is certainly the opposite of his well known position. But I did expect him to show that God was interesting and revolutionary. I think guys like Erwin McManus and John Burke tend to deliver better on what I expected from Vintage Jesus: how ageless truth is renewed within each generation.

Driscoll wrote boldly when it came to things that don’t really matter, such as his choice of over-the-top colorful language in retelling some biblical narratives. But he held back on the truly important matters, such as how radically life-altering is our faith. Except for a few confessional moments that really stood out, he played it safe in Vintage Jesus. Maybe he didn’t want to be mistaken for one of those emergent kooks who deny the basics of faith he finds important: beliefs such as hell and substitutionary atonement. Whatever the reason Driscoll chose to play small in this book, I was disappointed. I think he could have done better.



....



This would fit the impression I had about the sermon series from a few years ago, good but not ground-breaking, certainly not ground-breaking in terms of tilling the soil and pulling up things that need to be brought into the light, to labor a metaphor. While the Christ on the Cross sermon series included some highly doubtful theology that pitted the Father and Son's wills against each other in a propitiation sermon there was also an example of Driscoll at his best, when he integrated christus exemplar into a broader context of atonement theories. So in a way Vintage Jesus as a sermon series was a watered down version of the Christ on the Cross series. It was in some sense the weaker for that. Despite some not entirely implausible complaining in blog-land I thought that was one of his finest sermon sets. When he went out on a limb to talk about an atonement theory beloved historically more by theological liberals in the United States but anchoring it in the cross and with other atonement explanations besides the rather staid but crucial penal substitionary model he was looking like he would be going in an important direction. There are not that many pastors who not only take time to explain all the different theories of atonement there are also not that many who share with a congregation that they are ALL important. An unbalanced presentation on propitiation is not cool ... but I don't expect any theologian to adequately or fairly represent every aspect of the atonement. I had gotten used to the idea that the majority of pastors would tend to emphasize one aspect of the atonement and sacrifice the others as not only not useful but even to treat them as not within the pale of orthodoxy. It was a possibly rare case in which a pastor went out of his way to see the biblical foundation in a set of atonement explanations that are often not even discussed in evangelicalism, or even known about! It was, overall, an only occasionally flawed and generally important thing for a Protestant pastor at a huge church to be tackling. I was there for almost the whole thing and it was one of the most beneficial sets of sermons I think I've ever had a chance to hear. The christus exemplar sermon, particularly, was good and I was optimistic when he said he might go through Luke.

Or not. He revisited 1 Corinthians because he felt he blundered his way through the first time. TO be fair he did fine in the first 1 Corinthians sermon series even though no one will be able to find it in the Mars Hill media library. That's sort of too bad because it was only his sermons on spiritual gifts from years ago that were actually terrible. He had a more cessationist position back then that he has since abandoned with gusto. Fine by me. But the earlier series wasn't as terrible as all that. It was understandable to want to revisit 1 Corinthians because it is an amazing epistle.

Still, I have to admit to having been disappointed. I was really hoping that when he name dropped Luke we might hear him go through Luke. If his christus exemplar sermon was any indication that was where the iron was white hot and it seemed like he could have struck the iron really hard. It could have been amazing. Oh well ... maybe he'll feel up to tackling Luke later. Meanwhile, a guy can wait. If he's nervous about not doing justice to the text a person could only suggest that being motivated by fear (not like I'm one to talk, really) isn't helpful. Sometimes making a hash of a book isn't as bad as not tackling the biblical book and seeing where God leads you. Besides, it seems we're on a recycling binge from the stuff I'm hearing and I thought Driscoll wouldn't recycle. That might be why the spark is something the reviewer missed. There's nothing new under the sun but some things feel newer than others. We never get tired of drinking water because without water we'd die but sometimes we need an advocate to remind us that drinking water is better than drinking soda or beer or wine not because those things are bad but because it all comes down to water in the end.

There is a sense in which, at his best, Driscoll is simply not an innovator but someone who can consilidate and translate more important works for laymen. People who aren't aware of how deep and rich Christian intellectual traditions are and, frankly, aren't all that bright, may get the impression that Dricoll is a theological heavyweight. He gets the heavyweights but is not himself a heavyweight. He's not a Piper, and he's certainly not an N. T. Wright or John Stott or Bonhoeffer. But he can translate the insights of these sturdier theologians into terms that make them more accessible to people who would never dream of picking up those authors and reading them. Whether or not he's read any C. S. Lewis by now I can't even guess at but I know that years ago he once confessed to having never finished a Lewis book and finding the author boring. Since Lewis as both a theologian and a communicator is more up Driscoll's ally than some of the theologians he's plugged for I think that EVENTUALLY it would be good if he read some Lewis.

In saying that Driscoll translates the works of better theologians for laity I'm not putting him down. I think he knows where he is in the theological hierarchy and I think he endeavors to encourage people to move beyond his pop books to sturdier stuff. I think it's unfair to dismiss him as an intellectual lightweight because he can read and clearly understand very difficult stuff. I also don't think he should be overpraised for being able to read the heavy stuff, either.



If Driscoll has played small it may be because while he gets all the key points about how to translate the Gospel he doesn't always bring it home in application. Sometimes I wonder if this is because he sees the way application of the Gospel becomes politicized and attempts to avoid that. That's a valid concern, but avoiding the culture warrior mentality can have the side effect of not going out on the limb Jesus would have us go walking on.



The review is an interesting read because the reviewer would have preferred Driscoll said something significant, something important. Vintage Jesus was co-written with Breshears, which is different from Driscoll's two earlier entries Radical Reformission and Confessions of a Reformission Rev.



Driscoll is an entertainer and to some degree attempting to field serious theological questions is not as easy for him to pull off in print as it would be in person or from the podium. And Driscoll's approach to humor may not always help him. A reader could be forgiven for sometimes wondering if what Driscoll contextualizes is really Jesus and Scripture alone or if he contextualizes himself. As John the Baptist put it, "He must become greater and greater and I must become less and less." It's hard to detect that in Driscoll's writing. It's not as though he intends to be as prominent as Jesus, that's OBVIOUSLY not the intent, but if there's a situation in which the medium and the message should not be conflated it's the Gospel and sometimes Driscoll presents us with a Jesus who is rhetorically refashioned in Driscoll's image or, more to the point, a Jesus whose image is polemically refashioned by Driscoll into what he DOES NOT see Jesus as being. There's a time and place to debunk misconceptions about Jesus but, again, there's virtually nothing Driscoll has done that hasn't been done by sturdier scholars whom Driscoll generally name-drops when appropriate.



Yet it can be easy to be dismissive of writing books regular people can understand just as it can be easy to dismiss the importance of books that are by any standard tough to read. There's a sense in which it might be safe to say that Driscoll writes books for baby Christians or Christians who have room to grow in their walk with the Lord in terms of grappling with the meaning of biblical texts. Once you get to a point where you know why the "seed of Chucky" dismissal of the ancient interpretation of Genesis 6 is just that, dismissive, then you begin to realize that Driscoll does have a penchant for passing off his own interpretation of the text as though it were the plain, unalterable meaning of the text. This is less a cause for concern now that he's dropped ideas he had years ago that lack biblical and exegetical warrant, like a somewhat cessationist view about the spiritual gifts, but that doesn't mean that a sometimes reductive approach to the text isn't still a risk for him.



There is an interesting paradox at work in Driscoll's interpretation of Song of Songs. He has said that all of Scripture can point to Christ yet he explicitly rejects interpreting Song of Songs as an allegory of Christ's love for the church even though Christians for millenia have taken this approach. I don't think the allegory can work without acknowledging the symbolic framework from which the allegory would be said to exist; but it also seems as though when Paul says that he speaks of Christ and the Church that it wouldn't be difficult for him to appropriate Song of Songs by way of allusion since God describes Himself as a husband to Israel in more passages than I could possibly rattle off from memory. Yet Driscoll has sternly rejected the idea of Song of Songs as an allegory about God's love ... while also affirming that all of Scripture, read properly, will be seen to point to Christ.



This introduces a paradox that perhaps Driscoll will be able to address soon, since I'm hearing he will be revisiting Song of Songs. If all of Scripture points to Christ yet Song of Songs isn't even possibly an allegory about Christ's love for the Church then how exactly does Song of Songs point to Christ? Has Driscoll set up an exception to his own measure of what Scripture will always point to? If Song of Songs isn't even POSSIBLY an allegory about Christ's love for the Church then is it "only" a book about sexual love? If so, why did it get canonized?

I imagine someone else might have this question, too, and suppose it will get addressed at some point. If not, well, it's not like I care so much that I feel obliged to ask in a setting where Driscoll would ever read the question. I suspect it would not particularly interest him, or perhaps it might and it is in the Lord's hands to see whether or not the question reaches him. The question is simply this--if Scripture is all about Jesus and points to Christ and you reject an allegorical interpretaion of Song of Songs how can Scripture be pointing to Christ if the groom/bride metaphor is used in Hosea and Ezekiel in Scripture yet can't be allowed to apply to the Song of Songs? Doesn't that potentially reduce a book of the Bible to being little more than sanctified porn? Given Driscoll's history of reductio ad absurdum I don't think this is a disrespectful way of posing the question since he's been known to take that approach with others and turnabout IS fair play. I honestly do think the question can actually be answered anyway.

It is this sort of paradox that may be partly why some of Driscoll's writing is great and some of it is just all right. I think he's a remarkably gifted speaker who has a lot of great qualities as a pastor but who sometimes could buckle down and be a bit more generous to perspectives he doesn't agree with. If he shoots down Song of Songs as an allegory of Christ's love for the church he can make the case on historical and textual grounds but the trouble in this particular case is that by gunning down that perspective he has to explain why he's gunning down an interpretation of Song of Songs that sees Christ in the book, albeit allegorically. Is this the one paradoxical case in which Driscoll would have to insist for the consistency of his own interpretation of Scripture that Song of Songs is actually NOT primarily about Jesus? If it is about Christ in some way, how?

Wouldn't that paradoxically compell Driscoll to acknowledge that given the use of the groom/bride metaphor elsewhere in Scripture that perhaps Ezekiel and Hosea knew of that through the Solomonic writings and that perhaps that gave their parables more bite? I seriously doubt Driscoll would rely on the tradition which claims that SOng of Songs was appropriated from Egyptian love poetry because he'd prefer not to say a book of the Bible was indebted to a pagan literary tradition, let alone make a serious case that it was merely attributed to Solomon and wasn't written by him.

Not that Song of Songs as a narative about marriage, sex, and romance isn't interesting, just that since I hear Driscoll is revisiting this book I can't help but wonder if there are themes and concepts he wants to revisit because he felt he handled them poorly the first time around. Rethinking his rejection of Song of Songs as an allegory about CHrist and not just about marriage and sex is the only thing I can think of. I mean, it's not as though this year is some kind of homiletic sweeps week and there's any need to revisit his "greatest hits" is there? Scratch that, consider it a rhetorical question.

interesting

http://jesusshaped.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/read-the-fine-print/

...

Claims that Jesus is “gentle” and “lowly in heart” may not apply in all denominations. Some offers remove this clause because of confusion with other offers by liberal, girly-Jesus denominations.
...
“The Church” is not responsible for misinterpretations or misapplications of the above offer. Those seeking to take advantage of the offer are subject to varying traditions, expectations,
conditions, demands, requirements and schedules of participation.

For sake of laziness I am not going to comment on the original statement by Christ that prompted this entry from Michael Spenser, or cite the whole thing. I'm here simply ruminating on two parts of a gentle send-up of ways in which Christian communities don't always exemplify Jesus' words that the world will know we belong to Him by our love for one another.

These two parts of the blog entry are what interest me. The first joke points out that regardless of what Jesus says about Himself some people exempt themselves from following His example in those issues. So one need not be gentle or humble if one feels able to be harsh and proud. The polemic of the girly reconception of Jesus catches my eye for reasons I don't feel any obligation to explain.

The second joke highlights another strange thing, that Christians collectively can seem to feel as though the failure of Christians as a group. Your failures may be your own but the failures of the church may be your own, too. When does a failure of the local church to do and be what Christ commands us to be become the failure of the individual Christian to submit to godly authority? When does a failure of the local church to acknowledge its own failure cross the line from denial of fallibility to denial of sin? Does this invalidate its standing as the people of God?

Sometimes it seems that one of our biggest failings as His people is that despite the real sharp end of the parable of the good Samaritan we keep wanting to ask Jesus again and again, "And who is my neighbor?" The best way we try to declaw or defang the parable is by pretending to ourselves and each other that the point is that our neighbor is whomever is in need or oppressed. But the parable is Jesus' way of asking the lawyer, "Which of this three men was a neighbor to the man who was robbed?" If we miss Luke's cue earlier, "But he, wanting to justify himself ... ." then we miss the whole point of the parable. The man who was robbed is not the one who needs to be acknowledged as the neighbor in this parable. The man who needs to be acknowledged is the one whom the lawyer would not name.

But by spiritualizing it to be about the robbed man we avoid being confronted by Jesus' words, telling us that our neighbor is precisely who we refuse to recognize as a neighbor. The lawyer had to recognize that his neighbor was the person whose theology was wrong, who worshipped in the wrong place, who was in rebellion against God by not worshipping on the right terms or properly acknowledging spiritual authority by submitting to the right precepts. Of course when Jesus spoke to a Samaritan woman he said to her that the Samaritans worshipped one whom they do not know. And yet Jesus was crucified by those people. Ah ... the ironies just keep piling up so I won't belabor them.

be care ye who would be "slain in the spirit" no one may catch you

http://www.wate.com/global/story.asp?s=8651392

Now my background in my teens is thoroughly Pentecostal but I never really liked the "slain in the Spirit" stuff. God can work with you in ways that don't involve people shoving you down or suggesting that you hit the floor while claiming it's all the work of the Lord. Not that God is unable to act but that the supposition that God must act in a particular way in a particular context and that any resistence to this is somehow quenching the Spirit is what I find bothersome. The Spirit is able to do things His own way and people who go in with the wrong expectations literally hurt themselves and each other. In this case the scenario seems rather simple,dude, someone should have caught the old man already. Assuming that in the midst of a religious fervor the poor guy is somehow supposed to retain enough rationality to fall only in such a way that some designated catcher can catch him is telling the guy to "quench the Spirit" long enough to be "slain in the Spirit". Or it at least seems like a risk and now it appears to be a potentially legally actionable offense.

appropos of nothing

I hate the Doors. Really.

AHA! The tanker bid is reopened and then there's super blimp

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/370128_boeingblimp10.html
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/370114_tanker10.html

ah ... cranky

I thought about blogging about it but I won't. I would end up writing stuff that would be pretty harsh. But there are things I have blogged about eliptically that I am tempted to write about in a more direct and forceful way. I am in a situation where I am demanded to provide a certain amount of loyalty where neither of two sides has given me a whole lot of reason to demand such loyalty. It is the will of one demagogue against another in some ways, which is tough because I don't exactly dislike either demagogue.. That's a bit more than I planned to blog about on the 4th of July.

You know you're part of the mainstream if The Door makes fun of you ... so Driscoll has arrived

http://www.wittenburgdoor.com/blogs/bloom/2008-05-30
http://www.wittenburgdoor.com/news-doorkeeper-02-19-2008
http://www.wittenburgdoor.com/driscoll-kicks-own-ass



It's pretty funny, but then I would expect funny from The Door. Turnaround is fair play, after all. :) Masculinity has been a big theme for Driscoll over the years, so big that The Door understandably is sending him up for it now. This is a good sign. Last time The Door covered anything to do with Driscoll they wouldn't even make fun of him and suggested people pray for the church. If The Wittenburg Door won't make fun of you and asks people to pray that might be a red flag, because they'll make fun of just about everyone.

Other local news has not been so pleasant so reading something funny makes the day ever so slightly better.

"Now even our most critically acclaimed films are cartoons ... "

http://www.slate.com/id/2194532/pagenum/2


I certainly accept the fact that America's overall cultural tastes have degraded. Serious films for adults, such as The Best Years of Our Lives, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Graduate, and The Godfather, were all No. 1 box office hits for their respective years. So was Saving Private Ryan as recently as 1998. Seems an eternity ago. Now even our most critically acclaimed films are cartoons: Persepolis, Ratatouille, and The Simpsons Movie.



As though that were a measure of the degradation of cultural taste. The most critically acclaimed cartoons in the last ten years have included movies like Princess Mononoke, The Iron Giant, South Park, the aforementioned Persepolis, Ratatouille, The Simpsons Movie, The Incredibles, and the like.



Using the cartoon as a measure for what is wrong in the arts is one of the biggest ironies in the nature of the medium. Every frame literally is a work of art and there's no sense in which the moving picture is more a set of moving pictures than in a cartoon. I don't think Erik Lundegaard is necessarily going to pine for the days when cartoons were like, say, Heavy Metal, is he?



The old canard that live action is somehow more venerable and serious than animated film in the same way that books are more serious than comic books probably isn't going to die. If you look at the range of story-telling that is happening in international animation over the last twenty years the problem isn't that cartoons are somehow bad. If anything they have reached a level of nuance and sophistication the venerated films of the past were said to get to, while live-action films have become more cartoony and not necessarily because of cartoons.



We live in a highly polarized time and it's one of the ironies of our culture that cartoons seem better able to split the differences and punch holes in expectations than live-action where an art house film is going to be exactly what I expect it to be, the tent-pole film is going to be more or less exactly what I expect it to be. And yet because we have expected so little from them as a culture and have the biases of our assumptions about them being a medium for kids, cartoons, for all the complaints critics sometimes dish out in principle, the reviews and box offices suggest that the best cartoons out there are doing what the other films aren't, surprising us and entertaining us. Is there a film-maker out there that would dare to have the first hour of the film have virtually no dialogue like Andrew Stanton did with WALL-E? Sure, but Angel's Egg didn't exactly get huge distribution, did it? If you're wondering what Angel's Egg is that's my point. Not everyone can make an animated fantasy film in which Noah's ark gets flipped over and have it get distributed anywhere. Not all live action movies can successfully make those risks either.

http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=11581447


Intriguingly, the more educated Americans become, the more insular they are. (Hence Mr Miller's confusion.) Better-educated people tend to be richer, so they have more choice about where they live. And they are more mobile. One study that covered most of the 1980s and 1990s found that 45% of young Americans with a college degree moved state within five years of graduating, whereas only 19% of those with only a high-school education did.


There is a danger in this. Studies suggest that when a group is ideologically homogeneous, its members tend to grow more extreme. Even clever, fair-minded people are not immune. Cass Sunstein and David Schkade, two academics, found that Republican-appointed judges vote more conservatively when sitting on a panel with other Republicans than when sitting with Democrats. Democratic judges become more liberal when on the bench with fellow Democrats.
...
And the home-schooling movement, which has grown rapidly in recent decades, shields more than 1m American children from almost any ideas their parents dislike. Melynda Wortendyke, a devout Christian who teaches all six of her children at her home in Virginia, says she took her eldest out of public kindergarten because she thought the standards there were low, but also because the kids were exposed to a book about lesbian mothers.

http://jesusshaped.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/jesus-says-cross-the-line/#more-71

The Galilee of Jesus’ day was a multicultural place. To function in his world, Jesus was constantly confronted with the need to deal with other cultures, other languages, other customs and comfort zones. Into this world, the Pharisees, zealots and Essenes had put forward their own options for dealing with those who were different. Those options ranged from asserting a new encyclopedia of rules, declaring “clean and unclean” zones/persons, withdrawing into subculture ghettos of their own and declaring those who were different worthy of violent response.
As a result, some of the most controversial and incarnationally revealing things Jesus did were simply actions of eating with sinners, touching lepers, speaking to women, walking through communities and taking a public stand against the religious ghetto-think of his time.





Okay, i can't resist, are Pharisees the people of their time who would have condoned the equivalent of home-schooling? Nah, too easy and too inaccurate, but there IS a danger that because of culture war mentalities on any side of any major issue that people will entrench themselves. A liberal I once worked with said that the reason liberals get blind-sided is they operate under the assumption that THE WHOLE HUMAN RACE SHOULD THINK EXACTLY LIKE THEY DO. He wasn't joking, he wasn't being sarcastic, he said that that's exactly the case and that everyone SHOULD be a political liberal. Conservatives realize that not everyone is a conservative and that they have to work at winning people to their side and informing people, so that's what they do. Well, that's kinda true. Truth tends to become whatever confirms both in their already established views.



But there's a flip side, less educated people aren't really LESS insular, they just lack the academic credentials through which to ESPOUSE insularity. Anyone can simply assume insularity is the way to go, just like anyone can assume that Republicans or Democrats are the directly reportings minions of the Evil One.



In more or less this manner I've seen people circle the wagons about masculinity in a certain place and a certain satire magazine has made sport of this. I've seen guys my age go that route and then come out the other side being mellower ... and even somehow acquiring girlfriends in the process. One even got married, through a miracle of God, and is slowly mellowing out.



The gap between rhetoric aimed to create a certain effect (or affect) and the real world can get (and stay) big. It has been interesting for me to consider what men aspiring to be "real men" may think if they ask actual women what they think about some things. A very good friend of mine once shared with me that she discovered that sometimes a guy would approach her and lay out his whole ten year plan. Perhaps it was naivete and optimism but it was in some sense a ground plan for marriage set up pretty much at the start of what was merely a relationship of casual acquaintence, not necessarily an actual friendship. What I would admit I have done by way of simply being afraid and emotionally closed off (i.e. not dating) other guys may attempt to circumvent by going old school and attempting to invoke some kind of courtship/calling method of getting a wife.


When a group is ideologically homogenous ... indeed. It's the sort of setting in which a friend of mine could be approached by a guy in all seriousness about what he planned to do years away as though that in itself constituted a serious proposal. There are times when, to be very, very blunt, I think I'd be wasting my time even attempting to put myself on the market not just because I don't think I'm the greatest catch but also because I'm in a setting where (thanks to the frenetic efforts of some friends and associates, actually) an environment got set up where the idea that Christians dated was framed as though it were a sin, a priori. The definition of date was front-loaded with so much historical and cultural anathema that it became a marvel that so many people were "courting" when it seemed pretty damned obvious they were dating.

I had at least one relative who said he pitied singles in this context, that the sexual desperation was so thick you'd have to pull out two chainsaws to cut through it. I confess I never really noticed it much in its mass effect. I just noticed it in individual cases. Years ago I met a fellow who introduced me to a woman he was discipling. I looked at her for half a second and thought to myself, "Yeah, right. SUUURE you're discipling her." This woman was clearly not a moron and the "discipling" relationship must have ended soon, as did any interest in her part on being part of that particular community of Christians. I hope she found a place better suited to her. It's not as though the town has no other places sharing the Gospel even if people at a certain place pretend to themselves that's the case. And, really, it's only those who do a good chunk of investing.

In a time when I feel as though more and more is required where less and less seems able to be done there is a case to be made for a Christian who is disengaged from the life and turmoil of the church he or she attends. There is such a thing as coveting things within a Christian community and spiritualizing more or less worldly impulses. If you don't seek to be a leader or a prominent member of the community, and if you don't seek to leverage that status in any way to get what you want, to trump anyone else's position, or to outright bully them into submission by pulling rank and demanding respect ... then, well, you also won't get burned if people do to you what you have done to others. And, at the same time, you have nothing anyone would covet by way of this or that prominent role in the community. In other words, no one covets the stuff of the followers in the organization, by and large. It's the leaders that are self-appointed or appointed by others that become targets.

That is why in the midst of a politically charged situation where I have no desire to move up in the organization, and have virtually no desire to wield power or influence other than what the Lord in His providence may provide (and, really, I don't even need THAT, since it is whatever the Lord sees fit to accomplish), that is why I find I can continue to participate in a setting where other people think I shouldn't even stay. The reason they say this may be because they have had places that were prominent and that very place of prominence became a snare for them when they attempted to leverage it to get what they want. It's not that what they wanted was necessarily a bad thing, it might have been perfectly good. But it was the willingness to USE THEIR STATUS as a weapon that became a problem. Scripture might call this a fruit of the boastful pride of life. Christians have over the years described this as craving the acclaim, admiration, praise, and respect of other men. It is in short nothing less than believing your own hype and the hype of others and needing to have the hype machine working in your favor all the time.

One way this can manifest for demagogues and dictators (for instance) is ideological homogeneity. But it is fair to point out that what we might call ideological homogeneity can and is very healthy in certain settings. "Mom loves me" is an assumption that is generally true and something every child could probably say of his or her mom. "Mom or Dad is usually right and they have my best interests" is generally reliable, too. But the relationship itself becomes the basis for agreement, not the rank. No sooner has Mom or Dad said, "Obey me because I'm your parent" and defenses go up. "You should respect my opinion because I'm the older person with more vested authority." Same deal. And it's no small step from there to "You should obey me because I'm your pastor." The nature of the relationship is basically the same, a given or assumed role of power is used as leverage to socially impel a person to conformity with a decision and ideological uniformity can be the means through which enforcement of a decision can happen. And this can be good ... just as it can also be terrible.

This is why, I hope, Scripture is above Christians, that Christians should not simply appropriate Scripture for this or that purpose. Theoretically Protestants do this but it often doesn't work. Theoretically all believers submit to Christ and the Church but in practice ... well, it often looks different.

And it's tough because I can spiritualize my sins. Fear becomes caution, coveting becomes ambition, disregard becomes concern for the truth, condemnation becomes discernment, obsession with doctrine becomes contending for the faith. And at length contending for my desires, my agendas, and grasping for the things that I covet becomes saying and doing the right thing on principle. My capacity for self-deception is not small.

What is interesting about Paul's discussion of the Body of Christ is how manifold and multifaceted it is and how in practice we often wish the Body was simplly one big eye or one giant ear. It is so tempting to want the body of Christ to be unified where it is diverse, and to be single where it is variegated. We don't want to imagine that God in His wisdom would let the kingdom of God's people be divided over petty and stupid arguments. But He let it happen in the old covenant, so it is no surprise if He lets it happen in the new.

What each side failed to realize is that the unity of the kingdom was not the thing that would solve their problem of their idolatry and turning from the Lord. They were united within but in each united community of Judah and Samaria the problem was the same. They were finally only united in Exile, I guess.

What has been will be again, perhaps not in quite the same form but there is nothing new under the sun.