snowed in blogging

As any of you may notice, because there's a lot of snow in Seattle, we're all vaguely snowed in here, some of his very much snowed in. Not me personally, mind you, but I have friends and family who are. I listened to a sermon on the iPod today since I knew I wasn't going to bother to head out to an actual church service on public transit in this kind of weather.

I am considering the issue of "being fed" or what self-feeding looks like in a personal context. Earlier you may have noticed I wrote about how I have been dramatically reassessing my understanding and attitude toward the psalms. I was reading a bit of Athanasius on the topic, actually, and it struck me how much self-feeding I'm likely to have to do on the psalms. The church I have been part of has never once gone through psalms from the pulpit, which is pretty astonishing the more I think about it. I hope this may be rectified soon but I am not sure if I am sticking around for that or not.

Now when I wrote earlier about self-feeding and the pastoral buffet of teaching I was not consciously mulling over what I am consciously mulling over now, what may genuinely be grace to one man may be nothing but a damning law to the other. At this point a pastor must consider what may be a law of averages. You can preach for the 90% of the congregation who you believe needs to shape up and repent of X sin but doing so means that the 10% who are left who have a different or opposite struggle hear the rebuke for the others and either sense that it is not for them or feel worse about where they are already at for not being the other 90%

There are few issues in evangelicalism where this gets more prominent than not being married. I know of a church that dealt, dare I say, obsessively with the topic of marriage and dating for a few years and it tended to be from a set of assumptions that 1) everyone ought to get married at some point because 90% of people will marry 2) we're focusing on getting all those singles into that 90% 3) the net effect was to tell singles that their goal was to get out of their single status but paradoxically singles might be enjoined to serve more and thereby find people whom could get them out of the singleness phase of life.

Now if I find myself in a situation where the things I most struggle with, things like fear that my life is stagnating at a respectable but nevertheless dead end job in an economy where my skills don't seem all that marketable and I most certainly could not support a family on the income I have but I believe that for a wide variety of providential and rational reasons that I have the job God wants me to have where I am at ... of what use is teaching about marriage and dating to me in a setting where for years dating was considered bad? I have had well-intentioned friends say I'm not ready to be married. Yes, I knew that quite a long time before they did, thanks.

On the other hand, I am probably not that cut out to be a monk. I do not have a confessional tradition where being a monk really interests me. There are no evangelical monks, are there? Where are they? Evangelicals are busy telling people that 90% of people will marry. That 10 percent that won't marry or maybe aren't marriage material? Who cares about them? They don't matter that much, they're just the ones with lots of free time to serve ... in some formal capacity.

And that IS a distinct advantage, isn't it? But if the chef provides food for all but the lactose intolerant what are those lactose intolerant people going to do when they see tons of cheese being ladeled on to the plates? This is where the paradox of self-feeding returns. A person who feeds themselves what they know through experience they can handle suddenly risks being the jerk who doesn't go along with what the chef is spooning out for the others. The most respectful thing would be to not show up for the meal if you know no concession is being made for what you can and can't digest, but then people want to know why you're not showing up for the weekly meals. Well, uh, you can't exactly spin that and you can't say what's what without the risk of steeping on people's toes when that's the last thing you want to do.

And so it has been from that perspective that I have not attended a certain place for a few months. I am also at a stage in my life where to hear months of preaching on that topic would not be a benefit to me where I am at. I already feel a sense of anxiety that I am neither cut out to be married nor to remain single the rest of my life and rather than this motivating me to somehow "prepare" for married life ... as if anything on earth really does that ... it has put me in a place where I feel that since teaching on married life seems academic and useless to me and since I in my single state frankly don't need to know now the stuff that was apt to be discussed for the sake of my own conscience I skipped out. Not that I have no struggles with lust or anything, far from it, but knowing how things went last time these topics were broached by preacher X I know better than to put myself in a position where stuff that is meant for the 90% is stuff I actually need to hear again. I've heard from plenty of preachers that that special book is in the Bible and it would be wrong not to preach from it. I'm at a point in my life where me hearing preaching from that book ... eh, not so sure I need to. So if it is a blessing to others, awesome. I just skipped it.

So if that is what food is being put on the table and I don't feel that I can in good conscience partake of that food should I be at the table? Should I not be at a church because I'm either not being fed or the food on offer is food that I feel I shouldn't eat? Is being part of God's people about ME being fed to begin with? If by fed a person means understanding the Gospel in new and life changing ways I'm not sure I've been fed since about 2005, to be honest, and I don't like to frame things in terms of it being just a pastor's fault that I don't feel I have come to a great appreciable understanding of the Gospel of Jesus in three years' time. I've got a lot of problems, a lot of problems, in comprehending what the grace of God is. If I am in a church where it seems like other people get it and I don't does that mean it's all my fault? Somehow I don't get that sense either because no one is righteous except Christ when the chips are down.

So I have taken a break from a place and from any regular church attendance. I used to hold firmly that membership in a church was vital and necessary to one's Christian walk but over the last few years I have had my confidence in that shaken. I like the idea in principle more than in practice. Spenser's axiom that the more real you are the less likely you are to feel welcome "may" apply or it may be that what is genuinely grace for person X may come off as law for me. My best guess as to why this is is that there are things that I feel I ought to be and do and since I see myself as unfit to be and do those things I judge myself as wanting in the scales that other people seem to be obtaining.

Or, to be more blunt, if 90% of people marry and I am not only not married but have never even bothered to "he who finds a wife finds what is good and obtains favor from the Lord" (in other words actually date, which would have been weird because the church I've been part of has a colored history of being pro marriage and anti dating) what's my problem? Is it a problem that can be remedied or is it unfixable? If I don't think I'm selfless enough to be a husband or father or don't make enough money should I try to fix that or simply resign to that and then feel as though a lot of the preaching at the place I have been is simply not for me, never has been for me, and never will be for me? Or is it possible that people marry for reasons that are not that rational and I've been potentially sold a bill of good about how ready people actually are when they marry? I have had people tell me that people should marry because it is better to marry than to burn and what's my excuse for not marrying? Does pleading total lack of qualification to be married count? Nope. I have constantly felt like I'm in some weird double bind where if I don't feel like marriage material that's agreed to but that eventually I 'should' marry. And I have gotten some very clear indications from family and friends that married llife, particularly parenting, can be the measure of adult fulfillment. It's not on purpose .... but it can be unintentionally discouraging.

I don't know what I want, really. I'm told by a church culture and by some zealous friends what they think OUGHT to be the case. I am in a setting where I know what the "law" says, whether the law of averages or the law of Scripture or the law of expectations and I am starting to realize that what other people think is not very important. I am not good at ignoring the opinions of people I respect or care about. For a lot of my early years I was told I needed to know what I wanted and have a plan for my life. I did that for a while and it never panned out. Now I don't think it does anyone any good to have a plan for their lives because God thwarts our plans. We can commit our plans to the Lord and He can destroy them or uphold them as He sees fit.

I'll be honest, when I was in my late teens and early twenties where I wanted to be at this point in my life was to have a teaching position in literature or biblical studies at a college, be married, and have a kid or two and maybe have some time left over to write music once in a while or publish something in some form. I'm not a professor of anything, most certainly am not married, no kids (thank God, as I wouldn't want them except after the earlier conditionof being married had been met) and I haven't had anything published in the traditional sense of that term.

Instead I have a blog here on the internet that I know at least some people read. I started off this blog intending to write about music and cartoons and eventually deal with some theology and it seems to have inexorably shifted toward theology, but theology of an admittedly vague sort. I am most definitely single and have no, so far as I understand the term to have currency in this society, been on a date. I'm of two minds on whether I ought to or even want to go on a date. I am a boring fellow as my blog can probably attest, I tend to be obsessive about the topics that interest me, topics that I'm not sure very many people care about. Even within one of my fields of interest, classical guitar, my interest is often met with a sort of indifference or bewilderment. I am a very introverted person. Get me in a room with more than about ten people, especially people I don't really know, and I am apt to have an inversely proportional dynamic at work, the more people you put with me in a room that I don't know as family or friends the less likely I am to want to say things.

And the part where I feel like I must have a bad attitude on the subject of dating, marriage, and women, is that I often wonder who would be worth the trouble. Really, who would be worth the trouble? This is not tos ay I don't love women. There are women I love a great deal, as friends. The idea of there being any other element sorta repels me and not exactly because I plan it that way, either the feeling of anxiety about romantic attachment or, God knows, the slightest hint of romantic attachment itself.

So I can say that I'm not against the idea of having a girlfriend but am not sure it is worth the time, trouble, and effort to have one. But Ecclesiastes mentions that there is a man with no companion and no children and he works and works and he never stops to ask himself, "For whom am I doing all this work?" We can't spiritualize the topic to the point of saying "well, you work for God." We can, of course, but that's not what Koholeth talks about. You can't huddle up with Jesus to keep warm on a cold night. Make no mistake, it's pretty damned cold here in the Emerald City right now. Telling me I should be complete in Jesus and be warm ... thanks, I have my electric bill paid up and have baseboard heating. So I don't have anyone to help me keep warmbut I'm covered.

I have heard some Christians say over the years that is is important to have a legacy. This legacy has been most often framed in terms of kids. Kids are idols sometimes. The first born of Egypt were slain. Now at one level this indicated that children could be idols but at another level it's not what the point is. God destroyed the legacy of the Egyptians in one night but killing the firstborn in all the land. Our legacy is Christ, not the legacy that we spend our lives working to establish.

I could spend my whole life composing music and I could get published and perhaps in a century my music will actually be played or still be in print and perhaps I might end up getting mention in a footnote in a music history book. But that is not likely. My music is not that awesome and people who work on music primarily for their legacy or to prove things never amount to anything, not unless they happen to have already amounted to something and recognize that legacy is what you give to others for their benefit, not yours. Bach's music legacy is a gift to us and I believe that he recognized he rocked the house and also that it was his gift to future generations of an already musical family to continue serving by creating music. But as Koholeth put it, it is good to enjoy your work that God gives you to do. This isn't a caseof "do what you love and the money will follow" it's "love what you have been given to do because if you don't you probably can't bargain with God for a better deal."

And this is where the food for the 90% that is hard to digest for the 10% comes back. I have some idea what God wants me to do on the basis of the work that He has given me joy in doing. This is not stuff that makes any sense to people where I am at, and perhaps it is more accurate to say that the sort of music I feel God has given me time and inspiration to work on is useless to any church. I am too insecure a performer to want to put my music out in front of people myself. I prefer to give my music to other people to play. I tried a rock band thing for a while and musicians said positive things about the music and audiences, such few as I had, didn't resonate with it. I have often wondered if there is a basic problem in what I write, if it lacks emotional depth or connectivity with people.

but while I feel closer to the Lord when I compose, feel as though I am doing something He has given me to do when I compose, I do not sense that what I do as a musician or composer is something God's people will have any use for. I've tried a handful of things and nothing much came of it. A professional musician once told me that my music would be a challenge to market. She said that it's good music, accessible music, but that it is too complex and unusual to appeal to the usual church music crowd but it's not nearly strange enough to appeal to the academic musician crowd, not unusual enough. In other words I'm not John Rutter but I'm not Lutoslawski or Charles Ives.

I am not sure where God wants me to be other than where I am at and I'm chafing a bit at where I'm at. I feel as though if I were to ask people where my life is going they'd say "nowhere". That's where I feel I'm at now. In earlier ages there was a popular understanding that how providence played out could sometimes means that things suck and you can be grateful you're not worse off. We live in an age now where even among Christians providence tends to only be invoked as a way of pointing out all the cool stuff God gave you that you SAY you don't deserve but secretly think you do deserve because, hey, God in His omniscience gave it to you so that means you must have been doing something right. And if you claim, "No, that's not the reason" y0u're probably lying because the first great liar was immensely blessed by God and moved from "I deserved this" to "I deserve more". If you think you deserve something you can't have real gratitude for it.

I don't deserve to be able to compose the music I write. My eyes are poor and my hands were injured working some menial jobs ten years ago. I don't deserve to be able to write or play music at all or to read. In earlier age, even if I had been born ten years earlier, I'd have died at childbirth or shorty there after. I don't really "deserve" to be alive at all. And I don't take that in the weird health-and-wealth speak to mean that "You were a winner before you were even born. Your sperm hit the egg first out of millions of sperm." Uh, great, Mr. preacher, that really proves a lot. Unlike you, who are married, I have never once sat down and thought about which one among millions of sperm of any guy's semen would be most likely to reach the egg in a woman's uterus first and thereby somehow prove that the resultant baby was a winner before birth. It just doesn't follow logically anyway.

A friend and I were chatting a while back and when I explained that I like the idea of marriage in theory and as an institution but am not sure it would justify all the junk attendent to it he joked (or half-joked) that I would make a great monk. Perhaps I would, but evangelical Protestantism does not seem to have any monastic orders. If you're a fellow like me who specializes in researching obscure contemporary classical guitar repertoire and enjoys South Park then I would probably make, I don't know, probably make for a truly terrible monk. What I know does not have much practical value and what I don't know could fill enough books that would require the deforestation of Brazil.

Boar's Head Tavern discussion of Piper's seven theses

You will have to go read a few pages of the Boar's Head Tavern for this entry to make any sense. Piper wrote a few theses about what he considered central to his preaching and key to understanding the message of the Gospel. Unsurprisingly he rearticulated points from Desiring God and the Christian hedonist regimen. God is in it for His own glory and as He is the most perfect and holy being self gratification is nothing less than the best He can be and do and pursue.

Don't even bother reading what I'm saying here unless you trawl through the BHT's last week of stuff and I recognize that may bore you immensely. But it's important to get this caveat up front and center.

I am the lurker who wrote to John H and pointed out that the problem with Piper's theses is that you can hold to all of them and have Arian theology. I'm totally serious. I don't say it to suggest Piper has Arian theology at all, but I point out that there's a colloquial saying that to assume makes an ass of you and me. Yes, it does, and there is no more dangerous place in which assumptions can make asses of us than in confessional and creedal contexts where instead of articulating the Gospel as handed down to us over the ages we eschew creedal language and attempt to reinvent the wheel.

Christian hedonism, properly understood, is a concept with a superfluous and potentially even harmful nomenclature. Anyone with an Augustinian understanding of how sanctification works will observe that as none of us can delight in the Lord as perfectly as Scripture may prescribe that anyone with an iota of self examination may find Piper's formulations cheap and depressing even if they get at things that are biblically defensible and true. THe problem is that, as Piper seems to have put it about acolytes of Bishop Wright, the fan club can move in dangerous directions the exponent does not. Ah, well, ditto Piper.

One of the lamest things I have seen said for Christian teachers is "if you just understand his heart you'll see h's totally right about this." Another variation is, "You just don't get where he's coming from and don't understand why he's really correct." Jesus said, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God." So, no, I do not have to suppose that any teacher is so good as to be THAT good and that means that neither Piper nor Wright, both of whom have written thigns I admire, are above some basic observation and criticism. I don't think it's unfair to point out that Piper's seven theses don't seem to mention the Holy Spirit at all and that you can epouse those seven points while not even holding a traditional orthodox trinitarian confession. If I'm a bad guy for pointing this out I'm guilty as charged. Reformed folks freak out about what goes unsaid that they think needs to be said but so long as it's one of their own people cut slack precisely at the points where if the teacher ISN'T one of their own the assume the worst rather than the best.

I have seen discussions in cyber-land where people have shot down contemplative literature as a whole genre and then went on to say "I would read a book on contemplative prayer if John Piper wrote it!" Respecter of persons, dude, the apostle James says to not be that. You may not discriminate against poor brothers in the Lord but if you refuse to read any contemplative Christian authors and topics unless John Piper writes it then you need to grow up. Period. Protestants who get like that have no right to complain about the authoritarian favoritism of certain teachers by Rome or Constantinople if they're going to be the same way.

Since blogger readers seem able to completely misread what I have written about on other topics--Piper's fine overall and I usually don't have problems with him when focuses on Christ, which he does a lot, all the time really. But the thing is that I have grown tired of Piper fans who overlook in Piper what they would consider terrible in other pastors and theologians. For instance, N. T. Wright got grilled by people when Jesus & the Victory of God came out because they thought he didn't affirm the resurrection. So many people misunderstood what he said in that book he realized he had to write a new book in the series he's been working on, The Resurrection of the Son of God. Since that book is awesome we're better off as a community of saints that enough people didn't get Wright that he set the record straight on what he affirms as true about Christ and His rising from death. The freak-out was about what Wright didn't say. I think it was fair to ask but I also think it's fair to point out that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Just because I like Wright doesn't mean I think Resurrection didn't need to be written to set the record straight on where he's coming from.

By analogy, Piper has his Christian hedonism and God is in it for His own glory. If Piper had articulated his points in a more robustly trinitarian way (as in did it at all!) I wouldn't have suggested to John H that there were some serious problems in how Piper formulated his ideas. If people think Piper is off the hook because the context should be assumed ... well, that's why confessional and creedal language is so handy. If Piper had spent some time articulating a traditional orthodox Christian understanding of the GOspel in an ordinary way instead of inventing a new nomenclature that has to be explained in a whole book some of this could have been avoided.

Without clearly articulating the role the Father, Son, and Spirit have together as the one true God Piper's "Christian hedonism" 7 bullet points that attempt to say that the greatest glory is for God to be glorified fails to account for what makes this a truly Christian view if, indeed, it is even remotely Christian at all. But if someone were to point out this and say that it shouldn't be presupposed that the 7 points Piper made are necessarily Christian in their theology I imagine the flames wouldn't come by fast enough.

What prompts to say this is not a doubt about Piper's Christian confession but a frustrated observation that a pastor who has been at it as long as Piper has ought to know better. Paul said, "I resolved to know nothing except Christ and Him crucified." The minimalist statement was not, "I resolved to know nothing except that God is holy and sovereign." The good news isn't really that God is sovereign at all! Frankly the good news is not even an appeal that God is holy. Why? Because Zeus was considered holy and sovereign and he was often a holy and sovereign asshole! We can never take for granted as Christians that when we talk about the one true God who made all that is it somehow goes without saying that we're talking about the Father, Son, and Spirit, that the Son came and lived with us in real, human flesh, died, and rose from the dead. Certainly Piper gets this but there is never a time when this can be so presupposed that in making a list of bullet points we can, say, glide over that.

The good news is that God is loving and gracious! The prince of the power of the air has plenty of sovereignty after a kind but he is neither loving nor gracious. The kings of this world lord it over one another but that is not what the king of kings did. If Piper doesn't articulate his views in trinitarian and incarnational terms all the time he is no less susceptible than anyone else to distorting the Gospel. Even Paul wrote that he had to be careful so that it would not seem as though he had run the race in vain. Guess what? Last I checked Piper isn't quite at the level of the apostle Paul. This is not really written as a rebuke so much as a reminder, not to Piper, but to anyone who reads Piper and bothers to read the blog. The best of us can still potentially go astray. I wrote quite some time ago Joash was a king who began well, it seems, but ended terribly. I don'[t care how good Piper may seem now, there's enough time before death to have run the race in vain. It's not him I'm particularly worried about as the dynamic Michael Spenser pointed out that any attempt to offer a friendly, practical critique of some of Piper's weak points is often met with "how dare you?" This may be the case even in situations where Piper, not to put too fine a point on it, is unknowingly asking for trouble by presupposing what he has an opportunity to preach.

when self feeding becomes a pastors nightmare, people thinking for themselves and not agreeing with you. :)

http://gospeldrivenchurch.blogspot.com/2008/12/yet-more-on-self-feeding-part-two.html

One of the curiosities about self-feeding is that when it is prescribed it seems to come up in cases where you would think that self-feeding might actually be what you DON'T want if you're in church leadership. The paradox, the tension afoot in self-feeding is that if someone is a strong enough of a Christian with a strong enough of a personal walk with the Lord and knowledge of Scripture to feed themselves what do they need you for, the pastor? A pastor may understand his (or her, in some denominations) role to be putting the food and milk of the Gospel out there for people to partake of. That's the thing, if you are being like Peter and tasked with feeding the sheep then if the sheep can feed themselves who needs you? Certainly not God and arguably not the sheep!

If the sheep are smart enough to feed themselves (and I'll leave most of the humor and irony involved in this statement unexplored for now) then a pastor who aspires to have sheep who can feed themselves is aspiring to obsolescence, to not having a job. Think about it, if the role of the pastor is to tell people to feed themselves then the more they decide to feed themselves the less they have need of a pastor to tell them what is food or not. In churches that appeal to a common authority that must be agreed to on catechisjm/confessional grounds, then what is considered food and milk acceptable to eat and drink becomes clear.

For instance, what if a person studies the Scriptures and meditates on the Word and discerns that infant baptism is great and biblical and should be done but the pastoral leadership doesn't see it that way? Does the man who ascribes to infant baptism suddenly stop being a self-feeder and a divisive man who is dead weight to the local church? Pastors who want self-feeders should be careful what they wish for and Orthodox and Catholics might rush to point out that this is where most schisms tend to happen. I'm just cynical enough about church history that I'm not sure it's quite that simple, either, but the joke stands on its own. It is often the case that pastors want the flock to feed themselves just so long as everyone agrees on what food is.

Which is why confessional and creedal language is so valuable. If certain pastors did not feel a need to avoid confessional and creedal language in favor of reinventing the wheel then there would be less room for misunderstanding and for articulating would appear to be ostensibly orthodox Christian talking points in a way that is not as orthodox as first appears if one reads them without presupposing a staggering amount of doctrine.

Which I will get to in a different post.

self feeding and the endless challenge within Protestant evangelicalism

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/internet-monk-radio-podcast-121#comments

... And I would suggest that one's first reaction as an evangelical is to go feed yourself until you find the answer. Now that may including reading the Puritans and reading your church confession or going to seminary but you're, you're taking your plate and putting the food on it. And it seems to me there is this vast missing piece of the puzzle of who is feeding whom because evangelicalism ultimately doesn't WANT to solve the authority problem, doesn't WANT to say "What's the official teaching of the church", but wants to leave a very large component of self feeding as part of the journey.

This is a fascinating quote and a fascinating observation. When we discuss the term "authority" it gets to the basis on which an interpretation of Scripture can be considered to have any weight or credibility. The old saw amongst Catholics and Orthodox is that it does not good to take the approach of sola scriptura because even if you posit an inerrant Bible you do not have inerrant interpretation without some ground rule of authority. Of course this is not to say there is no epistemic challenge in establishing the authority of Orthodox or Catholic interpretation but the challenge there lays simply in the challenge anyone would face affirming faith in what Lewis called "mere Christianity".

I would agree with Spenser's suggestion that self-feeding is axiomatic in evangelicalism. I would go further to suggest that a crisis latent in any sort of Christian life or community is that when you feed yourself and when you fill your plate (which you invariably do even in settings where the question of authority is considered settled) what are you putting on your plate? To borrow the categories proposed by the author of Hebrews there is milk and there is solid food. As has been pointed out by countless people over the ages Jesus told Peter, at the time of his restoration, "feed my sheep." The apostles were tasked with providing spiritual food to those who would come to believe in Jesus.

Paul wrote that teachers should be careful what sort of building they work upon the foundation of Christ. This is where, if I may venture a bit in mixing the metaphors shared in Scripture, we should consider that the apostolic role, and the role of the teacher, is to provide food to the body of Christ. The provision of this food is that which was entrusted the apostles, the bread and wine that are the flesh and blood of Christ.

Now if milk represents elementary teachings it may be that a challenge in any church tradition is to consider the quality of the milk given. Is it possible that in evangelicalism there are different forms of solid food and different forms of milk? Some milk is raw and full while other milk is skim milk or pasteurized. Some would contend that this milk has been so processed that even it is no longer what it would be for the baby Christian. As for solid food, let us suppose it is meat per the colloquialism, some meat is of a very high quality while other meat is ground up into hot dogs and may not even be meat as we would normally wish to call it.

The central question here is do self feeders REALLY self feed? If they do then what sort of solid food or milk do they feed themselves with? If Spenser is right that evangelicals don't want to solve the issue of authority and that self-feeding is the norm perhaps it's helpful to reformulate this observation. Self-feeding means you decide what you put on your plate. Any iteration of church authority of any kind at any level supposes that what you put on your plate should be what the teacher puts there.

And this gets back to the issue or claim of "I'm not being fed." There are many ways this could be parsed. It could mean you want to hear something you haven't heard before. This sort of "I'm not being fed" could be nothing more than a case of itching ears. But other kinds of "I'm not being fed" could be because the milk is so processed or the meat is so processed that one begins to believe that the food one is being presented with is not really the food of the Gospel, not really the bread of Christ's body and the wine of Christ's blood. To labor this analogy of food a bit it may be that evangelicalism has a problem of obsessing over processed food. Grape juice and wonder bread have replaced the real bread and wine.

Now I'm still thoroughly Protestant enough to not be pessimistic about things. I believe that self-feeding happens in every Christian tradition but I also believe that the challenge of authority in evangelicalism and Protestantism does amount to how people determine what food should be options, at the risk of extening the food/feeding metaphor beyond any reasonable bounds.

There's a sense in which pastors who want the congregation to feed themselves have a point. We should all, as believers, study the Scriptures. For evangelicals (or any other branch of Christianity) the challenge of "private interpretation" comes up. A person who studies the Scriptures and concludes that people have free will will suddenly find himself odd man out in a Presbyterian church. A Methodist who holds that unconditional election is biblical will likely be invited to consider fellowship elsewhere. We want you to feed yourself, to be sure, but we want to make sure that what you put on your plate is what we consider food. Twinkies do not count. Nor do tootsie rolls. You should have meat ... but not just hot dogs ... unless the hot dogs were produced by your local pastor and then they are okay! By the way, I'm not necessarily saying hot dogs are never appropriate food. They have their time and place.

But it does seem to raise the spectre of what is considered solid food. Some things that are considered solid food may really be the Gospel while other things may be the bread and wine of legalism or antinomianism. The trouble is perhaps not the self-feeding aspect as who goes where for what food.

There is not a laughing emoticon big enough for this one

http://boarsheadtavern.com/2008/12/12/1242/

First follow this link, THEN follow the link he links to. You will understand, trust me.

random thought of the day

Feeling responsible for things you can't change or control, and which only get worse through your words or actions, can be a sign of being a control freak or having a rescuer complex. In some Christian circles this habit of mind and heart is euphemistically referred to as "headship" and considered a virtue all Christian men should aspire to.

awe-some

http://metalutheran.blogspot.com/2008/12/stages-of-conversion.html

I laughed quite a bit reading it. Phase 5 option 1 pretty much encapsulate the house church movement and the cycle starts over again. If you're lucky the people running the house church movement aren't people who are liable to jump at a bank debenture scam known as Omega the way some people I know did during the Clinton administration. That way some housewife doesn't make off with a bunch of money after saying things like that "Daddy" (God the Father) told you this or that. Or if you're lucky the house church you end up at doesn't have the husband and wife team hosting it at their home divorcing.

I ended up at the church I attended for the better part of thest decade because I thought that as pathetic as denominations and organized churches tend to be the crap piled up higher and faster with less real accountability in the house church movement. People are as facile and two-faced in that tradition, too, precisely because they think they're being real. And they are being real, real sinners. Doesn't mean that there aren't amazing problems everywhere else, just that this five-phase sequence illustrates beautifully how the person in quest of a tradition that defines them gets progressively disillusioned.

Even after i decided I leaned heavily Reformed that Reformed people were so giddy at the prospect of saying Arminians didn't really embrace the Gospel got on my nerves. I was led to believe that the popes were the ones who said other people weren't part of the true faith and then saw Calvinists do the same thing. Of course it's also possible for people to not like Protestants ripping on Catholics and then join a church that considers both Catholics and Protestants to be heretics ... but my Christianity is minimalist enough that I can consider people in the Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic spheres to all be believers without necessarily agreeing on a lot of mundane details.

One of the ironies of this cycle is that in leaving a tradition you tend to display yourself the worst excesses of the tradition you're trying to leave behind. This is particularly the case with what I'd have to describe as a spiritual superiority copmlex. More colloquially known as plank and speck.

Poem: duet of leaf blowers

A duet of leaf blowers

Death can be strangely beautiful
when it is something or someone else.
The dying of the day's light
is one of the great beauties of life.
We reflect on sunsets as
anchors of beauty
in the violent sea of the world.

The death of an animal
whose muscles feed us
is beautiful, something to savor
unless the animal was a friend to us
or our child.

And as leaves wither and fall from branches
their glowing red and yellow deaths
are beautiful to us
unless the rotting mulch on the streets
should cause us to slip
or lose our footing
or skid into an accident.

So we delegate the task
of cleaning the evidence of death
from our lives.
We assign men and women to blow away
the red and yellow leaves from the streets.
Hear them start the engines of their leaf blowers
as cars roll by, engines that would drive the saws that
cut down trees but now instead blow away their droppings.

I listen to two leaf blowers grind and roar
an improvised chorale on the subject of death in the city
and the rhythms of gathering and burning.
They roar like street preachers regaling a crowd
gathering the dying leaves to warn them of the hellfire to come
and the cars that roll by mumble each indifferent whoosh of "amen".

Free verse, first draft, weekend. Do not consider this a serious poem.

cat photographers and the design in things

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/tv/390951_cat06.html

"If my cat can take photos prettier than what we've taken, what is art? It asks a lot about the intention behind art and how it's interpreted," Michael Cross said.

I leave it to you to actually read the whole article. It's a classic puff piece work of journalism and I mean puff piece in a good way, honest. But this quote is emblematic of what I consider to be a huge risk in contemporary philosophy about art. Yes, strapping a camera programmed to take photos automatically every two minutes does ask us to consider questions about the intention behind art and how it is interpreted but the answers to these questions may not be to ask questions about what a cat is actually thinking about when he roams a neighborhood. The cat's intentionality isn't important in terms of the art. The intention of strapping a camera to a cat who is allowed to wander around the neighorhood all day is where the artist's intention is. What is the intent of an artist who seeks to literally see things the way a cat might see them?

What is it about humanity that we seek to understand or perceive thinsg from a perspective that is not human? Is it to consider possible kinship or shared experience with other animals since we all live in the same world? That seems obvious enough? But we can't be sure that the way a cat thinks is the way we think. What if the camera had been programmed differently so that the cat only "took" a picture if he looked at something intently by focusing on that thing for two to five seconds or longer? Then we would only get photos when the cat didn't make any sudden movements with his head. And we know that would lead to quite a few less pictures! Cats are layabouts who nevertheless move almost constantly.

If a cat takes photos that are prettier than his master, though, any honest photographer will admit that that can be as much about sheer dumb luck as skill. That's why photographers take more than one shot of the same subject. You don't know what image will take and what image won't.

Now I like cats so I find the idea of programming a camera to document a cat's journey through a neighborhood theoretically fascinating but I am pragmatic enough to recognize that this could also produce a lot of boring photos just like people can produce boring photos. The old axiom that 90% of anything is crap in the arts would surely apply when the art is being programmed to be taken by a cat throughout the day. THAT is the intentionality and interpretation behind art.

It is not new for artists since the 20th century to include elements of the random in the inspiration for art. In fact it is not new for ANY artist to include elements of the random in their work. Prior to about Beethoven cadenzas in piano concerti were often improvised by performers and room was given for individual interpretation. In other words, if you give people the opportunity to incorporate the random or unplanned into a planned form we're talking stuff as old as Baroque music (figured bass prescribed a lot but left a lot open) or jazz.

Where teleology and philosophy about existence go this gets me thinking about a time when my brother was discussing with an atheist whether the cosmos reflected design or not. The atheist argued that the universe was not designed but the result of stochastic processes. A cheap evasion, really. The real debate is not about whether or not the cosmos reflects design but whether we can infer from its existence that the design is intentional or not. If hydrogen has X properties rather than Y properties, which themselves are characteristic of oxygen, then the very nature of things indicates a limit on how random the cosmos can be.

This may or may not reflect an inherent, intentional design in terms of what we can prove but essentially no one can argue that there is no design to the cosmos. I grant that there is plenty of room for debate and strong disagreement about whether or not the cosmos reflects intelligentible or intelligent design. Note that by saying that I am not in any way endorsing Intelligent Design as a junk category of pseudo-scientific thought. Even as a Christian I don't think there's a legitimate basis for ignoring existing materials by way of saying "The butler did it as opposed to Mr. Jones." The argument that if intelligent design is going to be a viable alternative to Darwinian explanations there has to be a provable hypothesis with replicable results can't be evaded.

In other words, the alternative to saying the photographs taken by the cat are not without intent is NOT to say the cat took the photos on purpose. Intelligent design at best can postulate a world in which the camera can be programmed by the artist to take photographs but that does nothing to explain the cat or the photograph. On the other hand, it's no more accurate to say that there is no intent behind the photographs taken by the cat because they appear at two-minute intervals and while the cat brings no intent to the proceedings the person who programmed the camera is present, as it were, in the programmed camera and wishes to see whatever the cat sees.

We have to consider, as listeners and artists that in a setting where we are listening to music there is a great deal of trust that sound is being manipulated in a way that reflects intent. People who listen to sound that is considered unorganized by most but hear within that sound music are bringing their desire to hear music into things like listening to the sounds of public transit or distant trains. Does this make the sound of public transit or distant trains music? These people who bring that kind of intent to listening would say it most certainly does. But ask the other seventy people on a route 5 bus in Seattle if the sounds they hear on the bus are music and they will likely say 'no' or have to take their earbuds for their iPods off to even hear you ask them the question.

At some point if the tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it happened but you can't call it music. The perceiving mind alone is not enough to make music by itself. All arts, despite many protests by individualists that the individual artist or consumer of art is the arbiter of taste has a communal element. There must be both a message and a recipient. The reason no one takes seriously the idea that the creakings, squeakings and groanings of public transit constitute music is because no one assents that there is intent or design. If you go to a new-music festival or a Seattle Composer's Salon and hear music that sounds like a collection of random stuff thrown together you know that despite the appearance of chaos that is a stochastic process. The lack of organization is part of the organization. That is where we are at the point where we can recognize artistic intent, because we're told it was on purpose by virtue of someone bothering to bring the thing for people to hear. But on public transit those sounds are not yet art because no one says to another, "I perceive music in this."

This gets into how I think music and the arts become religious experiences for people these days in lieu of more traditional understandings of religion. Atheists can obsess about the Beatles as though the members of the band were gods, and many do. Others find other objects of worship but that worship happens is a given. We can elevate ourselves by choosing to perceive in random sound music. We become the music-makers even though we have no instruments and do not produce any sounds of ourselves. Now in a modernist thought-form this would indicate that the cosmos is random or stochastic and that we impose the perception of music on the world around us. In a pre-modern mind this may well have transformed into "The heavens are telling the glory of God." We may perceive music operating at every level if that is what our religion is or we may perceive music as an outworking of the harmony of the things God has made or some other divinity or may perceive that we ourselves hear the music. Obviously I'm not going to digress into all those variations of perception and attribution of purpose here in a blog entry. I like to enjoy my weekends doing things once in a while.

So when you read about how someone programs a camera to take photos every two minutes and straps that camera two a cat and sends him on his merry way then, yes, that experiment invites us to ask questions about the arts and about interpretation. We can ask questions about what art is and what the intent behind art is but I think that asking those questions over and over is a waste of time. Transposing our intents on to animals is not the same as asking whether chimps may produce art or whether birds actually sing for the fun of it.

As a Christian I see the entire cosmos suffused with art the Lord has given each of us, human or animal, an opportunity to be part of. I already acknowledge that my intent may not be what is needed to produce art but I also don't wish to ignore that there must be a sender and a recipient for art to happen. Too much of alleged musing on the arts focuses only on one or the other and not on the relationship the two, ideally, should have.

In pop culture this kind of relationship is explored obsessively in gossip magazines or in Rolling Stone interviews with Bob Dylan. When once a link is recognized between a performer or creator of some kind and his/her audience a cottage industry erupts to extol the greatness of the perceived link even though it is invariably virtual. People feel connected to the words of someone who doesn't know them and doesn't care about them but they PERCEIVE a connection because they believe divinity speaks through them.

This isn't just true about rock stars, film directors, composers, authors, or painters. In the Christian blogosphere it may be writing about Mark Driscoll or John Piper or Ben Witherington II or Tom Wright says stuff that speaks to us. The Christian doesn't have to be alive. Patron saints are everywhere whether we're talking about Francis of Assissi or Aquinas or Augustine or C. S. Lewis, Theresa of Avilla or Mother Theresa. Those we venerate we venerate in different ways and we venerate them, in a sense, because they are artists. A saint whose wisdom and life inspires you to seek Christ is someone you admire. They are not Christ, obviously, but if you email them asking them to help you with a question you have there is a sense in which what you are doing isn't so different from a Catholic petitioning a saint to help them. In some ways it is no more useful, really, since you can study the Bible and church history to obtain things.

But I think the way to think about them is as follows; God programs the camera and fixes it on the cat. The cat is just a dumb animal wandering around as he sees fit but God uses the beast to take photos of what the world is like, what is out there. The photographs reveal the truth, and can be used to reveal the beauty and kindness of God. We would, however, be fools to think the cat took the photographs or imputed intent and art to the cat himself. The cat just carries the camera, the camera is the Gospel. The cat is finally not important in terms of being an agent himself since without God's providence and the work of the Spirit the cat accomplishes nothing. So when we hear the Gospel preached through men, they are like the cats whose lives are valuable and whose lives are transformed by Christ through the mission they have been sent on and what they do and say matters, but they do not have control over the message of Christ. Moses can obey but God delivers His people and this paradoxically does not diminish the importance of Moses' calling.

Our cult of personality tendencies as Christians inspire us to think that the cat took the photos, like a misleading headline saying a cat took 200 to 400 photographs. We want the news to be about the cat when the cat is the vessel. In the same way that someone programmed a camera attached to a cat to take photographs to produce works of art God uses stupid people to do something stupid, preaching, to reveal His wisdom. The best preacher on earth is still a cat with a camera attached to his collar who is walking around doing the things that cats do. The resulting photographs that have any beauty are the moments where God in His kindness reveals Himself. As Bach is reputed to have said, he wrote down the notes but God made the music.

But we Christians with our penchant for idol worship want to see the cat and don't consider the one who programmed the camera. It's something I have to remind myself of. It can often seem as though the photos have no purpose and that most of them look dumb. There are all kinds of ways to live by sight rather than by faith and the most devious forms of living by sight look like living by faith.

Our capacity to comingle entertainment with worship is ancient. This may not even indicate that it is actually idolatrous. It is easy to claim that we should not transform worship into an entertainment culture. Yeah, we perhaps shouldn't have a world in which people think it's actually a great idea to program a camera, attach it to a cat, have the thing wander around for a day or two and then make a documentary about how you did that and broadcast the thing on Animal Planet. That IS really stupid and it would be equally stupid to do with a dog. This is in every respect the nadir of reality TV.

But is it? Isn't it easy to condemn how stupid other people are while not recognizing our own foolishness? The things that others buy that they don't need are stupid but the things that I buy that I don't need are art? Somewhere someone genuinely enjoys that awful painting Thomas Kinkade did of NASCAR but I listen to Messiaen's organ music about the Nativity, which is something most people would never reoognize as being anything other than the most atrocious noises. I'm not taking back any critical stuff I've ever said or written about Kinkade. Far from it.

But I am reflecting a moment on how easily I can look down on someone else's idea of art or purpose while being blind to my own foolishness. I watch Batman cartoons. I may think that people who watch 24 might as well watch superheroes who actually wear capes but the person who watches 24 would say I watch Batman cartoons. The truth is that we're both watching indestructible superheroes who can get grappling hooks to always work and whose cel phones never run out of power and whose internet connections actually work. If I have any advantage over the person watching 24 is that I KNOW Batman is fantasy.

So much of the human condition can be considered in attaching a camera to a cat. It speaks so simply about the nature of our race that I could spend the rest of the weekend writing about it. I could laugh about how silly it is and I've chuckled a bit or I could decide to be outraged at the waste of time and resources. I could get like Judas and claim that the money and time that went into that could have gone to helping the poor. Both reactions are facile. When I consider how as a Christian I have attended a church where I have seen video broadcast of someone I don't really even know talk for over an hour about his kids who I have never met and don't really care about, isn't that sort of like attaching a camera to a pastor and having him ramble for a while and notice that eventually he gets to a point? It's no more fair for me to dismiss that then the wandering cat with the programmed camera. God is big enough to use the foolishness of preaching to reveal Himself. God can use a cat with a camera to reveal His providential kindness just as He can use a preacher.

fascinating

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/david-hayward-the-naked-pastor-the-im-interview#more-2578

5. What’s the view of the church and the Christian life that’s behind the cartoons?

I think it’s my understanding of the principalities and powers and how the church is susceptible to falling under that. I hope my cartoons unveil hypocrisy, deflate arrogance, uncover abuse, unmask manipulation, and expose exploitation. That’s lofty, but I suspect they behave as whistle-blowers on the principalities and powers that we are susceptible to. I believe one of the ways the principalities and powers claim dominion over the church is through visionary thinking that attempts to steer people in a certain direction. [emphasis added] I question that. I believe in the church. I love the church. It’s is the body of Christ, the localized manifestation of his body in the world. Which explains why I am so intent on critiquing that which I think compromises that. And then some of my cartoons are just silly or poignant. Others they are just images from a warped mind that no one gets but me.

bin-go

megachurches, evangelicalism, and preaching about sex

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/dear-ed-young-jr#comments



This entry over at Internet Monk went in and out of existence pending a final attached photo, but it seems to be back up now. I don't understand exactly why the initial photo was such a problem but I guess if there's no face to attach to such a commonplace name that can be taken for what it is, wheatever that is.


iMonk focuses chiefly on Young but also refers to Driscoll along the way. As an older pastor he finds the prospect of younger pastors spending a ton of time preaching through Song of Songs and promoting sex among married people to be humiliating and setting an embarrassing precedent people in other churches may require of their own pastors. The happy smiley blonde preachers and their barby wives may get to him. And perhaps he's just an old fuddy duddy after all, as some people might have it.

But commenter Chris E. summarized the biggest risk, that a pastor can set up a disclaimer that marriage isn't created to make you happy but to make you holy. Okay, so you can say that at the start of a sermon but that doesn't mean that's the actual message that comes across in the next hour of preaching. It doesn't matter what disclaimers you put up about how God designed marriage not to make you happy but to make you holy if you spend the next hour talking about sex.

And if your story is that you married your high school sweetheart and love her more now than twenty years ago and you have a bunch of kids then the trouble is that despite all the disclaimers mentioned earlier they amount to nothing. Why? Because you're making a case from your life and general speech that marriage not only makes YOU holy it makes you HAPPY, too. It vitiates any value in the disclaimer that marriage is to make you holy not happy if you constantly talk in other settings about how great married life is, how much you love your spouse more now than ever, and how great everything is about married life that other people should pursue. Spend a few months on marriage as what most people statistically should obtain and it can also come off, unintentionally I might add, as equating holiness and happiness.

And, to be fair, most people I know who have been married for more than a decade are so happy to be married I might be tempted to wonder if some of them aren't just codependent. If you don't have any friends except your spouse odds are really good that you have some kind of codependent relationship because if you didn't you would have, uh, you know, other friends. Evangelicals can tend to make an idol out of marriage as though it were the main end of Christians in this life. Not that marriage is bad but an idol is any good that is placed at the same level as Christ.

What iMonk doesn't really address in his piece is that there are basically two books in Scripture where if you never read them your whole life you will not understand the core of the Gospel less. Those two books are Revelation and then at the very end Song of Songs. There's nothing about the Cross in Song of Songs, nothing about Christ (unless you take an allegorical interpretation that most evangelicals preaching Song of Songs are probably assiduously avoiding), and nothing about the different ways that Christ atones for us on the Cross.

By way of an aside on atonement I find it sad that Christians so often get behind one explanation of the atonement as the one you HAVE to believe while ignoring the others. I have never taken that stupid view of the atonement. I don't think you can understand what Christ accomplished on the cross just through substitionary explanation any more than I think you can understand it through christus victor or ransom. It has been sad over the years to see and hear Christians talk about the atonement as though it were one thing. Well, perhaps by way of analogy, it can be sad to see that evangelicals in megachurches can spend a ton of time on sex (which isn't bad in itself) when the same amount of time could be devoted to examining the atoning work of Christ. I do know one church that at least spent three months on the atonement so that at least is a way to balance things out, kind of.

As I said earlier, you can go for most of your life without reading Revelation or Song of Songs and still do just fine in your walk with the Lord. If a church spends three months on Song of Songs then spending three months on different explanations of the atoning work of Christ seems necessary. That way after you get people all worked up about sex you can spend time showing them how Christ went to the Cross for their sins. Or balance it out by spending a couple of years in a Gospel. It's not that sex isn't important or that Song of Songs isn't in the Bible, it's that I wonder if the book that gets the most seats filled isn't the one that in terms of explaining the core of the Gospel, that in terms of knowing only Christ and Him crucified, is the least important book in the Bible. Besides all that, I'm not sure that when Solomon says there are lots of wives and concubines that he isn't really referring to his own harem. No textual proof that he isn't referring to them. Solomon is the author that Christians can be very selective about taking seriously, assuming that all of the works traditionally ascribed to Solomon were written by him but I don't feel like getting into the reasons even some conservative scholars have for wondering if Solomon actually wrote Ecclesiastes.

a riff on iMonk's series on unresolved tensions in evangelicalism, part 2

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/the-unresolved-tensions-of-evangelicalism-2-god-proving-christian-experience#comments

Experience is a two-edged sword. It both confirms and denies, all according to the disposition of the mind and heart. The oracle at Delphi neither conceals nor reveals but merely gives a sign. Heraclitus wrote that about the Delphic oracle and that is, at the risk of sounding incredibly pagan when I'm a Christian, one of the central problems with how Christians and unbelievers are apt to interpret experience.

Suppose you walk into a house and you sense a spectacular amount of unease. You sense a tightness in the room even though it is empty but you can't explain why. Are you in a house that has demons? Are you in a house that has infrasound that is at such a low frequency your ears and mind can't perceive it but the vibrations of the sound effect a great anxiety in your body because your skin can feel it? Are these explanations actually mutually exclusive? This is what I mean when I invoke Heraclitus and do so with an eye toward Christians and experience.

iMonk recently wrote about how evangelicals want God-proving experience. It's true. It's true that Christians of every kind want it. We differ on HOW we want it. Some of us want the God-proving experience directly through mystical moments, visions, dreams, audible callings, and the like. Others want propositional truth and scientific verifiability of the existence of God. If things can't be explained EXCEPT by the existence of God then that is enough to prove God exists, even though it is surely the most negative explanation. Others want the God-proving experience to be through their church, either in terms of feeling as though tye have found the one true church or, far more broadly, that billions of Christians across space and time following in the steps of apostolic witness can't really all have been wrong about the claims of the way.

But the appeal to experience remains the same in the broadest sense. What iMonk writes about is personal experience as a validation of one's belief in the existence of God. And I agree that evangelicals (but I would say everyone has this issue) simultaneously put stock in and are skeptical of experience. One of the paradoxes of Mark Driscoll's early years at Mars Hill was that he admitted both that he had a charismatic type experience where God told him to marry Grace and start a church and yet he could go on cheerfully in the early years being, more or less, cessationist in his pneumatology. Fortunately quite a few years ago Driscoll figured out that there's an inherent (and spectacular) problem in this kind of selective methodology. How do you affirm that God can speak to you directly but the other guy just had some bad pizza the night before and that's possibly all it is?

The truth is that recognizing the voice of God is difficult and possibly impossible if by this we mean a voice that is outside ourselves and our own perception. Some heard the voice of God the Father praising the Son while others just heard peals of thunder. If Scripture affirms that experience is such a double-edged sword then we must be aware that our faith is faith. It is not faith in a vaccum or with no evidence but it is also not certainty. That is why experience is problematic when it is invoked as certainty.

I will go further and ask "certainty of what?" If we turn to Scripture we see that God calls men and women to serve Him and gives them tasks but what is the pattern? God calls upon Isaiah and sends him off to a people who won't listen and won't see. God sends Jeremiah to people who will go into exile. God sends Elijah to a nation full of idolators. God through Moses warns Israel of their inevitable betrayal of the covenant, exile, and restoration. The pattern that emerges when God speaks to us, His people, is not usually the "God told me to marry so-and-so" or "God told me to do this job." God throughout Scripture warns of disaster coming to His people and that He has appointed that disaster and will shepherd them through punishment, exile, and death into a renrewed relationship with Him.

In other words, we have reason to doubt that God really told you to go work at whatever job you have. It's not that He really didn't, but if you tell me that you have X job because God told you to and you're happily making a ton of money and have all the time you want to spend with friends or family then you have to admit that what you're telling me was God's call on your life could come across as just you telling me that God underwrote your suburban yuppie existence before your birth. :)

Yeah, that sounds mean-spirited but consider how you would feel if I shared the same story with you. Wouldn't you think it a bit odd that I would say God told me to do the thing I love doing? Let me put it this way, if a successfully man in his thirties is married to a wife he thinks is hot and says God told him to marry her the reason I don't take it entirely seriously is not because I don't think God doesn't speak to people, it's because God has designed men and women in such a way that if they find each other attractive they are apt to marry, especially if they agree on most other points about life and style. If you invoke the experience that God told you to marry a woman you think is hot I don't question it because of God's love or wisdom, I question why you're such a dim bulb that God had to tell you something billions of other people didn't have to be told. They saw someone hot, got to know them, and decided to marry. God didn't have to tell them, "Now my child, give yourself in marriage to so and so." He or she saw the love of their life and basically said, give or take a higher or lower degree of discretion and piety, "Ooh, I'd hit that."

My stepfather once said that moments where God speaks to us should be taken with some caution. It's rare he ever held forth on spiritual topics because he has never thought of himself as "that" kind of spiritual person. But he once said that people who talk about how God told them to do X, Y, or Z can be excited about that. They feel that experience validates their calling. But the flip side is that maybe they're so dumb and slow-witted God has to directly intervene and tell them before they'll go do what they're supposed to do. Experience is a double-edged sword. The things that so often seem like big signs that affirm our calling may be all of the fleeces of Gideon, signs of fear and doubt and unbelief so great that God has to directly intervene to exhort us to do what He would have us do. Many Christians go through life without any experience at all that would suggest doing X,Y, or Z.

It would seem as though we need to revisit the end of the gospel of Matthew. Jesus had RISEN FROM THE DEAD ... yet some doubted. Thomas would not believe until he saw Jesus himself. We don't realize as Christians how dubious our experience often is in our own sight. If even apostles wondered if Jesus had really risen from the dead at first then we should recognize that experience is a part of our walk with Christ but that it is a part.

And it is a part that is easy to doubt because experience can so often neither reveal nor conceal but merely gives a sign. This is why, all things considered, I have come to believe that we must steep ourselves in Scripture because it is only through that and an awareness of the ways God speaks through and to His people that, when experience arrives, we have a basis for understanding it. That basis is Christ and also the narrative of God's people. The experience of God's voice, however it comes to us, we must recognize is not proof of God's existence so that we may believe, not most of the time. That God speaks to us is to encourage us so that we don't lose hope or aware that God can and does enact justice against sin, individual and corporate.

ruminations on the psalms part 2: measuring one genre by another and why that's a mistake [updated]

No Trekkie who is humble about the genre (and believe me, Trekkies better be humble about their genre) will attempt to compare Star Wars to Star Trek and find the latter wanting. In the same way Star Wars fans (who should also be humble) should not find Star Trek wanting by the measure of sci-fi. Humanist fantasies appropriating sci-fi trappings are not always the same. Measure Trek by Wars and find it wanting and you have misconstrued both the purpose of the genre as a whole and the stories in particular. Measure Wars by Trek and you make the same mistake. If you have any appreciation for one it should be at least possible to contemplate an appreciation of the other. Conversely, if you don't like Wars or Trek and love John Wayne movies we're talking about something else.

One of the things I have discovered is that despite having a high view of the inerrancy and inspiration of Scripture there is a more pernicious error that lurks for a Christian, that is measuring one genre of biblical literature by another. I tried to shoehorn the Psalms into the prophetic writings. I was reading the Psalms through the lens of the prophets and finding it wanting. The problem wasn't in the Psalms but is in my own attitude toward emotions in general (mine in particular and those of others). It's not that the Psalms DON'T have messianic predictions and don't tell the story of God's people. The problem is that as I read the Psalms I only read it with the macro-story in mind. If it wasn't pointing to Jesus in some clearly prophetic way or wasn't pointing to something in Israel's narrative that I could clearly identify I basically didn't understand it, and not understanding it I struggled to find a use for it.

But for others the struggle may be different. A person may not mistakenly read the Psalms through the lens of just prophetic literature. A person may read the narrative books and epistles through the lens of wisdom literature and so doing impose a hermeneutic and an eisegetical lens on to a biblical text that smply isn't there.

This is especially common for those of us who bring our own struggles of character or conscience into a reading of a text. For instance, if a man sins against his wife by having her work to support them while he is getting an entertainment career off the ground then his sin against her is against her specifically. If he is convicted of this through 1 Timothy 5 then that's good as far as it goes, but that is the Spirit convicting him personally through a biblical text and his apprehension of the principle behind it. What it is NOT is an exegetically based conviction but what in Pentecostal circles might be called a "rhema" revelation. These things happen and God uses them, though Augustine and other church fathers would not endorse this as a sytematic approach to Scripture, I venture.

If this entertainer, having been convicted of his sin against his wife by 1 Timothy 5, then turns around and says that this is what the text means, that the main rebuke in the text is against husbands who don't support their families, then it is thoroughly mistaken because an exegesis of the text will make it plain that the primary subject of Paul's writing to Timothy is about widows. There is no husband left alive to forsake the care of his wife or children because the children are alive and are being commanded by Paul to take care of ma or grandma. Why else would Paul enjoin the children or grandchildren to learn piety and return the investment made in them by their parents if the precept at work was that somehow husbands are supposed to provide for their wives and kids. Seeing as the husbands here relative to their wives are DEAD that's not possible, those men have gone to be with the Lord. We may infer that not all those who had the status of widow in Thessalonica legitimately had that status. Some were freeloading off of the church's generosity while others were dumped off into the care of the church by family that refused to help their own flesh and blood in need. It is only after Paul lays out the principle that widows who are truly widows should be cared for by the church while all the others should be helped by family, who should learn piety and return the kindness given to them by parents and grandparents. Christians who refuse to do this are worse than unbelievers and have denied the faith.

So, again we're talking about exegesis here, any attempt to force the meaning of the biblical text BEYOND that basic principle to say the text says more than that is eisegesis and abuse of the biblical text. We could say that we can extrapolate from that text that a person who loves family will support family but that is better spelled out in the actual wisdom literature itself, not something forced on to an epistle. Don't make 1 Timothy 5 mean what it doesn't mean if Proverbs already gets you where you want to go. Let both passages be what God intended them to be, not what you find convenient for them to mean. To do otherwise is to place yourself above Scripture and to fail to appreciate it. BUt this is something, clearly, that even people with a high view of Scripture in general can mistakenly do. It is vital to neither find one genre of Scripture wanting because it isn't another, and it is vital to appreciate what the purpose of a genre is as well as what that purpose isn't.

So in my case I have needed to appreciate that the psalms are what they are, songs, prayers, narratives. The Psalms are in themselves a microcosm of other genres that appear in the biblical literature but are a genre unto themselves. Knowing what kind of literature the psalms are and aren't is crucial. As someone who has loved the epistles and the prophets I have to keep in mind that the psalms don't exactly work like that. If I attempt to shoehorn propositional statements about systematic theology into the Psalms, or forcibly extract them FROM the Psalms I risk completely misunderstanding what their purpose is. In fact I would say one of my biggest problems is looking to the Psalms as being another piece in a puzzle for a systematic theology. That's not what they are there for!

But it is comforting to know that as stupid a mistake as this is, I am surely not the only person to make this kind of stupid, sinful mistake. We all have the risk of doing this, especially those of us who affirm the priority, inspiration, and infallibility of Scripture. A recent anonymous poster said I seem to have a low view of Scripture. Well, yeah, I have had a low view of parts of Scripture, but that's the rub, I have been at a church that for the last decade never bothered to preach through the psalms. If I had a low view of Scripture regarding the Psalms specifically is the church I have attended for years ever going to get around to providing a positive alternative? This is not to diminish my responsibility for misunderstanding Scripture at all, but it is a question, rather, of how the community I have been part of could rectify that or help there. Pastors at a church that does not preach from the psalms or incorporate them consistently into public worship won't be RESPONSIBLE for my errant understanding of the Psalms ... but they won't be helping to be part of the solution either.

I feel strange discovering my inadequate appreciation of the psalms because I always thought I had a very high view of Scripture. But now that I consider it, a person may have a very high view of Scripture yet still refuse to accept what it says when the Gospel and its implications are presentd. Peter had a high view of Scripture and of the dietary laws and the Lord rebuked him Acts for refusing to call clean what God had called clean. Peter understood what the Torah said and understood that it said that no Jew should eat foods X, Y, and Z. Then the Lord revealed something Peter struggled to accept and only understood when it became clear that God's plan of salvation included the Gentiles. He knew what the Scriptures were and what the Gospel was but struggled to understand what it really meant. His high view of Scripture and of the dietary laws blinded him to understanding the outworking of Christ's mercy toward the Gentiles.

If Peter, who knew Christ in the flesh and was a witness to his life, death, and resurrection, could still declare when the sheet was lowered "No, Lord!" then if I, who have not seen the Lord, see in the Psalms that the heart is presented and what is really in the heart and what is acceptable for the Lord's children to feel and bring to the Lord I also am, like Peter, not someone who can say "No Lord!" because I am familiar with the prophets, the epistles, the gospels, the Law, and the writings. I do not get to act as though something is unclean because it goes against my faulty understanding of what the righteousness of Christ means for me and for others.

Piety is so frequently the greatest obstacle to knowing Christ, not just the piety we take up ourselves but the pieties we are enjoined to consider or are told we are obligated to. It was the piety of Job's comforters that led them to say what God revealed was not true about Him. Now that I am starting to appreciate that the Psalms reveal the heart of the psalmists and that this is something I can learn from I am able to appreciate that yes, the voice of God is present in the Psalms, but it is not Peter was rebuked for letting his piety appreciate the significance of God's reaching out to the Gentiles. I have been rebuked for not appreciating that the Psalms allow us to give voice to our heart toward God and preferring that it ONLY be the voice of God, never of men. This is an extremely dangerous dualism that, coupled with a propensity to view most emotions with skepticism or suspicion, presents a collosal problem I am only now starting to get any grasp of. The reason I often didn't feel I could relate to the Psalms is because I was reluctant to see them as the results of real people, not just as canonized messages from the Lord regarding Christ.

Now sometimes I wish I had been in a setting or was part of a group of believers that had paid attention to the Psalms at any level in the last decade but such is God's providence that just didn't happen. So I have stumbled blindly into these moments of reflection because that is the direction the Lord has been prompting me, sometimes because of but often despite the people (including but especially me) that have been in my life. Besides, it isn't really the fault of all the pastors of the church I have attended for eight years that they have never opened up the psalms and preached through them, is it? Pastors may one day be accountable before Christ for how they handled their responsibility but I am the one who is responsible even if pastors were to somehow shirk their duty in any way by preaching from the whole counsel of God's word.

But I could also understand if pastors might say that pastors do have a responsibility to preach the Word in season and out of season and to preach from the whole counsel of God's word and that if at any point there was a failure to touch upon certain biblical genres in favor of emphasizing others that this could be a background variable. A pastor some time ago said that if a man is sexually immoral the wife is not responsible for her husband's infidelity but her failures to make herself attractive to him and her letting herself go because she's got him locked into marriage may not be helping things either. If that argument has any weight at all then it may have a nominal amount of weight here, but it is preferable to consider that this is something I have to deal with myself, since it is not really the responsibility of anyone else to help me consider how I have misunderstood the psalms over the years. Since no one else has taught me anything about them in the last decade and a half besides a youth pastor who may have been out of his depth it more or less seems to be the case.

But mainly I would say that the closest analogy I can find for what I have been going through is Peter being told by God to stop calling unclean what is clean. That's invocation by metaphor, and as such has its giant limits, but that conveys where I am at. Other people, who may find it desirable to be led by the heart and the emotions may not directly understand why this is a challenge for me, who finds the heart so deceptive that emotions are suspect.

But all aspects of the human being are broken, including the mind and the will. Even as Christians we can be tempted to think our feelings are okay while our thoughts are not, or that our thoughts are okay while our feelings are not. All alike need to be transformed. As Bishop Wright put it, the reprobate mind is the end point of judgment within this age in Romans 1-2, and Romans 12 reveals that the renewal of the mind is the process of discovering what it means to be truly human and that can only be discovered in Christ.

The sneakiest dualisms are the ones you don't observe in yourself. The sneakiest way to slight Scripture is to say you affirm its inerrancy and then ignore or not bother to go through those parts that you are afraid to go through or just don't connect to. Or you can say you place yourself under Scripture and then just go on and make it mean whatever you want, either by force or, far more often, because in the weakness of your own conscience and sin you as the weaker brother or sister impose your guilt upon others. The grace of Christ in your life convicting you of your sins becomes the law by which you damn others as not measuring up to you. I am discovering that it is very easy to transform grace into law because it is easy to deceive yourself into thinking that the aim of the law you embrace in your heart is the means of grace for you and everyone else. It is in the Psalms that the psalmist express despair at the continual failure they find at attempting to keep the Law, whether God's law or even their own. It is in the Psalms that men cry out to God and ask if He has forgotten the covenant and abandoned His people. I was so busy looking only for the voice of God in the psalms I scoffed at the voice of man. Someone might say that's the sin of Gnosticism. Nope, docetism. Not all dualisms are of the same Greek variety. Some are different, and in our eagerness to battle some we overlook others. That has been a very tough lesson the Lord has been leading me through.

I am grateful for the recent anonymous comment. It helped to demonstrate by the poster's own example how I had failed to appreciate the Psalms for what they are, and how I had taken an erroneous view of them by judging them as poor prophetic literature rather than treating them as psalms. God providentially used the anonymous poster's willingness to decontextualize, not carefully read, and make sweeping judgments on the character of the author (me) to reveal that I had done the same thing to the Psalms by wanting there to be no voice of man in the psalms but only the voice of God. What the anonymous poster got wrong was what God used to help point me in the right direction. Does this justify an anonymous ad hominem straw man post? Nah, that's still someone with a plank complaining about my speck but I don't say that to suggest there was not a purpose of God's in that. Jesus doesn't say there is no speck, only that the person with the plank should remove his plank before removing the other person's speck. He is still saying that both men have blinkered vision. So both anonymous and I need the grace of God to appreciate Him as He truly is. My prayer is the Lord uses us to each other's benefit and His glory.

Ruminations on the psalms

This is simply a follow-up on something I wrote over on Wendy's blog.
http://theologyforwomen.blogspot.com/2008/11/thouhts-on-bible-study-part-4.html

She mentioned how she found the prophets to be her least favorite part of the Bible for a long time. As she put it so succinctly, "I love the gospels and Pauline epistles, find comfort in the Psalms and wisdom in the Proverbs. But the prophets?! They can be a real downer."

Surely the Lord has made a great world with a great variety in it, because I love the epistles and find the wisdom literature valuable. I lean more toward Job and Ecclesiastes for wisdom literature than Proverbs but I like Proverbs. I use to read the epistles every day and while I don't always read the Gospels I remember them often. I love reading the prophets, though, and find them challenging and encouraging.

In fact if we bear in mind that in the Jewish Bible the prophets include all the books of Samuel and Kings we begin to understand how powerfully necessary the prophetic literature is to our understanding not only of Yahweh but of ourselves through the story of Israel. Prophetic books are not only a predictor of Christ but serve as warnings to Christ's people over time. A failure to engage with the prophetic literature in a meaningful way ensures that a local church will go off the rails and justify anything it considers cool. Justifying any means to an end or misunderstand what the God-appointed ends toward which Christ calls us is unfortunately easy to do if we neglect the prophets.

But the part of Scripture that has always been my least favorite over the years has been the Psalms. Perhaps it is not the least bit surprising that to the extent that I have bothered to read Psalms at all (which was exceptionally rare over the years, now that I'm really thinking about it) was to read something about Jesus, preferably a prediction made of Jesus' coming or something about Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. So I could read through Hebrews (which I love) and go back and see all the Christological references and then I'd go back and read the Psalms and find, somewhat to my surprise, that I didn't really care.

Why was that? Well, I think some of my dislike of the Psalms came because I misunderstood the nature of prophetic fulfillment of God's promises in Christ. In the Western world it can be easy to want a one-to-one correspondence between a passage and its fulfillment. Western rationalists can lok at Isaiah 7 and say "Hey, this is CLEARLY not really referring to Jesus and is being quoted out of context." The rebuttal to this is to point out that similar misappropriations, if we're going to be hard-nosed about it, were being employed in Qumran and elsewhere in Judaism and there were battles about whether the Torah was considered to teach that the resurrection of the dead happened. The old joke is that two Jews have three opinions, and it reveals why many attempts to dismiss Christian interpretations of the prophets are potentially double-edged.

But the second reason I didn't care for the Psalms had less to do with not finding predictions of Christ than a more basic issue. I thought of the Psalms as emotionally dishonest. The language was often repetitive, it seemed clunky as poetry, and finally it just seemed impossible to me that anyone would actually feel the way the psalmist kept saying he felt (or the psalmists, to be more accurate, I suppose). The psalms seemed hyperbolic and insane. There would be whiplash changes of mood that didn't make sense, and there would be emotional outcries that seemed selfish and vicious.

It was also not clear to me that the voice of the psalmist was even really the voice of God since the psalmist kept asking God to destroy his enemies and poured out contempt on people he didn't like. How could I know the psalmist wasn't at fault? In Psalm 51 I have long wondered why David kept saying "against You and You alone I have sinned?" Really? David had just killed a man and his sin was such that God chose to kill his child because David had been disobedient. And yet David was saying he had only sinned against the Lord when he had a man murdered and that murder was something that prompted the Lord to kill a child in the womb? Really?

A pastor once mentioned from the pulpit that we need to consider that just because the psalmist says it does not mean we should take it as God speaking to us, we need to remember the psalms are where we see "us" through David and others speaking to God. He proferred the explanation that sin can be pervasive enough within us that we can imagine the consequences of our sin do not reach as far as they really do, which was his take on an aspect of Psalm 51 I have heard many Christians just skate over, the part about "against You and You alone have I sinned."

And to pick another, still more obvious example, is it good to pronounce a blessing on anyone who hurls babies against rocks to kill them? Christians are fond of making abortion a deal-breaker in politics and I do believe abortion is a moral and social evil overall ... but don't people realize that in Scripture God kills babies? It's something God has the ability to do to execute judgment against wicked empires. This does not diminish that abortion is wrong but how do we look at the Psalms and square much contemporary conservative Christian rhetoric against abortion with a biblical passage like Psalm 137 in which the psalmist pronounces a blessing on anyone who would take up Babylonian babies and kill them?

One of the more memorable exercises I did was to consider Samuel and consider the corresponding account of the same battle through Psalm 18. I began to realize that the Psalms display a heightened, emotional depiction of events that were in fact, rather prosaic. This is, I would suggest, a key to understanding apocalyptic literature, grasping that powerful symbolism and emotionally charged language may refer to things that, in their actual happening, may "look" pretty unimportant or normal. Apocalyptic as a genre allows biblical authors to invest things with a greater, more cosmic significance in terms of God's involvement in our lives, the narrative of God's work among us, if you will.

It has been this aspect of the psalms and their heightened emotional expression that I have only in the last few years begun to appreciate. I have come to see them less and less as emotionally dishonest or hyperbolic pity parties or mediums of what always seemed like a false sense of joy or contentment.

Perhaps it's not so strange that part of this process of having an actual appreciation for the psalms, and not just assenting that all Christians should read them and get something out of them at least some of the time, has been in setting psalms to music. There are many different ways of meditating on Scripture and for a musician and especially a composer one of the best ways to do this is to compose settings of biblical texts. This is not a substitute for exegetical or historical study at all! Instead it provides a believer with an opportunity to read multiple translations, consider contexts, observe historical settings in which texts are composed, and beyond all that consider both the emotional content of that biblical text and how you, as the composer, feel and what feelings you should and need to convey through that setting.

For instance, the most personal instance I can think of is when I asked a very dear friend of mine to suggest a Psalm for me to set to music. He picked Psalm 133. I had never really seriously considered the Psalm much over the years. Its theme seemed too mundane. Isn't it great when people get along? Yeah, sure, whatever, what else is there about predicting the coming of Christ? But having gone through (and at the time, really, still feeling I was in the middle of) a rough patch of misunderstanding and being misunderstood by family and things just being bad all around and not really being aware of some problems that resulted from sin I was not truly aware of, I began to see the psalm differently.

By way of an aside, there have sometimes been comparisons made between black American music and Jewish music. The comparison (which I think is apt in many ways) is the following--a song of joy will have a touch of sorrow and songs of sorrow will have a touch of joy. There are conflicting emotional elements within a song. That is, in a word, blues. The more clinical term would be ambivalence. This was, emotionally, a critical key to grasping the psalms as emotional narrative. Where as other Christians may need to see the narrative arc of the Psalms as a miniature of creation and fall, covenant and exile, war and ensuing victory and defeat, and the promise of final restoration and joy that was precisely not what I needed to see in the Psalms because that's what I see everywhere else in the Bible. I have trained myself over decades of reading Scripture to read the Bible for the macro themes, the overall narrative arc. To borrow nerd-speak, I am aware of the significance of continuit in story lines because I've read comic books and have watched Star Wars movies. :)

What I have needed to do with the Psalms is understand that they speak to real feelings and allow myself to appreciate them at a purely emotional level. I have needed to recognize that the feelings expressed in the psalms by the various psalmists are real, not overblown emotions. They sought poetic language to express their various emotions before God and people. Psalm 137 stopped being a psalm that seemed to be written by some bitter person who should just get over things and move on and should stop wanting to kill babies to someone who saw everything and possibly everyone he ever loved and fought for slain. He saw the city he loved, one of the greatest sources of joy in his life, beaten and battered down to its foundations while the sons of Edom were cheerleaders to the nation that executed the slaughter. When you have seen Babylonian soldiers hurl your babies against stones to kill them you desperately want to return the favor. After all that to be commanded by your captors to cheer THEM up with one of the vaunted songs of Zion, what would you do? By the waters of Babylon ... .

It has helped me immensely to remind myself during personal reading that the Psalms are not a litany of all the feelings we "should" feel. I have misread them for years as emotional equivalents of prescription drugs and there is a sense in which aspects of that are true. I needed to read them with an understanding that the Psalms reveal to us how we turn to God amidst what we actually feel, most of it mixed or ugly. We can rejoice in the glory of the Lord and His kindness in the past while feeling dread about the present and the future. We can be angry about injustice done or said against us while recognizing that our own sin has brought us to that point.

What we deduce, induct, observe, and infer about the lives of others throughout Scripture like Abraham, Moses, David, or Isaiah the Psalms allow us to participate in directly. The Psalms are where our story can be explored as part of the larger story of God and His people. But, at least for me, it is also a place where as the psalmist enjoins us, we can pour out our hearts before the Lord. Something I'm figuring out how to do. For reasons I don't feel like explaining, partly because I don't wish to and partly because I'm not sure I can, expressing emotions directly is not something I have often wanted or liked doing and this is why God seems to have providentially made the Bible as big as it is, because every believer has a part of Scripture he or she needs to be reconciled to as part of the challenge of following Christ. The Lord calls us to immerse ourselves in the parts of Scripture we fear or don't like as much as the parts that we call our favorites. It is the parts we tend to skip over that we may most need to focus on. So for me, that section of the Scriptures is clearly the Psalms.

a rumination on certain definitions of friendship by way of Proverbs 18:24

There are friends who claim to be friends and there are friends who are closer than family.


In the JPS the rendering is more, "There are people you can keep company with and there are friends who are closer than brothers." Another rendering is, "A man with too many friends comes to ruin." In the Jerusalem Bible the rendering is "There are friends who lead one to ruin."


There is considerable variation in this proverb but the contrast is clear, that there are friends who not valuable, friends who you can kill time with, and then friends who are actually friends.

Quite a bit could be written about friendships that lead one to ruin and what that may mean. Sometimes it isn't wise to have friends who lead you into chaos and destruction. Proverbs does warn us not to be fraternizing with people who defy God or king because disaster can strike suddenly from either God or king and then where are you?

This could have an interesting application now that Obama is president elect. Don't hang out with people who dissent against him or call for his assasination. Stupid rebellious people who speak that way of any elected official they don't like don't constitute good company. It would be just as stupid to make close ties with people calling for the assasination of Bush. I pick that as an extreme and, indeed, absurd example to demonstrate that Proverbs warns us against having friendships with mockers, scoffers, and rebels. These are not all quite the same and Christians can be guilty of being mockers and scoffers even as they suppose they're just being playful or teasing. As Proverbs warns us, as a man who throws around firebrands and death is someone who deceives his neighbor and says "Was I not joking?"

But those are all by way of digression. The main proverb for consideration is that a person can be ruined by too many friends or simply people who profess friendship. Older renderings of the proverb have the statement, "Those who profess friendship must show themselves friendly, but there is a friend who is closer than a brother." The contrast remains. In tims of stress you discover who your friends actually are, since a friend loves at all times (not just the convenient ones) and a brother (and a sister, too, of course) is born for adversity (i.e. sharing in it with you, not necessarily bringing it, just to be clear).

How things play out for me is the consideration of what we might call an urban legend:

Back in the days before it was decommisioned there was a legend about the Lockheed SR-71 surveillance plane. The legend was that the plane moved so quickly that there were times when flight controllers would see the plane on the radar in the air even though the plane had already landed or wasn't even in monitored airspace anymore. They were observing only an electromagnetic shadow of where the plane had been, not the plane itself. Some people who profess to be friends are like the SR-71. They flew into your airspace, but so quickly and with such singular, military-mission purpose, that effectively it is as though they weren't there at all and their reasons for entering your airspace are classified, discernable only because they showed up at all on their mission, to collect information.

There are SR-71 slipstream friendships, where there is no real meaningful contact for a huge amount of time, no attempt is made to stay in touch, yet friendship is professed. A friend of this sort, for want of a bettr word, is the SR-71 who flies through your airspace quickly enough to leave a radar cross-section that is nothing more than the disturbance of the air through which the plane has passed. You may think of this as a sort of hit-and-run affair. The would-be friend is satisfied to have simply flown through your airspace without having done or said much of anything other than being on that SR-71 surveillance mission getting from point A to point B, that happened to include flying through your airspace as part of the prescribed flight plan.

By the pilot's definition of friendship that fly-by constituted friendship. The question is, whether or not by any measure of friendship demonstrated to us through the life and teaching of Christ through the Scriptures, that is a meaningful definition of friendship. There are Facebook and Blogger friends and then there are the friends where you miss seeing their faces, and miss hearing their voices. More to the point, you try to DO something about that state of affairs. Let us not be Christians who are like a shepherd who when discovering one of the hundred sheep is lost mutters, "Oh well, guess the sheep just doesn't want to be part of the herd. It'll come back if it's serious about being part of the team." Jesus was not that kind of friend to us.

There is a time and a place to let go of friendships but I wonder if in the balance of not making idols of relationships or merely using relationships it is far too easy for us to go listing to one side or the other. If anything, as callous as this is likely to sound, I have to consider that friendships have to have a certain usefulness. It explains why various people I have considered friends have vanished and not bothered to stay in contact. It is because friendship with me is simply not useful to them. Conversely, use can be too high a priority and in that quest for people who are useful the dignity of man, rather than being elevated too high, is thrown down on the street and used to keep one's own feet clean when the humility of mud and dust must touch our feet.

If the example of Christ is any indication then friendship means we invest in the lives of, and reach out to, our friends even when they withdraw, when they are unlovable. As Christ loved me when I was unlovable (and am unlovable) should I not out of gratitude for that love reach out to those who are, it seems, unlovable, unwilling to respond, and eager to hide? God came to Adam and Eve even after they ran from Him. He did not decide, "Oh well, they haven't come to the spot where we usually met so they just don't want to talk to me. I'll leave them be." Sometimes friendship involves going out to your friend in his or her time of need, even when that includes getting treated like someone less than a friend. If Christ modeled that for us in His life with the power of the Spirit and that same Spirit dwells within us, then we can be friends to each other in Christ when affinity, proximity, and utility all fail in a relationship. What I hear is that husbands and wives make this sacrifice for each other. Parents and children make these sacrifices for each other. It would seem reasonableand consistent with Scripture to say that friends do this for each other, not least because through the blood of Christ we have now been made friends with the living God.

I admit that there are times when I do not consider the friendship of Christ useful. I don't know if anyone else has the temerity or lack of foresight to simply say that (well, one or two, I suppose, have admitted as much, to say the least) but it does not mean there is no reason to say it. Now I admit I've got my own issues regarding friendship, since I suspect my tendency is to make idols of relationships with people in general and not trust in God. It is the strange flip side of a coin, I have often wondered why God would waste so much time working through people when He could just do things Himself. What's the point in being this all-powerful, all-wise God and using stupid, selfish, wounded people to go do His work for Him? If Christ said the world will know we are His by our love for one another what kind of apologetic is that? Why go that route, when so many in Christ refuse to acknowledge each other as even in Christ, let alone love one another? If Christ offers Himself in friendship to his disciples why are we so bad at making the offer ourselves? Sin? Duh, and yet if we are new creations it would seem as if we could martial up the aid of the Spirit to be better at this. Yet when pressed to rely on, as the phrase puts it "Christ alone" many of us (specifically, me) walk by sight rather than faith because if Scripture reveals that God continually works through His people and doesn't show up every day in some visible way, wouldn't it make sense to rely on God's people? The trouble with idols is that they are good things, not bad. Yet within the good creation are the seeds of rebellion against the Lord.

The Proverbs were given to a community in which it would be supposed almost all were Israelites, descenents of Abraham, the father who received the promise. Yet this proverb is for us in Christ. There are Christians who profess friendship they should not profess. There are friendships that bring chaos and trouble. Only the aid of the Spirit can help us discern those relationships and dangers. We do not all have the same gifts or calling. There are men and women I can be friends with by the grace of God that few other people may be willing to talk to, much less listen to. So it goes.

Perhaps that is where God enables us to be Christ to someone, the people from whom other Christians turn away in anger and disgust. It is important to remember that you are always a loser to someone, someone will find you beneath contempt or consideration. Christ reaches out to you and takes you to Himself. And now you have the opportunity to do this for the least of them, those people for whom there may not be any reward except the act of self-giving love itself. Yes, Christ died and endured the Cross, scorning its shame, for the joy set before Him. What was that joy? We can't even imagine it, but some of that joy includes being friends with us, offering friendship to us on behalf of God, as God, and to offer His own joy to us even in the midst of our suffering, and His.