PART TWO: EVANGELICALISM MEANS WHAT NOW?
http://www.civitate.org/2009/01/the-new-evangelical-scandal/
In addition to their political, national, and familial affiliations, young evangelicals have slowly moved away from identifying with their own theological systems and heritage (the trend of evangelical converts to Anglicanism that Robert Webber first noted has not abated—if anything, it has expanded toward Rome and Constantinople). Such conversions belie, I think, evangelicalism’s failure to articulate its own theological distinctives and advantages and its rich intellectual and spiritual heritage. Few young evangelicals who convert have read—much less heard of—the writings of John Wesley, Andrew Murray, A.W. Tozer or other giants of the evangelical past (one wonders whether the new evangelical leaders like Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, Rob Bell and others have read them). And even fewer evangelicals are inclined to give the tradition in which they were raised the benefit of the doubt, to see the errors and problems and remain regardless.
This paragraph is intriguing and the dead give away of the problem beneath the diagnosis of the problem comes with the big names dropped at the end. John Wesley (as in Wesleyan), Andrew Murray (Dutch Reformed), and A. W. Tozer (Christian Missionary Alliance, and all attendent to that). We're talking three drastically different approaches to spiritual formation and even understanding of major and often divisive secondary doctrines. Anderson is hitting on the problem without fully realizing. Evangelicalism does not represent a unified intellectual or spiritual tradition and hasn't for ... a long time I'll put it that way.
Let's consider two patron saints of evangelicalism in thumbnail sketch, shall we? Franics Schaeffer (Presbyterian background) and Clive Staples Lewis (Anglican). On different sides of the pond and surely on different sides regarding doctrines about election and the level at which we could affirm things like inerrancy. Lewis was not an evangelical by any stretch of the imagination and Schaeffer's views on the arts are so idiosyncratic as to be helpful provided you filter them with a bit more depth in individual fields of study than Schaeffer himself got around to.
Anderson evidently doesn't consider Anglicanism to be part of evangelicalism. Yet consider not just C. S. Lewis but the contributions of other Anglicans such as J. I. Packer, John Stott, Leslie Newbegin, and N. T. Wright. These are Anglicans who have lent more intellectual and spiritual heft to evangelicals than many other evangelical Protestant pastors. Not that I never learned anything from Charles Stanley or Chuck Swindoll or Vernon McGee (the guy just had a cool sounding voice even if I didn't consider that he was a basic but very solid Bible teacher). But I admit that in the last ten years I have found that the broad category of Reformed/Calvinist Anglicans have been a group I really appreciate. They are in many respects more articulate proponents of what could be called core doctrines and beliefs of evangelicalism than ... well, I don't know who Anderson would name now, really. Piper? Keller? Witherignton?
That the evangelical tradition is so varied is part of the problem. If you talk to people from Europe they may not help things because they might say there is the Catholic church or state church and then there's all the evangelicals, who basically are Protestants that aren't the state church of where ever you're talking about. As I mentioned earlier, if American Christians are starting to distinguish between their faith as servants of Christ and their role as American citizens who is really to say that is a bad thing? It "might" be but it is impossible to say for sure that it is. Haven't wee seen enough cycles of religious right and left to see how things didn't work out. Does Anderson believe the evangelical right may yet succeed where the religious left failed? Or did the religious left fail? We are about to celebrate Martin Luther King day in a bit and many people would argue, strenuously, that King began sort of evangelical but ended up being a liberal. That may be but where are the conservative evangelicals that have holidays in this country that would be some counterpoint to Rev. King? Fill me in if you know of a national holiday for one of those evangelical conservatives.
This is not me stumping for liberalism, far from it. I hasten to add here that i consider myself a moderate actual conservative rather than a neo-conservative. I'm just pointing out that at this point Anderson seems to have forgotten something. When he says, "Such conversions belie, I think, evangelicalism’s failure to articulate its own theological distinctives and advantages and its rich intellectual and spiritual heritage." I go back to Mark Noll. The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there isn't much of a mind there. What intellectual heritage? Seriously. Anderson is talking about theologians and teachers from half a century ago. Not that that's bad or anything but it raise the issue of how much history evangelicalism has that Anderson thinks we should immerse ourselves in.
I'm more likely to hear, when I hear people say we should explore the roots of the evangelical faith, that we should go back to Luther's Bondage of the Will, Calvin's Institutes, Augustine's City of God, maybe even more obscure stuff like John Murry's The IMputation of Adam's Sin. But even among evangelicals I'm likely to hear reference to John Stott's The Cross of Christ, to N. T. Wright's Jesus & the Victory of God or The Resurrection of the Son of God, or J. I. Packer's Knowing God. Maybe evangelicals are shifting to Anglicanism because Anglicans, when they actually are evangelical in their outlook, are better at preserving the intellectual legacy of Protestantism than the home grown varieties in the United States.
Anderson doesn't really define what "evangelical" even means. He seems to exclude the mainline denominations as best we might understand those. He obviously excludes Anglicanism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy and believes that conversions to those traditions indicate a failure of young evangelicals to engage with the intellectual riches of their native traditions. Well, what if Noll had a point more than a decade ago and those intellectual riches aren't there now, or are so far back that finding them means you have to go outside what would now be considered "evangelical" by Anderson?
I hardly mean to suggest that people can't or shouldn't stay in a tradition even if there are flaws in such a tradition but let me give an example from my own life. I have attended Mars Hill for years. What tradition does it embody? Calvinism? Well, they reject infant baptism and Calvin was into that. They affirm adult believer baptism which would make them anabaptist. They hold to an elder managed government which applied across multiple campuses means there's a sort of episcopate. Campus pastors run things locally and the executive board runs the strategic things and no member input or member meetings have any bearing on major purchases or financial decisions. That could be construed as vaguely presbyterian in terms of church polity, especially with Calvinism ... but there is also no higher or mid range liturgy. It's as though it's a sort of presbyterian church government writ tiny with a Baptist ultra-low liturgical approach and approach to the sacraments. Yet is it also ostensibly charismatic yet no gifts are ever demonstrated in any services so in a sense it is charismatic in theory but not observably so.
So which tradition applies? All? None? If Anderson is concerned about the design-your-own evangelicallism Mars Hill exemplifies this at a very personal and perhaps even idiosyncratic level. Driscoll formed his own evangelical denomination on the fly, so much on the fly he couldn't have possibly planned it that way, but Mars Hill is poised to become something like another Calvary Fellowship or Calvary Chapel type movement.
But let's consider how Driscoll has approached the legacies within evangelicalism in light of Anderson's complaint. What if Driscoll has read all those authors and still engineers a new sort of evangelicalism from a grab bag because he has found things wanting in each individual tradition? His background was apparently the jackest of jack Catholics so he has come to a Protestant evangelical faith from the other side and may have a, not to put it too coldly, a very pragmatic and utilitarian approach. He would rather jettison the sorts of traditions Anderson asks us to embrace than embrace them and embrace the baggage they bring with them across generations.
So when Anderson reaches the point where he says:
All this bodes badly for the future of evangelicalism. In the face of declining partisanship, patriotism, and eroding family ties, young evangelicals have increasingly turned away from their roots in search of a sense of grounding and stability. They have the intelligence to notice the flaws, but often lack the charity and the patience to work to fix them.
I halfway agree. Driscoll said he started Mars Hill partly because he didn't like any of the other churches and wanted to start one that had a heart for missions like he did. That sure sounds like not having the charity or patience to work within an evangelical tradition tofix things. That's Dricoll for you. Thing is, would Anderson say Driscoll was wrong to do that? Driscoll has avoided the kind of activist and politicized soap boxing that older evangelicals, not least Dobson, seem to have embraced. In a setting like Seattle where people lean liberal in their politics and as liberal in personal ethics Driscoll hasn't really compromised on ethics but has steered clear of attempting to argue for more partisanship, more patriotism, as though that was needed. It's not. Jesus said that we would be known by our love for one another, not by the uniformity of our ballots cast in favor of this or that political candidate.
This doesn't mean it doesn't matter what candidates say or do regarding abortion, captial punishment, fiscal policy, or any number of other things. But what I would suggest it does mean is that evangelicals have made thems irrelevant when they have embraced a culture war to win back the culture for Christ. Even Francis Schaeffer, who spent decades telling us America had become a post-Christian culture, got talked into activism a bit by his son Frank, who now has repudiated both what he considers hsi father's fundamentalist background and the right-wing politics he goaded his father into.
So if we come back to Driscoll as an example of a new evangellical, what would Anderson say? Did Mark lack the charity and patience to attempt to fix things from within? If so is that a problem? If it IS a problem then what is significant about that? Is the design-your-own-evangelicalism because you don't like the traditions around you a sign of uber-American individualism? Yeah, sure, I'd agree with that. That can become a problem in as much as without a unified tradition to appeal to the capacity to have a historical basis in which to cultivate and also correct excesses in an evangelical stream of thought don't exist. If things are too fluid then there is no basis for accepted communal behavior.
For instance, Wesleyans and Holiness movement folks tend to look askance on dancing and drinking. They don't do those things. Individuals might but as a group policy is to abstain from those things. There are a few ways to deal with this if you're a Methodist who likes to drink.
1. You can just drink in defiance of your tradition,
2. you can not drink and hold firm that no Methodist should drink alcohol,
3. you can decide that it would be hypocritical to affirm Wesleyan teaching in general but ignore precedent on alcohol and decide to go somewhere where there is no tension between your personal convictions about alcohol and those of your church ...
4. or you can attempt to "fix" what you consider to be a mishandling of scripture on the issue of alcohol.
Which would Anderson advise you to do based on the above paragraph? Why #4 of course. Which options make more sense at a personal level or at the level of wanting to be part of a spiritual community that has shared values and convictions? One or three.
Take infant baptism. If your church refuses to baptise infants but you believe you should path 3 is your only option. No one who takes the baptism of infants seriously wants to do it themselves even if they consider themselves the priest or pastor to their own family. To be a child of the covenant means having a part in the family of God, purchased by the blood of Christ and since baptism has replaced circumcision as the sign of being part of the covenanted people of God it only makes sense that you baptise your infant before the body of believers. Would it really make any sense to try to "fix" a tradition from within if you know there is a centuries long history of that evangelical tradition not budging?
We have such a mobile society now that Anderson may underestimate the difficult of what he is suggesting. If you attempt to "fix" things within your evangelical tradition, whatever Anderson means by evangelical, you could quickly get labeled divisive or be asked to leave. If I had stayed in an Assemblies of God church with my Calvinist leanings and my firm belief that not only are tongues not necessary but that there is no clear biblical warrant that spiritual gifts once given are had for any longer than they may be a blessing to the local church. In other words, I'm saying a person may temporarily have a spiritual gift to bless the church that might be recalled. The gifts of God are without recall doesn't mean you always have a spiritual gift like tongues because where there are tongues they shall cease. The changes I came to studying Scripture caused me to so drastically reassess pneumatology and soteriology that I realize the most respectful thing I could do was not stay in the Pentecostal tradition and start finding a place where I did fit.
If the boomers church hopped why wouldn't their children? Anderson doesn't even seem to address this in a way that could provide a solution, if there is one.
Friday, January 16, 2009
"The New Evangelical Scandal" same as the Old Evangelical scandal part 1
PART ONE: You cannot serve both God and country? Why not?
http://www.civitate.org/2009/01/the-new-evangelical-scandal/
At the core of this revised patriotism is the attempt to rescue the Gospel from its American captivity, the chief symbol of which is the presence of the American flag in many evangelical churches. As the argument goes, the presence of patriotic symbols in the house of God inevitably marginalizes the church by subordinating it to the political order. Many young evangelicals fall into the trap of placing an “or” where there previously had been an “and,” assuming that we can remain loyal only to God or Caesar, but never both.
Now it's greatly amusing to me that he immediately follows this:
From whence the devaluation of patriotism? Sadly, much of this view is reinforced at historically Christian universities, which have become hotbeds of a baptized version of Sixties liberalism that is not as much anti-American as it is anti-national.
"From whence" is always a great way to come across as though you're talking down to whomever is reading the article (wink wink) except for those who love to write "whence" into something whenever they want a nice rhetorical flourish. And it sure looks pretty on the page, I admit it.
Well, maybe there's something to it, this aloofness to national identity. I mean, if I took even my own life as an example I'm the child of an interracial marriage. My mom is white and my biological father would probably be considered one of the "native peoples". So those of us who have family histories that don't just involve a simple history of white patriots begetting more white patriots for us an ambivalence about the legacy of the United States is understandable.
Yet even if I set that aside and just considered some passages from scripture there is a case to be considerate of government authority and obedient to it but to acknowledge that while God may have appointed it that does not always mean it is just. God appointed Pharoah to be destroyed. God established Herod but killed him when he accepted the praise, "This is the voice of a god, not a man." While the apostles urge us to respect and submit to government John shares in his Apocalypse that government is fully capable of being a seat of evil. If there is room for ambivalence about one and the same political earthly empire across the apostolic testimony then I don't think it's wrong for Christians to consider that in their thoughts about government now. It is only possible to serve one's country truly if one first serves the one true God and here I'm speaking just to Christians. Unbelievers and people of other faiths are not really who I am addressing here. I'm not expecting my atheist/agnostic buddies to even take this approach I'm taking here.
Peter instructed believers in the dispersion to obey the authorities God had put in place. We should note these authorities had things like venerating Caeser as a god. As a few theologians have pointed out to declare that Jesus was Lord was to declare that Caeser wasn't, that Jesus was a king greater than Caeser. Now after years of faddish declarations that Christianity was merely a way to shore up empire the opposite fad may be setting in but we should not see either fad as the real point.
Humankind cannot bear very much reality a fine poet once wrote, I believe, and so the beauty and brutality of reality is such that we tend to grasp one while letting go of the other. This is, after all, the advice of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes who points out that the godly man avoids all extremes. What have we not seen in the last thirty or so years if not men and women who profess a love for God while going to extremes. If Billy Joel doesn't know why he goes to extremes I'm sure we won't figure it out either. If evangelicals are moving toward the center that will look like a leftward movement to Anderson but if the GOAL these evangelicals have is to move toward a centrist position Anderson may be fretting about that movement because he doesn't understand its purpose. And, really, who could? Only God knows for sure and He isn't telling us. He's certainly not telling me anyway so I have to make a measley semi-educated guess, possibly the most dangerous kind there is.
Now at the risk of pointing out the obvious, communism represented a system that was in opposition to the West not just on economic grounds or on the grounds of the nature of governance but on religious grounds. So,to wit, godless communist oppressors per Calvin & Hobbes. When the communist bloc changed it had seemed to many that we "won" the Cold War even though it was arguably a matter of who managed to survive longest while holding breath underwater.
Why does this matter? With an enemy outside our nation that was an enemy both in terms of military power and in terms of ideological legacy it was much simpler and easier for evangelicals to equate loyalty to one's country with loyalty to one's God, since God had sovereignly allowed you to be born in the land of the free. That is not so easy to defend now that there isn't a Soviet bloc. We should still be immensely grateful to be able to live in the United States. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else, really. But I have to admit that when I consider Anderson's implied lament that evangelicals think we have to honor either God or country he may be missing out on some defensible reasosn for having some ambivalence about the nation.
http://www.civitate.org/2009/01/the-new-evangelical-scandal/
At the core of this revised patriotism is the attempt to rescue the Gospel from its American captivity, the chief symbol of which is the presence of the American flag in many evangelical churches. As the argument goes, the presence of patriotic symbols in the house of God inevitably marginalizes the church by subordinating it to the political order. Many young evangelicals fall into the trap of placing an “or” where there previously had been an “and,” assuming that we can remain loyal only to God or Caesar, but never both.
Now it's greatly amusing to me that he immediately follows this:
From whence the devaluation of patriotism? Sadly, much of this view is reinforced at historically Christian universities, which have become hotbeds of a baptized version of Sixties liberalism that is not as much anti-American as it is anti-national.
"From whence" is always a great way to come across as though you're talking down to whomever is reading the article (wink wink) except for those who love to write "whence" into something whenever they want a nice rhetorical flourish. And it sure looks pretty on the page, I admit it.
Well, maybe there's something to it, this aloofness to national identity. I mean, if I took even my own life as an example I'm the child of an interracial marriage. My mom is white and my biological father would probably be considered one of the "native peoples". So those of us who have family histories that don't just involve a simple history of white patriots begetting more white patriots for us an ambivalence about the legacy of the United States is understandable.
Yet even if I set that aside and just considered some passages from scripture there is a case to be considerate of government authority and obedient to it but to acknowledge that while God may have appointed it that does not always mean it is just. God appointed Pharoah to be destroyed. God established Herod but killed him when he accepted the praise, "This is the voice of a god, not a man." While the apostles urge us to respect and submit to government John shares in his Apocalypse that government is fully capable of being a seat of evil. If there is room for ambivalence about one and the same political earthly empire across the apostolic testimony then I don't think it's wrong for Christians to consider that in their thoughts about government now. It is only possible to serve one's country truly if one first serves the one true God and here I'm speaking just to Christians. Unbelievers and people of other faiths are not really who I am addressing here. I'm not expecting my atheist/agnostic buddies to even take this approach I'm taking here.
Peter instructed believers in the dispersion to obey the authorities God had put in place. We should note these authorities had things like venerating Caeser as a god. As a few theologians have pointed out to declare that Jesus was Lord was to declare that Caeser wasn't, that Jesus was a king greater than Caeser. Now after years of faddish declarations that Christianity was merely a way to shore up empire the opposite fad may be setting in but we should not see either fad as the real point.
Humankind cannot bear very much reality a fine poet once wrote, I believe, and so the beauty and brutality of reality is such that we tend to grasp one while letting go of the other. This is, after all, the advice of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes who points out that the godly man avoids all extremes. What have we not seen in the last thirty or so years if not men and women who profess a love for God while going to extremes. If Billy Joel doesn't know why he goes to extremes I'm sure we won't figure it out either. If evangelicals are moving toward the center that will look like a leftward movement to Anderson but if the GOAL these evangelicals have is to move toward a centrist position Anderson may be fretting about that movement because he doesn't understand its purpose. And, really, who could? Only God knows for sure and He isn't telling us. He's certainly not telling me anyway so I have to make a measley semi-educated guess, possibly the most dangerous kind there is.
Now at the risk of pointing out the obvious, communism represented a system that was in opposition to the West not just on economic grounds or on the grounds of the nature of governance but on religious grounds. So,to wit, godless communist oppressors per Calvin & Hobbes. When the communist bloc changed it had seemed to many that we "won" the Cold War even though it was arguably a matter of who managed to survive longest while holding breath underwater.
Why does this matter? With an enemy outside our nation that was an enemy both in terms of military power and in terms of ideological legacy it was much simpler and easier for evangelicals to equate loyalty to one's country with loyalty to one's God, since God had sovereignly allowed you to be born in the land of the free. That is not so easy to defend now that there isn't a Soviet bloc. We should still be immensely grateful to be able to live in the United States. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else, really. But I have to admit that when I consider Anderson's implied lament that evangelicals think we have to honor either God or country he may be missing out on some defensible reasosn for having some ambivalence about the nation.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
"The New Evangelical Scandal" same as the old Evangelical scandal, an introduction
http://www.civitate.org/2009/01/the-new-evangelical-scandal/
The first half of the article about politics does not, honestly, interest me as much because I consider myself evangelical but thought McCain stood no chance once he nominated Palin. In fact the kinds of churches Palin has attended I hesitate to identify as evangelical for reasons I don't feel like getting into right now but will get to later since Anderson touches on issues of eschatology. The real problem with Palin's selection as VP candidate is that it so utterly vitiated the legitimacy of McCain's campaign saying Obama lacked experience to serve adequately in the Executive Office that it wasn't even funny. I don't have to think she was some stupid hick like some of my less temperate friends did nor do I think she was "Esther" as a few probably false prophecies had it said about her. If I had a dollar for every bunk prophecy I have heard ... I would have paid off a lot of college debt by now.
So I was not one of those evangelicals "overjoyed" at Palin's nomination. I think it was one of many reasons McCain lost on all the points that mattered. All Obama had to do for his campaign was to master Clintonism more effectively than Hillary, not that that would be the least bit difficult.
A basic skepticism I have about Anderson's response to Rosin is that this prediction that evangelicals may move left is probably just a confirmation bias. After decades of political activism and culture war discussions we need to bear in mind the very real possibility that the evangelical community is not moving "left" as it is moving to a more centrist position. In other words, the odds that evangelicals are going to vote Democratic seems very low but the odds that they may become more moderate Republicans seems higher if the trends Anderson is looking at aren't the result of a sociological statistical fad. He seems to have a tacit understanding that evangelicals are Republican and dispensationalist and that Democratic party heads have attempted to woo evangelicals over to their side. So if that is the case then we are at a point in history where if we look at evangelicals over the last twenty years and consider what is broadly called the religious right then any move toward a centrist position would necessarily have to be moving left.
If you're used to seeing things only in those terms as either strictly moving right or left without a consideration of other variables ... then evangelicals adding social concerns to moral conservatism may seem like a leftward tilt when that may not be what it is at all. I'm not sure Anderson has this concern but it is worth saying that given some of the rhetoric I have seen from both left and right moving toward a more centrist position would be considered a betrayal by either side. If you read some of the squealing lefties did about Obama compromising on their most cherished principles you understand what I'm talking about and there's no need to labor the point.
Anderson also seems to overlook an interesting tension that reveals that the problems he's seeing aren't new at all. Take the decilne in national or patriotic pride. That has been brewing for nearly half a century and it tends to play out along partisan lines. The political partisans are proud of THEIR legacy and not the legacy of the people they consider on the other team. We should be proud of Reagan ... but not Roosevelt. We should be proud of Kennedy and Roosevelt ... but not of Reagan or the other Roosevelt and certainly not of Nixon.
Nearly forty years after Watergate who wouldn't think a little skepticism about government is called for? If the partisan goal of Christian conservatives is the abolition of abortion and anything less than that is the permission of murder in the United States then the very nature of politics, a kind of pragmatism that recognizes that getting what you want
The devaluation of patriotism is something that may not be a bad thing. Peter exhorted us as resident aliens, as ambassadors, as sojourners, as exiles, as those who live in a time and place that is part of an age that is passing away. So, yes, we are Americans but we don't "have" to see ourselves as Americans first or on an equal footing with our identity in Christ.
Beyond that Mark Noll rightly pointed out what should be obvious, that the Civil War happened in a culture that was almost universally agreed upon evangelical principles. Rather than consider if Rick Warren has read the giants of the faith in evangelicalism Anderson might do well to ask whether that would have changed things. It is not histrionic or unfair to note that evangelicals were fighting on both sides of the Civil War and the battle was over issues that have not really been resolved to this day.
Given what I have seen of the pendulum and culture war battle cries that Christians need to make society better, it doesn't seem to matter if it is fueled by premillenialism or post-millenialism the result is a burn out of the generation and a burn out of the next generation (whether it's the immediately descended one or the next century). Sure, I lean conservative but the old saw is that politics is about compromise and religion is about absolutes so how do you compromise absolutes by being a mixer of politics and religion? Every side has to consider this ... except maybe the "brights" but they have their own mixture issues.
That is all for the moment. Later I will tend to the most fascinating parts of the article and the issues and observations raised in the second half. There is a lot that I think Anderson doesn't get but when he nails things he nails things really well. I think that his criticisms are themselves openings for some serious criticism of what his suppositions seem to be.
For now I'll end a bit too snarkily and say that the "new"scandal of evangelicalism is the same as the "old" scandal and I hope to unpack why I think that ... possibly over the next month.
For any of the blog entries with the above title to make sense you have to read all of the article I link to above. Yep, all of it. It won't have hurt to have read some Mark Noll and N. T. Wright either. What I'm about to say is that Anderson has written, in general, an often fascinating article but he doesn't realize that the "new" evangelical is the same as what might now be called the "old" evangelical scandal Mark Noll tackled more than a decade ago. It has worked itself out to a new destination along a path but that path in itself is not new. In other words, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
But Anderson, I believe, also misconstrues some things in terms of possibilities and anticipating reactions ... which I will get to eventually.
This article was linked to by iMonk. Surprise, I read iMonk and so I'm linking to it here. But I mention this by way of preface--this article nails so many aspects of what I have seen and thought as a self-identifying evangelical Protestant over the last ten years it is fascinating to read someone articulate many things I have been thinking for years.
The first half of the article about politics does not, honestly, interest me as much because I consider myself evangelical but thought McCain stood no chance once he nominated Palin. In fact the kinds of churches Palin has attended I hesitate to identify as evangelical for reasons I don't feel like getting into right now but will get to later since Anderson touches on issues of eschatology. The real problem with Palin's selection as VP candidate is that it so utterly vitiated the legitimacy of McCain's campaign saying Obama lacked experience to serve adequately in the Executive Office that it wasn't even funny. I don't have to think she was some stupid hick like some of my less temperate friends did nor do I think she was "Esther" as a few probably false prophecies had it said about her. If I had a dollar for every bunk prophecy I have heard ... I would have paid off a lot of college debt by now.
So I was not one of those evangelicals "overjoyed" at Palin's nomination. I think it was one of many reasons McCain lost on all the points that mattered. All Obama had to do for his campaign was to master Clintonism more effectively than Hillary, not that that would be the least bit difficult.
A basic skepticism I have about Anderson's response to Rosin is that this prediction that evangelicals may move left is probably just a confirmation bias. After decades of political activism and culture war discussions we need to bear in mind the very real possibility that the evangelical community is not moving "left" as it is moving to a more centrist position. In other words, the odds that evangelicals are going to vote Democratic seems very low but the odds that they may become more moderate Republicans seems higher if the trends Anderson is looking at aren't the result of a sociological statistical fad. He seems to have a tacit understanding that evangelicals are Republican and dispensationalist and that Democratic party heads have attempted to woo evangelicals over to their side. So if that is the case then we are at a point in history where if we look at evangelicals over the last twenty years and consider what is broadly called the religious right then any move toward a centrist position would necessarily have to be moving left.
If you're used to seeing things only in those terms as either strictly moving right or left without a consideration of other variables ... then evangelicals adding social concerns to moral conservatism may seem like a leftward tilt when that may not be what it is at all. I'm not sure Anderson has this concern but it is worth saying that given some of the rhetoric I have seen from both left and right moving toward a more centrist position would be considered a betrayal by either side. If you read some of the squealing lefties did about Obama compromising on their most cherished principles you understand what I'm talking about and there's no need to labor the point.
Anderson also seems to overlook an interesting tension that reveals that the problems he's seeing aren't new at all. Take the decilne in national or patriotic pride. That has been brewing for nearly half a century and it tends to play out along partisan lines. The political partisans are proud of THEIR legacy and not the legacy of the people they consider on the other team. We should be proud of Reagan ... but not Roosevelt. We should be proud of Kennedy and Roosevelt ... but not of Reagan or the other Roosevelt and certainly not of Nixon.
Nearly forty years after Watergate who wouldn't think a little skepticism about government is called for? If the partisan goal of Christian conservatives is the abolition of abortion and anything less than that is the permission of murder in the United States then the very nature of politics, a kind of pragmatism that recognizes that getting what you want
The devaluation of patriotism is something that may not be a bad thing. Peter exhorted us as resident aliens, as ambassadors, as sojourners, as exiles, as those who live in a time and place that is part of an age that is passing away. So, yes, we are Americans but we don't "have" to see ourselves as Americans first or on an equal footing with our identity in Christ.
Beyond that Mark Noll rightly pointed out what should be obvious, that the Civil War happened in a culture that was almost universally agreed upon evangelical principles. Rather than consider if Rick Warren has read the giants of the faith in evangelicalism Anderson might do well to ask whether that would have changed things. It is not histrionic or unfair to note that evangelicals were fighting on both sides of the Civil War and the battle was over issues that have not really been resolved to this day.
Given what I have seen of the pendulum and culture war battle cries that Christians need to make society better, it doesn't seem to matter if it is fueled by premillenialism or post-millenialism the result is a burn out of the generation and a burn out of the next generation (whether it's the immediately descended one or the next century). Sure, I lean conservative but the old saw is that politics is about compromise and religion is about absolutes so how do you compromise absolutes by being a mixer of politics and religion? Every side has to consider this ... except maybe the "brights" but they have their own mixture issues.
That is all for the moment. Later I will tend to the most fascinating parts of the article and the issues and observations raised in the second half. There is a lot that I think Anderson doesn't get but when he nails things he nails things really well. I think that his criticisms are themselves openings for some serious criticism of what his suppositions seem to be.
For now I'll end a bit too snarkily and say that the "new"scandal of evangelicalism is the same as the "old" scandal and I hope to unpack why I think that ... possibly over the next month.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
gah! fugues are hard to write
It should go without saying but if you have ever tried to write a fugue you know how difficult they are! The fugue in question I am trying to write is for viola and guitar ... and I am constantly rediscovering how difficult fugues are to write just at the keyboard. One of the central difficulties is pulling off a satisfying form of what would be called invertible counterpoint. The subject, countersubject, and second countersubject should express solid voice-leading in any iteration
SC1C2
SC2C1
C1SC2
C1C2S
C2C1S
C2SC1
Well, the problem is that the guitar and viola don't always present practical possibilities for that and so I have fallen prey to the temptation to fudge the second countersubject in some ways that are frankly unsatisfying when I start working out new ideas for middle entries and episodes. Generally episodes and middle entries derive from material in the exposition, though free material is always possible and that means that you had best be VERY satisfied with your three tunes in the exposition before you proceed.
That's the thing. I'm not. I'm very happy with the SUBJECT and the first countersubject pleases me but the second countersubject has some problems. I suppose I haven't helped myself any by insisting on a subject that has two measures of major followed by two measures of parallel minor. The rapid modal mutation is the thing I most like about the subject and the first countersubject complements that element nicely. The second countersubject .... it is tough to find a way to round it off in a way that doesn't lead to parallel fifths when the two countersubjects are interchanged.
Perhaps this is just a problem in my understanding of counterpoint but any permutation should work equally well and that is why fugue expositions can be so hard to master. When I finally get this exposition right the episodes and middle entries will all be easier ... not to say easy.
At least the two stretto passages, the chorale, and the coda all work really well. I have all of those details worked out in such a way that the countersubjects are just not that important in the last third of the piece. Sometimes I want to be lazy and just call the thing a fugato and not worry about it ... but I'm picky and principled I guess. I may have to drop that to ensure that the piece can go somewhere.
SC1C2
SC2C1
C1SC2
C1C2S
C2C1S
C2SC1
Well, the problem is that the guitar and viola don't always present practical possibilities for that and so I have fallen prey to the temptation to fudge the second countersubject in some ways that are frankly unsatisfying when I start working out new ideas for middle entries and episodes. Generally episodes and middle entries derive from material in the exposition, though free material is always possible and that means that you had best be VERY satisfied with your three tunes in the exposition before you proceed.
That's the thing. I'm not. I'm very happy with the SUBJECT and the first countersubject pleases me but the second countersubject has some problems. I suppose I haven't helped myself any by insisting on a subject that has two measures of major followed by two measures of parallel minor. The rapid modal mutation is the thing I most like about the subject and the first countersubject complements that element nicely. The second countersubject .... it is tough to find a way to round it off in a way that doesn't lead to parallel fifths when the two countersubjects are interchanged.
Perhaps this is just a problem in my understanding of counterpoint but any permutation should work equally well and that is why fugue expositions can be so hard to master. When I finally get this exposition right the episodes and middle entries will all be easier ... not to say easy.
At least the two stretto passages, the chorale, and the coda all work really well. I have all of those details worked out in such a way that the countersubjects are just not that important in the last third of the piece. Sometimes I want to be lazy and just call the thing a fugato and not worry about it ... but I'm picky and principled I guess. I may have to drop that to ensure that the piece can go somewhere.
Friday, January 09, 2009
Seriously, I have to link to this, the passing of Richard John Neuhaus
http://cyberbrethren.typepad.com/cyberbrethren/2009/01/a-grief-observed-richard-john-neuhaus.html
I admit it, up front, that I'm one of those Protestants who reads First Things and found what Neuhuas wrote to be interesting about half the time. Considering how Protestant I am and how unsteeped I am in a number of things (like Lutheranism) that he was before he converted to Catholicism there's stuff I admit I just didn't always get, or care about.
But what I found fascinating and still find fascinating about First Things is that whether or not I agree with it it is a kind of ecumenical I find interesting. Not the namby pamby ecumenicism that skates over profound confessional and doctrinal differences in substance or formulation but of a stripe that points out that Protestants and Catholics really differ on key things. We can't paper over those differences and shouldn't but we can also debate them. So, sure, I remain Protestant but we don't have an Inquisition going on and I have over the years become just jaded enough about how Protestants venerate relics, venerate saints, often incorporate sacramental ideas about marriage as a sanctifying sacrament without really seeing how it is indebted to earlier traditions within Catholicism, or any number of other debates.
It's not that I have any interest in crossing the Tiber at all, it's that I have grown over a good chunk of my life to have made comparative religion a modesty hobby of mine. I'm not that great at it, really and I admit it has only applied to differences within Christian confessions but those differences are sufficiently legion I could spend the rest of my life learning about them.
And Neuhaus, I must say, was one of the more consistently interesting Catholics for me to read from. I'm going to remember the smart-ass observation that mainline Protestants in America were all enthusiastic post-millenials in the 19th century until World War I happened and then, lo and behold, these churches suddenly become premillenial because they no realize they won't Christianize the world and it's all going to seed. No, really, it was hilarious and I laughed out loud. And I can read about things ten years after Gary North and the Y2K problem and I can still laugh out loud like some green haired, white skinned Batman villain.
And I'm conservative, yes. Moderately conservative, so I don't find First Things "unbearably arrogant to people they don't agree with" as a professor I met once put it. Everyone is like that. I mean, I HAVE read Salon after all. Everyone gets like that at some point. :)
If you're going to be controversial be convervational and also be interesting. There have been conservatives who I think have been better at that than others. Coulter I don't pay attention. Limbaugh is not interesting to me. I'll admit it, Bill Buckley and Neuhaus were the sorts of conservatives I was more interested in keeping track of. By way of aside I'm not surprised Christopher Buckley decided Obama was the better deal. I've been waiting for conservatives to actually follow their so-called platform for the last twenty years and there's no sign that they will. It's like a boyfriend or girlfriend promising they will be true and dating someone else every other weekend.
It's better to say exactly what you are and where you're at up front and let the conflict happen than to skim things and as a Protestant I appreciate that Neuhaus could articulate the differences and also, I think, articulate points of common ground.
Besides, a tribute to Messiaen seems to make more sense in First Things than Christianity Today.
I admit it, up front, that I'm one of those Protestants who reads First Things and found what Neuhuas wrote to be interesting about half the time. Considering how Protestant I am and how unsteeped I am in a number of things (like Lutheranism) that he was before he converted to Catholicism there's stuff I admit I just didn't always get, or care about.
But what I found fascinating and still find fascinating about First Things is that whether or not I agree with it it is a kind of ecumenical I find interesting. Not the namby pamby ecumenicism that skates over profound confessional and doctrinal differences in substance or formulation but of a stripe that points out that Protestants and Catholics really differ on key things. We can't paper over those differences and shouldn't but we can also debate them. So, sure, I remain Protestant but we don't have an Inquisition going on and I have over the years become just jaded enough about how Protestants venerate relics, venerate saints, often incorporate sacramental ideas about marriage as a sanctifying sacrament without really seeing how it is indebted to earlier traditions within Catholicism, or any number of other debates.
It's not that I have any interest in crossing the Tiber at all, it's that I have grown over a good chunk of my life to have made comparative religion a modesty hobby of mine. I'm not that great at it, really and I admit it has only applied to differences within Christian confessions but those differences are sufficiently legion I could spend the rest of my life learning about them.
And Neuhaus, I must say, was one of the more consistently interesting Catholics for me to read from. I'm going to remember the smart-ass observation that mainline Protestants in America were all enthusiastic post-millenials in the 19th century until World War I happened and then, lo and behold, these churches suddenly become premillenial because they no realize they won't Christianize the world and it's all going to seed. No, really, it was hilarious and I laughed out loud. And I can read about things ten years after Gary North and the Y2K problem and I can still laugh out loud like some green haired, white skinned Batman villain.
And I'm conservative, yes. Moderately conservative, so I don't find First Things "unbearably arrogant to people they don't agree with" as a professor I met once put it. Everyone is like that. I mean, I HAVE read Salon after all. Everyone gets like that at some point. :)
If you're going to be controversial be convervational and also be interesting. There have been conservatives who I think have been better at that than others. Coulter I don't pay attention. Limbaugh is not interesting to me. I'll admit it, Bill Buckley and Neuhaus were the sorts of conservatives I was more interested in keeping track of. By way of aside I'm not surprised Christopher Buckley decided Obama was the better deal. I've been waiting for conservatives to actually follow their so-called platform for the last twenty years and there's no sign that they will. It's like a boyfriend or girlfriend promising they will be true and dating someone else every other weekend.
It's better to say exactly what you are and where you're at up front and let the conflict happen than to skim things and as a Protestant I appreciate that Neuhaus could articulate the differences and also, I think, articulate points of common ground.
Besides, a tribute to Messiaen seems to make more sense in First Things than Christianity Today.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Internet Monk, his wife's Catholic conversion and ruminations on "headship"
If the man is the spiritual authority in his home and is a Baptist and his wife converts to Catholicism does that constitute a failure of his "headship"? Somewhere some very serious Christians must be blogging about this issue and I would rather make an entry that is not very serious becasue any time I attempt to seriously consider it ... I find it perplexing.
I know about the "you and your household" verses. I know about all that covenant stuff. Thing is it's easy to take that stuff too far and it is easy to misread covenantal theology into texts because, hey, you feel like it. I've met guys who seriously argued Adam and God had a covenant. God has to have a covenant with everything. Now covenants are important ... but there has been in some places a fad about covenants that in practice is just another variation of Western contract negotiation. The "covenant" aspect comes along simply because some pastors want to make sure that if they break the rules you still have to keep them. If you break the rules that they may change when they see fit then they can discipline you. There's something somewhere in there about servant leadership but I will leave that alone for now.
Christians I have interacted with over the last eight years might give an emphatic "yes" to that initial question. I'm parsing the potential significance of this because depending on how you slice the apple headship may mean that if your wife or kids leave your denominational affiliation it means you're a failure as "head" or it may mean the definition of "headship" holds you responsible for things that autonomous moral agents also known as sinners have already made decisions about. I'm not considering the whole scenario from the standpoint of "is so and so fit to be a pastor anymore" but "what is the practical outworking of this kind of view?" and "What does 'headship' actually mean if it is applied in a setting to say that a husband is responsible for his household?"
The way I have heard it described is that Eve sinned first but God came looking for Adam. Fair enough, I get that. But I have also seen people declare, almost without batting an eyelash, that if Samson turned out as badly as he did it is because his parents dropped the ball, no ifs ands or buts. Child of the covenant stuff and all that, I guess. Thing is, if you are a Protestant and you raise your kids up to be Protestants and then they jump ship and become Orthodox or Catholic does that mean you failed as a parent? Really? Doctrinal litmus tests become the measure of your parenting skills? If my parents raising me in a Pentecostal background about half the days of my youth was supposed to have gotten me to be a Pentecostal Republican then, sure, I'd have to say they "failed" because I have become a Calvinist with Anglican and Lutheran sympathies while retaining aspects of charismatic/pentecostal thought and some sympathies to Presbyterianism. And I happen to be an often politically apathetic moderate real conservative as opposed to a neo-conservative and I am deeply skeptical about Christian attempts to sanctify the public sphere for their own benefit while professing a love of country and God.
But the thing is my parents didn't raise me to be a particular KIND of Christian. They raised me to be a Christian. My differing with them on any number of doctrinal or political issues is not and should not be taken as a sign that they failed. If my family who are Orthodox one day discover that one of their kids becomes a Methodist that won't mean they will have failed as parents.
Would such a change indicate that perhaps a pastor had not, so far as outsiders observed, done a good job of keeping his house in order for the sake of satisfying a Baptist or Catholic or Presbyterian hiearchy? Well, sure, I get that. But what I am contemplating here is the nature of the parent-child relationship. At the risk of pointing out the obvious the conundrum of training your kid to think for himself is that he will and then he's likely to think you have some bad ideas. I have personally been skeptical of parents who want to raise kids to think for themselves from the earliest age. Kids aren't that smart by nature, they aren't that autonomous,and it's foolhardy to impose on them a level of emotional, intellectual, and cultural responsibility they are developmentally incapable of.
So, no, were I to be a parent Iwould not be that kind of "enlightened" parent. I would insist on raising my kids to be Christians who learn about Christ, the Father, and Spirit and learn the Bible. What I'm not sure I would do is raise them to think that other confessional tradtiions within Christendom are a priori wrong. That doesn't mean I'd be so ecumenical as to let everything go by the board a la Unitarianism, it means that I take seriously the proverb that says that if you train up a child in the way that he should go then when he is old he won't depart from it.
But I know from my own life and what I learned of the life of my parents is that this is no insurance clause that the kid won't veer wildly from the path when young. As Michael Spenser once put it, the proverb says that when he is OLD he won't depart from it. He might for a while in his hot-blooded youth. I know a few people whose rebellious years were full of hedonism and turning away from the faith and they stayed away for good. Others came back to the faith. My rebellion and asserting my own identity in my late teens and early twenties was to become a Calvinist and to become more moderate in my politics. It didn't make things easy for my parents, I guess I'll just leave it at that. Anyone can imagine how that might have looked.
I'm certainly not married but what struck me about Spenser sharing his frustration about his wife's conversion to Catholcicism is the gnawing sense that came from in his writings that maybe it was his fault. Married people must have some aspect of themselves so inextricably tied to the other person that it would look, frankly, like a really co-dependent identity. Like you're not really you unless the other person is there. I have no real comprehension of that and I admit it. What things I can infer from what Spenser has shared in different settings is that no matter how one flesh you may be when it comes to Christ the two of you are NOT one and that in the age to come you won't be married. Who knkows whether the breath of man rises to God or the breath of the animal descends to the earth. Koholeth asks the question as if he didn't know. Do we have immortal souls? Not likely since only God is eternal, but more pertinent is the observation that we cannot be so certain of what we ourselves are.
I have heard that one of the beauties and trials of marriage is that you can wake up every morning and ask yourself, "Who is this person beside me?" Marriage is the trial or joy or whatever it is of waking up each morning with a quest, if I am observing things with any accuracy (and I'm probably not) and that quest is to know Christ but also to know and be known by this other person. I have heard it said that a husband or wife is the one who will sin against you and be sinned against by you more than anyone on earth. If that's true then parents can rest easy because it means there's finally someone else their kid can be upset with and blame for ruining their lives. ;)
I know about the "you and your household" verses. I know about all that covenant stuff. Thing is it's easy to take that stuff too far and it is easy to misread covenantal theology into texts because, hey, you feel like it. I've met guys who seriously argued Adam and God had a covenant. God has to have a covenant with everything. Now covenants are important ... but there has been in some places a fad about covenants that in practice is just another variation of Western contract negotiation. The "covenant" aspect comes along simply because some pastors want to make sure that if they break the rules you still have to keep them. If you break the rules that they may change when they see fit then they can discipline you. There's something somewhere in there about servant leadership but I will leave that alone for now.
Christians I have interacted with over the last eight years might give an emphatic "yes" to that initial question. I'm parsing the potential significance of this because depending on how you slice the apple headship may mean that if your wife or kids leave your denominational affiliation it means you're a failure as "head" or it may mean the definition of "headship" holds you responsible for things that autonomous moral agents also known as sinners have already made decisions about. I'm not considering the whole scenario from the standpoint of "is so and so fit to be a pastor anymore" but "what is the practical outworking of this kind of view?" and "What does 'headship' actually mean if it is applied in a setting to say that a husband is responsible for his household?"
The way I have heard it described is that Eve sinned first but God came looking for Adam. Fair enough, I get that. But I have also seen people declare, almost without batting an eyelash, that if Samson turned out as badly as he did it is because his parents dropped the ball, no ifs ands or buts. Child of the covenant stuff and all that, I guess. Thing is, if you are a Protestant and you raise your kids up to be Protestants and then they jump ship and become Orthodox or Catholic does that mean you failed as a parent? Really? Doctrinal litmus tests become the measure of your parenting skills? If my parents raising me in a Pentecostal background about half the days of my youth was supposed to have gotten me to be a Pentecostal Republican then, sure, I'd have to say they "failed" because I have become a Calvinist with Anglican and Lutheran sympathies while retaining aspects of charismatic/pentecostal thought and some sympathies to Presbyterianism. And I happen to be an often politically apathetic moderate real conservative as opposed to a neo-conservative and I am deeply skeptical about Christian attempts to sanctify the public sphere for their own benefit while professing a love of country and God.
But the thing is my parents didn't raise me to be a particular KIND of Christian. They raised me to be a Christian. My differing with them on any number of doctrinal or political issues is not and should not be taken as a sign that they failed. If my family who are Orthodox one day discover that one of their kids becomes a Methodist that won't mean they will have failed as parents.
Would such a change indicate that perhaps a pastor had not, so far as outsiders observed, done a good job of keeping his house in order for the sake of satisfying a Baptist or Catholic or Presbyterian hiearchy? Well, sure, I get that. But what I am contemplating here is the nature of the parent-child relationship. At the risk of pointing out the obvious the conundrum of training your kid to think for himself is that he will and then he's likely to think you have some bad ideas. I have personally been skeptical of parents who want to raise kids to think for themselves from the earliest age. Kids aren't that smart by nature, they aren't that autonomous,and it's foolhardy to impose on them a level of emotional, intellectual, and cultural responsibility they are developmentally incapable of.
So, no, were I to be a parent Iwould not be that kind of "enlightened" parent. I would insist on raising my kids to be Christians who learn about Christ, the Father, and Spirit and learn the Bible. What I'm not sure I would do is raise them to think that other confessional tradtiions within Christendom are a priori wrong. That doesn't mean I'd be so ecumenical as to let everything go by the board a la Unitarianism, it means that I take seriously the proverb that says that if you train up a child in the way that he should go then when he is old he won't depart from it.
But I know from my own life and what I learned of the life of my parents is that this is no insurance clause that the kid won't veer wildly from the path when young. As Michael Spenser once put it, the proverb says that when he is OLD he won't depart from it. He might for a while in his hot-blooded youth. I know a few people whose rebellious years were full of hedonism and turning away from the faith and they stayed away for good. Others came back to the faith. My rebellion and asserting my own identity in my late teens and early twenties was to become a Calvinist and to become more moderate in my politics. It didn't make things easy for my parents, I guess I'll just leave it at that. Anyone can imagine how that might have looked.
I'm certainly not married but what struck me about Spenser sharing his frustration about his wife's conversion to Catholcicism is the gnawing sense that came from in his writings that maybe it was his fault. Married people must have some aspect of themselves so inextricably tied to the other person that it would look, frankly, like a really co-dependent identity. Like you're not really you unless the other person is there. I have no real comprehension of that and I admit it. What things I can infer from what Spenser has shared in different settings is that no matter how one flesh you may be when it comes to Christ the two of you are NOT one and that in the age to come you won't be married. Who knkows whether the breath of man rises to God or the breath of the animal descends to the earth. Koholeth asks the question as if he didn't know. Do we have immortal souls? Not likely since only God is eternal, but more pertinent is the observation that we cannot be so certain of what we ourselves are.
I have heard that one of the beauties and trials of marriage is that you can wake up every morning and ask yourself, "Who is this person beside me?" Marriage is the trial or joy or whatever it is of waking up each morning with a quest, if I am observing things with any accuracy (and I'm probably not) and that quest is to know Christ but also to know and be known by this other person. I have heard it said that a husband or wife is the one who will sin against you and be sinned against by you more than anyone on earth. If that's true then parents can rest easy because it means there's finally someone else their kid can be upset with and blame for ruining their lives. ;)
Christians and paranoia past, first rule, never say you're sorry
The Y2K bug was a beautiful if unimportant thing if for no other reason than it played a small yet beautiful part in the Mike Judge classic Office Space.
When the looming threat of the economic meltdown of the free world (however free it really was is now moot) was building up I had what some might have called a resigned, disinterested train of thought. There was nothing that was going to happen that was going to be as bad as people anticipated. Since our currency is fiat based anyway what would people do with money they could still get because it was backed by the word of the United States government? I lived close by to family and friends and IF anything happened I could adapt but odds were pretty good nothing would happen. And nothing did happen.
But that didn't stop people from anticipating doom and gloom. And so a trip down memory lane has been in order because there have been Christians who have blown the trumpet in Zion to sound the alarm to God's holy army about this stuff, stuff that now can be looked back upon:
http://teampyro.blogspot.com/2009/01/apocalypse-then.html
Ths didn't lead to the funkier doctrinal tiers of Adventism or the Watchtower Society but the history of Christian in the West is peppered with freak-out moments hinged on predictions that go south not North. Maybe being a postmillenial theonomist/Christian reconstructionist means never having to say you're sorry. :)
Postmillenialism is to me a curious thing. It is supposedly optimistic but the postmillenialist I have read seem most exercised about the godlessness of culture in ways the premillenialists must half savor half dread. As an amillenialist I guess the smart-ass reply is that I don't care. Koholeth's great declaration, "Do not ask yourself where are the old days that were better than these because it is foolish to ask that question." has been my motto. I have little use for nostalgia or supposing that we have some decline of western civilization. Scripture cannot be broken so while in the last days men will go from bad to worse it is no less true that it is foolish to pine for the days of sinners past. It was in the past that God obliterated all of humanity except for Noah. So put that in your pipe and smoke it for a while. The last time a flood wiped out everything except a few people was a long time ago.
My main concern observing postmillenialists is that when they tilt toward things like reconstructionism they think they are being optimistic. They set themselves up for failure both at a cultural level and a moral level if they aren't careful. They set themselves up for cultural failure because clearly we are not seeing the kind of society that theonomists would like. They set themselves up for failure by failing to see clearly how the Social Gospel gave us a grab bag of legacies that led to the elimination of child labor laws, prohibition, public education, all things Christians pressed for because they believed it was a mandate of the Gospel to press for "good law". And so they did and the result was a culture of decadence and the rise of the teenager in the roaring 20s through the 30s that the world had not seen in a while ("ever" if we want to be hyperbolic about it).
There is no better ammunition you can give the devil than to suppose you are doing God's work for Him. In this respect few groups in modern Christendom seem to be so eager to pass the ammunition. How Christians of this stripe can condemn Rome for the Inquisition or consider the excesses of the Crusades (which many likely don't) or side with the Confederacy without considering how their own goals essentially appropriate the State in essentially the same way is hard for me to grasp. It's not that I think there is no sense in which ASPECTS of postmillenialism make sense ... it's that the temptation to some kind of Corinthian over-realized eschatology executed by a bunch of losers who are pining for an age that has passed them by or never existed is hard for me to ignore.
The Religious Right is so busy attempting to implement the failures of the Religious Left I'm not sure when they will step back long enough to figure out that if God providentially didn't let it work for the old religious left it's not postmillenially certain God will let it work for anyone else either. I don't think it's without any historically sobering cause that the group God allowed to have this level of revolutionary power were the communists. Don't think you or your fellow believers are so sanctified you couldn't do that, too.
Besides, if a decade later you're called out by a fellow Christian for not coming back and saying you had rocks in your head the rest of the world won't be more generous.
When the looming threat of the economic meltdown of the free world (however free it really was is now moot) was building up I had what some might have called a resigned, disinterested train of thought. There was nothing that was going to happen that was going to be as bad as people anticipated. Since our currency is fiat based anyway what would people do with money they could still get because it was backed by the word of the United States government? I lived close by to family and friends and IF anything happened I could adapt but odds were pretty good nothing would happen. And nothing did happen.
But that didn't stop people from anticipating doom and gloom. And so a trip down memory lane has been in order because there have been Christians who have blown the trumpet in Zion to sound the alarm to God's holy army about this stuff, stuff that now can be looked back upon:
http://teampyro.blogspot.com/2009/01/apocalypse-then.html
Ths didn't lead to the funkier doctrinal tiers of Adventism or the Watchtower Society but the history of Christian in the West is peppered with freak-out moments hinged on predictions that go south not North. Maybe being a postmillenial theonomist/Christian reconstructionist means never having to say you're sorry. :)
Postmillenialism is to me a curious thing. It is supposedly optimistic but the postmillenialist I have read seem most exercised about the godlessness of culture in ways the premillenialists must half savor half dread. As an amillenialist I guess the smart-ass reply is that I don't care. Koholeth's great declaration, "Do not ask yourself where are the old days that were better than these because it is foolish to ask that question." has been my motto. I have little use for nostalgia or supposing that we have some decline of western civilization. Scripture cannot be broken so while in the last days men will go from bad to worse it is no less true that it is foolish to pine for the days of sinners past. It was in the past that God obliterated all of humanity except for Noah. So put that in your pipe and smoke it for a while. The last time a flood wiped out everything except a few people was a long time ago.
My main concern observing postmillenialists is that when they tilt toward things like reconstructionism they think they are being optimistic. They set themselves up for failure both at a cultural level and a moral level if they aren't careful. They set themselves up for cultural failure because clearly we are not seeing the kind of society that theonomists would like. They set themselves up for failure by failing to see clearly how the Social Gospel gave us a grab bag of legacies that led to the elimination of child labor laws, prohibition, public education, all things Christians pressed for because they believed it was a mandate of the Gospel to press for "good law". And so they did and the result was a culture of decadence and the rise of the teenager in the roaring 20s through the 30s that the world had not seen in a while ("ever" if we want to be hyperbolic about it).
There is no better ammunition you can give the devil than to suppose you are doing God's work for Him. In this respect few groups in modern Christendom seem to be so eager to pass the ammunition. How Christians of this stripe can condemn Rome for the Inquisition or consider the excesses of the Crusades (which many likely don't) or side with the Confederacy without considering how their own goals essentially appropriate the State in essentially the same way is hard for me to grasp. It's not that I think there is no sense in which ASPECTS of postmillenialism make sense ... it's that the temptation to some kind of Corinthian over-realized eschatology executed by a bunch of losers who are pining for an age that has passed them by or never existed is hard for me to ignore.
The Religious Right is so busy attempting to implement the failures of the Religious Left I'm not sure when they will step back long enough to figure out that if God providentially didn't let it work for the old religious left it's not postmillenially certain God will let it work for anyone else either. I don't think it's without any historically sobering cause that the group God allowed to have this level of revolutionary power were the communists. Don't think you or your fellow believers are so sanctified you couldn't do that, too.
Besides, if a decade later you're called out by a fellow Christian for not coming back and saying you had rocks in your head the rest of the world won't be more generous.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
thoughts before the tenth anniversary release of The Powerpuff Girls on DVD
I like cartoons. Did I mention somewhere that I like cartoons? If the comment on the masthead didn't indicate so then I indicate it now.
We are coming upon a not-very solemn occasion my friends on the internet. We are coming along to a decade with the Powerpuff Girls. When I was a kid I saw Hanna Barbara cartoons and most of them, after an initial age 5-7 fascination with Scooby Doo and The Flintstones wore off and I turned to Transformers, G. I. Joe, and Star Blazers, seemed to me cheap knock-off cartoons that lacked in characterization or plot. Yes, it sounds incredibly snobby but I was an incredibly snobby kid about cartoons, especially by the age of about 10-12. I found it ANNOYING that Optimus Prime won all the time and was so flawless he never made any real mistakes. By that time I had completely left Hanna Barbara cartoons behind, though there was a certain drive-by-the-car-wreck fascination I had with the excreble Space Ghost.
But in the 1990s Hanna Barbara capitalized on its trashy past and brought Space Ghost back in Cartoon Planet and the weird but often strangely satisfying Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. It was a sort of cartoon playing out of the equally cartoonish but puppet-based Mystery Science Theater 3000. I could get all meta and talk about how both MST3K and SG:C2C present worlds in which evil is reduced to the banal, the petty, the pathetic and use that as a cultural measure of a certain moral failure in society in the West to properly address or consider the actual magnitude of evil in our world. But that would be so obviously both petty and extravagantly silly that I leave jokes too dry but for the eggiest of eggheads with genre fascinations to pretend that I actually wrote that. Some essays are better left as ideas and not essayed. Here I am making dumb puns ... as though there were other kinds.
But by the time the Powerpuff Girls hit the TV I began to see that Hanna Barbara might do something I never thought possible, get behind an actually original idea (as opposed to a neutered or kiddified Looney Toons knock-off or a rip off of the Honeymooners in space or in the stone age) for the first time since ... say 1965 or so. The Powerpuff Girls were doubtless not the only original series concept HB got behind but it was the one that, when I saw it, I didn't regret seeing! Other shows that got launched like Sealab 2021 or Space Ghost's reboot were obviously indebted to earlier creations and that's not getting to the Brak show. Mind you I'm not saying ANYTHING bad about the Brak show! I'm not that inspired to say much about Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I enjoy it in small doses but the show that for me single-handedly rehabilitated Hanna Barbara's decades of suck was basically the show affectionately abbreviated to PPG.
Why? Simple, it was a funny show. It was a show that was geared not just toward kids but toward adults. There was nothing about Femme Fatale that kids would necessarily get in terms of jokes but the character herself was altogether a joke. The characters were all types but types of the sincerely played out kind. McCracken and Tartakovsky and company only winked through the camera lens a handful of times and played things relatively straight. By that I mean we got a HB cartoon that didn't have some canned laugh track as happened in earlier epochs. The show simply had to be funny in order to survive and was on late enough that it couldn't afford to pander either just to kids or adults. Saving the world before bedtime was an apt sales pitch.
I have read comments from any number of people with delusional nostalgia who miss the days of the 1980s Saturday morning cartoons as though those were the be all and end all of actually good cartoons. No, dude, seriously, they WEREN'T that good. I've got a passage from Ecclesiastes for you folks, don't ask yourself "where are the old days that were better than these?" because it is not from wisdom you ask that question. Do you really want Saturday morning cartoons where Optimus Prime and the Autobots cross the Atlantic ocean on water skis? Really? How were all these multi-ton vehicles supposed to FLOAT on water enough to mvoe forward? Russian accents in G. I. Joe anyone? Lion-O's sword? And at the risk of inviting some back-talk for using this colloquialism, even at the age of 11 we all knew that He-Man was totally gay.
And when guys in their thirties (and isn't it ALWAYS usually guys in their thirties) complain about how cartoons were all better in the 1980s I bet they aren't really talking about the Snorks, My Little Pony, Jem, Rubik the Amazing Cube, the Mr. T. Show, the Gary Coleman Show, Laverne & Shirley (the cartoon, not the live action series), the Private benjamin cartoon, Turbo Teen, or Pole Position! Naw, they're thinking of stuff like Thundercats, G. I. Joe, Transformers, MAYBE Silverhawks. Some more obscure folks might name drop Thundarr the Barbarian and more could point to some landmark imports like Star Blazers or maybe point to Robotech. Stuff like Tranzor Z or Speed Racer from earlier periods might come up, too.
All that is to say that if you really go back and WATCH most of these shows you'll see that the people who complain about how bad shows like Teen Titans or The Batman are don't know the suckitude of the cartoons they are actually defending by way of comparison. Transformers G1 wasn't THAT good. Beast Wars, after a weak season 11 first half, got pretty interesting. The Transformers movie that is often beloved by fans, crap. No, it is NOT better than the Michael Bay film. Michael Bay's film is at the same level and has a less obtrusive soundtrack. I don't care if you think Optimus Prime's death signalled the end of your childhood. The movie just wasn't too good. The kinds of continuity errors that fanboys forgive to consider TF a decent movie within the context of the show is, well, peculiar.
All that is to say that my fondness for PPG is not based on a childhood nostalgia. I was an adult and in the work force by the time the show came out. I wouldn't say the 1990s were a new golden age of cartoons by any means. I'd say it's more like a silver age. We didn't have Disney or Looney Toons or the Fleischers and the truth is no one is likely to "beat" those artistic achievements but we had Batman: the animated series, we had an influx of anime that people began to have more appreciation for, we had the DC animated universe as a whole, Miyazaki's work gained currency and Pixar enabled Disney to get behind the release and distribution of cartoons that didn't suck.
Perhaps the single biggest innovation was simply The Simpsons demonstrating that a prime time cartoon geared toward adults and not just children could work. Beavis and Butthead laid the groundwork for other shows like King of the Hill and to some degree South Parh. The 1990s didn't equal, in most respects, the level of artistic innovation of the golden age, but it consolidated the reality for cartoons that is true elsewhere but wasn't so true here, that cartoons could appeal to a wide audience but also diversity out to more adult stuff.
Where the Powerpuff Girls fit into that, for me, is that it was simply a fun show that works at multiple levels. Take anyone element of the show or the writing or the characters and you'll see that it doesn't "look" like a particularly special show. But the show was fortunately often quite a bit more than the sum of its, on the face of it, ordinary parts. The blonde, redhead, brunnete breakout of character designs bespoke covering all the bases of girlyness. The Professor served as not just a father figure but as someone the girls could rescue. McCracken once said, I think, that he wanted to create a show in which girl power and feminist ideas could be presented in a way that was fun and accessible for anyone.
As a cultural manifestation of would be feminist agitprop, if you want to put the worst possible spin on the motive (which I think would be extremely unfair but I say this to make a rhetorical point), I would say The Powerpuff Girls succeed by taking the high road of taking the low road. Aim to please, first of all.
C. S. Lewis famously opined that the best way to tell stories to children it to tell a fun, pleasing story and prefer that moral lessons are learned along the way. The WRONG way to approach things would be to begin with the moral lesson children ought to learn and then go about fashioning a story that gets the job done. The Powerpuff Girls, right up to the name (or down to the name) demonstrated that the committment to first make sure it's fun goes a long way. Even if McCracken conceived of the series as a way to promote a social view you won't see that played out in so blatantly a didactic fashion that you "have" to deal with the subtext/metatheme to even get drawn into the show.
I suppose if I were to arbitrarily select two cartoons that for me bookended the 1990s that had signal agendas they wanted to promote you could go one of two ways. At the start of the 1990s there would be Captain Planet and at the end of the 1990s there would be the Powerpuff Girls. Which of these cartoons even got to the point of having a tenth anniversary release of the entire run of the series?
Particularly in terms of how Christians with conservative theology and politics might see things, the social agenda PPG was designed to help promote is so sweet, charming, and in many respects benign where speechifying goes it would be easy to see virtues in the show. If Christians wanted to freak out into culture war mode they would have been better off freaking out about The Powerpuff Girls rather than Pokemon or Captain Planet. Captain Planet's didactism was so off-putting that that might be the single simplest reason there's not some tenth anniversary box set of the entire run of Captain Planet. I think those Christians would need to chill out but that's not really why I'm writing.
I'm writing to share some of my enthusiasm for a very cute show. Tara Strong and E. G. Daily do some of their most memorable work here and Cathy Cavadini is great as Blossom. I have a soft spot for Strong's voice-over work. I liked her as Batgirl, liked her as Bubbles a great deal, liked her work as Raven on Teen Titans. Even her tiny role in the dub of Spirited Away was fun for what a small part it was. And, yes, I even know that she did work under her maiden name as Tara Charendoff. Yes, I am that much of a cartoon nerd that I recognize voice actors. Roger Jackson gave us one of the landmark voices of the late 1990s with the wonderful voice of Mojo Jojo, easily one of the greatest ineffectual blowhard villains in cartoons in the last ten years. What's not to like about a genius level monkey who can't get his plans to work because he's a monkey and he's fighting three little toddlers with powers that get into pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths Superman level? Answer? Nothing.
So my suggestion to 1980s cartoon nostalgists is to rethink your loyalties. There are very few cartoons from the 1980s I would want my now 7-year-old and 4-year old nieces to watch from that period. That cartoon with Bill Cosby as a bad guy and the hourglass full of thistles? You remember that one? The Care Bears movies 1 and 2? Trust me, that age of "good" cartoons you're remembering from the 1980s had a lot of crap. If you think Michael Bay was wrong to make a Transformers cartoon that desecrated your childhood, well, you didn't have to watch that thing, did you? And the truth is that the only thing I really remember for Transformers are a few voices--Chris Latta as Starscream, Frank Welker as Megatron, and Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime, and Scatman Cruthers as Jazz, of course. But, really, I never thought of Jazz as Jazz, I always thought of him as Hong Kong Phooey (a show that was in some ways more fun as a concept than execution but another HB cartoon that I admit I remember fondly, seeing episodes on reruns in the mid 1980s that really came out in mid 1970s).
So, in short, forget the 1980s if you're a nostalgia type and if you were a fan of Powerpuff Girls you can be content knowing this series is finally getting what looks like a decent release package.
We are coming upon a not-very solemn occasion my friends on the internet. We are coming along to a decade with the Powerpuff Girls. When I was a kid I saw Hanna Barbara cartoons and most of them, after an initial age 5-7 fascination with Scooby Doo and The Flintstones wore off and I turned to Transformers, G. I. Joe, and Star Blazers, seemed to me cheap knock-off cartoons that lacked in characterization or plot. Yes, it sounds incredibly snobby but I was an incredibly snobby kid about cartoons, especially by the age of about 10-12. I found it ANNOYING that Optimus Prime won all the time and was so flawless he never made any real mistakes. By that time I had completely left Hanna Barbara cartoons behind, though there was a certain drive-by-the-car-wreck fascination I had with the excreble Space Ghost.
But in the 1990s Hanna Barbara capitalized on its trashy past and brought Space Ghost back in Cartoon Planet and the weird but often strangely satisfying Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. It was a sort of cartoon playing out of the equally cartoonish but puppet-based Mystery Science Theater 3000. I could get all meta and talk about how both MST3K and SG:C2C present worlds in which evil is reduced to the banal, the petty, the pathetic and use that as a cultural measure of a certain moral failure in society in the West to properly address or consider the actual magnitude of evil in our world. But that would be so obviously both petty and extravagantly silly that I leave jokes too dry but for the eggiest of eggheads with genre fascinations to pretend that I actually wrote that. Some essays are better left as ideas and not essayed. Here I am making dumb puns ... as though there were other kinds.
But by the time the Powerpuff Girls hit the TV I began to see that Hanna Barbara might do something I never thought possible, get behind an actually original idea (as opposed to a neutered or kiddified Looney Toons knock-off or a rip off of the Honeymooners in space or in the stone age) for the first time since ... say 1965 or so. The Powerpuff Girls were doubtless not the only original series concept HB got behind but it was the one that, when I saw it, I didn't regret seeing! Other shows that got launched like Sealab 2021 or Space Ghost's reboot were obviously indebted to earlier creations and that's not getting to the Brak show. Mind you I'm not saying ANYTHING bad about the Brak show! I'm not that inspired to say much about Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I enjoy it in small doses but the show that for me single-handedly rehabilitated Hanna Barbara's decades of suck was basically the show affectionately abbreviated to PPG.
Why? Simple, it was a funny show. It was a show that was geared not just toward kids but toward adults. There was nothing about Femme Fatale that kids would necessarily get in terms of jokes but the character herself was altogether a joke. The characters were all types but types of the sincerely played out kind. McCracken and Tartakovsky and company only winked through the camera lens a handful of times and played things relatively straight. By that I mean we got a HB cartoon that didn't have some canned laugh track as happened in earlier epochs. The show simply had to be funny in order to survive and was on late enough that it couldn't afford to pander either just to kids or adults. Saving the world before bedtime was an apt sales pitch.
I have read comments from any number of people with delusional nostalgia who miss the days of the 1980s Saturday morning cartoons as though those were the be all and end all of actually good cartoons. No, dude, seriously, they WEREN'T that good. I've got a passage from Ecclesiastes for you folks, don't ask yourself "where are the old days that were better than these?" because it is not from wisdom you ask that question. Do you really want Saturday morning cartoons where Optimus Prime and the Autobots cross the Atlantic ocean on water skis? Really? How were all these multi-ton vehicles supposed to FLOAT on water enough to mvoe forward? Russian accents in G. I. Joe anyone? Lion-O's sword? And at the risk of inviting some back-talk for using this colloquialism, even at the age of 11 we all knew that He-Man was totally gay.
And when guys in their thirties (and isn't it ALWAYS usually guys in their thirties) complain about how cartoons were all better in the 1980s I bet they aren't really talking about the Snorks, My Little Pony, Jem, Rubik the Amazing Cube, the Mr. T. Show, the Gary Coleman Show, Laverne & Shirley (the cartoon, not the live action series), the Private benjamin cartoon, Turbo Teen, or Pole Position! Naw, they're thinking of stuff like Thundercats, G. I. Joe, Transformers, MAYBE Silverhawks. Some more obscure folks might name drop Thundarr the Barbarian and more could point to some landmark imports like Star Blazers or maybe point to Robotech. Stuff like Tranzor Z or Speed Racer from earlier periods might come up, too.
All that is to say that if you really go back and WATCH most of these shows you'll see that the people who complain about how bad shows like Teen Titans or The Batman are don't know the suckitude of the cartoons they are actually defending by way of comparison. Transformers G1 wasn't THAT good. Beast Wars, after a weak season 11 first half, got pretty interesting. The Transformers movie that is often beloved by fans, crap. No, it is NOT better than the Michael Bay film. Michael Bay's film is at the same level and has a less obtrusive soundtrack. I don't care if you think Optimus Prime's death signalled the end of your childhood. The movie just wasn't too good. The kinds of continuity errors that fanboys forgive to consider TF a decent movie within the context of the show is, well, peculiar.
All that is to say that my fondness for PPG is not based on a childhood nostalgia. I was an adult and in the work force by the time the show came out. I wouldn't say the 1990s were a new golden age of cartoons by any means. I'd say it's more like a silver age. We didn't have Disney or Looney Toons or the Fleischers and the truth is no one is likely to "beat" those artistic achievements but we had Batman: the animated series, we had an influx of anime that people began to have more appreciation for, we had the DC animated universe as a whole, Miyazaki's work gained currency and Pixar enabled Disney to get behind the release and distribution of cartoons that didn't suck.
Perhaps the single biggest innovation was simply The Simpsons demonstrating that a prime time cartoon geared toward adults and not just children could work. Beavis and Butthead laid the groundwork for other shows like King of the Hill and to some degree South Parh. The 1990s didn't equal, in most respects, the level of artistic innovation of the golden age, but it consolidated the reality for cartoons that is true elsewhere but wasn't so true here, that cartoons could appeal to a wide audience but also diversity out to more adult stuff.
Where the Powerpuff Girls fit into that, for me, is that it was simply a fun show that works at multiple levels. Take anyone element of the show or the writing or the characters and you'll see that it doesn't "look" like a particularly special show. But the show was fortunately often quite a bit more than the sum of its, on the face of it, ordinary parts. The blonde, redhead, brunnete breakout of character designs bespoke covering all the bases of girlyness. The Professor served as not just a father figure but as someone the girls could rescue. McCracken once said, I think, that he wanted to create a show in which girl power and feminist ideas could be presented in a way that was fun and accessible for anyone.
As a cultural manifestation of would be feminist agitprop, if you want to put the worst possible spin on the motive (which I think would be extremely unfair but I say this to make a rhetorical point), I would say The Powerpuff Girls succeed by taking the high road of taking the low road. Aim to please, first of all.
C. S. Lewis famously opined that the best way to tell stories to children it to tell a fun, pleasing story and prefer that moral lessons are learned along the way. The WRONG way to approach things would be to begin with the moral lesson children ought to learn and then go about fashioning a story that gets the job done. The Powerpuff Girls, right up to the name (or down to the name) demonstrated that the committment to first make sure it's fun goes a long way. Even if McCracken conceived of the series as a way to promote a social view you won't see that played out in so blatantly a didactic fashion that you "have" to deal with the subtext/metatheme to even get drawn into the show.
I suppose if I were to arbitrarily select two cartoons that for me bookended the 1990s that had signal agendas they wanted to promote you could go one of two ways. At the start of the 1990s there would be Captain Planet and at the end of the 1990s there would be the Powerpuff Girls. Which of these cartoons even got to the point of having a tenth anniversary release of the entire run of the series?
Particularly in terms of how Christians with conservative theology and politics might see things, the social agenda PPG was designed to help promote is so sweet, charming, and in many respects benign where speechifying goes it would be easy to see virtues in the show. If Christians wanted to freak out into culture war mode they would have been better off freaking out about The Powerpuff Girls rather than Pokemon or Captain Planet. Captain Planet's didactism was so off-putting that that might be the single simplest reason there's not some tenth anniversary box set of the entire run of Captain Planet. I think those Christians would need to chill out but that's not really why I'm writing.
I'm writing to share some of my enthusiasm for a very cute show. Tara Strong and E. G. Daily do some of their most memorable work here and Cathy Cavadini is great as Blossom. I have a soft spot for Strong's voice-over work. I liked her as Batgirl, liked her as Bubbles a great deal, liked her work as Raven on Teen Titans. Even her tiny role in the dub of Spirited Away was fun for what a small part it was. And, yes, I even know that she did work under her maiden name as Tara Charendoff. Yes, I am that much of a cartoon nerd that I recognize voice actors. Roger Jackson gave us one of the landmark voices of the late 1990s with the wonderful voice of Mojo Jojo, easily one of the greatest ineffectual blowhard villains in cartoons in the last ten years. What's not to like about a genius level monkey who can't get his plans to work because he's a monkey and he's fighting three little toddlers with powers that get into pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths Superman level? Answer? Nothing.
So my suggestion to 1980s cartoon nostalgists is to rethink your loyalties. There are very few cartoons from the 1980s I would want my now 7-year-old and 4-year old nieces to watch from that period. That cartoon with Bill Cosby as a bad guy and the hourglass full of thistles? You remember that one? The Care Bears movies 1 and 2? Trust me, that age of "good" cartoons you're remembering from the 1980s had a lot of crap. If you think Michael Bay was wrong to make a Transformers cartoon that desecrated your childhood, well, you didn't have to watch that thing, did you? And the truth is that the only thing I really remember for Transformers are a few voices--Chris Latta as Starscream, Frank Welker as Megatron, and Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime, and Scatman Cruthers as Jazz, of course. But, really, I never thought of Jazz as Jazz, I always thought of him as Hong Kong Phooey (a show that was in some ways more fun as a concept than execution but another HB cartoon that I admit I remember fondly, seeing episodes on reruns in the mid 1980s that really came out in mid 1970s).
So, in short, forget the 1980s if you're a nostalgia type and if you were a fan of Powerpuff Girls you can be content knowing this series is finally getting what looks like a decent release package.
Saturday, January 03, 2009
From a discussion on Bonhoeffer at Internet Monk:
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/bonhoeffer-and-making-the-best-use-of-everything#comments
on 02 Jan 2009 at 12:49 pm iMonk
...
I said that good leadership of the disciples in the Gospel of Mark still produced jerky disciples. It’s a major point of the book. Jesus never taught them any of the stupid things they said and did, but they used ther status as his followers to be jerks.
...
A fascinating theme that I could stand to read more about. Mark Driscoll joked in the past that Jesus picked twelve guys and one of them was still Judas. The joke is funny and true as far as it goes but the truth is that all the disciples were bad apples.
There are any number of things we could observe about the disciples as a group that demonstrate Judas was not the only problem disciple, just the one who betrayed rather than abandoned Jesus to His death. They thought that by being disciples of Jesus it was okay to call down fire from heaven to destroy people they found offensive. They saw fit to rebuke people for casting out demons in the name of Jesus just because the man wasn't part of their dozen. They bickered among themselves as to who was going to have the greatest legacy as a disciple of Jesus. They had their parents try to pull rank as elders within society to wring from Jesus a promise that the kids would have pride of place in the kingdom to come. They told kids to scram when they wanted to meet the Lord.
To say that Judas was the bad apple on the team misses the point of the four gospels, the disciples were utter losers who reveled in thinking themselves special at the worst times while being predictably fickle and fearful at times when they could have trusted in Jesus most. What's more they at various times thought that being disciples of Jesus entitled them to look down on others or consider themselves fit to do things they clearly weren't up for. After some successful ventures in casting out demons and healing the sick as Jesus' ministry progressed there came cases where the disciples couldn't cast out the demon and Jesus had to come cast out the demon Himself.
Jesus began to speak in terms that revealed He was about to die, the last thing these disciples wanted to have happen to the one they considered God's annointed one who had come to destroy the Roman empire. They were supposed to be the advance guard, the hand-picked elite of Jesus to usher in the new kingdom that would redeem not just the culture around them but the world. Jesus was starting to say things more and more that made no sense. They began to have to ask, "Lord, is this parable for us or for someone else?" Even after Christ had risen from the dead they still asked Him when He would destroy the pagan nations. They still imagined things in terms of Jesus, after having risen from death, being about underwriting the future as they imagined it in their minds, as they wanted things to be for the world. They were, in a phrase, still jerks for Jesus.
It is amazing how Jesus' disciples can see Him as a blank check for writing in whatever they most want. In the tradition in which I have grown up Jesus was invoked as a key to revival and cultural transformation. The whole, "If my people who are called by my name ... and I will heal their land" became a form of Americanism. Whether we frame it in terms of "We need God in America again" or frame it in terms of a mission to "redeem culture" Jesus can finally be invoked as nothing more than a prescription to make sure people or our pet target demographic start behaving the way we want them to. We can persuade ourselves at this or that point that it becomes all about Jesus but that is how we are so easily able to deceive ourselves. We think it is all about Jesus without realizing that like Jesus' OTHER disciples we have really made it all about us.
Jesus never taught them any of the stupid things they said and did, but they used ther status as his followers to be jerks.
Right there is the quote that sums it up. This, more and more, is something that impresses me about Christians I have met. I have seen things that were shameful, shameful displays of pettiness, anger, resentment,bitterness, greed, fear, I have participated in these things and all have been given a sanctified gloss of being done out of right principle for Jesus' fame. No, I don't see it that way anymore.
No one can be so graceless as those who talk about grace. There are few jerks so jerkish as those who sanctify their jerkish behavior as being servants of the King who are just looking for Jesus to be glorified when it is finally about them, not Jesus, about them wanting to be recognized as Jesus' special brigade. Peter said that if everyone else abandoned Jesus HE would not. And what did Jesus tell Peter?
We know what happened--the man who was most certain he would stand by Jesus no matter what denied even knowing the man over and over and swore up and down "I don't know the man." All it takes is the loss of the things we really place our security in and then we reveal our true hearts. Someone does something we don't like or says something we don't like and we ask the Lord if it is all right to call down fire from heaven to destroy that person. We go to Him ourselves or through proxies to ask for a special place and special recognition in the kingdom of God.
It is easy to be tempted to require of others or ourselves things that Jesus does not require of us and to insist on spiritualizing away the things that Jesus does require of us. The disciples who broke heads of wheat to feed themselves were the ones who rebuked a man for not being in the in-crowd while casting out demons in the name of Jesus. The disciples who were afraid when Jesus was about to calm the storm were the disciples who were confident enough to argue about who was going to be greatest in the kingdom.
Most of us, since we have the gospels on hand to read, are too smart to actually talk to other people about these sorts of delusions we may be tempted to harbor that the disciples had! But sometimes in less guarded moments we might share things with our kids about what we think God may have in store for them. Or we may announce to people what we hope God will accomplish that is quite simply what WE want for our own lives and legacies.
And like Judas even our outrage can reveal a sinful heart in expressing something that might appear to everyone else to be the highest good. Judas declared that the money spent on the perfume that she used to wash Jesus' feet could have been used to help the poor. Not that Judas cared at all about the poor, he just liked to take money from the common purse to whatever end he saw fit. After all, he shared the common purse and he was able to do through that things like booking a room for Jesus' posse. He was potentially the most responsible with money and a sharp business guy, which is why Jesus might have entrusted him with such a great responsibility. But that didn't mean Judas didn't cut corners on things that were important and it didn't mean that he actually acted out of compassion.
You can spend three or four years of your life with God Himself and still be innoculated against the love and compassion He displayed. You can be given the ability to cast out demons and heal the sick but still betray Him. Judas was able to do all these things yet still assume that he could do what he wanted with the common purse and then say that "This money could have been used to help the poor." There are times when moral outrage (real or imagined) allows us to focus on the failures of others at the expense of considering ourselves. The folly was in the saying, I think.
But Jesus likes to choose disciples who make the stupid mistake of appropriating His name and presence to get what they want. I don't get it. I don't know why it happens but I have lived just long enough to know that for some reason Jesus likes to use losers like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and Moses. He likes to transform them over their lives into people we can ... eventually, admire. It can be said that God is the only hero in His own book but what about Psalm 15 that says that the godly of the land are heroes? They don't start out that way.
But eventually Peter and the other apostles are transformed by knowing who Jesus truly is and they stop invoking Him or His presence to get what they want and start learning how to proclaim the good news, that Christ is king of all and has risen from the dead. Less than this message is simply disaster, following the example of disciples who do not know better than to use Jesus as a means to their end. They sought things like the overthrow of Rome, of the re-establishment of Israel as utmost among nations (not that they ever were, really, but that's another topic). They wanted Jesus to, as the modern parlance might have it, "redeem culture". Jesus had something better in mind. He redeemed THEM.
on 02 Jan 2009 at 12:49 pm iMonk
...
I said that good leadership of the disciples in the Gospel of Mark still produced jerky disciples. It’s a major point of the book. Jesus never taught them any of the stupid things they said and did, but they used ther status as his followers to be jerks.
...
A fascinating theme that I could stand to read more about. Mark Driscoll joked in the past that Jesus picked twelve guys and one of them was still Judas. The joke is funny and true as far as it goes but the truth is that all the disciples were bad apples.
There are any number of things we could observe about the disciples as a group that demonstrate Judas was not the only problem disciple, just the one who betrayed rather than abandoned Jesus to His death. They thought that by being disciples of Jesus it was okay to call down fire from heaven to destroy people they found offensive. They saw fit to rebuke people for casting out demons in the name of Jesus just because the man wasn't part of their dozen. They bickered among themselves as to who was going to have the greatest legacy as a disciple of Jesus. They had their parents try to pull rank as elders within society to wring from Jesus a promise that the kids would have pride of place in the kingdom to come. They told kids to scram when they wanted to meet the Lord.
To say that Judas was the bad apple on the team misses the point of the four gospels, the disciples were utter losers who reveled in thinking themselves special at the worst times while being predictably fickle and fearful at times when they could have trusted in Jesus most. What's more they at various times thought that being disciples of Jesus entitled them to look down on others or consider themselves fit to do things they clearly weren't up for. After some successful ventures in casting out demons and healing the sick as Jesus' ministry progressed there came cases where the disciples couldn't cast out the demon and Jesus had to come cast out the demon Himself.
Jesus began to speak in terms that revealed He was about to die, the last thing these disciples wanted to have happen to the one they considered God's annointed one who had come to destroy the Roman empire. They were supposed to be the advance guard, the hand-picked elite of Jesus to usher in the new kingdom that would redeem not just the culture around them but the world. Jesus was starting to say things more and more that made no sense. They began to have to ask, "Lord, is this parable for us or for someone else?" Even after Christ had risen from the dead they still asked Him when He would destroy the pagan nations. They still imagined things in terms of Jesus, after having risen from death, being about underwriting the future as they imagined it in their minds, as they wanted things to be for the world. They were, in a phrase, still jerks for Jesus.
It is amazing how Jesus' disciples can see Him as a blank check for writing in whatever they most want. In the tradition in which I have grown up Jesus was invoked as a key to revival and cultural transformation. The whole, "If my people who are called by my name ... and I will heal their land" became a form of Americanism. Whether we frame it in terms of "We need God in America again" or frame it in terms of a mission to "redeem culture" Jesus can finally be invoked as nothing more than a prescription to make sure people or our pet target demographic start behaving the way we want them to. We can persuade ourselves at this or that point that it becomes all about Jesus but that is how we are so easily able to deceive ourselves. We think it is all about Jesus without realizing that like Jesus' OTHER disciples we have really made it all about us.
Jesus never taught them any of the stupid things they said and did, but they used ther status as his followers to be jerks.
Right there is the quote that sums it up. This, more and more, is something that impresses me about Christians I have met. I have seen things that were shameful, shameful displays of pettiness, anger, resentment,bitterness, greed, fear, I have participated in these things and all have been given a sanctified gloss of being done out of right principle for Jesus' fame. No, I don't see it that way anymore.
No one can be so graceless as those who talk about grace. There are few jerks so jerkish as those who sanctify their jerkish behavior as being servants of the King who are just looking for Jesus to be glorified when it is finally about them, not Jesus, about them wanting to be recognized as Jesus' special brigade. Peter said that if everyone else abandoned Jesus HE would not. And what did Jesus tell Peter?
We know what happened--the man who was most certain he would stand by Jesus no matter what denied even knowing the man over and over and swore up and down "I don't know the man." All it takes is the loss of the things we really place our security in and then we reveal our true hearts. Someone does something we don't like or says something we don't like and we ask the Lord if it is all right to call down fire from heaven to destroy that person. We go to Him ourselves or through proxies to ask for a special place and special recognition in the kingdom of God.
It is easy to be tempted to require of others or ourselves things that Jesus does not require of us and to insist on spiritualizing away the things that Jesus does require of us. The disciples who broke heads of wheat to feed themselves were the ones who rebuked a man for not being in the in-crowd while casting out demons in the name of Jesus. The disciples who were afraid when Jesus was about to calm the storm were the disciples who were confident enough to argue about who was going to be greatest in the kingdom.
Most of us, since we have the gospels on hand to read, are too smart to actually talk to other people about these sorts of delusions we may be tempted to harbor that the disciples had! But sometimes in less guarded moments we might share things with our kids about what we think God may have in store for them. Or we may announce to people what we hope God will accomplish that is quite simply what WE want for our own lives and legacies.
And like Judas even our outrage can reveal a sinful heart in expressing something that might appear to everyone else to be the highest good. Judas declared that the money spent on the perfume that she used to wash Jesus' feet could have been used to help the poor. Not that Judas cared at all about the poor, he just liked to take money from the common purse to whatever end he saw fit. After all, he shared the common purse and he was able to do through that things like booking a room for Jesus' posse. He was potentially the most responsible with money and a sharp business guy, which is why Jesus might have entrusted him with such a great responsibility. But that didn't mean Judas didn't cut corners on things that were important and it didn't mean that he actually acted out of compassion.
You can spend three or four years of your life with God Himself and still be innoculated against the love and compassion He displayed. You can be given the ability to cast out demons and heal the sick but still betray Him. Judas was able to do all these things yet still assume that he could do what he wanted with the common purse and then say that "This money could have been used to help the poor." There are times when moral outrage (real or imagined) allows us to focus on the failures of others at the expense of considering ourselves. The folly was in the saying, I think.
But Jesus likes to choose disciples who make the stupid mistake of appropriating His name and presence to get what they want. I don't get it. I don't know why it happens but I have lived just long enough to know that for some reason Jesus likes to use losers like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and Moses. He likes to transform them over their lives into people we can ... eventually, admire. It can be said that God is the only hero in His own book but what about Psalm 15 that says that the godly of the land are heroes? They don't start out that way.
But eventually Peter and the other apostles are transformed by knowing who Jesus truly is and they stop invoking Him or His presence to get what they want and start learning how to proclaim the good news, that Christ is king of all and has risen from the dead. Less than this message is simply disaster, following the example of disciples who do not know better than to use Jesus as a means to their end. They sought things like the overthrow of Rome, of the re-establishment of Israel as utmost among nations (not that they ever were, really, but that's another topic). They wanted Jesus to, as the modern parlance might have it, "redeem culture". Jesus had something better in mind. He redeemed THEM.
Friday, January 02, 2009
2009 and not exactly resolutions
If you don't call them resolutions then they aren't resolutions, right? ;)
Well, I am at a point where I am hitting the middle of the thirties and have things to change in my life--losing some weight, incrementally changing my diet to be healthier, getting more consistent exercise, organizing my life a little bit. I still have mounds of school debt like any college graduate tends to have who didn't have a full ride scholarship or parents with deep pockets. I am typical of my generation in that respect. There are certain types of debt, however, that I no longer have any of and in that respect I may NOT be typical of my generation.
But that is not why I am blogging here. No, the ironic reason I am blogging now is a consideration that too much of my life is taken up by, heh, computers! I feel as though it would do me some good to not even turn on the computer one or maybe two days at a time. Maybe not every week! I am not so great at being weaned of computers as that by now! Yet it is good to have some time away from computers when you work with them all the time at the day job and a great deal of the time at home. It is easier to compose music that people can read if you can play with computers so as to make a presentable score, especially if your penmanship is bad as mine. No, I won't provide any samples.
Blogs, as I consider them, are places where you can write about and publish the things that you want to get off your chest that no one else bothers to read. I speak hyperbolically but there is a sense in which nothing is LESS important than what you blog. What I mean by that is that by the time you blog something I would imagine you have processed it enough emotionally and intellectually that by the time you dump it on the internet it is in some sense resolved for you or you have resolved through it enough to write about it. Nothing actually in process would (or at least in my opinion should) hit the net. The internet is a publishing medium so as I see it completed, thought-through sentiments are best suited for it, not necessarily all the details of works or thoughts or feelings in progress.
Of course I compose as a hobby so that factors heavily into how I approach blogging. I was also a student of a certain form of mass communication where knowing what you were talking about and having a clear finished product was critical ... though I sometimes feel as though the isntruction I got on those issues were kinda old school. I was taught that you can't escape having a bias but that you must never let your bias get in the way of discovering what the facts are, what the truth is.
At any rate, I have had a more productive 2008 as a composer than I could have ever imagined, which was good because 2007 did not feel all that productive to me. I managed last year, however, to compose four preludes and fugues for solo guitar. Yes, that's right. I'm not kidding, I have started composing preludes and fugues for guitar. Because I'm a classical guitarist (not a great one by any means) and a composer I have posted some stuff on the Delcamp discussion forum and it has some nice resources and discussions for classical guitarists. One of my favorite publishers isn't allowed on there anymore and you'd have to be a serious student formal or otherwise of classical guitar literature and publishing to figure out who that is.
All that is to say that I have been slowly and steadily working on cultivating contacts and networking so as to present my compositions to professional musicians. It is a slow process and requires a great deal of patience. It would seem that it takes musicians as long to get around to playing your music when you're a composer as it takes you to write the music yourself. So you learn not to expect things to happen too soon or even ever. But thanks to a variety of contacts made through Delcamp I have a few people looking at some of my music.
Most interesting for me is the request that I compose a quartet for clarinet, French horn, guitar, and cello. I started sketching out ideas for that just this week. I have noticed for a while that people claim the guitar is like a miniature orchestra but that's all nonsense. The guitar can't play the way a string section in an orchestra can. What's more if the guitar were a miniature orchestra in practice guitarists would spend all their time playing accompaniment patterns to woodwinds, brass, and the like while not holding the limelight. Most guitarists seem too eager to grandstand and have the focus on them rather than taking a purely supportive role.
I suppose at this point I might want to mention that for years I played guitar and sang in a band. As a guitarist I am accustomed to the idea that no matter how complex or simple a guitar's part is the real purpose is to support the human voice and to guide the structure of music rather than as a basis for shredding. Shredding is cool and all, don't get me wrong, and I am not saying that my not being a great guitarist doesn't mean I have no chops whatever. A three-voiced fugue for solo guitar in G major that is nearly five minutes long won't give anyone the impression I have no chops at all. I DO know how to write for my instrument.
But I'm not a showboater and I'm not anxious to be up in front of people and play stuff if I can inspire other guitarists to take up my music. That, however, probably has to change. I have shown music to professional guitarists and guitarists, at the risk of speaking ill of my kind, are a curiously flaky bunch. I am no doubt the best exemplar of my own observation!
This last year I wrapped up a set of sonatas for woodwinds and guitar. It is a project I started back in 2000 and I am excited by the possibility of having it complete, at least for now. I only covered flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon and did not really write much for English horn, alto flute, contrabassoon or the other members of the clarinet family outside of B flat. For now I feel it is enough to hit the four basic food groups, if you will.
This year my hope is to tackle the strings and brass. Nearly no one has written for guitar and brass and there are almost no high profile works for guitar and brass in the classical repertoire. Jazz, of course, is an entirely different matter. For the combination of tuba and guitar I guess there's Leon Redbone and that's about all I can think of but why should that be all there is?
Since I'm in my mid thirties and have contemplated how I have had a kind of mid life crisis (hey, given life expectancies the "mid" counts in the thirties) I think about how little I often feel I have accomplished. I have been comparing myself to friends or family the same age who are settled down and have kids or have this or that established career. What I haven't done is look back on what I have done in the last ten years. I have had the same job for eight years now and while it often feels like a dead end job it is a job I can do and leave at home. I have begun to have a renewed appreciation of jobs like that. Some people are addicted to work as a way to define who they are. I imagine this is especially prominent for, say, CEOs or pastors and it would be especialy true of CEO/pastors, ennit?
But I have looked back on the last ten years and realized that I have in my own unobserved way done plenty, things that married or parenting types just never had time for.
I've written:
probably 35 songs, 15 sacred, 20 secular based on original or existing texts
two ragtimes for piano, 5 minutes each
a piano sonata in three movements with a closing fugue, 10 minutes
a prelude and fugue in G for piano, 6 minutes
four preludes and fugues for solo guitar, 23 minutes total
a sonata for flute and guitar; 9.5 minutes
a sonata for oboe and guitar; 18 minutes
a sonata for clarinet and guitar; 12 minutes
a sonata for bassoon and guitar; 21 minutes
single movement guitar sonata; 6 minutes
a set of variations on a theme for solo guitar; 4.5 minutes
a little rondo for guitar; 4 minutes
three lullabies for guitar; about six minutes
six studies in harmonics; about 8 minutes
two movements from an accapella Mass (Kyrie and Gloria); about nine minutes
an Evening Service (Magnificat for SSAA and organ, Nunc Dimittis for SATB with S solo, closing Gloria Patri SATB with organ) about seven minutes
two thirds of a sonata for viola and guitar, seven minutes
a passacaglia for tenor trombone and guitar, about five minutes
part of a sonata for cello and guitar, four minutes
a trio for flute, bassoon, and guitar, four minutes
When I add that all up it comes to almost three hours of music and that's not counting ANY of the songs in the aforementioned 35. Add those and it moves up to something more like five hours worth of music ranging from rock and gospel to classical and hints of jazz.
Yet it doesn't seem like much to show for a decade worth of composing. That might be simply because not a single one of these pieces has been published and nearly none of them have been performed for audiences. The few songs I played for audiences didn't feel like audiences that really seemed all that interested in or receptive of the music. I spent a lot of time arguing with my bandmates about the music I wrote so if they didn't seem to get it sometimes and audiences didn't seem responsive what was the point in trying to find more of an audience for what didn't seem to fit the interests of a Seattle crowd? I figured my music was too cerebral to have any emotional link to an audience and that I was too diffident a player lacking in chops to get the music across.
I suppose the dirty confession I have to make here is that the flip side of my feeling I'm not really much of a performer is that I also have an acquired contempt for things that lots of people seem to enjoy like "passion" and "soul" and "authenticity". The 1990s went along and I found myself not only not liking Nirvana or Radiohead but disliking them. Soundgarden was all right and I have a residual respect for U2 but they stopped being fun for me once Rattle and Hume came along and I started to become respectful but underwhelmed. Weezer was loads of fun up through Maladroit and Portishead is still interesting and Bjork was great up through Vespertine.
But on the whole I have found that I basically have had no use for a lot of pop music and the emphasis would be on use. When you start to immerse yourself in music from centuries ago or even just stick with music from 1900 to 1975 there's so much material that you start recognizing as recycled in the last twenty years of music that it's hard to feel gung-ho about it. I still like plenty of Peter Gabriel and U2 but I am starting to realize that what my brother sarcastically said remains true, rock dies as soon as you graduate from college. As soon as you decide you're an adult nothing new that doesn't fit what you consider good music qualifies as good music. I'm not really against new music at all. Gnarls Barkley and Portishead have done things recently that I really like. It's just that when you compose classical music and you're not hearing much that sticks with you like a Stevie Wonder album or a Bob Dylan album or a mid 1980s Peter Gabriel or even 1990s Weezer you feel less inclined to go digging for new pop.
Put all that together and I never really bothered to go out and play pop music when I wrote pop songs because I figured, "What's the point?" I'm not even following that music scene and it seems as though if you're going to market yourself as a performer and a musician you have to know the scene and what if you just don't care about the pop music scene or rock music? It seems smarter and more beneficial to everyone to just not bother.
On the other hand, these five hours of music I've written aren't going to perform themselves so I might just have to go out and do something even though I would be first to admit I don't feel like it. I'm not sure that what I do is so good that anyone would want to buy it in the attempts at pop music and I realize I'm writing for an incredibly tiny niche by obsessing over chamber music for classical guitar, to say nothing of writing preludes and fugues for solo guitar. All stuff that I may just have work on playing myself ... if I can find anyone in this town interested in playing the stuff with me for the chamber music.
And I think lately that if I had ever had even one girlfriend the output might have been a lot less. Or a lot more, I don't really know. Two of my favorite composers (Bach and Hindemith) wrote stuff specifically for their wives.
Well, I've spent more time on a computer today than I think I probably really should. :)
Well, I am at a point where I am hitting the middle of the thirties and have things to change in my life--losing some weight, incrementally changing my diet to be healthier, getting more consistent exercise, organizing my life a little bit. I still have mounds of school debt like any college graduate tends to have who didn't have a full ride scholarship or parents with deep pockets. I am typical of my generation in that respect. There are certain types of debt, however, that I no longer have any of and in that respect I may NOT be typical of my generation.
But that is not why I am blogging here. No, the ironic reason I am blogging now is a consideration that too much of my life is taken up by, heh, computers! I feel as though it would do me some good to not even turn on the computer one or maybe two days at a time. Maybe not every week! I am not so great at being weaned of computers as that by now! Yet it is good to have some time away from computers when you work with them all the time at the day job and a great deal of the time at home. It is easier to compose music that people can read if you can play with computers so as to make a presentable score, especially if your penmanship is bad as mine. No, I won't provide any samples.
Blogs, as I consider them, are places where you can write about and publish the things that you want to get off your chest that no one else bothers to read. I speak hyperbolically but there is a sense in which nothing is LESS important than what you blog. What I mean by that is that by the time you blog something I would imagine you have processed it enough emotionally and intellectually that by the time you dump it on the internet it is in some sense resolved for you or you have resolved through it enough to write about it. Nothing actually in process would (or at least in my opinion should) hit the net. The internet is a publishing medium so as I see it completed, thought-through sentiments are best suited for it, not necessarily all the details of works or thoughts or feelings in progress.
Of course I compose as a hobby so that factors heavily into how I approach blogging. I was also a student of a certain form of mass communication where knowing what you were talking about and having a clear finished product was critical ... though I sometimes feel as though the isntruction I got on those issues were kinda old school. I was taught that you can't escape having a bias but that you must never let your bias get in the way of discovering what the facts are, what the truth is.
At any rate, I have had a more productive 2008 as a composer than I could have ever imagined, which was good because 2007 did not feel all that productive to me. I managed last year, however, to compose four preludes and fugues for solo guitar. Yes, that's right. I'm not kidding, I have started composing preludes and fugues for guitar. Because I'm a classical guitarist (not a great one by any means) and a composer I have posted some stuff on the Delcamp discussion forum and it has some nice resources and discussions for classical guitarists. One of my favorite publishers isn't allowed on there anymore and you'd have to be a serious student formal or otherwise of classical guitar literature and publishing to figure out who that is.
All that is to say that I have been slowly and steadily working on cultivating contacts and networking so as to present my compositions to professional musicians. It is a slow process and requires a great deal of patience. It would seem that it takes musicians as long to get around to playing your music when you're a composer as it takes you to write the music yourself. So you learn not to expect things to happen too soon or even ever. But thanks to a variety of contacts made through Delcamp I have a few people looking at some of my music.
Most interesting for me is the request that I compose a quartet for clarinet, French horn, guitar, and cello. I started sketching out ideas for that just this week. I have noticed for a while that people claim the guitar is like a miniature orchestra but that's all nonsense. The guitar can't play the way a string section in an orchestra can. What's more if the guitar were a miniature orchestra in practice guitarists would spend all their time playing accompaniment patterns to woodwinds, brass, and the like while not holding the limelight. Most guitarists seem too eager to grandstand and have the focus on them rather than taking a purely supportive role.
I suppose at this point I might want to mention that for years I played guitar and sang in a band. As a guitarist I am accustomed to the idea that no matter how complex or simple a guitar's part is the real purpose is to support the human voice and to guide the structure of music rather than as a basis for shredding. Shredding is cool and all, don't get me wrong, and I am not saying that my not being a great guitarist doesn't mean I have no chops whatever. A three-voiced fugue for solo guitar in G major that is nearly five minutes long won't give anyone the impression I have no chops at all. I DO know how to write for my instrument.
But I'm not a showboater and I'm not anxious to be up in front of people and play stuff if I can inspire other guitarists to take up my music. That, however, probably has to change. I have shown music to professional guitarists and guitarists, at the risk of speaking ill of my kind, are a curiously flaky bunch. I am no doubt the best exemplar of my own observation!
This last year I wrapped up a set of sonatas for woodwinds and guitar. It is a project I started back in 2000 and I am excited by the possibility of having it complete, at least for now. I only covered flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon and did not really write much for English horn, alto flute, contrabassoon or the other members of the clarinet family outside of B flat. For now I feel it is enough to hit the four basic food groups, if you will.
This year my hope is to tackle the strings and brass. Nearly no one has written for guitar and brass and there are almost no high profile works for guitar and brass in the classical repertoire. Jazz, of course, is an entirely different matter. For the combination of tuba and guitar I guess there's Leon Redbone and that's about all I can think of but why should that be all there is?
Since I'm in my mid thirties and have contemplated how I have had a kind of mid life crisis (hey, given life expectancies the "mid" counts in the thirties) I think about how little I often feel I have accomplished. I have been comparing myself to friends or family the same age who are settled down and have kids or have this or that established career. What I haven't done is look back on what I have done in the last ten years. I have had the same job for eight years now and while it often feels like a dead end job it is a job I can do and leave at home. I have begun to have a renewed appreciation of jobs like that. Some people are addicted to work as a way to define who they are. I imagine this is especially prominent for, say, CEOs or pastors and it would be especialy true of CEO/pastors, ennit?
But I have looked back on the last ten years and realized that I have in my own unobserved way done plenty, things that married or parenting types just never had time for.
I've written:
probably 35 songs, 15 sacred, 20 secular based on original or existing texts
two ragtimes for piano, 5 minutes each
a piano sonata in three movements with a closing fugue, 10 minutes
a prelude and fugue in G for piano, 6 minutes
four preludes and fugues for solo guitar, 23 minutes total
a sonata for flute and guitar; 9.5 minutes
a sonata for oboe and guitar; 18 minutes
a sonata for clarinet and guitar; 12 minutes
a sonata for bassoon and guitar; 21 minutes
single movement guitar sonata; 6 minutes
a set of variations on a theme for solo guitar; 4.5 minutes
a little rondo for guitar; 4 minutes
three lullabies for guitar; about six minutes
six studies in harmonics; about 8 minutes
two movements from an accapella Mass (Kyrie and Gloria); about nine minutes
an Evening Service (Magnificat for SSAA and organ, Nunc Dimittis for SATB with S solo, closing Gloria Patri SATB with organ) about seven minutes
two thirds of a sonata for viola and guitar, seven minutes
a passacaglia for tenor trombone and guitar, about five minutes
part of a sonata for cello and guitar, four minutes
a trio for flute, bassoon, and guitar, four minutes
When I add that all up it comes to almost three hours of music and that's not counting ANY of the songs in the aforementioned 35. Add those and it moves up to something more like five hours worth of music ranging from rock and gospel to classical and hints of jazz.
Yet it doesn't seem like much to show for a decade worth of composing. That might be simply because not a single one of these pieces has been published and nearly none of them have been performed for audiences. The few songs I played for audiences didn't feel like audiences that really seemed all that interested in or receptive of the music. I spent a lot of time arguing with my bandmates about the music I wrote so if they didn't seem to get it sometimes and audiences didn't seem responsive what was the point in trying to find more of an audience for what didn't seem to fit the interests of a Seattle crowd? I figured my music was too cerebral to have any emotional link to an audience and that I was too diffident a player lacking in chops to get the music across.
I suppose the dirty confession I have to make here is that the flip side of my feeling I'm not really much of a performer is that I also have an acquired contempt for things that lots of people seem to enjoy like "passion" and "soul" and "authenticity". The 1990s went along and I found myself not only not liking Nirvana or Radiohead but disliking them. Soundgarden was all right and I have a residual respect for U2 but they stopped being fun for me once Rattle and Hume came along and I started to become respectful but underwhelmed. Weezer was loads of fun up through Maladroit and Portishead is still interesting and Bjork was great up through Vespertine.
But on the whole I have found that I basically have had no use for a lot of pop music and the emphasis would be on use. When you start to immerse yourself in music from centuries ago or even just stick with music from 1900 to 1975 there's so much material that you start recognizing as recycled in the last twenty years of music that it's hard to feel gung-ho about it. I still like plenty of Peter Gabriel and U2 but I am starting to realize that what my brother sarcastically said remains true, rock dies as soon as you graduate from college. As soon as you decide you're an adult nothing new that doesn't fit what you consider good music qualifies as good music. I'm not really against new music at all. Gnarls Barkley and Portishead have done things recently that I really like. It's just that when you compose classical music and you're not hearing much that sticks with you like a Stevie Wonder album or a Bob Dylan album or a mid 1980s Peter Gabriel or even 1990s Weezer you feel less inclined to go digging for new pop.
Put all that together and I never really bothered to go out and play pop music when I wrote pop songs because I figured, "What's the point?" I'm not even following that music scene and it seems as though if you're going to market yourself as a performer and a musician you have to know the scene and what if you just don't care about the pop music scene or rock music? It seems smarter and more beneficial to everyone to just not bother.
On the other hand, these five hours of music I've written aren't going to perform themselves so I might just have to go out and do something even though I would be first to admit I don't feel like it. I'm not sure that what I do is so good that anyone would want to buy it in the attempts at pop music and I realize I'm writing for an incredibly tiny niche by obsessing over chamber music for classical guitar, to say nothing of writing preludes and fugues for solo guitar. All stuff that I may just have work on playing myself ... if I can find anyone in this town interested in playing the stuff with me for the chamber music.
And I think lately that if I had ever had even one girlfriend the output might have been a lot less. Or a lot more, I don't really know. Two of my favorite composers (Bach and Hindemith) wrote stuff specifically for their wives.
Well, I've spent more time on a computer today than I think I probably really should. :)
Thursday, January 01, 2009
ah
http://boarsheadtavern.com/2009/01/01/re-where-can-i-find-the-gospel/
... The Gospel is self-authenticating because it is the declarative promise of salvation from the mouth of Christ (through the servant of the Word): “You are saved.” “I’ve got the Gospel and you don’t” statements are something completely different–basically Gnostic claims to secret knowledge. The Gospel is always Christ’s Word, not our own. When we’re curious who’s got the Gospel and who doesn’t, the question to ask is not, “Does so-and-so line up with this principle,” but “Are they declaring Christ’s promise of salvation to sinners?” And if the question is, “Where can I find the Gospel?” then the answer is, “In the mouth of anyone who’s telling you that Christ has saved you.”
That answer isn't complete, of course, but it gets to the heart of what we need to remember. There is a point past which freaking out about particular doctrines and angles misses the point of the One to whom those doctrines ought to be pointing if they are Christian doctrines. The one who declares the good news is the one who declares that Christ is savior. The one who declares that because Christ is savior you can live a new life and should start living that life now with a bullet-point list has missed the boat, not on purpose, but missed the boat.
It is becoming clearer to me how things I have considered acceptable preaching and teaching have often hollowed out the actual Gospel that Christ saves sinners and replaced it with Christ being a god who validates what people want to in His name. It is one thing to say that we as ambassadors of Christ can live out the Gospel in our lives and another to speak as though we are tasked to "redeem culture" which can often become a form of tacitly accepted Christian imperialism, attempting to reclaim a Christendom we believe we have unfairly lost. It would be good to go back to a less sexually decadent era ... but not if we got back to the racist and ethnocentrist and self-deluding weaknesses of the earlier generations. At some point we must recognize that in repudiating the sins of our fathers we bring our own sins to the table and there is a place for us in the ranks of those whom the future will look back upon and ask, "Why did they think THAT was smart or holy?"
More and more I can appreciate why C. S. Lewis articulated what he called "mere Christianity" and why so many Christians of every confessional stripe find that "mere Christianity" is not only not good enough but for many of them simply not Christianity. Which is a shame, because if there is a lesson to be learned from the Pharisees in every generation it is that zeal for what you consider the things of God does not always mean you make the right decisions or that your vision isn't blinkered. We should be brave enough to speak of what is wrong and to reach out to those in need but we should also recognize that when we speak of ourselves and not in a way that points toward the Lord we are using the Lord as a mere tool, a device to get for us from others what we demand of them. Those who may speak most of grace are too often those least able to demonstrate it in any meaningful way in their actual lives, which is a shame.
... The Gospel is self-authenticating because it is the declarative promise of salvation from the mouth of Christ (through the servant of the Word): “You are saved.” “I’ve got the Gospel and you don’t” statements are something completely different–basically Gnostic claims to secret knowledge. The Gospel is always Christ’s Word, not our own. When we’re curious who’s got the Gospel and who doesn’t, the question to ask is not, “Does so-and-so line up with this principle,” but “Are they declaring Christ’s promise of salvation to sinners?” And if the question is, “Where can I find the Gospel?” then the answer is, “In the mouth of anyone who’s telling you that Christ has saved you.”
That answer isn't complete, of course, but it gets to the heart of what we need to remember. There is a point past which freaking out about particular doctrines and angles misses the point of the One to whom those doctrines ought to be pointing if they are Christian doctrines. The one who declares the good news is the one who declares that Christ is savior. The one who declares that because Christ is savior you can live a new life and should start living that life now with a bullet-point list has missed the boat, not on purpose, but missed the boat.
It is becoming clearer to me how things I have considered acceptable preaching and teaching have often hollowed out the actual Gospel that Christ saves sinners and replaced it with Christ being a god who validates what people want to in His name. It is one thing to say that we as ambassadors of Christ can live out the Gospel in our lives and another to speak as though we are tasked to "redeem culture" which can often become a form of tacitly accepted Christian imperialism, attempting to reclaim a Christendom we believe we have unfairly lost. It would be good to go back to a less sexually decadent era ... but not if we got back to the racist and ethnocentrist and self-deluding weaknesses of the earlier generations. At some point we must recognize that in repudiating the sins of our fathers we bring our own sins to the table and there is a place for us in the ranks of those whom the future will look back upon and ask, "Why did they think THAT was smart or holy?"
More and more I can appreciate why C. S. Lewis articulated what he called "mere Christianity" and why so many Christians of every confessional stripe find that "mere Christianity" is not only not good enough but for many of them simply not Christianity. Which is a shame, because if there is a lesson to be learned from the Pharisees in every generation it is that zeal for what you consider the things of God does not always mean you make the right decisions or that your vision isn't blinkered. We should be brave enough to speak of what is wrong and to reach out to those in need but we should also recognize that when we speak of ourselves and not in a way that points toward the Lord we are using the Lord as a mere tool, a device to get for us from others what we demand of them. Those who may speak most of grace are too often those least able to demonstrate it in any meaningful way in their actual lives, which is a shame.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
lopsided interpretations of Malachi 4
I hope to never see Malachi 4 invoked as a text that fathers should have regard for their children. Sometimes I have seen this chapter used and the passage about Elijah being sent to turn the hearts of fathers toward their children and the hearts of children toward their fathers is used as some kind of moralistic gibe to motivate Christian parenting.
Crap. Utter crap.
Malachi is a prophetic book and while it is true that it is considered good that Elijah would come to turn the hearts of fathers toward their sons and the hearts of sons toward their fathers how would a Christian interpret Elijah's relevance today? We do not have any teaching from John the Baptist that fathers and sons should turn their hearts toward each other.
Guess what? Though Christians have often taken Malachi 4 to prophecy the coming of John and I accept that interpretation to take the last verse of Malachi and make it prescriptive does violence to the text. It is not a prescription for what fathers or sons should do of their own accord, it is a prophecy about what Elijah would be sent by God to do. Incidentally we could spend a bunch of time on what smiting the earth with a curse might mean but for now that does not interest me.
No, what interests me is what God designs and promises. Christians see that John fulfills the promise but John simply points to Christ. Jesus notes that John was Elijah and yet the gospels never really indicate that John preached a lot about turning the hearts of the fathers toward their sons or vice versa.
So what does this thing in Malachi 4 mean? I am not here attempting to exegete the text down to the Hebrew or Aramaic, I am considering that John finally was pointing to Christ and that Elijah was the instrument used for a particular generation. But now someone greater than Elijah is here. Now someone greater than John the Baptist is here. John the Baptist was the greatest among prophets and yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he. So ... about this Elijah fellow who turns the hearts of fathers toward their children.
Here's my hunch, Christ accomplishes this. The Christ who divides mother and daughter who declared that a person's enemies would be in their own household is the one who can turn the heart of a father toward his child. I have started to think that many a Christian invokes malachi 4 as a prescription for what Christian parents are SUPPOSED TO DO without considering the flip side, that Elijah will turn the hearts of the children toward their fathers.
I have sometimes noticed that a kind of pop psychology suffuses evangelicalism, often unobserved. Perhaps because of a whole generation of baby boomers who thought they had to rebel against the ideasl of their parents' generation this came about. Perhaps all the beatniks felt they had to forsake the legacy of their parents to find their true selves and find the true way. Perhaps all the hippies felt it was the path to enlightenment and true, unfettered humanity. Many Christians desire families where the children display love and affection and loyalty and honor to their parents and Malachi makes that look good. Malachi makes it look good saying that fathers should turn their hearts toward the children,.
Dude, guess what? Prophecy. If people were able to do that of their own natural abilities and never screw it up would God send Elijah to begin with? Would God send Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord? Would God promise to spare people in the day of the Lord in MALACHI 3? Yeah, go back and check that out. it's not that prophets never prescribe ethical teaching, of course, it's that the more I consider Malachi as a prophetic book the more apparent it is that some people have missed that this is a promise from God to His people, not a list of things He expects people to do as though they were naturally inclined to do so.
So why does this matter?
A while back I read a blog entry of sorts by a Christian who was lamenting the loss of fathers. The loss of fathers is a grievous thing in society (and not like the robot in the Star Wars movie) and the problem in society is that fathers are not to be found and not given the seriousness of consideration or responsibility that they have. And so on. I read an entry where a person lamented that their father did not love them as they needed to be loved. Even in evangelicalism there is a sort of lament raised for the father who wasn't good enough or wasn't what he should have been or wasn't around.
One of the more memorable jokes on this trope about the lost father, for me, is the gaggle of sharks in 12 step in Finding Nemo. The great shark laments, "I never knew my father!" and starts to sob. And why is it funny? Because it is thought by the shark that if he laments this loss of something never had that it will keep him from eating other fish, which is his natural inclination. Paradoxcially we, as Christians, could laugh at a joke like that and yet use Malachi 4 to the same effect as the giant shark supposing that if he admits he never knew his father he wouldn't be tempted to each fish. The smell of blood reveals his real appetite.
And so it is with us in America, when I consider how the narrative of the parents who betrayed us and let us down and weren't what we hoped is invoked by Christians. This is not to say parents, to say nothing of fathers, aren't abusers, rapists, killers, slave-drivers, liars, users ,manipulators, tyrants, drunkards, and every other sort of sin known to man. I heard a testimony from a woman a few years ago that made my blood cold. My heart went out to her and I have prayed for her regularly since. What we tacitly shared in common was something I shared in a group where she and I seemed to be the only people who appreciated something from blunt experience. The group had discussed how family can be a wonderful thing to rely on in times of trouble. I replied that that was often true but that on the other hand no one has the power to destroy you and maim your heart like family.
Solzhenitsyn once wrote that millions become statistics, you fail to have the framework from which to understand the magnitude of the horror. You might need photos of every person whose life was destroyed to begin to grasp the significance of at all. In the age of the internet we have that sort of capacity and yet it paradoxically numbs us. There is a reason Dostoevsky's Ivan reduced the staggering scope of evil in the world to the voice of one desperate child. What I fear we may have in our age is the strange paradox that we ignore that child as another statistic or consider ourselves the child against who all the injustices are done rather than see what we ourselves do to the child, for the child is not merely ourselves but those we sin against.
So, then, there is Malachi 4. This is, again, not a prescription of what Christian parents should do or expect from their children. It is a promise from God that through His servant He will incline the heart of a father toward his child and the heart of the child toward his father. It is a promise for mothers and daughters as well. This promise presupposes a rift in the natural order of things. After all, what God has made crooked no one can make straight. Yet it seems Malachi 4's last few versers are popular verses to invoke so that people can make straight what God has left crooked.
This speaks of the coming terrible day of the Lord whom no one could survive without God's mercy. So when the prophet promises for God that Elijah will turn hearts of generations toward each other we have gotten to a point where Ezekiel has said that fathers alone will be punished for their sins and not the sons, a change in things if you consider earlier punishments.
As a considerable aside, I once made a suggestion that when Jesus said that Moses allowed divorce because of hardness of men's hearts that this is something to consider in the following way, Moses received the laws from God so is Jesus suggesting Moses added a proviso or two in the Law that God did not intend? No, so then if God through Moses permitted that which He did not approve of what was the purpose? I wondered, probably to the dismay of some, if this wasn't a demonstration of God making some concessions even in the Mosaic law to some aspects of humanity in a certain epoch that were so far gone there was no point in prohibiting it. It is probably disturbing for Christians to consider that there are certain types of reprobation in a given time and age that God simply grants that in that epoch there is no changing it.
Rather than merely horrify us we must consider how this grace from God may manifest itself toward us in our time. This is not an observation that should lead us only to damn earlier generations whose sins repel us yet who might damn us with equal fervor for sins that we consider the acme of decent behavior. The generation that condoned child labor would still be right to condemn the generation that created and used the atomic bomb. If you don't think I have any grounds to say that go read Barefoot Gen. This point I have made obliquely and I am sure many will not catch what I am getting at. But I am content to let it be what it is and suggest that we consider that what may seem the cruelty of God permitting wickedness may, paradoxically, be more merciful than the justice we would demand He bring forth. And so here the aside is finished. Trust me, it is not so tangential as might appear.
We live in a society that idolizes youth. Preferably adult, sexualized youth of course the way our society works, but children are the future, as Whitney Houston sang so long ago. Children are held up as innocent. Children in Disney films are held up as the heroes over against blundering parents. We have a culture suffused with a belief that children will discern failures their elders missed and Christians certainly believe this, too, and it has more than a kernel of truth to it. It is often truth. We live in a society that makes children both heroes in narrative and also victims. So much so that the Comics Code prohibits the depiction of any child being struck by an adult and there is a whole stupid subgenre of horror about demon children who adults don't harm because of societal taboos. Believe me, there would be no possibility for such an absurd genre of narrative in earlier epochs of even Western history. Certain kids who were bad enough really would get killed. But that is yet another aside getting to the next one.
Scripture at various places attests that evil is indeed locked up in the heart of a child (and the parent, as well, since Scripture condemns various forms of child sacrifice). Focus on the rod and you'll miss what even Piaget observed, that children are capable of nearly limitless self-regard and truly believe the cosmos revolves around them. This does not make them guilty in any adult sense of guilt and their eternal fate is hardly my concern. I don't know, I don't pretend to know. But I am just jaded enough by what I have seen of children that I believe many Christians who take up Malachi 4 about parenting don't realize how hopeless that is and do not consider how Elijah, not them, will turn the hearts of children toward their fathers.
Things like infanticde and killing children were not considered a priori goods in Jewish society. Yeah, you could stone a kid for being rebellious but unlike Greco-Roman culture you weren't supposed to dump the aby over a hill if you didn't want another one.
Having taken many diversions by now I come back to the mourning shark. I have read things to the effect of people grieving for their father not being good enough but what if Malachi 4's promise is read as the eschatological promise that it is instead of as a prescription for a social agenda? What if we read it not as a prescriptive moralism but as an apocalyptic promise? Remember the words of God given through His sevent and He will send His servant to give you the hearts to fulfill it.
In this light I suggest that while there is nothing necessarily wrong with grieving for the failures and sins of your father when I consider Malachi 4 I notice that it addresses the children, too. God not only enables the fathers to grieve over their sin but the children to grieve over theirs. Who might they sin most against in this age? Each other, of course? You cannot manufacture what only the Spirit of God can produce. Your grief over your father's failure will not turn his heart toward you and his grief over your failure will not turn your heart toward him.
Yet if the Spirit gives you and your father, or you and your child conviction that you have sinned against each other and in that grief you reach out to each other and find ways to grieve together THEN I suggest that Elijah has truly spoken to you and prepared the way for the Lord. So often Christians would be eager to take Malachi 4 and prepare the way themselves! They want either their parents or their children to grieve and be turned back to them. That's not how it works.
It may be too simplistic to say this but legalism always seems to be some case where we insist on accomplishing for ourselves out of impatience what only Christ can accomlish within us. We do not realize how helpless we truly are because we think that we can help ourselves. We do not realize how depraved we are because we consider first the depravity of others. Malachi 4 does not say that Elijah will turn the hearts of fathers toward children only or the hearts only of children toward their fathers.
We must be skeptical when we find ourselves tempted to lament not because there is nothing to mourn. Jesus said that those who mourn are most happy for they will be comforted. We must be skeptical when we find ourselves inclined to lament because we should ask what we are truly lamenting. Not all sorrow is godly sorrow. Strangely, perhaps, mourning the loss of things we did not have can become our greatest pleasure and becomes our comfort. But if you lament what you did not have how would you know what it was?
A blind man can lament that he has never been able to see but what is he really lamenting? He is not lamenting the lack of sight so much as those things he would be sure to have, he trusts, if he had ever been able to see. That is often how our mourning is--we are blind men who are mourning the things we do not have because we cannot see even though we do not understand what it is like to see them. Indeed we mourn having never seen and the things we could have had had we seen. This is not itself truly mourning that we are blind. No, that is a different thing altogether.
Think of it this way, the man born blind may not lament that he is unable to see his wife if he can touch her. He has never seen anything but he can touch his wife and be touched by her. The man who has seen his wife and is then blind can surely mourn that he can no longer see his wife. He can praise her beauty as beheld in his eyes from memory alone and not see how she grows and changes yet remains beautiful over time.
We are blind men from birth whom Christ can give the gift of sight. We can mourn those things we believe we should be able to see yet we do not see them. But if Christ comes to us and heals us then perhaps we may weep in a new way. We are allowed to weep not for the things we never saw that we wished we could see but to weep with joy at the things Christ gives us sight to see that we have never seen before.
So mourn, yet do not make mourning your comfort or you have received your comfort already. Mourn without comfort and then Christ can come and comfort you. Mourn without comfort and Christ can bring forth people who can mourn with you. You may even be surprised to discover that those who Christ may bring to mourn with you are the people you were mourning about, the people who you were mourning over that they did not mourn. Only be alert so that when the moment comes you may be given grace by God to see and hear it or it may come and be unappreciated, just as Elijah was!
That is how, if I understand God's promises and their fulfillment in Christ rightly, the hearts of fathers are turned toward sons and the hearts of sons are turned toward fathers. Christians are so busy being zealots attempting to bring the kingdom of God in by force, being violent men grasping violently at the kingdom, that they do not see how it arrives meekly, on a colt, and do not recognize it when it speaks to them. It is no wonder to me now that Jesus so often says, "Let he who has ears to hear hear." Elijah came to point to Christ and Christ alone inclines your heart to the child or the father.
Why do so many Christians transform a startling promise from God into a command they must fulfill? They do not believe the promise. Fortunately God's ability to fulfill His promise is not dependent on their belief.
O Light who makes the cosmos shine
Please fill our minds with light divine
That with Yourself our hearts may glow
And You our darkness overthrow.
O Light in Whom no shadow lies
Give sight to all our blinded eyes
That we may see You are the Word
True light and life to all the world.
Amen.
Crap. Utter crap.
Malachi is a prophetic book and while it is true that it is considered good that Elijah would come to turn the hearts of fathers toward their sons and the hearts of sons toward their fathers how would a Christian interpret Elijah's relevance today? We do not have any teaching from John the Baptist that fathers and sons should turn their hearts toward each other.
Guess what? Though Christians have often taken Malachi 4 to prophecy the coming of John and I accept that interpretation to take the last verse of Malachi and make it prescriptive does violence to the text. It is not a prescription for what fathers or sons should do of their own accord, it is a prophecy about what Elijah would be sent by God to do. Incidentally we could spend a bunch of time on what smiting the earth with a curse might mean but for now that does not interest me.
No, what interests me is what God designs and promises. Christians see that John fulfills the promise but John simply points to Christ. Jesus notes that John was Elijah and yet the gospels never really indicate that John preached a lot about turning the hearts of the fathers toward their sons or vice versa.
So what does this thing in Malachi 4 mean? I am not here attempting to exegete the text down to the Hebrew or Aramaic, I am considering that John finally was pointing to Christ and that Elijah was the instrument used for a particular generation. But now someone greater than Elijah is here. Now someone greater than John the Baptist is here. John the Baptist was the greatest among prophets and yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he. So ... about this Elijah fellow who turns the hearts of fathers toward their children.
Here's my hunch, Christ accomplishes this. The Christ who divides mother and daughter who declared that a person's enemies would be in their own household is the one who can turn the heart of a father toward his child. I have started to think that many a Christian invokes malachi 4 as a prescription for what Christian parents are SUPPOSED TO DO without considering the flip side, that Elijah will turn the hearts of the children toward their fathers.
I have sometimes noticed that a kind of pop psychology suffuses evangelicalism, often unobserved. Perhaps because of a whole generation of baby boomers who thought they had to rebel against the ideasl of their parents' generation this came about. Perhaps all the beatniks felt they had to forsake the legacy of their parents to find their true selves and find the true way. Perhaps all the hippies felt it was the path to enlightenment and true, unfettered humanity. Many Christians desire families where the children display love and affection and loyalty and honor to their parents and Malachi makes that look good. Malachi makes it look good saying that fathers should turn their hearts toward the children,.
Dude, guess what? Prophecy. If people were able to do that of their own natural abilities and never screw it up would God send Elijah to begin with? Would God send Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord? Would God promise to spare people in the day of the Lord in MALACHI 3? Yeah, go back and check that out. it's not that prophets never prescribe ethical teaching, of course, it's that the more I consider Malachi as a prophetic book the more apparent it is that some people have missed that this is a promise from God to His people, not a list of things He expects people to do as though they were naturally inclined to do so.
So why does this matter?
A while back I read a blog entry of sorts by a Christian who was lamenting the loss of fathers. The loss of fathers is a grievous thing in society (and not like the robot in the Star Wars movie) and the problem in society is that fathers are not to be found and not given the seriousness of consideration or responsibility that they have. And so on. I read an entry where a person lamented that their father did not love them as they needed to be loved. Even in evangelicalism there is a sort of lament raised for the father who wasn't good enough or wasn't what he should have been or wasn't around.
One of the more memorable jokes on this trope about the lost father, for me, is the gaggle of sharks in 12 step in Finding Nemo. The great shark laments, "I never knew my father!" and starts to sob. And why is it funny? Because it is thought by the shark that if he laments this loss of something never had that it will keep him from eating other fish, which is his natural inclination. Paradoxcially we, as Christians, could laugh at a joke like that and yet use Malachi 4 to the same effect as the giant shark supposing that if he admits he never knew his father he wouldn't be tempted to each fish. The smell of blood reveals his real appetite.
And so it is with us in America, when I consider how the narrative of the parents who betrayed us and let us down and weren't what we hoped is invoked by Christians. This is not to say parents, to say nothing of fathers, aren't abusers, rapists, killers, slave-drivers, liars, users ,manipulators, tyrants, drunkards, and every other sort of sin known to man. I heard a testimony from a woman a few years ago that made my blood cold. My heart went out to her and I have prayed for her regularly since. What we tacitly shared in common was something I shared in a group where she and I seemed to be the only people who appreciated something from blunt experience. The group had discussed how family can be a wonderful thing to rely on in times of trouble. I replied that that was often true but that on the other hand no one has the power to destroy you and maim your heart like family.
Solzhenitsyn once wrote that millions become statistics, you fail to have the framework from which to understand the magnitude of the horror. You might need photos of every person whose life was destroyed to begin to grasp the significance of at all. In the age of the internet we have that sort of capacity and yet it paradoxically numbs us. There is a reason Dostoevsky's Ivan reduced the staggering scope of evil in the world to the voice of one desperate child. What I fear we may have in our age is the strange paradox that we ignore that child as another statistic or consider ourselves the child against who all the injustices are done rather than see what we ourselves do to the child, for the child is not merely ourselves but those we sin against.
So, then, there is Malachi 4. This is, again, not a prescription of what Christian parents should do or expect from their children. It is a promise from God that through His servant He will incline the heart of a father toward his child and the heart of the child toward his father. It is a promise for mothers and daughters as well. This promise presupposes a rift in the natural order of things. After all, what God has made crooked no one can make straight. Yet it seems Malachi 4's last few versers are popular verses to invoke so that people can make straight what God has left crooked.
This speaks of the coming terrible day of the Lord whom no one could survive without God's mercy. So when the prophet promises for God that Elijah will turn hearts of generations toward each other we have gotten to a point where Ezekiel has said that fathers alone will be punished for their sins and not the sons, a change in things if you consider earlier punishments.
As a considerable aside, I once made a suggestion that when Jesus said that Moses allowed divorce because of hardness of men's hearts that this is something to consider in the following way, Moses received the laws from God so is Jesus suggesting Moses added a proviso or two in the Law that God did not intend? No, so then if God through Moses permitted that which He did not approve of what was the purpose? I wondered, probably to the dismay of some, if this wasn't a demonstration of God making some concessions even in the Mosaic law to some aspects of humanity in a certain epoch that were so far gone there was no point in prohibiting it. It is probably disturbing for Christians to consider that there are certain types of reprobation in a given time and age that God simply grants that in that epoch there is no changing it.
Rather than merely horrify us we must consider how this grace from God may manifest itself toward us in our time. This is not an observation that should lead us only to damn earlier generations whose sins repel us yet who might damn us with equal fervor for sins that we consider the acme of decent behavior. The generation that condoned child labor would still be right to condemn the generation that created and used the atomic bomb. If you don't think I have any grounds to say that go read Barefoot Gen. This point I have made obliquely and I am sure many will not catch what I am getting at. But I am content to let it be what it is and suggest that we consider that what may seem the cruelty of God permitting wickedness may, paradoxically, be more merciful than the justice we would demand He bring forth. And so here the aside is finished. Trust me, it is not so tangential as might appear.
We live in a society that idolizes youth. Preferably adult, sexualized youth of course the way our society works, but children are the future, as Whitney Houston sang so long ago. Children are held up as innocent. Children in Disney films are held up as the heroes over against blundering parents. We have a culture suffused with a belief that children will discern failures their elders missed and Christians certainly believe this, too, and it has more than a kernel of truth to it. It is often truth. We live in a society that makes children both heroes in narrative and also victims. So much so that the Comics Code prohibits the depiction of any child being struck by an adult and there is a whole stupid subgenre of horror about demon children who adults don't harm because of societal taboos. Believe me, there would be no possibility for such an absurd genre of narrative in earlier epochs of even Western history. Certain kids who were bad enough really would get killed. But that is yet another aside getting to the next one.
Scripture at various places attests that evil is indeed locked up in the heart of a child (and the parent, as well, since Scripture condemns various forms of child sacrifice). Focus on the rod and you'll miss what even Piaget observed, that children are capable of nearly limitless self-regard and truly believe the cosmos revolves around them. This does not make them guilty in any adult sense of guilt and their eternal fate is hardly my concern. I don't know, I don't pretend to know. But I am just jaded enough by what I have seen of children that I believe many Christians who take up Malachi 4 about parenting don't realize how hopeless that is and do not consider how Elijah, not them, will turn the hearts of children toward their fathers.
Things like infanticde and killing children were not considered a priori goods in Jewish society. Yeah, you could stone a kid for being rebellious but unlike Greco-Roman culture you weren't supposed to dump the aby over a hill if you didn't want another one.
Having taken many diversions by now I come back to the mourning shark. I have read things to the effect of people grieving for their father not being good enough but what if Malachi 4's promise is read as the eschatological promise that it is instead of as a prescription for a social agenda? What if we read it not as a prescriptive moralism but as an apocalyptic promise? Remember the words of God given through His sevent and He will send His servant to give you the hearts to fulfill it.
In this light I suggest that while there is nothing necessarily wrong with grieving for the failures and sins of your father when I consider Malachi 4 I notice that it addresses the children, too. God not only enables the fathers to grieve over their sin but the children to grieve over theirs. Who might they sin most against in this age? Each other, of course? You cannot manufacture what only the Spirit of God can produce. Your grief over your father's failure will not turn his heart toward you and his grief over your failure will not turn your heart toward him.
Yet if the Spirit gives you and your father, or you and your child conviction that you have sinned against each other and in that grief you reach out to each other and find ways to grieve together THEN I suggest that Elijah has truly spoken to you and prepared the way for the Lord. So often Christians would be eager to take Malachi 4 and prepare the way themselves! They want either their parents or their children to grieve and be turned back to them. That's not how it works.
It may be too simplistic to say this but legalism always seems to be some case where we insist on accomplishing for ourselves out of impatience what only Christ can accomlish within us. We do not realize how helpless we truly are because we think that we can help ourselves. We do not realize how depraved we are because we consider first the depravity of others. Malachi 4 does not say that Elijah will turn the hearts of fathers toward children only or the hearts only of children toward their fathers.
We must be skeptical when we find ourselves tempted to lament not because there is nothing to mourn. Jesus said that those who mourn are most happy for they will be comforted. We must be skeptical when we find ourselves inclined to lament because we should ask what we are truly lamenting. Not all sorrow is godly sorrow. Strangely, perhaps, mourning the loss of things we did not have can become our greatest pleasure and becomes our comfort. But if you lament what you did not have how would you know what it was?
A blind man can lament that he has never been able to see but what is he really lamenting? He is not lamenting the lack of sight so much as those things he would be sure to have, he trusts, if he had ever been able to see. That is often how our mourning is--we are blind men who are mourning the things we do not have because we cannot see even though we do not understand what it is like to see them. Indeed we mourn having never seen and the things we could have had had we seen. This is not itself truly mourning that we are blind. No, that is a different thing altogether.
Think of it this way, the man born blind may not lament that he is unable to see his wife if he can touch her. He has never seen anything but he can touch his wife and be touched by her. The man who has seen his wife and is then blind can surely mourn that he can no longer see his wife. He can praise her beauty as beheld in his eyes from memory alone and not see how she grows and changes yet remains beautiful over time.
We are blind men from birth whom Christ can give the gift of sight. We can mourn those things we believe we should be able to see yet we do not see them. But if Christ comes to us and heals us then perhaps we may weep in a new way. We are allowed to weep not for the things we never saw that we wished we could see but to weep with joy at the things Christ gives us sight to see that we have never seen before.
So mourn, yet do not make mourning your comfort or you have received your comfort already. Mourn without comfort and then Christ can come and comfort you. Mourn without comfort and Christ can bring forth people who can mourn with you. You may even be surprised to discover that those who Christ may bring to mourn with you are the people you were mourning about, the people who you were mourning over that they did not mourn. Only be alert so that when the moment comes you may be given grace by God to see and hear it or it may come and be unappreciated, just as Elijah was!
That is how, if I understand God's promises and their fulfillment in Christ rightly, the hearts of fathers are turned toward sons and the hearts of sons are turned toward fathers. Christians are so busy being zealots attempting to bring the kingdom of God in by force, being violent men grasping violently at the kingdom, that they do not see how it arrives meekly, on a colt, and do not recognize it when it speaks to them. It is no wonder to me now that Jesus so often says, "Let he who has ears to hear hear." Elijah came to point to Christ and Christ alone inclines your heart to the child or the father.
Why do so many Christians transform a startling promise from God into a command they must fulfill? They do not believe the promise. Fortunately God's ability to fulfill His promise is not dependent on their belief.
O Light who makes the cosmos shine
Please fill our minds with light divine
That with Yourself our hearts may glow
And You our darkness overthrow.
O Light in Whom no shadow lies
Give sight to all our blinded eyes
That we may see You are the Word
True light and life to all the world.
Amen.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Comments as drive-by events
This last year has seen some comments on this blog. By comments I don't mean, "I very much like your blog and here is a great money-making opportunity I want to share with you." We all know those aren't real comments. I mean comments about things I have written that contain substance to them. Many of the comments have been anonymous, and a few from people I know or am related to, and a handful from people I've never met but who for some reason read what I blogged.
I have heard it said that what people on the internet do is lie about who they are and use pseudonyms to say on-line what they would never tell people in person. Nah, that's not really true. ConcernedAbout, for instance, would undoubtedly tell me I'm some childish delusional person for actually being a Christian to my face. People may exagerrate aspects of themselves on the internet and, yes, there's a degree to which people do lie about themselves but most people are not so different on-line from who they are in face-to-face life.
Having said that I am not sure that anonymous comments should be seen as being made by people who are unwilling to identify themselves, though I know it may be tempting to see things that way. I tend to be a bit more prgamatic, and perhaps a bit more cynical, in supposing that it is essentially laziness that prompts anonymous comments. A person wants to speak up about a blog entry without actually logging in to a blogger username or any of that. They post an anonymous comment and have their say.
I have noticed that despite anything I might think I was really clear about it's always possible, even likely, for people to not get what I said. half the time I think this is because I was a sloppy, disorganized writer. The other half of the time I figure my blog comments section is simply being used as a way to generate traffic for the blogs of others and that commenting on anything I said is merely incidental to that goal. That's part of the deal, though, so that's fine. And those who decided to post as themselves did me the favor of speaking for themselves.
But there are also people who posted to disagree with me or to provide their own take on things I have written about. When anonymous I figure it is laziness rather than cowardice that spurred them to post anonymously. Really, since I've allowed for anonymous comments why bother to log in if you don't have a Blogger account?
In light of all that I'd like to say a word of thanks to the people who posted comments on the blog and did so from their own blogger account. Thanks to family, of fourse, for reading, thanks to Marie for reading when she has time, thanks to dwayne, thanks to wendy, thanks to quinalt, thanks to niccola, thanks to ConcernedAbout. Whether or not we have agreed on any issues at all some time of your day for reading is appreciated. Blogging is simply a form of entertainment in the end and I am glad if my little blog can be of some entertainment to you where ever you are at.
Yes, you too Concerned About. :) You might think my taking the biblical stories seriously as referring to things that happened is childish and dishonest but if that's the case you had better things to do with your time than comment on a blog. But you, too, posted as you, and that's something I do appreciate. Now I certainly have more interesting things to do with my time than to get into the differences between the Masoretic text and the Septuagint regrading the psalms, for instance, and I leave it to others to discuss the differences in emphasis and literary approach that exist in the way the synoptics handle a given parable that all three synoptists use ... but I trust readers get the idea. This blog is obviously about what I find interesting but is not all-inclusive.
And over time this blog has tended to be less and less about non-Spanish classical guitar repertoire, something I might change (or not) this upcoming year. I have also not written much about cartoons, either. I have no resolutions for the new year beyond composing more music, which I already tend to do anyway. I suppose I might also "resolve" to keep working on this blog. I anticipate that not many will read and that when people comment about 3/4 of the time it will be from people who don't quite get where I'm coming from.
I have heard it said that what people on the internet do is lie about who they are and use pseudonyms to say on-line what they would never tell people in person. Nah, that's not really true. ConcernedAbout, for instance, would undoubtedly tell me I'm some childish delusional person for actually being a Christian to my face. People may exagerrate aspects of themselves on the internet and, yes, there's a degree to which people do lie about themselves but most people are not so different on-line from who they are in face-to-face life.
Having said that I am not sure that anonymous comments should be seen as being made by people who are unwilling to identify themselves, though I know it may be tempting to see things that way. I tend to be a bit more prgamatic, and perhaps a bit more cynical, in supposing that it is essentially laziness that prompts anonymous comments. A person wants to speak up about a blog entry without actually logging in to a blogger username or any of that. They post an anonymous comment and have their say.
I have noticed that despite anything I might think I was really clear about it's always possible, even likely, for people to not get what I said. half the time I think this is because I was a sloppy, disorganized writer. The other half of the time I figure my blog comments section is simply being used as a way to generate traffic for the blogs of others and that commenting on anything I said is merely incidental to that goal. That's part of the deal, though, so that's fine. And those who decided to post as themselves did me the favor of speaking for themselves.
But there are also people who posted to disagree with me or to provide their own take on things I have written about. When anonymous I figure it is laziness rather than cowardice that spurred them to post anonymously. Really, since I've allowed for anonymous comments why bother to log in if you don't have a Blogger account?
In light of all that I'd like to say a word of thanks to the people who posted comments on the blog and did so from their own blogger account. Thanks to family, of fourse, for reading, thanks to Marie for reading when she has time, thanks to dwayne, thanks to wendy, thanks to quinalt, thanks to niccola, thanks to ConcernedAbout. Whether or not we have agreed on any issues at all some time of your day for reading is appreciated. Blogging is simply a form of entertainment in the end and I am glad if my little blog can be of some entertainment to you where ever you are at.
Yes, you too Concerned About. :) You might think my taking the biblical stories seriously as referring to things that happened is childish and dishonest but if that's the case you had better things to do with your time than comment on a blog. But you, too, posted as you, and that's something I do appreciate. Now I certainly have more interesting things to do with my time than to get into the differences between the Masoretic text and the Septuagint regrading the psalms, for instance, and I leave it to others to discuss the differences in emphasis and literary approach that exist in the way the synoptics handle a given parable that all three synoptists use ... but I trust readers get the idea. This blog is obviously about what I find interesting but is not all-inclusive.
And over time this blog has tended to be less and less about non-Spanish classical guitar repertoire, something I might change (or not) this upcoming year. I have also not written much about cartoons, either. I have no resolutions for the new year beyond composing more music, which I already tend to do anyway. I suppose I might also "resolve" to keep working on this blog. I anticipate that not many will read and that when people comment about 3/4 of the time it will be from people who don't quite get where I'm coming from.
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