This post from iMonk got me thinking ....

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/the-face-of-gracious-god#more-2760

Religion #1:
God is mean, angry and easily provoked. From day 1, we’ve all been a disappointment, and God is–justly–planning to punish us forever. At the last minute, thanks to Jesus stepping in to calm him down, he decides to be gracious.
But don’t do anything to mess that up. Peace is fragile around here.

Religion #2
God is gracious, loving, kind, generous and open-hearted. He rejoices in us as his creations, and is grieved that our sins have made us his enemies and caused so much brokenness and pain. In Jesus, he shows us what kind of God he is and restores the joy that should belong to the children of such a Father. True to his promises, he will bless all people in Jesus, and restore the world by his resurrection victory.

Here are some questions inspired by this part of iMonk's post ... for the very few people who probably read this blog.

First question, have you considered who preaches religion #1 in your life and who has preached religion #2?

Did they know they were preaching those religions or not? Is it possible for someone to preach religion #1 while thinking he is preaching religion #2

Second question, have you met anyone who preached religion #1 and then switched to religion #2? Did you ever learn how the Lord worked in their hearts to get them to that point?

Third question, have you come across a preacher who started with religion #2 and started preaching religion #1? Were there any indications of a change in the preaching? What changes presaged such a shift? Was the teacher aware of the shift?

The thing I can't help but think about is that we like to talk about preachers who just preach 1 or 2, we like to talk about preachers who preached 1 and then preached 2 as Paul would be the pet example from history for that. But what about those who get religion 2 (the good news of Christ) and then start preaching religion 1?

I consider the case of Pelagius. It seemed he wanted to solve a problem, the problem being that people were immoral in the big city. He taught in ways that would attempt to curtail that by emphasizing responsibility ... and now Pelagianism is considered by many to be a wildly pernicious heretical teaching. The more time goes by the more it seems as though a transition from religion 2 to religion 1 can come when theology gets ... at the risk of making a statement wildly susceptible to misinterpretation ... practical. You're not likely to land in heresy by proclaiming that Jesus is King and God and man, you're likely to end up stating something heretical because you're trying to solve a problem, a real problem, in a local religious community.

Is the problem so pernicious it is worth it for you to switch from religion 2 to religion 1? What different ways can a pastor or theologian switch from religion 2 to religion 1 without even, possibly, noticing it? I am most interested in how a pastor or Christian can get from version 2 of Christianity to version 1. Why does it happen? What do these Christians believe they are preserving by jumping from 2 to 1?

What happens if religion 2 and religion 1 are both taught in the same church as what the good news of Jesus really is? I don't mean that there are aspects of the two, if you will, caricatures in true religion. Let's suppose for sake of argument religion 2 is the truer definition of the prodigal love of God for His creation. What happens when you get both religion 1 and 2 taught in the same church by different people in different settings on different topics and they all believe they are teaching the same thing? Is that even possible? I say, speaking as someone with a very dim view of how Christians so often teach, that it is perfectly possible for versions 1 and 2 of Christianity to show up in the same church, in the same family, even in the same person.

Just a few things to consider. If I had a clearer idea whether there were answers to this then this would be a longer blog entry but since I don't I am just throwing out these questions for consideration while I mull them over. We always want to hear stories about people who go from 1 to 2 ... but it feels like a dark spot in the history of Christianity is that there have been plenty of people who went from 2 to 1 and probably didn't realize it. Perhaps they thought they were solving or addressing the burning cultural problem of their time and perhaps they were ... in their own way, but the history of Christianity and aberrant teaching serves as a warning that your solution to today's moral problem may be the seed from which tomorrow's heresy grows if you tilt too far to the one side or the other.

John Frame's Machen's Warrior Children, a history of Calvinists as jerks for Jesus ... or their idea of Jesus

http://www.frame-poythress.org/frame_articles/2003Machen.htm

At a time when there has been coverage of the young, restless and Reformed I wish this article had been written in 1993 instead of 2003 so that it could have a preventative role ... and I wish that it had been able to exist as a preface to Mars Hill's old school Midrash. Seriously, I wonder if I or any number of other people ... including pastors, would have posted half the stupid stuff we posted if Frame's observations had been available. But, fortunately, Frame's observations are at least available now. As before, a good deal of this running commentary will only make sense if you read the original article.

A few passing thoughts regarding some of the issues Frames mentions as fighting points:

1. Eschatology. I am going to get slammed at some point for saying this but too many postmillenialists are simply smug buttholes. If you're a postmillenialist, good for you. I dislike premillenialism immensely ... but they're all brothers and sisters in Christ so I try to be nice to the people even when I think they are out to lunch, particularly dispensationalist premillenialists. Frame nails it by pointing out that there's been almost no room for simply being nice about differences of opinion.

I saw first hand postmils declaring that amillenialists were pessimistic and didn't have a basis for hope, which is stupid since the hope is in Christ Himself as my inheritence through faith not that a bunch of postmillenialists will eventually hand the world to Jesus on a silver platter because they redeemed the culture. As First Things so snarkily put it, lots of mainline Protestants love postmillenialism up until World War 1 and then they dropped it like a hot potato when they found out, to their dismay, that THEY were not going to be Christianizing the world for Jesus.

Regarding Frame's point 8 ... Fans of Rushdoony, North, and Bahnsen ... well ... THEY think those guys matter. But trust a broader sense of history, they don't and they won't. Frame is right to point out that the eschatological views of this or that group don't yield any reasonable cause and effect relationship between the stated view and their optimism or pessimism regarding society.

What I continually doubt regarding the likes of the reconstructionists is their failure to see that the Social Gospel movement and its eventual mainline and liberal outworkings, produced a whole raft of unanticipated social changes that I would think many conservative Christians now dislike. And if you look at the home-school movement, at the desire to teach intelligent design, at the fondness for moderated alcohol consumption, or a few other things you'll see that there's a desire to, as it were, turn back the clock on the products of the old Christian activist causes that led to things like public education, the enforcement of child labor laws to give adult men jobs during the Depression, prohibition so as to prevent abuse of alcohol (which Frame mentions).

All of these things were done with the desire to pursue "good law" and law Christians believed would better society. A consequence of all these variables was the development of the cultural entity known as the teenager, relatively unprecedented in social history. Note I hedge there because there's nothing new under the sun. Arguably the adult but not independent adult we would use to describe the teenager has always been with us, we simply see a relatively unique and modern form of the non-adult who is physically but not emotionally or intellectually adult. Christian social critics fret that this stage is prolonged more and more even into the twenties. Well, yeah, consider that the economy and the nature of cities like Seattle makes truly independent life less and less viable. I would argue that extended family is simply making a comeback so that America will look more like other cultures. This is not bad and provided Christians and Americans in general have a certain pragmatic humility about not being able to live truly independent lives but depending on some kind of community or extended family there's nothing to be ashamed of.

The problem with a theonomistic approach, to say it simply, is that it isn't practical and doesn't apply to the real world. Jesus said that His kingdom is not of this world, yet this world is part of His kingdom. Christians have been struggling with that since the beginning of the Lord's ministry on earth and the theonomists can be tempted to want God's kingdom to be implemented here and now. It's not that I don't get in any way their enthusiasm, but there is a surprising lack of doubt about whether or not the thing they advocate would actually be a good idea. In a word, humility is needed and too often that isn't what I see ... which Frame doesn't necessarily address but he doesn't need to. I can blog about it.

11. Counseling. Frame touches on this and I wonder if it isn't a replay of the old conflict in viewed between Tertullian and Augustine, not a formal or personal conflict but a tension among formative Christian leaders about the things of Jerusalem that do or don't have anything to do with Rome.

This one has been interesting to me because of family history. My mom got an undergrad degree in psychology and said that it was a perfectly reliable way of assessing the ways of the fallen human heart and mind but that it was not a good way for Christians to think through how people are. So I guess the best way to articulate that position would be to say it's good to know but it's not something that supplants biblical teaching. Perhaps not the clearest way of putting it but the gist of it.

But having a charismatic/pentecostal background that included things like identifying and naming local principalities and spirits or cutting soul ties or things like that (Rebecca Brown M.D. anyone?) and Sandfords and the "healing of memories" movement ... and a lot became ... curious. Some folks believes that anything that involved psychological problems had to have a demonic explanation. Did the schizophrenia lead to demonic posession or did the demonic oppression lead to schizophrenia was almost a rhetorical question. Now I would be content to say over and over again that the body and mind and spirit are all intertwined. As Frame points out, the connections are becoming more evident and that means that both the ostensibly scientism side and the skeptical side (about science, that is) may have to learn from each other.

Now the reason I think this issue becomes important is because in the 1990s we didn't just have a craze about healing of memories we also had ... I don't know how to put this delicately, stories abounding about sexual abuse. Now I'm not saying this stuff isn't rampant. But combined with a healing of memories approach and a skepticism about professional psychiatric/psychological evaluation combined with an evangelical metanarrative of the disintegrating family and the loss of athers ... I worry (a lot, can you tell?) that this is an area where Christians can suck up gallons of pop psychological pap and meta-narrative melodrama. For those who have read this blog a long time I give you the giant shark in Finding Nemo lamenting that he never knew his father as though that would explain why he wanted to eat meat. I'm not interested in diminishing abuse at all but I'm a kid of the 1980s and I am afraid I know of some stories where tales of abuse became useful in securing custody after divorce proceedings or where real abuse went unreported for reasons no one on earth could possibly guess at. We live in a broken and often evil world.

Sometimes I worry, perhaps with no grounds, that a pastor skeptical about actual professional training in psychology may think that armed with just the Holy Spirit and his high school diploma can "discern" things about people that are not really there. It can all be very well-intended but not necessarily accurate. At a church I have attended for years there used to be quite a bit of joking that the seminarians had no life experience to know what they were doing and at that church there are people seeking precisely the seminary credentials they used to laugh at. Perhaps it is good to hold on to one and not let go of the other?

Some churches have enough disclaimers to the effect that nothing provided constitutes professional or competent counsel except from a "biblical" standpoint that the buyer beware couldn't get any bigger for those who have eyes to see.

17. Presbyterians are Baptists, too. :)

Believe it or not this ties in with the series I'm working on, it really does, but at a meta-level. Frame outlines all the ways in which the Reformed, specifically, fought battles that in hindsight seemed to be not-very-important over not-very-important things without knowing how to be gracious or patient. Calvinists are often great at being self-righteous assholes and per a recent article in the New York Times, a doctrine of total human depravity has the paradoxical effectof emboldening rather than humbling its adherents. Well, this Calvinist finds plenty to be humble about, not least the behavior of all the other Calvinists.

I "could" get up in arms about how unfair and inaccurate the New York Times was about Calvinism but I won't. See I love and serve Jesus, not Calvin. Only Jesus has the words of life, not Calvin and many Calvinists (and other sorts of Christians for that matter) so easily forget this about the Truth.

As we can see by a survey of Frame's survey your tradition can be the greatest impulse AWAY from that tradition you could possibly have. I went to a Christian school that touted Arminianism and open theism in some circles and after five years of that I came out of it very Calvinist and VEEEERRRY skeptical about the way Christians used the word "community". I bet by now you can figure out EXACTLY what school I went to with a little research. But that traditions, such as they are, in evangelicalism are often the water jet pushing the kid out to the deep end of the pool rather than making the kid able to stay near where he got into the water is for another time. . Consider this a transition that touches on part 3 in transition to part 4.

Mostly reading this article by Frame and re-reading it made me very grateful that I grew up with more of a Pentecostal background than a Presbyterian one! Not that I would say 'no' to being some kind of Presbyterian down the road, actually ... but I'm grateful to God I didn't grow up in such a setting.

"The New Evangelical Scandal" same as the Old Evangelical scandal part 3

THREE: CHOOSE YOUR OWN COMMUNITY (OR EVANGELICALISM)

http://www.civitate.org/2009/01/the-new-evangelical-scandal/

All this, ironically, signals the triumph of western individualism on the evangelical (and post-evangelical) mind. The renewed focus on community and on institutional structures is still grounded in the decisionism that has always marked evangelicalism. The fact that we are born as Americans—or as evangelicals—is unimportant. What is important is that we choose to be patriotic, that we choose to be Republican, that we choose to be evangelicals (or emergent, or Catholic, or Presbyterian)—and that we make that choice independent from and irrespective of any tradition that may have shaped us.

The young evangelical fashions himself into his own preferred identity, and then finds others who have done likewise. More often than not, this results in a rejection of the traditions—political or otherwise—in which younger evangelicals were raised.

When I was a kid there came into vogue a brand of novel called "Choose your own adventure". Supposedly this novel had as its virtue that you could start the story in the first chapter and depending on what you decided you wanted the character to do at the end of chapter one you would be isntructed which page to turn to so as to continue the adventure to the next point.
This is the kind of trick that works great on a seven-year old or an eight-year old and around the age of nine the kid starts figuring out the options in the choose-your-own-adventure story kinda suck.

I tried them out when I was a kid and I found that after about three or four decisions every iteration of the story would play out or in some cases just one or two decisions. I just didn't see that the method was all that special. Why should I have to choose the story? Couldn't the author have enough gumption to tell a story and not give me, the reader, so-called total control over the story? In every single case the options presented in the ostensibly choose-your-own adventure story were options laid out and limited by the author. It introduced such a limiting set of options that even as a kid I found them boring. I preferred instead to take up stories where the author had complete control and was moving in the direction of one story. That, paradoxically, left me free to have any reaction I wanted to upon reading the story. If I always had the power to affect the outcome of a highly affected narrative device there was no suspense, no momentum, I knew it was all going to hinge on me and that the options were tedious.

Matthew Lee Anderson seems to have a similarly dismissive view of what he considers to be a "new" kind of evangelical that takes the DIY ethos to its ultimately American conclusion. Anderson sees that as a bad thing. The choose your own evangeicalism exemplifies what he believes is bad, I guess. That would seem the acme of both national character and patriotic spirit to me, as an American citizen, but Anderson seems to spend a lot of time wanting to have his cake and eat it, too. He'd prefer more of the younger types would choose to be patriot, Republican, and evangelical rather than aloof from patriotism, Democratic, and not evangelical. There is no particular need that any one combination of these choices is a given and Anderson seems to understand that even if he doesn't much like it.

He makes a sort of compelling case that evangelicals today, or perhaps more accurately Americans today, are so set on the choose your own path aspect of the narrative of life they don't consider that where they begin is crucial to where they end up. Now I believe there are some spectacular flaws in Anderson's reasoning as applied to evangelicals and that he misunderstands how little of the history of evangelicalism proper is considered by Americans, so often a culture without a history because history often represents that which we would like to be free from for the sake of reinvention and personal discovery. But he isn't wrong to point out that the preference for a DIY theology is not a great thing in itself. He seems to have an ambivalent position on just how American evangelicalism is. In most cases I would say he is more bothered by the distinctly American pragmatism endemic to these decisionist "I'm the decider" angle on spirituality than by a failure to acknowledge this or that spiritual legacy. If he did consider the nature of evangelicalism and how it addresses or fails to address many aspects of life he could trott out Mark Noll, who once again demonstrates that he hit the nail on the head fourteen years ago in ways that Anderson might wish he could do now.

Perhaps no church in America represents the choose your own evangelicalism approach in the last twelve years quite as much as Mars Hill in Seattle. I think the church is an example of both the positive and negative aspects of this DIY ethos in applied theology Anderson may be concerned about. For years there was talk about "intentional living" and "community" There has also been plenty of talk over the years about "redeeming culture" and "engagign culture", all things Anderson has touched upon.

The fondness of intentional living included a suggestion that various singles rent space together in a house to make life more affordable. This had the added advantage that pastors who had invested in local real estate and had more than one house could rent out their homes to six or seven guys at a time and have de facto apartment complexes, if you will. For those who were lucky enough to have more than one home in a housing market like Seattle, it became a way to consolidate financial holdings for their children. For those who would, as the old satire put it from the Clinton era, live in a rented house forever and ever, the advantage was that you could use a connection at church, in some key cases a pastor, to have relatively low rent in a house owned by someone who was a prominent member of a growing church. You could also be assured, more or less, that you'd be with a bunch of Christians on the same page as you on most theological and ethical and cultural matters.

But this fad, as I see it, overlooked a rather mundane and even grim reality about most "intentional communities" in the world. First of all most extended communal lives come about due to financial necessity and most frequently come about in the form of extended family. More than one generation, three or four even, might live in one home because that is what has been done for ages and what people can afford. There's no romance or countercultural imperative in financial and social necessity. Mars Hill as a culture and its leadership particularly always seemed very naive about those issues. Perhaps it was convenient for pastors who owned homes they didn't wish to sell yet while buying more family-friendly homes as a way to serve people in the church ... but they could also collect rent so it was not an entirely altruisitic endeavor.
But Anderson's implicit gripe seems to be that the zeal for community is a zeal predicated on you inventing your own idea of what evangelicalism or Christianity might be, setting it out, and then joining the people who have decided on the same thing. A person can choose this or that cherry-picked idea regardless of the tradition one was raised in. Anderson should consider this a strength rather than a weakness or give more balanced thought to why he thinks it is a weakness. What evangelical traditions does he believe are being abandoned by the new evangelicals that should not be abandoned? We'll get to that but for now let me propose an observation.

I know a few ex-charismatics who are now in churches varying from Episcopal to Presbyterian to non-denominational evangelical. They are not ex-charismatic in their actual pneumatology but they no longer subscribe to the NORMATIVE elements of charismatic or Pentecostal teaching. They do not think any longer that you have to speak in tongues as the most common sign of the second blessing or hold to second blessing ideas about sanctification. Instead they hold a traditional Christian understanding that when you become a Christian the Spirit renews you, you've been baptised, and are part of God's people. A "second blessing" is a misunderstanding of the first blessing.

At Mars Hill the founding elders were, by a majority of a sort of jack Catholic persuasion prior to making a serious committment to Christ. Anderson wouldn't consider any of them to have had evangelical backgrounds. The choose-your-own theology approach is why people leave mainlines or the Catholic church to become evangelicals. In a culture like the United States we should seriously ask how many conversions or adherents to evangelicalism have come from completely unchurched people or people who returned after not taking their faith seriously or who arrived from within other non-evangelical streams of Christianity. Would Anderson complain that pastors at Mars Hill should have stayed in their Catholic traditions rather than become evangelicals?

But there is a peculiarity to the choose your own evangelicalism Anderson doesn't really touch on that I think he could have touched on more directly. The risk inherent in a choose your own adventure approach to evangelicalism is how ad hoc and utilitarian it can be. If these new evangelicals were choosing to be and affirm the things Anderson agrees with he wouldn't be writing quite as much about the problems of decisionism being most rampant in a zeal for community. He's not wrong about that, by the way but he does seem to miss that the real problem is that an ends justifying the means to church polity would be the most natural and dangerous outgrowth of this kind of self-selecting approach to community. There is eHarmony and then there is eChurch, if you will.

Let me give an example from the history of Mars Hill, since Mars Hill couldn't be a better example of the new evangelicalism. By Driscoll's account God called him to marry Grace, plant a church, and train up young men to follow Jesus. Driscoll also had dreams from God warning him about things to come ... yet for years he taught from a cessationist position about the gifts and avoided discussing the spiritual gifts except in neutered terms. I will not soon forget the night I heard him explain from the pulpit that the gift of healing was the ability to speak into a person's life in such a way that the person spoken to felt a sense of healing as a result. I thought to myself that this must mean Dr. Phil and Oprah had the gift of healing.

What made this even more baffling to me was that at around that time I had had dinner with Driscoll at a now long-gone Denny's in Ballard and we talked about works by Wayne Grudem, Gordon Fee, N. T. Wright and people like that. I knew he was perfectly familiar with the works of these theologians and it made it all the more bewildering that given his personal experience and given his study that he still leaned cessationist. What was the reason? When your study of scholars, study of Scripture, and personal experience all point in direction A what was the purpose of affirming direction B from the pulpit and as a general rule? I surmised that God would disabuse Mark of this very weird attitude and in short order that is exactly what God did. These are things that Mark explains a bit in Reformission Rev so in adding my personal experience with the man I am not, I hope, saying anything problematic.

This is just an example of how Driscoll has in the past settled on a position over against his own research and personal experience for reasons I can't really understand. The only practical, pragmatic reason I can think of for taking such a position is that a church leader feels safer trusting that HE is being led by the Holy Spirit without taking the huge risk in a disorganized and nascent church of trusting that OTHER people are similarly led by the Spirit. I get the practical need for that but there is an immense practical risk, that you can essentially place what you consider to be the organizational and social needs of the community over what the Bible, reason, and your own experience would plainly spell out.

Is it okay to do this? I don't know to be honest but I'll be honest and say that this kind of approach bothers me. God disabused Mark Driscoll of his applied cessationism some time ago. I don't think a mature Christian response entails either a cessationist or a charismatic approach. We have to be open to the reality that God may dispense spiritual gifts at any time to those He prompts. I also however do not see any compelling historical or scriptural argument that a spiritual gift, once given, is without recall or even without conditions to its use. Samson had conditions spelled out to his parents and to him about what would cause him to lose his strength and lose his strength he eventually did. Gifts are given for the edification of the body of Christ and so they are not given for the personal edification of the individual believer, which is one of the ways in which I significantly differ with teaching from my Pentecostal background.

If Mars Hill's founding pastor could change his mind about these things it doesn't harm anyone so long as it isn't any key doctrine, but in other settings the turn around is more problematic.For years Mark and other pastors taught against a pejoratively defined custom of dating and for courtship. Guys were supposed to take wives by going to the woman's dad, getting permission, and then when dad approved the relationship could formally begin and IF after that the woman assented marriage could happen to the glory of Jesus. THis was not really something that had any serious precedent at Mars Hill prior to about 2002. It was in essence a fad fueled by any number of variables and as a fad it followed a bit late on the "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" thing that evangelicalism had for a while.

I was actually at a singles ministry launch at Mars Hill years ago in which Ruth was brought out as a how-to-get-married manual. A peculiar and somewhat limited but potentially practical approach, I didn't like it. I didn't like it because the main use of the text was essentially to the end of how to stop being single. It stopped being primarily a narrative about how God's providence became a blessing to individuals who were outside of God's people and to God's people and eventually gave us the lineage of Christ. It was about how guys needed to have "real" jobs and get married and similar advice for women. For church leaders who could vote their own salaries this was a very convenient line of reasoning. What's more spending hours showing the folly of dating and arguing for courtship and saying this was how things were going to get done at Mars Hill was news to me, bad news.

I knew perfectly well Driscoll didn't do any of these things with his wife before marriage, no, he'd done other things. He even admitted as much though he was loathe that anyone should know about it until just last year. Twenty years is long enough that you can admit you didn't do what you should have done so there's no sense in not sharing things now. In obsessing about courtship and the avoidance of sins that he himself had not avoided I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that Driscoll and other pastors were putting a huge burden on singles that they had not lifted a finger to carry themselves in their own lives and for which their lives couldn't possibly be an example the singles could look to to follow.

Courtship and the singles ministry that grew up around the time that fad was in place was simply a pointless waste of time. There was nothing about actually seeking Christ, imitating Christ, or considering that one could do these things whether married or single. The ministry was set up with a prominent spokesperson for the ministry saying that it would be great if one day the ministry could end because there weren't any single people left. I all too cynically figured he was hoping he'd be out of the ministry by marriage in a few years' time. A singles ministry that folds because everyone got married off would be in a church where no new single people are coming to the church and would suggest an unhealthy, dying church ... or a fertility cult ... which I'm not going to touch with a twenty-foot long metal pole.

Lo and behold by 2008 courtship had run its course and was no longer the in thing for Mars Hill to promote. Driscoll said from the pulpit that Christian dating was and is possible and that perhaps the church had not emphasized that as much in the past as it could have. My rather un-Christian response at the time was to think to myself, "No shit!" Who had been scaring people about the sinfulness of casual dating and then when pressed for more guidelines on how TO do things would chuckle and say "Everyone wants rules"? The leadership. The pastors had been so eager to warn the flock away from the sexual sins they committed, I guess, that they never stopped to consider that following Christ was the more important goal. Perhaps the acme of cynicism for me was my surmise that the only reason courtship was so popular was because a bunch of dads who are at heart control freaks wanted to make sure that no one ever pursued their little girls who behaved the way THEY behaved with their wives prior to and just after marriage.

Evangelicals can be very cagey and downright dishonest about what can really motivate them and if new evangelicals are more blunt about their pragmatism that might be a good thing.
But I think Anderson's comments are not entirely accurate. Yes, I agree with him when he says that evangelicals these days make things up as they go and that the "community" is nothing more than a working out of self-selecting and even narcissistic spiritual tendencies. He doesn't grasp that his definition of evangelical is too narrow but he grasps the dangers of the kind of evangelicalism that has sprung up in the last fifty years. Mark Noll, in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, did a great job summarizing how we got to this particular brand of evangelicalism. I would say that Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll in particular can exmplify that problem even in attempting to provide a remedy. That Driscoll can take up this or that cause and drop it like a hot potato for what may be pragmatic, church-governing reasons is impossible for me to establish. I just know that he did a 180 on cessationism and that now he at least is consistent across the board. I also know that his old teaching on courtship was something that couldn't have been tested out from experience with his own family because none of his girls are old enough to be spoken for. But he liked the idea for a while and for some reason thought it could work. He probably knew someone who looked like they got it to work and decided he wanted that. Looks, however, can be deceiving and things that work out don't always work out because your best laid plans are any good. God is merciful.

Now where the chickens come home to roost in Anderson's prescription is the question of whether to leave a "tradition" or stay around and hope to reform it. I think Anderson's prescription is essentially naive and stupid in its belief that such reforming impulses will be heard or considered. I am also skeptical enough and cynical enough to think that what he wants is less a reform of problems in evangelicalism than return to a status quo he wishes were still in place. He is right to be skeptical about a new evangelical fad for community. Most of this may be fueled by a desire for community that affirms your own path with God. Even those who say "It's not about you it's about God" can be the very people who may think that because they are pastors and because you aren't that what is about God is, ironically enough, about trusting them.
At a personal level I am finding myself in the paradoxical place that trusting God more may involve trusting His people less. This isn't about not loving the Church or loving God's people but a recognition that a person can make an idol of a Christian community. I have sensed this problem in my life and I know people at Mars Hill who have discovered similar problems in their own walk with the Lord. We need to remember that the Bride of Christ is special because of her husband, not because she is special. Yahweh warned Israel to not believe they were chosen by God because they were special or might or great. THey were not chosen becasue they were righteous, that is not why they were being given the land to possess. They were rebels and they were stubborn people and it was only because of the wickedness of others that God was taking the land from them. As Paul told those in Corinth, there was nothing they had that was not a gift and since that was so why were they boasting as though what they had was not a gift?

We are so easily tempted to think that because God has been kind to us it is because we have gotten something we deserve or that we have been blessed because God approves of what we do. We can be so readily tempted to think that people should not argue with the success God has given us. This is a path to destruction. Israel took the ark of the covenant with them into battle thinking that because they had the ark of the Lord's covenant with them they would be victorious. The Phillistines conquered them and they failed. God's people thought that because they had the temple they were safe and God destroyed the temple and sent them into exile.

If evangelicalism as Anderson defines it is on the wane or in a point of seeming dangerously hippie-like how do we know it is because of a failure to articulate the distinctives of the evangelical tradition? That could certainly be true but the distinctives of the evangelical tradition Anderson holds up for admiration are the same sorts of pragmatic ends-justifying-the-means or recent anomalies that evangelicals should be dropping. What if, by contrast, evangelicals have been for generations saying God is on our side because we have the Bible and the cultural mandate to redeem culture and to wake up and fight the culture war? What if we are like Samson with his hair cut and we do not realize we let the Phillistines get us to this point because we were pursuing what we wanted while simply using the position God gave us within society to serve ourselves? I don't think we have to frame this in purely either/or terms.

I am not writing as someone who has no idea what this new evangelicalism looks like but as someone who is immersed in it. THere are both great and stupid things in it, and I am not sure thata Anderson has done a good job articulating in more than thumbnail sketch what any of those things really are. A generation or two of evangelicals devoted to culture wars is going to produce by reaction a generation of evangelicals who would rather immerse themselves in the culture and find points of contact than attempt to fight a culture war that, if any of us were listening to Francis Schaeffer, we would see evangelicals ceded as far back as the 1920s. I agree with Anderson that there are big problems with how the new evangelicals approach things and that is where I find myself not only agreeing with Anderson but believing Anderson doesn't go nearly far enough. When Anderson expresses skepticism about "authenticity" I think he can use a corrective nudge. What he may identify as "authentic" looks a lot more like charisma. People aren't looking for the authentic as much as they think they are and that is something I will get to in part four.

we interrupt the weekend broadcast ...

The three parts I posted so far on "The New Evangelical Scandal" are part of what is shaping up to be a ten part series. Yeah, there's that much material for me to comment on and I've already tipped my hand about Mark Noll and the "old" articulation of the scandal. I can't say that Anderson is knowingly invoking Noll in his article but if he is then it's more unfortunate since Anderson should know he's just dumped himself into a great song by The Who.

But since ten parts is a lot to write on a weekend even for me I'm going to stagger out the parts over time. Think of it as a February project ... maybe even through March. There's just too much mate5rial to consider and too many things to connect to these points to tackle it all in a weekend.

Along the way I will touch upon what I feel are pertinent observations by iMonk and personal observations living in Seattle and things I have observed at Mars Hill. I keep thinking I'm done blogging about the place but I do not have simple sentiments or feelings about the place and it has, to be rather plain spoken, been part of my life for about a quarter of my life. That's not short for anyone no matter what their age. Twenty-five cents of the dollar isn't as small as you think. There are things at the church that touch on both the good and bad Anderson touches on and it's hard to think of a church that more exemplifies the "new" evangelical at its best and worst than Mars Hill. It is a place and people that spectacularly prove Anderson wrong on a few points and demonstrate where he's right and wheere he is so blinkered by his own limited definitions of "evangelical" he misses the forest for one or two trees that are on a postcard of the forest that aren't there in the forest anymore but he keeps looking at them.

And since, per an earlier blog entry, the tenth anniversary edition of The Powerpuff Girls is available soon and since this blog is ALSO about cartoons and classical music and not just theology I'll interrupt things a bit to write about other stuff. So if you have enjoyed or been merely interested by the introduction and parts 1 and 2 let those simmer for a while parts 3-10 may take a while.

"The New Evangelical Scandal" same as the Old Evangelical scandal part 2

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.

"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.

"The New Evangelical Scandal" same as the old Evangelical scandal, an introduction

http://www.civitate.org/2009/01/the-new-evangelical-scandal/

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.

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.

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.

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. ;)

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.

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.