mind power, boy! mind power! five dispositions I have found useful in slogging through composing

The more I work as a composer the more I realize that the greatest obstacles to getting work done do not so much lay in the body as in the mind. If you're blind, like Joaquin Rodrigo or Louis Vierne were, this is no obstacle to composing so long as you can feel instruments and hear. It was clearly no obstacle in the end for either Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder. If you become deaf and are Beethoven it is no inherent obstacle to you being a composer. To be fair each of these musicians overcome remarkable obstacles but I'm getting to my point about the mind's role in creativity. Mind power, boy! Mind power!

It is becoming more apparent to me as I get older (not that I'm old, I'm in my mid-30s, but I plead guilty to having always felt old at heart) that failures in creative arts (as perhaps anywhere) are failures of mind. When I was in high school I took some cermaics classes and I made a number of ambitious projects, considering I was a first semester student, like a clay doll and some whistles. But in my second semester I remember only making a series of frog whistles and I didn't even have the technique to create the whistle part of things. My more ambitious creations involved multiphonic frog whistles. I kid you not, I created these big frogs that had two chambers and options for playing a few notes. In one case one of the frogs had two chambers that were not the same size and created a surreal tremelous sound. My teacher was impressed at my luck, saying it actually sounded like a frog and that if I was going to make a mistake in the size of the chambers it was a serendipitous mistake. Yes.

Well, that's to say that when working with ceramics my mind was limited. I couldn't clearly imagine all the things I could do with clay, all the possibilities. With poetry I had a clearer sense of what was possible, how I could play with language and it was easier to play with things and branch out into new possibilities. Immersing myself in T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens certainly didn't hurt but that was college. At the rist of pointing out something obvious the difference between an artist and a non-artist is that the artist explores the arts out of love for the art but also to learn where as the non-artist explores the arts for simple enjoyment.


What is the difference between exploring a theme as an artist and being stuck in a rut? One person's theme may be another person's rut and as many have joked Haydn symphonies all start sounding the same after you hear a dozen of them. Phillip Glass works that all sound the same to me, however, sound scintillatingly different to fans of his work just as I can hear distinctions within Haydn symphonies that other people, I'm sure, utterly fail to appreciate or even perceive. I can hear a few seconds of a guitar solo and in a few cases just hear a bass line and can identify an old rock tune. Our brains adapt themselves to become good at the things we believe we need or want to be good at.

Having said all that, the difference between being stuck in a rut and exploring a theme is a painful, obvious, yet mysterious one. If you can't think of new things to do or can think of new things but don't feel that you can or want to do them then that is a sign of a rut. A musician who spends sixty years writing different kinds of blues because that's what he or she wants to do may seem to be in a rut to the outsider but to the blues fan and to the musician this is not a rut but a theme to explore. Arguably the blues musician IS in a rut but sometimes ruts are themes. If the blues musician were to tackle Tin Pan Ally we wouldn't be surprised to see the person crash and burn. If we saw a blues musician sing Tin Pan Ally songs but not write them, that would still be an interesting avenue of creative development. Arguably what Johnny Cash and Ray Charles demonstrated to us in the last century is that singers and songwriters can assimilate nearly anything in the popular style into their artistic vision. These men were reminders that style and substance are not necessarily the same even when they are powerfully intertwined.


And when you survey the greats of pop music you begin to observe that the greats were able to assimilate a wide variety of concepts. When you survey the greats in art you see that this holds true as well. The great classical composers, most obviously in the case of Haydn, assimilated both popular and academic elements of their art. The stratification of high and low art in the 20th century is one of the more puzzling and unfortunate aspects of academic culture. There's nothing wrong with seeing Beethoven and U2 as part of the same continuum of musical heritage. The Rolling Stones and Takemitsu are part of the same heritage, too.


Now at the risk of pointing out what by now would be obvious to anyone who reads my blog I believe that since Christ is reconciling all things to Himself there is no high or low, pop or art, classical or rock. These things exist, certainly, but the divisions between them don't have to, all are united by Christ. So this means that the differences can be respected and celebrated but that they can ALSO be assimilated, minimized, and in some cases eliminated. The important caveat I feel I need to include about the "also" statement is that this assimilation and synthesis can be accomplished without obliterating the unique identity of each style of music. Perhaps an analogy might be to marriage, the man and woman do not cease to be themselves in marriage but in marriage they become not just new people as individuals but something new as a couple.


I make no bones that a theological agenda drives all of my composing. If Christ is uniting all things through Himself (Collosians) then the path for the Christian musician is clear, to explore through music how this reconciliation happens. For others this happens through direct song-writing. For me that sometimes happens but I have a less direct approach, an approach I admit may be too esoteric for most people to appreciate. On the other hand, perhaps less direct approaches that are informed by reflection are what is needed. Would Andrew Stanton have gotten to a point where he could give us Finding Nemo and WALL-E if he had spent all his career in VeggieTales level didacticism? Probably not. I covered that issue interacting with Matthew Lee Anderson's work and won't recycle that beyond saying that the older I get the more I observe how young evangelicals want the status of being "culture shapers" without actually being culture shapers. I also notice that the be fruitful and multiply set seem to think that if we just outbreed the Muslims we'll re-Christianize society.


All of that preamble is to say that I have made some important progress on a project I have been working on for years. Thanks to studying the fugue at the end of the Hammerklavier and sifting through the analysis Charles Rosen did of the sonata as a whole I have returned to a sonata I have been working on that has a fugue as its closing movement. For years I have been fascinated by exploring a three-movement cycle that goes like this: sonata, aria, and fugue. I have been attempting to find ways to tie together the three movements and inevitably I would have to study Beethoven to get a clearer sense of how this could be done. For my piano sonata that took me a decade to complete I had to study Schubert but Schubert, you know, was in the shadow of Beethoven. Now that I have studied up important works by both composers I have a clearer sense of how to proceed in my own work.


I would probably bore you if I attempted to explain how I have managed to solve the structural problems in the fugue I'm writing for viola and guitar. I will, however, take the liberty to share things I have learned from other musicians over the years. Perhaps the most important of these lessons for me in the last few months is this:

1) Some of the most important work you do is AWAY from your instruments.

I first heard this advice from a fellow composer who was a very accomplished composer and pianist and had years of experience singing in choral groups. He found that both in studying music and in writing music it was valuable to tackle a score on its own terms, studying and memorizing and analyzing it apart from being at the keyboard. There is a temptation to let your fingers do the walking and cheat your way through playing something it that you may, in truth, not really understand. Now it is just as true that many a musical work does not reveal itself until it is played but that is another form of knowing. That is also, to be a bit too simplistic, a PERFORMER'S way of knowing music. For a composer the advice that it is valuable to work away from your instrument is vital.

As a composer it is hard to emphasize this enough. The initial inspiration may come to me at an instrument, whether I am playing piano, playing guitar, or singing, but the actual WORK of the work frequently happens somewhere else. I'm not even talking about working on a computer, I'm talking about sitting down with pencil and pen and an eraser and paper and working things out by hand. I will even manipulate melodies as I go on the page and sing the results back to myself to find out how I feel about them. If a melody sounds good forward how will it sound upside down? What if I break out a fragment of it and sequence that? What happens if I sing a melody backwards? If the melody isn't very pleasing backwards what little changes can I make so that it will be pleasing backwards? Suppose I take a gesture form the melody and alter each note by changing the gap between leaps by one step each? Suppose I attempt to present the melody in its primary form over an augmented retrograde inversion in the bass line beneath? Maybe it wouldn't work but it might at least be interesting to try.

2) always be willing to change the form of the work to fit the substance of the idea.

The axiom that form follows function is essentially true. Perhaps it is TOO axiomatic but there is still something to it. I do believe Beethoven has proven to us that ideas that can work as a fugue subject can ALSO work as a sonata theme but, again, Beethoven is so far out at the conceptual limits of what is musically possible I would urge people to be careful. You won't discover a melody that can be transformed into both the foundation of a sonata theme and a fugue subject right off the bat. In fact as I have been arguing implicitly through this whole blog entry you won't even be capable of CONCEIVING of such a thing until after possibly ten to fifteen years worth of work in music.

If you find yourself committed to working on an idea as the basis for a set of variations and find that in the end none of the variations as variations are winning you over but that you can repeat individual variations over and over again as stand alone ideas you MIGHT be looking at something better used in a sonata form. That was the discovery I made for a sonata I am working on now. If you find that something you wanted to turn into a fugue presents too many difficulties for generating satisfactory counterpoint you may be looking at a variation form idea if it is pregnant enough for embellishment, or you may be looking at something better employed in a dance form.

At the risk of speaking too generally my discovery in the last fifteen years has been that if a melody does not lend itself well to a fugue exposition it will not necessarily lend itself to a sonata form either, and vice versa. I don't want to waste your time by explaining precisely why. I"ll just make an appeal that historically the sonata replaced the fugue as a way to express the most abstract and intellectually intense musical ideas in the Classic era after the high Baroque era came to a close.

3) If it is really worth doing today it will still be worth doing next week or next year.

This might seem counterintuitive but it is true for composers. Don't let your obsession with being goal-oriented blind you to art as a process. Getting something done does not in itself prove that you got that thing done well. Shostakovich used to remark that he would solve the problems of one piece when he tackled them in the next piece he wrote. Villa-Lobos clearly had a similar aesthetic. Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach pretty obviously did not. Haydn was writing works for hire and seems to have been somewhere in the middle.

If you have a scrap of melody or a chord progression that you think needs to get attention now then by all means plug away. But it doesn't hurt to also ask yourself, "How happy will I be with playing this thing exactly as it is four or five years down the road?" Think of rock bands that don't play their earliest songs anymore.

Especially if you ever consider being on the road or having works published or performed consider that when you work on something the throw-away bits may be the bits the world knows you for. Ravel rued the day he scribbled out "Bolero". He's probably even luckier to have never lived long enough to see how the music would eventually be used in some films. This is not a paragraph appealing to the ideal of timeless art that will outlive you, it's a reminder that you will have to live with what you have created so make sure you don't lower your standards so much you spend the rest of your life realizing that you, like John Lennon, have a few songs that are well-known that you hate and feel don't represent your best artistic self.

Paradoxically the works that we toss off casually may be most indicative of where we are and who we are as artists. There is a carefulness to art that can hide rather reveal the true nature of the artist. I am at a point in my life where the material I whip out in a week feels about as indicative of my work as the pieces I toil over for years. That may be good or it may be terrible.

Another way of saying this is that if there is something worth doing it is something worth RE-doing. To descend to mere jocularity a friend of mine was explaining to my brother how he and his wife were trying to have children and had not had success. My brother said, "Well, if all else fails try, try again." The friend chuckled and told my brother that put that way it didn't seem quite so frustrating. Koholeth wrote that there is nothing better for a man to do than to enjoy the work God has given him to do under the sun and lamented that when God does not give a man enjoyment of his labor or possessions the man is miserable indeed. Part of working in the arts is you can discover whether or not you find joy in the work itself or whether it is something else, something I'll get to in point 5. For now this latest thought allows me to transition straightaway into observation 4.

4) You create to continue learning not to prove what you have learned.

I'm willing to go on a limb and assert that this is the difference between an artist and a dilletante, however wildly the technical skill or appreciation may differ across the arts. The difference between scripture and a catachecism is that the first beckons us to join in the life long struggle across space and time and place to discover Truth while the second tells us what we must affirm the truth to be. Both have value but the second could not exist without the first. The second affirms the scope of mysteries revealed in the first that cannot be exhausted. So it is with the distinction between great art and other kinds (whether middling to good to bad to awful)--a great artist creates to continue exploring and learning while a middling artist may well set out to prove a point.

Hollow didacticism and truncated definitions of the human experience are hardly the sole domain of the religious but the stereotype is not without warrant. There is a role for didactic art, obviously, and Bach wrote quite a few explicitly didactic works but the process of discovery is not simply that of the student but also the teacher. THere is a difference between sharing something with someone else that is for you a moment of discovery and sharing something because you believe the world needs a public service announcement of what you know that the world would be better off for knowing. Even an ego like Beethoven's could have moments in which the core of the artistic moment is, for want of other words, humble.

This last one is more observation than anything shared with me

5) Pursue the arts out of love of the craft and not to feel special

I worked on literary magazines in both high school and college and I met a few would be poets and artists and dreamers. Since I attended a Christian college I got to see and hear stuff prefaced by the inevitable, "God gave me this ... ." A number of my acquaintences cynically took to rhetorically asking themselves whether God REALLY gave this or that person such and such, the rhetorical answer being 'no'. I opted for a different approach. God giving you a poem or a song or a story does not mean you have no obligation to shape and mold the material yourself. Whereas God might tell other people exactly what music they needed I always have had the distinct impression that God wants ME to rewrite stuff. I shared this with my composition professor and he laughed.

So far as I can hazard a guess what inspired these people to write their poems or write their songs or make their paintings is that they felt the love of God. Feeling the love of God is wonderful, feeling special is wonderful. We all want that. No one on earth or under the earth or above the earth doesn't want to feel special and loved. In a culture that worships artists of varying sorts as heroes, whether novelists or musicians or painters or actors or directors or poets or entrepreneurs it is the easiest thing in the world to want to go do something and be something so as to be special. There is a fine and puzzling boundary between embracing the arts because you feel touched by the divine participating in the arts and feel drawn closer to God (any unbelieving readers, bear with this, I'm writing as a Christian and I get that your experience will be different) and embracing the arts out of a sense of or a desire to be feeling special.

Jesus said that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks and that the good man out of the treasure of his heart brings good things while the bad man out of the treasure of his heart brings bad. Paradoxically there is absolutely nothing about the arts that will make you feel special. Indeed, you will be a nobody. Beethoven was a nobody to many people. Many people today have no idea who J. S. Bach was. Tomorrow many people will not know who Bob Dylan is, most of the world, really. As Koholeth put it, there is no memory of that man. If your heart is not full embracing the arts will not make your empty heart full. If you attempt to fill your heart with something so that your art will be full it won't get anywhere.

Now the truth is I am not sure what I do matters or that people will much care about the music I write. I often wonder if my music is too uncompromising to get played or for people to appreciate it. I am also anxious in performance settings. I would much rather write music that other people can play that to put my head on the chopping block of an audience if I can help it. I admit to generally having a failure of nerve. I also see clearly that being a composer or a writer or whatever will not in itself confer any meaning to a person.

Man does not live by art alone and God did not design us to be alone. I bristle at the Driscollian propensity to argue that this means people should be married because of how it tends to be employed and because it seems as though it forgets that one's identity is ostensibly in Christ. Well, by the same measure, if you attempt to find your identity in your art or your boyfriend or girlfriend those things will die and shrivel up at some point. Even egos as large as those of Beethoven or Bach were working out of love, love for the craft and in their own unusually usual ways love of neighbor.

All that said, people and not things love you and make you feel special. If you want to feel special go get a boyfriend or girlfriend or spend time with your mom and dad or your friends (and you probably have a few). Don't go become an artist or a writer or a musician or a composer or an actor. You won't matter, you won't feel special, you probably won't make any money, and no one will ever know who you are, most likely. If by chance I'm wrong on all those counts you STILL won't feel special. If you feel special and in the spur of the moment write a poem of gratitude to God for feeling special, awesome. Don't send it to me. Becoming an artist of any sort to differentiate yourself from family or friends will yield nothing for you. You might even find that if you embrace something to be special that someone else will overtake you in the thing you chose because you hoped it would help you stand out. That totally sucks but then again we don't know who will be better than us and there's always someone.

Yet if the beauty of the art and the world around you is something that spurs you to continue exploring a medium; if the beauty of friends and family or some other loved one fills you with joy and the sheer work of working within a medium continues to inspire you; if after three to five stupendous challenges you happily think "What's next?"; if every setback becomes a challenge to surmount and inspiration to exploring new possibilities of learning and sharing then by all means become an artist of some kind. That's awesome, even if you're Phillip Glass and I absolutely detest your music I won't begrudge you the joy of sharing the beauty of the world with people even if I'd rather I didn't have to hear your music.

So them's my ramblings on that topic. Better that than boring all of you with technical minutae about modal mutation in a subject and how it lends itself to rapid tonic to mediant modulations, right? :)

Jesus said that it is better to give than receive. It is in giving that we receive and it is in dying we are born to eternal life. Even among those who are not Christians I find it incontestable that the artists who perservere do so out of love for their craft and out of love for their neighbor. The affirmation of the self is not the point, even the expression of the self is not the main point but a kind of fringe benefit.

slowly unpacking

I pulled a few scores out of boxes this last weekend, two very important scores for personal reasons and long-time readers of this blog will piece together why as soon as I name them:

Vaughan Williams' Mass in G minor
Frank Martin's Mass for double choir

Yep, at some point I want to tackle the Credo and Martin's mass in particular has been promising. As I have written elsewhere at some length Martin uses a thematic approach in which a melody is used to indicate the persons of the Trinity, exactly the kind of musical and theological structuring device I have been wanting to use in my own Mass, particularly the Credo. A very broad ABab structure is what I am settling on. Where the text discusses persons of the Trinity I want common thematic material, where the text discusses the life, death, and resurrection of Christ I want common material that can be redeployed in closing statements about the Church.

It is funny how I now feel as though I have spent a whole decade reflecting on musical forms and on the theological content of the Creed to just now get to the point where I have what is admittedly a tentative plan for a musical setting. I'm not like Haydn or other Classic era composers, who apparently tossed off settings of Masses that even in their own time were criticized for being a bit glib, celebratory, and lacking in theological content. I happen to like some of Haydn's masses, honestly, but I agree with Charles Rosen that sacred choral music in the Classic era largely sucks and I probably disagree with Rosen about the quality of Beethoven's sacred choral music which I like least of all among the composers from that era. Beethoven blows, Mozart wrote parts of a Requiem and a Mass that I wish he had actually finished, while it has been Haydn's Creation that stands out as probably one of the few truly great sacred choral works from that entire epoch.

Part of developing s an artist is recognizing what stuff to keep and what stuff to ignore, the stuff to ignore often being at least as imporant as the stuff to keep. Different eras of Western music employ different forms to different symbolic effect. I could attempt to get into affect and the would-be science of music emotional responses were invoked by means of thematic creation and manipulation but despite the role of music in the quadrivium in ancient thought music even asn applied sciene remains an art more than a science. I respect the social sciences as being useful and capable of keen insights ... but social sciences do not really have laws like the hard sciences do. There is no social science equivalent to the law of gravity, Newtonian observation about inertia, or observations about chemical interactions. If there are such laws in social sciences they are fraught with interpretive and applicational issues, such as the degree to which conformity should be used in social structuring and directing the thought and actions of individuals or assessing them.

And so it is with music, there is room for great disagreement about what constitutes great music or any great art. You cannot anticipate what may be great art or music and what is great art or music may arise from the quality of design and structure or language or the ideology with which a work may be freighted. Now I love the big novels of Dostoevsky and love how he explores his ideas but I come back to them because in all of his exploration of big ideas he didn't forget his story or his characters. Even Ivan Karamazov is a character and not just a cipher for whatever ideology Dostoevsky wanted to either promote or demote. Dostoevsky was not just an author of ideas, he lived in the world and had to make a living. There is a sense in which the reality of commercial viability separates professionals from amateurs. I am most assuredly an amateur.

Even among professionals, like Haydn, there are moments where great art emerges through experimentation and refinement. Haydn wrote plainly that he had time to experiment to see what worked, what didn't, what evoked emotional response, what evoked bewilderment and through all of these pieces of music he wrote adn all of these performances he was able to refine his art, understand what was likely to evoke what response he might be seeking. Haydn was, in other words, making nearly a science out of the art of selling out. Indeed, in the patronage system of his day what we would call selling out was arguably the acme of developing as an artist. He was able to attain mass popular appeal and please his employer through the same process.

I sometimes wonder if in contemporary society we overvalue artistic credibility and independence. I have been skeptical even from my teens about the propensity of this contemporary Western age to want the rules broken without having any idea what rules might be in place. It would simply matter to break whatever rules there are by breaking something. Paradoxically critics can both reinforce this and avoid it. In the past critics upheld the standards of what styles were acceptable and thus you would get things that ended up in Slonimsky's Lexicon. On the other hand there are those who want whatever is to be overturned. Free verse has become paradigmatic in our era as traditional verse was in earleir times. It was not popular for teachers to point ou tthat the best poets demonstrated a mastery of both conceptions of literature or poetry.

We live in an era in which it is hard to argue that a single unified style exists. That means that it might be possible for someone to compose a Mass based entirely on doo-whop material. It would not, so far as I can tell, be any less pious or appropriate as a means of setting the Mass than many pieces from the tiem of Haydn and Mozart. Sacred choral music, as Rosen put it, presents a challenge because of the two impulses that emerge from sacred texts, the celebration and ritual side of things, and the abstraction of theological content. Since, as the psalmist puts it, we are enjoined to sing to teh Lord a new song, at some point Christian composers must inevitably garpple with all of these things. Only those of the most rigid liturgical approaches make no allowances for new ways of singing the parts of the Mass ... even a Calvinist like Frank Martin composed a setting of the Mass and Calvinists are not, by and large, known for ever tackling that.

Solomon loved the Lord enough to walk in the ways of David, hero worship as a form of Christian idolatry

Contrary to the often glowing descriptions of Solomon's early reign 1 Kings suggests a man of blood. The time of peace and the man of peace who was to build the temple did not so much indicate that David could not build the Temple because he shed blood alone. We can point out that there was a practical, military, and political reason behind the divine delay of the building of the Lord's house--namely that it would not be until Solomon consolidated the kingdom during a peaceful time that it would be safe to begin work on the Temple without the threat of invasion.This hardly indicates that Solomon himself was necessarily a man who did not have blood on his hands!

Now I have been cruising through some discussions of Old Testament literature by V. Phillips Long and he points out that one way you can render the passage about Solomon's love for the Lord is that he loved the Lord enough to walk in the ways of his father David. David urged Solomon to keep the covenant so that the house of David would be forever established. There is more than just a whiff of "Do good, boy, so we can always have this royal dynasty." It isn't necessarily all bad but it does read a bit curiously. David tells his son to act in the wisdom he has and then we see Solomon doing that, killing political threats from the old dynastic period and those who might oppose a fully united kingdom. It is probably Solomon believed over time that how he handled things was not good or he would not have told the Lord he needed a discerning heart and wisdom because he didn't know how to do his job.

Now in the Sunday school version of things we hear that Solomon asked for wisdom and God was pleased. We are not told about the bloodshed of Solomon's early years. We are also not told that he did not swiftly tackle the issue of building the Lord's house and that because of this worship in high places persisted. People were not worshipping idols, perhaps, but they were still not worshipping in a way sanctioned by the Mosaic law. After killing potential threats Solomon goes and marries an Egyptian and sacrifices at the high places, neither particularly promising things. He also seems to understand God's faithfulness as contingent on the obedience of his father and his righteousness. This is an admittedly curious though partly true observation since David said and did a great deal that was hardly righteous at all.

We may observe, if we read Samuel and Kings as a whole, that there is a great deal of foreshadowing of Solomon's demise. Even at the beginning of his reign his capacity for harshness, for crushing adversaries, and for making marriage a matter of loving a foreign woman and opening up alliances that run counter to the Law all point toward his grim end. Certain fanciful notions about Solomon and Abishag sitting in a tree withstanding, Solomon's reign begins inauspiciously. Solomon acts in his wisdom, the wisdom his father David observed he had, but it was arguably a worldly sort of wisdom. As Iain Provan put it, Solomon was also able to "interpret" promises so as to make them favorable to him. This way of interpreting conditions allows Solomon to get what he wants even after he has overlooked the core of an agreed on element.

Christians seem to want to have it both ways with Solomon. We want to hold him up as this wise and good king when it comes to the wisdom literature but then ignore him regarding women. I have heard Christians say that a guy who had a thousand wives probably doesn't have the best advice about marriage or gender relations. Well, you can say that, but then why take seriously what he collected elsewhere? This suggests a an approach to the wisdom literature that discounts what we are plainly told in Proverbs and in Ecclesiastes, that Solomon collected proverbs and wise sayings. Having the capacity to recognize wisdom, collate it, collect it, and make observations about it is not the same thing as living by it. A man may have wisdom from God and use it for foolishness. There is more than one kind of wisdom and it is arguably part of the narrative in Kings to invite us to consider what kind of wisdom Solomon is acting from when he makes this or that decision.

The scriptures do not whitewash David or Saul or Solomon so each man presents us with a problem. David did many things that were more heinous than what Saul did yet what was a man after God's own heart. Saul had the spirit of the Lord overwhelm him and cause him to do many heroic acts but he took credit for victories his son accomplished and finally revealed that he did not trust or obey the Lord and was cut off. Solomon was an apostate who was loved by God, whose final fate we infer came to a positive end out of Solomonic attribution for Ecclesiastes, which even many conservative scholars are not universally agreed upon. Scripture presents us with ambiguous men who have, nevertheless, unambiguous hearts (except maybe for Solomon).

What inspires us as Christians to simplify the biblical narratives? Do we wish to see ourselves in certain OT figures? A book like Ezra/Nehemiah invites that sort of moral simplification. It would be easy to read through Nehemiah and either think the authors are jerks or to take their side without considering the very one-sided account they give. Now that doesn't make the account of no value, but as Long once put it, Ezra/Nehemiah presents things in starker black and white terms than the rest of the narrative books of the Bible. For people who want to bottom line things and see themselves as in the right even when they're wrong Nehemiah is a useful book. The most compelling question left open at the end of Nehemiah is why the presence of the Lord did not descend on the re-established city of God or worship. Was it because of sin? Not even Nehemiah discusses why the presence of the Lord was not with them, if you look through his writings.

But it seems that even with other narrative books the propensity to see in black and white terms what the Spirit through Scriptures reveals in shades of lighter and darker gray is hard to resist. At the risk of pointing out the obvious it is too tempting to see ourselves in biblical figures we like when we like them and too easy to see our "enemies" or frenemies in the people we don't like when we don't like them in a biblical narrative. Cultivating the capacity to see our own weaknesses in the men and women revealed in the Bible is difficult. It is difficult to see David at the end of his life loathe to rebuke his children even in their most blatant and self-serving sin whether it's Absalom or Adonijah. It is distressing to see David's advice to his son Solomon on his death bed be that of killing without mercy people who might prevent the unified kingdom and to settle old grievances. This is one of the heroes of the faith.

And we must be cautious in ripping on Solomon without a proper understanding that God loved Solomon and that Solomon's legacy gave us Proverbs, the song named after him and, if traditional ascription to him is true, Ecclesiastes. We want Solomon to be either good or bad depending on what agendas we push without recognizing how deeply flawed the sinners are who have been saved by the grace of Christ.

It has stuck with me that in evangelical Protestant circles a man like David, let alone a man like Solomon, would be denounced today. The multiple wives, the abject failure to produce children, by and large, of godly character, and even the best of his mentioned children ended up being a killer, a man prone to marry foreign women, and lapsed into apostasy before repenting late in life (which itself may be subject to some debate depending on how solid the case for Solomonic attribute of Ecclesiastes is but I set that aside as the tangent it so obviously is), these all suggest that many people would consider David unfit to lead God's people.

In fact that's what we see, a number of people saying that because David was a man of bloodshed he wasn't fit to lead God's people. Of course a few of these people were partisans of Saul, who killed a few people he wasn't supposed to kill and DIDN'T kill people he was supposed to annihilate. Yet Scripture attests that despite this many, many flaws that David was, nevertheless a man after God's own heart. There is a sense in which we, as Christians, are tempted to think we need spiritual leaders who are, in a phrase, too good. We want a level of quality in them we would not expect of ourselves ... or perhaps expect of ourselves without warrant.

Solomon, it seems, loved the Lord enough to walk in the ways of his father David. That might be the most brutal observation that can be made about anyone in Scripture, in a way, that a person loves the Lord enough to walk in the ways of a father like David. We know that David was in many respects both a great and terrible man. What might seem like a complement of Solomon's love of the Lord at first turns out to be a foreshadowing of a pending tragedy in the house of David.

If you love the Lord enough to emulate the example of another Christian, no matter how good that Christian may be, the seeds of an apostasy may be even in there for the growing but may not bear fruit until later in life. There are reasons Jesus said that in order to follow Him you must hate your father and mother and family. If you love Him enough to follow Him the way anyone you love does or did that's not good enough. You will eventually leave Him when you have the option to do so, as Solomon eventually did long after the death of David.

That David to your Solomon might be a father, a mother, a brother, a husband, a wife, a sister, an aunt, a pastor, a friend, anyone you consider a hero to you not simply for their faith but altogether. Now David did write that as for the saints in the land they were the excellent ones in whom was all his delight, but that is after he first delights in God Himself. "You are my refuge, I have no good apart from You" comes before delighting in the saints of the land.

We can and should delight in the saints God places in our lives because they do not exist apart from Christ, but even these saints have been and are those apt to sin. David himself sinned and was apt to sin yet that does not mean we cannot look to him as a guide for both what to do and not to do. What we must do, as David did, is to delight in Christ first and THEN delight in those whom He gives us. To everything there is a season and it is right to delight in the one in whom we should delight first before delighting in those lesser but still real goods we receive from His hand.

As I grow older I consider a variety of ways in which I loved the Lord enough to emulate the example of Christians I have admired. That is good, really, but it alone will not be the same as being a man after God's own heart. My prayer is that I will not simply be like Solomon loving the Lord enough to walk in the ways of the Davids in my life but to, like David, have a heart that loves God first, is grateful to Christ first, and then delights in the saints of the land, so that when the Davids in my life are taken from me I am still able to walk with the Lord and seek Him.

Ecclesiastes 3:4, a personal reflection after coming home from a wedding

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance ...



On Saturday May 30, 2009 Ry and Mi got married. This is not a reflection on Scripture that involves my usual lengthy ramble. No, this is where I share that sometimes you can go your whole life not appreciating what a simple verse means until you come to a moment where God in His kindness illuminates it. I am not a dancer and I am not likely to ever be one. But I have prayed for Ry and Mi for a couple of years and their friends have prayed and they have prayed and yesterday they got married and as the bride so eloquently put it, you can ultimately be surprised by the kindness and love of God.



While I would never describe myself as a dancer and normally avoid dancing and prefer to be the wallflower on the sidelines this was, finally, not one of those times. Seeing the faithfulness and love of Christ in answered prayers and in the joy of yesterday's wedding I realized that there comes a point when words are not enough and thankfulness as an internal state is not enough and joy as a feeling is not enough. There comes, as the Preacher puts it, a time to dance. Yesterday was that time not just for the other wedding guests but also, perhaps most surpriing of all to me, for me. No one in cyberspace may really understand or appreciate how surprising this is for me.



Thanks to Ry and Mi and the rest of the friends I met with on the day of their wedding, for showing me through your lives and friendship what I did not understand in the Scriptures, that there is a time to dance. May the blessings of the Lord be with you.

A recapitulation of my earlier thoughts about Pixar

I just saw Up with some people I know. Pixar continues to amaze me even when elements of their story-telling and stories feel freighted with an eagerness to please. The reason Pixar's films have not yet descended to Disney level pap or Dreamworks glibness could be summed up in roughly the first fifteen minutes of Up. Too many artists want to focus on the triumph of the human spirit as though that were all there is. We have been given stories in which the human spirit triumphs when there is nothing to triumph or against, nothing even for the human spirit to merely endure, let alone just survive in the wake of anything. We are a culture that wants to have the luxury of hope without appreciating fully our need for hope.

What I'm saying now is that Pixar films can depict or elicit unaffected joy because if you look at each film you'll find the better ones look death and sorrow and grief and despair straight in the eye. No Pixar film preceding Up has been quite so direct as Pixar's newest film is about a character finding hope and a resilience of a human spirit in the face of emotional agony. I don't feel like going through everything all over again from an earlier blog entry. You can go look up my ramble on Pixar if you really want to. I just want to reiterate that I am impressed at how the emotional weight and sincerity of their stories depend on not flinching or shrinking back at confronting, constantly, the reality and horror of death. It is this, and not necessarily all the otherwise usual Disney tropes you can point to in Pixar films, that gives these movies their depth and emotional power.

From the first Pixar film where Woody admits that it should be him strapped to the rocket we have been given something unusual in the wake of a Disneyfied approach to the art of animated film, a protagonist who can admit he is, more or less, a sinner. Pixar heroes are not those whose plucky and validated self prevails over nominal evil, Pixar heroes are people who, half the time at least, have a moment in which they confront in themselves and the world around them the reality of clay marred in the hands of the potter, if you will. Of course this isn't announced with intertitles so many a Christian viewer won't see this narrative trope and, to be fair, possibly no one else but me may be seeing it or considering it, but it's something I want to share since blogs are places where people write what no one needs to read.

Now I would hardly call Up a masterpiece but it is still a beautiful, sweet movie. Yet that sweetness, as with the best Pixar films, is given to us only after we are shown how bitter the world is. That, my friends, is why Pixar is still making cinematic art that Dreamworks and others are struggling to get to, because the bitterness of life is not just outside threatening to mess up things for us, it is something we find within us whether it is loneliness, grief, anger, bitterness, despair, envy, or greed. To put things in terms of my faith in Christ, too many story-tellers want the fruits of the redemption of Christ without NEEDING to be redeemed and too many people tell stories that suppose that we cannot or do not deserve to be redeemed. These two things apart do not confront the truly awful things in life and death. We must grasp in Christ both that we NEED a savior and HAVE a savior, we both lack the image of Christ within us to the extent that we are born into a world and are ourselves marred by sin and death and yet also BEAR Christ's image no matter how damaged that image within us may be.

because the real world is important ...

I have not blogged so much as I might have. This is not to say I have what most people would call "a life". I'm still this side of a hermit but finishing a sonata for cello and guitar for an ensemble is a big project and I still have yet another sonata to finish for another ensemble. On top of that there is a quartet for clarinet, French horn, guitar, and cello I want to finish. I may end up writing that piece as something quite a bit shorter than what I originally intended. Instead of giving two solos a piece to each member of the quartet I may just assign one solo a piece and be done with it. Ever the neo-classicist in my disposition I can tell myself that multiple movements are okay.

For a while, to ramble as almost no one reads, it seemed as though some composers were dead set on making titanic works for guitar. Koshkin's Sonata for guitar solo is awesome, to be sure, and the grand cyclical work of them all is, to my mind and heart, Britten's Nocturnal. Sor's grand sonatas are not quite my taste but they surely deserve the name.

Still, other works attempting the superlative "Beethoven for the guitar" (or whatever it is), grate on the nerves. I'm just going to come out and say it I loathe Ginastera's guitar sonata and can't stand Royal Winter Music by Henze. Henze's work is what you get if you took all the beautiful gem-miniatures of Takemitsu and blew them up on a Xerox machine so that they were five times as big and lost all their lovely intimacy. So, yeah, I don't like Henze's attempt to make, what was the phrase?, a Hammerklavier for solo guitar. If that was what he were trying to do he'd remember to have included tunes!

I have also spent time attempting to catch up with visits with family and some close friends, all of which is more compelling than blogging about the uses and abuses of Old Testament literature, not that I don't have volumes of things to share about THAT topic. And, of course, about others.

A word to the bored, if Star Trek represents the high point of this year's crop of tentpole summer movies it looks like the downward slope to G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is going to be very long, very steep, and very ugly! When I saw the trailer for Joe ... it made Michael Bay's upcoming Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen look like some kind of movie by Bergman or Kubrick! I kid you not! At best we could hope that Joe will be something so bad it becomes inexplicably awesome like Freddy vs Jason ... but I am not quite that optimistic.

yet another cursory observation about Absalom

Setting aside the very good quesetion of whether Absalom loved and knew the Lord at all, I here simply note briefly that David's real sins and real injustices did not prove Absalom to be in the right in the end and were not justification for his own sins. People who crusade for justice can still have evil hearts. Conversely, the very real sins and failures and injustices of spiritual or temporal leaders do not justify a person's turning to sin.

In the end the Lord observes us anddoes not permit us to say "He/she/they started it." in justification of our own embrace of the wrong. Neither Absalom nor David are exonerated in the end. David never comes to a point where he tells his wayward sons, "Why are you doing this?" Absalom never comes to a point where he observes that he has done wrong by his father and the Lord in what he has done. David was a man after God's own heart yet the sum of his life reveals that there were weaknesses and sins he never overcame, frankly disturbing weaknesses and sins if we consider what the Law said about the ideal king. How often are we tempted to be like Absalom and deny that David has any place to be on the throne on which God has providentially placed him? How often are we David who fails to shake off the coils of sin even at death, advising his son to carry out a legacy of bloodshed for political purposes?

The saints were those whom God loved and who were transformed by that love as they recognized it, not those who by dint of their own efforts somehow became more god-like. This is not to say that Jacob or Abraham did not seek the Lord, far from it, but they were recipients of the mercy of Christ and, as the Scriptures say, we love Him because He first loved us. The easiest thing for His saints to forget is the order in which these loves are given.

by way of an aside

I'm going to get back to stuff connected to OT narrative books but I'm going through V Phillips Long's The Reign and Rejection of King Saul. Nice to stumble upon a book that argues for the literary coherence of the book rather than supposing it is a hodgepodge of conflicting editorial and source accounts and interests. A friend of mine who is studying to be a PCA pastor introduced me to some of Long's work through some of his lectures, and then it turned out my brother who goes by Totoro Man has had the book on Saul all along, citing it as one of the very few books he's found on Samuel that spends any time on Saul.

Much as I like the idea of plowing through William Gurnall's The Christian in Full Armor in THEORY, in practice it is quite a slog. I'm sticking, for now, with the much shorter The Bruised Reed, commended by a friend of mine (the one who is working toward becoming a pastor). That friend has a divinely given gift for suggesting the right book at the right time for the right situation. Of course having been friends with him for aw hile he has an unfair advantage compared to most other people I know.

I was talking with a friend about the new Trek movie and a concern he has is that the characters' destiny seems assumed to be the same regardless of what alternate timeline exists. Who, in this alternate universe, will help Spock become more in touch with his human heritage? I think this question, while interesting for long-term Trekkies, may overlook that Vulcan proper was blown up and Earth is the only home Quinto Spock has. Quinto does a great job as Spock, by the way. Considering how awful Heroes became across seasons 2 and 3 I wouldn't blame Quinto for thinking Spock is the better gig.

Now that we're some fifteen years past Roddenberry's death I think Trek will benefit from shrugging off some of the sillier philosophical notions that weighed the franchise down. If they're smart they will ignore the prime directive since the whole show literally could not happen if the prime directive were actually followed. This new iteration of Trek reaffirms what old iterations of Trek established, that the Federation as a liberal and humanitarian peace-keeping armade won't even keep its own rules. I will leave it to you, dear reader, to insert whatever sarcastic interpretation may be applied there. Having Trek be more about popcorn worthy adventures in space rather than hours of discussing diplomacy on made-up planets with other suspiciously humanoid bipedal aliens Kirk can have sex (tactfully off screen, we hope) with can be saved for Trekkies who actually like Captain Janeway.

One thing that strikes me about Old Testament narrative literature is how terrifyingly easy it is to appropriate it for whatever pastoral or ecclesial agenda may be on the front burner at the moment. I wish to return to this at some point but since I have a life, family to visit, and friends to visit, and other things to tend to, not least a sonata for viola and guitar, I may not write as much as I initially planned. Obviously I write plenty when i finally get to it and could probably use an editor. I have been mulling over the possible significance of that, too.

is a certain place a cult? A half skeptical, half sympathetic ramble

This is going to be a long and rambling blog entry because I'm contemplating a whole decade worth of a place. You've been warned.

There are those who would suggest that the level of power exercised by certain religious groups cosntitutes the makings of a cult. I am not here suggesting that one group or another be dubbed a cult and have that end discussion (not that there's discussion going on here, mind you, necessarily, since this is a blog). What I am interested in proposing is that a popular way of expounding upon the nature and origin of cults seems to be misunderstood or misapplied. The propensity is to define a cult in terms of the authoritarian way its leaders may take in this or that way. I would suggest that that is merely part of how things work. Let me make an appeal to ancient Israelite history, idolatry was something that was embraced not merely by leadership but by the people.

ALl of this is to propose that for cultish leadership to happen at the top there has to be a groundswell from the bottom promoting that. A cult leader has to appeal to the anxieties and insecurities of those whom he or she ostensibly would lead. It would not be hard to say that charismatic leaders who eventually wield immense power do so by tapping into the desires and fears of the people they win over. I would argue that for a bunch of insecure young men who want a sense of identity in terms of their affirmed masculinity and the sense that they are not losers in a contemporary society that, in its egalitarianism and globalism, has less and less use for "unskilled" labor that there is a great deal, sociologically speaking, that would make a leader appealing who has the following platform:
1) reaching out to young men
2) giving them a sense of purpose
3) elevating their status when they often feel they are lacking
4) presents an implied narrative of the man being endangered in this time and place so that "real men" are considered an endangered minority in today's society
5) promotes a social order in which the social and economic viability of young men gets them culturally approved sexual contact (marriage, et al)
6) allows them to invest in the emerging culture/counterculture in a way that allows them to rise to levels of leadership within the social unit regardless of how much they appear to be nobodies on the outside.

This is essentially a kind of sociological appeal that ANY cult can have. Young insecure men with a general lack of certainty about what purpose their life serves will be drawn to this sort of thing. Older men who have similar anxieties or believe that all the above are necessary things will be drawn to such a movement. It will have a populist appeal that may only later take on the trappings of academic thought. Young men can get what they want and older men can get the disciples they secretly or unconsciously crave.

This is, I am aware, a common liberal explanation about the appeal of certain kinds of religious cults. I don't say that this means one should accept it at face value but one should also not reject it out of hand. But as time goes by and I look at how self-identified complementarian Reformed thinkers tend to apply their reasoning and explain their interpretation of the Bible the more it seems to me that this stream of thought can be, in the hands of an immensely charismatic leader, a cult waiting to happen.

But if it IS a cult waiting to happen it cannot become so on the basis of leadership alone. The used car salemsman and the used car need a customer and it is this element, the customer, that is so often (it seems) not adequately addressed in writings regarding cults. There have to be enough people at the trench levels who believe that this kind of agenda will get them what they want, whether prestige or financial stability or a wife or whatever earthly measure of success you want, and that it behooves them to get behind that, that they latch on with gusto to what they may later reckon a terrible cult. In some case older men may smell the scent of disciples in the air. If they get on board with this program they can gather young men around themselves who look up to them and whom they can treat as disciples. Younger men can see in this sort of movement the opportunity to become "real men", whatever that may mean, and that as they pursue that goal they will get the wife and kids or career or whatever they believe they want or perhaps "should" want. If this is couched in terms of the divine will then one's own existing predisposition as a matter of faith gets involved and, let me not bother to put too fine a point on it, grace in Christ can become law as interpreted by the herd instinct.

In Scripture we see that the leaders of GOd's people and GOd's people often fall into the same sorts of idolatry. In some cases the leaders lead the way but in other case they do not. One of the great delusions spiritual leaders can suffer from is thinking that if they have all their ducks in a row they will either be immune to idolatry or that their example will sway the idolatry of the common masses. NOpe, not necessarily. We can observe that even during the reigns of the best kings idolatry was not completely stamped out. We can also observe that a king like Joash might be a mixed bag at best at first and then slide terribly into apostasy ... thanks to being fawned over by important people in the community. When the nobles of Judah bowed before Joash it pleased him and he permitted them to have the idols they wanted. Yes, I'm working the subtext mojo for quite a bit here. In the end Joash descended into idolatry and permitted idolatry because the important people around him were into their pet idols. Even the pinnacle of Joash's career, a long and badly pock-marked building project, is rife with compromise and failure.

One of the great mistakes I believe gets made regarding cults or semi-cultic religious groups is the supposition that the great danger is from the abuses of leadership. No, not entirely, though that is an important risk. It is equally dangerous for abuses to swell up from the ground level. For a cult to develop that lasts there has to be a synergy. Everyone has to get most of what they want from the dynamics of the social order. In fact people who have been in cults tend to explain how they felt they really belonged, found their identity in the movement.
This can happen in groups Christians formally consider to be cults on the basis of doctrine but this can happen just as frequently in what are, on the surface, relatively orthodox churches. We can go into something thinking "This is the one group that GETS IT" And this is exactly where people do not realize that they bring themselves into it. When you render the verdict that this little or large group is the real deal, the genuine article, accept no substitutes and this is how it goes and ANYONE should appreciate this, congratulations, you're a cult-maker at least in potential if not in actual fact. If you render the verdict that lots of other churches are truly gifted and being used by the Lord but that right here, right now, at this point, you have found a community whose beliefs you agree with then you're being a regular Christian.
The paradox at work here is that over time I have seen a few Christians decry consumerism while displaying that consumeristic impulse. It is the consumeristic impulse refracted into you being the secret shopper for everyone you know that leads to cult stuff.
When God's people fail the trend can be as brutal coming to the top from the bottom as it is coming from the top down. King Saul spent more time listening to the voice of the people than the voice of God. After years of heeding the voice of the people from below, as it were, the more Saul found it easier to, as it were, believe his own hype machine and become more autocratic in his top-down approach. He was willing to take credit for the work others did and willing to punish those in whom God prompted active obedience in areas where he failed (whether David as his annointed successor or Jonathan as the son who accomplished without divine oracles what Saul was loathe to do with direct prophetic instruction). In our legitimate skepticism about the abuses of authority we should not forget that God's people have failed at every level, which means that leaders can often fail because they sell to the masses what idols the masses are already clamoring for.

It is instructive to consider the first idol mentioned by way of description and name is Yahweh. Aaron creates a golden calf that he describes as the Lord. Here is where the chickens come home to roost, the most dangerous idols we may set up for ourselves are our own truncated understandings of Christ. ANd here I will not pull any punches, an manly Jesus set up as an alternative to a gay, limp-wristed hippie Jesus is still just as much an idol as the alternative. As Tim Keller put it, the conservative Jesus is no closer to the true Christ than the liberal Jesus is.

Few things seem more dangerously legalistic to me now than Reformed complementarian types who go on and on about "real men". Throw in the 1990s inspired craze of "kissed dating goodbye" and throw that into the mix and you get leaders who create destructive matrixes of legalism in a church culture under the guise of being "biblical". Much of what I saw by way of applied legalim on that issue was often a matter of as many things floating to the top from lower levels as coming down from on high.

I have seen moments where in the wake of conduct and speech that could be considered abusive that people at the ground level, in the trenches, saw the protest and considered it "sour grapes". Here I return to my earlier analogy of the neighborhood dog who attacks people. The person who owns the dog does not consider the dog to be a neighborhood terror because the dog has not bitten the hand that feeds him yet. No sooner does this happen than the man who thought he owned the dog and that the dog was on his side learns the truth, that the dog thinks he's above the rabble and can do whatever he wishes. By not checking the behavior of the dog earlier the last man to be bitten does not realize how he contributed to his own harm. There is nothing wrong with lamenting the dog attacking people he doesn't like for this or that canine whim, the trouble is that so many let the dog do whatever he wished that by the time the attacks get more flagrant and aggressive it is, so to speak, a bit late.

By analogy, a cult that forms around notions of what true humanity is (and make no mistake, "real men" rhetoric posits nothing less than the ambition to define what is truly human for males) can go on for some time and it can, in time, be a sort of cover for other concerns. When Israel failed, Israel failed as a whole. It was a matter of the leaders and the led alike. The time to have checked the behavior of the neighborhood dog was, say, four to six years ago. Now perhaps the reason this didn't happen was because those who could have made a cogent case didn't, for whatever reasons. It might be possible, to admittedly take a rather morose perspective, that so long as people at the ground or mid-level are getting what they want out of the thing they don't speak out of "respect" when that respect may be part of the problem. Cults tend to breed in an artificial sense of unity. "Shoulds" proliferate to the point where being a viable part of the community hinges on things that escalate what is expected. Because the people who have been around longer have much to gain through this escalation it continues when the net effect may be that graciousness is withheld to those who, in an earlier time, would have been considered good enough. The sorts of abuses that can happen in cults happen synergistically. At the risk of having this entire entry descend into the domain of Godwin's Law, Hitler didn't start off big, he just made big promises about what he was selling would revive the "real" Germany. Many, many people bought it hook, line, and sinker.

By analogy, and this is the part that can legitimately be considered unfair but I write all this as a cautionary blog entry, Reformed complementarians into stuff like Rushdoony or "real men" or courtship or what-have-you, this can all lead very quickly into cultish stuff. It would be unfair to say people rush headlong into this thinking that's where it WILL go or even that this is where they WANT to go. People struggle to believe the Truth revealed in Scriptures. He is, simply , not good enough, not as good as the ability to, say, plan out the next five years of your life so that you feel like you're in control, or, say, a mapped out checklist of traits you or someone you "ought" to marry may have. It is fascinating how in terms of actual application much of the "real men" rhetoric I have observed in Reformed or merely Calvinistic complementarian circles smells like the work of Pharisees and experts in the law. It is, to make things controversial, the circumcision of this Galatian crowd. Marriage has been to mars Hill what circumcision was in Galatia and that Driscoll has said people make an idol of marriage does not really change that. For any "you don't HAVE to do X you GET to do X" there will be jokes about singles having expiration dates or being single for too long. The jokes and asides undercut the abstractions.
Let a fad like this run its course for even a while and it swallows up the Gospel and the grace of Christ and replaces it with law. It is within this sort of setting in which tiny infractions can be seen as terrible. The ground has been made fertile for quashing other sorts of dissent that this or that thing sold so strongly is not, in the end, particularly biblicaly and does not, in the end, REALLY point unswervingly to Christ. A church in which a pastor can say "I'm the pastor so you have to trust me" is the same kind of setting in which a father can say "I'm the father, I don't have bad days" when a conflict comes up or, "I'm the older person so you need to respect me" when failing to make a cogent case for a particular position. This is the sort of setting in which "all the elders are in agreement on this even though we admit it isn't exactly backed up by the Bible" can emerge. I saw this four years ago and articulated by some of the people whose lives, as I've been told, have been destroyed by the church. I agree, but I also believe it is necessary to point out that after nearly a decade I have seen the same cultish and inadequately biblical mentality manifest even among some of those who were most hurt. I am not diminishing their hurt at all but pointing out that by now it is necessary to observe that the same spiritual weakness has been evident in leaders and members past and present. Daniel prayed a prayer of repentence not only on behalf of himself but on behalf of the people. A place like Mars is a place where corporate repentence has been virtually non-existent and individual repentence is emphasized to a degree that has often been imbalanced.
I am willing to make a rather broad generalization, that the abuses that happen at every level in the body of Christ spring from some form of idolatry. In order to grapple with this and bring it before the Lord repentence is needed and this often needs to happen at different levels. At times the people suffer under an unrepentent leader, at other times an unrepentent leader leads the people into ruin, at other times the repentent leader leads the people forth and at other times a leader is corrupted by an unrepentent people. And as we saw in the life of Christ, a good and holy man may be destroyed by the sinners He came to save. This would only be true without qualification of Christ Himself. There are cases where good leaders are crushed by those who do not regard the Lord. It does seem, though, that just about any pastor fools himself into thinking he's in this last category.

When I have spoken with a handful of people about the time they spent at a particular community I began to observe a pattern. The pattern was that problems of conflict resolution in the community were essentially hiding in plain sight not because there was nothing to observe but simply because members who had invested themselves in the community and were literally not on the receiving end of harsh treatment at the time considered themselves to be in the clear and those protesting about harshness were in a state of "sour grapes". A few years later and the tables turned, with people regretting their treatment at the hands of people they cheered on a few years earlier. What happened? What changed? Well, what changed was nothing so much as who was on the receiving end of the same sorts of conflict resolution techniques that were deployoed earlier; the same fallible humanly applied definitions of sin that one might expect to have seen then or now. E.g. the neighborhood dog bite me and not someone else even though the dog's condut was evident from the start. It took our collective apathy, indifference, or even active sympathy to encourage the neighborhood dog to get to the point he may be at today.

In other words, our idolatry would be the fuel of his idolatry. The paradox is that for a cult to form there has to be idolatry at every level but as the stratification of critera falls into place and the standards of true membership in the cult become slowly but steadily more stringent, those who did the most to promote the stratification may themselves suffer at the hands of a process they helped along. We can simultaneously pity those Stalin destroyed among those who helped his rise to power. They were getting what they thought they wanted in the process, perhaps little realizing that they were sowing their own destruction as they destroyed others.
I surely don't have to spell out the implications of this for anyone who has read me for a while. The seeds of cultishness were right there, let the reader understand. It merely took a general attitude of, say, "I'm the dad so I'm always right and don't have bad days" while theoretically granting that possibility for others, to slowly manifest itself in other ways, such as "the elders are all in agreement about this so that means a difference of opinion is going against the elders." The two forms of exercising a level of control and a requirement of uniformity within the body of Christ that is, so to speak, not natural, are different limbs growing out of the same tree, different flowers that, as it were, sprung from the same seed and have common roots.
We can find it acceptable to sacrifice the lives of other people, or our own lives, for the idols we have made. The Church has a lengthy history of this, which should not surprise us, since it is a struggle we continually fail at since before the coming of our Lord. In assessing the failures of our Shepherd's flock we must consider the failure not just of the shepherds who behave as though they were hired hands but of the sheep who were perfectly content to follow those shepherds as though they were the Shepherd Himself. This is a painful, difficult path because it means that if I sense a shepherd has become an idol to himself or merely that others treat him that way it is not a simple matter in practice, however simple it is in principle. My repenting of my idolatry is no surety that others will repent of theirs.

As Tim Keller put it, Christians tend to have three idols--"Truth" (insert trademark here), gifts, and moralism. These are, not to be subtle about it, the kinds of ways that cults are helped. You trademark truth as you expound it and present it as though it were the plain meaning of the Bible sans any serious exegesis or presentation of potentially different perspectives. "Truth" is what you enlist to assure yourself you have the truth and will fight for the truth when no one else will, a trait I have seen Mars Hillians display almost constantly even in cases where leadership urged them to not have so strong an us vs them mentality. Sadly it seems as though in many cases the idolatry of the flock has often been in danger of poisoning the leadership. I cannot forgot the "Wallace! Wallace!" chants on the old Midrash. Who are we who have spent years at that place to simply condemn leaders when it has been our own idolatry of ourselves through them that helped fuel that weakness? The smarter, more repentent ones set aside their idols and started on a different spiritual path within the body of Christ. The dumber ones stayed and got burned and take that as a self-implicating statement since it is meant to be.

Gifts can be anything that is salutory or admirable about you or others. Those gifts can be held up as more special than others and once that happens a fundamentally Corinthian abuse happens because the PURPOSE of the gifts is not understood. Some super pastor who is gifted as a communicator who does not help other pastors learn how to be as effective a communicator as he is has been placed or places himself on a pedastal He could humble himself by helping to train people to take over the work GOd may have for him, or he could choose the path of continuing to do things himself and deprive brothers in Christ the opportunity to grow in the ways he grew. Paul invested in Timothy because, in part, Paul knew one day he would die and that he was planting for Christ as well as harvesting for Christ. Gifts are frequently the basis of Christian idolatry.

Moralism, of course, is, too. Moralism is usually the basis from which distinctions are made as to who, in Driscollism, is "varsity" and "junior varsity". These distinctions are made all the time.
Moralism is imposing rules that are not outlined in Scripture as though they were. Say, the idea that the man has to not live with his parents. In most societies that wouldn't have been true at all. In many societies the man would marry into the authority of his father-in-law as Jacob did his uncle Laban. A guy like Driscoll and complementarians in general seem to operate under the delusion that they can read the nuclear family into biblical texts. I have seen this for years and find it stupid and aggravating. It is moralism, plain and simple. Pharisees are never the sort to think that they are promoting a works-based righteousness. No! THey think they are getting back to the Bible and taking the Bible seriously.

If complementarianism were simply a position in which it was articulated that on the basis of a combination of scripture and tradition we don't have women as having pastoral and priestly roles in the formal leadership of the church and just left it at that things could be left well enough alone. But as I observe actual complementarians I have met it tends to give off the stink of insecure young white guys who feel like they need to be affirmed in their masculinity.

I suggest, not without a great deal of regret, that an appeal or selling point of Driscoll for young men is less about the love and grace of Christ and more about the appeal to "real men" Get a young, insecure guy who has a fraught relationship with his parents either in reality or on the basis of his own sense that his parents let him down (a pop narrative that suffuses Mars Hill in several areas) and he is primed to make Mars Hill a cult even where it wouldn't be. He brings his own moralistic impulse to Mars Hill and then when things go south for him or his friends he reads that moralistic impulse back on to Mars Hill without realizing that he was a participant and advocate of the thing he feels hurt by.

At the risk of callously pointing out the obvious, God is not mocked and we reap what we sow. That is a chiefly eschatological observation that moralists can invoke incorrectly as having a one-to-one correspondence in this age. But I can point to the origin of the kingship in Israel to point out that there are times where the Lord disciplines us by giving us exactly what we want. If moralists and crusaders at Mars Hill have been hurt then perhaps the Lord is chastening them a bit about their moralism and crusading to let them know they should also be still and know that He is God. Others who may be still too much may be prompted by the Lord to actually do something.

Getting back to gifts as idols, this is a problem rampant in Christianity in America, and not just in places where a premium is placed on "the annointing". I recall a person or two who explained Driscoll was just so much more gifted and less boring than other pastors it only made sense for him to have the lion's share of preaching. My case that other pastors will not be allowed to grow into their preaching gifts this was was met with indifference. Ironically, things are closer to what I have hoped for NOW than at the time when ex-members were at Mars Hill who now believe Driscoll is a tyrant and a bully. Well, had you read Pussified Nation or listened to him explain how Pelagianism and Arminianism were basically the same circa 2001-2002 you could have been less surprised. I am aware of concerns that the leadership at Mars Hill is abusive and I wish to point out that if you are serious about those concerns that implicates not only present leadership but past leadership. Investing in a building without researching adequately whether it could be used for anything other than industrial purposes having announced a capital campaign is still part of the problem and the fired pastors are as culpable for that as anyone else.

Now a person might say "Shouldn't we offer them grace?" Well, sure, yet if they pleade grace for a million-dollar purchase while telling stay-at-home dads they should be subject to church discipline; if Driscoll is the sort of man who can repent of making his wife work in time to be paid a salary but not earlier, then there's some systemic risk of the whole leadership in pleading grace for things on a massive scale they do not necessarily extend grace to others in. This has been an issue going back as far as a lack of graciousness even in some of the fired pastors. In other words, people who have been burned by Mars Hill are not wrong to feel burned but repentence is something needed all across the board. Some of the people who left were apt to legalism and control of the same stripe that may be present at the place now.

Instead of just looking at Driscoll or other Mars Hill leaders and saying "this is a cult" consider how even those hurt by that church contributed to that mentality. If no one else will then I am willing to point this out. Christ is everything and we are merely His creations, His ervants. It will not suffice to insist only on the repentence of the other without considering how we contributed to things. IF, in fact, Driscoll is a bully of a pastor and Mars Hill is in any way a cult then those who joined the church and left will need to keep struggling with how their own idolatries fueled their participation in that cult. A church leadership team that dumps money into a building that can only be industrially zoned shouldn't turn around and tell stay-at-home dads they are in sin. Jesus told a parable about a master forgiving two debtors and asked who would be more grateful. The answer is simple, the one who owed the greater amount. Jesus also told a parable about a master who forgave his steward a huge debt, an astronomically high debt. The steward then threw someone in prison for having a large debt. I'm going to spell out the application here, Mars Hill pastors who dumped the money of members into Ballard would-be-campus 2 simply don't have the basis for disciplining stay-at-home dads about money. The hypocrisy of that is just too much. Instead of laying into the stay-at-home dad for being a worthless coward and failure as a man consider the worthless cowardice and failure of men to admit they made a dumb-ass mistake buying a huge building without investigating whether they could finish the tower. I keep mentioning this precisely because others do not and because the essence of moralism is to excuse or justify in ourselves what we would punish in others. This is why I find it hard to buy rebukes of stay-at-home dads when the leaders are guilty of squandering quite a bit more money on an ill-advised purchase. If they can do that and plead ignorance they should extend a great deal more mercy and understanding to stay-at-home dads. If dad and mom are having an argument the kids many not need to know what's going on but if the kids' tithe checks pay for mom and dad's salary then they should recognize there are limits to what they can say to the kids about giving if dad and mom are going on expensive dates.

The thing is that the leaders ALONE should also not be held culpable for the sorts of moralism and hypocrisy that can happen. A flock that takes alcohol to an alcohol-free camp site and then pleads ignorance of the rules is guilty of both moralism and hypocrisy for considering its own rules above those of fellow Christians and this is, frankly, a weakness I have seen rampant in the place. It's the kind of place where a person can take disciplinary action against uppity members while being guilty (no doubt witlessly) of a major violation of international copyright. When people ask "Shouldn't you extend grace?" I reply that I do extend grace but I don't have to keep writing checks, and I can also urge that the people who presume upon grace stop presuming on it quite so much. I have come to see that no one presumes on the grace of God and others quite the way a moralist does.

I think liberal secularists have some very legitimate points about how a cult (if Mars Hill is a cult) promises an identity for young insecure men, perhaps promoted by young insecure men. A synergy emerges in which legalism spirals upward and outward as young men with more zeal than knowledge might take a Driscoll joke or statement about "real men" and then spin that out into saying that people shouldn't watch a show like Alias if they have the Holy Spirit. Or they might promote courtship as good and dating as sinful without acknowledging that there is not an adequate scriptural or even traditional defense for that. People may lament an "epidemic" of singleness that pins all the blame on singles without examining how the fiscal policies and social world created by those policies can make marriage more and more challenging. Or you might get a pastor saying from the pulpit that he urged a young couple to not become members at a church like Mars Hill because the wife vastly out-earned the husband and she and her husband were both totally cool with that. That is just stupid, legalistic foolishness.

Then again, that sort of thing has been popular for years. Driscoll was the one who once said that if guys don't get married by 30 they are like milk cartons and start to smell funky. He's matured a bit, just as I hope Munson has matured a bit since his "There are no righteous poor in America" statement at Dead Men. Seriously, ex-members, all the evidence you needed was staring you in the face and speaking to you for a decade if you want to plead "cult". Obviously I'm not sure I either need or want to consider Mars Hill a cult. God can raise up enough heathens that if God's people make a mockery of Him then per Romans Paul's words apply, then it will be on account of us that God's name is mocked among the Gentiles. People expressed concerns about a pastor who said "I'm not some pansy-ass therapist" years ago.

It is, I understand, tempting to look at the tree and the fruit and worry about it at the expense of considering how the seeds grew and what and who watered those seeds over time. As Stevie Wonder put it in a great song, you better tell your story fast and if you lie it will come to pass. It is too convenient to think that someone else's lies may have come to pass without consider how our lies to ourselves or others in the depth of our sin may affect us and others. If only God is truly good and Christ is God then only Christ reveals the truth without mixture. The rest of us are those to whom Christ reveals Himself in different ways, often choosing to use murderers like Moses and Paul or David.

It's a good year to like Star Trek

It shouldn't be as though you have to ask, dear reader, why it is a good year to like Star Trek. The movie has been out for just a week. I'm not talking about liking Star Trek in the Trekkie sense of the thing. I'm thinking more in terms of Abrams' new film has preserved and updated what was best about the original series. To be honest, I have a certain amount of respect for The Next Generation and gave up almost entirely on the franchise after Roddenberry's death. First Contact, yes, I did muster up the interest to see it and it was fun but TNG has never had the same appeal or value the original series had for me.

See, Star Trek is old style old TV liberalism in politics and intellectual thought and to some degree that is both its weakness and its strength. It could be preachy and didactic. And with characters like the self-impressed horndog James T. Kirk, and the equally cardboard cut-out characters of Spock and Dr. McCoy vrrtinh wildly to the intellectual left and emotional right we were seeing caricatures on the small screen.

But like Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup this trio of characters became vastly more than the sum of its initially limited parts. Trekkies, take some meds because I'm sticking with that comparison for the rest of this blog entry. Star Trek was at its essence a humanist show, a deeply humanistic show. Many Christians don't want to recognize how profoundly secularist the perspective of Trek as a franchise has always been. Name me a Republican Christian Trekkie who complains about Star Trek IV and the whales and I'll show you someone who just plain wasn't paying attention to the previous two decades of Trek!

But let me set that aside for a moment. Star Trek, the original series, gave us an inspiring trio of characters in popular culture because the trio of mind, body, and spirit is conveyed through Spock, Kirk, and McCoy. Let's face it, Kirk is body all the way because he's always jumping the bones of alien women. What the three characters lack as individuals they find in the others. Through the community of these three Kirk, Spock, and McCoy can be presented, by means of the always subtly to brazenly didactic Star Trek, to reveal what the fulness of the human experience can be. At its best it did not seek answers so much as encourage the legitimacy of being able to ask questions. It might be best to phrase things this way, that Trek as a franchise has its best storytelling and best characterization when it eschews the pablum of the triumph of the human spirit (or whatever) and examines the profundity of human need in terms of the individual and the community. I would submit that this is a reason Christians of various stripes DO like Star Trek and why it's okay to like what I have often considered to be the celluloid syndicated secular humanist's version of a Chick tract. Fortunately for us regarding the original series Roddenberry and company gave us a FUN show, not merely a didactic one.

And this examination of human need is why I find the spin-off series to be, well, underwhelming. There was no other series that capture the trichotomy of mind/body/spirit the wway Spock/Kirk/McCoy presented it. There were no Powerpuff Girls adventures, more or less. The multiracial integrated crew of the ship is no longer the novelty it was forty years ago. Many things are simply not as daring as they once were. I don't happen to have any real affinity for secular humanism, to be honest. I consider it to be as naive as the unbelievers consider Christianity to be. On the other hand, humanity bears the image of Christ whether it recognizes Christ at all. I can respect that Hayao Miyazaki can sense shadows of divinity or the image of divinity in the human race despite his pessimism about the inclination of the race as a whole.

Christians should not be so averse to what they consider the enemies of the faith in humanism or liberalism or whatever culture war shibboleth they are obsessed with now that they faill to recognize something--that there is still something valuable about humanity recognizing the possibility of redemption. When Trek wallows gleefully in its belief that we have come so far or would be further were it not for bad guys ... it sucks (Insurrection). When Trek examines how the foibles of men lead to unexpected catastrophe and how people can choose in the darkest moment to sacrifice themselves for the greater good it is genuinely touching. Seriously, I shouldn't have to tell you I'm referring to Spock's death in Star Trek 2 but I might as well underline it. There is nothing wrong with being touched by a statement we all yearn to hear and often do not, a statement we often sense is made without meaning it, which is why even in an imaginary story it is still touching when Spock says, "I have been and always shall be your friend."

And this is, of course, what Christ offers us Himself. The reason I admit I love a lot about the original series and don't really care in the end about the rest of the knock-offs is because despite itself the original Star Trek stories had characters who struggled with what it meant to be truly human. They often didn't understand each other, they often didn't like each other, they often were not sure what the future had but they also were willing to "boldly go where no man has gone before" (old school now). It did not matter where, perhaps, so much as with whom you went into the unknown. This is what made the original trio in the Trek-verse so enjoyable--Kirk, Spock, and McCoy might butt heads but at the end of the day they were loyal to each other even when some of them were a bit loathe to admit it.

I admit I find things about the old series strangely touching, and not so strangely touching. I got into Star Trek as a child through reruns and also because of my dad. Before a few things in our relationship changed significantly for the worse Star Trek was one of the things we could have lots of fun conversation about and it was my dad who pointed out that the original Trek trio was great on archetypal grounds because the three characters completed each other and weren't just obstacles to each other. It made for good drama and comedy at the same time because they could work together or lock horns with each other because each had a unique strength that was also a unique limitation. And here let me toss out a potentially pointless observation that the body of Christ can learn much from this. :) Sometimes God uses the stories of others to help us grasp important elements of His story that He shares with us in and through Christ.

I believe Abrams made the right decision abadnoning all the knock-offs and spin-offs from the original series that no one has any reason to give a damn about in this day and age. All those things were the sad creations of guys like Roddenberry who became self-congratulatory, bought their own hype, and forgot that the original thing was a one-off. Perhaps I could liken it to Joss Whedon, an essentially one-trick pony who hasn't realized his time has largely come and gone. He may be the Gene Roddenberry of our time amongst sci-fi and genre fiction fans.

Back on track, Abrams wwas right to bring back and reboot the premise and cast of the original series. He was right to abandon the "scientific plausibility" that Trekkies have clung to that has made the show increasingly ossified and missed the real point of the series. Abrams was right to distill everything down to revealing who these characters are and why we can come back to them and enjoy their story in a new way.

It can be easy to look down on things from forty years ago or things that were before our time. I have met people in their twenties or thirties who have no thought for any of the arts before their childhood. This might manifestt itself as the attitude that no movies made ten years before you were born "matter". The release of a movie like Trek reveals, in this case, that the old stuff matters and the old stuff will continue to matter, flaws and all. Those who do not know the past, it is said, are doomed to repeat it. In the arts those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it without knowing they have wasted their lives and our time. This can also happen when people hope to build on the past without understanding the past. Ergo, the rest of Star Trek after the original series ... at least, in my opinion, until about now.

I make exceptions, but I make this broad, polemical point for a reason. Star Trek, the originals eries, was good campy fun while still making its serious points. The characters worked and they still work. There were no "principles" that humans couldn't have conflict with each other. The rest of the Trek franchise is, in some sene, varying degrees of failure because they missed the point of the original. They saw the optimism of Trek without seeing that the optimism was brought to bear against odds, not ignorant of the likelihood of failure, but not considering failure to be as bad as inaction. Spock tells Kirk there is only a 4.3 percent probability that what they are undertaking will work. "Spock! ... It'll work!" is Kirk's optimistic reply. And, of course, being Star Trek, it does work. As with the far flung solutions, so with the original series and original characters.

Seeing Star Trek in the theater this year not only reminds me what I loved Star Trek once but also why my dad loved Star Trek and that's anything but a bad thing. I am not a particularly optimistic fellow, I am often more cynical and moribund than perhaps a thirty-five year old person should be. I need to be reminded that wanting things to be better and hoping tha tthings can be better and working to make things better is not in vain. In my case, specifically, I have to recall these things because in Christ life is not in vain. In Star Trek a character can die in vain and The Humanist will be pleased with that. Great, someone had to sit through Generations. In Star Trek a character can die in vain because you'll cyniclaly observe that in yet another movie they will be brought back, but that's a different kind of "in vain" known as the "death without cost".

In Christ our deaths are not in vain but there is something that can be rarely articulated in the circles I have spent time with, that our LIVES are not in vain. It can be terribly easy for me to feel that my life is basically in vain, that there is not much to accomplish here or to consider valuable in this life as I await eventual death and consider that one day Jesus will return. Perhaps the kind of apocalytpic upbringing I had had something to do with this. Perhaps I grew up getting the impression that whatever it meant to be fully human I wasn't measuring up, couldn't measure up, and wouldn't measure up.

I have been in settings where Christians talk fondly about getting their asses kicked metaphorically by the preaching. There was a time when I valued this but it is an incomplete understanding of humanity and of Christ. But by now, obviously, I have steered so far off topic that I am no longer talking about Star Trek. Well, that is more or less as it should be. In the end my hope is in Christ and if that means in some cases I have to turn my eyes from how Christ is presented by some to consider who Christ is and isn't that is part of the process, too.

Dostoevsky wrote with great clarity that in your twenties the easiestt thing for a man to do is die for a cause. Put that mean in a position where he spends five years of his burning youth toiling away indoors and you discover what he is REALLY willing to accomplish. We are like Peter, swearing that we will embrace sacrifices of the highest level when we are not even willing to admit we know Christ. Over the last twenty years I have seen that happen often, especially in the arts, whether myself or others. I have also seen it, sadly, in professions of faith. I know people who were "on fire" for God who have cast that all aside. I have struggled almost my whole life with doubts that numb the heart and with the visible wickedness of the visible church ... and yet for some reason I can't turn away from Christ. I can neither say that my adherance to Christ is to my credit or that it has nothing to do with me. It is mysterious and I don't understand it.

By now, obviously, I have steered far off from my topic and that is, as I said, just as well. Sometimes learning how to hope that things can be betterhere and now can help one remember that there is a greater hope. All of Hebrews describes how that which we have now is but a shadow of the things to come, shadows compared to Christ. I have come to realize that in the last ten years I have heard people ostensibly preach Christ but preach Him in such a way that He becomes the measure of what you should be NOW or what you should be becoming soon with the help of some "community" or "spiritual authority" rather than a hope that sustains you in the midst o of continuing failure. Some find it easier to preach 1 Corinthians than 2 Corinthians, which is both our loss and theirs.

Some people define spirituality through, say, Spock alone, or McCoy alone, or through Kirk. Some combine two and omit the third. Some combine all three and write books about it. Clearly I'm playing with the analogy of mind, body, and spirit. I have heard preaching from Christians who uphold the body and mind but neglect the spirit. I have heard people who uphold the spirit and body but not the mind. I have heard peopel uphold the mind and the spirit but not the body and these all reveal what they want redeemed in themselves at the expense of whatever it is they omit. A person who emphasizes that Christ redeems the body and mind has no thought of the spirit. The other combinations apply. They are piloting the Enterprise of their selves into uncharted lands without one of the key crew members they need, i.e. that part of their walk with Christ considered. Eventually Spock and Kirk discover they need Dr. McCoy if they have not brought him along. At length McCoy must acknowledge that Spock's logic outweighs his desire to act right away. So it is, by extended analogy, in our walk with Christ. If we neglect the body the spirit and mind suffer terribly, just as the neglect of another causes the other two to suffer terribly. And by now I am pointlessly rambling.

factoring in variables of obvious bias ...

http://slog.thestranger.com/2005/10/antioch_bible_c

http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/misogynyhomophobiamisogynyhomophobia

For those of you who may not be familiar with the concept of advocacy journalism I can explain it rather simply, there are people who believe that the illusion of objectivity in mainstream medium was an illusion, a delusion, and something best not embraced. In contrast to the appearance of being at a remove, of being "objective", advocacy journalism puts the convictions of the journalist as observer and interviewer researcher front and center. This is a form of journalism in which, at its best, we are not seeing yellow journalism in the archetypal "bad" sense but a kind of advocacy in which the journalist puts his or her convictions on the table and does research. Their bias and perspective may color how they view the truth but, if you will, their bias, if they are pursuing the truth, will not necessarily get in the way of reporting the facts.

Now obviously a person may object that any links to this publication can only be links to highly biased and unprofessional journalism. Sure, bear with me, however.

There is a certain pastor who apprenticed for a time in some capacity in this place and as Jesus once put it, it is enough for a student to be like his teacher. This pastor has distanced himself publicly from things like May Day for marriage as ineffective and being a bunch of suburban pastors and Dobson fans showing up, protesting, and basically doing nothing beneficial for the actual city (a perspective I happen to agree with, by the way). However, be that as it may, certain types of confrontational rhetoric about what constitutes a manly man may, to make this point obvious, indicate an essential continuity of both rhetoric and position. In other words, certain weaknesses regarding the use of rhetoric in the confrontation of opposing views may have a homiletic generational mark to them, a kind of DNA. The mustard plant was once a mustard seed.

Bias in this publication's coverage? Well, sure, they don't pretend otherwise. Factually inaccurate? That would have to be verified. A publication can publish a lot of stuff you don't like for ideological reasons and not necessarily wrong about the essential details of the story. As with another story, the bias inherent in the article is not really prima facie proof that it is inaccurate. At the risk of employing an outlandish example, Satan can still quote the Bible accurately and in context. Obviously I'm not suggesting The Stranger is Satan in any literal way, I evoke and allude. And since Satan is allowed by God to torment Job and Satan is not wrong to consider how Job has been protected by God the obscurity of these sayings is not really obscure.

But I do have other things to consider, like the wonderfully entertaining new Star Trek film. I plan to get to that in a bit and share a bit about what it has been like to be an ex-Trekkie who has rediscovered some of what has made Trek fun.

the implications of Mars Hill Global in light of a Mark Driscoll from years gone by

Part of me should be excited that more people are able to be reached through something like Mars Hill Global but I can't muster the enthusiasm for it. I can't help but wonder if Mark Driscoll has turned into the kind of spiritual leader he preached against circa 2001-2002. He's primary teaching pastor of what is effectively a denomination, except for that part where local campus pastors in the trenches do all the pastoral care and teaching besides.



Yes, I get that the reasoning is that the main draw to Mars Hill is Driscoll. I got that line of reasoning back in 2005 and I didn't buy it then either when some now bitter former Mars Hill members were trying to argue the case for that back then. I "could" name names but I don't wish to, I simply note rather dryly that some of the people who bitch most about a "cult of personality" were among its stronger advocates. All that is to say that I have the same reservations now that I did back then about this scale of contextualizing Mark, as it were. He's good at what he does but having him have such a high profile place as a teacher in Mars Hill means he's the kind of denominational leader/spiritual figurehead who has no idea what is going onin the real world in the trenches of the church that is Mars Hill. If Driscoll circa 2001 saw what Driscoll is now would he be happy? Possibly, but if he were that would raise questions about what he wants, because by Driscoll's own preaching circa 2001-2002 he has become the very sort of pastor he warned people against. I don't know that this is on purpose or even observed, I just throw it out on the internet because finding the sermons in which he expounded upon the dangers of denominational hierarchical systems wouldn't be that difficult.



A lot of people can and will be touched for the sake of the kingdom of Christ this way, don't get me wrong, I just doubt that this is the ideal way to do it. If Driscoll's preaching gets piped out to Arizona or New Mexico or London or Guam or Australia or some other English-speaking culture it doesn't mean it's really contextualizing the Gospel for those places. Driscoll in those settings might be a useful SUPPLEMENT to another pastor's preaching but should not be considered equivalent to it. If you don't live in the United States or Seattle then don't consider Driscoll to be your pastor, it doesn't matter how much you like his preaching.



The real dillema, given Mars Hill's understanding of membership, is that this kind of move to an interstate or global church means the death knell of meaningful membership. At this point if a person wants to become a member they can be invited to log on to The City, a kind of Facebook meets MySpace knockoff for churches. It has some value, I grant, but does bode entirely well that to become a member of the "real "community you have to sign up through a virtual community? Let's not kid ourselves or anyone else, The City is a social networking implement and a virtual community no matter what the people who built it may say. If Mars Hill ever cracked wise about the way things work in the evangelical Christian ghetoo they had better stop cracking because this is the kind of reinventing the wheel I have seen at the place for a while. Wheels are great but they aren't great just because WE made them.

Don't get me wrong, the need for a competent, centralized database that can be used for administrative purposes is cool and all ... but the terrible risk of getting invited to join a virtual community (even an invitation only virtual community) is that that virtual community is still inextricable from being considered formally connected to "real" community, whatever that is. And the thing is that given the level of personal investment leaders as a whole can often have at different levels the only red flag that something might be amiss is if someone hasn't given for six consecutive months, in which case membership is revoked. A person can give on-line and download sermons. A person can attend a community group but this in itself is not a sign of real community. In other words, when the membership process can be done entirely by listening to sermons from a Doctrine series and then through filling out forms on-line through The City and donations can be done via internet and automatic deposit we're talking about a virtual church.

In fact there is a great deal in principle in which Driscoll and Benny Hinn would even out. Think about it, potentially millions of people who don't know jack about Driscoll and who Driscoll will never meet consider him a great spiritual leader and teacher and immensely gifted by God. Benny uses TV and Mark uses the internet but the mass communication means of "pastoring" is essentially unchanged. Now if I had to pick just one of these guys I'd pick Driscoll any day every day for the rest of my life ... maybe. Sometimes Benny gets better musicians. Sorry, but even Benny occasionally grabs a capable musician or two while Mars Hill has done the DIY indie punk don't-quite-tune-your-guitar approach.

The Catholics have the Pope and the Orthodox have their own approach to determing what all Christians should believe. Since the Doctrine series of early 2008 Driscoll may, note I say "may", be setting himself on a path where he is effectively making himself a kind of evangelical Protestant Pope. Even a subtitle like "What christians should believe" telegraphs at least that possibility. Now attending a church like Mars Hill isn't necessarily a problem, despite what various cranky ex-Mars Hill members have blogged in the last three years. I may have more to say about the problems of many of the ex-Mars Hill member criticisms I have begun to observe are out there on the internet but that is another matter for another time. As I have written elsewhere, taking sides is not really my interest, not least because after a decade I see the same spiritual troubles in the complainers as I have seen in those about whom they have complained. It is more fruitful to consider our own weakness rather than simply rip into people as though they didn't have character flaws until the second they hurt US, which is what a lot of certain types of blogging have amounted to.

I am concerned, and I am willing to put it that blandly, that Driscoll in the last six years has transformed into exactly the kind of spiritual leader he was telling us was bad and to avoid. It is highly improbable he is consciously aware of this transformation in his ministry and in his life. That he's been recycling material and doing that as part of his book deal isn't a problem, it's when he recycles Song of Songs or rehashes the Doctrine series to streamline an increasingly impersonal memberization process that may one day resemble Borg assimilation that I admit I start to worry. What are the odds Driscoll has any idea what is going on at any given campus in his denominationa, er, multi-site church? What are the odds that Driscoll has done any pastoral counseling? Maybe high, maybe low, it's not something I know for sure. I ask all this simply because those who heard Driscoll's teaching on good and bad pastoring from 1 & 2 Timothy may note that much of what Driscoll spoke against is exactly the kind of spiritual leader Driscoll seems to be turning into.

Now if he'd just admit that denominations aren't as bad as he thought six years ago and that Mars Hill is functionally a denomination much would improve. That would probably entail two unlikely things happening. The first would be Driscoll admitting he was young, naive, and wrong and the second would be that he'd have to admit he's effectively a Protestant Pope and a denominational leader. Any number of his mentors and hereos have denominational affiliations. It's not like Tim Keller is worse off for being Presbyterian. It's not like John Piper is worse off for being Baptist. These are men who trust their denominations enough to submit to them in practical ways that Driscoll, frankly, may not, not least because he effectively is not formally submitted at an organizational level to anyone beyond his own team. It has ever been thus, though, so I suggest that any bloggers seizing to leap on the charge that Driscoll has no accountability to ask whether he had it. Again, that's another topic for another time.

As evidenced from his courtship craze and reverse-engineering-your-life craze (both stupid, frankly) and how he broached the topic of the legitimacy of Christian dating in 2008 the evidence suggests that Driscoll and Mars Hill as a whole have problems saying, "We were actually wrong". It's easier to say "Maybe we haven't emphasized the legitimacy of Christian dating in the past as much as we could have" than to admit that "We promoted a stupid, extrabiblical and unbiblical fad because we thought we were being countercultural but were really more about moralism and control than about the saving power of Christ." And OF COURSE that is more difficult to say. Collective confession of actual sin is hard not least because God's people are loathe to admit they sin, first of all, and not everyone agrees what the sins might even be. There were people who dropped their membership precisely because they saw these kinds of things. Many of the newer members have no institutional memory of what has come before and many members who HAD that memory may have left in the last three years. This is, perhaps, if anything a great disservice to the local church. I am not, however, in a position to tell other people what the Lord would have them do or where their convictions lead them. I have also met too many people at and previously at Mars Hill who would make their convictions YOUR need to repent. I have been that sort of person myself, really, so it's not as though I should rush to become one of the pots calling kettles black.

I have talked with people who have gone through the process and they noted that it seemed really impersonal and none of the follow-up interviews that were supposed to be part of the process ever happened. In that case, isn't membership membership in a virtual church where the bottom line is that the only benefit from it is to leaders who can work things out for budgetary reasons? Mars Hill may have depersonalized the membership process to the point where a person can fulfill most of the requirements of becoming a member without being in the same state. Rather than seeing that as a great opportunity for how God is opening doors to expand missional work MAYBE we could also see that as the threshhold of a potentially terrible compromise in what membership actually means.

I just wonder if Driscoll has reserved for himself many of the privileges of being a campus pastor or denominational leader without taking on many of the core responsibilities. That a church is thousands large with plans to go global is part of the problem, how would anyone know? Would Driscoll circa 2001-2002 even recognize himself? Would he be proud of his accomplishments? Some, I think. He'd have every right to be proud of the bulk of his preaching in the Atonement series. It is also nice to consider that he may finally be getting the balls to go through a Gospel for the first time in eight years. For a man who has said "It's all about Jesus" he's been overdue to really make it all about Jesus for some time now, even by his own measure of things. His best preaching has almost invariably come from Luke so, Lord willing, we will see Driscoll's preaching at its best very, very soon, if God is kind to him. We can certainly use less of Driscoll attempting to preach through the Old Testament.

So long as people recognize that Mars Hill is nothing, that Driscoll is nobody, and that Christ is all in all, then I'm okay. I will occasionally write to that very end, obviously. He used to say we should take God seriously and take ourselves lightly. I'm not sure that's what's happening these days, ergo, a blog entry.

Mars Hill Global ... we ARE talking about a denomination now, aren't we?

Mars Hill GLobal is going, literally, global. I am sure there must be compelling legal and financial reasons to not call Mars Hill a denomination but I don't know what they are. But surely by now they could admit what any normal, thinking person could point out. Once it gets outside Seattle and has multiple campuses we're talking a denomination. Admittedly a rather weird denomination in which the denominational figurehead does all the preaching and this at a level that not even the Pope has, but more or less if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck we're talking about a denomination.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing. If anything it's the eagerness with which that word is avoided in Mars Hill press that strikes me as baffling, ergo, an appeal to the existence of some legal/fiscal reason to not call the duck a duck. Might be a very good reason, it's just puzzling, that's all.

Well, and here I had considered Mars Hill, Microsoft, Starbucks, and Boeing to be emblematic of Seattle. And Wamu, too, but Wamu is sort of changing into something else right now so it may no longer be representative of Seattle and the Northwest as such ... which for all I know might be a good thing. At any rate, it seems to me Mars Hill has been a denomination for a while and I look forward to the possibility that one day Driscoll and company can actually admit in public what they surely must know by now is the truth in private. It's nothing to be ashamed of, really, is it?

"Many people think nastiness ends Christian community. The gospel says nastiness is where Christian community begins."

http://christthetruth.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/nice-and-christian/

Just had to put that quote up there as a teaser for this link.

I don't feel like explaining exactly why this resonates with me so much in much detail. I will, however, say that I have seen a lot of what appeared to be "Christian" friendship and fellowship devolve into worldly fellowship if the measure of worldly fellowship is a complete failure to live out Collossians 3:13. I have seen oodles of Christians, myself especially, utterly fail to be clothed in compassion, kindness, gentleness, patience or humility. It's easier to clothe yourself with indignation, impatience, pride (as often well-concealed as openly displayed), harshness, and smart-assery and condescension.

I have for nearly a decade had a connection to a Christian community where one of the most highly praised experiences is getting your ass kicked verbally, whether by the leadership or proxies. Real confrontation with sin it tends to be called, and all of that is, I understand, necessary. But the unilateral way in which it has often been practiced has been disconcerting. It is easy to feel as though it is tough love when you are on the dispensing end of it, much harder to feel certain it is tough love when you are on the receiving end of it. Being confronted with sin or confronting someone about sin tends to be the acme of the spiritual experience. And it is, as I have said earlier, necessary, but it is also not the only experience Christians have.

In fact a great deal of confrontation about sins real or imagined can happen without any reference to bearing with one another or forgiving each other. I guess that's my rueful observation that I'm not sure I have been connected to a Christian community that is even, as the blog I linked to puts it, "nice". Still, if Jesus can raise Lazarus from the dead He can do whatever He wills.