Singleness, depression, and relative privation

http://www.theologyforwomen.org/2010/05/all-you-single-ladies-or-at-least-those.html


"I’ve found that changing my circumstances isn’t the hope of release from depression, because inevitably, the depression returns in a slightly different form regardless of how my circumstances evolve."

One of the common memes in the thoughts of singles is that they find being single depressing. I don't necessarily find being SINGLE depressing. I find being unemployed more depressing. I don't "need" a wife or girlfriend so much as I need a job, though even in the midst of having no job it is not as though I have been unable to make ends meet. For some single guys I have met, though, this sort of thing is no consolation. Rather than see singleness as being profoundly beneficial in preventing the necessity of people relying on your non-existent income for support some single guys hold to the falacy that maybe known as relative privation. "Well, at least you're married so you have someone to be with you in bad times." is how this kind of sentiment goes.

Sure, but that's an extra mouth to feed or someone who may rely on your now non-existent income for support. The fallacy of relative privation is to simply suppose that things are worse or better for someone else. It is essentially nothing more than asserting that the grass is greener or browner on the other side relative to where ever you are. Some guy may assume that he couldn't possibly make it as a single man because the temptation to sexual dalliance would be too great. Or he may imagine that single guys can't make it through life because the guy has never bothered to read laundry detergent instructions once in his life to see that you wash things a certain way. Paradoxically said married guy could know all sorts of things about theology and history but still not be able to do rudimentary domestic tasks because his wife has always tackled that stuff. The fallacy at work in this man's thinking is relative privation. If at some point his wife dies and he is left a widower he'll have to learn how to do all those things for himself.

On the other hand, a single guy may frequently operate under the delusion that if a person is married then at least that person has a spouse and gets to have sex. This whole "at least you get to have sex" delusion seems to be the big one for a certain brand of Christian single guy! If, say, your spouse is deployed to a combat zone because he or she is enlisted then, no, you don't get to have sex. If your spouse ends up having an injury or health problem that necessitates the avoidance of sex then a person ends up effectively a married celibate. It won't matter how many times a married guy can explain that if all other aspects of a marriage are not healthy then the sex isn't happening either that single guy will persist in his pipe dream (which may be more one sort of figurative than another). You may infer from this that I am positive I know such single guys.


The relative privations we consider ourselves or others to have frequently say as much or more about our own emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and physical want than it does about whatever the allegedly greener or browner grass on the other side is.


What I find paradoxical is that among Christians we frequently pay lip service to the idea of finding identity entirely in Christ and yet ... in practical ways we define identiy in a multi-valent way like everyone else. If you define yourself by one relationship or task that thing consumes you (a la Ahab in Moby Dick or the equally doomed Ahab who was king over Samaria). If you define yourself through a multiplicity of things you are less likely to fall. A cord of three strands is not easily broken.


Yet what can amplify depression in a single state is the double-speak Christians can have. The most common and virulent form I have encountered is to define adulthood on the basis of marriage and parenthood. These, to be sure, cast you into the crucible of forming adulthood for most people in ways that are not necessarily matched by anything else. But, as Paul put it in another setting, not everyone has this gifting. I know of the screeds in which often super-Reformed theo-blogger types say there is no real gift of singleness and that singleness is an epidemic that has ravaged the American church but Paul wrote "not everyone has this gift" referring to his ability to go through life without a spouse. Exegetical gymnastics withstanding, Paul wrote what he wrote and it is merely the impulse of some people to ignore the intent of the apostle while claiming to take him seriously.

Particularly among certain stripes of evangelical Protestants there can be a double bind in which adulthood is predicated on being the right kind of breeding man or woman and yet to earnestly desire those things as life-defining pursuits is called idolatry even when that pursuit is held up as the normative purpose of human life as designed by God. I have seen this a LOT over the last fifteen years but most of all during a stint from 1999 to 2008. It has not inspired me to give up on the Christian faith as it has some of my friends but it has led me to rethink how seriously some of my evangelical friends actually engage the good news of Christ as the good news of Christ instead of as the good news of marriage.

My friend Wendy has already written about the prosperity gospel of conservative evangelicals and I cannot hope to equal her eloquence on that matter over at Practical Theology for Women. For my part I remember all those men (and it was mainly men) who went on and on about how marriage brings "redemption" into the lives of women without knowing that it came off like they were saying the lives of women were redeemed by their husbands and that single men were redeemed from their single state by a woman.


What I'm seeing at this stage of my life is a lot of friends who are married and raising kids and have less time to spend with me. What is strange, however, is that while some of my more bitter unattached friends in the male subspecies lament how stuck up married people are I find this is often not the case. While single guys lampoon the shallowness of women they don't recognize that they have attitudes that invite a reciprocally shallow response. A guy who says he doesn't care if they're real so long as they are a certain size shouldn't be surprised if women end up returning the favor in terms of attitude or be surprised that if he does not himself measure up to such a mentality in women that they are no more shallow than he is. The indignation of the singles can, even though I speak as one unmarried, confirm that they lack the pragmatism and realism to make a flesh and blood relationship work even as they earnestly believe that having such a flesh and blood relationship would make them more whole. I consider all of that stuff with utmost reluctance and my married friends sometimes tell me that I'm far more ready to be married than I think I am.

In some ways I suspect that total heathens are probably more realistic in their ways of dealing with the opposite sex. A friend of mine remarked that it seems that on things like sexuality, attraction, and courtships that the world seems able to transform those frustrations and longings into art while evangelical Christians seem only able to transform all of that into REALLY BAD THEOLOGY. This brother can say "Amen".

It is often the single people who are more stuck up. Married people, and especially married parents, have a lot less time to spare but when the time is spared it is still immensely meaningful for us. This doesn't mean that married people are less shallow or selfish than single people as certain married preachers keep saying. :) What it means is that there are some people married or single who value friendships enough to keep investing in them apart from some blunt assessment of utility. These are the kinds of friendships everyone needs.

Now a married guy who says that singles are selfish, yet who evaluates all of his friendships on a brutally utilitarian ethic of who will get him "upstream", or who is "wasting his time", has completely failed to understand the way in which Christ chose to befriend us while we hated Him. He may be convinced he understands friendship because he's read the Bible and takes the Bible seriously but just as the Pharisees searched the scriptupres for eternal life and rejected Christ a person may search the scriptures for wisdom about friendship while ultimately rejecting true friendship. It is possible for a person to go for years in ministry without truly understanding the self-emptying nature of not only Christian friendship but even ordinary "heathen" friendship.

The error of assuming the grass is browner on the other side can be at an abstract level or at a personal level. To be thankful for what the Lord has providentially given you in a way where you are not belitting others is no small feat of spiritual discipline and no small grace from the Holy Spirit! The temptation to see all of your life in terms of relative privation is immense. If you always look at the grass as greener on the other side then you are coveting and putting yourself in a terrible position by harboring sin in your heart. If you always look at the grass as browner on the other side then you are in worse shape because pride overflows in your heart, though, ultimately, both impulses are pretty sinful. If you see your own yard as a mixture of brown and green grass and see that this is true of others then you can learn to be gracious. The Father sends rain on the just and unjust alike and waters the grass of the field that is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire.

Computational composition, don't knock it until you've tried it

http://www.slate.com/id/2254232/pagenum/all/#p2

It is fascinating as an amateur composer and guitarist to consider how often people talk about the arts as arts. There are aesthetic absolutes or there aren't and even those who deny vehemently that any aesthetic absolutes are possible will still grandly pronounce what the true nature of true art in a given medium is. I have a friend who denies aesthetic absolutes are even possible who bemoans 1990s rock and declares confidently that rock is about spectacle and bombast while I remind him that he is using purely visual criteria to assess the merits and demeirts of an aural experience.

This fellow also holds that talent is subjective while skill is objective. Well, in a way the problem with this line of reasoning is that it separates potential from kinetic energy as though never the twain should meet. The other problem is that we now have a computer program that can compose music imitating the styles of various composers. If "talent" for musical creation is in no way measurable then it should not even be theoretically possible for a computer to compose.

Of course we all know the programmer establishes the foundation from which the computer program can compose. This doesn't mean computers will replace human input in the creative process. That programs can emulate effectively the works of existing composers so that students of Bach or Beethoven are hoodwinked into thinking they have heard an original work when they are hearing a computer-generated variation doesn't mean we'll stop having humans composing music.

What this does mean, however, is that I feel grandly justified in my conviction that much of the compositional process can be demystified without taking away the essential mystery of the beautiful moment and the painstaking process of composing. David Cope's work does not over-compensate in this demystification process. If anything his proposal by example that productive composers approach the art in a computational or data mining way makes sense. If you have ever studied the works of great composers extensively you begin to discover how, at a mammoth scale, composers pilfer from themselves, recycle, borrow, style, imitate, and distort existing patterns as a pathway to discovering what are for them new musical possibilities.

I actually like the idea of a giant database that allows computer software to compose music. Sure, I admit I'm not particularly eager to listen to that music but I believe that too many people throw around the complaint about musicians that this or that musician just sounds like they are playing midi files. Much of music as music is more fundamentally robotic than people give it credit for. I don't listen to the radio now and haven't for more than a decade. You can listen to several hours of oldies or new songs on format radio and can begin to identify stock chord progressions. I have grown particularly weary of songs that insistently build themselves around I-V-vi-IV because, to be honest, I like "With or Without You" by U2 just fine and there are only so many ways to write passacaglias in a pop song format. It is tough for me to even listen to songs that are I-IV progressions ad infinitum.

The art of composing, the art of anything, really, begins with a bad idea that you can make better. During the Enlightenment era artists believed that the hallmark of a great artist was to find what was beautiful in nature and to improve upon its form, beauty, and practicality. This sounds scandalous and impossible to hippies and neo-hippies everywhere for whom unalloyed nature is the highest good. Those are probably people who have no physical infirmities or handicaps and have the luxury of imagining they are in better touch with nature or the true nature of things by being neo-Luddites. But I digress ... .

As the author Anne Lamont famous put it the key to being a writer is writing shitty first drafts. Many people never get past the point of first drafts and others believe their first drafts are fundamentally above reproach. Others subscribe to a "less is more" aesthetic because the less they can do is pretty much all they can do. Still others are persuaded that what is cliche is what works therefore all works ought to hew closely to cliche. Still others are so bent on defying cliches they become beholden to the very cliches they would supposedly repudiate and become defined as dopplegangers reflexively. Artists that mature don't give a crap about being either cliche or not cliche but, at the risk of speaking too broadly, depicting things as truly as they can.

Sometimes the truth about the creative process is that it is more workaday and "uninspired" than a lot of people claim it is. I have for years been coming to the conclusion that in the arts inspiration is as much a function of work ethic as some lightning flashing in the mind leading one to some moment of discovery. I am willing to liken artistic breakthroughs to scientific breakthroughs--you have to have a hypothesis and test it out over and over again to see if it works and if it doesn't you move on to the next hypothesis. There may be situations where the technology is not available to apply what is in principle a sound idea. Jack Northrop's concept of the flying wing was not impractical in the 1980s but it was lethally impractical in the 1920s!

I don't know if giving an example from my own work is even a good idea but it can take me years to settle on the particular form a musical idea can take. In one case, ten years ago, I got some ideas for what I thought would make for a great guitar concerto. I thought I wanted to compose a guitar concerto based on a couple of riffs and eventually I got themes for them. The trouble was that the theme for the first rif was basically not very interesting. It was a jagged scalar riff around a pedal point. You could say that the problem was there was no room amidst all that pedal pointing for harmonic and meaningful melodic development. There was no tune.

The trouble with devising a theme for the second riff was that it was yet another jagged riff, this one being in an asymmetric meter and pentatonic. Pentatonic scales, as my composition instructor kept telling me, has no shape, no inherent direction. Since one of his favorite hymns was the predominantly pentatonic "Be Thou My Vision" I didn't take this warning as literal! The problem with a fast, jagged 11/8 riff in a pentatonic scale, though, is that it tends to invite the grnaddaddy of all lazy rock and roll writing, the riff basher! How was I going to develop thematic material out of a recursive guitar riff that I admitted sounded totally awesome and aggressive? How was I, then, going to go further and turn that into part of a guitar concerto?

First things first, I had to get to the first theme. The riff itself just became a riff, a hunting call, an introduction. An attention-arresting guitar riff just has to be that and not used for more than that at the start of a form. I mapped out an antiphonal response to the strings on woodwinds. I then took my static first theme on the guitar and buried it in a string section and focused just on developing a theme for a pair of wind instruments to play over the riff bashing. Once I came up with a tune I liked I jettisoned the original guitar theme. At this point I felt confident I had the beginnings of a nice guitar concerto.

But there was a problem and that problem is the one of form. In a concerto you have the soloist and the ensemble in competition with each other or, perhaps a better way to put it, playing with each other and off each other. I had a harmonically static theme and that meant that if I gave the theme in the orchestra to the guitar it would be droning on and on over essentially two chords. Now if you're John Lee Hooker telling a story that's awesome, really, but I'm not John Lee Hooker and there's no narration in a guitar concerto.

I never actually solved the problems with coming up with a theme based on the second riff for years. I had a secondary theme derived from the pentatonic riff that uses a massively liberal retrograde inversion of the riff with rhythmic augmentation but I knew I couldn't make that the first theme in a movement based on such an agressive riff. I knew it would be a wonderful B section in a five-part rondo, which would be a good way to end a guitar concerto.

Finally one winter I was hanging out with a roommate who has been a buddy of mine for years. He plays electric bass. He was interested in learning the 11/8 riff so I was teaching him how to play it. He ended up making all notes that would have to be played on the second fret first fret notes by mistake. He apologized for playing the riff so badly but I had a flash of realization at that point and thanked him. His playing the riff the "wrong" way was precisely the right way to approach building a thematic idea out of that pentatonic riff.

Now before you suggest that this was the "aha!" moment apart from some rational enquiry I am going to mention it as an example of a conductor's axiom, "never underestimate the obvious". Each musical idea by its very nature will lend itself more readily to some developmental techniques than others. In the case of the 11/8 pentatonic riff I had overlooked a crucial device and that device was intervallic change. Instead of changing the relentless rhythm of the guitar riff, which I needed to sustain the momentum of the piece at a linear/horizontal level, I needed to alter the harmony both at the literal and implied level and manipulate the vertical. At this point manipulating the vertical element was all I could do once I had committed to the idea that the best way of expanding on this material was taking a neo-Baroque prelude/toccata approach to the guitar riff. My friend's accidentally playing two notes in the riff flat was what I needed to hear to realize how I had blocked myself in by not thinking through all the possibilities.

One of the disadvantages of following your gut as a compositional METHOD is that you get stuck thinking in terms of the emotional moment or intellectual flash of the moment of inspiration itself. You don't manage to break beyond that to the METHOD of inspiration, moving beyond the thing that sparked your interest in composing something to begin with. You may find (as I did) in the process of working that you no longer even like the material you came up with to go with the first riff. The first and second riffs themselves, however, remained compelling and I had to find new and more persuasive ways to develop that material in a way that made sense.

At length a request from a guitarist for a work for cello and guitar was what inspired me to rethink everything about the form I was giving to the work. Once I saw that there was no likelihood of a local orchestra performing a guitar concerto anyway I pragmatically decided that what I was doing would make more sense and be more practical as a straightforward sonata for cello and guitar. This would eliminate the structural and conventional need to repeat thematic material on the guitar that had been played by an orchestra. I could simply assign the thematic material to the cello or the guitar as I saw fit. I had eliminated the repetitions of harmonically static themes and could streamline the form.

Discovering that employing intervallic change on the 11/8 riff meant that I could begin to compose a rudimentary ABABA rondo form for cello and guitar that would have a much tighter, leaner form and more thoroughly develop the material I had. I could assign the slow theme of the B material to the guitar in the first case and to the cello in the second case. This added the spice of variety to the form while leaving the A material the same throughout.

The A material took shape as I realized that riff bashing works better in classical music as it does in rock, when you create a real or implied cascade of shifting harmonies over the riff, around the riff, or within the riff. This is a harmonic technique that can broadly be called oblique motion. You don't change everything in the harmony at once, that would be too abrupt, you change just one or two notes at a time so that you progressive travel further in your harmonic development than you might otherwise. Modulations and chord progressions that would be awkward or unconvincing with wholesale linear movement become more compelling and plausible shifting just one or two notes at a time.

If there is an argument to be made against a computer program composing music it is that computers are better at exploring and exploiting unity over contrast and contrast is what makes structural development interesting. I notice this more in fugues than in other forms but I could point to an exposition by Shostakovich and say that a Hindemith exposition is better because Hindemith has a clearer grasp of the need for contrasting melodic concepts within his expositions. I could point to a fugue by Haydn and say that Hindemith's fugue expositions are stronger in terms of rhythmic variation and weaker in terms of episodic development. I could point to Bach and say, of course, that his fugues are most compelling because he continually favors fully invertible counterpoint which displays not only a higher mastery of contrapuntal art but also has more memorable individual tunes. Yet the irony in all this is that for many music fans who can't stand the Baroque, all of Bach's music all sounds the same. They hear a computational mainframe of a musician and not anything very inspired or inspiring. We should not be surprised that David Cope has come up with a computer program that can churn out musical works because in his one way Bach beat everyone at that game centuries ago, only we love him for it!

Apologies for Hell: part 2, the "nature of the offended" argument is a failure

When Christians confront the offense of the doctrine of Hell in conversation with unbelievers it is common enough for them to make a case that is even more offensive than the actual doctrine of Hell itself, that a sin against an eternal God warrants an eternal punishment. Christians don't realize that this argument is what might be called by some "epic fail"--It would be roughly on par with sending Bumblebee out in single combat against Megatron; It would be roughly on par with Riddler being sent to best Batman in martial arts; It would be like expecting Snoopy to easily conquer the cat next door; And it would be like expecting Garfield to actually be funny. I trust you get the idea.


The reason this apologetic is a failure can be demonstrated by highlighting its other form, that a sin against an infinite god warrants infinite punishment. Why? Well, the answer is inherent in the apologetic itself, the rationalization for punishment inheres in the offended party rather than on the nature of the actual offense. By this reasoning a four year old boy who angrily punches his father's penis warrants being punched in his penis by the offended father. Clearly the punishment is not physically or emotionally proportional to the offense and is not morally viable in the context of the relationship where spectacular differences in knowledge and power are involved. While it would be wrong for the father to not discipline his boy we cannot morally or rationally contest that the discipline would be derived from a proper response to the offense and not only from the nature of the offended party.


Ergo, a finite sinner who is only capable of committing finite sins cannot justly be punished infinitely or eternally for committing sins that in themselves are incapable of harming an all-powerful, all-knowing, indestructible, eternal, life-giving spirit. Punishment for wrong cannot derive from the nature of the offended party because if we take seriously the attributes of God it is completely impossible for God to be harmed in any way by anyone's sins.

Christians seem to want to have it both ways on this issue of how or if God can be somehow hurt or offended by sin. On the one hand we want to say that nothing anyone could say or do could hurt God or upset God or catch God off guard and yet we also wish to say that our sins are so offensive to God that He can't even stand the sight of us--some people propose to eliminate the sin nature as even being possible and there, generally, is a path to Pelagianism. If we're not born with a sin nature there is no need to baptise babies, as Pelagius was apt to put it. Well, even if we grant this paradox of bearing God's image yet bearing it in a tarnished way that is corrupted by death it does not in itself furnish an apologetic for Hell since a god could choose to obliterate offenders rather than subject them to unending torment.

Ultimately the reason this whole line of argument fails as an apologetic for Hell for the Christian is that it has nothing to do with Christ. A deist, a polytheist, a Muslim, an Odinist, etc could all make this argument and the Christian would reject it. A Christian explanation of the basis for eternal punishment or punishment of any kind must be grounded in trinitarian terms and this is where, as I have been arguing, too many popular theodicies for Hell have failed and will continue to fail.


If punishment for sin is just (and I have never said that it isn't) then punishment for sin must of necessity be in response to the nature of the actual offense and not merely the offended party. For those of us who take seriously the scriptural statement and warning that there is no one who is righteous among mortals, not one, we must remember that though sins may "ultimately" be against God by sinning against God's image in humanity and reflections of the divine image present in creaetion, sins are also against others and ourselves.

Now for some people who do not grant that people may be punished for lack of faith on the basis of the nature of the offense there is another defense that is popular, the free will defense. This simply means that God doesn't SEND you to Hell. On the contrary, YOU chose Hell by virtue of refusing to choose God. This has a few things to commend to it but I will get to the problem of that defense in another post. It is, to be sure, far less ineffective than the "a sin against an infinite, eternal god requires an infinite, eternal punishment" but it is not without weakness.

Apologies for Hell: part 1, is it a fiery dart shot at you or a napalm-covered bear trap you step in because you overlooked it?

Few things figuratively fire up the imagination as readily as the idea of Hell. Hell is where all past injustices get disciplined. Hell is where people are tortured in all the grisliest ways we say we don't like to imagine, but keep imagining in literature, film, and art all the same. Hell has alternately been depicted as active, actual torment, and horrifying privation. Hell has been depicted as total isolation and as being eternally bound to other people, people whose very existence you detest.

Clearly we have two great and apparently conflicting traditions defining Hell in terms of active assigned punishment and passive punishment that is inevitable as a consequence of disobedience.
There is even a third stream of thought that is annihilationist but this tends to historically come off as the passive formulation rather than the active one for reasons I'll get to shortly.

In summary, the active Hell is one that people are condemned to where they are tormented for their evils. The passive Hell is the one people consign themselves to because they refuse to accept the truth and change their ways or show compassion to the needy or do not have the wits or circumstances to placate the appropriate god, goddess, or pantheon that would otherwise prevent them from facing oblivion in whatever form it may take. When you think of the active Hell it is best to think of it as the flamethrower or fiery dart that God shoots at you for actively courting His disapproval. The passive Hell can be thought of as a napalm-lined bear trap that you step into because you refuse to heed God's warnings that you're about to place your foot on to a bear trap.

Now for unbelievers the active Hell is likely to seem most barbaric while for believers they may be certain that a passive Hell makes the doctrine both more pallatable to them and more just as an explanation for what, if any, kind of hell sinners shall be consigned to for however long that sentence will be.

In consideration of my friends who are not believers in Christianity and not believers in any sort of religion at all I have to say that those Christians who see Hell in the passive form may not realize that the doctrine is offensive no matter how we sugar coat it to ourselves or each other. It doesn't matter how much we talk about how we send ourselves to Hell when we consider how people outside the Christian faith will consider these things. The doctrine has always been an offense and it will always remain an offense.

Even those who specialize in "turn or burn" evangelism recognize the offense of Hell as a doctrine and bank on that offense as part of their evangelistic approach. There is, it virtually goes without saying, a whole evangelistic tradition that hinges upon scaring people into the Kingdom so that they will avoid going to Hell. Jesus taught about Hell in the synoptics more than most other biblical books so it is impossible for a Christian to say that there is no Hell if a person takes Jesus' sayings seriously. Whatever the flaws of the turn-or-burn evangelism approach it cannot be said that this approach fails because it fails to take the words Christ used about divine judgment seriously. It is, for the Christian, better to err on the side of caution and taking the Lord's words presented in the testimonies seriously.

Yet in the documents of the New Testament we would be hard-pressed to argue that the use of Hell as a scare tactic in evangelism frequently appeared. Though the Lord Himself spoke vividly about the judgment the apostle to the Gentiles had remarkably little to say about it. This could hardly have been because there were no ideas about the fate of people after death or ideas about some form of divine justice. Paul did not see much reason to bank a lot of his writings on the subject of Hell. This does not mean he had no concept of it but it does strongly suggest that while Jesus had vivid things to say about divine judgment Paul tended to avoid those topics because they were not central to his message about Christ.

What I wish to reiterate and emphasize now is that though

1) Christians may exploit a definition of Hell as active torment meted out to sinners who defiantly defied GOd;

2) though Christians may choose to define Hell in the most passive of terms as that penalty people accept by refusing to accept the love of God through Christ;

3) and though Christians of both schools will remain convinced of the inerrancy of their particular traditions it is important to remind us all who are in the faith that

4) unbelievers don't give a crap about how we define for ourselves what they consider one of the most offensive of many things taught by Christians over millenia.

As a discussion among the faithful in an attempt to understand what the Lord said a discussion about what exactly Hell is will always be fruitful but we need to have a reality check about how useless that can be if we attempt to transpose all of that content on to our non-Christian friends and family. Telling your father or daughter or brother or sister or mother "Your unbelief means you would rather choose Hell than Jesus" comes off pretty much as sanctimoniously as "You're going to Hell!" Dying because you got shot in the head with a fiery dart and burning to death because you got your foot caught in a napalm-coated bear trap ends up being pretty terrible either way. This is why unbelievers rightly don't care if you have a preference for either the active or passive Hell in your lexicon of personal belief. The reason is simple and is something I will get to presently.

Apologies for Hell: introduction

Of all the cotrines taught in Christianity the least appealing one would probably be the doctrine of Hell. More than any other doctrine in our age or probably any other, the doctrine of Hell is considered offensive, outrageous, and unjust. Many Christians have devised a variety of ways to explain and defend the legitimacy of this teaching by appeal to traditions and to the scriptures. There is a great deal of both in a defense of hell and yet in many cases too much and too little is said on behalf of the teaching; it is this making too much of too little that presents problems.

Over time I have come to the observation that the problem with the doctrine of Hell as Christians defend it comes about in part because there are two apparently opposite views of what Hell actually is. It would be more accurate to say there is debate about what Hell actually will be. Scholars have noted that the conflation of the lake of fire in Revelation with Hell happened quite some time ago and that the two are considered essentially the same.

I believe it is necessary to examine how Christians defend the doctrine of Hell so that a viable defense of the doctrine can be made. One of the chief problems of the doctrine's defense is that significant category mistakes happen both int he process of defining what Hell may actually be and on what grounds it would then be justified. Worse yet, however, is the essential problem that most allegedly Christian theodicies regarding Hell have nothing to commend them as actually Christian discussions of the subject. I intend to slowly survey some of the options and arguments that often come up when I have seen and heard christians discuss the doctrine of Hell and explain which ideas I consider to be weak in terms of scriptural support and which ideas fail due to internal and external problems.

People who in power are better at lying

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It would appear that the more power people have the better they are at lying, according to one study, such as it is. Though there are physiological symptoms associated with lying an increase in power offsets these physical symptoms. The advantage power confers, it seems, is that the more power you have the more comfortably you can lie to others about goals and practices to get what you want.

When Christ taught his disciples about leadership he said that the greatest among us would be the servant of all. That is not how leadership works in the world. In the world power and the capacity to lord it over others is considered the measure of a leader. The person who is up and coming and able to make conquests is considered the leader to follow. The bad-ass warrior or executive or politician who doesn't take crap and take names can also be the accomplished liar.

That this happens even within God's people is confirmed through the scriptures by way of example, since to try to spare his own life both Abraham and Isaac respectively lied. Jacob swindled his brother out of the key blessing and birthright twice, first by conning Esau into trading his birthright for a bowl of stew and the by deceiving his father into conferring a blessing on him that was meant for Esau. Jacob was disciplined by falling into the hands of his uncle Laban, who was more a master of deception than even Jacob. Jacob was appointed by God to be the heir through which the promises of God would be fulfilled but Jacob used deceit and treachery to obtain it. Ironically the blessing he thought would make him someone was his father Isaac's though the blessing he truly needed was that of his father. (I could (and likely will) write a whole separate blog post about the contrast between the first blessing Jacob sought and the second blessing he sought because it seems emblematic of a problem in contemporary males that goes beyond a merely "evangelical" obsession about the decline of men.)

Many of the saints of old slipped into lying to save their reputations or their skins (beyond the patriarhcs both of the first kings quickly learned how to spin lies once power was conferred on them). God found a few ways to ensure that those who lied to further their own material or political agendas had a chance to see consequences for it. Unfortunately, though, what some of the liars in the people of God don't necessarily see coming is how their lives will destroy not their own lives but the lives of innocent people who are seeking to do the will of the Lord.

Interesting comment at BHT about "Sunday's Coming"/Growtivation

http://boarsheadtavern.com/2010/05/13/21055/

Mark N writes:
The video: I thought it was Hee-larious until I found out that it was made by the the purveyors of circus-nous. Now I’m just confused. Magicians aren’t supposed to reveal their tricks. I guess its supposed to be self-referentially ironic in a post-modernish sort of way. Its like modern art- you don’t understand it unless you’re in on the joke. Even so, Caiaphas did prophecy.

Magicians aren't supposed to reveal their tricks. This explains why what some people see as satire, and others see as an in-joke, still others see as something less amusing and more revealing than either, an inadvertant revelation of the magic trick that attracts people to a particular kind of church.

In public speaking the principle you go by is to tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. What works as the great metanarrative can defuse the power of the sales pitch in making the sales pitch. The person who declares, in whatever way, "I am going to sell you something" has lost the customer who doesn't really want to be sold that something. If what you have to sell isn't in some sense desirable in itself the sales pitch is ineffective. We are not blind to the fact that if we don't want something we can't be sold on it.

The rock and roll concert vibe with the motivational speaker who has all the answers ultimately can't be an inside joke because that's what the role of the rock band and speaker actually is in that setting. There's that song that is supposed to make people cry because it has strings backing it up ... or because it's just so "real" and "authentic" it just hits people where it counts, and also potentially because the sheer volume of the mid-tempo I-V-vi-IV progression through Marshall amps on a Stratocaster tends to elicit that effect when a high singing voice talks about endless love.

From Tim Challies: Joel Osteen ... or fortune cookie?

http://www.challies.com/humor/joel-osteen-or-fortune-cookie

I find this one mildly amusing, amusing enough to link to.

By way of self-reference, this reminds me of a poem I wrote based on something that happened to me ...

Today I got a
fortuneless fortune cookie.
Have I no future?

So my spin on Challies point is this: does the fortuneless fortune cookie have more wisdom than the Osteen axiom?

As Heraclitus put it "all is flux"

It is weird when you can't be certain about how things are going to work. You never get used to it. I thought something was going to happen this weekend that isn't going to happen. Then it's going to happen again but that is because something else I thought was going to happen can't happen.

Even without a job one's schedule can be aflutter with the butterflies of chaos carrying the pollen of Fortune or MissFortune along the crags of one's path.

Now that I'm done poorly emulating the rhythms of Krazy Kat I can say that it stinks that I have little idea what I can fit time in for even while I'm unemployed.

From Orthocuban: The Greatest threat to the church comes from sin within

http://www.orthocuban.com/2010/05/the-greatest-threat-to-the-church-comes-from-sin-within/



There is virtualy nothing I can add to Fr Ernesto Obregon's observations on the Pope's statement. It IS too easy for us to see the great threats to the church coming from outside. We have, as Obregon points out, found it perilously easy to define "outside" in ways that include all those other Christians than our own confessional niche. Catholics may see the Church as under fire from unfair critics from the outside but if the Pope says, in essence, "We brought this on ourselves and our own sins are catching up with us" how do you defend the Church then?


Of course this is not just a Catholic problem. Every group of Christians eventually faces the horns of this dillema. Non-believers will continue to assert that this is proof of our own wickedness. They could say that all the pedophiles, perverts, child molestors, and obstructors-of-justice aren't the gays or the fornicators who are "living in sin" but the priests and pastors and Sunday school teachers and social conservatives. God has said through the scriptures in the prophets that the Israelites were nastier, more brutish, more perverse, and more absurd in pleading persecution and martyrdom than all their heathen neighbors put together. God's people were described as a hooker so desperate for johns she goes out and PAYS people to do business with her. Even normal hookers at least expect to get paid for their services.

I suppose in a way this is an unexpected part 4, eh?

The book that didn't actually cost a church a thousand members

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2010/05/06/an-interview-with-mark-driscoll-on-the-book-that-cost-mars-hill-a-thousand-church-members-and-gave-him-an-intestinal-ulcer%e2%80%94and-whether-or-not-the-new-calvinist-coalition-will-hold-together/

This link serves as an unfortunate title for the linked article. Nowhere in the article does Driscoll say the book in question cost Mars Hill a thousand church members. The author and the editor of the on-line content never make that statement, so why does the link have this heavily freighted collection of words? I would suggest that whoever wrote that link might want to revise it since it attributes to Driscoll a statement he and the author never make. Web-page designers have copy editors, right?

I was at Mars Hill from roughly late 1999 through to 2008 (up through the Jonah series and feeling a need to excuse myself from Peasant Princess because I didn't want another homiletic rerun from Mark on stuff I'm not sure I benefited from the first time). It would have been beyond me to surmise that 1,000 members somehow left because if everyone's membership was cancelled pending renewal these were not members who quit, they were members who had their memberships cancelled by elder fiat and chose not to renew. It is improbable that those members declined to renew on the basis of doctrinal disagreements.

It seems more likely that members declined to renew because at one point they were told that agreeing with the by-laws was a prerequisite to member renewal above and beyond agreeing with the doctrinal statement (easy, because an evangelical Protestant would agree with it) and a membership contract (oh, wait, "covenant"). I had renewed my "covenant" a few times before this reboot happened. In fact I had renewed it enough times that I began to wonder why I had to keep doing it. What was the point of signing a "covenant" if the terms of renewal were going to come up in two years and my membership could be unilaterally revoked if I failed to give for six months according to the by-laws that were approved in 2007? No offense but if I lost my job and was in some way ineligible for unemployment tithing was not gonna happen.

The reason I didn't renew was because (among many, many other reasons) I had gotten tired of renewing. As I saw it I was not the one who was being a quitter in my committment to the church, the leadership seemed to display a potentially consumeristic approach to its members by forcing the question of "how committed are you?" by rebooting membership rosters every couple of years. At least when you get confirmed in traditional denominations it is in effect until one or both parties agree to cancel it.

On the other hand, I had no interest in resigning. I was actually seeing cases where people were resigning their memberships only to discover that that in itself was considered grounds for church discipline and that meant that their resignations were not accepted because, subject to church discipline, they weren't allowed to just leave. I don't know how that practically meant anything because they left anyway but perhaps their memberships were finally allowed to be ended during the doctrine series or something. The most peaceful thing to do was to simply not renew when the time came up and to step down from ministries I was participating in that were contingent on membership. Not everyone was paying attention or enquiring about this and I was loathe to just say "no" in indisputable terms so I ended up being a moron and let myself get talked into handling a bunch of stuff that led to burn-out. I should have been wiser, more forthright, and more industrious.

Since I am among those 1,000 alluded to in the article I thought I would point out that a lot of us decided to drop out of Mars Hill well before the Doctrine series. Most of us had no quibble with the doctrine but had reservations about things like that would-have-been Ballard campus 2--that whole spending a huge sum of money on a piece of property before adequately investigating the zoning issues. If Driscoll has convinced himself that the 1,000 who left left over doctrinal issues he's welcome to persuade himself of that but I suggest that the reasons people didn't renew are not necessarily related to doctrine or to the raised expectations of membership. The expectations were already really high. I had no problem with the contract or the doctrinal statement but being told via memo I had to agree to by-laws I had never been required to sign off on seemed redundant.

I eventually learned that most people who became members after the Doctrine series had rarely bothered to actually read the by-laws old members were told they had to agree to in order to renew their membership. This even was the case for long-standing members-they didn't actually look through the by-laws but they signed up for membership renewal and were welcomed as "new" members. It turned out that my reservation about renewal was based on the belief that a standard would be enforced that was apparently not very well enforced. Oh well, in light of that that is a post hoc reason to have not renewed.

Again, Driscoll's explanation can be considered broadly true but it begs of us a great deal of correlation that assumes causation. I can't go that far. I grant the correlation. I mean, I was there during that period. But I saw no evidence then or now of the causation. I would suggest that Driscoll is so far above the trenches he probably saw a few howitzer bursts along the trench lines but didn't necessarily see any of the troops getting hit, except maybe if there were troops in there he knew personally. This was around the time Moi's name seemed to vanish from most references in Mars Hill websites.

So I respectfully disagree with the supposition that the doctrine series and raising the bar of membership caused a loss of 1,000 members. It may be partly true but if you say the membership roster was cancelled out and 1,000 people don't renew that's not really your church LOSING 1,000 members. It could be that the 1,000 members who you cancelled from your records got tired of having to renew their membership contracts over and over again. This from the guy who laments consumerism but has three Tivos and two home theaters? Maybe members didn't renew because when they got wind of things like three Tivos and two home theaters they wanted to be at a church where the pastor couldn't make off-the-cuff remarks about stuff like that because the pastor doesn't HAVE that kind of gear.

There are a lot of lives being transformed at Mars Hill and the Lord uses all sorts of churches to further the work of the kingdom. That I am more than a little incredulous at Driscoll's account of the doctrine series doesn't mean I don't think you should read the book. His writing over the years has gotten better and having Breshears help means it will probably even have some more substance to it now. That said, I hope he's done with books and can focus on, I dunno, actually being a pastor to the network of churches. The Luke series seems like a very positive change of direction. 2007-2008 was a very low point in his career in terms of substance. I'm glad that his teaching has largely rebounded from the nadir of Ruth and Nehemiah. For a while I thought maybe 1,000 people were going to bail in 2007 because Driscoll's sermons totally sucked. They did, my opinion, for what little it's worth.

I'm not like Scotteriology who can rip Driscoll apart for dissembling about the actual purpose and content of Targum Neophiti but we might well both agree that someone should keep Driscoll pretty far away from OT books for a while until he can handle texts more responsibly than he did in Nehemiah. Fortunately, God in His providence seems to have inspired Mark to spend several years in Luke. That's awesome. God is good. I've said for a while that somebody has been overdue to tackle a gospel and it's encouraging to hear that happening. Now if he'd just avoid stunt proclamations about Avatar where he lets slip how many Tivos he has after lamenting consumerism ... . I had hoped he would outgrow the spiritual gift of shoving both feet in his mouth.

Meanwhile, I've figured out that since I'm into Reformed Anglican theologians but don't want to be Episcopalian that Presbyterianism is looking like a more natural fit for my theological disposition these days. Plus it's nice that membership with them doesn't have to be renewed every couple of years via contract the way it was at Mars Hill. So in saying all the above I don't wish to give the impression that I parted ways from Mars Hill on particularly bad terms. Far from it. I just sometimes find myself frustrated seeing the official narrative with a feeling that the official narrative doesn't fit what I actually saw in the lives of my friends and family there. Still, I trust the Lord will work things out for good in the end, even the stuff that puzzles me.

P.S. paedobaptists and old-school Reformed folks have been saying for years that Driscoll isn't one of them. 22 comments on the link above were deleted and comments have been closed because the usual back and forth about Driscoll as divider and Driscoll as uniter got under way. For a guy who said in Reformission Rev that the paedobaptist/theonomist types were dead weight holding the church back I think that the hard-core Reformed have a point in saying Driscoll rips on Reformed traditions like infant baptism and then claims to be in the Reformed tradition. Their take is that it would seem more forthright for Driscoll to identify himself as a Calvinist Baptist. Say ... that whole hanging with John Piper thing MIGHT lend some creedance to that assertion. If you look like a duck, walk like a duck, and hang out with ducks you can't get too upset if a bunch of geese think you're a duck. Still, Driscoll is too much of a pragmatist to actually anchor himself down to existing theological traditions that don't appeal to him. Depending on how you parse that it's a weakness or a strength. I see it as both, no surprise.

from Chaplain Mike at Internet Monk: A sound argument [and a few comments]

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/a-sound-argument#more-7322

Nothing to add, really, just linking. Michael Spenser has gone to be with the Lord but there's still stuff getting posted at Internet Monk.

Denouncing in others the sins in yourself, part 3: "We would never do that" you say, while you're doing just that

Fearsome Tycoon wrote something recently about the contrast between a state deciding what punishments to mete out for crimes against individuals verses crimes against the state itself. I couldn't resist pointing out that the state's view of children and infants reveals this gap. There is nothing against the law with respect to aborting an unwanted child but once that child is allowed to be born and registered as a citizen of the United States it becomes a crime to kill the infant. On the basis of what? That once you permit the child's birth it becomes criminal to change your mind? If it isn't criminal to change your mind and abort the child before it is born why is it criminal to kill the baby?

Well, in one sense the simple explanation is that once the child is born the child is considered a citizen and only the state has the power, in its eyes, to decide what citizens ought to live and die. It also can be considered to make sense that prior to allowing the child to be born the child was in the prospective mother's body and the mother has the right to terminate the pregnancy. However, this whole set of observations highlights that the state can consider it onerous to do in one setting what it permits in another.

The thing is that we are all susceptible to this sort of temptation, to permit ourselves what we deny others or to permit to others selectively what we feel free to do ourselves. The subject of abortion can be construed as part of a larger whole. The question may be seen as the conflict between liberty and loyalty, both expected but not always in agreement.

I have thought a lot over the years about the subject of betrayed trust and about what is involved in the feeling of betrayal. Betrayal of trust varies with loyalty. If you learn something through a newspaper or the internet and the information turns out to be wrong you are hurt but you won't feel that your loyalty has been betrayed. If you hear something from a person and act on that knowledge and that knowledge turns out to be false then you WILL probably feel betrayed because the betrayal of trust has probably stopped being tacit and has been made explicit. This doesn't mean that fraud on the internet or through email or through companies isn't bad, just that the level of emotional damage is different because the emotional weight of loyalty invested into the relationship or (more likely) transaction is not as significant as a betrayal of loyalty from a friend, spouse, or child.

At the risk of stating the obvious, betrayals of loyalty (i.e. also known as trust) hurt because we put our trust in the principle of reciprocity. As we have seen from the indications of recent research, the idea that you should favor those who are favorable and punish those who are not helpers and only look after themselves is, as some propose, hardwired into the brains of babies.

Yet (there always seems to be a "yet" in the human condition) this loyalty can actually be a problem and a means to injustice. Many crimes are committed through loyalty and jealousy. The girlfriend or boyfriend who is worth dying for is, we may presume, also worth killing for. Thus people enlist in the military to kill those who would kill their loved ones. Betraying the ideals of the in crowd is worth ostracizing people for and this is why we ostracize those who betray the ideals of our given community.

What happens when your community or the person you give your emotional loyalty to is wrong? What if you are wrong in the emotional loyalty requirements you place on others? Is it equitable to expect emotional and loyalty sacrifices from others even on the premise that you sacrificed X and Y so that person should sacrifice A through W? We do not all view sacrifices in the same way. Christ Himself said that once his disciples had done all that was required of them they were to say that they were not good servants for they had done merely what was expected of them. That is a little digression of the sorts I have many of. And I just ended a sentence with a preposition. Oh well.

It seems that there are active and passive forms of betrayal. The passive form is to have our loyalty taken for granted, the active form is to actively betray loyalty by ending the cycle of reciprocation. The passive form might be that your boss takes your loyalty to and hard work for the organization for granted. You aren't thanked for anything, your work is never praised, and only discussed when it is in some way a failure. An active form of betrayal might be the boss taking credit for work that you did in a setting where work-for-hire is not explicity agreed upon. Another active form of betrayal might be that your boss fires you for standing on principle. Or, actually, you might feel betrayed even if your boss fires you and with good cause because you got fired for something that the boss hadn't bothered to discipline you for before. The sense of betrayal inheres in your understanding of not just what the relationship has been, or is, but also in what you perceive it ought to be in the future.

Now it probably goes without saying that a relationship in which these forms of betrayal occur will tend to reveal both active and passive forms of betrayal. As the old axiom goes, a cheating spouse in sex was cheating in some way before things got to sex. To feel betrayed there has to, at some level, be a measure in the relationship, a determination of one or more parties to keep score. Betrayal is when the score is considered uneven. Betrayal is virtually inevitable when a score is the point of the relationship.

It could be easy to talk about how unspiritual it is to want reciprocity in relationships, particularly in marriage. While spiritual jargon may have that the two think entirely of each other that giving ensures that each recipient is getting. Reciprocity is still fundamentally at play. The score is considered even if the two participants are devoted to not counting the score for themselves but for each other. By "score" I don't mean "happy", I simply mean that so long as both partners in a marriage work on making the relationship work to whatever degree the relationship can be mutually agreed upon the relationship "works". People who don't like each other but stay together for the benefit of the children have a relationship that 'works' even if the most crucial prerequisite for a "relationship" in this culture, mutual attraction and affection, is absent. In Christianese jargon the phrase may be "pursue your wife" or "honor your husband".

While in marriage score-keeping is a recipe for death score-keeping is, arguably, the essence of the courting process. Despite lip service to how unspiritual it may be to keep score it may be useful to point out that score-keeping IS something that God does. If score-keeping were not in some sense an issue in life itself, to say nothing of the Christian understanding of salvation, there would never be terms like "ransom" or "atonement" or "mediation". I don't care what theories you think you do or don't hold on these issues, the Christian faith posits that through Christ God has settled the score on our behalf instead of on behalf of death. Part of the reign of death is that in this age we look everywhere and can see many cases where the score is not even. People ask of us sacrifices that are not commensurate with the sacrifices they seem willing (or unwilling) to make on our behalf. If you are keeping score you are setting yourself up for disappointment and yet the truth is that we all keep score. Even BABIES, it seems, know how to keep the score in observing helpers and hinderers.

With the sort of background I have loyalty is pretty important. If you sacrifice for someone then though you might prefer to not explicitly cash in on owed favors you might be tempted to mention what you have done in the past as leverage to get something you want now. This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the sort of thing that is startlingly easy to lapse into doing yourself without consciously knowing of it while being tempestuously aware of it in other people. It sometimes seems as though it could in some sense be a family weakness, the tacit score-keeping about who does what for whom because one is family. This seems, I think, an essentially normal part of family life.

I am, though I dare to say this foolishly on the internet, what I would consider a pretty loyal person. Once I give my loyalty to someone or something it lasts a long time. I have a friend I still consider a friend after fifteen years even though he has renounced his faith and shifted from being a conservative to a liberal. We are not quite so close now as we were at first for geographical reasons but I still consider him very much a friend. It was he who said of me that I am very loyal and that I have been loyal to him as a friend beyond anything he could imagine someone else putting up with after the crap he talked about religion and politics. For other people, I suppose, having a good friend abandon the shared values of religious belief and a particular branch of political or social thought and the subsequent changes in applied ethics might be a great big deal-breaker. For me it is not. I believe that loyalty means choosing to be pragmatic about expected results rather than the people you connect yourself to.

But not everyone is like this. Some people see people essentially as resources to use. You use the winners and off-load the losers, however you choose to define the nature of the loser. I once heard a pastor state from the pulpit in the plainest possible language that you should do a big inventory of your friends to find out who is helping you meet your goals and who is simply wasting your time, draining your life of energy that should be devoted to pursuing your plan. With God as my witness I'm not making that up. I remember being mortified by the statement but a lot of people, a freakishly large amount of people, didn't seem to bat a single eye.

How do people who have this user mentality about people become pastors? Well, they persuade people like me (i.e. those whose loyalty is driven by devotion to people rather than ends) that their goals are admirable and sanctioned by the Lord. They persuade people like me that though other churches or causes have faltered THIS one is different, THIS one is special, THIS one won't be a grand royale screw-up like all the others that are the majority of human experience. Samaria has gone astray but JUDEA will perservere against all odds and bring about the true nature of the Kingdom of God. I and thousands of other people bought into that.

If I get upset that many people choose the pragmatism of personal loyalty over means that are justified by ends then I have to recognize that my criticism of others reveals my own weakness in this area. Perhaps I can learn from those whose besetting sin is to simply use people and throw them away once they have outlived their usefulness. Perhaps there is a kingdom purpose in that. Perhaps I, too, should make a list of those friends who are wastes of time and who are keeping me back like that pastor did and advised others to do. I don't wish to.

Yet it may be that I have something to learn from that man's example as he has lived it out. A person may claim to be a nobody wanting to tell everyone about somebody in public and then in private just throws his weight around and insists on getting his way or the people who disagree with him are under God's judgment. No, I'm not necessarily talking about someone like Benny Hinn or the "touch not God's annointed" crowd. But a person who makes the public appeal can fall far short of the substance of the appeal in the lived life despite it being a sincere goal.

I, at length, began to realize that though God has His times and purposes this person the person was now, for the most part, a time-waster for me. He ISN'T for other people, let me assure you, but I have learned from his example of trimming back on useless people by recognizing that his role in my life is no longer particularly helpful. I have providentially ended up in a setting where I hear more responsible expository preaching in a setting where there are less impulses to reinvent the wheel.

The person alluded to had an immensely positive influence years ago, and for that I am grateful to the Lord. But the Lord could have used anyone else to do that. The nobody doesn't really grasp what a nobody he is in God's design because a bunch of somebody's take him seriously (as well, I suppose, they either should or simply will anyway despite any contrary suggestions).

It's tough for me to realize the full significance of the knowledge that a strength can often be a weakness. When I feel my loyalty has been taken for granted or has been abused I can get REALLY bitter. It's not pretty. It doesn't look very loud or anything. I'm not a shouter or a screamer. It's more likely to be the slow burn and stretches of silence or sarcasm. There is a quirk about me that I'm not sure even my family members necessarily remember about me--there is a roughly inversely proportional relationship between how close I feel to someone and how often I am likely to tease them. Sarcasm I save for debate on aesthetics and other intellectual activities. Sarcasm at a personal level is rare for me unless I'm dealing with someone who at an emotional level I just can't take very seriously.

During the times when I was angry and upset at people pragmatically placing relationships over principles I was unaware that I have this weakness. Those people who place aims over people upset me, and continue to upset me, but it may be the Lord has something for me to learn from them. Not everything we learn through observation is always what we ought to emulate. In fact a great deal of scripture is written as a warning to us of how NOT to do and be and think on any number of things. Even a Jehosaphat can make dangerous alliances that cost him while not putting his love for God into question. Scripture is full of godly men who despite their good intentions made spectacularly stupid and devastating decisions. David's reign ends, more or less, on the brink of disaster. Why?

Well, to venture a risky summary, David had the same kind of problem I find that I have, pragmatically valuing relationships over goals. This is not the opposite problem in principle to the users of people for goals because whether you use people to obtain objectives or use people to feel better about yourself you are still facing the temptation to use people for your own ends. Sometimes a person can be upset about the sin of someone else without realizing that their own life forms a kind of doppleganger, a mirrored image of the problem in someone else. One side is white and the other black and the two sides may be distributed differently but the mixture does not change in the nature of being mixed. I await, like the apostle, deliverance from these things. I trust I am being delivered from these things now but this process is not complete.

Growtivation

You may have seen it already and seen discussions of it over at Bill Kinnon's blog and other places. I chuckled and smirked a bit because though it might aspire to be a satire of a Sunday-only variation of Christian practice; and though it may also send up forms of emotional manipulation taken up in deference to a mixture of pop culture assimilation and branding; it is, as Bill Kinnon put it, less a satire than an inside joke. It can be taken as a sort of hiding-in-plain sight send up of what a whole slew of churches do and intend to keep doing. The only question is how authentically you appear to be doing what everyone else in that milleu of church practice is doing.

I chuckled when I saw the video because, well, it was more or less a summary of what I had seen in the church I attended for ten years. Even though I by and large do not question the genuineness of either the people or their employment of the methods spoofed in the video I have come to believe that more dangerous than whatever the video ostensibly satirizes or doesn't satirize is my own capacity and the capacity of others to say "Oh, I would never fall for that and I DON'T fall for that."

But you do. That you and I may not have precisely the same formula through which we are susceptible to emotional manipulation and self-congratulation doesn't mean we aren't susceptible ourselves in ways that we find safer to impute to others. Jesus rebuked Pharisees and law experts for saying of their ancestors who persecuted the prophets, "Oh, we would NEVER have done that!" thereby testifying that they are the same sorts of people. This, interestingly enough, gets back to the theme I have been reflecting on lately where we as Christians can find it easier to denounce in others what we are not particularly repentant of ourselves. It is easier to look down on someone else's failures than to see your own failures in their failures.

Projects that have been on the back burner so long they got cold

I have a lot of compositional projects I placed on the back burner over the years.

My first string quartet never has been finished. I completed the first movement and that was even performed, once. The second movement was finished but my teachers said I needed to revise it. My theme was too long to subject to meaningful variations. Some fourteen years later I just never mustered the interest to recompose what was already a completed second movement for quartet. The finale of the first quartet was supposed to be a fugue and that ... well, even back fourteen years ago I knew that composing THAT sort of fugue would be utterly beyond me for at least a decade. It turns out I was totally right. I am only just now attaining a level of compositional skill and skill as a guitarist where I can ever get an exposition of three of the projected final four voices for the exposition taken care of.

My second string quartet was begun ten years ago and I have not finished even the first movement of the projected four. I have the exposition, recapitulation, and coda for the first movement complete but this is a sonata form with a development that presents nearly insuperable challenges. The second and third movements are also daunting. The fourth movement is theoretically the easiest one to finish since it has a slow introduction for a closing rondo but there are some structural and conceptual elements that make even that movement tough.

The most terrifying prospects, however, are the completion of the middle movements. The scherzo has some inherent problems that make it nearly impossible to contemplate and the variation form (perhaps better thought of as a fantasia) could be wonderful if I could pull it off but it would be exceptionally difficult as it relies on a remarkably static folk tune fraught with heavy extramusical symbolism. For now let's just say that the Good Friday movement is gonna be rough but it's possible to finish that. The Easter movement has the easiest prospect of being finished already and the Holy Saturday movements creep me out something fierce, particularly the slow movement.

The third string quartet ... I should have had finished by now but I need to completely revise the final movement to adjust its tonal architecture and the second movement isn't finished. I'm very weak in variation forms. In fact I feel SO weak in variation form I had to approach writing variations forms by way of passacaglia and by way of unusually stringent executions of monothematic sonata forms that eventually turned into more free-wheeling variations.

Of all the projects I have begun that have gone fallow, though, the woodwind quintet is the one that has been dormant for the longest time. After years of slogging away I settled on my exposition and if you've read this blog more than a month you know the exposition I'm talking about is not a sonata exposition. No, of course not. I resolved to write a fugue exposition for woodwind quintet. As I was heavily immersed in the works of Durufle fourteen and thirteen years ago I settled on a slow, solemn lydian subject. The subject was splitting the difference between my immersion in Durufle and my immersion in Duke Ellington.

The result is a languid, introspective lydian tune that becomes the focal point of an exposition with quintuple counterpoint, all the countersubjects also being in lydian. Fully invertible counterpoint in five voices with entirely lydian tunes is no small feat! It's such a freakish musical challenge I have only gotten to the exposition's completion and have not been brave enough to tackle middle entries, episodes, or what the possible end of such a fugue might be. The stretto possibilities alone could be collosal, and there is the possibility of building a second exposition on the first countersubject.

I have been so daunted by just the fugue itself the possibility of other movements in the woodwind quintet has scarcely even crossed my mind.

Are infants innately moral?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?pagewanted=1&ref=magazine

This set of studies could be cited as evidence by some that even babies know right from wrong and thus we have free will. As with any research into the demographic demonstrations of moral impulses this will always be a double-edged sword. The same babies who display a desire to encourage or reward the helpful and punish the hinderer are the same babies who are automatically drawn to their own ethnic group over against other ethnicities. If we may say that the impulse in babies from birth is to be moral agents this is both positive and negative. The seeds for empathy and kindness are in babies ... but the seeds for racism and xenophobia are also there.

Most salient of all, as any number of atheists would point out, if babies are instinctively able to discern right from wrong then it's stupid to propose that one must teach them to believe in the existence of gods in order for them to have any morals. Babies, after all, automatically display all the hallmarks of empathy and sympathy to those who are good, right? The truth is that things are not that simple and have never been that simple. The scriptures themselves are not uniform in respect to every aspect of infant and childhood morality. You still have to train up a child in the way that he should go even if Paul can say that those who do not have God instinctively understand what is right and testify against themselves that they should do the right but often do not. But for the atheist the way this gets reformulated is that though your baby may be hardwired to be a good, helpful baby, you still have to train junior to not be a racist twerp when he grows up.

While I respect the usefulness of the social sciences I have a kind of skepticism about them that I don't have for the hard sciences. I think the author above found an apt way of discussing the limitations of even this linked-to research:

Just as critics describe much of experimental psychology as the study of the American college undergraduate who wants to make some extra money or needs to fulfill an Intro Psych requirement, there’s some truth to the claim that this developmental work is a science of the interested and alert baby.

Or, as Stephen Colbert joked to Dr. Zimbardo, that one Canadian ruins the whole experiment. This doesn't invalidate the entirety of the research but does remind us that in the social sciences there are no such things as Newtonian laws. We must keep in mind the warning that within certain limits each generation gets the sort of science that it wants. This becomes even more problematic and pronounced when we want to use it to justify ideological and theological positions.

For instance, years ago while on a certain discussion forum the question about brain disorders and free will came up, as it inevitably would. An example was cited of a man who had a tendency to molest children until a tumor was removed. When the tumor was removed the impulses went away and the man was given medication to manage his cancer. When the man lapsed in taking medication he relapsed and was brought to court again. One fellow in reading this declared that the man had free will and was able to choose not to do things. This is the sort of puzzle that can happen in almost any church setting, a person who affirms one theology in principle while applying another theology in practice. Churches are full of people who affirm what they do not really believe when the chips are down and it's time to make a moral judgment of someone else.

But significant brain damage highlights one of the continuing challenges Christians and others will face in assessing moral actions. Advocates for sexual minorities have been making the argument for generations that their attraction is innate and emerges from their physiology. A Christian who would appeal to the innate morality of babies to know right from wrong then has the option of deciding that if those babies grow up to be homosexuals or pedophiles that they either unlearned that innate morality or freedom of choice ... or perhaps the observation that infant capabilities in empathy and action are nonetheless incomplete. After all, long ago a certain theologian argued that because babies were not born with the stain of original sin there was no need to baptise them and they would of their own free will choose the right thing to do if they exercised their freedom of will. Somehow ... Pelagius' ideas didn't quite catch on.

Even among "normal" babies there have been studies that indicate that infants display a marked preference for their own ethnic identity and that they prefer the prettier people. A baby who instinctively knows the helper is better than the hinderer is also a baby who is primed from birth toward the possibilities of ethnocentrism and to preferring the prettier people. For those who would argue that physical beauty is a cultural construct this is a problem. Even babies seem to have fixed ideas of which males and females are prettiest and to prefer their own ethnicity. Notice how interracial marriages, though more widely accepted, are still not common and there are groups in every ethnicity who see interracial marriage and interracial adoption as immense cultural evils that need to be stamped out. This is something that even secular ethicists and sociologists observe is the two-edged sword of what may be our innate sense of right and wrong from birth.

As the author notes in the close of the article, empathy and impartiality are not at all the same. Infants have empathy but that very partiality that is good and which allows them to learn is not enough for the establishment of ethics in a societal context. Those Marvel fans would never hang out with the DC fans unless there was some compelling reason (imagine one, whatever one you will). Mac users see themselves as smarter and more virtuous than PC users. Greens see themselves as more virtuous than others and vice versa. We need Paul's letter to the Romans to remind us that what we consider not only to be our best individual qualities but our best ethnic, religious, or societal qualities, are still things from which Christ has come to redeem us.

In light of blogs and counter-blogs, a non-random memory of the late William Lane

I went to that little school by the canal, as some people have called it. I also had the plasure of meeting Wlliam Lane, whose commentary on Hebrews I am very belatedly reading since Bill went to be with the Lord more than a decade ago now, if memory serves.

It is a pleasure to read a book written by someone you had an opportunity to meet. I pick another strikingly non-random example, N. T. Wright, who I had the pleasure of meeting at that little school by the canal. I went to that school with the impression that they were namby pamby about anything doctrinal and that I would not necessarily see things the way the religion professors saw things. That was often true.

I had heard, however, about a fellow named Dr. Lane. The first time I enquired as to who this Dr. Lane was when I heard about his reputation at the campus a fellow said without the slightest hesitation, "He's a man of God." I chuckled and asked, "That's great and the first thing I wanted to know ... but how is he as a scholar." "Oh," the guy said with a semi-sheepish smile, "he's a very good scholar, too." I took no small encouragement learning that students who studied with him or knew of him identified him first by the vibrancy of his faith and THEN identified him as a scholar.

When I got to know Bill he explained, in his own low-key way, why this sort of thing can be important. I once asked Dr. Lane's advice on going to seminary and one of the things he warned me about is that seminarians tend to have a mentality that since they study the scriptures day in and day out that they, naturally being immersed in the Bible, have no worries about continued church participation, church attendence, prayer, intercession, public worship or those other things that help define Christian fellowship. In addition to these various omissions he warned that I steer clear of the Ivy League on general principle since they have lost many positive points due to developing what he used to call the "guild mentality".

There were scholars that he said I should keep on eye. Since he knew I had a Pentecostal background he said Gordon Fee would be good to study. He also advised me to read a younger scholar, someone I had never heard of before, N. T. Wright. He said that Wright was doing a lot of work to emphasize the Jewish background of New Testament literature, that this was a welcome change from the assumptions of the previous few generations of scholars that assumed an essentially Hellenistic view of NT literature, and that I should keep my eye on Wright. Wright, so Bill told me, was going to become VERY important in New Testament studies.

I suppose if Bill were with us today he would be happy to report that his prediction seems to have turned out to have at least SOME accuracy to it. More than ten years before theo-bloggers were theo-blogging about whether Wright was a menace to sound doctrine I was advised to keep an eye on his work. I have Dr. Lane's presence in my life to thank for providentially steering me toward Wright's work.

Lane was a surprisingly unassuming and friendly fellow. He was one of those sorts of people who does not necessarily wear his or her vast reservoirs of knowledge on his or her sleeve. He never said of himself what some of his students told me about him, that he had forgotten more about biblical literature than the better-than-average biblical literature student was ever going to know. One of his students said that the time you would begin to learn Lane was twenty times smarter than you was if you or someone else asked a dumbass or rhetorical question to try to prove a point. One fellow tried doing this by arguing that Paul's thought was not REALLY particularly Jewish. What ensued, I was told, was a very warm and friendly juggernaut of scholarly overview replete with Greek variants of Pauline texts written from memory on the chalkboard.

I was also told that Lane's advice to me that if I wanted to learn French then just a summer with parallel renderings of Good News for Modern Man would probably be all I would need to do to get a decent mastery of reading French. He said that German, an inflected language, would require actual formal study but since I had some Spanish under my belt I wouldn't need to insist on formal study of the Romance languages. When I told a student of Lane's this was his advice the fellow's reply was, "Well, that man is a genius. OF COURSE he can imagine that that would be easy to do in a summer." Since I do not consider myself to be a genius, certainly not a genius at languages, I never worked up the nerve to try Bill's suggestion. I do, however, now wish I had put all my foreign language study into German or Russian instead of Spanish.

But I truly ramble here. Reading Lane's first volume is a bit trippy and very much nostalgic for me. Having known Bill for at least a little while I can't read his books without hearing his voice in my head. It has become that way with Tom Wright's books. It has become that way with Joan Didion, though in Didion's case we never had conversations the way I was able to have conversations with Bill, or with Tom Wright (he strongly urged me to pick up a book by Richard Bauckham on the reliability of the gospels. I've got it but must confess I have not read very many theology books since getting laid off from my job).

But I ramble. I suppose in many ways I have always been old at heart even when I was very young. I often found it easier to hang out with older people and Bill was one of those older people I would hang out with when I had the opportunity to do so. He is one of a few people I can look back on as helpful spiritual mentors in my life. As I followed Wright's work I began to realize that what Wright was doing was already accomplishing what I had hoped I would have an opportunity to do. Seeing that Wright was doing so much of what I had hoped to do I realized that what I had to offer was redundant.

I also nearly immediately realized that I am not in any way "called" to any kind of formal ministry and have never had the funds to go to seminary and have largely declined to have any formal denominational affiliation. Or at least I have avoided it for years. My stint at Mars Hill I could look back on as a sort of closeted stint as a Reformed Baptist. Mars Hill is basically Reformed Baptist and has been for as long as Driscoll has been a Calvinist who thinks Calvin was wrong about paedobaptism. Ironically as Lane was once a Calvinist and became Wesleyan I started off Pentecostal (i.e. Wesleyan) and became a Calvinist. I would have to say I have always been a bad sort of Calvinist who has no enthusiasm for claiming that Arminians are heretics or fatally compromise the message of Christ. I suppose my strength and flaw has been that I have been eager and convinced as a moderate. I suppose, in some small way, Bill may have had something to do about that.

"By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

This is a saying that is axiomatic in Christian teaching and the teaching of Christ. The question I have today is whether or not this presents a problem for us. I don't mean precisely "Does this establish a works-based salvation for us?" though the question may be understood that way by some. What I mean is a somewhat more practical question, does this statement, properly understood, indicate how profoundly mediated the love of Christ is in our day to day lives?

As a Christian I certainly wish to affirm all that is unique about Christianity and the identity of a Christian. But there are times when I wonder if we Christians are good at fooling ourselves into thinking we are better than other faiths or non-faiths. WE have our identity derived from Christ alone. Well, we don't, do we? On a day to day basis do we really have our identity wrapped up in Jesus or do we have it mediated in any number of ways? What I'm asking is whether or not we have a Christianese dichotomy between "Christ alone" and other things. As certain Christians in certain camps of the traditions are fond of saying, "he cannot have God as his father who does not call the Church his mother."

One of the ironies of life as I'm seeing it now is that there are some very Protestant, very baptist-style churches that see "adoption" in theological terms as obtaining membership in a local congregation. They would deny vehemently that they are in any way Catholic or Orthodox in their approach to ecclesiology but functionally they would display an essentially episcopal form of government and would define membership in their church as equivalent to discipleship. In other words, in many practical ways we all see the love of Christ for us as providentially mediated. If you are married then your spouse is one means of that providential mediation of Christ's love. If you have children that is another and yet in both cases we would recognize that we ourselves form a conduit of mediation in their lives.

The paradox afoot is that it seems as though we try to have it both ways. We try to affirm that our identity is in a relationship with Christ alone when the truth is that we grasp most of that relation through providential mediation. We can, it seems, belittle the means of that mediation by insisting on saying that the love of Christ is unmediated. It is true, forever, that Christ is our mediator, but it is this Christ who said "By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

Think of it this way, if you go through the day living entirely by yourself and you are convinced of the love of Yahweh for you and that that love for you is expressed through Christ then at a practical level couldn't it be said that your reflection on God's love for you is not mediated by any person in any direct way? You could, but it could also be the case that you are demonstrating what in secular circles could be called "self esteem". "Your identity is hid in Christ" can still practically end up looking like "you have self esteem" in contemporary spirituality.

This would, however, not be any demonstration of a successful spiritual life. In fact it would be the epitome of failure in spiritual things. If you know that you are loved by God but that love does not prompt you to love and serve others then you have not actually demonstrated a faith that works itself out naturally in a love for Christ's followers. We would know that you CONSIDER YOURSELF a disciple of Christ more than we would know for certain that you actually are one.

John the Baptist said "he must become greater and greater while I must become less and less." Yet John's faith wavered. John was at one point afraid of becoming nothing, of being killed after having possibly pointed to the wrong hope. John needed the Mediator to mediate more than just an abstract expression of general divine good will. Thomas needed more than just reports that Christ was risen. THis is another paradox that seems to be at work, that when we as Christians claim we should find our identity only in Christ we may be selling a falsehood not only to other Christians but to ourselves.

Denouncing in others what you have done, part 2: beware, your sins may overtake theirs

It sometimes seems as though evangelical Christians are worst about denouncing in others what they have done themselves. Ted Haggard was famous for speaking against homosexuals before being caught with a gay prostitute. Recently a relatively famous opponent of homosexuals was caught on film with a male prostitute. The full details of the story are not fully established but the editorial angle remains the observation that the irony drips too much not to be noticed.


Closer to the Seattle area Mark Driscoll has been eager to denounce fornication and yet he obviously admitted he did a bit of fornicating prior to marriage; he also has denounced stay-at-home dads as having forsaken their obligations while having admitted that for a time earlier in the history of Mars Hill he let Grace be the breadwinner, another case, it seems, of denouncing sins in others where you acutely feel guilt in yourself about your own moral failings. Driscoll's guilt about what he considers the sin of making the wife be the bread-winner of the family was so severe it colored his intepretation of 1 Timothy 5 to the point where his application of the text has pretty much nothing to do with any exegesis of the passage in question.

Paul wrote that when someone sins those who are spiritual should restore that sinner gently but to also be watchful so as to not fall prety to temptation themselves. One of the foremost problems of simply denouncing someone else's sin is that when we do this we give the impression that we would never sin in the way that someone else does. My very denunciation of "your" sin proves that I would NEVER even think of sinning in that way, right? Well, no. The lack of gentleness in the effort to restore or confront one in sin may (or may not, of course) be a sign that we are on the dangerous precipe of falling into the sin we are denouncing in others.

Don't believe me? Well, consider Ps 52 where David denounces Doeg the Edomite. Consider that in 1 Samuel 21 David lies about being on a mission from King Saul. Now I have heard it proposed that David in Ps 52 is rebuking himself and not Doeg but I admit to not seeing a ton of textual evidence to confirm this. I will leave it to actual OT scholars to tend to that for now. My observation is that despite David's passionate rebuke of Doeg the Edomite for working to kill innocent people and for his deceit David was just as capable of deceit.

Not only was David capable of the deceit at the start of 1 Samuel 21, in 1 Samuel 27 we see that David was willing to massacre village after village to keep his cover while living in Phillistine territory. Now that the Phillistines were the enemies of Israel could lead us to suppose that David was simply killing villages of the enemy camp and that that was okay. I am considering, however, another explanation for us to reflect on--David denounced Doeg for slaying innocent people and was far more accomplished in bloodshed toward women and children then Doeg.

The passion of David's denunciation of Doeg in Psalm 52 makes his own cavalier taking of the lives of others in the subsequent chapters of Samuel (1 Samuel 27 to the end of 2 Samuel) more rather than less offensive. If we see in the scriptures that the one true hero of the grand narrative of scripture is Yahweh and not people then we can learn from David as both a positive and negative example. As the apostle wrote, things were written down as a warning to us so that we would not fall prey to the same temptations. We should denounce sin but we must beware that in our denunciation of sin we are not secretly overcompensating and deceiving ourselves into thinking (and convincing others) that we are more virtuous than we actually are. Once you have deceived yourself you cannot help but deceive others.

Scripture attests in the book of Samuel that David, after lamenting that Doeg killed innocent people realized that he had failed by causing the death of innocent people. David himself would later massacre villages to keep his cover while living in enemy territory. One of the perils of denouncing sins in others is that we may find ourselves more guilty of that very sin than the person we have denounced. While David was a hero in Israelite history and killed a lot of Phillistines; while it is also true that he decimated Amalekites and so doing did the thing Saul declined to do; we should also bear in mind that as a critic of the taking of innocent blood David was more guilty than Doeg or Saul were in terms of sheer numbers.

The apostle Paul was not ignorant of these accounts in scripture, which may be why he took care to warn us by way of precept so that as we meditate on the scriptures we consider the life of a man like David as a concrete example.

a political guess

It is merely a guess, mind you, but it seems as though conservatives have failed by attempting to hitch their wagon to two different stars. Social conservaties want government employed in a way that ultimately must pit them against fiscal conservatives, while fiscal conservatives want things that, if ardently pursued, would cull government to a degree that the enforcement of social conservative policies might simply not happen.

Meanwhile, a third stream of conservative thought holds that the actual power of government should be minimalist. There are inconsistencies amidst some of these views that puzzle me in terms of precedent. A state should reserve all rights that are not delegated to federal branches unless that state is doing something objectionable. Massachusetts therefore sets a bad precedent in permitting gay marriage or promoting it but the use of any constitutional apparatus to eliminate it would violate the integrity of states' rights. Cynically, I suppose, I make the observation that people who are into states' rights are only selectively into states' rights. States are sovereign unless they need to return a fugitive slave, perhaps. Conversely, even if a state passes a law saying it's okay for a doctor to assist suicide a doctor may simply not comply. All that is to say that neither a fiscal conservative nor a social conservative may actually be entirely committed to truly minimalist government. What liberals want may seem impossible (and it is in many cases) but they present the illusion of its coherence better because there don't SEEM to be the tensions inherent between fiscal and social conservatism.

My personal hunch is that fiscal conservatism is a more likely bet than social conservatism. Too many social conservatives bet on the Republicans doing that for them and have been proven wrong for decades. Abortion is still legal, gay marriage seems more and not less likely to gain acceptance, and so on and so forth. It is too late to change horses mid-stream and conservatives who went the social route won't get anywhere by pleading fiscal now. You can't simultaneously say "less government" and "ban abortion" because to ban abortion involves government. Simply no longer funding abortion but not banning it would probably be the most methodologically consistent form of fiscal conservatism and is defensible on the arguable grounds that a society should not invest in the pre-emptive elimination of its citizenry at either the point of birth or simply in deciding which citizens ought to be killeed to pre-empt their continuing capacity to damage to society.

But, again, it's too late for that, far too late. It was always too late, really.