As happens once in a while someone you know decides to completely redefine themselves, who they are, what they believe in, what their principles of living are, and may even announce that this change has occurred. Christians are used to the idea of this referring to being born again but it is just as common or more common for people in their teens and twenties to reveal they don't have any Christian faith. Some people delay this transition into their thirties. I've seen it happen more than once.
In the past someone who wanted to reinvent themselves could change their name, move to a new place, find new friends, get a new spouse, or any number of things. As a few pundits and authors have noted Americans are proud of their ability to reinvent themselves but in the information age reinventing yourself and establishing a new identity becomes more and more difficult. I suggest, perhaps with too jaded an eye toward these things, that no one ever really reinvented themselves so much as reinvented their branding. Very frequently the supposedly reinvented self is not a fundamentally new person but the same old person desperately eager to believe his or her own hype and hoping that by dint of this process other people will actually come to believe a real change has occurred.
What I have wondered lately is how radical this redefinition of the self actually is. I don't mean to say it isn't important but at a perhaps very cynical level how many people do we know, who swear they have turned over a new leaf, have not merely paid lip service to the idea of making a new life for themselves. They think they have discovered who they really are through some epiphany, through some new relationship or career choice or choice in religion and what has happened may be more a case of discovering who they have always been rather than who they thought they are.
Think of the guy who dumps trophy wife #1 for trophy wife #2. Think of the woman who bails on one bad egg relationship with a guy only to go to the next one and maybe has kids with both guys. Think of the guy who thinks he'll be more responsible with alcohol and still binge drinks to deal with depression. Or the chronic procrastinator who thinks that this time she'll get all her ducks in a row and will power will save the day. And all the while these peopel continue being the same people that got themselves in trouble.
I have known some people who have formerly been Christians and rejected the Christian faith. Thing is that some fourteen years later these men and women are actually NOT different people than they were in their religious days. They still struggle with being chronic underachievers or obsessed about work. An unbeliever who had bipolar disorder while a believer will still struggle with it as an unbeliever. A person who had little incentive to pay the rent while investing in old European import cars is probably not really going to be a more reliable tenant after rejecting Christianity than before when he held to it. For the unbeliever or the believer alike there can be this belief that 1) simply because I changed my beliefs a whole new set of ethics and personhood will follow and 2) my problems stemmed from my holding to false beliefs.
Well, yes, no, and maybe. Yes, changing your beliefs is a big deal but, no it does not mean anything at all about your person and character has changed but maybe it could if you make a point of changing not only what you think but how the what that you think influences the how in your thinking. In Christian terms this is fairly simple in principle. You believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and God Himself, the second person of the Trinity. Okay, so in light of this knowledge and profession you begin, as the scriptures say, to no longer be conformed to the thinking and acts of the world but become transformed by the renewing of your mind. The metanarrative through which you comprehend the entirety of the universe continues to be reshaped and you also reshape how you live in light of this.
What this means is that unless you discipline yourself to both think and act in new ways a mere changing of signposts regarding ontology and metaphysics has done nothing. Someone who was bad about paying the rent on time before he became a Christian is not going to be good about paying the rent on time just because he converted to Christianity. A woman who had a problem being drawn into emotionally or physically abusive relationships when she was raised a Christian and considered herself a Christian is not going to automatically suss out and reject inappropriate lovers now that she is no longer a Christian. If you begin a Christian and become an atheist your taste in expensive entertainment may change because you want your diversions to match your newfound convictions but your expensive taste itself is not likely to change unless you come up with a new basis for what you even consider entertainment.
One of the delusions we seem to have in the United States is the idea that there is still a viable cultural narrative in which this is America, home of the free. Some people don't believe that 9and they tend to be way to the left or right in their convictions) but they still believe in the power of self-reinvention or self-determination. I don't. I think our capacity to reinvent ourselves is actually very limited. I have never said it isn't possible but I think most people think of themselves as being more flexible and resilient and adaptable and open to change than they really are. We think we are rational creatures when most of the time we are not, especially when we attempt to reason through why we are!
If a guy changes beliefs and relies on his emotions as the fuel to run the engine of his motivation and action he might as well throw whatever he believes to the side because the beliefs won't make any difference in his life. If the fuel for his action is emotion than as his emotions change his actions change. This sort of fellow will resolve through ambition or envy or guilt to go to college and get a degree and get a real job and then weeks later give up on all that and sulk in his room listening to mope rock and decide that everything is pointless. As Ulysses in the Coen's spoof of The Odyssey would put it, the man is like a cat caught by the tail of his own humor. Emotions are what they are but to let yourself be governed by them makes you their slave. As Paul put it, he would recognize what he is free to do but he will not be mastered by it. This is not so different from what "free thinkers" would advocate in any case if they are really free thinkers.
Now as a Christian I do affirm that the good news of Christ provides a powerful incentive to become a new person but as I just wrote earlier this incentive comes in the form of partly fulfilled promises. In many cases for us as Christians we struggle with the realization that we do not really think in our day to day lives that those partly fulfilled promises are good enough. We, no less and probably more than an unbeliever, are susceptible to believing the promise of sin delivering the goods.
For an unbeliever there really is nothing else besides his or her idol(s) of the moment. There is no higher good. We who profess a higher good in theory deny it in practice by embracing as refuges the things that unbelievers consider to be the best thing to cling to for life. An unbeliever who makes the sexual relationship and the sex drive a god knows what he is doing, a Christian who makes the sexual relationship (with a few more restrictions) the basis for assessing whether or not one is really an adult has tricked himself into thinking he's defending what the scriptures say when what may have happened is that he has baptised his own convictions about what true humanity is and isn't in the name of Jesus while, functionally, still holding that the person in their forties who hasn't gotten laid yet is some kind of failure as a human being.
So the paradox for us, regardless of our religious or non-religious convictions, is that merely saying "This is what I know to be true" will not make us live lives that are truly built around that. Liberals want to abolish the second amendment while conservatives wouldn't mind doing away with the first in many cases (same for the liberal). A liberal wants to dismantle the Pentagon and dump money into education even though dumping money into education would still be a pile of deficit spending through fiat currency. Perhaps few places are more depressing to look at than the realm of politics for showing how a world of professed confictions does nothing to cause one to actually live and govern on the basis of those convictions.
But I am not writing about societies so much as the individuals that populate them. Our consistency in action despite our convictions is very frequently the biggest problem we have. I accept the good news of Jesus because the good news is that this is my problem and that the Lord provides a way of release from it. Jesus once said to Pharisees, "If you were merely blind you would not be guilty but because you claim "We see" your guilt remains." Many people, bellievers or unbelievers, are actually blind people who claim to see and whose lives reveal their blindness. The good news is Christ revealing our blindness to us so that we may see.
The good news for an unbeliever, I suppose, could be stated in a parallel fashion but in both cases how this often plays out is a determination not to see one's own blindness but to try to shine a light on what we are certain is the blindness of the other so as to compel the other person to change. If the truth does not transform us then do we believe the truth at all, whatever we say the truth may be? I'm not saying that the transformation affected and effected by a belief in the truth will be swift, easy, or ever fully complete but if it is true it will yield some kind of result. Paradoxically these results will be an outworking of living life in light of the truth rather than a reverse-engineered process by which we reason "I'm a loser, I don't want to be a loser, so I will embrace a radically new belief about reality than what I embraced before so that this will motivate me to not be a loser." No, you'll still be a loser even with your new beliefs and they won't impel you to change a single thing about your life unless you begin the excruciating process of not just rethinking "what" and "why" but "how".
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Musing on a Slate piece, 3 sources of anxiety today and how Christians can amplify them
http://www.slate.com/id/2283221/pagenum/all/#p2
Three proposed sources of anxiety get mentioned in this article in Slate as to why not only teens but Americans in general are more anxious now than fifty years ago. The recession and the bad job market or housing market are not considered the real sources of anxiety. The three proposed sources of anxiety interested me because in many respects these are sources of anxiety that we as Christians can accelerate in unexpected or unobserved ways.
1) loss of community
Ostensibly this is something all kinds of Christians in all kinds of churches say they WANT but what kind of community do we mean? In the last seventeen years I grew jaded by what is often meant by "community". The little school by the canal I attended had leaders whose idea of "community" was of a sort that looked pretty on student recruitment brochures and talked a lot about making a difference in the world and having global impact. All the while it remained the little school by the canal, big enough to get noticed by me in another state but not big enough to, so far as I see it, really change the world.
Ironically I was drawn to the church on the opposite side of the canal because it seemed to have what the little school opposite it didn't have. They also didn't talk about "community" quite the same way but they did talk about "intentional community". I was young enough and naive enough in my twenties to think that adding some kind of modifier in front of "community" meant that the overall concept had changed. Oh the folly of youth, eh? Not that I'm exactly old but I'm closer to forty than thirty.
At length I gained a certain jadedness to this "intentional community", too, because often "intentional community" meant an ambitious couple buying a house they couldn't really afford on their own during the `00s; renting out as many rooms as they wished to have to single tenants; and then hosting events at the house that were church related so that it could be a kind of de facto church building in lieu of being able to afford actually renting space. I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't do that but I am willing to say that in the long haul view of things that is a spectacularly careerist thing for someone with ambitions toward full-time professional ministry to do. It worked out very well for a few of the younger guys who did it, though! They have one of the fastest growing churches in the country on their hands. Very clever!
But the thing is that the more the church succeeded the less necessary it was to hold any connection to that "community". "Intentional community" in Reformed contemporary lingo now differs from "community" (as I've heard it described in secular and other Christian terms) only in terms of how much cherry-picking a person does to decide who his or her neighbor is or isn't. In other words "community" in many respects can isolate and constrain us. What we consider "community" can become more like an unrecognized social club in which, if you pay your dues and are productive as a member of the club you are considered valuable.
If you come upon hard times that last longer than a couple of months or, at most, a couple of years; if you reveal that you are a chronically needy person who constantly deals with failures; or if you are in all unvarnished terms a jerk who is actually a bona fide Christian then eventually the "intentional community" begins to feel you may not be pulling enough of your weight. You could ask them to help you bear a particular burden but they might decide that God will providentially let someone else help you bear that burden or suggest that how you seek help imposes a burden on them. After all God is faithful ... so I don't have to be.
As Tim Keller once put it, the reason so many of us do not help and say we cannot afford to help the person is not because we can't help but because we don't want that help given to the other person to cost us something we value for ourselves.
Dostoevsky wrote of the passion of young men that it is easy for them to be willing to die for a cause but to spend five years of one's burning youth in a boring life of study and research, well, then you'll find out what causes a young man is REALLY willing to make a sacrifice for. The pastor at my church once said that the measure of a pastor's work as a pastor is tested by how he treats the people he can't get anything out of. If he is only nice to the members of the congregation he can get something out of then he might as well be a hired hand and not a shepherd. A shepherd tends to the sheep who are infirm and even useless. In this sense a measure of a Christian's walk with the Lord is how willing he or she is to invest in the life of someone who lacks utility.
So that is a reflection on how Christian community can actually exacerbate both anxiety and loneliness. I suppose I should write about the other two points in separate posts.
Three proposed sources of anxiety get mentioned in this article in Slate as to why not only teens but Americans in general are more anxious now than fifty years ago. The recession and the bad job market or housing market are not considered the real sources of anxiety. The three proposed sources of anxiety interested me because in many respects these are sources of anxiety that we as Christians can accelerate in unexpected or unobserved ways.
1) loss of community
Ostensibly this is something all kinds of Christians in all kinds of churches say they WANT but what kind of community do we mean? In the last seventeen years I grew jaded by what is often meant by "community". The little school by the canal I attended had leaders whose idea of "community" was of a sort that looked pretty on student recruitment brochures and talked a lot about making a difference in the world and having global impact. All the while it remained the little school by the canal, big enough to get noticed by me in another state but not big enough to, so far as I see it, really change the world.
Ironically I was drawn to the church on the opposite side of the canal because it seemed to have what the little school opposite it didn't have. They also didn't talk about "community" quite the same way but they did talk about "intentional community". I was young enough and naive enough in my twenties to think that adding some kind of modifier in front of "community" meant that the overall concept had changed. Oh the folly of youth, eh? Not that I'm exactly old but I'm closer to forty than thirty.
At length I gained a certain jadedness to this "intentional community", too, because often "intentional community" meant an ambitious couple buying a house they couldn't really afford on their own during the `00s; renting out as many rooms as they wished to have to single tenants; and then hosting events at the house that were church related so that it could be a kind of de facto church building in lieu of being able to afford actually renting space. I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't do that but I am willing to say that in the long haul view of things that is a spectacularly careerist thing for someone with ambitions toward full-time professional ministry to do. It worked out very well for a few of the younger guys who did it, though! They have one of the fastest growing churches in the country on their hands. Very clever!
But the thing is that the more the church succeeded the less necessary it was to hold any connection to that "community". "Intentional community" in Reformed contemporary lingo now differs from "community" (as I've heard it described in secular and other Christian terms) only in terms of how much cherry-picking a person does to decide who his or her neighbor is or isn't. In other words "community" in many respects can isolate and constrain us. What we consider "community" can become more like an unrecognized social club in which, if you pay your dues and are productive as a member of the club you are considered valuable.
If you come upon hard times that last longer than a couple of months or, at most, a couple of years; if you reveal that you are a chronically needy person who constantly deals with failures; or if you are in all unvarnished terms a jerk who is actually a bona fide Christian then eventually the "intentional community" begins to feel you may not be pulling enough of your weight. You could ask them to help you bear a particular burden but they might decide that God will providentially let someone else help you bear that burden or suggest that how you seek help imposes a burden on them. After all God is faithful ... so I don't have to be.
As Tim Keller once put it, the reason so many of us do not help and say we cannot afford to help the person is not because we can't help but because we don't want that help given to the other person to cost us something we value for ourselves.
Dostoevsky wrote of the passion of young men that it is easy for them to be willing to die for a cause but to spend five years of one's burning youth in a boring life of study and research, well, then you'll find out what causes a young man is REALLY willing to make a sacrifice for. The pastor at my church once said that the measure of a pastor's work as a pastor is tested by how he treats the people he can't get anything out of. If he is only nice to the members of the congregation he can get something out of then he might as well be a hired hand and not a shepherd. A shepherd tends to the sheep who are infirm and even useless. In this sense a measure of a Christian's walk with the Lord is how willing he or she is to invest in the life of someone who lacks utility.
So that is a reflection on how Christian community can actually exacerbate both anxiety and loneliness. I suppose I should write about the other two points in separate posts.
Monday, February 14, 2011
The faithfulness of God in the present, part now, all later. Is that good enough for us?
Hebrews 11:39
And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised
For every time I have heard or read someone invoke "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life" there is this passage in Hebrews that serves as an interesting corrective. And yet that is not exactly what I want to discuss now. Anyone can make fun of a prosperity-gospel that appropriates "For I know the plans I have for you ... " as a personal fulfillment mantra. In context Yahweh was telling His people through Jeremiah that even though they were going to be in exile for seventy years (and then, later, through Daniel, that the exile was really going to last four hundred and ninety years, which should make any Christian think twice about too cheerfully employing the phrase "progressive revelation") that THIS plan of generations of exile was a plan to prosper them and not to harm them. The plan credited to Yahweh by false prophets was that in a few years Israel would gain its freedom and shake off the yoke of oppression and exile imposed on them by a godless empire, THAT was the false prophecy!
Yet here is the thing, though Hebrews is right to point out that none of those saints of old received the fullness of what God had promised they did receive in part. Abraham DID live to see the birth of his son Isaac. Isaac did live long enough to have two sons. Jacob did live long enough to have at least a dozen sons and lived long enough to know that Joseph was alive. Abraham even received a promise that for four hundred years his descendents would be slaves in a foreign land. Daniel received word that Israel would be stuck in their situation for at least four centuries and that then their deliverance would come.
Let us consider Ps 72, for instance. Those things prayed for in the psalm for the king Solomon (or by Solomon, let's suppose for sake of broadness) did not ultimately come to pass in Solomon's reign. They are, obviously, fully realized in Christ. And yet even now we do not see Christ fully and obviously enthroned. We, too, are shown that God's promises are all "yes" in Christ and yet we do not yet see all those things fully manifest. God is faithful and yet it is not false to say that God gives us the Spirit as a downpayment and seal as the promise of a future fulfillment yet to come. Paul wrote that we know in part and we prophesy in part but that when that which is perfect comes all prophecy and knowledge will cease. This perfection has not yet come and contrary to cessationists it is patently obvious that Paul is referring to the return of Christ, the great eschaton, the day of the Lord, and not merely the canonization of the Bible.
What I continually struggle to remember is that the Christian life is one in which it is good and right to be thankful for God's faithfulness in mercurial or even bad circumstances. I have had friends suggest that we should be confident that God has a good plan for us. Yes, He does, but we do not know what that good plan entails in our lifetime. I don't know whether my mother will or won't die of some health problems in the next year. Certainly I pray that she lives many, many more years. But there was a stage in my life where I hoped I would get married before my maternal grandmother died and that most assuredly was not the case!
At one point I thought I might be a professor of New Testament studies by the time I was in my thirties. That, most assuredly, has not turned out to be the case! In fact nothing seems more alien or unlikely to me now than that I should either 1) be married or 2) be a teacher of any kind. What I hope for in this life and what God providentially permits or directs may be completely different things. My mother certainly never wanted me to have the poor eyesight that I have or for me to have a macular detachment at 21. I didn't want that either.
Now in a time and place where Christians may wish to speak of God's faithfulness in terms of a job or a spouse or children or ministry success or anything like that, any outward measure of status or prosperity as an indicator of what we consider godliness I have something else to share. Yes, all those things are, indeed, signs of God's blessing. What distinguishes a Christian's disposition toward those things is to realize that all these things, blessings as they are from the Lord, are at most partial fulfillments of promises yet to be fully kept. Do you have a spouse you consider to be a blessing? Wonderful. Do you have children you love? That is also wonderful. Do you have a job? That is great. Do you have a job you enjoy? Even better.
Christians can talk glibly about idolatry and about how we as Christians should not take good things and make them gods. That's all true but I wonder if I haven't idolized things while thinking they were signs of God's favor. I do not doubt for a moment that a person can make one's own church an idol by leaning on it and idealizing it. I've done it and am likely to do it again. In the bluntest and crudest way possible--the difference between an idol and a blessing for which you or I can be thankful to the Lord may consist of this; the idol is something which presents itself as the complete fulfillment of any kind of promise we make to ourselves or dream we have; or a promise that is made to us in any way or a dream we are enjoined to have. By contrast, a blessing is something that we can see is, for all its beauty or value, as nothing more and nothing less than a partial manifestation of the faithfulness of the Lord toward us or people we love.
Let me restate this observation another way. Even a partial fulfillment of a promise of God is better for us than the fullest realization of any hopes or dreams we may have or of promises we have made to ourselves or received from others (i.e. others who are not Yahweh). The fullest fulfillment of someone else's promise to you is not necessarily a bad thing but it is still not as great as a partial fulfillment of the Lord's promise to you. In many cases that fulfillment may be a providentially partial fulfillment of a promise from the Lord.
“Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.
This is a promise from the Lord Himself and yet even this promise is, at most, a partial fulfillment of the promises that Yahweh gives that all, ultimately, find their fulfillment in Christ. It may be the key to contentment for the Christian throughout life is to be content in the partial fulfillment of God's promises to us through Christ and His body.
I suppose at this point the momentum of this blog post has me thinking out loud. I have heard many Christians talk about this or that being an idol and I agree with much of it in principle but too much is made of the false nature of the promises made by idols and not enough is made of how those false promises appeal to us. God's promises seem weak to us because they are partly fulfilled at most in the life of any one believer. God delivered Israel out of Egypt but when they grumbled that they were being led through the wilderness they turned from the Lord. Moses himself did not get to enter the promised land because he disobeyed the Lord yet Moses was glad to at least see the promised land even though he did not enter it himself.
By contrast the serpent's promise was fully realized and realized immediately after Adam and Eve ate the fruit. The power of temptation and the seductive appeal of an idol is not merely what it promises but that it delivers on that promise here and now. We as Christians should not kid ourselves about how and why idols are so appealing, whatever our idols may be. The eyes of Adam and Eve were opened and they did learn the difference between good and evil, just as the serpent predicted! To prevent them from eating of the tree of life and living forever God banished Adam and Eve from the garden. Even God's declaration that in the day they ate of the fruit they would die was no more than partly fulfilled in the day that they disobeyed! Of course we don't have reason to doubt that Adam and Eve died.
In the scriptures ever there after we see God giving promises that saints of old have never seen more than partly fulfilled even after Christ Himself rose from the dead! If we as Christians convince ourselves or each other that what is necessary is for God to be "fully" faithful in whatever we think He has promised us or others in scripture then we should consider whether or not we need to repent of putting God to the test and grumbling against Him in some way.
If even Christ Himself prayed that the cup would pass from Him yet drank the fullness of it anyway then we have an example to follow in obedience that goes to the Cross even after a prayer to not go to the Cross received an answer. I have to ask myself daily whether it is better to trust in the Lord whose promises have every single day at most been partly fulfilled with a promise of a full fulfillment in the final day, or whether it is better to trust in the tiny promises made by everyone else that are fully fulfilled.
Since today is Valentine's day imagine that you are a woman with two suitors. One promises that you can be married today if you will accept him. He comes with an engagement ring, a concrete plan for and vision of the future for you both, and chocolates. The other comes with nothing but a declaration of his love for you, not even a ring. He promises that you will be his bride in the future if you will accept him and that you will be married after he has set his affairs in order. He declines to tell you when that is but assures you that, basically, everything is already in place, is being put in place, and will be worked out soon so he would like your answer now. He asks that you trust in the goodness of his character and his promise. Is that promise, coming from him, good enough for you to say "yes" to his proposal of marriage?
Well, obviously for the sake of this illustration the Lord is like the suitor who holds forth the great promise of marriage but has not told us when the day of the marriage supper of the Lamb will be. Idols tell us exactly when the marriage supper will be and invite us to it daily. I too often accept the more immediate, concrete offer that has a specific timeline. This is, to the best of my limited ability, why I am so easily swayed by promises from idols that distract me from the Lord. Since the serpent in the garden we have been swayed because the Lord promises a whole but has only ever fulfilled in part while idols promise and deliver in whole. It is only after we have discovered that the whole we were sold was itself not only incomplete but a devourer of our selves that we begin to rue our decision. Hebrews and the rest of scripture reminds us that the partial fulfillment from God is more precious than the full fulfillment of the promises of anyone else or anything else.
Sin promises us the moon and gives us the moon every single time. It is only after we have agreed to the moon that we realize the plants in our garden need sunlight to grow and that we have just agreed to an eternal eclipse that will darken the dawn. The faithfulness of the moon we see now outstrips any confidence we have in the sun that has not yet risen but that we are told has risen before.
I had not originally intended this as any uniquely Valentine's Day meditation but I suppose it will suffice for one.
And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised
For every time I have heard or read someone invoke "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life" there is this passage in Hebrews that serves as an interesting corrective. And yet that is not exactly what I want to discuss now. Anyone can make fun of a prosperity-gospel that appropriates "For I know the plans I have for you ... " as a personal fulfillment mantra. In context Yahweh was telling His people through Jeremiah that even though they were going to be in exile for seventy years (and then, later, through Daniel, that the exile was really going to last four hundred and ninety years, which should make any Christian think twice about too cheerfully employing the phrase "progressive revelation") that THIS plan of generations of exile was a plan to prosper them and not to harm them. The plan credited to Yahweh by false prophets was that in a few years Israel would gain its freedom and shake off the yoke of oppression and exile imposed on them by a godless empire, THAT was the false prophecy!
Yet here is the thing, though Hebrews is right to point out that none of those saints of old received the fullness of what God had promised they did receive in part. Abraham DID live to see the birth of his son Isaac. Isaac did live long enough to have two sons. Jacob did live long enough to have at least a dozen sons and lived long enough to know that Joseph was alive. Abraham even received a promise that for four hundred years his descendents would be slaves in a foreign land. Daniel received word that Israel would be stuck in their situation for at least four centuries and that then their deliverance would come.
Let us consider Ps 72, for instance. Those things prayed for in the psalm for the king Solomon (or by Solomon, let's suppose for sake of broadness) did not ultimately come to pass in Solomon's reign. They are, obviously, fully realized in Christ. And yet even now we do not see Christ fully and obviously enthroned. We, too, are shown that God's promises are all "yes" in Christ and yet we do not yet see all those things fully manifest. God is faithful and yet it is not false to say that God gives us the Spirit as a downpayment and seal as the promise of a future fulfillment yet to come. Paul wrote that we know in part and we prophesy in part but that when that which is perfect comes all prophecy and knowledge will cease. This perfection has not yet come and contrary to cessationists it is patently obvious that Paul is referring to the return of Christ, the great eschaton, the day of the Lord, and not merely the canonization of the Bible.
What I continually struggle to remember is that the Christian life is one in which it is good and right to be thankful for God's faithfulness in mercurial or even bad circumstances. I have had friends suggest that we should be confident that God has a good plan for us. Yes, He does, but we do not know what that good plan entails in our lifetime. I don't know whether my mother will or won't die of some health problems in the next year. Certainly I pray that she lives many, many more years. But there was a stage in my life where I hoped I would get married before my maternal grandmother died and that most assuredly was not the case!
At one point I thought I might be a professor of New Testament studies by the time I was in my thirties. That, most assuredly, has not turned out to be the case! In fact nothing seems more alien or unlikely to me now than that I should either 1) be married or 2) be a teacher of any kind. What I hope for in this life and what God providentially permits or directs may be completely different things. My mother certainly never wanted me to have the poor eyesight that I have or for me to have a macular detachment at 21. I didn't want that either.
Now in a time and place where Christians may wish to speak of God's faithfulness in terms of a job or a spouse or children or ministry success or anything like that, any outward measure of status or prosperity as an indicator of what we consider godliness I have something else to share. Yes, all those things are, indeed, signs of God's blessing. What distinguishes a Christian's disposition toward those things is to realize that all these things, blessings as they are from the Lord, are at most partial fulfillments of promises yet to be fully kept. Do you have a spouse you consider to be a blessing? Wonderful. Do you have children you love? That is also wonderful. Do you have a job? That is great. Do you have a job you enjoy? Even better.
Christians can talk glibly about idolatry and about how we as Christians should not take good things and make them gods. That's all true but I wonder if I haven't idolized things while thinking they were signs of God's favor. I do not doubt for a moment that a person can make one's own church an idol by leaning on it and idealizing it. I've done it and am likely to do it again. In the bluntest and crudest way possible--the difference between an idol and a blessing for which you or I can be thankful to the Lord may consist of this; the idol is something which presents itself as the complete fulfillment of any kind of promise we make to ourselves or dream we have; or a promise that is made to us in any way or a dream we are enjoined to have. By contrast, a blessing is something that we can see is, for all its beauty or value, as nothing more and nothing less than a partial manifestation of the faithfulness of the Lord toward us or people we love.
Let me restate this observation another way. Even a partial fulfillment of a promise of God is better for us than the fullest realization of any hopes or dreams we may have or of promises we have made to ourselves or received from others (i.e. others who are not Yahweh). The fullest fulfillment of someone else's promise to you is not necessarily a bad thing but it is still not as great as a partial fulfillment of the Lord's promise to you. In many cases that fulfillment may be a providentially partial fulfillment of a promise from the Lord.
“Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.
This is a promise from the Lord Himself and yet even this promise is, at most, a partial fulfillment of the promises that Yahweh gives that all, ultimately, find their fulfillment in Christ. It may be the key to contentment for the Christian throughout life is to be content in the partial fulfillment of God's promises to us through Christ and His body.
I suppose at this point the momentum of this blog post has me thinking out loud. I have heard many Christians talk about this or that being an idol and I agree with much of it in principle but too much is made of the false nature of the promises made by idols and not enough is made of how those false promises appeal to us. God's promises seem weak to us because they are partly fulfilled at most in the life of any one believer. God delivered Israel out of Egypt but when they grumbled that they were being led through the wilderness they turned from the Lord. Moses himself did not get to enter the promised land because he disobeyed the Lord yet Moses was glad to at least see the promised land even though he did not enter it himself.
By contrast the serpent's promise was fully realized and realized immediately after Adam and Eve ate the fruit. The power of temptation and the seductive appeal of an idol is not merely what it promises but that it delivers on that promise here and now. We as Christians should not kid ourselves about how and why idols are so appealing, whatever our idols may be. The eyes of Adam and Eve were opened and they did learn the difference between good and evil, just as the serpent predicted! To prevent them from eating of the tree of life and living forever God banished Adam and Eve from the garden. Even God's declaration that in the day they ate of the fruit they would die was no more than partly fulfilled in the day that they disobeyed! Of course we don't have reason to doubt that Adam and Eve died.
In the scriptures ever there after we see God giving promises that saints of old have never seen more than partly fulfilled even after Christ Himself rose from the dead! If we as Christians convince ourselves or each other that what is necessary is for God to be "fully" faithful in whatever we think He has promised us or others in scripture then we should consider whether or not we need to repent of putting God to the test and grumbling against Him in some way.
If even Christ Himself prayed that the cup would pass from Him yet drank the fullness of it anyway then we have an example to follow in obedience that goes to the Cross even after a prayer to not go to the Cross received an answer. I have to ask myself daily whether it is better to trust in the Lord whose promises have every single day at most been partly fulfilled with a promise of a full fulfillment in the final day, or whether it is better to trust in the tiny promises made by everyone else that are fully fulfilled.
Since today is Valentine's day imagine that you are a woman with two suitors. One promises that you can be married today if you will accept him. He comes with an engagement ring, a concrete plan for and vision of the future for you both, and chocolates. The other comes with nothing but a declaration of his love for you, not even a ring. He promises that you will be his bride in the future if you will accept him and that you will be married after he has set his affairs in order. He declines to tell you when that is but assures you that, basically, everything is already in place, is being put in place, and will be worked out soon so he would like your answer now. He asks that you trust in the goodness of his character and his promise. Is that promise, coming from him, good enough for you to say "yes" to his proposal of marriage?
Well, obviously for the sake of this illustration the Lord is like the suitor who holds forth the great promise of marriage but has not told us when the day of the marriage supper of the Lamb will be. Idols tell us exactly when the marriage supper will be and invite us to it daily. I too often accept the more immediate, concrete offer that has a specific timeline. This is, to the best of my limited ability, why I am so easily swayed by promises from idols that distract me from the Lord. Since the serpent in the garden we have been swayed because the Lord promises a whole but has only ever fulfilled in part while idols promise and deliver in whole. It is only after we have discovered that the whole we were sold was itself not only incomplete but a devourer of our selves that we begin to rue our decision. Hebrews and the rest of scripture reminds us that the partial fulfillment from God is more precious than the full fulfillment of the promises of anyone else or anything else.
Sin promises us the moon and gives us the moon every single time. It is only after we have agreed to the moon that we realize the plants in our garden need sunlight to grow and that we have just agreed to an eternal eclipse that will darken the dawn. The faithfulness of the moon we see now outstrips any confidence we have in the sun that has not yet risen but that we are told has risen before.
I had not originally intended this as any uniquely Valentine's Day meditation but I suppose it will suffice for one.
There won't really be any "eureka lost" moments in the long run
http://www.slate.com/id/2282989/
This sort of rumination seems to miss the point of whether the "eureka" moment in hunting for consumer goods is something to make the focal point of discussing any "eureka" moment. The "original" moment of "eureka" was a little more truly momentous than simply finding a totally cool consumer good that helped you feel like one of the cool kids. Innovations and discoveries about the natural world and the sciences are surely cooler and a greater benefit to people on the whole than discovering an awesome and heretofore difficult to find minor league baseball cap. Still, it's a nicely built article and I thought enough of it to link to it even while I dissent in part from its observations and points.
Let's not forget that as the internet makes it easier to find things that the level of obscurity to delineate the cool kids from the common rabble simply changes by a matter of degree. Let's just pick one of my own pet interests as an example. These days in classical guitar if you know Sor or Giuliani or Carcassi or Villa-Lobos or Torroba or Ponce, big deal. EVERYONE knows about those people. Even lesser-knowns that nobody knows of outside the world of classical guitar like Koshkin or Brouwer aren't "really" that big a deal. Takemitsu wrote soundtracks for films so he's a little more nerd-cred but for the cool kids, so to speak, the greater cool factor necessitates a greater obscurity. This is easily provided in the internet age. For fans of modernist literature Nicholas Maw or Peter Maxwell Davies or Frank Martin or Elliot Carter get the job done. Even more obscure would be repertoire played by Tillmann Hoppstock (yeah, I have a couple of his CDs and his Bartok transcription is wonderful).
For nerds who want their musical nerdiness to encompass more than just the most avant of the avant garde in classical guitar you can go with Castelnuovo-Tedesco but not necessarily his famous solo works (famous? ;) ) or concerti. You can go for his preludes and fugues for guitar duet or, better yet, Eclogues for flute, English horn and guitar.
But there's nothing like living composers in classical music to affirm the highest level of hip nerdiness. Contemporary classical music is not too much different from indie rock, probably, and has an exponentially greater cool factor. Anyone can google even the most obscure indie rock band without a whole lot of effort. If there is anything the recent flap about Lady Gaga's retread of Madonna's retread of a soul number from before either woman's time has established it's the truth of Led Zeppelin's old claim that the song remains the same. As Ecclesiastes warned us millenia ago, there is nothing new under the sun. Do you believe there is something new? Do you rush to say "See, here? This is new?" It has come before, it is simply something from long ago that has come back. Innovations are generally matters of degree more than kind. Even something as earth-shattering as the development of nuclear weaponry is a revolutionary leap in doing something that people sought to do before.
None of this is to downplay the specialness of discovery. I was stoked to discover Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Eclogues, his preludes and fugues for guitar duet, and his sonatina for flute and guitar. I am still happy I discovered Igor Rekhin's preludes and fugues for solo guitar. It was simultaneously a surprise and a slight disappointment. I was hoping I might be the first composer to have tried tackling 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar. I should have known a Russian composer would have gotten their first because Russian guitar literature is in several respects much more adventurous than Western approaches to the instrument.
Now I speak with the bias of being a composer by hobby but the greatest moments of discovery and happiness don't seem to ever come from the acquisition of things anyway. I get excited when I discover a piece of music I haven't heard or studied before that I think is brilliant. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. This is not as exciting to me as discovering something new in a creative process, coming up with a melody or a harmony I like that is new for me. Stumbling upon what is, for me, a new insight in conversation with a friend or family member is more exciting than just picking up a new book or movie.
Discoveries that are great can include finding this or that awesome movie but a truly great discovery at a personal level is usually a gift that keeps on giving and is a gift to more than just yourself, a gift you can share with others. We don't have to labor the point too much about good news that is so good we want to share it with others and evangelize them to the cause, do we? Those moments never go away and won't stop happening. The internet may make the more mundane moments of joyful discovery of small-level things seem less important but the really big changes and discoveries in life like a new baby or a new friend or a long-lost family member or a new job (this one is particularly dear to me just now!) .
Today is Valentine's day and even though I haven't dated I don't suppose it requires any great effort to point out that lots of people like to discover a new "love" or something new about the person they already love. We are not wrong to want both the familiar and the new and to discover new things about the familiar we didn't know before. We will only lose our capacity for joyful surprise if we steel ourselves against it or keep changing the goal posts and the threshhold of what surprises us.
This sort of rumination seems to miss the point of whether the "eureka" moment in hunting for consumer goods is something to make the focal point of discussing any "eureka" moment. The "original" moment of "eureka" was a little more truly momentous than simply finding a totally cool consumer good that helped you feel like one of the cool kids. Innovations and discoveries about the natural world and the sciences are surely cooler and a greater benefit to people on the whole than discovering an awesome and heretofore difficult to find minor league baseball cap. Still, it's a nicely built article and I thought enough of it to link to it even while I dissent in part from its observations and points.
Let's not forget that as the internet makes it easier to find things that the level of obscurity to delineate the cool kids from the common rabble simply changes by a matter of degree. Let's just pick one of my own pet interests as an example. These days in classical guitar if you know Sor or Giuliani or Carcassi or Villa-Lobos or Torroba or Ponce, big deal. EVERYONE knows about those people. Even lesser-knowns that nobody knows of outside the world of classical guitar like Koshkin or Brouwer aren't "really" that big a deal. Takemitsu wrote soundtracks for films so he's a little more nerd-cred but for the cool kids, so to speak, the greater cool factor necessitates a greater obscurity. This is easily provided in the internet age. For fans of modernist literature Nicholas Maw or Peter Maxwell Davies or Frank Martin or Elliot Carter get the job done. Even more obscure would be repertoire played by Tillmann Hoppstock (yeah, I have a couple of his CDs and his Bartok transcription is wonderful).
For nerds who want their musical nerdiness to encompass more than just the most avant of the avant garde in classical guitar you can go with Castelnuovo-Tedesco but not necessarily his famous solo works (famous? ;) ) or concerti. You can go for his preludes and fugues for guitar duet or, better yet, Eclogues for flute, English horn and guitar.
But there's nothing like living composers in classical music to affirm the highest level of hip nerdiness. Contemporary classical music is not too much different from indie rock, probably, and has an exponentially greater cool factor. Anyone can google even the most obscure indie rock band without a whole lot of effort. If there is anything the recent flap about Lady Gaga's retread of Madonna's retread of a soul number from before either woman's time has established it's the truth of Led Zeppelin's old claim that the song remains the same. As Ecclesiastes warned us millenia ago, there is nothing new under the sun. Do you believe there is something new? Do you rush to say "See, here? This is new?" It has come before, it is simply something from long ago that has come back. Innovations are generally matters of degree more than kind. Even something as earth-shattering as the development of nuclear weaponry is a revolutionary leap in doing something that people sought to do before.
None of this is to downplay the specialness of discovery. I was stoked to discover Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Eclogues, his preludes and fugues for guitar duet, and his sonatina for flute and guitar. I am still happy I discovered Igor Rekhin's preludes and fugues for solo guitar. It was simultaneously a surprise and a slight disappointment. I was hoping I might be the first composer to have tried tackling 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar. I should have known a Russian composer would have gotten their first because Russian guitar literature is in several respects much more adventurous than Western approaches to the instrument.
Now I speak with the bias of being a composer by hobby but the greatest moments of discovery and happiness don't seem to ever come from the acquisition of things anyway. I get excited when I discover a piece of music I haven't heard or studied before that I think is brilliant. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. This is not as exciting to me as discovering something new in a creative process, coming up with a melody or a harmony I like that is new for me. Stumbling upon what is, for me, a new insight in conversation with a friend or family member is more exciting than just picking up a new book or movie.
Discoveries that are great can include finding this or that awesome movie but a truly great discovery at a personal level is usually a gift that keeps on giving and is a gift to more than just yourself, a gift you can share with others. We don't have to labor the point too much about good news that is so good we want to share it with others and evangelize them to the cause, do we? Those moments never go away and won't stop happening. The internet may make the more mundane moments of joyful discovery of small-level things seem less important but the really big changes and discoveries in life like a new baby or a new friend or a long-lost family member or a new job (this one is particularly dear to me just now!) .
Today is Valentine's day and even though I haven't dated I don't suppose it requires any great effort to point out that lots of people like to discover a new "love" or something new about the person they already love. We are not wrong to want both the familiar and the new and to discover new things about the familiar we didn't know before. We will only lose our capacity for joyful surprise if we steel ourselves against it or keep changing the goal posts and the threshhold of what surprises us.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Link: Brian Auten post at BHT, a great white sort in "missional" church planting?
http://boarsheadtavern.com/2011/02/12/24708/
http://theaquilareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3975:the-pca-a-clustering-of-political-and-social-conservatives-and-city-center-elites-part-one-setting-forth-the-premise&catid=79:commentary&Itemid=137
http://theaquilareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3981:the-pca-a-clustering-of-political-and-social-conservatives-and-city-center-elites-part-two-analyzing-the-premise&catid=79:commentary&Itemid=137
Pulitzer-prize finalist Bill Bishop's data-tested thesis is that social conservatives and social elites sort themselves politically and form churches around already accepted social norms. This will explain how the PCA grew and why it likely won't grow beyond its current cultural demographic in the near future. For example (page numbers to Bishop's book are in parenthesis) ...
There is a great deal that could be said about these two links Brian Auten linked to. I will keep my comments relatively brief. As the son of an American Indian what I can say in response to the majority of points Anthony Bradley males about the failure of the PCA to effectively assimilate or reach non-whites as a whole is a great big "duh". A denomination with roots in Southern conservative Presbyterianism may have lots of trouble being a home to ethnic, economic, and racial groups that didn't already fit into them in the "big sort". Any church tradition which has as part of its legacy any connection to any Confederate anything at any point is probably going to have trouble winning over non-whites. Visit nearly any website at random that expresses concern about institutionalized racism connected to Christian religion in the United States and you're going to quickly find the name of Dabney and some choice words about the ideas Dabney set forth about race.
(3) As "white flight" ideologically sorted geographically, "liberal church goers would live in one place and conservative church goers in another"(42). Center city church goers likely voted for President Obama (regardless of whether or not they were evangelicals) whereas few suburban PCA'ers would even think about supporting Obama. I was recently at a city center PCA church overhearing a group of people loudly thankful for Obama's policies and presidency. I just can't imagine that would be the case in PCA suburban churches in Virginia, for example.
(4) According to Bishop, the "real white flight" of the past two generations has been white ideologues moving to communities that were becoming staunchly Republican to live among socially similar people (53). I don't have the numbers, but my guess is that upwards of around 90% of the PCA church plants between 1980 and 2002 were in Republican counties. This fits with the homogeneous unit principle. We mistakenly only viewed "white flight" as racial. It was ideological.
...
(8) Ideological and social white flight has left rural America behind [emphasis mine] (137). The most neglected and ignored churches in the PCA are rural. They have been left behind by suburban and city center white elites (137). As I've written before, middle-class elitism does not seem to care about poor white people. [emphasis mine]
9) City center churches will be easier to plant in the future because young Americans culturally sort by lifestyle preference. Lifestyle is a city's main product and the housing market has shifted accordingly. People will use "missional" as justification for sociologically sorting as an urban elite if necessary. [emphasis mine] Church planters follow people who sort according to social and cultural preferences (153). We should not be overly impressed with center city plants because they will likely also not be successful at reaching blacks or Latinos in cities (as I've stated before).
Since I attend and joined a PCA church all of this stuff interests me, not least because I joined recently and because, having an American Indian dad these things do kinda address me where I live in an urban center. But what also intrigues me about these observations is that I cannot help but wonder if they in some sense could explain the entire "young, restless and Reformed" community as a whole. These are the kinds of young buck Christians (or youngbuck at heart rabblerouser Christians) who admonish us to read "dead white guys" and brush up on church history and all that. They are the sorts of folks who manage to repackage the middle class suburban white middle-American dream as though it were "countercultural" simply because this is a life that is presented as "counterculture" to the urban setting in which "missional" churches get planted.
The popular slogan amongst theo-bloggers I've read in the last five years includes the motto "what you win them with is what you win them to". The PCA may well not be the only Reformed denomination or Reformed sort of church in which we convince ourselves that our distinctives are chiefly our theology when out in the trenches our distinctives may be socio-economic and cultural. That the entire "missional" movement may be catering almost exclusively to upwardly mobile white twenty-something males who hope to get "upstream" and "influence culture" may show that not only traditional denominations but even many of the so-called "missional" churches may turn not into "God's new thing" but new forms of old, established white conservative denominations.
In fourteen years I've seen Mars Hill in Seattle go from a tiny "emergent" non-denominational church into what I would describe (I think fairly) as a nascent Reformed Baptist denomination catering to white upwardly mobile urban hipsters. To be sure white upwardly mobile urban hipsters need Jesus, too, but Mars Hill (and the PCA, let's be fair) may both constitute Reformed and neo-Reformed church movements that appeal to or seek the loyalty of the young white males who may be considered the culture-shapers of the future and tend to be theologically conservative and (very probably in many cases) politically conservative.
We get statistics saying that the number of Christians who are "real" Christians does not seem to be growing a whole lot and yet Reformed churches report growth. What if this is, as Bishop's work may propose, a "big sort"? What if the "growth" is not real growth so much as ideological alignment that is confused for growth. If the big sort were, say, people fleeing the mainlines into either more conservative denominations or no religious affiliation at all then people are not necessarily being reached for Jesus.
Or, perhaps worst of all, people are being reached for Jesus but they are being reached for a Jesus we have engineered to conform to the kind of social community or social network we already have in mind. Say whatever you wish about the new perspective on Paul and whether you think that is a terrible or a great thing (there's a lot I admit I respect about it), there may be a point at which the axiom "What we win them with is what we win them to" will hinge upon what Jesus we declare to the world to be the king of kings, particularly how we say obedience to this king of kings "ought" to play out in the Christian communities and friendships we form together. It will remain, perhaps, a tragic inevitability that in many ostensibly Christian communities where there is to be no slave or free, Jew or Greek, male or female that all those divisions will not only remain in place but that each division will have its own conception of Jesus to ensure that those divisions remain in place.
http://theaquilareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3975:the-pca-a-clustering-of-political-and-social-conservatives-and-city-center-elites-part-one-setting-forth-the-premise&catid=79:commentary&Itemid=137
http://theaquilareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3981:the-pca-a-clustering-of-political-and-social-conservatives-and-city-center-elites-part-two-analyzing-the-premise&catid=79:commentary&Itemid=137
Pulitzer-prize finalist Bill Bishop's data-tested thesis is that social conservatives and social elites sort themselves politically and form churches around already accepted social norms. This will explain how the PCA grew and why it likely won't grow beyond its current cultural demographic in the near future. For example (page numbers to Bishop's book are in parenthesis) ...
There is a great deal that could be said about these two links Brian Auten linked to. I will keep my comments relatively brief. As the son of an American Indian what I can say in response to the majority of points Anthony Bradley males about the failure of the PCA to effectively assimilate or reach non-whites as a whole is a great big "duh". A denomination with roots in Southern conservative Presbyterianism may have lots of trouble being a home to ethnic, economic, and racial groups that didn't already fit into them in the "big sort". Any church tradition which has as part of its legacy any connection to any Confederate anything at any point is probably going to have trouble winning over non-whites. Visit nearly any website at random that expresses concern about institutionalized racism connected to Christian religion in the United States and you're going to quickly find the name of Dabney and some choice words about the ideas Dabney set forth about race.
(3) As "white flight" ideologically sorted geographically, "liberal church goers would live in one place and conservative church goers in another"(42). Center city church goers likely voted for President Obama (regardless of whether or not they were evangelicals) whereas few suburban PCA'ers would even think about supporting Obama. I was recently at a city center PCA church overhearing a group of people loudly thankful for Obama's policies and presidency. I just can't imagine that would be the case in PCA suburban churches in Virginia, for example.
(4) According to Bishop, the "real white flight" of the past two generations has been white ideologues moving to communities that were becoming staunchly Republican to live among socially similar people (53). I don't have the numbers, but my guess is that upwards of around 90% of the PCA church plants between 1980 and 2002 were in Republican counties. This fits with the homogeneous unit principle. We mistakenly only viewed "white flight" as racial. It was ideological.
...
(8) Ideological and social white flight has left rural America behind [emphasis mine] (137). The most neglected and ignored churches in the PCA are rural. They have been left behind by suburban and city center white elites (137). As I've written before, middle-class elitism does not seem to care about poor white people. [emphasis mine]
9) City center churches will be easier to plant in the future because young Americans culturally sort by lifestyle preference. Lifestyle is a city's main product and the housing market has shifted accordingly. People will use "missional" as justification for sociologically sorting as an urban elite if necessary. [emphasis mine] Church planters follow people who sort according to social and cultural preferences (153). We should not be overly impressed with center city plants because they will likely also not be successful at reaching blacks or Latinos in cities (as I've stated before).
Since I attend and joined a PCA church all of this stuff interests me, not least because I joined recently and because, having an American Indian dad these things do kinda address me where I live in an urban center. But what also intrigues me about these observations is that I cannot help but wonder if they in some sense could explain the entire "young, restless and Reformed" community as a whole. These are the kinds of young buck Christians (or youngbuck at heart rabblerouser Christians) who admonish us to read "dead white guys" and brush up on church history and all that. They are the sorts of folks who manage to repackage the middle class suburban white middle-American dream as though it were "countercultural" simply because this is a life that is presented as "counterculture" to the urban setting in which "missional" churches get planted.
The popular slogan amongst theo-bloggers I've read in the last five years includes the motto "what you win them with is what you win them to". The PCA may well not be the only Reformed denomination or Reformed sort of church in which we convince ourselves that our distinctives are chiefly our theology when out in the trenches our distinctives may be socio-economic and cultural. That the entire "missional" movement may be catering almost exclusively to upwardly mobile white twenty-something males who hope to get "upstream" and "influence culture" may show that not only traditional denominations but even many of the so-called "missional" churches may turn not into "God's new thing" but new forms of old, established white conservative denominations.
In fourteen years I've seen Mars Hill in Seattle go from a tiny "emergent" non-denominational church into what I would describe (I think fairly) as a nascent Reformed Baptist denomination catering to white upwardly mobile urban hipsters. To be sure white upwardly mobile urban hipsters need Jesus, too, but Mars Hill (and the PCA, let's be fair) may both constitute Reformed and neo-Reformed church movements that appeal to or seek the loyalty of the young white males who may be considered the culture-shapers of the future and tend to be theologically conservative and (very probably in many cases) politically conservative.
We get statistics saying that the number of Christians who are "real" Christians does not seem to be growing a whole lot and yet Reformed churches report growth. What if this is, as Bishop's work may propose, a "big sort"? What if the "growth" is not real growth so much as ideological alignment that is confused for growth. If the big sort were, say, people fleeing the mainlines into either more conservative denominations or no religious affiliation at all then people are not necessarily being reached for Jesus.
Or, perhaps worst of all, people are being reached for Jesus but they are being reached for a Jesus we have engineered to conform to the kind of social community or social network we already have in mind. Say whatever you wish about the new perspective on Paul and whether you think that is a terrible or a great thing (there's a lot I admit I respect about it), there may be a point at which the axiom "What we win them with is what we win them to" will hinge upon what Jesus we declare to the world to be the king of kings, particularly how we say obedience to this king of kings "ought" to play out in the Christian communities and friendships we form together. It will remain, perhaps, a tragic inevitability that in many ostensibly Christian communities where there is to be no slave or free, Jew or Greek, male or female that all those divisions will not only remain in place but that each division will have its own conception of Jesus to ensure that those divisions remain in place.
semi-regular link to Practical Theology for Women and ensuing ramble
http://www.theologyforwomen.org/2011/02/grace-based-libertarianism.html
Appropos of this link but otherwise appropos of nothing one of the things I've heard plenty of singles say is that they won't take seriously any advice from any single about how to approach marriage or, to use that Christianese term, "relationships". Years ago one of my friends was invited to speak at a church event addressing singles. I didn't attend the event myself because I had an opportunity to have dinner with some friends I hadn't seen in a while, if memory serves.
One of the only things I heard said about the event was that the singles who attended had no idea why this single guy was invited to speak the event. He wasn't married so what could he possibly have to contribute to the discussion? What could a single guy know about relationships anyway? Having known this particular fellow for eleven years I can confidently say that he is a godly man who is smart, thoughtful and exceptionally generous and that there is much in every way to learn from his example whether he was married or not. That he happens to be married now and a father merely means that he would be someone I would commend to fellow Christians for even more reasons. But the thing is, he was a solid and prudent fellow before he got married. He was a solid and prudent believer even when women weren't giving him time of day at the church.
As no shortage of Christian bloggers have noted, it seems as though in reaction to a Catholic notion that the unmarried are more spiritual, more spiritually devoted, and more able to serve the Lord there has been a contemporary evangelical reaction which goes the other way. An evangelical Protestant preacher might go so far as to say that there is nothing an unmarried person can do to further the kingdom of God that in way exceeds or even equals what a married eprson can do. I've heard at least one preacher make this scripturally unsupportable claim. I am sure you have probably heard a preacher say something similar.
What I find curious is that among fellow unmarried people a mentality can pervade which holds that the people who know about "relationships" must be the married. I will grant this readily to those who have remain married to the same person for anywhere between ten to twenty years. I don't grant that so readily to people in second marriages without getting a chance to get to know them. Some second marriages really are beautiful changes compared to the first marriages; other second marriages are just a transitional state to third marriages or single parenthood; and other second marriages are probably okay but do not confer wisdom or bragging rights to the parties involved to dispense advice just yet.
Several things have stuck with me for a while and because I am not sure there is any merit to them I figured I'd just blog them. That is, after all, what blogs are often for. ;) It has puzzled me that at least in some Christian subcultures there is a conviction, perhaps a rhetorical flourish, that marriage shows a person how selfish he or she is. Then parenthood is the next grander revelation of gnosis as to how REALLY selfish a person is. This must be some kind of rhetorical flourish because if marriage and then parenthood really reveal to you how selfish you are why do people pursue those things that most fully reveal their selfishness? If marriage and parenthood are the mirrors through which people can see most clearly just how selfish they really are then what disadvantage does singleness confer upon a person? Merely the opportunity to avoid discovering how selfish they inescapably are?
What I have found most curious about males in the young, restless and Reformed particularly is how they so often display an immense confidence. It would appear that among this crowd there is a great confidence that single guys particularly don't know what they are doing and have not attained true manhood yet but that they, no sooner than they marry and cause youngsters to spring forth from the wombs of their beloveds, are imbued with a charism of boundless wisdom from which to consider all aspects of human experience.
I again consider how often it appears that the curriculum vitae entails: follower of Jesus, husband of X, father of Y and Z, pastor at A. There is a scriptural precedent for establishing one's household as a basis for being considered a bishop/pastor/overseer/priest ... but I have in the last few years wondered if there is quite as much magic in the transition from single to married that qualifies YRR's to go from "completely unqualified to speak about anything in life that matters" to "fully equipped to teach and train everyone from all walks of life and let no one look down on you because you're young and your youth is excuse enough for any mistakes you might make anyway". What if, as Tim Keller once so succinctly put it, the problem is in attempting to show favoritism to one status or the other?
When Paul describes the church as the body of Christ he emphasizes that each part of the body of Christ has a role to play. Not all members of the body are equally glorious or presentable which is why the less presentable parts are treated with greater care and honor; the less presentable parts are treated with modesty, and that these seeming lesser parts are indispensable and require a deference and honor that the more presentable parts of the body do not require.
It may be, however, that a temptation common to every Christian and in every church is to give the most glory and honor to the most presentable members of the body of Christ. Does it not seem, at times, that we Christians give the greatest deference and consideration to members of the body that may, in the light of apostolic teaching, actually need the least of this special consideration? We bestow honor upon the already honored and ignore those who, for whatever reason, are not considered as honorable. If the grace of Christ is unmerited favor then why do we do this?
I have heard more than a couple of unmarried Christians lament that the unmarried seem to be regarded as second or third class members of a Christian community just as I have heard more than a couple of Christians declare that singles are selfish and don't do as effective kingdom work (unless these Christians are attempting to get unmarried Christians to volunteer in ministries so they can spend more time with their wives). Paul does not attempt to explain what or who constitutes the more or less honorable members of any local body so perhaps that is why we can so readily excuse ourselves or accuse others with regard to what body parts are honorable or dishonorable rather than consider that our assessment of them should lead us to take Paul's words to heart.
If I consider a member of the body of Christ to be less honorable or presentable I must take Paul's teaching to heart and give that member more consideration and modest treatment and honor precisely because whoever is more "honorable", however I see that, does not NEED the honor or deference I probably already bestow upon them. Church leaders who lead well are worthy of a double honor but notice, too, that they are also by necessity the most visible and honorable members of the body. In other words, this double honor may not necessarily be one that is the same as the honor Paul discusses with the Corinthians. They were already enamored with conspicuous power and authority and it is easy to show deference to those who are supposed to be running the local show. At another level a spiritual leader who is aware of his dependency on God may be more aware than others that while he may be most presentable amongst the members of a body this means he also needs none of the special treatment Paul alludes to.
Just as Paul rebuked the Corinthians for their favoritism toward splashy gifts that by themselves were not useful so he in a different way admonishes us to remember that mere body parts do not comprise the entire body. This is an understandable human habit but it is, it seems, an archetypally Corinthian error. It is not merely something that appears in distinguishing between the married hand and the unmarried foot who may or may not be considered really an honorable member of the body of Christ, it is a challenge we face in all sorts of ways.
Appropos of this link but otherwise appropos of nothing one of the things I've heard plenty of singles say is that they won't take seriously any advice from any single about how to approach marriage or, to use that Christianese term, "relationships". Years ago one of my friends was invited to speak at a church event addressing singles. I didn't attend the event myself because I had an opportunity to have dinner with some friends I hadn't seen in a while, if memory serves.
One of the only things I heard said about the event was that the singles who attended had no idea why this single guy was invited to speak the event. He wasn't married so what could he possibly have to contribute to the discussion? What could a single guy know about relationships anyway? Having known this particular fellow for eleven years I can confidently say that he is a godly man who is smart, thoughtful and exceptionally generous and that there is much in every way to learn from his example whether he was married or not. That he happens to be married now and a father merely means that he would be someone I would commend to fellow Christians for even more reasons. But the thing is, he was a solid and prudent fellow before he got married. He was a solid and prudent believer even when women weren't giving him time of day at the church.
As no shortage of Christian bloggers have noted, it seems as though in reaction to a Catholic notion that the unmarried are more spiritual, more spiritually devoted, and more able to serve the Lord there has been a contemporary evangelical reaction which goes the other way. An evangelical Protestant preacher might go so far as to say that there is nothing an unmarried person can do to further the kingdom of God that in way exceeds or even equals what a married eprson can do. I've heard at least one preacher make this scripturally unsupportable claim. I am sure you have probably heard a preacher say something similar.
What I find curious is that among fellow unmarried people a mentality can pervade which holds that the people who know about "relationships" must be the married. I will grant this readily to those who have remain married to the same person for anywhere between ten to twenty years. I don't grant that so readily to people in second marriages without getting a chance to get to know them. Some second marriages really are beautiful changes compared to the first marriages; other second marriages are just a transitional state to third marriages or single parenthood; and other second marriages are probably okay but do not confer wisdom or bragging rights to the parties involved to dispense advice just yet.
Several things have stuck with me for a while and because I am not sure there is any merit to them I figured I'd just blog them. That is, after all, what blogs are often for. ;) It has puzzled me that at least in some Christian subcultures there is a conviction, perhaps a rhetorical flourish, that marriage shows a person how selfish he or she is. Then parenthood is the next grander revelation of gnosis as to how REALLY selfish a person is. This must be some kind of rhetorical flourish because if marriage and then parenthood really reveal to you how selfish you are why do people pursue those things that most fully reveal their selfishness? If marriage and parenthood are the mirrors through which people can see most clearly just how selfish they really are then what disadvantage does singleness confer upon a person? Merely the opportunity to avoid discovering how selfish they inescapably are?
What I have found most curious about males in the young, restless and Reformed particularly is how they so often display an immense confidence. It would appear that among this crowd there is a great confidence that single guys particularly don't know what they are doing and have not attained true manhood yet but that they, no sooner than they marry and cause youngsters to spring forth from the wombs of their beloveds, are imbued with a charism of boundless wisdom from which to consider all aspects of human experience.
I again consider how often it appears that the curriculum vitae entails: follower of Jesus, husband of X, father of Y and Z, pastor at A. There is a scriptural precedent for establishing one's household as a basis for being considered a bishop/pastor/overseer/priest ... but I have in the last few years wondered if there is quite as much magic in the transition from single to married that qualifies YRR's to go from "completely unqualified to speak about anything in life that matters" to "fully equipped to teach and train everyone from all walks of life and let no one look down on you because you're young and your youth is excuse enough for any mistakes you might make anyway". What if, as Tim Keller once so succinctly put it, the problem is in attempting to show favoritism to one status or the other?
When Paul describes the church as the body of Christ he emphasizes that each part of the body of Christ has a role to play. Not all members of the body are equally glorious or presentable which is why the less presentable parts are treated with greater care and honor; the less presentable parts are treated with modesty, and that these seeming lesser parts are indispensable and require a deference and honor that the more presentable parts of the body do not require.
It may be, however, that a temptation common to every Christian and in every church is to give the most glory and honor to the most presentable members of the body of Christ. Does it not seem, at times, that we Christians give the greatest deference and consideration to members of the body that may, in the light of apostolic teaching, actually need the least of this special consideration? We bestow honor upon the already honored and ignore those who, for whatever reason, are not considered as honorable. If the grace of Christ is unmerited favor then why do we do this?
I have heard more than a couple of unmarried Christians lament that the unmarried seem to be regarded as second or third class members of a Christian community just as I have heard more than a couple of Christians declare that singles are selfish and don't do as effective kingdom work (unless these Christians are attempting to get unmarried Christians to volunteer in ministries so they can spend more time with their wives). Paul does not attempt to explain what or who constitutes the more or less honorable members of any local body so perhaps that is why we can so readily excuse ourselves or accuse others with regard to what body parts are honorable or dishonorable rather than consider that our assessment of them should lead us to take Paul's words to heart.
If I consider a member of the body of Christ to be less honorable or presentable I must take Paul's teaching to heart and give that member more consideration and modest treatment and honor precisely because whoever is more "honorable", however I see that, does not NEED the honor or deference I probably already bestow upon them. Church leaders who lead well are worthy of a double honor but notice, too, that they are also by necessity the most visible and honorable members of the body. In other words, this double honor may not necessarily be one that is the same as the honor Paul discusses with the Corinthians. They were already enamored with conspicuous power and authority and it is easy to show deference to those who are supposed to be running the local show. At another level a spiritual leader who is aware of his dependency on God may be more aware than others that while he may be most presentable amongst the members of a body this means he also needs none of the special treatment Paul alludes to.
Just as Paul rebuked the Corinthians for their favoritism toward splashy gifts that by themselves were not useful so he in a different way admonishes us to remember that mere body parts do not comprise the entire body. This is an understandable human habit but it is, it seems, an archetypally Corinthian error. It is not merely something that appears in distinguishing between the married hand and the unmarried foot who may or may not be considered really an honorable member of the body of Christ, it is a challenge we face in all sorts of ways.
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Link: Seattle Weekly "The Shuffling of Music Has Dilluted Its Cultural Impact", Not
http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/reverb/2011/02/the_shuffling_of_music_has_dil.php
Read this editorial commentary on the shuffle function of the iPod and the negative effect it has on music. A few excerpts and some responses:
Some people might make the case that this lack of tribalism in music is a positive development. Obviously something's been gained, especially by the generation of kids who have access to great music in an uninterrupted stream. All those teenagers whose parents played them Bach in the womb, who were raised on a steady diet of the Beatles and Beck, are surely the most musically literate generation in history. But as music becomes more of a commodity, the value of any one band or song declines.
When genres blur, the culture of the past becomes an indistinct stew. Bands quit being symbolic, or invested with much more importance than as purveyors of hits on a soundtrack. If a young songwriter perceives little difference between early REM and early Elvis, the music he or she writes, and the culture it eventually spawns, risks never rising above pastiche.
Genres do not blur themselves. When genres blur it is become someone makes a point of blurring the genres. I do not see that many people complaining that the destruction of stylistic purity in jazz can be laid at the feet of Miles Davis. I know of more than a few critics who blasted Dave Brubeck for having "no swing" and for attempting to assimilate classical elements into his work. Purity of musical style does not indicate purity of personhood.
If as Leo Brouwer put it a few years ago there is a failure on the part of academia to fully appreciate the significance and value of fusion as a musical approach then perhaps this linked editorial may be taken as a paradoxical populist objection. Sure, the populist objection is still ultimately a hipster posture of the sort that academia is guilty of but my main jibe is that compared to the work of an actual musicologist the objections of a hipster amount to a populist objection rather than an academic one, that the purity of the culture associated with a musical style gets lost. This is why some commenters on the editorial, perhaps quite unfairly, see the whole gist of the editorial as lamely curmudgeonly and even racist. That's a histrionic over-reaction ... but that's not unsurprising coming from folks who make comments on Seattle Weekly links to a column in Reverb, is it?
That connection is all but gone now. The endless playlist has reduced every song to top-40 status, to an equal footing in a shuffle roulette. Songs that once stood for something are interspersed randomly with ones that didn't, all just a skip button away from oblivion. I'm going to make an effort from now on to try to remember a little bit of the world each song came from. I owe them that.
Now here's the part where I put on my faux academic/social critic hat and point out that the whole idea that are songs that once stood for something (and don't now?) being set against songs that didn't suggests both a hegemonic and a consumeristic impulse that delineates on the basis of status. We can't have it both ways, we can't value the album as the artifact of true fandom and then invoke that some songs mattered and some songs didn't because we all know that some songs on an album matter more than others.
Some songs are just plain old filler created to meet a contractual obligation. That "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones became a massive hit and a manifesto for a generation does not mean that it wasn't originally written as a simple space-filler to make sure the album had enough songs on it. I defy anyone to argue that "Goodbye Blue Sky" is anywhere near as interesting or important a song on The Wall than "Another Brick in the Wall" or "Comfortably Numb". "Won't Get Fooled Again" is incontestably more important and memorable as a song than "My Wife". Since this is the case within albums it vitiates any force a person could have in trying to say that albums gave us a more cohesive and intense listening experience.
Here's the thing, not everyone listens to music in the same way and listens for the same things. I can tell you that my lack of keen interest in pop music these days is not because I don't listen. I listen but I listen for lyrics, how lyrics connect to melodies, how musical form reinforces associated meaning. I listen for thematic and formal development. Music is to me not merely about the expression of feelings or the consolidation of cultural values that are, strictly speaking, extra-musical. Music is capable of exploring ideas. This doesn't mean that I'm a big fan of Elliot Carter but it does mean I appreciate a lot of music by Messiaen and Bach.
Now here's the other thing, a lot of those songs on those old albums DON'T mean something. Sure a hard-core Dylan fan will as quickly recognize "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" as "Like a Rolling Stone". But for most people that first song never mattered because they weren't listening to it. The experiences that bind us together are the same experiences that can also keep us apart. Do we "really" want a society in which fans of the Bee Gees and fans of AC/DC can't stand each other and won't associate with each other? I would say my life has moved along just fine without the music of either band.
What Roderick considers a problem in the shuffle-age of the iPod, the decline in value of the individual song as music becomes more of a commodity, is a shibboleth. Music has always been a commodity and if you want to find a demonstration of how the value of an individual song can get obliterated by the sheer accumulation of listening try listening to everything Robert Johnson ever recorded in one go. The thing about pre-World War 2 blues performers is they didn't release albums, they released singles, and if you set those singles back to back you begin to realize that as good as he was to have heard one Robert Johnson song is to have very nearly heard them all. I always enjoyed Blind Willie Johnson a great deal more personally but that's a personal taste matter. I do still own all of Robert Johnson's work.
All work in the arts is pastiche in the earliest stages of any artist's career. We can point to how early Beethoven sounds suspiciously like late Haydn. We can chart the shift in Mozart's concept of formal and thematic development after he came into contact with Bach (i.e. Mozart started sounded much, much cooler!). It's not hard to chart the trajectory of Hindemith's early work influenced by Debussy and Wagner through to his shift away from romanticism into expressionism and then his later neo-classical phase after coming into contact with the music of Stravinsky, Webern, and others.
If a young songwriter hears early R.E.M and early Elvis and notices that the use of song forms descended from Tin Pan Alley and country permeate their work this is not a sign that the young songwriter is going to make some indistinguishable musical brine it may simply be a sign that that songwriter has figured out that musical forms and themes can't be restricted to the largely cosmetic differences in what amplifier or what solid-body electric guitar were used. R.E.M. and Elvis are both examples of pastiche. This is not a reason to dislike or like them it's simply a reality of any serious musicological engagement with what their recordings reveal. Do Bob Dylan fans go on and on about how his early works were nothing more than a pastiche of Woody Guthrie songs or snippets of things that could have passed for Ginsbergh? Uh, not too much it seems.
The disadvantage of the contemporary scene for music is that it reveals what classical snobs have been trying to say for decades, that the whole of pop music (i.e. non-concert music) is a virtually indistinguishable mush of songs separated not by any inherently musical differences but by cultural, ethnic, socio-economic and other distinctions. Now I think all of those assertions have always been grossly overplayed and I still think Stevie Wonder remains a musical genius but what any concerned hipster musical fan's worries prove about pop and indie music is that the things that bind them together at the level of musical form and musical idiom have always been stronger than the things that were once considered to separate them.
With respect to grunge 19 years ago is not recent history, man. I don't regret the music of Nirvana receding into the mists of history just a teensy bit Grunge was just emo before emo got the label and was what we got when punk from twenty years earlier was put in the microwave and came out of the reheating process a little spongier and less flavorful. I don't really need to further spell out that I was in high school when grunge came out and found the whole musical style insufferably stupid, do I?
The shuffling of music has not dilluted its cultural impact, the tendency of people to not listen to music as more than a soundtrack to one's own life does that. The shuffling of music has not dilluted the cultural impact of music so much as revealed that if you shuffle 300 blues songs you're going to realize that that's an awful lot of I-IV-I-V-I to listen to for hours in 2.5 minute episodes! We're not talking about some giant cyclical work like Bach's Matthew Passion, Messiaen's Vingt Regards, Penderecki's Lukaspassio, Beethoven's Fifth, Haydn's Op. 76 string quartets, Stravinksy's Rite of Spring, Arvo Part's Berliner Mass, or Byrd's Mass for Five Voices. The reasons all those rock and pop songs blur together is because they do, just the same way 104 Haydn symphonies tend to blur together if you try to absorb them in big chunks.
The closest pop music has ever come to actually requiring an extended attention to musical form was the oft-derided "concept album". I enjoy classical and pop and jazz but at some point someone has to keep saying that the only thing goofier than the snobbish disdain of classical fans toward non-classical music is a hipsterish worry that 3 minute odes to sex, drugs, and rock `n roll praising its own virtues may somehow be drained of their life-changing power. How we listen is what gives us the ability or inability to hear and be transformed by beauty and truth. A certain Jewish rabbi once said "He who has hears to ear, let him hear." To the one who has more will be given but to the one who has not even what he thinks he has will be taken away from him. Now obviously Jesus was speaking about things far more important than what bands one listens to but at a much smaller level the concepts can still apply.
Read this editorial commentary on the shuffle function of the iPod and the negative effect it has on music. A few excerpts and some responses:
Some people might make the case that this lack of tribalism in music is a positive development. Obviously something's been gained, especially by the generation of kids who have access to great music in an uninterrupted stream. All those teenagers whose parents played them Bach in the womb, who were raised on a steady diet of the Beatles and Beck, are surely the most musically literate generation in history. But as music becomes more of a commodity, the value of any one band or song declines.
When genres blur, the culture of the past becomes an indistinct stew. Bands quit being symbolic, or invested with much more importance than as purveyors of hits on a soundtrack. If a young songwriter perceives little difference between early REM and early Elvis, the music he or she writes, and the culture it eventually spawns, risks never rising above pastiche.
Genres do not blur themselves. When genres blur it is become someone makes a point of blurring the genres. I do not see that many people complaining that the destruction of stylistic purity in jazz can be laid at the feet of Miles Davis. I know of more than a few critics who blasted Dave Brubeck for having "no swing" and for attempting to assimilate classical elements into his work. Purity of musical style does not indicate purity of personhood.
If as Leo Brouwer put it a few years ago there is a failure on the part of academia to fully appreciate the significance and value of fusion as a musical approach then perhaps this linked editorial may be taken as a paradoxical populist objection. Sure, the populist objection is still ultimately a hipster posture of the sort that academia is guilty of but my main jibe is that compared to the work of an actual musicologist the objections of a hipster amount to a populist objection rather than an academic one, that the purity of the culture associated with a musical style gets lost. This is why some commenters on the editorial, perhaps quite unfairly, see the whole gist of the editorial as lamely curmudgeonly and even racist. That's a histrionic over-reaction ... but that's not unsurprising coming from folks who make comments on Seattle Weekly links to a column in Reverb, is it?
That connection is all but gone now. The endless playlist has reduced every song to top-40 status, to an equal footing in a shuffle roulette. Songs that once stood for something are interspersed randomly with ones that didn't, all just a skip button away from oblivion. I'm going to make an effort from now on to try to remember a little bit of the world each song came from. I owe them that.
Now here's the part where I put on my faux academic/social critic hat and point out that the whole idea that are songs that once stood for something (and don't now?) being set against songs that didn't suggests both a hegemonic and a consumeristic impulse that delineates on the basis of status. We can't have it both ways, we can't value the album as the artifact of true fandom and then invoke that some songs mattered and some songs didn't because we all know that some songs on an album matter more than others.
Some songs are just plain old filler created to meet a contractual obligation. That "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones became a massive hit and a manifesto for a generation does not mean that it wasn't originally written as a simple space-filler to make sure the album had enough songs on it. I defy anyone to argue that "Goodbye Blue Sky" is anywhere near as interesting or important a song on The Wall than "Another Brick in the Wall" or "Comfortably Numb". "Won't Get Fooled Again" is incontestably more important and memorable as a song than "My Wife". Since this is the case within albums it vitiates any force a person could have in trying to say that albums gave us a more cohesive and intense listening experience.
Here's the thing, not everyone listens to music in the same way and listens for the same things. I can tell you that my lack of keen interest in pop music these days is not because I don't listen. I listen but I listen for lyrics, how lyrics connect to melodies, how musical form reinforces associated meaning. I listen for thematic and formal development. Music is to me not merely about the expression of feelings or the consolidation of cultural values that are, strictly speaking, extra-musical. Music is capable of exploring ideas. This doesn't mean that I'm a big fan of Elliot Carter but it does mean I appreciate a lot of music by Messiaen and Bach.
Now here's the other thing, a lot of those songs on those old albums DON'T mean something. Sure a hard-core Dylan fan will as quickly recognize "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" as "Like a Rolling Stone". But for most people that first song never mattered because they weren't listening to it. The experiences that bind us together are the same experiences that can also keep us apart. Do we "really" want a society in which fans of the Bee Gees and fans of AC/DC can't stand each other and won't associate with each other? I would say my life has moved along just fine without the music of either band.
What Roderick considers a problem in the shuffle-age of the iPod, the decline in value of the individual song as music becomes more of a commodity, is a shibboleth. Music has always been a commodity and if you want to find a demonstration of how the value of an individual song can get obliterated by the sheer accumulation of listening try listening to everything Robert Johnson ever recorded in one go. The thing about pre-World War 2 blues performers is they didn't release albums, they released singles, and if you set those singles back to back you begin to realize that as good as he was to have heard one Robert Johnson song is to have very nearly heard them all. I always enjoyed Blind Willie Johnson a great deal more personally but that's a personal taste matter. I do still own all of Robert Johnson's work.
All work in the arts is pastiche in the earliest stages of any artist's career. We can point to how early Beethoven sounds suspiciously like late Haydn. We can chart the shift in Mozart's concept of formal and thematic development after he came into contact with Bach (i.e. Mozart started sounded much, much cooler!). It's not hard to chart the trajectory of Hindemith's early work influenced by Debussy and Wagner through to his shift away from romanticism into expressionism and then his later neo-classical phase after coming into contact with the music of Stravinsky, Webern, and others.
If a young songwriter hears early R.E.M and early Elvis and notices that the use of song forms descended from Tin Pan Alley and country permeate their work this is not a sign that the young songwriter is going to make some indistinguishable musical brine it may simply be a sign that that songwriter has figured out that musical forms and themes can't be restricted to the largely cosmetic differences in what amplifier or what solid-body electric guitar were used. R.E.M. and Elvis are both examples of pastiche. This is not a reason to dislike or like them it's simply a reality of any serious musicological engagement with what their recordings reveal. Do Bob Dylan fans go on and on about how his early works were nothing more than a pastiche of Woody Guthrie songs or snippets of things that could have passed for Ginsbergh? Uh, not too much it seems.
The disadvantage of the contemporary scene for music is that it reveals what classical snobs have been trying to say for decades, that the whole of pop music (i.e. non-concert music) is a virtually indistinguishable mush of songs separated not by any inherently musical differences but by cultural, ethnic, socio-economic and other distinctions. Now I think all of those assertions have always been grossly overplayed and I still think Stevie Wonder remains a musical genius but what any concerned hipster musical fan's worries prove about pop and indie music is that the things that bind them together at the level of musical form and musical idiom have always been stronger than the things that were once considered to separate them.
With respect to grunge 19 years ago is not recent history, man. I don't regret the music of Nirvana receding into the mists of history just a teensy bit Grunge was just emo before emo got the label and was what we got when punk from twenty years earlier was put in the microwave and came out of the reheating process a little spongier and less flavorful. I don't really need to further spell out that I was in high school when grunge came out and found the whole musical style insufferably stupid, do I?
The shuffling of music has not dilluted its cultural impact, the tendency of people to not listen to music as more than a soundtrack to one's own life does that. The shuffling of music has not dilluted the cultural impact of music so much as revealed that if you shuffle 300 blues songs you're going to realize that that's an awful lot of I-IV-I-V-I to listen to for hours in 2.5 minute episodes! We're not talking about some giant cyclical work like Bach's Matthew Passion, Messiaen's Vingt Regards, Penderecki's Lukaspassio, Beethoven's Fifth, Haydn's Op. 76 string quartets, Stravinksy's Rite of Spring, Arvo Part's Berliner Mass, or Byrd's Mass for Five Voices. The reasons all those rock and pop songs blur together is because they do, just the same way 104 Haydn symphonies tend to blur together if you try to absorb them in big chunks.
The closest pop music has ever come to actually requiring an extended attention to musical form was the oft-derided "concept album". I enjoy classical and pop and jazz but at some point someone has to keep saying that the only thing goofier than the snobbish disdain of classical fans toward non-classical music is a hipsterish worry that 3 minute odes to sex, drugs, and rock `n roll praising its own virtues may somehow be drained of their life-changing power. How we listen is what gives us the ability or inability to hear and be transformed by beauty and truth. A certain Jewish rabbi once said "He who has hears to ear, let him hear." To the one who has more will be given but to the one who has not even what he thinks he has will be taken away from him. Now obviously Jesus was speaking about things far more important than what bands one listens to but at a much smaller level the concepts can still apply.
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
Link: LA Times commentary, "phony solutions for real social ills"
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-boaz-social-conservatives-20110207,0,4157527.story
Not TOO surprising coming from someone connected to the Cato Institute but an interesting little read all the same. If social conservatives are concerned about abortion and gay marriage as symptoms of what is wrong with society why focus on those when the bigger problems or the prevalence of divorce and single parenthood? At a purely anecdotal level most of the "heathen" secular leftists either don't have children and don't want children or are raising their children. It tends to be among the politicall conservative self-described Christians I know that divorce and single parenthood seems more common.
I've seen a few bewildering cases in which a person speaks against something in the absttract while benefiting from it in the concrete. One person I know spoke against unemployment as "government subsidized work" while having a job that derives from a defense department program. It doesn't get more government subsidized than that. Now I hasten to add that I think that particular government-subsidized program is a good and useful thing but I STILL pointed out the odd irony of a man speaking up against government-subsidized work while benefiting from it himself.
A more puzzling example, though, was discovering a woman who was lamenting people who want government hand-outs and entitlements who is now a single parent and who was lamenting the tribulation of not having her unemployment benefits extended. Now I have been loathe to just pick up state aid for myself even though, in principle, I do not automatically object to its existence or use. All things considered I'd rather NOT be dependent on state aid but if I have no alternative I'm willing to go with it. What doesn't make sense to me is to denounce people as a whole for taking government assistance while making use of it yourself or denouncing others for it. As my sister noted with some amusement recently, Ayn Rand was willing to have one of her medical aids get medical assistance through government programs near the end of her life while still being against moochers.
Now I am the kind of moribund and pessimistic fellow who believes that inconsistency and hypocrisy are unavoidable and inextricably bound up in the human condition. Even if you are not a hypocrite (and I believe most people are not, strictly speaking, hypocrites) you will still at some point completely fail to live out the ideals you aspire to and urge others to. It is not necessarily hypocrisy to say that people should avoid making use of government programs like welfare or medicaid or unemployment in favor of working where they can if you end up injured on the job and file an L&I claim or you get laid off from your job and collect unemployment.
Contrary to those people who have only had to pay into unemployment without ever having to collect it I would say that it's too easy to dismiss people who collect unemployment checks as being moochers discouraged from doing real work by government handouots. Your objection is "probably" not based on your sense of justice being broken with respect to the person who got laid off but your sense of justice about your possessions being offended. If, however, it's all "God's money" then if the state takes a few things out in advance then God providentially took some of His money from you before you could consider it part of your paycheck. Sorry, folks, but I'm not enough of an entrepreneur yet to share the moral outrage just yet. I might share it one day, though, so I can't say that sense of outrage is somehow "wrong".
But it does seem hypocritical to condemn in others what we excuse in ourselves. I'm not sure I would want to speak up against people living off of government handouts and entitlement programs as a whole if I'm only getting by because of food stamps or welfare or state medical aid for myself or my kids. The hypocrisy isn't in the necessity of that reliance, it's in the condemnation I would heap on others for having some kind of moral failure that led them to doing what I would be doing.
Now if someone were married and their spouse left them and they were stuck getting by trying to raise a kid then I'd say that the social welfare program exists to provide a modicum of help (note I said a modicum). If someone divorced their spouse and went out and had a kid out of wedlock with someone else and THEN took up government aid then, well, I can't say I have a ton of sympathy for moral outrage coming from that person.
As conservatives might put it, you can't go to war against the math, against the statistics and likelihoods of it all. If you bail on your spouse and have a kid out of wedlock then if you attempt to speak as a conservative against what you consider to be wrong with society at the level of people bailing on a spouse and kids and living off the largesse of funds wrongly appropriated via tyrannical force (oh, that would be taxes, right?) then you are the hypocrite, not the liberals you might blame for societal ills. You are, after all, the single parent who got that way by bailing on your marriage and bringing forth a child you can't afford to raise without government assistance. Isn't that what social conservatives object to?
How does a social conservative who has gotten themselves into that kind of position not notice the hypocrisy inherent in that? I don't know. Maybe if I ever thought dating and marriage were worth actively pursuing for my own life I might understand the temptations better that led a social conservative to literaly embody the things he/she most resents about "liberalism". I'll admit that I really do not understand how people get "caught up in the moment" with all that lovey-dovey stuff and view the emotional volatility of all that stuff with a skepticism and suspicion that I admit even I consider very unhealthy.
Not TOO surprising coming from someone connected to the Cato Institute but an interesting little read all the same. If social conservatives are concerned about abortion and gay marriage as symptoms of what is wrong with society why focus on those when the bigger problems or the prevalence of divorce and single parenthood? At a purely anecdotal level most of the "heathen" secular leftists either don't have children and don't want children or are raising their children. It tends to be among the politicall conservative self-described Christians I know that divorce and single parenthood seems more common.
I've seen a few bewildering cases in which a person speaks against something in the absttract while benefiting from it in the concrete. One person I know spoke against unemployment as "government subsidized work" while having a job that derives from a defense department program. It doesn't get more government subsidized than that. Now I hasten to add that I think that particular government-subsidized program is a good and useful thing but I STILL pointed out the odd irony of a man speaking up against government-subsidized work while benefiting from it himself.
A more puzzling example, though, was discovering a woman who was lamenting people who want government hand-outs and entitlements who is now a single parent and who was lamenting the tribulation of not having her unemployment benefits extended. Now I have been loathe to just pick up state aid for myself even though, in principle, I do not automatically object to its existence or use. All things considered I'd rather NOT be dependent on state aid but if I have no alternative I'm willing to go with it. What doesn't make sense to me is to denounce people as a whole for taking government assistance while making use of it yourself or denouncing others for it. As my sister noted with some amusement recently, Ayn Rand was willing to have one of her medical aids get medical assistance through government programs near the end of her life while still being against moochers.
Now I am the kind of moribund and pessimistic fellow who believes that inconsistency and hypocrisy are unavoidable and inextricably bound up in the human condition. Even if you are not a hypocrite (and I believe most people are not, strictly speaking, hypocrites) you will still at some point completely fail to live out the ideals you aspire to and urge others to. It is not necessarily hypocrisy to say that people should avoid making use of government programs like welfare or medicaid or unemployment in favor of working where they can if you end up injured on the job and file an L&I claim or you get laid off from your job and collect unemployment.
Contrary to those people who have only had to pay into unemployment without ever having to collect it I would say that it's too easy to dismiss people who collect unemployment checks as being moochers discouraged from doing real work by government handouots. Your objection is "probably" not based on your sense of justice being broken with respect to the person who got laid off but your sense of justice about your possessions being offended. If, however, it's all "God's money" then if the state takes a few things out in advance then God providentially took some of His money from you before you could consider it part of your paycheck. Sorry, folks, but I'm not enough of an entrepreneur yet to share the moral outrage just yet. I might share it one day, though, so I can't say that sense of outrage is somehow "wrong".
But it does seem hypocritical to condemn in others what we excuse in ourselves. I'm not sure I would want to speak up against people living off of government handouts and entitlement programs as a whole if I'm only getting by because of food stamps or welfare or state medical aid for myself or my kids. The hypocrisy isn't in the necessity of that reliance, it's in the condemnation I would heap on others for having some kind of moral failure that led them to doing what I would be doing.
Now if someone were married and their spouse left them and they were stuck getting by trying to raise a kid then I'd say that the social welfare program exists to provide a modicum of help (note I said a modicum). If someone divorced their spouse and went out and had a kid out of wedlock with someone else and THEN took up government aid then, well, I can't say I have a ton of sympathy for moral outrage coming from that person.
As conservatives might put it, you can't go to war against the math, against the statistics and likelihoods of it all. If you bail on your spouse and have a kid out of wedlock then if you attempt to speak as a conservative against what you consider to be wrong with society at the level of people bailing on a spouse and kids and living off the largesse of funds wrongly appropriated via tyrannical force (oh, that would be taxes, right?) then you are the hypocrite, not the liberals you might blame for societal ills. You are, after all, the single parent who got that way by bailing on your marriage and bringing forth a child you can't afford to raise without government assistance. Isn't that what social conservatives object to?
How does a social conservative who has gotten themselves into that kind of position not notice the hypocrisy inherent in that? I don't know. Maybe if I ever thought dating and marriage were worth actively pursuing for my own life I might understand the temptations better that led a social conservative to literaly embody the things he/she most resents about "liberalism". I'll admit that I really do not understand how people get "caught up in the moment" with all that lovey-dovey stuff and view the emotional volatility of all that stuff with a skepticism and suspicion that I admit even I consider very unhealthy.
Sunday, February 06, 2011
"heart issue" and heart issues
In the Christian circles I have been part of over the last decade I have heard an idiomatic expression I have never heard anywhere else. The expression is "heart issue". It almost invariably refers to an imputed motive, though it can refer to a curiosity or discernment about ACTUAL motives. When a Christian says he or she wants to address "the heart issue" this is, at the risk of speaking too broadly and cruelly, a kind of Christianese psycho-babble, a pop pyschological shibboleth that goes unrecognized because of a tacitly assumed "biblical" foundation.
Few things, just now, seem dumber or more risky to me than a Christian going to another Christian attempting to address "a heart issue". I don't say this because Christians are not called to be irons sharpening irons to each other. I early on came to an appreciation that "blows from a friend are better than kisses from an enemy" even though I have written elsewere in this blog about how the riddle-like nature of many proverbs suggests that many Christians only reflect upon one possible meaning of this verse and to that one meaning, in contrast to the other, I intend to devote my attention.
Christians often give themselves liberties that normal heathens would not advise. What I mean to say is that a husband and a wife might have an argument and, whereas in a not-overtly spiritual marriage the two would talk through their differences and work out some kind of solultion if they want their relationship to continue being healthy, a spiritual couple may well have lengthy discourses about how this, that, and the other are "heart issues" or "sin issues". Of course there are perfectly legitimate reasons for discussing all of life with those categories in mind for a Christian ... but I have seen a few cases in which that spirituality becomes a tool that a Christian can appropriate, pious-sounding language invoked as leverage for much less than pious thoughts, feelings, and actions.
What I alluded to earlier I will explain here, the famous proverb that is often rendered "faithful are the wounds of a friend, deceptive the kisses of an enemy" or in the aforementioned alternate wording, can also be read in a substantially different but apparently similar way: the wounds of a friend endure but the kisses of an enemy are profuse. WHEN a friend hurts you the wound is terrible and long-lasting precisely because the wound comes from a friend. If you don't believe that this is a practical reflection or meditation on the nature of the proverb do yourself the favor of reading Psalm 55! Yes, I am aware of the christological import of the psalm but bear with me as I have come to realize in the last seven years that a default mode of interpreting the psalms ONLY as christological references has been one of my biggest problems in appreciating the psalms. I have already written about that elsewhere so forgive yet another digression.
What I have meant to say in the above is to note that there is a flip side to a popular proverb through which we as Christians can justify confronting fellow believers on what we consider to be their great failures. If we only consider the first, more popular meaning of the proverb we may be quick to confront a "friend" (see any variation of the "open letter" in blogging) without considering the second, less popular meaning. We are quick to suppose that in Jesus our blows prove our faithfulness without considering that they will be long-lasting and whether or not the long-lasting effects of the blows are going to be the most faithful way to express a God-honoring friendship. The desire to offer the "wounds from a friend" may be a sign of neither friendship nor help. The proverb obliges us to consider whether we are friends before counseling that faithful blows will be helpful.
I have seen a few cases in my own life where I or others have assumed the worst about each other as fellow Christians and the results were disastrous. Not too long ago I saw to Christians I know display a problematic relational pattern. I eventually concluded I had to speak to both Christians separately about this pattern. Without getting too detailed what I noticed among them both was a pattern in whiich each Christian felt justified in having a suspicious disposition based on an assessment of the other's heart. One of them actually said that the concern at sake was not addressing concrete behavior but "the heart issue".
That was the point where I pointed out that that, precisely, was the problem. He wanted to get past specific, concrete measurable things that could be practically addressed to get at "the heart issue" and that attitude and assumption was actually where the bad faith was developing. He had already made up his mind about what was in his neighbor's heart based on his own concerns. I had seen the same problem with the other Christian. We can tell ourselves that by wanting to skip past the behavior and get to "the heart" that we are doing the Christian thing. In many cases we are not, we are tempted to spiritualize our own resentments and fears. I suggested to both Christians that what would work better is for concrete things to get addressed. I even went so far as to argue that in one case the proper response was not to go in and try to address the "heart issue" but to instead eastablish a concrete approach to mutually agreed upon objecctives.
When I was told that this might skip the heart issue I pointed out that we should not ignore the power of operant conditioning. For instance, I would suspect any parent knows that a child never has the "heart" to clean his or her room without some kind of external motivator. It takes a lot of conditioning and training and encouragement and, let's face it, rewards to induce a child to make a habit of cleaning a room. I'm not even an adult who is as concerned as others about how tidy my room happens to be. My hope is that the Christians I talked to stopped assessing each other on the basis of "heart issues" that were projections of their own suspicions or resentments and were able to discuss the concrete behavioral and relational rifts that developed in their relationship.
There are some Christians whose "heart issue" is that they constantly want to frame their concerns, their objections, their fears or resentments of others as "heart issues" in other people that must be addressed. It comes off as a wonderfully spiritual and c0nvincing approach to spirituality but it means that the Christian who embraces this kind of spirituality becomes an insufferable, sanctimonious disputer. Differences that might otherwise be manageable if kept at the mundane level on which the occur are elevated to nearly insurmountable problems because "the heart issue" has to get addressed.
And naturally how this plays out pours fuel on the fire rather than puts a fire out. This leads to a Christian who, to put things unfairly and bluntly, is much happier dishing out than taking confrontations about "heart issue" subjects in any relational context. "I" get to tell you that the real problem between us is the "heart issue" but if "you" confront me about being a jerk then "I" get to hide behind the idea that if "you" knew my heart things would go more easily. It becomes a self-exonerating cycle.
So if one Christian notices another Christian doesn't clean the dishes as much as he'd like he can tell that other Christian that he'd appreciate a lot more diligence about dishwashing. OR he could say that more than the dishes not being washed to his liking he's REALLY concerned about the "heart issue" behind the person who is not washing the dishes as much as he likes. If you've spotted the Christianese so far you can imagine how being on the receiving end of this kind of pious condescension could inspire a negative reaction even from a fellow believer.
Perhaps the first Christian might even go so far as to throw in another wonderfully Christianese buzzword and say that it's a matter of "stewardship". In terms of rhetoric this is actually a brilliant maneuver because it skips past any enquiry as to the nature of the behavioral lapse and presupposes the subject around which any discussion should happen. Anyone who attempts to back the conversation up to concrete actions is trying to dodge "the heart issue", which has been made about stewardship of objects and has not managed at any point to touch the relational dynamics at hand. Of course the first Christian who brings up "stewardship" has absolutely no idea that he's done this and only perceives an uneasiness or hostility on the part of the recipient of his admonitions, which he then suspects is yet another "heart issue".
There, if you're with me this far, is one of the inevitable risks of framing everything in "heart issue" terms--it becomes a nasty form of self-fulfilling prophecy in which employing spiritual jargon and making assumptions about the motive of the other person actually goes a long way to transforming them into the adversary you have, in your heart, already decided that other person must be. Through your own eagerness for confrontation or moral evaluation you paradoxically end up turning the person into the kind of person you fear they are by how you relate to them. Men look at outward appearances but God looks on the heart.
Now some may say at this point that we cannot judge the heart but we can judge the fruit. What this often really means in practice is judging actions and associations. Let's take a popular example, evangelicals and politicians. There are plenty of evangelicals who consider Bush 2 to have been a solid president who respects the Constitution. I have many sincere doubts about that myself. I don't see a necessary correlation between one's bona fides as an evangelical and the success of one's given job.
Now it's true that the scriptures describe rulers as good or bad based on what are fairly simple criteria. We don't live in a theocratic monarchy, obviously, but we can search the scriptures and consider leaders to succeed or fail in governing in a way that seems to conform to scriptural precedents. But the scriptures also reveal that some of the best intended Israelite kings made some of the worst mistakes and had the least competence in important leadership decisions. Even a king who starts off well can be ruined by initial success. If you want to read further on that I have some blog entries on Jehoshephat and Amaziah for your consideration. For this entry it suffices to say that another problem of attempting to address "heart issues" is that a person may have the best heart possible for a mortal and still be imcompetent.
Perhaps the best way to sum all of this up is in the apostolic exhortation that we consider others as better than ourselves. We are not told we have no value, of course, because we are being saved by the work of Christ and the Spirit for fellowship with the Father, Son and Spirit. Considering each other as better than ourselves as a useful corrective against the temptation to make things about addressing someone else's "heart issue". It would be overstating my case to mention that Pharisees were great at jumping into the lives of other people and confronting them about their "heart issue". They tried doing this with Jesus disciples and then eventually directly questioned Jesus' motives. Of course we know from the scriptures that God the Son took their allegations and assumptions about His "heart issue" and turned it back on them. Their eagerness to make everything about Jesus' "heart issue" gave the Lord the opportunity to confront them about the real problem at hand, THEIR heart issue.
Few things, just now, seem dumber or more risky to me than a Christian going to another Christian attempting to address "a heart issue". I don't say this because Christians are not called to be irons sharpening irons to each other. I early on came to an appreciation that "blows from a friend are better than kisses from an enemy" even though I have written elsewere in this blog about how the riddle-like nature of many proverbs suggests that many Christians only reflect upon one possible meaning of this verse and to that one meaning, in contrast to the other, I intend to devote my attention.
Christians often give themselves liberties that normal heathens would not advise. What I mean to say is that a husband and a wife might have an argument and, whereas in a not-overtly spiritual marriage the two would talk through their differences and work out some kind of solultion if they want their relationship to continue being healthy, a spiritual couple may well have lengthy discourses about how this, that, and the other are "heart issues" or "sin issues". Of course there are perfectly legitimate reasons for discussing all of life with those categories in mind for a Christian ... but I have seen a few cases in which that spirituality becomes a tool that a Christian can appropriate, pious-sounding language invoked as leverage for much less than pious thoughts, feelings, and actions.
What I alluded to earlier I will explain here, the famous proverb that is often rendered "faithful are the wounds of a friend, deceptive the kisses of an enemy" or in the aforementioned alternate wording, can also be read in a substantially different but apparently similar way: the wounds of a friend endure but the kisses of an enemy are profuse. WHEN a friend hurts you the wound is terrible and long-lasting precisely because the wound comes from a friend. If you don't believe that this is a practical reflection or meditation on the nature of the proverb do yourself the favor of reading Psalm 55! Yes, I am aware of the christological import of the psalm but bear with me as I have come to realize in the last seven years that a default mode of interpreting the psalms ONLY as christological references has been one of my biggest problems in appreciating the psalms. I have already written about that elsewhere so forgive yet another digression.
What I have meant to say in the above is to note that there is a flip side to a popular proverb through which we as Christians can justify confronting fellow believers on what we consider to be their great failures. If we only consider the first, more popular meaning of the proverb we may be quick to confront a "friend" (see any variation of the "open letter" in blogging) without considering the second, less popular meaning. We are quick to suppose that in Jesus our blows prove our faithfulness without considering that they will be long-lasting and whether or not the long-lasting effects of the blows are going to be the most faithful way to express a God-honoring friendship. The desire to offer the "wounds from a friend" may be a sign of neither friendship nor help. The proverb obliges us to consider whether we are friends before counseling that faithful blows will be helpful.
I have seen a few cases in my own life where I or others have assumed the worst about each other as fellow Christians and the results were disastrous. Not too long ago I saw to Christians I know display a problematic relational pattern. I eventually concluded I had to speak to both Christians separately about this pattern. Without getting too detailed what I noticed among them both was a pattern in whiich each Christian felt justified in having a suspicious disposition based on an assessment of the other's heart. One of them actually said that the concern at sake was not addressing concrete behavior but "the heart issue".
That was the point where I pointed out that that, precisely, was the problem. He wanted to get past specific, concrete measurable things that could be practically addressed to get at "the heart issue" and that attitude and assumption was actually where the bad faith was developing. He had already made up his mind about what was in his neighbor's heart based on his own concerns. I had seen the same problem with the other Christian. We can tell ourselves that by wanting to skip past the behavior and get to "the heart" that we are doing the Christian thing. In many cases we are not, we are tempted to spiritualize our own resentments and fears. I suggested to both Christians that what would work better is for concrete things to get addressed. I even went so far as to argue that in one case the proper response was not to go in and try to address the "heart issue" but to instead eastablish a concrete approach to mutually agreed upon objecctives.
When I was told that this might skip the heart issue I pointed out that we should not ignore the power of operant conditioning. For instance, I would suspect any parent knows that a child never has the "heart" to clean his or her room without some kind of external motivator. It takes a lot of conditioning and training and encouragement and, let's face it, rewards to induce a child to make a habit of cleaning a room. I'm not even an adult who is as concerned as others about how tidy my room happens to be. My hope is that the Christians I talked to stopped assessing each other on the basis of "heart issues" that were projections of their own suspicions or resentments and were able to discuss the concrete behavioral and relational rifts that developed in their relationship.
There are some Christians whose "heart issue" is that they constantly want to frame their concerns, their objections, their fears or resentments of others as "heart issues" in other people that must be addressed. It comes off as a wonderfully spiritual and c0nvincing approach to spirituality but it means that the Christian who embraces this kind of spirituality becomes an insufferable, sanctimonious disputer. Differences that might otherwise be manageable if kept at the mundane level on which the occur are elevated to nearly insurmountable problems because "the heart issue" has to get addressed.
And naturally how this plays out pours fuel on the fire rather than puts a fire out. This leads to a Christian who, to put things unfairly and bluntly, is much happier dishing out than taking confrontations about "heart issue" subjects in any relational context. "I" get to tell you that the real problem between us is the "heart issue" but if "you" confront me about being a jerk then "I" get to hide behind the idea that if "you" knew my heart things would go more easily. It becomes a self-exonerating cycle.
So if one Christian notices another Christian doesn't clean the dishes as much as he'd like he can tell that other Christian that he'd appreciate a lot more diligence about dishwashing. OR he could say that more than the dishes not being washed to his liking he's REALLY concerned about the "heart issue" behind the person who is not washing the dishes as much as he likes. If you've spotted the Christianese so far you can imagine how being on the receiving end of this kind of pious condescension could inspire a negative reaction even from a fellow believer.
Perhaps the first Christian might even go so far as to throw in another wonderfully Christianese buzzword and say that it's a matter of "stewardship". In terms of rhetoric this is actually a brilliant maneuver because it skips past any enquiry as to the nature of the behavioral lapse and presupposes the subject around which any discussion should happen. Anyone who attempts to back the conversation up to concrete actions is trying to dodge "the heart issue", which has been made about stewardship of objects and has not managed at any point to touch the relational dynamics at hand. Of course the first Christian who brings up "stewardship" has absolutely no idea that he's done this and only perceives an uneasiness or hostility on the part of the recipient of his admonitions, which he then suspects is yet another "heart issue".
There, if you're with me this far, is one of the inevitable risks of framing everything in "heart issue" terms--it becomes a nasty form of self-fulfilling prophecy in which employing spiritual jargon and making assumptions about the motive of the other person actually goes a long way to transforming them into the adversary you have, in your heart, already decided that other person must be. Through your own eagerness for confrontation or moral evaluation you paradoxically end up turning the person into the kind of person you fear they are by how you relate to them. Men look at outward appearances but God looks on the heart.
Now some may say at this point that we cannot judge the heart but we can judge the fruit. What this often really means in practice is judging actions and associations. Let's take a popular example, evangelicals and politicians. There are plenty of evangelicals who consider Bush 2 to have been a solid president who respects the Constitution. I have many sincere doubts about that myself. I don't see a necessary correlation between one's bona fides as an evangelical and the success of one's given job.
Now it's true that the scriptures describe rulers as good or bad based on what are fairly simple criteria. We don't live in a theocratic monarchy, obviously, but we can search the scriptures and consider leaders to succeed or fail in governing in a way that seems to conform to scriptural precedents. But the scriptures also reveal that some of the best intended Israelite kings made some of the worst mistakes and had the least competence in important leadership decisions. Even a king who starts off well can be ruined by initial success. If you want to read further on that I have some blog entries on Jehoshephat and Amaziah for your consideration. For this entry it suffices to say that another problem of attempting to address "heart issues" is that a person may have the best heart possible for a mortal and still be imcompetent.
Perhaps the best way to sum all of this up is in the apostolic exhortation that we consider others as better than ourselves. We are not told we have no value, of course, because we are being saved by the work of Christ and the Spirit for fellowship with the Father, Son and Spirit. Considering each other as better than ourselves as a useful corrective against the temptation to make things about addressing someone else's "heart issue". It would be overstating my case to mention that Pharisees were great at jumping into the lives of other people and confronting them about their "heart issue". They tried doing this with Jesus disciples and then eventually directly questioned Jesus' motives. Of course we know from the scriptures that God the Son took their allegations and assumptions about His "heart issue" and turned it back on them. Their eagerness to make everything about Jesus' "heart issue" gave the Lord the opportunity to confront them about the real problem at hand, THEIR heart issue.
Saturday, February 05, 2011
HT Orthocuban: how laws from two decades ago can contribute to unforeseen consequences
http://www.orthocuban.com/2011/02/the-bottom-line-of-the-healthcare-debate/
I have made no secret here and there that it often seems to me that Christians (and anyone, really) can establish a policy or precedent on the basis of immediate cultural or economic or political or social concerns without thinking through the implications of those policies and precedents. Fr. Ernesto points out that thanks to a law signed off by Reagan Republicans are in the position of attempting to oppose what they consider socialized medicine which, ironically, was half-way attained when Reagan signed off on the law that requires that no one be turned away from emergency room care regardless of citizenship, finances, or legal standing. As he put it, no one would contend now that the Gipper was a leftist or a socialist. It is a bit of an irony to consider that a law given to us by a Republican president may have had decades-long ripples that have gotten us to where we arenow.
Do we want to eliminate the legal requirement as it stands? Do we let hospitals turn away anyone and everyone for the reason of not having sufficient money to pay? Consider the reasons for which hospitals have turned away patients in the past and consider whether you might be a candidate in earlier epochs of medical practice of having been turned away. For all I know if Reagan hadn't signed that law into effect I could have been turned away by a hospital because when I had my big old macular detachment I had no job or money with which to pay for the surgery. Had THAT happened I would have lost my right eye, become completely illiterate, and have become a uselessly unemployable guy in his early twenties.
I have made no secret here and there that it often seems to me that Christians (and anyone, really) can establish a policy or precedent on the basis of immediate cultural or economic or political or social concerns without thinking through the implications of those policies and precedents. Fr. Ernesto points out that thanks to a law signed off by Reagan Republicans are in the position of attempting to oppose what they consider socialized medicine which, ironically, was half-way attained when Reagan signed off on the law that requires that no one be turned away from emergency room care regardless of citizenship, finances, or legal standing. As he put it, no one would contend now that the Gipper was a leftist or a socialist. It is a bit of an irony to consider that a law given to us by a Republican president may have had decades-long ripples that have gotten us to where we arenow.
Do we want to eliminate the legal requirement as it stands? Do we let hospitals turn away anyone and everyone for the reason of not having sufficient money to pay? Consider the reasons for which hospitals have turned away patients in the past and consider whether you might be a candidate in earlier epochs of medical practice of having been turned away. For all I know if Reagan hadn't signed that law into effect I could have been turned away by a hospital because when I had my big old macular detachment I had no job or money with which to pay for the surgery. Had THAT happened I would have lost my right eye, become completely illiterate, and have become a uselessly unemployable guy in his early twenties.
Link: Internet Monk: Learn from a lousy referee
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/imonk-classic-lessons-from-a-lousy-referee#more-16711
I was what some would derisively regard as a communications major, a journalism major no less. I would not say I was or am especially brilliant at this because one of the perennial obstacles I have faced in "communicating" has been that I don't tend to remember to simplify vocabular, jargon, and concepts for people. In fact I confess that I often look upon this simplifying impulse with suspicion because glib simplification of facts is a pet technique of demagogues (hey, I DID just mention I was a journalism major, right?).
But despite this weakness I have I firmly believe that the characteristic of a great writer is to convey his or her point by simultaneously NOT presuming you understand all the concepts and terms but also by being fluent enough with language to, in good faith, make the effort to express ideas so that even if you don't get every last tiny little syllable you BASICALLY get the idea of what the author intends to say. The author may not be OBLIGED to meet you at your door and spell everything out, the author may choose to make you work for comprehension, but the author is capable of doing all the work as a communicator to ensure that you DO finally understand. As an orchestration teacher I had in college once put it to me, the artists obligation is not to be understood so much as to not be misunderstood.
To that end, it's hard for me to express fully my appreciation for the writing that Michael Spenser (aka Internet Monk) did in his lifetime. He was a gifted communicator and certainly a capable writer. How do I know this? Look, I don't care about football. I don't care about athletics. In fact I generally find it profoundly silly and annoying when pastors attempt to make points that they anchor to sports events because it's not something I care about or find interesting, at all. I also tend to find it annoying because there's a propensity for a bunch of has-been, didn't-make it athletes to retroactively cast themselves as armchair pundits on games they couldn't play well enough to go pro. Hey, just because I don't care for sports doesn't mean I didn't notice all the armchair stuff. :)
All that said, Michael could write something that drew from the realm of sports but write it in a way where if you don't give a crap about sports you can STILL learn something from it and still find it interesting to read. I can say that for myself and I say that as someone who was conscripted into attending at least one football game and has never found anything about football interesting. But Michael's essay I've linked to is a fun read and a useful one not just for Christian "leaders" but how any Christian can consider living life as a whole.
I was what some would derisively regard as a communications major, a journalism major no less. I would not say I was or am especially brilliant at this because one of the perennial obstacles I have faced in "communicating" has been that I don't tend to remember to simplify vocabular, jargon, and concepts for people. In fact I confess that I often look upon this simplifying impulse with suspicion because glib simplification of facts is a pet technique of demagogues (hey, I DID just mention I was a journalism major, right?).
But despite this weakness I have I firmly believe that the characteristic of a great writer is to convey his or her point by simultaneously NOT presuming you understand all the concepts and terms but also by being fluent enough with language to, in good faith, make the effort to express ideas so that even if you don't get every last tiny little syllable you BASICALLY get the idea of what the author intends to say. The author may not be OBLIGED to meet you at your door and spell everything out, the author may choose to make you work for comprehension, but the author is capable of doing all the work as a communicator to ensure that you DO finally understand. As an orchestration teacher I had in college once put it to me, the artists obligation is not to be understood so much as to not be misunderstood.
To that end, it's hard for me to express fully my appreciation for the writing that Michael Spenser (aka Internet Monk) did in his lifetime. He was a gifted communicator and certainly a capable writer. How do I know this? Look, I don't care about football. I don't care about athletics. In fact I generally find it profoundly silly and annoying when pastors attempt to make points that they anchor to sports events because it's not something I care about or find interesting, at all. I also tend to find it annoying because there's a propensity for a bunch of has-been, didn't-make it athletes to retroactively cast themselves as armchair pundits on games they couldn't play well enough to go pro. Hey, just because I don't care for sports doesn't mean I didn't notice all the armchair stuff. :)
All that said, Michael could write something that drew from the realm of sports but write it in a way where if you don't give a crap about sports you can STILL learn something from it and still find it interesting to read. I can say that for myself and I say that as someone who was conscripted into attending at least one football game and has never found anything about football interesting. But Michael's essay I've linked to is a fun read and a useful one not just for Christian "leaders" but how any Christian can consider living life as a whole.
Friday, February 04, 2011
Families and worry
Family worries about each other. This is not news, nor is it some revelation of any special import. It is mundane. Worry is an extension of care and this, also, is nothing new.
What may feel new within the moment, or within the relationship, is to have a moment in which you discover that what a family member shares may already be something you worry about. For instance, my mom has called from time to time and said she's worried that I might be depressed. I tell her there's no need to worry or wonder about whether I am depressed. I am depressed, most of the time in fact. Not having a job and not managing to even land jobs when I apply at grocery stores or music shops for jobs I applied at in person is depressing. Having a whole set of skills and knowledge that are uselessly proprietary is depressing.
Not having a financial situation, by and large, that has been stable enough to even consider going back to school has been depressing and when that hasn't been depressing it has been depressing to consider whether it's worth it to rack up thousands more in debt by way of loans to earn yet another degree that may not even net me another job at the end of it all. So to the extant that my mom has worried all those worries can be confirmed.
On my side, well, let's just say that some news was broken about family health stuff that was not exactly a revelation in and of itself. The revelation was more that the revelation was made at all by the person who made the revelation about the person themselves. I had always been at least partly concerned that a relative of mine could drop dead at any moment, literally, since an episode of congestive heart failure the relative had back in 2006.
Even after reports of being cured came up I disbelieved those reports entirely but didn't say anything at the time out of a sense of diplomacy. Heart failure is not something that just gets better and while that sounds pessimistic or like "not a positive confession" I have lived with substantially impaired vision all my life. There are things in physical health where once it goes bad the effects can only be minimized and never reversed.
I know this because I've had at least one gigantic retinal detachment in my good eye and have to consider at least the risk that another big detachment could happen in either eye as I get older. I am not merely speaking in abstractions or apart from personal experience here. Once you have part of the inside of your eye peel off the most you can do is minimize the damage that causes. It is not possible within any human effort to reverse that damage. The only foreseeable likely avenues for such an innovation to happen as best I can conceive that would be a combination of stem cell research and a selective combination of cloning and eugenics. I trust I don't have to rehearse the sentiments most evangelicals would be likely to have about this trio of suggestions. :)
In other words I have spent the last four years wondering about every week if this relative wasn't going to drop dead at any moment. Jesus said that worrying won't add even an hour to your life but I worry anyway. I was worried about stress at my job when I had my job, I was worried about relational stress in my family that I was sure (alternately) that I could and could not do something about. I was worried about family health issues, I was worried about church issues. Unsurprisingly all this dread began to culminate in panic attacks which I for the most part kept to myself.
I did share with a certain circle of friends and discovered to my further discouragement (at first) that a surprisingly large ratio of the friends I confided this matter to seemed to take no note of it at all. There were friends and family I felt comfortable sharing this with who were very supportive and I learned along the way that sometimes you are better off not telling everyone you would wish to tell something what is going on. I can respect the conviction that there is and isn't a right time to share with family or friends just how badly things are really going.
So when the relative shared with me just how bad things have really been it was more a relief than a shock. I feel bad putting it this way but I had already been sufficiently worried the person could have dropped dead any given week over the last few years that at least hearing that was the official medical verdict made me feel that however little my worries lengthened my life my worries were, at least, not the least bit irrational. It sounds really stupid to say this in print or in person because it can be taken as saying, "Well, uh, at least I was right about what I was worried about for so many years because that turned out to be the case."
We as Christians can often be told to not worry. Jesus, after all, said do not worry about what you will eat or what you will drink or what you will wear for the Lord knows you need these things. The context of that teaching does not mean that you don't worry that a relative could die at any moment. David did not pray in Psalm 3 as though all was well adn that he had no need to worry because his son was seeking to kill him and vital allies had betrayed his confidence and sided with a usurper. David did not fail to recognize that he had brought about much of this grief on himself and yet even as he could acknowledge how his own sin led to this point of disaster he didn't refrain from asking the Lord to deliver him.
I suggest that this awkward, exasperating paradox is more emblematic of the Christian life than "don't worry, be happy". We're not going to stop worrying or fearing that terrible things might happen. Trusting the Lord does not mean we won't have any fear. Far from it. What trusting the Lord means, as poorly as I may be understanding it, is clarified by Jesus Himself, "Do not fear men who can destroy the body and can do nothing more. Fear the One who can cast both body and soul into Hell."
We are not enjoined with "Do not fear" because there is no reason to fear our enemies or poor health but because what the Lord in His power could do to us is far worse and yet the Lord values us more than many sparrows. At my old church, early on, we were admonished to realize that many things Christians believe are "held in tension". Over time I have wondered if Christians tire of "holding things in tension" and wish simply to choose or affirm merely one or the other. We want things to either be fine or either be terrible. Worry is in some sense an endless temptation because worry is recognizing the risk of disaster in otherwise stable situations (even situations that are, let's be honest, not always very good).
For reasons that are not entirely clear to me I feel I shall have to tackle writing about family and worry connected to the last words of David. This is just a ramble here.
What may feel new within the moment, or within the relationship, is to have a moment in which you discover that what a family member shares may already be something you worry about. For instance, my mom has called from time to time and said she's worried that I might be depressed. I tell her there's no need to worry or wonder about whether I am depressed. I am depressed, most of the time in fact. Not having a job and not managing to even land jobs when I apply at grocery stores or music shops for jobs I applied at in person is depressing. Having a whole set of skills and knowledge that are uselessly proprietary is depressing.
Not having a financial situation, by and large, that has been stable enough to even consider going back to school has been depressing and when that hasn't been depressing it has been depressing to consider whether it's worth it to rack up thousands more in debt by way of loans to earn yet another degree that may not even net me another job at the end of it all. So to the extant that my mom has worried all those worries can be confirmed.
On my side, well, let's just say that some news was broken about family health stuff that was not exactly a revelation in and of itself. The revelation was more that the revelation was made at all by the person who made the revelation about the person themselves. I had always been at least partly concerned that a relative of mine could drop dead at any moment, literally, since an episode of congestive heart failure the relative had back in 2006.
Even after reports of being cured came up I disbelieved those reports entirely but didn't say anything at the time out of a sense of diplomacy. Heart failure is not something that just gets better and while that sounds pessimistic or like "not a positive confession" I have lived with substantially impaired vision all my life. There are things in physical health where once it goes bad the effects can only be minimized and never reversed.
I know this because I've had at least one gigantic retinal detachment in my good eye and have to consider at least the risk that another big detachment could happen in either eye as I get older. I am not merely speaking in abstractions or apart from personal experience here. Once you have part of the inside of your eye peel off the most you can do is minimize the damage that causes. It is not possible within any human effort to reverse that damage. The only foreseeable likely avenues for such an innovation to happen as best I can conceive that would be a combination of stem cell research and a selective combination of cloning and eugenics. I trust I don't have to rehearse the sentiments most evangelicals would be likely to have about this trio of suggestions. :)
In other words I have spent the last four years wondering about every week if this relative wasn't going to drop dead at any moment. Jesus said that worrying won't add even an hour to your life but I worry anyway. I was worried about stress at my job when I had my job, I was worried about relational stress in my family that I was sure (alternately) that I could and could not do something about. I was worried about family health issues, I was worried about church issues. Unsurprisingly all this dread began to culminate in panic attacks which I for the most part kept to myself.
I did share with a certain circle of friends and discovered to my further discouragement (at first) that a surprisingly large ratio of the friends I confided this matter to seemed to take no note of it at all. There were friends and family I felt comfortable sharing this with who were very supportive and I learned along the way that sometimes you are better off not telling everyone you would wish to tell something what is going on. I can respect the conviction that there is and isn't a right time to share with family or friends just how badly things are really going.
So when the relative shared with me just how bad things have really been it was more a relief than a shock. I feel bad putting it this way but I had already been sufficiently worried the person could have dropped dead any given week over the last few years that at least hearing that was the official medical verdict made me feel that however little my worries lengthened my life my worries were, at least, not the least bit irrational. It sounds really stupid to say this in print or in person because it can be taken as saying, "Well, uh, at least I was right about what I was worried about for so many years because that turned out to be the case."
We as Christians can often be told to not worry. Jesus, after all, said do not worry about what you will eat or what you will drink or what you will wear for the Lord knows you need these things. The context of that teaching does not mean that you don't worry that a relative could die at any moment. David did not pray in Psalm 3 as though all was well adn that he had no need to worry because his son was seeking to kill him and vital allies had betrayed his confidence and sided with a usurper. David did not fail to recognize that he had brought about much of this grief on himself and yet even as he could acknowledge how his own sin led to this point of disaster he didn't refrain from asking the Lord to deliver him.
I suggest that this awkward, exasperating paradox is more emblematic of the Christian life than "don't worry, be happy". We're not going to stop worrying or fearing that terrible things might happen. Trusting the Lord does not mean we won't have any fear. Far from it. What trusting the Lord means, as poorly as I may be understanding it, is clarified by Jesus Himself, "Do not fear men who can destroy the body and can do nothing more. Fear the One who can cast both body and soul into Hell."
We are not enjoined with "Do not fear" because there is no reason to fear our enemies or poor health but because what the Lord in His power could do to us is far worse and yet the Lord values us more than many sparrows. At my old church, early on, we were admonished to realize that many things Christians believe are "held in tension". Over time I have wondered if Christians tire of "holding things in tension" and wish simply to choose or affirm merely one or the other. We want things to either be fine or either be terrible. Worry is in some sense an endless temptation because worry is recognizing the risk of disaster in otherwise stable situations (even situations that are, let's be honest, not always very good).
For reasons that are not entirely clear to me I feel I shall have to tackle writing about family and worry connected to the last words of David. This is just a ramble here.
Thursday, February 03, 2011
pending project part 2.56
Essay project pending, big one. I've had enough unexpected problems come up for family and some friends that I keep having to table stuff while handling all that stuff and also job-hunting. But the big project on cartoon characters vs cartoon morality IS still coming together.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Pre-written all purpose "open letter" for Christian bloggers
Dear Christian celebrity (who is better-known than I probably am) whose doctrine or person I find problematic for reasons I explain at length in my blog (even though people don't know me from their dog):
I "love you in the Lord" (if you are even truly a Christian) but you suck and I am obligated before God as a good, honest, humble Christian who struggles with his flaws (but not as much as you do) to tell you so.
Your could-have-been-friend-if-we-didn't-differ-on-essential-Gospel-distinctives,
Me
P. S. I'm not perfect, just better than you, and by the grace of God that's good enough for me, for Jesus' fame.
I "love you in the Lord" (if you are even truly a Christian) but you suck and I am obligated before God as a good, honest, humble Christian who struggles with his flaws (but not as much as you do) to tell you so.
Your could-have-been-friend-if-we-didn't-differ-on-essential-Gospel-distinctives,
Me
P. S. I'm not perfect, just better than you, and by the grace of God that's good enough for me, for Jesus' fame.
Friday, January 28, 2011
big weekend
This is a busy weekend. Tonight I am playing at the Seattle Classic Guitar Society open mic. I'm presenting my guitar sonata in f minor. Tomorrow I'm hitting the Free at the Frye guitar recital and then meeting up with my brother (Totoro-Man) and an old college buddy to catch an anime (I sincerely hope this one is better than the horrifically bad Goro Miyazaki film Tales of Earthsea). Then Sunday I get to wake the dawn (so to speak) and head over to church to prepare my vernacular Magnificat setting for voice, guitar, and cello for communion. Big weekend in terms of music.
On top of all of this one of my housemates is coming home this weekend and he and I have been discussing, er, discussing OT literature and Israelite history. On top of all this I have been making some important bits of progress in the DCAU essay project. Being sick a good chunk of this week and having to sleep on almost everything except music practice may have paradoxically been good for me.
On top of all of this one of my housemates is coming home this weekend and he and I have been discussing, er, discussing OT literature and Israelite history. On top of all this I have been making some important bits of progress in the DCAU essay project. Being sick a good chunk of this week and having to sleep on almost everything except music practice may have paradoxically been good for me.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
HT to Jared Wilson: "Not Calvinistic Enough"
http://gospeldrivenchurch.blogspot.com/2011/01/not-calvinistic-enough.html
As it happens, then, the occasional Calvinist's insistence on the exclusivity of the personal gospel -- God/Sin/Christ/Response contra Creation/Fall/Redemption/Consummation -- turns out to be not Calvinistic enough.
This is a salient observation. I don't mind making a polemical observation that piggy-backs off of Jared's comment--if Calvinsts and other Protestant theologians had not spent so many centuries boiling down salvation to a purely personal/transactional understanding of the good news of Jesus then "threats" liked the New Perspective on Paul would have had no breeding ground because the fullness of the Gospel (not to say "the full Gospel" in the old Pentecostal sense) would not have been compromised. Now I know what my Eastern Orthodox relatives might be tempted to say about this. ;) If I'm going to play with ever crossing the river, so to speak, I haven't seen sufficient evidence that Rome has any advantage in antiquity or reliability. As it is, however, I am tempted to quote the German composer Paul Hindemith when he said something like, "I may not be a good Protestant but I am a loyal one." Of course a few years later he converted to Catholicism so maybe I shouldn't say that. ;)
As it happens, then, the occasional Calvinist's insistence on the exclusivity of the personal gospel -- God/Sin/Christ/Response contra Creation/Fall/Redemption/Consummation -- turns out to be not Calvinistic enough.
This is a salient observation. I don't mind making a polemical observation that piggy-backs off of Jared's comment--if Calvinsts and other Protestant theologians had not spent so many centuries boiling down salvation to a purely personal/transactional understanding of the good news of Jesus then "threats" liked the New Perspective on Paul would have had no breeding ground because the fullness of the Gospel (not to say "the full Gospel" in the old Pentecostal sense) would not have been compromised. Now I know what my Eastern Orthodox relatives might be tempted to say about this. ;) If I'm going to play with ever crossing the river, so to speak, I haven't seen sufficient evidence that Rome has any advantage in antiquity or reliability. As it is, however, I am tempted to quote the German composer Paul Hindemith when he said something like, "I may not be a good Protestant but I am a loyal one." Of course a few years later he converted to Catholicism so maybe I shouldn't say that. ;)
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
A short musing on dramatic irony in True Grit
Yes, I've seen the Coens' adaptation of True Grit and it's wonderful as well as charming. Of numerous things I find entertaining chief among them is Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross who pretty well owns the entire film. One of the great and amusing ironies throughout the story is Mattie's righteous anger at her father's murderer, the proverbial snake-in-the-grass Tom Chaney. When the bumbling and insecure Lebeouf warns Mattie of the snake pit Mattie doesn't pay it any mind until, of course, things are too late. The shot that allows her to avenge herself on Tom Chaney hurls her down into the snake pit where she gets bitten (this is stuff from the novel so after more than half a century I trust spoilers of a novel adapted to film at least twice shoudn't be a problem for you). Cogburn must then ride as swiftly as possible to save Mattie from being killed be the consequences of getting what she most wanted.
The completely impious and worn down Cogburn becomes, ironically, more gracious and considerate of the lives of others than the defiant, self-assured and self-righteous Ross. Of course Mattie isn't wrong to want her killer brought to justice she just refuse to accept what the less pious and more pragmatic marshal and Texas ranger repeatedly point out to her, that justice would be done if they could do things their way, either way being quite a bit simpler than insisting on seeing Chaney hanged or killed for the murder of her father specifically. Wanting justice is not her fault, it is insisting on both justice and vengeance on her own terms that nearly gets Mattie killed.
We can often be like Mattie Ross, convincing ourselves that we are working for justice in the face of imcompetent or indifferent officers of justice. We may discover that when we finally grasp for the thing we want most and think we deserve it stings us with the sting of death. To say that True Grit is a story involving religious faith misses all the ways the story satirizes and inverts expectations. The marshall is an old drunk who has alienated everyone in his life. The ranger as barely competent, insecure, and prone to doing what in modern day paralance would be called self-congratulatory spamming for his in-group. One of the most discussed outlaws in the story, when we finally meet him, turns out to be a surprisingly friendly and principled man. The orphaned young girl turns out to be a self-assured conniving schemer set on getting retribution on her own terms even if it means messing up the pre-existing legal claims against a known and wanted fugitive. Sometimes the good news of Christ in our lives is, as some say, keeping from us the things we think we want most.
Rather than end with the trite observation amongst some Christians that wanting X may be an idol a story like True Grit points out that the problem is both more pernicious and less obvious than that. As T. S. Eliot put it, the highest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason. The idol may not be what we want or even entirely why we want it but the self-justifying impulse and self-exoneration we want THROUGH those things. The whole point in the prophet warning us on behalf of the Lord that the heart is deceitful above all things is that it is. You convince yourself that your motives are pure and that the outlaw Tom Chaney is the worst possible sort of coward and scarcely worthy of being called a man and then when you confront him by accident he tells you that the sanctimony and meddling of both you and your father was always a problem. There are times where if we did not think so much of our charity, loyalty, and other characteristics we might not be so upset when those are either not appreciated or become betrayed.
This is a short musing on a story, for me anyway.
The completely impious and worn down Cogburn becomes, ironically, more gracious and considerate of the lives of others than the defiant, self-assured and self-righteous Ross. Of course Mattie isn't wrong to want her killer brought to justice she just refuse to accept what the less pious and more pragmatic marshal and Texas ranger repeatedly point out to her, that justice would be done if they could do things their way, either way being quite a bit simpler than insisting on seeing Chaney hanged or killed for the murder of her father specifically. Wanting justice is not her fault, it is insisting on both justice and vengeance on her own terms that nearly gets Mattie killed.
We can often be like Mattie Ross, convincing ourselves that we are working for justice in the face of imcompetent or indifferent officers of justice. We may discover that when we finally grasp for the thing we want most and think we deserve it stings us with the sting of death. To say that True Grit is a story involving religious faith misses all the ways the story satirizes and inverts expectations. The marshall is an old drunk who has alienated everyone in his life. The ranger as barely competent, insecure, and prone to doing what in modern day paralance would be called self-congratulatory spamming for his in-group. One of the most discussed outlaws in the story, when we finally meet him, turns out to be a surprisingly friendly and principled man. The orphaned young girl turns out to be a self-assured conniving schemer set on getting retribution on her own terms even if it means messing up the pre-existing legal claims against a known and wanted fugitive. Sometimes the good news of Christ in our lives is, as some say, keeping from us the things we think we want most.
Rather than end with the trite observation amongst some Christians that wanting X may be an idol a story like True Grit points out that the problem is both more pernicious and less obvious than that. As T. S. Eliot put it, the highest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason. The idol may not be what we want or even entirely why we want it but the self-justifying impulse and self-exoneration we want THROUGH those things. The whole point in the prophet warning us on behalf of the Lord that the heart is deceitful above all things is that it is. You convince yourself that your motives are pure and that the outlaw Tom Chaney is the worst possible sort of coward and scarcely worthy of being called a man and then when you confront him by accident he tells you that the sanctimony and meddling of both you and your father was always a problem. There are times where if we did not think so much of our charity, loyalty, and other characteristics we might not be so upset when those are either not appreciated or become betrayed.
This is a short musing on a story, for me anyway.
theological cyber-punditry and the temptation of the double standard
I more or less live in what you might call a world of the "young, restless and Reformed". Well, maybe not that young or restless since I'm in my thirties but I've lived connected to what has been branded as YRR for short.
In my short time I have seen cyber-pundits of various sorts call out false doctrine on this or that. Sometimes it has been doing a theological smack down on N. T. Wright for being an apostate. Sometimes it's been reading blogs about how Mark Driscoll is unfit for ministry because he uses cuss words (and cuss words at that point are defined however the blogger wants just to reach a foregone conclusion). Sometimes I have seen people blogging about the "epidemic of singleness" as though it were a disease that needed to be eradicated like small pox.
But a common element I have seen in most of these bloggy moments is that at some point in the public spouting something like the following exchange will happen:
Anonymous: You should stop being so judgmental against X because X is a brother in Christ. Did you contact X privately first with your concerns as prescribed Matthew 18?
Poster: No, because public wrongness must be rebuked publicly and because X is wrong there is no need to contact X privately. False doctrine and false teaching must be publicly confronted.
Open fan of X: I know X [i.e. have served in ministry with, read twenty books by, listened to every podcast of, am friends with on Facebook, etc] and you've got X all wrong. You're grossly simplifying and mispresenting X's views
Poster: No, because X chooses to teach things that are wrong and no one on the internet can be wrong without my having to sound off about it, especially if the wrongness involves Holy Scripture. Your personal devotion to X has blinded you to the reality that you don't take scripture seriously like I do.
Then as is wont for the internet, the shoe gets on the other foot. Leave it to Christian bloggers and fans of Christian punditry to want to be able to dish it out but not have to take it. No sooner does the pundit's favorite Christian or own self become subject to the same theo-blogging or cyber-punditry then we see them urging people to be respectful and considerate and take things to private discussion before airing disagreements. It's okay to rip on someone for writing a book like The Shack but publicly slamming someone amongst the YRR as not really Reformed because of views on baptism or sacraments and then a few comments get wiped out. Suddenly failing to adhere to truly Reformed distinctives is something folks can disagree on, at least something people should disagree on in a way that doesn't involve public rancor about the pet subject of the blogger.
It's not really hard to point out that this kind of double standard is a temptation everyone can face. We all want to be rougher on whomever we consider not on the same team than we want to be on our team. The American Calvinist milleu is oddly wonderful at excelling in these things, of course. It's nearly impossible to get too much mileage from John Frame's essay "Machen's Warrior Children" because we've been so great at living out that eagerness to fight about doctrinal matters that are not even close to primary.
We convince ourselves they are primary, however, often because we have anchored real-world concerns into second and third level doctrines or even lifestyle preferences that have nothing to do with doctrine at all. There are neo-Calvinists congregations that have reflexively favored alcohol consumption simply to not seem legalistic. There are other neo-Calvinist congregations that fixate on postmillenialism as a motive for action when it isn't necessarily a better approach to motivating Christian activity than other things. Certainly in many, many places attempting to fix society's problems (as "we" see them) regarding gender roles has often become a defining characteristic of neo-Calvinist church life.
When I "discovered" a few neglected nuggets of Calvinist hymnody I was "assisted" in this process of discovery by a Lutheran. :) He helped out in clarifying a few textual elements and elements of musical phrasing. I am a Calvinist but I have always, so far as I have been able to tell, been a rather bad Calvinist. What I mean to say is that my cage phase was chiefly a reaction to what I felt were excesses in charismatic/TBN-influenced theology. I overdid it a bit but then most orthodox Christians might say that it would be tough to blame me for wanting to move as far away from Third-stream Latter Rain Rick Joyner style theology! I don't blame myself for wanting to distance myself from that stuff as much as possible. But here's the thing, along the way I resolved to not speak or think of non-Calvinists as holding to heresies. I don't particularly share in Jonathan Edwards' sentiment that Arminianism was then as bad as open theism is now. I don't hold to that view (Arminianism) obviously but I don't believe there is ultimately any benefit in establishing a polemic about it. I'm okay with Lutherans being Lutherans and Methodists being Methodists and so on.
Along the way I have seen a lot of this double standard I have described. It is one of those things that I find embarrassing on behalf of my theological clan. I'd find it embarrassing on behalf of any intellectual tribe but I find it more embarrassing for my theological clan because as a friend put it, you'd think that people who are big on "the doctrines of grace" would have a shred of humility to them but often they don't.
The biggest bump to this usual pattern in Calvinist blogdom was Steve Camp's eventual change of heart about his blogging on Mark Driscoll. I'm not going to attempt to replicate everything Camp blogged about Driscoll because he removed all his older posts and in deference to that I'm not going to reproduce any of the stuff I read. I'll just say that even big fans of Steve Camp the person will recognize what Camp recognized. I have myself made some fairly trenchant criticisms of Driscoll as exegete, theologian, scholar, and demagogue but the thing is that despite my numerous differences with the man I have never forgotten he's a brother in the Lord and I have seen no reason to question whether or not the Lord has providentially established him as an elder. I can, as he might put it himself, find ways to salute the uniform while adamantly disagreeing with him on a few other things. In other words if Driscoll and I were to discuss or debate theology in person (we've done it and both had a pleasant time of it so don't assume we haven't) I believe that despite our various respective character flaws we can both trust that whatever our myriad mistakes what we'd be trying to be to each other is iron sharpening iron.
Camp, for a while, was not so good at that and it was a pleasant surprise to see that he had a change of heart not about his misgivings about Driscoll's pulpit mannerisms or handling of scripture but about his own heart in the process of expressing those concerns. It is entirely possible to be "right" in substance but so wrong in style that you lose any traction you could have had even in the things you were right about. The Reformed blogosphere seems to be one in which guilt is imputed even in cases where someone's motives do not need to be questioned. It's not enough for us to say that someone handled a biblical text irresponsibly or made a point too acerbically.
We theo-bloggers have to zero in on what we assume the problem of the heart is. "Seeking to address the heart" becomes shorthand for us judging the motives of someone else in the guise of discerna-blogging. It may have been this more than some other cultural qualities of character that inspired the late Internet Monk to bid farewell to Calvinism. I'm not willing to bid farewell to Calvinism myself but I can certainly see how many people have been inspired to bail on the whole tradition simply on the basis of the humility deficit amongst those most eager to tell everyone else how they have bungled the doctrines of grace and have done so so graciously.
What was disappointing to see was that there are some folks who were fans of Camp's take-downs of Driscoll as a kind of theological gladitorial theater. I've seen a few "discernment ministries" and they can often be an argument by hamster-wheel example for a church that has a shared confession and a creed. If you don't then you're doomed to keep reinventing the wheel and constantly having an ad hoc response to every cultural or social issue that presents itself as a theological problem.
The risk inherent in this kind of theological blogging or church culture is that your anchoring point can stop being in a common confession and can start being in the common process theology (to wit) of figuring out who really isn't on the same page as you theologically or on ecclesiology (which is the same thing as ethics, praxis, you get the idea). Of these things and their outworkings as making Baptists the butt of jokes there is no end.
Circling the wagons around a core confession of the triune nature of Yahweh and the kingdom of Christ is central. Most of the time when Christian cyber pundits and bloggers circle the wagons it's around things of a decidedly lesser order than that. We hitch our wagons to lesser stars than the bright and morning star while convincing ourselves we have picked the highest and best. We are still tempted to say "I am of Paul" or "I am of Apollos" and being Corinthians.
In my short time I have seen cyber-pundits of various sorts call out false doctrine on this or that. Sometimes it has been doing a theological smack down on N. T. Wright for being an apostate. Sometimes it's been reading blogs about how Mark Driscoll is unfit for ministry because he uses cuss words (and cuss words at that point are defined however the blogger wants just to reach a foregone conclusion). Sometimes I have seen people blogging about the "epidemic of singleness" as though it were a disease that needed to be eradicated like small pox.
But a common element I have seen in most of these bloggy moments is that at some point in the public spouting something like the following exchange will happen:
Anonymous: You should stop being so judgmental against X because X is a brother in Christ. Did you contact X privately first with your concerns as prescribed Matthew 18?
Poster: No, because public wrongness must be rebuked publicly and because X is wrong there is no need to contact X privately. False doctrine and false teaching must be publicly confronted.
Open fan of X: I know X [i.e. have served in ministry with, read twenty books by, listened to every podcast of, am friends with on Facebook, etc] and you've got X all wrong. You're grossly simplifying and mispresenting X's views
Poster: No, because X chooses to teach things that are wrong and no one on the internet can be wrong without my having to sound off about it, especially if the wrongness involves Holy Scripture. Your personal devotion to X has blinded you to the reality that you don't take scripture seriously like I do.
Then as is wont for the internet, the shoe gets on the other foot. Leave it to Christian bloggers and fans of Christian punditry to want to be able to dish it out but not have to take it. No sooner does the pundit's favorite Christian or own self become subject to the same theo-blogging or cyber-punditry then we see them urging people to be respectful and considerate and take things to private discussion before airing disagreements. It's okay to rip on someone for writing a book like The Shack but publicly slamming someone amongst the YRR as not really Reformed because of views on baptism or sacraments and then a few comments get wiped out. Suddenly failing to adhere to truly Reformed distinctives is something folks can disagree on, at least something people should disagree on in a way that doesn't involve public rancor about the pet subject of the blogger.
It's not really hard to point out that this kind of double standard is a temptation everyone can face. We all want to be rougher on whomever we consider not on the same team than we want to be on our team. The American Calvinist milleu is oddly wonderful at excelling in these things, of course. It's nearly impossible to get too much mileage from John Frame's essay "Machen's Warrior Children" because we've been so great at living out that eagerness to fight about doctrinal matters that are not even close to primary.
We convince ourselves they are primary, however, often because we have anchored real-world concerns into second and third level doctrines or even lifestyle preferences that have nothing to do with doctrine at all. There are neo-Calvinists congregations that have reflexively favored alcohol consumption simply to not seem legalistic. There are other neo-Calvinist congregations that fixate on postmillenialism as a motive for action when it isn't necessarily a better approach to motivating Christian activity than other things. Certainly in many, many places attempting to fix society's problems (as "we" see them) regarding gender roles has often become a defining characteristic of neo-Calvinist church life.
When I "discovered" a few neglected nuggets of Calvinist hymnody I was "assisted" in this process of discovery by a Lutheran. :) He helped out in clarifying a few textual elements and elements of musical phrasing. I am a Calvinist but I have always, so far as I have been able to tell, been a rather bad Calvinist. What I mean to say is that my cage phase was chiefly a reaction to what I felt were excesses in charismatic/TBN-influenced theology. I overdid it a bit but then most orthodox Christians might say that it would be tough to blame me for wanting to move as far away from Third-stream Latter Rain Rick Joyner style theology! I don't blame myself for wanting to distance myself from that stuff as much as possible. But here's the thing, along the way I resolved to not speak or think of non-Calvinists as holding to heresies. I don't particularly share in Jonathan Edwards' sentiment that Arminianism was then as bad as open theism is now. I don't hold to that view (Arminianism) obviously but I don't believe there is ultimately any benefit in establishing a polemic about it. I'm okay with Lutherans being Lutherans and Methodists being Methodists and so on.
Along the way I have seen a lot of this double standard I have described. It is one of those things that I find embarrassing on behalf of my theological clan. I'd find it embarrassing on behalf of any intellectual tribe but I find it more embarrassing for my theological clan because as a friend put it, you'd think that people who are big on "the doctrines of grace" would have a shred of humility to them but often they don't.
The biggest bump to this usual pattern in Calvinist blogdom was Steve Camp's eventual change of heart about his blogging on Mark Driscoll. I'm not going to attempt to replicate everything Camp blogged about Driscoll because he removed all his older posts and in deference to that I'm not going to reproduce any of the stuff I read. I'll just say that even big fans of Steve Camp the person will recognize what Camp recognized. I have myself made some fairly trenchant criticisms of Driscoll as exegete, theologian, scholar, and demagogue but the thing is that despite my numerous differences with the man I have never forgotten he's a brother in the Lord and I have seen no reason to question whether or not the Lord has providentially established him as an elder. I can, as he might put it himself, find ways to salute the uniform while adamantly disagreeing with him on a few other things. In other words if Driscoll and I were to discuss or debate theology in person (we've done it and both had a pleasant time of it so don't assume we haven't) I believe that despite our various respective character flaws we can both trust that whatever our myriad mistakes what we'd be trying to be to each other is iron sharpening iron.
Camp, for a while, was not so good at that and it was a pleasant surprise to see that he had a change of heart not about his misgivings about Driscoll's pulpit mannerisms or handling of scripture but about his own heart in the process of expressing those concerns. It is entirely possible to be "right" in substance but so wrong in style that you lose any traction you could have had even in the things you were right about. The Reformed blogosphere seems to be one in which guilt is imputed even in cases where someone's motives do not need to be questioned. It's not enough for us to say that someone handled a biblical text irresponsibly or made a point too acerbically.
We theo-bloggers have to zero in on what we assume the problem of the heart is. "Seeking to address the heart" becomes shorthand for us judging the motives of someone else in the guise of discerna-blogging. It may have been this more than some other cultural qualities of character that inspired the late Internet Monk to bid farewell to Calvinism. I'm not willing to bid farewell to Calvinism myself but I can certainly see how many people have been inspired to bail on the whole tradition simply on the basis of the humility deficit amongst those most eager to tell everyone else how they have bungled the doctrines of grace and have done so so graciously.
What was disappointing to see was that there are some folks who were fans of Camp's take-downs of Driscoll as a kind of theological gladitorial theater. I've seen a few "discernment ministries" and they can often be an argument by hamster-wheel example for a church that has a shared confession and a creed. If you don't then you're doomed to keep reinventing the wheel and constantly having an ad hoc response to every cultural or social issue that presents itself as a theological problem.
The risk inherent in this kind of theological blogging or church culture is that your anchoring point can stop being in a common confession and can start being in the common process theology (to wit) of figuring out who really isn't on the same page as you theologically or on ecclesiology (which is the same thing as ethics, praxis, you get the idea). Of these things and their outworkings as making Baptists the butt of jokes there is no end.
Circling the wagons around a core confession of the triune nature of Yahweh and the kingdom of Christ is central. Most of the time when Christian cyber pundits and bloggers circle the wagons it's around things of a decidedly lesser order than that. We hitch our wagons to lesser stars than the bright and morning star while convincing ourselves we have picked the highest and best. We are still tempted to say "I am of Paul" or "I am of Apollos" and being Corinthians.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
despite the flurry of recent activity I'll be on another hiatus
I have too many things going on with musical activity and the job hunt to keep up my recent rate of production for long. I have also made some small but still significant breakthroughs in my pending DCAU survey project for Mockingbird. Most importantly, though, my family and I finally managed to have "Christmas" after a whole month's worth of consecutive delays due to numerous family illnesses. Everyone is generally in fair health and I'm hoping to finish an essay series on the DCAU as soon as I can manage. "Soon as I can manage" has just been mitigated by numerous non-bloggy real-world concerns.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)