three musical recommendations for Good Friday

Matthew Passion by J. S. Bach (of course)
Passion According to St. Luke by Krysztof Penderecki (of course)
John Passion by Arvo Part (also of course)

You won't find three more greatly contrasting works of sacred choral music. They are all in various ways extremely demanding and time-consuming works but they are all worth listening to and deeply involving music. I've seen a few contemporary church services that attempt to convey the agony and suffering of Christ on the Cross. All puerile over-ambitious child's play compared to Penderecki's brutal, harrowing yet grimly beautiful Luke passion. Bach's passion is so brilliant I can hardly say a word about why you should listen to it. Part is, compared to the other two composers, so wild in his understatement and restraint you could scarcely believe he is writing music about the death of Christ.

At the risk of invoking a purely personal and unprovable way of describing what I find compelling about each Passion and going with the spur of the moment I would say the following:

Penderecki's passion setting is unmatched in using every avant garde technique available in 20th century music to portrary the agony and suffering of Christ, suffering brought about by seemingly unlimited human capacity for evil. Yet the end of his setting is a simultaneously harrowing and beautiful remembrance that the suffering of Christ is for the salvation of those who believe and I swear that the closing chord (and I won't spoil the text setting for you) is nothing less than shattering both for what it says about the nature of Christ and His disposition toward us for those willing to endure 70 minutes of atonality. It has a lot of what Thelonious Monk might have called "ugly beauty" and is all the more beautiful for taking the ugliness of the avant garde and putting it into musical service to a sacred purpose. I've seen a few Mars Hill services attempt to hit people hard with the suffering of Christ. They mean well in their way but Penderecki has the last word, musically speaking, on musically emulating what crucifixion "might" sound like.

Bach's music, by contrast, plumbs the emotional depths of Christ. Where Penderecki focuses on the physical torment of Christ Bach explores the spiritual torment of Christ embracing the Cross out of love and the spiritual torment of those disciples of Christ who come face to face with the significance of their sins sending Christ to the Cross yet those sins being the reason for which Christ was willing to go willingly, out of love for us.

Part's Passion is different. I can only attempt to describe his strangely sedate setting as a kind of attempt to look beyond the passion as a work accomplished chiefly by Christ and more as, well, perhaps as a work accomplished through the whole Trinity. Maybe his being Orthodox influences this whole approach but the paradoxically impersonal vibe his Passion setting has with respect to describing the death of Christ, I believe, has a purpose to it. We are invited not so much to have our emotions directly and deliberately manipulated, which Penderecki is clearly going for and even Bach is obviously willing to do. Part approaches the whole task of setting the passion according to John in a context where he seems to assume a shared capacity for introspection. We already should know our sins put Christ on the Cross. We should already know that this was borne by Christ for our salvation. What Bach and Penderecki frame in visceral personal terms Part seems to frame in distant, even cosmic terms.

Yet this emotional detachment ironically lends Part's John Passion a peculiar emotional power. A musical setting of the story of Christ's death that does not ramp up emotional guilt or attempt to musically depict the suffering of Christ reveals an often overlooked aspect of the Passion, which is to say that while you benefit from the gift of salvation as an individual the work of salvation is universal in scope and in a way it is, no offense, not really about YOU and YOUR salvation but the redemption of the cosmos.


For those possibly ad hoc and personal reasons I consider these three passion settings by great composers to be treasures of Christian sacred choral music. You realistically won't have time to listen, perhaps, to even ONE of these on Good Friday, let alone all of them, but I would encourage you, as time allows, to eventually listen to all of these works. I would also say go get your hands on the musical scores if you read music and perhaps you will see what I mean more easily than if you were to listen to the music. You'll hear things, for sure, but there are thematic relationships and motifs in each of the works that won't be so easy to hear as they will be to see in the scores.

Is it just me or is Xtra Normal a great way for people to say "Thank God I'm not that stupid"?

I've seen a few things from Xtra Normal by now and while some of the stuff is genuinely funny (I'm partial to the "stuff your Lutheran pastor loves" series myself) I also have the distinct impression that a lot of these "real" conversations are not as real as advertised. The capacity for whomever is in the right to express death wishes and the like is, as it were, a trope straight out of apocalyptic hyperbole. And the fire of their burning will go up forever and ever and all that. :)

And in the end a lot of it comes off as a comprehensive realization of the great Pharisee prayer Jesus referred to as "Thank you, God, that I am not like that tax collector over there."

Remember, friends, no matter how funny that imaginary or possibly real person being made fun of for their blithering idiocy looks and sounds on Xtra Normal, there is always some way and some place in which you and I are the same kind of idiot. We just disguise it from ourselves well.

Internet Monk: Demythologizing radical Christianity part 2

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/demythologizing-radical-christianity-2#more-19305


Now having at one point been "plugged in" to Mars Hill where one of Mark's first books was called Radical Reformission I admit I am burned out on the use of "radical" in Christian talk. I think I know what is hoped for, aspired to, and intended by the use of the term but I am no longer comfortable with the implicit judgment made on brands of Christian faith and practice that are not "radical". I have seen people who used to be at Mars Hill go another path that was not really less "radical" so much as less high profile. Some people went to the Episcopal church, others to Eastern Orthodoxy, others to Baptist churches, others to non-denominational congregations, still others (like me) to Presbyterianism.


What one former Mars Hill member shared with me once was that he and his wife were pretty content at their PCA church because the church did some things to help people in the community and he didn't get the impression that one of the main ways to serve in the church was chiefly to give money. Of course this is a simplified account of a single perspective from a former member but Mars Hill is nothing if not an embodiment of attempts to recover a "radical" and "real" Christian faith. The more church history and theology I studied the more I began to realize that as well-intentioned as a lot of stuff at Mars Hill has been they're essentially Reformed Baptist without the denominational label. You don't have to be a Calvinist to be a member of Mars Hill but you'd better be one if you plan on participating in any leadership role.


Unofficially, if you don't consider plugging into a ministry in some capacity that can be construed as a potential consumerism. Now I've already written elsewhere about how serving in ministry can, paradoxically, be a kind of consumerism. You can get sold out to participating in a movement you believe will change the Christian faith in a region. I know, I'm one of those people who bought into that in the early days of Mars Hill. The neo-Reformed evangelical world can imagine it has somehow recovered a sense of vocation but at least in my neck of the woods I am not sure that there is a realistic sense of how mundane that vocation will be in daily life.


A title like "Radical Reformission" is the sort of thing a guy in his twenties imagining God will use him to shake up American Christianity from its conformity and dead traditions would write. I was that kind of young man myself once only I didn't plant one of the fastest growing churches so perhaps I became disillusioned with my potential for changing the world for Jesus a little faster than I hope Mark has. Mars Hill is not going to revolutionize anything. I don't say that as condemnation, I say it because if they preserve what is best about the Christian faith then they can't revolutionize anything. The most they can (or should) aspire to is going to amount to merely reinventing the wheel. I think it is far more dangerous that we in the new Calvinist camp buy our own hype than we get criticized for anything by outsiders, whether believers who are not Calvinists, or not megachurch people, or even unbelievers.

When Mike Gunn said in a sermon he preached this year that looking back on his days with Mars Hill he realizes that they had a lot of good intentions but a lot of naivete and arrogance I'm inclined to say, "Amen!" In fact I'd venture to say that for those of us who were there we couldn't even BEGIN to fathom the level of our arrogance. I have a dim guess of it now and it is profoundly sobering for me! I have not gone the route of just bailing on everything connected to it. I am, after all, still at a Reformed church, but I came to realize over a decade that all the "distinctinctives" of Mars Hill were, in the grand scheme of church history, not only not special, but that we as a whole and I in particular were guilty of a massive case of believing our own hype about ourselves as a spiritual community. Even people who were there at one point who left and went to this, that, or the other still display aspects of that superiority complex.


Rather than damn them as being smug know-it-alls who think they're better than other people I have to recognize that there are various sinful forms of exceptionalism and I have been at least as guilty, if not more, of these things than other people. So when Mike Gunn talked about his arrogance and Mark's arrogance and Lief's arrogance I don't just say "Amen" because I entirely agree with him but also because I realize I have been part of the same weakness myself.


You might think that having spent about a decade connected to one of the fastest growing churches in America with one of the rock star pastors of the new Calvinism that I'd either be awestruck at being able to be part of something so special (I was) or entirely cynical about it all (sometimes I am). But what I am passionate about is that the account of Mars Hill is not a hagiography. I don't want to skate over the bad parts (which can be, honestly, pretty bad) or ignore good parts. Obviously if I had no problems whatever with Mars Hill I would still be there but I spent a third of my life there at one point so the place and the people will stick with me.


I have grown accustomed to the idea that immersive ambivalence is basically the way life is. I have not attempted, as so many people I know have, to decide firmly in one direction or another. I am skeptical about "radical" Christianity and about "legacy" for many reasons but the most important reason is that when times are good, be thankful to the Lord, and when times are bad consider, for the Lord has made one as well as the other so that a man may not know what comes after him.


Too many people who have advocated "radical" Christianity of any stripe, whether Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox or other, have done so because they already have a vision in mind of where this "radical" Christian practice will lead. They know what "should" happen if a great revival of whatever it is they want to revive happens. The Second Great Awakening brought forth great passions about what christians ought to do and within a decade or two the American Civil War happened. Even though I consider the claim that wars have been fought in the name of religion to be deliberately ignorant in light of the real reasons wars get fought, for which religion is often the excuse (i.e. religion becomes the motive for claiming resources that could, were,and will be fought for on other grounds). Let us not deceive ourselves as to the worldly legacies for which we frequently endorse a "radical" and "real" Christianity.

Part two of the Superman essay is up at Mockingbird

http://www.mbird.com/2011/04/superman-an-american-icon-at-war-with-and-for-his-legacy-part-2/

David proposed that we dedicate the Superman series to the memory of the great writer and Justice League Unlimited story editor Dwayne McDuffie. Actually, it was McDuffie's passing that catalyzed my passion to write about Superman because it was McDuffie's brilliant writing of Superman in the first season of Justice League Unlimited that sold me on the character. I'll have more to say about that later on. Despite my willingness to put in spoilers in all sorts of settings I don't want to spoil everything. I want you, dear reader, to go to Mockingbird and read my essay and all the other stuff over there that they publish, after all. :)

Link: Reformation 21: The Price of Everything [The believer and apocalyptic hyperbole]

http://www.reformation21.org/articles/the-price-of-everything.php

Carl Trueman manages to summarize things well. I don't know if I would say it's exactly cynicism and pessimism but realism to observe that most things trumpeted as major game- changing and history-changing events aren't. Wait a minute ... does that make me a pessimist and a cynic? It might.


To see the value of the historian's cynicism, one need only look at the bombastic rhetoric which permeates the modern world. Mainstream news media rarely let a week go by without some reference to a `defining moment' or a `watershed', yet most of this is simple hyperbole. Even 9/11 which was meant to have changed the world forever has not had much of an impact upon most of us. Those affected by the tragic loss of loved ones and those who have military connections would be obvious exceptions; for me, the only time I really feel the impact is in the slight indignities and extended time now imposed as I pass through airport security. Far less is the election of a particular individual or party to power a `defining moment,' given the global forces that really drive national economies and domestic policies.


Yet this hyperbole continually rears its ridiculous head in the church. Some years ago, Phyllis Tickle likened Brian McLaren to Luther and the Emergent Church to the kind of paradigm shift that happens only once a millennium. The amazing thing was not that she said this; in a world shaped by the continual escalation of sales rhetoric, this kind of language is to be expected in advertising. No. What was truly amazing was that people actually took her seriously, friend and foe alike. Such people are in urgent need of help to stop them saying or believing things that are very, very silly and absurdly self-important

It is true that we manage to inflate our importance the importance of events that have happened to us. We can cast relatively mundane events in terms that give cosmic scope to things that are really local in their immediate import. In crucial ways this can even be said of events in scripture. Compare David's account of God rescuing him in 2 Sam 22 and Ps 18 to what David actually did between 1 Sam 16 and 2 Sam 1. He kept himself blameless? Might need some unpacking there. I think I have some guesses as to why the Psalms can be tough for some Reformed preachers to preach. How do we account for David declaring how blameless he is when we look at his multiple wives of political alliance and convenience? How do we account for David being so confident he's blameless when we can see that he killed so many people and shed so much blood? Liberals can just chalk this up to David being a bloodthirsty deceptive cretin who claimed divine approval of anything he did. But if we go back and look at all the events David could be taken to describe in 2 Sam 22 and Ps 18 we can see that the actual events, in the global scope of things, can be seen as far more prosaic.


So even though there's a lot of what Trueman says I totally agree with I want to ask if maybe we've got ourselves a challenge as Christians. David presents some interesting challenges for us. David was both a king and prophet, as the apostle Peter noted on Pentecost. Yet he seems to have been habitually guilty of various sins we would never consent to let continue in contemporary church life. Yet David confidently said he was blameless. Now I'm aware of imputed and imparted righteousness discussions and justification and so forth. What I'm wondering about for this blog post is David's capacity to speak hyberbolically about the importance of events that arguably did absolutely nothing in themselves to change the course of history. I agree we as Christians should not spend so much time trumpeting people as being more important than they are but it would seem that gushing with praise is something we can't resist doing with the things and people we like. You know, maybe a Pointer Sisters reunion wouldn't be such a bad thing, Carl. Not that I like them personally but it would not be the sacking of Jerusalem if it happened.

In popular culture we love to invest apocalyptic hyperbole to all sorts of mundane things. Justin Bieber is one of the horsemen of the apocalypse and all that. So how much can we fret about apocalyptic hyperbole from fellow believers if we can see even David, who contributed so much to the scriptures by way of what he wrote and what was written about him, seems to have been spectacularly prone to this habit himself? Arguably apocalyptic hyperbole is one of the literary legacies David has given us (even if we assume, from a cynical rationalist perspective, that David didn't really write anything attributed to him within the scriptures). It's one thing for us in the neo-Reformed camp to wave all this off as David being a whiny emo boy as I've heard some new Calvinist pastors do, it's another thing to actually contend with the significance of this impulse in David's work.


Part of the historian's task is to see how much we repeat ourselves despite our claims that we won't make the mistakes our forebears made. When we know this is a temptation in each age of believers it won't prevent us from succumbing to its temptation entirely but we can at least be humble and remember that our hope is not that we will somehow change the world but that we serve the true King.

Carl Trueman writes about the American neo-Reformed world

http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2011/04/home-thoughts-from-abroad.php

http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2011/04/what-hath-jerusalem-to-do-with.php


http://pastoralized.com/2011/04/19/a-not-famous-pastors-take-on-the-evangelical-hollywood/


The challenge of being neither cynical nor a fanboy amongst the neo-Reformed is a constant struggle. Really I would say that the struggle to not fall into either of these ditches on the roadside is pertinent regardless of what path you're traveling as a Christian. Carl Trueman has written some stuff recently that makes me think that some of this trouble is a trouble with Americans. Americans are apt to embrace personalities and particular leaders regardless of their church affiliation. American Catholics have these heroes, American Baptists have others, American Orthodox have still other heroes, Pentecostals have this, Wesleyans and Lutherans have that. Even when we profess to be above all that we tend to demonstrate it in invisible ways just after we thought we established our bona fides for being above all that. Trueman refers to how this American habit distinguishes itself in the conference circuit:


First, the conference [in the UK, not the US] was built around content not speakers. In fact, I was almost refused entry to my own final seminar because I could not find my armband. I was unrecognized by the steward even after speaking three times. Fantastic. In the UK, people come to hear what is said; they do not particularly care for who is saying it. This is subtly evident in the way events are marketed in the two countries. It also points to a major cultural difference. In the US in general, there is great suspicion of institutions yet huge and often naïve confidence placed in individuals. This is part of what makes celebrity culture so important, from politics to the church. In the UK, there is an often naïve trust in institutions but far more suspicion of individuals. I make this point as an observation; but also to flag the fact that US culture lends itself more readily to the problems Paul highlights in 1 Corinthians.


Carl Trueman notes with disappointment:


Second, no speaker made reference (almost obligatory when speaking at trendy Reformed evangelical conferences in the US) to how gorgeous his wife is. That is an odd and most distasteful American phenomenon. As one friend recently pointed out to me, such men are actually boasting about themselves, not honouring their wives. It amounts to little more than the old rugby changing room protocol where the male of the species draws attention to how virile he is on the basis of the bird/babe/chick (choose your demeaning noun) he has been able to 'pull.' One wishes that references by American speakers to their wives focused a little more on their godly characters and a little less on their vital statistics.

Ah, so I'm not the only one who has noticed American Reformed types must all speak about how lovely their wives are! I pointed out in an earlier blog entry here that among the neo-Reformed it is paradigmatic for a guy to say he is a Christian, husband of X, father of Y and Z, and pastor at such and such a church. If Reformed preachers and teachers get any more zealous in trumpeting the hotness of their wives I expect to see measurements, dress size, and shoe size trotted out as proof of how hot the pastor's wife is.


Yes, I do sometimes wonder if some of these Reformed pastors shouldn't just list the measurements and dress sizes of their wives for good measure. Does that, by chance, signal that I struggle with being a cynic? I wouldn't want to be too subtle about that, now. But this observation of Trueman's really sticks with me because I often get the sense that mentioning the invariably "lovely wife" and the brood really does end up being praise of the man in the blog entry or by-line rather than being praise of the actual wife and children.
Now I do know at least one pastor in the neo-Reformed orbit who will praise his wife but he does not tend to talk about how hot she is but about how loving, patient, kind, and smart she is. I'm not going to name names but I can say in response to Trueman's second observation that I do at least know ONE American neo-Reformed pastor who has said more in public praising his wife's character than her "vital statistics". Maybe Trueman would say that proves his point. Well, maybe there's no point in attempting to cite exceptions if they're going to be taken as proving the rule. :)

But to grant the sharpness of Trueman's point, let's reverse the observation and look at women bloggers or speakers. One of my favorite blogs to read is Practical Theology for Women and I can't say as Wendy has the same kind of formula listing exactly who she has been married to for how many years and the names of her children. These things are valuable to know if she is your friend but if you simply follow her blog it's stuff that you kinda, sorta don't exactly need to know. Just from her blog entries you'd find out she is a wife and mother without her having to announce the vital statistics. Seriously, go and look at any Christian blog written by a woman and tell me if she raves about how hot her man is. Maybe there are a few out there that I just didn't spot because I only read so many blogs.


Perhaps the most cutting observation Trueman makes is in "What Hath Jerusalem to Do with Hollywood? In it he recounts an email from a European who visited the Gospel Coalition conference, showed up early, and got some good seats about 10 rows from the front. When the person returned after a break it had turned out that the seats had been cordoned off as for VIP guests only. Ten rows from the front is VIP seems like a big conference to me. It would seem that while we pay lip service to just preaching what's in the Bible we can be guilty of breaking precepts taught clearly in the scriptures while finding ways to defend our breach of apostolic instruction. Sure, I know all sorts of things can (and maybe should) be said about false dichotomies and so on. I wonder, though, if trotting out the "false dichotomy" defense is what we do to make sure we innoculate ourselves against certain kinds of criticisms that could touch a nerve. Just throwing that out as an idea, for what little it may be worth.

P.S. I sympathize with Jared Wilson's pushback some because, well, I'm a Tim Keller fan myself. :) Keller's lecture/sermon about how to preach Christ from Old Testament texts is very good.

Christian consumerism? Is it just "consuming" or can it also be ministry?

A few people (specifically people at City of God, Internet Monk, and Out of Ur) have written about how the cure for consumerism in American Christianity is not going to come about through "radical" anything. I agree. I was at Mars Hill in the early years and one of the things I heard quite a bit was that Christians should not merely be consumers. This was specifically the sharp end of the wedge I got when I was told I needed to become a church member. If I attended a church every Sunday but was not a member who was participating in church life I was a consumer. Ironically the person who most ardently made this case to me left Mars Hill years ago and left Protestantism altogether. There's plenty of room to change one's mind in life.


But I would suggest, in that person's defense, that it's possible to discover that church membership as an alternative to "consumerism" (whatever that is) reveals itself to be consumerism. That you tithe a certain amount of money and show up at church every week to hear preaching and so on may appear to be an alternative to "consumerism" but if through these experiences you believe you are a better person than someone else, more spiritual, more pure, more possessed of the right doctrines and concerns that make for a true Christian then, tell me, how are you NOT approaching life in the Church as a consumer?


It doesn't matter whether or not your spiritual experience is a high liturgical or low liturgical one (though high liturgy fans invariably convince themselves low liturgists don't HAVE a liturgy as much as low liturgists do the same!). It doesn't matter, to some degree, what doctrines you do or don't propound. To the extent that you use your embrace of doctrine X or Y as the basis for determining that you are a better Christian than others, more serious, more sold out, more truly a Christian, you can, paradoxically, still approach following Christ in an utterly consumerist way. The product you purchase as a consumer is spiritual superiority. That too many Christians who don't bother to observe Lent also think that all that stuff is dead ritual and legalism doesn't make them any better.


I've met Christians who think that a read sermon is not really a sermon. I've met Christians who think that reading ANYTHING in a church service is probably dead formalism. Yet some of these Christians have had no problem reading Rebbeca Brown books and "cutting soul ties" and doing other rituals that don't change anything about a person's day-to-day life. I've met Christians who put stock in sacraments without realizing that they do. I have met Christians who think that because they are on the right team that they are not consumers even though they may deploy any number of cultural elements about the species of Christian faith they practice as a way to delineate the "real" Christian. They do not realize that this can be just as consumeristic as the Christianity they supposedly left. You could be Baptist or Orthodox or Catholic or whatever and still have a consumeristic mentality about that church even if the church itself doesn't. All it takes is for you to say in your heart, "Thank God I'm not like THOSE people."


Last week I attended a memorial service. A friend of mine had died and her husband was speaking. A mutual friend of ours, a pastor, was sharing that the husband said, while he was helping his wife in the midst of her cancer, that he wished he could help people, be useful to people, be able to minister to people and not just spend all his energy helping his wife. He wanted to be able to do more. My pastor friend suggested to the man that perhaps that was what the Lord wanted his ministry to be, to minister entirely to his wife in her time of need. Is being an ambassador of Christ to one person too small a thing?


To borrow an observation from C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters, consumerism may be compared to pride. Just when a person is about to become truly humble you tempt that person to consider how humble he or she is being and, bingo, they are even more proud than they were before they tried being humble! So it is with avoiding a "consumer" mentality in church. You are even more in danger of being a consumeristic Christian if you think that because of your immersion in church life through activity that you are not as consumeristic as those people you see who just show up, go through the motions and aren't, say, leading or hosting a community group; attending the special services; wearing the right clothing as a sign of committment; or fixating on the approopriate bits of shared church history and social lingo.


Now I hope I don't have to make it clear that I have no problem with people participating in their church. I have no problem with people participating in ministries. I think that's a good thing. I would like to think that's clear already but since the internet is what it is and people are what they are it never hurts to make a few statements that you may, as an author, consider redundant.


I think that in some ways so much rhetoric against "consumer" Christianity ends up being spiritual snobbery. Even megachurch pastors like Mark Driscoll can talk about how bad it is to be a consumer. If a megachurch pastor can speak against consumerism then pretty much any American Christian can. But attending a tiny parish of a traditional church with high liturgy that you like because it has more old school high art than the shoebox megachurch experience isn't any less consumeristic, is it? In fact I'd say in my observation the anti-consumeristic stance is often precisely how many consumeristic Christians convince themselves they aren't consumers. They believe that by their vibrant and authentic spiritual activity in a community group or an accountability group or serving in a ministry that they are keeping it real.

Some of them do, I know, but those that do tend to be able to do so because they realize they are tempted, they are weak, they have sins to confess. They are not thanking the Lord they are not like those other consumeristic Christians. At this point in my life a person who admits they go to a church for what might be considered "consumer-driven" reasons may be more honest with themselves than the man or woman urging us to be more "radical" in our Christian practice. I've seen men supremely committed to a radical Christian expression transform, over twenty years, into looking pretty much like most other Christians I've met. The fuel of our walk of faith that sustains us is neither our principles nor our goals but our King. I can't say I am not a consumeristic Christian.

When I was most involved in the widest variety of ministries I may well have been the most consumeristic about my faith? WHy? Because I let those roles in different ministries become my identity. My church life became the entirety of my social life. Those who say the local church cannot be idolized have simply forgotten how Jesus rebuked those who thought that God's people were defined as Israel and ISrael's concerns. They were wrong then to have that view and we are wrong now to imagine that the local church is the be all and end all of the Christian experience. We'll tell ourselves that we're rational and know this could be a problem but we won't examine our hearts as we reflexively consider other flocks and other Christians as lesser than ourselves and what we have. The most insidious thing about this mentality is that it can most permeate our hearts when we are sure we don't have this vice in us.

I can't say I am a better Christian than anyone and in several ways I am probably much worse. So I don't have the place to say that someone else is a consumeristic Christian, especially if in the process of saying this I exempt myself from the verdict. We are told that if anyone is caught in a sin those who are spiritual should gently correct them and carefully so as not to fall prey to the same sin themselves. Somewhere it is written for our benefit. Leaders, whatever they lead, can lead well if they lead first in repentance so that others can follow their example. You or I could just tell someone "You need to repent" but if we want them to live out that repentance it helps if they can see us living the life of repentance we keep telling them they should have. We as God's peopel can repent together as well as individually. Rather than thank God that I am not a consumeristic Christian I am glad the blood of Christ was shed for consumerism, too.

new series over at Mockingbird

http://www.mbird.com/2011/04/superman-an-american-icon-at-war-with-and-for-his-own-legacies-part-1-of-5/

This is a link to the first of a five-part series about Superman and particularly Superman: the animated series. This is actually intended to be part 3 of a 6 series set on the DCAU that I'm working on for Mockingbird. The other parts are still in progress but since the Superman series is finished David is posting that and I'll be tackling the other segments as I'm able. I'm also juggling looking for work and a return to school so this project is potentially going to be more piecemeal and sporadic than if I were attempting to write all of my thoughts on the DCAU in one fell swoop.

I actually never liked Superman as a kid or really even as a teenager. I thought he was over-powered and under-interesting. I didn't get interested in the character until I saw the DCAU version of him and then I got interested in Siegel and Shuster's actual comics. THAT version of Superman is fun! In fact in several ways I think Siegel and Shuster's Superman is more fun, funny, and engaging than Bob Kane's Batman. Yeah, even as a Batman I did just say that.

This project in particular and the project of which it is a part has been taking longer than I initially planned because, well, I have real world concerns, chiefly finding work and now returning to school. I have also been helping with music at church so this project has both grown far beyond what David or I initially imagined when we began discussing this project by email last winter. That said I am have been and am still excited by this project. I just have to tackle it as a side project. Here's hoping that it's a side project you will enjoy reading. I hope you enjoy what I consider to be, heh, episode 3. Other episodes, God willing, shall eventually follow. Just because I have five other parts mapped out doesn't mean unexpected things can't happen but I hope to be writing quite a bit more about the DCAU in the days to come.

Neo-Calvinism, young men, and the appeal of the permitted taboo

Over at the Boar's Head Tavern there's been a discussion going about adults who leave the faith and then later come back. This topic is interesting but not quite what I'm going to discuss, though what I mean to discuss connects to that. I'm considering a pyschological explanation of apostates that proposes that people who lave the Christian faith do so not because of the intellectual integrity of arguments against the Christian faith but because they want to justify sins they are already willing to commit or have committed themselves to. As Fearsome Tycoon put it, more young people leave Christianity because they want to drink, smoke, and get laid than are persuaded by philosophical arguments.


I am willing to agree with that but I would also say that this is a stock explanation on the part of many evangelicals that may not be entirely accurate. Yeah, I have known guys who bailed on the Christian faith because they wanted to get laid but they also found evolution to be a more compelling explanation for their biology and behavior than what they were told at church. But that's not where I plan on going, merely a turn taken along the on-ramp to the highway. I grant both that there are intellectual as well as sociological reasons a person may cling to or reject an expression of Christian faith.


I want to take Fearsome's axiom on its face and consider how it may apply to the "resurgence" of Reformed thought and New Calvinism. Let's say that Fearsome is right and particularly right with respect to young guys. Young guys want to drink, smoke, and get laid because those are cool things to do and a way to define manhood and social status.


All right then. The book Drinking with Luther and Calvin, anyone? Federal Husband? Mark Driscoll's Song of Songs sermons? Firepit discussions with beer and cigars about theology? Now maybe the New Calvinists have actually bought their own hype regarding doctrinal purity but I doubt that's what the appeal of the New Calvinist movement has been in the last decade. A lot of us migrated to neo-Calvinism from Arminian theological backgrounds where the Wesleyan Holiness tradition dominates. Don't drink, don't smoke, and don't go out with girls who do.


For a young men who finds the prospect of drinking, smoking, and getting laid compelling the neo-Calvinist movement is not appealing because that guy actually cares about the fine distinctions between infralapsarianism (J. I. Packer) and supralapsarianism (R. C. Sproul). The guy also probably doesn't care about postmillenialism and if he DOES care about postmillenialism it is probably purely in reaction to the premillenial dispensationalism he got in his Wesleyan American evangelical background and because cool kid bad boys of neo-Calvinism pumped postmillenialism. He probably only knows anything about N. T. Wright because John Piper thinks there's some dangers with Wright's theology and that's if he knows who John Piper is (which means he'd be a neophyte to the neo-Reformed team). Above all there is virtually no way this young buck Calvinist slogged through John Murray's The Imputation of Adam's Sin.


No, the real appeal of the neo-Calvinist movement may simply be that it holds forth the promise that a guy can drink, smoke, and get laid all while still officially being some kind of Christian. Postmillenialism looks like the opposite of a premillenial dispensationalist theology that frets that, since Jesus is coming back in two weeks because Jack van Impe says so, there is no point in ever getting married, building a professional career, having kids, or having any kind of productive life. Well, the young Calvinist persuades himself, that's all good that dispensationalism is not the only way to interpret the Bible because he plans on getting married as soon as possible and he's got most all his ducks in a row. Caring about doctrinal purity in this kind of church cultural context makes a guy more eligible because if he can talk about why Rob Bell's book is bad and resembles a pastor he's more likely to be eligible on the dating scene, particularly if he's gained the social clout of having some kind of leadership role.

But here's the thing, guys I've seen who bought into that ten years ago with gusto, so much gusto they actively ripped on men who didn't buy into all of the social customs associated with that paradigm, have come out of the other side of all that a decade later bitter and resentful that they didn't get what they thought the deal promised. These may well be guys who were going to leave the faith at some point anyway, but were sidelined temporarily by a false promise imputed to the neo-Reformed movement.

Wendy over at Practical Theology for Women "might" describe this as one of the many secret prosperity gospels of conservative Christianity. If you get a real job, get your ducks in a row, and be the best Christian man you can be then, well, women will be stumbling over themselves to get ahold of you. But after a decade of labors some guys jumped through all the hoops like courtship and getting a dad's permission and finding the right kind of work and being a doctrine hound and despite all that still didn't get any sanctified tail. Or, worse, they almost got there but things didn't work out and relationships went south and that marriage thing didn't happen. Women who complained that nobody was asking them out would categorically shoot these guys down, who mistakenly thought they had a shot because, well, those women had just complained that they were upset that no guys were asking them out, right?

So for these guys who followed those rules in the hopes that A would lead to B and then to C either failed A or became disillusioned with the whole thing. One Christian I know has said several times that if God's promises are only good for the life to come what good are theY? If there's no earthly benefit to being a Christian why be one? Well, who says the earthly benefits promised by Christ are the ones you think you should get? Me, I'd like a job, and I pray that I get one soon! Forgive me if I think that another guy's lament that he hasn't gotten laid yet is a relatively minor concern.


I'm not going to do the other stock Christianese thing which is to declare in solemn, righteous tones that if you haven't gotten married yet and really want to be married then maybe God has prevented you from getting married because you've made marriage an idol. No, I'm going to suggest that maybe you lack the fiscal, emotional, and social competence to even be in such a relationship and should stop wasting your time lamenting that you don't have what you would probably ruin. See, compared to the that proposal the pat Christianese answer doesn't sound so bad, does it?


There are a few guys I have known who are ostentatiously bitter that they never paired off and they'd rather blame the shallowness of women or the uselessness of the estate of marriage rather than concede that their lack of matrimonial bliss stems from their problematic disposition. These are guys with a gut-level emotional need to argue passionately about anything, to be right about everything, and to take things personally. It's not really any wonder to me, even as a single man, how they managed to somehow have marriage slip through their fingers. It's easy for a guy to declare that it's only ever the less attractive women who talk about the shallowness of men in seeking after the "hot" woman. It's less easy for a guy who has said this to face the facts that he's not hot enough or financially stable enough to catch a woman's eye. Some guys and gals get so resentful about this injustice they decide to abandon the faith.


Well, how do I know they weren't going to do that at some point anyway? Suppose they had gotten that magic wife or husband and she or he died of a congenital disease? A cancer in the brain? A car accident? A murder? Suppose the spouse was raped or sustains a brain injury that leaves them a functionally and truly different person, not the person he or she was on the wedding day? Intellectual arguments against the Christian faith I can understand and to a certain degree respect. I'm still a Christian so I beleive there are reasons to still be a Christian that go beyond the objections I have heard and read but intellectual objections I get. Emotional objections to people who found Christianity wanting because it didn't give them what they thought they deserved are a different class of person. People who reject the things they coveted, and for which they hoped Christianity would be the means to attaining what they coveted, these people I confess I have little ability to respect unless they are able to spell out that this is what their motive was.


Why? Because to the extent that we as Christians tell ourselves that we don't value social and economic status as a foundation for a healthy marriage we do seem to do ourselves and each other a disservice. We don't help things by gearing practical teaching primarily around the assumption that most people ought to marry. When we tell each other that if you just be the best Christian man or woman you can be and he/she will be knocking at your door that's not true. We don't know. As I've written elsewhere, proverbs are not rules that, if followed, yield automatic and inevitable results. None of us is as righteous as we tell ourselves in our most confident moements we are, even if we only go by the sliding scale of comparing ourselves to others or comparing ourselves to where we once were.


The sin nature is like Brainiac in the DC animated universe. Sure, Superman, you destroyed Brainiac that one time in his space ship. You don't know that he's hiding in Lex Luthor's computers at LexCorp. You beat him by stopping him from using a kidnapped Luthor to build him a body an effect a get-away? Well, cool, but he's not gone, just taking a different form somewhere else. I'm not going to keep being a super-nerd and spoil anything about the Cadmus arc there. The point is that when we are most willing to exonerate ourselves is when we should suspect ourselves. The beginning of considering other people as better than yourselves might be something as simple as not thinking you're better than other people. Don't thank God that you're not like that tax collector. You and I both do, that, though, and that is to some degree why the young, restless and Reformed among us had best keep repenting, especially of the things we're liable to take pride in.


One of those points of pride can be that we sucker ourselves into thinking that so many young bucks are attracted to our culture of neo-Calvinism because of the sturdy doctrine and manly discourse on a proper understanding of saving faith that is not imbued with legalistic works. We're growing and important and if a big chunk of those people won to our side were dithering Arminians who decided to give us a shot because they were uptight with the legalism of Wesleyan Holiness teaching then I feel sorry for them already. They'll find that we Calvinists are plenty legalistic enough ourselves, we just put a different varnish on things. It may be the sociological reasons young bucks favor new Calvinism has less to do with the doctrine and more to do with what things we allow that their old church traditions forbade. I know of at least one mother on the internet who fled Pentecostal churches for high liturgical worship and `twas all for naught because her teenage son has figured out that Pentecostal girls in worship teams are hot. I was a Pentecostal teenager once and, yes, some of them are hot.


If as the neo-Reformed love to say "What we win them with is what we win them to" we'd best ask ourselves some really, really hard self-incriminating questions about what our sales pitch is to guys actually is. If in winning the young men we win the generation then what is our sales pitch to the men? Dollars to doughnuts it's not as much doctrinal purity as we think. We think it's Jesus but what if "Jesus" means gaining an increasingly significant amount of social capital in a church structure while becoming a more eligible bachelor who eventually marries, has children and leaves "a legacy"? Isn't this a way for us to advertise to young guys, "You can totally drink, smoke, and get laid and be on the team and if you do it our way it's all better than the ways the world does it." Of course it's not just neo-Calvinists who can do this. For all I know Lutherans and Anglicans and emergents and Catholics and so on can do it, too. I notice it more in the neo-Reformed camp because of spending a good chunk of my adult life in this orbit. I don't assume we are unusually guilty but nor do I assume (as I trust has been obvious) that we are unusually innocent.

Finished a small but major part for my Mockingbird project

I have some fine-tuning to do but I finished a small but still big part of a project for Mockingbird. I'm willing to make it official, I've been working on a fairly massive overview of the DCAU for Mockingbird for some time. That I finished a substantial part of the work just in time for the new website to launch is purely providential coincidence.


So if you've enjoyed what I've written about cartoons here head over to Mockingbird (which is one of my favorite blogs ever) and check out their cool stuff. And, sure, I'm shameless enough to plug once more for my essay series "Toy Story as a Trilogy of Heroic Repentance" that I wrote for them last year. http://www.mbird.com/

Link: Practical Theology for Women: Wisdom vs the Law ...

http://www.theologyforwomen.org/2011/04/wisdom-verses-law-on-womens-issues.html

Observing the contrast between wisdom literature and the law is something I've been stumbling on to in the last five years. I'm neither married nor a parent but it does seem as though in our eagerness to avoid relativism and antinominianism we as conservative Protestants can transform the wisdom literature, but especially Proverbs, into a new kind of law that goes beyond what scripture itself advises. The older I get the more I appreciate that we get not one but two books in the wisdom literature that provide different warnings against a misuse of proverbs. Both of these correctives reveal the ways in which proverbs aren't laws. Job shows us a personal case study of a godly man who meets disaster.


A friend of mine once taught a course on Job at a church and he explained that Job's friends had the correct theology, the correct theodicy but that at the end of the day they were still told by God that they had not spoken the truth about Him. The right theology applied at the wrong time to the wrong person for the wrong reasons is still wrong theology about the Lord. Too few Christians realize the staggering implications and ramifications of this, particularly when we are tempted to pass judgment on other Christians for going through suffering or experiencing failure. Then, of course, there are proverbs that have contrasting observations. Your friend's observations intrigue me because, well, I have been concluding that Christians need to read proverbs as riddles rather than rules, riddles that allow us to examine the mysteries of living rather than as checklists to ensure that we won't meet disaster (ergo what I said earlier about Job's friends and their mistake of universal application of what was given, as you noted, as situational wisdom).


If Job presents us with the personal history of a godly man who faced disaster permitted by God then Ecclesiastes reveals that a lifetime of wisdom does not necessarily yield the happiness a person would expect. A believer can treat the proverbs as rules for living a great life and then still find himself or herself looking back on a life lived by rules that do not bring fulfillment.


One of my favorite observations about Ecclesiastes is that in the epilogue we're shown that in addition to being wise the Preacher collected and weighed many proverbs. Ecclesiastes can be seen as the Preacher approaching the end of his life and realizing that amassing all that wisdom did not bring the kind of success or fulfillment he assumed would be his. Why, then, had he been so very wise? Ecclesiastes looks at the limits and problems of attempting to live life as though proverbs were rules for success. It is not merely an example of how "earthly wisdom" reveals our need for Christ. Ecclesiastes predates Christ so, obviously, we won't be pointed to Jesus.


What we are pointed to is that even the divinely inspired scriptures we get in the form of wisdom literature through Proverbs was given to give us wisdom but that wisdom will reveal conflicting priorities. What happens when a father and mother approach an adult child about taking on their debt? A blunt application of the ten commandments might advice the child to handle his/her parents' debt while Proverbs 6 would warn against taking on anyone's debt for any reason. As Tim Keller put it, wisdom is what we need because there are many decisions that are not forbidden by the Bible and are not really immoral but are, finally, still not wise. Attempting to reduce wisdom to a checklist of moral or immoral actions can cause us to forsake wisdom while thinking we are attaining it.


This is perhaps best summed up in the otherwise inexplicable "Do not be too righteous and do not be a fool." This is not necessarily a warning against self-righteous religious pride or we wouldn't see the Preacher say that no one is blameless just a few verses later. The most self-righteous people in the world are frequently the first people to say "I'm not perfect" before condemning you for not being them. We know this even without having to consult the scriptures!


If no one is righteous because no one can fail to avoid sin then the admonition to not be overly righteous as a reference to religious self-righteousness makes no sense. It's pointless to warn people to avoid doing something they can't do. Clearly it is impossible to live without sin. Conversely, advising people to not be wicked and die before one's time is pedestrian by itself. That the overly righteous man dies early like the overly wicked does not suggest that this is a case of religious self-righteousness. It makes far more sense to read this passage not as a reference to piety but as a reference to the stance rather than the actual wisdom of the wise person.


In a useful cross reference to the JPS Tanakh the reading goes roughly as follows--"In my short life I have seen everything. I have seen a wise man die despite his wisdom and an evil man prosper despite his wickedness. So don't overdo goodness and don't act the wise man too much or you will be dumbfounded. Don't overdo wickedness and be a fool and then die early. It is best to grasp the one without letting go of the other because the one who fears God will account for both." Let me propose that the problem with Job's friends was that they had the affectation of wisdom rather than actual wisdom. In the end they were dumbfounded by the Lord while Job, who asked questions that went unanswered was, strangely, vindicated not by any answers but by a visitation from the Lord.



If balance in avoiding the extremes of Ecclesiastes 7 is the measure of the one who fears God then it can't refer to either sin or to self-righteousness. The godly person knows sinlessness is impossible but does not as a result embrace sin. It makes more sense to say we are warned against the affectation of wisdom rather than some kind of false piety or religious self-righteousness. Why, because if it weren't then why are we warned that there are wicked who prosper in their wickedness while there are wise people who die early in their wisdom?



When God said He would confound the wisdom of the wise it was not merely the pagan wisdom He was confounding. Christ is a stumbling block to both the Jew as well as the Gentile. In fact I may as well be so bold as to point out that you will not see Christ in the wisdom literature. Christ Himself is the wisdom of God that the wisdom literature aspired to comprehend but cannot comprehend. Let us not forget that Proverbs is a collection of axioms and observations and riddles collected by people attempting to live in light of the fear of the Lord. Ecclesiastes is a reflection on the limits of those observations and the depth of those riddles. Job is a series of speeches in which orthodox friends of Job misapply orthodoxy to the issue of Job's suffering at the hands of God. Depending on who we talk to Song of Songs is a typological reflection on God's love for His chosen people or a manual of sex positions and communication techniques. But none of this necessarily points us to Christ.


Look at the life of Christ in light of Proverbs, particularly if you would like to interpret Proverbs as a set of rules or laws. Did Christ receive a wife that would be a sign of blessing from the Lord? Did He have an inheritance to leave to his children? Oh, well, no, He didn't. What about not taking up the debts of others? Wasn't there that coin that was miraculously provided for Peter to pay his tax? Sure, Jesus was sinless but consider that what Christ did in going to the cross was not just foolishness to the Greeks, there was a great deal of it that would have to be considered foolishness even by the measure of Proverbs. It is not for nothing that Paul wrote that the foolishness of God is better than the wisdom of men, and that would even include the wisdom of men compiled for our benefit in the canonical book of Proverbs or Job or Ecclesiastes.



Scripture tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and this is beyond dispute. What I am learning as I go is that, given the riddles explored by the wisdom literature, that the fear of the Lord is also the GOAL of wisdom. We can't just tell ourselves that if we consider ourselves reverant enough toward the Lord that we will then get wisdom. That often doesn't happen! It often leads to nothing more than the affectation of wisdom. In my life that has manifest in the form of married guys assuming they have more wisdom than single guys because they are married. It manifests in the form of liberals or conservatives assuming they have more wisdom than their idiotic alternates. None of that is wisdom, the fear of the Lord is wisdom. If there is more hope for a fool than for a man who is wise in his own eyes then we must not only be cautious about how wise we think we are but about the scope and usefulness even, dare I say it, of the wisdom tradition in general. If we construe the aim of the wisdom literature as living a successful life then we are in danger of distorting the real goal of the wisdom literature which is the fear of the Lord. Yes, if you get wisdom you will have more odds at success but no guarantees of it.

and another link, just because--xkcd, "Significant"

http://xkcd.com/882/

Link: Alex Ross in the New Yorker touches on J.S. Bach and death

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2011/04/11/110411crmu_music_ross?currentPage=all


I spoke too soon if I said that 2011 was at least not a year that included as much death around me as 2011. I don't mean death in natural disasters such as the tsunami in Japan, but death that touches at a personal level. My sister lost a baby she was carrying recently and today I learned that an old friend from my Mars Hill days has died. Learning of two deaths in a single day is ... grim. When I was young I appreciated Bach for the genius of his approach to musical thought and his mastery of counterpoint. I still love those things about his work but I have also come to appreciate how comprehensive his range of emotional expression is and how he composed as a Christian. Plus Bach dealt with more death than any emo or grunge or death metal sort has probably actually had to deal with in this American life.


What Alex Ross describes in summary could be a life's work I am not capable of writing at the age of 37. My life's work, whatever it may be, shall not likely be a treatise on how Bach's cumulative work in sacred choral music can be construed as a meditative live-out reflection on the warnings of Ecclesiastes that life is short and unstable and that we shall all die. Besides, Bach's music itself is so suffused with the realization of the reality and brutality of death I have nothing I could add in writing about it. Good artists and bad artists alike can spend their days grappling with what it means to be human and what it means to live. Good artists and bad artists alike can confront what it means to die and what the daily reality of death surrounding us means.


The difference between a Pixar and a Disney film in which death is in the stakes is that in a Disney film death tends to come only to the villain, who at any rate we see deserves death. In pixar films death is what threatens to rob the protagonist of love and friendship and action. The figurative facing down of the endless fire of the trash heap in Toy Story 3 is affecting because, as with so many of Pixar's best films, the reality and, for us, immutability of death most directly confronts us in the narrative. Death is averted by a providential intervention but death is still one day going to come. As many works of art on grief and death and loss have revealed, the great pain of death is for the living who have lost those they have loved. In childrens' entertainment even being so bold as to confront the reality that such loss can happen can be profoundly affecting and even unnerving for us. As one reviewer put it so pointedly about TS3, "These are pretty fricking existential toys!" Not existential, so much, but aware of the reality of death.


It may be a mistake of our era in terms of art and thought to imagine that simply confronting the reality of mortality involves existentialism. Existentialism as a philosophy was hardly the currency of Bach's day and yet he certainly lived a life full of the death of those he loved. As a man who lost his parents, his first wife, and no less than ten children to death, Bach was, dare I say, almost terribly qualified to reflect in his art on the brevity and frailty of human life. What makes Bach work special is that, as a Christian, he reflected not only on the pervasiveness and depth of death but explored in his music how Christ Himself lay in the bonds of death, broke the bonds of death, accepted death for us, and conquered death for us. Bach has hardly been the only composer to have reflected on these things.


Other composers have done a great job of using music to reflect on how Christ embraced death on a cross for our salvation and Penderecki's harrowing and, yes, melodramatic Luke Passion is a sturdy 20th century example. But arguably without Bach Penderecki's masterpiece would not really be what it was. Furthermore, while I respect Penderecki's use of the techniques of the avant garde to depict the suffering of Christ Bach's music is adept at plumbing beneath that into what scriptures reveal, ultimately are the motives of Christ. Christian choral music would be impoverished were either of the works of these two composers not with us but, obviously, the absence of Bach would lead to the greater poverty. Fortunately that possibility is utterly moot.

Link: 1 year anniversary of death of Internet Monk

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/the-forever-frontier

Of course I couldn't help but notice this. Last year Internet Monk died and a month or so before a woman I used to know in my days after graduating from college was murdered by a man who had been stalking her for years. Months later last year one of my cousins died of skin cancer. 2010 was a year full of death for me. I don't really have much to add to that.

It wasn't all death, of course. I wrote a lot and some of what I wrote included "Toy Story as a trilogy of heroic repentance" over at Mockingbird. But today I remember that had it not been for Michael Spenser linking to Mockingbird and writing so warmly about their work I wouldn't have known about the blog, wouldn't have made comments on it and wouldn't have gotten the wonderful invitation from David Zahl to write for Mockingbird about my favorite movie trilogy. So, really, Michael, though you're not here with us to read this I owe one of my favorite writing projects in the last year to the long-term effects of your ministry.

Not much else to say right now so I'll leave it at that.

blast from the past: Rebecca Brown M.D., mental instability, and errors of spiritual warfarism

http://www.culthelp.info/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=1091 http://www.answers.org/satan/brown.html http://www.pfo.org/curse-th.htm


I was exposed to some of the writings of Brown in my teens and found them troublesome. I wasn't sure why at the time because a teenager isn't usually going to be so widely read in theology as to recognize the problems in an obvious or systematic way (unless the teenager happens to be someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, maybe). But the rampant declarations about generational curses, soul ties, and the like seemed to go beyond anything described in scripture. I distinctly remembered the passage in Proverbs that said that an undeserved curse is like a darting sparrow or a fluttering bird that will never come to rest.



That single verse in scripture pretty much destroyed 90% of what Brown espoused in her books. Even if it were to be argued that cases of genuine curses existed those were curses framed in terms of disobedience to the Lord by Israel. So the idea that disasters of a personal or corporate nature were explicable due to unidentified curses doesn't hold up. For that matter in the book of Job God permits Satan to destroy Job's possessions. God says to Satan, "All that he has is in your power but do not touch the man." We are almost immediately told about how "fire from God" came down from heaven and destroyed the sheep and the servants. The Chaldeans formed raiding bands and captured the camels. A great wind from the wilderness blew and destroyed Job's children.



Now to the extent that Brown could say that these are natural disasters from the Lord permitted to Satan to destroy Job's possessions this may constitute a partial rebuttal to John Piper's recent blogging about how earthquakes are only ever created by God. That's probably true but a thorough-going Christian interpretation of the relationship between natural disasters and Satan's involvement has to grant that God permits Satan to employ natural disasters as a tool in exceptional cases. With respect to Brown's curse teachings there aren't any attacks from Satan that aren't permitted by God but we should also grant as has been granted by many Christian teachers before, that in many cases the flesh is sufficiently troublesome that outright demonic attacks are often not necessary.


Other curiousities about Brown's theology and teaching are fascinating to consider on social and political grounds. If legal citizenship papers give permission for people to bring demons into the United States, for instance, then does this mean that illegal immigrants DON'T bring demons with them into the United States, in contrast to legal immigrants? Brown would seem, then, to want as much illegal immigration as possible so demons don't get permission from the United States government to enter our country. My hunch is that Rebecca Brown, were she ever to have considered this option, would change her theology to say that illegal immigrants bring even more demons into the United States because they have enough demons in them to overcome the principalities and powers of the United States (that probably didn't previously exist before, either). She would also say the Catholics and other Christians who don't subscribe to her theology bring demons with them, too. So learning about the legal cases against Brown in the last twenty to thirty years has certainly been illuminating and a blast from the past.


My sister found one of the above documents recently and I decided to do a little more reading of my own. Having come from a background that was Pentecostal where there was, to put it mildly, a heavy emphasis on spiritual warfare, I ended up being fascinated by exegetical studies and biblical literature as much out of a suspicion that most spiritual warfare teaching I was hearing was not really biblical as for any other reasons.


A lot of what passed for spiritual warfare teaching in the 1980s and 1990s now seems to me to have an unusually synergistic view of a believer's activity and I don't mean "synergistic" in the sense of a normal soteriological view. Instead I mean by "synergistic" the idea that is conveyed by spiritual warfare manuals, that you can, despite being a Christian open yourself up to all sorts of demonic influences and become demonized ignorantly due to this or that sin.


A lot of what has passed for spiritual warfare seems to me now to be paranoid madness. This does not mean that I don't see any value to prayer or intercession. It also does not mean I don't take seriously that Christians have a spiritual adversary. It does mean that I have come to suspect a great deal of supposedly Christian teaching by self-appointed spiritual warfare gurus in the United States peddles paranoia, fear, and fantasy rather than principles and observations that can be grounded in an exegesis of scripture.


What makes spiritual warfare as a topic so difficult to field, however, is that a great deal of the concepts endemic to spiritual warfare depend on ideas that are not clearly developed in the Old Testament canon but that are substantially expanded upon and defined in intertestamental literature which, in turn, are then alluded to without disapproval in the New Testament. This is one of the reasons so much dross rather than silver is possible in spiritual warfare teaching (and, of course, there are those who consider the whole field to be dross but they tend to have similar views about a great deal of other things taught in biblical literature). But I have to grant that in many, many cases the opportunities for fraudulent claims about demonic agency in the lives of Christians or non-Christians are, pun intended, legion.


I'm not unfamiliar with the psychological explanation that most cases of demonization occur in cases where an individual has a religious upbringing in which a belief in demons is taught and demonization is considered possible. Therapists have argued that the case of someone considered demonized is a person who has failed to integrate aspects of their self into their conscious understanding of self, thereby formulating a "demon" as something that permits them to consider that part of themselves separate. If you survey spiritual warfare teachings and consider what demons are considered to give bondage to Christians and need rebuking there's a surprisingly large amount of overlap.


I have seen some cases of ad hoc home-made exorcisms that have not, ultimately, led captives to freedom. In fact spiritual warfare teaching done apart from psychological assessment seems to set people up for more rather than less bondage because either part of the person is demonized by themselves or by other Christians (who may be concluding demons are involved because it is a desperate attempt to find and impose an explanation on a broken relationship); or because a person has been taught that aspects of themselves are signs of demonic influence. This may usually be a mixture of intentional rhetoric without a full understanding of the relational consequences of the emotional impact of the rhetoric. I've been told that my interest in theology and doctrine has amounted to being under the influence of "a religious spirit" and that this was really bad. It wasn't intended to be a declaration that I was under the influence of demons, as such, but it can come off that way when you're on the receiving end of "You have religious spirits" because a substantial segment of spiritual warfare teaching only uses the term "spirit" in a pejorative sense.


I can't say I feel anything but relief that Rebecca Brown has gotten herself into enough trouble to be shown that she has committed numerous crimes regarding the abuse of drugs, abuse of others, and that her character has been revealed. To the extent that her work has created at atmosphere of paranoia among sincere Christians who consider her writings as anything close to a competent supplement to scripture, let alone as an informed study of scripture themselves, I'm relieved. One of the most compelling reasons we should heed James warning in his epistle that not many of us should desire to be teachers because we will be held to a higher standard is in the field of spiritual warfare.


Character flaws in a person teaching on spiritual warfare frequently manifest themselves through the demonization of people that the teacher would choose to belittle on other grounds. Consider Brown's precedent of demonizing Catholics and immigrants (probably not just legal immigrants). Consider other teachers who consider women unusually susceptible to demonic influence as though men were not equally susceptible through different means. Consider those who view illegal immigrants as harbingers of devils even though some of these immigrants are believers who have fled economic and political troubles in their original lands.


But there is something else that needs to be said about spiritual warfare as a domain for abusive teaching, it tends to be an abuse fostered by conservatives rather than liberals. Liberals tend to dismiss the possibility of tthe demonic. To be sure they demonize conservatives in numerous ways because by not granting any spiritual element to the world they no longer use spiritual warfare teaching as an indirect way to demonize their opponents they directly demonize them by declaring them to be insane or hucksters or creators of lies. This looks more reasonable and I'll grant in many cases it is but the net effect in terms of how people are treated is still, basically, the same.


Liberals can demonize others while being confident that they aren't really demonizing others because they don't believe in demons. The errant conservative may be wrong to say so and so is motivated to speak or act in such and such a way because the person has a demon but that conservative has no illusions about the nature of the description. The liberal doesn't either in the sense of knowing what he or she is calling the conservative, but there is a cloud of self-exoneration in not believing demonic influence really happens that allows the demonization to be held as intrinsic to the errant conservative. The errant conservative may be deluded into thinking the liberal has demons but the flip side of errant demonization of opponents is that a person who sincerely believes someone has demons may also believe the person would not have their wrong views apart from demonic influence. In this respect, oddly, the liberal who views the conservative in demonized terms assumes an inherent character flaw leads them to demonize others while the conservative in question may hold that it is possible for the demonized liberal to at some point be free of demonic influence. It's rare, I concede, but possible. It still looks like the same level of demonization and self-exoneration to me on either side of the liberal/conservative divide of anything.


I've seen non-Christians talk about theism as a terrible thing while the said atheist has not become a significantly different person for being an atheist rather than a Christian. The person who got evicted for not paying rent on time or threatening fellow tenants; the person who got restraining orders from more than one ex; the person who managed to have a mercurial professional career due to mood swings, this person may become a better person as an atheist than as a Christian but it won't be through saying that Christians are stupid and judgmental so much as confronting his/her own weaknesses. It's easy to judge others mentally or emotionally weak without considering our own emotional and mental weaknesses.


A proper understanding of Christian teaching is to consider others better than ourselves and to recognize that our own emotional and mental weaknesses make us vulnerable to error and foisting that error upon our neighbor. This is the core error of most spiritual warfare teaching from the last 20 years that focuses on outward actions, outward judgments, and a disposition toward seeing the demonic in others rather than as an internal battle with our own character flaws and weaknesses.


What is more we can decide to externalize in the form of a demon what is ultimately a mental or even a physiological problem in ourselves. Rebecca Brown has obviously had problems with delusions of grandeur that she translates into a conviction that demons are everywhere and must be battled. A person may perceive physiological symptoms of a pending health catastrophe as spiritual warfare and make the terrible mistake of not seeking medical help out of an erroneous belief that the physical symptoms are signs of outside spiritual assault rather than failures in one's own body. It is also possible to resort to a belief in demonic influence on another as a substitute for attempting to understand multiple fractures in a relationship; tragically, resorting to such a belief will further fracture an already damaged relationship. If you dig into the multiple uses and abuses of spiritual warfare teaching it will often have a gloss of biblical passages and a formal appearance of being what is in the Bible but the practical application of it will often be so far afield of Phillipians 2:1-4 as to belie the allegedly biblical spirit in which the self-appointed spiritual warfare guru announces himselr or herself as being God's emmisary.


Rebecca Brown's case of delusion and abuse, seen in this light, begins to seem as though it is a sad warning that becoming a spiritual warfare teacher out of the selfish ambition to feel important and to have clout as being an expert in something leads to destruction of one's own life and the lives of others. In my personal experience few people are more prone to vain conceit than those who appoint themselves as teachers and experts on spiritual warfare because they do not submit themselves to the scriptures either in what the scriptures say or do NOT say regarding evil spirits. They certainly don't avail themselves of historical or serious study of the influence intertestamental literature has had on the subject of diabology or demonology in scripture itself.


Most of all self-appointed gurus on spiritual warfare, whatever they consider their credentials, have too rarely valued others as better than themselves. While they persuade us and assert to us that they have the interests of others in mind a careful examination of their rhetoric and aims in the use of spiritual warfare teaching reveals that, in the end, they consider their own interests and the interests of whomever they consider their team to be to be of greater significance than the interest of others.

http://boarsheadtavern.com/2011/03/31/25488/


Matthew Johnson writes: Denny Burk posts a video interview with Bell.


Says he’s been “slandered”. And “crucified”.


Rob, dude, some mean guys said some stuff about what you have written. On their blogs. Sayed Musa was almost hung – by his neck – for being a Christian. Your feelings are hurt but no one has crucified you.

still working on a lot of off-line stuff

There are several major projects occupying my time of late. One of them has been the continued hunt for work, another is that writing project for Mockingbird I keep cryptically referring to, and still another is preparing music for services at church over the next month. Several pieces are original compositions and I'm also tackling the project of learning a bunch of established repertoire used at my church.

I am ALSO preparing the first movement of Castelnuovo-Tedesco's charming Fantasia for piano and guitar for a public performance later this year. My pianist and I are discussing tackling this at the Seattle Classic Guitar Society open mic iin late spring and it since my pianist buddy has a recital coming up later this year he has suggested that I could play as part of his piano recital, which sounds fun.

I'm working my way through Battles of the Bible; a biography on Bonhoeffer my sister has lent me; and, thanks to my pastor, a book by a NT scholar that taught Bonhoeffer in his early years. This should make for a very interesting time of non-fiction reading for me right now!

I'm also trying to make sure I have an actual social life and get off my duff and do at least some exercise.

Link: by way of Matthew Johnson at BHT by way of Brian Auten ... more Rob Bell stuff

http://www.patheos.com/community/philosophicalfragments/2011/03/30/what-launched-the-bell-battle-part-1-rob-bell-is-no-c-s-lewis/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PatheosPhilosophicalFragments+%28Patheos+-+Philosophical+Fragments%29

two probably unrelated posts on a common theme

http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/japan-after-empathy-and-aid-people-want-answers


>http://priestlyrant.com/on-john-9-and-blindness/1600.html

The first entry may be considered an "environmentally conscientious" blog entry because it's obviously using recycled material. John Piper blogging about the inscrutable providence in the deaths of tens of thousands of people is virtually a cottage industry by now if it weren't already a ministry. It's easier to blog about how God perfectly willed the deaths of thousands as long as they aren't Americans. The one exception to the pattern was 9/11/01 because that was a man-made disaster but Robertson, at least, was a bit more consistent in being willing to ascribe even this to a warning fromGod that people needed to repent.


Despite having been in the neo-Reformed camp for a while I must confess that John Piper's popularity sometimes confounds me. He's okay, I guess but he's a reminder to me that at the end of the day I've never been a particularly zealous Reformed Baptist. The meditation on John 9 is, you'll have figured out by now, the more obviously interesting meditation to me. I also consider it the more biblically informed one. Sure, Piper throws out lists of biblical texts but his is the less biblical meditation both for being a recycled reflection of something he blogged more than a decade ago and because the timing and wisdom of blogging about every natural disaster to the glory of God can be considered an epic feat in Job's comforter theology.

A friend of mine taught a class in a church we both used to attend about the book of Job. He summarized the import of the book as follows--the right theology applied at the wrong time to the wrong person for the wrong reason is still ultimately bad theology. The idea that Piper can say first things first and discuss the two things Christians should do ... but then spends ninety percent of his blog entry discussing what Christians should do after that is a collosal mistake. Jesus said we would be known as His by our love for one another. We are also known for how we love our neighbors.

We're at an early enough of a stage here that Piper's comments seem out of place not just for the fact that he has so obviously recycled his 1999 material on an earthquake that killed 17,000 for a tsunami that has devastated Japan. This is significant, of course, because it appears our Christian brothers and sister in Japan, to say nothing of the unsaved, apparently don't deserve any originally composed reflections on what has just happened to them. Even Job's friends waited a week before opening their mouths and that only after Job cursed the day of his birth. It looks like Piper could have waited at least one more day before blogging so as to follow the example of Job's comforters.


That would be reason enough, really, to consider his recent comments on Japan ill-advised. What surprises me is that few people have seemed to remark on this detail in itself so much as their concerns about his theology as a whole (fair enough) or to defend the humility in which he is perceived to have meant everything, which gets back to my concern that if he so openly concedes he is recycling material that this humility may be construed as a form of laziness in relation to contemporary events. Mobilizing people to help reconstruct churches and church communities in Japan (the few that are there) seems like a more well-thought-out thing to put before the public. Ergo, despite my differences with Driscoll and Mars Hill on some things I'd much rather more high-profile neo-Reformed churches get to the work of helping people rather than doing what they all too often seem best at, which is simply writing about why it's important to talk about proper theology at this point.


Thus we arrive at the second blog entry. Jesus heals the man born blind but does not explain the theological import of His having done so until after the blind man is interrogated by nearly everyone connected to him and met with the accusation that he wasn't even really born blind. Everyone is eager to explain what happened in some way or another. The disciples want to explain the man's blindness as the result of either his own sin or the sins of his parents. Jesus rejects that line of explanation and heals the blind man.


The blind man is overjoyed at being able to see and is met with people who try to explain what just happened, some saying he was never really blind and this disputation of the facts goes so faras to drag the man's parents into the debate. The experts in doctrine and dogma want to make sure glory is given to God and not Jesus. Well, we live in light of the resurrection so we will say "Of course it's about Jesus" and the Father and the Spirit, too.


Not all of us can act in the same way to the same degree but even if I granted Piper's premise that after we have acted and done what we can to help that people want answers isn't htere at least some scriptual basis for saying that our response of aid to weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn (and laugh with those who laugh) the first and most important aspect of our "answer" that we think everyone needs? There comes a point when if a pastor has been doing this John Piper thing on disasters for the last twelve years that he's turning into a kind of theodicy equivalent of Captain Hindsight (let viewers of South Park understand).

be careful what you tweet, libel and defamation suits can happen

http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=39eb0054-3a11-403e-a5e5-203f3a7292c7

I have told friends and associates for years that if it's on the internet it might as well be considered public record. Looks like there was just a case in which someone mistakenly tweeted that someone was taken aside at a police polling station. Though the tweet was corrected the correction was not sufficient to preclude a defamation case being filed.

http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=510d012d-0c07-4dc7-8af7-e0c5f29f1383

It's not really news that Facebook status postings can get you fired but it's a tangential theme.

Piper and Bell as the great white fight in contemporary evangelicalism

http://drewgihart.com/2011/03/25/evangelical-split-piper-imperialism-a-search-for-postcolonial-christian-expression/

http://politicaljesus.com/2011/03/18/rob-bell-the-gospel-coalitions-tim-keller-agree-on-hell/

http://billwalker.wordpress.com/2011/03/15/is-this-really-about-theology-the-test-case-of-rob-bell-and-tim-keller/


I was sure, to go by the blogosphere a few years ago, that the big fight upon which the evangelical faith (read neo-Calvinism) was going to win or lose was about the New Perspective on Paul and whether or not N. T. Wright's fans could be nipped in the bud by proving Wright denied double imputation and thus compromised the whole Gospel (at least based on sound bites exchanged by Mark Driscoll and R. C. Sproul).


Well, it would appear that the new, real, big fight is about whether or not Rob Bell is a universalist. Piper and Bell are the blogged about people at the putative center of this theological dust-up. Two white guys with glasses. Hey, solidarity, man, because I look pretty white and I have glasses. Still ... having come from a racially mixed marriage of an American Indian man and a white woman I admit that when I stumbled upon this link above I was more amused than perhaps some people would say I should be. Drew G. I Hart writes:

Younger, fresher expressions of church are “emerging” and are winning over many from white America. Simultaneously, the old guard is losing relevance, and feels threatened. Rather than working together as as the Church, imperial and colonial instincts have kicked in as folks gaze upon all the religious authority that could be attained. Domination over American Christian theological direction has quietly been the real story & narrative when you stop and read between the lines.

What is interesting is that some of the people who have aligned against Bell at various times were aligned with the "younger, fresher expressions of church". The rest of his comments are sufficiently interesting I am just going to post them as follows:

I can understand why younger white evangelicals would want to break away from this brand of American Evangelicalism. While I can appreciate many of the theological nuances expressed by this zealous group of white 20 and 30 somethings, they have their own set of problems. Before we get too excited about this coming shift in influence over American religious life, we must acknowledge that the practice of hegemony and domination will still continue through these “emerging leaders”. Overall, I have been pleased with the theological shifts being expressed, because they express desire for racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity in the Church… wanting the Church to be ONE church, which we were called to be. However, it did not take very long for me to realize that the proclamations and the practices of this group were not lining up. Everything that is done is done to cater to white middle class suburbia. They cater to the priviliged despite affirming Jesus’ call to serve the least of these. [emphasis mine] As far as hegemony goes, Black and Latino pastors and theologians still continue to be uninvited to the infamous “table” Even these newly formed tables under banners of emergent or missional are starting off on the wrong foot, being almost completely homogeneous. Of course these Evangelical 3.0′s have learned from their predecessors that you must at least grab a token black for your entourage or program (however the 2.0’s actually did a better job at pulling in tokens), often this GED effort of token representation is not even being done at many of their gatherings and events. Unfortunately the white control and supremacy over religious life in America is not going anywhere if left on track.
:

In a truly global Christian perspective the fight about whether or not Rob Bell is a universalist or believes in Hell is pretty unimportant. Even as a self-identifying conservative evangelical guy Bell is finally a non-entity. This Piper/Bell conflagration can be seen as nothing more than two fairly affluent white boys in glasses who are not quite so young making bids for which young and upwardly mobile white boys and their wives will shape the future of white American Christianity.


Despite the tempest in the teapot I know plenty of Christians who 1) have no idea who Rob Bell is and 2) have even less of an idea who John Piper is. We among the neo-Reformed think it's a super-big-deal that this is all happening. Conservative Protestants do have some reasons to have reservations about Bell, of course ... but we have to remind ourselves that to Christians even in America, let alone Christians around the world this fight is about as compelling and relevant as comic book fans debating who would be more likely to win a fight with bloodlust on, Captain America or Wolverine.


Again, I'm not saying the issues aren't important at all but that we take ourselves too seriously as though the issues and debates will stand or fall on whether or not we win. American evangelicals must continually be reminded that heretical views such as modalism, Docetism, Arianism, Nestorianism, Montanism, etc. etc. are not new. Even the New Perspective on Paul isn't new so much as an attempt to recover the old perspective that is older than the old perspective on Paul developed in the scholastic battles of the late medieval and Renaissance periods. If Piper matters now to a lot of Christians who aren't already committed super-soldiers in the young, restless and Reformed it will unfortunately that Piper seems to be working his way slowly toward pontificating on the need for all Christians everywhere to repent of worldliness any time a natural disaster arrives with a consistency greater than Pat Robertson.


Of course Robertson will be dismissed as a nutjob by the YRR crowd but Piper won't be even though he's make the same case without being so bold as to mention (most of the time) which specific sins American Christians need to repent of as God permits tens or hundreds of thousands of people to die in other countries where by and large white American Christians will never live. Now my Christian friend in Japan probably isn't spending a lot of time reflecting on how the tsunami is a sign that she and other Christians should repent of worldliness so much as she is hoping that our Lord Jesus returns soon so these kinds of horrors won't continue any longer.


While Internet Monk was alive I think, if memory serves, he once said that one of the controversies surrounding Mark Driscoll's popularity among younger Baptists was due to his being Calvinist and his lack of obvious adherence to Baptist concepts of Christian piety. He may have gone so far as to suggest that Driscoll was a lightning rod because he represented what conservative southern Baptists didn't want their denomination to become characterized by, either the Calvinsit part or the lack of earlier piety part. Piper came under fire from a few of the old guard about letting Driscoll be on the team, or Rick Warren.


Well, perhaps in a way Piper's view of Bell shows that these things can be relative. If the new Calvinists a la Calvinist Baptists are pretty confident they are blessed by God to reshape American evangelicalism then if there's no meaningful threat or competition from the old guard Baptists and the New Perspective is too European in terms of serious adherents to be a problem (and Wright has stepped down from his role as bishop to work on more books anyway), then the new big battle to mobilize the troops can focus around a Mars Hill founded by Rob Bell that could be confused with a Mars Hill founded by Mark Driscoll and two other guys.


Dare we suggest that maybe the fight is not merely about a political struggle to see which version of urban and urbane white Christianity will win but also a public battle over branding issues? It's not impossible, though it is obviously a small part of the fracas. That there are two Mars Hill churches in America in different parts of the country with semi-young pastors who are controversial for not seeming old-fashioned enough suggests that we are living in a small world indeed. I was at the one in Seattle for quite a long time and never had much interest in Bell or his church. I thought that Mars Hill was a bigger deal then I think, ultimately, it will prove to be.


Almost twelve years after first attending I'd say that it went from being an emerging church to a Calvinist Baptist denomination, which is okay, just no longer what I had signed up for. That the other Mars Hill and Rob Bell are being described as drifting back into traditional liberal Protestantism simply reinforces for me that in order for this description to have happened and for Driscoll to be aligned with Piper proves that Driscoll has already functionally lined up as Reformed Baptist in all but denominational affiliation.


Even though there's a lot about American evangelical white culture I can still very much appreciate I am not under the impression that in the history of God's global Church that this is as big a deal as the liberal and conservative white Protestants at contingently hip or influential churches are making it out to be. I'm pretty sure my Orthodox relatives and charismatic relatives have no idea who these people are (well, the Orthodox relatives know who Piper is, for sure, and don't like him. :)