more on J. S. Bangs' post the abjection of the past and genre literature

http://jsbangs.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/time-travelers-or-the-abjection-of-the-past-in-fantasy-literature/

This is the most striking thing about visiting the past. The people who live there certainly lack many of our modern luxuries, and their lives are less pleasant than ours in some ways. But they don’t think that their lives suck. They are happy at roughly the same levels that we are happy. Many of them are distinctly uncomfortable with the modern world when it inevitably forces itself on them. Sometimes they look down on us for our laziness, loss of virtue, and alienation. To say “the past sucked” is to ignore the happiness of those who lived there, and in many cases continue to live there.
...
One of the more interesting ideas of critical theory is the concept of abjection, which is the attitude by which the mainstream rejects and symbolically casts out its antithesis, defining itself by what it excludes. Racial whiteness is defined by the abjection of blackness. Literary fiction is defined by the abjection of genre. And modernity is defined by the abjection of the past.

This abjection is absolutely necessary for modernity to function. We have to be ashamed and disgusted by our ancestors, for how else would we justify the vandalism of our inheritance and our pollution of the natural and social environments? By making the past abject, we reassure ourselves that we have lost nothing in the transition to modernity, that our forefathers have nothing to teach us, that we were right to leave all of that behind. Daniel “The Past Sucked” Polansky is merely participating in this ongoing project of abjection.

Polansky says that he doesn’t understand fantasy, in particular its fascination with the past. But there is really an obvious alliance between the genre of fantasy, which abjected both by mainstream literary fiction and by its older sister science fiction, and the abjected past. The outcast genre and the outcast history have to make an alliance together. It is no coincidence that fantasy literature emerges as a distinct genre at the same time that the modern world starts onto its feet and begins to persecute history.

Or like my banner quote says: Realism is for those whose worldviews are already accepted as realistic. The rest of us must make do with genre.

My friend J. S. Bangs wrote a great blog entry in the last month or so about the abjection of the past and modernity. I have excerpted so much I could have just quoted the whole thing but I excerpted carefully. Particularly salient is J. S.'s observation that while people who lived in the past didn't have things we have they didn't see their lives as being bad. There is, of course, the sort of person who looks back now on the past with fondness and forwards things like "I miss Reagan" or "The Clinton years were better" but these people, I will callously declare, are people who are facing their own inevitable mortality and use emotional displacement--they don't really miss Reagan or Clinton so much as they miss the more unlimited horizons they had financially, emotionally, and physically. Old hippies don't miss the 1960s so much as they miss having the bodies of 20 year olds and the sense that they would do things that mattered.

The persecution of the past becomes necessary so that we can rationalize the present. People who justify abortion now can say that it is a necessary thing to prevent the repression of women. The babies who will never grow up to be women because they were aborted don't matter. We can discuss in enlightened terms how we are better than the racists of the 1950s and 1960s but the sad truth seems to be that every epoch of humanity will find a demographic to commodify, sell, and destroy as it sees fit.

When people ask of what benefit there could be in the study of religious history they may often see this in terms of looking back on benighted idiots from the past who believed the world was the center of everything. How much better we know things now. A society in which women were property also viewed children as property and infants could be thrown aside to die of exposure if they weren't good enough to keep or if they were too expensive to keep around.

The rationale for abortion today can dress itself up as being friendly to women, and in some respects it is because it grants women the power to kill. After millenia of women being killed in honor killings and so on I will hardly deny that there is a reversal afoot. But to suggest that we are better because we commodify the lives of unwanted children in a way that is considered pro-woman rather than patriarchal does nothing to change the reality that our society has rationalized the commodification of unwanted children while criminalizing abuse of wanted children in more or less the same way as the allegedly earlier, more barbaric, and less educated cultures we consider to be worse than ours.

The comics artist (comix) Art Spiegelmann was once asked about superhero comics in the Comics Journal, I think it was. In the interview he said he never much cared for superhero comics because those were the power fantasies and wish fulfillment impulses of children and that he had adult power fantasies. This is, I submit, the self-manifesting stupidity of comparison. The power fantasies of adults and children are, in my observation not so fundamentally different. What distinguishes the wish fulfillments of adults and children other than that adults of wish fulfillments that are informed by the transition through and beyond puberty? Let me reframe my polemic another way, what do people usually refer to when they euphemistically cite "adult entertainment"? How is that, precisely, more adult and emotionally advanced or intellectually sophisticated than the wish fulfillment fantasies of children?

A disabled man may have a fantasy of having normal physical abilities. As many people in the gospels were described, what they wished to receive from Jesus were simple things such as the ability to walk, the ability to see, the capacity to hear, a capacity to speak, to be free from chronic bleeding, to be liberated from seizures and demonic oppression. Adults who look down on the power fantasies of children tend, in my observation, to have an unrealistic assessment of the realism of their desires. It's not that the desires themselves are more realistic, it's that the person has the idea that his/her dreams are more "adult".

This gets to the question of genre. Are superhero comics really less "adult" than underground comics (comix for those snobs who wish to distinguish between "art" comics and "pop" comics)? Grant Morrison published his book Supergods this year. In it he points out that superhero comics let us directly ask questions about what kinds of powers we have as humans and how we should put it to use. Ever since we split the atom we have had superpowers as a human race, so how, really, is it unrealistic to have a comic book about Captain Atom and how the manipulation of atomic forces should be used to help humanity? But for a whole swath of people Captain Atom isn't serious while Dr. Manhattan is. If DC hadn't opted against Moore permanently killing off The Question Moore wouldn't have had to invent Dr. Manhattan.

Watchmen has been billed for decades as a "grown up" comic book but its plot points and narrative beats don't differ that much from a comic book for children, or a serial of a character like Indiana Jones. The central all or nothing stakes is not more "realistic" simply because a whole generation of comics readers in the throes of Cold War anxiety assumed (wrongly it turns out) that the world was going up in atomic fire or saved by peaceniks arguing for nuclear disarmament.

In other words, even those people who pretend to themselves and to us that they have more "grown up" wishes and fantasies reveal themselves, in the end, to be the same old kids who imagine that we can change/save/transform the world. The "realist" is simply the person who wants art to change the world by imagining stories about people who change the world with an idea like that humans should be treated with dignity. Obviously I take an extremely dim view of those people who imagine they have more "adult" views than others.

One of the most important modes of abjection that happens within Christianity in America is the contrast between the "authentic" and whatever is "fake" or "institutional". But there is another form of abjection, the contrast between"authentic" and "commercial" in the arts is something I want to write about at some length down the road. I am particularly interested in examining how this narrative pervades Western art and music and literary criticism across centuries. The contrast between "real rock" and "corporate rock" is instructive not merely because it's so easily observed but also because we can go back and look at how this dynamic can be seen in what can be broadly called a "socialist realist" outlook. But it would be somewhat inaccurate to say this impulse is a strictly socialist realist one since obsessing about which artist was the truly independent genius and which one was strictly working for "the man" predates even Marx's writing on such topics.

I hope later, maybe next week, to tackle writing about how pigeon-holing composers into certain categories partly establishes J. S.'s observations. If the 18th century was the beginning of a new capacity to abject the past then there's a fun article about Haydn's role in 19th century musical criticism and historiography that shows how ideology and aesthetics get used to simultaneously venerate and abject a single person and his work as a way to define both an artistic field and the society which would appoint itself the arbiters of art and taste.

thankfulness in the midst of bad times

I have been unemployed for almost two years. I pretty much have no money now and have failed to land any steady work. I don't know how long this jobless phase is going to last, I just know that I haven't managed to end it despite persistent efforts.

What I am certain has had nothing to do with my failure in the job hunt is having a disability. Nobody owes me a job but I can certainly try to do what I can to land work. I often look back on the last seven years and feel like I should have done something different, something to make myself more employable than I seem to have been in the year.

There are a lot of things to be afraid of when you have no job, no money, and come upon the two year mark facing down failure after failure. I've applied for burger flipping jobs and been shot down. I've applied for data entry. I've applied for data management jobs. I've applied for clerical work. My vision, which I'll get to momentarily, is so remarkably poor I can't do assembly work and in the last week I've discovered that I'm even less likely to be able to tackle that stuff than before. I don't think I've been discriminated against for having a substantial vision disability but it has also meant that there are a lot of jobs I realistically can't consider because the jobs are in places too inaccessible to me in terms of time to consider.

But in the last week I had a pretty big scare. I have no real history with headaches so last Wednesday when I had a slight headache I could make a necessarily obscure joke referencing a Harold Pinter play and leave it at that. By Friday however I experienced a headache of a strange and terrifying power. I felt like my head was being sawed open with a power tool, or as though someone was using a straight edge to skin my head. It felt like part of my brain was getting dug out of my skull.

Then I began to notice that vision in my left eye had deteriorated. Things were more fuzzy than before. I ended up meeting with my doctor. True, I'm in poverty but I can't afford to not see my doctor when I get an excruciating headache for the first time in my life coupled with a noticable decline in the vision of the left eye. Put those two things together and there's very few good things that adds up to for normal people.

I ended up in a marathon of medical appointments in the old `hood I used to live in more than ten years ago. By the end of the day I got my first CT scan. Nobody I know had mentioned CT scans and it feels weird when you're run through the scanner and then you feel like your brain is getting microwaved. It felt a little weird. I also saw my eye doctor and my regular doctor. The short version is my doctor and his assistants were very afraid I had had a stroke. Well, it turns out what I have is expanding cataracts in the left eye coupled with a recent onset of nasty headaches. Everyone else in my immediate family has been dealing with headaches for decades. This last week happened to be one in which my lessened left eye vision coincided with migraines.

So this week I am grateful for cataracts and migraines because those things aren't a stroke.

The apostle urges us to be thankful in all circumstances and sometimes there is a legitimate time to be thankful by way of negation. Of course I don't mean the Pharisee's prayer of "Thank God I'm not like that tax collector over there." I can be legitimately and genuinely grateful that the problems I have encountered in the last week in my physical health really are "just" cataracts and the occasionally agonizing headache. Paul could be thankful that he was blinded by the Lord and later healed by the Lord's mercies. Well, given the worries and uncertainties I had this week about what was going on with my health I can be glad I just have cataracts and headaches. If you've never had a massive macular detachment you may not appreciate why I keep saying "just cataracts". Trust me, if you have had a macular detachment you won't be wondering at all!

For Israel in exile being stuck in Babylon or the prospect of going there was lame. The prophet Jeremiah, famously, said to those in the exile to settle down, live, raise familys, and pray for the benefit of the city. Why? This was the city that embodied all the destruction and judgment the Lord rained down on them, wasn't it? Well, the exile, stern as it was, was God's better plan. When the Lord said He kknew the plans He had for Israel, plans to prosper them and not to harm them that plan was the exile! I didn't choose that at random, obviously. Thankfulness to the Lord even in exile is still possible. The thing about the cultivation of thankfulness to the Lord is that we can do this in the midst of misery. When Paul wrote "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" he wasn't talking about being able to scale tall buildings in a single bound like Superman; he was writing about how he was able to live not only with plenty but also with want. We also know that he was able to go on to martyrdom through the same Christ who strengthened him.

Even among those of us who bill ourselves as evangelical conservative Protestants, perhaps most especially because that's how we bill ourselves, we can sell ourselves on the idea we, like Peter won't sell out. We can sell ourselves on the idea that we're sold out for Jesus and then go straight back into assuming that if we're living in Jesus then the victorious living shouldn't stop and God's signs of divine favor constitute material success and popularity. The Christian emphasis on perservering in the midst of suffering has little to do with some ascetic renunciation of the world but a recognition that life in this world will necessarily bring with it some occasion for suffering and failure. The saints of old faced the feeling of being losers and failures and feeling forsaken and we know through their prayers and words in the scriptures that we are not alone in this even though we all, when we come to the dark valley, do feel alone.

So I can continue hunting for work and continue tackling writing, as you can see I'm doing in earnest. I can also, thank God, resume tackling my big writing project for Mockingbird.

Halden is back in action at Inhabitatio Dei: Christianity is not a cultural project

http://www.inhabitatiodei.com/2011/08/10/christianity-is-not-a-cultural-project/#comments

Halden is back and his post "Christianity is a not a cultural project" is interesting. I can't say I agree with its substance but that's because while I grant the legitimacy of the critique the alternative is too much a work in progress to describe adequately. Halden writes that post-evangelicals are moving away from a "relationship with God" talk because that is "obviously stupid". Is it? When the scriptures variously attest people interacting with Jesus and Abraham or Moses speaking with God are not Christians understandably interested in the potential for " a personal relationship with Jesus?" After all, the whole sales pitch of the Incarnation is that Jesus lived and walked among us. Jesus' teaching about how the Father knows the number of hairs on our head suggests that while the "relationship" is not of the same sort as you or I might have in the flesh to say there is no relationship of any kind might be tough to back up. Why pray at all if there is no element of relationship between God and His people?

On the other hand, Halden's got a point about the equal and opposite problem of viewing Christianity as a cultural project. Viewing Christianity as a cultural production enterprise is not really the opposite of a personal relationship with Jesus spirituality. In fact the two are usually wed in all sorts of ways. Even in comments on Halden's posts we can see Christianity described as a culture. Driscoll spent years talking about Mars Hill as forming a "counterculture". When conservative Protestants employ the term "counterculture" to describe their own social system you know that progressive terminology is meaningless and fully assimilated into the mainstream. If Mars Hill constitutes a "counterculture" as a megachurch/nascent denomination then the religious progressives must grant that many of the terms associated with Christianity as a cultural enterprise over against the American mainstream are completely meaningless. As some theorists would put it, the nature of hegemony is such that it appropriates the terminology of truly countercultural movements and vitiates that terminology of its ontological power. There we go, I could have a career in academia, eh?

But if the Christian experience does not necessarily consist in a personal relationship with God that looks anything like any other kind of relationship we have with flesh and blood; and if the Christian experience does not necessarily entail a "cultural enterprise" in the same way as others what does it entail? Very often what Christians really mean when they talk about a "cultural mandate" often looks suspiciously like a blank check from Jesus for them to keep doing whatever it is they already want to do and have baptised in the name of Jesus. If they can simply prove that whatever they're on about isn't against Jesus' teaching then it can be assimilated into a "cultural mandate"

I agree with Internet Monk that many Christians don't hear voices in their head they can describe as being God. I also note and not just in passing that there are plenty of Christians who have no problem saying "God told me X" who are skeptical that God, who apparently tells them all sorts of stuff, tells anyone else much of anything. There are preachers and super-Christians who trust that the Lord tells them to do this or who are not so trusting that the same Spirit they say speaks to and through them does so as readily or reliably through other people. In the realm of preachers as public figures it's curious how many people who cite their personal relationship with Jesus often invoke it as part of a "cultural mandate". In other words, Halden may have some points about certain types of criticisms of the "personal relationship" spirituality or "cultural project" but history has shown that these two intersect and intertwine at least as often as they diverge.

What is more, can't we observe that throughout history the alternatives to these two threads are, well, more of the same? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. So there's a hegemonic right leaning patriarchal "Christendom". What does it get replaced with? Something ostensibly different but often the same. Pacifists, as David Martyn Lloyd-Jones noted, are often so verbally violent about their ideas they attribute to Jesus they end up defeating the stance of pacifism they claim to stand for.

So it would seem the Christian lives in a Christian community (ugh, the buzzword "community" has annoyed me ever since my college days at a private Christian school). Lots of people talk about community and in my experience the people who bloviate most about "community" tend to be the people who least understand community. It's like someone who talks about friendship or decides that friendship isn't strong enough of a word and has to come up with something else--in the end the whole spiel becomes a distinction without a difference. It is impossible to avoid a definition of "community" or "Christian fellowship" that doesn't end up being the sort of hegemonic enterprise the rhetoric and rhetoritician would attempt to battle.

But speaking as someone who considers himself an evangelical Protestant I think there's still merit to some of the criticism. I do think that what ends up being scary for evangelical Protestants who don't hear voices in their heads; and who realize that Christianity as "cultural project" can often do nothing more than baptise the idols and principalities of one's own time and place; is that we begin to realize that our very experience of who Christ is is mediated. Some (not all) Protestants prefer to avoid this kind of discussion because we'd like to emphasize the priesthood of all believers.

The trouble I've seen in my life is that many of the people who camp hard-core on the priesthood of all believers don't seem to have any clear idea what that priesthood entails. It's a bit like Matanya Ophee's acerbic shot at guitarists--many of us who play classical guitar talk about how the guitar is a miniature orchestra and Ophee's snipe reminds us that most guitarists have no idea how to conduct. We end up making not only idle boasts but boast about things that we couldn't back up if our lives depending on it.

The super-spiritual person who talks about what the Spirit told him or her this week and leans on super-spiritual insights may be called a Montanist. A self-appointed prophet may believe he/she gets emails from God directly into the inbox of the brain. They may also feel obliged to spam us by literal spam or TV or radio or whatever. If I may be so bold, these sorts of Christians who often take refuge in a personal oracle approach to God; who double down on the "personal relationship with God" can often be precisely those people who have no truly communal walk of faith. There are spiritual alliances and networks, to be sure, but no truly "family" in Christ.

However the alternative is an equally false one. The cultural project, the cultural mandate, the "Christian culture" is no better precisely because it simply becomes a group norm, the kind of group norm that will eventually decide that the ear is not properly a part of the body because it is not an eye. The nose is more a part of the body than the fingernail on the left pinky. Scripture teaches that we do have both a corporate as well as an individual standing before God through Christ. If we fail to remember both of these aspects then history will never stop being full of sad object lessons in how bad things go if, as C. S. Lewis put it, we take a certain truth too far.

repost of one of my old poems: a sonnet--on election

In all the steady hand of Providence
guides well except if, this election year,
the party I love lacks preeminence.
Then I will cry out with many a tear:
"My God, my God, why did you forsake me!
The person I want in office has lost!
In your wrath have you forgotten mercy?
Have it on me and not the foolish host!
Did you break your promise to do my will
That was given `ere the day I was born?
Or did my requests lack a prayerful skill
that You listened not, and I am forlorn?
In all things Providence can only be
The stuff that should be convenient to me!"

temporary halt on production

I'm not really going to get into why there has to be a temporary halt in production both here and elsewhere but that's unfortunately how things have worked out.

Ecclesiastes 11:1-2, brew beer that you can share with others who shall, in turn, repay you

http://www.civitatedei.com/2011/08/more-on-biblical-beer-and-johnny-mac/
http://biblicalhorizons.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/the-wisdom-of-drinking-beer-with-others/
http://www.gty.org/Blog/B110809#.TlQBq12DTis
http://www.theologyforwomen.org/2008/09/cast-your-bread-upon-waters.html?showComment=1314130715555#c9068491740675192748

Ecclesiastes 11:1-2 may refer to brewing beer. If one casts bread into the water how is there any certainty that one will find it again? You won't since the bread will ferment and rot away ... unless that's the point. Giving portions to seven or eight is often thought of as referring to multiple investments and I would say most commentators of the few I've read tend to agree on this.

BUT what if this investment is in the lives of others. Give portions to seven or even eight may not refer to investments of a directly financial kind but investments in the lives of people who may one day return the favor. As Proverbs puts it we are urged to never forsake a friend, neither ours nor our father's. We are enjoined to not go to a distant relative's house in time of need. Better a neighbor who is near than a brother far away.

Ecclesiastes 11 certainly goes on to discuss how one can't be sure what will succeed or fail but Ecclesiastes 11 opens with a cryptic statement that you should cast your bread into the waters for in time you will receive it again. This is a weirdly certain statement if the whole chapter is about the uncertainty of investment. If, however, it is a prologue saying you should be willing to invest in things that are sure then this investment is an indirect one. I scratch your back and you scratch mine.

Of course over at City of God the upshot of such a proposed interpretation and the numerous references to wine in Ecclesiastes is that John MacArthur's stance against alcohol has to play so fast and loose with biblical texts as to be a joke. Grace to You apparently applies in those parts of life that MacArthur believes he can say are approved in the scriptures and that he also approves of. Or perhaps he can say that those passages don't apply.

I would like to make an aside about alcohol consumption at a more personal level. I didn't take a drink of alcohol until I was 27. I spent two hours sipping at a white russian watching Laurel & Hardy movies with friends of mine until 2 am. It was fun. For the teetotalers I respect their abstention from alcohol but I would point out that there are two general provisos given in the scriptures about alcohol. The first and obvious one is to not get drunk. The second less obvious association is that there are two times when alcohol consumption is considered normative. One is that you're dying. Alcohol can help deaden the nerves. But more common is the association of wine and prosperity. Paul wrote that if a man will not work let him not eat. Well, by extension, if a man will not work let him avoid drink, too. My alcohol consumption plummeted after I got laid off nearly two years ago. I have better and smarter things to do with my time than drink wine or beer or what-have-you.

The scriptures indicate that there will be wine at the feast of the Lamb. Alcohol production is taken as a sign of prosperity and leisure and peace in the scriptures. When times are good rejoice and when times are bad know that the Lord has made one as well as the other so that a person may not know what shall come in the future. This doesn't mean that God doesn't know what times will come but I will set that tangential path aside. It suffices to say that when times are bad taking solace in alcohol is a bad, bad idea.

But I suppose MacArthur, if he knows of this interpretation of Ecclesiastes 11:1-2 can either dispute its veracity or, more likely, emphasize the point that one should invest in the lives of others. Skip the part about brewing beer and casting on the waters and emphasize diversification of investment in the lives of others. That much, I suppose, everyone could agree on.

Postscript: My friend Wendy over at Practical Theology for Women made a funny but prescient remark that the idea that Ecclesiastes 11:1-2 hinges on brewing beer for an interpretation is the kind of thing a guy would come up with. Not necessarily a sarcastic observation but I still find it amusing. Maybe John MacArthur would go so far as to propose that a worldly man would insist on such an interpretation.

Link: Rolling Stone interviews Grant Morrison

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/grant-morrison-on-the-death-of-comics-20110822

Caveats, first it's Rolling Stone, so take that into advisement.
Second, it's Grant Morrison so if you haven't figured out the twenty-foot-tall neon figure doing carthweels that is the "strong language warning" I better spell it out for you before you click on the link!

There have been histories of comic books, but your book Supergods is all superheroes. It's a counter-narrative to the idea that comics need to outgrow this superhero stuff.

I can appreciate someone like Chris Ware for his artistry, which I think is beautiful, but I think his attitude stinks, it just seems to be the attitude of somebody really privileged, and honestly, try living here, try living on an Indian reservation and shut up, and really seeing all that nihilistic stuff, it really makes me angry, it's unhelpful to all of us, and it's coming from people who have money and success to talk like that and bring those aspects of the way we live in favor of all the others, and it's indefensible.

Dude, half my family line is American Indian. Grant Morrison gets an "amen!" from this comics reader!

Morrison's remark, which I won't quote here, about Alan Moore is creepy but momentous. He's got a point that considering Alan Moore isn't what you'd call a misogynist it's crazy to think there's almost any given story he's written where a woman has gotten raped or is nearly raped. Morrison's kinda crazy but I grant him a point that he made it three decades writing comics and never wrote a rape into his stories. Comics are as bad as Japanese genre movies on rape, I'm afraid. Of course the Bible not only has rape but incestuous rape to boot but that's some other topic for some other time.

HT You Are Not So Smart: The Illusion of Asymmetric Insight

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/08/21/the-illusion-of-asymmetric-insight/#more-1369


The illusion of asymmetric insight makes it seem as though you know everyone else far better than they know you, and not only that, but you know them better than they know themselves. You believe the same thing about groups of which you are a member. As a whole, your group understands outsiders better than outsiders understand your group, and you understand the group better than its members know the group to which they belong.

The researchers explained this is how one eventually arrives at the illusion of naive realism, or believing your thoughts and perceptions are true, accurate and correct, therefore if someone sees things differently than you or disagrees with you in some way it is the result of a bias or an influence or a shortcoming. You feel like the other person must have been tainted in some way, otherwise they would see the world the way you do – the right way. The illusion of asymmetrical insight clouds your ability to see the people you disagree with as nuanced and complex. You tend see your self and the groups you belong to in shades of gray, but others and their groups as solid and defined primary colors lacking nuance or complexity.

... So, you pick a team, and like the boys at Robber’s Cave, you spend a lot of time a lot of time talking about how dumb and uncouth the other side is. You too can become preoccupied with defining the essence of your enemies. You too need the other side to be inferior, so you define them as such. You start to believe your persona is actually your identity, and the identity of your enemy is actually their persona. You see yourself in a game of self-deluded poker and assume you are impossible to read while everyone else has obvious tells.

Earlier this year I wrote about false prophets and mental illness. Well, this entry could be considered a continuation of those thoughts. This entry can also be considered a tangential examination of watchbloggers for and against religious institutions. Ex-Christians and atheists imagine they know Christians better than Christians know themselves in the same way Christians imagine they know atheists and ex-Christians better than they know themselves. You know the drill. Did someone walk away from the faith? Well, of course they only did so because they wanted to keep sinning. The idea that they lost faith in Christ and then decided that because they lost that faith there was no point in using the same moral compass can't be considered. Non-Christians can look at Christians and surmise that culture and upbringing alone account for why someone would believe something as crazy as that religion without letting the shoe be on the other foot, there is nothing more inherently rational or more humane in a secular upbringing, either.

It should probably go without saying a false prophet (or even a real one I guess) can operate with the assumption of asymmetric insight. A person who imagines he/she has the gift of discernment can read the tea leaves, read the emails, read the blogs, read non-verbal cues, and all that. He or she is positive he or she has penetrated beyond the veil into things as they are. This lets a person imagine that someone she doesn't really know must be, against all evidence, someone other than who that person is. Maybe he went to college. Well, in the mind of the prophet that college degree must be a sham. Maybe the person has never actually dated anyone. Well, in the mind of the self-appointed prophet there's a significant other.

Of course the would be prophet might be obtaining ideas from outside sources whilst thinking he or she is sui generis or getting divine oracles. Maybe there's some pastor or famous preacher type who says "I see things" and that clicks in the mind and heart of some emotionally and mentally unstable person who retroactively ascribes to themselves insights and ideas they did not necessarily have. I'm the sort of glum type who imagines such a mentally ill person would develop delusions of grandeur anyway but that the public statements of a high profile Christian could nonetheless catalyze the particular forms a delusion may take.

There was a woman who claimed to have keen insights and who told me that something I mentioned in passing spoke to someone in a troubled marriage. I mentioned to the self-described seer that the thing I mentioned in passage referred to an infant. No matter, in the mind of this seer the feedback loop of one's own divine inbox in the mind was all that mattered. It was sad, really, and continues to be sad.

Of all the things I have seen about how Christians pretend and proclaim this or that about the nature of being a prophet or prophecy few things are more aggravating than the pervasive misrepresentation about what the role of a prophet normally is, or that the role of the prophet is necessarily normal. I've already written at some length about how a preacher is not a prophet, no matter how badly the preacher wants his ego stroked so that he imagines he's got a prophetic gift because someone lets him be a pastor. I have also written about how some self-appointed prophets are just plain insane. But there is a larger responsibility God's people have as a whole. If we misrepresent or misunderstand the communal role of the prophet historically then we have no chance of battling strains of Montanism or other errant beliefs.

A preacher who is a cessationist who thinks he stands firm in battling Montanism and actually believes that "prophecy" is fulfilled in role by preaching is accomplishing nothing. When people say there are no prophets because Christ has come they also misconstrue what the role of the prophet was in ancient Israel. Could not any number of Israelites have said there was no need for prophets or psalms? After all, the Torah was given by the Lord Himself to Moses. A cessationist argument from the completeness of divine revelation fails because there is no exegetical case to be made that the scriptures were referring to themselves.

If the Torah was complete why was there a granting of a prophetic role in Deuteronomy 18 to begin with? It's not to say Christians must expect a prophet or seer to fill in gaps left untouched by the scriptures (i.e. Torah or the Bible as a whole). It's that if Christians do not find such gifts we can trust that the Lord has given us enough to live for Him even when we have no answers. Ironically it took a prophet to articulate this in a uniquely memorable way. Who walks in darkness and has no light? Let him trust in the Lord. Those who light their own path and light a fire to warm themselves by the Lord promised this, that they would lie down in torment. There comes a point where it is better to admit the Lord has hidden Himself and gives no answers than to presume that anyone has answers. This means those preachers who assume cessationism because they see no evidence the Spirit works in this or that way; those preachers who assume that because the scriptures are complete there is no need for gifts; these are people who are not exegeting the scriptures but are at risk, it seems, of lighting their own path where the Lord has not spelled out explicitly that "these things never happen".

But the alternative to the cessationist is not necessarily the continuationist as usually appears in America! In the last twenty years the greatest error I have seen about spiritual gifts perpetuated among Christians is the idea that the gift is persistent and can be used for personal gain. We don't say this but we believe it. How many self-described prophets ultimately gun for a special relationship with a pastor or a church? If I cannot say "all of them" it is because I am aware that not all are tempted in precisely the same way, nevertheless I'd be willing to say "most of them"!

The illusion of asymmetric insight allows groups of us humans to circle the wagons and assume the worst about anyone outside our group, especially if those people on the outside offer criticisms of us, no matter how substantial those criticisms may be.

In Christian blogging I'd venture to say that John MacArthur and the young, restless Reformed are both doing a mighty fine job of demonstrating the illusion of asymmetric insight. :) People pro and con on SGM and C. J. Mahaney can and will display the illusion of asymmetric insight. And, yes, the illusion of asymmetric insight has everything to do with what I've seen in the last six years about Mars Hill and Driscoll. It is also the hallmark of a lunatic self-styled prophet who believes that having discernment super-powers means you can make sweeping remarks about other people while refusing to grant a rudimentary scriptural command that we confess our sins one to another. The application and implication of the illusion of asymmetric insight in politics was discussed sufficiently enough in the original post I won't really discuss that.

I find it more interesting to discuss asymmetric insight with respect to religious communities because I have seen some hard-core cases of people operating with that illusion within a community; then when things go south and their social capital and trajectory takes a nosedive they maintain the illusion of assymetric insight in a new way and instead of praising and defending the community they condemn and critique without so much as attempting to share positive aspects about the group or to concede their earlier role of dismissing dissenters as motivated by sour grapes. People who let any number of things slide because they had weight to throw around in the community can become remarkably testy about how abusive the community is while forgetting one's own role in the abuse. A self-described prophet finds it much easier to dish out than receive the perks of having a "prophetic" voice.

I'm not saying there aren't real rights and wrongs on any given subject I mentioned above, I'm simply discussing the temptation that will beset people on all sides of a controversy precisely because succumbing to that temptation will make things worse rather than better. It's possible to propose that someone is genuinely wrong about something without assuming the worst about their motives. It is also possible for a person who is going down a wrong path to sincerely believe it is the right path. After all, doesn't proverbs say that there is a way that seems right to a man but it's end leads to death? When it seems right to you, even approved by God, how can you possibly turn aside from the path that you are sure God is leading you down? How could you even know that it wasn't the Lord telling you something or giving you some insight?

In this way, ultimately, the illusion of asymmetric insight can be broadly described as a breach of the Golden Rule.

JS Bangs: Abjection of the past in fantasy literature

http://jsbangs.wordpress.com/2011/08/17/time-travelers-or-the-abjection-of-the-past-in-fantasy-literature/

http://jsbangs.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/nihilists-i-mean-say-what-you-like-about-the-tenets-of-national-socialism-dude-at-least-its-an-ethos/

I have much I could write about this but for now I'd rather just link to what my friend J. S. Bangs has written in these two links. The first link about the abjection of the past in literature and literary criticism is particularly intriguing to me. The observation that genre fiction emerged precisely at the moment when Western intellectual culture decided the past definitively needed to be escaped from so that we could embrace better-modern is something we could camp out on for a long time.

Priestly Rants: On the Stupidity of Mission Statements

http://priestlyrant.com/on-the-stupidity-of-mission-statements/2177.html#more-2177

...
I had never really considered it until I read Smith’s book on moving from being Evangelical to Roman Catholic, but upon consideration I think he’s right. Have you ever noticed how many non-denominational “evangelical” churches post “statements of belief”?

...

I don’t know; maybe it’s cool to sit down with your pals at Starbucks, enjoy a whatever kind of $6.00 latte they’re serving and compose some hip-cool-funk-a-delic-post-modern statement of why it is you feel the need to work with the poor or whom/whatever, but it seems to me to be more ego masturbation than anything else. In essence what you’re saying is that Creeds are not enough; the Gospel needs something else; Jesus needs a PR man. Of course the irony is that at the end of the day the only mission statement that matters is already written: “Here I am Lord; I come to do your will” (Ps. 40). [emphasis added]

There's almost nothing I could add to this, well, rant. :) Almost.

This is a long-term risk in the "missional" camp, which is why I am not surprised that churches that a decade ago were described as "emerging" are slowly emerging into either standard liberal or conservative Protestant lines of thought. When I was in my early twenties and was quite a bit more naive and lacking in historical grounding I thought that an emerging/missional church might actually turn out to be something else.

Well, youthful naivete can sometimes be excused, I hope! Now that I'm closer to forty than thirty I realize that it was youthful naivete to imagine that things would turn out that differently after all. In fact a certain pastor said in a sermon earlier this year that in some cases plain old-fashioned naivete was married to arrogance on the subject of how differently things would turn out "this time". Everyone wants to imagine he or she will be that exceptional person who didn't go along with "authority" in the Milgram experiment. Everyone wants to imagine that "I" will not be like the others. There's a huge difference between hoping and praying that you do not sin the same way your fathers did, and another thing to say that you won't in full confidence that the way you plan to honor the legacy of your forebears is to be a better person than them. One of these paths does not consist of pride going before a fall, right?

Links: Priestly Rants

http://priestlyrant.com/great-faith/2164.html#more-2164

http://priestlyrant.com/the-damned-how-on-romans-12/2167.html#more-2167

Link: The Guardian: Internet Anonymity and Trolling

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/24/internet-anonymity-trolling-tim-adams

Some ten years ago I was on an unmoderated forum. You can probably guess which one if you've read this blog for a while. I was unusual in that when I participated on the forum I used my real name. One man eventually met me in a class setting and said he'd been wanting to meet me for a while. He said anyone who had the balls to use his real name on a site like the one we both participated in was someone he wanted to meet. I didn't just use my real first name as a sobriquet, I used my real name.

Although I have long since developed the pseudonym Wenatchee The Hatchet this has never really been a truly identify-hiding pseudonym. It gives a person a snowball's chance of figuring out what region of the United States I live in by including the name of a real town in the Northwest (not that I've ever lived there, mind you). Even the alliteration built into the name could lead a widely read reader to suspect I have read more than a few comic books penned by Stan Lee. I have made no effort to conceal a longstanding connection in the last eleven years to Mars Hill. Of course last year I began writing for Mockingbird and decided that my pseudonym, already effectively doing nothing to conceal my identity, could be considered less a pseudonym and more like a brand.

But as I have said before the distinction between anonymous blogging and a public persona is not so big as might first appear. A comedian can appreciate this, as can an actor or a musician. It is easy for someone to remark on the public persona without seeing that this is the persona and not the person. It can be difficult for a person who has cultivated a persona to remember the distinction between persona and person for that matter. Someone might be tempted to shield family or friends from public remarks about the persona thinking they may feel that these remarks are about the person. That's understandable, yet it may also need to be said that when you compose a persona and enter the public sphere you invite comment that will inevitably emerge in the world on-line, which, if it were not really in any way effecting the real world, could not include statements over which lawsuits could be formed.

On the internet there's trolls to be sure but in a sad way there is really no trouble on the internet that we have not, for the most part, brought upon ourselves. The internet has been around for some twenty years and it can still be hard to fully appreciate this. We can imagine we get trouble or emotionally troubled by bloggers or news feeds or crazy people on the internet but we are not merely tempted by things outside, real as those external temptations may be. Those external temptations are given to us in "new" ways by means of the internet but the temptations themselves are ancient. Rumors of wars predated the internet by millenia. Rumors of scandals in church circles predated the church, if you think about it. The temptation to covet someone else's spouse predated the internet. The temptation to lie about someone to bolster your own reputation predates the printing press. Even if you were to hole yourself up and avoid any contact with the internet none of the temptations you think the internet will make worse will be absent.

In a way trolling exists in more than one form. How about forwards from supposedly real people who are often not attributed as sources? You know, the forwards that lambast this or that person and make claims that are not necessarily true but confirm your worst suspicions about so and so? Some of the most persistent and pervasive trolling on the internet comes in the form of spammy chain emails that we forward because we agree with whatever the sentiment is, frequently tagged with something to the effect of "and if you're a real American you'll forward this." I guess I'm not a real American.

I delete just about every forward I receive. Let me tell you, unbidden, why. I wouldn't want someone forwarding stuff of that sort about my family members and since I appreciate that people I disagree with, however strongly, also have family members, I'm not interested in forwarding this paranoid forward about how Obama is a Muslim conqueror or that forward about how Bush 2 was going to declare martial law and suspend the Constitution. It all ends up reading more or less the same way. Trolling happens in your heart long before you hit the reply button. We are all tempted to troll but that doesn't mean we have to give into that temptation. No, really, we are all tempted to troll. The difference between some of us and others of us has nothing to do with the temptation or even the disposition of the heart, the difference is more a matter of the fact that some of us go beyond imagining our witty rejoinders and put-downs to working at making those a reality. But the equally unhappy truth is that the vast majority of us are not so witty or clever or funny or coherent as we tell ourselves we are.

Priestly Rants writes about the gap between forensic justification and an actually transformed life

http://priestlyrant.com/on-tin-cans-hearts-minds-daughters-and-stupidity/2158.html#more-2158

The author at Priestly Rants is Lutheran and not "evangelical", which is to say not evangelical. He mentions how many Lutherans speak as if the "as if" part of salvation is the focal point of everything. Of course if the purely forensic aspect of justification is the big deal then what happens when a Christian continues to struggle with depression or continues to display patterns that reveal mental illness? Does the person with bipolar disorder get told that he or she just needs to trust in the forensic/judicial statement of justification? What does that mean?

In eternity, sure, we know what that means, but a forensic declaration of justification by faith doesn't look like the renewal of the mind, does it? What would the renewal of the mind look like? Not planning on discussing that at length here, smarter and better people than I shall ever be have fielded that subject generations before me. But I do want to link to this and mention that there can be a difference between a Christian counselor wanting to avoid "pop pyschology" and a Christian counselor who assumes that "all truth is God's truth" just so long as it doesn't require one to come up with a nuanced understanding of mental illness that doesn't involve mere demonization or "lack of repentance".

so angry Irish guys tend to die in disputes about honor and manhood?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44126188/ns/health-mens_health/?GT1=43001

... That’s the premise of a new study out today in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. The three authors, all from the University of Oklahoma, found that states with a “culture of honor” –- in the South, and the West, mainly -- also have higher rates of accidental death for white males: 42 per 100,000 compared to 36.8 per 100,000 in non “honor” states.

So what’s a “culture of honor”? “The relentless, and sometimes violent, defense of masculine reputation,” according to the study.

“This is an adaptation to what the Ulster Scots [also called the Scots-Irish] experienced over 800 or 900 years in southern Scotland,” one of the study’s authors, Ryan P. Brown, explained. “That’s a breeding ground for the types of dynamics we are looking at.”

Interclan raiding and warfare led to allegiance to family and a high value being placed on one’s personal bravery; think Mel Gibson and his blue William Wallace face. Then, when those people came to the United States, they tended to move to some pretty wild areas.

So does this mean road rage is more common in the West and South? Not entirely sure about the nature of the study or if it has replicable results. Psychologist Roy Baumeister has done work on violence and social integration and he has proposed that the badass is a person who fights more by reputation than actual fighting. If the badass is perceived as, well, a badass, then he doesn't have to fight most of the time. In fact he only needs to win the few fights he may get into or merely be perceived as having not lost his honor to keep his position. It's not entirely surprising that cultures in which a badass could emerge are those in which honor and masculinity are felt to be at stake.

I suppose the upshot so far as the author is concerned is that you, as a man, will live a bit longer if you don't feel obliged to actually prove your manhood over slights real or imagined, particularly if those slights are, well, slight.

and then there were three executive elders

Okay, so instead of five executive elders there are now three. Quaint ... and unfortunately unsurprising. The by-laws indicate that there ought be no less than three but no more than six executive elders so this fits the parameters of design but, still, three is a bare minium indeed. Setting aside (for the moment) that I think the kingly/priest/prophetic delineation is lazy one that not supportable by a truly thorough study of the scriptures, I would have found it difficult to stay at a church where the executive elder board shrinks from 5 to 3 in five years. What was the point of drafting by-laws if the organization was going to change so rapidly those by-laws were functionally meaningless? Just to have by-laws so you can get your 501(c)3 status cleared up?

This executive elder board trinity still includes an executive board with a member who got the bright idea to suggest the boondoggle in Ballard. I suppose he's older and wiser now but even Ahithophel can be thwarted by the Lord. Since I'm not there, one could say, it shouldn't make much difference to me. Well, it does. Just as accountability from pastors across the country who don't interact with a man and who both stepped down from active pastoral work in the last two years for a while doesn't come off like real accountability from "above" ; so a steadily shrinking executive elder board for a denomination in all but name doesn't come across like it necessarily provides a lot of room for accountabililty from "below". It's particularly true when one of the executives was converted under the preaching of the "prophet" pastor and has effectively had no professional life of any consequence outside the organization.

Precisely because the organization is so obviously a denomination in all but name it would seem that with ten churches, and with the new razzle-dazzle of all the campuses being churches then why wouldn't the executive board include the lead pastors of each campus, er, church? An executive board of ten or twelve would not seem too unwieldy for an organization with about ten thousand people in the organization and churches in multiple states with plans to go international at some point. The Seattle Symphony has 7 people on its board of directors. Seattle Art Museum has nine members on its managing board of trustees. There are nine members on the board of directors at Microsoft, to cast the net into for-profit organizations. Boeing has eleven members on its board of directors.

But the executive elder board at a certain denomination in all but name consists of just three people. It didn't matter that dozens of elders voted on the purchase of a certain piece of property that isn't being used as a campus so much as that there is a type of unanimity and efficiency that is counterproductive. There are two ways in which this can happen. One is when the leadership team tasked with making executive decisions is too big ... but another is when it is too small. We don't know whether or not three are really going to avoid the pitfalls of thirty. Considering that the three were once five and that only two of those have remained while the rest have been a revolving door it seems as though what should have been done from the outset was simply making the two the official executives who mattered at all who would then pick subordinates to do their will. Unofficially that may simply be exactly what has transpired.

Anyway, just making a few mental notes by way of blogging on the matter. If you get it then you get it and if you don't then you don't.

A link for later discussion: The Triumph of the Cyborg Composer

http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/

First off the title is a wonderful, provocative title. Secondly, there is a great deal I wish to write about this article later when I get much more work done on my BTAS series for Mockingbird. For now I just want to link to the article.

Sovereign Grace Ministries spiritual abuse/blackmail controversies and Mars Hill accountability

Years ago Mark Driscoll said that he was being held accountable by C. J. Mahaney and John Piper. Well, it appears that as scandals brew up people have asked who is keeping Mahaney accountable. I know Josh Harris resigned and heard at least some of his sermon and though I can't speak authoritatively about the "Syrian" remarks that people have said were supremely unfair I got the impression Harris was very sincere in his belief that the Lord was letting some heavy stuff hit the fan.

For me, having observed things here in Seattle in connection to Mars Hill the stuff all of this raises as a subject for consideration (if not discussion) is what this means for the accountability (if any) Mars Hill leadership, but most specifically Driscoll, gets. How do pastors on the other side of the country manage to mentor or lead a pastor who has a penchant for Facebook posts inviting people to share stories about anatomically male yet effeminate worship leaders? He did not, as some bloggers noted with some fervor, refer to homosexual worship leaders. Bloggers who go that direction are using Driscoll to continue frying their own fish rather than consider which fish Driscoll is out to fry. The salient issue I consider is that if one of the key pastors described as mentoring Driscoll has stepped down temporarily and partly conceded allegations of spiritual abuse in the leadership of his church and, to go by recent news via the Christian blogosphere, is no longer even attending the church he founded for a time, how is Driscoll supposed to be held accountable by this fellow?

Let me put it another way, if Mahaney himself has been accused of abusing spiritual authority and his leaders have been accused of blackmail and covering up abuse how can those comparable sins be called to account in a setting like Mars Hill? It's not that they categorically "can't", it's that the odds of such happening are so unlikely as to approach the appearance of zero even if zero is not literally obtainable.

But even if real accountability were happening it would seem moot now. It is easy for a pastor or an author to sound off in the public sphere about young adult fiction for girls or movies. Anyone can pontificate on that. It's far more dangerous to pontificate on things that matter in the life of an actual church. So while a pastor may use the pulpit to speak about gender roles in a public setting (while imagining he has not had a real opportunity to do so), said pastor will scrupulously avoid discussing churches going into financial ruin such as Crystal Cathedral. A pastor will studiously avoid discussing the news that R. C. Sproul's son was defrocked and found to have abused spiritual authority. Allegations of EIN fraud will go unremarked upon altogether.

There will likely be little to no comment about SGM scandals. There wouldn't be simply because if CJ is Driscoll's mentor/advisor/person-holding-him accountable, the man can't afford to publicly sound off on stuff he probably knows little to nothing about regarding a person he has described as being in spiritual authority over him. We may ask whether such a formal informal statement even means anything but we can't say there's no sense in keeping one's mouth shut in every medium and wait for everything to blow over. It remains to be seen whether Mahaney will even continue attending or participating in the church he founded.

What this means simply, and at a practical level, is what I already felt was the case, whatever accountability Driscoll says Mahaney has provided is probably of a pro forma variety. It isn't entirely without merit or meaning but it has probably never been of a particularly deep kind or involved much by way of relationship. There's a difference between the affectation of the bad boy willing to confront tough issues in the church and someone willing to confront tough issues in the church.

Piper, famously, stepped down for a time because he felt he had, among other issues, some species of pride that he did not believe disqualified him for ministry but that were significant issues that needed to be addressed. If Piper himself felt a need to step down over some issues for a time and Mahaney has stepped down amidst allegations of straightforward wrong-doing it does not fill me with the greatest confidence that these men were holding Driscoll accountable in any meaningful way. Truthfully I never expected it was possible even if a genuine will to that end existed.

Since I no longer attend Mars Hill I suppose in a way it's all moot ... BUT I still consider myself fairly Reformed, attend a Presbyterian church, and realize that the young, restless Reformed aren't going away. In fact they are working extremely hard to be the ones who, in their minds, guide and shape white American males who will influence the future. Yeah, I did put it like that for reasons I won't necessarily get into here but the neo-Calvinist movement has always flirted with mainly stuff that white people like. I linked earlier to Drew G. I. Hart's observation that the older school evangelicals have actually done more to reach out to blacks and other people of color than the emerging/emergent sorts, let alone newer evangelicals. While the new Calvinists and the emergents battle over who gets the as -yet-single white boys, there's a battle between the new Calvinists and self-described old Calvinists (i.e. the John MacArthur crowd) over who should be getting the white boys.

So even though I'm not at that church/denomination I notice that they frequently get themselves into the heart of controversies within things Reformed in America and the English-speaking world. They will continue to vie for a heavy amount of importance and relevance. Whether or not they would be able to consciously admit it they want to be THE movement that matters in new Calvinism. If SGM continues to spiral and the old self-appointed Calvinist vanguards like MacArthur, Piper, or others split over Mars as an issue then the nascent denomination may get exactly what it wants.

The price, however, will be that once it get what it wants it will become the focal point of institutional criticism. You can't become the biggest, fastest, most important church of your kind without becoming an institution and getting the kinds of surgical examinations that institutions warrant. It was easy to dismiss trenchant criticism ten or fourteen years ago because it was easy to imagine there was no institutional element involved. The closer the organization gets to the two decade mark the more unavoidable this set of issues shall become. Don't expect to see any concession of the reality of institutionalism.

Expect to see new ways of perceiving the self as having a big vision. Guess what, that's what institutions do, too. The little school by the canal just across the water from the not-institution/not-denomination has been doing that sort of "vision casting" for more than a century now. I still say (as I have said for years) that it's better to brace yourself for the reality of what you're becoming, a fat middle-aged guy, than to pretend you can still fit into the high school uniform. Varsity was a long time ago. Meanwhile, the accountability from "above" seems to be weirdly absent and the accountability from below ... well ... that's not something I have any keen insights into, I'm afraid.

about prophetic, priestly and kingly gifts

At a certain website for a certain Christian organization I came across the following:

•Prophets: God’s messengers to his people
•Priests: Mediators who approach God on behalf of his people
•Kings: Rulers who govern God’s people
...
With Jesus established as Senior Pastor for all eternity, at xxxxxxxxx we’ve decided to follow his example and organize our human leadership according to the key roles he fulfills:

•Prophet – The people must be taught the Bible.
•Priest – The people must be loved.
•King – The people must be led.

Well, it's fairly normal for Baptists to say that the "prophetic" role involves teaching people the scriptures. This was not necessarily what prophets did. Consider the book of Ezra/Nehemiah where no prophets play any significant role in teaching the people at all. Priests taught the Law of Moses. Prophets in the Pentateuch are never described as having a normative role in God's people at all. They come and go at the Lord's bidding, if they are true prophets, and they are brought forth for particular challenges and occasions. This fundamental misrepresentation of what prophets did (or might do if they existed in the present) is typical of a lazy approach in evangelical Christian thought. It's disappointing to see it so often continued.

Priests did serve as mediators but Moses, who was not a priest, frequently mediated on behalf of Israel to allay the wrath of Yahweh. Aaron, the priest, was ironically the one who encouraged and abetted Israel's idolatry.

But the king, you know the thing about Israelite kings is that they weren't exactly the people who led the people. Old Testament scholars have pointed out that Israelite governance had some checks and balances. The king led the military and went to war against Israel's enemies but there was no king at the time the Torah was given. Clearly a kingly role was consider optional during the administration of the Torah prior to David. The Mosaic law refers to priests, kings and prophets but only the priestly and prophetic roles were established during the exodus.

It was more accurate to say priests led Israel in spiritual matters. Kings led military ventures when necessary but those ventures were undertaken by judges. Saul was to be beholden to the prophet/judge Samuel. The king had to be accountable to the prophet, not the other way around. The priest, prophet, and king all played significant roles in keeping each other in check. If the king were to go to war he needed to consult a priest to enquire of the Lord. If a priest were to ally himself with a king he needed to consult a prophet to discern whether this was a wise idea. If a prophet were to prophesy falsely or lead the people astray the priest and the king were supposed to put an end to that prophetic ministry.

The Kuyperian jargon that would apply for this kind of quasi-constitutional theocracy might be "sphere sovereignty". Neither a prophet, nor a priest, nor a king was to arrogate for himself the roles or responsibilities delegated to the other offices. A king could not truly say his role was to lead God's people at all. The king's obligation was to study the book of the Law and to fight battles on behalf of the Lord's people. Saul's wickedness as a king lay not merely in his reluctance to actually obey God's commands through Samuel to fight. Saul was also willing to take up priestly roles that were being handled by Samuel. Samuel was a prophet and a priest who served the role of judge as well. We can imagine Samuel was unhappy with having to appoint a king but that is a digression, perhaps, for another time.

Now even the most cursory examination of the prophets across the Torah and well, the Prophets, reveals that what the prophets were doing was NOT teaching God's people the scriptures. Not exactly. What the prophets did was challenge the priests and kings and people to obey what they already acknowledged (sometimes) to be scriptures. Prophets would also reveal things inherent within the scriptures that were not obvious to others, or that were ignored, or those aspects of scriptures that were being disobeyed or even straight up falsified by priests. There is a prophet who warned that even having the scriptures would be of no use to Israel because the lying scribes and priests had transformed even the Scriptures themselves into a lie!

This is important to remember. Moses may be described as a prophet who brought God's Law, so, yes, prophets can and have played a role in bringing the words of the Lord to God's people. But the normative role of the prophet was not to teach people the scriptures. Priests were to instruct the people. Deuteronomy 18 promises that the Lord would raise up a prophet such as Moses. Now, of course, what Christians automatically do is jump straight to Jesus and say this is a prediction of the coming of Jesus. Yes, there is that meaning, too, and we do well to meditate on it. But consider the literary context of Deuteronomy 18.

The Lord is warning through Moses that God's people not imitate the wickedness of the nations around them, specifically by avoiding soothsaying and other forms of sorcery. The Lord promises to raise up a prophet so that a person who wishes to enquire of Yahweh may do so without resorting to augury, spells, soothsaying, child sacrifice, or other methods of obtaining knowledge forbidden by Yahweh. There's also that bit about the Urim and the Thummim but we obviously do not have those.

So we've established that the role of the prophet was to clarify the will of the Lord on those things not discussed in the Torah; this "should have" prevented the temptation to resort to witchcraft, sorcery, divination and other stunts God's people would be tempted to assimilate from the nations living in Canaan. But at this point it is vital to point out that no prophets were mentioned in Ezra/Nehemiah. It is also remarkably telling that after the Second Temple was built there was no manifestation of the Spirit of God filling the place as described for the consecration of the First Temple built by Solomon.

In fact we are told that people who had seen the old Temple and saw the new Temple wept. The new one was not as good as the old. Some commentators, eager to find something wrong with people who wept at the new temple, have opined on how lame those old fogeys were but what if this is not clearly what we're being told? What if those old-timers who wept did so because they were not seeing any signs that the Lord was manifesting among His people in His Temple in the way they had heard. They were not, as the modern lingo goes, "feeling it" and they realized that something was missing. In fact some things were missing, there's no sign that prophets were afoot. The Law in one passage can be read as either saying "when" or "if" a prophet arises to handle their ministries in particular ways. This should lead us to be cautious about assuming that every generation of Christians must have a prophetic role or office. It should also have us be cautious about those pastors who presume that because they are pastors they have prophetic giftings and roles. Pastors tend to have delusions of grandeur about that, just as self-appointed self-described prophets tend to have their own delusions of grandeur.

Moses told Joshua that he wished that all of God's people were prophets with the spirit of God resting on them. The prophets eventually promised that the Lord would, in fact, pour out His spirit on all His people. Bet it doesn't feel like you have that spirit in you a lot of the time, does it? Nevertheless, if you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ it is because the Spirit has given you faith.

Now all of this rambling has a point, which is to say that in order to live out the roles and functions of a prophet or a priest or a king among God's people we have to properly understand what those roles were and understand, further, if those roles are necessarily delegated to God's people today. A preacher/pastor/bishop is not really a prophet. Catholics and Orthodox have properly retained the understanding that the ones among God's people who teach His people the scriptures is the priest. It was only after Protestants got hung up about particular applications of the priesthood of all believers that American evangelical Protestants would begin to prefer to have their preachers think of themselves as prophets rather than priests. If you're a preacher you're more a priest than a prophet. It is possible for prophet/priests to be around (Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel and Samuel, for instance) but these would be hard to describe as normative.

But if a prophet was not always present in God's people and Jesus is the greatest prophet how, then, can Protestant pastors appropriate for themselves the title or role of "prophet"? Priests and scribes taught the scriptures as given but it was prophets who shared insights from the Lord that were not already given in such scriptures as were received. Moses was the prophet who went to the Lord and received the Torah/the Law. Jesus gave us the proper interpretation and direction of the Law. If as Deuteronomy reveals prophets were given so people would not turn to divination then temptation Israelites would face would be to get extra knowledge, insight or wisdom about things that troubled them, chiefly things that the Torah itself did not directly address or perhaps even address at all.

Now here permit me yet another digression. What does that observation above tell us about the nature of the scriptures? Yes, we can say how the Bible deals with everything one could possibly face in life. Yes, there's a sense in which that is true, but the Bible is never presented to us as a divine set of dice. We may face decisions that the scripture does not directly address or discuss. Does this mean there is no way the scriptures can speak to that issue? No, but we cannot downplay the significance of the Deuteronomic concession that prophets needed to exist at any point in the history of God's people.

Let me put it this way, the cessationist can look at Deuteronomy 18 and consistently say that there are no prophets anymore. Christ accomplished for us what all the prophets failed to do. For this reason we have no need of prophets not because there was no need for, say, Agabus, but because where salvation is concerned and the fullness of God's will are concerned we have the last word in the Word Himself. Anyone who takes the role of a prophet who affirms that scriptures cover everything has to concede that he or she doesn't quite believe this. He or she must grant a belief that he or she has access to divine oracles others may not. The Montanist risks inherent in this approach I trust I don't have to explain.

Turning my attention to the role of the king, it makes no sense to speak of kings as though kings were the formal leaders of God's people. It is already abundantly clear throughout the scriptures that the king ended up playing two roles. The king served as military leader and the king also ended up being the one who appointed judges and bureaucrats to ensure civil disputes were adjudicated. It was David's failure to establish such a network that allowed Absalom to form his insurrection. That the king's role was to see to military and civil matters meant that even a wicked king who did only evil in the sight of the Lord could, nevertheless, be a brilliant military leader and tactician who secured the borders of God's people. This is not something most theologians and Bible scholars bother to discuss but the military history of Israel is something to consider.

If we trust that the Lord raises and deposes leaders as He wills then we must grant that not all leaders were raised up because they were righteous men, sometimes unrighteous men were raised up because despite or through their wickedness they had qualities God had in mind for reasons we won't be able to discern in our lives. This should also give anyone appointed any authority a massive dose of humility. You do not know, dear leader, that you got the leadership position you got either because you deserve it or because you are a good person. God has raised up many thoroughly wicked leaders since the dawn of humanity.

All of this is to say that if you misunderstand or misrepresent what the three roles in God's people were actually appointed for then it becomes that much more difficult for you to live them out or embody them in any meaningful way among God's people. A king was not there to rule God's people. A king was there to serve and protect God's people from military enemies! The king was there to form even a priestly role for God's people but in the military sphere. The priest was there to look after the education and purity of God's people to avoid improper methods of worship. The prophets, when they were available, were those to whom the people could turn when they might otherwise be tempted to soothsaying, spells, and other forms of witchcraft or idolatry to obtain special knowledge about how to obtain success in life.

It is critical to repeat here that prophets were not unambiguously promised for every generation of Israelites but their role was explained. It is also critical to repeat that the presence of a prophet in ancient Israelite would and did indicate that the priests, the king, and the people were deficient either in their understanding of the scriptures or that they were going against what they clearly understood. In other words, a priest would be someone to educate you about the Lord's will in the Torah if you were ignorant of it, and a prophet would be someone to educate you about the Lord's will that the Torah did not address but also to confront you about your witting or unwitting disobedience to what was in the Torah you were supposed to already know about.

We should be cautious about describing ourselves as having kingly, priestly, or prophetic gifts. This can become an invitation to vanity. How, precisely, do we know that we have kingly gifts? Because we run things? Because we have a gift for administration? Many Christian pop culture artifacts describing spiritual gifts are little more than a Christianized variation of Meiers-Briggs personality tests. Frequently these things are little more than methods to divine what one is already doing and to extrapolate from that. Yet if the Spirit of God blows where it will and you can hear its sound but not see where it is going and so it is with all those born of the Spirit, then perhaps what our spiritual gifts are is less clear. The Spirit may appoint people with gifts at one time and not another, for one task and not another.

One of the errors I believe was perpetuated in Pentecostal circles is the idea that spiritual gifts are without recall even though Paul clearly states in Corinth that one day tongues and prophecy will cease. Clearly then the gifts of the Spirit have a recall date when the Lord returns! Saul had the Spirit descend upon him and he prophesied and yet he ultimately was crushed by the Lord. We must beware that we do not interpret our potent mystical spiritual experiences as signs of the Lord's favor. They may be signs of the Lord's discipline or even judgment.

Equally important, if we do not have any numinous experiences we should not consider ourselves forsaken by the Lord if we do not "feel" His presence. The greatest temptations to idolatry God's people face may well be precisely because we are so eager to "feel" the presence of the Lord we insist on whatever magical means are necessary to usher in the presence of the Lord. For some this may be a special kind of "worshipful" or "joyful" music. For others it may be "good preaching" or, really, exciting preaching. For others it may be feeling good doing acts of service. All these things are precious and valuable in their way but if we do them to feel closer to God we may find ourselves wildly disappointed and embittered.

The prophets were given so that magical means of summoning up the will of Yahweh would not be tried and if at the beginning of the Second Temple period Ezra and Nehemiah had no prophets among them to clarify the will of the Lord it may be said that they were coming into an epoch when Israel was so removed from knowledge of the Lord and the Torah that simply rediscovering the Torah itself and observing it was what they needed to do. They did not need a king for that! They did not need a prophet for that! They had just come back after years in exile that the Lord said they would be sent into by prophets as discipline for their idolatry. The Torah itself predicted this exile. Why should they have needed a prophet to have told them that what previous prophets and the Torah itself had warned about had come to pass? Some of these men and women hearing the words of the Torah would have been born while in exile.

And we who trust in Christ are, as it were, born into exile ourselve.s We have Christ as our prophet, priest, and king and this does not mean we have no need of prophets, priests or kings in our own lives. What may be said, however, is that we must continually guard against the abuse of these titles and ranks by those who wish to vaunt themselves as having this or that gift without its disposition. My quibble with the above cited texts is that I am not convinced the sales pitch for what prophets, priests and kings did in Israel is accurate, nor am I convinced that the person who wrote the above has come up with a persuasive application for the roles that he, in my study of scriptures, seem to come off as misunderstoof or misapplied.

a distinction without a difference: "No More Mars Hill `campuses'"

http://blog.marshill.com/2011/08/08/no-more-mars-hill-%E2%80%9Ccampuses%E2%80%9D/

No more campuses but churches. This is merely a semantic distinction unless the actual nature of pastoral work and responsbilities changes, which is not mentioned (as yet) as being on the table for campus pastors. Merely being "more biblical" in language and terminology does not by itself mean that the infrastructure in place at Mars Hill is automatically more congruent with ecclesiology described in scripture. Ecclesiology wouldn't be so wide and deep a field if everyone could just agree on what "biblical" ecclesiology was. Catholics say we'd all still be Catholics if things were this simple and the Orthodox would say there'd be no Catholics if Catholics truly appreciated this!

My impression of James MacDonald from his conversation with Mark Dever is that he doesn't have conversations, he steamrolls better qualified and more thoughtful preachers. So I can't say that reading that James MacDonald has "helped" Mars Hill on ecclesiology is any real reason to be excited.

Planting new Mars Hill "churches" (campuses) does differ somewhat from planting a traditional church plant if the main goal is to set up a video presentation of a sermon Driscoll preached that, by the time it hits the campus/church will be at least a week old. Unless there's a live feed there may be a set-up in place where the sermons at campuses/churches are what Driscoll preached anywhere between one to two weeks prior. If that's you're thing then ... okay, that's your thing.

What would really be a revolutionary change-up is not calling campuses "churches" but if Mars Hill leadership had the stones to concede they are a denominational network in the making. Ten or more campuses in multiple states would strongly suggest the beginnings if not the actual realization of a denominational structure, especially given the post-2007 by-laws. I don't anticipate anyone at Mars Hill conceding that the church is a denomination until somewhere around 2026.

Now here I must confess one of the reasons I find this development at Mars Hill both quaint and silly is because stressing that Mars Hill in all its heretofore campuses as one church doesn't change what it is or what it has been. The older I get the more I appreciate that the creed says "I believe in one holy, apostolic church". In other words, those of us willing to recite creeds have already been confessing that we believe the Church is one Church. Not necessarily always one in the way we wish it were one (i.e. everyone agreeing with us) but that Christ makes us one despite all the lack of one-ness we see in our lives. A husband and wife may not "feel" much one-ness in their day to day life or when times in their marriage get miserable but that does not mean there is no one-ness there.

I look forward to the day when Mars Hill Church leadership can admit it is a Calvinist Baptist denomination. It's easy to talk about how denominations are fading away or failing and about building bridges but last I checked an egalitarian Arminian is never going to fit into Mars Hill and is certainly never going to get a spot in leadership. The reason denominations grow is not because people "want" to create institutions but because convictions across generations within time and place invariably lead to institutions if the cause survives.

Mars Hill is a few years away from the two decade point. If after two decades and presumably more than 10,000 members Mars Hill leaders can't grant that they're a denomination then they'll be like a fat middle-aged guy who insists he can still fit into his high school sports uniform or wear the school colors jacket. Everyone else can see he can't fit into that stuff anymore but he's sure he can do it with the right belt and maybe not zipping up the blazer. There's no shame in admitting what you have on your hands is a denomination unless you spent so many years talking about how denominations are on the decline that you feel embarrassed being what you talked against

But if they're so certain that this isn't a semantic change then they're welcome to believe it. As I said, I look forward to a day when they can admit they're a Calvinist Baptist denomination already. Right now the only people who seem truly uncomfortable at the prospect of this reality are them.

Some more ruminations on contrapuntal literature and the guitar

In the first half of the 1700s Bach compiled what has become the Well Tempered Clavier (aka The Correctly Tempered Keyboard). 48 preludes and fugues have defined Western musical literature and concepts in ways so far-reaching that it would be tedious to rehearse what so many other better scholars, musicians, and composers have already said.

However, as a guitarist with an interest in the history of contrapuntal literature for the guitar there are some things that I believe are worth saying. More than ten years ago Matanya Ophee said that we guitarists should shed any inferiority complex we have about our instrument and its literature. This I agree with. He also said that chamber music was arguably the best way for guitarists and guitarist composers to create a musical body of work that would win respect from general audiences but particularly from non-guitarist professional musicians and academics. This, too, I heartily agree with.

In the last five or six years I have seen a few discussions amongst fellow guitarists about how we should not see ourselves as constrained to playing second rate music because we don't play the keyboard. Well ... my worry has been that while that is something I can grant as true I grant that on a technicality. There is a lot of great music for the guitar, but often what guitarists seem to really mean when they say the guitar and its literature is as good as anything written and performed on a keyboard is that the guitar is more "expressive" and has "soul". Some cite Segovia as saying things such as that the piano is a monster that screams when you touch its teeth. These sorts of statements don't help guitarists with the non-guitarist historical-musical world, do they?

Supposing we say for the sake of discussion that the guitar is not inferior to the keyboard and keyboard literature. Suppose we even pretend that the guitar is more expressive. Suppose we even go so far as to say that Bach didn't write for the guitar but that he didn't write for the piano either. Well ... klavier can refer to any stringed instrument played by means of a keyboard, right? So whether the strings are played by plucking or by being struck with a hammer it's the keyboard that activates the sounding mechanism. Even if we guitarists try to claim that Bach didn't "really" write for the piano that doesn't change the reality that Bach wrote for organ and for harpsichord and that harpsichord still fits the definition of klavier.

Notice what was going on in that argument/assertion I responded to. The goal was to say that Bach essentially didn't write for the piano because he wasn't writing for the same kind of keyboard the piano is, therefore the pianist can no more say Bach wrote for their instrument than he wrote for the guitar. But this seems like a slippery and remarkably disingenuous argument, doesn't it?

Let me come up with a historical counter-example. Let's note that Bach compiled both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier somewhere in the space of 1720 to 1740. When was the first set of preludes and fugues for any number of guitars composed? Well, that would be Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco's charming cycle for two guitars that he wrote in the 1960s. Castelnuovo-Tedesco, we note, famously was a pianist and not a guitarist.

Okay, so when was a cycle of preludes and fugues for solo guitar composed? That would be Igor Rekhin, who composed his cycle of 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar between 1985 and 1990. So far as I know Rekhin is not himself a guitarist. If he is there needs to be better publicity and we must not take at face value his remarks about getting acquainted with the guitar as an instrument in the forward to the published complete set.

So now I am very much looking forward to the publication of the scores and CDs of Nikita Koshkin's 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar. Notice that these works have not yet been published. The score will be available, Koshkin has written, through Editions Margaux, and his wife Asya Seyultina is recording the cycle. So for the sake of historical discussion I'm not even mentioning my own yet-to-be-completed cycle as relevant since I'm not a professional composer. Maybe that will change in the future (I hope).

My point is that if we consider 1720 to be the compilation point for book 1 of the Well Tempered Clavier and consider that Koshkin's cycle will constitute the first time in classical music that a guitarist composer will have published a set of 24 preludes and fugues this means there is effectively a three century gap between Bach's first 24 and Koshkin's 24. Three centuries is not a small temporal gap, to put things mildly.

Of course Sor wrote works in pretty much every key, though not in a particularly systemic way. Luigi Legnani wrote his 36 caprices and if this could be taken as one of the formative compositional cycles in which a guitarist insisted on composing in every possible major and minor key around 1822. That is still, if we assume Legnani to be the first guitarist to deliberately tackle every key, a whole century after Bach assembled Book 1. Sor's own fairly comprehensive approach to the keys was taking shape in the 1820s so guitarists were coming into a comparable comprehensive mastery of all keys a century after Bach for reasons that, let's face it, can't be hard to discern.

We guitarists should shed any inferiority complex about our instrument and its literature but if we do this by attempting to claim Bach as as much ours as keyboardists we'll be making a big mistake. Bach belongs to all musicians but we know he wrote at the keyboard. There's no pretending that Bach didn't write at a keyboard. There is also no avoiding the reality that though the greatest guitarist composers chose to write in every key possible and expand the possibilities of the instrument most guitarists do not really go out of their way to play this sort of literature.

And while we should have no inferiority complex about our instrument and its repertoire we will not solve any problems or create any goodwill from other people in the music community by having a superiority complex about how the guitar is more expressive than the keyboard. No one gains anything for the cause of our instrument by saying the piano has no soul or expression and that there is no way to gain vibrato or tasto or ponticello on the piano. That doesn't mean that Beethoven's Op. 111 piano sonata is really less expressive or meaningful to people than one of Diabelli's guitar sonatas. Diabelli was one of Beethoven's contemporaries and I trust we all know that if we compare a Diabelli guitar sonata to a Beethoven piano sonata we're going to find most people consider Beethoven's work to be more moving. Only a case of classical guitar nerdiness that exceeds Wolverine fans can imagine that a Diabelli sonata for guitar trumps a Beethoven sonata for piano, just as only a Wolverine fanboy can imagine that Wolverine will actually beat Captain America in a fight. Yeah ... I know, I went there but I can't pretend I'm not kind of nerdy about everything. By analogy, those sorts of disputes about comic book characters fighting each other are comparably esoteric and meaningless to the average concert-goer.

At the risk of offering the blunt comparison of commercial recordings, how many commercially available recordings can we find of keyboard players who have recorded both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier? How many guitarists have made commercial recordings of all of Legnani's Op. 20 36 Caprices? How many guitarists have recorded the Op. 6 and Op. 29 etudes? How many guitarists have performed the Castelnuovo-Tedesco or Rekhin cycles? Even if we were to say these are works not written by guitarists we know that makes no difference. For instance, has ANYONE besides Anthony Glise recorded Diabelli's F major guitar sonata? Piero Bonaguri may have recorded them twenty years ago but good luck finding that recording if it still exists. I've never seen it or heard it myself so Glise's recording of the Diabelli F major sonata is the only one I know of.

Consider all those Asturias performances, for instance. Consider how many guitarists assume that audiences don't really have the patience to withstand movements longer than about three to four minutes. Consider how many guitarists suppose this despite the fact that plenty of people go to long operas or that people turn out in droves for Beethoven string quartets and piano sonatas that go on for epic lengths. If it is true we guitarists do not have inferior literature why have so few among us in the guitar world have sought to disseminate the great literature we have that encompasses the most challenging keys? The reality is that we all know perfectly well that while C major is relatively easy on the piano and C minor is relatively easy on the keyboard we know that on the guitar one key is drastically more difficult to play in than the other.

If we guitarists want to ensure that our instrument is fully appreciated for all the beauty it and its literature have to offer then we should go the extra distance to present the riches of our instrument that might go unknown. But to do that we have to get out of the comfort bubble of E major, A major, D major, C major, G major, D minor, B minor, A minor and so on. We need to make a case that B flat major, E flat minor, C minor, F sharp major, B major, D flat major, and F minor are all equally necessary in our repertoire. That Legnani and Sor did this nearly two centuries ago does not seem to be very much appreciated by many guitarists but we know that that work has been done.

That only now Koshkin has created for us a contrapuntal cycle, as a guitarist (give or take that focal dystonia has robbed us of more performances from him) should be both exciting and humbling. We should be excited because we can say that we guitarists finally have a great cyclical work written for the guitar by a guitarist in the tradition of Bach's legacy. We should be humbled if for no other reason than to concede that for the decades our members have denigrated piano music it just so happens it took centuries for us to "catch up" to the conceptual heights obtained in the "inexpressive" keyboard. We may also be humbled if it somehow transpires that Koshkin's music isn't very good. As a long-time Koshkin fan I seriously doubt that's going to happen.

Yet another historical irony about the guitar and contrapuntal literature is not simply that our first cycles were written by non-guitarists, but that when the time arrives that we guitarists can point to 48 preludes and fugues written for guitar they have been written by two men who are from Russia. Bach was German and the pinnacle of Western musical achievement yet for the solo guitar two books of preludes and fugues totalling 48 will be given to us by Russians and not by Western guitarists. As a fan of Russian guitar music I happily accept such a lovely gift.

Of course no one in the West was going to produce preludes and fugues in the style of Bach during the Classic or Romantic periods. That would have been a cultural and historical impossibility. Sor and Legnani gave us solid pieces in every key for the guitar but many guitarists avoid playing those or even dismiss them precipitously. The guitar is capable of sustained contrapuntal argument and development but three fully independent melodic lines are difficult to sustain.

Notice that I said "difficult" and not "impossible". They are impossible to sustain throughout but a studious composer and guitarist can nevertheless accomplish fully invertible counterpoint in middle entries even when he or she must relent in episodes. Even Bach in his violin fugues was content to imply in many places rather than directly state so we guitarists should feel no shame at implying if as great a master as Bach himself took what could appear from a purely scholastic perspective to be the path of a cheater.

I could write about how I have worked through the process of writing my own fugues for guitar but I am done writing on this topic for now. I would close only by saying that my approach to contrapuntal music for guitar has in the end benefited not merely from studying keyboard and string repertoire but from immersion in the earliest and most foundational of all contrapuntal musical art in Western history, choral music. Ultimately the guitar can only be enriched by its composers, performers and advocates having a most positive and sociable disposition toward all other sorts of music.

It is exciting to think that centuries after Bach we guitarists will be getting a contrapuntal cycle written by a guitarist. My hope as a guitarist is that Koshkin's cycle becomes widely heard and constitutes a collosal leap forward for the literature of our instrument. I even hope that the works get so widely known and played in the guitar world that I could even possibly complain one day about hearing them too much. Then we'll know that actual contrapuntal music, and not merely homophonic music with a contrapuntal countenance, has truly become mainstream in guitar literature.

writing continues

I am now at month 23 of looking for a normal day job. No success I'm afraid.

I am also as I blog in the process of writing the next thing in my project for Mockingbird. Writing is difficult and writing well is very hard and I constantly have doubts that I have written well or clearly. My friends over at Mockingbird have been happy with what I have written and for that I am grateful! I often feel that I could have done a better job expressing my ideas and working through them.

When DZ first approached me about this project last winter I was thinking of something small. We both were. But as I began to do the actual work I began to realize that I was attempting to summarize and examine what has effectively become a decade's worth of cartoon adventures. I also began to realize that to properly do, er, justice to the DCAU and its development I would have to provide a historical and pop cultural context in which it may be more fully appreciated. Ergo the most recent series about cartoon morality in Cold War era cartoons.

If Transformers may be seen as the quintessential 1980s Cold War era morally simplified cartoon series developed by American company Hasbro to market the Japanese Diaclone and Microman toy lines in a rebranding coup then Batman: the animated series represents the entirely opposite impulse--here was a cartoon created simply to tell (and, let's face it, sell) Batman in a compelling way to a new generation of children in a way that would also please adults and break new ground in animated story-telling by incorporating darker and more grown-up themes into a show while still aiming squarely to entertain kids. When the show proved wildly successful the merchandising expansion touched on toys, to be sure, but it ultimately led to a different kind of expansion than bringing in new toy lines and attempting to sell those as Transformers did; the result was to take up bigger creative and narrative challenges by introducing Superman and, ultimately, the Justice League.

I am broadly building a case that what the DCAU did, in contrast to 1980s cartoon moral simplification, was to blow up cartoon moralism from within the medium of cartoons. Now I don't mean to propose that cartoon moralism didn't exist before 1980s cartoons. Simplified good and bad was happening in cartoons all over the place even before that. Scooby-Doo was giving us the same formulaic would-be monster that was really a corrupt old man using a disguise for decades before Optimus Prime seemed to win the day in every other episode after uttering the words "I have a plan." He could have done us a favor by going one further and pulling up a stogie after inevitable victory and say "I love it when a plan together!" Actually, seriously, that would have been pretty cool!