http://thewartburgwatch.com/2011/11/04/tim-challies-deleting-both-scripture-and-hurting-people-a-request-from-sgm-refuge/
steve on Sat, Nov 05 2011 at 02:33 pm
In terms of comment deletion, dialogue, and such, here’s an interesting quote from Michel Foucault about the difference between entering into dialogue and being a polemicist.
“I like discussions, and when I’m asked questions, I try to answer them. It’s true that I don’t like to get involved in polemics. If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of ‘infantile leftism’, I shut it again right away. That’s not my way of doing things; I don’t belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake, the morality that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other….
….The polemicist, on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in the search for the truth, but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then, the game does not consists of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak, but of abolishing him, as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be, not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth, but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.”
Many of us have helped make these folk polemicists. We have hung on their every word, and let them be experts in preaching, theology, ethics, science, politics – basically whatever they have spoken about. Now, we all have opinions about the economy, global warming, the Bible, etc., and usually those opinions are not taken to be canonical. But when some of our evangelical pope/theologian/rock stars speak, we think they must be right, regardless of the topic. People are not supposed to receive that kind of admiration; it really does set people up for a fall. Too many evangelicals have allowed these people to think for them, with the predictable result that those at the top have become unbalanced.
Everything they say is right; therefore true, therefore biblically sound. If someone opposes their opinion, it is tacitly equated with opposing Scriptural insights, which is then opposing God. Why let someone challenge God on your blog? Now, it happens that God’s truth is mediated through the blogger, but that’s not what’s important. How can you not be polemical against wolves who are destroying sheep, the sheep who you must feed with God’s truth?
There is no room for discussion or dialogue because those who aren’t with you are against you, and therefore against Christ. And, to come full circle, since you are an expert about everything you talk about, if people oppose you on any issue or in any way, you don’t need to listen.
There are polemicists in seminaries, pastorates, and on blogs. The sad thing today is that polemicists in evangelicalism are often polemicists against other evangelicals.
It just so happens I read this interesting blog post over at City of God excerpting from Chomsky about Chomsky's dislike of postmodernists. He made an exception for, of all people, Foucault.
http://www.civitatedei.com/2011/11/noam-chomsky-is-no-fan-of-derrida-or-postmodernism/
Some of the people in these cults (which is what they look like to me) I’ve met: Foucault (we even have a several-hour discussion, which is in print, and spent quite a few hours in very pleasant conversation, on real issues, and using language that was perfectly comprehensible — he speaking French, me English
This didn't mean Chomsky agreed with Foucault necessarily but that he was saying he could an actual conversation with Foucault about actual issues (whatever those were and you may have put together I am not the world's hugest fan of either Chomsky or Foucault myself). But here wwe have to mentions of Foucault on two blogs I regularly read and Chomsky can be considered an independent witness of Foucault's eagerness to avoid being a mere polemicist.
At the other side of the political spectrum many a liberal said that though they would often vehemently disagree with William F. Buckley it was to his credit that they could have an actual conversation. Many people who miss Buckley style conservatism may not yet realize they are some of the reasons that style of conservativism isn't around. Buckley passed and we get Limbaugh and Coulter as prominent public and vocal conservatives? Well, duh, of course that means the nature of public discourse has just changed. Anyone who's read maybe ten of my blog posts here probably would have guessed I lean more Buckley in my preference and disposition.
Now here is where I wish to go a bit with this set-up. A polemicist, as Foucault put it, argues from a position of privilege which he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. This is exactly what I have seen, like steve, among neo-Reformed sorts. But it is also a quality I have seen in people who have set themselves as polemicists against the neo-Reformed sort. Whether you're in or out it's an all or nothing deal. You can't say that this is good and that is bad. You have to say it is all good or all horrid. This is something I object to. I have been told by some people that my problem is that I see things in black and white and, if anything, the problem is that those sorts of people insist on seeing everything in terms of black and white and because they disagree with me they read that quality on to me. People who actually know me know that the last thing I could be accused of being is someone who is utterly Manichean, seeing EVERYTHING in starkly black and white terms.
I have written at some length about difficulties in a particular church but here I want to reflect a bit on problems I have seen in some polemicists who have set their sights on Mars Hill. The problem, to put it bluntly, is that many of these polemicists against Mars Hill are just that, polemicists of precisely the same sort Driscoll has always been. I have come to be friends with a number of people who are such polemicists and I sometimes wonder if they always think through their own standards and behaviors in light of their capacity to be firebrands.
One fellow who initially objected to the courtship fad began to parrot everything the courtship advocates trumpeted hither and yon. He also went so far as to defend those advocates as always knowing what was going on. I was convinced otherwise by what I actually observed but the need to keep up appearances was strong. Years later one of the courtship advocates admitted to what I and probably hundreds of other people noticed, that he was completely blindsided by his daughter being in love with a guy. He hadn't kept track of things and the facade of being in the know was just that, a facade. Was it deception? No, not of anyone else, it was more likely a fear of admitting that the gap between rhetoric and reality was much bigger than advertised. So when this man eventually became an ex-member of Mars Hill and considered the gap between public rhetoric and private conduct I was disappointed to hear such gaps could be culturally systemic but not entirely shocked. After all, this man had the same kind of gap between public rhetoric and private reality in his own life on his pet subject of courtship.
One fellow made a point of pressing me about why I wasn't married even though he was at that point not necessarily keeping track of who his daughter was spending time with. For this man the polemic of my needing to be married was a sticking point. I eventually felt obliged to point out that since I'm not his kid and not situated to be married yet it might be better to keep his sights closer to home and keep track of who his daughter was hanging out with. This is another case where an ex-Mars Hill member engaged in the same sort of polemic for marriage that I'd seen in the Mars Hill culture itself. If the pot calls the kettle black how guilty is the kettle? I don't know if there's even an answer for that question.
In another situation a fellow had spent years going along with things he didn't necessarily agree with and, as I saw things, he was not agreeing to these things because he really agreed with them. He was willing to publicly denounce and attack other people for disagreeing with ideas he wasn't that committed to except on the basis of an utterly pragmatic and self-serving goal. If he stuck with and defended the courtship fad while attacking people who disputed it he might land a hot wife at the church. Now he views marriage as an abomination and likes to vent his spleen about the shallowness of women but, all things considered, his mercenary approach to conformity just to land a woman doesn't seem that much more admirable, neither does his pragmatic renunciation of a social relationship he has never seemed particularly well-suited to being part of anyway.
The men who have been the most angry ex-members have been the same sort of polemicist Driscoll has been. They invariably deny this but there is a sense in which this denial is a quality cut from the same cloth of Driscoll. Now there are other ex-members of Mars Hill who can say at some length who they encouraged and participated in things they now deeply regret. About those people I have nothing critical to say at all! We are brothers and sisters in recognizing how we had problems in our spiritual lives that led us to unfairly judge others.
But years after certain debacles happened in a row I still see on-line polemics about Mars Hill and this is where Foucault's observations about the polemicist are pertinent. Driscoll avails himself the privilege of saying God called him in a way that he would not necessarily grant to other preachers or self-described prophets possessing spiritual super powers. There is a certain person who has made vigorous claims to spiritual insight and spiritual superpowers who is pretty much insane and has not been at Mars Hill in a few years (that I know of) and yet no one at Mars Hill contests that when Driscoll says "I see things" that this is crazy the way this other person's claims are seen as crazy. That could be because Driscoll is claiming to see events that happened years ago that just about no one could independently verify or disprove; this other self-described seer has made patently falsifiable claims about who is and isn't really dead. But the question, for polemicists pro and con, will not exactly go away--however, that question about visions and all is something I'm saving for another time. As I have been writing here for years my desire is not to be a mere polemicist but to discuss things I appreciate as well as don't appreciate about a certain place.
And what a polemicist against Mars Hill might be tempted to do is fret about how terrible and abusive the place is despite having no less than two in-laws he loves a great deal having married into his family from, of all places, Mars Hill. Couldn't Driscoll say this proves he's on the right track? I mean, really, if the church is so evil and terrible and his goals and preaching are so awful how did that manage to produce not one but two sons-in-law? I'm not saying it justifies Driscoll being an asshole (which I'm sure he still is a good deal of the time) but I am saying that the problem with a polemicist who frames Driscoll and Mars Hill and anyone in its leadership network as being only evil all the time is that if such a polemicist has TWO in-laws (let alone three) who married into the family due to the man's family association with Mars Hill then maybe some nuancing can be considered.
Steve put it this way in his comment:
Many of us have helped make these folk polemicists. We have hung on their every word, and let them be experts in preaching, theology, ethics, science, politics – basically whatever they have spoken about. Now, we all have opinions about the economy, global warming, the Bible, etc., and usually those opinions are not taken to be canonical. But when some of our evangelical pope/theologian/rock stars speak, we think they must be right, regardless of the topic. People are not supposed to receive that kind of admiration; it really does set people up for a fall. Too many evangelicals have allowed these people to think for them, with the predictable result that those at the top have become unbalanced.
It takes a cult to make a cult of personality and the power at the center of the cult of personality is not one that the idol at its center can create. Superman gains his powers from the light of a yellow sun and the focal point of a cult of personality derives power from the reality that dozens, hundreds, thousands, or millions of people grant to their idol. I have been writing a lot about superheroes and cartoons in the last year and there's something about them that I believe is relevant to discussing celebrity pastors--heroes take huge risks, obtain great glory, and then become heroes because they make an offer to share that glory with the people willing to join ranks with them. The only way to not be tempted by such an offer or to fall prey to such a snare is to not have sharing in glory or obtaining glory as a personal goal.
The polemicist taps into a capacity to promise to people what they want. If you don't think a polemicist or teacher can get you something you want, and if you don't see that polemicist as articulating ideas for you that you don't know how to articulate for yourself, then that polemicist has no power over you and no appeal to you. At Mars Hill the courtship fad took hold because it promised a lot of people that if they would just jump through all the right hoops the smoking hot spouse of their dreams was just a few meetings with the future in-law away. This was all nonsense but people chose to believe it, people even chose to believe it was somehow "biblical" when it was just a made-up cherry-picked melange of some 19th century customs limited to a small socio-economic demographic. It didn't even matter that many of the people stumping most for this fad were fornicators who dated the new-fashioned way and had no experience in even being single at any point in their adult lives.
A friend of mine once said that his parents' generation got an idea that public schools were so sinful there needed to be private Christian schools. He saw how bad things were at private Christian schools and concluded that private Christian schools were even worse than public schools. He decided that homeschooling was a better option. Well, see, homeschooling won't keep kids from experimenting with drugs or sexual immorality as it turns out. Courtship, by extension, does not preclude sin. It may somehow preclude certain sexual sins from being as common but that's only if the parties involved are already resolved to exercise self-control. In other settings courtship can be a grand opportunity for parents and children to sin in all sorts of other ways that are as bad as sexual impropriety.
For polemicists who want to paint Mars Hill in only bad colors none of this will convince them. They already have made-up minds, they can appeal to the privilege of the abuses they have considered themselves or others to have received. Notice I'm not saying abuses have not happened. I'm not saying bullying has not happened.
I'm saying, however, that after a decade I have noticed that some of the people most bitter about things were among the key perpetrators of a bullying sort of church culture themselves. I have seen men who dismissed any and all concerns as "sour grapes" or having "problems with spiritual authority" while they were in good with the good old boy network who over a few years began to be bitter about the good old boy network they weren't complaining about when they still had more pull, friends, and social capital among the big dogs.
At the risk of pulling in a commonly repeated meme, those who have been the victims of abuse are more likely themselves to perpetrate cycles of abuse. When abuse is the "normal" setting you know you are far less likely to step back and consider whether the bullying you dish out is because bullying was what you were used to receiving. You don't even stop for a second to consider that what you're saying and doing to other people is abusive because while you may be keenly sensitive from experience to what it feels like to be abused you don't understand that there are things you do and say that are abusive.
A polemicist is frequently able to diagnose spiritual flaws in others that he either does not recognize in himself or is willing to excuse in himself. This could be described in a few words as the "I never beat up anyone who didn't deserve it" school of self-assessment. Or "I never belittled anyone who didn't have it coming." Or,"I'm not emotionally mainlining the high I get from being involved in fights about theology I'm contending for the truth."
At length I came to the conclusion that I could not diagnose a spiritual illness in a local congregation without searching through my heart, considering the scriptures, and recognizing that the disease I saw in others was actually a pernicious spiritual disease in my own heart. There comes a point where if a church is unable to aid you in repenting of sins X and Y because those sins characterize both you and the church then there is a time to let God open up paths to being part of another spiritual community. It took me a few years to start grasping that the point of theological discussion (and even polemic, when that happens) should not be for me to win, it should be to be of service to the church.. Or the Church, for that matter. There are some people who don't grasp that and there are others who grasp that but feel obliged to debate two kingdom theology or similar topics thinking they are sincerely doing the church a service when they are mainly stumping for their own social and political pre-convictions.
Let me end with a potentially weird and unconnected story summary. God continued to have prophets address Ahab despite Ahab's lack of regard for the Lord. As king of the northern kingdom he could have been considered, easily, to be no legitimate king and to not be worthy of any warning or consideration from the Lord. Yet consider the various times at which God relented from destroying Ahab. Consider the various ways in which God sent prophets to challenge and correct Ahab. Ahab thought that Elijah was troubling Israel and Elijah said that, no, it was Ahab who troubled Israel. If Elijah had played the game that some watchbloggers and would-be prophets or polemicists against Israel would have advised him to do he wouldn't have stayed connected enough to Obadiah to have even had a chance to arrange a meeting with Ahab.
I can't help but note the humor in Obadiah's response to Elijah, "What sin have I committed that you are sending me to my death!?" Dude, if I do this favor for you Ahab is totally gonna kill me, what evil thing have I done that makes me get this crap job!? Obadiah feared the Lord greatly and yet served Ahab. He also hid prophets when Ahab let Jezebel kill prophets of the Lord. Let us also not forget that besides Obadiah Micaiah was also in the royal court.
Let me pretend for the sake of some of those polemicists out there in internet land that Driscoll is some kind of Ahab, even if this were somehow the case there are still Obadiahs and Micaiah's in the royal court. Elijah didn't tell those prophets to leave Ahab's court or to stop hanging around Ahab. Elijah didn't tell those prophets that they were wrong. He didn't question the legitimacy of their trust in God or the legitimacy of their positioning in a corrupt regime that we can see recorded anywhere. He also did not attempt to drag them into his personal ministry campaign against Ahab. He let them be where they were despite their being installed in key positions in a corrupt regime. Was Obadiah afraid for his life because he hid and protected a hundred prophets of the Lord? Yeah. Was he a worthless coward for fearing for his life because he knew word had gotten back to his masters what he had done? No.
Ultimately it was Elijah and not Obadiah or Micaiah who turned out to have the huge attitude problem about needing everything to be about him. He was fine denouncing Ahab and being the big gun who battled prophets of Ba'al but when the battle began to actually hit home (i.e. Jezebel) he freaked out and fled because he didn't want to die and didn't want to get stuck in a position where he was on the losing side of something. When God gave Elijah direct commands to annoint kings and install his successor Elijah went and found Elisha but never did annoint those kings. Elijah's career-end was one where he persistently didn't do what God commanded him to do!
Apparently Elijah was cool with speaking the truth to power and confronting corruption ... just as long as he stayed the center of attention and could call the shots. When God revealed that Elijah was not the lonely righteous crusader he thought he was Elijah suddenly seemed able to be as petty and cranky as Ahab could be. When the Lord asks Elijah, "What are you doing here?" that is a question anyone who thinks they have a calling or obligation to speak up against corruptions in God's people have to consider. What, exactly, are you doing here?
What are you really trying to do here? If your goal is to honor the Lord as best you can despite your failings and to encourage people to seek the Lord, great. We're brothers and sisters in Christ. Does some kind of Ahab need to be challenged? Okay, just remember that in the end what matters is the greatness of Christ not whether or not we see the kinds of results we want. Our goal should be to be iron sharpening iron so that people seek Christ. Trying to turn people away from this or that teacher isn't the same thing as urging them to Christ.
We must be vigilant (I must be vigilant) and be on guard that I don't become the sort of polemicist that I so often find annoying. The apostle wrote that if anyone is trapped in a sin you who are spiritual should come alongside and help them but also be careful that you do not fall prey to the same snare yourself. If I have observed anything in ten years of reading Christians blogging on the internet it's that this is woefully true. There are plenty of firebrands and polemicists out there on the internet who are freaking out about firebrands and polemicists. There are abusers who are worked out that someone else is abusing people.
Anyway, that's my ramble about polemcists for the day.
Sunday, November 06, 2011
Saturday, November 05, 2011
seagulls and alkaseltzer
i want to go to the beach
and feed the seagulls alkaseltzer
i want to feel sand between my toes
to run along the tide pools
and think of brian eno
i see the seagulls flying
and i hear my spirit laugh
i imagine oysters singing
underneath the sand and sea
close my eyes and imagine
their sweet alkaseltzer drams
and feed the seagulls alkaseltzer
i want to feel sand between my toes
to run along the tide pools
and think of brian eno
i see the seagulls flying
and i hear my spirit laugh
i imagine oysters singing
underneath the sand and sea
close my eyes and imagine
their sweet alkaseltzer drams
Loving your enemies
It doesn't just so happen that this subject came up for two reasons. One is someone I know suggested this topic but the other not coincidental reason is that the most reason part of David Martyn Lloyd-Jones Studies in Sermon on the Mount sermon I read happened to be the one on this very subject. So this subject obviously didn't just "happen" to come up at all for me this week.
Lloyd-Jones opens practically out the gate with the observation that Jesus' teaching that we should love our enemies and do good to them, to bless those that curse us, and seek to be of help to those who persecute us seems at odds with Jesus Himself denouncing Pharisees as sons of the Devil. It seems Jesus pours a lot of hatred on His enemies, right? But we also have all those imprecatory psalms in which the psalmist prays for the death, mayhem, and destruction of those he describes as enemies.
David, particularly, could lay things on thick in praying against his enemies. In Psalm 3 he implores God to rise up and save him and says, "For You have struck all my enemies on the cheek. You have broken the teeth of the wicked." In the prologue to Psalm 3 we see that this was a psalm David wrote when he was fleeing from Absalom his son. Yeah, the same Absalom whom David urged Joab and the rest of his armies to not harm. The same Absalom whose death struck David with such great sorrow he lamented Absalom's death. Absalom's death hit David so hard that Joab said that if David kept carrying on in public weeping and crying over the death of a son, who killed his brother and sexually carried on in public with ten of David's concubines while forming an insurrection, that the armies that saved David would turn on him. THAT Absalom. How do we make sense of David asking that God would destroy the wicked and thank God for breaking the teeth of the wicked when the teeth that were broken were, poetically speaking, people who included David's own beloved son?
Lloyd-Jones provides a useful distinction at this point, by pointing out that the Psalms are not ultimately expressions of individual faith but are written for corporate worship and for reflection by God's people. He also points out that the imprecations in the Psalms are those that have to do with a reaction to God's name and honor being rejected or attacked. The imprecations have to do with those who destroy and batter God's people. Blessed be the man who takes your babies and smashes their heads upon a stone ... by the waters of Babylon. The Psalms, as Lloyd-Jones points out, cannot merely be read as the wish for a purely personal form of vengeance but as prayers that God's name and might would be vindicated in the midst of those who scoff at the name of the Lord and trample on God's people.
Jesus Himself said that God sends rain on the just and unjust alike. "Common grace" means that the wicked as well as the good benefit from the created order. As individuals we are called to love our enemy. Lloyd-Jones points out something that should be obvious but which, of course, may not be obvious--loving our enemy does not mean we like our enemy. Yet loving our enemy means we bless them and ask for the Lord's mercy to be extended to them rather than praying for their downfall. We cannot help but consider the example of Christ Himself who extended mercy and forgiveness to those who killed Him. Those Christians who pretend that forgiveness must be conditioned by true repentance do not realize that were this condition ever consistently applied Christ would never have died for us!
One of the stranger ironies in my life is that I have noticed the people most eager to condition forgiveness on a display of repentance have been Calvinists! Who, of all people, would be most persuaded by the testimony of Scriptures that a repentant heart is a gift from the Spirit more than a Calvinist? And yet who would seem most to demand a demonstration of in another what he knows is impossible apart from a sovereign move of the Lord in such a case? Did Christ wait for you, dear Calvinist, to make a convincing demonstration of repentance before infusing you with life through the Gospel when you heard it? I didn't think He did. Why then, in your daily life would you attempt to justify the notion that someone must prove themselves worthy of forgiveness by demonstrating conformity to your idea of "repentance"?
Well now, some may say at this point, it is one thing to forgive and another thing to be reconciled. Yeah, I get that. I get that more than you might be able to guess merely reading my blog. And yet loving enemies still brings us back to Christ. Christ chose to reconcile us to Himself while we were His enemies. Consider that Stephen as he was being stoned to death asked that the sins of those who killed him would not be held against him even after he had denounced them for being stiff-necked people who resisted the Holy Spirit. Among those who approved of us death was none other than the Paul who would one day become an apostle.
Okay, I know some Christians may be considering now, that's okay at an individual level. A certain pastor was fond of saying that pacificism and turning the other cheek is a-okay for the individual but that if you go after his family there's gonna be a fight. He'll put up with whatever indignities he feels he's going to suffer but if you go after the people he cares about he'll come after you. I've met Christians who take this line of thought and on the basis of that the question may come up, "How do I treat those people who are not just some personal enemy but who have harmed people I care about."
Well ... perhaps a useful point of instruction on this subject may come from Jesus. Jesus was asked by a certain legal expert what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asked what the man read in the Law. The man replied that one must love God and one's neighbor. Jesus replied, "This is good. Do this and you shall live." But the man, wanting to justify himself, asked, "And who is my neighbor?" Thus the parable about the good Samaritan.
This man wanted to justify hating a group of people who represented apostates, sell-outs, and traitors to Judea and to true religion. In the law expert's mind it was perfectly okay to hate a Samaritan for these reasons. Christ told a parable that revealed that the Samaritan is still the neighbor. "Which of these was a neighbor to the man who was robbed?" Jesus asked. Unwilling to even name the man, the legal expert replied, "The one who showed him kindness." Jesus replied, "Go and be like that man." Jesus cuts through our pretensions to define our neighbor in a way that precludes our seeking his welfare. He reveals that if we even ask the question "And who is my neighbor?" we are seeking a self-justifying path in which our hatred can be justified. We, like that law expert, want to come to God in a way that permits hatred and seeks justification in the hope that whomever the enemy is God will destroy him.
One of the common temptations I have seen among at least some Christians is to then attempt to do some kind of end run and still find some kind of loophole. You see one of the things they don't necessarily teach in Sunday school or discuss from the pulpit is that if you live mainly among Christians the person who is most likely to end up feeling like your enemy is a fellow Christian. Certainly in Corinth there were enough betrayals and mistakes and sins happening that lawsuits were taking place. To this Paul wrote a rebuke and he emphasized it still further by writing, "This I say to shame you." That there are lawsuits at all is a sign of defeat. Why not rather be wronged? As it is you go to unbelieving courts and fight each other which is a discredit to the Gospel and to you.
Let me cite by way of a specific example that a cease and desist letter from Mars Hill met with the disapproval of numerous Christians. Any church that went through 1 Corinthians in sermons TWICE could have kept in mind the precept the apostle Paul taught, "Why not rather be wronged?" I've seen the logo in question and even though I need eye surgery I can tell you the logos don't look that similar. If there is any comfort for Mars Hill it is that unbelievers have not (yet) gotten wind of the cease and desist letter and made much hay about it. Give it time, I suppose, but here's hoping it doesn't become too huge a deal.
This is a useful case study because I am seeing plenty of Christians assume that one party is completely evil and the other party is good. There is a temptation to assume that the big bad church is the big bad enemy. I've met some Christians who have a penchant for deciding who is and isn't a Christian on the basis of personal affronts. I met a fellow who took the side of a pastor who got fired and declared that all the pastors involved in that man's firing were completely unfit for ministry. Then, a few years later, when the pastor failed to keep a promise made to help this man's family during a difficult time (as the man understood it, anyway) the man began to declare among friends that this ex-pastor wasn't even really a Christian. Huh? What just happened here? The ex-pastor, about whom this man said that other pastors firing the ex-pastor weren't fit for ministry, suddenly becomes "not really a Christian" for failing to keep a promise to this man? What did James warn us about the ways in which we judge people? What did Jesus Himself warn us about with respect to judgment?
You see there is no escape hatch in this teaching to love and bless our enemies. If we pretend that fellow professing Christians are not really Christians this does not absolve us of a calling to love them even if we consider them enemies. This does not absolve us of seeking their welfare even if they have harmed by offense or neglect people we care about. John wrote that if we hate our brother then we walk in darkness and do not know where we are going. So if we hate fellow Christians, for whatever reason, we are walking in darkness and need to seek the Light, which is Christ. If we hate people who say they are Christians and decide they are not we are not excused from loving our neighbor. In the parable about the good Samaritan Jesus did not say the Samaritan had true beliefs or true doctrines or otherwise "good" or "Christian" ethics. Jesus told the Samaritan woman, "You worship what you do not know." Even among those who are truly enemies and not even on the same team in our estimation, Christ's teaching is not somehow nullified to justify our wrath.
Now if Christians wrong other Christians that's still no good. But what we do not benefit from is keeping a record of wrongs. There's some obscure apostle named Paul who made some mention of that. But many Christians, this one included, are often tempted to keep a record of wrongs as a form of defense. Surely I don't have to explain how keeping a list of wrongs is a form of defense? It becomes the basis from which some Christians say "I will not forgive X because X has not shown the necessary signs of repentance." It becomes the basis on which some Christians say, "I have forgiven X but I can't hang out with X because X is in rebellion." It becomes the basis for some Christians to say that this or that Christian shouldn't hang out with another Christian because of some wrong. Shunning leads to counter-shunning, which at heart is pretty much the same thing.
In my own life I have often encountered situations in which people do not apologize for things they have done but more often I find that people do not apologize to me for things they have said. This has happened often enough that I actually can't remember how many times some people have said things that have hurt my feelings. Rather than say anything about it I have found out over time that even expressing my discomfort at some of the things said to and about me gets me more trouble. I find myself wishing I had not brought anything up and that there is a sense where Paul's advice sticks with me--why not rather be wronged? In many cases the people who have said the most offensive and hurtful things to me don't even remember they said any of these things. Or they may actually tell me (as some have) that I just completely misremembered what really happened and shouldn't have taken things personally. The things were meant personally and while my memory has limits some things have stuck with me.
But Proverbs says that it is a gracious thing for a man to overlook faults. Yes, it is, and so I have been slowly learning that in many cases simply putting up with things that are said about me is actually the better and more Christian path. Years ago I was spoken about in very unfavorable terms by some people I had to work with. They said my work was poorly done and my attitude to their correction was terrible. To the best of my ability and knowledge I was doing things exactly the way I was told I needed to do them. Yet I was becoming the subject of such vociferous complaint my supervisors had a meeting with me and discussed the complaints about me. I didn't attempt to make things personal or offensive to the best of my knowledge but people were getting very upset. I was trying very hard to figure out what I was doing wrong and no one could explain what it was.
Finally things came to the point where a conference call had to happen. The biggest people in the situation all had a call and I was present for discussing things. Well, to keep a long story short, it turned out that I was not only right in doing my work the way I had been doing it I was the only person in the whole region who was doing the work the right way. Now here was a perfect opportunity for me to have said "Ha! I told you I was right." I didn't. Let others praise you and not yourself, after all. So I was vindicated after about a year of complaints about my character and my work. I was vindicated by the quality of the work itself. I found that when I attempted to defend myself this was held against me. When I simply did the best work I could according to the instructions I had been given by the most important people in the organization it was those people, and not myself, who took the chance to speak up and both defend my work and clarify that the other people had been doing things the wrong way. My chief concern was not about whether or not my "honor" was being defended but whether or not the work was being done the right way.
Loving our enemies, however our enemies may be defined, is something we are only able to do if we understand the mercy of Christ and not merely in some abstract doctrinal way. To put it another way, loving enemies and serving them and doing good work despite problems is something which we are only able to do if our goal is not a purely personal sense of glory or right. If we understand our own failures before the love and holiness of God and understand the depth of the forgiveness Christ obtained for us, more than that, the love with which Christ loves us and has sought us out, then we are better equipped to demonstrate that love toward others. If Christ can forgive me then who can I not forgive?
Yet there are plenty of people who care a great deal about "the doctrines of grace" who sadly know nothing of it in their daily lives. They are like those people who profess a love for humanity in the abstract but hate everyone they know. They are like people who profess a great love for the Church or a church but they love not the real flesh and blood people in that body of Christians--they love their ideal of what that church ought to be in their own imagination and seek to bring that forth into reality.
There are people who think their concern is for sound doctrine who are concerned about their influence and popularity. There are Christians who profess a concern about social justice who are concerned about their own reputation. There are men who are eager to name-drop their important associates, pull rank within their communities to get things their way and cow any dissenters. There are men who nominate themselves to roles of influence and then get upset when things don't go their way or when their influence is insufficient to the tasks or conflicts they set themselves to mastering. And perhaps because these sorts of people are in the grip of the boastful pride of life it's the only way they know how to understand or explain sin. At the other end of things those who are consumed by doubt and fear tend to only grasp things in terms of those doubts or fears. There are many Christians I can think of who would assume that fellow brothers and sisters in Christ are basically at heart non-believers because of old-fashioned politics. If any of these Christians are actually right then they are ALL unbelievers at heart.
None of this means that Christians don't wrong each other. We wouldn't even have the epistles of Scripture if no early Christians wronged each other! Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov advised that we must love the sinner and even love his sins. Does this mean we actually love sin? Dostoevsky had seen too much of evil to have meant this in some flatly literal way. Even in the sins of fellow sinners we can see how these people are, despite their brokenness, still image-bearers of God. It is very easy to hate those qualities in others that seem most opposite or own but an unbelieving teacher of mine once told me that he noticed that in many, many cases the things people hate most in others are often the traits they must admit are in themselves. Is there a person who infuriates you because he or she pretends that nothing is wrong and won't talk about the elephant in the room?
Here perhaps we can discuss Romans 2. You who hate idols, do you rob temples? This is a phrase that puzzled me for a while but a comment by Adolph Schlatter may be relevant. He notes that there may have been Jews who, despite their formal protest against any pagan images, were selfish enough to gain money tha tthey would breach pagan taboos the pagans themselves would not break. Now if, building somewhat speculatively on this observation, we consider it axiomatic that one must hate one's enemies and that it is not wrong to defraud them then a person could justify stealing what belongs to an infidel as being permitted by God.
After all, all things belong to God and I believe in and follow the one true God therefore all things are permitted to me, particularly that I should somehow profit from taking things that others dare not use due to a silly taboo. Other gods are not really gods at all so if one takes the gold from the temple of a god which is no god then no god has been defrauded. Really? Well, Paul says no, you're still a thief. Paul warns here that if you claim to hate idols/graven images but steal gold out of temples then you don't really hate idols and graven images that much. In fact you paradoxically profit off of the very thing you claim to despise in the name of the Lord. Paul takes time to point out that there are sins that people commit where if they took idolatry seriously they wouldn't even be committing certain sins.
That Gentiles are part of the new covenant in Christ at all speaks to the reconciliation Christ accomplished for the world. Jew and Gentile are no longer enemies in Christ and both groups are guilty of sin warranting judgment from God. But God's gift is faith in Christ and Christ Himself. There were Jews who did not accept this implication of the kingdom of Christ because they did not want the Good News to extend to the enemies of God's people. There were Jews who may not have been or felt personally oppressed or harmed by Gentiles who nevertheless resented the Gentiles for the disgrace and oppression they had brought to God's people.
The Maccabean revolt was not about nothing, after all, it was about rejecting the imposition of idolatry on God's people and attempting to forbid honoring Yahweh. The scandal of the Cross is that the invitation of God has been extended to the enemies of God's people, the nations that desecrated the Temple, the nations whose leaders offered swine on the altar, the peoples who slew women and children, the traitors among God's people who helped these tyrants to rule. To fail to grasp the scandalous political and social implications of Christ dining with tax collectors and being willing to help government officials by healing their children is difficult to overstate. As N. T. Wright put it well in Jesus & the Victory of God Jesus was announcing and celebrating the coming of the Kingdom of God but one of many scandals about how he did this was he was celebrating this coming of the kingdom with all the wrong people.
We need to be careful in considering whether the resentments we harbor are on behalf of the harm caused others or resentments that are our own. The two are not the same. That legal expert who sought ot justify himself by asking "And who is my neighbor?" may never have been harmed by an actual Samaritan but he still hated them because of what they represented to him, those who wronged God's people. Jesus' implicit rebuke was no less stinging for that, "Go and be like that man." If we have been angry that others have wronged us let's not forget how often we have wronged others and if we think we haven't we're in pretty good danger of being proven liars. The apostle John warns that if we hate fellow Christians for whatever reason we are walking in darkness and the truth isn't in us. Are our enemies truly NOT Christians? The Jesus who said that if one will not listen to you to then treat them as you would a tax collector or a Gentile dined with tax collectors. He also healed the dying children of Gentiles and said that he had sheep in another flock that needed to be brought in.
If you and I cannot remind ourselves of these we should consider how seriously we appreciate the love and mercy of Christ who taught us to pray:
Our Father, who is in heaven
hallowed be your name.
May your kingdom come, and your will be done
here on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day or daily bread
and forgive us our debts
as we have forgiven our debtors.
Do not lead us into the hour of trial
but deliver us from the evil one.
I don't think I really need to unpack the significance of how our willingness to forgive indicates our appreciation of forgiveness. As David Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it, unless God is working within our hearts there are things we can't do and blessing and doing good to whomever we consider enemies would be one. And if we hate people who are brothers or sisters in Christ then, well, we need to ask ourselves the uncomfortable question of how much we actually love Christ.
Lloyd-Jones opens practically out the gate with the observation that Jesus' teaching that we should love our enemies and do good to them, to bless those that curse us, and seek to be of help to those who persecute us seems at odds with Jesus Himself denouncing Pharisees as sons of the Devil. It seems Jesus pours a lot of hatred on His enemies, right? But we also have all those imprecatory psalms in which the psalmist prays for the death, mayhem, and destruction of those he describes as enemies.
David, particularly, could lay things on thick in praying against his enemies. In Psalm 3 he implores God to rise up and save him and says, "For You have struck all my enemies on the cheek. You have broken the teeth of the wicked." In the prologue to Psalm 3 we see that this was a psalm David wrote when he was fleeing from Absalom his son. Yeah, the same Absalom whom David urged Joab and the rest of his armies to not harm. The same Absalom whose death struck David with such great sorrow he lamented Absalom's death. Absalom's death hit David so hard that Joab said that if David kept carrying on in public weeping and crying over the death of a son, who killed his brother and sexually carried on in public with ten of David's concubines while forming an insurrection, that the armies that saved David would turn on him. THAT Absalom. How do we make sense of David asking that God would destroy the wicked and thank God for breaking the teeth of the wicked when the teeth that were broken were, poetically speaking, people who included David's own beloved son?
Lloyd-Jones provides a useful distinction at this point, by pointing out that the Psalms are not ultimately expressions of individual faith but are written for corporate worship and for reflection by God's people. He also points out that the imprecations in the Psalms are those that have to do with a reaction to God's name and honor being rejected or attacked. The imprecations have to do with those who destroy and batter God's people. Blessed be the man who takes your babies and smashes their heads upon a stone ... by the waters of Babylon. The Psalms, as Lloyd-Jones points out, cannot merely be read as the wish for a purely personal form of vengeance but as prayers that God's name and might would be vindicated in the midst of those who scoff at the name of the Lord and trample on God's people.
Jesus Himself said that God sends rain on the just and unjust alike. "Common grace" means that the wicked as well as the good benefit from the created order. As individuals we are called to love our enemy. Lloyd-Jones points out something that should be obvious but which, of course, may not be obvious--loving our enemy does not mean we like our enemy. Yet loving our enemy means we bless them and ask for the Lord's mercy to be extended to them rather than praying for their downfall. We cannot help but consider the example of Christ Himself who extended mercy and forgiveness to those who killed Him. Those Christians who pretend that forgiveness must be conditioned by true repentance do not realize that were this condition ever consistently applied Christ would never have died for us!
One of the stranger ironies in my life is that I have noticed the people most eager to condition forgiveness on a display of repentance have been Calvinists! Who, of all people, would be most persuaded by the testimony of Scriptures that a repentant heart is a gift from the Spirit more than a Calvinist? And yet who would seem most to demand a demonstration of in another what he knows is impossible apart from a sovereign move of the Lord in such a case? Did Christ wait for you, dear Calvinist, to make a convincing demonstration of repentance before infusing you with life through the Gospel when you heard it? I didn't think He did. Why then, in your daily life would you attempt to justify the notion that someone must prove themselves worthy of forgiveness by demonstrating conformity to your idea of "repentance"?
Well now, some may say at this point, it is one thing to forgive and another thing to be reconciled. Yeah, I get that. I get that more than you might be able to guess merely reading my blog. And yet loving enemies still brings us back to Christ. Christ chose to reconcile us to Himself while we were His enemies. Consider that Stephen as he was being stoned to death asked that the sins of those who killed him would not be held against him even after he had denounced them for being stiff-necked people who resisted the Holy Spirit. Among those who approved of us death was none other than the Paul who would one day become an apostle.
Okay, I know some Christians may be considering now, that's okay at an individual level. A certain pastor was fond of saying that pacificism and turning the other cheek is a-okay for the individual but that if you go after his family there's gonna be a fight. He'll put up with whatever indignities he feels he's going to suffer but if you go after the people he cares about he'll come after you. I've met Christians who take this line of thought and on the basis of that the question may come up, "How do I treat those people who are not just some personal enemy but who have harmed people I care about."
Well ... perhaps a useful point of instruction on this subject may come from Jesus. Jesus was asked by a certain legal expert what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asked what the man read in the Law. The man replied that one must love God and one's neighbor. Jesus replied, "This is good. Do this and you shall live." But the man, wanting to justify himself, asked, "And who is my neighbor?" Thus the parable about the good Samaritan.
This man wanted to justify hating a group of people who represented apostates, sell-outs, and traitors to Judea and to true religion. In the law expert's mind it was perfectly okay to hate a Samaritan for these reasons. Christ told a parable that revealed that the Samaritan is still the neighbor. "Which of these was a neighbor to the man who was robbed?" Jesus asked. Unwilling to even name the man, the legal expert replied, "The one who showed him kindness." Jesus replied, "Go and be like that man." Jesus cuts through our pretensions to define our neighbor in a way that precludes our seeking his welfare. He reveals that if we even ask the question "And who is my neighbor?" we are seeking a self-justifying path in which our hatred can be justified. We, like that law expert, want to come to God in a way that permits hatred and seeks justification in the hope that whomever the enemy is God will destroy him.
One of the common temptations I have seen among at least some Christians is to then attempt to do some kind of end run and still find some kind of loophole. You see one of the things they don't necessarily teach in Sunday school or discuss from the pulpit is that if you live mainly among Christians the person who is most likely to end up feeling like your enemy is a fellow Christian. Certainly in Corinth there were enough betrayals and mistakes and sins happening that lawsuits were taking place. To this Paul wrote a rebuke and he emphasized it still further by writing, "This I say to shame you." That there are lawsuits at all is a sign of defeat. Why not rather be wronged? As it is you go to unbelieving courts and fight each other which is a discredit to the Gospel and to you.
Let me cite by way of a specific example that a cease and desist letter from Mars Hill met with the disapproval of numerous Christians. Any church that went through 1 Corinthians in sermons TWICE could have kept in mind the precept the apostle Paul taught, "Why not rather be wronged?" I've seen the logo in question and even though I need eye surgery I can tell you the logos don't look that similar. If there is any comfort for Mars Hill it is that unbelievers have not (yet) gotten wind of the cease and desist letter and made much hay about it. Give it time, I suppose, but here's hoping it doesn't become too huge a deal.
This is a useful case study because I am seeing plenty of Christians assume that one party is completely evil and the other party is good. There is a temptation to assume that the big bad church is the big bad enemy. I've met some Christians who have a penchant for deciding who is and isn't a Christian on the basis of personal affronts. I met a fellow who took the side of a pastor who got fired and declared that all the pastors involved in that man's firing were completely unfit for ministry. Then, a few years later, when the pastor failed to keep a promise made to help this man's family during a difficult time (as the man understood it, anyway) the man began to declare among friends that this ex-pastor wasn't even really a Christian. Huh? What just happened here? The ex-pastor, about whom this man said that other pastors firing the ex-pastor weren't fit for ministry, suddenly becomes "not really a Christian" for failing to keep a promise to this man? What did James warn us about the ways in which we judge people? What did Jesus Himself warn us about with respect to judgment?
You see there is no escape hatch in this teaching to love and bless our enemies. If we pretend that fellow professing Christians are not really Christians this does not absolve us of a calling to love them even if we consider them enemies. This does not absolve us of seeking their welfare even if they have harmed by offense or neglect people we care about. John wrote that if we hate our brother then we walk in darkness and do not know where we are going. So if we hate fellow Christians, for whatever reason, we are walking in darkness and need to seek the Light, which is Christ. If we hate people who say they are Christians and decide they are not we are not excused from loving our neighbor. In the parable about the good Samaritan Jesus did not say the Samaritan had true beliefs or true doctrines or otherwise "good" or "Christian" ethics. Jesus told the Samaritan woman, "You worship what you do not know." Even among those who are truly enemies and not even on the same team in our estimation, Christ's teaching is not somehow nullified to justify our wrath.
Now if Christians wrong other Christians that's still no good. But what we do not benefit from is keeping a record of wrongs. There's some obscure apostle named Paul who made some mention of that. But many Christians, this one included, are often tempted to keep a record of wrongs as a form of defense. Surely I don't have to explain how keeping a list of wrongs is a form of defense? It becomes the basis from which some Christians say "I will not forgive X because X has not shown the necessary signs of repentance." It becomes the basis on which some Christians say, "I have forgiven X but I can't hang out with X because X is in rebellion." It becomes the basis for some Christians to say that this or that Christian shouldn't hang out with another Christian because of some wrong. Shunning leads to counter-shunning, which at heart is pretty much the same thing.
In my own life I have often encountered situations in which people do not apologize for things they have done but more often I find that people do not apologize to me for things they have said. This has happened often enough that I actually can't remember how many times some people have said things that have hurt my feelings. Rather than say anything about it I have found out over time that even expressing my discomfort at some of the things said to and about me gets me more trouble. I find myself wishing I had not brought anything up and that there is a sense where Paul's advice sticks with me--why not rather be wronged? In many cases the people who have said the most offensive and hurtful things to me don't even remember they said any of these things. Or they may actually tell me (as some have) that I just completely misremembered what really happened and shouldn't have taken things personally. The things were meant personally and while my memory has limits some things have stuck with me.
But Proverbs says that it is a gracious thing for a man to overlook faults. Yes, it is, and so I have been slowly learning that in many cases simply putting up with things that are said about me is actually the better and more Christian path. Years ago I was spoken about in very unfavorable terms by some people I had to work with. They said my work was poorly done and my attitude to their correction was terrible. To the best of my ability and knowledge I was doing things exactly the way I was told I needed to do them. Yet I was becoming the subject of such vociferous complaint my supervisors had a meeting with me and discussed the complaints about me. I didn't attempt to make things personal or offensive to the best of my knowledge but people were getting very upset. I was trying very hard to figure out what I was doing wrong and no one could explain what it was.
Finally things came to the point where a conference call had to happen. The biggest people in the situation all had a call and I was present for discussing things. Well, to keep a long story short, it turned out that I was not only right in doing my work the way I had been doing it I was the only person in the whole region who was doing the work the right way. Now here was a perfect opportunity for me to have said "Ha! I told you I was right." I didn't. Let others praise you and not yourself, after all. So I was vindicated after about a year of complaints about my character and my work. I was vindicated by the quality of the work itself. I found that when I attempted to defend myself this was held against me. When I simply did the best work I could according to the instructions I had been given by the most important people in the organization it was those people, and not myself, who took the chance to speak up and both defend my work and clarify that the other people had been doing things the wrong way. My chief concern was not about whether or not my "honor" was being defended but whether or not the work was being done the right way.
Loving our enemies, however our enemies may be defined, is something we are only able to do if we understand the mercy of Christ and not merely in some abstract doctrinal way. To put it another way, loving enemies and serving them and doing good work despite problems is something which we are only able to do if our goal is not a purely personal sense of glory or right. If we understand our own failures before the love and holiness of God and understand the depth of the forgiveness Christ obtained for us, more than that, the love with which Christ loves us and has sought us out, then we are better equipped to demonstrate that love toward others. If Christ can forgive me then who can I not forgive?
Yet there are plenty of people who care a great deal about "the doctrines of grace" who sadly know nothing of it in their daily lives. They are like those people who profess a love for humanity in the abstract but hate everyone they know. They are like people who profess a great love for the Church or a church but they love not the real flesh and blood people in that body of Christians--they love their ideal of what that church ought to be in their own imagination and seek to bring that forth into reality.
There are people who think their concern is for sound doctrine who are concerned about their influence and popularity. There are Christians who profess a concern about social justice who are concerned about their own reputation. There are men who are eager to name-drop their important associates, pull rank within their communities to get things their way and cow any dissenters. There are men who nominate themselves to roles of influence and then get upset when things don't go their way or when their influence is insufficient to the tasks or conflicts they set themselves to mastering. And perhaps because these sorts of people are in the grip of the boastful pride of life it's the only way they know how to understand or explain sin. At the other end of things those who are consumed by doubt and fear tend to only grasp things in terms of those doubts or fears. There are many Christians I can think of who would assume that fellow brothers and sisters in Christ are basically at heart non-believers because of old-fashioned politics. If any of these Christians are actually right then they are ALL unbelievers at heart.
None of this means that Christians don't wrong each other. We wouldn't even have the epistles of Scripture if no early Christians wronged each other! Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov advised that we must love the sinner and even love his sins. Does this mean we actually love sin? Dostoevsky had seen too much of evil to have meant this in some flatly literal way. Even in the sins of fellow sinners we can see how these people are, despite their brokenness, still image-bearers of God. It is very easy to hate those qualities in others that seem most opposite or own but an unbelieving teacher of mine once told me that he noticed that in many, many cases the things people hate most in others are often the traits they must admit are in themselves. Is there a person who infuriates you because he or she pretends that nothing is wrong and won't talk about the elephant in the room?
Here perhaps we can discuss Romans 2. You who hate idols, do you rob temples? This is a phrase that puzzled me for a while but a comment by Adolph Schlatter may be relevant. He notes that there may have been Jews who, despite their formal protest against any pagan images, were selfish enough to gain money tha tthey would breach pagan taboos the pagans themselves would not break. Now if, building somewhat speculatively on this observation, we consider it axiomatic that one must hate one's enemies and that it is not wrong to defraud them then a person could justify stealing what belongs to an infidel as being permitted by God.
After all, all things belong to God and I believe in and follow the one true God therefore all things are permitted to me, particularly that I should somehow profit from taking things that others dare not use due to a silly taboo. Other gods are not really gods at all so if one takes the gold from the temple of a god which is no god then no god has been defrauded. Really? Well, Paul says no, you're still a thief. Paul warns here that if you claim to hate idols/graven images but steal gold out of temples then you don't really hate idols and graven images that much. In fact you paradoxically profit off of the very thing you claim to despise in the name of the Lord. Paul takes time to point out that there are sins that people commit where if they took idolatry seriously they wouldn't even be committing certain sins.
That Gentiles are part of the new covenant in Christ at all speaks to the reconciliation Christ accomplished for the world. Jew and Gentile are no longer enemies in Christ and both groups are guilty of sin warranting judgment from God. But God's gift is faith in Christ and Christ Himself. There were Jews who did not accept this implication of the kingdom of Christ because they did not want the Good News to extend to the enemies of God's people. There were Jews who may not have been or felt personally oppressed or harmed by Gentiles who nevertheless resented the Gentiles for the disgrace and oppression they had brought to God's people.
The Maccabean revolt was not about nothing, after all, it was about rejecting the imposition of idolatry on God's people and attempting to forbid honoring Yahweh. The scandal of the Cross is that the invitation of God has been extended to the enemies of God's people, the nations that desecrated the Temple, the nations whose leaders offered swine on the altar, the peoples who slew women and children, the traitors among God's people who helped these tyrants to rule. To fail to grasp the scandalous political and social implications of Christ dining with tax collectors and being willing to help government officials by healing their children is difficult to overstate. As N. T. Wright put it well in Jesus & the Victory of God Jesus was announcing and celebrating the coming of the Kingdom of God but one of many scandals about how he did this was he was celebrating this coming of the kingdom with all the wrong people.
We need to be careful in considering whether the resentments we harbor are on behalf of the harm caused others or resentments that are our own. The two are not the same. That legal expert who sought ot justify himself by asking "And who is my neighbor?" may never have been harmed by an actual Samaritan but he still hated them because of what they represented to him, those who wronged God's people. Jesus' implicit rebuke was no less stinging for that, "Go and be like that man." If we have been angry that others have wronged us let's not forget how often we have wronged others and if we think we haven't we're in pretty good danger of being proven liars. The apostle John warns that if we hate fellow Christians for whatever reason we are walking in darkness and the truth isn't in us. Are our enemies truly NOT Christians? The Jesus who said that if one will not listen to you to then treat them as you would a tax collector or a Gentile dined with tax collectors. He also healed the dying children of Gentiles and said that he had sheep in another flock that needed to be brought in.
If you and I cannot remind ourselves of these we should consider how seriously we appreciate the love and mercy of Christ who taught us to pray:
Our Father, who is in heaven
hallowed be your name.
May your kingdom come, and your will be done
here on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day or daily bread
and forgive us our debts
as we have forgiven our debtors.
Do not lead us into the hour of trial
but deliver us from the evil one.
I don't think I really need to unpack the significance of how our willingness to forgive indicates our appreciation of forgiveness. As David Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it, unless God is working within our hearts there are things we can't do and blessing and doing good to whomever we consider enemies would be one. And if we hate people who are brothers or sisters in Christ then, well, we need to ask ourselves the uncomfortable question of how much we actually love Christ.
Friday, November 04, 2011
Link: Internet Monk: When Christians Won the Culture War
http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/when-christians-won-the-culture-war
I could write thousands of words about this but I'd rather just link to the post and subsequent discusion.
I could write thousands of words about this but I'd rather just link to the post and subsequent discusion.
musical kindness
Someone kindly sent me some recordings recently, Hilary Hahn's recent recording of the Charles Ives violin sonatas, as well as her seminal 1997 Bach recording. I have been a happy camper in terms of listening to music.
And since this post is pretty much just about Hilary Hahn anyway, Alex Ross' blog has an entry mentioning her.
http://www.therestisnoise.com/2011/09/misc-1.html
"Do you have any advice for people who would like to become fish?" Hilary Hahn, having apparently sat through too many robotic interviews, has responded with a Cagean provocation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xZl1_NXKls
It's deliberately drawn out and awkward and yet also dryly funny. A friend took me to see Hahn's recital at Benaroya Hall in mid-October and I noted that she can be more than a tiny bit of a smart ass. That smart ass side with more than a bit of cerebral, distant humor is on display in the above clip.
Her recent recital included a whole bunch of pieces from her recently commissioned encores. It was a fun concert. Hahn always puts on a great concert. I admit that this recent visit was not as astonishing as her Ives/Bartok/Brahms/Ysaye recital from 2009 but, I tell you, it would be tough for any musician, even Hahn herself, to have topped that recital! My siblings have been occasionally joking that I don't just enjoy her work because she's a great musician but also because she's cute. Well, yes, guilty as charged. I don't think she could have been any hotter than when she played all the Charles Ives violin sonatas at Seattle in 2009.
Hahn is an attractive woman but I admire that, unlike certain other classical musicians, she has not banked on that the way some other lesser tier musicians in the field have. I'm not going to name names but if you know classical musicians you can probably make a few guesses and can probably guess with more clarity if you've read anything by Norman Lebrecht (who Hahn stonewalled on the question of whether she dates, which is fair game seeing as Lebrecht bemoaned how boring her website was).
Being absurdly beautiful does not mean you have to make that the foundation for your marketing. You can make the foundation of marketing your career the fact that you play kick-ass music by Bach, Schoenberg, Ives, Shostakovich, Mozart, Pagannini, and Stravinsky. Physical beauty will fade with time for even the most beautiful person but playing wonderful music can still be done after you don't look like you did in your twenties, thirties, forties and so on. I admire Hahn's willingness to play the warhorses in a compelling way but to also throw in works that are just plain difficult. Let's face it, it would be hard to throw in to back up a work less accessible than Schoenberg's violin concerto. Here's hoping Hahn doubles down and records Alban Berg's violin concerto!
And it doesn't hurt if you can make deliberately awkward, forced video satires of journalists throwing the same old questions at you. I was a journalism student back in my college days and so there's another meta-level of humor in this for me. Anyway, Hahn's music has been a much-appreciated part of my musical life since I learned about her work and I'm grateful to a wonderful friend who took me to her October recital. I'm also grateful to the anonymous benefactor who sent me Hahn's recordings of the Bach partitas and the Charles Ives sonatas.
And, since I know my siblings have joked about it already, yes, I think Hilary Hahn is ridiculously hot.
And since this post is pretty much just about Hilary Hahn anyway, Alex Ross' blog has an entry mentioning her.
http://www.therestisnoise.com/2011/09/misc-1.html
"Do you have any advice for people who would like to become fish?" Hilary Hahn, having apparently sat through too many robotic interviews, has responded with a Cagean provocation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xZl1_NXKls
It's deliberately drawn out and awkward and yet also dryly funny. A friend took me to see Hahn's recital at Benaroya Hall in mid-October and I noted that she can be more than a tiny bit of a smart ass. That smart ass side with more than a bit of cerebral, distant humor is on display in the above clip.
Her recent recital included a whole bunch of pieces from her recently commissioned encores. It was a fun concert. Hahn always puts on a great concert. I admit that this recent visit was not as astonishing as her Ives/Bartok/Brahms/Ysaye recital from 2009 but, I tell you, it would be tough for any musician, even Hahn herself, to have topped that recital! My siblings have been occasionally joking that I don't just enjoy her work because she's a great musician but also because she's cute. Well, yes, guilty as charged. I don't think she could have been any hotter than when she played all the Charles Ives violin sonatas at Seattle in 2009.
Hahn is an attractive woman but I admire that, unlike certain other classical musicians, she has not banked on that the way some other lesser tier musicians in the field have. I'm not going to name names but if you know classical musicians you can probably make a few guesses and can probably guess with more clarity if you've read anything by Norman Lebrecht (who Hahn stonewalled on the question of whether she dates, which is fair game seeing as Lebrecht bemoaned how boring her website was).
Being absurdly beautiful does not mean you have to make that the foundation for your marketing. You can make the foundation of marketing your career the fact that you play kick-ass music by Bach, Schoenberg, Ives, Shostakovich, Mozart, Pagannini, and Stravinsky. Physical beauty will fade with time for even the most beautiful person but playing wonderful music can still be done after you don't look like you did in your twenties, thirties, forties and so on. I admire Hahn's willingness to play the warhorses in a compelling way but to also throw in works that are just plain difficult. Let's face it, it would be hard to throw in to back up a work less accessible than Schoenberg's violin concerto. Here's hoping Hahn doubles down and records Alban Berg's violin concerto!
And it doesn't hurt if you can make deliberately awkward, forced video satires of journalists throwing the same old questions at you. I was a journalism student back in my college days and so there's another meta-level of humor in this for me. Anyway, Hahn's music has been a much-appreciated part of my musical life since I learned about her work and I'm grateful to a wonderful friend who took me to her October recital. I'm also grateful to the anonymous benefactor who sent me Hahn's recordings of the Bach partitas and the Charles Ives sonatas.
And, since I know my siblings have joked about it already, yes, I think Hilary Hahn is ridiculously hot.
Slate--Kevin Smith's Army: how his loyal fans prop up a stunningly mediocre career
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2011/11/kevin_smith_s_career_reviewed_.single.html
I managed to never see a single Kevin Smith film since he began his career and though I have met people who have praised exactly two of his films (Clerks and Chasing Amy) I have never seen the entirety of any of his films. I only saw a small part of Clerks 2 at the behest of a friend who wanted to show me the only time, in his opinion, Kevin Smith ever made a single cinematic moment that had some kind of art to it. It was the bit with Rosario Dawson dancing and the technique of color saturation adding more vibrant color to the scene as she danced. Plus, this friend admitted to me, the art was mainly something Dawson took care of by just looking like Dawson ... so maybe the art wasn't even necessarily Smith's.
But my friend pointed out that when Smith could have had a moment take a natural, emotionally plausible course and explore that cinematically and visually, Smith demurred. My impression was that Kevin Smith was like Rumiko Takahashi, who has made a career out of deliberately avoiding emotional depth in favor of slapstick. The trouble is that it simply isn't possible for Kevin Smith, so far as I could tell in the few scenes of Clerks 2 I saw, to pull off dumb funny the way Rumiko Takahashi does. There is a certain kind of humorous stupidity it takes a very clever person to pull off and, as yet, I don't know whether or not Smith has ever been, could be, or will be such a person. Whatever Clerks may have been it can't be as unhinged as even less memorable stories from Ranma 1/2.
Of course I recognize that is an apples to oranges comparison ... or is it? Consider Kevin Smith's comic book career. At least he can say he is not as widely villified as Jeph Loeb seems to have become. Sam Adams' article on Kevin Smith does not even pretend to give Smith any respect or serious consideration. Suggesting that after 17 years the man has merely honed his cinematic skills up to the level of a Hollywood hack (a la Michael Bay or Brett Ratner, perhaps?) is not even damning with faint praise.
Adams' remark about wondering whether Kevin Smith has ever even watched a movie that was made before he was born is a particularly intriguing shot in the whole fusillade. Then there's this:
Smith once said he wasn’t particularly interested in how his films looked, which is a little like a novelist saying he doesn’t much care for words
Now years ago I hung out with a friend who declared that Kevin Smith was the most successful and best purveyor of mainstream comedy in American cinema at that time. Only a Kevin Smith fan could possibly say that. If Smith was willing to go into debt with a mass of credit cards to make his first film that surely indicates a man committed to his work but it may well be indicative of a broader question and crisis artists of every sort can consider. What exactly is the patronage system that sustains and encourages the development of any sort of art, at any level? I don't know if there is some metanarrative implicit in the 17 year history of a director who was willing to max out possibly every credit card he could get ahold of to realize his vision. On the one hand how can I begrudge a person the desire to make films when I have never sat through even one of his films? On the other hand decades later, I'm not sure how or why Kevin Smith has ever mattered. I'm curious as to what could inspire Adams to such a merciless and disdainful summary of a man whose career he describes as only reaching hack levels in directorial skill after 17 years ... but I'm also not at all curious to actually watch Kevin Smith films.
I managed to never see a single Kevin Smith film since he began his career and though I have met people who have praised exactly two of his films (Clerks and Chasing Amy) I have never seen the entirety of any of his films. I only saw a small part of Clerks 2 at the behest of a friend who wanted to show me the only time, in his opinion, Kevin Smith ever made a single cinematic moment that had some kind of art to it. It was the bit with Rosario Dawson dancing and the technique of color saturation adding more vibrant color to the scene as she danced. Plus, this friend admitted to me, the art was mainly something Dawson took care of by just looking like Dawson ... so maybe the art wasn't even necessarily Smith's.
But my friend pointed out that when Smith could have had a moment take a natural, emotionally plausible course and explore that cinematically and visually, Smith demurred. My impression was that Kevin Smith was like Rumiko Takahashi, who has made a career out of deliberately avoiding emotional depth in favor of slapstick. The trouble is that it simply isn't possible for Kevin Smith, so far as I could tell in the few scenes of Clerks 2 I saw, to pull off dumb funny the way Rumiko Takahashi does. There is a certain kind of humorous stupidity it takes a very clever person to pull off and, as yet, I don't know whether or not Smith has ever been, could be, or will be such a person. Whatever Clerks may have been it can't be as unhinged as even less memorable stories from Ranma 1/2.
Of course I recognize that is an apples to oranges comparison ... or is it? Consider Kevin Smith's comic book career. At least he can say he is not as widely villified as Jeph Loeb seems to have become. Sam Adams' article on Kevin Smith does not even pretend to give Smith any respect or serious consideration. Suggesting that after 17 years the man has merely honed his cinematic skills up to the level of a Hollywood hack (a la Michael Bay or Brett Ratner, perhaps?) is not even damning with faint praise.
Adams' remark about wondering whether Kevin Smith has ever even watched a movie that was made before he was born is a particularly intriguing shot in the whole fusillade. Then there's this:
Smith once said he wasn’t particularly interested in how his films looked, which is a little like a novelist saying he doesn’t much care for words
Now years ago I hung out with a friend who declared that Kevin Smith was the most successful and best purveyor of mainstream comedy in American cinema at that time. Only a Kevin Smith fan could possibly say that. If Smith was willing to go into debt with a mass of credit cards to make his first film that surely indicates a man committed to his work but it may well be indicative of a broader question and crisis artists of every sort can consider. What exactly is the patronage system that sustains and encourages the development of any sort of art, at any level? I don't know if there is some metanarrative implicit in the 17 year history of a director who was willing to max out possibly every credit card he could get ahold of to realize his vision. On the one hand how can I begrudge a person the desire to make films when I have never sat through even one of his films? On the other hand decades later, I'm not sure how or why Kevin Smith has ever mattered. I'm curious as to what could inspire Adams to such a merciless and disdainful summary of a man whose career he describes as only reaching hack levels in directorial skill after 17 years ... but I'm also not at all curious to actually watch Kevin Smith films.
Thursday, November 03, 2011
Batman: The Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire part 3 is up on Mockingbird
http://www.mbird.com/2011/11/batman-the-agony-of-loss-and-the-madness-of-desire-pt-3/
I'm happy to report that "Heart of Ice, Heart of Wrath" just went up on Mockingbird.
I'm happy to report that "Heart of Ice, Heart of Wrath" just went up on Mockingbird.
stay tuned for more writing about Batman: the animated series
I've been sick as a dog until just a week ago and had a lot going on (still have a lot going on), and DZ had a big conference recently. Yet despite the frenzy of life I can at least tell you that part 3 in my essays about Batman: the animated series should be going up pretty soon. DZ and I were able to catch up and discuss part 3 in the BTAS series and he's a fantastically helpful editor.
I know there have been huge gaps and delays in this set of essays about the DCAU but the struggle to write about this wonderful series has been worth it. I am extremely excited about part 3. DZ has taken something I thought was very good and made it even better. It is always better to do something slowly and well than to do something quickly yet poorly. Unity and clarity of thought is more valuable and lasting than grasping for a quick but ultimately facile insight, which is something that can be all too common in dealing with the comics medium and cartoons. It is one the paradoxicaly tragedies of film criticism in the West that a medium so dependent on the continual development of narrative art in its most literal form is so often considered with so much disdain by fans of "real" film.
I have written here about how in Christ there is no slave or free, Jew or Greek, male or female and how the significance of this plays out in approaching music. Well, it can be said not just about "high" and "low" musical art, it can also be said about the distinction between live action "grown-up" film and animated film that is so often relegated to the category of "kid stuff". Art, where we find it, is worth championing even if we find it in paradoxical or unexpected places.
If we consider how Christ is reconciling all things to Himself and recognize this to be true, then we recognize this in all sorts of realms where people would not necessarily look. I've already written earlier this week about a way in which the nature of Christ's reconciliation of all things to Himself can be explored in music; yet this reconciliation and unification of things under Christ's authority and rule can also be observed in the elimination of the gap between "grown-up" and "kid stuff" in film. One of the most childish things grown-ups can do is imagine that they are too grown-up for the things of childhood. As Chesterton put it, we may have grown too old at heart and have lost the childhood ability to enjoy things as God enjoys them. There's a difference between not wanting to grow up and being ashamed to think that ideas and words shared with children couldn't be that important compared to "grown-up" concerns. Consider that the disciples, the ones who wanted to know when Jesus would finally overthrow the Roman empire, tried turning away children who wanted to see Jesus.
Anyway ... stay tuned to Mockingbird for "Heart of Ice, Heart of Wrath". You should be able to spot it on Mockingbird some time this week. I'll make sure to link to it here.
I know there have been huge gaps and delays in this set of essays about the DCAU but the struggle to write about this wonderful series has been worth it. I am extremely excited about part 3. DZ has taken something I thought was very good and made it even better. It is always better to do something slowly and well than to do something quickly yet poorly. Unity and clarity of thought is more valuable and lasting than grasping for a quick but ultimately facile insight, which is something that can be all too common in dealing with the comics medium and cartoons. It is one the paradoxicaly tragedies of film criticism in the West that a medium so dependent on the continual development of narrative art in its most literal form is so often considered with so much disdain by fans of "real" film.
I have written here about how in Christ there is no slave or free, Jew or Greek, male or female and how the significance of this plays out in approaching music. Well, it can be said not just about "high" and "low" musical art, it can also be said about the distinction between live action "grown-up" film and animated film that is so often relegated to the category of "kid stuff". Art, where we find it, is worth championing even if we find it in paradoxical or unexpected places.
If we consider how Christ is reconciling all things to Himself and recognize this to be true, then we recognize this in all sorts of realms where people would not necessarily look. I've already written earlier this week about a way in which the nature of Christ's reconciliation of all things to Himself can be explored in music; yet this reconciliation and unification of things under Christ's authority and rule can also be observed in the elimination of the gap between "grown-up" and "kid stuff" in film. One of the most childish things grown-ups can do is imagine that they are too grown-up for the things of childhood. As Chesterton put it, we may have grown too old at heart and have lost the childhood ability to enjoy things as God enjoys them. There's a difference between not wanting to grow up and being ashamed to think that ideas and words shared with children couldn't be that important compared to "grown-up" concerns. Consider that the disciples, the ones who wanted to know when Jesus would finally overthrow the Roman empire, tried turning away children who wanted to see Jesus.
Anyway ... stay tuned to Mockingbird for "Heart of Ice, Heart of Wrath". You should be able to spot it on Mockingbird some time this week. I'll make sure to link to it here.
Wednesday, November 02, 2011
more composing
As some of you readers probably know (but that others may not) I compose and arrange music while I look for a normal day job. Last year I got a paid commission to arrange an hour's worth of Christmas music for oboe, cello, and guitar for a chamber ensemble in Italy. That was a huge amount of fun. I spent a week (58 hours of work at that) mapping out 23 songs for the three instruments and had a ball. It was also nice that it helped me keep a roof over my head for a couple of months!
I have been writing quite a bit over the last few years about composing preludes and fugues for solo guitar but, you may surmise I have been composing other things as well. It has come time to return to composing some of those other things. Chief among them is a sonata for violin and guitar in A minor. I have finished movements 2 and 4 but movements 1 and 3 remain to be finished.
The third movement and first movement present the "usual" challenges that come from attempting to compose a sonata form and a fugue. But they present some unusual challenges because by committing so firmly to a compositional and conceptual approach indebted not only to Charles Ives but also Benjamin Britten I have presented some wildly difficult challenges in how I approach these unfinished movements. To explain how and why these problems have shown up would be to give the game away and I refuse to do that on a blog. Particularly shrewd readers who know how Ives worked and know how Britten worked, particularly on a piece that a guitarist would be likely to know about, can probably guess a few things without my having to explain anything. Those guesses would probably even be mostly correct. But the secrets are in details.
Still, I feel comfortable saying that I have spent a decade refining a kind of matrix derived approach to tonal composition that is informed by set theory and dodecaphonic techniques. I have rarely employed true atonality but have liberally drawn from atonal and paratonal idioms. Years ago I composed a Kyrie setting that was performed at Mars Hill in 2004 by the choir I helped put together. I'm not sure anyone cared that I did something musically very nerdy--I made sure that the christe eleison section was based on the relative major harmonization of the retrograde of the cantus firmus that the kyrie eleison section is built on. Besides the simple fact that this sounded fun it had a musical symbolism to it; I wanted to illustrate that whether from within the Mosaic covenant looking forward or in the new covenant in Christ looking backward appeals to the mercy of God are equally meaningful for those of us who live after Christ as for those who were looking forward to Christ. At the risk of seeming piously mushy I wanted to compose a Kyrie setting that musically (even at a visual level in the score) demonstrated how the grace of God toward us in Christ looks the same whether we are looking backward or forward in time as we go.
All that is to say that I like to play around with themes in esoteric ways that only musicologists and sight-reading musicians would pick up on. But ten years ago when I was trying to write sacred choral music is a whole different stage of life than what I've been experimenting with over the last few years. I've been exploring ways in which a kind of monothematicism can be used as the basis for obliterating stylistic and formal distinctions in Western music.
If in Christ there is no slave or free, Jew or Greek, male or female; if Christ is reconciling all things to Himself then the way a Christian composer can explore this is by playing in a wide variety of styles but also in exploring ways in which apparently contrasting styles can be shown to have an otherwise ignored underlying unity. There is no final conflict between Fernando Sor and Johnny Cash, for instance. These distinctions do not lose their importance and these musical styles do not cease to be what they are but there is no irreconciable difference between them to a Christian unless someone decides to be a twerp and imagine that these distinctions "must" exist for retroactive theological rationales that have very little to do with truly Christian teaching and more to do with Christian teaching appropriated for the sake of an ethnic agenda that the kingdom of Christ does not necessarily justify. If that were ever ultimately true then no Gentiles would ever have received the Gospel.
This is why, in an admittedly broad and too-abstract way, I have found composers such as Messiaen, Penderecki, Stravinsky, and Charles Ives appealing, because in their disparate ways they provide an example of how a contemporary composer can approach eclecticism and fusion from a perspective not of assumed fragmentation but of assumed unity, however wildly personalized, esoteric, and even inscrutable that perceived unity may often seem to be. As Bono put it with outsized sentiment in that anthem on the Joshua Tree, "that all the colors will bleed into one." People obsessed with racial purity will never dig this and I don't expect them to. Being the son of an American Indian and a white I don't particularly care about racial or ethnic purity. So for me it's not surprising that attempting to break down different boundaries between jazz and classical or "serious" and "light" music is a fun thing to explore. It is for me, a practical and blatantly theological enterprise.
Completing my violin and guitar sonata in A minor is an important step forward in a massive series of chamber sonatas I have been working on since 2000. I've been eager to finish this series because I've been wanting to create a duo sonata pairing the guitar up with every instrument I can think of. I'm not just eager to finish 24 preludes and fugues, though I am eager to finish that. I've also been eager to complete a cycle of chamber sonatas pairing the guitar up with woodwinds, strings, and brass as part of my larger, potentially lifelong project. There's no reason I can't equally love J. S. Bach, Bartok, Beethoven, Bob Dylan, Blind Willie Johnson, and Dave Brubeck. There's no reason I can't draw equal inspiration from Thelonious Monk as I do from Haydn. I can dig John Lee Hooker like I dig Paul Hindemith.
Now I absolutely love writing about cartoons and about Batman cartoons and I am committed to doing yet more writing on the DCAU. But I must also admit that I need to have a social life and I am also a composer and arranger in addition to a sometime writer. I'm also slated to get eye surgery this month so in a way I feel like I want to cram in some more composing as well as writing in this month before I get one and possibly both eyes worked on. It's nice that the Lions Club Foundation is around to help people who are more than just strapped for cash and have been told they need cataract removal surgery!
And of course, the quest for work will continue.
I have been writing quite a bit over the last few years about composing preludes and fugues for solo guitar but, you may surmise I have been composing other things as well. It has come time to return to composing some of those other things. Chief among them is a sonata for violin and guitar in A minor. I have finished movements 2 and 4 but movements 1 and 3 remain to be finished.
The third movement and first movement present the "usual" challenges that come from attempting to compose a sonata form and a fugue. But they present some unusual challenges because by committing so firmly to a compositional and conceptual approach indebted not only to Charles Ives but also Benjamin Britten I have presented some wildly difficult challenges in how I approach these unfinished movements. To explain how and why these problems have shown up would be to give the game away and I refuse to do that on a blog. Particularly shrewd readers who know how Ives worked and know how Britten worked, particularly on a piece that a guitarist would be likely to know about, can probably guess a few things without my having to explain anything. Those guesses would probably even be mostly correct. But the secrets are in details.
Still, I feel comfortable saying that I have spent a decade refining a kind of matrix derived approach to tonal composition that is informed by set theory and dodecaphonic techniques. I have rarely employed true atonality but have liberally drawn from atonal and paratonal idioms. Years ago I composed a Kyrie setting that was performed at Mars Hill in 2004 by the choir I helped put together. I'm not sure anyone cared that I did something musically very nerdy--I made sure that the christe eleison section was based on the relative major harmonization of the retrograde of the cantus firmus that the kyrie eleison section is built on. Besides the simple fact that this sounded fun it had a musical symbolism to it; I wanted to illustrate that whether from within the Mosaic covenant looking forward or in the new covenant in Christ looking backward appeals to the mercy of God are equally meaningful for those of us who live after Christ as for those who were looking forward to Christ. At the risk of seeming piously mushy I wanted to compose a Kyrie setting that musically (even at a visual level in the score) demonstrated how the grace of God toward us in Christ looks the same whether we are looking backward or forward in time as we go.
All that is to say that I like to play around with themes in esoteric ways that only musicologists and sight-reading musicians would pick up on. But ten years ago when I was trying to write sacred choral music is a whole different stage of life than what I've been experimenting with over the last few years. I've been exploring ways in which a kind of monothematicism can be used as the basis for obliterating stylistic and formal distinctions in Western music.
If in Christ there is no slave or free, Jew or Greek, male or female; if Christ is reconciling all things to Himself then the way a Christian composer can explore this is by playing in a wide variety of styles but also in exploring ways in which apparently contrasting styles can be shown to have an otherwise ignored underlying unity. There is no final conflict between Fernando Sor and Johnny Cash, for instance. These distinctions do not lose their importance and these musical styles do not cease to be what they are but there is no irreconciable difference between them to a Christian unless someone decides to be a twerp and imagine that these distinctions "must" exist for retroactive theological rationales that have very little to do with truly Christian teaching and more to do with Christian teaching appropriated for the sake of an ethnic agenda that the kingdom of Christ does not necessarily justify. If that were ever ultimately true then no Gentiles would ever have received the Gospel.
This is why, in an admittedly broad and too-abstract way, I have found composers such as Messiaen, Penderecki, Stravinsky, and Charles Ives appealing, because in their disparate ways they provide an example of how a contemporary composer can approach eclecticism and fusion from a perspective not of assumed fragmentation but of assumed unity, however wildly personalized, esoteric, and even inscrutable that perceived unity may often seem to be. As Bono put it with outsized sentiment in that anthem on the Joshua Tree, "that all the colors will bleed into one." People obsessed with racial purity will never dig this and I don't expect them to. Being the son of an American Indian and a white I don't particularly care about racial or ethnic purity. So for me it's not surprising that attempting to break down different boundaries between jazz and classical or "serious" and "light" music is a fun thing to explore. It is for me, a practical and blatantly theological enterprise.
Completing my violin and guitar sonata in A minor is an important step forward in a massive series of chamber sonatas I have been working on since 2000. I've been eager to finish this series because I've been wanting to create a duo sonata pairing the guitar up with every instrument I can think of. I'm not just eager to finish 24 preludes and fugues, though I am eager to finish that. I've also been eager to complete a cycle of chamber sonatas pairing the guitar up with woodwinds, strings, and brass as part of my larger, potentially lifelong project. There's no reason I can't equally love J. S. Bach, Bartok, Beethoven, Bob Dylan, Blind Willie Johnson, and Dave Brubeck. There's no reason I can't draw equal inspiration from Thelonious Monk as I do from Haydn. I can dig John Lee Hooker like I dig Paul Hindemith.
Now I absolutely love writing about cartoons and about Batman cartoons and I am committed to doing yet more writing on the DCAU. But I must also admit that I need to have a social life and I am also a composer and arranger in addition to a sometime writer. I'm also slated to get eye surgery this month so in a way I feel like I want to cram in some more composing as well as writing in this month before I get one and possibly both eyes worked on. It's nice that the Lions Club Foundation is around to help people who are more than just strapped for cash and have been told they need cataract removal surgery!
And of course, the quest for work will continue.
HT City of God--Andy Unedited: HarperCollins Buys Thomas Nelson
http://andyunedited.ivpress.com/2011/10/harpercollins_buys_nelson.php
About a decade ago I told a friend of mine, who was working as a temp for a Boeing subsidiary, that it bothered me that Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merged. It bothered me because consolidation within the aerospace industry didn't seem to bode well for real competition in civil and military markets nationally. A lack of real competition at a regional level was a problem during wartime production in Germany in World War 1. I confess I'm not a huge scholar on World War 1 history but my brother is a WWI history buff and he told me that regional monopolies and pork barrel style deals harmed production quality in some regions during the war effort in Germany.
Big deal, you might say here in America, we wanted the Germans to lose, right? Well, how the so-called "peace" was brokered at the end of World War 1 had a lot to do with setting the stage for World War 2. World War 1 was ostensibly to do, among other things, defend the British empire, which if anything arguably destroyed it. That touches ever so slightly on an observation I made about Amaziah elsewhere on this blog about how a victory can ultimately be its own form of defeat.
Well, conslidating publishing is something people interested in a truly free press have been concerned about for decades. Arguably there are more avenues and options now in a variety of ways than ever before but the number of "official" or "authorized" authorities within a cultulral milleu has probably not truly grown. Stratification of "reliable" sources has often played out along ideological lines. There are people who listen to Olbermann and other people who listen to Limbaugh. There are people who listen to Maddow and there are people who listen to Beck. I am not entirely sure why either side is somehow better than the other except through the wildly filtering prism of one's own ideological committments.
Consolidation of ownership can still have its effect regardless of how many people are on the internet claiming to speak truth to power. Then again I've seen how in a lot of cases the so-called alternative press only differs in what kind of spin they put on things being covered in the "mainstream media". The cycle of spin and counterspin doesn't encourage me. I suppose that's neither here nor there for the consolidation of Christian publishers in its way.
About a decade ago I told a friend of mine, who was working as a temp for a Boeing subsidiary, that it bothered me that Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merged. It bothered me because consolidation within the aerospace industry didn't seem to bode well for real competition in civil and military markets nationally. A lack of real competition at a regional level was a problem during wartime production in Germany in World War 1. I confess I'm not a huge scholar on World War 1 history but my brother is a WWI history buff and he told me that regional monopolies and pork barrel style deals harmed production quality in some regions during the war effort in Germany.
Big deal, you might say here in America, we wanted the Germans to lose, right? Well, how the so-called "peace" was brokered at the end of World War 1 had a lot to do with setting the stage for World War 2. World War 1 was ostensibly to do, among other things, defend the British empire, which if anything arguably destroyed it. That touches ever so slightly on an observation I made about Amaziah elsewhere on this blog about how a victory can ultimately be its own form of defeat.
Well, conslidating publishing is something people interested in a truly free press have been concerned about for decades. Arguably there are more avenues and options now in a variety of ways than ever before but the number of "official" or "authorized" authorities within a cultulral milleu has probably not truly grown. Stratification of "reliable" sources has often played out along ideological lines. There are people who listen to Olbermann and other people who listen to Limbaugh. There are people who listen to Maddow and there are people who listen to Beck. I am not entirely sure why either side is somehow better than the other except through the wildly filtering prism of one's own ideological committments.
Consolidation of ownership can still have its effect regardless of how many people are on the internet claiming to speak truth to power. Then again I've seen how in a lot of cases the so-called alternative press only differs in what kind of spin they put on things being covered in the "mainstream media". The cycle of spin and counterspin doesn't encourage me. I suppose that's neither here nor there for the consolidation of Christian publishers in its way.
Monday, October 31, 2011
a very short update on Lief Moi
He and his wife own and run a pizzeria in Redmond, WA called Filo's. They make very tasty pizza.
This Protestant's Protestant sense of vocation is such that if you make good pizza that is as good an accomplishment for the kingdom of God as being a pastor. It's a better tasting experience than an hour long sermon at a very literal level.
So if you're in the Redmond, WA area tonight and would like some pizza give the place a visit.
This Protestant's Protestant sense of vocation is such that if you make good pizza that is as good an accomplishment for the kingdom of God as being a pastor. It's a better tasting experience than an hour long sermon at a very literal level.
So if you're in the Redmond, WA area tonight and would like some pizza give the place a visit.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Twelve studies in harmonics for guitar
While I keep my eyes open for job leads and work on stuff connected to pending eye surgery I can still compose music now and then, right?
I have recently finished six more studies in harmonics for guitar. I wrote six studies in harmonics for guitar years ago and should have known I wouldn't limit myself to just six. I completed studies 7 through 12 within the last few weeks and am refining them for eventual performance and recording. There are not a lot of dedicated studies for the use of harmonics though there are plenty of guitarists who have made extensive use of harmonics. My own interest in them stems from, well, having been a U2 fan in my early teens. I've just been intrigued by the sound of harmonics on the guitar as a thing in itself. Any musicians who have worked with me for even a short period of time will know that harmonics for stringed instruments intrigue me.
Years ago when I was moving from temp job to temp job I came down with a terrible case of tendonitis. It was so bad I had to get it treated as though it were carpal tunnel. Simply holding silverware was sometimes a painful and awkward activity. I spent months getting not particularly wonderful or personal occupational therapy treatment at a local medical facility and during that time I was exasperated that I could not play guitar the way I had before. It was one of those times where I almost cried in frustration at not being able to play any music. My hands had no strength to play the things I usually played.
I was able to regain a majority of the strength in my hands over time and even went on to write what is a punishingly difficult F minor guitar sonata. But during those months when I couldn't play in a normal way I cast about for a way to keep playing and writing guitar music despite crippling tendonitis. Before I got tendonitis I had written what is now study #6 in harmonics for guitar from my set. I realized that though I had lost all my grip strength and endurance I had not lost my left and right hand flexibility or agility. So to cope with otherwise being unable to play guitar I began to compose studies in harmonics as a way to make sure I was still creating music despite my miserable handicap. Thus studies 1 through 6 in harmonics were born over the course of years, even long after I had gotten over the damage my tendonitis caused my hands.
So now I have roughly eighteen minutes worth of material using harmonics alone. Pieter van der Staak's studies in harmonics are fun but cover all types of uses of harmonics in guitar literature. What I have aimed for is more specialized than that. Because I have been playing classical guitar with a church orchestra at least once a month throughout this year studies six through twelve have been, uh, heavily informed by various hymns used in churches. I settled on this theme for the second set of studies for two reasons, first simply to make use of traditional melodies that will make the studies easier to learn, and secondly the probably obvious motivation to compose some studies that could be used as unobtrusive music in small-scale liturgical settings. Or, you know, if you felt like playing them on an electric guitar through an amplifier that would be fine, too. I'm not a purist about classical guitar.
I have not had the opportunity to record all twelve studies yet but I hope in time to do that. I also hope to complete my twenty-four preludes and fugues for solo guitar, preferably before the end of this year if I can help it.
I have recently finished six more studies in harmonics for guitar. I wrote six studies in harmonics for guitar years ago and should have known I wouldn't limit myself to just six. I completed studies 7 through 12 within the last few weeks and am refining them for eventual performance and recording. There are not a lot of dedicated studies for the use of harmonics though there are plenty of guitarists who have made extensive use of harmonics. My own interest in them stems from, well, having been a U2 fan in my early teens. I've just been intrigued by the sound of harmonics on the guitar as a thing in itself. Any musicians who have worked with me for even a short period of time will know that harmonics for stringed instruments intrigue me.
Years ago when I was moving from temp job to temp job I came down with a terrible case of tendonitis. It was so bad I had to get it treated as though it were carpal tunnel. Simply holding silverware was sometimes a painful and awkward activity. I spent months getting not particularly wonderful or personal occupational therapy treatment at a local medical facility and during that time I was exasperated that I could not play guitar the way I had before. It was one of those times where I almost cried in frustration at not being able to play any music. My hands had no strength to play the things I usually played.
I was able to regain a majority of the strength in my hands over time and even went on to write what is a punishingly difficult F minor guitar sonata. But during those months when I couldn't play in a normal way I cast about for a way to keep playing and writing guitar music despite crippling tendonitis. Before I got tendonitis I had written what is now study #6 in harmonics for guitar from my set. I realized that though I had lost all my grip strength and endurance I had not lost my left and right hand flexibility or agility. So to cope with otherwise being unable to play guitar I began to compose studies in harmonics as a way to make sure I was still creating music despite my miserable handicap. Thus studies 1 through 6 in harmonics were born over the course of years, even long after I had gotten over the damage my tendonitis caused my hands.
So now I have roughly eighteen minutes worth of material using harmonics alone. Pieter van der Staak's studies in harmonics are fun but cover all types of uses of harmonics in guitar literature. What I have aimed for is more specialized than that. Because I have been playing classical guitar with a church orchestra at least once a month throughout this year studies six through twelve have been, uh, heavily informed by various hymns used in churches. I settled on this theme for the second set of studies for two reasons, first simply to make use of traditional melodies that will make the studies easier to learn, and secondly the probably obvious motivation to compose some studies that could be used as unobtrusive music in small-scale liturgical settings. Or, you know, if you felt like playing them on an electric guitar through an amplifier that would be fine, too. I'm not a purist about classical guitar.
I have not had the opportunity to record all twelve studies yet but I hope in time to do that. I also hope to complete my twenty-four preludes and fugues for solo guitar, preferably before the end of this year if I can help it.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
there's nothing like being sick to kill writerly momentum
Being sick and unemployed isn't that much worse than being sick and in some ways it's an easier thing to deal with. It's not like a company is going to lose productivity for my being absent and it means I can keep hunting down job leads from home. But it has meant that physical and mental energy depletes faster and that as a result I have not been tackling my essays for Mockingbird as assiduously as I would like.
Oh, yes, and there's this thing about needing eye surgery. All things considered, with the distractions at hand, I feel that I'm still doing a tolerable job writing about cartoons when I have so many other things going on in my life. It is going to be easier to write when I'm not coughing up green sputum.
But there is a time and a season to everything under heaven and sometimes there is a time to party with friends. I have come upon such a time. For others there is a time to speak and organize conferences, so I hope you'll bear with us, dear readers, if the essays about Batman: the animated series have had to take a hiatus due to my health problems. I trust there's no nail-biting anticipation. I still have a lot more to write about the DC animated universe yet and hope to do that. Meanwhile, the real world does have its priorities like hunting for work and doing what I can to get help for eye surgery.
Oh, yes, and there's this thing about needing eye surgery. All things considered, with the distractions at hand, I feel that I'm still doing a tolerable job writing about cartoons when I have so many other things going on in my life. It is going to be easier to write when I'm not coughing up green sputum.
But there is a time and a season to everything under heaven and sometimes there is a time to party with friends. I have come upon such a time. For others there is a time to speak and organize conferences, so I hope you'll bear with us, dear readers, if the essays about Batman: the animated series have had to take a hiatus due to my health problems. I trust there's no nail-biting anticipation. I still have a lot more to write about the DC animated universe yet and hope to do that. Meanwhile, the real world does have its priorities like hunting for work and doing what I can to get help for eye surgery.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Accolades of Steve Jobs as conqueror
http://boarsheadtavern.com/2011/10/06/28327/
Today, Americans everywhere remember Steve Jobs with the accolades civilization has traditionally reserved for conquerors. But Jobs slew no hated enemies. He did not plunder any rival city-state and bring the spoils home. He did not seize political power and crush despised factions. He made things and introduced services that changed millions of lives and the way we do business in both little and big ways. His vision was for a world where everyone’s life is more convenient and filled with more opportunities, not a world where “his people” gather arms to march on “those people” to utterly ruin them. The fact that he’s regarded as heroic in our age says a lot about how different the world is today.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/10/steve_jobs_biography_the_new_book_doesn_t_explain_what_made_the_.single.html
It turns out, though, that he was much worse than you ever suspected. There are several admiring Steve Jobs stories in Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s much-anticipated authorized biography, but they’re overshadowed by the many, many more instances in which Jobs comes off as a world-class jerk. Jobs was rude, mean, abusive, and often neglectful to everyone in his life; the people he hated got it bad, but the people he loved sometimes got it worse. Some of this isn’t surprising. Jobs’ arrogance, his monumental self-regard, his irresponsibility, and his unremitting cruelty to those who failed to live up to his expectations have always dogged his image. During his life, Jobs did express regret for some of his actions—including abandoning his first daughter, Lisa, for several years after she was conceived out of wedlock. (He continued to suggest that he might not be her father even after a paternity test proved he was.)
...
When friends and colleagues offer theories about Jobs—several say that both his genius and his cruelty stem from the fact that he was put up for adoption by his biological parents—Jobs dismisses them. He can’t explain even the smallest of his quirks. Why did he refuse to have a license plate on his car? He admits that his initial reason, privacy, became moot in the age of Google Maps. So in the end he didn’t have a plate “because I don’t.” Illuminating!
... Jobs also seemed to suspect that he wasn’t really wounding the people he berated. If you were a bozo, why wouldn’t you want to know it? “I don’t stay mad,” he protested to Ive. Some friends suggest that he simply lacked empathy—or, as Tina Redse, a longtime former girlfriend, says, that he suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It’s also quite likely that he was afflicted with an eating disorder. All his life, Jobs experimented with various extreme diets. (He’d fast for days, eat only certain kinds of fruits for weeks, and proclaim himself cleansed and invigorated after all of it.) He kept this up even after he got sick—indeed, for nine months after his cancer diagnosis, he refused surgery and tried various dietary cures, some of which he found online. His wife explored psychiatric treatment for his food issues, but Jobs refused
It may be true that our world is different today when a man like Steve Jobs can be celebrated in a way reserved for conquerors but the jury may still be out on how few human sacrifices Jobs made upon the altars of success and innovation. Call me jaded, pessimistic, cynical, or cruel but I'm not so sure modern Western civilization has advanced to the point where we have heroes who obtain their victories without human sacrifices. We may be better off in as much as the human sacrifice doesn't have to bleed to death but a guy who tried to convince his own daughter he wasn't really her dad still sounds like a guy with problems.
Today, Americans everywhere remember Steve Jobs with the accolades civilization has traditionally reserved for conquerors. But Jobs slew no hated enemies. He did not plunder any rival city-state and bring the spoils home. He did not seize political power and crush despised factions. He made things and introduced services that changed millions of lives and the way we do business in both little and big ways. His vision was for a world where everyone’s life is more convenient and filled with more opportunities, not a world where “his people” gather arms to march on “those people” to utterly ruin them. The fact that he’s regarded as heroic in our age says a lot about how different the world is today.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/10/steve_jobs_biography_the_new_book_doesn_t_explain_what_made_the_.single.html
It turns out, though, that he was much worse than you ever suspected. There are several admiring Steve Jobs stories in Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s much-anticipated authorized biography, but they’re overshadowed by the many, many more instances in which Jobs comes off as a world-class jerk. Jobs was rude, mean, abusive, and often neglectful to everyone in his life; the people he hated got it bad, but the people he loved sometimes got it worse. Some of this isn’t surprising. Jobs’ arrogance, his monumental self-regard, his irresponsibility, and his unremitting cruelty to those who failed to live up to his expectations have always dogged his image. During his life, Jobs did express regret for some of his actions—including abandoning his first daughter, Lisa, for several years after she was conceived out of wedlock. (He continued to suggest that he might not be her father even after a paternity test proved he was.)
...
When friends and colleagues offer theories about Jobs—several say that both his genius and his cruelty stem from the fact that he was put up for adoption by his biological parents—Jobs dismisses them. He can’t explain even the smallest of his quirks. Why did he refuse to have a license plate on his car? He admits that his initial reason, privacy, became moot in the age of Google Maps. So in the end he didn’t have a plate “because I don’t.” Illuminating!
... Jobs also seemed to suspect that he wasn’t really wounding the people he berated. If you were a bozo, why wouldn’t you want to know it? “I don’t stay mad,” he protested to Ive. Some friends suggest that he simply lacked empathy—or, as Tina Redse, a longtime former girlfriend, says, that he suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It’s also quite likely that he was afflicted with an eating disorder. All his life, Jobs experimented with various extreme diets. (He’d fast for days, eat only certain kinds of fruits for weeks, and proclaim himself cleansed and invigorated after all of it.) He kept this up even after he got sick—indeed, for nine months after his cancer diagnosis, he refused surgery and tried various dietary cures, some of which he found online. His wife explored psychiatric treatment for his food issues, but Jobs refused
It may be true that our world is different today when a man like Steve Jobs can be celebrated in a way reserved for conquerors but the jury may still be out on how few human sacrifices Jobs made upon the altars of success and innovation. Call me jaded, pessimistic, cynical, or cruel but I'm not so sure modern Western civilization has advanced to the point where we have heroes who obtain their victories without human sacrifices. We may be better off in as much as the human sacrifice doesn't have to bleed to death but a guy who tried to convince his own daughter he wasn't really her dad still sounds like a guy with problems.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
another update on the Mars Hill trademark and the cease and desist letter
http://www.scotthagan.net/side-effects/
As I have blogged and commented here in the last week I don't see that Mars Hill has automatically been screeching evil in getting on the case of people about a trademark and logo. The bit that caught me off guard was the trademark and logo didn't get federal approval until this year ... but then I remembered how many years Mars Hill was running before it had anything like by-laws at all and this stopped catching me off guard.
It's interesting to learn that the church in Sacramento that was part of this cyber-dust-up is Assemblies of God. Ah, the old AG days. I'm not Assemblies of God anymore but I do have some fond memories from my Pentecostal days.
Over the years I have continually noted the cynicism, anger, and hostility toward Mars Hill and Driscoll as its distillation over the last five to six years. I remain committed, perhaps obstinately so, to ambivalence. The denomination recently put together a food drive for the Port Angeles Salvation Army corps food pantry over this last week and I have heard eleven tons of food were put together. It also seems to have turned out that trademark lawyers have conceded that maybe they should have let the organizations talk to each other before lawyers do that lawyer thing they do.
As Proverbs put it, every story sounds like the truth until the cross examination. If you've made up your mind to be unabashedly for or against Mars Hill without any qualification or reservation you're being foolish. There's no wiggle room for qualification there.
As I have blogged and commented here in the last week I don't see that Mars Hill has automatically been screeching evil in getting on the case of people about a trademark and logo. The bit that caught me off guard was the trademark and logo didn't get federal approval until this year ... but then I remembered how many years Mars Hill was running before it had anything like by-laws at all and this stopped catching me off guard.
It's interesting to learn that the church in Sacramento that was part of this cyber-dust-up is Assemblies of God. Ah, the old AG days. I'm not Assemblies of God anymore but I do have some fond memories from my Pentecostal days.
Over the years I have continually noted the cynicism, anger, and hostility toward Mars Hill and Driscoll as its distillation over the last five to six years. I remain committed, perhaps obstinately so, to ambivalence. The denomination recently put together a food drive for the Port Angeles Salvation Army corps food pantry over this last week and I have heard eleven tons of food were put together. It also seems to have turned out that trademark lawyers have conceded that maybe they should have let the organizations talk to each other before lawyers do that lawyer thing they do.
As Proverbs put it, every story sounds like the truth until the cross examination. If you've made up your mind to be unabashedly for or against Mars Hill without any qualification or reservation you're being foolish. There's no wiggle room for qualification there.
Priestly Rants, The Reformation from Jeremiah's Point of View
http://priestlyrant.com/the-reformation-from-jeremiahs-point-of-view/2338.html#more-2338
Ever since I really soaked up Jeremiah 8:8 and began to think about its implications it has been hard not to think about God warns through the prophet that we cannot claim to rest in the scriptures and claim that we draw wisdom from that because the lying pen of the scribes have made them into a lie.
I feel it is useful to build upon what Priestly Rants wrote, the Law was not initially accusatory. The Law was given for civil governance and, yes, that third use of the Law was in there. This was actually one of the most important purposes of the Torah, to explain to God's people how they were to be different from the other nations around them. If we attempt to avoid or disdain the third use of the Law we are not just running roughshod over the Torah in some happenstance way, we are ignoring the reason stated with the Torah as being essential to its coming about to begin with! As N. T. Wright put it in his book on Justification in response to John Piper, the West might have been better off in its view of the Torah and handling justification if Calvin's fans rather than Luther's fans had had a bit more influence. Not that there can't be huge problems seen in every team in Christendom but that's some other topic for another time.
One of the more memorable and weird debates I saw back on the unmoderated Midrash was between Pastormark and sorenchurchyard (whom I've never met but still dimly remember). The debate was whether Law or Grace came first. Several people said Law came first and sorenchurchyard suggested that if anything it would appear to be "grace" that creation was made at all and that grace did, by virtue of that, precede the "law" in the garden. Things spiraled downhill from there with Mark's fans and sometimes Mark himself behaving badly toward sorenchurchyard. I got flamed by about three people along the way for pointing out that sorenchurchyard had defended his view ably and that Mark had lost his temper. Mark apologized but the fanclub didn't. Even back then Mark's fan club had much the same dynamic it has now. And we're not even Lutherans here! We didn't have to go lock-step into a formulaic Law/Gospel distinction.
I could write more, as I often could, but sometimes food for the mind must be subordinated to bodily food. ;)
Ever since I really soaked up Jeremiah 8:8 and began to think about its implications it has been hard not to think about God warns through the prophet that we cannot claim to rest in the scriptures and claim that we draw wisdom from that because the lying pen of the scribes have made them into a lie.
I feel it is useful to build upon what Priestly Rants wrote, the Law was not initially accusatory. The Law was given for civil governance and, yes, that third use of the Law was in there. This was actually one of the most important purposes of the Torah, to explain to God's people how they were to be different from the other nations around them. If we attempt to avoid or disdain the third use of the Law we are not just running roughshod over the Torah in some happenstance way, we are ignoring the reason stated with the Torah as being essential to its coming about to begin with! As N. T. Wright put it in his book on Justification in response to John Piper, the West might have been better off in its view of the Torah and handling justification if Calvin's fans rather than Luther's fans had had a bit more influence. Not that there can't be huge problems seen in every team in Christendom but that's some other topic for another time.
One of the more memorable and weird debates I saw back on the unmoderated Midrash was between Pastormark and sorenchurchyard (whom I've never met but still dimly remember). The debate was whether Law or Grace came first. Several people said Law came first and sorenchurchyard suggested that if anything it would appear to be "grace" that creation was made at all and that grace did, by virtue of that, precede the "law" in the garden. Things spiraled downhill from there with Mark's fans and sometimes Mark himself behaving badly toward sorenchurchyard. I got flamed by about three people along the way for pointing out that sorenchurchyard had defended his view ably and that Mark had lost his temper. Mark apologized but the fanclub didn't. Even back then Mark's fan club had much the same dynamic it has now. And we're not even Lutherans here! We didn't have to go lock-step into a formulaic Law/Gospel distinction.
I could write more, as I often could, but sometimes food for the mind must be subordinated to bodily food. ;)
"Even in laughter the heart aches, and the end of joy is grief" Proverbs 14:13
We find it easier to rejoice with those who rejoice than to weep with those who weep. Let's face it, in most cases those who rejoice are so eager to rejoice they'll spend their own money to invite you to rejoice with them. I've been invited to just enough weddings here that I am not idly saying this, nor am I saying for a second I wasn't fully of genuine joy to be at the weddings I've attended in the last two years. Those weddings were the high points of my social life in the last few years, no kidding.
But Proverbs says that even in laughter there is sadness and the end of joy is grief. The joy of the wedding day is real and should be celebrated and cherished because the unknown day may come when grief and sickness and, finally, death arrive. The day is not unknown because there will never be grief, sickness or death but because we do not know when that day comes.
But Proverbs says that even in laughter there is sadness and the end of joy is grief. The joy of the wedding day is real and should be celebrated and cherished because the unknown day may come when grief and sickness and, finally, death arrive. The day is not unknown because there will never be grief, sickness or death but because we do not know when that day comes.
ruminations on an axiom, "I trust God, I just don't trust His people."
God in His providence often uses people and organizations. This has been one of the scarier things for me to accept about life in the last couple of years. Part of me is still some kind of old school Pentecostal hoping for some ostentatious miracle of provision rather than the mundane acts of flesh and blood people. In certain circles this latter set of provisions are called "ordinary means of grace". Well, I've had the kind of life where I have been doubtful about such ordinary means of grace. In the last two years I haven't really had much of a choice whether or not to accept them.
Years ago I once admitted that I've gone through a good deal of my life with the axiom, "I trust God ... I just don't trust His people." It has dawned on me over time that in my own way this is a paraphrase of Ivan Karamazov's sentiment, which I paraphrase here as, "It's not that I cannot accept God, I cannot accept His world." Over time the previously unrealized overlap in these two sentiments started to get to me. The overlap got to me for two simple reasons. The first was that Ivan's statement was about his unbelief and this made me realize that perhaps I have had more unbelief in my life than I realized. The second was that Christ said "They shall know you are mine by your love for one another" and this got me wondering how much I loved God's people as a measure of my love for God Himself. As a certain saying puts it, he cannot regard God as his Father who does not acknowledge the Church as mother.
But there can be reasons it is good to not necessarily trust God's people, particularly at institutional levels. A lot of churches have done a lot of bad. There are always the tales about Catholic priests molesting children. There are stories about metropolitans caught with young hookers. There are stories about homophobic raging closet case Pentecostal preachers. There are stories about bloodthirsty Lutherans. There are stories about draconian and cravenly political Reformed. There are patent white supremacists, debauched cardinals, scheming patriarchs and the whole line-up. The Church is full of people so bad and mean that even a superhero, if a guy like Batman or Superman were real, would throw up their hands and say, "I give up. There's nothing that can be done to fix this."
Some churches have done a lot of good but depending on where and how you grow up you get told that "those" churches are just into some liberal "Social Gospel" that isn't the real Gospel. Twenty years ago I would have assumed Presbyterians were all of the Social Gospel liberal cloth just because from a Pentecostal perspective they would be labeled the frozen chosen. Not that I was in much of a place to talk like that because I'm not exactly fire breathing myself. I used to joke that I was a Pentecostal holy roller but some of my college friends were astonished by this joke because when they found out that really WAS my background they couldn't believe it. One of my friends said he'd always pegged me as Dutch Reformed. Ha, are there actually any Dutch Reformed in the whole state of Washington? Well, anyway, it would appear that even when I still considered myself Pentecostal a bunch of people figured I was more likely to be Presbyterian. And, well, now I am, so I guess my friends were right about me before I could even have guessed it.
I'm at a stage in life that I know would be enviable to someone in the Third World. I weigh a bit more than I should and I live in a pleasant enough home. I need eye surgery to remove cataracts and, fortunately, I am getting help for that. Yet if a fellow American were to suggest I'm not really poor I'd differ with them. I'm poor. God willing I won't be at some point in the future but there's nothing like having no money and no job to make me realize both of myself and of people around me that when white well-off people talk about "consumerism" most of the time they don't really mean consumerism at all, they just mean that they like to bitch about the purchasing habits of other people so as to feel more righteous about their tastes. People who are into "realistic" fiction can see comic books as unreal and something to look down on. C. S. Lewis used to write that the child who reads about dragons and monsters is less in danger of being lied to about the nature of real life than a kid who reads dramas about borading schools and students who become friends there. There may, in the annals of post 20th century literature be few dangers to dealing with reality than a literary fetish for socialist realism of any kind. That's my take, but I digress as usual.
I'm not homeless and so I can't speak to the "hard life" that other people may have but I have become irritated by the realization that class resentments seem to abound. I'm aggravated when relatively well-off white guys complain about racism from native populations who also complain about class warfare. A college friend of mine once said that he'd hear fellow white guys say "I'm working for the Man" Dude, historically speaking you are the Man! That doesn't require a prophet like Nathan to mention, does it? And the witness of non-white Christians to how many white Christians have conducted themselves doesn't need to get recited ad nauseum yet we do well to remember it.
As Fearsome Tycoon noted over at BHT earlier this year, the Anglo Christians did their missionary work in a way where a lot of the native populations targeted by their work have renounced Christianity and Christendom. And why wouldn't they? It's hard to adopt the religious beliefs of people who attempted to subject you to genocide, right? Cue no true Scotsman to the fiftieth power. Those who think they know history and won't repeat its mistakes are worse off than those who don't know history. It was the Pharisees, after all, who were saying they would not have persecuted the prophets when Jesus told them they were self-deceived.
But the reason it's scary to need help from other people is not exactly because I don't need help and can't accept help. I can ... it's that this is, in its way, a kind of crisis of faith. Is God "only" knowable through the kindness or cruelty of His people? The more the Christian life is integrated into the life of Christian community the more perilous it becomes when you realize how broken and past repair every Christian community truly is. If you haven't found something wrong with the spiritual community you're part of you just haven't looked hard enough. But if you haven't found some spiritual fruit within that sphere of believers from which you can participate, benefit, and grow then you haven't looked hard enough, either.
There is a brand of Christian piety that is not really marked by love. It is impatient, it is cruel, it envies and it boasts of its purity, It dishonors, mocks and belittles others while tacitly promoting itself. It is, by accident of obsession, self-seeking even in its altruism. It is easily angered and keeps an endless list of wrongs for reference at such times as will be appropriate. It may not delight in official evil but can indulge in a bit of schadenfreude now and then when providential suffering is meted out to the right people. It rejoices in the truth so long as that truth conveniently confirms its own worst suspicions about other people or the rightness of one's own cause. It often protests, rarely trusts, snickers at hope, and doubts the use of perserverence. Yet it will still protect, still assume the best, will still hope, and will perservere. It is a paradoxical thing. It is something I see in myself even more than I see in others.
Trusting in the kindness of God's people is difficult because if we are betrayed or let down by God's people we then inevitably feel betrayed or let down by God, too.
Years ago I once admitted that I've gone through a good deal of my life with the axiom, "I trust God ... I just don't trust His people." It has dawned on me over time that in my own way this is a paraphrase of Ivan Karamazov's sentiment, which I paraphrase here as, "It's not that I cannot accept God, I cannot accept His world." Over time the previously unrealized overlap in these two sentiments started to get to me. The overlap got to me for two simple reasons. The first was that Ivan's statement was about his unbelief and this made me realize that perhaps I have had more unbelief in my life than I realized. The second was that Christ said "They shall know you are mine by your love for one another" and this got me wondering how much I loved God's people as a measure of my love for God Himself. As a certain saying puts it, he cannot regard God as his Father who does not acknowledge the Church as mother.
But there can be reasons it is good to not necessarily trust God's people, particularly at institutional levels. A lot of churches have done a lot of bad. There are always the tales about Catholic priests molesting children. There are stories about metropolitans caught with young hookers. There are stories about homophobic raging closet case Pentecostal preachers. There are stories about bloodthirsty Lutherans. There are stories about draconian and cravenly political Reformed. There are patent white supremacists, debauched cardinals, scheming patriarchs and the whole line-up. The Church is full of people so bad and mean that even a superhero, if a guy like Batman or Superman were real, would throw up their hands and say, "I give up. There's nothing that can be done to fix this."
Some churches have done a lot of good but depending on where and how you grow up you get told that "those" churches are just into some liberal "Social Gospel" that isn't the real Gospel. Twenty years ago I would have assumed Presbyterians were all of the Social Gospel liberal cloth just because from a Pentecostal perspective they would be labeled the frozen chosen. Not that I was in much of a place to talk like that because I'm not exactly fire breathing myself. I used to joke that I was a Pentecostal holy roller but some of my college friends were astonished by this joke because when they found out that really WAS my background they couldn't believe it. One of my friends said he'd always pegged me as Dutch Reformed. Ha, are there actually any Dutch Reformed in the whole state of Washington? Well, anyway, it would appear that even when I still considered myself Pentecostal a bunch of people figured I was more likely to be Presbyterian. And, well, now I am, so I guess my friends were right about me before I could even have guessed it.
I'm at a stage in life that I know would be enviable to someone in the Third World. I weigh a bit more than I should and I live in a pleasant enough home. I need eye surgery to remove cataracts and, fortunately, I am getting help for that. Yet if a fellow American were to suggest I'm not really poor I'd differ with them. I'm poor. God willing I won't be at some point in the future but there's nothing like having no money and no job to make me realize both of myself and of people around me that when white well-off people talk about "consumerism" most of the time they don't really mean consumerism at all, they just mean that they like to bitch about the purchasing habits of other people so as to feel more righteous about their tastes. People who are into "realistic" fiction can see comic books as unreal and something to look down on. C. S. Lewis used to write that the child who reads about dragons and monsters is less in danger of being lied to about the nature of real life than a kid who reads dramas about borading schools and students who become friends there. There may, in the annals of post 20th century literature be few dangers to dealing with reality than a literary fetish for socialist realism of any kind. That's my take, but I digress as usual.
I'm not homeless and so I can't speak to the "hard life" that other people may have but I have become irritated by the realization that class resentments seem to abound. I'm aggravated when relatively well-off white guys complain about racism from native populations who also complain about class warfare. A college friend of mine once said that he'd hear fellow white guys say "I'm working for the Man" Dude, historically speaking you are the Man! That doesn't require a prophet like Nathan to mention, does it? And the witness of non-white Christians to how many white Christians have conducted themselves doesn't need to get recited ad nauseum yet we do well to remember it.
As Fearsome Tycoon noted over at BHT earlier this year, the Anglo Christians did their missionary work in a way where a lot of the native populations targeted by their work have renounced Christianity and Christendom. And why wouldn't they? It's hard to adopt the religious beliefs of people who attempted to subject you to genocide, right? Cue no true Scotsman to the fiftieth power. Those who think they know history and won't repeat its mistakes are worse off than those who don't know history. It was the Pharisees, after all, who were saying they would not have persecuted the prophets when Jesus told them they were self-deceived.
But the reason it's scary to need help from other people is not exactly because I don't need help and can't accept help. I can ... it's that this is, in its way, a kind of crisis of faith. Is God "only" knowable through the kindness or cruelty of His people? The more the Christian life is integrated into the life of Christian community the more perilous it becomes when you realize how broken and past repair every Christian community truly is. If you haven't found something wrong with the spiritual community you're part of you just haven't looked hard enough. But if you haven't found some spiritual fruit within that sphere of believers from which you can participate, benefit, and grow then you haven't looked hard enough, either.
There is a brand of Christian piety that is not really marked by love. It is impatient, it is cruel, it envies and it boasts of its purity, It dishonors, mocks and belittles others while tacitly promoting itself. It is, by accident of obsession, self-seeking even in its altruism. It is easily angered and keeps an endless list of wrongs for reference at such times as will be appropriate. It may not delight in official evil but can indulge in a bit of schadenfreude now and then when providential suffering is meted out to the right people. It rejoices in the truth so long as that truth conveniently confirms its own worst suspicions about other people or the rightness of one's own cause. It often protests, rarely trusts, snickers at hope, and doubts the use of perserverence. Yet it will still protect, still assume the best, will still hope, and will perservere. It is a paradoxical thing. It is something I see in myself even more than I see in others.
Trusting in the kindness of God's people is difficult because if we are betrayed or let down by God's people we then inevitably feel betrayed or let down by God, too.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
rapid response clarification from Mars Hill about rumors on cease and desist letters
http://blog.marshill.com/2011/10/22/clarification-on-some-rumors-that-have-been-on-some-blogs/
by Mars Hill Church on Saturday, October 22nd, 2011 8:34 pm
At Mars Hill we like to be generous with everything we’ve been given. For over ten years, we’ve made all of our sermons available for free online, invested significant time and money to help raise up thousands of leaders around the globe through theresurgence.com, and given millions of dollars to plant dozens of churches through Acts 29. Recently, this has grown to include such things a free Leadership Coaching and Campaign research to help other churches and ministries grow. We love other churches and ministries, and we love giving generously to serve them.
By God’s grace, our ministry has grown to the place where we’re recognized by people all over the world. With this kind of recognition, we have a responsibility to be good stewards of the influence that God has given us to tell people about Jesus.
Sadly, in addition to giving things away, we’ve also had things taken. We’ve had churches cut and paste our logo, take our website code and copy it completely, had ministry leaders cut and paste documents of ours, put their name on them to then post online as if it were their content, and even seen other pastors fired for preaching our sermons verbatim.
We’re not the only church called Mars Hill, and occasionally there arises confusion between us and other churches that share the “Mars Hill” name, particularly as we now have our churches in four states. This was the case recently when one of our members called us to find out if we had planted Mars Hill churches in the Sacramento, California area. We had not, but when we went to these churches’ websites, it was obvious to us how people could be confused. Each of these three connected churches in the Sacramento region—planted in 2006, 2007, and 2010—bore the “Mars Hill” name and their logo was substantially similar to the logo we’ve used since 1996.
When cases like this arise in the business world, it’s customary for a law office to send a notice asking the other organization to adjust their branding to differentiate it. This is commonly referred to as a cease and desist letter. On September 27, 2011, our legal counsel sent such a letter to these three Mars Hill churches requesting that they change their logo and name. In hindsight, we realize now that the way we went about raising our concerns, while acceptable in the business world, is not the way we should deal with fellow Christians. On Friday we spoke with the pastor of Mars Hill in Sacramento to apologize for the way we went about this. We had a very productive conversation and look forward to continuing that conversation in the days and weeks ahead.
We made a mistake in not calling these churches prior to sending the letter. We should have picked up the phone before sending any other communication.
Unfortunately, rather than hearing from the church in Sacramento, we began hearing that the matter was instead being speculated on by a blogger who did not verify any facts with us and, as a result, provided an inaccurate version of what transpired. This blog post from us is intended to alleviate any confusion.
As a clarification, we have not sued any churches and have no plans to sue any churches.
We have not sent any similar letters to any other “Mars Hill” churches, and we are not planning on asking any church with “Mars Hill” in their name to change their name.
At the speed of the internet clarification has come.
By now I don't anticipate the fans or detractors will have anything new to say they haven't already been saying. What we can establish at this point is that if at any point in the future Mars Hill sues any church over branding issues the whole English-reading/English-speaking internet world has been put on notice that a flip-flop will have happened.
By the way, plagiarism is lame. There are a lot of things that can be said about a guy like Driscoll but his bibliographic citations and attributions have been, on the whole, pretty consistent. He might lift some weak jokes from another pastor's Mother's Day sermon (which I've written about elsewhere on this blog) but for actual bibliographic stuff in his writings he's usually good about, say, referring to Richard Bauckham as a scholarly reference for his 1 & 2 Peter sermon series. His spiritual warfare series includes a reference to the monstrous, door-stop book The Christian in Full Armour by William Gurnall. Give Driscoll credit for at least this much, when an idea isn't really his own he's usually pretty good about giving credit where it's due. It's when he gets goofy ideas like that the Targum Neofiti teaches the Trinity that you can be sure that dumb idea is all Driscoll and not an idea he got from somebody like John Stott or Jim Packer.
by Mars Hill Church on Saturday, October 22nd, 2011 8:34 pm
At Mars Hill we like to be generous with everything we’ve been given. For over ten years, we’ve made all of our sermons available for free online, invested significant time and money to help raise up thousands of leaders around the globe through theresurgence.com, and given millions of dollars to plant dozens of churches through Acts 29. Recently, this has grown to include such things a free Leadership Coaching and Campaign research to help other churches and ministries grow. We love other churches and ministries, and we love giving generously to serve them.
By God’s grace, our ministry has grown to the place where we’re recognized by people all over the world. With this kind of recognition, we have a responsibility to be good stewards of the influence that God has given us to tell people about Jesus.
Sadly, in addition to giving things away, we’ve also had things taken. We’ve had churches cut and paste our logo, take our website code and copy it completely, had ministry leaders cut and paste documents of ours, put their name on them to then post online as if it were their content, and even seen other pastors fired for preaching our sermons verbatim.
We’re not the only church called Mars Hill, and occasionally there arises confusion between us and other churches that share the “Mars Hill” name, particularly as we now have our churches in four states. This was the case recently when one of our members called us to find out if we had planted Mars Hill churches in the Sacramento, California area. We had not, but when we went to these churches’ websites, it was obvious to us how people could be confused. Each of these three connected churches in the Sacramento region—planted in 2006, 2007, and 2010—bore the “Mars Hill” name and their logo was substantially similar to the logo we’ve used since 1996.
When cases like this arise in the business world, it’s customary for a law office to send a notice asking the other organization to adjust their branding to differentiate it. This is commonly referred to as a cease and desist letter. On September 27, 2011, our legal counsel sent such a letter to these three Mars Hill churches requesting that they change their logo and name. In hindsight, we realize now that the way we went about raising our concerns, while acceptable in the business world, is not the way we should deal with fellow Christians. On Friday we spoke with the pastor of Mars Hill in Sacramento to apologize for the way we went about this. We had a very productive conversation and look forward to continuing that conversation in the days and weeks ahead.
We made a mistake in not calling these churches prior to sending the letter. We should have picked up the phone before sending any other communication.
Unfortunately, rather than hearing from the church in Sacramento, we began hearing that the matter was instead being speculated on by a blogger who did not verify any facts with us and, as a result, provided an inaccurate version of what transpired. This blog post from us is intended to alleviate any confusion.
As a clarification, we have not sued any churches and have no plans to sue any churches.
We have not sent any similar letters to any other “Mars Hill” churches, and we are not planning on asking any church with “Mars Hill” in their name to change their name.
At the speed of the internet clarification has come.
By now I don't anticipate the fans or detractors will have anything new to say they haven't already been saying. What we can establish at this point is that if at any point in the future Mars Hill sues any church over branding issues the whole English-reading/English-speaking internet world has been put on notice that a flip-flop will have happened.
By the way, plagiarism is lame. There are a lot of things that can be said about a guy like Driscoll but his bibliographic citations and attributions have been, on the whole, pretty consistent. He might lift some weak jokes from another pastor's Mother's Day sermon (which I've written about elsewhere on this blog) but for actual bibliographic stuff in his writings he's usually good about, say, referring to Richard Bauckham as a scholarly reference for his 1 & 2 Peter sermon series. His spiritual warfare series includes a reference to the monstrous, door-stop book The Christian in Full Armour by William Gurnall. Give Driscoll credit for at least this much, when an idea isn't really his own he's usually pretty good about giving credit where it's due. It's when he gets goofy ideas like that the Targum Neofiti teaches the Trinity that you can be sure that dumb idea is all Driscoll and not an idea he got from somebody like John Stott or Jim Packer.
HT to Brian Auten over at BHT: The Rawest Nerve
http://boarsheadtavern.com/2011/10/23/brandingcelebrity-the-raw-nerve-of-conservative-evangelicalism/
When you bring up the issues of branding (a la Mars Hill) and celebrity in the context of young, restless, Reformed evangelicalism, I’d argue that you are hitting not just a “raw nerve,” but the “rawest nerve.” Yesterday, I organized my notes and links on the “state of the blog conversation” between 2007-2011 re: conservative evangelical celebrity. For those who might be interested, or might find them helpful for your own research, you can find the notes here.
[Addendum -- Thanks to Matthew Johnson for explaining the whole Dropbox thing to me; I'm a technological neanderthal.]
Yep, seens like branding and celebrity is the rawest nerve in the context of young, restless Reformed evangelicalism. In a different sort of way the pitfalls of branding and celebrity were rampant in American Pentecostalism in the 1980s and 1990s. Bakker, Swaggart, and others. We could swap out terms like "annointed", "fresh fire", and "move of God" and replace them with "missional", "community" and "contextualization". Of course the scandals that have erupted in connection to Pentecostals have tended to be about sex and money. The scandals that have erupted in the young, restless Reformed orbit have been about about pride and power.
It is usually said that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. Well, maybe the trouble is that those who do know history (or think they do) are doomed to think they will transcend it. A friend of mine was telling me that the bit with the latest X-Men titles (not that, honestly, I have ever cared about X-men despite being a comics fan) is that "history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes."
Slant rhyme is still rhyming. We'll just have to wait and see how the next few couplets play out in the poem.
When you bring up the issues of branding (a la Mars Hill) and celebrity in the context of young, restless, Reformed evangelicalism, I’d argue that you are hitting not just a “raw nerve,” but the “rawest nerve.” Yesterday, I organized my notes and links on the “state of the blog conversation” between 2007-2011 re: conservative evangelical celebrity. For those who might be interested, or might find them helpful for your own research, you can find the notes here.
[Addendum -- Thanks to Matthew Johnson for explaining the whole Dropbox thing to me; I'm a technological neanderthal.]
Yep, seens like branding and celebrity is the rawest nerve in the context of young, restless Reformed evangelicalism. In a different sort of way the pitfalls of branding and celebrity were rampant in American Pentecostalism in the 1980s and 1990s. Bakker, Swaggart, and others. We could swap out terms like "annointed", "fresh fire", and "move of God" and replace them with "missional", "community" and "contextualization". Of course the scandals that have erupted in connection to Pentecostals have tended to be about sex and money. The scandals that have erupted in the young, restless Reformed orbit have been about about pride and power.
It is usually said that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. Well, maybe the trouble is that those who do know history (or think they do) are doomed to think they will transcend it. A friend of mine was telling me that the bit with the latest X-Men titles (not that, honestly, I have ever cared about X-men despite being a comics fan) is that "history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes."
Slant rhyme is still rhyming. We'll just have to wait and see how the next few couplets play out in the poem.
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