Mere Orthodoxy: Are Evangelicals Really Conservative? Not everyone is convinced

http://www.mereorthodoxy.com/evangelicals-conservative/http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2011/november/sarahpalin.html?paging=off

And thus to D. G. Hart's case that evangelicalism is ultimately going to move in the direction of progressivism and has never had anything substantial to add intellectually to conservatism as a movement.

Irony of ironies: the Religious Right has spawned the Religious Left. Today in many evangelical circles, especially anywhere in the vicinity of a university community, affiliation with conservatism is viewed like membership in a leper colony.

Really?  I've had the impression the Religious Right didn't spawn the Religious Left (as we know it now).  The Religious Right attempted to replicate what they considered to have been the triumph of the Religious Left for the wrong kinds of causes in a rearguard attempt to move things back toward the right ones.  That's my impression of the history, anyway.  Maybe the Religious Left got mobilized because after Reagan they freaked out that the people they thought would never gain any power or influence actually got power and influence at all.  Maybe it wasn't enough power and influence to get the kinds of theocratic police states lefties keep assuming conservative Christians want but enough to make them use that as a sales pitch to mobilize their own base.  Enough, certainly, for Franky Schaeffer to keep acting like that's what his dad was on about and downplaying his own formative, self-admitted role in the whole affair, sordid or glorious as it may be depending on who you talk to.

Nevertheless, Hart awakens evangelicals to five factors that put them at odds with conservatism: (1) habitual appeal to the Bible as the prescriptive standard for national affairs, which abuses the Reformation principle of sola scriptura; (2) failure to differentiate the norms and tasks of the "little platoons" in society (e.g., family, work, church, neighborhood association, political party); (3) conflation of ultimate and proximate realities, thus neglecting "an older Augustinian view of the relationship between the City of God and the City of Man"; (4) naïveté about human depravity, beholden to a perfectionist model of sanctification; and (5) an anti-formalist attitude, which regards "the American political tradition's conventions of federalism, republicanism, and constitutionalism [as] merely formal arrangements that may be discarded if a better option surfaces." Bottom line:

… after thirty years of laboring with and supposedly listening to political conservatives, evangelicals have not expanded their intellectual repertoire significantly beyond the moral imperatives of the Bible. In fact, born-again Protestants show no more capacity to think conservatively than they did in the age of Billy Graham's greatest popularity. They do not know how to yell "stop" to the engines of modernity the way conservatives typically have. They have not learned to be wary of concentrations of power and wealth, frustrated with mass society and popular culture's distraction from "permanent things," or skeptical about any humanitarian plan to end human misery. Instead, evangelicals are more likely to support political plans to improve society, grow the economy, and expand the United States' global presence as long as doctors are not performing abortions and ministers are not presiding over the marriage of gay couples.

I could write more about this but I kinda don't feel like it.  I do, however, want to mention these links and point them out for your consideration.  Right now I've been more interested in blogging about negative critical responses to Haydn and other stuff.

Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective and some stuff that wasn't covered

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2009/02/great_composers_lousy_reviews.single.html
... Meanwhile, Slonimsky's Lexicon encouraged composers in their delusion that scabrous reviews are a badge of honor, that if you aren't denounced you aren't any good. When all is said and done, I'd wager that through history the majority of lousy reviews have been bestowed on lousy pieces, but nobody collects the notices of forgotten composers.

A basic oversight on the part of Slonimsky's still very enjoyable book has only dawned on me slowly over the last ten years.  The timeline works from Beethoven through to Schoenberg and other moderns.  Some reference is made to Mozart and criticism of Mozart's work (criticisms that, frankly, I can actually agree with at times).  But it's Romantic and modernist to focus on Beethoven as the beginning of ticking off musical establishments.  Historically musical controversies and objections to a creative approach obviously did not begin with Beethoven, even in the realm of concert music. 

In fact I might suggest here that it can be easy to overlook criticisms of Haydn during his career that anticipated some of the complaints about Beethoven.  Beethoven was complained about by critics who thought he was searching for dissonances and over-heated passion and rambling on and on ... and on ... and on ... and on and on. 

Haydn, however, was subject to ire for different reasons.  There were those, particularly earlier in Haydn's career, who still subscribed to the northern German school of thought and to a lot of Baroque concepts about form, affect, and aesthetics.  In the book Haydn & his world (1997 Princeton University Press) Elaine Sisman points out that the northern German critics and music theorists were unhappy with Haydn's penchant for drastically changing moods within movements.  Haydn was found wanting for breaking rules of decorum and for doubling octaves and using parallelism that in Baroque and Renaissance music was considered very bad.  It is important to stress here how indebted musical theory and practice in earlier epochs of Western theory derived from the limitations and exigencies of choral music.  The development of a purely instrumental concert music idiom didn't develop overnight, it didn't even develop in the ways we're used to in even one generation but throughout a couple of generations with some major innovations happening in each generation.

And if you compare a movement from a Bach violin sonata or partita to a string quartet by Haydn or a piano sonata you'll begin to see that this shift happened, this development of changing moods within a movement.  Haydn wasn't the only composer to introduce mood changes but he was better at introducing abrupt mood changes within movements than others.  Part of his genius at musical comedy is his ability to set up an expectation and subvert that expectation entirely within a musical work.  As the members of the Emerson string quartet may have put it years ago, Mozart was able to be witty but Haydn was able to be genuinely funny. 

A lot of northern German music fans and theorists were like Batman to Haydn's Joker, they got that Haydn sure thought it was funny ... but they weren't laughing.  And they didn't like that the rest of the German-speaking world thought the jokes were funny, too.  It seemed to diminish the seriousness of musical art to watch and hear Haydn cranking out symphonies and chamber works that were basically massive situation comedies like he was some sausage-making factory. 

Yet for centuries Haydn has not only not been seen as some iconoclastic punk messing with the bounds of great art and decorum, he is considered staid, parochial and boring because everyone knows he wrote fun music and it has no seriousness.  As Leon Botstein posed the point in Haydn and his world, Haydn had been revered and lionized into a paradoxically respectable irrelevance among theorists, composers, and performers.  Or in a rare moment of framing a gag well Gallagher once opined that you know you're getting old when you hear "Stairway to Heaven" on easy listening stations. 

Slonimsky did us a service collection critical vitriol against now-celebrated composers but he could have done us a bit more of a service by exploring how critical vitriol derives not merely from reactions to musical works as musical works but musical works as landmarks or boundary indicators of cultural, religious, ethnic, racial, economic, and other forms of social identity.

Now as I have been blogging I think that Haydn's work offers a touchstone for musicians and composers who are interested in exploring how to synthesize apparently contrasting musical styles and concepts.  Bach, and other Baroque composers, worked in a milleu in which there was the "old style" and the "new style".  When we moderns attempt to consider how many musical styles there are and how many regional variations there are in music this is not really that new.  What is new for our time period is that we have recordings and writings and musical examples of nearly every kind of musical culture from every region within the last century and a half, maybe two centuries.  And we have been able to coin phrases like "world music".  Yet this concept is not so new, either.  When J. S. Bach assimilate Italian and French music and Polish folk music into his work as a German composer he was still engaged in what, then, could be considered "world music" now.  And in a perhaps "lesser" but still important way the same could be said about Haydn.

Haydn worked in a period in which there was a kind of stylistic consolidation.  Western music was steadily transitioning out of the dance based, opera-derived, and liturgically-based idioms of the Baroque period into a new and more purely instrumental conception of music thought that benefited from equal temperament and new approaches to musical form.  Certain melodic intervals that were prohibitted (and impractical) in earlier centuries of music were becoming more practical and attainable thanks to newer approaches to temperament and harmonic development.  A great deal was accomplished by the time Haydn was established but Haydn was, in some ways like J. S. Bach, able to employ an encyclopedic awareness of musical possibilities form his time and working with them in a way that became a template for later work.  In Haydn's case he was also able to recognize and encourage people with more raw talent and capability than himself and thus he ended up being a formative influence on both Mozart and Beethoven.

I submit that if we fail to appreciate the ways in which Haydn was revolutionary in his own time we may fail to appreciate that there is more to be learned from Haydn's work than mere as a foundation upon which Beethoven and Mozart built their own masterpieces.  We need to consider what Haydn's proteges learned from their master and how we may learn from that in our time.

Links: Lyric Arts Forum posts audio for my sonata for flute and guitar; Youtube video of my sonata for oboe and guitar, 1st movement

http://lyricartsforum.blogspot.com/2011/05/sonata-for-flute-and-guitar-by-jeremiah.html
The above link is to the two movements from my sonata for flute and guitar.  I had to record the work on a steel-stringed instrument because I didn't own a classical guitar at the time.  The flute sonata was an idea I took on because I'd been advised by a teacher to write for the musicians you actually know, not for the idealized ensembles you'd like to play your music.  In fact the flute sonata did not even begin as a flute sonata.

The flute sonata began as a guitar sonata with the first movement but something felt off.  I felt that nothing was tuneful enough in the guitar part.  So I sat down one day and decided that I needed to add a flute part and to do that I just started playing through the guitar part and whistling as I played until I found something I liked.  I then went back and revised the guitar part in light of the flute part and refined the first movement until it became what you can hear on the audio file. 

As you'll discover when you listen to the flute sonata's first movement I committed to a monothematic sonata form.  I did this because my teacher told me that monothematic sonata forms are harder to write.  I wanted to do whatever the harder thing to do was.  But I also came to the conclusion that a monothematic sonata form would provide a compositional process that would help me discovers ways in which to blur the distinctions between classical, jazz, blues, and pop. 

As I began to work on the sonata I discovered that a recapitulation in a monothematic form leads to
the main theme being stated four different times.  I began to appreciate why Haydn would frequently continue developing his themes even in recapitulation.  I resolved to do the same thing.  Only what could I do that would both continue developing my one theme yet also wind down the momentum of the sonata as a form? 

My solution was to have the theme played in retrograde on both the flute and the guitar.  If you were to look at the score for the first movement you'd see that I just go note for note in reverse where "theme 2" would appear in the recapitulation.  I settled on this approach because of the predominantly mixolydian cast of the primary theme.  Since there's no leading tone as there normally would be in a major scale mixolydian lends itself nicely to retrograde.  We can think of it as a more chipper form of dorian without being quite so symmetrical as a scale.  Now I'm sure someone else must have composed a sonata form in which a monothematic approach is sued and the one theme is played both forward and backward in a recapitulation.  I just couldn't tell who that person is.  But one thing I do know is that in my sonata having the theme recapitulate fowards and then backwards before having a codetta seemed like the right way to go.

The second movement is a very simple passacaglia.  I began sketching this idea very far back, probably around 1998 or so and I was immersing myself in the works of Takemitsu and Villa-Lobos at that point.  Or maybe it was Bach, and Prokofiev?  My memory is getting fuzzy on that.  I just remember spending a lot of time refining the passacaglia and this was where I went through it with my flutist and made several changes in the score based on her suggestions.  By the time the sonata was done she'd made some valuable suggestions that became the basis for revamping the second movement.   

After I wrote the sonata for flute and guitar I got the idea that it should have a companion piece.  When I completed the flute sonata I thought it would be fun to give to some friends of mine to play.  These friends had been married for a while and the husband plays guitar and the wife plays flute.  The husband played electric guitar rather than classical and didn't feel comfortable tackling a classical guitar piece.  He did, however, play the oboe, English horn, and I think maybe baritone?  His wife and I recorded the sonata for flute and guitar linked to above ten years ago (I think).  But this left me thinking my original goal of writing music that could include both of them had been left incomplete.

That's when I got the idea that I ought to just write a sonata for oboe and guitar.  He and I could play that piece together and by composing a sonata for oboe and guitar I would be writing a companion piece for the flute sonata, a companion piece that was that on as many levels as could be possible.   By the time I finished the sonata for oboe and guitar I realized that I should just go for broke and tackle a duo sonata pairing the guitar up with every instrument I could think of.

The oboe sonata took several years to finish and I started working on it almost as soon as I finished the flute/guitar sonata.  Because it is a companion piece to the flute sonata I resolved that the oboe sonata would operate in a similar mood and have a similar set of procedures and concepts.  I had written a sonata for the flutist wife and so I wanted to create a sonata that captured my impressions of the oboe-playing husband.  And, of course, I was also playing around with ideas that are what I'm into.  So I completed the work over the course of four years. 

This is the first movement from my sonata for oboe and guitar.  The Swede and his comrade were kind enough to play the first movement a few years ago.  The other three movements, as yet, have not been performed but it's not an easy sonata for the guitar. My hope is the sonata as a whole will get a premiere and some exposure. 

There's some wonderful repertoire already written for oboe and guitar but I'd like to see a world in which Coste's sweet duets for oboe and guitar are not the ONLY standard works for the instrument.  We could use more ensembles playing David Evan Thomas' wonderful Sonata for oboe and guitar, for instance.  Andrew Hallyday (sic?) has written a marvelous piece for oboe and guitar called "The Widow, the Orphan, and the Immigrant" for the Mountain Music Duo.  And, yes, I'd also like my sonata to get some play time, too.  My hope is that the best years for oboe/guitar repertoire are still coming along.  I've seen some cute Youtube videos of oboe/guitar adaptations of Weezer and I've got to say that Weezer for that instrumental combination works out nicely.

As I wrote at some length elsewhere in this blog I've been inspired to tackle chamber music for the guitar partly because I've loved ensemble music-making pretty much all my life, and also because I read a transcript of Matanya Ophee's "Repertoire Issues" lecture. That was a eureka moment for me.  I'd spent years singing in choirs.  I'd spent a year or two in a little guitar/cello/harmonic trio that was fun.  I was, at the time, in a rock trio.  I was also wrapping up a sonata form for a string quartet.  I was like someone struck by the lightning of a great idea, it seemed I was already doing pretty much ensemble music in all my musical work and why not just keep that approach going by adding chamber music for classical guitar?  Even though I've had fun composing preludes and fugues for solo guitar

So, after all that blather, here's the Youtube link to the Swede playing movement 1 from my sonata for oboe and guitar.  He and the oboeist did a very good job playing my piece and I'm very grateful to them for playing the first movement, video-taping it, and posting the video to Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_Ryh6HPxLk

Link: NYT--Don't Blink! The Hazards of Confidence

http://www.mbird.com/2011/11/from-the-nytimes-mag-the-illusion-of-control/#comment-11378
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-hazards-of-confidence.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=surety%20of%20fools&st=cse

Here's another fun link over at Mockingbird and a link to the original article.  I have landed upon a different money quote than Mockingbird has:

True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes. You are probably an expert in guessing your spouse’s mood from one word on the telephone; chess players find a strong move in a single glance at a complex position; and true legends of instant diagnoses are common among physicians. To know whether you can trust a particular intuitive judgment, there are two questions you should ask: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals’ experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes. Anesthesiologists have a better chance to develop intuitions than radiologists do. Many of the professionals we encounter easily pass both tests, and their off-the-cuff judgments deserve to be taken seriously. In general, however, you should not take assertive and confident people at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about. [emphasis added] Unfortunately, this advice is difficult to follow: overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.       

This is useful advice when considering things said by celebrity rock star pastors as well as stock brokers.  The independent study that comes from investigating biblical literature, historical theological development, and related subjects can reveal that the confident preacher (as well as the bloggers some preachers confidently talk about) don't actually know what they're talking about.  There are people who are not as knowledgeable or informed in things as they imagine they are.  People who subscribe to an axiom that one must not doubt one's own greatness are rarely ever great.  Confidence can be mistaken for competence.

The late Internet Monk, Michael Spenser, wrote years ago about a lower profile form of prosperity gospel that is rampant in evangelicalism.  It holds the idea that if you're just really smart and wise and godly then, basically, you won't be poor.  A contrast to this axiom is the great British pilot's proverb that, if memory serves, may have originated in World War I.

"I'd rather be lucky than good any day."

Which gets me to Ecclesiastes 9:11-12

I have seen something else under the sun:
The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.

Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come:
As fish are caught in a cruel net,
or birds are taken in a snare,
so people are trapped by evil times
that fall unexpectedly upon them.

Yep, I have certainly discovered a few things about how evil times can fall unexpectedly upon a person.  My evil times are not as bad as those of others and I still have a lot to be thankful for, not least some generosity extended toward me by many people during a difficult time I've had in the last two years.  When times are good be thankful and when times are bad consider for God has made one as well as the other so that man may not know what is to come after him. You may be Ahithophel ,with wisdom and experience so great that your words are considered like the words of God Himself.  Yet David can pray one day that God might make the wisdom of Ahithophel foolishness and God may answer that prayer.  Then it will be a terrible day to be Ahithophel!

update on reading Romans: The Righteousness of God by Adolf Schlatter

Oh my!  This book could be the most challenging read I've ever undertaken!  There are sentences where there are no active verbs.  I've been borrowing my sister's copy of Bethghe's biiography on Bonhoeffer and in it he writes that Schlatter was often barely comprehensible even to fellow Germans because of his unusual dialect and way of speaking.  Well I do not doubt this now that I've spent months (yes months) steadily poring through just the first hundred pages of the book.

I've been intended to get into this book more (and more) partly in response to Brooks' suggestion over at City of God but mostly because my pastor has been very, very nice in letting me borrow it for a long time.  He's said that he's spending a year in John so he won't need the Schlatter commentary for a while.  Thank God!  This book is proving to be, as I said, the most challenging read as sheer reading experience I think I"ve had.  On the other hand I have been mentioning that I've got cataracts, right?  I've also got weird black transluscent eel-like floaters mussing about in even my good eye so reading books in my house is sometimes tougher than it used to be.  Fully lit screens, however, I can totally read with ease.  There's a strange irony for people who want to pretend that reading computer screens is somehow inferior to books.  Different people are in different spots.

Anyway, this is all I'm rambling about for this post.  The whole time switch thing did not find my waking up earlier as I anticipated I would so Sundays I'm going to have to build up to.  One thing about staying up late with friends for the better part of a week is it takes time to reset the sleep rhythm for me now. 

That's all for now.

a comment from a discussion at the Wartburg Watch gets me thinking

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.

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

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.