If there is a thesis statement or a central premise to Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of The Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take it All (or almost all) Back then perhaps chapter 57 is where the thesis statement finally appears, somewhere around page 347 of the 408 page book (not counting the index).
Yes, this would seem to be relatively late in the game to reveal the topic sentence.
Frank opens up with a statement that he considers abortion to be an unmitigated tragedy, still, decades after Roe vs Wade. He goes on to explain how the pro-life leaders in the Christian Right like Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson, have played Christians for suckers, using a single hot-button issue as a way to manipulate and rouse political support and sustaining their hold on power.
Frank holds Bush 2 accountable for the deaths of Christians in Iraq, who he believes were in better conditions prior to the war than they have been since. In fact Frank seems to believe the hypocrisy of Bush 2's administration is essentially intolerable.
Frank lays at the feet of Roe vs Wade the blame for three decades of terrible leadership from both political parties who jumped on this decision as the rallying cry for their respective teams. If there had been some moderation on either side to allow for something beyond a strictly binary decision, Frank seems to believe, politiccs in America wouldn't have become the sharp delineation of Religous Right and Secular Left it has become in the last two or three decades. And I think in one sense he's right, he's right that for years the secular left and mainstream media didn't take anything said by evangelicals seriously and for years abortion really was essentially a "Catholic issue" (which was why Francis was so loathe to jump into the political fray and address the issue until Frank, by his own account, cussed his dad into taking a stand on the issue).
As Frank puts it seemed like the requirement of ideological purity on abortion and any number of single-issue political topics) led both parties to prevent the development of any intelligent, pragmatic, and competent political leadership. Left in the wake of this is a series of ideological litmus tests, loyalty oaths, and partisan loyalties that reveal very little about applied principle and more about idology. Politics becomes less about the implementation of policy for the public good and more about the implementation of policy to reward those who fight over policy. This is a relatively old observation since complaints of this sort were rumbling in the United States in a few corners when I was a kid twenty years ago.
There are a handful of statements I admit to not quite getting from Frank. Frank seems to recognize some hypocrisy inherent in either side--the pro-life side opposes abortion but supports the death penalty and the pro-choice side supports abortion and opposes the death penalty. Ironically the Catholic position of the last decade or so seems to often oppose both abortion AND the death penalty and even war in a few cases. Personally I distrust the role and right of government to kill or sanction the killing of citizens without a warrant based on defending the citizenry. War as an act of self-defense I can understand because it is a matter of defending your own people from attack, but killing your own people pre-emptively because they are not wanted or killing them because they are considered too unsuitable to deserve life is bothersome to me and I don't think either should be done lightly.
Now the thing Frank says that seems to clearly indicate how he feels and thinks is something I will quote briefly:
page 349 from Crazy for God:
If it had been the other way around and the left had championed the unborn, perhaps against corporate medical industry interests, or in the name of euqality--or because of the lessons taguht by the rise of the eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s, or because of being queasy over a recently slave-owning society once again deciding who was more equal, even more human "legally" than others--my father would have been embraced as a religious leader on the left. And if Dad had been allied with the left, it would have ultimate been a much better fit for him--and for me.
That Frank notes how evangelicals ignored his father's passion for conservationism and environmentalism is easy to establish earlier in the book and that Francis was undoubtedly more broad-minded and inquisitive than most evangelicals and fundamentalists on the arts is something that ought to be universally agreed upon.
But the idea of Francis Schaeffer as a hero to the religious left? That's an amazingly big what-if. I don't see how given Francis Schaeffer's approach to epistlemology worked, let alone how he actually interpreted a great deal of modernist art, music and literature, that such an alternate reality would be possible. Schaeffer was bold enough to embrace, digest, absorb, and interpret a lot of 20th century culture but at the end of the day he was decidedly old-school in his interests and passions. This isn't bad, but it's the kind of thing that in the long run would have made him a hard-sell as a leader amongst the religious left. To the religious left of the 1960s was he something other than an irrelevant sideshow. Frank obvi0usly loves his dad and I think this love for his dad may cloud his perceptions when he goes so far as to suppose that if the left had championed the opposition of abortion that his father would have been a hero to the religious left. It was the religious left that Francis had been partly reacting to all along and Frank himself seems to even know this better than anyone.
If I were to fault the book it's not because Frank reveals that Francis and Edith were fallable human beings who loved the Lord, it's not even that their zeal for the Lord made them crazy because the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men. Nor is the fault of the book that the Religious Right is a movement that has done some terrible things or even done nothing much at all because that is the provence of any political movement, having a terribly mixed track record. I've been wondering for two decades when the Republican party will actually implement smalle rand less invasive government instead of simply claiming that's what they stand for. No, if I were to fault Frank's book it's that he gets to his real point so late in the book that I can't quite say I've experienced the "joy in the journey". His life was no doubt interesting but then so was mine and that doesn't mean I ought to write a memoir about it.
Given the pithy title and the lengthy subtitle I was hoping Frank would, uh, get to the point less than fifty pages away from the end of his book. And his point seems to be not only that he regrets playing a crucial part in forming the Religious Right (okay, I grant him that, I guess) but that if things had gone the other way his dad could have been a leader of the religious left. Okay ... sure I suppose ... but at that point would we even be talking about the religious left of the Western world that rose up in the last two centureis? Soemhow I doubt it.
Of course by eliminating a strictly scriptural approach to knowledge of Christian ethics and practice you can jump to the other side of the Proestant/Catholic/Orthodox divide but the political and historical reality is that Francis Schaeffer couldn't have done that based on his personal convictions. He was far too Prostetant. Would the Francis Schaeffer who seriously believed Billy Graham had compromised the Gospel by working with Catholics have REALLY become a hero to the religious left? Not likely. Did Francis have any interaction with non-Protestant Christians? Here I simply profess my ignorance because it is easy for Protestants to forget that left and right political debates happen within Catholic and Orthodox circles, too. God's kingdom every where has been divided since the time of Solomon's death so it's hardly a surprise that claims of unity are often a facade or mere optimism in the face of reality.
Still, what I appreciate about Crazy for God is that overall Frank seems to be able to admit in the crudest possible terms what evangelicals and really many Christians of every stripe and people of every stripe seem reluctant to admit. He doesn't just say "I'm not perfect [but I'm better than these other people]." He sometimes seems to lack the directness needed to say, "I helped contribute to the destruction of civil discourse in America and helped lay the foundation for nutjobs like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell to polarize discussion of politics and religion in America." He seems to be TRYING to say that but doesn't quite say it directly, but then maybe he's going for the indirect approach.
But what he does manage to say often, even if indirectly is "I screwed this up. I screwed up pretty much everything and some of that was because of my parents." But a lot of it, he knows, was simply because he was an asshole and he seems to recognize that getting the nickname "the little shit from Switzerland" was deserved, at some level.
I am almost doen with the book and I have no less respect for Francis Schaeffer now than when Is tarted reading Frank's book. I actually have more respect for Frank now than before when I had only read his books from fourteen years ago, tripe like Addicted to Mediocrity that seemed to brazenly use his father's name to plug for political battles that were deeply problematic. Christians so often forget that the Jesus who came to redeem the world said His kingdom was not of it. Frank's memoir is an awkward reminder to me that many Christians willfully ignore this saying of Jesus. It's not that we can't get involved in politics but that what unites us is Christ Himself, not the subsidiary things that we often put at the front alongside Christ.
We are too often tempted to decide that someone is in Christ or not based on political and social views. Not that these aren't important, but I can relate to some of what Frank writes about. If you have been in a position where family have told you that you're not really a Christian, perhaps, if you didn't vote for the Republican or Democrat they told you you must vote for then in some sense Frank's memoir can be read asn apology from a man who willingly and zealously persued that sort of spirituality, that definition of how spirituality ought to inform politics. Whether it's refusing to spend time with Christians because they are Republican and therefore stupid or potentially deciding that a fellow brother in Christ is guilty of treason for opposing the current war the moral outcome is the same, we end up being guilty of judging our brother and thus break the law. And it's so damned easy to do we can often not recognize that we're doing it.
So whether or not I agree with everything Frank has written I think I appreciate him more now. The odds that Francis Schaeffer could have been a leader on the religious left seems like wishful thinking of a very high order but if that's what Frank feels and believes, oh well. It's his book. He can say what he likes.
Having felt for years, even more than a decade, that Francis Schaeffer has been cherry-picked and retroactively edited to serve as a tool for the religious right that doesn't want to engage cultural, historicla, and artistic issues with a heart toward evangelism and service but toward political and social control while using the appearance of political martyrdom as a means to mask their play for control I feel that in some sense Frank has revealed that the Francis Schaeffer I sensed in his famous books (Francis') was still the same Francis that was father to Frank. That probably doesn't make sense but since Frank has written things that don't make sense to me it won't surprise me that I write things that won't make sense to anyone else.
All this is to say is that Frank's memoir reminds me of what I have felt for a long time, that there is a big difference between the actual Francis Schaeffer who lived and died and loved the Lord, and the Francis Schaeffer bill of goods we have been sold by Christian culture warriors who professed admiration for him but in some sense finally used him. If Frank's memoir debunks the elements of Francis' legacy that make him useful to culture warriors then in that respect Frank has done us immeasurable good by the grace of God.
And of course the thing is that I'm not quite done with the book. I'm not anticipating too much else popping up in the next fifty pages but I'll keep reading.
Saturday, March 01, 2008
first they did it with Jesus, now J.S. Bach
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/tayside_and_central/7270795.stm
I'd love to know how the CGI replication 250 years later is more the "real person" than the portraits painted in Bach's lifetime. I love me plenty of CGI movies and even I can't go so far as to say the CGI image looks more like a real person.
This must be why the world has French post-structuralists.
I'd love to know how the CGI replication 250 years later is more the "real person" than the portraits painted in Bach's lifetime. I love me plenty of CGI movies and even I can't go so far as to say the CGI image looks more like a real person.
This must be why the world has French post-structuralists.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Emergent Islam?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7265021.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7264903.stm
Some journalists and authors have noted that Islam has never had the equivalent of what might be called the Reformation, the development of a Protestant type movement, which some believe may explain why Islam has retained a militant and violent aspect similar to the violence and racial isolationism often endemic in European Christianity for centuries. Now whether or not that is the case in either situation (or the extent to which it is true and historically verifiable) is hardly something a blogger who has a modicum of a life has any reason to write about.
But that Islam picked up a variety of traditions that are not necessarily inherent to Islamic belief that involved cultural syncretism is something I've come across here and there. Muslim views about women did seem to change after contact with Indian cultures and some have argued that the chauvinism and misogyny that sometimes appear may be less a sign of inherent Islamic views than culturally assimilated views from adjacent cultures. A similar argument could be made that early Christians did not endorse the kind of slavery that white American Christians often endorsed prior to the Civil War. And of course there's a niche market and niche element in historical research that points out that racism was at least as bad or worse in the North. So in that respect noting progressive elements within Islam suppressed by militant groups is not surprising to learn about. We Christians have similar stories within our own history.
In terms of framing this in the broader context of wars of religion then it may be the sometimes labelled new atheists would prefer this all goes further than reform to the elimination of religion entirely. That such a world is imaginable simply proves that such a world is imaginable. We are all tempted to wish for a land ruled as a single-party state, our party. This gets me thinking of some comments by Frank Schaeffer in chapter 57 of Crazy for God that I'll blog about later.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7264903.stm
Some journalists and authors have noted that Islam has never had the equivalent of what might be called the Reformation, the development of a Protestant type movement, which some believe may explain why Islam has retained a militant and violent aspect similar to the violence and racial isolationism often endemic in European Christianity for centuries. Now whether or not that is the case in either situation (or the extent to which it is true and historically verifiable) is hardly something a blogger who has a modicum of a life has any reason to write about.
But that Islam picked up a variety of traditions that are not necessarily inherent to Islamic belief that involved cultural syncretism is something I've come across here and there. Muslim views about women did seem to change after contact with Indian cultures and some have argued that the chauvinism and misogyny that sometimes appear may be less a sign of inherent Islamic views than culturally assimilated views from adjacent cultures. A similar argument could be made that early Christians did not endorse the kind of slavery that white American Christians often endorsed prior to the Civil War. And of course there's a niche market and niche element in historical research that points out that racism was at least as bad or worse in the North. So in that respect noting progressive elements within Islam suppressed by militant groups is not surprising to learn about. We Christians have similar stories within our own history.
In terms of framing this in the broader context of wars of religion then it may be the sometimes labelled new atheists would prefer this all goes further than reform to the elimination of religion entirely. That such a world is imaginable simply proves that such a world is imaginable. We are all tempted to wish for a land ruled as a single-party state, our party. This gets me thinking of some comments by Frank Schaeffer in chapter 57 of Crazy for God that I'll blog about later.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
I really do love to read First Things every so often
http://www.firstthings.com/blog/2008/02/28/john-mccain-will-not-be-left-behind/
Can't help but share the caveat about Wright as a good Bible teacher with some political views I'm not sure I agree with. Then again, he's Anglican ... what can I say? Actually, plan to get more on the matter of Anglicans later since Guinness mentioned that John Stott's question about the Schaeffer family was whether it would be a family dynasty (bad) or a family that brought others into the ministry circle at the highest decision-making levels (good). I'd venture to say that setting aside an question about Frank's objectivity the simple fact that Frank could even make any kind of career out of his father's name and legacy answers the question in the first category at least where Frank was concerned. But that is another musing for another time.
And FT link us up to the latest from Hal Lindsey. As The Door put it ... Planet Earth, Still Ticking. "Politically Incorrect, Prophetically Correct" ... right.
http://hallindsey.org/
Can't help but share the caveat about Wright as a good Bible teacher with some political views I'm not sure I agree with. Then again, he's Anglican ... what can I say? Actually, plan to get more on the matter of Anglicans later since Guinness mentioned that John Stott's question about the Schaeffer family was whether it would be a family dynasty (bad) or a family that brought others into the ministry circle at the highest decision-making levels (good). I'd venture to say that setting aside an question about Frank's objectivity the simple fact that Frank could even make any kind of career out of his father's name and legacy answers the question in the first category at least where Frank was concerned. But that is another musing for another time.
And FT link us up to the latest from Hal Lindsey. As The Door put it ... Planet Earth, Still Ticking. "Politically Incorrect, Prophetically Correct" ... right.
http://hallindsey.org/
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Os Guinness' assessment, pre scheduled outage
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2008/002/1.32.html
He mentions a few things that do seem patently obvious to me, that Frank as the family runt was, even by his own account, able to manipulate or outmaneuver his parents so as to get what he wanted. That Frank can lament that he was subject to neglect or abuse as a child can still mesh easily with Guinness' account of Frank the spoiled little hellion. After all, the capacity for distortion is equally possible from either side. It's not as though Schaeffer's book doesn't display a bit of self pity, or a lot, actually. When Frank writes that there's a particular power a son can wield over a father he seems a little too proud of it and how he used it even as he seems to set the tone through the book of somehow regretting turning his dad toward the Dark Side of Republicanism and politics. Apparently saying you're sorry for being a highly politicized right-wing asshole who used your dad's reputation to get what you thought you wanted isn't simple enough. Not that I don't think there's NO value in the book but at some level what Frank could have been clearer about was what he doesn't say so far, about 66% of the way through his book.
Since there's a scheduled Blooger outage at 6pm PST I will just choose to blog about this more later.
He mentions a few things that do seem patently obvious to me, that Frank as the family runt was, even by his own account, able to manipulate or outmaneuver his parents so as to get what he wanted. That Frank can lament that he was subject to neglect or abuse as a child can still mesh easily with Guinness' account of Frank the spoiled little hellion. After all, the capacity for distortion is equally possible from either side. It's not as though Schaeffer's book doesn't display a bit of self pity, or a lot, actually. When Frank writes that there's a particular power a son can wield over a father he seems a little too proud of it and how he used it even as he seems to set the tone through the book of somehow regretting turning his dad toward the Dark Side of Republicanism and politics. Apparently saying you're sorry for being a highly politicized right-wing asshole who used your dad's reputation to get what you thought you wanted isn't simple enough. Not that I don't think there's NO value in the book but at some level what Frank could have been clearer about was what he doesn't say so far, about 66% of the way through his book.
Since there's a scheduled Blooger outage at 6pm PST I will just choose to blog about this more later.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Unlike some of my fellow Protestants ... I actually read First Things
Not too often lately, but once in a while. :) Their website takes forever to load up from my computer here at home.
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=981
I find it amusing that this is happened. I could explain why but if it's funny to you it's because you already get it and if you don't, well, it's not that funny anyway.
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=981
I find it amusing that this is happened. I could explain why but if it's funny to you it's because you already get it and if you don't, well, it's not that funny anyway.
church swap
http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/02/25/religion.survey.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories
Unsurprisingly most "converts" to evangelicalism may not be the completely unchurched but those who were raised Protestant. Protestantism is such a remarkable grab bag of doctrinal ideas that there's almost something for anyone who would, generally, like to claim Jesus Christ is both God and Lord and containing within Himself what we would tend to call hypostatic union.
The group listed as "no affiliation" where religion is concerned is growing, not a surprise.
But it has seemed as though most conversions within Christendom are just church swap situations. If someone converts from Protestantism to Catholicism or from Protestantism to Orthodoxy or from Orthodoxy to Lutheranism then for those converts, by all means, they trust they have converted to the one true Church from where ever they left. But in terms of tbe "mere Christianity" factor no conversion of any kind has taken place, people merely take sides in internecine bickering that is so typical within the divided kingdom of Israel (i.e. the Church since Christ's coming). So if some are Samaritans and some are Judeans they're all in Israel. It's the number of people who are taking no affililation with any religion that would be the unchurched, and the truly unchurched would potentially represent the most difficult group for evangelism because the worldly benefits of the Gospel in this day and age can't be appealed to. Not "worldly" in the biblical use of the term as a pejorative, but of this age in a more mundane sense.
For instance, if we were to appeal to this or that Christian tradition as appealing to "real" men we've got a problem. Any other variation within the Christian tradition could make the same claim and then there's the question of what constitutes a "real" man? Some real men like beer, some real men like wine, and some real men don't drink. In the same way some real men are Catholics, some real men are Protestants, and some real men are atheists or whatever else they profess or don't profess. At some point, perhaps not very far into an attempt to prosyletize the convert, doesn't it seem that we are eventually selling a pet dog on the basis of, "This dog will poop in your house just like any other domesticated animal will"? What a great selling point? Real men are real sinners, after all.
And real men seems to be what many churches DON'T want. As I'm reading through Crazy for God it's interesting to read Schaeffer's undoubtedly biased but still interesting comments about Francis Schaeffer's disdain for Calvinists as arrogant, self-impressed jerks who would rather obsess about doctrine than reach out to real people. If there's even a kernel of truth to this then I can surmise why Calvinists aren't fond of the book, and it's not as though they have no reason to be. Knocking Francis Schaeffer off the pedastal evangelicals have put him on is only problematic where their idol worship and appropriation of the life of a flesh and blood man might be concerned. The idea possibility that in today's evangelical culture Francis Schaeffer might be denounced as a long-haired environmentalist hippie doesn't seem to be seriously considered but the seeds of such a possible state are there if you read his work carefully.
That Frank feels responsible for turning his dad back to his more fundamentalist roots ties into this Pew stuff. Sometimes a person can start in one path spiritually, veer off into another, and then returns. Instruct a child in the way that he should go and when he is OLD he will not depart from it. But there are all sorts of diversions and deviations that happen, and it doesn't meean the child will end up where the parent hopes he or she will. I'm not too close to where my parents would have wanted me to be theologically, in my aesthetics, or politically. On the other hand, I think that my parents and I understand each other more than we did years ago.
As yet, almost two thirds to three quarters of the way through the book Schaeffer does not really discuss his jump to Orthodoxy. The sense I get at this point in the book is that at some level he acknowledges that his writings from his nominally evangelical period were at some base-line level a sham. He takes this to mean that he turned his dad toward founding the Religious Right and that if Francis Schaeffer had known how his work and legacy would have been used he would have been very upset if he were still alive today to see it. It's not really something that can be proven even by Frank Schaeffer himself and to some degree the point is not the least bit useful for its factual accuracy or likelihood, since it's what might be called a huge example of a counterfactual.
But it is useful as a springboard for contemplating whether there is a difference between how evangelicals appropriate the life and work of Francis Schaeffer now and what the aim of Schaeffer's work was in his own heart and mind. Tim LaHaye invoked Schaeffer here and there in Battle for the Mind, a book a relative ran by me and LaHaye impressed me as someone who could quote Francis Schaeffer and still not seem smart, much like a professor at a university once quoted Dostoevsky and still, somehow, managed to sound like a total rube and a bureaucratic shill all at the same time.
But in some sense Frank seems to admit that what he did was basically turn his father's legacy into a brand for political activism, activism that began in a very sincere way that devolved into a jade and self-regarding, self-pitying turn. It wouldn't surprise me if Frank looked back on Addicted to Mediocrity and would simply agree with my assessment that it was a mediocrity.
What comes across as I read through the book more is the peculiar sense that in some way Frank feels he wasted his life on things that weren't important and that in some way he betrayed his own life's dreams and the best things about his family. If so then it takes some bravery to confront that you've wasted your life in your own eyes. Interestingly, he doesn't really seem to "turn to Christ" about this stuff, probably because his intended audience seems to be secular. This is not a book that seems to be written merely by a man raised to be a believer to believers but also to the liberal secularistts he once battled so often. He more or less impugns the liberals of the United States for choosing to ignore the nascent Religious Right until it was so well-established that there was nothing left to do but freak out. I think he's right about that. Choosing to ignore Christians who are culturally and politically conservative until they've actually formed the Religious Right as we know it now was amazingly stupid. The answer now is not to freak out about how eager they are to reshape culture and society because in this respect the Religous Right is simply doing what the newer Left elements wanted to do in the 1960s, except for wanting to turn the clock backward. But in essence both sides want to turn the clock backward to either the time of Reagan or the time of Kennedy. It's still a complete breach of the wry observation of the Preacher--do not ask yourselves, "Where are the good old days that were better than these?" because it's stupid to ask that kind of question.
Surreptitiously lurking throughout the pages of Crazy for God Frank seems to be letting us know in small ways that he knows this. the subtitle explains how he helped to found the Religious Right and lived to take all (or most) of it back.
Unsurprisingly most "converts" to evangelicalism may not be the completely unchurched but those who were raised Protestant. Protestantism is such a remarkable grab bag of doctrinal ideas that there's almost something for anyone who would, generally, like to claim Jesus Christ is both God and Lord and containing within Himself what we would tend to call hypostatic union.
The group listed as "no affiliation" where religion is concerned is growing, not a surprise.
But it has seemed as though most conversions within Christendom are just church swap situations. If someone converts from Protestantism to Catholicism or from Protestantism to Orthodoxy or from Orthodoxy to Lutheranism then for those converts, by all means, they trust they have converted to the one true Church from where ever they left. But in terms of tbe "mere Christianity" factor no conversion of any kind has taken place, people merely take sides in internecine bickering that is so typical within the divided kingdom of Israel (i.e. the Church since Christ's coming). So if some are Samaritans and some are Judeans they're all in Israel. It's the number of people who are taking no affililation with any religion that would be the unchurched, and the truly unchurched would potentially represent the most difficult group for evangelism because the worldly benefits of the Gospel in this day and age can't be appealed to. Not "worldly" in the biblical use of the term as a pejorative, but of this age in a more mundane sense.
For instance, if we were to appeal to this or that Christian tradition as appealing to "real" men we've got a problem. Any other variation within the Christian tradition could make the same claim and then there's the question of what constitutes a "real" man? Some real men like beer, some real men like wine, and some real men don't drink. In the same way some real men are Catholics, some real men are Protestants, and some real men are atheists or whatever else they profess or don't profess. At some point, perhaps not very far into an attempt to prosyletize the convert, doesn't it seem that we are eventually selling a pet dog on the basis of, "This dog will poop in your house just like any other domesticated animal will"? What a great selling point? Real men are real sinners, after all.
And real men seems to be what many churches DON'T want. As I'm reading through Crazy for God it's interesting to read Schaeffer's undoubtedly biased but still interesting comments about Francis Schaeffer's disdain for Calvinists as arrogant, self-impressed jerks who would rather obsess about doctrine than reach out to real people. If there's even a kernel of truth to this then I can surmise why Calvinists aren't fond of the book, and it's not as though they have no reason to be. Knocking Francis Schaeffer off the pedastal evangelicals have put him on is only problematic where their idol worship and appropriation of the life of a flesh and blood man might be concerned. The idea possibility that in today's evangelical culture Francis Schaeffer might be denounced as a long-haired environmentalist hippie doesn't seem to be seriously considered but the seeds of such a possible state are there if you read his work carefully.
That Frank feels responsible for turning his dad back to his more fundamentalist roots ties into this Pew stuff. Sometimes a person can start in one path spiritually, veer off into another, and then returns. Instruct a child in the way that he should go and when he is OLD he will not depart from it. But there are all sorts of diversions and deviations that happen, and it doesn't meean the child will end up where the parent hopes he or she will. I'm not too close to where my parents would have wanted me to be theologically, in my aesthetics, or politically. On the other hand, I think that my parents and I understand each other more than we did years ago.
As yet, almost two thirds to three quarters of the way through the book Schaeffer does not really discuss his jump to Orthodoxy. The sense I get at this point in the book is that at some level he acknowledges that his writings from his nominally evangelical period were at some base-line level a sham. He takes this to mean that he turned his dad toward founding the Religious Right and that if Francis Schaeffer had known how his work and legacy would have been used he would have been very upset if he were still alive today to see it. It's not really something that can be proven even by Frank Schaeffer himself and to some degree the point is not the least bit useful for its factual accuracy or likelihood, since it's what might be called a huge example of a counterfactual.
But it is useful as a springboard for contemplating whether there is a difference between how evangelicals appropriate the life and work of Francis Schaeffer now and what the aim of Schaeffer's work was in his own heart and mind. Tim LaHaye invoked Schaeffer here and there in Battle for the Mind, a book a relative ran by me and LaHaye impressed me as someone who could quote Francis Schaeffer and still not seem smart, much like a professor at a university once quoted Dostoevsky and still, somehow, managed to sound like a total rube and a bureaucratic shill all at the same time.
But in some sense Frank seems to admit that what he did was basically turn his father's legacy into a brand for political activism, activism that began in a very sincere way that devolved into a jade and self-regarding, self-pitying turn. It wouldn't surprise me if Frank looked back on Addicted to Mediocrity and would simply agree with my assessment that it was a mediocrity.
What comes across as I read through the book more is the peculiar sense that in some way Frank feels he wasted his life on things that weren't important and that in some way he betrayed his own life's dreams and the best things about his family. If so then it takes some bravery to confront that you've wasted your life in your own eyes. Interestingly, he doesn't really seem to "turn to Christ" about this stuff, probably because his intended audience seems to be secular. This is not a book that seems to be written merely by a man raised to be a believer to believers but also to the liberal secularistts he once battled so often. He more or less impugns the liberals of the United States for choosing to ignore the nascent Religious Right until it was so well-established that there was nothing left to do but freak out. I think he's right about that. Choosing to ignore Christians who are culturally and politically conservative until they've actually formed the Religious Right as we know it now was amazingly stupid. The answer now is not to freak out about how eager they are to reshape culture and society because in this respect the Religous Right is simply doing what the newer Left elements wanted to do in the 1960s, except for wanting to turn the clock backward. But in essence both sides want to turn the clock backward to either the time of Reagan or the time of Kennedy. It's still a complete breach of the wry observation of the Preacher--do not ask yourselves, "Where are the good old days that were better than these?" because it's stupid to ask that kind of question.
Surreptitiously lurking throughout the pages of Crazy for God Frank seems to be letting us know in small ways that he knows this. the subtitle explains how he helped to found the Religious Right and lived to take all (or most) of it back.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God, self-pity, evangelicals and the culture war
Overall I think there's nothing wrong with Frank Schaeffer's self-pity in terms of reflecting a cultural millieu in which he grew up. Not to say that the Schaeffer family itself was somehow riddled with self-pity, though perhaps just Frank. ;) No, what I mean to say is that there is a sense in which though he is not part of the evangelical/fundamentalist fold any longer Frank Schaeffer is a reminder of the embattled or self-pitying perspective evangelicals and fundamentalists have had for decades. It's part of a tendency I've noticed growing up in the background. It's not necessarily unusual, dyed-in-the wool people of any stripe tend to get this way. When I read people in all seriousness writing about how the United States died with the ascent of Ronald Reagan it's the same kind of paranoid self-pity and self-regard I have seen in people who made the same shrieking claims about Clinton.
If Christians trust that the leaders in charge are placed there by the will of God then they can be thankful for any Bush or Clinton or Reagan or Carter who gets into office. Funny how people are better at paying lip service to that concept in the United States then they are at coming close to living it out.
So while I detect some self-pity in Frank's wistful remembrance of his early paintings it's not like he doesn't know it's maudlin self-pity. So, hey, we've all been there. We've all made decisions we deeply regret if we're even as young as 22 or 12. It doesn't matter what age, the temptation to self pity is there. And sometimes, perhaps, self-pity and repentance can appear ever so slightly similar to the untrained eye that cannot discern the heart of the person who is speaking or writing. Since Frank notes that there's some maudlin self-pity in his own book I don't think I'm being unfair, and it's not like I can't possibly sympathize.
And it's not as though we who identify as evangelicals or fundamentalists haven't been guilty of the same thing any time we have talked about how no one believes in real heroes or godly principles anymore or who we are in the holy barracks staving off the hordes of the unclean in some last ditch effort to save our children from endemic godlessness. You don't even have to be evangelical to have that attitude. You could be a Catholic, an atheist, a Muslim, Orthodox, Shinto, Buddhist, etc.
To the extent that Schaeffer's writing is breezy and sloppy I'd say he doesn't fare any worse than Mark Driscoll, for instance (yes, I've read some of his stuff because I live in Seattle and one can't live in Seattle without having at least a vague idea that a pastor named Mark Driscoll preaches and teaches here).
Any author will have some good and bad moments as a stylist, after all. Piper tends to repeat himself ad nauseum and think that by saying the same thing multiple times it's saying something slightly different each time. That's okay, it was a custom in ancient Christian writing, too. It's not like Augustine didn't say the same thing a few times over. Since authors are human they get to have personal literary ticks that might be annoying. Schaeffer's happens to be that he rambles and, again, a person may ramble and still be a genius (like Augustine) not that Schaeffer per se is a genius.
Which is to say I'm still reading through Crazy for God here and there and it's an interesting read and I think a necessary one. Since I'm Protestant I'm not so big an advocate of the veneration of saints to see any reason Francis Schaeffer shouldn't be taken down a peg or two. See, in my estimation this doesn't make Francis less of a saint. Christ must increase and we must decrease. If Frank has a providentially appointed role to play in this then praise be to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that Frank has burst the bubble just a teensy bit about his dad. And if Frank is wrong on something or distorts or misrepresents something he seems to have cheerfully admitted it in advance. That's more than some Christian authors have managed to do. Would have been nice if John Macarthur had done that in a revised forward to Charismatic Chaos.
If Christians trust that the leaders in charge are placed there by the will of God then they can be thankful for any Bush or Clinton or Reagan or Carter who gets into office. Funny how people are better at paying lip service to that concept in the United States then they are at coming close to living it out.
So while I detect some self-pity in Frank's wistful remembrance of his early paintings it's not like he doesn't know it's maudlin self-pity. So, hey, we've all been there. We've all made decisions we deeply regret if we're even as young as 22 or 12. It doesn't matter what age, the temptation to self pity is there. And sometimes, perhaps, self-pity and repentance can appear ever so slightly similar to the untrained eye that cannot discern the heart of the person who is speaking or writing. Since Frank notes that there's some maudlin self-pity in his own book I don't think I'm being unfair, and it's not like I can't possibly sympathize.
And it's not as though we who identify as evangelicals or fundamentalists haven't been guilty of the same thing any time we have talked about how no one believes in real heroes or godly principles anymore or who we are in the holy barracks staving off the hordes of the unclean in some last ditch effort to save our children from endemic godlessness. You don't even have to be evangelical to have that attitude. You could be a Catholic, an atheist, a Muslim, Orthodox, Shinto, Buddhist, etc.
To the extent that Schaeffer's writing is breezy and sloppy I'd say he doesn't fare any worse than Mark Driscoll, for instance (yes, I've read some of his stuff because I live in Seattle and one can't live in Seattle without having at least a vague idea that a pastor named Mark Driscoll preaches and teaches here).
Any author will have some good and bad moments as a stylist, after all. Piper tends to repeat himself ad nauseum and think that by saying the same thing multiple times it's saying something slightly different each time. That's okay, it was a custom in ancient Christian writing, too. It's not like Augustine didn't say the same thing a few times over. Since authors are human they get to have personal literary ticks that might be annoying. Schaeffer's happens to be that he rambles and, again, a person may ramble and still be a genius (like Augustine) not that Schaeffer per se is a genius.
Which is to say I'm still reading through Crazy for God here and there and it's an interesting read and I think a necessary one. Since I'm Protestant I'm not so big an advocate of the veneration of saints to see any reason Francis Schaeffer shouldn't be taken down a peg or two. See, in my estimation this doesn't make Francis less of a saint. Christ must increase and we must decrease. If Frank has a providentially appointed role to play in this then praise be to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that Frank has burst the bubble just a teensy bit about his dad. And if Frank is wrong on something or distorts or misrepresents something he seems to have cheerfully admitted it in advance. That's more than some Christian authors have managed to do. Would have been nice if John Macarthur had done that in a revised forward to Charismatic Chaos.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Schaeffer on Schaeffer, continued, "The Little Shit from Switzerland"
Interesting nickname Frank got, and interesting that he volunteers it in Crazy for God. Still more interesting that he seems to have no qualms more or less admitting he deserved the nickname. Something tells me that Frank has been more circumspect and fair than some of his pre-emptive critics may believe. That he notes that with a maudlin sort of self-pity he did some good paintings is telling, because even for a generally generous reader assuming good will Frank does drip with a bit of self-pity here and there in the book, more for things he wishes he hadn't done (it seems) than for what his parents did or didn't do.
I'm in section 3 and if I could have made any recommendation that Frank wouldn't have listened to, it would have been to trim section 2 a bit. Of course one's memoir is one's own and you can write in it whatever you wish so I suppose section 2 may yield unpredicted significance by the time I finish the book. It helps to establish what some of Frank's non-fans may be at pains to dispute, that Francis and Edith could be very hands-off parents in both good and terrible ways. But this is something to blog about later.
I'm in section 3 and if I could have made any recommendation that Frank wouldn't have listened to, it would have been to trim section 2 a bit. Of course one's memoir is one's own and you can write in it whatever you wish so I suppose section 2 may yield unpredicted significance by the time I finish the book. It helps to establish what some of Frank's non-fans may be at pains to dispute, that Francis and Edith could be very hands-off parents in both good and terrible ways. But this is something to blog about later.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
from the AP, religious hard-liners voted out in Pakistan
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/P/PAKISTAN_ISLAMISTS_LOSE?SITE=DEWIL&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
Sometimes I just parrot links, like other local Northwestern media outlets. ;)
Sometimes I just parrot links, like other local Northwestern media outlets. ;)
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Don't buy stuff when you're miserable if you can help it
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23057223?GT1=10856
Or have someone who isn't miserable buy things for you. This study indicates that the misery spends money approach isn't the same as people shopping to make themselves feel better because the people tested were certain that being sad did NOT affect their purchasing behavior when the statistics indicate the emotional state was an important variable. Sure, we could argue correlation that doesn't establish causation but I think we intuitively know that if you buy something to make yourself feel better, even if it's, say, a stiff drink, that this is so broadly and even anecdotally relevant that it's probably something to take to heart.
Or have someone who isn't miserable buy things for you. This study indicates that the misery spends money approach isn't the same as people shopping to make themselves feel better because the people tested were certain that being sad did NOT affect their purchasing behavior when the statistics indicate the emotional state was an important variable. Sure, we could argue correlation that doesn't establish causation but I think we intuitively know that if you buy something to make yourself feel better, even if it's, say, a stiff drink, that this is so broadly and even anecdotally relevant that it's probably something to take to heart.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
could be interesting ... .
http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2008/02/05/scholars-find-treasure-trove-of-early-new-testament-manuscripts/
Early manuscript material of biblical literature is usually interesting.
Early manuscript material of biblical literature is usually interesting.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
family as idol
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.
Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
He said to another man, "Follow me." But the man replied, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God."
Let no foreigner who has bound himself to the LORD say, "The LORD will surely exclude me from his people." and let not any eunuch complain, "I am only a dry tree." For this is what the LORD says: "To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant- to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will not be cut off.
And foreigners who bind themselves to the LORD to serve him, to love the name of the LORD, and to worship him, all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it and who hold fast to my covenant- these I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations." The Sovereign LORD declares— he who gathers the exiles of Israel: "I will gather still others to them besides those already gathered."
'I am to be the only inheritance the priests have. You are to give them no possession in Israel; I will be their possession.
Jesus replied, "I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. I know you are Abraham's descendants. Yet you are ready to kill me, because you have no room for my word. I am telling you what I have seen in the Father's presence, and you do what you have heard from your father."
"Abraham is our father," they answered.
"If you were Abraham's children," said Jesus, "then you would do the things Abraham did. As it is, you are determined to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did not do such things. You are doing the things your own father does.
"We are not illegitimate children," they protested. "The only Father we have is God himself."
Jesus said to them, "If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own; but he sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me! Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, why don't you believe me? He who belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God."
"I tell you the truth," Jesus replied, "no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—and with them, persecutions) and in the age to come, eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first."
These passages interest me not merely in the context of culture wars Christians have gotten into about the family but because it seems that evangelicals have been so fond of promoting marriage and family as an alternative to worldly thinking that it seems like that all these things, valuable though they are, need a corrective. Perhaps not even much of a corrective, but a little teaching from Christ never hurts, after all. And the reality is that it doesn't matter what one's confessional alliance happens to be, family can be a pernicious idol
It was through family that the child of the promise was promised. It was through family that Abraham was told he would be a blessing to the whole world. It was through Isaac and not Ishmael that the promise was given. It is even this early that Scripture reveals to us that flesh and blood family is not the same as the family given to us by the spirit of God, though both are by no means without value. But it is God Himself who is more valuable than all the family in the world, God Himself who provides the promise of family based on His own goodness.
When the people of Israel presumed upon the basis of their family heritage to be right with God the Lord punished them for it. When they presumed upon the basis of their family heritage to even know God Christ Himself said they were sons of the devil. Rather than be confronted with the reality of not being part of God's family His opponents protested that they were descendents of Abraham even after the Lord told them that this in itself counted for nothing. Why? Simply because as far as they were concerned Abraham was their ancestor. Literally true, but not true at the level of the spirit.
Salvation is through Christ, and not family, which can be exceptionally difficult for a person with a close family to recognize. We may be in settings where a family may divide over an issue and we should remember that Christ is more important than family. Family reconciliation may one day come but it is of secondary importance to serving Christ Himself. If our sacrifices are at the altar of family then family is the idol we worship rather than worship given to Christ. It's very simple and tempting to do. As Scripture so eloquently puts it, it can be very easy to suppose our salvation comes from the family we're in, the family we're from, the family we've made, the family we've kept. Our salvation doesn't come from the children we have our defend, in fact our very downfall can come from them. Our salvation does not come from living in peace with brothers who obstruct us from the path to Christ Himself. Our salvation does not come from us walking in the same path as family but through Christ.
It can be easy to decide to hate father or mother but not one's wife or husband. It can be easy to decide to hate one's brothers or sisters but not one's own children. It can be easy to hate one's own children and not one's brothers or sisters. In short, it can be easy for us to try to bargain with Christ Himself about what family we can love or hate as a condition of serving Him. Those are not the terms. We must hate them all for the sake of Christ if all of them are obstacles to following Him alone. It was not without cause that the Lord made Abraham bind up the child of the promise and offer him as a sacrifice before Him. The child was spared only after Abraham demonstrated by faith that he was willing to make the sacrifice.
There are some families Christ came to mend and some Christ came to destroy. There are some families Christ came to reconcile and some He came to tear apart. Trusting Christ means a great deal of bearing of the cross and it can mean that we have to trust that He will destroy as well as create, uproot as well as plant. We cannot decide who He has made to be our fleshly family any more than we can decide who He has made our family to be in spirit. Both are, in their various ways, gifts from Him, gifts that admittedly may be hard to be thankful for.
Who easily learns how to be thankful for a pedophile father or a drunken mother or an abusive father? Who easily learns how to be thankful to Christ for a neglectful parent? And yet in His way Christ reveals that even these can be signs of His mercy. Decades in the wilderness are hard but life enslaved to other gods is worse in the end. The exodus itself was no great test of God's people as the decades of moving toward the promised land. It hardly seems a coincidence that Israel's problem was that they stuck closer together than they stuck to Christ. I suppose that might be why when the chips were down God destroyed that entire generation. They had made their own form of family identity greater in their hearts than serving Christ.
When we consider the legacy we have or receive or create in our own family to be the paramount manifestation of Christ as our inheritance we are on the knife's edge of idolatry. We only have these things as gifts from Christ Himself, which He may take from us at any moment as He did with Job. If Christ takes our family from us do we curse Him? We can bring our sense of loss to Him but can we curse Him if he takes our idols from us and family or prestige or honor is what we used to give value to our lives? Sometimes we sow to war and reap war, sometimes we sow to family and reap family, sometimes we sow to anger and reap anger, sometimes we sow to Christ and reap Christ.
If we define ourselves by anything other than Christ, even if we claim to sow to those things in Christ's name, we deceive ourselves, especially if we do so thinking we are doing so for the sake of Christ. That reveals the depth of our own idolatry, of our own willingness to use Christ as a means to our end. If we recognize that we have nothing to give to Christ that is our own (because no blessing we have is truly ours so much as that which is given to us by Christ Himself) except our own sin and our own gratitude that Christ is merciful (if that is indeed even possible without the help of Christ Himself) then we have something, which is namely just the gift of Christ Himself. If we have this we have no need of other things ... and yet we live day by day (I certainly do) with the awareness that the gap between this sense of ought and is can be remarkable. It is very easy for Israel to wander in the desert for decades being God's people but not acting like it and reaping the deadly harvest of that. I suppose that is the warning we receive in each generation.
Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.
He said to another man, "Follow me." But the man replied, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God."
Let no foreigner who has bound himself to the LORD say, "The LORD will surely exclude me from his people." and let not any eunuch complain, "I am only a dry tree." For this is what the LORD says: "To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant- to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will not be cut off.
And foreigners who bind themselves to the LORD to serve him, to love the name of the LORD, and to worship him, all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it and who hold fast to my covenant- these I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations." The Sovereign LORD declares— he who gathers the exiles of Israel: "I will gather still others to them besides those already gathered."
'I am to be the only inheritance the priests have. You are to give them no possession in Israel; I will be their possession.
Jesus replied, "I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. I know you are Abraham's descendants. Yet you are ready to kill me, because you have no room for my word. I am telling you what I have seen in the Father's presence, and you do what you have heard from your father."
"Abraham is our father," they answered.
"If you were Abraham's children," said Jesus, "then you would do the things Abraham did. As it is, you are determined to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did not do such things. You are doing the things your own father does.
"We are not illegitimate children," they protested. "The only Father we have is God himself."
Jesus said to them, "If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own; but he sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me! Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, why don't you believe me? He who belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God."
"I tell you the truth," Jesus replied, "no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—and with them, persecutions) and in the age to come, eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first."
These passages interest me not merely in the context of culture wars Christians have gotten into about the family but because it seems that evangelicals have been so fond of promoting marriage and family as an alternative to worldly thinking that it seems like that all these things, valuable though they are, need a corrective. Perhaps not even much of a corrective, but a little teaching from Christ never hurts, after all. And the reality is that it doesn't matter what one's confessional alliance happens to be, family can be a pernicious idol
It was through family that the child of the promise was promised. It was through family that Abraham was told he would be a blessing to the whole world. It was through Isaac and not Ishmael that the promise was given. It is even this early that Scripture reveals to us that flesh and blood family is not the same as the family given to us by the spirit of God, though both are by no means without value. But it is God Himself who is more valuable than all the family in the world, God Himself who provides the promise of family based on His own goodness.
When the people of Israel presumed upon the basis of their family heritage to be right with God the Lord punished them for it. When they presumed upon the basis of their family heritage to even know God Christ Himself said they were sons of the devil. Rather than be confronted with the reality of not being part of God's family His opponents protested that they were descendents of Abraham even after the Lord told them that this in itself counted for nothing. Why? Simply because as far as they were concerned Abraham was their ancestor. Literally true, but not true at the level of the spirit.
Salvation is through Christ, and not family, which can be exceptionally difficult for a person with a close family to recognize. We may be in settings where a family may divide over an issue and we should remember that Christ is more important than family. Family reconciliation may one day come but it is of secondary importance to serving Christ Himself. If our sacrifices are at the altar of family then family is the idol we worship rather than worship given to Christ. It's very simple and tempting to do. As Scripture so eloquently puts it, it can be very easy to suppose our salvation comes from the family we're in, the family we're from, the family we've made, the family we've kept. Our salvation doesn't come from the children we have our defend, in fact our very downfall can come from them. Our salvation does not come from living in peace with brothers who obstruct us from the path to Christ Himself. Our salvation does not come from us walking in the same path as family but through Christ.
It can be easy to decide to hate father or mother but not one's wife or husband. It can be easy to decide to hate one's brothers or sisters but not one's own children. It can be easy to hate one's own children and not one's brothers or sisters. In short, it can be easy for us to try to bargain with Christ Himself about what family we can love or hate as a condition of serving Him. Those are not the terms. We must hate them all for the sake of Christ if all of them are obstacles to following Him alone. It was not without cause that the Lord made Abraham bind up the child of the promise and offer him as a sacrifice before Him. The child was spared only after Abraham demonstrated by faith that he was willing to make the sacrifice.
There are some families Christ came to mend and some Christ came to destroy. There are some families Christ came to reconcile and some He came to tear apart. Trusting Christ means a great deal of bearing of the cross and it can mean that we have to trust that He will destroy as well as create, uproot as well as plant. We cannot decide who He has made to be our fleshly family any more than we can decide who He has made our family to be in spirit. Both are, in their various ways, gifts from Him, gifts that admittedly may be hard to be thankful for.
Who easily learns how to be thankful for a pedophile father or a drunken mother or an abusive father? Who easily learns how to be thankful to Christ for a neglectful parent? And yet in His way Christ reveals that even these can be signs of His mercy. Decades in the wilderness are hard but life enslaved to other gods is worse in the end. The exodus itself was no great test of God's people as the decades of moving toward the promised land. It hardly seems a coincidence that Israel's problem was that they stuck closer together than they stuck to Christ. I suppose that might be why when the chips were down God destroyed that entire generation. They had made their own form of family identity greater in their hearts than serving Christ.
When we consider the legacy we have or receive or create in our own family to be the paramount manifestation of Christ as our inheritance we are on the knife's edge of idolatry. We only have these things as gifts from Christ Himself, which He may take from us at any moment as He did with Job. If Christ takes our family from us do we curse Him? We can bring our sense of loss to Him but can we curse Him if he takes our idols from us and family or prestige or honor is what we used to give value to our lives? Sometimes we sow to war and reap war, sometimes we sow to family and reap family, sometimes we sow to anger and reap anger, sometimes we sow to Christ and reap Christ.
If we define ourselves by anything other than Christ, even if we claim to sow to those things in Christ's name, we deceive ourselves, especially if we do so thinking we are doing so for the sake of Christ. That reveals the depth of our own idolatry, of our own willingness to use Christ as a means to our end. If we recognize that we have nothing to give to Christ that is our own (because no blessing we have is truly ours so much as that which is given to us by Christ Himself) except our own sin and our own gratitude that Christ is merciful (if that is indeed even possible without the help of Christ Himself) then we have something, which is namely just the gift of Christ Himself. If we have this we have no need of other things ... and yet we live day by day (I certainly do) with the awareness that the gap between this sense of ought and is can be remarkable. It is very easy for Israel to wander in the desert for decades being God's people but not acting like it and reaping the deadly harvest of that. I suppose that is the warning we receive in each generation.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
sometimes I'm lazy, so here's a link to some stuff
http://trsbu.blogspot.com/2008/01/banned-from-church-abuse-of-church.html
A few notable excerpts:
Seems straightforward, and is an interesting point. I'm not in a position to dispute the accuracy of the claim. I suppose for the sake of extending this observation it wouldn't surprise me if this sort of thing happened amongst pastors within denominational structures. In fact the Episcopalian church leadership has discussed disciplining priests who don't agree with them on a few things, a point I hardly think I need to refer to in any detail because if you do a tiny amount of on-line research the news virtually reaches you. This obviously doesn't mean church discipline can't be practiced.
My own view, for reasons I will not discuss as I find it too boring, is that this all reminds me of how the kingdom divided after the death of Solomon. His descendents had the opportunity to rule as servants and to rule in the way God advised but they didn't and they used the structures God provided as leverage for or against fellowship in either direction. The truth was that neither side of the divided kingdom was really the least bit godly or righteous but that has never, historically, stopped God's people from doing stupid things in the name of Yahweh or Jesus.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120061470848399079.html?mod=todays_us_nonsub_weekendjournal
http://www.founders.org/blog/2008/01/wsj-on-church-discipline.html
When the Wall Street Journal writes about church discipline you know it's an evangelical fad. :) I mean, really, that the WSJ covered this at all is sad. Never mind the questions about how biased it was. That a pastor called the cops on a little old lady who apparently objected that the pastor didn't see fit to install deacons according to the by-laws and the instruction of Scripture is sad. To claim that the woman was guilty of sinful divisiveness and discord for that is, well, even if I suppose the charge against the woman could even possibly be true (which I doubt) "church discipline" of that particular variety just shames Christ.
On the other hand, how one responds to such unfair discipline can be just as stupid. It sometimes comes to my attention that this or that case of church discipline is inequitable and the solution is in some rare cases to hit the secular world, as the case linked to above, whether because a pastor calls the cops or because someone decides to leak a story about a church issue to the press from within the community (I'm thinking here of situations like the Overlake scandal in the Puget Sound region years ago).
It's possible in the process of objecting to injustice to perpetrate injustice, even of the same kind and degree that one is objecting to. When the kingdom divided Israel forsook the house of David and in objecting to the injustice turned to idols. The kingdom of Judah also turned to idols and in both cases both kingdoms claimed to worship the living God and this was essentially nothing more than a sham. That Christ came to the entire divided people of Israel and revealed to Jew and Samaritan alike their lost state is what interests me.
The distinction between church discipline and pastoral discipline interests me because it raises the natural question of whether pastoral discipline has any meaning without church discipline. If the pastors urge the body not to ostracize someone but the body ostracizes the member anyway then in effect the body is enforcing a level of church discipline the pastors didn't endorse. Whether or not the pastors or the congregants err in that matter is obviously subject to debate based on circumstance but I have no reason to suppose it isn't possible that either the pastors or congregants may err in choosing one way or the other.
I will freely admit that I tend to identify myself as a Protestant of the evangelical stripe but it seems like church discipline is the fad of the 00's the way courtship was a fad in the 90s. Every church epoch has it's own fads. For some epochs of the Church it was Russian Orthodox people persecuting Poles (but then, really, it seems almost everyone ganged up on the poor Poles who hardly ever seemed to deserve it so far as I could tell). There were strange fads like the curse of Ham or something like that which attempted to rationalize racism on the basis of an obscure biblical text.
Well, I'm off to bed soon.
A few notable excerpts:
Church discipline, however, is all too frequently viewed in an altogether
contrary way. Many pastors, who prove not to be truly pastoral at all, exploit
church discipline as a legitimate threat to hold over a congregation as a way to
manipulate and to control the people without any disagreement with him, however
small and legitimate disagreement may be.Consequently, many evangelical churches are far more cultic than evangelicals are willing to admit. The origination of cults is not principally from errant doctrine but from errant behavior by charismatic leaders whose personal insecurities lead them, when their authority seems challenged even slightly (and usually legitimately), to
resort to desperate measures to maintain their grip upon their followers'
affections, if not blind allegiance and devotion.... Only rarely have I witnessed an act of church discipline that led to
excommunication that actually followed the biblically authorized form and
pattern and was not incited by a pastor's animus springing from personal
insecurity toward a member who asked "the wrong question." Those legitimate
cases entailed actual, demonstrable, documentable cases of recalcitrant refusal
to repent for obvious sinful behavior.
Far more frequently, however, the church discipline cases that I have
witnessed entailed dismissal of godly Christians whose disagreements with the
pastor incited his personal insecurities, triggering his hostility and
revengeful and retaliatory campaign to purge the church of anyone who dared
disagree with him. ...
Seems straightforward, and is an interesting point. I'm not in a position to dispute the accuracy of the claim. I suppose for the sake of extending this observation it wouldn't surprise me if this sort of thing happened amongst pastors within denominational structures. In fact the Episcopalian church leadership has discussed disciplining priests who don't agree with them on a few things, a point I hardly think I need to refer to in any detail because if you do a tiny amount of on-line research the news virtually reaches you. This obviously doesn't mean church discipline can't be practiced.
My own view, for reasons I will not discuss as I find it too boring, is that this all reminds me of how the kingdom divided after the death of Solomon. His descendents had the opportunity to rule as servants and to rule in the way God advised but they didn't and they used the structures God provided as leverage for or against fellowship in either direction. The truth was that neither side of the divided kingdom was really the least bit godly or righteous but that has never, historically, stopped God's people from doing stupid things in the name of Yahweh or Jesus.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120061470848399079.html?mod=todays_us_nonsub_weekendjournal
http://www.founders.org/blog/2008/01/wsj-on-church-discipline.html
When the Wall Street Journal writes about church discipline you know it's an evangelical fad. :) I mean, really, that the WSJ covered this at all is sad. Never mind the questions about how biased it was. That a pastor called the cops on a little old lady who apparently objected that the pastor didn't see fit to install deacons according to the by-laws and the instruction of Scripture is sad. To claim that the woman was guilty of sinful divisiveness and discord for that is, well, even if I suppose the charge against the woman could even possibly be true (which I doubt) "church discipline" of that particular variety just shames Christ.
On the other hand, how one responds to such unfair discipline can be just as stupid. It sometimes comes to my attention that this or that case of church discipline is inequitable and the solution is in some rare cases to hit the secular world, as the case linked to above, whether because a pastor calls the cops or because someone decides to leak a story about a church issue to the press from within the community (I'm thinking here of situations like the Overlake scandal in the Puget Sound region years ago).
It's possible in the process of objecting to injustice to perpetrate injustice, even of the same kind and degree that one is objecting to. When the kingdom divided Israel forsook the house of David and in objecting to the injustice turned to idols. The kingdom of Judah also turned to idols and in both cases both kingdoms claimed to worship the living God and this was essentially nothing more than a sham. That Christ came to the entire divided people of Israel and revealed to Jew and Samaritan alike their lost state is what interests me.
The distinction between church discipline and pastoral discipline interests me because it raises the natural question of whether pastoral discipline has any meaning without church discipline. If the pastors urge the body not to ostracize someone but the body ostracizes the member anyway then in effect the body is enforcing a level of church discipline the pastors didn't endorse. Whether or not the pastors or the congregants err in that matter is obviously subject to debate based on circumstance but I have no reason to suppose it isn't possible that either the pastors or congregants may err in choosing one way or the other.
I will freely admit that I tend to identify myself as a Protestant of the evangelical stripe but it seems like church discipline is the fad of the 00's the way courtship was a fad in the 90s. Every church epoch has it's own fads. For some epochs of the Church it was Russian Orthodox people persecuting Poles (but then, really, it seems almost everyone ganged up on the poor Poles who hardly ever seemed to deserve it so far as I could tell). There were strange fads like the curse of Ham or something like that which attempted to rationalize racism on the basis of an obscure biblical text.
Well, I'm off to bed soon.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
family legacy, Christians, and mediocrity
Something that strikes me about Frank's almost agnostic tone in Crazy for God is that it at some point it doesn't matter who your parents were, it does not necessarily follow that a hero of the Christian faith will raise a child who is also a hero of the faith, too. Samson's parents raised a stupid horny brute of a man and while it may be tempting for people to say they dropped the ball in raising Samson this is reading into biblical text more than can possibly be warranted. Samuel was a man of God who raised horrible sons. Saul was an insecure, insane king who turned from the Lord who somehow managed to raise a son who was a great ally to David. David was said to be a man after God's own heart and yet many of his children were foul. Solomon had wisdom like no other and yet his kids were apostates of a peculiarly pathetic kind. As Paul put it, fleshly descent from Abraham hardly meant one is a child of the promise.
While some would see this as bad reasoning it's not unbiblical and more to the point, if children choose a path of sin after parents have done the best they can it's wrong to blame the parents. This doesn't excuse sin in the parents, of course, but as the Lord told Ezekiel, He will punish sons for their own sins and fathers for their own sins. Of course if the mystery of lawlessness weren't so mysterious we wouldn't need the greater mystery of Christ to save us from it, which is to say I'm not going to pretend to know much more than what I have learned studying Scripture and the lives of others around me, to say nothing of my own life.
Now, supposing for the sake of argument, Frank Schaeffer does not live up to his father's legacy this is a modern reminder that it doesn't matter how good a Christian you may seem to be or have been, it's no insurance policy on the faith (or lack thereof) in your children. As Ecclesiastes framed the matter so starkly, there is wisdom but the wisdom literature itself has limits. Job is a corrective to the idea that the Christian faith is based on what amounts to sympathetic magic. A Christian upbringing can increase the odds but is no substitute for the work of the Spirit.
So even if I suppose that Frank is not a chip off the old block or a disgrace to his father's name. Well, in a sense my response is "So what? This is what we see in Scripture." In Christ our family is not necessarily flesh and blood but those whom Christ provides us. Ideally it's awfully nice to have it both ways and to have flesh and blood family and family in Christ all at the same time but life and death are what they are and not everyone has the beenfit of Christian biological family.
Obviously Christians can and should raise their children to love the Lord but one doesn't even have to be a parent to observe that this an act of faith, not of certainty. I can't help but wonder since I am not a parent where the line is between really trusting the Lord that your kids will follow Christ and a form of religious inculcation that is essentially Pavlovian. Raising your kids to believe in Scripture, love Jesus, and avoid sin doesn't mean they won't end up becoming atheists or homosexuals or drug addicts. The world is just too mysterious and God's ways too mysterious. Raise up a child in the way that he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it but sapiential sayings have their limit. Wisdom from the Lord is not necessarily the same as a promise from the Lord. Job and his comforters discovered this, as did the Preacher. For Francis Schaeffer's legacy, not everyone who imbibed worldview discussions came out the end of it a Christan and Francis Schaeffer was always honest enough to admit that this was a real risk in that approach, a risk that some others may not have taken to heart.
Something that has been on my mind lately is to compare Crazy for God to Addicted to Mediocrity. I'm not going to beat around the bush, AtM was essentially an earnest mediocrity indicting mediocrity. It's not as though there is no place for that but I wonder if at some level the problem is in indicting mediocrity itself. How do we define mediocrity? Every Lutheran named Bach is a mediocrity in the wake of Johann Sebastian, after all. Is this why you could search high and low across Germany and possibly not find a single person named Bach who is a professional musician?
What did Frank actually accomplish writing Addicted to Mediocrity? I don't really know. Did converting to Orthodoxy change anything? Somehow I don't think that's likely. For that matter is the charge that mediocrity is bad entirely valid? If we are to not think of ourselves more highly than we ought what if some of us are mediocrities? Wouldn't it be fairer to have a realistic view of ourselves than to suppose we are more than mediocrities? If Frank thought evangelicals were not living up to the legacy of his father what was he doing? It might well have been the pot calling the kettle black. It might also have been the nose deciding it was not a part of the body because it was not an ear. Tough to say, but Frank's earlier book left me thinking that the objections against mediocrity were too passionate and repetitive to leave me thinking Frank had the actual answer.
So in a way Crazy for God is a relief to read. If Frank has come through the other side of Addicted to Mediocrity able to admit he has had at best a middling career is that bad? Since I haven't paid attention to anything he's done since Addicted to Mediocrity up until now I don't feel particularly bad saying that if Frank had done more I might have paid any attention. Now, to be fair, I have spent a lot more time watching anime, collecting Miyazaki films, importing chamber music for classical guitar from Europe, and collecting old blues recordings to pay much attention to Frank. At the risk of belittling him by taking his earlier argument seriously, I was too busy finding what was excellent to be distracted by a mediocrity (which is not to say I'm not a mediocrity myself, I'm probably less than that). But perhaps in that respect I did Frank Schaeffer the favor of ignoring him in favor of all the great music and literature I discovered that he had nothing to do with.
While some would see this as bad reasoning it's not unbiblical and more to the point, if children choose a path of sin after parents have done the best they can it's wrong to blame the parents. This doesn't excuse sin in the parents, of course, but as the Lord told Ezekiel, He will punish sons for their own sins and fathers for their own sins. Of course if the mystery of lawlessness weren't so mysterious we wouldn't need the greater mystery of Christ to save us from it, which is to say I'm not going to pretend to know much more than what I have learned studying Scripture and the lives of others around me, to say nothing of my own life.
Now, supposing for the sake of argument, Frank Schaeffer does not live up to his father's legacy this is a modern reminder that it doesn't matter how good a Christian you may seem to be or have been, it's no insurance policy on the faith (or lack thereof) in your children. As Ecclesiastes framed the matter so starkly, there is wisdom but the wisdom literature itself has limits. Job is a corrective to the idea that the Christian faith is based on what amounts to sympathetic magic. A Christian upbringing can increase the odds but is no substitute for the work of the Spirit.
So even if I suppose that Frank is not a chip off the old block or a disgrace to his father's name. Well, in a sense my response is "So what? This is what we see in Scripture." In Christ our family is not necessarily flesh and blood but those whom Christ provides us. Ideally it's awfully nice to have it both ways and to have flesh and blood family and family in Christ all at the same time but life and death are what they are and not everyone has the beenfit of Christian biological family.
Obviously Christians can and should raise their children to love the Lord but one doesn't even have to be a parent to observe that this an act of faith, not of certainty. I can't help but wonder since I am not a parent where the line is between really trusting the Lord that your kids will follow Christ and a form of religious inculcation that is essentially Pavlovian. Raising your kids to believe in Scripture, love Jesus, and avoid sin doesn't mean they won't end up becoming atheists or homosexuals or drug addicts. The world is just too mysterious and God's ways too mysterious. Raise up a child in the way that he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it but sapiential sayings have their limit. Wisdom from the Lord is not necessarily the same as a promise from the Lord. Job and his comforters discovered this, as did the Preacher. For Francis Schaeffer's legacy, not everyone who imbibed worldview discussions came out the end of it a Christan and Francis Schaeffer was always honest enough to admit that this was a real risk in that approach, a risk that some others may not have taken to heart.
Something that has been on my mind lately is to compare Crazy for God to Addicted to Mediocrity. I'm not going to beat around the bush, AtM was essentially an earnest mediocrity indicting mediocrity. It's not as though there is no place for that but I wonder if at some level the problem is in indicting mediocrity itself. How do we define mediocrity? Every Lutheran named Bach is a mediocrity in the wake of Johann Sebastian, after all. Is this why you could search high and low across Germany and possibly not find a single person named Bach who is a professional musician?
What did Frank actually accomplish writing Addicted to Mediocrity? I don't really know. Did converting to Orthodoxy change anything? Somehow I don't think that's likely. For that matter is the charge that mediocrity is bad entirely valid? If we are to not think of ourselves more highly than we ought what if some of us are mediocrities? Wouldn't it be fairer to have a realistic view of ourselves than to suppose we are more than mediocrities? If Frank thought evangelicals were not living up to the legacy of his father what was he doing? It might well have been the pot calling the kettle black. It might also have been the nose deciding it was not a part of the body because it was not an ear. Tough to say, but Frank's earlier book left me thinking that the objections against mediocrity were too passionate and repetitive to leave me thinking Frank had the actual answer.
So in a way Crazy for God is a relief to read. If Frank has come through the other side of Addicted to Mediocrity able to admit he has had at best a middling career is that bad? Since I haven't paid attention to anything he's done since Addicted to Mediocrity up until now I don't feel particularly bad saying that if Frank had done more I might have paid any attention. Now, to be fair, I have spent a lot more time watching anime, collecting Miyazaki films, importing chamber music for classical guitar from Europe, and collecting old blues recordings to pay much attention to Frank. At the risk of belittling him by taking his earlier argument seriously, I was too busy finding what was excellent to be distracted by a mediocrity (which is not to say I'm not a mediocrity myself, I'm probably less than that). But perhaps in that respect I did Frank Schaeffer the favor of ignoring him in favor of all the great music and literature I discovered that he had nothing to do with.
thoughts on Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God, chapter 15
This chapter, particularly, interests me because it encapsulates one of the most important themes that comes across in the book, that those we revere as saints were just crazy, fallible people corrupted by sin. This does not, however, lessen their humanity or their capacity to influence people for good.
I had come across people complaining that this b0oks is poorly written and slags Francis Schaeffer. Since Francis Schaeffer is dead at any rate anyway I don't see how he would feel he has suffered any indignity through his son writing a memoir, even a memoir that mentions that his father was hot-tempered and abusive to his wife, or that his mother was often a self-righteous grandstanding woman and that the whole family was apt to judge people for not having the right doctrinal beliefs.
This can sound suspiciously familiar to someone who grew up in a background like that. What I find striking that is not borne out in Schaeffer's memoir yet (but suspect I will) is that children who grow up in such a setting tend to carry on that sort of legacy of a spiritual superiority complex that masks a virtually innate uncertainty about the reality of Christ. Doctrinal and political purity are necessary to ensure that one's faith is actually real, or one must search for that church which is the most real and apostolic and authentic and authoritative because the reality that there is no tangible evidence apart from the witness of the Spirit in one's own life is too disturbing a foundation for the reality of Christ. Not to say that there is no evidence whatsoever but a professor who was also a minister once explained to me that Christians can be tempted to explain faith in Christ on the basis of statistical rather than convergent probability. It is by faith we even accept that God created the worlds.
Schaeffer's most interesting comment is also patently obvious, every human has a dark side. In our desperation to have a hero, someone to look up to, we settle on amazingly fallible people, people who have grave and even terrible flaws. And we look to these people to be the voice of God to us within this life.
That we make the most important decisions of our lives with a paucity of information, decisions like where to go to college, who to marry, what our beliefs about the universe itself will be, that people hold up a man like Francis Schaeffer who had an honorary doctorate in theology that in itself was basically not worth very much as a hero of the Christian faith can't be avoided. That decisions that make the least sense rationally can work out the best could be chalked up to intuition, and some statistical studies have suggested that simple guesswork can be best--it may be that the brain can handle complex decisions more readily through hunches and guesswork than conscious thought because the brain cannot handle all of the mess of information in sequential order but can respond to, as it were, the gestalt presented.
What is most intriguing is how Schaeffer writes about the mysteriy of human need, how religious leaders must become in the mind of their devotees more than the sum of their fallible and even awful parts. What he writes is that this is not a sign of hypocrisy in the person who is made a saint, it is a sign of the sheer desperation of those who appointed them saints.
I am not at a point where I find much value in treating Christians of any kind as heroes to be looked up to. It simply isn't necessary in the sense of, say, a child looking up to his parents or wanting to be like Superman. That's not necessarily wrong to do and Scripture says in the Psalms that it is good to make the godly men and women of the land your heroes. But that is not the same as trusting in Christ himself. If we cannot love our neighbor who we have seen we most certainly cannot love Christ, whom we have not seen. If we cannot see Christ in our neighbor then will we see Christ? If we appoint fallible people as saints whether in our own hearts or at the acceptance of those who have come before us it is hardly a bad thing, but it does not benefit it us in any way to forget that the saints are no better than us. Their example is not in who they really were but in that they sought Christ.
I still respect the influence and legacy of Francis Schaeffer not because I would have wanted to meet the man (I basically wouldn't and would consider meeting him unnecessary); and not even because I agree with that much of what he had to say any more; but because of his eagerness to follow the Lord and to continue doing so. I think Frank Schaeffer's book is a necessary antidote to the kind of veneration of saints that Protestants pretend they don't do.
I don't think paying respects to the influence of godly men and women is in any way problematic but I don't think any saint's reputation suffers by pointing out that they dragged themselves through the mud. It is Christ's goodness imparted to the saint that makes them a saint, not the frequently corrupted and sinful desires of the saint himself. Even Scripture itself reveals that it is possible to become important in God's people simply for killing the right person at the right time but most people these days would not suppose you attain memorable status in the people of God these days just by killing the right uncircumcised Phillistine. A mudering philanderer who covers his tracks and brings disaster on his people be disobeying God is, nevertheless, described as a man after God's own heart.
So far Crazy for God is a bit sloppy but I don't expect precision in a memoir from the son of Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer's own books were not really all that precise in the way that someone like Bonhoeffer or Stott or Augustine were precise, all in drastically different ways. What has interested me in the book is the fracas about how Frank, as described by reviewers, feels culpable for turning his father toward the Christian Right and having a disproportionally large contribution to the Christian rightwing evangelicalism he now detests. I can't help but wonder if a lot of clucking done about Frank Schaeffer's book comes from people who don't think he's theologically or politically conservative in the right ways. That Frank thinks the current war is stupid and illegal probably won't be welcome to any soldiers who support the cause but then this underlines my observation that saints (and I do not suppose Frank Schaeffer isn't one just because people have claimed he has disgraced his family legacy) are severely messed up people.
I had come across people complaining that this b0oks is poorly written and slags Francis Schaeffer. Since Francis Schaeffer is dead at any rate anyway I don't see how he would feel he has suffered any indignity through his son writing a memoir, even a memoir that mentions that his father was hot-tempered and abusive to his wife, or that his mother was often a self-righteous grandstanding woman and that the whole family was apt to judge people for not having the right doctrinal beliefs.
This can sound suspiciously familiar to someone who grew up in a background like that. What I find striking that is not borne out in Schaeffer's memoir yet (but suspect I will) is that children who grow up in such a setting tend to carry on that sort of legacy of a spiritual superiority complex that masks a virtually innate uncertainty about the reality of Christ. Doctrinal and political purity are necessary to ensure that one's faith is actually real, or one must search for that church which is the most real and apostolic and authentic and authoritative because the reality that there is no tangible evidence apart from the witness of the Spirit in one's own life is too disturbing a foundation for the reality of Christ. Not to say that there is no evidence whatsoever but a professor who was also a minister once explained to me that Christians can be tempted to explain faith in Christ on the basis of statistical rather than convergent probability. It is by faith we even accept that God created the worlds.
Schaeffer's most interesting comment is also patently obvious, every human has a dark side. In our desperation to have a hero, someone to look up to, we settle on amazingly fallible people, people who have grave and even terrible flaws. And we look to these people to be the voice of God to us within this life.
That we make the most important decisions of our lives with a paucity of information, decisions like where to go to college, who to marry, what our beliefs about the universe itself will be, that people hold up a man like Francis Schaeffer who had an honorary doctorate in theology that in itself was basically not worth very much as a hero of the Christian faith can't be avoided. That decisions that make the least sense rationally can work out the best could be chalked up to intuition, and some statistical studies have suggested that simple guesswork can be best--it may be that the brain can handle complex decisions more readily through hunches and guesswork than conscious thought because the brain cannot handle all of the mess of information in sequential order but can respond to, as it were, the gestalt presented.
What is most intriguing is how Schaeffer writes about the mysteriy of human need, how religious leaders must become in the mind of their devotees more than the sum of their fallible and even awful parts. What he writes is that this is not a sign of hypocrisy in the person who is made a saint, it is a sign of the sheer desperation of those who appointed them saints.
I am not at a point where I find much value in treating Christians of any kind as heroes to be looked up to. It simply isn't necessary in the sense of, say, a child looking up to his parents or wanting to be like Superman. That's not necessarily wrong to do and Scripture says in the Psalms that it is good to make the godly men and women of the land your heroes. But that is not the same as trusting in Christ himself. If we cannot love our neighbor who we have seen we most certainly cannot love Christ, whom we have not seen. If we cannot see Christ in our neighbor then will we see Christ? If we appoint fallible people as saints whether in our own hearts or at the acceptance of those who have come before us it is hardly a bad thing, but it does not benefit it us in any way to forget that the saints are no better than us. Their example is not in who they really were but in that they sought Christ.
I still respect the influence and legacy of Francis Schaeffer not because I would have wanted to meet the man (I basically wouldn't and would consider meeting him unnecessary); and not even because I agree with that much of what he had to say any more; but because of his eagerness to follow the Lord and to continue doing so. I think Frank Schaeffer's book is a necessary antidote to the kind of veneration of saints that Protestants pretend they don't do.
I don't think paying respects to the influence of godly men and women is in any way problematic but I don't think any saint's reputation suffers by pointing out that they dragged themselves through the mud. It is Christ's goodness imparted to the saint that makes them a saint, not the frequently corrupted and sinful desires of the saint himself. Even Scripture itself reveals that it is possible to become important in God's people simply for killing the right person at the right time but most people these days would not suppose you attain memorable status in the people of God these days just by killing the right uncircumcised Phillistine. A mudering philanderer who covers his tracks and brings disaster on his people be disobeying God is, nevertheless, described as a man after God's own heart.
So far Crazy for God is a bit sloppy but I don't expect precision in a memoir from the son of Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer's own books were not really all that precise in the way that someone like Bonhoeffer or Stott or Augustine were precise, all in drastically different ways. What has interested me in the book is the fracas about how Frank, as described by reviewers, feels culpable for turning his father toward the Christian Right and having a disproportionally large contribution to the Christian rightwing evangelicalism he now detests. I can't help but wonder if a lot of clucking done about Frank Schaeffer's book comes from people who don't think he's theologically or politically conservative in the right ways. That Frank thinks the current war is stupid and illegal probably won't be welcome to any soldiers who support the cause but then this underlines my observation that saints (and I do not suppose Frank Schaeffer isn't one just because people have claimed he has disgraced his family legacy) are severely messed up people.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
This is not the age of clowns for kids
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080116/od_nm/clowns_odd_dc
Maybe too many kids have grown up in the last sixty years watching Batman kick the crap out of a psychopathic mudering clown for clowns to have much PR with kids anymore? Or maybe clowns are just not that fun?
Maybe too many kids have grown up in the last sixty years watching Batman kick the crap out of a psychopathic mudering clown for clowns to have much PR with kids anymore? Or maybe clowns are just not that fun?
Friday, January 11, 2008
book arrived in the mail
Yeah, I know, big deal. Crazy for God just arrived in the mail for me this week and it's on the queue (sic) of books to get to. I still have Bauckham's book to tackle about the gospels as based on eyewitness testimony which sounds interesting but it's Bauckham so it's not the more literary of styles. I'm feeling like I need to return to fiction. Fiction engages a different part of the mind and heart than non-fiction does and it just seems I've been overdue for that for some years.
But Crazy for God is on the list of things to get to. I've been reading the forward and Schaeffer obviously regrets having what he felt was too formative and influential a hand in the development of the Christian right. He's obviously not agnostic or atheist or he would have made THAT clear. But he's obviously what a lot of politically conservative evangelical Christians would consider apostate. I've had enough friends who are theologically conservative but politically liberal over the years (i.e. Lutherans, a Catholic or two, et al. give or take the standard dividing issues that every Calvinist seems to feel are dividers) and I have no problem with someone being a Christian who is opposed to the current war. I'm apathetic about the current war because I tend to be more old school in my approach to conservative politics and foreign policy. I wasn't sure about the grounds but I thought Hussein should have been deposed at the end of the first Gulf War so it's hard to muster enthusiasm either way. I don't think there have been very fair handling of the soldiers' lives in the present outing but I admit that's a purely personal sentiment.
Since Schaeffer is so vehemently and publicly against the war and has said the current persident is on an illegal and idiotic misadventure costing the lives of servicemen and putting his own children in harm's way (one of his sons is in the service) I have a feeling that as with anyone opposed to the war there's going to be some fiery rhetoric somewhere in the book.
I have read folks say the book is problematic, for those who feel Schaeffer sr has been dishonored by it. Well, I have to admit I'm still curious. Schaefffer has been appropriated like a saint in evangelical circles and while Schaeffer had good points no saint really helps you become a better person if they're dead and you haven't met them, not in the sense of them being active to help you. On the other hand, reflecting on the life of a saint can help you focus on aspects of your own walk with the Lord. I have been of the mind that Protestants venerate saints the same way Catholics or Orthodox do but trick themselves into thinking that they aren't being idolators because they don't do it the same way. But my hunch is that when I get done with Crazy for God I may be a step closer to discovering that evangelicals can have the same problems with veneration of saints they claim Catholics have.
Since I've dug into the shifting exegetical and interpretive issues of the epistle of Jude I have been aware that Christians embrace traditions that are held to be sacred without recognizing that these traditions are a bit more, um, flexible than anyone is comfortable admitting. Where some lock down and attempt to say that this or that tradition is the authoritative tradition I notice that some things that date from the apostolic time, like the assumption of angelic human hybrids in Jude and the citation of 1 Enoch, others hold that that view is not to be held.
Others decide that with this apperance of shifting sands of Christian tradition to throw the baby out with the bathwater and embrace rationalism, atheism, or some other religious alternative.
I have wondered over the years if the problem for us is that we serve a living Lord and a living Lord is a moving target. The traditions that surround him can point to Him but are not themselves Him. Eugene Peterson's invocation of the dead bark of the tree that protects the living plant may be useful if reapplied. The bark of tradition itself may be dead but it can still point to the living Christ and it can do this regardless of which tradition is invoked. His kingdom is not of this world and if before His coming His kingdom was divided and splintered because His people were disobedient and idolators then it would stand to reason that what happened among sinful creatures before His coming could happen after His ascent upon rising from the dead.
And in the same way the tribes of Israel dispute who has the real claim to true worship of Yahweh while all sides reveal their being of His people and of being corrupted by sin. Fortunately we have the hope that Christ Himself will return, as His first coming was promised.
So, uh, that's my ponderings of late.
Man, I have so many books to catch up on it's embarrssing. I should spend less time on-line and more time with my nose in a book, huh? Not as though you few people who read this blog see much of me here, eh?
But Crazy for God is on the list of things to get to. I've been reading the forward and Schaeffer obviously regrets having what he felt was too formative and influential a hand in the development of the Christian right. He's obviously not agnostic or atheist or he would have made THAT clear. But he's obviously what a lot of politically conservative evangelical Christians would consider apostate. I've had enough friends who are theologically conservative but politically liberal over the years (i.e. Lutherans, a Catholic or two, et al. give or take the standard dividing issues that every Calvinist seems to feel are dividers) and I have no problem with someone being a Christian who is opposed to the current war. I'm apathetic about the current war because I tend to be more old school in my approach to conservative politics and foreign policy. I wasn't sure about the grounds but I thought Hussein should have been deposed at the end of the first Gulf War so it's hard to muster enthusiasm either way. I don't think there have been very fair handling of the soldiers' lives in the present outing but I admit that's a purely personal sentiment.
Since Schaeffer is so vehemently and publicly against the war and has said the current persident is on an illegal and idiotic misadventure costing the lives of servicemen and putting his own children in harm's way (one of his sons is in the service) I have a feeling that as with anyone opposed to the war there's going to be some fiery rhetoric somewhere in the book.
I have read folks say the book is problematic, for those who feel Schaeffer sr has been dishonored by it. Well, I have to admit I'm still curious. Schaefffer has been appropriated like a saint in evangelical circles and while Schaeffer had good points no saint really helps you become a better person if they're dead and you haven't met them, not in the sense of them being active to help you. On the other hand, reflecting on the life of a saint can help you focus on aspects of your own walk with the Lord. I have been of the mind that Protestants venerate saints the same way Catholics or Orthodox do but trick themselves into thinking that they aren't being idolators because they don't do it the same way. But my hunch is that when I get done with Crazy for God I may be a step closer to discovering that evangelicals can have the same problems with veneration of saints they claim Catholics have.
Since I've dug into the shifting exegetical and interpretive issues of the epistle of Jude I have been aware that Christians embrace traditions that are held to be sacred without recognizing that these traditions are a bit more, um, flexible than anyone is comfortable admitting. Where some lock down and attempt to say that this or that tradition is the authoritative tradition I notice that some things that date from the apostolic time, like the assumption of angelic human hybrids in Jude and the citation of 1 Enoch, others hold that that view is not to be held.
Others decide that with this apperance of shifting sands of Christian tradition to throw the baby out with the bathwater and embrace rationalism, atheism, or some other religious alternative.
I have wondered over the years if the problem for us is that we serve a living Lord and a living Lord is a moving target. The traditions that surround him can point to Him but are not themselves Him. Eugene Peterson's invocation of the dead bark of the tree that protects the living plant may be useful if reapplied. The bark of tradition itself may be dead but it can still point to the living Christ and it can do this regardless of which tradition is invoked. His kingdom is not of this world and if before His coming His kingdom was divided and splintered because His people were disobedient and idolators then it would stand to reason that what happened among sinful creatures before His coming could happen after His ascent upon rising from the dead.
And in the same way the tribes of Israel dispute who has the real claim to true worship of Yahweh while all sides reveal their being of His people and of being corrupted by sin. Fortunately we have the hope that Christ Himself will return, as His first coming was promised.
So, uh, that's my ponderings of late.
Man, I have so many books to catch up on it's embarrssing. I should spend less time on-line and more time with my nose in a book, huh? Not as though you few people who read this blog see much of me here, eh?
Thursday, January 10, 2008
reasons it's good to not simultaneously be Christian, conservative, AND a Jack van Impe style dispensationalist
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/world/middleeast/11prexy.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/world/middleeast/10jericho.html?_r=1&ref=middleeast&oref=slogin
This would necessarily be damned if he does and damned if he doesn't because if he fails it was a fool's errand and a pipe dream but if he succeeds he's the Antichrist. As an amillenial partial preterist I've got no reason to suppose this dichotomy is even real but it's practically real if Christians voted for Bush and also believe that anyone who successfully brokers a peace deal between the Arabs and Israel is the Antichrist. On that score Bush has been promising to be the Antichrist since the start of his first term, more or less.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/10/world/middleeast/10jericho.html?_r=1&ref=middleeast&oref=slogin
This would necessarily be damned if he does and damned if he doesn't because if he fails it was a fool's errand and a pipe dream but if he succeeds he's the Antichrist. As an amillenial partial preterist I've got no reason to suppose this dichotomy is even real but it's practically real if Christians voted for Bush and also believe that anyone who successfully brokers a peace deal between the Arabs and Israel is the Antichrist. On that score Bush has been promising to be the Antichrist since the start of his first term, more or less.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
David and the census
2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21 are interesting passages for providing different insights into the same event. Samuel reveals that God's anger was kindled against Israel and that He punished them by inciting David to take a census. The Chronicler reveals that Satan incited David to take a census. It is interesting that Gad is the seer of the king at this point when Nathan had done so much but that is another topic for another time.
What interests me is that God allows David to make a decision that brings catastrophe on His people. In fact God is the one who incites it in Samuel and yet it is the agent Satan, the accuser, who incites it in Chronicles. In the way of redaction criticism this explanation is simple, the Chronicler did not want to credit God with planning destruction for Israel in His anger. But in any case since both accounts cover the same waterfront I find it interesting that a leader is used as the means through which God's people are punished when God wills Satan to put a stupid idea into the leader's head.
Joab, normally anything but a paragon of righteousness, points out in advice "Hey, dude, this is a lame idea." David still does it and it is David who has to repent in order that the people of Israel might be spared. Interesting. We are not told why God visited this kind of mayhem on the people of Israel, are we? We're just told that God was angry at His people and apparently a great way to punish His people when He is angry with them is to make their leaders do amazingly stupid things. I suspect every variation of the Church has been subject to this at some point. Apparently what appeases God's wrath against His people is for his appointed leaders of said people to admit they're idiots who have sinned against the Lord and brought disgrace, death, and mayhem on His people. What is interesting is that God Himself ordains the leader to get this idea and to execute the idea against the better judgment of his closest advisors. Now that's interesting, I don't really know why, but it's interesting. How it could be applied in any way in a modern setting I don't presume to say, it just seems interesting to me.
Of course some of this is that it's close to bed time, really, and I'd need more time to consider the passage.
What interests me is that God allows David to make a decision that brings catastrophe on His people. In fact God is the one who incites it in Samuel and yet it is the agent Satan, the accuser, who incites it in Chronicles. In the way of redaction criticism this explanation is simple, the Chronicler did not want to credit God with planning destruction for Israel in His anger. But in any case since both accounts cover the same waterfront I find it interesting that a leader is used as the means through which God's people are punished when God wills Satan to put a stupid idea into the leader's head.
Joab, normally anything but a paragon of righteousness, points out in advice "Hey, dude, this is a lame idea." David still does it and it is David who has to repent in order that the people of Israel might be spared. Interesting. We are not told why God visited this kind of mayhem on the people of Israel, are we? We're just told that God was angry at His people and apparently a great way to punish His people when He is angry with them is to make their leaders do amazingly stupid things. I suspect every variation of the Church has been subject to this at some point. Apparently what appeases God's wrath against His people is for his appointed leaders of said people to admit they're idiots who have sinned against the Lord and brought disgrace, death, and mayhem on His people. What is interesting is that God Himself ordains the leader to get this idea and to execute the idea against the better judgment of his closest advisors. Now that's interesting, I don't really know why, but it's interesting. How it could be applied in any way in a modern setting I don't presume to say, it just seems interesting to me.
Of course some of this is that it's close to bed time, really, and I'd need more time to consider the passage.
Monday, December 31, 2007
another clunky poem
I met the canary of the coalmine
and, considering the health of his song,
the mine is safer than some people say
and the miners do know when to listen.
There are sparrows who think they're canaries
and there are owls who believe that their songs
should be the portent of the darkened sun
and a seeping of blood into the moon
but neither of these are the canary--
though their songs have a certain poetry
they think too much of the songs that they sing
and that their songs stop won't clear out the mine.
and, considering the health of his song,
the mine is safer than some people say
and the miners do know when to listen.
There are sparrows who think they're canaries
and there are owls who believe that their songs
should be the portent of the darkened sun
and a seeping of blood into the moon
but neither of these are the canary--
though their songs have a certain poetry
they think too much of the songs that they sing
and that their songs stop won't clear out the mine.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Bremerton man erects Santa crucifix to protest commercialism at Xmas
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20071223/santa_crucified_071223/20071223?hub=TopStories
AP Photo/Kitsap Sun, Larry Steagall
AP Photo/Kitsap Sun, Larry Steagall
This one speaks for itself, more or less. I mean I "could" go on a digression about Saint Nicholas but why? That's a cause for someone else to take up but I will say that there are multiple levels of resonance in the installation here.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
The Wittenburg Door interviews N. T. Wright
http://www.wittenburgdoor.com/heavy-theological-dude-mistakenly-talks-us
Haven't reaad the Door in a while but I couldn't help but notice this thanks to BHT.
Haven't reaad the Door in a while but I couldn't help but notice this thanks to BHT.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
per BHT links, why does God favor the sheltered momma's boy?
http://theresurgence.com/ab_blog_2007-12-11_preaching_to_smothered_mamas_boys
http://threehierarchies.blogspot.com/2007/12/i-think-they-missed-crucial-point.html
The behavior of Jacob's parents may have helped lead him to become a passive aggressive deceiver, yet the same favoritism also lead Esau to be a fool with an unrepentant heart who sold his birthrate for a bowl of soup. If the upbringing of the twins is proof of parental wrong-doing this plays out in interesting ways because in the end neither son was that grateful to or attentive to the Lord based on the upbringing of their parents.
Jacob's tragedy was not that he grew up emasculated but that he grew up in a setting where he chose to take lightly the Lord's legacy, the same problem that Esau had. God in His mercy chose Jacob over Esau to reveal something about His character to us.
A father who shows favoritism to one son is not necessarily being more involved as a parent in a healthy way than the passive one. Passivity from a father is not just a categorical point but a relational point. A father can choose to be passive with one of his children and not the other but odds are decent a father who is passive with one child may be overly involved in the other. If Jacob was smothered by his mother then couldn't we suggest that Esau was smothered by his father? To go by the lack of gratitude both men displayed toward the Lord it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.
And of course the thing about these twins is that you can have the same parents and the same upbringing but neither is by itself a matter to consider if the Lord has His own design.
http://threehierarchies.blogspot.com/2007/12/i-think-they-missed-crucial-point.html
The behavior of Jacob's parents may have helped lead him to become a passive aggressive deceiver, yet the same favoritism also lead Esau to be a fool with an unrepentant heart who sold his birthrate for a bowl of soup. If the upbringing of the twins is proof of parental wrong-doing this plays out in interesting ways because in the end neither son was that grateful to or attentive to the Lord based on the upbringing of their parents.
Jacob's tragedy was not that he grew up emasculated but that he grew up in a setting where he chose to take lightly the Lord's legacy, the same problem that Esau had. God in His mercy chose Jacob over Esau to reveal something about His character to us.
A father who shows favoritism to one son is not necessarily being more involved as a parent in a healthy way than the passive one. Passivity from a father is not just a categorical point but a relational point. A father can choose to be passive with one of his children and not the other but odds are decent a father who is passive with one child may be overly involved in the other. If Jacob was smothered by his mother then couldn't we suggest that Esau was smothered by his father? To go by the lack of gratitude both men displayed toward the Lord it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.
And of course the thing about these twins is that you can have the same parents and the same upbringing but neither is by itself a matter to consider if the Lord has His own design.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Comfort
More or less, when Israel had grown sleek and fat, as one prophet put it. There are many things we would rather hold on to than the truth and comfort is one of them. No one wants to be in a position, least of all me, where I am not sure who I can rely on or who I can unconditionally trust. Conditional trust is problematic because it means it is performance derived and becomes a sort of works theology in the end, applied to everyone I know. If I trust people based on whether or not they come through for me I sit in judgment over them.
Naturally it's not smart to just trust any person without a good cause but I am considering the good cause with which I trust plenty of people. There are thousands of people who go into making a secure financial transaction on the internet. If I order a book from, say, Amazon.com, I know that many people worked to make that transaction secure so that in buying something from them I am not automatically and immediately compromising the safety and integrity of my financial information. If I make a donation to a church I am trusting that the money will actually be used to help someone and not just line the pockets of someone who is not doing the Lord's work. If I use a debit card to make a purchase I am trusting that the information on my card is secure and safe in the hands of the person at the check-out desk. If I get on a bus I am trusting the bus driver knows where he or she is going and that that person will get me there in a timely manner.
We trust people with things that are not our heart all the time. Understandably, though, a person wants to keep his heart safer than his checkbook in some things, though it is ideal to have both things kept safe.
The Lord warns against the dangers of comfort regularly in Scripture and it just strikes me at the mmoent that it is comfort the two kings of the divided kingdoms were really seeking. They wanted thing to remain as they had been, they wanted to remain comfortable in their knowledge, influence, power, prestige. They wanted to retain what they believed was their God-given right, and indeed God had through His providence provided them with what they had and it seems that they both recognized that at some level, and yet when pressed they both opted to lead God's people into idolatry for the sake of their own convenience and comfort. This may shed some light (or not) on what Scripture says in saying that this or that king did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. Idolatry is the great sin of man and it is man's sin not only because I forsake God but that through my example I encourage others to forsake the Lord, too. We are in that respect as Satan is, deceivers who are deceived and deceiving one another and I am certainly afflicted by this. I can truly believe I am telling the truth and understanding things as they are but not aware that I have been deluded by my older nature and not attentive to the Spirit that dwells within me.
And we are all so apt toward this that it becomes difficult to discern the folly in our own hearts even as we consider so readily and easily the folly in the hearts of others. We all bear traces of the divine image, however marred, yet we do not recognize it in each other and do not cultivate it in ourselves, nor can we apart form the work of the Spirit within us and yet we can, paradoxically cooperate with the Spirit who has sealed us for the Lord's purposes.
None of this is very simple in practice and all of it involves steps of faith that are far easier described than done.
To take comfort is to take refuge and it is sobering to remember that there are so many things a person can take refuge in before Christ--friends, family, work, pleasure, honor, distinction, service, none of them bad things but if I define my value through the friends I have, the family I have, the work I have done, the pleasure I derive, the honor I receive, the distinction I have been given, or the things I think I have done in service, these are all of no value. If I take comfort in any service I have rendered I am most to be pitied because service is of no account to the Lord not because it has no value but because the things that seem most humble are often least humble and the things that seem most truthful are often least truthful. I cannot trust myself and that is why it is easier in some sense to trust others, because the heart is deceitful above all things.
But in the end there is only one who tells the truth without the shadows of corruption and deceit and self-regard, that is Christ.
Naturally it's not smart to just trust any person without a good cause but I am considering the good cause with which I trust plenty of people. There are thousands of people who go into making a secure financial transaction on the internet. If I order a book from, say, Amazon.com, I know that many people worked to make that transaction secure so that in buying something from them I am not automatically and immediately compromising the safety and integrity of my financial information. If I make a donation to a church I am trusting that the money will actually be used to help someone and not just line the pockets of someone who is not doing the Lord's work. If I use a debit card to make a purchase I am trusting that the information on my card is secure and safe in the hands of the person at the check-out desk. If I get on a bus I am trusting the bus driver knows where he or she is going and that that person will get me there in a timely manner.
We trust people with things that are not our heart all the time. Understandably, though, a person wants to keep his heart safer than his checkbook in some things, though it is ideal to have both things kept safe.
The Lord warns against the dangers of comfort regularly in Scripture and it just strikes me at the mmoent that it is comfort the two kings of the divided kingdoms were really seeking. They wanted thing to remain as they had been, they wanted to remain comfortable in their knowledge, influence, power, prestige. They wanted to retain what they believed was their God-given right, and indeed God had through His providence provided them with what they had and it seems that they both recognized that at some level, and yet when pressed they both opted to lead God's people into idolatry for the sake of their own convenience and comfort. This may shed some light (or not) on what Scripture says in saying that this or that king did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. Idolatry is the great sin of man and it is man's sin not only because I forsake God but that through my example I encourage others to forsake the Lord, too. We are in that respect as Satan is, deceivers who are deceived and deceiving one another and I am certainly afflicted by this. I can truly believe I am telling the truth and understanding things as they are but not aware that I have been deluded by my older nature and not attentive to the Spirit that dwells within me.
And we are all so apt toward this that it becomes difficult to discern the folly in our own hearts even as we consider so readily and easily the folly in the hearts of others. We all bear traces of the divine image, however marred, yet we do not recognize it in each other and do not cultivate it in ourselves, nor can we apart form the work of the Spirit within us and yet we can, paradoxically cooperate with the Spirit who has sealed us for the Lord's purposes.
None of this is very simple in practice and all of it involves steps of faith that are far easier described than done.
To take comfort is to take refuge and it is sobering to remember that there are so many things a person can take refuge in before Christ--friends, family, work, pleasure, honor, distinction, service, none of them bad things but if I define my value through the friends I have, the family I have, the work I have done, the pleasure I derive, the honor I receive, the distinction I have been given, or the things I think I have done in service, these are all of no value. If I take comfort in any service I have rendered I am most to be pitied because service is of no account to the Lord not because it has no value but because the things that seem most humble are often least humble and the things that seem most truthful are often least truthful. I cannot trust myself and that is why it is easier in some sense to trust others, because the heart is deceitful above all things.
But in the end there is only one who tells the truth without the shadows of corruption and deceit and self-regard, that is Christ.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
a short rumination about the division of the kingdom of Israel
There was a point in the history of Israel when the king had the opportunity to decide how he was to rule and he consulted with the old man of his father's household, those who advised Solomon, and asked them how he should rule. They advised to make the burden of the people lighter and to be merciful and generous. They said, "If you will be a servant to this people they will serve you for their whole lives."
But Rehoboam did not like this advise and went to the people who grew up with him in the king's court and asked them for advice instead. They advised him to make the task of being an Israelite harder not easier, even couching it in what may be termed a rather crude analogy along the lines of "My little finger is greater than my father's loins". At the word that he would whip them with scorpions and not whips the people rebelled and rejected his authority and left and the kingdom became divided.
When all Israel saw that the king refused to listen to them, they answered the king:
"What share do we have in David,
what part in Jesse's son?
To your tents, O Israel!
Look after your own house, O David!"
So the Israelites went home.
They all went to follow Jeroboam instead. Now Jeroboam was a man who had rebelled against Solomon, the previous king. Solomon tried to kill Jeroboam but did not succeed and the Lord gave Jeroboam ten tribes as promised. The Lord said "I will humble David's descendants through this but not forever." God promised that David's house would have at least one tribe so that His word would be kept.
Jeroboam feared that Israel would revert to the house of David if they worshipped at the Temple and offered sacrifices to Yahweh so he made new gods to ensure that loyalty would not bring his kingdom's subjects back to Judah. And so to secure his own rule he turned to idols.
Rehoboam planned to reclaim the ten tribes by force and prepared for war but the Lord stopped him. The Lord told him "Don't go to war against them for this is my doing." Rehoboam set up idols and was worse in idolatry than Solomon. It is curious to consider that to consolidate power over God's people both men turned to idols. It is hardly surprising but it is sad and it may serve as, so to speak, a parable about the history of God's people since the time of Christ as before. The Lord predicted division and strife within His kingdom before the time of Christ and so it is now since His coming. This may be taken, as it were, as a parable about the history of the Lord's people and those who are able to understand it will understand it well.
What I am struggling to understand is why Jeroboam and Rehoboam did not repent of their own sins. Why did Jeroboam choose to embrace his own power and influence rather than understand the kingdom had not been given to him over Israel forever? Why the lack of humility? Why did Rehoboam refuse to live as a servant in being king over Israel? Why did he choose to listen to the young men with whom had had grown up in the house of Solomon? Why did he make such a point of saying he was more a man than the leaders among God's people who preceeded him? His desire to rule powerfully divided the Lord's people when he could have chosen to be a servant and have reigned for his whole life in an era blessed by the Lord.
For reasons I can't really explain this has been on my mind a lot lately. Both kings who presided over the division of the kingdom, on either side, were finally crushed by the Lord, which is tragic because it was the will of the Lord to divide the kingdom. That was unavoidable and could not be stopped because the Lord called it in advance through a prophet. But the judgment turned out to not merely be against Rehoboam but against all of Israel.
Who are Jeroboam and Rehoboam today? Who has divided the house of the Lord to preserve their own station and respect rather than be a servant to the Lord's people? Who has horded up influence and power for themselves to defy what they have seen as an abuse of the Lord's people by those God has appointed? Are any of them above reproach in this story? It doesn't seem that they are, but all have the opportunity to repent and turn to the Lord who came and was the servant of all. It's a sad thing to see the Lord's people divided when the men who have power and influence seek to fight.
But Rehoboam did not like this advise and went to the people who grew up with him in the king's court and asked them for advice instead. They advised him to make the task of being an Israelite harder not easier, even couching it in what may be termed a rather crude analogy along the lines of "My little finger is greater than my father's loins". At the word that he would whip them with scorpions and not whips the people rebelled and rejected his authority and left and the kingdom became divided.
When all Israel saw that the king refused to listen to them, they answered the king:
"What share do we have in David,
what part in Jesse's son?
To your tents, O Israel!
Look after your own house, O David!"
So the Israelites went home.
They all went to follow Jeroboam instead. Now Jeroboam was a man who had rebelled against Solomon, the previous king. Solomon tried to kill Jeroboam but did not succeed and the Lord gave Jeroboam ten tribes as promised. The Lord said "I will humble David's descendants through this but not forever." God promised that David's house would have at least one tribe so that His word would be kept.
Jeroboam feared that Israel would revert to the house of David if they worshipped at the Temple and offered sacrifices to Yahweh so he made new gods to ensure that loyalty would not bring his kingdom's subjects back to Judah. And so to secure his own rule he turned to idols.
Rehoboam planned to reclaim the ten tribes by force and prepared for war but the Lord stopped him. The Lord told him "Don't go to war against them for this is my doing." Rehoboam set up idols and was worse in idolatry than Solomon. It is curious to consider that to consolidate power over God's people both men turned to idols. It is hardly surprising but it is sad and it may serve as, so to speak, a parable about the history of God's people since the time of Christ as before. The Lord predicted division and strife within His kingdom before the time of Christ and so it is now since His coming. This may be taken, as it were, as a parable about the history of the Lord's people and those who are able to understand it will understand it well.
What I am struggling to understand is why Jeroboam and Rehoboam did not repent of their own sins. Why did Jeroboam choose to embrace his own power and influence rather than understand the kingdom had not been given to him over Israel forever? Why the lack of humility? Why did Rehoboam refuse to live as a servant in being king over Israel? Why did he choose to listen to the young men with whom had had grown up in the house of Solomon? Why did he make such a point of saying he was more a man than the leaders among God's people who preceeded him? His desire to rule powerfully divided the Lord's people when he could have chosen to be a servant and have reigned for his whole life in an era blessed by the Lord.
For reasons I can't really explain this has been on my mind a lot lately. Both kings who presided over the division of the kingdom, on either side, were finally crushed by the Lord, which is tragic because it was the will of the Lord to divide the kingdom. That was unavoidable and could not be stopped because the Lord called it in advance through a prophet. But the judgment turned out to not merely be against Rehoboam but against all of Israel.
Who are Jeroboam and Rehoboam today? Who has divided the house of the Lord to preserve their own station and respect rather than be a servant to the Lord's people? Who has horded up influence and power for themselves to defy what they have seen as an abuse of the Lord's people by those God has appointed? Are any of them above reproach in this story? It doesn't seem that they are, but all have the opportunity to repent and turn to the Lord who came and was the servant of all. It's a sad thing to see the Lord's people divided when the men who have power and influence seek to fight.
Friday, December 14, 2007
a clunky poem
So that he and his family would not wind up dead
All Elimelech’s house went to Moab for bread.
Naomi, Malon, and Chilion went with him
And left all the things they had known in Bethlehem
For the Lord had afflicted their home with a famine.
Now Isaac, ages before, had sensed the divine
Warning to not depart during the affliction.
Elimelech was of another disposition,
When wavering judges ruled over Israel;
And he had no father like Abraham to tell
Him, “God Himself will provide us our offering.”
Or of God’s promise and the decades of waiting;
Nor did he send his sons back to Judah for wives.
So his sons took the glances a Moabite gives.
There are no books that say what became of our friends
But we know most of them met some untimely ends
And Mara did not hide what she thought of her plight
She went out with blessing and returned from a blight.
A while back I heard a pastor go through the book of Ruth and the idea of writing a short narrative poem about this obscure fellow in the OT just wouldn't get out of my head. So this is my very forced, clunky narrative poem on the subject. No one in their right mind would attempt to make something rhyme with Elimelech unless you wanted to contrast him with Melchizedek (there, see what I mean?) and so I didn't go that route. The couplets are already pretty forced so I resorted to slant rhyme whenever possible. I think the slant rhyme works tolerable for the couplet about the wives with its forward allusion to Ruth joining the Israelite community through a second marriage to a Hebrew of more distinction.
Anyway, that's the poem. Not much to it is a poetic creation I suppose.
All Elimelech’s house went to Moab for bread.
Naomi, Malon, and Chilion went with him
And left all the things they had known in Bethlehem
For the Lord had afflicted their home with a famine.
Now Isaac, ages before, had sensed the divine
Warning to not depart during the affliction.
Elimelech was of another disposition,
When wavering judges ruled over Israel;
And he had no father like Abraham to tell
Him, “God Himself will provide us our offering.”
Or of God’s promise and the decades of waiting;
Nor did he send his sons back to Judah for wives.
So his sons took the glances a Moabite gives.
There are no books that say what became of our friends
But we know most of them met some untimely ends
And Mara did not hide what she thought of her plight
She went out with blessing and returned from a blight.
A while back I heard a pastor go through the book of Ruth and the idea of writing a short narrative poem about this obscure fellow in the OT just wouldn't get out of my head. So this is my very forced, clunky narrative poem on the subject. No one in their right mind would attempt to make something rhyme with Elimelech unless you wanted to contrast him with Melchizedek (there, see what I mean?) and so I didn't go that route. The couplets are already pretty forced so I resorted to slant rhyme whenever possible. I think the slant rhyme works tolerable for the couplet about the wives with its forward allusion to Ruth joining the Israelite community through a second marriage to a Hebrew of more distinction.
Anyway, that's the poem. Not much to it is a poetic creation I suppose.
natural or social selection??
http://www.slate.com/id/2179998/fr/flyout
If Saletan is actually right, the subject of some discussion in itself, and the idea holds merit that what constitutes natural selection in human evolution may be less natural than social then his closing statement is merely an echo of sorts to a comment C. S. lewis once made, that every generation, within limits, gets exactly the kind of science it wants.
If Saletan is actually right, the subject of some discussion in itself, and the idea holds merit that what constitutes natural selection in human evolution may be less natural than social then his closing statement is merely an echo of sorts to a comment C. S. lewis once made, that every generation, within limits, gets exactly the kind of science it wants.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Schaeffer and Schaeffer part 3 (well, link discovered through iMonk)
http://www.rutherford.org/oldspeak/Articles/Interviews/oldspeak-frankschaeffer.html
Fascinating. Not sure that I have any plans to be Orthodox but reading this interview reminds me of how much I also feel Francis Schaeffer's real work has been distorted, misappropriated, and hijacked for political and culture war reasons that had nothing to do with what I felt was the heart of Schaeffer's real work.
Identifying the Christian Right as an activist right wing variation of the New Left makes sense. It's easy to see how the Christian Right has been attempting for the last twenty years to do what they feel the Left of the 1960s should not have done. Granted the Left of the 1960s advocated some stupid stuff, but that's not going to make the Right any better. I stand by my belief that Jesus was crucified by a bipartisan committee.
Fascinating interview. I agree with Michael Spenser that it's a must read. :)
Fascinating. Not sure that I have any plans to be Orthodox but reading this interview reminds me of how much I also feel Francis Schaeffer's real work has been distorted, misappropriated, and hijacked for political and culture war reasons that had nothing to do with what I felt was the heart of Schaeffer's real work.
Identifying the Christian Right as an activist right wing variation of the New Left makes sense. It's easy to see how the Christian Right has been attempting for the last twenty years to do what they feel the Left of the 1960s should not have done. Granted the Left of the 1960s advocated some stupid stuff, but that's not going to make the Right any better. I stand by my belief that Jesus was crucified by a bipartisan committee.
Fascinating interview. I agree with Michael Spenser that it's a must read. :)
Sunday, December 09, 2007
Stockhausen dead
http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/story/0,,2224073,00.html
Yeah, I know, lazy blogging to just link to a headline but Song of the Youths made a pretty big impression on me when I was a teenager and my brother brought it home one day, back when record players were still fairly commonplace. An amazing piece. Doesn't mean I'd own a ton of Stockhausen but I could never hear Revolution #9 (interesting as it was) as anything more than a Stockhausen knock-off of a good but decidely lesser order. What can I say? I guess I'm a music snob on that point. The Beatles were a great pop band that got dubbed a rock band but they were so open about who they copied I figure it's still good to tip my hat to the guy who inspired them and set them aside, so to speak.
But I couldn't blog anything about him or his music that couldn't have been blogged about more eloquently by others.
Yeah, I know, lazy blogging to just link to a headline but Song of the Youths made a pretty big impression on me when I was a teenager and my brother brought it home one day, back when record players were still fairly commonplace. An amazing piece. Doesn't mean I'd own a ton of Stockhausen but I could never hear Revolution #9 (interesting as it was) as anything more than a Stockhausen knock-off of a good but decidely lesser order. What can I say? I guess I'm a music snob on that point. The Beatles were a great pop band that got dubbed a rock band but they were so open about who they copied I figure it's still good to tip my hat to the guy who inspired them and set them aside, so to speak.
But I couldn't blog anything about him or his music that couldn't have been blogged about more eloquently by others.
Friday, December 07, 2007
What!? Nasa made zero gravity guinea pig porn?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2000/feb/24/spaceexploration.internationalnews1
This is so weird that I just have to believe NASA actually did this!
Read on my friends. The Wittenburg Door has to put this in the category of "things we wish we made up".
No I suppose I can just take their word for it, whoever did this research, that sex in space is a very serious matter and necessary for ensuring that some decades long journey into space will ... man, there's just no figure of speech I can write now that won't seem unintentionally prurient. That's how crazy this story is.
The whole guinea pig thing is just SO ... LITERAL!!
If Joel, Tom Servo and Crow could only comment about headlines.
This here is a news story where it doesn't matter what year it happened, it's one for the ages!
In case you're wondering how I came across this, well, Wenatchee The Hatchet hangs out at discussion forums where people talk about comic books. Perhaps there's some poetic justice there but I won't elaborate.
This is so weird that I just have to believe NASA actually did this!
Read on my friends. The Wittenburg Door has to put this in the category of "things we wish we made up".
No I suppose I can just take their word for it, whoever did this research, that sex in space is a very serious matter and necessary for ensuring that some decades long journey into space will ... man, there's just no figure of speech I can write now that won't seem unintentionally prurient. That's how crazy this story is.
The whole guinea pig thing is just SO ... LITERAL!!
If Joel, Tom Servo and Crow could only comment about headlines.
This here is a news story where it doesn't matter what year it happened, it's one for the ages!
In case you're wondering how I came across this, well, Wenatchee The Hatchet hangs out at discussion forums where people talk about comic books. Perhaps there's some poetic justice there but I won't elaborate.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
culture war as jihad aspiration?
http://www.boarsheadtavern.com/archives/2007/12/04/1556752.html
Not necessarily making the point that Michael Spenser is saying anything of the kind, but that's what I'm pondering. I grew up in a church setting where culture war stuff came up. It wasn't as prominent as a quest for personal spiritual enlightenment and an inner communion with God but that depended on who I talked to. In others it was a matter of praying for revival so that God would heal the land (i.e. America). National idolatry seemed to be a big part of the enterprise. I don't see any biblically defensible argument that revival's goal should be renewal of the United States' cultural life. It's good to defend the United States and its people from attack, though. But the kind of cultural dominance many Christians aspire to in the United States is understandably the same aspiration toward dominance in the eyes of many a secularist that jihadists want. I think Christopher Hitchens isn't as brilliant as he obviously thinks he is but I'll give him the natural suspicion that Christians and Jews with a culture war mentality are the same as Muslims in spirit, assuming he grants the existence of spirit for purely rhetorical effect.
Christianity certainly has a long history in every tradition of this kind of behavior. We all know about the Inquisition. Polish Catholics were on the receiving end of their own variation from the Orthodox for a while and Protestants have the Puritans and Lutherans to thank for plenty of killing. There is no branch of Christendom that is immune from the use of violence to further a cultural or political end as though it were an aim of the Lord Himself.
The more difficult enterprise than getting energized and exercised about the faults within society is to recognize the depth of one's own sin and to work toward the creation of something that, should the Lord wish to do so, be blessed with the ability to be a part of culture. It probably won't do to say that those who can do and those who can't teach because teaching requires at last a nominal knowledge of the subject. In our generation and time it is probably more likely to be true that those who can do, those who can't teach, and those who could do either but won't or don't blog. I do not even suppose that those who teach can't do themselves, they just couldn't do it professionally full time. After all, it has been my experience that in music those who teach invariably also play music as a career. Those who can both do and teach. Those who can't do neither. But there's always blogging, at least for now.
Not necessarily making the point that Michael Spenser is saying anything of the kind, but that's what I'm pondering. I grew up in a church setting where culture war stuff came up. It wasn't as prominent as a quest for personal spiritual enlightenment and an inner communion with God but that depended on who I talked to. In others it was a matter of praying for revival so that God would heal the land (i.e. America). National idolatry seemed to be a big part of the enterprise. I don't see any biblically defensible argument that revival's goal should be renewal of the United States' cultural life. It's good to defend the United States and its people from attack, though. But the kind of cultural dominance many Christians aspire to in the United States is understandably the same aspiration toward dominance in the eyes of many a secularist that jihadists want. I think Christopher Hitchens isn't as brilliant as he obviously thinks he is but I'll give him the natural suspicion that Christians and Jews with a culture war mentality are the same as Muslims in spirit, assuming he grants the existence of spirit for purely rhetorical effect.
Christianity certainly has a long history in every tradition of this kind of behavior. We all know about the Inquisition. Polish Catholics were on the receiving end of their own variation from the Orthodox for a while and Protestants have the Puritans and Lutherans to thank for plenty of killing. There is no branch of Christendom that is immune from the use of violence to further a cultural or political end as though it were an aim of the Lord Himself.
The more difficult enterprise than getting energized and exercised about the faults within society is to recognize the depth of one's own sin and to work toward the creation of something that, should the Lord wish to do so, be blessed with the ability to be a part of culture. It probably won't do to say that those who can do and those who can't teach because teaching requires at last a nominal knowledge of the subject. In our generation and time it is probably more likely to be true that those who can do, those who can't teach, and those who could do either but won't or don't blog. I do not even suppose that those who teach can't do themselves, they just couldn't do it professionally full time. After all, it has been my experience that in music those who teach invariably also play music as a career. Those who can both do and teach. Those who can't do neither. But there's always blogging, at least for now.
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Schaeffer and Schaeffer part 2
Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back
That's the book and I plan to get to it. When reviewers lay into Frank Schaeffer for railing against Pat Robertson and George W Bush and the Christian Right and the current war I don't really care that much if that becomes the basis of a middling to bad review. Conversely, if the people raving about the book are secularists or on the Christian left that does not necessarily mean I have a reason to actually read the book.
No, I plan to get to the book because it seems interesting. If Frank Schaeffer is guilty of blaming a lot of his problems on the legacy of his parents he won't be any different from most Americans I've met. We live in a society where blaming family for our own abject failure is an easy temptation. But I don't have to assume that's what Frank Schaeffer has done in his book because a few Christians who don't want the late Francis Schaeffer taken down a peg by his own son don't think I should read the book. Conversely, I'm not so set in my politics at either extreme that I have a reason to think Frank Schaeffer must be a moron for opposing the current war or thinking that evangelicals are a bad joke. If Schaeffer is as bad as an agnostic or an atheist as some reviews I've seen on the net seem to think he is that won't be a surprise but I'm not sure it's a foregone conclusion. I'd like to read the book for myself to find out what I think. If Frank Schaeffer feels his father was led down a bad path by his friends and kids who changed him from a gift to the Church into a windy political pedant then I will very likely see in Schaeffer's memoir what I have seen in the last twenty years done with Francis Schaeffer's work.
Plus some of the more scholarly tomes I've thrown myself into just aren't feeling that winsom right now. I'll get back to Augustine and Bauckham later. Right now I'm sticking with lighter or more personable literary fare.
That's the book and I plan to get to it. When reviewers lay into Frank Schaeffer for railing against Pat Robertson and George W Bush and the Christian Right and the current war I don't really care that much if that becomes the basis of a middling to bad review. Conversely, if the people raving about the book are secularists or on the Christian left that does not necessarily mean I have a reason to actually read the book.
No, I plan to get to the book because it seems interesting. If Frank Schaeffer is guilty of blaming a lot of his problems on the legacy of his parents he won't be any different from most Americans I've met. We live in a society where blaming family for our own abject failure is an easy temptation. But I don't have to assume that's what Frank Schaeffer has done in his book because a few Christians who don't want the late Francis Schaeffer taken down a peg by his own son don't think I should read the book. Conversely, I'm not so set in my politics at either extreme that I have a reason to think Frank Schaeffer must be a moron for opposing the current war or thinking that evangelicals are a bad joke. If Schaeffer is as bad as an agnostic or an atheist as some reviews I've seen on the net seem to think he is that won't be a surprise but I'm not sure it's a foregone conclusion. I'd like to read the book for myself to find out what I think. If Frank Schaeffer feels his father was led down a bad path by his friends and kids who changed him from a gift to the Church into a windy political pedant then I will very likely see in Schaeffer's memoir what I have seen in the last twenty years done with Francis Schaeffer's work.
Plus some of the more scholarly tomes I've thrown myself into just aren't feeling that winsom right now. I'll get back to Augustine and Bauckham later. Right now I'm sticking with lighter or more personable literary fare.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
down time and more down time
the holidays are here and I am occupied. Yes, I know, lame. But I just don't feel inspired to blog. Then again, not lame. I have spent plenty of time with very good friends, some of whom I have not been able to visit in quite some time. That's better than blogging. While I have been repeating myself on a number 0f topics I consider worthy they shall most likely have to wait, again.
Friday, November 09, 2007
Schaeffer and Schaeffer
http://www.newstatesman.com/200710250048
Not sure I take the article hook, line, and sinker but it would not surprise me that Francis Schaeffer was as conflicted as any of us. What drew me into his work was not the exposition of doctrine, which frankly now seems a bit simplistic fifteen to seventeen years after I read his famous trilogy; or even his assessment of the arts. It really is possibly he completely screwed up Kierkegaard, for instance. His failure to grasp the difference between atonality and polytonality is understandable.
But in the end what still appeals to me about the work he did is that he bothered ... and by that I mean AT ALL to not just "engage culture" the way his self-appointed or somewhat more literal disciples have, he actually immersed himself in it. He obviously enjoyed all of the arts and did so as a Christian. There were times when he decided he had to not like things for what might be dubbed "theologically correct" reasons. I have had no problem enjoying the works of some modernists Schaeffer felt obliged to dislike. I don't necessarily enjoy the content of all of Dali's paints but his style was something else.
But where I DO agree with the gist of the article is that the Schaeffer that inspired me is obviously not the same Schaeffer that has inspired Tim LaHaye and others who have been identified with the religious right-wing movement. Schaeffer pretty much WAS drafted into a culture war--yet Schaeffer had already warned people in his prime had this culture war been so completely abdicated by Christians fifty years earlier that the battle was not to reclaim the culture for the Christian faith but to understand the culture and speak to it, to even begin to be able to speak to it.
It seems paradoxical for Christians to talk about engaging the culture because the separatist impulse is so strong for some of us that we are trying to reach into the culture while simultaneously pulling ourselves out of it. And in order to do that we have to be some Christian Mr. Fantastic with ever elongating arms.
We aren't in a cultural milleu where Christianity as a culture movement defines much of anything except reactionary and vestigially progressive politics. By so utterly subordinating any sense of art to another goal we get what one of my professors would have called, unflinchingly, ersatz. And it's true, that's what a lot of "Christian" art is, and a lot of Christian "cultural engagement".
Well, I don't feel like blogging THAT badly. :) Sure, I have a couple of lengthy treatises I'm considering that probably won't even turn into very lengthy treatises at all. I'm toying with an examination of Takahashi's comedic staple, the embarrassment of attachment she pins on to all of her characters. And I am still interested in writing a potentially windy treatise on depictions of child abusive dynamics in Eureka Seven. Hey, I freely admit to being a total nerd.
Now, see, the reason I feel okay saying all this is because I really think that what Schaeffer did so well that most of his self-proclaimed heirs really stink at is studying culture with an eye for the Gospel, finding places where they are not only speaking "to" the world around them about what is merely a presuppositional grid of what is or isn't great art and great philosophy or theology, but to actually LEARN. I have learned some rather startling things about myself and people around me through some of the things I have watched and read in the last year, stuff I never would have expected. If Christians of a broadly evangelical stripe and a cultural warrior bent can stop attempting to war with the culture they might find a few snippets of it to quote to the Athenians. It's possible to go so far that direction as to assimilate but then as Koholeth put it in an entirely different setting, it is good to hold on to one and not let go of the other and the man who fears God will avoid all extremes.
Not sure I take the article hook, line, and sinker but it would not surprise me that Francis Schaeffer was as conflicted as any of us. What drew me into his work was not the exposition of doctrine, which frankly now seems a bit simplistic fifteen to seventeen years after I read his famous trilogy; or even his assessment of the arts. It really is possibly he completely screwed up Kierkegaard, for instance. His failure to grasp the difference between atonality and polytonality is understandable.
But in the end what still appeals to me about the work he did is that he bothered ... and by that I mean AT ALL to not just "engage culture" the way his self-appointed or somewhat more literal disciples have, he actually immersed himself in it. He obviously enjoyed all of the arts and did so as a Christian. There were times when he decided he had to not like things for what might be dubbed "theologically correct" reasons. I have had no problem enjoying the works of some modernists Schaeffer felt obliged to dislike. I don't necessarily enjoy the content of all of Dali's paints but his style was something else.
But where I DO agree with the gist of the article is that the Schaeffer that inspired me is obviously not the same Schaeffer that has inspired Tim LaHaye and others who have been identified with the religious right-wing movement. Schaeffer pretty much WAS drafted into a culture war--yet Schaeffer had already warned people in his prime had this culture war been so completely abdicated by Christians fifty years earlier that the battle was not to reclaim the culture for the Christian faith but to understand the culture and speak to it, to even begin to be able to speak to it.
It seems paradoxical for Christians to talk about engaging the culture because the separatist impulse is so strong for some of us that we are trying to reach into the culture while simultaneously pulling ourselves out of it. And in order to do that we have to be some Christian Mr. Fantastic with ever elongating arms.
We aren't in a cultural milleu where Christianity as a culture movement defines much of anything except reactionary and vestigially progressive politics. By so utterly subordinating any sense of art to another goal we get what one of my professors would have called, unflinchingly, ersatz. And it's true, that's what a lot of "Christian" art is, and a lot of Christian "cultural engagement".
Well, I don't feel like blogging THAT badly. :) Sure, I have a couple of lengthy treatises I'm considering that probably won't even turn into very lengthy treatises at all. I'm toying with an examination of Takahashi's comedic staple, the embarrassment of attachment she pins on to all of her characters. And I am still interested in writing a potentially windy treatise on depictions of child abusive dynamics in Eureka Seven. Hey, I freely admit to being a total nerd.
Now, see, the reason I feel okay saying all this is because I really think that what Schaeffer did so well that most of his self-proclaimed heirs really stink at is studying culture with an eye for the Gospel, finding places where they are not only speaking "to" the world around them about what is merely a presuppositional grid of what is or isn't great art and great philosophy or theology, but to actually LEARN. I have learned some rather startling things about myself and people around me through some of the things I have watched and read in the last year, stuff I never would have expected. If Christians of a broadly evangelical stripe and a cultural warrior bent can stop attempting to war with the culture they might find a few snippets of it to quote to the Athenians. It's possible to go so far that direction as to assimilate but then as Koholeth put it in an entirely different setting, it is good to hold on to one and not let go of the other and the man who fears God will avoid all extremes.
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