by way of an aside

I'm going to get back to stuff connected to OT narrative books but I'm going through V Phillips Long's The Reign and Rejection of King Saul. Nice to stumble upon a book that argues for the literary coherence of the book rather than supposing it is a hodgepodge of conflicting editorial and source accounts and interests. A friend of mine who is studying to be a PCA pastor introduced me to some of Long's work through some of his lectures, and then it turned out my brother who goes by Totoro Man has had the book on Saul all along, citing it as one of the very few books he's found on Samuel that spends any time on Saul.

Much as I like the idea of plowing through William Gurnall's The Christian in Full Armor in THEORY, in practice it is quite a slog. I'm sticking, for now, with the much shorter The Bruised Reed, commended by a friend of mine (the one who is working toward becoming a pastor). That friend has a divinely given gift for suggesting the right book at the right time for the right situation. Of course having been friends with him for aw hile he has an unfair advantage compared to most other people I know.

I was talking with a friend about the new Trek movie and a concern he has is that the characters' destiny seems assumed to be the same regardless of what alternate timeline exists. Who, in this alternate universe, will help Spock become more in touch with his human heritage? I think this question, while interesting for long-term Trekkies, may overlook that Vulcan proper was blown up and Earth is the only home Quinto Spock has. Quinto does a great job as Spock, by the way. Considering how awful Heroes became across seasons 2 and 3 I wouldn't blame Quinto for thinking Spock is the better gig.

Now that we're some fifteen years past Roddenberry's death I think Trek will benefit from shrugging off some of the sillier philosophical notions that weighed the franchise down. If they're smart they will ignore the prime directive since the whole show literally could not happen if the prime directive were actually followed. This new iteration of Trek reaffirms what old iterations of Trek established, that the Federation as a liberal and humanitarian peace-keeping armade won't even keep its own rules. I will leave it to you, dear reader, to insert whatever sarcastic interpretation may be applied there. Having Trek be more about popcorn worthy adventures in space rather than hours of discussing diplomacy on made-up planets with other suspiciously humanoid bipedal aliens Kirk can have sex (tactfully off screen, we hope) with can be saved for Trekkies who actually like Captain Janeway.

One thing that strikes me about Old Testament narrative literature is how terrifyingly easy it is to appropriate it for whatever pastoral or ecclesial agenda may be on the front burner at the moment. I wish to return to this at some point but since I have a life, family to visit, and friends to visit, and other things to tend to, not least a sonata for viola and guitar, I may not write as much as I initially planned. Obviously I write plenty when i finally get to it and could probably use an editor. I have been mulling over the possible significance of that, too.

is a certain place a cult? A half skeptical, half sympathetic ramble

This is going to be a long and rambling blog entry because I'm contemplating a whole decade worth of a place. You've been warned.

There are those who would suggest that the level of power exercised by certain religious groups cosntitutes the makings of a cult. I am not here suggesting that one group or another be dubbed a cult and have that end discussion (not that there's discussion going on here, mind you, necessarily, since this is a blog). What I am interested in proposing is that a popular way of expounding upon the nature and origin of cults seems to be misunderstood or misapplied. The propensity is to define a cult in terms of the authoritarian way its leaders may take in this or that way. I would suggest that that is merely part of how things work. Let me make an appeal to ancient Israelite history, idolatry was something that was embraced not merely by leadership but by the people.

ALl of this is to propose that for cultish leadership to happen at the top there has to be a groundswell from the bottom promoting that. A cult leader has to appeal to the anxieties and insecurities of those whom he or she ostensibly would lead. It would not be hard to say that charismatic leaders who eventually wield immense power do so by tapping into the desires and fears of the people they win over. I would argue that for a bunch of insecure young men who want a sense of identity in terms of their affirmed masculinity and the sense that they are not losers in a contemporary society that, in its egalitarianism and globalism, has less and less use for "unskilled" labor that there is a great deal, sociologically speaking, that would make a leader appealing who has the following platform:
1) reaching out to young men
2) giving them a sense of purpose
3) elevating their status when they often feel they are lacking
4) presents an implied narrative of the man being endangered in this time and place so that "real men" are considered an endangered minority in today's society
5) promotes a social order in which the social and economic viability of young men gets them culturally approved sexual contact (marriage, et al)
6) allows them to invest in the emerging culture/counterculture in a way that allows them to rise to levels of leadership within the social unit regardless of how much they appear to be nobodies on the outside.

This is essentially a kind of sociological appeal that ANY cult can have. Young insecure men with a general lack of certainty about what purpose their life serves will be drawn to this sort of thing. Older men who have similar anxieties or believe that all the above are necessary things will be drawn to such a movement. It will have a populist appeal that may only later take on the trappings of academic thought. Young men can get what they want and older men can get the disciples they secretly or unconsciously crave.

This is, I am aware, a common liberal explanation about the appeal of certain kinds of religious cults. I don't say that this means one should accept it at face value but one should also not reject it out of hand. But as time goes by and I look at how self-identified complementarian Reformed thinkers tend to apply their reasoning and explain their interpretation of the Bible the more it seems to me that this stream of thought can be, in the hands of an immensely charismatic leader, a cult waiting to happen.

But if it IS a cult waiting to happen it cannot become so on the basis of leadership alone. The used car salemsman and the used car need a customer and it is this element, the customer, that is so often (it seems) not adequately addressed in writings regarding cults. There have to be enough people at the trench levels who believe that this kind of agenda will get them what they want, whether prestige or financial stability or a wife or whatever earthly measure of success you want, and that it behooves them to get behind that, that they latch on with gusto to what they may later reckon a terrible cult. In some case older men may smell the scent of disciples in the air. If they get on board with this program they can gather young men around themselves who look up to them and whom they can treat as disciples. Younger men can see in this sort of movement the opportunity to become "real men", whatever that may mean, and that as they pursue that goal they will get the wife and kids or career or whatever they believe they want or perhaps "should" want. If this is couched in terms of the divine will then one's own existing predisposition as a matter of faith gets involved and, let me not bother to put too fine a point on it, grace in Christ can become law as interpreted by the herd instinct.

In Scripture we see that the leaders of GOd's people and GOd's people often fall into the same sorts of idolatry. In some cases the leaders lead the way but in other case they do not. One of the great delusions spiritual leaders can suffer from is thinking that if they have all their ducks in a row they will either be immune to idolatry or that their example will sway the idolatry of the common masses. NOpe, not necessarily. We can observe that even during the reigns of the best kings idolatry was not completely stamped out. We can also observe that a king like Joash might be a mixed bag at best at first and then slide terribly into apostasy ... thanks to being fawned over by important people in the community. When the nobles of Judah bowed before Joash it pleased him and he permitted them to have the idols they wanted. Yes, I'm working the subtext mojo for quite a bit here. In the end Joash descended into idolatry and permitted idolatry because the important people around him were into their pet idols. Even the pinnacle of Joash's career, a long and badly pock-marked building project, is rife with compromise and failure.

One of the great mistakes I believe gets made regarding cults or semi-cultic religious groups is the supposition that the great danger is from the abuses of leadership. No, not entirely, though that is an important risk. It is equally dangerous for abuses to swell up from the ground level. For a cult to develop that lasts there has to be a synergy. Everyone has to get most of what they want from the dynamics of the social order. In fact people who have been in cults tend to explain how they felt they really belonged, found their identity in the movement.
This can happen in groups Christians formally consider to be cults on the basis of doctrine but this can happen just as frequently in what are, on the surface, relatively orthodox churches. We can go into something thinking "This is the one group that GETS IT" And this is exactly where people do not realize that they bring themselves into it. When you render the verdict that this little or large group is the real deal, the genuine article, accept no substitutes and this is how it goes and ANYONE should appreciate this, congratulations, you're a cult-maker at least in potential if not in actual fact. If you render the verdict that lots of other churches are truly gifted and being used by the Lord but that right here, right now, at this point, you have found a community whose beliefs you agree with then you're being a regular Christian.
The paradox at work here is that over time I have seen a few Christians decry consumerism while displaying that consumeristic impulse. It is the consumeristic impulse refracted into you being the secret shopper for everyone you know that leads to cult stuff.
When God's people fail the trend can be as brutal coming to the top from the bottom as it is coming from the top down. King Saul spent more time listening to the voice of the people than the voice of God. After years of heeding the voice of the people from below, as it were, the more Saul found it easier to, as it were, believe his own hype machine and become more autocratic in his top-down approach. He was willing to take credit for the work others did and willing to punish those in whom God prompted active obedience in areas where he failed (whether David as his annointed successor or Jonathan as the son who accomplished without divine oracles what Saul was loathe to do with direct prophetic instruction). In our legitimate skepticism about the abuses of authority we should not forget that God's people have failed at every level, which means that leaders can often fail because they sell to the masses what idols the masses are already clamoring for.

It is instructive to consider the first idol mentioned by way of description and name is Yahweh. Aaron creates a golden calf that he describes as the Lord. Here is where the chickens come home to roost, the most dangerous idols we may set up for ourselves are our own truncated understandings of Christ. ANd here I will not pull any punches, an manly Jesus set up as an alternative to a gay, limp-wristed hippie Jesus is still just as much an idol as the alternative. As Tim Keller put it, the conservative Jesus is no closer to the true Christ than the liberal Jesus is.

Few things seem more dangerously legalistic to me now than Reformed complementarian types who go on and on about "real men". Throw in the 1990s inspired craze of "kissed dating goodbye" and throw that into the mix and you get leaders who create destructive matrixes of legalism in a church culture under the guise of being "biblical". Much of what I saw by way of applied legalim on that issue was often a matter of as many things floating to the top from lower levels as coming down from on high.

I have seen moments where in the wake of conduct and speech that could be considered abusive that people at the ground level, in the trenches, saw the protest and considered it "sour grapes". Here I return to my earlier analogy of the neighborhood dog who attacks people. The person who owns the dog does not consider the dog to be a neighborhood terror because the dog has not bitten the hand that feeds him yet. No sooner does this happen than the man who thought he owned the dog and that the dog was on his side learns the truth, that the dog thinks he's above the rabble and can do whatever he wishes. By not checking the behavior of the dog earlier the last man to be bitten does not realize how he contributed to his own harm. There is nothing wrong with lamenting the dog attacking people he doesn't like for this or that canine whim, the trouble is that so many let the dog do whatever he wished that by the time the attacks get more flagrant and aggressive it is, so to speak, a bit late.

By analogy, a cult that forms around notions of what true humanity is (and make no mistake, "real men" rhetoric posits nothing less than the ambition to define what is truly human for males) can go on for some time and it can, in time, be a sort of cover for other concerns. When Israel failed, Israel failed as a whole. It was a matter of the leaders and the led alike. The time to have checked the behavior of the neighborhood dog was, say, four to six years ago. Now perhaps the reason this didn't happen was because those who could have made a cogent case didn't, for whatever reasons. It might be possible, to admittedly take a rather morose perspective, that so long as people at the ground or mid-level are getting what they want out of the thing they don't speak out of "respect" when that respect may be part of the problem. Cults tend to breed in an artificial sense of unity. "Shoulds" proliferate to the point where being a viable part of the community hinges on things that escalate what is expected. Because the people who have been around longer have much to gain through this escalation it continues when the net effect may be that graciousness is withheld to those who, in an earlier time, would have been considered good enough. The sorts of abuses that can happen in cults happen synergistically. At the risk of having this entire entry descend into the domain of Godwin's Law, Hitler didn't start off big, he just made big promises about what he was selling would revive the "real" Germany. Many, many people bought it hook, line, and sinker.

By analogy, and this is the part that can legitimately be considered unfair but I write all this as a cautionary blog entry, Reformed complementarians into stuff like Rushdoony or "real men" or courtship or what-have-you, this can all lead very quickly into cultish stuff. It would be unfair to say people rush headlong into this thinking that's where it WILL go or even that this is where they WANT to go. People struggle to believe the Truth revealed in Scriptures. He is, simply , not good enough, not as good as the ability to, say, plan out the next five years of your life so that you feel like you're in control, or, say, a mapped out checklist of traits you or someone you "ought" to marry may have. It is fascinating how in terms of actual application much of the "real men" rhetoric I have observed in Reformed or merely Calvinistic complementarian circles smells like the work of Pharisees and experts in the law. It is, to make things controversial, the circumcision of this Galatian crowd. Marriage has been to mars Hill what circumcision was in Galatia and that Driscoll has said people make an idol of marriage does not really change that. For any "you don't HAVE to do X you GET to do X" there will be jokes about singles having expiration dates or being single for too long. The jokes and asides undercut the abstractions.
Let a fad like this run its course for even a while and it swallows up the Gospel and the grace of Christ and replaces it with law. It is within this sort of setting in which tiny infractions can be seen as terrible. The ground has been made fertile for quashing other sorts of dissent that this or that thing sold so strongly is not, in the end, particularly biblicaly and does not, in the end, REALLY point unswervingly to Christ. A church in which a pastor can say "I'm the pastor so you have to trust me" is the same kind of setting in which a father can say "I'm the father, I don't have bad days" when a conflict comes up or, "I'm the older person so you need to respect me" when failing to make a cogent case for a particular position. This is the sort of setting in which "all the elders are in agreement on this even though we admit it isn't exactly backed up by the Bible" can emerge. I saw this four years ago and articulated by some of the people whose lives, as I've been told, have been destroyed by the church. I agree, but I also believe it is necessary to point out that after nearly a decade I have seen the same cultish and inadequately biblical mentality manifest even among some of those who were most hurt. I am not diminishing their hurt at all but pointing out that by now it is necessary to observe that the same spiritual weakness has been evident in leaders and members past and present. Daniel prayed a prayer of repentence not only on behalf of himself but on behalf of the people. A place like Mars is a place where corporate repentence has been virtually non-existent and individual repentence is emphasized to a degree that has often been imbalanced.
I am willing to make a rather broad generalization, that the abuses that happen at every level in the body of Christ spring from some form of idolatry. In order to grapple with this and bring it before the Lord repentence is needed and this often needs to happen at different levels. At times the people suffer under an unrepentent leader, at other times an unrepentent leader leads the people into ruin, at other times the repentent leader leads the people forth and at other times a leader is corrupted by an unrepentent people. And as we saw in the life of Christ, a good and holy man may be destroyed by the sinners He came to save. This would only be true without qualification of Christ Himself. There are cases where good leaders are crushed by those who do not regard the Lord. It does seem, though, that just about any pastor fools himself into thinking he's in this last category.

When I have spoken with a handful of people about the time they spent at a particular community I began to observe a pattern. The pattern was that problems of conflict resolution in the community were essentially hiding in plain sight not because there was nothing to observe but simply because members who had invested themselves in the community and were literally not on the receiving end of harsh treatment at the time considered themselves to be in the clear and those protesting about harshness were in a state of "sour grapes". A few years later and the tables turned, with people regretting their treatment at the hands of people they cheered on a few years earlier. What happened? What changed? Well, what changed was nothing so much as who was on the receiving end of the same sorts of conflict resolution techniques that were deployoed earlier; the same fallible humanly applied definitions of sin that one might expect to have seen then or now. E.g. the neighborhood dog bite me and not someone else even though the dog's condut was evident from the start. It took our collective apathy, indifference, or even active sympathy to encourage the neighborhood dog to get to the point he may be at today.

In other words, our idolatry would be the fuel of his idolatry. The paradox is that for a cult to form there has to be idolatry at every level but as the stratification of critera falls into place and the standards of true membership in the cult become slowly but steadily more stringent, those who did the most to promote the stratification may themselves suffer at the hands of a process they helped along. We can simultaneously pity those Stalin destroyed among those who helped his rise to power. They were getting what they thought they wanted in the process, perhaps little realizing that they were sowing their own destruction as they destroyed others.
I surely don't have to spell out the implications of this for anyone who has read me for a while. The seeds of cultishness were right there, let the reader understand. It merely took a general attitude of, say, "I'm the dad so I'm always right and don't have bad days" while theoretically granting that possibility for others, to slowly manifest itself in other ways, such as "the elders are all in agreement about this so that means a difference of opinion is going against the elders." The two forms of exercising a level of control and a requirement of uniformity within the body of Christ that is, so to speak, not natural, are different limbs growing out of the same tree, different flowers that, as it were, sprung from the same seed and have common roots.
We can find it acceptable to sacrifice the lives of other people, or our own lives, for the idols we have made. The Church has a lengthy history of this, which should not surprise us, since it is a struggle we continually fail at since before the coming of our Lord. In assessing the failures of our Shepherd's flock we must consider the failure not just of the shepherds who behave as though they were hired hands but of the sheep who were perfectly content to follow those shepherds as though they were the Shepherd Himself. This is a painful, difficult path because it means that if I sense a shepherd has become an idol to himself or merely that others treat him that way it is not a simple matter in practice, however simple it is in principle. My repenting of my idolatry is no surety that others will repent of theirs.

As Tim Keller put it, Christians tend to have three idols--"Truth" (insert trademark here), gifts, and moralism. These are, not to be subtle about it, the kinds of ways that cults are helped. You trademark truth as you expound it and present it as though it were the plain meaning of the Bible sans any serious exegesis or presentation of potentially different perspectives. "Truth" is what you enlist to assure yourself you have the truth and will fight for the truth when no one else will, a trait I have seen Mars Hillians display almost constantly even in cases where leadership urged them to not have so strong an us vs them mentality. Sadly it seems as though in many cases the idolatry of the flock has often been in danger of poisoning the leadership. I cannot forgot the "Wallace! Wallace!" chants on the old Midrash. Who are we who have spent years at that place to simply condemn leaders when it has been our own idolatry of ourselves through them that helped fuel that weakness? The smarter, more repentent ones set aside their idols and started on a different spiritual path within the body of Christ. The dumber ones stayed and got burned and take that as a self-implicating statement since it is meant to be.

Gifts can be anything that is salutory or admirable about you or others. Those gifts can be held up as more special than others and once that happens a fundamentally Corinthian abuse happens because the PURPOSE of the gifts is not understood. Some super pastor who is gifted as a communicator who does not help other pastors learn how to be as effective a communicator as he is has been placed or places himself on a pedastal He could humble himself by helping to train people to take over the work GOd may have for him, or he could choose the path of continuing to do things himself and deprive brothers in Christ the opportunity to grow in the ways he grew. Paul invested in Timothy because, in part, Paul knew one day he would die and that he was planting for Christ as well as harvesting for Christ. Gifts are frequently the basis of Christian idolatry.

Moralism, of course, is, too. Moralism is usually the basis from which distinctions are made as to who, in Driscollism, is "varsity" and "junior varsity". These distinctions are made all the time.
Moralism is imposing rules that are not outlined in Scripture as though they were. Say, the idea that the man has to not live with his parents. In most societies that wouldn't have been true at all. In many societies the man would marry into the authority of his father-in-law as Jacob did his uncle Laban. A guy like Driscoll and complementarians in general seem to operate under the delusion that they can read the nuclear family into biblical texts. I have seen this for years and find it stupid and aggravating. It is moralism, plain and simple. Pharisees are never the sort to think that they are promoting a works-based righteousness. No! THey think they are getting back to the Bible and taking the Bible seriously.

If complementarianism were simply a position in which it was articulated that on the basis of a combination of scripture and tradition we don't have women as having pastoral and priestly roles in the formal leadership of the church and just left it at that things could be left well enough alone. But as I observe actual complementarians I have met it tends to give off the stink of insecure young white guys who feel like they need to be affirmed in their masculinity.

I suggest, not without a great deal of regret, that an appeal or selling point of Driscoll for young men is less about the love and grace of Christ and more about the appeal to "real men" Get a young, insecure guy who has a fraught relationship with his parents either in reality or on the basis of his own sense that his parents let him down (a pop narrative that suffuses Mars Hill in several areas) and he is primed to make Mars Hill a cult even where it wouldn't be. He brings his own moralistic impulse to Mars Hill and then when things go south for him or his friends he reads that moralistic impulse back on to Mars Hill without realizing that he was a participant and advocate of the thing he feels hurt by.

At the risk of callously pointing out the obvious, God is not mocked and we reap what we sow. That is a chiefly eschatological observation that moralists can invoke incorrectly as having a one-to-one correspondence in this age. But I can point to the origin of the kingship in Israel to point out that there are times where the Lord disciplines us by giving us exactly what we want. If moralists and crusaders at Mars Hill have been hurt then perhaps the Lord is chastening them a bit about their moralism and crusading to let them know they should also be still and know that He is God. Others who may be still too much may be prompted by the Lord to actually do something.

Getting back to gifts as idols, this is a problem rampant in Christianity in America, and not just in places where a premium is placed on "the annointing". I recall a person or two who explained Driscoll was just so much more gifted and less boring than other pastors it only made sense for him to have the lion's share of preaching. My case that other pastors will not be allowed to grow into their preaching gifts this was was met with indifference. Ironically, things are closer to what I have hoped for NOW than at the time when ex-members were at Mars Hill who now believe Driscoll is a tyrant and a bully. Well, had you read Pussified Nation or listened to him explain how Pelagianism and Arminianism were basically the same circa 2001-2002 you could have been less surprised. I am aware of concerns that the leadership at Mars Hill is abusive and I wish to point out that if you are serious about those concerns that implicates not only present leadership but past leadership. Investing in a building without researching adequately whether it could be used for anything other than industrial purposes having announced a capital campaign is still part of the problem and the fired pastors are as culpable for that as anyone else.

Now a person might say "Shouldn't we offer them grace?" Well, sure, yet if they pleade grace for a million-dollar purchase while telling stay-at-home dads they should be subject to church discipline; if Driscoll is the sort of man who can repent of making his wife work in time to be paid a salary but not earlier, then there's some systemic risk of the whole leadership in pleading grace for things on a massive scale they do not necessarily extend grace to others in. This has been an issue going back as far as a lack of graciousness even in some of the fired pastors. In other words, people who have been burned by Mars Hill are not wrong to feel burned but repentence is something needed all across the board. Some of the people who left were apt to legalism and control of the same stripe that may be present at the place now.

Instead of just looking at Driscoll or other Mars Hill leaders and saying "this is a cult" consider how even those hurt by that church contributed to that mentality. If no one else will then I am willing to point this out. Christ is everything and we are merely His creations, His ervants. It will not suffice to insist only on the repentence of the other without considering how we contributed to things. IF, in fact, Driscoll is a bully of a pastor and Mars Hill is in any way a cult then those who joined the church and left will need to keep struggling with how their own idolatries fueled their participation in that cult. A church leadership team that dumps money into a building that can only be industrially zoned shouldn't turn around and tell stay-at-home dads they are in sin. Jesus told a parable about a master forgiving two debtors and asked who would be more grateful. The answer is simple, the one who owed the greater amount. Jesus also told a parable about a master who forgave his steward a huge debt, an astronomically high debt. The steward then threw someone in prison for having a large debt. I'm going to spell out the application here, Mars Hill pastors who dumped the money of members into Ballard would-be-campus 2 simply don't have the basis for disciplining stay-at-home dads about money. The hypocrisy of that is just too much. Instead of laying into the stay-at-home dad for being a worthless coward and failure as a man consider the worthless cowardice and failure of men to admit they made a dumb-ass mistake buying a huge building without investigating whether they could finish the tower. I keep mentioning this precisely because others do not and because the essence of moralism is to excuse or justify in ourselves what we would punish in others. This is why I find it hard to buy rebukes of stay-at-home dads when the leaders are guilty of squandering quite a bit more money on an ill-advised purchase. If they can do that and plead ignorance they should extend a great deal more mercy and understanding to stay-at-home dads. If dad and mom are having an argument the kids many not need to know what's going on but if the kids' tithe checks pay for mom and dad's salary then they should recognize there are limits to what they can say to the kids about giving if dad and mom are going on expensive dates.

The thing is that the leaders ALONE should also not be held culpable for the sorts of moralism and hypocrisy that can happen. A flock that takes alcohol to an alcohol-free camp site and then pleads ignorance of the rules is guilty of both moralism and hypocrisy for considering its own rules above those of fellow Christians and this is, frankly, a weakness I have seen rampant in the place. It's the kind of place where a person can take disciplinary action against uppity members while being guilty (no doubt witlessly) of a major violation of international copyright. When people ask "Shouldn't you extend grace?" I reply that I do extend grace but I don't have to keep writing checks, and I can also urge that the people who presume upon grace stop presuming on it quite so much. I have come to see that no one presumes on the grace of God and others quite the way a moralist does.

I think liberal secularists have some very legitimate points about how a cult (if Mars Hill is a cult) promises an identity for young insecure men, perhaps promoted by young insecure men. A synergy emerges in which legalism spirals upward and outward as young men with more zeal than knowledge might take a Driscoll joke or statement about "real men" and then spin that out into saying that people shouldn't watch a show like Alias if they have the Holy Spirit. Or they might promote courtship as good and dating as sinful without acknowledging that there is not an adequate scriptural or even traditional defense for that. People may lament an "epidemic" of singleness that pins all the blame on singles without examining how the fiscal policies and social world created by those policies can make marriage more and more challenging. Or you might get a pastor saying from the pulpit that he urged a young couple to not become members at a church like Mars Hill because the wife vastly out-earned the husband and she and her husband were both totally cool with that. That is just stupid, legalistic foolishness.

Then again, that sort of thing has been popular for years. Driscoll was the one who once said that if guys don't get married by 30 they are like milk cartons and start to smell funky. He's matured a bit, just as I hope Munson has matured a bit since his "There are no righteous poor in America" statement at Dead Men. Seriously, ex-members, all the evidence you needed was staring you in the face and speaking to you for a decade if you want to plead "cult". Obviously I'm not sure I either need or want to consider Mars Hill a cult. God can raise up enough heathens that if God's people make a mockery of Him then per Romans Paul's words apply, then it will be on account of us that God's name is mocked among the Gentiles. People expressed concerns about a pastor who said "I'm not some pansy-ass therapist" years ago.

It is, I understand, tempting to look at the tree and the fruit and worry about it at the expense of considering how the seeds grew and what and who watered those seeds over time. As Stevie Wonder put it in a great song, you better tell your story fast and if you lie it will come to pass. It is too convenient to think that someone else's lies may have come to pass without consider how our lies to ourselves or others in the depth of our sin may affect us and others. If only God is truly good and Christ is God then only Christ reveals the truth without mixture. The rest of us are those to whom Christ reveals Himself in different ways, often choosing to use murderers like Moses and Paul or David.

It's a good year to like Star Trek

It shouldn't be as though you have to ask, dear reader, why it is a good year to like Star Trek. The movie has been out for just a week. I'm not talking about liking Star Trek in the Trekkie sense of the thing. I'm thinking more in terms of Abrams' new film has preserved and updated what was best about the original series. To be honest, I have a certain amount of respect for The Next Generation and gave up almost entirely on the franchise after Roddenberry's death. First Contact, yes, I did muster up the interest to see it and it was fun but TNG has never had the same appeal or value the original series had for me.

See, Star Trek is old style old TV liberalism in politics and intellectual thought and to some degree that is both its weakness and its strength. It could be preachy and didactic. And with characters like the self-impressed horndog James T. Kirk, and the equally cardboard cut-out characters of Spock and Dr. McCoy vrrtinh wildly to the intellectual left and emotional right we were seeing caricatures on the small screen.

But like Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup this trio of characters became vastly more than the sum of its initially limited parts. Trekkies, take some meds because I'm sticking with that comparison for the rest of this blog entry. Star Trek was at its essence a humanist show, a deeply humanistic show. Many Christians don't want to recognize how profoundly secularist the perspective of Trek as a franchise has always been. Name me a Republican Christian Trekkie who complains about Star Trek IV and the whales and I'll show you someone who just plain wasn't paying attention to the previous two decades of Trek!

But let me set that aside for a moment. Star Trek, the original series, gave us an inspiring trio of characters in popular culture because the trio of mind, body, and spirit is conveyed through Spock, Kirk, and McCoy. Let's face it, Kirk is body all the way because he's always jumping the bones of alien women. What the three characters lack as individuals they find in the others. Through the community of these three Kirk, Spock, and McCoy can be presented, by means of the always subtly to brazenly didactic Star Trek, to reveal what the fulness of the human experience can be. At its best it did not seek answers so much as encourage the legitimacy of being able to ask questions. It might be best to phrase things this way, that Trek as a franchise has its best storytelling and best characterization when it eschews the pablum of the triumph of the human spirit (or whatever) and examines the profundity of human need in terms of the individual and the community. I would submit that this is a reason Christians of various stripes DO like Star Trek and why it's okay to like what I have often considered to be the celluloid syndicated secular humanist's version of a Chick tract. Fortunately for us regarding the original series Roddenberry and company gave us a FUN show, not merely a didactic one.

And this examination of human need is why I find the spin-off series to be, well, underwhelming. There was no other series that capture the trichotomy of mind/body/spirit the wway Spock/Kirk/McCoy presented it. There were no Powerpuff Girls adventures, more or less. The multiracial integrated crew of the ship is no longer the novelty it was forty years ago. Many things are simply not as daring as they once were. I don't happen to have any real affinity for secular humanism, to be honest. I consider it to be as naive as the unbelievers consider Christianity to be. On the other hand, humanity bears the image of Christ whether it recognizes Christ at all. I can respect that Hayao Miyazaki can sense shadows of divinity or the image of divinity in the human race despite his pessimism about the inclination of the race as a whole.

Christians should not be so averse to what they consider the enemies of the faith in humanism or liberalism or whatever culture war shibboleth they are obsessed with now that they faill to recognize something--that there is still something valuable about humanity recognizing the possibility of redemption. When Trek wallows gleefully in its belief that we have come so far or would be further were it not for bad guys ... it sucks (Insurrection). When Trek examines how the foibles of men lead to unexpected catastrophe and how people can choose in the darkest moment to sacrifice themselves for the greater good it is genuinely touching. Seriously, I shouldn't have to tell you I'm referring to Spock's death in Star Trek 2 but I might as well underline it. There is nothing wrong with being touched by a statement we all yearn to hear and often do not, a statement we often sense is made without meaning it, which is why even in an imaginary story it is still touching when Spock says, "I have been and always shall be your friend."

And this is, of course, what Christ offers us Himself. The reason I admit I love a lot about the original series and don't really care in the end about the rest of the knock-offs is because despite itself the original Star Trek stories had characters who struggled with what it meant to be truly human. They often didn't understand each other, they often didn't like each other, they often were not sure what the future had but they also were willing to "boldly go where no man has gone before" (old school now). It did not matter where, perhaps, so much as with whom you went into the unknown. This is what made the original trio in the Trek-verse so enjoyable--Kirk, Spock, and McCoy might butt heads but at the end of the day they were loyal to each other even when some of them were a bit loathe to admit it.

I admit I find things about the old series strangely touching, and not so strangely touching. I got into Star Trek as a child through reruns and also because of my dad. Before a few things in our relationship changed significantly for the worse Star Trek was one of the things we could have lots of fun conversation about and it was my dad who pointed out that the original Trek trio was great on archetypal grounds because the three characters completed each other and weren't just obstacles to each other. It made for good drama and comedy at the same time because they could work together or lock horns with each other because each had a unique strength that was also a unique limitation. And here let me toss out a potentially pointless observation that the body of Christ can learn much from this. :) Sometimes God uses the stories of others to help us grasp important elements of His story that He shares with us in and through Christ.

I believe Abrams made the right decision abadnoning all the knock-offs and spin-offs from the original series that no one has any reason to give a damn about in this day and age. All those things were the sad creations of guys like Roddenberry who became self-congratulatory, bought their own hype, and forgot that the original thing was a one-off. Perhaps I could liken it to Joss Whedon, an essentially one-trick pony who hasn't realized his time has largely come and gone. He may be the Gene Roddenberry of our time amongst sci-fi and genre fiction fans.

Back on track, Abrams wwas right to bring back and reboot the premise and cast of the original series. He was right to abandon the "scientific plausibility" that Trekkies have clung to that has made the show increasingly ossified and missed the real point of the series. Abrams was right to distill everything down to revealing who these characters are and why we can come back to them and enjoy their story in a new way.

It can be easy to look down on things from forty years ago or things that were before our time. I have met people in their twenties or thirties who have no thought for any of the arts before their childhood. This might manifestt itself as the attitude that no movies made ten years before you were born "matter". The release of a movie like Trek reveals, in this case, that the old stuff matters and the old stuff will continue to matter, flaws and all. Those who do not know the past, it is said, are doomed to repeat it. In the arts those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it without knowing they have wasted their lives and our time. This can also happen when people hope to build on the past without understanding the past. Ergo, the rest of Star Trek after the original series ... at least, in my opinion, until about now.

I make exceptions, but I make this broad, polemical point for a reason. Star Trek, the originals eries, was good campy fun while still making its serious points. The characters worked and they still work. There were no "principles" that humans couldn't have conflict with each other. The rest of the Trek franchise is, in some sene, varying degrees of failure because they missed the point of the original. They saw the optimism of Trek without seeing that the optimism was brought to bear against odds, not ignorant of the likelihood of failure, but not considering failure to be as bad as inaction. Spock tells Kirk there is only a 4.3 percent probability that what they are undertaking will work. "Spock! ... It'll work!" is Kirk's optimistic reply. And, of course, being Star Trek, it does work. As with the far flung solutions, so with the original series and original characters.

Seeing Star Trek in the theater this year not only reminds me what I loved Star Trek once but also why my dad loved Star Trek and that's anything but a bad thing. I am not a particularly optimistic fellow, I am often more cynical and moribund than perhaps a thirty-five year old person should be. I need to be reminded that wanting things to be better and hoping tha tthings can be better and working to make things better is not in vain. In my case, specifically, I have to recall these things because in Christ life is not in vain. In Star Trek a character can die in vain and The Humanist will be pleased with that. Great, someone had to sit through Generations. In Star Trek a character can die in vain because you'll cyniclaly observe that in yet another movie they will be brought back, but that's a different kind of "in vain" known as the "death without cost".

In Christ our deaths are not in vain but there is something that can be rarely articulated in the circles I have spent time with, that our LIVES are not in vain. It can be terribly easy for me to feel that my life is basically in vain, that there is not much to accomplish here or to consider valuable in this life as I await eventual death and consider that one day Jesus will return. Perhaps the kind of apocalytpic upbringing I had had something to do with this. Perhaps I grew up getting the impression that whatever it meant to be fully human I wasn't measuring up, couldn't measure up, and wouldn't measure up.

I have been in settings where Christians talk fondly about getting their asses kicked metaphorically by the preaching. There was a time when I valued this but it is an incomplete understanding of humanity and of Christ. But by now, obviously, I have steered so far off topic that I am no longer talking about Star Trek. Well, that is more or less as it should be. In the end my hope is in Christ and if that means in some cases I have to turn my eyes from how Christ is presented by some to consider who Christ is and isn't that is part of the process, too.

Dostoevsky wrote with great clarity that in your twenties the easiestt thing for a man to do is die for a cause. Put that mean in a position where he spends five years of his burning youth toiling away indoors and you discover what he is REALLY willing to accomplish. We are like Peter, swearing that we will embrace sacrifices of the highest level when we are not even willing to admit we know Christ. Over the last twenty years I have seen that happen often, especially in the arts, whether myself or others. I have also seen it, sadly, in professions of faith. I know people who were "on fire" for God who have cast that all aside. I have struggled almost my whole life with doubts that numb the heart and with the visible wickedness of the visible church ... and yet for some reason I can't turn away from Christ. I can neither say that my adherance to Christ is to my credit or that it has nothing to do with me. It is mysterious and I don't understand it.

By now, obviously, I have steered far off from my topic and that is, as I said, just as well. Sometimes learning how to hope that things can be betterhere and now can help one remember that there is a greater hope. All of Hebrews describes how that which we have now is but a shadow of the things to come, shadows compared to Christ. I have come to realize that in the last ten years I have heard people ostensibly preach Christ but preach Him in such a way that He becomes the measure of what you should be NOW or what you should be becoming soon with the help of some "community" or "spiritual authority" rather than a hope that sustains you in the midst o of continuing failure. Some find it easier to preach 1 Corinthians than 2 Corinthians, which is both our loss and theirs.

Some people define spirituality through, say, Spock alone, or McCoy alone, or through Kirk. Some combine two and omit the third. Some combine all three and write books about it. Clearly I'm playing with the analogy of mind, body, and spirit. I have heard preaching from Christians who uphold the body and mind but neglect the spirit. I have heard people who uphold the spirit and body but not the mind. I have heard peopel uphold the mind and the spirit but not the body and these all reveal what they want redeemed in themselves at the expense of whatever it is they omit. A person who emphasizes that Christ redeems the body and mind has no thought of the spirit. The other combinations apply. They are piloting the Enterprise of their selves into uncharted lands without one of the key crew members they need, i.e. that part of their walk with Christ considered. Eventually Spock and Kirk discover they need Dr. McCoy if they have not brought him along. At length McCoy must acknowledge that Spock's logic outweighs his desire to act right away. So it is, by extended analogy, in our walk with Christ. If we neglect the body the spirit and mind suffer terribly, just as the neglect of another causes the other two to suffer terribly. And by now I am pointlessly rambling.

factoring in variables of obvious bias ...

http://slog.thestranger.com/2005/10/antioch_bible_c

http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/misogynyhomophobiamisogynyhomophobia

For those of you who may not be familiar with the concept of advocacy journalism I can explain it rather simply, there are people who believe that the illusion of objectivity in mainstream medium was an illusion, a delusion, and something best not embraced. In contrast to the appearance of being at a remove, of being "objective", advocacy journalism puts the convictions of the journalist as observer and interviewer researcher front and center. This is a form of journalism in which, at its best, we are not seeing yellow journalism in the archetypal "bad" sense but a kind of advocacy in which the journalist puts his or her convictions on the table and does research. Their bias and perspective may color how they view the truth but, if you will, their bias, if they are pursuing the truth, will not necessarily get in the way of reporting the facts.

Now obviously a person may object that any links to this publication can only be links to highly biased and unprofessional journalism. Sure, bear with me, however.

There is a certain pastor who apprenticed for a time in some capacity in this place and as Jesus once put it, it is enough for a student to be like his teacher. This pastor has distanced himself publicly from things like May Day for marriage as ineffective and being a bunch of suburban pastors and Dobson fans showing up, protesting, and basically doing nothing beneficial for the actual city (a perspective I happen to agree with, by the way). However, be that as it may, certain types of confrontational rhetoric about what constitutes a manly man may, to make this point obvious, indicate an essential continuity of both rhetoric and position. In other words, certain weaknesses regarding the use of rhetoric in the confrontation of opposing views may have a homiletic generational mark to them, a kind of DNA. The mustard plant was once a mustard seed.

Bias in this publication's coverage? Well, sure, they don't pretend otherwise. Factually inaccurate? That would have to be verified. A publication can publish a lot of stuff you don't like for ideological reasons and not necessarily wrong about the essential details of the story. As with another story, the bias inherent in the article is not really prima facie proof that it is inaccurate. At the risk of employing an outlandish example, Satan can still quote the Bible accurately and in context. Obviously I'm not suggesting The Stranger is Satan in any literal way, I evoke and allude. And since Satan is allowed by God to torment Job and Satan is not wrong to consider how Job has been protected by God the obscurity of these sayings is not really obscure.

But I do have other things to consider, like the wonderfully entertaining new Star Trek film. I plan to get to that in a bit and share a bit about what it has been like to be an ex-Trekkie who has rediscovered some of what has made Trek fun.

the implications of Mars Hill Global in light of a Mark Driscoll from years gone by

Part of me should be excited that more people are able to be reached through something like Mars Hill Global but I can't muster the enthusiasm for it. I can't help but wonder if Mark Driscoll has turned into the kind of spiritual leader he preached against circa 2001-2002. He's primary teaching pastor of what is effectively a denomination, except for that part where local campus pastors in the trenches do all the pastoral care and teaching besides.



Yes, I get that the reasoning is that the main draw to Mars Hill is Driscoll. I got that line of reasoning back in 2005 and I didn't buy it then either when some now bitter former Mars Hill members were trying to argue the case for that back then. I "could" name names but I don't wish to, I simply note rather dryly that some of the people who bitch most about a "cult of personality" were among its stronger advocates. All that is to say that I have the same reservations now that I did back then about this scale of contextualizing Mark, as it were. He's good at what he does but having him have such a high profile place as a teacher in Mars Hill means he's the kind of denominational leader/spiritual figurehead who has no idea what is going onin the real world in the trenches of the church that is Mars Hill. If Driscoll circa 2001 saw what Driscoll is now would he be happy? Possibly, but if he were that would raise questions about what he wants, because by Driscoll's own preaching circa 2001-2002 he has become the very sort of pastor he warned people against. I don't know that this is on purpose or even observed, I just throw it out on the internet because finding the sermons in which he expounded upon the dangers of denominational hierarchical systems wouldn't be that difficult.



A lot of people can and will be touched for the sake of the kingdom of Christ this way, don't get me wrong, I just doubt that this is the ideal way to do it. If Driscoll's preaching gets piped out to Arizona or New Mexico or London or Guam or Australia or some other English-speaking culture it doesn't mean it's really contextualizing the Gospel for those places. Driscoll in those settings might be a useful SUPPLEMENT to another pastor's preaching but should not be considered equivalent to it. If you don't live in the United States or Seattle then don't consider Driscoll to be your pastor, it doesn't matter how much you like his preaching.



The real dillema, given Mars Hill's understanding of membership, is that this kind of move to an interstate or global church means the death knell of meaningful membership. At this point if a person wants to become a member they can be invited to log on to The City, a kind of Facebook meets MySpace knockoff for churches. It has some value, I grant, but does bode entirely well that to become a member of the "real "community you have to sign up through a virtual community? Let's not kid ourselves or anyone else, The City is a social networking implement and a virtual community no matter what the people who built it may say. If Mars Hill ever cracked wise about the way things work in the evangelical Christian ghetoo they had better stop cracking because this is the kind of reinventing the wheel I have seen at the place for a while. Wheels are great but they aren't great just because WE made them.

Don't get me wrong, the need for a competent, centralized database that can be used for administrative purposes is cool and all ... but the terrible risk of getting invited to join a virtual community (even an invitation only virtual community) is that that virtual community is still inextricable from being considered formally connected to "real" community, whatever that is. And the thing is that given the level of personal investment leaders as a whole can often have at different levels the only red flag that something might be amiss is if someone hasn't given for six consecutive months, in which case membership is revoked. A person can give on-line and download sermons. A person can attend a community group but this in itself is not a sign of real community. In other words, when the membership process can be done entirely by listening to sermons from a Doctrine series and then through filling out forms on-line through The City and donations can be done via internet and automatic deposit we're talking about a virtual church.

In fact there is a great deal in principle in which Driscoll and Benny Hinn would even out. Think about it, potentially millions of people who don't know jack about Driscoll and who Driscoll will never meet consider him a great spiritual leader and teacher and immensely gifted by God. Benny uses TV and Mark uses the internet but the mass communication means of "pastoring" is essentially unchanged. Now if I had to pick just one of these guys I'd pick Driscoll any day every day for the rest of my life ... maybe. Sometimes Benny gets better musicians. Sorry, but even Benny occasionally grabs a capable musician or two while Mars Hill has done the DIY indie punk don't-quite-tune-your-guitar approach.

The Catholics have the Pope and the Orthodox have their own approach to determing what all Christians should believe. Since the Doctrine series of early 2008 Driscoll may, note I say "may", be setting himself on a path where he is effectively making himself a kind of evangelical Protestant Pope. Even a subtitle like "What christians should believe" telegraphs at least that possibility. Now attending a church like Mars Hill isn't necessarily a problem, despite what various cranky ex-Mars Hill members have blogged in the last three years. I may have more to say about the problems of many of the ex-Mars Hill member criticisms I have begun to observe are out there on the internet but that is another matter for another time. As I have written elsewhere, taking sides is not really my interest, not least because after a decade I see the same spiritual troubles in the complainers as I have seen in those about whom they have complained. It is more fruitful to consider our own weakness rather than simply rip into people as though they didn't have character flaws until the second they hurt US, which is what a lot of certain types of blogging have amounted to.

I am concerned, and I am willing to put it that blandly, that Driscoll in the last six years has transformed into exactly the kind of spiritual leader he was telling us was bad and to avoid. It is highly improbable he is consciously aware of this transformation in his ministry and in his life. That he's been recycling material and doing that as part of his book deal isn't a problem, it's when he recycles Song of Songs or rehashes the Doctrine series to streamline an increasingly impersonal memberization process that may one day resemble Borg assimilation that I admit I start to worry. What are the odds Driscoll has any idea what is going on at any given campus in his denominationa, er, multi-site church? What are the odds that Driscoll has done any pastoral counseling? Maybe high, maybe low, it's not something I know for sure. I ask all this simply because those who heard Driscoll's teaching on good and bad pastoring from 1 & 2 Timothy may note that much of what Driscoll spoke against is exactly the kind of spiritual leader Driscoll seems to be turning into.

Now if he'd just admit that denominations aren't as bad as he thought six years ago and that Mars Hill is functionally a denomination much would improve. That would probably entail two unlikely things happening. The first would be Driscoll admitting he was young, naive, and wrong and the second would be that he'd have to admit he's effectively a Protestant Pope and a denominational leader. Any number of his mentors and hereos have denominational affiliations. It's not like Tim Keller is worse off for being Presbyterian. It's not like John Piper is worse off for being Baptist. These are men who trust their denominations enough to submit to them in practical ways that Driscoll, frankly, may not, not least because he effectively is not formally submitted at an organizational level to anyone beyond his own team. It has ever been thus, though, so I suggest that any bloggers seizing to leap on the charge that Driscoll has no accountability to ask whether he had it. Again, that's another topic for another time.

As evidenced from his courtship craze and reverse-engineering-your-life craze (both stupid, frankly) and how he broached the topic of the legitimacy of Christian dating in 2008 the evidence suggests that Driscoll and Mars Hill as a whole have problems saying, "We were actually wrong". It's easier to say "Maybe we haven't emphasized the legitimacy of Christian dating in the past as much as we could have" than to admit that "We promoted a stupid, extrabiblical and unbiblical fad because we thought we were being countercultural but were really more about moralism and control than about the saving power of Christ." And OF COURSE that is more difficult to say. Collective confession of actual sin is hard not least because God's people are loathe to admit they sin, first of all, and not everyone agrees what the sins might even be. There were people who dropped their membership precisely because they saw these kinds of things. Many of the newer members have no institutional memory of what has come before and many members who HAD that memory may have left in the last three years. This is, perhaps, if anything a great disservice to the local church. I am not, however, in a position to tell other people what the Lord would have them do or where their convictions lead them. I have also met too many people at and previously at Mars Hill who would make their convictions YOUR need to repent. I have been that sort of person myself, really, so it's not as though I should rush to become one of the pots calling kettles black.

I have talked with people who have gone through the process and they noted that it seemed really impersonal and none of the follow-up interviews that were supposed to be part of the process ever happened. In that case, isn't membership membership in a virtual church where the bottom line is that the only benefit from it is to leaders who can work things out for budgetary reasons? Mars Hill may have depersonalized the membership process to the point where a person can fulfill most of the requirements of becoming a member without being in the same state. Rather than seeing that as a great opportunity for how God is opening doors to expand missional work MAYBE we could also see that as the threshhold of a potentially terrible compromise in what membership actually means.

I just wonder if Driscoll has reserved for himself many of the privileges of being a campus pastor or denominational leader without taking on many of the core responsibilities. That a church is thousands large with plans to go global is part of the problem, how would anyone know? Would Driscoll circa 2001-2002 even recognize himself? Would he be proud of his accomplishments? Some, I think. He'd have every right to be proud of the bulk of his preaching in the Atonement series. It is also nice to consider that he may finally be getting the balls to go through a Gospel for the first time in eight years. For a man who has said "It's all about Jesus" he's been overdue to really make it all about Jesus for some time now, even by his own measure of things. His best preaching has almost invariably come from Luke so, Lord willing, we will see Driscoll's preaching at its best very, very soon, if God is kind to him. We can certainly use less of Driscoll attempting to preach through the Old Testament.

So long as people recognize that Mars Hill is nothing, that Driscoll is nobody, and that Christ is all in all, then I'm okay. I will occasionally write to that very end, obviously. He used to say we should take God seriously and take ourselves lightly. I'm not sure that's what's happening these days, ergo, a blog entry.

Mars Hill Global ... we ARE talking about a denomination now, aren't we?

Mars Hill GLobal is going, literally, global. I am sure there must be compelling legal and financial reasons to not call Mars Hill a denomination but I don't know what they are. But surely by now they could admit what any normal, thinking person could point out. Once it gets outside Seattle and has multiple campuses we're talking a denomination. Admittedly a rather weird denomination in which the denominational figurehead does all the preaching and this at a level that not even the Pope has, but more or less if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck we're talking about a denomination.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing. If anything it's the eagerness with which that word is avoided in Mars Hill press that strikes me as baffling, ergo, an appeal to the existence of some legal/fiscal reason to not call the duck a duck. Might be a very good reason, it's just puzzling, that's all.

Well, and here I had considered Mars Hill, Microsoft, Starbucks, and Boeing to be emblematic of Seattle. And Wamu, too, but Wamu is sort of changing into something else right now so it may no longer be representative of Seattle and the Northwest as such ... which for all I know might be a good thing. At any rate, it seems to me Mars Hill has been a denomination for a while and I look forward to the possibility that one day Driscoll and company can actually admit in public what they surely must know by now is the truth in private. It's nothing to be ashamed of, really, is it?

"Many people think nastiness ends Christian community. The gospel says nastiness is where Christian community begins."

http://christthetruth.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/nice-and-christian/

Just had to put that quote up there as a teaser for this link.

I don't feel like explaining exactly why this resonates with me so much in much detail. I will, however, say that I have seen a lot of what appeared to be "Christian" friendship and fellowship devolve into worldly fellowship if the measure of worldly fellowship is a complete failure to live out Collossians 3:13. I have seen oodles of Christians, myself especially, utterly fail to be clothed in compassion, kindness, gentleness, patience or humility. It's easier to clothe yourself with indignation, impatience, pride (as often well-concealed as openly displayed), harshness, and smart-assery and condescension.

I have for nearly a decade had a connection to a Christian community where one of the most highly praised experiences is getting your ass kicked verbally, whether by the leadership or proxies. Real confrontation with sin it tends to be called, and all of that is, I understand, necessary. But the unilateral way in which it has often been practiced has been disconcerting. It is easy to feel as though it is tough love when you are on the dispensing end of it, much harder to feel certain it is tough love when you are on the receiving end of it. Being confronted with sin or confronting someone about sin tends to be the acme of the spiritual experience. And it is, as I have said earlier, necessary, but it is also not the only experience Christians have.

In fact a great deal of confrontation about sins real or imagined can happen without any reference to bearing with one another or forgiving each other. I guess that's my rueful observation that I'm not sure I have been connected to a Christian community that is even, as the blog I linked to puts it, "nice". Still, if Jesus can raise Lazarus from the dead He can do whatever He wills.

Absalomian woolgathering in preparation of a rebellion

Back to matters of Absalom and David.

After the faux reconciliation that satisfied both father and son, Absalom gathers an entourage, a set of chariots and men to run before him. This is a man who has his own fan club and sends them forth among God's people to declare how cool and just he is, how kingly he is. He is, after all, son of the king. He is happy to have a retinue running ahead of him to announce his glory and weight. There is some solid textual evidence that Absalom, despite having David as a father, seems not to have had any serious consideration of following the Lord. He played the role well enough but he only played the role in the presence of his father. Once apart from his father's influence he revealed his character to be considerably less marked by a desire to know and seek God.

Absalom's entourage is built to impress. He presents himself as someone the people ought to look up to and admire. While Absalom himself was very likely a godless man we must consider that even Christians can, at heart, be Absalom's in relationship to spiritual leaders, presenting themselves as big guns whose advice should be heeded and whose presence should be honored. They like to be looked up to, fawned over, sought for counsel, considered wise judges of character and that means that when such a man or woman regards you that you have become special by receiving the attentions, as it were, of a prince of the faith.

Absalom was always around. He woke up early and went out to where the people were and mingled with them. In modern Christianese terms, Absalom was at every church service networking and working toward his pet projects and pet people. He was able to be a warm, winsome, thoughtful fellow. When people had problems and were going to the king's court, so to speak, he intervened and offered to help the matter himself, noting that the royal structure lacked the means to fairly administer justice. This might be, in a church setting, a warm, glad-handing fellow who urges you to consider him for advice and counsel because the pastors are great people and all but they don't understand justice or fairness quite as well as he does.

Absalom was able to identify hurt people coming to the king for a legal hearing because they had not obtained justice elsewhere in the land. He was able to prey upon the weakness of the weak to sell himself as an advocate for truth, justice, and the Israelite way.

What Absalom was careful to NOT do at this point was to ever speak against his father. He noted that there was no judge appointed or intermediary appointed to remedy conflicts, legal cases, and the like before the people. It might be like, say, the head pastors not having adequately provided counseling pastors to help rectify or ameliorate conflicts in a church, so Absalom, if we pretend for the moment he is in a church, presents himself as the one who can get the job done. He never complains about the church leaders directly because he is too clever for that. Rather he can present privately that he may disagree with any number of positions the leaders have but he is too respectful and considerate to openly disagree because they are, after all the leaders. By way of incidental contrast, Joab, a bastard if there ever was one, would say, "May the king live forever, but why does he request this thing?" The Absalom in a church is more genteel and smooth-tongued at first but more dangerous than a Joab who is quite frankly an asshole but often reveals a better concern for the house of David than the "son" of high standing.

Absalom parlays his prominence into a case for his being among the leaders. "Oh that I were appointed a judge in the land! Then I would ensure that justice is done." His sales pitch is startling direct, that the king has failed to appoint someone to enact justice. Earlier David is described as being a just king who sought the good of the people. After his failure to punish Amnon for the rape of Tamar the royal family is marred by David's failure and inconsistency in executing justice. The people may well have believed that David was not harsh enough in punishing Amnon and too harsh in his reaction to Absalom. Wasn't Absalom the one who did what the king SHOULD have done?

There is a strange and sad irony here in which David is, for a time, not unlike Saul. Saul was a king who was glad to have the authority of kingship but had not bothered to execute the Lord's will. The son, Jonathan, ended up contending with the enemies of Israel as Saul should have done. Now, in a strange parallel, David had failed to execute justice and act against a sin, and the son usurps the role. Jonathan was, arguably, a nobler and more God-fearing man than his father. Absalom, clearly, was not, yet there is the strange parallel of a son executing a task that was by the understanding of that time and place the duty of the father. Both the godliest and ungodliest of parents can find that they have failed to do what is appointed at hand and that the children take it upon themselves to accomplish for themselves or the people what they believe ought to have been done. In the former category we see that chaos is about to erupt and in the latter it can be toward the work the Lord had commanded the father to do.

Now Absalom also had another advantageous approach, he did not let anyone pay hommage to him as a member of the royal court or for what he was accomplishing among the people. He may well have heard the cases at hand fairly or, as some suggest, he simply took the side of the person who came to him first and said, "Your case is good and right." I think it would be tough to make an assumption either way and the import of the text is not how, precisely, Absalom adjudicated individual cases, but the goal toward which each individual case was adjudicated. The end result was to destroy the legitimacy of David's rule in the eyes of the people and for Absalom to IMPLICITLY present himself as an advocate of justice over against his aging and compromised father.

Absalom did not let people pay hommage to him but, as it were, paid hommage to THEM. He feigned the position of a lowly servant advocating for justice when his heart is set on self-regard, self-aggrandizement, the accumulation of power and influence and prominence for himself, and, finally work toward declaring himself king in Hebron and destroying his father. Despite his not letting people pay hommage to him this was not a sign of humility in Absalom at all. Not everyone who appears to be humble and deferential actually is. One's apparent humility can be a mask for a spectacular pride and avarice for power and influence and getting one's way. Absalom was handsome, smart, popular, and had three sons and a beautiful daughter and was considered the most beautiful man in the land. He became loved more than David for how he presented himself and we may as well surmise he believed his own hype. Insurgents generally have to, after all.

And what is strange to consider is that all of this fulfills Nathan's prophecy from the Lord.

Link: Slacktivist says what I've been saying, but in a much funnier way, and about the Left Behind books

http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2009/05/tf-bruces-big-plan.html

awesomely funny this is! Go and read it now!

What makes this commentary so beautiful is pointing out how all the speculation about end times THEN is really just a narrative address to end times advocates now. It is also useful to point out that premillenial dispensationalists, despite their putatively hopeless eschatology regarding temporal matters, have the "dig a big hole and wait in it for Jesus" mentality that would essentially incorporate all of the United States as a really big hole.

As I have been saying, premillenial dispensationalist eschatology tends to be a ruse Christians literally and figuratively left and right use to justify their own paranoia that the political, social, racial, religious, financial, or sexual "bad guys" are going to run the world in a few inglorious years until Jesus comes back. And why else would Christians of this stripe be apt to fall for bank debenture scams, the creation of above-ground religious compounds that get raided by the ATF, or become political activists whose main goal is to defeat whatever it is they believe corrupts the God-appointed greatness of America? The hole you wait in for Jesus' return has to be really big.

Of course the postmillenialists seem to have the same plan, but with slightly more theocratic overtones and rhetorical about "good law" or "moral law" or observing how everyone "legislates morality" and that the Christians should be the ones legislating it. Never mind the failures of theocratic experiences in the wake of the Reformation. The smarter direction in the wake of the Reformation was beginning to realize why a separation of church authority from the authority of the state was so vital. It meant that if one week Pastor Bob was replaced by Pastor Bill that Pastor Bill couldn't just decide to use the power of the sword held by the state to kill the flock of Pastor Bob, who was now an apostate for abandoning the true Gospel because he was a credobaptist/paedobaptist/egalitarian/complementarian/critic of the divine right of kings/advocate of a restoration of the royal family, etc, etc.

If the Left Behind books really are code books that reveal the location of hidden dug-outs after the rapture then I don't need them because God is so merciful that as a Christian I shall be raptured away from the tribulation whether I read those books or not! And if they aren't secret code books that reveal the location of hidden dug-outs ... then I STILL don't need to read them. Thank you Jesus!

I am not sure there is an ROTFLMAO big enough for this one

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/my-latest-attempt-to-become-a-complementarian#comments

on 01 May 2009 at 11:01 am iMonk
Jonathan Edwards view of the ideal church: I tell you what the Bible says and turn it into big time theology. My wife and children are amazed at me. My church only expects me to emerge from my study a couple of times a week. I really enjoy debating whether the real world matters at all in how we apply scripture. Then I go back to a church totally submerged in a particular culture and denounce missional churches as apostate.

This seems to me to be what a lot of folks are shooting for.

***

I read this recently and it's just too funny. Spenser is no longer a Calvinist and for that alone people might write him off but he absolutely nails this serious/satirical definition of an ideal church leadership position and what, as he put it, a lot of folks are shooting for. It tragically reminds me of what a pastor I have met seems to be becoming over the years, which makes me sad, but I also have to admit I kinda did laugh my ass off at this zinger summary of a Reformed Edwardsian model of the pastorate. At least the missional part doesn't apply in the case I'm thinking of, which is good.

swine flu, obviously one of the plagues mentioned in Revelations, right?

Give it a minute and it will show up. SOMEONE will be blogging or broadcasting on TV. Perhaps Jack and Rexalla (oh Jack!) van Impe will have something about it possibly being a sign of the end.



Chrsitians in America would do well to remember that just because a disease you've never heard of until last week is making the rounds doesn't mean it proves that we're living in the end times. We've been living in the end times since John the Baptist but most American Christians seem too unaware of the nature of eschatological expression in Jewish and early Christian thought to get that. I can't imagine that the number of people who have died of swine flu in the West is even a drop in the bucket compared to pandemics in Africa and elsewhere. Not belittling sufffering in the United States at all so much as belittling the impulse of American Christians to see every emergence of something modern medicine can't quite lick in a week and a half before you've heard of the disease as a sign of the end times.



I have said it before and I will say it again, too much discussion of end times anything in American Christianity seems like a mash up of fears--winnow away the rhetoric and bluster and out-of-context and eisegeted Scripture and the fears take on familiar faces: fears about political, religious, ethnic, racial, economic, ideological or sexual bad guys winning the day and ripping the last shreds of some benighted Christendom from the weary fingers of Christians who remember the good old days of some bygone epoch that may well have existed chiefly in our feeble imagining of history. The earliest Christians did not by and large suffer from this particular self-aggrandizing delusion. I would explain the situation at Corinth were it not so needless. You can do your own homework on that.



Too many Christians who quite simply ought to know better completely bungle apocalyptic literature. The apocalyptic literature that literally became biblical does not merely bewail a coming apocalypse where the end of all things comes, it considers that in and through Christ those things that are most beautiful transcend this life and literally cannot be destroyed by the worst that life and death can throw down. The book of Revelation should not be read as though it were some giant iteration of Bill Paxton's "GAME OVER MAN!!" from Aliens, which is often how Christians seem to handle it in the United States. They make it a book of their own fears and not one of hope in Christ.



I am not one of those "pan" millenialists who thinks it will all "pan out" in the end. I'm not a postmillenialist or a pre-millenialist. I lean decidedly amillenial partial preterist and don't take the tribulation as being anything unusual that Christians will be "raptured" from. The book itself says those destined for captivity will go into captivity and that those who slay with the sword will be slain with the sword, here is perserverance for the saints, as it goes. I kid you not, though, I discovered that at a church I was attending (this happened about five years ago) that a friend of mine had to explain to someone that I am not, in fact, a heretic for identifying as an amillenial partial preterist. It's a common view, historically, within the faith, and while it is highly unusual for an AMERICAN evangelical Protestant it's probably far more the norm than the historicist/futurist dispensationalism present in our country.

I trust that by and large MOST people will not look at swine flu as though it were the contents of one of the seven golden bowls. Still, I remember growing up hearing explanations about locusts representing helicopters or other sorts of fanciful allegorical interpretations taken by various people. Very few people interpret Revelation literally even when they pretend to themselves and others that the images are made to speak and take that as referring to television. If you know that the keeping of the Passover is as a mark on the right hand or a mark above the eyes then you know that within the Jewish idiom the Revelator drew upon that the mark of the Beast may not be anything particularly literal at all but a custom or ritual that defined one's allegiance to a god other than Christ.

just to prove that I still blog here

A person who regularly reads this blog (ha!) or has read the blog from the beginning (double "ha"! triple "ha!" for those who remember Space Ghost) may be forgiven for thinking that perhaps I've just let this thing drop or something. Not so, exactly, but I have been tending to a lot of things. I have also written elsewhere in other variations of cyber-space about what my business is. Ergo, I have written a bit less here.

I have been working through a number of things I don't think anyone has much business blogging about and a number of things that might be worthwhile for someone ELSE to blog about but that I won't be touching.

I have also, lest anyone of the few who read this have forgotten, been composing. Slowly composing I have but composing indeed have I been, hmm.

As part of my big old series of chamber sonatas for classical guitar I have been throwing myself into a sonata for cello and guitar. Violoncello and guitar for those who want to be fancy pants about it. I have taken a whole series of riffs and ideas that were supposed to be a guitar concerto nine years ago and redirected them all toward just a duo sonata. This has turned out to be an awesome decision creatively and practically. Creatively this means that a bunch of material I would have had to employ in some kind of obligatory concertante format can now be presented however I wish to present it. This leads into the practical consideration, the thematic material I'm working with simply isn't symphonic, springs too directly from the guitar, and wouldn't withstand the repetitions of an orchestra I OBVIOUSLY can't go contact or book anyway. As a cello and guitar duo, however, it's all working far better than I could have hoped.

And all of this material is also comprised of riffs that never became songs in the garage band I used to play in for about ... uh, a decade. Clearly the garage band was not on the fast track to anywhere except the drummer and his wife having more babies together and so I tabled all the rock song riffs until such time as I could use them. Such time as I can use them turns out to be this cello and guitar sonata.

So I have gone and bought a CD of the music of Armoend Coeck (sic) and I have found a recording by the Villa-Lobos duo that has Radames Gnatalli's gorgeous, charming sonata for cello and guitar, and I have set about to adding my own modest sonata to the surprisingly large and beautiful cello/guitar repertoire. Fortunately it's not just Villa-Lobos Bachianas Brasileiras #5 over and over ... not that I don't love that piece.

I hope to have the first movement of this sonata done in possibly as short a time as a month. There are some ideas I absolute insist on incorporating into the development that will be a bit tricky. I want to make sure that this idea doesn't kill the momentum of the development but I also realize I don't wish to place it the second movement, a variation form. I was once advised that when in doubt, you use sequence as a composer. I would hasten to add to that axiom, don't be afraid to use chains of rising fourths (i.e. a sequence of circle progressions). If it was good enough for Bach and Beethoven, damn it, it should be good enough for you, too, because it's just not possible that you'll be a greater composer than those two! Pardon the language, I wax enthusiastic.

And for those with nerdiness inclining toward theology and the Bible I have NOT forgotten about my big old rumination on Absalom and David. It has been tabled but not forgotten and, God willing, I shall be able to return to writing about that relatively soon.

I have considered Matthew Lee Anderson's observation that many new evangelicals like to talk the talk of being culture shapers without actually demonstrating any real interest in the work of shaping culture. I have been thinking about this in connection to the fascinating interview with Andrew Stanton in Christianity Today. Arguably the problem Christians have is they can be so busy TALKING ABOUT shaping culture they're never doing it. Those that do, and arguably Stanton is shaping a part of popular culture at a collosal scale, are probably going to get dismissed by many evangelical christians as promoting a cause that is perceived to be too "green". It's not easy being green but that's sorta beside the point and at any rate no one said that evangelicals had to "not" embrace putatively "green" agendas and still be evangelical. If Francis Schaeffer were alive today I think he would have probably fallen in love with WALL-E and argued that Stanton's films are steeped in a Christian worldview if Christians would just stop to pay attention.

So I'm around, out and about, and I'll eventually get back to blogging here about stuff I've been writing about earlier but I'm still settling into a new phase of life.

A short list of things that make the Pacific Northwest unique to me

Boeing
Starbucks
Microsoft
Mars Hill
Washington Mutual

A short list for consideration. There is some kind of common thread here but I can't quite identify what it is. Somehow these seem unique to the NW despite their national or international recognition.

raising up the cross to the diminishment of joy, another post Good Friday reflection

We must remember that Christ rising from the dead is not just life from death for us but is the promise of life from death for all of creation. There are times when I believe atheists are right to say Christians often operate under the delusion of thinking everything is about them. Despite our talk of the Cross there can be too much emphasis on how we as sinners killed baby Jesus when the message of good news is that Christ is king.

We dare not suppose this is some kind of "liberal" distraction from substitionary atonement at the expense of recognizing the great mystery of the good news, news that is good not merely for us as individuals or for us as the human race but for the whole cosmos. "Behold I make all things new" doesn't just refer to you or me, it refers to the whole of creation. We cannot imagine that the me-and-Jesus paradigm of spirituality is all there is to "the joy set before Him" when we consider that for the joy set before Him Christ embraced the Cross, scorning its shame. The renewal and restoration of the cosmos and the salvation of those who through sin brought death to themselves and the created world is a pretty big dose of joy.

The flip slide of "your suffering is nothing compared to the suffering of Christ" (which is in some sense obviously true since the suffering of God the Son as a man is a mystery we cannot grasp, which does not make it any more suitable for a "quit yer bitchin" rejoinder for its mystery) is to imagine a joy that is too small, a joy that would not be so precious that it would be worth Christ's own blood and death and also so great that He would scorn death on the Cross and EMBRACE it's shame! Does your personal sense of peace and renewal and happiness sound like that? Does the happiness and growth of your church sound like that? Does having a girlfriend or boyfriend sound like that? Does not living in someone else's home because you're "independent" sound like that? Does being published sound like that? Does your kid getting straight A's in grade school sound like that? Does your having a successful ministry sound like that? Does your favorite political candidate winning public office sound like that? No, of course not.

Does the renewal of the cosmos and its liberation from the spiritual and physical death sin has ravaged it with and the restoration of all thing in, through, and for the one true God sound like it? Now we're talking a joy so great that it makes Christ's embrace of the Cross as though it were nothing in comparison.

Indeed, if we use the Cross to belittle the suffering of others might we accidentally belittle the joy for which Christ was willing to embrace the Cross? Easily, because it is beyond our imagination to truly grasp what Christ will inaugurate at His return when He makes all things new and when we become like Him because we will see Him as He is.

On using the Lord's suffering to belittle the suffering of others, a reflection on Good Friday

This is a whole week late, I know, but I chose to wait to write about this because I am not writing a Good Friday meditation so much as I am writing about how Christians USE Good Friday and aspects of the Cross. Speaking as a self-identified evangelical Protestant I have come to appreciate that the pet atonement explanations are often easily abused because they are not presented alongside less popular explanations among evangelicals. Penal substitionary atonement without christus victor or christus exemplar IS damaging, just as every other explanation of the atonement in isolation can be positively destructive.

Let me approach the subject this way ...

Over the years I have often heard it said that what Jesus suffered on our behalf makes all our suffering as though it were nothing in comparison. The torture of crucifixion and the abandonment Jesus felt on the Cross make all of our suffering nothing in comparison.

This smells more and more like a modern Western American guilt trip approach to preaching by folks who only default to penal substitionary atonement yet abuse it and fail to grasp the fullness of its meaning. Don't misunderstand me, I'm actually a huge fan of penal substitionary atonement ... in conjunction with EVERY OTHER theory of the atonement. All the theories of the atonement are that, attempts to explain a manifold mystery. If we treat the theories as though they in themselves explained things we've got a problem.

In the same way, if we ONLY see Christ's suffering on the Cross as being FOR our sins and not also as a way to identify with His people and suffer WITH His people we fail to grasp the bewildering beauty of the Cross. God chose to suffer with us and not simply subject us to suffering because we sinned. There is a brand of Christian who only grasps the Cross and does not grasp the life of Christ. To this person it is enough that Jesus died for me that I might be free from sin and get to be like Jesus. The idea that Christs' suffering included His life and that He identified with the losers that constitute the human race is not readily understood, perhaps because the people expounding do not realize they are actually losers.

To say that the Father's wrath had to be satisfied and so the Son interposed fails to grasp the unity of the Father and Son. It also fails to grasp something more fundamental, that in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God and the Word was God. All things were made through Him and so the God who makes all things chooses voluntarily to die at the hands of those whom He made. Penal substitionary atonement is where God chose to die with His creation rather than leave it in the state of judgment and despair. Having allowed us time and again to take what we believed we deserved and what we wanted He came to walk among us and provide what we needed. Do we deserve such pity? Perhaps a better question is to ask who we are that we should go on and on about how we so little deserved that pity if Christ through the Cross extends it to us. At some point that lady doth protest too much.

In the hands of Christians without pity penal substitionary atonement CAN become a theology of Job's comforters when it is improperly explained or applied and this can happen among Christians who are otherwise convinced of their orthodoxy. In the hands of someone who recognizes that the theology of the Cross is a theology of Christ laying down His life, in the hands of someone who recognizes that the Jesus who was the Word through Whom all things were made chose to become the substitute then we can grasp the outline of something words so often fail to convey and can only attempt--what wondrous love is this, o my soul?

It is so often because we think we know that we reveal our profound ignorance. It is not our knowledge itself that has to be the problem so much as our attitude about our knowledge. The wisest person on earth can still recognize in himself or herself more than a little foolishness. We can so easily think that we have some knowledge of the grace of Christ but if we say to someone that their sufferings are as nothing compared to the suffering of Christ or if we even simply say "Your suffering is nothing compared to what I have suffered." we place ourselves above our brother or sister. It is not for nothing the apostle writes that there is no temptation that is not common to all.

Instead of saying that your suffering counts as nothing compared to the suffering of Christ why not consider that your suffering, however great or small it may be, gives you an insight into the suffering Christ took upon Himself. He took our wounds and diseases upon Himself. Christ had pity on the man and reached out and healed him. If we want people who are in Christ to resist self pity then let us remember Christ chose to take our suffering on Himself voluntarily while we resist our sufferings placed pon us by the consequences of life, others' sins, or our own.

There is a strange, ineffable place at which to say to someone "You're suffering is nothign compared to what Christ endured for your sins" becomes a theology of Job's comforters. There is surely a time and a place for it but it can often be a truth misapplied and wrested from the broader truth of the man of sorrows. It can too often be a propositional truth trotted out, more or less, to say "Quite yer bitchin and shut up already." That may seem like good theology to some people but it doesn't necessarily become good news.

The problem with Job's comforters wasn't that their theology was completely wrong, it was that it was misapplied and therefore became false. The best theology in the world can still become lies and destruction if applied in the wrong way to the wrong person at the wrong time. It is not enough for me to think I'm right in the theology I apply to a given case.

It is better to judge not and so not be subject to judgment. By your standard of measure it will be measured to you. Job's comforters spend a lot of time telling Job he had to have sinned and was wrong and that this was why he was under God's wrath ... and then in the end God says that His servant Job will intercede so that His wrath will be turned from the very people who sought to defend God's honor. Job was humbled yet, strangely, vindicated.

If someone tells you that your suffering is nothing compared to what Christ suffered remember that Christ took your suffering upon Himself. If you feel alone and abandoned Christ took that upon Himself. If you feel wronged and betrayed Christ took that upon Himself. He both took it upon Himself for you and received it from you at His own expense. It is not simply either one or the other. Christ on earth and on the Cross both suffers for you as well as with you. If we tell people that what they suffer is nothing compared to what Christ took upon Himself not only on the Cross but in His life how can we be sure we are not bereft of the very pity from which Christ came to give us mercy?