Long, long ago when I was in college I knew a fellow named Steve Hays. We occasionally commiserated about theology and one of a few observations he shared was that there seems to be a paradox at work--the Christians who are often biggest into free will are very concerned to discern what God's will is, to pray that one would find God's specific will in a specific situation. In other words a lot of effort went into the whole process of discovery. It is as though the more freedom you insist God has given you the more anxious you are to find out what GOD'S will for you in any given situation is.
Conversely, there were many people who were sure of God's providential direction who, to put it a bit simply, were content that anything not expressly forbidden to do in scripture was entirely within their Christian liberty to do. God has not given any specific instructions about what kind of job to have so you go and pursue the kind of job you would like to have provided it is not something that is prohibited by scripture. The Bible does not say whether or not YOU specifically should marry so you marry if you choose at the time that you choose. God does not generally tell you anything outside what is revealed in scripture so within the confines of what scripture does not prohibit you do whatever you want. These correspond roughly to what Mark Driscoll referred to as normative and regulative principles.
The paradox is that these modes seem to have applications that are inversely proportional to the formulated principles. The more likely you are to advocate the power of your freedom the more likely you are to be concerned in discerning what God's will is for your life. The more certain you are that God providentially directs all things the less certain you are that God has any particular interest in actually telling you whether you're going to have X job in Y place at Z time.
This often manifests in another paradox, that those who describe their calling and direction from God in the most passive terms tend to be the most active, even activist, in how they live out their life of faith. For instance, when I consider the life and example of Mark Driscoll he describes his calling in the most passive terms imaginable. God told him to marry Grace and plant a church to reach young men. Everything is about what God told Mark to do. He describes himself in many cases as the passive recipient of whatever God tasked him to go do.
Yet if you look at how he goes through life (especially if you've met the man) no one could be more active or even activist about trying to figure out and implement the nuts and bolts of what he believes God wants him to do. If a person is unusually cynical they have another assessment but I'll get to that cynicism and the problem of the flip side momentarily. Perhaps the most vivid articulation of the active implementation of what might otherwise be a man prone to describe his calling as passive is how Mark talked about prayer in his Ruth sermon series. In discussing Boaz' prayer of blessing for Ruth Driscoll had this broad observation to share, "sometimes you have to answer your own prayer." Now this was the same series in which Driscoll described himself as Abimelech, a guy who "could" ask God what His will is but generally doesn't bother to because he's got it all figured out. So, again, the paradox is that a man who describes his ministry as passively received by command of God admits that he's pretty much an action guy who makes plans and figures out what he's going to do.
Now lest someone get overly cynical this paradox, has precedent as far back as Paul. Paul wrote that he did more than all the other apostles yet also said that it was not him but Christ at work in him. Paul, too, describes his conversion experience in exceptionally passive terms. He is a recipient of salvation and not someone who "made a decision for Christ'. While a person could make the suggestion that a guy like Driscoll uses descriptions of God's calling to do what he basically wants to do we could say this about all sorts of religious leaders, even the apostle Paul. Unbelievers, of course, have been saying this for generations so it's no surprise there. It is the Christian in danger of hoisting himself on his own petard trying to use this argument selectively. The argument that someone else's spiritual hero is just doing what he wants in God's name applies equally well to your own hero, after all. And of course that is why I'm not presenting my observation and that of others as an argument, just as an observation.
But what I DO present as an argument is a caution, namely that what I have seen in a guy like Driscoll is a willingness to present his own words from the Lord at face value while expressing from the pulpit a significant skepticism about the words of God claimed by other spiritual people. Driscoll doesn't do this quite so much any more but he used to do it regularly. Having recounted that there were people who were claiming God wanted them to run the church he was planting I understand that skepticism on his part, but as I wrote earlier, skepticism is invariably a double-edged sword here. Both experience and a lack of it or changes in it can often precipitate drastic changes in theology. We would do well to be cautious in claiming for ourselves what we would deny others.
At the other side are folks from charismatic backgrounds who believe that we have free will and talk about how God communicates to us. For these people the freedom is paradoxically moot because people are urged to find out what God's will for them is. It is ironic that those who lay stock by the divine permission of freedom seem least eager to use it and pray through or "tarry" until they figure out what God wants. But in the end a person could persuasively argue that in both cases people are trying to figure out what they want to do and employ different modes of theological language to figure out what that is. These people want to move to the place where they feel they are in God's will. If the annointing has moved to Toronto then visit Toronto to catch the fresh fire. If you aren't sure what to do then pursue the feeling of peace that what you are doing is in God's will and, say, doesn't this end up looking pretty much the same as with the other folks who just do what they want and trust that God is going to providentially work it all out?
The danger in the application of both "theories" of divining the will of God is that if you don't know what YOU want God certainly doesn't spell things out in most cases and it is presumptuous to suppose that God has something so important that He has to tell you about it in some unusual way. Or, to go by the precedent of saints of old, if you're thick-headed and stubborn enough that God has to actually tell you what to do then that speaks poorly of your inattention to the Lord.
There are two other considerations about the active/passive faith distinction. A "passive" faith can be considered accepting that whatever happens is God's will, whether circumstances are good or bad. The "active" faith is considered to be the conviction that prayer moves the heart of God and that if you ask in Jesus' name that prayer will be answered. The passive approach describes the functin of prayer as changing your heart toward God so that you accept His providential will while the active version of faith is seen as pouring your heart out to the Lord in the faith that God will respond.
I can't take either extreme seriously. It is true that to say prayer's chief end is to change our acceptance or lack of acceptance about circumstances does not fit with the entirety of what the scriptures teache about prayer and what saints have understood prayer to be. If someone prays for thirty years and that petition is never granted how long do we avoid the surmise that God's answer to said prayer is "no"?
On the other hand, enough prayers get answered in unobservable ways that we end up seeing that faith is faith, the substance of things hoped for the evidence for which is unseen. Abraham knew that his body was as good as dead and that his wife was barren. He believed God, often fitfully and with starts and stops and spectacular lapses, but he believed God.
This was not, however, a positive confession, nor a "blab it and grab it" or "name it and claim it" approach to trusting God. Abraham was promised something by God without having asked for it. Now we live in a time in which studies have, as unbelievers have often touted, established that prayer has no medical effect whatever and that prayer is useless to change circumstances. If your theology of prayer hinges on the idea that your prayers change the order of the universe unbelievers have a ready answer for you, your prayers don't matter. If your theology of prayer is that it changes your heart toward your circumstances and toward God's providence then your reply would be that such studies that supposedly disprove the effectiveness of prayer fail to grasp one of the key reasons God would have us pray to Him, for fellowship and to better understand His character.
This is not a case of one or the other as a chorus from a Paula Abdul song insists it is. Yet many frustrations about prayer can stem from embracing one of these two aspects without giving due consideration to the other. God is not obliged to answer our prayers insofar as He is God and owes us nothing, yet we are taught that if we pray in the Lord's name the Father will hear and grant whatever we request.
The question inevitably becomes what it means to ask for something in the name of Jesus. Many things have been asked in the name of Jesus that were declined, such as the removal of the thorn in Paul's flesh. It was not wrong for Paul to ask that that thorn be removed but the answer God made to that prayerwas clearly "no", which came in the form of "my grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." Paul in his action of prayer was admonished to recognize the need of a "passive" acceptance of the weakness God was content to give him just as he was active more than the other apostles in proclaiming what he had passively received. As I have been attempting to demonstrate, many of the contrasts we construct in our minds about the contrast between "active" faith and "passive" faith is ultimately pedestrian, academic, and woefully inaccurate. In what may surely be a case of a broken clock telling the correct time twice a day I once heard Benny Hinn say that it doesn't matter how much faith you have if whatever amount of faith you do have is in Christ.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
triumph is not "redemption"
Earlier this year I finally got around to catching District 9. It was show at Mars Hill Lake City campus and since I know more than a few people there and wanted to see the film I went. One of the things that James Harleman discussed there that I believe merits continuing discussion is that in our popular imagination we tend to conflate two aspects of a heroic narrative that are not necessarily the same. We expect stories like Iron Man or Avatar where someone who is on the wrong side of things has an epiphany and a conversion experience and goes on to become the most renowned exponent of the view he or she once spurned. Paul's apostolic ministry after a pre-conversion career of persecution is obviously in view for this sort of narrative convention and the narrative exists in many forms throughout literature and history.
However, this arc is rare in the real world and District 9 subverts the expectations of modern sci-fi tropes by having the protagonist be an essentially venal, stupid man. He does not find redemption in the Jake Sully mode of redemption because he has no personal moment of triumph against all odds. All things considered merely surviving within the odds is miraculous for Wikus. James' observation that we tend to want our protagonists to not only repent but to prevail is undercut in District 9's narrative. I propose that to properly understand the implications of what redemption and victory mean it helps to understand what is and isn't in common between redemption and triump.
To be redeemed is to be bought back, to be recovered. This means you have been snatched from the jaws of death. To stop going down the wrong path is not the same as beating everyone else to the finish line that is on the right path. We can get this idea that "redemption" is the full shift from going the wrong way to being the champion of the right way. While we can cite an apostolic precedent in the life of Paul or Augustine or whomever we wish to indicate (and some of us present ourselves as the exemplars of this kind of thing either directly or indirectly) this is not really a way to readily understand the kindness of Christ.
Is it? Perhaps it is and I am simply not that smart but if we take seriously "He must become greater and greater while I must become less and less" we have to eschew this kind of holding ourselves up as examples. There are ways to do it but I am not convinced that most people who hold themselves up for our emulation in Christ are the same as those who uphold Christ as the true king to follow. A great witness for some seems to consist of telling others how much they need Jesus as though having once acquired Jesus all is well. I have Jesus and you NEED Jesus. But need Jesus for what? To lose your life? Jesus does not sell His cause to us the way we so often sell His cause to others. You know, the "I used to be on crack cocaine and lived a life of sin but Jesus turned my life around" stuff. Even in the popular testimony there is the urge to embrace the narrative of our looking death in the eye and somehow being able to say that thanks to God death blinked.
How this squares with Paul is that it doesn't square with Paul who wrote that he and other apostles faced death daily and yet lived. Paradoxically being constantly aware of the inevitability of death allowed the apostle to be aware that he was given life through Christ. In Christ we share in His triumph by faith but we are in the process of being redeemed now.
However, this arc is rare in the real world and District 9 subverts the expectations of modern sci-fi tropes by having the protagonist be an essentially venal, stupid man. He does not find redemption in the Jake Sully mode of redemption because he has no personal moment of triumph against all odds. All things considered merely surviving within the odds is miraculous for Wikus. James' observation that we tend to want our protagonists to not only repent but to prevail is undercut in District 9's narrative. I propose that to properly understand the implications of what redemption and victory mean it helps to understand what is and isn't in common between redemption and triump.
To be redeemed is to be bought back, to be recovered. This means you have been snatched from the jaws of death. To stop going down the wrong path is not the same as beating everyone else to the finish line that is on the right path. We can get this idea that "redemption" is the full shift from going the wrong way to being the champion of the right way. While we can cite an apostolic precedent in the life of Paul or Augustine or whomever we wish to indicate (and some of us present ourselves as the exemplars of this kind of thing either directly or indirectly) this is not really a way to readily understand the kindness of Christ.
Is it? Perhaps it is and I am simply not that smart but if we take seriously "He must become greater and greater while I must become less and less" we have to eschew this kind of holding ourselves up as examples. There are ways to do it but I am not convinced that most people who hold themselves up for our emulation in Christ are the same as those who uphold Christ as the true king to follow. A great witness for some seems to consist of telling others how much they need Jesus as though having once acquired Jesus all is well. I have Jesus and you NEED Jesus. But need Jesus for what? To lose your life? Jesus does not sell His cause to us the way we so often sell His cause to others. You know, the "I used to be on crack cocaine and lived a life of sin but Jesus turned my life around" stuff. Even in the popular testimony there is the urge to embrace the narrative of our looking death in the eye and somehow being able to say that thanks to God death blinked.
How this squares with Paul is that it doesn't square with Paul who wrote that he and other apostles faced death daily and yet lived. Paradoxically being constantly aware of the inevitability of death allowed the apostle to be aware that he was given life through Christ. In Christ we share in His triumph by faith but we are in the process of being redeemed now.
Note to Leo Brouwer (I'm sure he won't read it)
Please consider writing more fugues for solo guitar. Your Fuga #1 rocks all around. Please write more of those.
Rekhin's set is fun and all but there's no reason there can't be other sets and you're one of the guitarist-composers who I think could tackle it. The other one is Atanas Ourkouzounov (check out Suite in modo bulgaro for proof of that). Michael Nicollela wrote a beautiful Toccata and Fugue that I hope some more people play. And surely we know of the various transcriptions of Bach for solo guitar. I'm not even going to count my modest attempts to compose my own set.
So obviously I know the field a bit but you (on the billion to once chance you'll read this), Mr. Brouwer, are well-situated to compose such a set and have it get some circulation in the West. So, uh, even though I know you're never going to read this I'm posting a public request on my blog that nobody reads in the hopes that I can plug for some of your music and maybe inspire more guitarist-composers to write fugues for our beautiful instrument.
Rekhin's set is fun and all but there's no reason there can't be other sets and you're one of the guitarist-composers who I think could tackle it. The other one is Atanas Ourkouzounov (check out Suite in modo bulgaro for proof of that). Michael Nicollela wrote a beautiful Toccata and Fugue that I hope some more people play. And surely we know of the various transcriptions of Bach for solo guitar. I'm not even going to count my modest attempts to compose my own set.
So obviously I know the field a bit but you (on the billion to once chance you'll read this), Mr. Brouwer, are well-situated to compose such a set and have it get some circulation in the West. So, uh, even though I know you're never going to read this I'm posting a public request on my blog that nobody reads in the hopes that I can plug for some of your music and maybe inspire more guitarist-composers to write fugues for our beautiful instrument.
and the beat goes on
I may well have overcome some hurdles in my preludes and fugues project. I've got a subject for E major, D flat major, and E flat minor. I have two ideas for D major and D minor respectively and an idea for an E minor fugue. If I can knock out these then all the major and minor keys from C major to F minor will be covered. Yep, you guessed it, I'll be at the half-way point for the 24 preludes and fugues.
I'd like to finish the whole set as quickly as I can but I want to finish it as EFFECTIVELY as I can. Pairing the works off into dozens made sense for Igor Rekhin and I would be a fool to not follow the precedent established by earlier composers. So while I would love to finish F# major, F# minor, G minor, A minor, B flat major, B major, and B minor those form a hefty amount of work. Meanwhile, if I focus on the smaller number of fugues to be finished in the first half I could reach a point where the first half in chromatic sequential and major/minor order is finished.
Seeing as this is intended to be a complete cycle of pieces it makes more sense to finish them in groups. Having said that, there's no reason that a guitarist could not perform just a few entries from the series. As yet I have few takers for performance. I've gotten some positive feedback about the project and specific pieces from a composer whose work I admire greatly so that's encouraging.
I'm thinking about performing all my F minor material as a unified work later this year. It may prove to be as brutal a gauntlet as Diabelli's F major guitar sonata (which pretty much nobody plays except Anthony Glise)! My compositions are not exactly in that style but for hard core classical guitar nerds you should go snap up Glise's edition of complete sonatas or Sor, Giuliani, and Diabelli. If I had money to burn (and believe me I don't!!) I'd go get this edition! Be warned, it's way, way out of print (as of 2006, why didn't I think to get that back when I had a job!).
So, anyhow, I'm still hunting for work and while I'm doing that I'm trying to prepare a few pieces for performance. The odds are good (unless something catastrophic happens to me) that I can finish at least half of the 24 this year, which excites me a great deal. These are the things that make life exciting for me (other people, I imagine, get excited by things like dating or building things). It would appear that other than Rekhin no one else has finished a set of these works. I won't be the first but at the rate things are going I'll be the first to finish a set that uses invertible counterpoint and employs grand stretto. Brouwer uses grand stretto brilliantly in his one fugue for guitar.
Man, now that I'm thinking about it, why doesn't Leo Brouwer write a set of preludes and fugues for solo guitar. I don't doubt that they would rock. Someone who has the time and resources should ask Brouwer if he plans to write more fugues for guitar! I'd do it but I've got no reasons to head to Cuba!
I'd like to finish the whole set as quickly as I can but I want to finish it as EFFECTIVELY as I can. Pairing the works off into dozens made sense for Igor Rekhin and I would be a fool to not follow the precedent established by earlier composers. So while I would love to finish F# major, F# minor, G minor, A minor, B flat major, B major, and B minor those form a hefty amount of work. Meanwhile, if I focus on the smaller number of fugues to be finished in the first half I could reach a point where the first half in chromatic sequential and major/minor order is finished.
Seeing as this is intended to be a complete cycle of pieces it makes more sense to finish them in groups. Having said that, there's no reason that a guitarist could not perform just a few entries from the series. As yet I have few takers for performance. I've gotten some positive feedback about the project and specific pieces from a composer whose work I admire greatly so that's encouraging.
I'm thinking about performing all my F minor material as a unified work later this year. It may prove to be as brutal a gauntlet as Diabelli's F major guitar sonata (which pretty much nobody plays except Anthony Glise)! My compositions are not exactly in that style but for hard core classical guitar nerds you should go snap up Glise's edition of complete sonatas or Sor, Giuliani, and Diabelli. If I had money to burn (and believe me I don't!!) I'd go get this edition! Be warned, it's way, way out of print (as of 2006, why didn't I think to get that back when I had a job!).
So, anyhow, I'm still hunting for work and while I'm doing that I'm trying to prepare a few pieces for performance. The odds are good (unless something catastrophic happens to me) that I can finish at least half of the 24 this year, which excites me a great deal. These are the things that make life exciting for me (other people, I imagine, get excited by things like dating or building things). It would appear that other than Rekhin no one else has finished a set of these works. I won't be the first but at the rate things are going I'll be the first to finish a set that uses invertible counterpoint and employs grand stretto. Brouwer uses grand stretto brilliantly in his one fugue for guitar.
Man, now that I'm thinking about it, why doesn't Leo Brouwer write a set of preludes and fugues for solo guitar. I don't doubt that they would rock. Someone who has the time and resources should ask Brouwer if he plans to write more fugues for guitar! I'd do it but I've got no reasons to head to Cuba!
speaking of chamber music for the guitar ...
http://www.dobermaneditions.com/en/shortcuts/ourkouzounov-series/
http://www.dobermaneditions.com//en/sheet-music-for-other-instruments/c378081924/c378033634/p17575023.html
http://www.dobermaneditions.com//en/sheet-music-for-other-instruments/c378081922/c378033624/p17263556.html
http://www.dobermaneditions.com//en/sheet-music-for-other-instruments/c378081924/c378033636/p17263948.html
http://www.dobermaneditions.com//en/new-issues/c378107332/p17502913.html
http://www.dobermaneditions.com//en/sheet-music-for-other-instruments/c378081922/c378033624/p17263729.html
Seeing as I'm on the search for work and can't be spending money on these pieces I can only vouch for the pieces generally rather than speaking of specifics. If you're a Keith Jarrett fan who wants more guitar music inspired by that style Kaleidascore is a must-get piece. All Atanas' music for flute and guitar is wonderful and his work for cello and guitar is also great. You may have noticed I love his music. :) I'm going to have to see if I can persuade the local guitar society to tackle some of his music for guitar quartet.
http://www.dobermaneditions.com//en/sheet-music-for-other-instruments/c378081924/c378033634/p17575023.html
http://www.dobermaneditions.com//en/sheet-music-for-other-instruments/c378081922/c378033624/p17263556.html
http://www.dobermaneditions.com//en/sheet-music-for-other-instruments/c378081924/c378033636/p17263948.html
http://www.dobermaneditions.com//en/new-issues/c378107332/p17502913.html
http://www.dobermaneditions.com//en/sheet-music-for-other-instruments/c378081922/c378033624/p17263729.html
Seeing as I'm on the search for work and can't be spending money on these pieces I can only vouch for the pieces generally rather than speaking of specifics. If you're a Keith Jarrett fan who wants more guitar music inspired by that style Kaleidascore is a must-get piece. All Atanas' music for flute and guitar is wonderful and his work for cello and guitar is also great. You may have noticed I love his music. :) I'm going to have to see if I can persuade the local guitar society to tackle some of his music for guitar quartet.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Scotteriology: Apologetics and the Dead Sea Scrolls
http://scotteriology.wordpress.com/2010/04/12/apologetics-and-the-dead-sea-scrolls/#comments
I could have gone over there and posted a comment but the comment I had seemed too long to warrant posting in the actual comment section.
I have not read a ton on the Dead Sea Scrolls and have only dabbled a bit in intertestamental literature. I read parts of the Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah, enough to know that if you really think Isaiah wrote that after his martyrdom that I can now make a sales pitch to you and introduce myself as Ricky Roma. I have not actually read all of the books of Enoch but I, er, have them on my desktop and may get to them one day. I have read Bauckham's valuable monograph on Jude and 2 Peter where he discusses the connection between Jude's epistle and the surprisingly high ratio of non-canonical material referenced in the epistle. And, as I mentioned elsewhere, I read Susan Garrett's useful books on diabology in NT literature to say nothing more than the name Jeffrey Burton Russell for the historian's side of things.
And all that is to say that one of the most useful applications of studying intertestamental literature is to observe how much stuff that is supposedly attributed to "biblical" teaching on spiritual warfare does not derive from the biblical texts as much as traditions surrounding the texts and intertestamental literature. Preachers who would not accept the idea that church tradition trumps a plain reading of the text will affirm without question that the Prince of Tyre and light-bearer passages in Ezekiel and Isaiah refer to the devil (Mark Driscoll is only a local example). Now as Russell pointed out that these texts have taken on an interpretive reference to Satan does not make that interpretation invalid, it's just useful to point out that this is not even close to what the ORIGINAL REFERENTS IN THE TEXTS WERE.
Possibly the single most abused aspect of apocalyptic literature is to presume that it was written as a warning to US and not to THEM, the people who first received the message. It's more fun to think that some Hal Lindsey or Jack van Impe meaning for NOW is intended in the apocalyptic literature than to see apocalyptic literature as a commentary on contemporary events from the AUTHOR'S time period. This is, of course, one of they key reasons Daniel is considered by many scholars to be a fabrication that couldn't have been written by Daniel, assuming Daniel even existed.
Ironically one of the ways that apocalyptic literature is abused in seemingly every generation is in a way that is roughly concordant with original use. The error is to transpose OUR crises on to the crises the author was dealing with. So Ezekiel or Isaiah are writing about the United States whenever an eagle is used even though that's not what the eagle refers to. The lion must refer to England or the unidentifiable beast must refer to Russia because early Christian writers in the middle east might not have seen bears. The number of the Beast HAS to refer to someone we can identify now in our time, not Nero. Sure, every variation of the number reveals Nero's identity but that doesn't matter because the primary purpose of prophecy is not a call to faithfulness and trust in the goodness of God but the prediction of when God will destroy the people you hate, whomever you hate.
The idea that the scriptures are a gift to us so that we may understand who God is but not FOR US in the sense of being some IM from God straight to our iPhone needs continual clarification. Pastors and teachers who talk about "what God told me" don't help because no one can explain what it even means to say God told them something. Now for unbelievers, of course, that whole question never comes up because the supposition is that people make stuff up and retroactively plug God into the space where justification for doing what you want comes up. For people in that camp there's always the Woody Allen stand-by of "The heart wants what it wants." Or whatever applicable organ may be applicable--the Woody wants what the Woody wants, I guess.
For those who don't have the temerity to invoke a deity proposing that what you want or think is validated by the Bible is the next best step. If you think that the European Union is the seat of the antichrist then you can make the Bible fit that design. If you think that the United States is God's chosen nation then by blunt application of covenant theology you can delude yourself into thinking that "if my people" refers to ANY country that you decide had a start as a Christian nation.
Now it is certainly true that Jewish and early Christian authors did address the politics of their time but not many Christians seem interested in investigating that because if Scott's observation that many Christians don't care about Dead Sea Scrolls research except as an aid to apologetics holds true then it probably holds equally true that most laity investigating eschatology and apocalyptic literature are doing so to bolster their already established political and social views in the here and now. I have written about this at length in other blog posts here. I don't wish to repeat myself too endlessly but the recent post on Scotteriology has gotten me thinking about these things again.
I could have gone over there and posted a comment but the comment I had seemed too long to warrant posting in the actual comment section.
I have not read a ton on the Dead Sea Scrolls and have only dabbled a bit in intertestamental literature. I read parts of the Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah, enough to know that if you really think Isaiah wrote that after his martyrdom that I can now make a sales pitch to you and introduce myself as Ricky Roma. I have not actually read all of the books of Enoch but I, er, have them on my desktop and may get to them one day. I have read Bauckham's valuable monograph on Jude and 2 Peter where he discusses the connection between Jude's epistle and the surprisingly high ratio of non-canonical material referenced in the epistle. And, as I mentioned elsewhere, I read Susan Garrett's useful books on diabology in NT literature to say nothing more than the name Jeffrey Burton Russell for the historian's side of things.
And all that is to say that one of the most useful applications of studying intertestamental literature is to observe how much stuff that is supposedly attributed to "biblical" teaching on spiritual warfare does not derive from the biblical texts as much as traditions surrounding the texts and intertestamental literature. Preachers who would not accept the idea that church tradition trumps a plain reading of the text will affirm without question that the Prince of Tyre and light-bearer passages in Ezekiel and Isaiah refer to the devil (Mark Driscoll is only a local example). Now as Russell pointed out that these texts have taken on an interpretive reference to Satan does not make that interpretation invalid, it's just useful to point out that this is not even close to what the ORIGINAL REFERENTS IN THE TEXTS WERE.
Possibly the single most abused aspect of apocalyptic literature is to presume that it was written as a warning to US and not to THEM, the people who first received the message. It's more fun to think that some Hal Lindsey or Jack van Impe meaning for NOW is intended in the apocalyptic literature than to see apocalyptic literature as a commentary on contemporary events from the AUTHOR'S time period. This is, of course, one of they key reasons Daniel is considered by many scholars to be a fabrication that couldn't have been written by Daniel, assuming Daniel even existed.
Ironically one of the ways that apocalyptic literature is abused in seemingly every generation is in a way that is roughly concordant with original use. The error is to transpose OUR crises on to the crises the author was dealing with. So Ezekiel or Isaiah are writing about the United States whenever an eagle is used even though that's not what the eagle refers to. The lion must refer to England or the unidentifiable beast must refer to Russia because early Christian writers in the middle east might not have seen bears. The number of the Beast HAS to refer to someone we can identify now in our time, not Nero. Sure, every variation of the number reveals Nero's identity but that doesn't matter because the primary purpose of prophecy is not a call to faithfulness and trust in the goodness of God but the prediction of when God will destroy the people you hate, whomever you hate.
The idea that the scriptures are a gift to us so that we may understand who God is but not FOR US in the sense of being some IM from God straight to our iPhone needs continual clarification. Pastors and teachers who talk about "what God told me" don't help because no one can explain what it even means to say God told them something. Now for unbelievers, of course, that whole question never comes up because the supposition is that people make stuff up and retroactively plug God into the space where justification for doing what you want comes up. For people in that camp there's always the Woody Allen stand-by of "The heart wants what it wants." Or whatever applicable organ may be applicable--the Woody wants what the Woody wants, I guess.
For those who don't have the temerity to invoke a deity proposing that what you want or think is validated by the Bible is the next best step. If you think that the European Union is the seat of the antichrist then you can make the Bible fit that design. If you think that the United States is God's chosen nation then by blunt application of covenant theology you can delude yourself into thinking that "if my people" refers to ANY country that you decide had a start as a Christian nation.
Now it is certainly true that Jewish and early Christian authors did address the politics of their time but not many Christians seem interested in investigating that because if Scott's observation that many Christians don't care about Dead Sea Scrolls research except as an aid to apologetics holds true then it probably holds equally true that most laity investigating eschatology and apocalyptic literature are doing so to bolster their already established political and social views in the here and now. I have written about this at length in other blog posts here. I don't wish to repeat myself too endlessly but the recent post on Scotteriology has gotten me thinking about these things again.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
I know I get on this hobby horse but guitarists, explore chamber music
I'm not exactly a great classical guitarist but I do play once in a while and the more time goes by the more I wish guitarists would get into chamber music. It's fine to lament that the same guitarists keep playing the same stuff over and over again.
I don't mind that people say that guitarists tend to be conservative in what they program or explore but we all know that is not universally true. The bad reviews I saw of Michael Nicollela's Shard are proof enough that there are guitarists (even locally) who are willing to play some really far out stuff that a lot of people don't like. I'll admit that Shard is not as fun for me as Micahel's own compositions (which are great, by the way) but I admire his interest in exploring all sorts of music, even music I don't personally get. But he plays some stuff that's awesome. His version of Reich's Electric Counterpoint is pretty satisfying.
Yet for all this there are times and places for guitarists who are not as adventurous as you would like them to be.
But it seems as though some ten years ago Matanya Ophee was right to point out that chamber music can get more attention. Guitarists can often pay lip service to the idea of chamber music while never venturing to make careers based on performing and recording chamber music, much less composing it. To all this I would say this is why Atanas Ourkouzounov is one of my favorite living guitarists. He does a lot of performing, composing, and arranging chamber music for guitar. By chamber music I mean there is more than one instrument involved and that other instrument is not just another guitar!
I have been hoping to work with other musicians but am not well situated for it right now. Job hunting means a lot of attention I might otherwise put into networking has to be devoted to looking for work. I also am just now networking with a handful of musicians who have busy lives. The possibility of managing to play chamber works is not immediately high but I hope, in the long run, will be solid.
But in many cases guitarists do not make themselves available to other musicians and there seems to be an unstated desire that the guitar parts not be too boring. We guitarists who play classical guitar have the same sorts of weakness guitarists in rock bands have, at least guitarists who are not also singers. One of my favorite musical collaborations in college involved a cellist and a harmonica-player. A lot of what I did in that setting was simply strumming chords but I had a blast. I let the cello and harmonica do pretty much all of the solo work and kept a steady rhythm.
It useful for all musicians to perform in musical settings where your part is indispensable but not glamorous. I don't think most guitarists really crave that paradoxical quality. Most of us are drawn to the instrument because of its self sufficiency, because the guitar, as so many people tritely put it, "is a miniature orchestra". Ophee's smart-ass remark that most guitarists have no idea how to conduct is salient. If the guitar is a miniature orchestra then would that more guitarists get used to the idea that they may play a concerto or two in which someone else is featured as the soloist. In the orchestra there are also woodwinds, brass, percussion, and things like that.
So if you haven't considered playing music with other musicians already, consider it. If you're a music student and a guitarist start networking to play chamber music with non-guitarist musicians now! Play in folk bands, rock bands, jazz bands, get in some kind of ensemble setting where what you do matters because it contributes to the musical whole and not just the glamour of the rock star persona. You'll find that you develop an entirely new set of musical disciplines keeping time with other musicians. In choral and quartet repertoire people recognize that your individual part lacks glamour. Those of us who sing in inner voices in choral repertoire are acutely aware of this! Violists and second violinists also know this! Guitarists ... we guitarists all have some kind of first fiddler mentality or worse. It is a disposition to overcome. Ophee made this point a decade ago and while it may never be heeded it always bears repeating.
I don't mind that people say that guitarists tend to be conservative in what they program or explore but we all know that is not universally true. The bad reviews I saw of Michael Nicollela's Shard are proof enough that there are guitarists (even locally) who are willing to play some really far out stuff that a lot of people don't like. I'll admit that Shard is not as fun for me as Micahel's own compositions (which are great, by the way) but I admire his interest in exploring all sorts of music, even music I don't personally get. But he plays some stuff that's awesome. His version of Reich's Electric Counterpoint is pretty satisfying.
Yet for all this there are times and places for guitarists who are not as adventurous as you would like them to be.
But it seems as though some ten years ago Matanya Ophee was right to point out that chamber music can get more attention. Guitarists can often pay lip service to the idea of chamber music while never venturing to make careers based on performing and recording chamber music, much less composing it. To all this I would say this is why Atanas Ourkouzounov is one of my favorite living guitarists. He does a lot of performing, composing, and arranging chamber music for guitar. By chamber music I mean there is more than one instrument involved and that other instrument is not just another guitar!
I have been hoping to work with other musicians but am not well situated for it right now. Job hunting means a lot of attention I might otherwise put into networking has to be devoted to looking for work. I also am just now networking with a handful of musicians who have busy lives. The possibility of managing to play chamber works is not immediately high but I hope, in the long run, will be solid.
But in many cases guitarists do not make themselves available to other musicians and there seems to be an unstated desire that the guitar parts not be too boring. We guitarists who play classical guitar have the same sorts of weakness guitarists in rock bands have, at least guitarists who are not also singers. One of my favorite musical collaborations in college involved a cellist and a harmonica-player. A lot of what I did in that setting was simply strumming chords but I had a blast. I let the cello and harmonica do pretty much all of the solo work and kept a steady rhythm.
It useful for all musicians to perform in musical settings where your part is indispensable but not glamorous. I don't think most guitarists really crave that paradoxical quality. Most of us are drawn to the instrument because of its self sufficiency, because the guitar, as so many people tritely put it, "is a miniature orchestra". Ophee's smart-ass remark that most guitarists have no idea how to conduct is salient. If the guitar is a miniature orchestra then would that more guitarists get used to the idea that they may play a concerto or two in which someone else is featured as the soloist. In the orchestra there are also woodwinds, brass, percussion, and things like that.
So if you haven't considered playing music with other musicians already, consider it. If you're a music student and a guitarist start networking to play chamber music with non-guitarist musicians now! Play in folk bands, rock bands, jazz bands, get in some kind of ensemble setting where what you do matters because it contributes to the musical whole and not just the glamour of the rock star persona. You'll find that you develop an entirely new set of musical disciplines keeping time with other musicians. In choral and quartet repertoire people recognize that your individual part lacks glamour. Those of us who sing in inner voices in choral repertoire are acutely aware of this! Violists and second violinists also know this! Guitarists ... we guitarists all have some kind of first fiddler mentality or worse. It is a disposition to overcome. Ophee made this point a decade ago and while it may never be heeded it always bears repeating.
A brief word about Barefoot Gen
I read the first four volumes of the series some ten years ago and they constitute the single most harrowing comic book narrative I have managed to read. I'm not counting hentai stuff that I have heard about and never plan to read. There are famous titles in anime and manga that I have heard about and have good sense enough to leave alone. As an old icon in a lexicon of genre reviews had it, "naughty tentacles" with the non-explaining explanation of `nuff said. Trust me, the less you know the better off you are there!
Now Barefoot Gen is, you may know, the semi-fictionalized account of Keiji Nakazawa's being in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped. He describes what he saw first hand of the destruction. My leaning conservative in both theology and politics does not mean I have no appreciation for what Nakazawa sets out to do. There is a sense in which some may find it easy to simply assume the United States was terrible to drop the bomb. Dropping the bomb was incontestably terrible and yet Nakazawa's narrative reveals the capacity for monstrous action everywhere.
What makes Gen a compelling read is how despite the anger and sentiments of Gen it is impossible to exonerate anyone. Attempting to end all wars and prevent the use of the atomic bomb is no less admirable a wish because it is perhaps among most wishes most exemplary of a desire that we not live in a world rife with sin and with those who embrace sin. Just as that the poor shall always be with us does not mean we don't care how we may help the poor so that there will always be wars does not mean we have to suppose every war is inevitable. It does not, however, mean that the moral certainty of opponents is anymore certain than the moral certainty of advocates.
What I mean is this, human has ever had the capacity for technology outstripping our ethics. The problem is not, as so many people like to claim it is, that technological advances prove that technology is bad. This is to locate sin outside the human heart and to imagine that what you eat defiles you. Jesus spoke so forcefully against that he was crucified for it. In Gen we can see that even a pacifist father is capable of being physically abusive to his children. The series is harrowing because no one is untouched. This is a book series that I believe more people should read. One need not subscribe to the policies and views of those who have championed the book in every detail to appreciate the necessity of the comic book and the value it has for collecting eye witness accounts of the bombing of Hiroshima and exploring the ways in which everyone reveals their own corruption. There is no better story to expound by example the scriptural observation, "There is no one who is righteous, not even one."
A few bits of advice about reading Barefoot Gen. First off make sure you have not eaten anything or don't plan to eat anything for a while before and after reading the comic book. You will see cartoon depictions of things that are, once you grasp them, pretty horrific. Give yourself plenty of alone time for this reading experience. Which gets me to the second observation, that this such an emotionally blunt, raw, even simplistic read that it is advisable to read it in chunks and not attempt to read all ten volumes in one go, or even simply one of the ten volumes in one go.
It may be tempting for American Christians to not even read the book if they know about it because it was written by someone in Japan protesting that we dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The atomic bomb was necessary to end the war and therefore reading a critical assessment at a purely personal level by a cartoonist won't benefit anyone. No one should bother reading it because it wouldn't be helpful.
Well, by that measure no one should read Kings or Chronicles or Judges in which a Levite carves up his dead concubine, David slaughters villages to keep his profile low while wandering outside Israelite lands, and where Israelite kings endorsed child sacrifice. If it merely be said that the Bible has some reason for discussing these things Barefoot Gen has the same reason, to warn us of our own capacity for depravity and the dangers of convincing ourselves that we are above doing terrifying things to each other.
If it were not for Barefoot Gen we probably would not have had Art Speigelmann's Maus, a comic book account of Spiegelmann's father's time in a concentration camp in World War 2. Where the American cartoonists transforms people into mice, cats, pigs, and dogs (Jews, Germans, Poles, and Americans respectively) as a way to create emotional distance for himself and the reader, Nakazawa eliminates that emotional distance entirely by using a very cartoony rendering of humans.
Having read both Barefoot Gen and Maus I have been persuaded that Maus is the product of someone who is not just distancing himself from the horrors his father suffered but who has also, at some level, chosen to distance himself from his parents. It is the kind of emotional remove that I half understand and half do not understand but that is another subject for another time. The creator of Maus, in any event, had the emotional and artistic luxury of making an intra-art distance to help him get through the work. Nakazawa deprived himself of that and goes so far as to have metanarratives within metanarratives that keep emotionally cycling back to the same formative experience. As he observes through his characters thorughout Gen, the bomb opened up possibilities that altered even those who strove to be good people.
In any number of places Barefoot Gen has characters describing the atomic bomb as a portal to hell. If this seems flamboyant and inaccurate it would be wise to reconsider. Scripture in a few places describes the final judgment as one of fire, a fire that will consume the elements. The end of this age will come not with a flood but with fire. Even Christians in America who do not necessarily embrace "liberal" ideas tend to think of atomic blasts as being part of the coming of Armaggedon. That the metaphor of the atomic bomb as being an entry to hell is overwrought and overused does not necessarily make it inaccurate.
Now obviously I do enjoy lots of comic books and enjoy anime. Eureka Seven has become one of my favorite anime ever and I try to catch Miyazaki's films when I can. Barefoot Gen is less glamorous than many more popular anime and manga (Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Ninja Scroll, Neon Genesis Evangelion and any number of other series) but it is more important to read. What it lacks in artistic sophistication it makes up for in historical importance. I would strongly urge everyone to read the combination of Barefoot Gen, Maus, and Persepolis to get a good overview of the biographical genre of comics particularly because the bombing of Hiroshima, the Nazi concentration camps, and the Muslim revolution in Iran are all very important historical events in the 20th century. These are also all amazing comic books but I think the most important of these is Gen.
Now Barefoot Gen is, you may know, the semi-fictionalized account of Keiji Nakazawa's being in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped. He describes what he saw first hand of the destruction. My leaning conservative in both theology and politics does not mean I have no appreciation for what Nakazawa sets out to do. There is a sense in which some may find it easy to simply assume the United States was terrible to drop the bomb. Dropping the bomb was incontestably terrible and yet Nakazawa's narrative reveals the capacity for monstrous action everywhere.
What makes Gen a compelling read is how despite the anger and sentiments of Gen it is impossible to exonerate anyone. Attempting to end all wars and prevent the use of the atomic bomb is no less admirable a wish because it is perhaps among most wishes most exemplary of a desire that we not live in a world rife with sin and with those who embrace sin. Just as that the poor shall always be with us does not mean we don't care how we may help the poor so that there will always be wars does not mean we have to suppose every war is inevitable. It does not, however, mean that the moral certainty of opponents is anymore certain than the moral certainty of advocates.
What I mean is this, human has ever had the capacity for technology outstripping our ethics. The problem is not, as so many people like to claim it is, that technological advances prove that technology is bad. This is to locate sin outside the human heart and to imagine that what you eat defiles you. Jesus spoke so forcefully against that he was crucified for it. In Gen we can see that even a pacifist father is capable of being physically abusive to his children. The series is harrowing because no one is untouched. This is a book series that I believe more people should read. One need not subscribe to the policies and views of those who have championed the book in every detail to appreciate the necessity of the comic book and the value it has for collecting eye witness accounts of the bombing of Hiroshima and exploring the ways in which everyone reveals their own corruption. There is no better story to expound by example the scriptural observation, "There is no one who is righteous, not even one."
A few bits of advice about reading Barefoot Gen. First off make sure you have not eaten anything or don't plan to eat anything for a while before and after reading the comic book. You will see cartoon depictions of things that are, once you grasp them, pretty horrific. Give yourself plenty of alone time for this reading experience. Which gets me to the second observation, that this such an emotionally blunt, raw, even simplistic read that it is advisable to read it in chunks and not attempt to read all ten volumes in one go, or even simply one of the ten volumes in one go.
It may be tempting for American Christians to not even read the book if they know about it because it was written by someone in Japan protesting that we dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The atomic bomb was necessary to end the war and therefore reading a critical assessment at a purely personal level by a cartoonist won't benefit anyone. No one should bother reading it because it wouldn't be helpful.
Well, by that measure no one should read Kings or Chronicles or Judges in which a Levite carves up his dead concubine, David slaughters villages to keep his profile low while wandering outside Israelite lands, and where Israelite kings endorsed child sacrifice. If it merely be said that the Bible has some reason for discussing these things Barefoot Gen has the same reason, to warn us of our own capacity for depravity and the dangers of convincing ourselves that we are above doing terrifying things to each other.
If it were not for Barefoot Gen we probably would not have had Art Speigelmann's Maus, a comic book account of Spiegelmann's father's time in a concentration camp in World War 2. Where the American cartoonists transforms people into mice, cats, pigs, and dogs (Jews, Germans, Poles, and Americans respectively) as a way to create emotional distance for himself and the reader, Nakazawa eliminates that emotional distance entirely by using a very cartoony rendering of humans.
Having read both Barefoot Gen and Maus I have been persuaded that Maus is the product of someone who is not just distancing himself from the horrors his father suffered but who has also, at some level, chosen to distance himself from his parents. It is the kind of emotional remove that I half understand and half do not understand but that is another subject for another time. The creator of Maus, in any event, had the emotional and artistic luxury of making an intra-art distance to help him get through the work. Nakazawa deprived himself of that and goes so far as to have metanarratives within metanarratives that keep emotionally cycling back to the same formative experience. As he observes through his characters thorughout Gen, the bomb opened up possibilities that altered even those who strove to be good people.
In any number of places Barefoot Gen has characters describing the atomic bomb as a portal to hell. If this seems flamboyant and inaccurate it would be wise to reconsider. Scripture in a few places describes the final judgment as one of fire, a fire that will consume the elements. The end of this age will come not with a flood but with fire. Even Christians in America who do not necessarily embrace "liberal" ideas tend to think of atomic blasts as being part of the coming of Armaggedon. That the metaphor of the atomic bomb as being an entry to hell is overwrought and overused does not necessarily make it inaccurate.
Now obviously I do enjoy lots of comic books and enjoy anime. Eureka Seven has become one of my favorite anime ever and I try to catch Miyazaki's films when I can. Barefoot Gen is less glamorous than many more popular anime and manga (Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Ninja Scroll, Neon Genesis Evangelion and any number of other series) but it is more important to read. What it lacks in artistic sophistication it makes up for in historical importance. I would strongly urge everyone to read the combination of Barefoot Gen, Maus, and Persepolis to get a good overview of the biographical genre of comics particularly because the bombing of Hiroshima, the Nazi concentration camps, and the Muslim revolution in Iran are all very important historical events in the 20th century. These are also all amazing comic books but I think the most important of these is Gen.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
nose to the grindstone, or however the phrase goes
I have stalled in a few spots on the work at hand but I am still composing preludes and fugues for solo guitar. I certainly won't manage to finish all 24 in less than a few years but I do believe I should be able to get to the halfway point before this year is out. It took Rekhin five years to compose his set so I won't be surprised if it takes me five years to complete mine. It took roughly ten years to finish the four duo sonatas in the cycle for guitar and woodwinds and those are considerably larger works.
Yet it also bears repeating that fugues are among the most complex musical works to write and the guitar is an exceptionally unforgiving instrument for contrapuntal music. Chris Kachian is correct to observe that sustained three-voice counterpoint is impossible on the guitar (composers who are not guitarists should go pick up his Composer's desktop guide to the guitar) There is no trouble, however, with sustained two-part textures that convey the effect of multiple textures.
This two parts in place of three or more brings with it other challenges.Even in works like Bach's fugues for violin stripping everything down to a single line punctuated by chords means you have not sacrificed the implication of thematic development throughout your piece. But I don't feel like getting into all the details of that now.
Yet it also bears repeating that fugues are among the most complex musical works to write and the guitar is an exceptionally unforgiving instrument for contrapuntal music. Chris Kachian is correct to observe that sustained three-voice counterpoint is impossible on the guitar (composers who are not guitarists should go pick up his Composer's desktop guide to the guitar) There is no trouble, however, with sustained two-part textures that convey the effect of multiple textures.
This two parts in place of three or more brings with it other challenges.Even in works like Bach's fugues for violin stripping everything down to a single line punctuated by chords means you have not sacrificed the implication of thematic development throughout your piece. But I don't feel like getting into all the details of that now.
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
the sound of Internet Monk
I've been lurking (as I have for years) on the Bht and Bill's comments about the sound of Michael's voice are funny. The backpedaling about saying that Michael read much smarter than he sounded and Bill having to explain that he's not from the American South is funny. :)
I am not from the Southern United States. I was born and raised on the "left coast" in the Northwest nearly all of my life. But half of my family is of Okie stock (they came over during the Depression period, if memory serves) and another part of my family has roots in Arkansas. So while a significant chunk of my family is as not-Southern as possible (Northwestern American Indian) a decent chunk of my family has roots from the southern regions of the United States. All that is to say that I knew Michael was in Kentucky and I've heard enough music from the South and enough voices from the South that all of that felt, if not natural, unsurprising.
It was that he had nice things to say about the band Rush that completely mystified me. For years I imagined that Geddy Lee was somehow living proof that the tradition of producing castrati had somehow not died!
I am not from the Southern United States. I was born and raised on the "left coast" in the Northwest nearly all of my life. But half of my family is of Okie stock (they came over during the Depression period, if memory serves) and another part of my family has roots in Arkansas. So while a significant chunk of my family is as not-Southern as possible (Northwestern American Indian) a decent chunk of my family has roots from the southern regions of the United States. All that is to say that I knew Michael was in Kentucky and I've heard enough music from the South and enough voices from the South that all of that felt, if not natural, unsurprising.
It was that he had nice things to say about the band Rush that completely mystified me. For years I imagined that Geddy Lee was somehow living proof that the tradition of producing castrati had somehow not died!
Link: Fearsome Tycoon on the passing of Michael Spencer
I said that I couldn't add anything meaningful beyond what other people have said and it's true (it's certainly true for the time being at any rate). As an example, here's a link to something Fearsome Tycoon wrote recently on the passing of Michael Spencer.
http://metalutheran.blogspot.com/2010/04/some-thoughts-on-passing-of-michael.html
Michael's own words seem appropriate:
"If Christianity is not a dying word to dying men, it is not the message of the Bible that gives hope now."
I think about death almost every day. Statistically I'm half-way there for life expectancy. Even in my twenties I considered often the possibility of death. It's easy to die at the hands of someone driving a car. I don't think about death in the way that some would advise you to think about death,in the sense of living life in such a way that at the day of your death you imagine that all these people will be sad that you are gone. Living your life forward toward some imagined legacy for yourself is not exactly what I mean. That is the opposite of what I mean because those sorts of legacy-living Christians have fooled themselves into thinking that Koholeth is wrong.
Or they may persuade themselves that on the day of their death they will stand before God and think that they have built a legacy that God can be proud of. He won't be because it's silly to take credit for the work that God has done through you. Again, these sorts of legacy Christians have fooled themselves into thinking Koholeth was just kidding around when he said that when you die your legacy is forgotten and there is no memory of godly or wise men in the generation to come. We imagine to ourselves that Koholeth is wrong but the truth is borne out in the millions of people whose names we cannot even recognize or conceive of who were living lives with such legacies in mind. If you don't believe me I'll get to examples of the sorts of legacies we REALLY remember and discuss in our time.
As Fearsome puts it, death still wins. We live in an era in which notoriety comes more from being notoriously wicked and cruel than notoriously kind and just. On the basis of Godwin's law alone more people are likely to know about Hitler or Stalin than about some saint who helped the downtrodden or innovated something positive for society. We can go find out about who helped bring the atomic bomb into the world but who were the people who developed the first viable plastics? Canyou name them?
But did Walter Semon ever imagine that his invention would be used to adorn Kate Beckinsale in vampire movies? Heh, dollars to doughnuts he probably never thought of that application. Of course my point is you have to go look this stuff up. The names of people who have made positive and taken-for-granted contributions to society are entirely forgotten while the names of tyrants and armchair philosophers and demagogues who are, in the grand scheme of things, mostly useless remain legends. We remember novelists and entertainers who deigned to tell us how to live our lives ranging from Mark Twain to Huxley to Orwell to Rand to Dostoevsky to Dickens.
Even Christians who talk about legacy can end up talking about the legacy of Marxism or Stalinism or Freudian thought or Darwinism. A lot of Christians talk more about the negative legacies of men they don't admire than about the legacy of Christ. Perhaps that is because though we pay lip service to the legacy of the living Christ which has not yet been formed in us we find it more glamorous and politically compelling to talk about the legacies of people whose ideologies we oppose. A lot of Christian blogging can be about the legacies we want death to remove than about the legacy of the One who has conqured death itself. But this legacy is what makes our prospective legacies count for nothing. Paul sacrificed an unblemished legacy as trash for the sake of Christ. We have the legacy of Paul's writings because he forsook every other legacy he had been working toward his whole life up to that moment of meeting Christ in favor of considering Christ his legacy. The more I reflect upon the cross of Christ the more I believe we fool ourselves into thinking we understand the mystery of it. Our understanding of the scandal of the cross is to put it at the level of a scandal involving Tiger Woods, ostensibly offensive but easily forgotten while we go work on our legacies. The scandal of the cross is the scandal of Christ's death revealing what our legacies are apart from trusting that His legacy alone is sufficient to give life.
I find it no coincidence that it has been from pastors who have daily actually faced death that the most useful warnings have come. Michael's words about death and Matt Chandler's words about how serving Christ will involve staring failure and death in the face to be more compelling than a lot of sermons I have heard in the last ten years. These are men whose legacies will survive because Christ lives and not because God has somehow told them in any other way that they will have a legacy.
Consider those to whom Yahweh promised a lasting legacy,Abram and David. Those legacies were fulfilled in Christ. Consider every other part of the legacies of these men and you will see how miserable, brutish, and sin-riddled those legacies of Abraham and David are. Their descendents went into slavery, exile, idolatry, banishment, war, and suffering. But when we come to Christ, the second Adam, the legacy is fulfilled. Our faith is that Christ Himself is the fulfillment of whatever legacies God may (or may not have) promised to us and our ancestors and our descendents.
But we don't really believe that, do we? Why else would we work toward legacies in which our names are even remembered? This is not simply an allure for people in the arts but also in preaching. And why not? Who among the arts would object to having a literary and pastoral legacy on the order of John Donne? I admit that I find the idea appealing even though I have no desire to be a pastor and am at best only able to say that I am a competent and rather boring poet. But consider Donne's passion for moments and we'll see that his passion was not directed at his legacy as such. In Christ those who are remembered are remembered for considering Christ more worth remembering than their own names. If we remember their names we are blessed with the opportunity to live out the Psalmist's advice to make the godly men and women of the land our heroes to emulate regardless of the era in which we live.
Yet we don't even know who wrote the letter to the Hebrews yet that author's words speak across millenia to challenge us to perservere in the faith. We have scholars debating about who Koholeth even was and yet Koholeth's words have been preserved for us in the scriptures. A name like Obadiah is common enough that we have trouble saying who he was.
I am glad to have read Internet Monk for these last eight years. His work has been a blessing and an encouragement to me. As I have said before I owe my being at the church I am at to Michael linking to a great sermon on Psalm 41. It can be popular to cite John the Baptist's words, "He must become greater and greater while I must become less and less." Do we really remember where that trajectory of less and less ended? It ended in execution because a power-hungry king felt he couldn't break a silly promise he made to a dancing girl. This is the trajectory of a man who sent disciples to ask Jesus, "Are you the one we have been waiting for or should we seek another?" Even a man as great in the faith as John struggled at the end of his life with a panoply of doubt and discouragement in the face of both death and uncertainty that the one he baptised was the one who was promised.
It is fitting that the pastors who have faced death and the one who has been taken by death are the ones whose sermons and writings stick with me now because they in that have shared supremely in the death of Christ and will at the end of all things share in that life.
http://metalutheran.blogspot.com/2010/04/some-thoughts-on-passing-of-michael.html
Michael's own words seem appropriate:
"If Christianity is not a dying word to dying men, it is not the message of the Bible that gives hope now."
I think about death almost every day. Statistically I'm half-way there for life expectancy. Even in my twenties I considered often the possibility of death. It's easy to die at the hands of someone driving a car. I don't think about death in the way that some would advise you to think about death,in the sense of living life in such a way that at the day of your death you imagine that all these people will be sad that you are gone. Living your life forward toward some imagined legacy for yourself is not exactly what I mean. That is the opposite of what I mean because those sorts of legacy-living Christians have fooled themselves into thinking that Koholeth is wrong.
Or they may persuade themselves that on the day of their death they will stand before God and think that they have built a legacy that God can be proud of. He won't be because it's silly to take credit for the work that God has done through you. Again, these sorts of legacy Christians have fooled themselves into thinking Koholeth was just kidding around when he said that when you die your legacy is forgotten and there is no memory of godly or wise men in the generation to come. We imagine to ourselves that Koholeth is wrong but the truth is borne out in the millions of people whose names we cannot even recognize or conceive of who were living lives with such legacies in mind. If you don't believe me I'll get to examples of the sorts of legacies we REALLY remember and discuss in our time.
As Fearsome puts it, death still wins. We live in an era in which notoriety comes more from being notoriously wicked and cruel than notoriously kind and just. On the basis of Godwin's law alone more people are likely to know about Hitler or Stalin than about some saint who helped the downtrodden or innovated something positive for society. We can go find out about who helped bring the atomic bomb into the world but who were the people who developed the first viable plastics? Canyou name them?
But did Walter Semon ever imagine that his invention would be used to adorn Kate Beckinsale in vampire movies? Heh, dollars to doughnuts he probably never thought of that application. Of course my point is you have to go look this stuff up. The names of people who have made positive and taken-for-granted contributions to society are entirely forgotten while the names of tyrants and armchair philosophers and demagogues who are, in the grand scheme of things, mostly useless remain legends. We remember novelists and entertainers who deigned to tell us how to live our lives ranging from Mark Twain to Huxley to Orwell to Rand to Dostoevsky to Dickens.
Even Christians who talk about legacy can end up talking about the legacy of Marxism or Stalinism or Freudian thought or Darwinism. A lot of Christians talk more about the negative legacies of men they don't admire than about the legacy of Christ. Perhaps that is because though we pay lip service to the legacy of the living Christ which has not yet been formed in us we find it more glamorous and politically compelling to talk about the legacies of people whose ideologies we oppose. A lot of Christian blogging can be about the legacies we want death to remove than about the legacy of the One who has conqured death itself. But this legacy is what makes our prospective legacies count for nothing. Paul sacrificed an unblemished legacy as trash for the sake of Christ. We have the legacy of Paul's writings because he forsook every other legacy he had been working toward his whole life up to that moment of meeting Christ in favor of considering Christ his legacy. The more I reflect upon the cross of Christ the more I believe we fool ourselves into thinking we understand the mystery of it. Our understanding of the scandal of the cross is to put it at the level of a scandal involving Tiger Woods, ostensibly offensive but easily forgotten while we go work on our legacies. The scandal of the cross is the scandal of Christ's death revealing what our legacies are apart from trusting that His legacy alone is sufficient to give life.
I find it no coincidence that it has been from pastors who have daily actually faced death that the most useful warnings have come. Michael's words about death and Matt Chandler's words about how serving Christ will involve staring failure and death in the face to be more compelling than a lot of sermons I have heard in the last ten years. These are men whose legacies will survive because Christ lives and not because God has somehow told them in any other way that they will have a legacy.
Consider those to whom Yahweh promised a lasting legacy,Abram and David. Those legacies were fulfilled in Christ. Consider every other part of the legacies of these men and you will see how miserable, brutish, and sin-riddled those legacies of Abraham and David are. Their descendents went into slavery, exile, idolatry, banishment, war, and suffering. But when we come to Christ, the second Adam, the legacy is fulfilled. Our faith is that Christ Himself is the fulfillment of whatever legacies God may (or may not have) promised to us and our ancestors and our descendents.
But we don't really believe that, do we? Why else would we work toward legacies in which our names are even remembered? This is not simply an allure for people in the arts but also in preaching. And why not? Who among the arts would object to having a literary and pastoral legacy on the order of John Donne? I admit that I find the idea appealing even though I have no desire to be a pastor and am at best only able to say that I am a competent and rather boring poet. But consider Donne's passion for moments and we'll see that his passion was not directed at his legacy as such. In Christ those who are remembered are remembered for considering Christ more worth remembering than their own names. If we remember their names we are blessed with the opportunity to live out the Psalmist's advice to make the godly men and women of the land our heroes to emulate regardless of the era in which we live.
Yet we don't even know who wrote the letter to the Hebrews yet that author's words speak across millenia to challenge us to perservere in the faith. We have scholars debating about who Koholeth even was and yet Koholeth's words have been preserved for us in the scriptures. A name like Obadiah is common enough that we have trouble saying who he was.
I am glad to have read Internet Monk for these last eight years. His work has been a blessing and an encouragement to me. As I have said before I owe my being at the church I am at to Michael linking to a great sermon on Psalm 41. It can be popular to cite John the Baptist's words, "He must become greater and greater while I must become less and less." Do we really remember where that trajectory of less and less ended? It ended in execution because a power-hungry king felt he couldn't break a silly promise he made to a dancing girl. This is the trajectory of a man who sent disciples to ask Jesus, "Are you the one we have been waiting for or should we seek another?" Even a man as great in the faith as John struggled at the end of his life with a panoply of doubt and discouragement in the face of both death and uncertainty that the one he baptised was the one who was promised.
It is fitting that the pastors who have faced death and the one who has been taken by death are the ones whose sermons and writings stick with me now because they in that have shared supremely in the death of Christ and will at the end of all things share in that life.
Link: No Voices Inside My Head (Bill MacKinnon)
http://www.internetmonk.com/articles/V/voicehead.html
Out of consideration of iMonk's passing this week I wanted to link to one of the more memorable, enjoyable, and useful entries in his blog by a friend of his. Bill's comments and jokes ring especially true for me because I have a Pentecostal background and because I have been around a few people who claim to have gotten IM's from the Almighty about any number of things without explaining how they just know they heard these things or got these emails.
Even preachers who say we should not expect these sorts of missives to be normative can still manage to talk as though those things are normative ... for them. The most honest comment I ever heard about hearing from God and reading the scriptures came from an AG youth pastor who told me that, for real ninety percent of the time he read the scriptures and didn't feel like he was getting anything out of it. He was studying to make sure he knew what the Lord said through the scriptures. On the other hand, that ten percent of the time where the Lord used scripture to potently speak to his circumstances would get larger the more time he spent studying the scriptures and, in any case, even that ten percent is something to be grateful for as a gift from the Lord.
It is ironic that in my life an Assemblies of God youth pastor did the most important work in demystifying the process of studying the scriptures to appreciate that in most of your life God won't seem to be talking to you at all and that even in your private study of scripture you shouldn't expect to read the Bible and have some pointed personal message for YOU that day. The older I get the more I realize I was blessed to have an exceptional, unusual Assemblies of God youth pastor as a mentor in my teens. He was one of the first people to tell me that God generally never speaks to you through voices inside your head and that it is good to be grateful for the relatively few times when Scripture, if you will "comes alive". It is alive even if it doesn't seem to be alive "for you".
Out of consideration of iMonk's passing this week I wanted to link to one of the more memorable, enjoyable, and useful entries in his blog by a friend of his. Bill's comments and jokes ring especially true for me because I have a Pentecostal background and because I have been around a few people who claim to have gotten IM's from the Almighty about any number of things without explaining how they just know they heard these things or got these emails.
Even preachers who say we should not expect these sorts of missives to be normative can still manage to talk as though those things are normative ... for them. The most honest comment I ever heard about hearing from God and reading the scriptures came from an AG youth pastor who told me that, for real ninety percent of the time he read the scriptures and didn't feel like he was getting anything out of it. He was studying to make sure he knew what the Lord said through the scriptures. On the other hand, that ten percent of the time where the Lord used scripture to potently speak to his circumstances would get larger the more time he spent studying the scriptures and, in any case, even that ten percent is something to be grateful for as a gift from the Lord.
It is ironic that in my life an Assemblies of God youth pastor did the most important work in demystifying the process of studying the scriptures to appreciate that in most of your life God won't seem to be talking to you at all and that even in your private study of scripture you shouldn't expect to read the Bible and have some pointed personal message for YOU that day. The older I get the more I realize I was blessed to have an exceptional, unusual Assemblies of God youth pastor as a mentor in my teens. He was one of the first people to tell me that God generally never speaks to you through voices inside your head and that it is good to be grateful for the relatively few times when Scripture, if you will "comes alive". It is alive even if it doesn't seem to be alive "for you".
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
A champion among stupid theological statements: God won't give you anything you can't handle
Over the years I have heard any number of theological aphorisms that on closer inspection turn out to be false. The whole book of Ecclesiastes is best read as a reflection on the limits of the best wisdom human experience has to offer. Rather than see it as the book of some guy who cynically disobeyed God and whose judgment can't be trusted we should remember that every word of the scriptures is inspired and consider that if one of the authors of scriputres throws up his hands in exasperation at the limits of even the best wisdom we should be wary of simplifying what is complex and remember that that which is crooked cannot be made straight.
Yet we always want to simplify and straighten. Among stupid simplifying and straightening statements in theology none seems more perncious to me now than the axiom "God won't give you anything you can't handle." Now if by that statement someone just means to say "there is no temptation but is common to man", okay. But if the idea is that God won't give you a mission you can't accomplish, well, then that's grossly mistaken.
Not one of the saints in scripture met the end of their lives saying "mission accomplished". Moses died outside the promised land with the knowledge that an entire generation of God's people would die in the wilderness due to their faithlessness. Joshua did not really complete the conquest of Canaan. None of the judges managed to secure more than a temporary reprieve on injustice and war. The kings were generally mitigated disasters. Even Elijah, arguably greatest among the OT prophets, failed to accomplish two things God explicitly and directly commanded him to do (annoint Hazael king of Aram and annoint Jehu king of Israel). Abraham was commanded to sacrifice Isaac and then stopped. God promised Abraham that his descendents would be enslaved in a foreign land for centuries and THAT came to pass long after Abraham was dead.
The pioneers of our faith are failures through and through. Luther did not manage to reform the western church. It splintered. The Puritans failed to reform the church of England and pioneered Presbyterianism. Our best attempts with what we are sure are the most God-given reasons end in failure. There are those who would say this is a sign that God is not really on our side because you can't argue with success and failure is the most compelling argument for God's disfavor. The kingdom divided because of wicked kings but did that mean that Israel stopped being God's chosen people? Did that nullify the promises God made to Abraham or David? By no means!
Yet we are people who like to believe that when it really matters our failures are the surest proof of God's disapproval. We still have a kind of spirituality where we pay lip service to the idea of considering God before men but still believe that we can manage to hold our heads high in front of others because if God is really on our side no one can stop us. We don't really rejoice when we feel we are persecuted for the sake of Christ. Our idea of persecution is that unbelievers think Christians are jerks who believe God approves of them by giving them awesome parking spots going to the mall or that their favorite athletics team won the series. We think of persecution as the neighbors speaking poorly of our church for eating up local real estate and seeming bent on altering the fiscal and political landscape through subculture-wide breeding programs. We consider this persecution? While Michael Spenser was alive I believe he rightly called this sort of thing out as a particularly obnoxious form of self-pity.
Now if God actually only ever gives you no more than you can handle then some saints have aptly joked that it would be nice if God thought less of what they could handle! Let us consider the greatest pioneer of the Christian faith, faith in the power of the coming Christ. Let us consider the one who is often rightly called the first Christian. Why is Mary most blessed among women? For being constantly under the suspicion of being a lying adulteress whose bastard son was executed because he was yet another rab-burrough Palestinian anti-Roman terrorist in waiting? Jesus was our pioneer in death and failure even though He has the words of life. I can say that it's always a temptation to want a resurrection without crucifixion but it is also a huge temptation to still see crucifixion as a sign of failure.
If we tell someone like Mary "God won't give you anything that you can't handle" what do we mean by that? What can we mean by it? If we tell Christians that God won't send you on an impossible mission we don't understand the Lord or ourselves. The Lord saw that after generations upon generations the mission was impossible. In fact Yahweh tells Moses in the most potent terms possible that Israel was GOING TO FAIL! The mission was going to be a complete disaster. The team was going to give up, sell out, and go home. God called Abraham out of the realm of Babylon and he willingly went but after centuries of recalcitrance Israel was sent by war and exile back into the very land of Babylon out of which the great ancestor of the faith had been called. What Israel as a whole did with Yahweh and His appointed prophets, priests, and kings Jesus' own disciples did to Him at Gethsemane. Christ Himself knows what it is like to face unanswered prayers and to be sent on a mission that ends in death. Christ embraced a failure greater than any we fear so as to give us the gift of a victory we cannot obtain, a victory that is beyond what we are really capable of fully imagining.
Yet why, after all of this testimony in the scriptures and the lives of the saints do we persist in supposing that God does, in fact, somehow have this rule that He won't give us anything we can't handle? Do we not remember that the Lord is the first inventor of impossible missions? God tells Noah to build a boat when it had not rained. God comes to Abram and says that through his descendents a great nation will be made. Abram rightly says that that is impossible because he is an old man and his wife is barren. Moses is sent to be the human agent of rescue for a people whom God will spend a generation crushing in the wilderness for their unbelief and disobedience, their unwillingness to trust in His goodness. God comes to the ancestor of our faith with an impossible mission and yet we delude ourselves and each other into thinking that God won't give us anything beyond what we can handle?
Yet we always want to simplify and straighten. Among stupid simplifying and straightening statements in theology none seems more perncious to me now than the axiom "God won't give you anything you can't handle." Now if by that statement someone just means to say "there is no temptation but is common to man", okay. But if the idea is that God won't give you a mission you can't accomplish, well, then that's grossly mistaken.
Not one of the saints in scripture met the end of their lives saying "mission accomplished". Moses died outside the promised land with the knowledge that an entire generation of God's people would die in the wilderness due to their faithlessness. Joshua did not really complete the conquest of Canaan. None of the judges managed to secure more than a temporary reprieve on injustice and war. The kings were generally mitigated disasters. Even Elijah, arguably greatest among the OT prophets, failed to accomplish two things God explicitly and directly commanded him to do (annoint Hazael king of Aram and annoint Jehu king of Israel). Abraham was commanded to sacrifice Isaac and then stopped. God promised Abraham that his descendents would be enslaved in a foreign land for centuries and THAT came to pass long after Abraham was dead.
The pioneers of our faith are failures through and through. Luther did not manage to reform the western church. It splintered. The Puritans failed to reform the church of England and pioneered Presbyterianism. Our best attempts with what we are sure are the most God-given reasons end in failure. There are those who would say this is a sign that God is not really on our side because you can't argue with success and failure is the most compelling argument for God's disfavor. The kingdom divided because of wicked kings but did that mean that Israel stopped being God's chosen people? Did that nullify the promises God made to Abraham or David? By no means!
Yet we are people who like to believe that when it really matters our failures are the surest proof of God's disapproval. We still have a kind of spirituality where we pay lip service to the idea of considering God before men but still believe that we can manage to hold our heads high in front of others because if God is really on our side no one can stop us. We don't really rejoice when we feel we are persecuted for the sake of Christ. Our idea of persecution is that unbelievers think Christians are jerks who believe God approves of them by giving them awesome parking spots going to the mall or that their favorite athletics team won the series. We think of persecution as the neighbors speaking poorly of our church for eating up local real estate and seeming bent on altering the fiscal and political landscape through subculture-wide breeding programs. We consider this persecution? While Michael Spenser was alive I believe he rightly called this sort of thing out as a particularly obnoxious form of self-pity.
Now if God actually only ever gives you no more than you can handle then some saints have aptly joked that it would be nice if God thought less of what they could handle! Let us consider the greatest pioneer of the Christian faith, faith in the power of the coming Christ. Let us consider the one who is often rightly called the first Christian. Why is Mary most blessed among women? For being constantly under the suspicion of being a lying adulteress whose bastard son was executed because he was yet another rab-burrough Palestinian anti-Roman terrorist in waiting? Jesus was our pioneer in death and failure even though He has the words of life. I can say that it's always a temptation to want a resurrection without crucifixion but it is also a huge temptation to still see crucifixion as a sign of failure.
If we tell someone like Mary "God won't give you anything that you can't handle" what do we mean by that? What can we mean by it? If we tell Christians that God won't send you on an impossible mission we don't understand the Lord or ourselves. The Lord saw that after generations upon generations the mission was impossible. In fact Yahweh tells Moses in the most potent terms possible that Israel was GOING TO FAIL! The mission was going to be a complete disaster. The team was going to give up, sell out, and go home. God called Abraham out of the realm of Babylon and he willingly went but after centuries of recalcitrance Israel was sent by war and exile back into the very land of Babylon out of which the great ancestor of the faith had been called. What Israel as a whole did with Yahweh and His appointed prophets, priests, and kings Jesus' own disciples did to Him at Gethsemane. Christ Himself knows what it is like to face unanswered prayers and to be sent on a mission that ends in death. Christ embraced a failure greater than any we fear so as to give us the gift of a victory we cannot obtain, a victory that is beyond what we are really capable of fully imagining.
Yet why, after all of this testimony in the scriptures and the lives of the saints do we persist in supposing that God does, in fact, somehow have this rule that He won't give us anything we can't handle? Do we not remember that the Lord is the first inventor of impossible missions? God tells Noah to build a boat when it had not rained. God comes to Abram and says that through his descendents a great nation will be made. Abram rightly says that that is impossible because he is an old man and his wife is barren. Moses is sent to be the human agent of rescue for a people whom God will spend a generation crushing in the wilderness for their unbelief and disobedience, their unwillingness to trust in His goodness. God comes to the ancestor of our faith with an impossible mission and yet we delude ourselves and each other into thinking that God won't give us anything beyond what we can handle?
A small parable about the history of prophetic literature
http://xkcd.com/723/
Of course that's not literally what it is about but the observations are applicable to anyone with a thorough knowledge of prophetic literature and how people have responded to it in its time.
Of course that's not literally what it is about but the observations are applicable to anyone with a thorough knowledge of prophetic literature and how people have responded to it in its time.
Transfiguration and failures
This is not quite an Easter reflection but it is a sort of Easter reflection. The resurrection of Christ is the ultimate demonstration that Yahweh uses what is considered of no account to bring to no account those things and people that are considered great in this age. God was pleased to use those things that are nothing to bring to nothing those things that are. This is not merely true of Christ Himself, it is also true even of those who were with Him at the transfiguration.
Consider the life of Moses. As Matt Chandler so ably expounded in a sermon, Moses' ministry ended in abject failure. He saw God declare that an entire generation of His chosen people would die in the wilderness because of their disobedience. Yes, Moses received the stone tablets and the law and it was that law that revealed not only how fully God's people had failed to be God's people but the law itself came full of the promise of inevitable failure. I do not think that evangelicals in America in particular appreciate how fully and inevitably the Mosaic law comes with the predction of failure not onloy for Israel in some abstracted historical sense but also as a warning to us, as Paul takes some pains to explain.
Moses was God's appointed man, a chosen one, a man annointed with the task of leading Israel out of Egypt. Moses, through God's power, did that ... sort of ... but not really. They merely went out of Egypt through God's divine power but they died in the wilderness under God's wrath. Yet Israel's failure was not credited to Moses. Moses failed on his own terms, in anger striking the rock when he merely needed to speak to it. Now a pastor could explain that since the rock that is Christ had been struck once before there was no need to strike the rock a second time.
I would propose that a less allegorical reading that still gets to this weakness is that Moses had been so accustomed to being the conduit of God's laws and God's words to Israel he presumed upon both the content and necessity of his mediation and did not realize that his responsibility was a gift to be considered a gift. If you will, we could describe it as a privilege rather than a right. He had the responsibility to lead them out of Egypt but Israel's entrance into the promised land, clearly, was a privilege that could be revoked. Moses died a failure who saw from far off what he could not enter into. Yet by faith Moses trusted in the goodness of God and in God's promises. Moses knew that the Lord spoke the truth in predicting the failure of Israel to keep covenant and the need for covenant renewal.
So if Moses' ministry ended in failure what about Elijah, considered the greatest among the prophets for raising the dead and destroying kingdoms? Elijah fled as soon as Jezebel declared that he would die. He was restored to his ministry by the Lord and went forth in power ... yet two things God specifically commanded Elijah to do Elijah did not, in fact, ever do. Annointing Hazael as king of Aram Elijah left undon and that task was accomplished by Elisha. The annointing of Jehu as king was handed off by Elisha to another, which means Elijah's failure to annoint Jehu is literally twice removed since not even his prophetic protege accomplished the task on his behalf in obedience to God's command.
We must appreciate here that if the law-giver failed in his administration of the law because of the hardness of the people; and if the prophets served the role of challenging the people to recognize their failure to uphold the law; that just as the law itself is unable to give life then just as terribly the prophet is unable to convince people to follow the laws they are already not following. In Christian preaching and teaching we can persuade ourselves that even if people do not desire to follow the laws of God that if you just scream at them prophetically enough that they will be induced to become obedient because they feel bad about being failures. Now this failure is very real and that is why we need Christ as our mediator and the Lord as our sustainer ... but we should be reminded that Elijah as well as Moses ended his life a failure, as one who explicitly had NOT done the things that God had explicitly commanded of him.
And then there were the kings, those predicted by both the laws and the prophet. Moses revealed on God's behalf that one day there would be a time and a place for a king. We know from the entire line of Samuel through Kings and Chronicles that these kings were perhaps the greatest failures. If the law failed to convict and quicken life in its hearers; and if the prophets failed to challenge God's people to be obedient to the law; then the kings went seveeral steps furhter and actively encouraged the people through boththeir precepts and actions to run AWAY from Yahweh. The significance of this cannot be overemphasized because when we speak of these things we are talking about the Lord's chosen people.
We are not told what Jesus spoke with Moses and Elijah about at the mountain during the Transfiguration. We know that after this moment Jesus began to speak more plainly about the necessity of His death and of the coming resurrection. At the risk of speculating based on what the scriptures reveal as the failures of both Moses and Elijah I imagine that Jesus, as God the Son, had an opportunity to explain to Moses and Elijah (who had been taken up in a fiery chariot and had not tasted death) that where they had failed He would now succeed. He would succeed in accomplishing the aim of the Law that Israel and its human mediator in law-giving could not do. He would succeed in challenging God's people to consider the scope of that law from the heart as even the greatest of prophets, Elijah, had failed to do. Furthermore, Jesus as the Christ would accomplish as king the defeat of enemies that waylaid every previous king in Israel, the enemies of sin and death.
Yet to obtain this victory would entail embracing a failure greater than any failure known by Moses the law-giver or Elijah the prophet. Jesus would embrace death on a cross on charges of blasphemy and anti-Roman terrorism. Jesus would be summarily executed for being, in our contemporary terms, some Palestinian sectarian religious terrorist who was presented as a threat to the liberties of contemporary Western society and enlightenment. He was seen as yet another upstart Palestinian attemping to foment a revolution that would revive the glory days of a long-lost pathetic rabble of a bygone Middle Eastern petty empire.
Ever since swine had been offered in sacrifice to Zeus on the altar from the days of Antiochus there had been an abomination that desolates and signs of it everywhere. The failures of God's people were not only present but these failures could be seen as signs of God's continuing lack of favor. Israel was still languishing in a mixture of failure and violent attempts to obtain success.
Christ announced the acceptable year of the Lord but with it came an announcement that Israel had failed and failed at every level. The cursed fig tree, the unharvested harvest, the Gentiles who would one day be part of the harvest, Jesus announced all these things and announced that there was greater faith outside the chosen people than within it. Jesus also declared that those most eager to get "back to the Bible" were the worst offenders. It can be easy to domesticate this criticism as that of the "religous" in Jesus' day without seeing the implications of it for our own time. Jesus would have a stern rebuke to those who want to get back to "biblical" Christianity. Jesus would also have a rebuke to those who want to get back to "biblical" manhood and womanhood. I am not particularly an egalitarian, mind you, but when Jesus said to Martha that Mary had chosen the better part and it would not be denied her that involved letting Mary ignore that societal limitations of what was expected of her as a woman in that age.
Consider the mother of the Lord, Mary. She went her whole life being considered by at least some to have been a liar and a fornicator at best. She went through life a nobody and constantly under the suspicion of being an adulteress, a liar, and a freak. She could have, in our most pious reconstructions, known that Jesus was going to die but since the annunciation would have happened while she was still a teenaged girl possibly as young as twelve it is not likely that she had a category for the kind of warrior her son would grow up to be. She saw her son dying on the cross and the gospels attest that in some cases Jesus' family thought He was beside himself, possibly not even in His right mind.
The good news of Jesus' life and death as the Christ is arguably the most horrific experience any mother could ever have. So in every respect she is our forerunner in the faith, witnessing firsthand the ways in which Jesus was seen as stricken by God. Mary saw her son so transfigured by crucifixion as to seem not even human. By this time she must have lost her husband as well, because it was John to whom Christ entrusted the care of His mother. Mary was then like Naomi but did not take for herself the name Mara because of the bitterness of losing both her husband and her son, the loss of the son being quite literally more excruciating for her because she was losing her son to a cross.
Jesus' adversaries said, "We are not born out of wedlock. We know who our father is." Jesus was seen as a bastard by his religous opponents in every possible sense of that term, from its most literal to its most figurative interpretation. Christ embraced a level of shame and degradation and failure that we spend our entire lives running from, avoiding, convincging ourselves we have not attained or cannot possibly attain.
The Transfiguration functions as both fulfillment and tacit rebuke. In it we get a glimpse of the Christ we hope Him to be and see that He communes with the greats of the past both in giving laws and in speaking with prophetic power. Yet these greats are still ultimately failures and this is a sobering lesson I must continually revisit and learn anew each step of my life. As Matt Chandler put it, lots of people go into ministry wanting the victorious stuff of deposing kings and raising the dead and putting armies to flight, not hiding in caves or wearing animal skins and being derilect. We want the glory now and not to see that to have it said of us that the world was not worthy of us also really means that we were not considered worthy of the world. We do not believe, really, that God has truly chosen to use those things that are nothing to make nothing those things that are.
The Transfiguration makes the scandal of Jesus' death on the Cross all the more unbearable and His apparent failure all the more complete. It is the Transfiguration we hope for without the path to the Cross. We do not see that even in the Transfiguration the path of the Cross is still there in the failures of those men who were permitted to speak with Christ on the mountain. Moses failed and Elijah failed and Christ was about to go forward to a failure even more scandalous and horrifying than the failures of either Moses or Elijah. They failed as prophets who were recognized as truly serving the Lord, Christ would fail to be recognized even as a prophet and would be killed as a blasphemer and a bastard. Moses and Elijah were never considered guilty of the emblematic failures of the people they spoke to, Christ was considered stricken by God and possessed by devils. Moses and Elijah proclaimed the Lord's warning and desires to the people, Jesus was executed as a man leading the people astray from the mission given to them by Yahweh.
It is so perilously easy to want the path of Transfiguration without realizing that it leads straightaway into Golgotha. The path of Transfiguration is what people invoke, whether they know it or not, when they parrot "If my people ... " as a way to revive the fortunes of America little knowing the import of the scriptures they happily distort for the sake of the same national glory Jesus' adversaries sought to preserve in their own time. Paradoxically to surpass the failures of Moses and Elijah Christ had to embrace failure and defeat more scandalous than either those failures had ever known. Yet it was through this miserable, horrific failure Christ purchased on our behalf both peace and victory.
Though the misery is real it is still better to be counted among the losers with Jesus than the winners of earth.
Consider the life of Moses. As Matt Chandler so ably expounded in a sermon, Moses' ministry ended in abject failure. He saw God declare that an entire generation of His chosen people would die in the wilderness because of their disobedience. Yes, Moses received the stone tablets and the law and it was that law that revealed not only how fully God's people had failed to be God's people but the law itself came full of the promise of inevitable failure. I do not think that evangelicals in America in particular appreciate how fully and inevitably the Mosaic law comes with the predction of failure not onloy for Israel in some abstracted historical sense but also as a warning to us, as Paul takes some pains to explain.
Moses was God's appointed man, a chosen one, a man annointed with the task of leading Israel out of Egypt. Moses, through God's power, did that ... sort of ... but not really. They merely went out of Egypt through God's divine power but they died in the wilderness under God's wrath. Yet Israel's failure was not credited to Moses. Moses failed on his own terms, in anger striking the rock when he merely needed to speak to it. Now a pastor could explain that since the rock that is Christ had been struck once before there was no need to strike the rock a second time.
I would propose that a less allegorical reading that still gets to this weakness is that Moses had been so accustomed to being the conduit of God's laws and God's words to Israel he presumed upon both the content and necessity of his mediation and did not realize that his responsibility was a gift to be considered a gift. If you will, we could describe it as a privilege rather than a right. He had the responsibility to lead them out of Egypt but Israel's entrance into the promised land, clearly, was a privilege that could be revoked. Moses died a failure who saw from far off what he could not enter into. Yet by faith Moses trusted in the goodness of God and in God's promises. Moses knew that the Lord spoke the truth in predicting the failure of Israel to keep covenant and the need for covenant renewal.
So if Moses' ministry ended in failure what about Elijah, considered the greatest among the prophets for raising the dead and destroying kingdoms? Elijah fled as soon as Jezebel declared that he would die. He was restored to his ministry by the Lord and went forth in power ... yet two things God specifically commanded Elijah to do Elijah did not, in fact, ever do. Annointing Hazael as king of Aram Elijah left undon and that task was accomplished by Elisha. The annointing of Jehu as king was handed off by Elisha to another, which means Elijah's failure to annoint Jehu is literally twice removed since not even his prophetic protege accomplished the task on his behalf in obedience to God's command.
We must appreciate here that if the law-giver failed in his administration of the law because of the hardness of the people; and if the prophets served the role of challenging the people to recognize their failure to uphold the law; that just as the law itself is unable to give life then just as terribly the prophet is unable to convince people to follow the laws they are already not following. In Christian preaching and teaching we can persuade ourselves that even if people do not desire to follow the laws of God that if you just scream at them prophetically enough that they will be induced to become obedient because they feel bad about being failures. Now this failure is very real and that is why we need Christ as our mediator and the Lord as our sustainer ... but we should be reminded that Elijah as well as Moses ended his life a failure, as one who explicitly had NOT done the things that God had explicitly commanded of him.
And then there were the kings, those predicted by both the laws and the prophet. Moses revealed on God's behalf that one day there would be a time and a place for a king. We know from the entire line of Samuel through Kings and Chronicles that these kings were perhaps the greatest failures. If the law failed to convict and quicken life in its hearers; and if the prophets failed to challenge God's people to be obedient to the law; then the kings went seveeral steps furhter and actively encouraged the people through boththeir precepts and actions to run AWAY from Yahweh. The significance of this cannot be overemphasized because when we speak of these things we are talking about the Lord's chosen people.
We are not told what Jesus spoke with Moses and Elijah about at the mountain during the Transfiguration. We know that after this moment Jesus began to speak more plainly about the necessity of His death and of the coming resurrection. At the risk of speculating based on what the scriptures reveal as the failures of both Moses and Elijah I imagine that Jesus, as God the Son, had an opportunity to explain to Moses and Elijah (who had been taken up in a fiery chariot and had not tasted death) that where they had failed He would now succeed. He would succeed in accomplishing the aim of the Law that Israel and its human mediator in law-giving could not do. He would succeed in challenging God's people to consider the scope of that law from the heart as even the greatest of prophets, Elijah, had failed to do. Furthermore, Jesus as the Christ would accomplish as king the defeat of enemies that waylaid every previous king in Israel, the enemies of sin and death.
Yet to obtain this victory would entail embracing a failure greater than any failure known by Moses the law-giver or Elijah the prophet. Jesus would embrace death on a cross on charges of blasphemy and anti-Roman terrorism. Jesus would be summarily executed for being, in our contemporary terms, some Palestinian sectarian religious terrorist who was presented as a threat to the liberties of contemporary Western society and enlightenment. He was seen as yet another upstart Palestinian attemping to foment a revolution that would revive the glory days of a long-lost pathetic rabble of a bygone Middle Eastern petty empire.
Ever since swine had been offered in sacrifice to Zeus on the altar from the days of Antiochus there had been an abomination that desolates and signs of it everywhere. The failures of God's people were not only present but these failures could be seen as signs of God's continuing lack of favor. Israel was still languishing in a mixture of failure and violent attempts to obtain success.
Christ announced the acceptable year of the Lord but with it came an announcement that Israel had failed and failed at every level. The cursed fig tree, the unharvested harvest, the Gentiles who would one day be part of the harvest, Jesus announced all these things and announced that there was greater faith outside the chosen people than within it. Jesus also declared that those most eager to get "back to the Bible" were the worst offenders. It can be easy to domesticate this criticism as that of the "religous" in Jesus' day without seeing the implications of it for our own time. Jesus would have a stern rebuke to those who want to get back to "biblical" Christianity. Jesus would also have a rebuke to those who want to get back to "biblical" manhood and womanhood. I am not particularly an egalitarian, mind you, but when Jesus said to Martha that Mary had chosen the better part and it would not be denied her that involved letting Mary ignore that societal limitations of what was expected of her as a woman in that age.
Consider the mother of the Lord, Mary. She went her whole life being considered by at least some to have been a liar and a fornicator at best. She went through life a nobody and constantly under the suspicion of being an adulteress, a liar, and a freak. She could have, in our most pious reconstructions, known that Jesus was going to die but since the annunciation would have happened while she was still a teenaged girl possibly as young as twelve it is not likely that she had a category for the kind of warrior her son would grow up to be. She saw her son dying on the cross and the gospels attest that in some cases Jesus' family thought He was beside himself, possibly not even in His right mind.
The good news of Jesus' life and death as the Christ is arguably the most horrific experience any mother could ever have. So in every respect she is our forerunner in the faith, witnessing firsthand the ways in which Jesus was seen as stricken by God. Mary saw her son so transfigured by crucifixion as to seem not even human. By this time she must have lost her husband as well, because it was John to whom Christ entrusted the care of His mother. Mary was then like Naomi but did not take for herself the name Mara because of the bitterness of losing both her husband and her son, the loss of the son being quite literally more excruciating for her because she was losing her son to a cross.
Jesus' adversaries said, "We are not born out of wedlock. We know who our father is." Jesus was seen as a bastard by his religous opponents in every possible sense of that term, from its most literal to its most figurative interpretation. Christ embraced a level of shame and degradation and failure that we spend our entire lives running from, avoiding, convincging ourselves we have not attained or cannot possibly attain.
The Transfiguration functions as both fulfillment and tacit rebuke. In it we get a glimpse of the Christ we hope Him to be and see that He communes with the greats of the past both in giving laws and in speaking with prophetic power. Yet these greats are still ultimately failures and this is a sobering lesson I must continually revisit and learn anew each step of my life. As Matt Chandler put it, lots of people go into ministry wanting the victorious stuff of deposing kings and raising the dead and putting armies to flight, not hiding in caves or wearing animal skins and being derilect. We want the glory now and not to see that to have it said of us that the world was not worthy of us also really means that we were not considered worthy of the world. We do not believe, really, that God has truly chosen to use those things that are nothing to make nothing those things that are.
The Transfiguration makes the scandal of Jesus' death on the Cross all the more unbearable and His apparent failure all the more complete. It is the Transfiguration we hope for without the path to the Cross. We do not see that even in the Transfiguration the path of the Cross is still there in the failures of those men who were permitted to speak with Christ on the mountain. Moses failed and Elijah failed and Christ was about to go forward to a failure even more scandalous and horrifying than the failures of either Moses or Elijah. They failed as prophets who were recognized as truly serving the Lord, Christ would fail to be recognized even as a prophet and would be killed as a blasphemer and a bastard. Moses and Elijah were never considered guilty of the emblematic failures of the people they spoke to, Christ was considered stricken by God and possessed by devils. Moses and Elijah proclaimed the Lord's warning and desires to the people, Jesus was executed as a man leading the people astray from the mission given to them by Yahweh.
It is so perilously easy to want the path of Transfiguration without realizing that it leads straightaway into Golgotha. The path of Transfiguration is what people invoke, whether they know it or not, when they parrot "If my people ... " as a way to revive the fortunes of America little knowing the import of the scriptures they happily distort for the sake of the same national glory Jesus' adversaries sought to preserve in their own time. Paradoxically to surpass the failures of Moses and Elijah Christ had to embrace failure and defeat more scandalous than either those failures had ever known. Yet it was through this miserable, horrific failure Christ purchased on our behalf both peace and victory.
Though the misery is real it is still better to be counted among the losers with Jesus than the winners of earth.
Monday, April 05, 2010
Michael Spencer (aka Internet Monk) has died
I can't really add anything that has not been said effectively by others. I'll miss his writing.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Link: Inhabitateo Dei: Your Hopes Must Be Dashed--reprise of the temptation of Christ in Luke
http://www.inhabitatiodei.com/2009/04/05/your-hope-must-be-dashed-a-palm-sunday-sermon/
Earlier I wrote about the temptation of Christ in the gospel of Luke. The proximate cause for that post was learning that Mark Driscoll had taught from that passage and the broader cause was that I have read a lot and thought a lot about the passage over the years. Ergo Garrett, Jeffrey Burton Russell, et al in the earlier post.
Being a Dostoevsky fan I can't help but consider things like The Grand Inquisitor and perhaps Halden considered Dostoevsky's masterpiece of confrontational philosophy while drafting his reflection on Palm Sunday. He describes (I think rightly) Palm Sunday as the end of Lent and the culmination of a new form of temptation of the sort that Satan visited upon Jesus in the wilderness. In Luke's gospel the ultimate temptation is to invoke the scriptures themselves, even a passage in the Psalms that was used as a go-to prayer against demonic attack, and to use that scripture to tempt Jesus to put God to the test. It is precisely this that Jesus now confronts in the face of a throng of people who welcome Him with shouts of "Hosanna". I don't need to rehearse that this word means "save us!" The temptation Christ faced was a temptation He overcame. He did not choose to be the kind of King His people wanted Him to be and for that they crucified Him.
It is not coincidental to say that at this time many American Christians whip out the passage that says "If my people who are called by my name will heed my voice and turn to me then I will hear them and heal their land." No one bothers to look at what actually happened in that narrative--Israel did NOT listen and they did NOT turn and they went into destruction and exile as the Lord predicted centuries before in the book of Deutoronomy. God knows the hearts of people and anticipated the failure of those in that time. Quote the passage in the context of Chronicles as a literary whole and it becomes impossible to cite the passage as an optimistic admonition that if you just vote in the right political party God will favor your country again.
Since other Christians have forced the matter I'll just force it in another way, both Judah and Samaria ultimately fell. If we want to insist on allegorizing this in absurdly American terms Samaria represents the Democratic party and they apostasized early and greatly. Judea represents the Republicans and while at the end Reagan mightily went forth on behalf of the cause and salvaged America from the liberals the party ultimately also betrayed true principles and term limits meant the Josiah figure (Reagan) did not rule or reform for long before the Republican party ultimately failed just like the Democrat party to secure and preserve the richness of the republic (e.g. the Torah). I can reverse the allegory to have it apply to Democrats, too, but that would involve digressing into the misdirection of JFK's administration and the analogy would fall apart even more quickly than it would for the elephant. I hope by now you figured out that I'm employing more than a little sarcasm here.
So, why, then, should American Christians who are conservative imagine that things in our age would be any different? Why should the trajectory of "God's country" be different in the United States than it was for Israel? This is granting the generous concession that the comparison is apt and that the United States was actually founded on "Christian principles". I always thought Francis Schaeffer's argument that principles influenced by Christian thought is not the same as "Christian nation".
Now conflating God and country is one of the perennial problems of every pagan empire and it was even a problem in Israel. It is, in essence, a problem with the human condition. Even without gods this human capacity remains and would not be remedied even if religion itself were somehow magically obliterated from the human race. Taking a passage severely out of context and acting as though the United States of America is the temple built by Solomon and Israel is the chosen people is not surprising to me ... but it is still profoundly disappointing. American Christians have had a knack of deluding themselves into thinking the Bible has to be about them for centuries. Now I don't tend to get questions about how America plays into Bible prophecy but I still settle for Psalm 2.
I am not really particularly liberal in my politics or my religion ... but I find the ignorant abuse of scripture to rally about political causes offensive coming from both conservatives and liberals alike. "If my people ... " who will sacrifice their children, kill the innocent, levy heavy burdens on the people, and justify it through exceptionalism continue to do so then they will fail. If people value profit and industry over people for generations then when they have given away their industrial base and jobs to foreigners why, precisely, should they complain that foreigners have the jobs that their masters of inidustry gave away decades ago? How far can you complain "They are taking are jobs?" when you and your allies have given them away for years to improve the profit margin? There are progressives and leftists who are opposed to internationalism because they want Americans to have jobs instead of having them shipped overseas.
There are otherwise stalwart conservatives who believe it is wrong to take a punitive approach to immigration. As Pat Robertson once said, conservatives have erred about immigration because they do not realize that Christians are to be kind toward them ... of course Robertson has mistakenly imagined that the United States in some sense at all a "Christian" nation or was one. A friend of mine put it this way, no one seems to be complaining about all the WHITE illegal immigrants living in the United States, working jobs, starting businesses, and the like. If the immigrant is willing to work as hard for a third less money and the home-grown American doesn't want to work for the pay grade the American employer is offering then who is going to get the job?
Ergo, immigrants are taking away American jobs at least in part because Americans don't want to work for what they believe to be too little pay while employers are not willing to pay more to Americans because of the impact it will have on their bottom line. Employers who do not want to bother jumping through the legal hoops required to employ someone can be described as sticking it to the man but the interpretation of these actions may simply be to complain that Mexicans or other illegal immigrants are stealing American jobs and living off of American social welfare programs. I in my broadly pessimistic disposition do not see a reason to be optimistic that this or that will get better. I suppose I share Miyazaki's generally gloomy outlook on the race as a whole while being willing to have some optimism at a local level.
Since my hope (though I often struggle here) is in Christ it is foolish to put hope in politicians winning this or that election. Just as God ordained slavery for Israel some Christians might just as well be told that God ordained Obama for such a time as this. Christians of a particularly conservative bent may see it as punishment on America for choosing evil. America chose evil a long, long time ago. The truth is that every nation is part of the swarming sea that opposes the reign of the Lord in the Apocalypse. Some thirty years ago American Christians were anticipating that Russia was the place of the antichrist, or perhaps the European Union. Others anticipated that Syria would be where the antichrist comes from. Now, of course, some American Christians are imagining that Obama could be the one or is at least as bad. The number of the beast in any number of ways spells out Nero. There have been countless antichrists, just as there will be countless more.
These concerns are not new. The old days were not without these concerns. As far back as Cicero guys were complaining about how the old days were better and the youth today are dissolute and without direction. Yet Koholeth wrote millenia ago that it is not your place to ask, "Where are the good old days that were better than these?" because it is stupid to ask that question. Yet that is precisely what I see a lot of Christians doing, asking where the good old days were. I in my mixture of skepticism about the future and glum assessment of the past is that the past was not really all that good and the future isn't really all that good either unless we're talking about the return of Christ. It is easy at a generational level to excuse in ourselves what we now condemn in others. Perhaps it is God's providential sense of humor not only to turn us into our parents but to ensure that our children at some broad level mirror our own folly back to us.
When Christ came and said "My kingdom is not of this world" He demonstrated that throughout His life and ministry. Welcomed as a savior on Palm Sunday within a week the mob sought His death. Christ did not come to be the kind of military, political, or economic savior we wanted Him to be. He did not come to bring peace but to bring a sword and, paradoxically, entered Jerusalem on a donkey, a king coming in peace. It is the nature of the peace He purchased on our behalf that we continue to find offensive and continue to find grounds enough to forsake Him. Our capacity to forsake Christ and the temptation to forsake Him is a subject so large it will merit another post and seeing as Halden wrote a sermon that has gotten me thinking about that, another post there is.
Earlier I wrote about the temptation of Christ in the gospel of Luke. The proximate cause for that post was learning that Mark Driscoll had taught from that passage and the broader cause was that I have read a lot and thought a lot about the passage over the years. Ergo Garrett, Jeffrey Burton Russell, et al in the earlier post.
Being a Dostoevsky fan I can't help but consider things like The Grand Inquisitor and perhaps Halden considered Dostoevsky's masterpiece of confrontational philosophy while drafting his reflection on Palm Sunday. He describes (I think rightly) Palm Sunday as the end of Lent and the culmination of a new form of temptation of the sort that Satan visited upon Jesus in the wilderness. In Luke's gospel the ultimate temptation is to invoke the scriptures themselves, even a passage in the Psalms that was used as a go-to prayer against demonic attack, and to use that scripture to tempt Jesus to put God to the test. It is precisely this that Jesus now confronts in the face of a throng of people who welcome Him with shouts of "Hosanna". I don't need to rehearse that this word means "save us!" The temptation Christ faced was a temptation He overcame. He did not choose to be the kind of King His people wanted Him to be and for that they crucified Him.
It is not coincidental to say that at this time many American Christians whip out the passage that says "If my people who are called by my name will heed my voice and turn to me then I will hear them and heal their land." No one bothers to look at what actually happened in that narrative--Israel did NOT listen and they did NOT turn and they went into destruction and exile as the Lord predicted centuries before in the book of Deutoronomy. God knows the hearts of people and anticipated the failure of those in that time. Quote the passage in the context of Chronicles as a literary whole and it becomes impossible to cite the passage as an optimistic admonition that if you just vote in the right political party God will favor your country again.
Since other Christians have forced the matter I'll just force it in another way, both Judah and Samaria ultimately fell. If we want to insist on allegorizing this in absurdly American terms Samaria represents the Democratic party and they apostasized early and greatly. Judea represents the Republicans and while at the end Reagan mightily went forth on behalf of the cause and salvaged America from the liberals the party ultimately also betrayed true principles and term limits meant the Josiah figure (Reagan) did not rule or reform for long before the Republican party ultimately failed just like the Democrat party to secure and preserve the richness of the republic (e.g. the Torah). I can reverse the allegory to have it apply to Democrats, too, but that would involve digressing into the misdirection of JFK's administration and the analogy would fall apart even more quickly than it would for the elephant. I hope by now you figured out that I'm employing more than a little sarcasm here.
So, why, then, should American Christians who are conservative imagine that things in our age would be any different? Why should the trajectory of "God's country" be different in the United States than it was for Israel? This is granting the generous concession that the comparison is apt and that the United States was actually founded on "Christian principles". I always thought Francis Schaeffer's argument that principles influenced by Christian thought is not the same as "Christian nation".
Now conflating God and country is one of the perennial problems of every pagan empire and it was even a problem in Israel. It is, in essence, a problem with the human condition. Even without gods this human capacity remains and would not be remedied even if religion itself were somehow magically obliterated from the human race. Taking a passage severely out of context and acting as though the United States of America is the temple built by Solomon and Israel is the chosen people is not surprising to me ... but it is still profoundly disappointing. American Christians have had a knack of deluding themselves into thinking the Bible has to be about them for centuries. Now I don't tend to get questions about how America plays into Bible prophecy but I still settle for Psalm 2.
I am not really particularly liberal in my politics or my religion ... but I find the ignorant abuse of scripture to rally about political causes offensive coming from both conservatives and liberals alike. "If my people ... " who will sacrifice their children, kill the innocent, levy heavy burdens on the people, and justify it through exceptionalism continue to do so then they will fail. If people value profit and industry over people for generations then when they have given away their industrial base and jobs to foreigners why, precisely, should they complain that foreigners have the jobs that their masters of inidustry gave away decades ago? How far can you complain "They are taking are jobs?" when you and your allies have given them away for years to improve the profit margin? There are progressives and leftists who are opposed to internationalism because they want Americans to have jobs instead of having them shipped overseas.
There are otherwise stalwart conservatives who believe it is wrong to take a punitive approach to immigration. As Pat Robertson once said, conservatives have erred about immigration because they do not realize that Christians are to be kind toward them ... of course Robertson has mistakenly imagined that the United States in some sense at all a "Christian" nation or was one. A friend of mine put it this way, no one seems to be complaining about all the WHITE illegal immigrants living in the United States, working jobs, starting businesses, and the like. If the immigrant is willing to work as hard for a third less money and the home-grown American doesn't want to work for the pay grade the American employer is offering then who is going to get the job?
Ergo, immigrants are taking away American jobs at least in part because Americans don't want to work for what they believe to be too little pay while employers are not willing to pay more to Americans because of the impact it will have on their bottom line. Employers who do not want to bother jumping through the legal hoops required to employ someone can be described as sticking it to the man but the interpretation of these actions may simply be to complain that Mexicans or other illegal immigrants are stealing American jobs and living off of American social welfare programs. I in my broadly pessimistic disposition do not see a reason to be optimistic that this or that will get better. I suppose I share Miyazaki's generally gloomy outlook on the race as a whole while being willing to have some optimism at a local level.
Since my hope (though I often struggle here) is in Christ it is foolish to put hope in politicians winning this or that election. Just as God ordained slavery for Israel some Christians might just as well be told that God ordained Obama for such a time as this. Christians of a particularly conservative bent may see it as punishment on America for choosing evil. America chose evil a long, long time ago. The truth is that every nation is part of the swarming sea that opposes the reign of the Lord in the Apocalypse. Some thirty years ago American Christians were anticipating that Russia was the place of the antichrist, or perhaps the European Union. Others anticipated that Syria would be where the antichrist comes from. Now, of course, some American Christians are imagining that Obama could be the one or is at least as bad. The number of the beast in any number of ways spells out Nero. There have been countless antichrists, just as there will be countless more.
These concerns are not new. The old days were not without these concerns. As far back as Cicero guys were complaining about how the old days were better and the youth today are dissolute and without direction. Yet Koholeth wrote millenia ago that it is not your place to ask, "Where are the good old days that were better than these?" because it is stupid to ask that question. Yet that is precisely what I see a lot of Christians doing, asking where the good old days were. I in my mixture of skepticism about the future and glum assessment of the past is that the past was not really all that good and the future isn't really all that good either unless we're talking about the return of Christ. It is easy at a generational level to excuse in ourselves what we now condemn in others. Perhaps it is God's providential sense of humor not only to turn us into our parents but to ensure that our children at some broad level mirror our own folly back to us.
When Christ came and said "My kingdom is not of this world" He demonstrated that throughout His life and ministry. Welcomed as a savior on Palm Sunday within a week the mob sought His death. Christ did not come to be the kind of military, political, or economic savior we wanted Him to be. He did not come to bring peace but to bring a sword and, paradoxically, entered Jerusalem on a donkey, a king coming in peace. It is the nature of the peace He purchased on our behalf that we continue to find offensive and continue to find grounds enough to forsake Him. Our capacity to forsake Christ and the temptation to forsake Him is a subject so large it will merit another post and seeing as Halden wrote a sermon that has gotten me thinking about that, another post there is.
Link: Inhabitatio Dei--Judas, Jeremiah--a Holy Saturday homily
http://www.inhabitatiodei.com/2007/04/07/judas-jeremiah-a-holy-saturday-homily/
For some reason I never bothered to note that Halden Doerge of Inhabitatio Dei blogging is in Portland, Oregon. I, er, happen to be Oregonian by birth and upbringing and came to the Emerald City to study. This homily I read recently is something I find encouraging and so I am linking to it, in classic WenatcheeTheHatchet fashion, literally years after it was posted.
What sticks with me is the observation that Judas, upon realizing his guilt in betraying Christ to death, goes to the very religious authorities to whom he betrayed Jesus. Their response is to refuse him any possibility of absolution. We may surmise that Jesus' enemies who arranged for the crucifixion did not, in fact, even remotely care that Jesus was innocent. They were taking matters into their own hands because they had cause to believe Jesus was a blasphemer and very probably a bastard who claimed to be able to do what God alone could do. And, on top of all these things, Jesus was being welcomed as a king; had spoken against the Temple predicting its total destruction; and was becoming popular enough that Rome was in danger of beginning to take some action. All these, for the Temple authorities, would have made Jesus anything but an innocent man.
Yet Judas, we are told, knew the magnitude of his sin. He may have known it incompletely in as much as he merely knew he was guilty of shedding innocent blood. He may have known that he consigned to death a man whom he may even at one point have considered the Christ, God's appointed man to defeat the power of evil in that age. When he realized his guilt he went to the very authorities to whom he had betrayed the Lord. Their answer was "See to it yourself." Judas was trapped in a double bind of his own making.
We generally see Judas as the betrayer, as the bad seed from the start. Yet Jesus was abandoned by all of His disciples at the hour of death. Judas betrayed his master and quickly came to regret it. We are told that he repented. He felt remorse. He turned, however, to religious authorities who neither absolved him of the death he was complicit in nor approved of his being party to the death. The religious leaders and his pangs of conscience put him in an inescapable double bind. He was needed so that the enemies of Christ could obtain what they wanted by finding a pretext to have Jesus put to death, and yet he would not be considered any kind of hero or ally, merely a tool. He became a tool to his own sin and to those who found his sins useful for obtaining their ends.
Yet in the end it seems to be Judas' despair of any hope in the face of his own regret and rejection by those whose money he sought that impels him to end his life. The other disciples were, theologically speaking, no less guilty of nailing Christ to the cross through their own sins. What was it, then, that made Judas so particularly doomed? Was it because Judas did not recognize that Jesus was the Christ? No, this does not seem to be the case or he would have abandoned Jesus with the others and would not have remained when Peter said "To whom shall we go? You alone have the words of life?" We are told that Satan entered Judas. We are not told that Satan entered Judas at the START of Jesus' ministry but near its end.
Was Judas' particular flaw unbelief? Even the other disciples did not believe until after the resurrection and even Thomas doubted. Did Judas lack hope? So did the other disciples. What did Judas do or think in the wake of the death of Christ that made him different? In his lack of hope he forcefully accomplished for himself what he realized he was guilty of according to the law--he took his own life. I don't have more to blog about at the time so I'm just going to unceremoniously end.
For some reason I never bothered to note that Halden Doerge of Inhabitatio Dei blogging is in Portland, Oregon. I, er, happen to be Oregonian by birth and upbringing and came to the Emerald City to study. This homily I read recently is something I find encouraging and so I am linking to it, in classic WenatcheeTheHatchet fashion, literally years after it was posted.
What sticks with me is the observation that Judas, upon realizing his guilt in betraying Christ to death, goes to the very religious authorities to whom he betrayed Jesus. Their response is to refuse him any possibility of absolution. We may surmise that Jesus' enemies who arranged for the crucifixion did not, in fact, even remotely care that Jesus was innocent. They were taking matters into their own hands because they had cause to believe Jesus was a blasphemer and very probably a bastard who claimed to be able to do what God alone could do. And, on top of all these things, Jesus was being welcomed as a king; had spoken against the Temple predicting its total destruction; and was becoming popular enough that Rome was in danger of beginning to take some action. All these, for the Temple authorities, would have made Jesus anything but an innocent man.
Yet Judas, we are told, knew the magnitude of his sin. He may have known it incompletely in as much as he merely knew he was guilty of shedding innocent blood. He may have known that he consigned to death a man whom he may even at one point have considered the Christ, God's appointed man to defeat the power of evil in that age. When he realized his guilt he went to the very authorities to whom he had betrayed the Lord. Their answer was "See to it yourself." Judas was trapped in a double bind of his own making.
We generally see Judas as the betrayer, as the bad seed from the start. Yet Jesus was abandoned by all of His disciples at the hour of death. Judas betrayed his master and quickly came to regret it. We are told that he repented. He felt remorse. He turned, however, to religious authorities who neither absolved him of the death he was complicit in nor approved of his being party to the death. The religious leaders and his pangs of conscience put him in an inescapable double bind. He was needed so that the enemies of Christ could obtain what they wanted by finding a pretext to have Jesus put to death, and yet he would not be considered any kind of hero or ally, merely a tool. He became a tool to his own sin and to those who found his sins useful for obtaining their ends.
Yet in the end it seems to be Judas' despair of any hope in the face of his own regret and rejection by those whose money he sought that impels him to end his life. The other disciples were, theologically speaking, no less guilty of nailing Christ to the cross through their own sins. What was it, then, that made Judas so particularly doomed? Was it because Judas did not recognize that Jesus was the Christ? No, this does not seem to be the case or he would have abandoned Jesus with the others and would not have remained when Peter said "To whom shall we go? You alone have the words of life?" We are told that Satan entered Judas. We are not told that Satan entered Judas at the START of Jesus' ministry but near its end.
Was Judas' particular flaw unbelief? Even the other disciples did not believe until after the resurrection and even Thomas doubted. Did Judas lack hope? So did the other disciples. What did Judas do or think in the wake of the death of Christ that made him different? In his lack of hope he forcefully accomplished for himself what he realized he was guilty of according to the law--he took his own life. I don't have more to blog about at the time so I'm just going to unceremoniously end.
Jonah and the Assyrians
The church I attend recently wrapped up a series on Jonah that is quite good. A few years ago I heard a friend of mine preach through Jonah and he also did quite a good job. A cursory review of the circumstances the book describes are in order and hearing Jonah preached at one church and then another has reminded me that God's kindness is offensive because He so often shows it to those whom many of God's most ardent supporters (in their own minds, at least) can be livid when God chooses to show mercy on the utterly merciless.
That the Assyrians were a very martial and combative culture is not particularly lost on those who investigate them. That God chose to relent of destroying the city after Jonah preached "Yet forty days and the city will be overthrown" is beyond dispute. That Jonah was exceedingly angry and furious that God chose to show mercy on the Assyrians is something Jonah makes plain. He was angry enough to wish for death after the death of a plant ... while waiting to see more than a hundreed thousand die under the wrath of God.
What God reveals in Jonah is that He may choose to send us to pronounce judgment on those who are accurately considered terrible sinners. We may object to even warning them of the Lord's wrath to come, flee from His presence, and then eventually realize that we must go back. Jonah asked to be thrown into the sea to calm the storm rather than ask the sailors to return him to his land to make the trip to Ninevah. Jonah chose death rather than obedience to the Lord ... and yet the Lord showed mercy to him.
Out of that mercy Jonah goes and speaks to the city of Ninevah and pronounces judgment on them. Then the city repents and Jonah is furious that God relents of the destruction promised. Jonah waits. A plant grows up and withers overnight and Jonah is more upset about and more grateful for the plant that he did not work for then for the city that God has spared. Jonah is who we are. We are the sort of people not merely tempted but who actually do consider ourselves the measure of justice and mercy. We say to ourselves "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy." We can fool ourselves into thinking that those we "pity" are those whom we pity when we detest them, perhaps even for good reasons. Yet God calls Jonah to speak to a city full of people whose soldiers have destroyed his homeland. God sent them in judgment on Israel's wickedness and yet, paradoxically, they warrant warning. And when warned by Jonah they repent, and this is what infuriates Jonah--that he knew beforehand in his own country that Yahweh would have pity on them.
Who do we not pity that deserves our real compassion, not merely the "pity" we use as a mask to hide ourselves from the depth of our hatred? The first form of pity pours out life to those who need it and may not seem to have earned it. The second is the mask we wear to hide ourselves from the loathing we have at having our hopes or desires thwarted. Jonah hoped for the ultimate destruction of the Assyrian empire.
There may be several levels at which Jonah was furious. First, he could easily look like a false prophet in as much as he had pronounced a judgment that was averted. Judgment EVENTUALLY came as predicted by another prophet, but Jonah's warning was not to be the one that brought about destruction. Second, Jonah saw that God chose to mercifully spare the least deserving nation he could think of, a nation that had ravaged Israel. Third, Jonah saw himself and his people as the good guys and the Assyrians as the bad guys.
It is this third reason that I wish to consider at some small length, because while Jonah would be right to be angry at the cruelty of the Assyrians he was more angry at God for His mercy toward them, it seems, than toward the Assyrians themselves. Here is the part where, true to small group discussion form, I can ask "Who are the Assyrians that you don't want God to show mercy to?" I know that for a LOT of people I have known in the last five years those "Assyrians" would constitute Mars Hill. See, long-time readers of the blog won't have to search too long to see that I have had a profoundly ambivalent perspective on the church and people who have via anonymous comments wanted me to be more on "their" side have not gotten this.
Well, one of the last sermons I heard at Mars Hill was during the Jonah series back in 2008 and it has been illuminating to realize that the church I'm now attending has just gone through Jonah. I'm not interested in ignoring the providential potential in this for myself. It was actually a sermon a friend of mine preached from Jonah that helped me realize that instead of staying where I was at the time that I actually really did need to start moving forward into the next phase of life. I very much appreciate my friend for preaching that sermon and appreciate that there is a new place for me to be for the time being. The future is as always uncertain and often looks gloomy but the Lord leads us through gloomy and uncertain times as well as positive ones. The Lord ordered Jonah to go speak to Ninevah and sometimes the great unexpected turn of events is that God grants blessing and even victory to those you consider your enemy, those you consider unfit for the mercy of God. And in case I miss an opportunity to make this observation again, I did write the sonnet "On Election" in response to how many American Christians view this with respect to politics.
Jonah's anger was that God averted wrath and extended mercy precisely because of Jonah's obedience in proclaiming the warning of God. Jonah's sermon was one of doom, certain doom, and yet God used it to catalyze an act of repentence that averted the very doom Jonah so confidently declared. Jonah said, "Did I not say this when I was still in my own country!? You are a God who is slow to anger and merciful." Our greatest resentments are often at those who continue in sin for years or decades and whom, it seems, God providentially lets off the hook. Not only does God "let" them carry on in sin but they then turn away from those things they did to the Lord and we feel like fools. Jonah hoped for a destruction that did not come. First he fled God's presence, then he insisted on being cast into the sea but even there he did not die. Finally when Jonah realized that God would not even allow him death and that he had to go pursue obedience Jonah relented ... a little ... before reverting to his old anger.
What this means is that Jesus was not kidding when he said to bless those who curse you and to pray for those who persecute you. Jonah shows us how that DOESN'T look so that we can better see how it WOULD look when Christ comes to a world that ultimately rejects Him. Jonah arguably had a more compelling case to want the Assyrians dead than many of us will have about the people we want dead. Jonah's reasons were not even, by our measure of ethics, even remotely bad reasons. Yet the mercy and love that Yahweh extends can be scandalous, even obscene.
In fact that mercy is so obscene Jonah asked God to kill him. There are acts of mercy the Lord offers to people we hate or have been hurt by that are so offensive we would rather not be alive. It is to this fury of Jonah that the Lord asks, "Do you do well to be angry?" Do you do well to go outside of the city all by yourself and hide in a shelter you didn't even make that God providentially gave you for a time and from there wait for the Lord to destroy people because you have felt wronged? Jonah was a prophet who wanted collective guilt to be true for the enemy and not for his own people. Even though we say that collective guilt at all is barbaric this is something we cling to whether we hate Democrats or Republicans or Christians or atheists or Jews or blacks or whites or whomever we choose to resent collectively.
Jonah is a reminder that this kind of resentment is not new and it will never go away. What God does in the midst of this is show a degree of kindness that we find obscene. Jonah is at slightly greater length an examination of what Jesus spoke of through the parable of the Samaritan. Only Jesus went further by demonstrating that the apostate, the heretic, the traitor, the destroyer of all things good and holy was the one who showed greater kindness than those who would have been considered the heroes of righteous.
We constantly want God to give us and our people victories in obvious ways and through obvious means and then become offended when God continues to use those things that are nothing to put to shame those things that are. We, like Jonah, benefit from recognizing that the Lord who can show boundless mercy to us can also show that boundless mercy to people we don't think deserve that mercy. If we question the legitimacy of that mercy for others how can we say that we merit it? We don't and if it is a gift given to us do we question God's wisdom and kindness in giving it to others? We often do. I know I must remind myself regularly that this is a struggle for me and I recognize it is a struggle everyone will have in life.
Whatever your Jonah moment may be, do not wait outside the city of Ninevah for a destruction you want the Lord to enact on your behalf because you feel morally outraged. Proverbs warns that you shouldn't even be happy when your enemy falls or the Lord will take note of your resentment and turn around and bless your enemy. You shouldn't be too eager for your enemy to fail to begin with. Jonah had not learned that and apparently did not learn that for some time. God used him anyway and if God can use such a bitter, combative, and disobedient prophet whose message of brute destruction became a catalyst for the Lord's mercy then this is instructive.
That the Assyrians were a very martial and combative culture is not particularly lost on those who investigate them. That God chose to relent of destroying the city after Jonah preached "Yet forty days and the city will be overthrown" is beyond dispute. That Jonah was exceedingly angry and furious that God chose to show mercy on the Assyrians is something Jonah makes plain. He was angry enough to wish for death after the death of a plant ... while waiting to see more than a hundreed thousand die under the wrath of God.
What God reveals in Jonah is that He may choose to send us to pronounce judgment on those who are accurately considered terrible sinners. We may object to even warning them of the Lord's wrath to come, flee from His presence, and then eventually realize that we must go back. Jonah asked to be thrown into the sea to calm the storm rather than ask the sailors to return him to his land to make the trip to Ninevah. Jonah chose death rather than obedience to the Lord ... and yet the Lord showed mercy to him.
Out of that mercy Jonah goes and speaks to the city of Ninevah and pronounces judgment on them. Then the city repents and Jonah is furious that God relents of the destruction promised. Jonah waits. A plant grows up and withers overnight and Jonah is more upset about and more grateful for the plant that he did not work for then for the city that God has spared. Jonah is who we are. We are the sort of people not merely tempted but who actually do consider ourselves the measure of justice and mercy. We say to ourselves "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy." We can fool ourselves into thinking that those we "pity" are those whom we pity when we detest them, perhaps even for good reasons. Yet God calls Jonah to speak to a city full of people whose soldiers have destroyed his homeland. God sent them in judgment on Israel's wickedness and yet, paradoxically, they warrant warning. And when warned by Jonah they repent, and this is what infuriates Jonah--that he knew beforehand in his own country that Yahweh would have pity on them.
Who do we not pity that deserves our real compassion, not merely the "pity" we use as a mask to hide ourselves from the depth of our hatred? The first form of pity pours out life to those who need it and may not seem to have earned it. The second is the mask we wear to hide ourselves from the loathing we have at having our hopes or desires thwarted. Jonah hoped for the ultimate destruction of the Assyrian empire.
There may be several levels at which Jonah was furious. First, he could easily look like a false prophet in as much as he had pronounced a judgment that was averted. Judgment EVENTUALLY came as predicted by another prophet, but Jonah's warning was not to be the one that brought about destruction. Second, Jonah saw that God chose to mercifully spare the least deserving nation he could think of, a nation that had ravaged Israel. Third, Jonah saw himself and his people as the good guys and the Assyrians as the bad guys.
It is this third reason that I wish to consider at some small length, because while Jonah would be right to be angry at the cruelty of the Assyrians he was more angry at God for His mercy toward them, it seems, than toward the Assyrians themselves. Here is the part where, true to small group discussion form, I can ask "Who are the Assyrians that you don't want God to show mercy to?" I know that for a LOT of people I have known in the last five years those "Assyrians" would constitute Mars Hill. See, long-time readers of the blog won't have to search too long to see that I have had a profoundly ambivalent perspective on the church and people who have via anonymous comments wanted me to be more on "their" side have not gotten this.
Well, one of the last sermons I heard at Mars Hill was during the Jonah series back in 2008 and it has been illuminating to realize that the church I'm now attending has just gone through Jonah. I'm not interested in ignoring the providential potential in this for myself. It was actually a sermon a friend of mine preached from Jonah that helped me realize that instead of staying where I was at the time that I actually really did need to start moving forward into the next phase of life. I very much appreciate my friend for preaching that sermon and appreciate that there is a new place for me to be for the time being. The future is as always uncertain and often looks gloomy but the Lord leads us through gloomy and uncertain times as well as positive ones. The Lord ordered Jonah to go speak to Ninevah and sometimes the great unexpected turn of events is that God grants blessing and even victory to those you consider your enemy, those you consider unfit for the mercy of God. And in case I miss an opportunity to make this observation again, I did write the sonnet "On Election" in response to how many American Christians view this with respect to politics.
Jonah's anger was that God averted wrath and extended mercy precisely because of Jonah's obedience in proclaiming the warning of God. Jonah's sermon was one of doom, certain doom, and yet God used it to catalyze an act of repentence that averted the very doom Jonah so confidently declared. Jonah said, "Did I not say this when I was still in my own country!? You are a God who is slow to anger and merciful." Our greatest resentments are often at those who continue in sin for years or decades and whom, it seems, God providentially lets off the hook. Not only does God "let" them carry on in sin but they then turn away from those things they did to the Lord and we feel like fools. Jonah hoped for a destruction that did not come. First he fled God's presence, then he insisted on being cast into the sea but even there he did not die. Finally when Jonah realized that God would not even allow him death and that he had to go pursue obedience Jonah relented ... a little ... before reverting to his old anger.
What this means is that Jesus was not kidding when he said to bless those who curse you and to pray for those who persecute you. Jonah shows us how that DOESN'T look so that we can better see how it WOULD look when Christ comes to a world that ultimately rejects Him. Jonah arguably had a more compelling case to want the Assyrians dead than many of us will have about the people we want dead. Jonah's reasons were not even, by our measure of ethics, even remotely bad reasons. Yet the mercy and love that Yahweh extends can be scandalous, even obscene.
In fact that mercy is so obscene Jonah asked God to kill him. There are acts of mercy the Lord offers to people we hate or have been hurt by that are so offensive we would rather not be alive. It is to this fury of Jonah that the Lord asks, "Do you do well to be angry?" Do you do well to go outside of the city all by yourself and hide in a shelter you didn't even make that God providentially gave you for a time and from there wait for the Lord to destroy people because you have felt wronged? Jonah was a prophet who wanted collective guilt to be true for the enemy and not for his own people. Even though we say that collective guilt at all is barbaric this is something we cling to whether we hate Democrats or Republicans or Christians or atheists or Jews or blacks or whites or whomever we choose to resent collectively.
Jonah is a reminder that this kind of resentment is not new and it will never go away. What God does in the midst of this is show a degree of kindness that we find obscene. Jonah is at slightly greater length an examination of what Jesus spoke of through the parable of the Samaritan. Only Jesus went further by demonstrating that the apostate, the heretic, the traitor, the destroyer of all things good and holy was the one who showed greater kindness than those who would have been considered the heroes of righteous.
We constantly want God to give us and our people victories in obvious ways and through obvious means and then become offended when God continues to use those things that are nothing to put to shame those things that are. We, like Jonah, benefit from recognizing that the Lord who can show boundless mercy to us can also show that boundless mercy to people we don't think deserve that mercy. If we question the legitimacy of that mercy for others how can we say that we merit it? We don't and if it is a gift given to us do we question God's wisdom and kindness in giving it to others? We often do. I know I must remind myself regularly that this is a struggle for me and I recognize it is a struggle everyone will have in life.
Whatever your Jonah moment may be, do not wait outside the city of Ninevah for a destruction you want the Lord to enact on your behalf because you feel morally outraged. Proverbs warns that you shouldn't even be happy when your enemy falls or the Lord will take note of your resentment and turn around and bless your enemy. You shouldn't be too eager for your enemy to fail to begin with. Jonah had not learned that and apparently did not learn that for some time. God used him anyway and if God can use such a bitter, combative, and disobedient prophet whose message of brute destruction became a catalyst for the Lord's mercy then this is instructive.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
John Piper is taking a sabbatical
I confess to not being the hugest fan of John Piper. I don't dislike him and I even own a few of his books but his popularity at Mars Hill baffled me. I took it as a sign of what I had surmised as far back as 2002, that Mars Hill is basically Reformed Baptist but is loathe to identify as such. Well, if there are pastors on staff who are actually Arminian then I could say that they are a nascent addition to the broad denominational umbrella of "Baptist".
That was cool for a time but I have found over time that since my sympathies are more Presbyterian it was helpful to move in that direction (if Piper's popularity eludes me I totally get why people at Mars have enjoyed Tim Keller's teaching).
Long-time readers of this blog will know that I have had some pretty serious concerns about Mars Hill over the years but I stay in touch with my friends and family there and have even networked so as to get a capable musician in touch with a campus pastor. Last I heard (with my own ears) said musician is doing fine work at the campus and the pastor's sermon was excellent. I just needed some time to figure out that there is a no direction for me to travel. Moving in that new direction hardly means that I don't keep connections to the past. That may well be my strength and weakness, I am not the sort of person who likes to burn bridges where others burn bridges as soon as they find it useful and appealing.
I hope, since Driscoll has cited Piper as an example, that he will follow Piper's example at some point. Luke is mapped out enough that at some point Mark should consider an actual sabbatical. This seems to be the thing he has not really done. A month, I suppose, but eight months? Never. Mark seems to define himself by his work and it is going to remain a persistent idol he will struggle with. David struggled all his life with not being a particularly good husband or parent. Driscoll may struggle all his life with defining himself by his work and his being a family man. I have struggled my whole life with fear so I can at least credit Mark with not being afraid, though that can often be precisely what leads to problems. He's not afraid to make all sorts of stupid statements from the pulpit ... then again I believe every strength is generally also its own corresponding weakness.
I wish Piper well during his sabbatical.
That was cool for a time but I have found over time that since my sympathies are more Presbyterian it was helpful to move in that direction (if Piper's popularity eludes me I totally get why people at Mars have enjoyed Tim Keller's teaching).
Long-time readers of this blog will know that I have had some pretty serious concerns about Mars Hill over the years but I stay in touch with my friends and family there and have even networked so as to get a capable musician in touch with a campus pastor. Last I heard (with my own ears) said musician is doing fine work at the campus and the pastor's sermon was excellent. I just needed some time to figure out that there is a no direction for me to travel. Moving in that new direction hardly means that I don't keep connections to the past. That may well be my strength and weakness, I am not the sort of person who likes to burn bridges where others burn bridges as soon as they find it useful and appealing.
I hope, since Driscoll has cited Piper as an example, that he will follow Piper's example at some point. Luke is mapped out enough that at some point Mark should consider an actual sabbatical. This seems to be the thing he has not really done. A month, I suppose, but eight months? Never. Mark seems to define himself by his work and it is going to remain a persistent idol he will struggle with. David struggled all his life with not being a particularly good husband or parent. Driscoll may struggle all his life with defining himself by his work and his being a family man. I have struggled my whole life with fear so I can at least credit Mark with not being afraid, though that can often be precisely what leads to problems. He's not afraid to make all sorts of stupid statements from the pulpit ... then again I believe every strength is generally also its own corresponding weakness.
I wish Piper well during his sabbatical.
in which I admit to not liking the Eagles
They aren't the worst band out there but for reasons I don't feel like getting into I have been exposed to a hefty dose of the Eagles in the last week and I have become more aware of a line from the Dude in The Big Lebowski. I don't need to quote the line if you have seen the film and understand the sentiment Jeff Bridges' character expresses about the Eagles. I am, at any rate, not in a situation to be ordered to get out of a cab for expressing the sentiment.
Decades ago (really) Musician published a great skewering of Don Henley's lyrics by pointing out that the man had such a way with poetry, such a way with turning a lyrical phrase that you would have thought that those phrases had ALWAYS EXISTED IN THE LANGUAGE. True that!
I remember hearing the song "Take it Easy" and the whole premise of the song just seemed absurd in a way that could only, perhaps, happen in the 1970s. This song was co-written with Jackson Browne? Seven women on his mind and looking to be saved by the "love" of an eighth one?
The Eagles' songs are not exactly terrible but they represent a banality of musical and artistic direction that is respectably self-contained but just doesn't hold up in many details. "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast" stands out as one of the great howlers of Eagles' lyrics. Why, yes, they grabbed the steely knives because plastic cutlery just wouldn't get through the pot roast. The Eagles' creative output in songs like Hotel California or Life in the Fast Lane particularly constitute what in television we would call the "very special" episode of a comedy. That would be the scenario where the comedy proposes grandiose pretentions to being "serious" without a particularly compelling basis for it. Think Alex P Keaton going on in soliloquoys about death for this one.
It's not that comedies cannot touch upon serious issues or that drams can't be broadly comedic. I hardly ever watch TV but to pick two shows that I think broadly balance comedy and drama House and Scrubs come to mind. These are the only two shows about doctors I have seen that I can actually enjoy because the characters are not just plausible in their "good" traits they are even MORE plausible in their pettiness and their varying inexplicable weakness. Dorian's capacity for empathy is equalled by his absurd self-regard and narcissism. House has a similar capacity for craven self-regard without the oft-extended capacity to empathize with people. If the show starts off mixing drama and comedy that mixture is more readily retained.
In music I have mentioned earlier (much earlier) in this blog that a musician like Elton John can plausibly transition from pop songs to Broadway because of common connections. Billy Joel didn't make the transition from rock/pop to classical so effectively because he hadn't really stayed connected to it. I can't speak to Elvis Costello's attempts to get into classical music but in many cases that addition of classical to pop is often as ineffective as the transition from classical to pop.
I consider it unlikely that people who read this blog with any consistency are necessarily Eagles fans but they have stuck around for the long haul. My not liking them doesn't mean I can't respect their longevity. There are people who actually enjoy M.A.S.H. for some reason and people still flock to see Wagner performances even though I have found both his music and his person to be loathsome. But so it goes. For all I know after I'm dead and buried there will still be someone who hears those lines "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast" as some sort of profound utterance.
Decades ago (really) Musician published a great skewering of Don Henley's lyrics by pointing out that the man had such a way with poetry, such a way with turning a lyrical phrase that you would have thought that those phrases had ALWAYS EXISTED IN THE LANGUAGE. True that!
I remember hearing the song "Take it Easy" and the whole premise of the song just seemed absurd in a way that could only, perhaps, happen in the 1970s. This song was co-written with Jackson Browne? Seven women on his mind and looking to be saved by the "love" of an eighth one?
The Eagles' songs are not exactly terrible but they represent a banality of musical and artistic direction that is respectably self-contained but just doesn't hold up in many details. "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast" stands out as one of the great howlers of Eagles' lyrics. Why, yes, they grabbed the steely knives because plastic cutlery just wouldn't get through the pot roast. The Eagles' creative output in songs like Hotel California or Life in the Fast Lane particularly constitute what in television we would call the "very special" episode of a comedy. That would be the scenario where the comedy proposes grandiose pretentions to being "serious" without a particularly compelling basis for it. Think Alex P Keaton going on in soliloquoys about death for this one.
It's not that comedies cannot touch upon serious issues or that drams can't be broadly comedic. I hardly ever watch TV but to pick two shows that I think broadly balance comedy and drama House and Scrubs come to mind. These are the only two shows about doctors I have seen that I can actually enjoy because the characters are not just plausible in their "good" traits they are even MORE plausible in their pettiness and their varying inexplicable weakness. Dorian's capacity for empathy is equalled by his absurd self-regard and narcissism. House has a similar capacity for craven self-regard without the oft-extended capacity to empathize with people. If the show starts off mixing drama and comedy that mixture is more readily retained.
In music I have mentioned earlier (much earlier) in this blog that a musician like Elton John can plausibly transition from pop songs to Broadway because of common connections. Billy Joel didn't make the transition from rock/pop to classical so effectively because he hadn't really stayed connected to it. I can't speak to Elvis Costello's attempts to get into classical music but in many cases that addition of classical to pop is often as ineffective as the transition from classical to pop.
I consider it unlikely that people who read this blog with any consistency are necessarily Eagles fans but they have stuck around for the long haul. My not liking them doesn't mean I can't respect their longevity. There are people who actually enjoy M.A.S.H. for some reason and people still flock to see Wagner performances even though I have found both his music and his person to be loathsome. But so it goes. For all I know after I'm dead and buried there will still be someone who hears those lines "They stab it with their steely knives but they just can't kill the beast" as some sort of profound utterance.
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