HT Practical Theology for Women: The Terrible Sin of Eisigesis

http://www.theologyforwomen.org/2011/01/terrible-sin-of-eisigesis.html

Wendy at Practical Theology for Women has a nice new entry on eisigesis and why it is one of the most terrible things Christian teachers and preachers can do. In the words of someone who ostentatiously exemplified the problem himself, eisigesis is where you put yourself above scripture rather than putting yourself under the scriptures. The irony of such a man actually being guilty of that himself having told others not to do it would be funny if the abuse of the scriptures themselves were not so terrible.

I myself came to a point where I fielded a question on behalf of someone about a biblical text and how a Christian used the text. I concluded the Christian had grossly abused the biblical text and then realized that the pastor at my church had actually been guilty of an equally gross misuse of the scriptures. One misused scripture in one sermon I could dismiss as an honest mistake. A six month series of transforming biblical books into springboards for soap-boxing about contemporary social and cultural or annual report presentations issues was not something I could overlook so readily.

Here's the thing, I believe that eisigesis is to some extent inevitable and will reveal to you HOW you have a low view of certain scriptures. Notice I'm not saying that it proves you have a low view of scripture as a whole. Some of the worst eisigesis I've ever seen in my life has been committed by people who profess the highest view of the scriptures as a whole. A person who professes the inerrancy of the Bible and the necessity of believing the truth of the scriptures can still say "the gift of God is without recall" and sincerely believe that means that a person will have the spiritual gift of prophecy for life even though there's absolutely nothing about the context in which the apostle wrote that suggests such a thing.

In fact you are most likely to delude yourself into abusing God's word by telling yourself you have a high view of scripture and thereby excuse yourself from the abuses you commit and the negligence you pay to certain genres of the Bible. There is no greater way to fool yourself into thinking you are handling the scriptures well than to convince yourself of your high view of scripture as a whole. What about the parts of the Bible you don't immerse yourself in because they seem too boring, because they seem too emotionally odd, because they seem offensive, because they seem irrelevant? Do you REALLY read the geneaologies in Chronicles and sense that the Spirit is telling you that it is really important for everyone in the church who calls that church home to step up and become members? If so that's a good bit of eisigesis there. If you think that you're even in the story of the Bible as an individual you may just be missing the point of the scriptures.

As a pastor once explained it to me, eisigesis most often happens when you simply skip the process of exegesis and try to get into hermeneutics. In other words your desire to compel the biblical text to mean something practical and significant or life-changing for you or someone else right now trumps all considerations of what that biblical text actually says. Many a preacher and Christian who may be described as "just preaching what's in the Bible" has really been giving you what he/she THINKS the Bible says without getting into the actual reasons for it. I've been a Christian my whole life and I'll admit that there are many moments when I'm poring through Numbers where I realize a huge chunk of that biblical text doesn't seem to connect to my current life. If I attempt to read a biblical passage and take from that passage that God has made a promise to me as an individual then I'm missing the corporate nature of scriptural communication. The scriptures were given to, for, by, and through God's people over times and places. The temptation to make a biblical text about you is, in some sense, understandable because in Christ the scriptures are given for your encouragement and your faith.

But this does not mean that just because the fifth chapter of Proverbs tells you to enjoy the wife of your youth that that actually applies to you at all. The first reasons is that you may not be married in a near-Eastern village. The second reason is that you may be a woman who isn't married or has a husband and so the appelation of Proverbs 5 is less direct. The third reason may be that you're a child who hasn't even hit puberty yet and so that passage is useless to you. All scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching provided you understand that it is given for God's people and not necessarily to YOU.

A secular author I read years ago said that one thing the Bible does like no other book is invite you to be part of the story simply by virtue of reading it. This man was not a believer of any stripe but he immediately grasped the power of this appeal. The power of this appeal, however, is also the most frequent temptation to eisigesis in the life of a Christian. Eisigesis is not just a sin committed by Christian cults and heretics, it is also a sin committed by actual Christians. The first and most important step toward avoiding this sin in your life is to recognize how powerfully capable you are of committing it even after you think you know what it is. I don't care how greatly you affirm sola scriptura and the inerrancy of scripture. As I've said before, the worst offenders in eisigesis I've ever met have been the ones who most loudly protest that they affirm these things.

Brian Auten at BHT raises a question about admiring the Reformers' productivity

http://boarsheadtavern.com/2011/01/15/if-you-want-to-be-calvin-how-tired-are-you-going-to-be/#more-24366

Brian Auten at the BHT quotes an excerpt from Kevin DeYoung that goes as follow:

Whatever good is accomplished in and through the church will be by the grace of God. And normally that grace will flow most (thought not necessarily most noticeably) through those whom God enables to work the hardest.

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/2011/01/14/a-secret-to-calvins-success/?comments#comments

Auten himself goes on to say the following as part of his rumination on this:

What I’ve not seen addressed — and considering the language in the original Ordinary Pastors post about “[not] intend[ing] to merely turn the tables and slight the God-anointed ministry of revered pastors with extraordinary gifts,” I wonder if it can and will be addressed – is what kind of trade-offs are involved in becoming and being, for lack of a better term, a “non-ordinary” pastor? How many “ordinary pastors” are “ordinary” because they’ve either (a) seen the trade-offs required and have decided against it; or (b) can’t manage — for whatever reason — the necessary trade-offs? At our end of the theological pool (YRR), we’re telling people to be content with who/where they are, to be “plodders,” yet the lion’s share of attention and adulation is given to those who can seemingly get by with 4 hours of sleep/night, read a stack of books in a week and/or publish upteen-thousand books or articles in a given 2-year period. Without knowing (as DeYoung later explained about Calvin [ED: that Calvin effectively worked as though he were an unmarried man]) the context, the details and the trade-offs involved, we tend to attribute production and end-result to, as is seen in the Gospel Coalition’s language and elsewhere, special gifting. [emphasis added]

I could write a massive blog entry on any number of points raised by Brian. If you never get told that Calvin's wife died after they were married for nine years and that he effectively lived the life of a single man because he wasn't actually that involved in the raising of his children then you might get the idea that the young, restless Reformed types who hold Calvin up as an example to follow aren't getting into how comparatively uninvolved fathers were in the upbringing of their children in different time periods.

As Kevin DeYoung puts it himself:

It’s also worth remembering that in general the expectations of parental involvement with their children, for better or worse, are much higher now than centuries ago (especially for men).

In other words, a guy like Mark Driscoll might look at the actual day-to-day life John Calvin had and consider Calvin to be too absentee a father, just to frame all of this in polemical terms.

Link YouTube: The Widow, the Orphan and the Immigrant

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lDjWmgBQOo

This is a charming piece for English horn and guitar performed by the Mountain Music Duo. The piece was written by Andrew Halladay and was inspired by a passage in Deuteronomy. This pleases me at multiple nerdy levels. It sounds cool (the composer worked a lot with octatonic ideas in this piece). That it is written for an extremely unusual combination of instruments that includes guitar makes it cool (I have, in case you are curious, written a sonata for English horn and guitar of my own). It is also awesome that Halladay's work was inspired by a passage in Deuteronomy.

I have suggested to Tenly that she pass along an idea to Andrew, that he compose a sequel work for English horn and guitar (or oboe) that musically depicts the story of Ruth. Ruth was both a widow and an immigrant in Israel, and was in some sense a kind of orphan from her former homeland in Moab. Think of it, a work about the story of Ruth for English horn and guitar could be wonderfully beautiful. Kudos to Andrew Halladay for writing such a lovely piece and here's at least one guitarist/composer pulling for him to write a lovely sequel inspired by Ruth. :)

"Community" or "Alliance"?

My brother once said that the people who talk most about "community" are usually the people who least understand it and don't actually have it. I heard that buzzword, "community" thrown around freely in my college days. Bigwigs in the university I attended stressed how important community was. Usually this meant suppressing any negative talk about any aspects of the community. I grew quite jaded toward the term.

Then I ended up in a church that talked about being a missional community. I liked this idea better. For a while I even thought it managed to sort of be that but over time I began to realize that the longer I was there the more it looked like a conventional church and even a conventional denominational structure. Since I do not feel particularly called by the Lord either from the scriptures or at any personal level of hearing some "voice" from God to go reinvent the wheel I have settled upon attending a church in an established denomination. Some people have the spiritual gift of reinventing the wheel and feeling like they've actually done something new. I am grateful the Lord has given them that gift but since I don't have it I have found it useful to be in a different branch of the tree, so to speak.

But at that church I began to regain my skepticism about what is often called "community". A friend of mine said a month or so ago that in many case what is often presented as "community" isn't real community at all but a set of alliances. THIS is something I want to write at least one blog post about. The history of God's people is rife with uneasy alliances that appear to be community. The seeds of the divided kingdom in Israel were present even before the development of the monarchy. Certainly within the united monarchy the seeds of dissolution were present. Those seeds? Competing filial allegiances and the harsh demands of God-appointed leaders on those who served them.

The leadership at this church kept discussing how "all the elders are in agreement" on whatever any publicly addressed issue was. I was a journalism student so you may correctly guess at this point that when on-record statements are so unanimous I become cautious and suspicious. ALL the elders agreed on X? They all agreed on purchasing a piece of property that couldn't be zoned for anything but industrial use at the time and that unanimity was considered a sign of God's blessing.

Eventually crap hit the fan about some real disagreements and thanks to a culture in which total agreement was, er, agreed upon beyond any necessity for it, what appeared to be a community fractured into what it really had become, a series of alliances that all happened up until that point to have been on the same page. Some of the leadership conceded that the facade of unity was just a facade. This was basically admitting to a massive wholesale self-deception on the part of the "community" to itself. I was part of that giant self-deception. In fact it was a lame coincidence that just after I had let my guard down about the possibility that something could go terribly wrong and everything would fracture just about everything did go wrong and things did fracture.

I have now come to what some consider the rather grim idea that if you're going to be part of a church you have to take a clear-eyed look at what weaknesses and sins are rampant in that church that they may never become aware of or repent of and decide if those are things you can live with. This should not seem like too shocking a view. People come to this conclusion every day, any day that two people decide to get married. We in the land of Christians can often assume, and that wrongly, that "sin" refers to defiance against God or God-given authority. It's that but only partly that. To sin is to fall short, to miss the mark, and this can be done without intending to. I can say that we "all" as Christians "aspire" to community but that what we all end up forming out of habit and mistrust and human limitations are what ultimately reveal themselves to be alliances.

Let me put it this way, a community is full of people who share proximity and necessity. An alliance is shared by those who see that they are pursuing a common goal. A community will continue in the face of splintered goals and splintered methods because a real community is, if you will, stuck together in some way. An alliance will hold together for as long as everyone agrees on the shared goal. In other words if a prerequisite to being "in community" is being "on mission" then there's no such thing as community animating the alliance, however much an alliance may perceive itself as having community.

Now communities DO form around alliances. I'm a member of the Seattle Classic Guitar Society. Obviously people can and do get into organizations all the time and make friends and build families and all that in those sorts of ways. I also do take church membership seriously. I've just been chastened by being in church settings where membership had to be renewed every other year and was intrinsically tied to a tithe pledge. I'm not going to revisit all of my reservations about the misapplication of covenantal language and terminology pertinent to that setting. I merely bring it up again to elucidate my discovery that what I had thought of as acceptable for pragmatic reasons I now look back on as revealing the real nature of the society I was in as a group of allies rather than members of a community.

By now I trust it is obvious that terms like "community" and "alliance" invariably overlap. I don't mind the word "alliance" and not just because I grew up with the old, actually-fun Star Wars movies. "Community" is a word that may need to be, uh, redeemed, because of how many Christians I have seen abuse the term.

HT Pastoralia: interesting stuff about faith, doubt, failure, and unbeliefs

http://pastoralia.org/church/missional-postmortem-some-personal-struggles

... The need to fulfill (to fully fill) the daily renewing void of hunger and desire in oneself and those nearest your heart is intrinsic to being a human animal; but the need to do so creatively and productively – and (let’s face it) to be recognized for it – is intrinsic to being made an image (or ikon) of God.

The void itself is a gift, which anticipates the gift that fills it. This what we are: empty begging bowls; that are periodically filled to overflowing; that fill others from our abundance; that do it again. This is literally our human vocation.

It’s a noble humility.

Imagine, then, the agony of pushing one’s empty bowl toward God, in faith – day after day and year after year – only to bring it back still empty, or merely dribbled with the spittle of one’s own desperation (some of you don’t need to imagine, you know this feeling). Now, faith itself drives you to a fairly limited number of unpleasant explanations for this cosmic stinginess.
My temptation is to suspect divine rejection, the emotional by-product of which can only be God-loathing, self-loathing, or both.
...

So the loss of certainty is the price I’ve paid for a career in ministry, a theological education, and a long and painful walk of obedience to a God I seem habitually unable to disdain despite his apparent indifference. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to look people in the eye again and give easy answers. There’s no un-eating the apple. Yet that’s what most people want to hear from a pastor; the simple innocence of Eden before the fall, not the scarred wisdom of Jerusalem after the eschaton.

Still, I did gain something from the loss.

I’ve begun to see this sense of futility as one of the significant challenges to faith in the courtroom of postmodernity. Once you feel the agony of unrequited faith, I think you begin to apprehend the general perspective of atheism.

We tend to see Modernity as the age of anti-faith rationalism, but I think it was actually the age of mans most earnest supplications – risks of faith that largely went unanswered. ‘Postmodernity’ is the resulting malaise. Modernity’s bowl of faith was returned empty time and time again, and that emptiness indicts the cocksure certainty of our Janus-headed enlightenment cults of religion and science, which often conspired to deliver the emptiest promises of the past ‘Christian century.’

***
As someone who has been hunting for work for the last fourteen months with almost no success (except for a two very-much-over short-term free lance projects) I find it interesting to read someone who got into ministry admit that before 2008 there wasn't a job he applied for that he didn't get. It is fascinating to read a man who attempted pastoring describe failure. We tend to hear from pastors who are in some form or another at the top of their game and the peak of their influence whether this pastor is Joel Osteen or Mark Driscoll or Billy Graham or James Kennedy.

Sometimes we hear about pastors after they crash such as Ted Haggard or we learn that some superstar in the American Christian world of some stripe like Benny Hinn has had his wife file for divorce:
http://www.christianpost.com/article/20100811/benny-hinn-says-neglecting-family-led-to-divorce/

or Todd Bentley bailing on his cancer-ridden first wife to marry the woman he'd been having an affair with. We might read that Rick Joyner considered that a premature move on Bentley's part but not keep the guy from doing his fresh fire ministry whatever thing.

But pastors practically and plainly describing how they failed ... that you almost never see. Now I was in a church that at one point looked like it was planning to become a missional community that is now basically a megachurch and a nascent denomination. He hasn't spent a whole lot of time recounting any of his failures. Some of his most conspicuous failures, for those who were there to see them, are the things he's least likely to take credit for.


There "may" be something in the enterprise of a "missional community" that risks reinventing the wheel which "could" account for the difficulty of the enterprise. Notice I'm not saying don't do it or that nobody should try it. I have no pastoral gifts of any kind so far be it from me to be an armchair quarterback about that stuff. I find it refreshing that someone who attempted to plant a missional community could share something in the midst of that failure since I've been failing to land steady work for more than a year.

I also find it intriguing that we see here in this excerpt an interesting observation about unbelief. We as Christians can frequently suppose that if someone leaves the Christian faith for X or Y reason that X or Y was that person's idol. Yeah, there's all sorts of truth to that but what interests me lately is that what we as Christians don't like to acknowledge is that the idols a person may embrace and for which a person might reject Christianity can sometimes be the idols we put forth as the measure of successful humanity.

Suppose a man wants to be married (or just wants a sexual relationship) and following all the rules of the Christian life fail to obtain for this man his much-sought nookie. He rejects the Christian faith perhaps not for some intellectual reason but out of a sense of betrayal. He gets tired of being measured as a failure in the realm of being an adult because he has passed his thirties and isn't married with children. Now if he rejects Christ for that then, yes, he has given up the riches of Christ for an idol. And there are pastors who will simultaneously say that guy is guilty of idolatry while also excoriating him for being a failure as a man because he hasn't gotten married. The guy is basically damned if he wants to be married because he's made marriage an idol and damned if he doesn't want to be married because he's rejecting the God-given design for men. He's even damned if happens to be married but has opted to be a stay-at-home dad for reasons that are considered unacceptable to the men around him. As Jesus' disciples once put it, "If that is the case then it is better to not be married." ;)

Now notice I'm not saying the person who rejected Christ for nookie isn't an idolator. He or she obviously is. I'm suggesting that we remembers Romans 2. Those of us who condemn the idolator do not realize that many, many cases of idolatry in the scriptures are not those who worship other gods INSTEAD of Yahweh, they are those who worship other gods IN ADDITION to or ALONG SIDE Yahweh. We should consider whether or not our part in this cycle of shame is that we sold that idolator at some point on an idea: if he or she just jumped through all the right hopes for the sake of Jesus' fame, that Jesus would clean things up and give them that thing they wanted that we told them is the measure of a successful human.


My friend Wendy blogged about this kind of evangelical prosperity gospel over at Practical Theology for Women. I have considered this a lot because this has touched me where I live. I have friends who once were Christians who are no longer Christians and resent that they felt like they were sold a bill of goods, particularly about things like marriage and family. They thought that if they did everything right and sought after the right things a spouse would come their way. Now I'm kind of a buzzkill about marriage in the abstract while being a fan of the concrete marriages of the married people in my life. With marriage specifically and romantic coupling generally I have wondered if evangelical Christians create a collosal double bind.


People who grow up nominal Christians have no incentive to cling to the hope that is in Christ because if they bought the idea that has often been sold within evangelicalism that IF you do the right things THEN happiness and success will follow they swear off Christianity because to them it is a sham and religious people are hypocrites like guys who were fornicating left and right with their girlfriend and then pontificate about how evil fornication is to single guys after Mr. Fornicator manages to marry his high school sweetheart and produce a litter. It's not that the preacher hasn't changed his path, he has, it's that he ends up building a whole message out of "Do as I say the Bible says, not as I did at any single point in the past." Even though he is rightly denouncing paths scripture warns against he lacks the example of a lived life to help reinforce the teaching.

A nominal Christian or an unbeliever can look at what this teacher did with his life and say that if, somehow, God is actually real, then God clearly has no problem rewarding a sinner with fame and influence such as has been received by someone now telling him/her that he/she should refrain from things without any practical guidance as to how or why. To the nominal Christian or unbeliever the pontificating of the former fornicator not only lacks the force of a moral authority to advise on resisting temptation it seems to suggest that one might as well sin that grace may abound. I don't feel like taking the time to list all the reasons this is obviously false but to show that we as Christians can attempt to seize the moral authority that rightly belongs to God and not realize that in so doing we have deigned to work in what is ultimately our assessment of our own moral authority and not as ambassadors of Christ.

This is the kind of failure that could be compared to my attempting, as an unmarried man, to give advice to parents. It's tempting to suggest how other people should approach things with kids. Everyone eventually succumbs to the temptation to given an opinion that lacks either moral authority or practical knowledge. :) The problem is less that I can search the scriptures and come up with things that are confirmed by the truthfulness of scripture, it's that no one will grant me the moral authority to do so. By the same measure, a man or woman who got into marriage through fornication lacks the moral authority to advice those on the other side of the marriage divide how best to avoid temptations he or she clearly caved in to.

All of that is to say this, a person who rejects Christ in favor of whatever it is they are pursuing may have rejected Him because He was sold as the means to obtaining, in some form, whatever it was they REALLY wanted. When Christ was found wanting for not having delivered on whatever He was expected to give, He was rejected. As Orthoduck put it in a recent blog entry, Americans tend to sell Christ as some path to self-fulfillment. As Wendy put it, even those who think they are evangelicals preaching Christ as Lord, there can be a sales pitch that has it that if you get all your ducks in a row then things will go better for you and God is faithful (which means I'm not actually obliged to do anything until you prove yourself worthy of my help).


In my case I very much need a job. I could decide the Lord isn't faithful because I haven't managed to land a steady job in the last fourteen months. I providentially came upon two short-term projects that have let me handle rent for two more months. The Lord has provided for my needs but not necessarily for many of the needs that some might say are wants. Do people "need" work? Well, I've heard one Christian say to another Christian that maybe he had made an idol of his career. Well, okay, but what about that verse Christians like to quote about "he who will not work, let him also not eat"? See how a double bind can accrue? Seems simple enough to me.

If I don't manage to get work does that automatically prove that I haven't repented of sin? Keep in mind that sins can often be unintentional, something some churches I have been to really don't seem to get. I could be sinning in all kinds of ways in my job hunt without having any conscious awareness of it. Then again, attempting to only explain or comprehend a job hunt in terms of sinning or not sinning forgets that time and chance happen to us all, something that various forms of prosperity teaching that are open or self-hidden fail to remember.

Now I don't really agree with the idea that modernism held out the bowl of faith and rejected God because the bowl came back empty. I subscribe to the more pessimistic assessment that no one goes out looking for God and that even when we do seek God we frequently seek God/god/gods as a means to an end. Even those who convince themselves they seek only the fame of Jesus may be guilty of aggrandizing themselves without knowing it.

HT PsyBlog: the over interpretation of dreams--a short rumination on spiritualizing what may be mundane

http://www.spring.org.uk/2011/01/the-over-interpretation-of-dreams.php

the general commentary is that when people have dreams they ascribe greater significance to it than they would if they had thoughts or perceptions in any other setting. Someone has a daydream about a different job and they don't take it as seriously as they would a dream about having another job. Christians can look to any number of passages about dreams as evidence that dreams are a means of hearing from the Lord.

The most famous example of a person who had dreams in the Bible is Joseph. Joseph had dreams that he would one day rule over his relatives and he shared these dreams with his family. He was already the object of favoritism from Jacob and even his siblings Issachar and Zebullan (from the same mother) loathe him. Joseph is sold into slavery and eventually lands in an Egyptian prison for a crime he didn't commit. There he displays the ability to interpret dreams which Joseph ascribes to God. It is this last part that even many Christians often fail to consider. If you have a dream it does not necessarily mean anything and if it does mean something that meaning may be hidden from you. If it does mean something it does not make it from the Lord (all of Jeremiah 23, Deuteronomy 13).

I know of a few cases in which Christians have stated that God warned them of this or that in a dream. I do have some experience with dreams that seem to have spiritual significance but I am cautious about them because the heart is deceitful above all things. But I am also cautious because Christians can be overzealous to ascribe meaning to a dream that may, really, have a very natural explanation.

For instance I used to have dreams on a semi-regular basis that I was being attacked by demons that were out to kill me. This happened often enough that I became aware of the pattern in the dreams. I was also vividly aware that I was dreaming (more on this soon). So in my dreams where I was being attacked by demons I would rebuke the demons in the name of Jesus and one of two things happened: 1) I would wake up 2) I would find myself having a different kind of dream. About five years ago I finally got a primary care physician who put a few things together about my blood tests and my habit of dreaming in color and being able to tell I was dreaming--they all strongly suggested I had a sleeping disorder. The sleep specialist confirmed that I had not one but two sleeping disorders and I have been getting the usual treatment for those since.

All of this is to say that while I "could" have interpreted my recurring dreams of being attacked by demons trying to kill me as some sign that I was called by God to contend with principalities and powers that's never been what I wanted to do with my life in any way that would be any different from the usual experience of usual Christians who hear from God mostly through personal study of the scriptures. Instead of interpreting these recurring dreams as signs of some spiritual greatness I just treated them as unpleasant dreams that might or might not say anything more than that I was capable of lucid dreaming and it might be nice to not have that stuff. Since I got my two sleeping disorders treated dreams of being attacked by demons have vanished. Now I won't say there couldn't POSSIBLY be any spiritual component to such dreams but I don't presume a spiritual dimension to a dream simply because the dream involves a demon trying to kill me.

Now a "secular" thinker might propose that my dreams of demonic attacks didn't indicate that any demons existed that were trying to kill me in my sleep but that my body and brain functions detected that my life was in actual peril due to complications from a then-undiagnosed sleeping disorder. Because scripture does not prescribe any unusual or even inherent significance to dreams on the whole I don't see any conflict that ostensibly naturalistic explanation and the intra-dream pattern I noticed that any time I rebuked demons in the name of Jesus in my dream I either woke up or the demonic attack dream stopped. Fortunately after thirty years of just having horrible sleep I finally got my condition some treatment.

When we attempt to spiritualize physical conditions, and dreaming is a function of the brain, we can do irreparable damage to ourselves or others. One of the things I don't miss about having connections to the charismatic/Pentecostal movement is being in a culture that conflates the physical and the spiritual but errs on the side of the spiritual. Does someone have wild mood swings? Probably demons! Does someone feel depressed? Probably spiritual oppression and generational curses need to be renounced. Does someone have a strong sense of physical discomfort? It could be they are dealing with the palpable presence of principalities and powers.

... or it could be blood sugar issues. It could be the onset of a congestive heart failure episode. It could be a sign of clinical mood disorder. It could be the result of a massive accumulation of stress that causes dreams that reflect that stress back in a way that is informative but not (necessarily) a direct spiritual beacon from the Lord of hosts that something is about to go wrong in your church. These are not abstractions to me. One of my long-time friends was once a charismatic Christian and is now an atheist. He attributes most of his mountain-top spiritual experiences from his charismatic days as an indication of his long-ago diagnosed bipolarity (one of his relatives has it). I was the one who delicately but firmly suggested that given his family history that it was at least possible he had some neurological issues that could require medical attention.

There are many, many ways to use the Lord's name in vain and if we take the warnings in Jeremiah 23 and Deuteronomy seriously one of the most popular ways Christians could be tempted to take the Lord's name in vain is to say "I had a dream" and then presume that there is some deep spiritual content behind it. There may come a time when you have a dream that may really be from the Lord but it won't be a pleasant thing. You won't feel better about having had it and the contents of the dream will not make you feel better. Even if we suppose that the dream described in Daniel was a literary device employed for rhetorical effect it still wouldn't count as the kind of dream you pleasantly consider waking up from. Your wanting a dream to have spiritual significance might even be a reason you probably shouldn't consider it to have spiritual significance.

In some ways the unhelpful way to put things is that you don't really know something is a word from the Lord until it comes to pass. Before that time what you would ascribe to the Lord might be your own ambitions or anxieties or very literal physical symptoms of illness that you ascribe to the Lord because you want to imagine that you are bigger and more important than you really are. You are important enough that Christ died on the cross for your sins ... but not so important as to suppose that God will speak to you in dreams about what decisions you should make. IF you go by the precedent of dreams described in scripture then if the Lord gives you a dream it is likely to be a nightmare that warns you of a disaster that's coming that you cannot avert but that you can in some way prepare for ... if someone else is gifted by the Lord to explain your dream to you. Or you have just been told to take your family and leave the country so your child isn't killed. You get the idea.

glasses okay now--teaser of things to come: Cartooon characters vs cartoon morality

Theoretically my other projects can commence in the next week or so. The title for this blog entry is a teaser of ideas I'm working out for my friends at Mockingbird. Things are in a very bad way for me right now in terms of lack of work and finances but I am still thinking through a project on the DCAU . "Cartoon characters vs cartoon morality" is one of the things I will be touching on just to let you know that 1) I DO hope by the grace of God to write some more and that 2) I am not necessarily going to be doing that writing here at Wenatchee The Hatchet.

Plus I do still have to look for work and numerous family illnesses have tabled "Christmas" three weeks in a row. I concede that much as I love writing finally having a family Christmas even after nearly a month of cancellations and postponements WOULD be nice!

imploding glasses are a bad way to usher in the new year

There's nothing like having your only pair of glasses fall apart on you. This has tabled a number of projects I have been interested in tackling. The glasses frames are under warranty but have been discontinued, which turns out to be common with frames.

Christmas in the family get-together sense of things hasn't happened. Sick relatives with sicknesses ranging from a bad cold to congestive heart failure has caused multiple reschedulings of "Christmas". And I'm still unemployed and hunting for work. It's not as though I lack for time to work on things but keeping focus on writing projects for blogs has been waylaid by the combined need to keep hunting for work and dealing with the circumstances of family health issues. THe most immediately pressing one has been that my glasses fell apart. Working with the eye clinic on figuring out what my options are at this point. If there are replacement frames handy despite the discontinuation things will be simple. If not then, well, I've got to figure out how to get replacement frames with a dearth of income. The first thing is to establish the if-then within warranty and not try to get ahead of myself. I have loaner frames from the clinic that will suffice for the short-term.

I was gearing up to work on a series of essays about the DCAU and that has been tabled more times than I like but I have to admit that life has been throwing more than a few lemons my way. I am at least mapping out four different sections. This is another project I've been eager to tackle for my friends over at Mockingbird and I will, by the grace of God, get to finishing it as soon as I can, but I also have to concede that if it be the Lord's will then I shall tackle the project andcome up with something cool. But first I've got a greatly postponed family holiday to participate in while I do some job hunting and look at getting my glasses fixed and stuff.

Tron Legacy as an allegory of internal conflict and of "legacy" as the obstacle between father and son

For all the drubbing this film has gotten from critics I enjoyed it. Yeah, it's not exactly 2001 or Lawrence of Arabia or Citizen Kane by any conceivable stretch of the imagination. It's a big, dumb, special-effects saturated popcorn movie. Was it as po-faced and pretentious as The Stranger called it? Meh .. I'd reserve that put-down for Terence Malick before I'd ascribe it to a movie that calls itself Tron Legacy. Does anyone even remember these days what Tron refers to? TRace ON and TRace OFF were old commands in a computer language, BASIC, that was commonly used at the time.

Now, sure, people could say that thirty years later we don't need a sequel to Tron. Sure, we can keep saying that. But no movie of any kind is, strictly speaking, strictly necessary. All cinema is the result of consumerism, period. No matter how high flown your aesthetics of cinema may be the person who goes to see The Sorrow and the Pity or The Black Swan or Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen or Toy Story or American Beauty or whatever film is going for the same reason, that person has the leisure time, disposable income and the will to spend hours of his or her life immersed in a divertisment that is not necessarily for living. The reason I can be so laid back about what appears to be the shallowness of this or that pop culture manifestation is because we all excuse our hobbies while denouncing the hobbies of things we don't like. Some guy could denounce Twilight as absurdly unrealistic and promoting delusional ideas about love and romance while enjoying the TV show 24, which promotes delusional ideas about patriotism and national security risks.

So while I obviously have a place in my heart and mind for all art to address matters of utmost importance, there is a point where I see a trailer for a new Tron movie that has Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner in it I think to myself, "Sure, why not?"

Tron Lgeacy is a popcorn flick. It has "some" pretenses to weighty ideas but not many. There's a whole plot of a son dealing with a life estranged from his father by circumstance. Film critics have noted a preponderance of "daddy issues" in blockbusters like Iron Man 2. Tron Legacy is not so different. In fact Tron Legacy and Inception both have in common that the central premise of the story is that there are fathers whose immersion in a virtual reality has led to their separation from their children. In Inception Cobb is working to get back to his children (or so he thinks) while in Tron Legacy Kevin Flynn and his son Sam are brought together by the machinations of C.l.u. I'm not going to bother either with spoilers or explanations too much on Christmas eve. I'm just sharing some disorganized thoughts about the film.

Critics who see a preponderance of "daddy issues" in blockbusters real and would-be aren't wrong. Critics being critics they seem surprisingly uninterested in doing more than just noticing the subtext without doing much work at thinking through why even blockbusters are saturated with this meme. Why blockbusters and not so much those artier films? Even on TV shows like Scrubs the whole Dorianic quest for a hug from Dr. Cox has been at least one example of the daddy meme in pop culture over the last decade.

Then there's Homer Simpson's ambivalent quest to be a better dad than he is though he's likely to forget that he aspires to that next week anyway and we've had that for two decades. Christians could set aside the rote objection that Homer is Fox ripping on the American dad but these days a guy like Mark Driscoll might do more conspicuous ripping on an American dad as a failure if he's in any way a stay-at-home kind than the by now anodyne satire of the Simpsons. I mean, come on folks, I have friends who weren't even born until after the first episode aired! By now evangelicals are probably more obsessed with the failures of dad and mom with "Where's dad?" rhetoric than the world, which is ambivalently noted that dad's disappear and sometimes it's their fault and sometimes it isn't.

In the case of Kevin Flynn the disappearance is a combination of things. It's his "fault" in the sense that he made the program C.l.u. in his own image and C.l.u. was a self-impressed fellow who imagined he could re-order everything to be better. In this way Kevin Flynn and Cobb from Inception are both fathers whose ultimate battle is confronting their own failures of character not merely as fathers but as men. I would propose, in a rather slapdash thumbnail spoilery way, that the difference between Tron Legacy and Inception is that the Disney film reconciles the father and son as we would expect it to while in Christopher Nolan's film the father's dream of being reunited with his children itself is the dream from which he cannot wake up which paradoxically ensures that it is not real reunion he attains but a chimera from his own self-deceiving mind. We have two fathers whose obsession with pursuing and exploiting the possibilities of different kinds of dreams separates them from the ones they love.

Now if people consider Tron to be a lightweight film that's fine but as Anton Ego so eloquently put it in Ratatouille more time, thought, and passion goes into the creation of a common piece of junk than in the review from the critic that designates it as junk. I mean, someone clearly put a lot of thought into the haircuts and hairstyles the characters do and don't have in Tron Legacy. If some of that work somehow seems odd or lazy that does not preclude that even a popcorn film can attempt to grapple with, however unsuccessfully, big ideas.

Let's take the portentious speeches of the different forms of Flynn. Both Flynn and C.l.u declare that "out there is a new world. .... out there is our destiny!" The idea that any concept of destiny becomes the ethical enemy of natural being isn't hard to glean from the film. We're getting hammered with it about every twenty minutes. The "value your family over your vision of the future" thing is not surprising coming from a Disney film but I do think that instead of just shooting down the film a reviewer or two could have attempted to discuss that the film was in its own way actually proposing ideas.

The conflict that is at length revealed in Tron Legacy is less about Sam Flynn (who is merely our entry-point into the Grid) than about the conflict between old Flynn and C.l.u. who at the most literal level represents the younger Flynn who embodies the ambition that trapped him in the Grid and thus separated Kevin from his son.

Curiously underexplored and unstated is a fascinating possible irony throughout Tron Legacy--Kevin Flynn spent so much time motivated by seething resentment and a massive sense of entitlement in his crusade to get revenge on Dillinger in the original Tron that he didn't seem to realize that once he got his revenge, made Clu, and set about to create a new Grid that he was in most respects simply mirroring the same character flaws Dillinger himself had. Sure, Flynn wasn't lying or stealing other people's work but Flynn managed to have comparable character flaws that included massive ambition married to a sense of entitlement. That Flynn wasn't a liar or a thief does not make his character flaws less similar to Dillinger.

For a sequel that comes to us decades after the original and is obviously still revolving around Kevin Flynn there could have been more in the story about Flynn having some recognition that he had the same flaws Dillinger had but displayed them in a different way. Those of us who watched the original Tron know the Master Control Program reflected the flaws of Dillinger and that Clu ends up displaying a similarly tyrannical impulse is simultaneously too obvious as a plot point but not obvious enough in how the film was directed. On the other hand, if we consider the story to be Kevin Flynn's and not Sam's then most of the plot holes in the film are moot. Once we go with the Flynn vs Flynn conflict as the central point of the film plot holes that might be terrible built around another conflict become less important. It's too bad that at many points the director seemed to be staging everything so that the main story appears to be intended to be about Sam.

What did the conflict between Flynns consist of? Their attitude toward the "isomorphic algorhythms". As Bridges Lebowski's his way through the old Kevin Flynn's lines (which, don't get me wrong, is always fun) he explains that the "isos" represented the birth of a native and autonomous form of digital sentient life.

Well before that point I knew that Quorra, played by Olivia Wilde, would inevitably turn out to be plot device girl. That Wilde somehow settled on playing Quorra as a mixture of Bubbles and Buttercup from The Powerpuff Girls with Dora the Explorer's look in Tron gear doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the character. Considering she had the almost universally thankless role of playing a magic pixie girlfriend in a genre film she doesn't come off any worse than most. Wilde obviously decided that playing up the ultimately childlike nature of the character was the thing to do. The whole orange and teal color schemes in Tron so obviously telegraph "good" and "bad" that when any character is dominated by "white" that identifies them as free agents. Ergo, Kevin, Sam, and Quorra represent those who have free will over against those that don't have it.

Or ... maybe not. One of the most undeveloped plot points in Tron Legacy is the title character. Tron was Alan's program and Tron was seen getting attacked by Clu for siding with Flynn. Sure enough, it was no surprise to discover that Tron joined Clu's quest to order the virtual cosmos. There is virtually no explanation for this in any obvious way but just as Alan in the real world had what everyone called an absurd loyalty to Kevin Flynn and a belief in the goodness of his motives so Tron displays what is arguably the same character flaw in his avatar. This is not quite as undeveloped or unexplored as might first seem. Tron's loyalty to Clu is the loyalty of a program to another program. In other words Tron's loyalty to Clu is based on his established loyalty to Flynn the user. When Flynn escapes Tron is left only with Clu as the extension of Flynn. Without Flynn and with no certainty of Flynn's survival Tron's loyalty shifts to the next best thing, Flynn's creation after Flynn's own image.

The first Tron film opined in the bluntest way possible that the creations of men reflect the men in every way. It's unsurprising in the extreme that Alan's creation would side with Kevin's creation right up to the point that Kevin himself, from within the Grid, declared that none of these things that transpired in Tron Legacy's plot were what he REALLY wanted. Once Flynn expresses his change of heart and acts upon it it doesn't take Tron long to reveal that his loyalty is to the users. So both Alan the man and Tron the program reveal the same indomitable loyalty we would expect of them. The allegory is so crude that we could declare it ineffectual or stupid but as I said earlier, when we do this we should remember that we are at this point debating the significance of things we don't need to spend money on. As it happens I don't have the money to spend but a friend was kind enough to treat me to the film. I am happy to say I enjoyed the film for what it was. Hey, I admit I enjoyed The A-Team this year, too.

It may be too obvious and thus benefit the dignity of some film reviewers but Tron Legacy pretty much tells us through the title and the subsequent movie that too many men damage the relationships they have with their children by thinking of their own legacy. The "legacy" in this case is what separates father and son. Now officially the folks involved in the film have talked about how the technology that brought people together in the first film keeps them apart in the second but this official description does not really go deep enough. Technology even in the original Tron, in the form of the Master Control Program, sought to separate. Those who believed in users were separated and punished. The MCP was part of Dillinger's taking credit of Flynn's work.

Despite the fantasy trappings Tron Legacy is ultimately a story about the conflict of man vs himself. Clu can't be destroyed so much as reabsorbed back into Flynn by Flynn recognizing and confronting Clu as himself. That ending probably seems cheesy and stupid to some film-goers and, well, why should we say it's not? But that doesn't mean that the actual conflict in the story we got in Tron Legacy didn't require the conflict to be resolved in that way. Flynn's resentment in the first Tron film is simultaneously understandable but inevitably sets the stage for his avatar Clu placing his own legacy and self-aggrandizement above the benefit of others. The old Kevin can neither escape this by merely hiding nor can he escape the consequences of thid abdication merely by attempting to supress desire and argue himself continually into the state of inaction. At one point he says in piquish frustration, "You're messing with my Zen thing, man!" Kevin has to embrace both the reality of Clu's propensity for evil (which is his own, and which is something he in his self-righteous indignation and envy could not have possibly reconciled himself to in the first film) and his own shortcomings as a father through the denial of a desire for presence and empathy in order to resolve the conflict within himself. Sure, that's absurdly bad sci-fi but it's not as though the original Tron was actually sci-fi, it was clearly unhinged fantasy using sci-fi trappings as a gateway. Yes, I do want to give credit to J.S. Bangs for getting me thinking about this in the last week or so with one of his blog posts over at Infinite Recursion.

So that's some rambling on Tron Legacy from my on Christmas Eve.

xkcd has a little comic on breaking up and the use of data

http://xkcd.com/833/

There's no need to explain the comic, just go read it. Don't forget to read the scroll-over commentary. Often the best part of the joke is saved for an added punchline in the scroll-over.

projects new and old

The old project about writing a series on Hell has been tabled for so long I wonder if I should bother. Well, I feel I should but I have had other things that have been more pressing. Still, I don't wish to give up on the idea and, frankly, even in my Mockingbird essay on the Toy Story trilogy I was thinking through aspects of what I have wanted to say in writing about Woody and Lotso. Toy Story 3 includes an image of toys being sucked into the fiery maw of toy hell where the fire at the center of the land fill never dies. Most film critics noted this hellfire imagery and remarked on how startlingly existential and anxious these toys were about points of ultimate destiny. See, it's a very Christian movie!

Anyway, in addition to that still-tabled project I started just the first part of a rambling series on complementarianism and evolutionary psychology over at City of God. I still plan to tackle that but I recently also got an offer I can't refuse, to begin a primer on the DC animated universe. So I have been mapping out my numerous thoughts on what is an even more daunting project than the Toy Story project, some fifteen years of virtually continuous narrative continuity rather than three easily digested feature films!

And on top of all this I have not really stopped composing preludes and fugues for solo guitar. I recently even sketched out a blues trio for trumpet, tuba and guitar I hope to test out with a musician at church. As I blogged earlier I did finally finish the Good Friday movement for a string quartet in G minor I've been working on for ten years. One of three projected movements getting finished in a decade means that quartet probably has to be chalked up as a life's work.

And, of course, I haven't stopped looking for a steady job. There have been some short-term free lance projects working on a database and before that a commission to arrange Christmas music that have kept me busy the months of October and September but I still am searching for even part-time steady employment.

Oh, yeah, and I'm rehearsing Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Fantasia for piano and guitar so that my pianist buddy and i can play through at least the first movement. Ironically we knew each other for years and had discussed Pixar films and Powerpuff Girls episodes all that time without realizing that, hey, he plays piano well enough to tackle the Apassionate sonata and I wrote a guitar sonata in F minor inspired by the late works of Beethoven. Okay, so what's to stop us from tackling a great piano/guitar duet written by the composer who was the mentor to John "Star Wars" Williams? Turns out mercurial schedules. Be that as it may, we're making slow but steady progress.

HT Orthocuban: Rosa Parks 2010

http://www.orthocuban.com/2010/12/rosa-parks-2010/

I could write a bit about this link but for now I'll just link to it.

thanksgiving in failure

I have been looking for work for thirteen months and have not successfully landed any steady employment. For a short period in September I had a commission to arrange Christmas music and that was a wonderful opportunity. For a short while in October I had an opportunity to do some short-term work but overall in the last year I have not managed to land much of any work at all.

Not all my friends would agree to this statement but in the last year I have lived in poverty. No, I don't mean the "poverty" that means I'm in some shanty in Africa and, yes, I'm aware that there are plenty of evangelical Christians who define American poverty as somehow not counting as "real" poverty because we're so blessed and all that. I know all that but to that I suggest, not without some hesitation, that the scriptures do not actually define what poverty is for us. Why? Well, whatever the providential reasons the Lord saw fit to not define poverty would be speculation.

Since the speculations of many brothers and sisters are presented by said-same as certain observations I'm going to speculate--perhaps the Lord does not define for us what poverty is in the scriptures so that we are not tempted to refuse helping someone in need on the thinking that since he or she isn't really in poverty I have no reason to help my neighbor. I could tell them that compared to someone else in some far off land what may seem like poverty to them is wealth and riches in, say, Africa. But, of course, poverty isn't the same in every region.

All that is to say that in the last year things have not been so great for me. I have looked for work without success. I have often felt like I have simply failed as a person. I studiously and not-so-studiously skip listening to the Peter Gabriel song "Don't Give Up". Now I've pretty much always liked Peter Gabriel's solo work even since I was a kid but that song hits too close for me these days. It doesn't just hit home, it turns out to have a key to unlock the front door, comes in, sits on the sofa, and asks me how I'm doing even though it already knows the answer. So, yeah, I don't listen to that song so much these days.

In everything give thanks for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus is both a command and an invitation. We tend to get given this verse as a kind of "count your blessings" verse, we tend to sell it to ourselves that way. I know that is how I used to interpret the verse, as a kind of "be thankful for the good things that you got" as the old song in the Christianese pep talk tradition puts it. Being thankful in the midst of persistent failure is not something that seems to preach well. It's so easy to feel as though my persistent failure must be indisputable proof of a plethora of character flaws. Well, okay, other people may see persistent failures as stemming from something ELSE, perhaps from bad people holding them back or holding them down or otherwise depriving them of much-deserved success. I, on the other hand, as I have written elsewhere, tend to internalize failure. If I have failed at something it's because there's something wrong with me.

Perhaps strangely, giving thanks to the Lord in the midst of failure seems like a reminder that even if there seems like nothing to be thankful for there is a kind of spiritual discipline involved in thankfulness. It is not as though Joseph seemed to have much to be thankful for after being sold into slavery and then wrongly imprisoned on false charges of attempted rape and years of his life being stuck in a prison with no one outside remembering him. Yet by the time Joseph is reunited with his brothers he says without hesitation "What you intended for evil God worked out for good."

To put it mildly that is not the kind of spontaneous declaration that could have been said by a man who never found reasons to be thankful to God! When you are, after years of being imprisoned in a foreign land because your brothers literally sold you out from resentment, presented with those brothers that betrayed you it's impossible to say what Joseph said if you have not cultivated a heart that is thankful in the midst of catastrophic personal failure, loss, and injustice! Joseph went so far as to say that what his brothers meant for evil God had worked out for good. If this does not reveal a disposition of thankfulness when confronted with the people who committed the first and harshest betrayal in his life I am not sure what does. Joseph had spent a lifetime paying the consequences for wrongs that were wrongly credited to him.

There comes a point in the life of every Christian where we do not have an opportunity to thank God for the abundant blessings we see that we have but do have an opportunity to practice thankfulness for whatever we have and perhaps even for whatever we don't have. Godliness with contentment, as the apostle put it, is great gain. Whether or not all American evangelical Christians I know would even agree I have spent the last year living in poverty I have a lot to be thankful for. As the book of Ecclesiastes put it it is better to be a living dog than a dead lion and as I have said before we live in a culture that prefers to celebrate dead lions and ignore living dogs. That's how people are. The scriptures would not include a reminder to us that it is better to be a living dog than a dead lion if we were not so often tempted to think otherwise.

If you are a living dog you can be thankful that you're alive and not a dead lion. Since in prosperity Israel often turned from the Lord we can even cultivate in our hearts a thankfulness that some of our prayers have not been answered. To say that the Lord always answers prayers skips the reality that we go through life with prayers that have no answers that we can discern. This is no abstraction for me. I can be thankful that, for whatever reason, I have not yet landed a permanent job. I have had friends and family praying for this job or that job to work out and those prayers were either answered with "no" in the form of my not getting the job or, at best with the "not yet" of me not getting the job.

Even so I have lived just long enough to realize that there can be times when God permits one disaster to protect you from another you couldn't have thought of. Some fifteen years ago I was in college and the professor whose work constituted 90% of what coursework I needed to get my degree resigned in a university politics dispute. My self-designed degree had finally gotten approved and the professor who I needed to keep studying with to finish the degree had just resigned! This was a disaster. How was I supposed to finish my degree?

The dean of humanities gathered us together who had this self-designed degree and had us sign contracts with him establishing that he would ensure that now that our degrees had finally been approved he would do whatever it took to see to it that we'd actually graduate with those degrees. This was small consolation to me as a couple of classes I needed to complete my degree were never going to get taught.

Fast forward a couple of years. In my last quarter the business office called me to tell me they were expelling me. This was a big shock. Why? Because I had not kept up with payments enough and they were cutting me loose. The fact that this was my last quarter didn't matter to them. I objected that my degree had been messed up by university politics and that Professor X had promised that he'd help me graduate. Was the business office saying this professor's word counted for nothing on the campus? The business office said they would get back to me and check to see if what I was saying was true.

A week later the business office got back to me. It turned out that, yes, I was telling the truth after all and that the dean of humanities really had signed a contract with me to ensure I could graduate. So, no, they were no longer going to expel me but they sternly warned me that I had better graduate! I replied that I made sure to pick the most bonehead courses possible for my last quarter and that I would definitely graduate. I did graduate with my degree. Of course I got that degree and found out that it was virtually useless in the job hunt but that is not quite the point of my story. What I am able to see now is that God used the disaster of not being able to finish my degree as a way of providentially ensuring that I could actually graduate with that degree. Even with an admittedly useless communications degree at least I have that degree. As my teachers used to tell me, by the early 1990s all an undergraduate degree really told a prospective e mployer is that you can finish what you started if you commit to a big expensive project. At any rate I ended up being thankful for the thing that, in the moment it happened, seemed like nothing less than a disaster for my academic career.

It may seem like grasping at straws to be thankful for what you don't have but there is a time and purpose for everything under heaven. In the last year I learned things that made me grateful, at least for a time, that I no longer had my old job. When I got in touch with some former coworkers earlier this year one of them told me that they got hit by a disaster in something that directly concerned my whole former job. She said that the situation was so bad that she said I could be glad I got laid off when I did because I would have been furious and miserable dealing with the problems that other people had created.

There is a bad kind of thankfulness when you thank God that you're not this or not dealing with that--we all know the Pharisee was wrong to say "Thank you I'm not like that tax collector." But there is a time to be thankful that you don't have this or that. Certainly in the last year I have become thankful that I didn't have to deal with the things my former coworker told me about. I have also been thankful to neither be married nor to have children who would be more adversely effected by my poverty than I would be by myself. If having virtually no income and only expenses for an entire year living in America doesn't cosntitute poverty we can discuss that in other contexts.

I can be thankful for things that, I admit, seem like not great things to be thankful for. When I had some significant differences with decisions made by leadership at my old church I can be thankful that I was able to find a way to express those differences without rupturing all the relationships I still have with people from there. I have also maintained friendships with people who have left, at least the ones I'm closest to, despite a period where members were told to avoid association with those people. I have lost a few friends along the way in the wake of that but those losses, sad as they are, did not come about because of that initial rupture but as the culmination of character differences. With some regret I can say that I am thankful I'm not around those former friends anymore. Not being around doggedly bitter people does make it easier to avoid a temptation to bitterness. Yet in even this I can be thankful that through circumstances and reflection on scripture God can provide lessons of observation even from these moments.

Unmet expectations and unfulfilled dreams constitute two of the most powerful roots of bitterness a person can have. There is a kind of false hope you have to relinquish before you can be truly thankful because those false hopes are what you hope to be thankful for in the future that guide you now. A man who rejects God because he doesn't have a wife ultimately put his hope in securing a wife or being the kind of man whose status would procure one.


But I am thankful for the opportunities I have been given in this year all the same. I am thankful that I got a commission to arrange Christmas music and that I got paid for that work. That constitutes my first paid gig as an arranger. I am thankful that I was given an invitation to write for Mockingbird and was more than happy to write about the Toy Story trilogy. I am thankful I was invited to contribute to City of God, which is another blog I enjoy reading. In the last thirteen months of job-seeking I have finished sixteen of twenty-four preludes and fugues for solo guitar. Of course I am likely to revise some of that work because I'm a perfectionist and a self-doubter but I am glad I have been able to have a creatively productive year. I am also thankful to have generous and generally very understanding housemates. I am thankful for the church I have been able to be part of over the last year.

None of this means I don't want a job or that I don't often feel depressed. But even in the midst of feeling like a failure and, well, being a failure where hunting for work goes, the Lord's mercies are new every morning even when I don't feel like they are.

Who is our ultimate model for thankfulness? The man who went to the cross. Who is our ultimate guide for giving thanks? The man whose prayer that the cross might not be the path he had to take and then went to the cross, scorning its shame for the joy that was set before Him. That the path of thankfulness to God ends in death for us, too, need not be a basis for despair. Christ took upon Himself our sin, our failure, and by sharing in that with us gives us the hope of sharing in His life. Trusting in the goodness of the God of Israel who made all things and trusting in Him through Christ means that I embrace a path following someone who was killed on trumped up charges of terrorism against Rome and blasphemy against the God Christ proclaimed Himself to be. A servant is not greater than his master. Even at Lazarus' tomb Jesus could thank the Father that his prayers were heard and still be angry at death. In the moments when Christ knew he was about to be betrayed he could still thank the Father those those who had been given to him had not been lost. Not for nothing does Joseph's example of perserverance in the midst of suffering and loss and the capacity to be thankful to God for a providential kindness that cannot be seen except through faith culminates in Christ Himself.

Well, that's my little Thanksgiving self-directed pep talk for the 2010 season. It may not be of any use to you, dear reader, but these are things I feel it is important to remind myself of.

Link: Practical Theology for Women: Pariahs

http://www.theologyforwomen.org/2010/11/pariahs.html

Generally whatever Wendy says on her blog is succinct enough and substantial enough that I feel comfortable merely linking to what she says.

The liberation of being average part 2: feeling free to dream small

Much dreaming and many words are meaningless. Therefore stand in awe of God.
Ecclesiastes 5:7

One of the great staples in children's entertainment is best distilled in a song in Blue's Big Musical Movie, in song, no less. You can be anything that you want to be, do anything that you want to do. If you can dream it then you can do it the moral goes so the implicit admonition is to dream the biggest dreams you can dream.

Many of us know the film It's a Wonderful Life. Many of us know that George Bailey dreamed of leaving his penny-ante hometown to go and see the world, to build big buildings and see and do great things. He didn't get to do any of those things but as the film so poignantly tells us, George Bailey really did have a wonderful life. He made the lives of the people around him better despite not having attained any of his great dreams. Without George Bailey to save his brother his brother would not have gone on to be the war hero he became. Yet by the time of his fateful encounter with Clarence he is bitter and resentful and believes he would be better off dead than alive or, perhaps even better (as the author of Ecclesiastes grimly noted) to have not been born so as to not see how miserable things are in this world.

Less explicit in the film's narrative is that the man who has attained the greatest achievements in that penny-ante town is one of the most reviled and distrusted people in that town, Mr. Potter. Something the ancients frequently understood that we lie to ourselves about is the nature of the hero. We lie to ourselves and each other about the cost of being a hero on any scale. Every hero to one is a villain to another. The person who heroically accomplishes great things destroys the lives of people along the way in attaing his victory.

Ecclesiastes warns that with much dreaming and many words there is foolishness and that we should fear God. My reflection upon this precept lately has been in looking at the arts and what I have wanted to do and what I have seen others want to do. To frame this all rather cynically there are three things idealists aspire to, four that they rarely accomplish: a trilogy of fantasy novels; an innovative rock song; a screenplay filmed exactly as written; and getting anything done.

I look back on my own idealistic aspirations in the arts with a little embarrassment. I thought I was going to accomplish big things. I guess most teen-aged boys dream big and think the sky is the limit. I was disabused of this no sooner than I graduated from college and tried to find a job to pay the rent. The band I was in was never going to go anywhere and I figured that out after a few years but I didn't feel like bailing on the band for something more potentially "promising". I have since not exactly entirely abandoned pop or rock music but have not really hung any hopes on doing the rock thing. I also found over time that I really enjoyed composing chamber music. The dreams I had of what I was going to accomplish and the plans I made to accomplish those things have by and large not come to pass. I don't think they ever will come to pass.

There are two ways we can use our ambition to look down on other people. Really there are only two relationships we can have with other people in light of our ambition depending where we are in relationship to accomplishing those ambitions. Either we look down on others for not having our ambition as though that meant their dreams were nothing. Or, as I suspect is more common among mediocre, average, bad, and inferior artists, we can look down on others who are actually getting work done because we believe our ambitions and vision will ensure that we do better than them. I definitely have always been in this second category even when I managed to accomplish anything myself.

When I was in my teens I faulted my peers for their lack of vision. One of my high school teachers who was a mentor to me said that if I had managed to find a creative vision to motivate me to feel lucky and not hold it against other people that they didn't have it at such a young age. Most people don't find their creative vision until later in life, if at all. In hindsight I realize that a downfall latent within a strong creative vision is that traps you into such a narrow or didactiic frame of mind that you don't get anything done. I wanted my work to have content and meaning but I also was not particularly prolific. Other people were prolific and didn't think at all about content or meaning. Truthfully it seems that you can't avoid one at the expense of the other--by dint of production themes will emerge and by dint of exploration of a theme one will at some time become more prolific.

Now that I'm in my thirties and nearing forty I consider all the people I have known and it seems as though the people who have dreamed some of the biggest dreams for projects in a creative enterprise have had the smallest production. There's a guy I used to know who, when I met him ten years ago, had like so many other guys before him, resolved to write a trilogy of fantasy novels. My brother once said that it seems that every guy who wants to write fantasy has to conceive of a trilogy of fantasy novels. Some unobtrusive and overlooked boy of humble beginnings turns out to be the chosen one who was prophesied about long ago who will conquer the forces of evil and bring about a new era of peace and prosperity the likes of which the benighted earlier epochs did not know.
***
Curiously the idea that the landmark fantasy trilogy told the opposite sort of story
seems to get less attention. The idea that someone is chosen to bear the terrible task of carrying the distillation of evil and abusive power to the point of death so that its power is diminished but ushers in the final crumbling of the remnants of an earlier, great age, is not usually what people think makes for great fantasy-telling even though that's how Tolkien did it. The number of heroic epics that end happily ever after may not be so big as we think. Arthur's kingdom ends in ruins. Beowulf ultimately falls. Even the Jedi, yes, are all but obliterated and survive only because one jedi refuses to follow the deceptive and bad advice of his mentors (for the record the prequels reveal that Obi-wan and Yoda are preening imcompetent fools).
Actually there is another guy who was interested in writing a trilogy of fantasy novels. His first novel went through several drafts that were frankly painful to read but he has over time dropped (so far as I know) the fantasy trilogy part in favor of just getting something done.
***
Another fellow I met had settled upon writing a rock opera (I considered it at several points in my life so I get the appeal). Neither he nor I ever finished a rock opera. I certainly haven't even come close to composing anything like a passion setting that I had planned for years. I have at best composed two movements of a Mass. I have not composed any of the big projects I set out to do and when I have begun the projects I have not finished them. It took me ten years to finish what I at various times thought was going to be a gigantic piano sonata. When I finished the sonata it turned out to be ten minutes.

But I had comparable or greater delusions of grandeur for myself for much of my life. When I look at the lives of people who dreamed big and didn't accomplish any of those dreams I am looking at my own life. I never became the poet I wanted to be in my teens. I never even kept interest in politics long enough to get into politics. I wanted to go into New Testament studies in my undergrad days but I ended up a communications major. I minored in music composition by the time I finished and was more interested in music by the time I finished my journallism degree than I was interested in journalism. I found that I don't have that much of a gift as a writer of fiction. I am at best merely a competent poet. I am a guitarist and some people have said that I'm good but I am at best a guitarist of average technical ability who has a higher-than-average interest in musical form.

As a scholar of biblical literature I am below average as I never learned the biblical languages and merely have a middling Christian's affection for the Bible. Sure, I enjoy reading Leviticus and Deuteronomy but before you think I"m some saint I skip the genealogies in Numbers without remorse.

All of this is to say that when I look at myself and my actual life it was unfair of me to look down on other people as having less vision or ambition than I had in the arts. I have come to a fuller appreciation of a view that I always used to hate, the idea of creating art for the sake of art. Believe me, words fail me to describe how much I loathed the idea of art for the sake of art. I still feel weird about it. I still often feel as though the arts are in some sense not as useful as the sciences. I wanted to get into the sciences when I was a child and some part of me still sees the arts as time-wasting enterprises and science or engineering as somehow more useful. But God has created a world in which both sorts of activities can be pursued by the same people. Plus I never got beyond rudimentary algebra and remember virtually none of it. But I digress, as usual. Here I am blogging about how I wanted to do great things and I'm a nobody. There are folks who have a big public voice who describe themselves as nobodies but they're fooling themselves. :) Wenatchee the Hatchet obviously isn't my real name and odds are good (I hope) that you don't know me from Adam unless you know me personally. I haven't done much of anything that is ultimately that special and here I was a kid who thought he was going to do big things. Maybe getting a few possibly dubious or possibly kosher prophecies from charismatic acquaintences accounts for that.

What I have been trying to say is that for those who dream big and have ambitions to do big things with art that thing may be the greatest obstacle to you ever getting anything done. Abandon ambitions for great accomplishments in an art and replace it, if you can, with a love and joy in simply doing things for the fun of it. So the story goes Robert Frost had two aspiring poets come to him asking to learn how to become poets. One man said he had great and important things he wanted to say, the other said he just liked playing with words. Frost, so the story goes, chose the second man as the one who would actually make a good poet.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to say important and valuable things, of course, but a person bent on saying one thing would do well to heed the advice of pastors, find your one sermon and never stop preaching it! If you want to be a preacher, a one-note instrument, a one-trick pony and to be known for the amazing qualities of that one thing, then by all means go for it. It's okay to be a one-trick pony. Being, in essence, a one-trick pony got Jackie Chan his film career for years if you get my meaning. Just make sure no one on earth does your one trick as well as your pony does. But there is a sense in which, at the end of all that, you became the best at something because your goal was ultimately small enough to be perfected. As the psalmist so often wrote, selah.

In the first part of this reflection I wrote about how we generally consider ourselves above average. We imagine that we are better, more moral, more productive, and more inventive than we generally really are. The world is full of people who could have started rock bands or written rock operas; of people working on screenplays that will never get finished or never get filmed once they are finished; of people working on symphonies that will never be played and on books that will never get published. We can tell ourselves that what we are working on is as good or better than any of the junk out there that is currently getting published and in our minds it is but that does not make it so. It is true, as Brad Bird's Anton Ego put it, that more time and thought went into the creation of a piece of common junk in the arts than the review that designated that work as junk. Critics take that personally and they should because it is true.


But it is also true that most of us who aspire to write that comic book or finish that symphony or write that rock song or finish that screenplay or design that breakthrough in engineering simply won't do it. The bigness of our ambitions may have defeated us. And suppose we attain that big thing we went for? There is nothing new under the sun. The trilogy of fantasy novels was done by Tolkien. The big symphony was done by Beethoven ... and Mahler ... and Shostakovich. The graphic novel thing covers so many people I won't bother to list them. Even our greatest feats can and will be and have been dwarfed by other people with greater accomplishments. Whatever legacy we think we will leave is going to vanish, as Ecclesiastes so glumly warns us. How do we know that those who inherit these legacies we build for ourselves will even be worthy of the legacy? Have any of Lennon's sons lived up to the greatness of the legacy John Lennon's fans ascribe to him?

We are all much more average than we think we are and even those of us who are truly above average are aware, perhaps awkwardly aware, of just how limited they really are. Every one of us has a temptation at some point to look at something someone else did and say "I can do better than that." We are at some point tempted to begrudge someone else for having accomplished something we think we are already good enough to have pulled off or wish that we had accomplished by now.

This is a point where we, if we are Christians, can utterly fail to rejoice with those who rejoice. For our own lives it is okay to dream small for this life. If in Christ we have a promise to rule and reign with Him and to one day judge the angels not only should we learn from this to adjudicate smaller matters among ourselves, we should remember that Jesus said that whoever is faithful with little will be faithful with much. It is okay to acknowledge that in the eternal scope of things what we have been given is little. God can destroy any legacy we build for ourselves in a few minutes. We ourselves are capable of destroying a legacy that took a lifetime to build with just a few minutes of deciding something stupid that may not even be sinful. Jehoshephat's last decision as king led to the slaughter of his sons and a reversal of nearly everything he worked his whole life to achieve.

Rather than fool ourselves into thinking we have any legacy we may not even have in this world, let us remember to fear God. When foreigners and eunuchs were addressed by the Lord in Isaiah 56 He told them to not consider themselves withered, fruitless trees for the Lord Himself would establish a monument and a legacy for them, an inheritance and a name better than sons and daughters. In the ancient world sons and daughters, of course, were the hope that the family legacy could continue. God has revealed to us that that, too, can merely die. If our legacy is in Christ than though we become failures in everything that can be measured in this world we receive an inheritance in Christ that cannot perish. In this way we can appreciate Paul's advice that those who are married should live as though they are not and those who are free as though they were not free. When we properly understand what our real legacy is in Christ we understand that it is His legacy and not ours. Christ bore both the greatness and the weakness of our legacies to save us from them.

another link to the BHT

http://boarsheadtavern.com/2010/11/17/23352/

I don't know where J.S. found this but this could exemplify the worst impulses in theo-blogging in a very jocular way. Not that I'd say anyone should actually go ELCA at any point since I agree with my friend that the ELCA manages to only be American and may not quite so much be any of those other things in the acronym.

thoughts spurred by some new activity on the BHT

The question of why evangelicals stink at the arts has come up again over at the Boar's Head Tavern. One proposal was the lack of sacramentalism in evangelicalism. Not so sure if that's really the case. It's tempting if you look at how some of the big innovators in art, literature, and music in the last century or so came from Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox backgrounds ... and yet ... and yet there are plenty of people of no faith whatever that made remarkable works of art.

I think J. S. Bangs is on to something here:

I’m with Bill on the sanctification discussion, and against Capon. (I think. I haven’t actually read Capon on this, so really I’m just reacting against Capon as filtered through other BHT members.) But watch me connect this to the other conversation from yesterday: I think that this truncated understanding of salvation is the big reason that evangelicals suck at art. Salvation is gettin’ good with Jesus, and once you’ve got good with Jesus there’s nothing else to do. So not only sanctification, but art, beauty, etc. have no real place in this scheme, and the art that can properly be called Christian art is that which is made to help you get good with Jesus.


Here I mean to replicate but also correct spellings in something I shared with J. S. about his proposal:

I was reading an article in the Guardian a year ago (or maybe it was this year) where the author pointed out that we can see a curious dichotomy in the legacy of the Puritans. On the one hand they could often be very much against the arts and yet they gave us an amazing body of poetry and literature. They could be startlingly legalistic and yet amazing champions of individual conscience and liberty. Perhaps both the good and bad of the Puritans might speak to their actually giving a crap about sanctification and incorporating that concern into the arts? Just an idea I’m playing with.

In the works of Bach we could, arguably, see a nexus between traditional Lutheran thought and the integration, some say, of pietistic elements. Now if this were something by Rod Rosenbladt we'd jump into the dangers of pietism as a corruption of understanding justification by faith (or not, I plead ignorance of the bulk of Rosenbladt's work other than his compact but compelling The Gospel for those Broken by the Church). But since this is Wenatchee the Hatchet and not Mockingbird or Internet Monk and since J. S. is a friend of mine whose ideas in this case I find very compelling I'm going to run with his idea.

If you look at the actual lives of many of those ostensibly Catholic and Orthodox composers who were major innovators (i.e the actual lives of guys like Stravinsky or Haydn and what not) we'd see folks who would have or should have come under church disciplinary procedures so hard and fast their heads would have spun. Just about anyone who knows anything about Johnny Cash can surmise that his faith in Christ was genuine and that he was a genuinely flawed, fallible guy! Cash did not attempt to sand off the roughest edges of his failures in a walk after the Lord and that, we should probably agree, is why his work is of lasting value. Cash may well be a popular Protestant example of how someone who is not locked into the CCM template/prison can actually be a fully balanced artist and, however flawed, also a balanced Christian in exploring both how one gets right with/through Jesus and how that actually may look in the messiness of life.

I would go so far as to say that a Catholic like Messiaen was brilliant because he managed to compose music that was not merely (or even generally EVER) about jsutification. You may grant the minute you hear it tha tmeditations on the Holy Trinity is a sonic mess of a piece for organ. Ditto The Lives of the Saints or the Meditations on Pentecost. But the titles all suggest that Messiaen was able to integrate his work around the church year. Bach is the uber-exemplar for Lutherans. I would say that in our own time Arvo Part has demonstrated that it's possible to create compelling, contemporary and wonderful art.

Now here, to throw a bone to the folks who aregue that the problem with evangelical art is its lack of sacramentalism, we may suggest that the sacramental observation and the sanctification observation are two sides of the same thing. What are sacraments but means of mediating grace? Saving grace? Soteriological grace? No. Sanctifying grace? Yeah.

So in a way the statement that evangelical art founders due to a lack of sacramentalism and that evangelical art founders due to a lack of emphasis on sanctification in its obsession with a transactional view of salvation are basically the same observation from two different sides of the wound. At the risk of yet another sweeping generalization those who see a lack of sacramentalism or symbolism in evangelical art may be seeing things from the side of a kind of post-structuralist post-modernist abandonment or shared narrative that in evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity curiously predated post-modernism as a formal movement. The outward mechanisms and tools for articulating a symbolic iteration of life in Christ was rejected a priori as "dead formalism" and "traditions of men".

From the other side of the breach, though, the lack of emphasis on sanctification sees the wound from the perspective of recognizing that merely accepting Jesus as king does nothing to articulate or expand upon the implications of this kingship. The sacramental side may see a lack of vocabulary or tools to use the arts to embody feelings that must exist and are necessarily inherent in the Christian experience. Meanwhile, from the perspective of those who see transactionalism as drowning out any other experience of Christ the concern is that the transactional theology in evangelical art actually precludes the possibility of feeling those things the sacramentalist might think are actually being felt. One critique proposes a lack of a vocabulary for sharing experiences while another, perhaps, goes so far as to propose that the vocabulary that has been codified in "evangelical" art has straitjacketed the very concepts and feelings that are even possible to express. So I think J.S. was right to say that there may be different emphases on the same basic flaw in the arts in evangelicalism.

If the example of the Puritans reveals the best and worst attitudes and precedents regarding the arts then it means they were always hot or cold.
Those of us who are in any sense artists might here dare to allude to the words of the Lord, there are times and places where it is better to be hot or cold than to be lukewarm. It's better to see how art can explore and encourage sanctification or avoid it altogether than to subject art to such a truncated theology as a transactionalist understanding of life in Christ. If evangelical art is obsessed with the initial moment of "have you done business with God?" they need to understand that sanctification is what happens when, to press this metaphor further, a Christian does not merely buy Jesus but becomes a regular customer. The non-evangelicals and the old-school evangelicals (a la Bach, etc) obviously got this.

Evangelicalism, to the extent that it is fixated on a transactional comprehension of salvation, will be limited to either the discussion of the transaction or the anticipation of or a demand for a new transaction. In American spirituality this will take two generic forms. The first would simply be the "How I got Saved" narrative. The second would be the "We Need Revival" narrative. Of course this is wildly broad and unfair but there are kernels of truth to this. Consider how popular "Amazing Grace" is in American folk music. Does this not represent the archetypal "How I got Saved?" narrative compressed and distilled into its most universal expression in the English language? There are good reasons it is both one of the most compelling as well as the most beautiful and simple articulations of comprehending the mystery of salvation in Christ. Indeed arguably the entire musical life of the Church really should center on this one central proclamation.

I've rambled enough for this entry. What J. S. wrote is a great catalyst for thought and discussion. I hope this discussion can keep some momentum over at BHT. If Michael Spenser were alive to read it I think he might well be please.

for this post alone I hope the BHT goes on

http://boarsheadtavern.com/2010/11/14/23173/

Home brewing beer looks like so much fun. It’s too bad beer itself is unspeakably vile.

sometimes merely a link will do: from Practical Theology for Women

http://www.theologyforwomen.org/2010/11/hear-my-prayer-o-lord.html

project pending for City of God

Around the same time I was invited to write an essay on the Toy Story trilogy by Mockingbird I also got an invitation to join City of God. I think I finally have a writing project to put together for City of God but I'll need to hunker down and assemble that over time. I have more writing ideas than I feel I should try to tackle all at once but I'm overdue to write for City of God seeing as they were kind enough to invite me and I haven't written as much for them as I had hoped.

The little entry "Holy blasphemy" was the most I managed and that was more a personal reflection on how I've seen the name of the Lord abused in charismatic and Pentecostal circles than a sustained discussion of something. Now my background growing up was Assemblies of God and I've got a couple of books by Gordon Fee but the project that has most interested me that I think could be a good fit for City of God is something else. This is basically a "stay tuned" post for regular readers of the blog who are interested in the theology part of my nerdiness. If that's not you're thing and you're more into musical nerdiness I will try to have something for that interest eventually. For cartoon nerdiness I must plead poverty but because Quinault and Totoro-Man both commend the film I plan to see The Secret of Kells as soon as I realistically can.

Link: Cinemagogue: Flashback to Donnie Darko

http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=21320258
http://cinemagogue.com/2010/10/31/donnie-darko-in-gods-channel-pt-2/


When I saw this film it was all the way back around 2002 back at Mars Hill and I thoroughly enjoyed the film. Almost immediately it struck me as a mirror image of It's a Wonderful Life but recast as death. Donnie gets a chance to see how much better off the people he cares about will be if he is reconciled to his moment of death than if he defies it. Since Cinemagogue so conspicuously mentions this and I proposed the idea to James Harleman and other folks I know years ago I'm linking to this because, well, I came up with the Frank Capra comparison. :) I no doubt couldn't be the only person who made the comparison but I think it is a good angle into understanding how and why the film works, beyond the hilarious and ribald conversations about Smurfs or the satire on motivational speakers!

Plus I feel the least I can do is link to the work of one of my valuable friends over the years. James Harleman over at Mars Hill is a guy I respect a lot. If I hadn't known him over the last eight years I don't think I would have found myself thinking through Pixar films as I have or considering how various components of storytelling converge to express the things a storyteller urges us to put hope in or to reject. I owe James a lot for all the time we've spent together over the years discussing theology and comic books and anime. He, his wife and I have had some pretty good times discussing film and theology over the years which I hope will continue until the Lord calls us all home. Same goes for pretty much all the other folks who have contributed to Cinemagogue. So here's to my friends over at Cinemagogue. Keep up the good work. :-)