http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2011/10/dont-know-much-about-art-but-i.php
Over at the Gospel Coalition, the Rev. Thabiti Anyabwile has a post on definitions. His argument is a thoughtful one and he calls for the abandonment of talk of `celebrity' and 'rock star' pastors because, as he rightly points out, defining these terms is hard. He also sees me as one of the main culprits. So it seems apposite to thank him for his provocative and gently expressed thoughts and to offer a few in return.
I am tempted to say `I don't know how to define art, but I know it when I see it.' Except, other than understanding that Thomas Kinkade is not art, that statement would not be true. I am told Jackson Pollock is art but that, as they say, is clearly above my paygrade.
But let's bring it closer to home: most pastors I know would acknowledge that internet pornography is the number one pastoral problem among men in their congregation. Yet no pastor I have ever spoken to has been able to provide a fully adequate, stable, universally agreed definition of pornography which covers all cases any time any where. By the above logic, we should therefore stop all talk of pornography as a problem. We do not know how to define the term; we should not use it.
The problem is: semantics notwithstanding, pornography is a huge problem; and pastors who cannot define the p word know its a problem, recognise it, and take action to help those struggling with it. Frankly, pastoral time spent debating exactly what it is is pastoral time completely wasted -- time which might otherwise be spent tackling the issue.
Thus, the issue with the celebrity culture surrounding certain pastors and organisations is not ultimately one of linguistic definition or of those who use the term with a certain amount of elasticity or even incompetence. The issue is that there is a real problem -- in fact, many real problems -- to which some are trying to draw attention. There is a problem with the yob aesthetic, the arrogant stage swagger, the stand-up routines, the obsession with talking about sex in sermons which puts some of these conference headlining pastoral role models about as far from Paul's vision of leadership as possible; there is a problem with pastors who tell their people they will only visit them in hospital once they have been placed in a body bag; there is a problem with pastors who make videos which ape the aesthetics of the mainstream media and focus on the pastor, not the pastor's God; there is a problem with churches of thousands of people, few of whom ever get to meet an elder, let alone the pastor; there is a problem with church planting strategy that is so wedded to the cult of the one man that he has to be skyped in to the community; there is a problem when a man has to phone the librarian at Westminster Seminary with a pastoral issue because nobody at his home church of thousands has the time to speak to an ordinary church member about his crisis of faith.
Call it what you like. I call it the culture which grows up around celebrities. Maybe I am hopelessly wrong in my choice of terms. You may certainly choose others which fit better. But like internet pornography, I would rather spend time exposing the problems for what they are than debating semantic qualifications.
In the blog post Anyabwile wrote to which Trueman responds, Anyabwile explains that his training is in social science and education by background. Trueman does not mention his credentials outside being a pastor but his is the far more compelling case. Why? Well, I was a journalism student (which some would say makes me biased). Trueman attempts to address the celebrity pastor in terms that matter more than the domain of social science or education because celebrities and private citizens can end up having to meet different criteria to establish the grounds for a defamation suit!
Trueman's case is more pertinent because he brings up the inherent problem of objecting to a lack of definition in "celebrity pastor", special pleading. A pastor wouldn't say that one has to define pornography specifically before addressing the subject (unless that person is defending, say "Peasant Princess" as being erotic and not pornography, perhaps). I've got a counter-example closer to where I live, just because the Bible does not seem to define "poverty" or "the poor" as generously or strictly as some Christians would like does not mean there is no Christian obligation to help the poor. Trueman's right, just because we can't define "celebrity pastor" on the basis of a scientific method or procedure hardly precludes our being able to speak to the problems of the celebrity pastor.
Coming as I do from an academic background in journalism I don't think Anyabwile can make a viable case that terms can be so steadily or strictly applied for a celebrity pastor. Even his own attempt at defining celebrity pastor fails to come off as a meaningful deviation from the criteria Trueman came up with. It is, in any event, absurd to attempt to impose a scientific procedural definition on Trueman's criteria for celebrity pastor when Trueman's criteria mesh better with laws surrounding the basis for a defmation suit. Even a non "rock star" pastor can still have responsibilities as a public figure. A celebrity pastor is one for whom the grounds for a defamation suit would be even more stringent than that of some pastor no one has heard of. If you're a pastor whose soundbites and public remarks can get blogged about by people in other countries than the one in which you preach and get your paycheck you "might" be a celebrity pastor. If you're a pastor who is known about across the United States by millions of people you "might" be a celebrity pastor. What constitutes a "celebrity blogger" and why do "celebrity pastors" seem to think that there's more wiggle room for them than for the "celebrity blogger" to say stuff off the cuff?
... or do we want to make some potential exemptions for the celebrity pastors who are not modalists?
Saturday, October 15, 2011
Scotteriology misses the Mark on Mark Driscoll and Westboro Baptist Church
http://scotteriology.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/mark-driscoll-joins-westboro-baptist-church/#comment-10714
Must have seemed like a fun blog title for Scotteriology to say "Mark Driscoll Joins Westboro Baptist Church". Scotteriology mentions a number of things he's fond wrong with Driscoll and writes "Now it seems he is adopting the theology of Westboro Baptist Church."
Scott, being Canadian, just may not have access to the same coverage yours truly has to American coverage of the protest of Mars Hill Church Westboro Baptist Church planned earlier this year. Scott also has a job (something I wish I had) and does not live in Seattle. Just about nothing would make yours truly happier than if I could have had a job so as to have NOT noticed the old news of the Westboro Baptist Church protesting Driscoll and Mars Hill. As a matter of fact the protest was announced and happened ... four months ago:
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/sound/article/Westboro-Baptist-Church-will-picket-at-Mars-1430174.php
http://www.christianpost.com/news/westboro-to-picket-at-mars-hill-megachurch-in-seattle-51281
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/Religion/post/2011/06/doughnuts-donuts-westboro-seattle-mark-driscoll/1
The protest turned out to be a few people from Westboro Baptist Church showing up to "protest" by standing in front of a MH campus (they were still being called campuses back then, I think) for a few minutes and then moving on because, apparently, they had other places to protest. None of the protestors actually stayed to attend the service. See, Wenatchee the Hatchet lives in Seattle and word gets around. It looks like Westboro Baptist Church got what they thought was some handy publicity in announcing in advance they would protest Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church for saying God loves most people and then considered their mission accomplished.
So while Scott's certainly entitled to think Driscoll's theology is similar to that of Westboro Baptist Church, this year Westboro Baptist Church made it clear they think the God Driscoll preaches isn't actually hateful enough and they didn't want the donuts Mars Hill staff left for them. Such is life.
Must have seemed like a fun blog title for Scotteriology to say "Mark Driscoll Joins Westboro Baptist Church". Scotteriology mentions a number of things he's fond wrong with Driscoll and writes "Now it seems he is adopting the theology of Westboro Baptist Church."
Scott, being Canadian, just may not have access to the same coverage yours truly has to American coverage of the protest of Mars Hill Church Westboro Baptist Church planned earlier this year. Scott also has a job (something I wish I had) and does not live in Seattle. Just about nothing would make yours truly happier than if I could have had a job so as to have NOT noticed the old news of the Westboro Baptist Church protesting Driscoll and Mars Hill. As a matter of fact the protest was announced and happened ... four months ago:
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/sound/article/Westboro-Baptist-Church-will-picket-at-Mars-1430174.php
http://www.christianpost.com/news/westboro-to-picket-at-mars-hill-megachurch-in-seattle-51281
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/Religion/post/2011/06/doughnuts-donuts-westboro-seattle-mark-driscoll/1
The protest turned out to be a few people from Westboro Baptist Church showing up to "protest" by standing in front of a MH campus (they were still being called campuses back then, I think) for a few minutes and then moving on because, apparently, they had other places to protest. None of the protestors actually stayed to attend the service. See, Wenatchee the Hatchet lives in Seattle and word gets around. It looks like Westboro Baptist Church got what they thought was some handy publicity in announcing in advance they would protest Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church for saying God loves most people and then considered their mission accomplished.
So while Scott's certainly entitled to think Driscoll's theology is similar to that of Westboro Baptist Church, this year Westboro Baptist Church made it clear they think the God Driscoll preaches isn't actually hateful enough and they didn't want the donuts Mars Hill staff left for them. Such is life.
Christ at Cana and the absence of wine
http://graceseattle.org/Haralson100211.mp3
Last week I hit the two year anniversary mark of being laid off. I was laid off by a non-profit so I have not been eligible for unemployment. I got what was, all things considered, a very generous severance package and in the months before the lay-off I even considered that if a job at my organization had to be cut it should have been mine. Suffice it to say the day I got laid off I wasn't happy! I also did not want to be so very right in anticipating that if the recession kept having the dire results it was having that my prediction would turn out to be the right one!
This sermon is something I've been mulling over off and on for a few weeks and it's difficult for me to unpack its significance in a way that lends itself to writing. There are some people who are Christians are who are not sure they will continue to call themselves Christians because they are unhappy about the legalism and judgmentalism of other Christians. In some conspicuous cases I have observed as carefully as I can in the last ten years these are people who, it must be said, are themselves remarkably judgmental and callous people. There's a term that could be readily applied to these sorts of people and you probably know what the term is so I don't need to say it, and there may be brothers and sisters reading this blog who don't need that language brought up so I defer to them. The point is that there are points where people find most detestable in others those acrimonious traits in themselves; furthermore, there are some people who have tired of Christian company because Christians tend to act the way these people act.
But there can be a paradoxical other side of struggle within faith. That struggle can be Christian kindness. When God feels absent and seems to not answer your prayers for yourself but blesses others, and you receive kindness from Christians, it can paradoxically feel as though the kindness of Christians is more tangibly real then an abstract notion about the kindness and generosity of God. There are a lot of unbelievers and nominal Christians who choose the Paul McCartney axiom that evil is just the devil if you take the d off the word. Evil can't be transcendent. And per McCartney level thought, god is just what happens if you take an o out of good. This is sloganeering of the sort that McCartney (and Lennon, frankly) excelled at.
There is, however, a time and place when there is some strength to the mundane and obtuse axiom. There are times when the kindness of people does not always seem to indicate that there is a "Christian" let alone a "Christian worldview" motivation. Not that these things don't happen, I've benefited from the generosity of various sorts of people who are various sorts of Christian, but some folks more in the "worldview" camp have doubted the sincerity of those Christians who are "liberal" who, unbeknownst to the worldviewer types, have done far more to help me in tangible ways than they have. I don't wish to name names here but the "liberal" who "may not even be a Christian" gave to me so generously it broke down any sense of personal restraint or dignity I might have tried keeping up. Now I'm not saying conservative Christians haven't been helping me, they have, I'm just sharing that sometimes a crisis about faith in practice comes from seeing actions and outcomes that seem counterintuitive given what people would say about themselves verses those other Christians they judge to not quite be Christians.
All that is sort of a rambling preamble to discussing this sermon. In the last two years I have become familiar with lacking things. I have lacked money, and I have lacked income. I have also lacked the gain of continued employment I can live off of. I have ended up on food stamps and that because I relented when everyone in my family urged me to go on them. I have lacked the financial stability to consider the continuing education that some of have urged me to. I have lacked the marital status that would be needed to qualify for most of the worker re-education programs that are available, just as I have discovered that because I got a B.A. I lack the qualifications needed to be eligible for the few programs that fund worker retraining for people who aren't married. I have in the last few months discovered that I have a cataract growing in my left eye that has brought some new, unhappy impairments in my vision. I also lack the money or resources to obtain cataract removal surgery. Being unemployed, without money, and having a disability, these are all substantial lacks. Depending on which circle of Christians we're talking about I am also single and in my later 30s, which means I lack in other ways, particularly by way of what is considered "God's design". :)
The family that put on the wedding at Cana lacked wine. The social failure of this moment could be difficult to fully articulate. The groom's family and the groom were the ones to fund the wedding celebration, which usually lasted for days. The wedding was also a town-wide affair and in smaller villages people from adjacent villages were invited to participate. To run out of wine in such a setting would be a huge disgrace and not just on the level of "party foul" here in the West. This would not signal that the guests ate all the food you spent your money on because people eat a lot. No, this would signal shame and disgrace at being unable to pull off the kick-off party of one's own wedding. This would permanently mar your standing in society and signal to your in-laws that you were an abject failure.
In Western cultures the bride's family covers the wedding and this is not necessarily how it works in Eastern settings, either in the ancient near east nor in the far east but I don't want to digress into too many nerdy points about how these cultural expectations play into ancient Near Eastern or Asian story-telling. Yet I believe it would be useful to provide a case study from a pop culture tale from Japan to help unpack a basic difference between East and West here. There's a fun, low-key but momentous moment in a Rumiko Takahashi comic book (Maison Ikkoku, very far in the series' run) in which a man opens up his balance book to show a woman he loves that he's, in that culture's idiom, proposing marriage to her but showing that he's worked out the budgetary concerns of pulling off a wedding. Anyone who knows the series knows that Kozue accepts the proposal but I'll try to save any discussion of Takahashi comic books for some other time. Suffice it to say that in an Eastern setting it's a big, big deal if the man and his family can't pull off the wedding celebration because they lack the funds. In some Eastern settings demonstrating that the groom and his family can handle the expense is considered something necessary to share as part of the marriage proposal itself. See, my readers, it's not entirely useless to know trivia about Japanese culture from manga!
So when the wine runs out at Cana I don't think that it's possible to overstate the shame of that lack to a Westerner. "Party foul" doesn't even begin to cover the significance of this. This might as well have been a public, unintentional announcement on the part of the groom and his family saying "We don't cut it, we're failures." It's not necessarily material whether the guests drank too much or the groom was a poor planner the result ended up being the same. And that is, to some degree, the thing about how a lot of people can think about poverty. It doesn't matter why someone thinks you're poor. They could decide you're poor because your stupid or evil. They could decide you're poor because society is evil. They could decide any number of things but the lack remains the same either way.
I've certainly gotten the feeling I don't cut it. Two years of having no job and being ineligible for unemployment because I got laid off by a non-profit is no fun. In the last two years I've had one acquaintence die of cancer, another got murdered by her stalker, one of my cousins died of skin cancer, one of my uncles died of a diabetic coma that he (in his hermitic existence) didn't get help for in time, another of my associates finally succumbed to decades of battling brain tumors, and in the last few months I learned I have a cataract that needs to be removed from my left eye. I have not managed to sell anyone to hire me for a job in these two years and the non-profit I worked for had a set of proprietary systems that aren't full of the most obviously transferrable skill sets for either for-profit or non-profit work. There's a lot that sucks about my life at this point.
However, a lot of people have shown me kindness. I think that in the sense that followers of Christ show kindness that can be a kind of unsettling moment because when Jesus said "They will know you are mine by your love for one another" this invites the question of how many people, really, know we belong to Jesus by how we love one another.
I have managed to just barely obtain even four digits of income in either of the two years I have been unemployed. I have come across some fellow Christians who, surprisingly, have been willing to say I'm not really poor. I beg to differ ... well I don't beg to differ, I've got food stamps. ;) I've managed to adapt in a few ways, like learning how to cook a whole slew of meals I never thought to cook at home in my employed days. And friends and family and church have stepped in to support me in all sorts of ways for which I am grateful. In that respect Jesus' fills a lack in my life in that Christians inspired by Jesus' teaching have helped me. I can't hope to return the favor that has been shown me but I hope one day to display similar kindness to others who may need help. When I worked at the Salvation Army for nine years I certainly felt that in my own small way I could say that I was part of a Christian organization dedicated to helping meet people in their need.
So when friends give me food left over from a speaking engagement they were attending they were able to collect for me I'm grateful, very grateful. When friends and family run jobs leads by me I'm grateful even when the job turns out to be something I'm not able to get. I'm grateful for roommates who help me keep a roof over my head. I do have a lot to be grateful for despite my circumstances but that does not mitigate that I need a lot of help and lack a lot of things.
I used to be the person to get groceries for my disabled friend who couldn't get out of the house. I'd ask him what he needed for the month and go get that for him. I even picked up food for his cat while I was at it. As long-time readers of this blog will remember I don't have great vision. I had a macular detachment in my good eye (fixed up years ago thanks to a surgeon) and now have a cataract in my bad eye. I was calling my disabled friend about an item on his grocery list and then had a thought I couldn't help but share, I told my friend that I just realized that a partly blind guy grocery shopping for a cripple and playing phone tag about how to find items was actually pretty funny. We both chuckled but I did find what my friend needed.
I admit that being on the needing side of that equation feels a lot different than being on the helping side of that equation but not in the way I expected. I don't mind receiving help when I'm sure I need it I just wish I didn't have to say I need help as often as I have needed to. I don't know if I'd say that it's because I feel like a bad person for needing help, it's more like I wish I could be better than I am because I would like to be able to live up to the level of generosity I have received. Maybe that's a problem? There's a certain type of pious imagination that would tell me that that's pride. I have no use for that type of pious imagination (maybe I do and don't consciously realize it but that's not for me to work out at this stage in my life). Apparently to go by how Mary approached Jesus she didn't have that kind of pious imagination either.
Last week I hit the two year anniversary mark of being laid off. I was laid off by a non-profit so I have not been eligible for unemployment. I got what was, all things considered, a very generous severance package and in the months before the lay-off I even considered that if a job at my organization had to be cut it should have been mine. Suffice it to say the day I got laid off I wasn't happy! I also did not want to be so very right in anticipating that if the recession kept having the dire results it was having that my prediction would turn out to be the right one!
This sermon is something I've been mulling over off and on for a few weeks and it's difficult for me to unpack its significance in a way that lends itself to writing. There are some people who are Christians are who are not sure they will continue to call themselves Christians because they are unhappy about the legalism and judgmentalism of other Christians. In some conspicuous cases I have observed as carefully as I can in the last ten years these are people who, it must be said, are themselves remarkably judgmental and callous people. There's a term that could be readily applied to these sorts of people and you probably know what the term is so I don't need to say it, and there may be brothers and sisters reading this blog who don't need that language brought up so I defer to them. The point is that there are points where people find most detestable in others those acrimonious traits in themselves; furthermore, there are some people who have tired of Christian company because Christians tend to act the way these people act.
But there can be a paradoxical other side of struggle within faith. That struggle can be Christian kindness. When God feels absent and seems to not answer your prayers for yourself but blesses others, and you receive kindness from Christians, it can paradoxically feel as though the kindness of Christians is more tangibly real then an abstract notion about the kindness and generosity of God. There are a lot of unbelievers and nominal Christians who choose the Paul McCartney axiom that evil is just the devil if you take the d off the word. Evil can't be transcendent. And per McCartney level thought, god is just what happens if you take an o out of good. This is sloganeering of the sort that McCartney (and Lennon, frankly) excelled at.
There is, however, a time and place when there is some strength to the mundane and obtuse axiom. There are times when the kindness of people does not always seem to indicate that there is a "Christian" let alone a "Christian worldview" motivation. Not that these things don't happen, I've benefited from the generosity of various sorts of people who are various sorts of Christian, but some folks more in the "worldview" camp have doubted the sincerity of those Christians who are "liberal" who, unbeknownst to the worldviewer types, have done far more to help me in tangible ways than they have. I don't wish to name names here but the "liberal" who "may not even be a Christian" gave to me so generously it broke down any sense of personal restraint or dignity I might have tried keeping up. Now I'm not saying conservative Christians haven't been helping me, they have, I'm just sharing that sometimes a crisis about faith in practice comes from seeing actions and outcomes that seem counterintuitive given what people would say about themselves verses those other Christians they judge to not quite be Christians.
All that is sort of a rambling preamble to discussing this sermon. In the last two years I have become familiar with lacking things. I have lacked money, and I have lacked income. I have also lacked the gain of continued employment I can live off of. I have ended up on food stamps and that because I relented when everyone in my family urged me to go on them. I have lacked the financial stability to consider the continuing education that some of have urged me to. I have lacked the marital status that would be needed to qualify for most of the worker re-education programs that are available, just as I have discovered that because I got a B.A. I lack the qualifications needed to be eligible for the few programs that fund worker retraining for people who aren't married. I have in the last few months discovered that I have a cataract growing in my left eye that has brought some new, unhappy impairments in my vision. I also lack the money or resources to obtain cataract removal surgery. Being unemployed, without money, and having a disability, these are all substantial lacks. Depending on which circle of Christians we're talking about I am also single and in my later 30s, which means I lack in other ways, particularly by way of what is considered "God's design". :)
The family that put on the wedding at Cana lacked wine. The social failure of this moment could be difficult to fully articulate. The groom's family and the groom were the ones to fund the wedding celebration, which usually lasted for days. The wedding was also a town-wide affair and in smaller villages people from adjacent villages were invited to participate. To run out of wine in such a setting would be a huge disgrace and not just on the level of "party foul" here in the West. This would not signal that the guests ate all the food you spent your money on because people eat a lot. No, this would signal shame and disgrace at being unable to pull off the kick-off party of one's own wedding. This would permanently mar your standing in society and signal to your in-laws that you were an abject failure.
In Western cultures the bride's family covers the wedding and this is not necessarily how it works in Eastern settings, either in the ancient near east nor in the far east but I don't want to digress into too many nerdy points about how these cultural expectations play into ancient Near Eastern or Asian story-telling. Yet I believe it would be useful to provide a case study from a pop culture tale from Japan to help unpack a basic difference between East and West here. There's a fun, low-key but momentous moment in a Rumiko Takahashi comic book (Maison Ikkoku, very far in the series' run) in which a man opens up his balance book to show a woman he loves that he's, in that culture's idiom, proposing marriage to her but showing that he's worked out the budgetary concerns of pulling off a wedding. Anyone who knows the series knows that Kozue accepts the proposal but I'll try to save any discussion of Takahashi comic books for some other time. Suffice it to say that in an Eastern setting it's a big, big deal if the man and his family can't pull off the wedding celebration because they lack the funds. In some Eastern settings demonstrating that the groom and his family can handle the expense is considered something necessary to share as part of the marriage proposal itself. See, my readers, it's not entirely useless to know trivia about Japanese culture from manga!
So when the wine runs out at Cana I don't think that it's possible to overstate the shame of that lack to a Westerner. "Party foul" doesn't even begin to cover the significance of this. This might as well have been a public, unintentional announcement on the part of the groom and his family saying "We don't cut it, we're failures." It's not necessarily material whether the guests drank too much or the groom was a poor planner the result ended up being the same. And that is, to some degree, the thing about how a lot of people can think about poverty. It doesn't matter why someone thinks you're poor. They could decide you're poor because your stupid or evil. They could decide you're poor because society is evil. They could decide any number of things but the lack remains the same either way.
I've certainly gotten the feeling I don't cut it. Two years of having no job and being ineligible for unemployment because I got laid off by a non-profit is no fun. In the last two years I've had one acquaintence die of cancer, another got murdered by her stalker, one of my cousins died of skin cancer, one of my uncles died of a diabetic coma that he (in his hermitic existence) didn't get help for in time, another of my associates finally succumbed to decades of battling brain tumors, and in the last few months I learned I have a cataract that needs to be removed from my left eye. I have not managed to sell anyone to hire me for a job in these two years and the non-profit I worked for had a set of proprietary systems that aren't full of the most obviously transferrable skill sets for either for-profit or non-profit work. There's a lot that sucks about my life at this point.
However, a lot of people have shown me kindness. I think that in the sense that followers of Christ show kindness that can be a kind of unsettling moment because when Jesus said "They will know you are mine by your love for one another" this invites the question of how many people, really, know we belong to Jesus by how we love one another.
I have managed to just barely obtain even four digits of income in either of the two years I have been unemployed. I have come across some fellow Christians who, surprisingly, have been willing to say I'm not really poor. I beg to differ ... well I don't beg to differ, I've got food stamps. ;) I've managed to adapt in a few ways, like learning how to cook a whole slew of meals I never thought to cook at home in my employed days. And friends and family and church have stepped in to support me in all sorts of ways for which I am grateful. In that respect Jesus' fills a lack in my life in that Christians inspired by Jesus' teaching have helped me. I can't hope to return the favor that has been shown me but I hope one day to display similar kindness to others who may need help. When I worked at the Salvation Army for nine years I certainly felt that in my own small way I could say that I was part of a Christian organization dedicated to helping meet people in their need.
So when friends give me food left over from a speaking engagement they were attending they were able to collect for me I'm grateful, very grateful. When friends and family run jobs leads by me I'm grateful even when the job turns out to be something I'm not able to get. I'm grateful for roommates who help me keep a roof over my head. I do have a lot to be grateful for despite my circumstances but that does not mitigate that I need a lot of help and lack a lot of things.
I used to be the person to get groceries for my disabled friend who couldn't get out of the house. I'd ask him what he needed for the month and go get that for him. I even picked up food for his cat while I was at it. As long-time readers of this blog will remember I don't have great vision. I had a macular detachment in my good eye (fixed up years ago thanks to a surgeon) and now have a cataract in my bad eye. I was calling my disabled friend about an item on his grocery list and then had a thought I couldn't help but share, I told my friend that I just realized that a partly blind guy grocery shopping for a cripple and playing phone tag about how to find items was actually pretty funny. We both chuckled but I did find what my friend needed.
I admit that being on the needing side of that equation feels a lot different than being on the helping side of that equation but not in the way I expected. I don't mind receiving help when I'm sure I need it I just wish I didn't have to say I need help as often as I have needed to. I don't know if I'd say that it's because I feel like a bad person for needing help, it's more like I wish I could be better than I am because I would like to be able to live up to the level of generosity I have received. Maybe that's a problem? There's a certain type of pious imagination that would tell me that that's pride. I have no use for that type of pious imagination (maybe I do and don't consciously realize it but that's not for me to work out at this stage in my life). Apparently to go by how Mary approached Jesus she didn't have that kind of pious imagination either.
Friday, October 14, 2011
I just had to post this comment from Bill MacKinnon at BHT
http://boarsheadtavern.com/2011/10/14/28428/
Lutherans are mythical creatures in my area, so I don’t have any first hand experience with them, but I have to agree with Bob’s assessment of this situation.
Sorry, I know it's goofy and trivial but it made me laugh a lot. Some kinds of Christians really don't appear that often. Back in my Mars Hill days a friend of mine felt obliged to tell another fellow (who is now a pastor at MH) that I was not, in fact, a heretic for being an amillenial partial preterist. Even at a church like Mars Hill where lots of people care about doctrine 98% of Mars Hillians had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. I have myself been a sort of mythical creature in some parts of American conservative Protestantism for my views on eschatology. Seminarians get it, and sometimes chuckle, but most lay people have no idea what I'm talking about. Christian love often means not even attempting to explain it to them.
Lutherans are mythical creatures in my area, so I don’t have any first hand experience with them, but I have to agree with Bob’s assessment of this situation.
Sorry, I know it's goofy and trivial but it made me laugh a lot. Some kinds of Christians really don't appear that often. Back in my Mars Hill days a friend of mine felt obliged to tell another fellow (who is now a pastor at MH) that I was not, in fact, a heretic for being an amillenial partial preterist. Even at a church like Mars Hill where lots of people care about doctrine 98% of Mars Hillians had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. I have myself been a sort of mythical creature in some parts of American conservative Protestantism for my views on eschatology. Seminarians get it, and sometimes chuckle, but most lay people have no idea what I'm talking about. Christian love often means not even attempting to explain it to them.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
differences between 18 year old poets and 28 year old poets,an utter ramble
There are benefits to aging and there are benefits to establishing a context. One of the things I look back on in my teens, not that I'm moving through the late 30s, is I remember how many high school poets seemed obsessed with writing about the anonymous person who commits suicide. Well, there are people who write about anonymous suicides at much later ages but I'm not going to list Brian Eno as a poet as such. The anonymous person who commits suicide is one of those cliches that I hope is dispensed from poetry altogether at some point. The trouble is that the dead person, usually nameless, becomes a cipher for the poet's righteous indignation, or often self-righteous indignation.
In teenagers this is especially apparent. There's a moral outrage at the indifference toward which the world at large, however small that world may be, has toward the person who dies. The anonymity makes the death all the more tragic (the naive poet thinks) for being so mundane. The person does not even have a name and the cruel world cares not for the death. But that is the failure of the poet's imagination. The most memorable poem anyone wrote about a suicide in the English language is Richard Cory for the simple reason that Richard Cory has a name. Richard Cory was the envy of everyone, so the poem tells us, and then one day the man just kills himself. We are not given reasons why within the poem itself and are left to speculate. What ambitious and outraged teen poets fail to grasp is that by making their various suicides anonymous they, too, participate in the indifference of thosse societies that do not even have names for the deceased.
When I was a late teenager myself I began to have doubts about how touching or confrontational this trope of the anonymous suicide really was. It would make "me" feel good to notice what supposedly no one else noticed, and surely it made the poets feel good in their own perversely unaware way but the truth was none of us cared. And the truth is that deaths in society matter because they effect other people. Consider that Steve Jobs has been remembered as changing a lot of people's lives. He has. I've never been a committed Mac user and Macs seem absurdly expensive and not as diverse in software options as PC's. Yeah, I know the argumetns that Macs are more stable and have more robust antivirus protections and better warranties and if you're willing to pay two to three times as much money for a system that is reliable at the expense of versatility that's all right. I'm not a programmer or anything but I can appreciate a relatively recent xkcd.
http://xkcd.com/934/
You know it's true, folks. :)
Oh, where was I?
Yes, well, when someone important enough to effect millions of lives dies that's considered more important than an anonymous suicide. We can pretend that it's stilly to mourn the loss of a Steve Jobs or a Michael Jackson or people like that. But it could be as silly to mourn the loss of a John Stott or a Billy Graham or remember the dead at all. It can be easy to think you're too cool for school in feeling bad that someone you haven't met has died but it can be easy to think you're too cool for school in being angry that someone you haven't met has died, too. So it's not inappropriate to consider that Steve Jobs is dead. Many poets have celebrated dead people who accomplished big things.
And here I wish to piggyback on something Fearsome Tycoon wrote over at the Boar's Head Tavern. Steve Jobs did not kill tons of people in battle like many celebrated heroes of old. Jobs made stuff, stuff that has made the lives of various people more convenient. Even though I'm not exactly a user or loyal user of Mac/Apple products I can appreciate this point. Even though I was far happier that Finale becamse useable on a PC than I ever was that it was first available on Mac products I can grant that Mac users are happy with their products. And I also note that the following comic strip is an amusing assessment of how some folks are about brand loyalty.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apple
Where was I again? Yes, well, my teen years were some twenty years ago but here I'm just ruminating on random stuff. Ergo links to both xkcd and The Oatmeal when initially I was discussing teenagers writing poems about anonymous suicides and then thinking about Steve Jobs. I guess it all holds together as a succint, logical sequence
We'll just call it an obligatory free-writing session in blog form.
In teenagers this is especially apparent. There's a moral outrage at the indifference toward which the world at large, however small that world may be, has toward the person who dies. The anonymity makes the death all the more tragic (the naive poet thinks) for being so mundane. The person does not even have a name and the cruel world cares not for the death. But that is the failure of the poet's imagination. The most memorable poem anyone wrote about a suicide in the English language is Richard Cory for the simple reason that Richard Cory has a name. Richard Cory was the envy of everyone, so the poem tells us, and then one day the man just kills himself. We are not given reasons why within the poem itself and are left to speculate. What ambitious and outraged teen poets fail to grasp is that by making their various suicides anonymous they, too, participate in the indifference of thosse societies that do not even have names for the deceased.
When I was a late teenager myself I began to have doubts about how touching or confrontational this trope of the anonymous suicide really was. It would make "me" feel good to notice what supposedly no one else noticed, and surely it made the poets feel good in their own perversely unaware way but the truth was none of us cared. And the truth is that deaths in society matter because they effect other people. Consider that Steve Jobs has been remembered as changing a lot of people's lives. He has. I've never been a committed Mac user and Macs seem absurdly expensive and not as diverse in software options as PC's. Yeah, I know the argumetns that Macs are more stable and have more robust antivirus protections and better warranties and if you're willing to pay two to three times as much money for a system that is reliable at the expense of versatility that's all right. I'm not a programmer or anything but I can appreciate a relatively recent xkcd.
http://xkcd.com/934/
You know it's true, folks. :)
Oh, where was I?
Yes, well, when someone important enough to effect millions of lives dies that's considered more important than an anonymous suicide. We can pretend that it's stilly to mourn the loss of a Steve Jobs or a Michael Jackson or people like that. But it could be as silly to mourn the loss of a John Stott or a Billy Graham or remember the dead at all. It can be easy to think you're too cool for school in feeling bad that someone you haven't met has died but it can be easy to think you're too cool for school in being angry that someone you haven't met has died, too. So it's not inappropriate to consider that Steve Jobs is dead. Many poets have celebrated dead people who accomplished big things.
And here I wish to piggyback on something Fearsome Tycoon wrote over at the Boar's Head Tavern. Steve Jobs did not kill tons of people in battle like many celebrated heroes of old. Jobs made stuff, stuff that has made the lives of various people more convenient. Even though I'm not exactly a user or loyal user of Mac/Apple products I can appreciate this point. Even though I was far happier that Finale becamse useable on a PC than I ever was that it was first available on Mac products I can grant that Mac users are happy with their products. And I also note that the following comic strip is an amusing assessment of how some folks are about brand loyalty.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apple
Where was I again? Yes, well, my teen years were some twenty years ago but here I'm just ruminating on random stuff. Ergo links to both xkcd and The Oatmeal when initially I was discussing teenagers writing poems about anonymous suicides and then thinking about Steve Jobs. I guess it all holds together as a succint, logical sequence
We'll just call it an obligatory free-writing session in blog form.
Monday, October 10, 2011
new guest series is up at From Bitter Waters to Sweet
http://frombitterwaterstosweet.blogspot.com/2011/10/wth-on-driscolls-sos-intro-pt-1.html
http://frombitterwaterstosweet.blogspot.com/2011/10/wth-on-driscolls-sos-parts-2-3.html
http://frombitterwaterstosweet.blogspot.com/2011/10/wth-on-driscolls-sos-part-4a.html
http://frombitterwaterstosweet.blogspot.com/2011/10/wth-on-driscolls-sos-part-4b.html
I have written a guest series about Mark Driscoll's handling of Song of Songs for the Mara Reid at her blog From Bitter Waters to Sweet. This year when I saw Driscoll saying in a video interview that some pastors are using sex too much I just hit my limit. Three months of Driscoll talking about sex at his own church and then his Scotland discourse is enough, especially since he's displayed the moxy to claim that Ed Young Jr. overdid sex from the pulpit in his interview with Rhoades earlier this year.
I believe there are four related issues in Driscoll's handling of Song of Songs in the last eleven years that speak to weaknesses he has as a biblical scholar, theologian, and as a pastor. I don't say that lightly. After nine years at Mars Hill and having once served on the Theology Response Team I am one of the last people who could say that lightly. I once fielded theological questions on behalf of Driscoll and the other pastors because I was recruited to serve in that ministry.
I do think there are areas where Driscoll does a good job in discussing Scripture. He's done some strong preaching in 1 Corinthians which is ironically where he has been most self-critical. His series (there were a couple of them) on Ecclesiastes were pretty decent. Though I think he failed to make an entirely persuasive case against what he calls the "seed of Chucky" reading of Genesis 6 there were quite a few things in his Genesis series that were good. When his fans don't pick the most scabrous soundbites on his behalf he's done some teaching from Luke that has been very good. So in case you think I'm just ranting about Driscoll without knowing what I'm talking about I've got a decade of the man's sermons jostling in my head. You probably don't. I write what I write in an attempt to provide constructive, informed criticism of weaknesses. My pen name may be Wenatchee the Hatchet but a hatchet job is not the goal.
Now permit me (since it's my blog) to explain some things in advance, in case it is necessary. I am not defending an "allegory only" approach to Song of Songs. I believe that even an allegorical reading of Song of Songs must be predicated on the straightforward romantic/erotic/conjugal theme of the text. At the same time I can't help but note that Driscoll reveals that he's trying to have things both ways about the Puritans. He loves to share the same old story about Puritans who excommunicated a man who wasn't having sex with his wife as much as she wanted. But he skips over how the Puritans actually tended to handle Song of Songs, like, Matthew Henry for example. For a preacher like Driscoll who can hold up a Bible and say "It's all about Jesus" his approach to Song of Songs reveals the exception--Song of Songs can't be about Jesus or Jesus is taking Mark Driscoll from behind and he doesn't want to imagine that. Dude, a metaphor is a metaphor. You know Jesus says that in the resurrection no one will be married, not even Jesus. The wedding supper of the lamb is a metaphor, buddy. It's not literally going to occur.
Yet if everywhere else in the Bible the conjugal metaphor is used to describe God and His people why reject it only in Song of Songs, even if things get racy? Driscoll's okay with pinning his approach on the fanciful notion that Abishag and Solomon were carving their initials on a tree somewhere and going for the plainest reading of Song of Songs as a celebration of sex. Any innuendo he can find he goes for in Song of Songs.
Having listened to about a decade of Driscoll sermons I believe is is important to stress a potential pastoral implication in Driscoll's rejection of even a typological association of husband and bride with God and His people in Song of Songs. Driscoll, historically, has only really seemed to know how to get revved up in telling God's people their sin put Jesus on the Cross. Yeah, there's all that "Death By Love" stuff but that book was a rehash of material he preached in 2005. In other words it's recycled material from some time ago. "Christus exemplar" was, to be sure, the finest sermon I think I've ever heard Driscoll preach and it's because he got out of his comfort zone.
If the Church is the Bride of Christ the sermon Driscoll knows how to preach best to her is "You're a stupid spoiled whore and your sins put Jesus on the cross so you better repent." Yeah, there's that stuff in the Bible, but Driscoll has famously stunk at the other side, which is that Christ loves you enough to gladly bear the cross and your sins to reconcile you to Himself. If Piper and Mahaney, by Driscoll's account, have said he stinks at expressing the love of God for His people then Driscoll has conceded this point.
Another point to note here is that some Christians defending Driscoll have said that (and will say) there is a distinction to be made between what is truly pornographic and what is erotica. Driscoll is preaching Song of Songs, which is canonized erotica is firmly on the erotica side of things. "Frank without being crass" as Driscoll puts it.
Well, okay, then, so Driscoll is preaching Song of Songs and the biblical book is not about Jesus and is erotica. So there is now a canonically justified basis for Christians writing erotica, then? There must be since a whole book of erotica made it into the Bible. What, exactly, is the line of demarcation between pornography and erotica? Is erotica okay when it is strictly verbal or written? Erotica is definitely okay for public consumption on feast days in religious observance then. Okay so, uh, let me see if I can work this out, there's this whole genre of Christian literature I've never heard of before called Christian erotica and it's right and good for Christians to enjoy it if they're married.
Can someone explain whether or not there are actually examples of this genre of sanctified erotica outside the Bible? Maybe such stuff exists and this single guy does not really need to know authors, titles, publication dates or ISBN numbers (and, seriously, I don't). I just have this sneaking suspicion that this defense of Driscoll as preaching Song of Songs as sanctified erotica could begin to look curiously like special pleading if a Christian were to read erotica that isn't in the Bible. After all, if the Holy Spirit inspired the Song of Songs as sacred erotica and I have the Holy Spirit dwelling within me then I can read or write sacred erotica, too, right? I mean, not me personally, mind you, because I'm a single guy who's never been on a date and wouldn't know how that stuff works, but other people could write Christian erotica. But what, then, of all those pastors speaking against romance novels and Christian romance novels?
There are plenty of positive things I can say about Driscoll. He's a capable speaker, he's entertaining. He finds ways to make the Bible accessible to people. It's just too bad that he can often be irresponsible, sloganeering, and downright inventive in claiming that what he teaches from the text is actually in the biblical text. Song of Songs is a case where he is particularly enamored of his highly personalized take on a book of the Bible. I think that in the long run his apparent capacity to only address the Bride of Christ as though she were a whore needing to change her ways and not as the Bride Christ loves extravagantly will continue to be a problem in his pastoral work. This is not as simple as proposing that Driscoll is speaking the truth when he says God hates you if you don't believe in Jesus. Big deal, so it goes.
Where the rubber meets the road is when Driscoll makes jokes such as that congregational leadership is like asking the inmates to run the asylum. Here he is talking about church members who share the Spirit and who are in Christ. These he has referred to as mentally deficient people in an asylum who should not be allowed to run things. When Driscoll writes about ranked numbering categories for which friends and family are most valuable for fellowship this is where his ... unique view of the Bride can shine. I know some of the people Driscoll used to call "good friend" and they haven't seen him in years. They will probably never see him again. Driscoll has often said you must take stock on the people who are wasting your time and cut them loose.
At a purely pragmatic level, yes, such people exist, but in the scope of eternity could not Christ Himself be accused of wasting His time by permitting the universe to exist and calling us "brothers" and "friends"? We cannot give anything to Christ that is of value to Him, we have nothing He needs. Even if we give ourselves what have we given Him that He does not already rightfully posssess? There is a very real level at which Christian friendship means sharing life together with someone even when there is nothing you can gain from it. Driscoll has seemed to choose or reject friendships based on who will help him build his legacy for Jesus. We know that it's his legacy he's concerned about because in his own way he keeps talking about it.
Part of Driscoll's legacy is how his handling of Song of Songs reveals some problems in his theology and his approach to the scriptures and his approach to the Church. In the long run if you can only think of the Bride of Christ as a spotless bride in the future who is still just a stupid, spoiled whore now (because nowhere else in the Bible is the Bride described as already being loved as though she were flawless) it's not surprising you end up with the kind of pastoral approach Driscoll seems to have. It's too bad, though. I guess the more he sticks to NT literature the less likely he is to traffic in this? Only time will tell.
http://frombitterwaterstosweet.blogspot.com/2011/10/wth-on-driscolls-sos-parts-2-3.html
http://frombitterwaterstosweet.blogspot.com/2011/10/wth-on-driscolls-sos-part-4a.html
http://frombitterwaterstosweet.blogspot.com/2011/10/wth-on-driscolls-sos-part-4b.html
I have written a guest series about Mark Driscoll's handling of Song of Songs for the Mara Reid at her blog From Bitter Waters to Sweet. This year when I saw Driscoll saying in a video interview that some pastors are using sex too much I just hit my limit. Three months of Driscoll talking about sex at his own church and then his Scotland discourse is enough, especially since he's displayed the moxy to claim that Ed Young Jr. overdid sex from the pulpit in his interview with Rhoades earlier this year.
I believe there are four related issues in Driscoll's handling of Song of Songs in the last eleven years that speak to weaknesses he has as a biblical scholar, theologian, and as a pastor. I don't say that lightly. After nine years at Mars Hill and having once served on the Theology Response Team I am one of the last people who could say that lightly. I once fielded theological questions on behalf of Driscoll and the other pastors because I was recruited to serve in that ministry.
I do think there are areas where Driscoll does a good job in discussing Scripture. He's done some strong preaching in 1 Corinthians which is ironically where he has been most self-critical. His series (there were a couple of them) on Ecclesiastes were pretty decent. Though I think he failed to make an entirely persuasive case against what he calls the "seed of Chucky" reading of Genesis 6 there were quite a few things in his Genesis series that were good. When his fans don't pick the most scabrous soundbites on his behalf he's done some teaching from Luke that has been very good. So in case you think I'm just ranting about Driscoll without knowing what I'm talking about I've got a decade of the man's sermons jostling in my head. You probably don't. I write what I write in an attempt to provide constructive, informed criticism of weaknesses. My pen name may be Wenatchee the Hatchet but a hatchet job is not the goal.
Now permit me (since it's my blog) to explain some things in advance, in case it is necessary. I am not defending an "allegory only" approach to Song of Songs. I believe that even an allegorical reading of Song of Songs must be predicated on the straightforward romantic/erotic/conjugal theme of the text. At the same time I can't help but note that Driscoll reveals that he's trying to have things both ways about the Puritans. He loves to share the same old story about Puritans who excommunicated a man who wasn't having sex with his wife as much as she wanted. But he skips over how the Puritans actually tended to handle Song of Songs, like, Matthew Henry for example. For a preacher like Driscoll who can hold up a Bible and say "It's all about Jesus" his approach to Song of Songs reveals the exception--Song of Songs can't be about Jesus or Jesus is taking Mark Driscoll from behind and he doesn't want to imagine that. Dude, a metaphor is a metaphor. You know Jesus says that in the resurrection no one will be married, not even Jesus. The wedding supper of the lamb is a metaphor, buddy. It's not literally going to occur.
Yet if everywhere else in the Bible the conjugal metaphor is used to describe God and His people why reject it only in Song of Songs, even if things get racy? Driscoll's okay with pinning his approach on the fanciful notion that Abishag and Solomon were carving their initials on a tree somewhere and going for the plainest reading of Song of Songs as a celebration of sex. Any innuendo he can find he goes for in Song of Songs.
Having listened to about a decade of Driscoll sermons I believe is is important to stress a potential pastoral implication in Driscoll's rejection of even a typological association of husband and bride with God and His people in Song of Songs. Driscoll, historically, has only really seemed to know how to get revved up in telling God's people their sin put Jesus on the Cross. Yeah, there's all that "Death By Love" stuff but that book was a rehash of material he preached in 2005. In other words it's recycled material from some time ago. "Christus exemplar" was, to be sure, the finest sermon I think I've ever heard Driscoll preach and it's because he got out of his comfort zone.
If the Church is the Bride of Christ the sermon Driscoll knows how to preach best to her is "You're a stupid spoiled whore and your sins put Jesus on the cross so you better repent." Yeah, there's that stuff in the Bible, but Driscoll has famously stunk at the other side, which is that Christ loves you enough to gladly bear the cross and your sins to reconcile you to Himself. If Piper and Mahaney, by Driscoll's account, have said he stinks at expressing the love of God for His people then Driscoll has conceded this point.
Another point to note here is that some Christians defending Driscoll have said that (and will say) there is a distinction to be made between what is truly pornographic and what is erotica. Driscoll is preaching Song of Songs, which is canonized erotica is firmly on the erotica side of things. "Frank without being crass" as Driscoll puts it.
Well, okay, then, so Driscoll is preaching Song of Songs and the biblical book is not about Jesus and is erotica. So there is now a canonically justified basis for Christians writing erotica, then? There must be since a whole book of erotica made it into the Bible. What, exactly, is the line of demarcation between pornography and erotica? Is erotica okay when it is strictly verbal or written? Erotica is definitely okay for public consumption on feast days in religious observance then. Okay so, uh, let me see if I can work this out, there's this whole genre of Christian literature I've never heard of before called Christian erotica and it's right and good for Christians to enjoy it if they're married.
Can someone explain whether or not there are actually examples of this genre of sanctified erotica outside the Bible? Maybe such stuff exists and this single guy does not really need to know authors, titles, publication dates or ISBN numbers (and, seriously, I don't). I just have this sneaking suspicion that this defense of Driscoll as preaching Song of Songs as sanctified erotica could begin to look curiously like special pleading if a Christian were to read erotica that isn't in the Bible. After all, if the Holy Spirit inspired the Song of Songs as sacred erotica and I have the Holy Spirit dwelling within me then I can read or write sacred erotica, too, right? I mean, not me personally, mind you, because I'm a single guy who's never been on a date and wouldn't know how that stuff works, but other people could write Christian erotica. But what, then, of all those pastors speaking against romance novels and Christian romance novels?
There are plenty of positive things I can say about Driscoll. He's a capable speaker, he's entertaining. He finds ways to make the Bible accessible to people. It's just too bad that he can often be irresponsible, sloganeering, and downright inventive in claiming that what he teaches from the text is actually in the biblical text. Song of Songs is a case where he is particularly enamored of his highly personalized take on a book of the Bible. I think that in the long run his apparent capacity to only address the Bride of Christ as though she were a whore needing to change her ways and not as the Bride Christ loves extravagantly will continue to be a problem in his pastoral work. This is not as simple as proposing that Driscoll is speaking the truth when he says God hates you if you don't believe in Jesus. Big deal, so it goes.
Where the rubber meets the road is when Driscoll makes jokes such as that congregational leadership is like asking the inmates to run the asylum. Here he is talking about church members who share the Spirit and who are in Christ. These he has referred to as mentally deficient people in an asylum who should not be allowed to run things. When Driscoll writes about ranked numbering categories for which friends and family are most valuable for fellowship this is where his ... unique view of the Bride can shine. I know some of the people Driscoll used to call "good friend" and they haven't seen him in years. They will probably never see him again. Driscoll has often said you must take stock on the people who are wasting your time and cut them loose.
At a purely pragmatic level, yes, such people exist, but in the scope of eternity could not Christ Himself be accused of wasting His time by permitting the universe to exist and calling us "brothers" and "friends"? We cannot give anything to Christ that is of value to Him, we have nothing He needs. Even if we give ourselves what have we given Him that He does not already rightfully posssess? There is a very real level at which Christian friendship means sharing life together with someone even when there is nothing you can gain from it. Driscoll has seemed to choose or reject friendships based on who will help him build his legacy for Jesus. We know that it's his legacy he's concerned about because in his own way he keeps talking about it.
Part of Driscoll's legacy is how his handling of Song of Songs reveals some problems in his theology and his approach to the scriptures and his approach to the Church. In the long run if you can only think of the Bride of Christ as a spotless bride in the future who is still just a stupid, spoiled whore now (because nowhere else in the Bible is the Bride described as already being loved as though she were flawless) it's not surprising you end up with the kind of pastoral approach Driscoll seems to have. It's too bad, though. I guess the more he sticks to NT literature the less likely he is to traffic in this? Only time will tell.
MacArthur is to Elvis what Driscoll and MacDonald are to Lennon & McCartney: polemics among the rock star pastors
http://jamesmacdonald.com/blog/?p=9209#more-9209
I was at a 9Marks conference recently and was shocked to hear one of the panelists include me, and another preacher on the platform, as “rock star” pastors. I guess somewhere on the edge of my mental radar I had heard the term before, but it had never occurred to me that “I” might be one. As I listened, it became clear that the qualification for such a pejorative term was gained by extending my preaching ministry by video to places I did not go in person, and then including those reached locally as part of our church organizationally. I later discovered that by doing this we have evidenced an ego out of control and are inducing idolatry. Really?
My first celebrity pastor was John MacArthur. In the early 1980′s (before video), my home church substituted John MacArthur Jr. for our Sunday night preacher and showed his series on the family. ...
Now I'm going to go on record (again) and say I have never had one positive impression about James MacDonald. He's still not on my list of favorites. But you know what? I agree with his basic contention that John MacArthur was a celebrity pastor before a lot of the celebrity pastors MacArthur doesn't approve of hit the scene. As blogger Fearsome Tycoon put it over on the Boar's Head Tavern, a guy who has a study Bible named after him should not be complaining too loudly about a cult of personality surrounding another pastor. John MacArthur is as much a rock star pastor for his generation as Mark Driscoll is a rock star pastor for his. This is, in fact, a point I've been making for some time now to no effect because I am not a rock star blogger or a celebrity blogger. That's good and may it stay that way. The downside of being a real nobody trying to tell everybody about something (as opposed to the posture and franchise line purporting that) is that because you're nobody ... nobody pays attention to you. But I digress. Here's some more from MacDonald that provides a sense of what a rock star pastor this guy was even two decades ago.
When he came in 1985 to preach at our denominational convention, I lined up outside the door with a throng of eager hearers, then raced in to find a front seat, so I could soak up every word. My hands trembled as I stood in line to shake his hand. God had gifted him wonderfully, and he was extending that gift to as many people in as many places as possible. At the time I never dreamt that John MacArthur would be someone who came to speak at my church, as he has done numerous times, or that I would be invited to speak at his college and Seminary. Getting to golf with Dr. MacArthur several times I saw firsthand his generosity and uncommon graciousness. I was thankful through the years to have that testimony ready when colleagues in ministry took shots at him and attacked some of the stands he took on controversial issues. I not always agreed with his actions, but I have never doubted his fidelity to Scripture or his sincere desire to hold others to the same. I praise God for John MacArthur’s ‘celebrity,’ and how it has impacted my life. The issue is not celebrity, but how one arrives there and how they steward that influence. I realize that he, like all of us, will account to Christ for how he allows his influence to be used and how he treats every minister of the gospel, every Christian, and every person outside God’s family.
The time has come to model publicly, a gracious biblical method for how to disagree. Obviously our manner depends on who we are disagreeing with and what issues are at stake, but it must be:
• An approach that neither compromises truth nor fails to exhibit grace.
• A method that models correcting a brother in serious error and, if possible, protecting the relationship.
• An approach to dealing with serious doctrinal error that moves beyond a social “burning at the stake,” but refuses to back down or sing kumbaya when the gospel is on the line.
Hmm, well, Mr. MacDonald, those bullet points didn't seem on prominent display when you kept cutting off Mark Dever in a discussion about multi-site churches. Those bullet points didn't seem particularly prominent in bromides and proof-texting against congregational polity, either. That Jakes is even in a state of invitation to the Elephant Room doesn't fill me with optimism any more than any association with a tool like Furtick whose church is now nationally known for how it treated a person with a physical and mental disability.
But I'm in an unusually generous mood today and the MacArthur orbit and his fanboys haven't put together that MacArthur is a grand old man among rock star pastors. So I'm grateful that James MacDonald has helped to spell things out for me. You know, folks, if a pastor like John MacArthur inspires Steve Camp to write, in his well-tested "Here's my Christian book report" tradition, a song called "The Gospel According to Jesus" we might be talking rock star pastor category here. Yeah, I know that Steve Camp doesn't rock as hard as Kansas or Yes or Springstein but he rocks harder than Air Supply about half the time. Did I telegraph that I don't enjoy his music? Well, I admit as much but I respect his committment to the faith even when I don't land anywhere near the same places he does on a few things. And the amount of humble pie he ate in admitting that he overdid his crusade against Driscoll is something some of the other MacArthur fans might benefit from. Rock star pastors don't always look the same in each generation.
I'm not backing down on my disagreements with MacDonald on the few things I cared to learn about of his writings and words. I still think he's a self-regarding proof-texting tool just for how he dealt with Mark Dever. But I'm a nobody who doesn't matter, which is as it should be. Still, I'm going to throw MacDonald a proverbial bone because I have been saying for a while that a common denominator with some of the rock star shock jock pastors is that they have paid homage in various ways to MacArthur.
There's a sense in which MacArthur and his fan club have to consider what they have wrought. It'd be one thing if MacArthur inspired a whole series of folks who were not strident polemicists. For instance, I could look at Michael Card's musical career and then look at the life of scholar William Lane as I got to know him in the early 1990s and I could draw a remarkably straight line between the Christian teacher and the influence he had on Card. When I look at MacArthur and Camp I see a similar line of influence. MacArthur can't go on too much about rock star pastors because the line between rock and Christian pop isn't that huge in the end. When Driscoll has said (and he's said it a few times) that MacArthur was a huge formative influence on him I'm in a position to know because I got it from the man himself. We were never close, but we were in enough proximity that I can vouch for his repeated mention of MacArthur being an important early influence.
The trouble with legacies is that you die and you never know what those legacies are ultimately going to be. Even while you live you don't know what your legacy and influence will open doors for. Elvis paved the way for Lennon & McCartney. By analogy, John MacArthur could be taken as a late 20th century Elvis among rock star/celebrity pastors and he has paved the way for the rock star/celebrity pastoral team of Mark Driscoll and James MacDonald. It's not that the Elvis impersonators aren't entertaining or providing a useful service, it's that the nature of the rock star/celebrity pastor changes. The influence of MacArthur may paradoxically be stronger in American Christianity through the rock star pastors who basked in his cultural shadow, that he feels obliged to rebuke now, than through his more hand-picked proteges.
Paul urging the Christians in Corinth to not get caught up in loyalties to individual teachers has never lost its relevance and one of the continuing and sad paradoxes of the faith is that many people who would tell us to heed those words of Paul are guilty of breaking the spirit of their intent in the process of trying to make that point. Thus we get Elvis impersonators lining up around Elvis to make a case for why Lennon & McCartney are a downgrade.
I was at a 9Marks conference recently and was shocked to hear one of the panelists include me, and another preacher on the platform, as “rock star” pastors. I guess somewhere on the edge of my mental radar I had heard the term before, but it had never occurred to me that “I” might be one. As I listened, it became clear that the qualification for such a pejorative term was gained by extending my preaching ministry by video to places I did not go in person, and then including those reached locally as part of our church organizationally. I later discovered that by doing this we have evidenced an ego out of control and are inducing idolatry. Really?
My first celebrity pastor was John MacArthur. In the early 1980′s (before video), my home church substituted John MacArthur Jr. for our Sunday night preacher and showed his series on the family. ...
Now I'm going to go on record (again) and say I have never had one positive impression about James MacDonald. He's still not on my list of favorites. But you know what? I agree with his basic contention that John MacArthur was a celebrity pastor before a lot of the celebrity pastors MacArthur doesn't approve of hit the scene. As blogger Fearsome Tycoon put it over on the Boar's Head Tavern, a guy who has a study Bible named after him should not be complaining too loudly about a cult of personality surrounding another pastor. John MacArthur is as much a rock star pastor for his generation as Mark Driscoll is a rock star pastor for his. This is, in fact, a point I've been making for some time now to no effect because I am not a rock star blogger or a celebrity blogger. That's good and may it stay that way. The downside of being a real nobody trying to tell everybody about something (as opposed to the posture and franchise line purporting that) is that because you're nobody ... nobody pays attention to you. But I digress. Here's some more from MacDonald that provides a sense of what a rock star pastor this guy was even two decades ago.
When he came in 1985 to preach at our denominational convention, I lined up outside the door with a throng of eager hearers, then raced in to find a front seat, so I could soak up every word. My hands trembled as I stood in line to shake his hand. God had gifted him wonderfully, and he was extending that gift to as many people in as many places as possible. At the time I never dreamt that John MacArthur would be someone who came to speak at my church, as he has done numerous times, or that I would be invited to speak at his college and Seminary. Getting to golf with Dr. MacArthur several times I saw firsthand his generosity and uncommon graciousness. I was thankful through the years to have that testimony ready when colleagues in ministry took shots at him and attacked some of the stands he took on controversial issues. I not always agreed with his actions, but I have never doubted his fidelity to Scripture or his sincere desire to hold others to the same. I praise God for John MacArthur’s ‘celebrity,’ and how it has impacted my life. The issue is not celebrity, but how one arrives there and how they steward that influence. I realize that he, like all of us, will account to Christ for how he allows his influence to be used and how he treats every minister of the gospel, every Christian, and every person outside God’s family.
The time has come to model publicly, a gracious biblical method for how to disagree. Obviously our manner depends on who we are disagreeing with and what issues are at stake, but it must be:
• An approach that neither compromises truth nor fails to exhibit grace.
• A method that models correcting a brother in serious error and, if possible, protecting the relationship.
• An approach to dealing with serious doctrinal error that moves beyond a social “burning at the stake,” but refuses to back down or sing kumbaya when the gospel is on the line.
Hmm, well, Mr. MacDonald, those bullet points didn't seem on prominent display when you kept cutting off Mark Dever in a discussion about multi-site churches. Those bullet points didn't seem particularly prominent in bromides and proof-texting against congregational polity, either. That Jakes is even in a state of invitation to the Elephant Room doesn't fill me with optimism any more than any association with a tool like Furtick whose church is now nationally known for how it treated a person with a physical and mental disability.
But I'm in an unusually generous mood today and the MacArthur orbit and his fanboys haven't put together that MacArthur is a grand old man among rock star pastors. So I'm grateful that James MacDonald has helped to spell things out for me. You know, folks, if a pastor like John MacArthur inspires Steve Camp to write, in his well-tested "Here's my Christian book report" tradition, a song called "The Gospel According to Jesus" we might be talking rock star pastor category here. Yeah, I know that Steve Camp doesn't rock as hard as Kansas or Yes or Springstein but he rocks harder than Air Supply about half the time. Did I telegraph that I don't enjoy his music? Well, I admit as much but I respect his committment to the faith even when I don't land anywhere near the same places he does on a few things. And the amount of humble pie he ate in admitting that he overdid his crusade against Driscoll is something some of the other MacArthur fans might benefit from. Rock star pastors don't always look the same in each generation.
I'm not backing down on my disagreements with MacDonald on the few things I cared to learn about of his writings and words. I still think he's a self-regarding proof-texting tool just for how he dealt with Mark Dever. But I'm a nobody who doesn't matter, which is as it should be. Still, I'm going to throw MacDonald a proverbial bone because I have been saying for a while that a common denominator with some of the rock star shock jock pastors is that they have paid homage in various ways to MacArthur.
There's a sense in which MacArthur and his fan club have to consider what they have wrought. It'd be one thing if MacArthur inspired a whole series of folks who were not strident polemicists. For instance, I could look at Michael Card's musical career and then look at the life of scholar William Lane as I got to know him in the early 1990s and I could draw a remarkably straight line between the Christian teacher and the influence he had on Card. When I look at MacArthur and Camp I see a similar line of influence. MacArthur can't go on too much about rock star pastors because the line between rock and Christian pop isn't that huge in the end. When Driscoll has said (and he's said it a few times) that MacArthur was a huge formative influence on him I'm in a position to know because I got it from the man himself. We were never close, but we were in enough proximity that I can vouch for his repeated mention of MacArthur being an important early influence.
The trouble with legacies is that you die and you never know what those legacies are ultimately going to be. Even while you live you don't know what your legacy and influence will open doors for. Elvis paved the way for Lennon & McCartney. By analogy, John MacArthur could be taken as a late 20th century Elvis among rock star/celebrity pastors and he has paved the way for the rock star/celebrity pastoral team of Mark Driscoll and James MacDonald. It's not that the Elvis impersonators aren't entertaining or providing a useful service, it's that the nature of the rock star/celebrity pastor changes. The influence of MacArthur may paradoxically be stronger in American Christianity through the rock star pastors who basked in his cultural shadow, that he feels obliged to rebuke now, than through his more hand-picked proteges.
Paul urging the Christians in Corinth to not get caught up in loyalties to individual teachers has never lost its relevance and one of the continuing and sad paradoxes of the faith is that many people who would tell us to heed those words of Paul are guilty of breaking the spirit of their intent in the process of trying to make that point. Thus we get Elvis impersonators lining up around Elvis to make a case for why Lennon & McCartney are a downgrade.
Sunday, October 09, 2011
Joel Osteen as bigot, Joel Osteen as progressive prosperity gospel heretic
http://scotteriology.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/joel-osteen-im-still-a-bigot/
Conservatives have lambasted Joel Osteen for a prosperity theology false gospel and liberals consider Joel Osteen a bigot for refusing to get behind homosexual marriage. Now in the past I've heard it said by a preacher that the way to know if you're on the right path is if you annoy the liberals for being too conservative and if you annoy the fundamentalists for being too liberal. There was a more idealistic time in my life when I took that metric seriously. I no longer do.
And, surely, now that Joel Osteen has managed to pulled off this hat trick of being too liberal for conservatives and too conservative for liberals, too, it seems that this proposed metric of angering both liberals and fundamentalists or conservatives can be done by just about anyone. I mean if Joel Osteen can pull off this hat trick then the metric of ticking off both sides has no value at all, does it? Well, I suppose if he passed children through fire as a Moloch offering ... .
Conservatives have lambasted Joel Osteen for a prosperity theology false gospel and liberals consider Joel Osteen a bigot for refusing to get behind homosexual marriage. Now in the past I've heard it said by a preacher that the way to know if you're on the right path is if you annoy the liberals for being too conservative and if you annoy the fundamentalists for being too liberal. There was a more idealistic time in my life when I took that metric seriously. I no longer do.
And, surely, now that Joel Osteen has managed to pulled off this hat trick of being too liberal for conservatives and too conservative for liberals, too, it seems that this proposed metric of angering both liberals and fundamentalists or conservatives can be done by just about anyone. I mean if Joel Osteen can pull off this hat trick then the metric of ticking off both sides has no value at all, does it? Well, I suppose if he passed children through fire as a Moloch offering ... .
Saturday, October 08, 2011
Christ, Passover, and the marriage of Yahweh and Israel
I want to write something briefly here today. Christians generally affirm that per John 5 and Luke 24 that the scriptures, properly understood, point to Christ, and that Christ said He fulfilled the scriptures. As N. T. Wright and countless other theologians have noted Christ established the Lord's Supper as a Passover with a difference, redefining the Exodus and Passover around what He would accomplish on our behalf in winning victory over Satan, sin, and death.
But then there's Song of Songs, which has been read at Passover celebrations for generations. What does this set of romantic love poems have to do with Passover? Passover celebrates Yahweh delivering His people out of bondage in Egypt and leading them into the wilderness where He established His covenant with them. God betrothed Himself to Israel in the wilderness and promised them a home. The covenant itself and the prophets reveal that apostasy and rejection would precede full and ultimate restoration. This means that Christ is the one through whom and to whom God's marriage to His people is redefined. The Wedding Feast of the Lamb takes the marriage of God to Israel and reinterprets this metaphor for relationship in light of Christ, who becomes the Groom.
The implications for this on how both Jews and Christians have interpreted Song of Songs should not be that difficult to grasp. Jesus said that the law experts and Pharisees searched the Scriptures because in them they were sure they would find eternal life. If Song of Songs, then, is part of the scriptures, then the great interpretive paradigm of the perspicuity of Scripture means that if in John 5 Jesus says unequivocally that "the scriptures point to me" a biblical book must be about Christ, properly understood.
What, then, do we make of pastors who reject this interpretive lens provided by Christ Himself through apostolic testimony regarding Song of Songs? Song of Songs can certainly be a set of poems about romantic love but if Christ spoke the truth through apostolic witnesses then Song of Songs can't be interpreted as only referring to romantic love. Otherwise Jesus' words in John 5 and Luke 24 cannot be true. Then we have to ask why those pastors who have invested so much in an interpretive approach to Scripture that sees Song of Songs as only chiefly about sex are forced to implicitly say Jesus was a liar, don't we? After all, if Song of Songs does not point to Christ when it is properly interpreted then Jesus wasn't telling the truth about the scriptures as we have received them or about why the Holy Spirit inspired the scriptures for the benefit of God's people.
Either Christ was a liar (because Song of Songs does not speak of Him) or the person who refuses to see Christ in Song of Songs is a liar (by refusing to accept the truth about Christ's claims that Scriptures point to Him and He fulfilled the Scriptures and that this must include Song of Songs). There doesn't seem to be a legitimate third option here for any conservative professing Christian who affirms the Trinity and the inspiration and authority of the canon of Christian scripture. The only people who can stake out a legitimate third path by saying Christ is not in Song of Songs are liberals who cordon off parts of the scriptures as not speaking authoritatively about doctrine or ethical teaching.
I am not concerned here to discuss how liberals interpret Song of Songs because they are open and upfront about their intepretive approach. The liberal, a conservative will say, already refuses to accept the Lordship of Christ except on his terms. So it is the otherwise "conservative" pastor or teacher who claims the Lordship of Christ and the authority and authenticity of the Scriptures, who nevertheless refuses to grant a typological element in Song of Songs, and that person alone, who is in the peculiar position of saying Jesus is a liar only about one book in the canon. On this subject in general and a case study in particular I will have much more to say down the road, God willing.
But then there's Song of Songs, which has been read at Passover celebrations for generations. What does this set of romantic love poems have to do with Passover? Passover celebrates Yahweh delivering His people out of bondage in Egypt and leading them into the wilderness where He established His covenant with them. God betrothed Himself to Israel in the wilderness and promised them a home. The covenant itself and the prophets reveal that apostasy and rejection would precede full and ultimate restoration. This means that Christ is the one through whom and to whom God's marriage to His people is redefined. The Wedding Feast of the Lamb takes the marriage of God to Israel and reinterprets this metaphor for relationship in light of Christ, who becomes the Groom.
The implications for this on how both Jews and Christians have interpreted Song of Songs should not be that difficult to grasp. Jesus said that the law experts and Pharisees searched the Scriptures because in them they were sure they would find eternal life. If Song of Songs, then, is part of the scriptures, then the great interpretive paradigm of the perspicuity of Scripture means that if in John 5 Jesus says unequivocally that "the scriptures point to me" a biblical book must be about Christ, properly understood.
What, then, do we make of pastors who reject this interpretive lens provided by Christ Himself through apostolic testimony regarding Song of Songs? Song of Songs can certainly be a set of poems about romantic love but if Christ spoke the truth through apostolic witnesses then Song of Songs can't be interpreted as only referring to romantic love. Otherwise Jesus' words in John 5 and Luke 24 cannot be true. Then we have to ask why those pastors who have invested so much in an interpretive approach to Scripture that sees Song of Songs as only chiefly about sex are forced to implicitly say Jesus was a liar, don't we? After all, if Song of Songs does not point to Christ when it is properly interpreted then Jesus wasn't telling the truth about the scriptures as we have received them or about why the Holy Spirit inspired the scriptures for the benefit of God's people.
Either Christ was a liar (because Song of Songs does not speak of Him) or the person who refuses to see Christ in Song of Songs is a liar (by refusing to accept the truth about Christ's claims that Scriptures point to Him and He fulfilled the Scriptures and that this must include Song of Songs). There doesn't seem to be a legitimate third option here for any conservative professing Christian who affirms the Trinity and the inspiration and authority of the canon of Christian scripture. The only people who can stake out a legitimate third path by saying Christ is not in Song of Songs are liberals who cordon off parts of the scriptures as not speaking authoritatively about doctrine or ethical teaching.
I am not concerned here to discuss how liberals interpret Song of Songs because they are open and upfront about their intepretive approach. The liberal, a conservative will say, already refuses to accept the Lordship of Christ except on his terms. So it is the otherwise "conservative" pastor or teacher who claims the Lordship of Christ and the authority and authenticity of the Scriptures, who nevertheless refuses to grant a typological element in Song of Songs, and that person alone, who is in the peculiar position of saying Jesus is a liar only about one book in the canon. On this subject in general and a case study in particular I will have much more to say down the road, God willing.
Friday, October 07, 2011
Batman: The Agony of Loss and the Madness of Desire part 2 just went up on Mockingbird
http://www.mbird.com/2011/10/batman-the-agony-of-loss-and-the-madness-of-desire-pt-2/
Part 2 of the new series for Mockingbird has just gone up. I've been eager to tackle this set of essays for months but if life teaches me anything it is that the things that seem easy can prove difficult and things that seem difficult can prove easy.
As with any literary venture the difficulty of writing is never the writing itself. Nearly anyone with adequate motor skills in the hands and patience can write or type pretty much anything. What delineates the difference between doggerel and poetry; what delineates the difference between prose that is prosaic and prose that is effective is not the mere physical activity but the clarity and potency of thought. A writing teacher in high school once admonished me (and the rest of his class) with the axiom "Sloppy writing is the result of sloppy thinking." As Black Dynamite might say, "This is also true." What Dini, Burnett, Timm and the others did with Batman: the animated series was (and is) too big a thing to attempt to summarize in a mere 500 or 700 words.
I am still, to be honest, tackling essays 4-6 in this project because writing about this revolutionary TV show has proven more difficult than the earlier series I have written for Mockingbird. Knowing what to include and what to omit is important. For part 3 (coming up) I eagerly wished to include the observation that Mr. Freeze and Batman have related musical mottos. When Batman appears in an episode to lay the beat-down on a criminal we often hear an bold Wagnerian brass fanfare outlining his musical motto, the theme that became the opening music for Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. If you listen to Mr. Freeze's music in "Heart of Ice" at the start of the episode you'll hear that Freeze gets the same notes. Yet in contrast to Batman's Wagnerian brass chorale, Mr. Freeze's melody is taken by a piccolo over pizzicato strings and harp glissandi. It's as though Batman's fanfare had transformed from Wagnerian boldness to the desolate, emotional detachment of a waltz from a string quartet Shostakovich wrote to mourn the loss of his wife to cancer.
Some of Walker's most brilliant composing and scoring lays in that strange, surrealist waltz and I wanted to write about my fondness of the music. The Mr. Freeze theme is an ingenius reworking of Batman's motto because both Freeze and Batman are defined by their experience of loss and desire and how they respond to it. Where Batman first looks within at his wounds and then looks outward to serve his neighbor, Victor Fries, having reached out to seize what he thought was a solution to his problems and failed, turns inward and resolves that he will ultimately make the rest of the world feel his misery and wrath as he wallows in self-pity. Fries is a tragic figure for all sorts of reasons but I don't want to get too spoilerish about part 3 now that part 2 just went up! Let's just say that "Heart of Ice, Heart of Wrath" was kicking my butt until I accidentally reached for G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy when I was really going for C. S. Lewis' The Four Loves. I'll just leave you in suspense about what Chesterton and Lewis have to do with Mr. Freeze.
Part 2 of the new series for Mockingbird has just gone up. I've been eager to tackle this set of essays for months but if life teaches me anything it is that the things that seem easy can prove difficult and things that seem difficult can prove easy.
As with any literary venture the difficulty of writing is never the writing itself. Nearly anyone with adequate motor skills in the hands and patience can write or type pretty much anything. What delineates the difference between doggerel and poetry; what delineates the difference between prose that is prosaic and prose that is effective is not the mere physical activity but the clarity and potency of thought. A writing teacher in high school once admonished me (and the rest of his class) with the axiom "Sloppy writing is the result of sloppy thinking." As Black Dynamite might say, "This is also true." What Dini, Burnett, Timm and the others did with Batman: the animated series was (and is) too big a thing to attempt to summarize in a mere 500 or 700 words.
I am still, to be honest, tackling essays 4-6 in this project because writing about this revolutionary TV show has proven more difficult than the earlier series I have written for Mockingbird. Knowing what to include and what to omit is important. For part 3 (coming up) I eagerly wished to include the observation that Mr. Freeze and Batman have related musical mottos. When Batman appears in an episode to lay the beat-down on a criminal we often hear an bold Wagnerian brass fanfare outlining his musical motto, the theme that became the opening music for Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. If you listen to Mr. Freeze's music in "Heart of Ice" at the start of the episode you'll hear that Freeze gets the same notes. Yet in contrast to Batman's Wagnerian brass chorale, Mr. Freeze's melody is taken by a piccolo over pizzicato strings and harp glissandi. It's as though Batman's fanfare had transformed from Wagnerian boldness to the desolate, emotional detachment of a waltz from a string quartet Shostakovich wrote to mourn the loss of his wife to cancer.
Some of Walker's most brilliant composing and scoring lays in that strange, surrealist waltz and I wanted to write about my fondness of the music. The Mr. Freeze theme is an ingenius reworking of Batman's motto because both Freeze and Batman are defined by their experience of loss and desire and how they respond to it. Where Batman first looks within at his wounds and then looks outward to serve his neighbor, Victor Fries, having reached out to seize what he thought was a solution to his problems and failed, turns inward and resolves that he will ultimately make the rest of the world feel his misery and wrath as he wallows in self-pity. Fries is a tragic figure for all sorts of reasons but I don't want to get too spoilerish about part 3 now that part 2 just went up! Let's just say that "Heart of Ice, Heart of Wrath" was kicking my butt until I accidentally reached for G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy when I was really going for C. S. Lewis' The Four Loves. I'll just leave you in suspense about what Chesterton and Lewis have to do with Mr. Freeze.
Thursday, October 06, 2011
Mockingbird touches on a great Slate piece on the problem of neuroscience and its problem with evil
http://www.mbird.com/2011/10/that-simplistic-but-somehow-indispensable-word-neuroskepticism-and-the-dubious-replacement-of-evil/
DZ has just posted a fine entry at Mockingbird that I want to link to. I'm too tired (having spent almost the whole night writing) to have much to say now about this entry even though I think it's a great one.
DZ has just posted a fine entry at Mockingbird that I want to link to. I'm too tired (having spent almost the whole night writing) to have much to say now about this entry even though I think it's a great one.
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
HT Scotteriology: Crystal Cathedral Bankruptcy
http://scotteriology.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/crystal-cathedral-bankruptcy/
I'd read about news of this megachurch going bankrupt in the wake of political battles amongst Schuller's offspring over who would control the empire. Turns out the empire is bankrupt.
I had no idea about the 4k raised in the face of 50 mil in debt, though. That was astonishing. When I first read Scotteriology's blog post opener "put on your surprise faces" I figured, "Yeah, whatever, I probably won't be surprised."
Boy was I wrong! $4,737 of $50,000,000 is a majestic case of what is in some biblical parlance known as "missing the mark".
I'd read about news of this megachurch going bankrupt in the wake of political battles amongst Schuller's offspring over who would control the empire. Turns out the empire is bankrupt.
I had no idea about the 4k raised in the face of 50 mil in debt, though. That was astonishing. When I first read Scotteriology's blog post opener "put on your surprise faces" I figured, "Yeah, whatever, I probably won't be surprised."
Boy was I wrong! $4,737 of $50,000,000 is a majestic case of what is in some biblical parlance known as "missing the mark".
Sunday, October 02, 2011
Mark Driscoll on T. D. Jakes--suspend judgment until it's proven that Jakes wrote The Shack
http://pastormark.tv/2011/09/29/reflections-on-james-macdonald-td-jakes-and-the-trinity
http://jamesmacdonald.com/blog/?p=9055
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/thabitianyabwile/2011/10/01/collateral-damage-in-the-invitation-of-t-d-jakes-to-the-elephant-room/
From PastorMarkTV
...
Admittedly, sometimes when speaking, a teacher presents a belief in a way that is inaccurate and unclear. So called “discernment” bloggers who are usually not connected to any noteworthy or respected evangelical Christian theologians, schools, denominations, ministries, churches, or pastors make their living taking what people said wrongly, transcribing it, and then falsely—or at least wrongly—accusing them of heresy when it is untrue.
The ear is more forgiving than the eye, and when we say something wrong, people tend to give the benefit of the doubt. But, when what is said is then written down, there is far more scrutiny as a statement is parsed like a Bible verse, which is unfair. ...
In closing, I want to thank Pastor MacDonald for putting together what could be an amazingly insightful event around the Trinity and many other issues that the Church needs to consider. I thank God that I have an opportunity to be involved and ask some questions. I want to encourage folks to wait until the event before making any final judgments about anyone or anything. And, I want to encourage all the men who are signed up to show up. We worship a Jesus who died for what he believed. The least we can do in his name is get on a plane for what we believe.
Okay ... so Driscoll is encouraging everyone to wait until there's a meeting of the minds before making any final judgments about anyone or anything. I'm glad to know Driscoll is encouraging people to suspend final judgments about the doctrinal purity and character of a man like Jakes who has been preaching for decades, just like Driscoll himself refrained from making final judgments about William Young and Young's novel The Shack back in 2008. Driscoll totally waited to actually go talk to the best-selling author about what his actual views on the Trinity are before going off in public denouncing Young as a heretic.
Oh ... wait a minute ...
http://marshill.com/media/doctrine/trinity-god-is/the-shack
Maybe Mark Driscoll didn't avoid making a rush to a final judgment about anyone and anything in the case of William Young and The Shack. So when Driscoll says we should wait with Jakes, and that we should not assume the worst about mere words like "manifestations" in a doctrinal statement maybe he just means "Do as I say, not as I did." There needs to be time for the megachurch pastors Driscoll, MacDonald and Jakes to meet and discuss this stuff. We should give folks the benefit of a doubt because Jakes hangs out with James MacDonald sometimes, I guess, and we are supposed to be doing what Driscoll says we should do and not follow his example. Driscoll seems tentative only because Jakes sometimes associates with MacDonald and MacDonald's cool so a good ol' boy network among megachurch pastors has to count for something, doesn't it? After publicly using Joel Osteen as an example of an unhealthy prosperity theology (Driscoll denunciations can be so stern he can make people sound like heretics even when he agrees they're fellow believers 02-05-2013) and implying that Ed Young Jr's sex sermons were creepy and overselling sex (and obviously not as good as Driscoll's own quarter year Peasant Princess) .... maybe Driscoll just feels he needs to cut a megachurch pastor some slack now? I don't know.
But here is something I am relatively confident about--William Young is, let us remember, a novelist and not a pastor. He is not regarded by anyone as a pastor, or a theologian, or a spiritual authority on jack squat. Let me reframe this a bit for further clarity, William Young self-published his one novel with a few other guys' help (who he's been suing, apparently) and it's a novel. It's a made-up story that does not present itself as a sermon, as a catechism, as a creed, as a confessional statement, or anything other than a tale about a person. Young never seems to have been out to create the next Nicene Creed or the next Heidelberg catechism or some Westminster Confession. It's just a novel, and it is to date, apparently the only novel he has published. There may not even be a second one, folks.
T. D. Jakes, by contrast, is a megachurch pastor who has been in ministry for decades, and Driscoll believes Jakes deserves the most leniency we can muster. Innocent until Driscoll thinks Jakes is guilty even though Driscoll seems to have not really bothered to investigate things much. Okay, that Senator Grassley probe from 2007 didn't come up with anything untoward. Untoward was what got Jakes' son Jermaine in legal trouble but that's a different kind of untoward behavior and that's not T. D.'s fault except in the neo-Calvinist realm of headship where "headship means that as the father, even if it's not your fault, it's your responsibility." Driscoll at least used to put it that way.
But something seems backwards here. Wouldn't the person to be uncompromising and confrontational with is an actual pastor who preaches at a megachurch with 30,000 members; who's been in ministry for decadess; who has met with presidents of the United States; and has published numerous books? Wouldn't the person to take the wait-and-see approach have been the one-hit wonder novelist no one had heard of before, who has no theological training, apparently isn't even attending a church, and hasn't even had any other work published?
I'm not talking about the actual contents of either Jakes' writing or Young's writing here (I don't care for either, for what little that's worth). I'm talking about a sense of proportion and scale. Complaining about Young's novel and not addressing whether or not Jakes' doctrine is problematic is like some parent who thinks that rock and roll is a corrupting influence on his kids because of "Henry VIII" by Herman's Hermits. So he forbids his kids to listen to that degenerate song. He then turns around and says to his kids that he's gotta take the devil music to the church parking lot bonfire. He'll be back in maybe twenty minutes. One of the kids pipes up that a friend has lent him a country album. Well, country music is all right, thinks the father. So he gives them permission to listen to that innocuous-looking album by Ween called 12 Golden Country Greats. They can listen to that. What could possibly go wrong?
Off the father goes to dispose of that Herman's Hermits album. His kids listen to Ween.
http://jamesmacdonald.com/blog/?p=9055
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/thabitianyabwile/2011/10/01/collateral-damage-in-the-invitation-of-t-d-jakes-to-the-elephant-room/
From PastorMarkTV
...
Admittedly, sometimes when speaking, a teacher presents a belief in a way that is inaccurate and unclear. So called “discernment” bloggers who are usually not connected to any noteworthy or respected evangelical Christian theologians, schools, denominations, ministries, churches, or pastors make their living taking what people said wrongly, transcribing it, and then falsely—or at least wrongly—accusing them of heresy when it is untrue.
The ear is more forgiving than the eye, and when we say something wrong, people tend to give the benefit of the doubt. But, when what is said is then written down, there is far more scrutiny as a statement is parsed like a Bible verse, which is unfair. ...
In closing, I want to thank Pastor MacDonald for putting together what could be an amazingly insightful event around the Trinity and many other issues that the Church needs to consider. I thank God that I have an opportunity to be involved and ask some questions. I want to encourage folks to wait until the event before making any final judgments about anyone or anything. And, I want to encourage all the men who are signed up to show up. We worship a Jesus who died for what he believed. The least we can do in his name is get on a plane for what we believe.
Okay ... so Driscoll is encouraging everyone to wait until there's a meeting of the minds before making any final judgments about anyone or anything. I'm glad to know Driscoll is encouraging people to suspend final judgments about the doctrinal purity and character of a man like Jakes who has been preaching for decades, just like Driscoll himself refrained from making final judgments about William Young and Young's novel The Shack back in 2008. Driscoll totally waited to actually go talk to the best-selling author about what his actual views on the Trinity are before going off in public denouncing Young as a heretic.
Oh ... wait a minute ...
http://marshill.com/media/doctrine/trinity-god-is/the-shack
Maybe Mark Driscoll didn't avoid making a rush to a final judgment about anyone and anything in the case of William Young and The Shack. So when Driscoll says we should wait with Jakes, and that we should not assume the worst about mere words like "manifestations" in a doctrinal statement maybe he just means "Do as I say, not as I did." There needs to be time for the megachurch pastors Driscoll, MacDonald and Jakes to meet and discuss this stuff. We should give folks the benefit of a doubt because Jakes hangs out with James MacDonald sometimes, I guess, and we are supposed to be doing what Driscoll says we should do and not follow his example. Driscoll seems tentative only because Jakes sometimes associates with MacDonald and MacDonald's cool so a good ol' boy network among megachurch pastors has to count for something, doesn't it? After publicly using Joel Osteen as an example of an unhealthy prosperity theology (Driscoll denunciations can be so stern he can make people sound like heretics even when he agrees they're fellow believers 02-05-2013) and implying that Ed Young Jr's sex sermons were creepy and overselling sex (and obviously not as good as Driscoll's own quarter year Peasant Princess) .... maybe Driscoll just feels he needs to cut a megachurch pastor some slack now? I don't know.
But here is something I am relatively confident about--William Young is, let us remember, a novelist and not a pastor. He is not regarded by anyone as a pastor, or a theologian, or a spiritual authority on jack squat. Let me reframe this a bit for further clarity, William Young self-published his one novel with a few other guys' help (who he's been suing, apparently) and it's a novel. It's a made-up story that does not present itself as a sermon, as a catechism, as a creed, as a confessional statement, or anything other than a tale about a person. Young never seems to have been out to create the next Nicene Creed or the next Heidelberg catechism or some Westminster Confession. It's just a novel, and it is to date, apparently the only novel he has published. There may not even be a second one, folks.
T. D. Jakes, by contrast, is a megachurch pastor who has been in ministry for decades, and Driscoll believes Jakes deserves the most leniency we can muster. Innocent until Driscoll thinks Jakes is guilty even though Driscoll seems to have not really bothered to investigate things much. Okay, that Senator Grassley probe from 2007 didn't come up with anything untoward. Untoward was what got Jakes' son Jermaine in legal trouble but that's a different kind of untoward behavior and that's not T. D.'s fault except in the neo-Calvinist realm of headship where "headship means that as the father, even if it's not your fault, it's your responsibility." Driscoll at least used to put it that way.
But something seems backwards here. Wouldn't the person to be uncompromising and confrontational with is an actual pastor who preaches at a megachurch with 30,000 members; who's been in ministry for decadess; who has met with presidents of the United States; and has published numerous books? Wouldn't the person to take the wait-and-see approach have been the one-hit wonder novelist no one had heard of before, who has no theological training, apparently isn't even attending a church, and hasn't even had any other work published?
I'm not talking about the actual contents of either Jakes' writing or Young's writing here (I don't care for either, for what little that's worth). I'm talking about a sense of proportion and scale. Complaining about Young's novel and not addressing whether or not Jakes' doctrine is problematic is like some parent who thinks that rock and roll is a corrupting influence on his kids because of "Henry VIII" by Herman's Hermits. So he forbids his kids to listen to that degenerate song. He then turns around and says to his kids that he's gotta take the devil music to the church parking lot bonfire. He'll be back in maybe twenty minutes. One of the kids pipes up that a friend has lent him a country album. Well, country music is all right, thinks the father. So he gives them permission to listen to that innocuous-looking album by Ween called 12 Golden Country Greats. They can listen to that. What could possibly go wrong?
Off the father goes to dispose of that Herman's Hermits album. His kids listen to Ween.
Saturday, October 01, 2011
City of God: Tim Keller's subtle contextualization
http://www.civitatedei.com/2011/09/tim-kellers-subtle-contextualization/
In the last ten years I have become jaded about the word "contextualization" the way I used to be jaded (and still am) about "community". "Community" is one of those buzzwords used by people who are out to sell you something, namely their particular idea of community. I have written elsewhere on this blog about how much of what passes for "community" in Christian circles does not constitute community but alliance.
Much that passes for contextualization is tangential appropriation. Now let's be fair to post-internet preachers, it's not as though pastors didn't scour newspaper headlines for sometimes dubious sermon illustrations before Al Gore invented the internet. Cartoons depicting pastors desperately trying to form the acronym SUPERBOWL in sermon illustrations pre-date the internet. Christians in America are nothing if not eager to over-explain themselves. Thus the Wittenburg Door could publish a classic little one panel strip where a Christian singer songwriter is tuning his guitar and says, "Let me tell you a fifteen minute story about how God inspired me to write this three minute song." As Dan put it over on City of God, sorta, contextualization is what you do when you're not busy talking about doing it.
Much as I love brothers and sisters in Christ over at Mars Hill let me ask a leading question here, who is engaging culture and moving upstream to influence culture more, Driscoll when he rants about Avatar and Twilight or Andrew Stanton making movies like Finding Nemo and WALL-E? Someone seems quite a bit further upstream and engaging cultural concerns from within a Christian perspective and if I had to pick between Mark Driscoll and Andrew Stanton then Stanton seems like the person further upstream and more directly engaging culture. After all those Mars Hill members who listened to three months of Peasant Princess got busy and spawned babies odds are pretty good that their progeny are going to get exposed to exponentially more hours of Pixar films than Driscoll sermons. And this, really, is at it should be, but it also means that "engaging culture" and "influencing culture" are the things that are busy being done by people who rarely announce that this is what they're doing, they just go do it. Actually do it, not just talk about how Christians should aspire to do this.
A few years ago I wrote that the only real danger in any contextualization is the simple question of WHAT is being contextualized. Are you contextualizing "the Gospel" or contextualizing yourself? Contextualizing the Gospel would be discussing the teaching of Christ, the teaching of the apostles, the Triune God, and Christ as come in the flesh and risen from the dead in a way that touches upon a time and place. The moment of appropriation is present in any case of contextualization. Paul quotes Hellenistic poets and shares what they get right before proceeding to discuss who Jesus is.
But Paul quotes the Hellenistic poets as a pretext as much as a gesture of mutual understanding. The pretext is to move on to the Gospel itself, which interrupts and subverts the culture that is being engaged. Paul says "This and this you have are true but it is not adequate to a proper understanding of the true person and nature of God." To the extent that old-schoolers like MacArthur say that we should not contextualize the Gospel I agree when this means that the core doctrines of the faith don't change and we don't need to diverge from that.
Yet Francis Schaeffer's criticism of evangelicalism remains, "If Jesus is the answer, what is the question?" I am no longer sure that the "never contextualize" folks will ever care about this because they see that everything comes down to sin and there's nothing new or interesting about neurobiology, theory of mind, or anything else to discuss because there is nothing new under the sun and that means we don't have to study too long to figure out that whatever is going on today is just more of the same old heresy. Well ... kinda. But, for instance, not all stripes of Montanism are the same, just as not all stripes of church/state equivalency are the same. Reformed Christians who would denounce papists for a conflation of church and state concerns didn't seem to mind backing the Confederacy in a way that made them the pot calling the kettle black. If I may go so far as to say Anabaptists have one good idea it's proposing that the historical nexus of church with state power is always a bad one. It is, ironically, one thing a lot of American Christians have assimilated (and credobaptism) while explicitly rejecting all kinds of other things. But I digress again.
I've heard more than a few Keller sermons by now and when Keller provides an illustration or a contextualization moment it has a particular character. In a sermon on Christian friendship he cites C. S. Lewis' The Four Loves. Keller notes Lewis' observation that ours is an era that lionizes eros and that our literature is not full of famous friendships, or popular culture does not have friendships as famous as the names of famous lovers. Romeo and Juliet,, Antony and Cleopatra, these we know.
I would say that for anyone steeped in cartoons and childrens' stories there is another side to this. Don't we "all" know about Batman and Robin, Charlie Brown & Snoopy, Calvin & Hobbes, Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble? Then there's Wallace & Gromit. Shaggy and Scooby Doo. Consider Bart Simpson and Milhouse. For that matter, moving further along, there's Kyle, Stan, Cartman and Kenny. Under the noses of most so-called "adult" story-telling cartoons have been trafficking in stories of friendship for generations but we have, as a culture, often felt that there is a need to graduate from kid-fare into "adult" entertainment. Not THAT kind of adult entertainment, the other kinds. Still, Lewis, and by extension Keller, have a point, romances are more dominant in our culture than friendships.
Moving on, when Keller discusses friendship in ancient literature, Christian and otherwise, his stops on the road of literature and philosophy emphasize friendship within the sermon. They are not digressions but necessary elements in the presentation on how Christians can and should think about friendship both within the history of Christian reflection itself and within the broader context of human experience. In this way a contextualizing episode contextualizes ideas that relate to a Christian teaching about a topic in the scriptures in a way that permits reference to historic application.
At the risk of still using Driscoll as a negative example, most of the contraversies that have brewed up about the guy have had to do with digressionary rants within sermons that are far better known than the actual sermons in which they appeared. Who out there in the general populace heard that Driscoll preached a sermon on spiritual warfare in his Luke series? Anyone? No? Well, what about the bit how Avatar is the most satanic movie Mark has ever seen? Ah, a few people heard that. What biblical text and subject was Driscoll discussing when he had that soundbite about how video games are stupid because they are the pursuit of vicarious victories that don't matter and aren't building a legacy? Anyone remember which sermon that was?
Now I'll put my cards on the table here, I'm PCA for a number of reasons and I'm not going to hide my preference for Keller style contextualization over Driscoll style contextualization. Keller brings up cultural, literary, and philosophical aspects as a way to discuss things related to biblical texts. The connection is thematic rather than purely exegetical but there's an observable connection. So if Keller talks about how the Back to the Future movies give us a message that the future is entirely in our hands so we must make it a good one in contrast to movies that discuss destiny and fate, his thread is to show that popular culture cannot resolve the question of determinism and free will and that with respect to the life of the individual believer we can't say that the Bible gives us a clear cut resolution of the question of determinism via God's sovereignty and our responsibility for our actions. The pop cultural trivia become a point from which to observe that if Christians have not resolved the freedom/determinism question how much less has the world? You remember the illustration but you also remember the point for which the illustration was brought up to begin with.
I'm afraid Driscoll is often not that far along in his skill as an orator. In the last few years Driscoll's sermon digressions have become tidal waves of personal punditry that obliterate the relevance of his actual pastoral points. This is probably due far more to the people who put soundbites and video clips of him in Mars Hill media than Driscoll's actual hour-long sermons. That is also, unfortunately, generally immaterial because the little fracases describe themselves. When Driscoll discusses Avatar as the most satanic movie he's ever seenin a sermon on spiritual warfare he's contextualizing ... but by making the focal point of his contextualizing episode what HE thinks of Avatar what he ends up contextualizing is not a scriptural teaching on, say, friendship in light of what Christians and pagans have historically thought about friendship. What Driscoll ends up contextualizing in his rants against Avatar or video games is simply himself and his opinions about cultural trends that rarely need to be brought up in the setting of an allegedly expository sermon that is just discussing what is in a biblical text.
Now I have a friend who used to be a Christian and within the last ten years one of the things he has admitted to finding insufferable about a lot of preachers, particularly in some youth pastors, is a desperate appropriation of pop culture. He heard a youth pastor say of Aragorn after Return of the King hit theaters that Aragorn was a type of Christ. Superman, somewhat famously, has been described as being a type of Christ but this just gets at how meaningless the appropriation has become. To say that so and so is like Jesus simply means that the person or thing is so famous and unobjectionable as to not be worthy of scabrous attacks within the confines of an increasingly secular civic pseudo-religion. Anyone can say these days that they respect the real Jesus but reject Christianity.
A lot of what is passed off as "contextualization" is going to be more revealing of your Netflix queue as it is any indication of whether or not you even read the Bible. More is revealed by a person attempting to say that Optimus Prime or Superman or Jack Bauer are Christ-types than is ever revealed by the stories of those three characters as manifestations of American pop culture. Sure, there may be cosmetic resemblances between three characters and stories about Jesus but as skeptics have been pointing out for millenia, there are all sorts of fascinating similarities between early Christian tales and pagan mystery religions. The atheist and the skeptic could ask whether or not these Christians who see Superman, Jack Bauer, or Optimus Prime as Christ types are seeing Jesus in those characters or whether they are seeing those characters in their own custom-built versions of Jesus.
There are, for that matter, some Christians who are more careful about getting things right with the timeline for the Star Wars expanded universe than have paid attention to the significance of Rehoboam's first major decision as king in the wake of Solomon's death. There are people who are more alert to whether Greedo shot first than to what the significance might be of Micaiah being shown by God to tell Ahab a lying spirit had been sent to Ahab's prophets. No, I'm not going to give you chapter and verse because my point is to demonstrate that if you don't already know the tale and you can keep track of all the plot twists and character arcs on Lost you're revealing where your priorities have been. I haven't even seen a whole episode of Lost. I confess my nerdiness is already well-attested and accounted for.
It's okay to know a lot about nerdy stuff if you're a Christian but if you remember episodes of Family Guy or score listings for baseball games or things like that more readily than you can grasp the history of Israel as part of the history of Christ relating to His Creation then, well, I can't really make you fix that but I can urge you to consider what stuff is being contextualized for the sake of what. If there is any tragic flaw in the way some pastors "contextualize" it's that they do not impart for their church members a zeal for the scriptures themselves but a willingness to defend their pastors ultimately forgettable digressions on pop culture. Don't defend your pastor's cultural trivial pursuits, don't defend your pastor's rabbit trails into personal and cultural anecdotes. What will last are not the stories about the pastor's kids or the movies or books or video games or restaurants your pastor does or doesn't like. When your pastor (or mine) stands before the throne of Christ what's going to matter is what the pastor said about Him.
What if you, as a pastor, stood before Jesus' throne and Jesus asked you if you ever used the pulpit as a pretext for making fun of things you don't like? What would you say? You'd have to plead guilty, first of all, and second you'd have to consider whether or not the use of the pulpit and the privilege of expounding the scriptures to those who need to hear the words of life was worth taking that liberty. Now I'm not hiding my frequent disagreement with a guy like John MacArthur but I'm willing to say that on this particular subject he and I are probably in some agreement.
But there are two edges to this blade. Jesus can look at you and ask if you preached only Him or if you also preached Jack Bauer or golf or whatever other things you liked. But Jesus can also ask if you preached only His words instead of preaching against your dislike of The Simpsons or Family Guy or Desperate Housewives or light beer or vegetarians or Republicans or Democrats. As David Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it half a century ago, there will come a point where your being opposed to communism will not prove that you are in any way actually a follower of Christ. Being opposed to "contextualization" is the same way. My salvation and yours does not depend, thank God, on whether or not the words of so many forgettable and forgotten preachers went this way or that. He must become greater and greater and we must become less and less.
Then again I'm not a pastor, hope never to be, and perhaps don't know what I'm talking about.
In the last ten years I have become jaded about the word "contextualization" the way I used to be jaded (and still am) about "community". "Community" is one of those buzzwords used by people who are out to sell you something, namely their particular idea of community. I have written elsewhere on this blog about how much of what passes for "community" in Christian circles does not constitute community but alliance.
Much that passes for contextualization is tangential appropriation. Now let's be fair to post-internet preachers, it's not as though pastors didn't scour newspaper headlines for sometimes dubious sermon illustrations before Al Gore invented the internet. Cartoons depicting pastors desperately trying to form the acronym SUPERBOWL in sermon illustrations pre-date the internet. Christians in America are nothing if not eager to over-explain themselves. Thus the Wittenburg Door could publish a classic little one panel strip where a Christian singer songwriter is tuning his guitar and says, "Let me tell you a fifteen minute story about how God inspired me to write this three minute song." As Dan put it over on City of God, sorta, contextualization is what you do when you're not busy talking about doing it.
Much as I love brothers and sisters in Christ over at Mars Hill let me ask a leading question here, who is engaging culture and moving upstream to influence culture more, Driscoll when he rants about Avatar and Twilight or Andrew Stanton making movies like Finding Nemo and WALL-E? Someone seems quite a bit further upstream and engaging cultural concerns from within a Christian perspective and if I had to pick between Mark Driscoll and Andrew Stanton then Stanton seems like the person further upstream and more directly engaging culture. After all those Mars Hill members who listened to three months of Peasant Princess got busy and spawned babies odds are pretty good that their progeny are going to get exposed to exponentially more hours of Pixar films than Driscoll sermons. And this, really, is at it should be, but it also means that "engaging culture" and "influencing culture" are the things that are busy being done by people who rarely announce that this is what they're doing, they just go do it. Actually do it, not just talk about how Christians should aspire to do this.
A few years ago I wrote that the only real danger in any contextualization is the simple question of WHAT is being contextualized. Are you contextualizing "the Gospel" or contextualizing yourself? Contextualizing the Gospel would be discussing the teaching of Christ, the teaching of the apostles, the Triune God, and Christ as come in the flesh and risen from the dead in a way that touches upon a time and place. The moment of appropriation is present in any case of contextualization. Paul quotes Hellenistic poets and shares what they get right before proceeding to discuss who Jesus is.
But Paul quotes the Hellenistic poets as a pretext as much as a gesture of mutual understanding. The pretext is to move on to the Gospel itself, which interrupts and subverts the culture that is being engaged. Paul says "This and this you have are true but it is not adequate to a proper understanding of the true person and nature of God." To the extent that old-schoolers like MacArthur say that we should not contextualize the Gospel I agree when this means that the core doctrines of the faith don't change and we don't need to diverge from that.
Yet Francis Schaeffer's criticism of evangelicalism remains, "If Jesus is the answer, what is the question?" I am no longer sure that the "never contextualize" folks will ever care about this because they see that everything comes down to sin and there's nothing new or interesting about neurobiology, theory of mind, or anything else to discuss because there is nothing new under the sun and that means we don't have to study too long to figure out that whatever is going on today is just more of the same old heresy. Well ... kinda. But, for instance, not all stripes of Montanism are the same, just as not all stripes of church/state equivalency are the same. Reformed Christians who would denounce papists for a conflation of church and state concerns didn't seem to mind backing the Confederacy in a way that made them the pot calling the kettle black. If I may go so far as to say Anabaptists have one good idea it's proposing that the historical nexus of church with state power is always a bad one. It is, ironically, one thing a lot of American Christians have assimilated (and credobaptism) while explicitly rejecting all kinds of other things. But I digress again.
I've heard more than a few Keller sermons by now and when Keller provides an illustration or a contextualization moment it has a particular character. In a sermon on Christian friendship he cites C. S. Lewis' The Four Loves. Keller notes Lewis' observation that ours is an era that lionizes eros and that our literature is not full of famous friendships, or popular culture does not have friendships as famous as the names of famous lovers. Romeo and Juliet,, Antony and Cleopatra, these we know.
I would say that for anyone steeped in cartoons and childrens' stories there is another side to this. Don't we "all" know about Batman and Robin, Charlie Brown & Snoopy, Calvin & Hobbes, Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble? Then there's Wallace & Gromit. Shaggy and Scooby Doo. Consider Bart Simpson and Milhouse. For that matter, moving further along, there's Kyle, Stan, Cartman and Kenny. Under the noses of most so-called "adult" story-telling cartoons have been trafficking in stories of friendship for generations but we have, as a culture, often felt that there is a need to graduate from kid-fare into "adult" entertainment. Not THAT kind of adult entertainment, the other kinds. Still, Lewis, and by extension Keller, have a point, romances are more dominant in our culture than friendships.
Moving on, when Keller discusses friendship in ancient literature, Christian and otherwise, his stops on the road of literature and philosophy emphasize friendship within the sermon. They are not digressions but necessary elements in the presentation on how Christians can and should think about friendship both within the history of Christian reflection itself and within the broader context of human experience. In this way a contextualizing episode contextualizes ideas that relate to a Christian teaching about a topic in the scriptures in a way that permits reference to historic application.
At the risk of still using Driscoll as a negative example, most of the contraversies that have brewed up about the guy have had to do with digressionary rants within sermons that are far better known than the actual sermons in which they appeared. Who out there in the general populace heard that Driscoll preached a sermon on spiritual warfare in his Luke series? Anyone? No? Well, what about the bit how Avatar is the most satanic movie Mark has ever seen? Ah, a few people heard that. What biblical text and subject was Driscoll discussing when he had that soundbite about how video games are stupid because they are the pursuit of vicarious victories that don't matter and aren't building a legacy? Anyone remember which sermon that was?
Now I'll put my cards on the table here, I'm PCA for a number of reasons and I'm not going to hide my preference for Keller style contextualization over Driscoll style contextualization. Keller brings up cultural, literary, and philosophical aspects as a way to discuss things related to biblical texts. The connection is thematic rather than purely exegetical but there's an observable connection. So if Keller talks about how the Back to the Future movies give us a message that the future is entirely in our hands so we must make it a good one in contrast to movies that discuss destiny and fate, his thread is to show that popular culture cannot resolve the question of determinism and free will and that with respect to the life of the individual believer we can't say that the Bible gives us a clear cut resolution of the question of determinism via God's sovereignty and our responsibility for our actions. The pop cultural trivia become a point from which to observe that if Christians have not resolved the freedom/determinism question how much less has the world? You remember the illustration but you also remember the point for which the illustration was brought up to begin with.
I'm afraid Driscoll is often not that far along in his skill as an orator. In the last few years Driscoll's sermon digressions have become tidal waves of personal punditry that obliterate the relevance of his actual pastoral points. This is probably due far more to the people who put soundbites and video clips of him in Mars Hill media than Driscoll's actual hour-long sermons. That is also, unfortunately, generally immaterial because the little fracases describe themselves. When Driscoll discusses Avatar as the most satanic movie he's ever seenin a sermon on spiritual warfare he's contextualizing ... but by making the focal point of his contextualizing episode what HE thinks of Avatar what he ends up contextualizing is not a scriptural teaching on, say, friendship in light of what Christians and pagans have historically thought about friendship. What Driscoll ends up contextualizing in his rants against Avatar or video games is simply himself and his opinions about cultural trends that rarely need to be brought up in the setting of an allegedly expository sermon that is just discussing what is in a biblical text.
Now I have a friend who used to be a Christian and within the last ten years one of the things he has admitted to finding insufferable about a lot of preachers, particularly in some youth pastors, is a desperate appropriation of pop culture. He heard a youth pastor say of Aragorn after Return of the King hit theaters that Aragorn was a type of Christ. Superman, somewhat famously, has been described as being a type of Christ but this just gets at how meaningless the appropriation has become. To say that so and so is like Jesus simply means that the person or thing is so famous and unobjectionable as to not be worthy of scabrous attacks within the confines of an increasingly secular civic pseudo-religion. Anyone can say these days that they respect the real Jesus but reject Christianity.
A lot of what is passed off as "contextualization" is going to be more revealing of your Netflix queue as it is any indication of whether or not you even read the Bible. More is revealed by a person attempting to say that Optimus Prime or Superman or Jack Bauer are Christ-types than is ever revealed by the stories of those three characters as manifestations of American pop culture. Sure, there may be cosmetic resemblances between three characters and stories about Jesus but as skeptics have been pointing out for millenia, there are all sorts of fascinating similarities between early Christian tales and pagan mystery religions. The atheist and the skeptic could ask whether or not these Christians who see Superman, Jack Bauer, or Optimus Prime as Christ types are seeing Jesus in those characters or whether they are seeing those characters in their own custom-built versions of Jesus.
There are, for that matter, some Christians who are more careful about getting things right with the timeline for the Star Wars expanded universe than have paid attention to the significance of Rehoboam's first major decision as king in the wake of Solomon's death. There are people who are more alert to whether Greedo shot first than to what the significance might be of Micaiah being shown by God to tell Ahab a lying spirit had been sent to Ahab's prophets. No, I'm not going to give you chapter and verse because my point is to demonstrate that if you don't already know the tale and you can keep track of all the plot twists and character arcs on Lost you're revealing where your priorities have been. I haven't even seen a whole episode of Lost. I confess my nerdiness is already well-attested and accounted for.
It's okay to know a lot about nerdy stuff if you're a Christian but if you remember episodes of Family Guy or score listings for baseball games or things like that more readily than you can grasp the history of Israel as part of the history of Christ relating to His Creation then, well, I can't really make you fix that but I can urge you to consider what stuff is being contextualized for the sake of what. If there is any tragic flaw in the way some pastors "contextualize" it's that they do not impart for their church members a zeal for the scriptures themselves but a willingness to defend their pastors ultimately forgettable digressions on pop culture. Don't defend your pastor's cultural trivial pursuits, don't defend your pastor's rabbit trails into personal and cultural anecdotes. What will last are not the stories about the pastor's kids or the movies or books or video games or restaurants your pastor does or doesn't like. When your pastor (or mine) stands before the throne of Christ what's going to matter is what the pastor said about Him.
What if you, as a pastor, stood before Jesus' throne and Jesus asked you if you ever used the pulpit as a pretext for making fun of things you don't like? What would you say? You'd have to plead guilty, first of all, and second you'd have to consider whether or not the use of the pulpit and the privilege of expounding the scriptures to those who need to hear the words of life was worth taking that liberty. Now I'm not hiding my frequent disagreement with a guy like John MacArthur but I'm willing to say that on this particular subject he and I are probably in some agreement.
But there are two edges to this blade. Jesus can look at you and ask if you preached only Him or if you also preached Jack Bauer or golf or whatever other things you liked. But Jesus can also ask if you preached only His words instead of preaching against your dislike of The Simpsons or Family Guy or Desperate Housewives or light beer or vegetarians or Republicans or Democrats. As David Martyn Lloyd-Jones put it half a century ago, there will come a point where your being opposed to communism will not prove that you are in any way actually a follower of Christ. Being opposed to "contextualization" is the same way. My salvation and yours does not depend, thank God, on whether or not the words of so many forgettable and forgotten preachers went this way or that. He must become greater and greater and we must become less and less.
Then again I'm not a pastor, hope never to be, and perhaps don't know what I'm talking about.
Confident in competence
http://www.theologyforwomen.org/2011/09/on-quitting-my-job.html#comments
My friend Wendy posted this recently and it reminded me of a discussion on her blog earlier this year. A few people suggested that men derive a sense of worth from their professions while women find their worth in things like relationships and family. Some women (rightly) objected that this is far too simplistic a take on things. The simplification is problematic not because there are no women who measure their worth as wives and mothers in contrast to women who measure their worth as professionals or theologians; the simplification is problematic because it does not go far enough.
Our confidence in worldly terms sooner or later comes down to our competence. To cast this in utterly high school stereotypes the jock boasts in his athletic ability and the nerd boasts in his academic ability but both ground themselves in a competence. The pretty cheerleader who isn't much of a scholar but who is beautiful and well-liked and knows how to get along with the important people in the social structure grounders herself in competence. The teacher's pet does the same thing, as does the rebellious loner. In the course of our lives we weigh and balance what competencies seem most likely to give us the kind of life we want. The world does this at length and Christians are no different ... except that we often spiritualize our pursuit of competence in theological terms like "vocation" and "honoring the Lord" and "leaving a legacy." Certainly those three things are precious and valuable, but we can still end up defining ourselves by what we believe our competencies are.
It may be helpful to consider the following things. When Isaiah wrote to the barren woman and the eunuch he was telling them that the Lord was going to bring about a reversal. Those who entrust themselves to God will receive God Himself as their heritage, inheritance, and legacy even though by the measures of even the godly people of that age they had nothing and were nothing. They as individuals didn't matter and their names would not endure. When Qoholeth surveyed all the things he built he considered it meaningless. He had amassed a mountain of wealth someone else would receive after his death. He built many great things and yet these things would inevitably crumble and fall. He built himself a great legacy but saw it was vain.
Now traditionally Solomon is considered to be the author but even if we assume for the sake of discussion (and not even all conservative scholars agree that Solomon wrote the book) notice something about this book Ecclesiastes if Solomon was the author--the book is written in such a way as to deflect our attention away from anything that would make Solomon unique. Solomon never comes out and says "I'm Solomon and I wrote this book." Consider how self-effacing it is if one of the greatest kings in Israel who is credited with a library of songs and attached his name to the book of Proverbs and had his name attached to Song of Songs to, say, write Ecclesiastes but deliberately avoid even naming himself. Of course this could mean Solomon didn't write the book of Ecclesiastes but if he did then we overlook an obvious point if we focus on Solomonic authoriship as a point for scriptural authority and not at Solomonic authorship of Ecclesiastes as a take-down of the validity of Solomon's own legacy.
If Solomon refused to identify himself in any direct way and said the end of the matter is to fear God this means that this takes precedent over Solomon's own legacy. Kings and Chronicles do not suggest in any clear way that Solomon ever repented of his legions of sinful habits, though, and though it's nice to think that Solomon repented and wrote Ecclesiastes the warnings of Kings and Chronicles and Ecclesiastes do not stand or fall only on Solomonic authorship. The competency the author gained in being wise turns out to have been a trap. He sees that with increased knowledge comes increased misery and that the wise and the fool both die anyway, so what was gained in becoming so very wise? Something, to be sure, but something that will be lost at death.
To the extent that Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes and withheld his name we can see this as a kind of abnegation of his unique competence as being the foundation for his observations. Iain Provan mentions in his commentary on 1 & 2 Kings that the author talks about David considering Solomon's wisdom and we see Solomon asked for wisdom. There is a dramatic tension in the narrative in which we are invited to figure out whose wisdom Solomon is operating within when he makes this decision or that, the wisdom from Yahweh or his own wisdom. By the end of Solomon's life recounted in Kings and Chronicles it becomes tragically apparent which sort of wisdom dominated. It is good to gain wisdom and it is good to gain competence but these can be, in their own ways, snares. You and I will eventually and inevitably be forgotten as everyone will be. Jesus said to not store up treasures here on earth that will rot and rust but to store up treasures in heaven. It is good to be skilled and to be competent. The scriptures say that a man who is skilled in his labor will stand before kings and will not serve obscure and unknown men. That's true ... but it's also true, as Qoholeth noted so grimly, that great and wise men of all kinds are forgotten after they die, just like all the idiots who helped create the problems that great and wise men had to figure out how to solve! Death is the fate of everyone and the living take this to heart.
A Christian's struggle is not merely in vocation to be productive and helpful to others, though that is important, a Christian must remember he or she is saved not by self-possessed or self-acquired competence. Our competence will not always save us, no matter how much of it we have. The Lord is our provider and sometimes, truly, the Lord lets us suffer to the point of shed blood or some other kind of death. To deny this is to deny what the scriptures teach. In him we live and move and have our being as Paul shared at Areogapus, but he also said that to live is Christ and to die is gain. Whether we live or die it is to the Lord. Just because Jesus makes up my dying bed doesn't mean dying is ever fun but if Jesus makes up my dying bed it is He who raises me. It is His omnicompetence and not my competence or imcompetence that is the foundation of hope.
My friend Wendy posted this recently and it reminded me of a discussion on her blog earlier this year. A few people suggested that men derive a sense of worth from their professions while women find their worth in things like relationships and family. Some women (rightly) objected that this is far too simplistic a take on things. The simplification is problematic not because there are no women who measure their worth as wives and mothers in contrast to women who measure their worth as professionals or theologians; the simplification is problematic because it does not go far enough.
Our confidence in worldly terms sooner or later comes down to our competence. To cast this in utterly high school stereotypes the jock boasts in his athletic ability and the nerd boasts in his academic ability but both ground themselves in a competence. The pretty cheerleader who isn't much of a scholar but who is beautiful and well-liked and knows how to get along with the important people in the social structure grounders herself in competence. The teacher's pet does the same thing, as does the rebellious loner. In the course of our lives we weigh and balance what competencies seem most likely to give us the kind of life we want. The world does this at length and Christians are no different ... except that we often spiritualize our pursuit of competence in theological terms like "vocation" and "honoring the Lord" and "leaving a legacy." Certainly those three things are precious and valuable, but we can still end up defining ourselves by what we believe our competencies are.
It may be helpful to consider the following things. When Isaiah wrote to the barren woman and the eunuch he was telling them that the Lord was going to bring about a reversal. Those who entrust themselves to God will receive God Himself as their heritage, inheritance, and legacy even though by the measures of even the godly people of that age they had nothing and were nothing. They as individuals didn't matter and their names would not endure. When Qoholeth surveyed all the things he built he considered it meaningless. He had amassed a mountain of wealth someone else would receive after his death. He built many great things and yet these things would inevitably crumble and fall. He built himself a great legacy but saw it was vain.
Now traditionally Solomon is considered to be the author but even if we assume for the sake of discussion (and not even all conservative scholars agree that Solomon wrote the book) notice something about this book Ecclesiastes if Solomon was the author--the book is written in such a way as to deflect our attention away from anything that would make Solomon unique. Solomon never comes out and says "I'm Solomon and I wrote this book." Consider how self-effacing it is if one of the greatest kings in Israel who is credited with a library of songs and attached his name to the book of Proverbs and had his name attached to Song of Songs to, say, write Ecclesiastes but deliberately avoid even naming himself. Of course this could mean Solomon didn't write the book of Ecclesiastes but if he did then we overlook an obvious point if we focus on Solomonic authoriship as a point for scriptural authority and not at Solomonic authorship of Ecclesiastes as a take-down of the validity of Solomon's own legacy.
If Solomon refused to identify himself in any direct way and said the end of the matter is to fear God this means that this takes precedent over Solomon's own legacy. Kings and Chronicles do not suggest in any clear way that Solomon ever repented of his legions of sinful habits, though, and though it's nice to think that Solomon repented and wrote Ecclesiastes the warnings of Kings and Chronicles and Ecclesiastes do not stand or fall only on Solomonic authorship. The competency the author gained in being wise turns out to have been a trap. He sees that with increased knowledge comes increased misery and that the wise and the fool both die anyway, so what was gained in becoming so very wise? Something, to be sure, but something that will be lost at death.
To the extent that Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes and withheld his name we can see this as a kind of abnegation of his unique competence as being the foundation for his observations. Iain Provan mentions in his commentary on 1 & 2 Kings that the author talks about David considering Solomon's wisdom and we see Solomon asked for wisdom. There is a dramatic tension in the narrative in which we are invited to figure out whose wisdom Solomon is operating within when he makes this decision or that, the wisdom from Yahweh or his own wisdom. By the end of Solomon's life recounted in Kings and Chronicles it becomes tragically apparent which sort of wisdom dominated. It is good to gain wisdom and it is good to gain competence but these can be, in their own ways, snares. You and I will eventually and inevitably be forgotten as everyone will be. Jesus said to not store up treasures here on earth that will rot and rust but to store up treasures in heaven. It is good to be skilled and to be competent. The scriptures say that a man who is skilled in his labor will stand before kings and will not serve obscure and unknown men. That's true ... but it's also true, as Qoholeth noted so grimly, that great and wise men of all kinds are forgotten after they die, just like all the idiots who helped create the problems that great and wise men had to figure out how to solve! Death is the fate of everyone and the living take this to heart.
A Christian's struggle is not merely in vocation to be productive and helpful to others, though that is important, a Christian must remember he or she is saved not by self-possessed or self-acquired competence. Our competence will not always save us, no matter how much of it we have. The Lord is our provider and sometimes, truly, the Lord lets us suffer to the point of shed blood or some other kind of death. To deny this is to deny what the scriptures teach. In him we live and move and have our being as Paul shared at Areogapus, but he also said that to live is Christ and to die is gain. Whether we live or die it is to the Lord. Just because Jesus makes up my dying bed doesn't mean dying is ever fun but if Jesus makes up my dying bed it is He who raises me. It is His omnicompetence and not my competence or imcompetence that is the foundation of hope.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
James MacDonald disagrees with people who think T. D. Jakes is a modalist
I learned of this bit of trivia by way of the Boar's Head Tavern resident Matthew Johnson
http://jamesmacdonald.com/blog/?p=9055
http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2011/09/is-nicene-christianity-that-im.php
Among other things James MacDonald wrote the following:
... I affirm the doctrine of the Trinity as I find it in Scripture. I believe it is clearly presented but not detailed or nuanced. I believe God is very happy with His Word as given to us and does not wish to update or clarify anything that He has purposefully left opaque. Somethings are stark and immensely clear, such as the deity of Jesus Christ; others are taught but shrouded in mystery, such as the Trinity. I do not trace my beliefs to credal statements that seek clarity on things the Bible clouds with mystery. I do not require T.D. Jakes or anyone else to define the details of Trinitarianism the way that I might.
So he affirms the doctrine of the Trinity as he finds it in Scripture. He believes it is clearly presented but not detailed or nuanced. Nothing should be clarified that is left opaque.
So does this mean that MacDonald is seriously laying out a precedent through his public teaching and blogging in which it is more crucial to agree with him that, say, congregational rule is Satanic and most be spoken out against more vociferously than, say, Nestorianism? Or Docetism? Is the Satanic nature of congregational polity that clearly spelled out in Scripture in comparison to say the fully divine and human nature of Christ? If you don't get things nailed down along the lines of the Nicene Creed about the Trinity, well, hey, no biggie. But you better be sure you're not advocating congregational ecclesiology or suggesting that multi-site church preaching and sacramentology might have some long-term short-comings. Yeah, that, uh, is really reassuring there, man. For a second I would have thought that the Trinity and how we formulate it and understand it is nothing less than a make or break issue in the Christian faith. But what do I know? I only sat through the 2008 Doctrine series Mark Driscoll preached.
For the record, going through 10 of 27 books of the NT doesn't prove a person has any competence as an exegete or biblical scholar. Sorry, but it's true. A preacher can go through the whole book of Romans one verse at a time but if he's a Jehovah's Witness it's washed up.
What people say and think about the Trinity matters astronomically more than whether or not they'll agree with James MacDonald that congregational church leadership is from Satan or that multi-site churches constitute a basis from which MacDonald can keep Mark Dever from finishing more than a single sentence. MacDonald can say that the Trinity is a big deal and we know this is because it is true. But just the idea that not being informed by a creedal approach about the Trinity while sticking up for the idea that congregational rule is of Satan ... that's just something I don't get. Maybe someone can explain it to me.
http://jamesmacdonald.com/blog/?p=9055
http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2011/09/is-nicene-christianity-that-im.php
Among other things James MacDonald wrote the following:
... I affirm the doctrine of the Trinity as I find it in Scripture. I believe it is clearly presented but not detailed or nuanced. I believe God is very happy with His Word as given to us and does not wish to update or clarify anything that He has purposefully left opaque. Somethings are stark and immensely clear, such as the deity of Jesus Christ; others are taught but shrouded in mystery, such as the Trinity. I do not trace my beliefs to credal statements that seek clarity on things the Bible clouds with mystery. I do not require T.D. Jakes or anyone else to define the details of Trinitarianism the way that I might.
So he affirms the doctrine of the Trinity as he finds it in Scripture. He believes it is clearly presented but not detailed or nuanced. Nothing should be clarified that is left opaque.
So does this mean that MacDonald is seriously laying out a precedent through his public teaching and blogging in which it is more crucial to agree with him that, say, congregational rule is Satanic and most be spoken out against more vociferously than, say, Nestorianism? Or Docetism? Is the Satanic nature of congregational polity that clearly spelled out in Scripture in comparison to say the fully divine and human nature of Christ? If you don't get things nailed down along the lines of the Nicene Creed about the Trinity, well, hey, no biggie. But you better be sure you're not advocating congregational ecclesiology or suggesting that multi-site church preaching and sacramentology might have some long-term short-comings. Yeah, that, uh, is really reassuring there, man. For a second I would have thought that the Trinity and how we formulate it and understand it is nothing less than a make or break issue in the Christian faith. But what do I know? I only sat through the 2008 Doctrine series Mark Driscoll preached.
For the record, going through 10 of 27 books of the NT doesn't prove a person has any competence as an exegete or biblical scholar. Sorry, but it's true. A preacher can go through the whole book of Romans one verse at a time but if he's a Jehovah's Witness it's washed up.
What people say and think about the Trinity matters astronomically more than whether or not they'll agree with James MacDonald that congregational church leadership is from Satan or that multi-site churches constitute a basis from which MacDonald can keep Mark Dever from finishing more than a single sentence. MacDonald can say that the Trinity is a big deal and we know this is because it is true. But just the idea that not being informed by a creedal approach about the Trinity while sticking up for the idea that congregational rule is of Satan ... that's just something I don't get. Maybe someone can explain it to me.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
I think ... I think ...
I think I may be making the breakthroughs I need in a couple of projects now. :) I've made some important discoveries about how to approach my final fugue in my cycle thanks to Bach and Beethoven (duh, should have thought of this earlier).
I've also made a serendipitous discovery dusting off G. K. Chesterton that is going to be (probably) a vital new element in my forthcoming series at Mockingbird about Batman: the animateed series. Yep, Chesterton ... and C. S. Lewis, but chiefly Chesterton.
I've also made a serendipitous discovery dusting off G. K. Chesterton that is going to be (probably) a vital new element in my forthcoming series at Mockingbird about Batman: the animateed series. Yep, Chesterton ... and C. S. Lewis, but chiefly Chesterton.
Monday, September 26, 2011
a bit more from DG Hart on The Gospel Coalition
http://oldlife.org/2011/09/the-problem-of-sappy-evangelicals/
... Which is why it is possible that the problem afflicting the evangelicals at the Gospel Coalition is one of sentimentality. That is, they value feelings more than doctrine. This is what Ken Myers called orthopathy instead of orthodoxy. This does not mean that the folks at TGC ignore doctrine. Obviously, they promote it. But they never let it function in a way that might make leaders, readers, or bloggers uncomfortable — that is, doctrine will never be offensive, especially to the co-allies. But they seem to have no problem patrolling the Christian world for incorrect emotions.
This would apparently explain why the bloggers at TGC have yet to mention the two six hundred pound gorillas in the TGC parlor — C. J. Mahaney and Mark Driscoll. The former has at the very least created a ruckus about the kind of pastoral leadership within SGM circles, which would seem to undermine TGC’s commitment to promoting gospel-centered churches. And then there is Dricoll’s clairvoyance which in sixteenth-century Geneva would have gotten him drowned. I understand that these situations are delicate and that friends want to stand by friends. But to call Calvinists — yet again — angry when TGC has its own image problems is well nigh remarkable unless, that is, you remember the importance of feelings, affections, passions, and hedonism. A co-ally may not be able to spot Mahaney’s or Driscoll’s errors but can FEEL their pain.
***
I've seen rows of comments deleted from articles at the Gospel Coalition. One of the more memorable ones was an interview with Driscoll where he explained that 1,000 members left Mars Hill because they ramped up their doctrinal requirements. They didn't, I was there and they didn't ramp up doctrinal requirements in any meaningful way. What they did do was insist that members of long-standing had to renew their membership and said (but did not enforce) the new policy was renewing members had to sign off that they agreed with all the new by-laws circa 2007. I didn't renew because I didn't see the point of having to renew membership on the condition of saying I agreed to a pile of by-laws I was not allowed to have any input or say about. It's not a matter of some populist democratic impulse, it's a matter that the previous three to four times I renewed my membership I wasn't given this new requirement. Some friends and family renewed their memberships and never even SAW the by-laws.
The ridiculousness of setting up a criteria that was never even enforced got to be a bit much for me. And then this is sidelined and the "real" reason for a loss of members is an increased doctrinal stress? Sorry, I wish that were actually the case but nothing changed. Now if Mars Hill doctrine specifically repudiated both postmillenialism and premillenialism on the grounds that theonomistic reconstructionism and Rapture-expectant apocalypticism do harm to the spiritual health of congregants THAT would have been a truly brave and more demanding stance on doctrine!
Even something as simple as telling paedobaptists to go find another church would be braver but I have known any number of closeted paedobaptists who have been at Mars Hill, some of whom baptised their kids at home in lieu of any hope that the church would accept that. Wanna guess how many paedobaptists are members or serving in paid positions at Mars Hill? I have no idea but I know there are probably at least a few more of them there than are willing to attempt teaching on the subject in a community group.
The clairvoyence of Driscoll is something I'll tackle later, God willing. The problem D. G. Hart may be roughly pointing out is something that other Christians have pointed out with varying degrees of anger or equanimity, which is that the new Calvinists may be very soft on touching the subject of double predestination but are even softer on the subject of whether or not there is a double standard in when they believe they are justified in using polemics vs whether there is any justification for a polemic against a position or practice they stake out (or don't, for that matter). Doctrine exists for "me" to make "you" uncomfortable about a failure on your part to truly love Jesus. And pertinent to what the GC doesn't address ...
http://oldlife.org/2011/09/shooting-fish-in-a-barrel/comment-page-1/#comment-37149
That tallies up to Pat Robertson, Rob Bell, and angry Calvinists as all worthy of Gospel Coalition opposition. If I do my math aright, that means that TGC is against extremism and for moderation (read: nice). My calculations may be off. But I’m reasonably confident of my findings.
Robertson, Bell, and "angry Calvinists" do all seem to be fish in the same barrel. They are not risky targets because one of these targets has been the subject of worldly mockery for two decades and if the Wittenburg Door mentioned a guy at all in the past THREE DECADES that means a young, hip neo-Calvinist gains nothing by criticizing a crazy old man.
Rob Bell may just be another post-modern emergent sort of the type who a lot of people don't pay attention to but this lack of person-of-interest states cuts in several directions. I know a few Christians who will rhetorically ask "Who is John Piper?" To that I say "self-appointed Calvinist Baptist pope, maybe?" But unloading a few shots at Bell for his ideas about Hell seems easy. That doesn't mean it shouldn't have possibly been done, I guess. I don't think N. T. Wright was just wasting time writing his book on the Resurrection or replying to various claims made by people on the Jesus Seminar. The Body has different members locally and globally that do different things. But where Piper's "farewell Rob Bell" tweet may have had any relevance to me is not that he bid farewell to Rob Bell as though this were some big deal about Bell's ideas but that it was "farewell" at all. On what basis did Piper ever consider Rob Bell to be anything remotely close to being on the same team about anything? When were Bell and Piper under the same standard about anything anyway?
And last and lest "angry Calvinists". For Arminians and Lutherans and various other people who are not identified as "evangelical" Calvinist Baptists can be considered pretty angry. Various members of the Gospel Coalition writing about anything could be considered above the risk of "angry Calvinist" only on the basis of a generous sliding curve.
I've had friends run stuff by me that's at the Gospel Coalition and, well ...meh. It's just not quite my interest. I care about actual theological disagreements amongst sincere Christians. I also care about the disagreements and disputes over which Christians decide to start throwing around the word "heresy" because, as Carl Trueman put it, these were the kinds of differences about which self-professing Christians started killing each other over the last millenia. This is why a diet of polemic or "medicine" reveals itself in the end to be no diet at all for sustained life. It's not that there is never a place for it but there are a lot of Christians (and I have often seen how I am one of them) for whom polemic provides a kind of identity. I saw this a lot in the earliest days of Mars Hill but didn't recognize it for what it was because it was (and arguably still is) one of my weak spots. But it is why, quaintly enough, I fit in so very, very well there.
... Which is why it is possible that the problem afflicting the evangelicals at the Gospel Coalition is one of sentimentality. That is, they value feelings more than doctrine. This is what Ken Myers called orthopathy instead of orthodoxy. This does not mean that the folks at TGC ignore doctrine. Obviously, they promote it. But they never let it function in a way that might make leaders, readers, or bloggers uncomfortable — that is, doctrine will never be offensive, especially to the co-allies. But they seem to have no problem patrolling the Christian world for incorrect emotions.
This would apparently explain why the bloggers at TGC have yet to mention the two six hundred pound gorillas in the TGC parlor — C. J. Mahaney and Mark Driscoll. The former has at the very least created a ruckus about the kind of pastoral leadership within SGM circles, which would seem to undermine TGC’s commitment to promoting gospel-centered churches. And then there is Dricoll’s clairvoyance which in sixteenth-century Geneva would have gotten him drowned. I understand that these situations are delicate and that friends want to stand by friends. But to call Calvinists — yet again — angry when TGC has its own image problems is well nigh remarkable unless, that is, you remember the importance of feelings, affections, passions, and hedonism. A co-ally may not be able to spot Mahaney’s or Driscoll’s errors but can FEEL their pain.
***
I've seen rows of comments deleted from articles at the Gospel Coalition. One of the more memorable ones was an interview with Driscoll where he explained that 1,000 members left Mars Hill because they ramped up their doctrinal requirements. They didn't, I was there and they didn't ramp up doctrinal requirements in any meaningful way. What they did do was insist that members of long-standing had to renew their membership and said (but did not enforce) the new policy was renewing members had to sign off that they agreed with all the new by-laws circa 2007. I didn't renew because I didn't see the point of having to renew membership on the condition of saying I agreed to a pile of by-laws I was not allowed to have any input or say about. It's not a matter of some populist democratic impulse, it's a matter that the previous three to four times I renewed my membership I wasn't given this new requirement. Some friends and family renewed their memberships and never even SAW the by-laws.
The ridiculousness of setting up a criteria that was never even enforced got to be a bit much for me. And then this is sidelined and the "real" reason for a loss of members is an increased doctrinal stress? Sorry, I wish that were actually the case but nothing changed. Now if Mars Hill doctrine specifically repudiated both postmillenialism and premillenialism on the grounds that theonomistic reconstructionism and Rapture-expectant apocalypticism do harm to the spiritual health of congregants THAT would have been a truly brave and more demanding stance on doctrine!
Even something as simple as telling paedobaptists to go find another church would be braver but I have known any number of closeted paedobaptists who have been at Mars Hill, some of whom baptised their kids at home in lieu of any hope that the church would accept that. Wanna guess how many paedobaptists are members or serving in paid positions at Mars Hill? I have no idea but I know there are probably at least a few more of them there than are willing to attempt teaching on the subject in a community group.
The clairvoyence of Driscoll is something I'll tackle later, God willing. The problem D. G. Hart may be roughly pointing out is something that other Christians have pointed out with varying degrees of anger or equanimity, which is that the new Calvinists may be very soft on touching the subject of double predestination but are even softer on the subject of whether or not there is a double standard in when they believe they are justified in using polemics vs whether there is any justification for a polemic against a position or practice they stake out (or don't, for that matter). Doctrine exists for "me" to make "you" uncomfortable about a failure on your part to truly love Jesus. And pertinent to what the GC doesn't address ...
http://oldlife.org/2011/09/shooting-fish-in-a-barrel/comment-page-1/#comment-37149
That tallies up to Pat Robertson, Rob Bell, and angry Calvinists as all worthy of Gospel Coalition opposition. If I do my math aright, that means that TGC is against extremism and for moderation (read: nice). My calculations may be off. But I’m reasonably confident of my findings.
Robertson, Bell, and "angry Calvinists" do all seem to be fish in the same barrel. They are not risky targets because one of these targets has been the subject of worldly mockery for two decades and if the Wittenburg Door mentioned a guy at all in the past THREE DECADES that means a young, hip neo-Calvinist gains nothing by criticizing a crazy old man.
Rob Bell may just be another post-modern emergent sort of the type who a lot of people don't pay attention to but this lack of person-of-interest states cuts in several directions. I know a few Christians who will rhetorically ask "Who is John Piper?" To that I say "self-appointed Calvinist Baptist pope, maybe?" But unloading a few shots at Bell for his ideas about Hell seems easy. That doesn't mean it shouldn't have possibly been done, I guess. I don't think N. T. Wright was just wasting time writing his book on the Resurrection or replying to various claims made by people on the Jesus Seminar. The Body has different members locally and globally that do different things. But where Piper's "farewell Rob Bell" tweet may have had any relevance to me is not that he bid farewell to Rob Bell as though this were some big deal about Bell's ideas but that it was "farewell" at all. On what basis did Piper ever consider Rob Bell to be anything remotely close to being on the same team about anything? When were Bell and Piper under the same standard about anything anyway?
And last and lest "angry Calvinists". For Arminians and Lutherans and various other people who are not identified as "evangelical" Calvinist Baptists can be considered pretty angry. Various members of the Gospel Coalition writing about anything could be considered above the risk of "angry Calvinist" only on the basis of a generous sliding curve.
I've had friends run stuff by me that's at the Gospel Coalition and, well ...meh. It's just not quite my interest. I care about actual theological disagreements amongst sincere Christians. I also care about the disagreements and disputes over which Christians decide to start throwing around the word "heresy" because, as Carl Trueman put it, these were the kinds of differences about which self-professing Christians started killing each other over the last millenia. This is why a diet of polemic or "medicine" reveals itself in the end to be no diet at all for sustained life. It's not that there is never a place for it but there are a lot of Christians (and I have often seen how I am one of them) for whom polemic provides a kind of identity. I saw this a lot in the earliest days of Mars Hill but didn't recognize it for what it was because it was (and arguably still is) one of my weak spots. But it is why, quaintly enough, I fit in so very, very well there.
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