One of the strangest things about the kerfuffles surrounding a controversial story connected to Mars Hill, published in January 2012, is the story itself. Christian bloggers, critics, and journalists sounded off on this story in various ways. Yet it is, at its heart, a mundane though surely not insignificant story. Real people were involved.
We heard about this guy and this guy, see, he fell in love with a pastor's daughter. He was engaged to her and was physically intimate with her prior to marriage. There was also this indiscretion, this infidelity that, when it came to light, caused a disastrous change in the relationship. Things in the local church also suffered.
So let me ask you something, whose story was I just talking about?
Was it the story of Andrew and his fiancee?
Or was it the story of Mark and Grace Driscoll in Real Marriage?
Weird, isn't it? This is purely a coincidence. It is a coincidence so absurd that attempting to assign any meaning to it denies the darkly humorous beauty of its absurdity.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
HT Mockingbird: "What Doesn't Kill You Almost Kills You", Conan O'Brien's Dartmouth address
http://www.mbird.com/2012/05/what-doesnt-kill-you-almost-kills-you-conan-obrien/
In 2011 Conan O'Brien addressed the graduating class of Dartmouth. He said quite a few things.
One of his statements about the year 2011 job market is both funny and grim.
"Yes, you parents [of Darmouth graduates] must be patient because it is, indeed, a grim job market out there. And one of the reasons it's so tough out there is because aging baby boomers refuse to leave their jobs. Trust me on this. [audience laughs and applauds] Even when they promise you for five year's they're going to leave and say it on television, and you can go on Youtube right now and watch the guy do it, there is no guarantee they won't come back. Of course I'm speaking generally."
O'Brien transitions into the more serious content in the closing third of his address.
"There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized. I went to college with many people who prided themselves on knowing exactly who they were and exactly where they were going. At Harvard five different guys in my class told me they would one day be President of the United States." He went on to jocularly remark that none of those guys ever became POTUS.
O'Brien observed a paradox in the history of comedians. Each generation's great comedian in television could be said to have forged his identity in the failure to become his hero. In the 1940s Jack Benny was at the top of the heap. Johnny Carson wanted to be Jack Benny. Carson emulated Benny but his failure to completely become his hero made him the funniest man of his generation. David Letterman wanted to be the next Carson. Letterman famously failed to Carson and yet he became the model and hero for Conan O'Brien's generation of television entertainers. "It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. It's not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound reinvention."
Casting this in terms of musicians and composers both Mozart and Beethoven admired Haydn. Neither Mozart nor Beethoven was Haydn but, as many must already know, both Mozart and Beethoven are considered more profound and tend to be more popular than Haydn. I can appreciate Beethoven ... and some Mozart ... but I think I can hear what it was in Haydn that inspired his two different proteges to their own kind of greatness. J. S. Bach did not set out to revolutionize musical art as the Western world knows it, not that I know of, yet he did. Though a composer like Haydn could emerge as the son of a wheelwright and gain greatness many of the great musicians and composers in history have tended to be the culmination not merely of individual but of family legacies. Beethoven was the child of a musician. Mozart was the child of a musician. Bach represented the culmination of generations of musicians. Everyone builds on a foundation that someone else builds even if the foundation is your own mind. You, after all, didn't choose to bring yourself into the world, your parents made a simple decision or series of decisions that led to you being in this world. You got luck enough to be born because two other people before you, well, got lucky.
O'Brien had quite a few other things to say but his observation that whether you fear it or not failure will strike you is something to keep in mind. You can try to avoid it, as he advised you do, but you can never forget that failure can and will still strike you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmDYXaaT9sA&feature=player_embedded
It's not like I haven't been acutely aware of failure in the last 32 months since I got laid off. I knew my job well enough to know that if a tough decision had to be made my job would be the one that would be wisest to cut. It still hurt a lot when the day that job had to be cut came. Trust me, when you're alert enough to realize that if someone had to get cut it'd have to be you there's no consolation in having anticipated the possibility of that cut when the day the cut has to be made. I loved working with the team I was on. I liked and respected my boss. I liked and respected my boss's boss. I was not only good at what I did I was considered the best at what I did in the region I worked in. My work was considered the model for other people to follow. In the cases where I didn't follow some of the rules I was paid the respect of being told that if I broke a rule I came up with one that made sense, I explained why I did this, and I always followed it.
But life happens and economies tank and job markets change. When disaster strikes it can be because of something you don't see coming and can't control. Or, worse yet, it can hit you and you realize that it was something you sorta saw coming but didn't think would actually hit you. That's when it hurts even worse. It doesn't matter how long you live or how far you go in life, the shock of failure or of disaster never really gets easier to deal with. You never get used to it.
I'm not an optimist about many things. People who know me well know this about me. One of my family members has described me as a friendly pessimist. I'm pessimistic about the future and about the human condition but, do you need to talk? Sure, I can make time for that, it's okay. We can have some fun.
When I was about 20 or 21 I read The Brothers Karamazov, on of the greatest works in world literature. In this great novel it is observed that there are men who profess an undying love for all humanity and the nobility of the human spirit who, nevertheless, hate all the actual people they know. When I was determined to take the opposite approach, perhaps the approach embodied in some sense by Alexei perhaps not. My desire was that whatever I grimly concluded about the human condition and the nature of humanity I did not want to just write off the people I met who were flesh and blood.
Perhaps by extension I have admired the works of Hayao Miyazaki. As a pantheist and environmentalist Miyazaki could not be more morose about the future of humanity and the world and I am not a pantheist and I can't say I'm much of anything by way of environmentalism, though perhaps I might say I can sympathize with a conservationist interest. Miyazaki was once asked why his gloomy outlook on the human condition has not become an explicit theme in his work. To this he replied that he believed it was immoral to crush the hope of change for the future, it was immoral to tell a whole generation of children there was no hope and no possibility for change. You can't justify telling a child the world is so broken and the human condition so gloomy that the child has no basis for any hope.
Paradoxically or not a pantheist and a gloomy Christian can be said to have something in common, we do not believe our bleak assessment of the human condition entitles us to forget the spark of the divine in someone else. Miyazaki is a pantheist so it's not all that surprising he'd see an element of divinity in a person, for instance, but a Christian affirms that humanity bears the image of God. Francis Schaeffer used to say that though man is fallen he is not a zero. This is an observation that seems lost in a number of trenches in American Christianity. Yes, we live in a broken world and people will discover they are broken and even break others. Yet even something or someone that is broken can still be full of beauty.
If there is any great process of discovery for me as a Christian and as a writer and a thinker it is that the most profound gap between where I was and who I was ten years ago and where I am and who I am now seems to be this--I was part of a community that was determined to consider, per the Bob Dylan song, "Everything is broken." We did not stop to consider or discuss that we, ourselves, are broken in ways we can't really perceive or imagine. But, beyond those particular shortcomings, there was another--it is easy to forget that even broken things and broken people have beauty in them. Now might not be the most appropriate or shocking occasion to say that I have always found Batman a more fascinating character with more fascinating stories than Superman. Of course Batman is legendarily known to have begun his career in the face of a heart-crushing loss, a disaster he couldn't possibly avert. Batman is, in that way, a useful pop myth for the person who realizes that no amount of positive thinking or positive confession will make the world less broken. But when Ra's al Ghul decides humanity must be exterminated so the world will be pristine and beauitful again and humanity will know its proper place who goes to fight him? The Dark Knight.
It's silly, it's maudlin, it's overwrought, it's tired and worn out and yet it is a theme that never ceases to fascinate and obsess generations of people, just because something or someone is broken does not mean it has no beauty. This should be least surprising of all to those who are Christians who remember and celebrate the beauty of a man who was broken on a cross. We must remember that we do not remember the cross because the cross is beautiful. It is one of the most depraved ways Romans could devise to dispatch anti-Roman dissidents and terrorists who were not themselves Roman citizens. It was the ultimate way to humiliate, dehumanize and ultimately kill people who were already not even considered fit to be inside Roman society. The stone the builders rejected became the cornerstone.
Of course by this time I've appeared to gone so far afield of the themes in O'Brien's commencement address you might think I haven't been talking about how an apparently miserable failure could be the foundation for new life ...
In 2011 Conan O'Brien addressed the graduating class of Dartmouth. He said quite a few things.
One of his statements about the year 2011 job market is both funny and grim.
"Yes, you parents [of Darmouth graduates] must be patient because it is, indeed, a grim job market out there. And one of the reasons it's so tough out there is because aging baby boomers refuse to leave their jobs. Trust me on this. [audience laughs and applauds] Even when they promise you for five year's they're going to leave and say it on television, and you can go on Youtube right now and watch the guy do it, there is no guarantee they won't come back. Of course I'm speaking generally."
O'Brien transitions into the more serious content in the closing third of his address.
"There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized. I went to college with many people who prided themselves on knowing exactly who they were and exactly where they were going. At Harvard five different guys in my class told me they would one day be President of the United States." He went on to jocularly remark that none of those guys ever became POTUS.
O'Brien observed a paradox in the history of comedians. Each generation's great comedian in television could be said to have forged his identity in the failure to become his hero. In the 1940s Jack Benny was at the top of the heap. Johnny Carson wanted to be Jack Benny. Carson emulated Benny but his failure to completely become his hero made him the funniest man of his generation. David Letterman wanted to be the next Carson. Letterman famously failed to Carson and yet he became the model and hero for Conan O'Brien's generation of television entertainers. "It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. It's not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound reinvention."
Casting this in terms of musicians and composers both Mozart and Beethoven admired Haydn. Neither Mozart nor Beethoven was Haydn but, as many must already know, both Mozart and Beethoven are considered more profound and tend to be more popular than Haydn. I can appreciate Beethoven ... and some Mozart ... but I think I can hear what it was in Haydn that inspired his two different proteges to their own kind of greatness. J. S. Bach did not set out to revolutionize musical art as the Western world knows it, not that I know of, yet he did. Though a composer like Haydn could emerge as the son of a wheelwright and gain greatness many of the great musicians and composers in history have tended to be the culmination not merely of individual but of family legacies. Beethoven was the child of a musician. Mozart was the child of a musician. Bach represented the culmination of generations of musicians. Everyone builds on a foundation that someone else builds even if the foundation is your own mind. You, after all, didn't choose to bring yourself into the world, your parents made a simple decision or series of decisions that led to you being in this world. You got luck enough to be born because two other people before you, well, got lucky.
O'Brien had quite a few other things to say but his observation that whether you fear it or not failure will strike you is something to keep in mind. You can try to avoid it, as he advised you do, but you can never forget that failure can and will still strike you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmDYXaaT9sA&feature=player_embedded
It's not like I haven't been acutely aware of failure in the last 32 months since I got laid off. I knew my job well enough to know that if a tough decision had to be made my job would be the one that would be wisest to cut. It still hurt a lot when the day that job had to be cut came. Trust me, when you're alert enough to realize that if someone had to get cut it'd have to be you there's no consolation in having anticipated the possibility of that cut when the day the cut has to be made. I loved working with the team I was on. I liked and respected my boss. I liked and respected my boss's boss. I was not only good at what I did I was considered the best at what I did in the region I worked in. My work was considered the model for other people to follow. In the cases where I didn't follow some of the rules I was paid the respect of being told that if I broke a rule I came up with one that made sense, I explained why I did this, and I always followed it.
But life happens and economies tank and job markets change. When disaster strikes it can be because of something you don't see coming and can't control. Or, worse yet, it can hit you and you realize that it was something you sorta saw coming but didn't think would actually hit you. That's when it hurts even worse. It doesn't matter how long you live or how far you go in life, the shock of failure or of disaster never really gets easier to deal with. You never get used to it.
I'm not an optimist about many things. People who know me well know this about me. One of my family members has described me as a friendly pessimist. I'm pessimistic about the future and about the human condition but, do you need to talk? Sure, I can make time for that, it's okay. We can have some fun.
When I was about 20 or 21 I read The Brothers Karamazov, on of the greatest works in world literature. In this great novel it is observed that there are men who profess an undying love for all humanity and the nobility of the human spirit who, nevertheless, hate all the actual people they know. When I was determined to take the opposite approach, perhaps the approach embodied in some sense by Alexei perhaps not. My desire was that whatever I grimly concluded about the human condition and the nature of humanity I did not want to just write off the people I met who were flesh and blood.
Perhaps by extension I have admired the works of Hayao Miyazaki. As a pantheist and environmentalist Miyazaki could not be more morose about the future of humanity and the world and I am not a pantheist and I can't say I'm much of anything by way of environmentalism, though perhaps I might say I can sympathize with a conservationist interest. Miyazaki was once asked why his gloomy outlook on the human condition has not become an explicit theme in his work. To this he replied that he believed it was immoral to crush the hope of change for the future, it was immoral to tell a whole generation of children there was no hope and no possibility for change. You can't justify telling a child the world is so broken and the human condition so gloomy that the child has no basis for any hope.
Paradoxically or not a pantheist and a gloomy Christian can be said to have something in common, we do not believe our bleak assessment of the human condition entitles us to forget the spark of the divine in someone else. Miyazaki is a pantheist so it's not all that surprising he'd see an element of divinity in a person, for instance, but a Christian affirms that humanity bears the image of God. Francis Schaeffer used to say that though man is fallen he is not a zero. This is an observation that seems lost in a number of trenches in American Christianity. Yes, we live in a broken world and people will discover they are broken and even break others. Yet even something or someone that is broken can still be full of beauty.
If there is any great process of discovery for me as a Christian and as a writer and a thinker it is that the most profound gap between where I was and who I was ten years ago and where I am and who I am now seems to be this--I was part of a community that was determined to consider, per the Bob Dylan song, "Everything is broken." We did not stop to consider or discuss that we, ourselves, are broken in ways we can't really perceive or imagine. But, beyond those particular shortcomings, there was another--it is easy to forget that even broken things and broken people have beauty in them. Now might not be the most appropriate or shocking occasion to say that I have always found Batman a more fascinating character with more fascinating stories than Superman. Of course Batman is legendarily known to have begun his career in the face of a heart-crushing loss, a disaster he couldn't possibly avert. Batman is, in that way, a useful pop myth for the person who realizes that no amount of positive thinking or positive confession will make the world less broken. But when Ra's al Ghul decides humanity must be exterminated so the world will be pristine and beauitful again and humanity will know its proper place who goes to fight him? The Dark Knight.
It's silly, it's maudlin, it's overwrought, it's tired and worn out and yet it is a theme that never ceases to fascinate and obsess generations of people, just because something or someone is broken does not mean it has no beauty. This should be least surprising of all to those who are Christians who remember and celebrate the beauty of a man who was broken on a cross. We must remember that we do not remember the cross because the cross is beautiful. It is one of the most depraved ways Romans could devise to dispatch anti-Roman dissidents and terrorists who were not themselves Roman citizens. It was the ultimate way to humiliate, dehumanize and ultimately kill people who were already not even considered fit to be inside Roman society. The stone the builders rejected became the cornerstone.
Of course by this time I've appeared to gone so far afield of the themes in O'Brien's commencement address you might think I haven't been talking about how an apparently miserable failure could be the foundation for new life ...
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Engaging Church Blog Interview with Scott Thomas about Gospel Coach
http://engagingchurchblog.com/2012/05/17/interview-with-scott-thomas-and-a-giveaway/#more-2914
Posted May 17, 2012 at 12:19
I was thrilled this week to be able to interview Scott Thomas. Scott is the author of the new book, Gospel Coach: Shepherding Leaders to Glorify God, along with Tom Wood. He has also served as president and network director of Acts 29 Network and as an elder at Mars Hill Church.
Has also served as president and network director of Acts 29 Network and as an elder at Mars Hill Church. As of May 17, 2012 these are all described as in the past.
As I've blogged earlier this year, Scott Thomas has stopped being a pastor in any capacity either at Mars Hill or at Acts 29 Network. The weekend after former Mars Hill pastor Paul Petry went on record with a pile of documents at Joyful Exiles about how he was fired and what roles Scott Thomas, Jamie Munson, and Mark Driscoll played in that process, Matt Chandler mentioned that Scott Thomas told him over dinner he felt the Lord had released him from leading Acts 29.
What was published at Joyful Exiles? If you haven't read Joyful Exiles it went up back on March 19 or March 20.
http://joyfulexiles.com/timeline/
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/10-01-2007-termination-ltr-jamie-munson.pdf
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/scott-thomas-10-10-2007-no-show-for-trial.pdf
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/scott-thomas-10-11-2007-email.pdf
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/10-16-2007-statement-of-the-elders.pdf
Then on March 28, 2012 Scott Thomas posted this letter:
http://www.acts29network.org/acts-29-blog/a-letter-from-scott-thomas/
If it all seems pedestrian confirming basic facts and events often is pedestrian but not all basic facts and events have equally pedestrian significance.
Posted May 17, 2012 at 12:19
I was thrilled this week to be able to interview Scott Thomas. Scott is the author of the new book, Gospel Coach: Shepherding Leaders to Glorify God, along with Tom Wood. He has also served as president and network director of Acts 29 Network and as an elder at Mars Hill Church.
Has also served as president and network director of Acts 29 Network and as an elder at Mars Hill Church. As of May 17, 2012 these are all described as in the past.
As I've blogged earlier this year, Scott Thomas has stopped being a pastor in any capacity either at Mars Hill or at Acts 29 Network. The weekend after former Mars Hill pastor Paul Petry went on record with a pile of documents at Joyful Exiles about how he was fired and what roles Scott Thomas, Jamie Munson, and Mark Driscoll played in that process, Matt Chandler mentioned that Scott Thomas told him over dinner he felt the Lord had released him from leading Acts 29.
What was published at Joyful Exiles? If you haven't read Joyful Exiles it went up back on March 19 or March 20.
http://joyfulexiles.com/timeline/
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/10-01-2007-termination-ltr-jamie-munson.pdf
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/scott-thomas-10-10-2007-no-show-for-trial.pdf
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/scott-thomas-10-11-2007-email.pdf
http://joyfulexiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/10-16-2007-statement-of-the-elders.pdf
Then on March 28, 2012 Scott Thomas posted this letter:
http://www.acts29network.org/acts-29-blog/a-letter-from-scott-thomas/
If it all seems pedestrian confirming basic facts and events often is pedestrian but not all basic facts and events have equally pedestrian significance.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Kevin Bolk's Avengers parody worthy of Laura Depuy's Bizzare Breasts column at Sequential Tart
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/11/27/what-if-the-male-avengers-posed-like-the-female-one/
http://kevinbolk.tumblr.com/post/13332046686/as-promised-heres-the-avengers-parody-namely-of
You may have seen this already but it's worth it anyway. Kevin Bolk did a parody of what the male Avengers would pose like if they were drawn like female Avengers. It is exactly what you would expect. What you might not have known is that Bolk's parody is in the grand and severely, er, underexposed satirical tradition in comics whose apotheosis was arguably attained in the last twelve years by Laura DePuy in her column Bizarre Breasts over at Sequential Tart.
Who is Laura DePuy, you ask? She was colorist for The Authority and wrote some killer satirical commentary on how women get drawn in comics. Alas, dear reader, her visual examples no longer come up more than a decade later. However, her writing is sharp and crisp. There are acronyms aplenty that may need translating.
Here is chapter one of Bizzare Breasts, The POSE
(prevent onerous sags everywhere)
http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/feb01/bb_0201.shtml
Here's chapter two, The SWAY and The SNAP
(Spines will appear yanked)
(Spines never articulate properly)
http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/mar01/bb_0301.shtml
It's seriously a small tragedy of comedy that you can't see what she originally came up with for this chapter. I almost peed myself laughing so hard at what she came up with.
Fortunately for chapter three, the POINT, some of the art has survived. What does POINT mean?
(Perverse omnidirectional intuitive nipple tracking)
http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/apr01/bb_0401.shtml
finally, chapter four
http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/may01/bb_0501.shtml
There's too much to allude to in this final chapter. Depuy had a lot of fun at the expense of Image comics.
This is a post full of whimsy, if admittedly a certain delightfully cruel whimsy. It's really too bad so much of the art in the Bizarre Breasts columns at Sequential Tart is no longer around. Still DePuy's brilliant evisceration of the Image comics Bad Girl is, quite literally, instructive.
http://kevinbolk.tumblr.com/post/13332046686/as-promised-heres-the-avengers-parody-namely-of
You may have seen this already but it's worth it anyway. Kevin Bolk did a parody of what the male Avengers would pose like if they were drawn like female Avengers. It is exactly what you would expect. What you might not have known is that Bolk's parody is in the grand and severely, er, underexposed satirical tradition in comics whose apotheosis was arguably attained in the last twelve years by Laura DePuy in her column Bizarre Breasts over at Sequential Tart.
Who is Laura DePuy, you ask? She was colorist for The Authority and wrote some killer satirical commentary on how women get drawn in comics. Alas, dear reader, her visual examples no longer come up more than a decade later. However, her writing is sharp and crisp. There are acronyms aplenty that may need translating.
Here is chapter one of Bizzare Breasts, The POSE
(prevent onerous sags everywhere)
http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/feb01/bb_0201.shtml
Here's chapter two, The SWAY and The SNAP
(Spines will appear yanked)
(Spines never articulate properly)
http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/mar01/bb_0301.shtml
It's seriously a small tragedy of comedy that you can't see what she originally came up with for this chapter. I almost peed myself laughing so hard at what she came up with.
Fortunately for chapter three, the POINT, some of the art has survived. What does POINT mean?
(Perverse omnidirectional intuitive nipple tracking)
http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/apr01/bb_0401.shtml
finally, chapter four
http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/may01/bb_0501.shtml
There's too much to allude to in this final chapter. Depuy had a lot of fun at the expense of Image comics.
This is a post full of whimsy, if admittedly a certain delightfully cruel whimsy. It's really too bad so much of the art in the Bizarre Breasts columns at Sequential Tart is no longer around. Still DePuy's brilliant evisceration of the Image comics Bad Girl is, quite literally, instructive.
And, again, on opera: Cinemagogue on Spiderman vs the Opera
http://cinemagogue.com/2007/06/04/spider-man-versus-the-opera/
Really, I feel like this warrants being linked to all on its own, since I'm not sure which of you dear readers made a point of reading what I wrote about Bluebird's Castle in my previous entry.
Really, I feel like this warrants being linked to all on its own, since I'm not sure which of you dear readers made a point of reading what I wrote about Bluebird's Castle in my previous entry.
Friday, May 18, 2012
a night at the opera, thoughts about an unstaged Diamond opera, Bluebird's Castle, and storytelling
Last night I heard some operas with my brother. Well, parts of an opera in one case and all of another opera. Last night Seattle Symphony performed six arias from an unstaged opera by David Diamond. They also performed Bela Bartok's Bluebird's Castle. As concert music goes I'll admit I'm not the hugest fan of opera as a whole. I have, however, gone to see Bluebird a total of three times. I find the story fascinating.
The Diamond piece, though Schwarz may champion it assiduously, is a chore. I was not surprised when I heard the six arias why the opera was not staged and why it never took off. Sorry to say but it was a tuneless mash of overwrought doggerel set to even more overwrought music. Not overwrought isn't always a problem. Schoenberg wrote his share of overwrought musical settings. It's not like Erwartung is low key but it worked, and it worked as a double bill with Bluebird's Castle back at the Seattle Opera 2009 season. One opera could be said to be about the disconnect between man and woman while the other could be said to be the same thing but a more profound disconnect within the self.
But what those two operas have that the unstaged Diamond opera seems to have not had is a remorseless disinterest in "realism". I can't recall much about the premise of the Diamond opera except that it looked like the fifteenth reheating of a story line like The Great Gatsby or Tender it the Night. Opera by its nature can't easily afford to be quotidian. If you're going to fork over that much time and money and sit on your butt for hours you're not going to expect some aria singing the praises of hot running water (unless you're at a specific opera by Paul Hindemith). Caricature and even cartoonish stuff is not unheard of in opera. It's okay for a story to have weird and fanciful elements if the psychological trajectory of the character and the story rings true. We've had Pixar movies around for decades now, after all.
The premise and resolution of the unstaged Diamond opera was telling for me. The woman resolves to be alone and chart out the lonely path of freedom. Whatever. The premise is too pedestrian. To your own self be true is ultimately too tedious and pedestrian a point to be bothered with. You can get that kind of insight ("Maybe you need to stop looking for your identity in a man and be single for a while") in any third rate advice column in the Life section of a newspaper or a website. You don't need to write a two or three hour opera about that.
Of course perhaps I'm being unfair to an opera that has never been staged and that the composer gave up on. As a sometime composer myself, though, I'm willing to admit my bias up front, if even the composer gave up on the project that might be a signal. And at the risk of trafficking in name-dropping points, how many people, exactly, are die-hard David Diamond fans?
Bluebird's Castle completely eschews realism in favor of a purely psychological drama. Nothing really happens except opening doors amidst conversation. Really, I kid you not, that's all that technically "happens" in the opera. But as an exploration of how a husband and wife alternately seek and flee emotional vulnerability the story has a lot of weight to it. The sheer lack of realism can be funny. Depending on the way its staged when Bluebird's previous wives are discovered, alive but living so that their blood may feed the garden and their tears fill the placid lake (sorry, couldn't resist), they show up and we see that there's a brunette, a blond, and a redhead. The wives correspond to dawn, noon, and dusk, with Judith herself representing the night with her black hair. Yes, it's that obvious, Bluebird's harem includes a all the basic colors a guy might be expected to want in a harem. It's so patently silly to just "one of each" in Bluebird's harem and yet in a way it fits a kind of psychological realism--there are, after all, guys who want "variety" and would prefer whomever the current "in" wife is to not make too much of a point about it.
Though the plot revolves around Bluebird not wishing to divulge himself and Judith trusting her love will illuminate the darkest recesses of her husband's life this fantasy setting retains a core of emotional realism that wouldn't be conveyed by the fantasy trappings. As Joss Whedon put it about his recent film The Avengers, what genre lets you do is not worry about realism and get straight into the emotional and social undercurrents of a particular idea or concern. Bartok's opera does not need to traffic in realism to play with the idea that in a marriage a woman labors under the belief that her love will change her man while the man simply hopes that his wife will not figure out everything about him and will not herself change. Both find their hopes dashed by the end of the opera. Both resign themselves to their discoveries. Judith figures out that Bluebird has loved other wives before her even though Bluebird had urged her to not ask questions. Judith gets what she wants and opens all the doors that shed increasing light on the castle by the fifth door but the sixth and seventh doors are opened at the price of darkness that does not end.
One of my parents told me that one of the common mistakes made going into a marriage is that the woman thinks she'll change her man and the man thinks the woman won't change. Bluebird's Castle may seem pedestrian if cast in that light but there are some things that shock and amuse because, however pedestrian they are in real life, they never cease to shock and amuse people for whom there is always a first time. For instance, I could joke that eating food or drinking water might get boring after a while or that people might find sex boring after a while. It must happen, yet billions of people have demonstrated that some things apparently don't lose their lustre that much over time.
The flip side of the pedestrian is that it is often capable of being profound while the flip side of the profound is that it often ends up seeming pedestrian. Illuminating the profound within the pedestrian is more challenging than trying to go straight for profound. In one of these paths it's easier to establish some possibility for genuine surprise. Discovering the profound in the pedestrian, if it gets pulled off, is more powerful than trying to go for the profound, even going for the profound in a pedestrian setting. From the 1930s and 1940s there was still some Socialist Realism stuff going on. But let's face it, Superman has gotten a few more movies out of him than Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, right? We don't even need to seriously discuss why at much length, do we?
Yet time and again critics will miss this obvious point, the more realistic and "real" the social trappings and setting of a story become the more irrelevant many details become at a greater remove from the historical moment. The genre story, the science fiction tale, the fantasy tale, the superhero genre, these genres lack "realism" in terms of social setting but they compensate for this lack by way of having a fairy tale element that permits adaptation. Captain America is probably an exception that proves the rule, since his World War 2 origins are immutable. By contrast, it's possible to translate the origin of Batman or Superman in mythic terms across almost any modern urban setting and perhaps even pre-industrial societies in some cases (Gotham by Gaslight, for the cogniscenti). When done well genre stories can skip past concerns about period detail and get straight to the relational dynamics that become the core of any story.
I suppose to throw a bone to the Diamond arias the problem with an isolated presentation of arias is they are bereft of any relational context in which they could have any meaning. The legendary passacaglia from Dido and Aeneus by Henry Purcell is remarkable on its own, of course, but it's real emotional power derives from its context within the opera as a whole. I'm just going to assume you either know what I was talking about or are an even bigger music nerd than I am and know far more about opera than I do. Having written at some length about opera I feel like I should go back and write more about Batman cartoons. After all, one art form is not necessarily more profound or relevant than the other.
As Eve Tushnet put it:
P.S. 05/19/2012
Watching an actually good opera with a fantastic setting but psychological realism and a "realistic" opera with implausible character arcs and motivations reminded me of a fun comparison/contrast piece between Spiderman 3 and La Boheme James Harleman wrote a few years ago.
http://cinemagogue.com/2007/06/04/spider-man-versus-the-opera/
I'm obviously not the only Christian who cheerfully jumps from opera to comic books and back. James does a fine job jumping back and forth across the "high" and "low" divide. Another blog I'm not sure I've linked to in a while (if at all) I want to highlight is Jeffrey Overstreet's.
http://lookingcloser.org/
The Diamond piece, though Schwarz may champion it assiduously, is a chore. I was not surprised when I heard the six arias why the opera was not staged and why it never took off. Sorry to say but it was a tuneless mash of overwrought doggerel set to even more overwrought music. Not overwrought isn't always a problem. Schoenberg wrote his share of overwrought musical settings. It's not like Erwartung is low key but it worked, and it worked as a double bill with Bluebird's Castle back at the Seattle Opera 2009 season. One opera could be said to be about the disconnect between man and woman while the other could be said to be the same thing but a more profound disconnect within the self.
But what those two operas have that the unstaged Diamond opera seems to have not had is a remorseless disinterest in "realism". I can't recall much about the premise of the Diamond opera except that it looked like the fifteenth reheating of a story line like The Great Gatsby or Tender it the Night. Opera by its nature can't easily afford to be quotidian. If you're going to fork over that much time and money and sit on your butt for hours you're not going to expect some aria singing the praises of hot running water (unless you're at a specific opera by Paul Hindemith). Caricature and even cartoonish stuff is not unheard of in opera. It's okay for a story to have weird and fanciful elements if the psychological trajectory of the character and the story rings true. We've had Pixar movies around for decades now, after all.
The premise and resolution of the unstaged Diamond opera was telling for me. The woman resolves to be alone and chart out the lonely path of freedom. Whatever. The premise is too pedestrian. To your own self be true is ultimately too tedious and pedestrian a point to be bothered with. You can get that kind of insight ("Maybe you need to stop looking for your identity in a man and be single for a while") in any third rate advice column in the Life section of a newspaper or a website. You don't need to write a two or three hour opera about that.
Of course perhaps I'm being unfair to an opera that has never been staged and that the composer gave up on. As a sometime composer myself, though, I'm willing to admit my bias up front, if even the composer gave up on the project that might be a signal. And at the risk of trafficking in name-dropping points, how many people, exactly, are die-hard David Diamond fans?
Bluebird's Castle completely eschews realism in favor of a purely psychological drama. Nothing really happens except opening doors amidst conversation. Really, I kid you not, that's all that technically "happens" in the opera. But as an exploration of how a husband and wife alternately seek and flee emotional vulnerability the story has a lot of weight to it. The sheer lack of realism can be funny. Depending on the way its staged when Bluebird's previous wives are discovered, alive but living so that their blood may feed the garden and their tears fill the placid lake (sorry, couldn't resist), they show up and we see that there's a brunette, a blond, and a redhead. The wives correspond to dawn, noon, and dusk, with Judith herself representing the night with her black hair. Yes, it's that obvious, Bluebird's harem includes a all the basic colors a guy might be expected to want in a harem. It's so patently silly to just "one of each" in Bluebird's harem and yet in a way it fits a kind of psychological realism--there are, after all, guys who want "variety" and would prefer whomever the current "in" wife is to not make too much of a point about it.
Though the plot revolves around Bluebird not wishing to divulge himself and Judith trusting her love will illuminate the darkest recesses of her husband's life this fantasy setting retains a core of emotional realism that wouldn't be conveyed by the fantasy trappings. As Joss Whedon put it about his recent film The Avengers, what genre lets you do is not worry about realism and get straight into the emotional and social undercurrents of a particular idea or concern. Bartok's opera does not need to traffic in realism to play with the idea that in a marriage a woman labors under the belief that her love will change her man while the man simply hopes that his wife will not figure out everything about him and will not herself change. Both find their hopes dashed by the end of the opera. Both resign themselves to their discoveries. Judith figures out that Bluebird has loved other wives before her even though Bluebird had urged her to not ask questions. Judith gets what she wants and opens all the doors that shed increasing light on the castle by the fifth door but the sixth and seventh doors are opened at the price of darkness that does not end.
One of my parents told me that one of the common mistakes made going into a marriage is that the woman thinks she'll change her man and the man thinks the woman won't change. Bluebird's Castle may seem pedestrian if cast in that light but there are some things that shock and amuse because, however pedestrian they are in real life, they never cease to shock and amuse people for whom there is always a first time. For instance, I could joke that eating food or drinking water might get boring after a while or that people might find sex boring after a while. It must happen, yet billions of people have demonstrated that some things apparently don't lose their lustre that much over time.
The flip side of the pedestrian is that it is often capable of being profound while the flip side of the profound is that it often ends up seeming pedestrian. Illuminating the profound within the pedestrian is more challenging than trying to go straight for profound. In one of these paths it's easier to establish some possibility for genuine surprise. Discovering the profound in the pedestrian, if it gets pulled off, is more powerful than trying to go for the profound, even going for the profound in a pedestrian setting. From the 1930s and 1940s there was still some Socialist Realism stuff going on. But let's face it, Superman has gotten a few more movies out of him than Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, right? We don't even need to seriously discuss why at much length, do we?
Yet time and again critics will miss this obvious point, the more realistic and "real" the social trappings and setting of a story become the more irrelevant many details become at a greater remove from the historical moment. The genre story, the science fiction tale, the fantasy tale, the superhero genre, these genres lack "realism" in terms of social setting but they compensate for this lack by way of having a fairy tale element that permits adaptation. Captain America is probably an exception that proves the rule, since his World War 2 origins are immutable. By contrast, it's possible to translate the origin of Batman or Superman in mythic terms across almost any modern urban setting and perhaps even pre-industrial societies in some cases (Gotham by Gaslight, for the cogniscenti). When done well genre stories can skip past concerns about period detail and get straight to the relational dynamics that become the core of any story.
I suppose to throw a bone to the Diamond arias the problem with an isolated presentation of arias is they are bereft of any relational context in which they could have any meaning. The legendary passacaglia from Dido and Aeneus by Henry Purcell is remarkable on its own, of course, but it's real emotional power derives from its context within the opera as a whole. I'm just going to assume you either know what I was talking about or are an even bigger music nerd than I am and know far more about opera than I do. Having written at some length about opera I feel like I should go back and write more about Batman cartoons. After all, one art form is not necessarily more profound or relevant than the other.
As Eve Tushnet put it:
"Realism" only works for people whose worldviews are already accepted as realistic. The rest of us must make do with genre.
David Diamond fans are certainly welcome to champion an unstaged opera with a realistic setting. As for me and my house, I still prefer Bluebird's Castle.P.S. 05/19/2012
Watching an actually good opera with a fantastic setting but psychological realism and a "realistic" opera with implausible character arcs and motivations reminded me of a fun comparison/contrast piece between Spiderman 3 and La Boheme James Harleman wrote a few years ago.
http://cinemagogue.com/2007/06/04/spider-man-versus-the-opera/
I'm obviously not the only Christian who cheerfully jumps from opera to comic books and back. James does a fine job jumping back and forth across the "high" and "low" divide. Another blog I'm not sure I've linked to in a while (if at all) I want to highlight is Jeffrey Overstreet's.
http://lookingcloser.org/
and I'm still writing stuff for Mockingbird
Not as much as I feel I should be writing (not that you'd know this from my blogging) but I have been writing. I've been working on more installments for the Mockingbird project. I have along the way realized there has been a gigantic glaring oversight in my writings about Batman up to this point. If you've been a loyal reader (thank you) you may have a guess as to what that glaring oversight is. Well, I'll give you a spoilery clue what that oversight has been by invoking a popular axiom, at night all cats are gray.
Yes, dear reader, I forgot about her! You really can't write anything about Batman and not write about her. So I plan to fix that. If you don't know who she is by now go watch the trailer for The Dark Knight Rises and you'll figure it out. ;-)
Yes, dear reader, I forgot about her! You really can't write anything about Batman and not write about her. So I plan to fix that. If you don't know who she is by now go watch the trailer for The Dark Knight Rises and you'll figure it out. ;-)
Kinnon: One Ed to Rule Them All
http://kinnon.tv/2012/05/one-ed-to-rule-them-all.html
The title alone should telegraph the content and tone for this ... if you just supply "Young" after Ed. :-)
The title alone should telegraph the content and tone for this ... if you just supply "Young" after Ed. :-)
HT Phoenix Preacher: Jonathan Haidt on Social Conservatives, New Atheists and Civility at Christian Post
http://www.christianpost.com/news/interview-jonathan-haidt-on-social-conservatives-new-atheists-and-civility-in-politics-74984/
The link is buried so deep into this week's Linkathon I want to plug for the article by posting it as a stand alone entry here. A few years ago I think I read some of what Haidt was discussing about three verses six measures of ethics and that it was becoming more apparent to him that liberals focus on three while social conservatives focus on six. The challenge is not that liberals and conservatives don't share any common values, Haidt began proposing, it was that conservatives had some additional values liberals don't share that seemed to stymie the possibility for dialogue. Haidt was, by his own account (and my reading at the time) more liberal than he says he is now.
Anyway, it's a fascinating interview and worth reading. This part is just a sample, and an interesting one in which Haidt explains why he thinks Democrats and Republicans have made a mistake of ramping identity politics. He also makes what is (to me) an unsurprising distinction between conservative intellectuals and the Republican Party. You may not agree but it's an atheist talking about conservative and liberal politics and religion. Should any of us expect to agree on everything?
Haidt: First, let me distinguish between Republicans and conservatives. As I say in the book, I think conservatives have a more correct view of human nature than do liberals. But, as I also say, I'm praising conservative intellectuals, not the Republican Party. The Republican Party is now going through a moralistic fervor akin to that which gripped the Democrats in the 70s and 80s when they were into identity politics. I think the Republican Party has circled around a few issues, especially taxes, which are in some ways counter to conservative values and bad for the country.
I think Republicans need to take income inequality more seriously. Not because I favor equality of outcomes. I do not. I think the right is correct to stress merit and earned rewards, not handouts and forced equality. But I think what Republicans are blind to is that power corrupts. Especially in a democracy in which money buys access. I think the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are correct that crony capitalism is a huge problem for our country and I think the Republicans are not sensitive enough to that.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Link: Emotional Purity and Courtship discussed at Recovering Grace
http://www.recoveringgrace.org/2011/07/emotionalpurity/
http://www.recoveringgrace.org/2011/08/emotional-purity-and-courtship-a-conclusion/
A few old links about "emotional purity" and courtship.
I could write a lot about my observations about the courtship fad at a place I used to be at. I'm sorely tempted to, but I'm not going to do it right now.
HT Mockingbird: Can You Call a 9 year old a psychopath?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/can-you-call-a-9-year-old-a-psychopath.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=all
This article is a bit long and the title explains the focus of the piece succinctly.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Peter Enns asks the second most obvious question about Adam
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2012/05/whats-the-real-problem-with-no-historical-adam-really/
The problem for Christian theology is God’s wrath.
A historical Adam, who is first human created without evolutionary predecessor, whose disobedience is somehow put on the shoulders of all humans, gives some rationale for why God is so angry and why that anger needs to be dealt with.
If there is no first man who fell, why is God so mad at everyone?
Well ... if the problem for Christian theology is God's wrath that doesn't fit the vast majority of unbelievers I've met who say the problem for Christian theology is the existence of evil. Now, to be sure, God's wrath is problematic because if God knows everything God should have known better than to create the world we see, which is why atheists stay atheists and why many a former Christian becomes an atheist.
Many a person will note that it seemed silly to claim that a decision by one man should be the basis for the damnation of the entirety of humanity. Of course the idea seems silly and implausible to someone reading Genesis and not so silly or implausible when someone like George H. W. Bush or Barack Obama sits in the Oval office with the ability to authorize nuclear attacks. Of course the better send-ups of this level of power over life or death on the planet are more in the vein of Dr. Strangelove. People may think it silly or terrible that so much power could exist in the hands of a single person but wouldn't the more terrifying prospect be that the future of the human race lays in the human race as a whole, or in a small self-selected group?
One of those strange ironies of history and polemic seems to be that after centuries of the First World becoming the First World a bunch of people in the First World are afraid the Second World and the Third World might try to catch up with the First World ... and the worry is there aren't enough natural resources for everyone to pursue a First World existence. But we are creatures of comfort, aren't we? How many people who are worried about the rampant consumerism of the First World are going to live in a Second or Third World way? "Sustainable living" is the kind of concern that, in many ways, is a "First World problem" of the first order. We're the ones who would seem to have made the problems that come hand in hand with the ideals we have striven toward.
If there was no historical Adam then that's what it is, but it might also show how much even those who don't subscribe to the tale can be influenced by elements of the story. The Na'vi are yet another pandering homage to a story that imagines that if we just got back to Whatever Was Before Us we'd be in touch when the narrative of Genesis 3 tells us that whatever we might imagine about that home we can't go back there again. The harder we try to restore Eden, it seems, the more we make the world a Hell. The importance of Adam and Eve (and the serpent) is that creation itself contains moral agency that goes against what God is said to have created, that garden and all. It's true that in the Old Testament we see God gets angry at all sorts of times. The question that comes up is never "Why is God mad at us?" There's usually an explanation. Enns must surely realize that Revelation has a whole lot of wrath in it, too. It's not usual for figures in the Bible to question God's wrath in general.
What figures in the biblical books do push back on is when they tell God, "Is your being angry reason enough to do this!?" Abraham bargains with God over how few righteous people can dwell in Sodom so that the Lord won't destroy the city. God is talked out of destroying Israel by Moses so that the Egyptians will not mock the name of Yahweh. Job questions point blank the assumption that what God allowed to happen to him was the result of some sin. The believer and the unbeliever thus both turn to consider the misery and death in the world and ask, "Is this warranted by anyone who would claim to have made everything?" The different answers the believer and unbeliever come to about this question don't need to be rehearsed.
We scapegoat groups and individuals as regularly now as in the days when Genesis 3 was written, don't we? We can come up with more sophisticated ways of reasoning at a variety of levels. But even in a secular society there seem to be equivalents to what theologians have called "natural headship", "federal headship" and "imputation". Adam and Eve are the ones whose decisions are considered to have ruined things for the rest of us. They are the first humans humans can identify as being to blame. There's no buck to pass back to further than that except Satan and, beyond Satan, God. But the moral agency of Adam and Eve don't go away. If the failure of the first family is a typology what we "might" lose is the ability to talk historically about the consequences of our actions changing the world we live in for the worse.
If Adam, in some fashion, existed and made a decision to disobey God what was the nature of that decision? An Adam who can know a command and disobey it anyone, even as a kind of poetic expression, can make a decision where the consequences make sense. Obviously if we made a decision dumb enough God could get mad at us, which is what Genesis 3 details. If we just came into being and the world is the way it is with as much suffering that humans inflict upon themselves, to say nothing of the rest of the world, then, well ... a lot of what Genesis 3 on describes is God letting people deal with the consequences of decisions they've made and letting those consequences spin out into generations so far out that time slips away from us all. As Bonhoeffer put it, even talking about the role of the serpent doesn't dodge the essential problem, that evil emerged from within the creation that God Himself called good. The believer struggles to affirm how suffering, death, and evil exist within creation while saying the Creator is still good. The unbeliever, of course ,never has this particular problem, at least not the secularist.
The problem for Christian theology is God’s wrath.
A historical Adam, who is first human created without evolutionary predecessor, whose disobedience is somehow put on the shoulders of all humans, gives some rationale for why God is so angry and why that anger needs to be dealt with.
If there is no first man who fell, why is God so mad at everyone?
Well ... if the problem for Christian theology is God's wrath that doesn't fit the vast majority of unbelievers I've met who say the problem for Christian theology is the existence of evil. Now, to be sure, God's wrath is problematic because if God knows everything God should have known better than to create the world we see, which is why atheists stay atheists and why many a former Christian becomes an atheist.
Many a person will note that it seemed silly to claim that a decision by one man should be the basis for the damnation of the entirety of humanity. Of course the idea seems silly and implausible to someone reading Genesis and not so silly or implausible when someone like George H. W. Bush or Barack Obama sits in the Oval office with the ability to authorize nuclear attacks. Of course the better send-ups of this level of power over life or death on the planet are more in the vein of Dr. Strangelove. People may think it silly or terrible that so much power could exist in the hands of a single person but wouldn't the more terrifying prospect be that the future of the human race lays in the human race as a whole, or in a small self-selected group?
One of those strange ironies of history and polemic seems to be that after centuries of the First World becoming the First World a bunch of people in the First World are afraid the Second World and the Third World might try to catch up with the First World ... and the worry is there aren't enough natural resources for everyone to pursue a First World existence. But we are creatures of comfort, aren't we? How many people who are worried about the rampant consumerism of the First World are going to live in a Second or Third World way? "Sustainable living" is the kind of concern that, in many ways, is a "First World problem" of the first order. We're the ones who would seem to have made the problems that come hand in hand with the ideals we have striven toward.
If there was no historical Adam then that's what it is, but it might also show how much even those who don't subscribe to the tale can be influenced by elements of the story. The Na'vi are yet another pandering homage to a story that imagines that if we just got back to Whatever Was Before Us we'd be in touch when the narrative of Genesis 3 tells us that whatever we might imagine about that home we can't go back there again. The harder we try to restore Eden, it seems, the more we make the world a Hell. The importance of Adam and Eve (and the serpent) is that creation itself contains moral agency that goes against what God is said to have created, that garden and all. It's true that in the Old Testament we see God gets angry at all sorts of times. The question that comes up is never "Why is God mad at us?" There's usually an explanation. Enns must surely realize that Revelation has a whole lot of wrath in it, too. It's not usual for figures in the Bible to question God's wrath in general.
What figures in the biblical books do push back on is when they tell God, "Is your being angry reason enough to do this!?" Abraham bargains with God over how few righteous people can dwell in Sodom so that the Lord won't destroy the city. God is talked out of destroying Israel by Moses so that the Egyptians will not mock the name of Yahweh. Job questions point blank the assumption that what God allowed to happen to him was the result of some sin. The believer and the unbeliever thus both turn to consider the misery and death in the world and ask, "Is this warranted by anyone who would claim to have made everything?" The different answers the believer and unbeliever come to about this question don't need to be rehearsed.
We scapegoat groups and individuals as regularly now as in the days when Genesis 3 was written, don't we? We can come up with more sophisticated ways of reasoning at a variety of levels. But even in a secular society there seem to be equivalents to what theologians have called "natural headship", "federal headship" and "imputation". Adam and Eve are the ones whose decisions are considered to have ruined things for the rest of us. They are the first humans humans can identify as being to blame. There's no buck to pass back to further than that except Satan and, beyond Satan, God. But the moral agency of Adam and Eve don't go away. If the failure of the first family is a typology what we "might" lose is the ability to talk historically about the consequences of our actions changing the world we live in for the worse.
If Adam, in some fashion, existed and made a decision to disobey God what was the nature of that decision? An Adam who can know a command and disobey it anyone, even as a kind of poetic expression, can make a decision where the consequences make sense. Obviously if we made a decision dumb enough God could get mad at us, which is what Genesis 3 details. If we just came into being and the world is the way it is with as much suffering that humans inflict upon themselves, to say nothing of the rest of the world, then, well ... a lot of what Genesis 3 on describes is God letting people deal with the consequences of decisions they've made and letting those consequences spin out into generations so far out that time slips away from us all. As Bonhoeffer put it, even talking about the role of the serpent doesn't dodge the essential problem, that evil emerged from within the creation that God Himself called good. The believer struggles to affirm how suffering, death, and evil exist within creation while saying the Creator is still good. The unbeliever, of course ,never has this particular problem, at least not the secularist.
Electric cars could kill you (because you won't hear them coming)
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/gearbox/2012/05/hybrid_and_electric_cars_too_quiet_why_they_re_dangerous_to_pedestrians_.single.html
Electric cars are too quiet, quiet enough that blind people seem to have been hit by some of them. What a comforting thought for visually handicapable people everywhere in this country, eh? The electric car could be the death of someone. Well, one author at Slate helpfully suggests sleighbells, in obviously tongue-in-cheek fashion.
Electric cars are too quiet, quiet enough that blind people seem to have been hit by some of them. What a comforting thought for visually handicapable people everywhere in this country, eh? The electric car could be the death of someone. Well, one author at Slate helpfully suggests sleighbells, in obviously tongue-in-cheek fashion.
Phoenix Preacher: Hearing from God
http://phoenixpreacher.net/?p=12273
Point 3 from yesterday couldn't get made without some enquiries as to what was meant by it. Ergo, clarification and expansion.
Perhaps the most challenging application for me of the observation that God provides, which I've written about before, is that very often God providentially chooses to provide through His people or through people who aren't necessarily believers. In some ways a residual "me and God" relationship can still kick in. In some places I've been that would get chalked up as pride and there'd be some truth to that.
At another level I've wondered how proud people can be in some professions. I spent close to a decade doing non-profit work and, don't get me wrong, I like non-profit work. At the risk of making a deliberately polemical observation those of us who have worked in non-profit are essentially professional beggars, begging on behalf of helping others. That goes triple for any church employee if you think about it, so pride in a church employee should be obscene. After all, if you work for a church you're working for an institution that, at least in the United States, is probably a non-profit (if not a 501(c)3 etc). You're supposed to not be a lover of money to even get a job there (not that this hasn't stopped legions of those who are lovers of money from getting jobs but that's another topic for some other day).
You're also supposed to recognize that even having this faith in Christ to share with others (or whichever faith it might be if you're not a Christian) is a gift to be shared. If you raise funds for the work of the church where would pride come in? That you're a better than average professional beggar? I suppose there's "some" basis for pride in that if the pride is in the accomplishment of helping others. Maybe Roy Baumeister would say that a person can have pleasure in the power of making a difference in someone's life, ergo the actions of wealthy philanthropists toward those they can't possibly get to know. You see, at various levels, the whole thing about pride as a problem is itself fraught with problems. If you keep running with this morbid introspection it never ends. It may be precisely why authors of scripture urge self-examination for a time but get back to fixing our eyes upon Christ.
I'm an ex-Pentecostal and if there is something I don't miss it's a mystical requirement of having some spiritual destiny, maybe connected in some way to End Times stuff. In my teens I was still Pentecostal and dispensationalist. I still took seriously the possibility that we were in the End Times in some Hal Lindsey way. In the 1980s the Beast was being discussed as some supercomputer in Belgium associated with the European Common Market. The Antichrist was either going to come from the EU (revived Roman Empire, remember?) or maybe from Syria (since there was some shot at Syria brokering some deal between Israel and Palestinians in some fashion ... though I remember this far less clearly or accurately. The main thing was if Jesus was coming back to Rapture away all the real Christians before the Tribulation you were either on the right team or you weren't.
People I know later admitted to me that not having kids before 2000 was partly due to concerns about the possibility that maybe this Tribulation stuff might even be true. I had given up on the plausibility of the Rapture as a way to interpret biblical texts around 1992 but I certainly wasn't married and had jettisoned dispensationalist readings of Revelation by that time. I had come to the conclusion I was probably not cut out for married life on grounds other than that the End Times were so at hand it would be a waste of time to marry if Jesus was coming back and in the age to come no one would be married anyway. Other people, as Headless Unicorn Guy has mentioned here in some comments, decided to take the path of "Do not let the Rapture take you away a virgin, go get married now." I never encountered anyone who got married just to get laid before Jesus came back. I remember reading Michael Spenser's blog post "Wretched Urgency" but HUG's stories seem to bring a whole new level of meta to "desperate".
But at more mundane levels I get the urgency to know "what" God wants a person to do over who God wants a person to be. Nothing alleviates uncertainty about destiny or purpose quite like a god, right? If you can convince yourself, and especially others, that God has a destiny for you and you never waiver from that in any public setting (you can admit later that you had private doubts but that's to better cement the public certainty of your given destiny) then you can retain a pretty secure job. You might even be able to set up an organization with 501(c)3 status, eventually.
A Christian I know once told me that if the promises of God aren't good for anything but the age to come they aren't really good ofr anything. Well, there's always not being a Christian. The resurrection of the dead, particularly the resurrection of Jesus, and teh promise of a life to come is pretty much the focal point of the Christian faith. Benefits accrued in this life are matters of providence (i.e. you get lucky and SOMETIMES may be wise). If you live in the United States and have a job and maybe weigh a little more than you should it means you're blessed beyond the imagination of many people across the world. Life stinks at times but everyone dies at some point.
We're promised through Christ that in the age to come we will live and reign with Him. Paul wrote, "Do you not know that we will judge the angels?" But it's no surprise if many of us are tempted to get some of that divine eternal destiny in this life, preferably as soon as possible! Then again in some parables Jesus taught that those who had rewards and their fill in this life would not have it so awesome later. We don't know what awaits us so it would be silly to imagine that the big shots who claim to be Christians in this life will be shining the shoes of believers who died of a water-borne illness in Bangladesh. That isn't really what Jesus was getting at saying that many who are first shall be last and many who are last shall be first, however tempting it might be for people who are sure they're coming up last may like that idea.
The opportunities to hear from God are, very often, mundane, so mundane it would be easy to suppose (as unbelievers obviously do) that God does not even speak through them. One of the things psychologists and neuroscientists have been discovering over the last forty years is that attention is directional and a limited resource. Go look up "The Invisible Gorilla". When you are looking for X intently and actively you're not looking for Y and if you somehow manage to notice both X and Y you'll overlook Z. One of the sobering things about Christian life that is also encouraging is that as a quest for destiny in this life goes the Christian faith reminds us that rather than laying out the options of A through Z our destiny, our legacy as Christians, is not ultimately even in that alphabet and that judging the success or failure of people on the basis of that alphabet is still, ultimately, a worldly point of view.
It's easy for people with upper end five-figure incomes (or more) to talk about identity and how important it is. There's a kind of obsession with the grand meaning of life and legacy that comes form having the luxury of fretting about ultimate meaning and purpose. Considering ultimate destiny and legacy may be the most uniquely luxurious of first world problems. Obviously these are questions that have consumed people since the dawn of humanity, but some Americans (and some Christians among them) have the discontent of wanting to change the world, as though just having a room named after them in some building were too small a legacy in this life.
Remember that in the second half of Hebrews there were a bunch of people who were described as dying, as starving, as cast off and you know what? They don't even get names. In an even more fitting irony we don't know the names of anyone who got the letter to the Hebrews. More amusingly ironic than even that, we don't even know who wrote the letter to the Hebrews! For that matter, traditional ascription withstanding, the gospels are anonymous. Often I want to hear from God about what to do and what will happen to me. I can see from psalms that I'm not alone in wondering these things. David himself had anxiety that the promises be kept and gave Solomon advice concerned with how to make sure that happened. There's a bitter yet amusing irony in that if you want to go back and read that.
Sometimes I wonder if the big scandal for a lot of American Christians is having a boring, normal, uneventful life rather than an on-fire, sold-out, burning Gospel legacy that changes the world kind of life. It is, of course, a wonderful thing to have a life that matters and impacts people positively. I just wonder, as I have over the last few years, if that isn't the number one fast track for becoming a Pharisee.
Point 3 from yesterday couldn't get made without some enquiries as to what was meant by it. Ergo, clarification and expansion.
Perhaps the most challenging application for me of the observation that God provides, which I've written about before, is that very often God providentially chooses to provide through His people or through people who aren't necessarily believers. In some ways a residual "me and God" relationship can still kick in. In some places I've been that would get chalked up as pride and there'd be some truth to that.
At another level I've wondered how proud people can be in some professions. I spent close to a decade doing non-profit work and, don't get me wrong, I like non-profit work. At the risk of making a deliberately polemical observation those of us who have worked in non-profit are essentially professional beggars, begging on behalf of helping others. That goes triple for any church employee if you think about it, so pride in a church employee should be obscene. After all, if you work for a church you're working for an institution that, at least in the United States, is probably a non-profit (if not a 501(c)3 etc). You're supposed to not be a lover of money to even get a job there (not that this hasn't stopped legions of those who are lovers of money from getting jobs but that's another topic for some other day).
You're also supposed to recognize that even having this faith in Christ to share with others (or whichever faith it might be if you're not a Christian) is a gift to be shared. If you raise funds for the work of the church where would pride come in? That you're a better than average professional beggar? I suppose there's "some" basis for pride in that if the pride is in the accomplishment of helping others. Maybe Roy Baumeister would say that a person can have pleasure in the power of making a difference in someone's life, ergo the actions of wealthy philanthropists toward those they can't possibly get to know. You see, at various levels, the whole thing about pride as a problem is itself fraught with problems. If you keep running with this morbid introspection it never ends. It may be precisely why authors of scripture urge self-examination for a time but get back to fixing our eyes upon Christ.
I'm an ex-Pentecostal and if there is something I don't miss it's a mystical requirement of having some spiritual destiny, maybe connected in some way to End Times stuff. In my teens I was still Pentecostal and dispensationalist. I still took seriously the possibility that we were in the End Times in some Hal Lindsey way. In the 1980s the Beast was being discussed as some supercomputer in Belgium associated with the European Common Market. The Antichrist was either going to come from the EU (revived Roman Empire, remember?) or maybe from Syria (since there was some shot at Syria brokering some deal between Israel and Palestinians in some fashion ... though I remember this far less clearly or accurately. The main thing was if Jesus was coming back to Rapture away all the real Christians before the Tribulation you were either on the right team or you weren't.
People I know later admitted to me that not having kids before 2000 was partly due to concerns about the possibility that maybe this Tribulation stuff might even be true. I had given up on the plausibility of the Rapture as a way to interpret biblical texts around 1992 but I certainly wasn't married and had jettisoned dispensationalist readings of Revelation by that time. I had come to the conclusion I was probably not cut out for married life on grounds other than that the End Times were so at hand it would be a waste of time to marry if Jesus was coming back and in the age to come no one would be married anyway. Other people, as Headless Unicorn Guy has mentioned here in some comments, decided to take the path of "Do not let the Rapture take you away a virgin, go get married now." I never encountered anyone who got married just to get laid before Jesus came back. I remember reading Michael Spenser's blog post "Wretched Urgency" but HUG's stories seem to bring a whole new level of meta to "desperate".
But at more mundane levels I get the urgency to know "what" God wants a person to do over who God wants a person to be. Nothing alleviates uncertainty about destiny or purpose quite like a god, right? If you can convince yourself, and especially others, that God has a destiny for you and you never waiver from that in any public setting (you can admit later that you had private doubts but that's to better cement the public certainty of your given destiny) then you can retain a pretty secure job. You might even be able to set up an organization with 501(c)3 status, eventually.
A Christian I know once told me that if the promises of God aren't good for anything but the age to come they aren't really good ofr anything. Well, there's always not being a Christian. The resurrection of the dead, particularly the resurrection of Jesus, and teh promise of a life to come is pretty much the focal point of the Christian faith. Benefits accrued in this life are matters of providence (i.e. you get lucky and SOMETIMES may be wise). If you live in the United States and have a job and maybe weigh a little more than you should it means you're blessed beyond the imagination of many people across the world. Life stinks at times but everyone dies at some point.
We're promised through Christ that in the age to come we will live and reign with Him. Paul wrote, "Do you not know that we will judge the angels?" But it's no surprise if many of us are tempted to get some of that divine eternal destiny in this life, preferably as soon as possible! Then again in some parables Jesus taught that those who had rewards and their fill in this life would not have it so awesome later. We don't know what awaits us so it would be silly to imagine that the big shots who claim to be Christians in this life will be shining the shoes of believers who died of a water-borne illness in Bangladesh. That isn't really what Jesus was getting at saying that many who are first shall be last and many who are last shall be first, however tempting it might be for people who are sure they're coming up last may like that idea.
The opportunities to hear from God are, very often, mundane, so mundane it would be easy to suppose (as unbelievers obviously do) that God does not even speak through them. One of the things psychologists and neuroscientists have been discovering over the last forty years is that attention is directional and a limited resource. Go look up "The Invisible Gorilla". When you are looking for X intently and actively you're not looking for Y and if you somehow manage to notice both X and Y you'll overlook Z. One of the sobering things about Christian life that is also encouraging is that as a quest for destiny in this life goes the Christian faith reminds us that rather than laying out the options of A through Z our destiny, our legacy as Christians, is not ultimately even in that alphabet and that judging the success or failure of people on the basis of that alphabet is still, ultimately, a worldly point of view.
It's easy for people with upper end five-figure incomes (or more) to talk about identity and how important it is. There's a kind of obsession with the grand meaning of life and legacy that comes form having the luxury of fretting about ultimate meaning and purpose. Considering ultimate destiny and legacy may be the most uniquely luxurious of first world problems. Obviously these are questions that have consumed people since the dawn of humanity, but some Americans (and some Christians among them) have the discontent of wanting to change the world, as though just having a room named after them in some building were too small a legacy in this life.
Remember that in the second half of Hebrews there were a bunch of people who were described as dying, as starving, as cast off and you know what? They don't even get names. In an even more fitting irony we don't know the names of anyone who got the letter to the Hebrews. More amusingly ironic than even that, we don't even know who wrote the letter to the Hebrews! For that matter, traditional ascription withstanding, the gospels are anonymous. Often I want to hear from God about what to do and what will happen to me. I can see from psalms that I'm not alone in wondering these things. David himself had anxiety that the promises be kept and gave Solomon advice concerned with how to make sure that happened. There's a bitter yet amusing irony in that if you want to go back and read that.
Sometimes I wonder if the big scandal for a lot of American Christians is having a boring, normal, uneventful life rather than an on-fire, sold-out, burning Gospel legacy that changes the world kind of life. It is, of course, a wonderful thing to have a life that matters and impacts people positively. I just wonder, as I have over the last few years, if that isn't the number one fast track for becoming a Pharisee.
Orthocuban on Constantine and conservative Protestant culture warriors
http://www.orthocuban.com/2012/05/american-protestants-should-quit-complaining-about-constantine/#comments
Orthoduck admits in comments he bollixed what he was trying to get across but the point is still interesting--conservative evangelical Protestants will have a hard time complaining about how Constantine ruined the church given the passion with which they attempt to get the State to impose good moral law on everyone else if the core problem of Constantinian Christianity was conflating Church and State. Andrew's observation that North Americans seem to think they have a corner on the market for reasons Constantinian Christianity has been bad is a fun one. David Fitch (I think) suggested that one of the reasons there might arguably not be a "Reformed" movement in North America was because (and he may have been partly joking, I don't recall) that there were no churches or institutions to reform in the new continent they were there were in Europe.
Orthoduck's main point, which he clarifies in a comment, is that the American Anabaptist who would have avoided Church/State entanglement now seeks to wade into politics and social reform. I suppose whether it's the Religious Left or the Religious Right that much might be something people could agree on. Things have changed in the last century.
http://www.orthocuban.com/2012/05/american-protestants-should-quit-complaining-about-constantine/comment-page-1/#comment-112190
I suspect that Evangelicals today are actually doing the opposite of what they think Constantine did. If he allegedly made the Church the tool of the State (I would argue he did not do that; this would not really happen until the Erastian regimes of Protestant Western Europe following the Reformation and, sadly, in Russia after the abolition of the Patriarchate), well, it seems that THEY are trying to make the state the tool of the Church at least insofar as they feel they must use the state to impose a certain moral code on the country as a whole. In this effort, it seems they are willing to make common cause with people whose theology differs greatly from their own, whether it be Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or…Mormon.
http://www.orthocuban.com/2012/05/american-protestants-should-quit-complaining-about-constantine/comment-page-1/#comment-112191
I would also note that in pursuing such a strategy, they are, in effect, trying to do what the Pope actually did in the Middle Ages in the West, making the Church supreme over the secular powers. Of course, we know how THAT worked out!
Anyway, a few ideas tossed out there for consideration.
Orthoduck admits in comments he bollixed what he was trying to get across but the point is still interesting--conservative evangelical Protestants will have a hard time complaining about how Constantine ruined the church given the passion with which they attempt to get the State to impose good moral law on everyone else if the core problem of Constantinian Christianity was conflating Church and State. Andrew's observation that North Americans seem to think they have a corner on the market for reasons Constantinian Christianity has been bad is a fun one. David Fitch (I think) suggested that one of the reasons there might arguably not be a "Reformed" movement in North America was because (and he may have been partly joking, I don't recall) that there were no churches or institutions to reform in the new continent they were there were in Europe.
Orthoduck's main point, which he clarifies in a comment, is that the American Anabaptist who would have avoided Church/State entanglement now seeks to wade into politics and social reform. I suppose whether it's the Religious Left or the Religious Right that much might be something people could agree on. Things have changed in the last century.
http://www.orthocuban.com/2012/05/american-protestants-should-quit-complaining-about-constantine/comment-page-1/#comment-112190
I suspect that Evangelicals today are actually doing the opposite of what they think Constantine did. If he allegedly made the Church the tool of the State (I would argue he did not do that; this would not really happen until the Erastian regimes of Protestant Western Europe following the Reformation and, sadly, in Russia after the abolition of the Patriarchate), well, it seems that THEY are trying to make the state the tool of the Church at least insofar as they feel they must use the state to impose a certain moral code on the country as a whole. In this effort, it seems they are willing to make common cause with people whose theology differs greatly from their own, whether it be Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or…Mormon.
http://www.orthocuban.com/2012/05/american-protestants-should-quit-complaining-about-constantine/comment-page-1/#comment-112191
I would also note that in pursuing such a strategy, they are, in effect, trying to do what the Pope actually did in the Middle Ages in the West, making the Church supreme over the secular powers. Of course, we know how THAT worked out!
Anyway, a few ideas tossed out there for consideration.
Monday, May 14, 2012
Mockingbird: Joss Whedon on Genre Filmmaking, Objectification, and sympathy for the Devil
http://www.mbird.com/2012/05/joss-whedon-on-genre-filmmaking-objectification-and-sympathy-for-the-devil/
Any time a superhero film comes out there are invariably critics bemoaning the plethora of such films and asking why on earth anyone watches them and doesn't watch movies about the real world and deal with real life. Some British critics were particularly indignant at the popularity of the Lord of the Rings films in the midst of the war on terror and so on and so forth. The idea that stories can have subtexts is something many critics appreciate except in genre films, in which case the subtext is either not supposed to be there or the critic feels his/her intelligence insulted by the obviousness of a subtext or metatext. With great power comes great responsibility but too many superhero stories take Ducard's advice about theatricality a bit literally, right?
Whedon's comment that most intrigues me is that we are all caught between the impulse to objectify and genuine attraction.
If you’re not exploiting the dark side of something, if you’re not saying that the urge to objectify exists, you are not going to make a meaningful piece of work.
The temptation to objectify is pretty abstract, and it's pretty difficult to concede the point, isn't it?
Objectification and identification are at war but they’re at war in the way that people are, that narrative is, that creates art and humanity and life. Like they have to be at war. You have to root for the girl and the monster. It’s something nobody wants to admit
Which is to say we always want things to be both ways but can't admit it. To take up this idea and really run with it in just one deliberately idiosyncratic direction, there are people who want the good guys to be good and the bad guys to be bad and for the bad guys to get defeated. Some people have said they like this because it's not like real life, where working those things out is difficult. I'm going to suggest an even more prosaic reasoning for this, it can appeal to people who want the monster defeated and the girl to be safe because they will never concede there might be a bit of monster inside them, or something that could, if unchecked, become a monster. There can't be any "old man" or "new man" battling within us, can there? We're new creations, right? Where's the old man to put off?
I could write more about objectification and identification but I don't really feel like it. This is just noting some interesting stuff over at Mockingbird and being playful than trying to get to some actual point.
Any time a superhero film comes out there are invariably critics bemoaning the plethora of such films and asking why on earth anyone watches them and doesn't watch movies about the real world and deal with real life. Some British critics were particularly indignant at the popularity of the Lord of the Rings films in the midst of the war on terror and so on and so forth. The idea that stories can have subtexts is something many critics appreciate except in genre films, in which case the subtext is either not supposed to be there or the critic feels his/her intelligence insulted by the obviousness of a subtext or metatext. With great power comes great responsibility but too many superhero stories take Ducard's advice about theatricality a bit literally, right?
Whedon's comment that most intrigues me is that we are all caught between the impulse to objectify and genuine attraction.
If you’re not exploiting the dark side of something, if you’re not saying that the urge to objectify exists, you are not going to make a meaningful piece of work.
The temptation to objectify is pretty abstract, and it's pretty difficult to concede the point, isn't it?
Objectification and identification are at war but they’re at war in the way that people are, that narrative is, that creates art and humanity and life. Like they have to be at war. You have to root for the girl and the monster. It’s something nobody wants to admit
Which is to say we always want things to be both ways but can't admit it. To take up this idea and really run with it in just one deliberately idiosyncratic direction, there are people who want the good guys to be good and the bad guys to be bad and for the bad guys to get defeated. Some people have said they like this because it's not like real life, where working those things out is difficult. I'm going to suggest an even more prosaic reasoning for this, it can appeal to people who want the monster defeated and the girl to be safe because they will never concede there might be a bit of monster inside them, or something that could, if unchecked, become a monster. There can't be any "old man" or "new man" battling within us, can there? We're new creations, right? Where's the old man to put off?
I could write more about objectification and identification but I don't really feel like it. This is just noting some interesting stuff over at Mockingbird and being playful than trying to get to some actual point.
from Phoenix Preach: The Things I Think
http://phoenixpreacher.net/?p=12264
The reason you think you’re not hearing from God is that He’s talking to you about your character, not your plans.
I'm a former Pentecostal, which is to say some people would say I'm a former enthusiast. In that tradition it is not, to put it mildly, unexpected to anticipate or hope for specific direction from God about what to do with your life. For a tradition so often steeped in synergistic soteriology and emphasizing the freedom of the individual it has been one of those strange paradoxes to realize that many Christians who talk so freely about free will seem obsessed with finding God's perfect will as though God had mapped out the entire alphabet for their lives and they desperately needed to make sure they got to letter K without being sidetracked by a number that turns out to lead into another alphabet.
People I have met who subscribe to monergistic soteriology, by contrast, have often had precisely the opposite practical approach, which is to say that since the Holy Spirit elects and saves you then as long as you're not going out sinning there's no particular plan God has any obligation to tell you about. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life in both cases but in the second case there's no point fretting about what that plan might be whereas in the first case it's paramount that you not "miss God's perfect will for your life."
But for mature and maturing Christians in either camp I have noticed, over decades, that they have concluded that seeking God desperately about "what" is never as important as seeking God about "who" or about "how". This is, at the risk of making the wrong inference from Michael's point 3 at today's "The Things I Think" is what I have heard from other Christians over the years. Maybe God's chief concern is less about the bullet-pointed life-plan you want coming to pass than about who you are no matter what does or doesn't happen in your life. God the Father, Son and Spirit do not love you less or forsake you if you fail to live up to any of your dreams.
Whether or not I'm always comfortable making that observation (or anyone else in America is) is often the recurring struggle of faith for people in a country as affluent as the United States. I wonder how often it is that you or I may consider our "fit" in "God's will" to be little more than whether or not we've realized our dreams, dreams that may or may not have anything to do with the development of our character as believers. It's awfully tempting to be defined by the "what" of accomplishments, knowledge, influence, or prestige rather than be defined by character (i.e. the fruit of the spirit).
I think the temptation for me is to consider myself a failure because of what I haven't accomplished and what I haven't accomplished is often basic stuff like having a steady job or staying in touch with friends and family because finances are tight. I also can't fit into pants I wore six years ago, which is another thing that sometimes dogs me a bit. Time and gravity will defeat us all, I have often said, but there are times when I admit I wish the inevitable victory of time and gravity felt like it was further off than the breath which a human life is. The psalmists remind us that life is a breath. Perhaps one of the perennial temptations for those of us in America is if you've got one breath in this life you want to hold on to it as long as possible and not just breathe that one breath like you were an ordinary person.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Excerpts from Driscoll sermon on 1 Timothy 2
1 Timothy 2:11-15, 3:2
part 5 of 1 Timiothy
Pastor Mark Driscoll, February 1, 2004
He [Paul] goes on, "A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over man; she must be silent." he continues, not with a cultural argument. Some people say, "Well, that's just cultural. That was old school." He goes really old school. He goes all the way back to Adam. He roots this, not in culture. Some people will say, "Well, that was their culture, this is ours. Things are different now, because we're in a different culture," and again, culture's not the authority, creation is. This is a matter of creation. Because it's creation, it's binding and enduring over all cultures. That's why women in all cultures still have painful childbirths. It's cross-culturally binding. "For Adam was formed first, then Eve." When we read that, we say, "What does that mean? He was made first." It's important. With the culture that the concept of the first born was a huge issue, it's even a title given to the Lord Jesus. The first born had responsibility for the rest of the family. They had primary responsibility. God made Adam first, established him as head, as leader, as first, and then after him came Eve and he was responsible for creation, he was responsible for the woman. So that society--if any of you from an eastern, a far eastern culture, the oldest child has responsibility for the rest of the children. Here, Adam was made first. He's got responsibility for the rest of his family. He was made first. God made him first for a reason.
And "Adam was not the one deceived." He went into it eyes wide open. "It was teh woman who was deceived and became a sinner." Now this verse--if the other one didn't get you, this one will. We won't have near the parking troubles we had this week next week. We'll have all kinds of space. Next week, we'll be meeting in a phone booth at the 7-Eleven around the corner. This verse says that Eve was duped. She was deceived. 2 Corinthians 11, Paul says, my fear is that jsut as Satan, through his craftiness, deceived Eve, he's gonna deceive you too. Now through the history of the church, this--the theologians have always taken this to mean that women are more gullible. A lot of you say, "I'm not!" Well how would you know? Just think about it. Chrysostom, Erasmus, Gill, Knox, Luther, Wesley, Calvin--they all believed--they all taught--Aquinas--they all taught that this verse was teaching that women, when it comes to the highest authority of leadership in the church, that they will be more gullible. Meditate on it.
This sermon is a bit more than eight years old but looking back on it this Mother's Day weekend it strikes me that the approach seems incomplete. That Adam was made first and from that is considered to have headship is not a new idea and Driscoll's articulate this idea a few times.
But a generalization about the gullibility of women backed up by name-dropping a few famous theologians isn't the same as explicating a text. The trouble is, further, that there are plenty of stories within the scriptures where the man was more gullible or foolish in some way than his wife, who demonstrated a greater capacity for shrewdness. I'll touch later upon an ambivalent discussion of wisdom or craftiness but first I want to take a tour through a few case studies.
Abram passed his wife off as his sister twice to avoid getting killed by a guy who wanted to take Sarah as his wife. Who came up with the plan for Abram to have sex with Hagar and thus secure an heir? Sarah. Sarah went along with Abram's plans but also came up with her own plan. Considering how long the promise went without her own son Isaac being born Sarah was coming up with the best plan she could for the time.
Let's consider that it was Rebekah and not Isaac who heard that Jacob would be the one who received the blessing and promise rather than Esau and this despite Esau being the technical firstborn and his father's favorite. Rebekah helped Jacob receive the blessing from Isaac by taking advantage of Isaac's blindness. Isaac comes across as blind at more than one level and possibly a bit hard of hearing and not very swift on the uptake. Then in a fine dramatic irony Jacob himself is duped by his double-crossing uncle Laban. Moving on a bit Zipporah prevented Moses from dying at the hands of the Lord because Moses was not circumcised. Naomi shrewdly understood how to guide and observe the relationship between Ruth and Boaz to secure the financial and social standing of what was left of Elimelech's household. Deborah advised an important battle during the period of the judges.
When the angel of the Lord visited Samson's parents he came to Samson's mother. When the angel appeared again and Samson's father asked what kind of life the boy should live the angel instructed the man to listen to what the angel had told the wife. Abigail interceded to prevent David from killing the household of Nabal and shedding blood. Skipping ahead quite a few stories when Josiah's reform movement was beginning the court consulted Huldah. Suffice it to say there are more than just a handful of stories in which women proved to be wiser and more considerate of the Lord than the men in their lives. If women were considered to be more gullible in some general sense it was not unpacked all that well how and why this inference was made.
As name-dropping go Driscoll felt free to mention Luther and Calvin as being right (implicitly) about the gullibility of women while dropping them like hot potatoes on infant baptism. The trouble is that even if it were true all these dead theologians agreed on one subject this would not preclude a man like Driscoll himself from being gullible, lacking discernment, and being too easily impressed by credentials and titles that he should ignore.
...
"But women will be saved through childbearing--if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety." Now, some of you read that and you go, "What, if I have a baby I get to go to heaven?" No, it's not quite that easy. Takes a little more than that. You become a Christian through faith. Trusting in the Lord Jesus, his death, burial, resurrection for your sin. Your faith works itself out with love. You love God and your neighbor. Holiness, you hate sin and change your life. Propriety, you live your life for Christ. That's how you're saved. Justified. Brought into relationship with God. Your sanctification, ladies, your process of growing in your relationship with God is in large part done through childbearing. Accepting that God has created you to be a mother. It's interesting, there's one thing that men can do that women can't do. That's be an elder. There's one thing that women can do that men can't do and that's to bear children. Each of us has something that is unique and special that God has given us, and in our culture we hear that and we go, "What kind of gift is having children?" ...
Here we might find one of the better distillations of the idea of motherhood as a kind of sanctifying sacrament, for want of a better term. But what about those women who never marry? What about those who marry but are infertile? What about those who become widows having not borne children? If the way a woman's sanctification is in large part worked out is through childbearing
Now I don't doubt there will be plenty of other people who can look at the above paragraph and consider that there are myriad practical difficulties with the claim that a woman's sanctification is in large part done through childbearing. There are actually two different levels of problems with this at a theoretical level. Who is doing this sanctification? Is it God? Is it the woman? Is it both? Is it both God and the childbearing woman plus the children? I don't recall how many kids Mark and Grace had at this point but the sheer theoretical nature of this abstraction in the above paragraph now seems hard to miss. Even if one could settle for certain which agents are involved in what way in sanctifying a woman who has had children the practical question even at that time would be "What about unmarried women?" Another would be "What about married women who can't have children?" If you haven't heard or read through the above sermon there's no practical application in it. It's basically just a string of assertions where childbearing and sanctification go. Now, to be sure, Driscoll would go on at various points to "unpack" these ideas in later sermons but the core puzzle has remained largely the same.
Now obviously I linked to Wendy's observation that it is sentimentalism that places wifehood and motherhood as the greatest goods a Christian woman can pursue earlier this weekend. I'm going to out on a limb and suggest that (since we both were, at one point, immersed in Martian culture) that this may be an example of a kind of sentimentalism. Driscoll wouldn't seem like the kind of person to bask in such sorts of sentimentality at first but it would seem that he's got a stronger propensity to it than some might give him credit for. Now children are a blessing from the Lord and it's good to raise children in the fear and knowledge of the Lord. It's just that, to borrow an observation Paul made to another church about semi-related topics, not everyone has this gift and in particular not all women.
Since this is Mother's day weekend and all and I'm an unmarried man I figured I'd not just link to Wendy's observation that motherhood is not, in fact, the greatest good a Christian woman can pursue, but that there's a kind of sentimentalism associated with Christian motherhood that forgets that the unmarried woman, let alone the unmarried man, don't have those same sorts of experiential "tools of sanctification". I have over the last twenty some years heard people say "Boy, you really find out how selfish you are once you get married." This often turns into "Boy, you really find out how selfish you are once you become a parent." Oh that's wonderful! Who wouldn't want to find out in ever-increasing waves how joyful it is to discover how selfish you really are? ;-)
Well, for all you moms who have found out, as the Christianese verbiage puts it, how selfish you are then I guess thanks for being "selfish" enough to spawn some of us who blog about Mother's day.
Practical Theology for Women: Mother's Day for All Women
http://www.theologyforwomen.org/2012/05/mothers-day-for-all-women.html
It is an age-old conundrum in humanity in general and Christianity in particular. How do you honor someone who has something good that you want too? How do you applaud the sacrifices of one without minimizing the suffering of the other? I don’t know exactly, but I do think there is an over arching principle that is helpful. Motherhood is not the greatest good for the Christian woman.
Whether you are a mom or not, don’t get caught up in sentimentalism that sets it up as some saintly role. The greatest good is being conformed to the image of the Christ to the glory of God.
Just a short excerpt or a short entry that I found worth reading. Of course I might suggest there are principles that may be helpful to men for the corresponding holiday, Father's day. The highest good for Christian men is not being a husband or a father and it is a form of sentimentalism that sets up husbandry and fatherhood as saintly roles. Being a husband and a father are important and precious responsibilities just as being a wife and mother are but these things are not the greatest goods for Christian men and women. If you seek Christ you will be pursuing that good which will best prepare for whatever roles you may or may not have in the course of your life.
It is an age-old conundrum in humanity in general and Christianity in particular. How do you honor someone who has something good that you want too? How do you applaud the sacrifices of one without minimizing the suffering of the other? I don’t know exactly, but I do think there is an over arching principle that is helpful. Motherhood is not the greatest good for the Christian woman.
Whether you are a mom or not, don’t get caught up in sentimentalism that sets it up as some saintly role. The greatest good is being conformed to the image of the Christ to the glory of God.
Just a short excerpt or a short entry that I found worth reading. Of course I might suggest there are principles that may be helpful to men for the corresponding holiday, Father's day. The highest good for Christian men is not being a husband or a father and it is a form of sentimentalism that sets up husbandry and fatherhood as saintly roles. Being a husband and a father are important and precious responsibilities just as being a wife and mother are but these things are not the greatest goods for Christian men and women. If you seek Christ you will be pursuing that good which will best prepare for whatever roles you may or may not have in the course of your life.
Friday, May 11, 2012
A note on the apparent passing of Priestly Rants
I learned about the blog Priestly Rants from Fearsome Tycoon and would read the blog semi-regularly. Now, it seems, the blog is no more.
Earlier this year I noticed the disappearance of Driscontinuity, a blog I admit I read less frequently. One of the blog entries I wrote here was specifically to contest the accuracy of a claim made at Driscontinuity. Either you already know what claim by my mentioning it or you don't and I wouldn't get anything accomplished by explaining it.
But this is really about the end of Priestly Rants. Where ever its author may be, the passing of the blog is noted. Sorry it ended but I guess all things end some time and it was a consistently helpful read. So where ever you are, thanks for blogging.
Earlier this year I noticed the disappearance of Driscontinuity, a blog I admit I read less frequently. One of the blog entries I wrote here was specifically to contest the accuracy of a claim made at Driscontinuity. Either you already know what claim by my mentioning it or you don't and I wouldn't get anything accomplished by explaining it.
But this is really about the end of Priestly Rants. Where ever its author may be, the passing of the blog is noted. Sorry it ended but I guess all things end some time and it was a consistently helpful read. So where ever you are, thanks for blogging.
Kinnon: Church Discipline does not equal discipleship
http://kinnon.tv/2012/05/church-discipline-does-not-equal-discipleship.html
Some folks may not have seen posters that say "Membership equals discipleship". We know that membership does not necessarily entail discipleship. A disciple of Jesus may be a member of a church but a church member is not necessarily a disciple of Christ. The two may be overlapping spheres that are not always exactly the same.
One of the selling points ... for folks who are into this sort of thing, membership brings with it this joyful benefit of spiritual discipline. That might be a puzzling way to describe it if discipline is only defined in corrective and occasional terms. Now if a person were to describe "discipline" as having a positive and negative aspect there's room for actual exposition. Let me put it this way, "church discipline" could be something as mundane as going to church and singing songs and praying and reading scripture and hearing teaching and taking communion. These are all spiritual disciplines, are they not? There's a subculture, and I doubt I have to explain which subculture I mean to regular readers, that tends to define "spiritual discipline" entirely in corrective or potentially even punitive terms. "Spiritual discipline" ends up being mainly discussed only in terms of accountability and checklists and oversight. Now there's a time and a place, I suppose, for that stuff, too yet this would seem like a negative way of framing things.
As Bill Kinnon's post puts it, Jesus did rebuke and correct his disciples. We can go look that up. There was, however, a great deal of positive instruction and, equally important, lived out demonstrations of what Jesus would have his disciples say and do. A Jesus who taught us how not to pray also taught us positively how we ought to pray.
Conflating church discipline with discipleship may simply be a case of putting the cart ahead of the horse ... or ... maybe it's a case of calling the cart the horse.
Some folks may not have seen posters that say "Membership equals discipleship". We know that membership does not necessarily entail discipleship. A disciple of Jesus may be a member of a church but a church member is not necessarily a disciple of Christ. The two may be overlapping spheres that are not always exactly the same.
One of the selling points ... for folks who are into this sort of thing, membership brings with it this joyful benefit of spiritual discipline. That might be a puzzling way to describe it if discipline is only defined in corrective and occasional terms. Now if a person were to describe "discipline" as having a positive and negative aspect there's room for actual exposition. Let me put it this way, "church discipline" could be something as mundane as going to church and singing songs and praying and reading scripture and hearing teaching and taking communion. These are all spiritual disciplines, are they not? There's a subculture, and I doubt I have to explain which subculture I mean to regular readers, that tends to define "spiritual discipline" entirely in corrective or potentially even punitive terms. "Spiritual discipline" ends up being mainly discussed only in terms of accountability and checklists and oversight. Now there's a time and a place, I suppose, for that stuff, too yet this would seem like a negative way of framing things.
As Bill Kinnon's post puts it, Jesus did rebuke and correct his disciples. We can go look that up. There was, however, a great deal of positive instruction and, equally important, lived out demonstrations of what Jesus would have his disciples say and do. A Jesus who taught us how not to pray also taught us positively how we ought to pray.
Conflating church discipline with discipleship may simply be a case of putting the cart ahead of the horse ... or ... maybe it's a case of calling the cart the horse.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Cinemagogue assembles themes from The Avengers
http://cinemagogue.com/2012/05/08/the-avengers-where-loki-is-right/
http://cinemagogue.com/2012/05/09/the-avengers-where-loki-is-wrong/
http://cinemagogue.com/2012/05/10/the-avengers-where-we-are-loki/
You knew he would, after all.
The movie is easily the benchmark popcorn movies have to live up to the rest of this spring and summer. Sure, I admit I'm much more a fan of Batman and Spiderman so I look forward to Nolan's final Batman film and the Spiderman revamp but The Avengers has thrown down the gauntlet.
http://cinemagogue.com/2012/05/09/the-avengers-where-loki-is-wrong/
http://cinemagogue.com/2012/05/10/the-avengers-where-we-are-loki/
You knew he would, after all.
The movie is easily the benchmark popcorn movies have to live up to the rest of this spring and summer. Sure, I admit I'm much more a fan of Batman and Spiderman so I look forward to Nolan's final Batman film and the Spiderman revamp but The Avengers has thrown down the gauntlet.
questions for those who have read Real Marriage, five kids and C-sections
2012 opened up with Real Marriage, Mark and Grace Driscoll's book about, well, marriage. The sales pitch has been that they get real and vulnerable.
Every story will necessarily be selective. Things will be included and some things may get overlooked or go unmentioned. That Mark Driscoll recounted in Real Marriage how frustrated he was with the lack of sex is something all reviewers have noted. But as yet I have not read any reviews that consider what Driscoll might call the big E on the eye chart.
The Driscolls have five children and there's not a single one of them who is adopted. All the kids seem to be about two years apart in age. Now here is some things I'm not sure anyone's asked about or discussed in reviews.
Pregnancy normally lasts about nine months, right?
Weaning can take a while. Some mothers wean for at least a year, others take a couple of years. Mileage varies and not all mothers breastfeed.
I get that the Driscolls have talked about how the sex wasn't happening as often as Mark wanted it to but, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, they had to be having sex at least often enough for Grace to have birthed five children, right? Maybe it wasn't as fun for both parties as they would have liked, I get that, but five children do not just spontaneously emerge. There wasn't some magic kid dust left around the house that led children to spontaneously emerge from dust mites left on the floor. Mark Driscoll used to joke from the pulpit that liberal secular Seattleites have asked him, "Don't you know where babies come from!?" and his punchline was that the babies come from a hot wife. So given how he liked making that joke is it possible one reason not as much sex was going was because, well, Grace was carrying babies and then weaning them?
For those who were attenders of Mars Hill over ten or twelve years there's something else I've wondered, do either Mark or Grace Driscoll mention her C-section deliveries? Is it possible part of the reason Grace may not have felt frisky had something to do with a steady cycle of 9 months of pregnant, maybe a year of weaning, and this weaning time including recuperating from getting cut open to deliver her babies? That's a lot of physical change and some trauma to give birth to five children over the course of about ten years, isn't it? Do either of the Driscolls mention the possibility, at least, that all this may have put a damper on some things? This is the sort of issue that can come up in an otherwise healthy marriage, so I've heard, how much more could it have been a set of potentially exacerbating variables for a woman like Grace who Mark seems to have described as having a history of being sexually abused in her past and, well, frigid?
Dealing with a history of abuse would be traumatic enough without also dealing with the traumatic changes of carrying a baby to term, birthing by C-section, and nursing a baby for maybe a ten to 18 months or however long a mom might nurse a baby. No reviews I've read of Real Marriage touch significantly on any of these issues and this goes for sympathetic as well as negative reviews. Maybe most people don't know what many MH attendees would have known, that Mark said Grace delivered all her kids C-section. That doesn't seem like a mundane detail even to a single guy. If Grace spent a year weaning a child and the kids are spaced roughly two years apart then there's 9 months of carrying a baby and 12 months of nursing and that'd be 21 months of all that, which includes C-section birthing every two years. That doesn't seem like a whole lot of down time, does it? But my memory has limits and so perhaps none of these variables are worth considering.
Still ... let's face it, married people don't bring five children into the world by not having sex.. It may, again, have not been as frequent as Mark wanted and it may not have been as pleasant as Grace wanted it to be when it happened, but the five children are irrefutable evidence that sex happened. Mark Driscoll's punchline about the hot wife circa 2002-2005 was its own jovial testament that the sex was, in fact, happening just often enough to eventually bring five children into the world. I know this may be discussing the obvious but a teacher I had in school used to say "Never underestimate the obvious." It surprises me, looking back on a few months of reviews about the book that nobody mentions these things. Is it because the Driscolls never mentioned Grace's C-sections or C-sections in general? I'm curious. Perhaps people who have read the book can enlighten me.
P.S. some people have let me know, offline, but this underscores even more fully the perplexity of how nobody online seems to have broached these subjects in discussing or reviewing the book. I would think that as proof of sex between a husband and wife goes it just can't get more obvious than five children but, to go by chapter one of Real Marriage, you'd get the impression Mark Driscoll was struggling bitterly with the lack of action in his life when Grace's birthing five children would seem like at least a potential counter-narrative.
Every story will necessarily be selective. Things will be included and some things may get overlooked or go unmentioned. That Mark Driscoll recounted in Real Marriage how frustrated he was with the lack of sex is something all reviewers have noted. But as yet I have not read any reviews that consider what Driscoll might call the big E on the eye chart.
The Driscolls have five children and there's not a single one of them who is adopted. All the kids seem to be about two years apart in age. Now here is some things I'm not sure anyone's asked about or discussed in reviews.
Pregnancy normally lasts about nine months, right?
Weaning can take a while. Some mothers wean for at least a year, others take a couple of years. Mileage varies and not all mothers breastfeed.
I get that the Driscolls have talked about how the sex wasn't happening as often as Mark wanted it to but, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, they had to be having sex at least often enough for Grace to have birthed five children, right? Maybe it wasn't as fun for both parties as they would have liked, I get that, but five children do not just spontaneously emerge. There wasn't some magic kid dust left around the house that led children to spontaneously emerge from dust mites left on the floor. Mark Driscoll used to joke from the pulpit that liberal secular Seattleites have asked him, "Don't you know where babies come from!?" and his punchline was that the babies come from a hot wife. So given how he liked making that joke is it possible one reason not as much sex was going was because, well, Grace was carrying babies and then weaning them?
For those who were attenders of Mars Hill over ten or twelve years there's something else I've wondered, do either Mark or Grace Driscoll mention her C-section deliveries? Is it possible part of the reason Grace may not have felt frisky had something to do with a steady cycle of 9 months of pregnant, maybe a year of weaning, and this weaning time including recuperating from getting cut open to deliver her babies? That's a lot of physical change and some trauma to give birth to five children over the course of about ten years, isn't it? Do either of the Driscolls mention the possibility, at least, that all this may have put a damper on some things? This is the sort of issue that can come up in an otherwise healthy marriage, so I've heard, how much more could it have been a set of potentially exacerbating variables for a woman like Grace who Mark seems to have described as having a history of being sexually abused in her past and, well, frigid?
Dealing with a history of abuse would be traumatic enough without also dealing with the traumatic changes of carrying a baby to term, birthing by C-section, and nursing a baby for maybe a ten to 18 months or however long a mom might nurse a baby. No reviews I've read of Real Marriage touch significantly on any of these issues and this goes for sympathetic as well as negative reviews. Maybe most people don't know what many MH attendees would have known, that Mark said Grace delivered all her kids C-section. That doesn't seem like a mundane detail even to a single guy. If Grace spent a year weaning a child and the kids are spaced roughly two years apart then there's 9 months of carrying a baby and 12 months of nursing and that'd be 21 months of all that, which includes C-section birthing every two years. That doesn't seem like a whole lot of down time, does it? But my memory has limits and so perhaps none of these variables are worth considering.
Still ... let's face it, married people don't bring five children into the world by not having sex.. It may, again, have not been as frequent as Mark wanted and it may not have been as pleasant as Grace wanted it to be when it happened, but the five children are irrefutable evidence that sex happened. Mark Driscoll's punchline about the hot wife circa 2002-2005 was its own jovial testament that the sex was, in fact, happening just often enough to eventually bring five children into the world. I know this may be discussing the obvious but a teacher I had in school used to say "Never underestimate the obvious." It surprises me, looking back on a few months of reviews about the book that nobody mentions these things. Is it because the Driscolls never mentioned Grace's C-sections or C-sections in general? I'm curious. Perhaps people who have read the book can enlighten me.
P.S. some people have let me know, offline, but this underscores even more fully the perplexity of how nobody online seems to have broached these subjects in discussing or reviewing the book. I would think that as proof of sex between a husband and wife goes it just can't get more obvious than five children but, to go by chapter one of Real Marriage, you'd get the impression Mark Driscoll was struggling bitterly with the lack of action in his life when Grace's birthing five children would seem like at least a potential counter-narrative.
Wednesday, May 09, 2012
Dianne Anderson on unsolicited advice singles get
http://diannaeanderson.net/?p=1179
And we all know the advice.
The advice that says, “When you stop looking, you’ll find someone!”
The advice that tells you to “dance with Jesus, and he’ll let the right man cut in!”
That first line I've heard but that second line? That's a new one to me. I don't really dance and I don't exactly "dance with Jesus". I know some nice people who dance or used to dance. I've even gone to a couple of ballet productions (Stravinsky/Ballanchine collaborations are full of win) but the "dance with Jesus" stuff sounds like a line that guys are not likely to hear.
The guy variation is to "man up" and that "he who finds a wife finds what is good and has favor from the Lord." I've seen fun (sarcasm warning) discourses on how he who finds means that "find" means an intent and earnest and active quest and not some passive something or other. Women may be told to stop looking and be pursued while men may be told that it's all on them. I've seen anonymous women post at the blog of a friend of mine about how the epidemic of singleness is on those guys who don't man up and pursue the women whose godly obligation is to wait to be pursued.
Is it? You folks do realize how many marriages were brokered and arranged in the ancient near east, right?
I've heard a guy take the aforementioned proverb and claim that because that proverb says that the man who finds a wife finds what is good and has favor from the Lord then it means that the man who doesn't find a wife does not have the Lord's favor. Only an idiot would reason like that because there's no shortage of proverbs about how a wife can be a bad wife and be rottenness in the bones of a man. There's even a proverb about things that are better than living with a quarrelsome wife. The idea that wisdom literature includes these life-rules is something I've discussed elsewhere. I don't intend to digress too much into that. I simply reiterate what I mentioned in the topic sentence for this paragraph, a guy can come to the delusional conclusion that because he's single he does not have the Lord's favor and let's never mind Isaiah's message to eunuchs, eh?
I'm nearing 40 and I've seen single guys get super bitter. I don't want to be one of those guys myself, and the big temptation I've seen guys succumb to is externalizing failure on to women or on to "relationships". I've seen a guy consider marriage an abomination and another guy consider breeding to be a moral evil. Whether it's some pseudo-Marxist critique of "consumerism" or a Rand-inspired rant against emotional dependence I've seen single guys who never had it in them to emotionally bond in "that way" in any observable way adopt ideologies in which their failure to pair off stopped being interpreted as failure and started being interpreted as moral superiority. I really don't want to be "that" guy because in the end either of those two paths looks pretty much like misogyny suited up as philosophical integrity.
Now I would say that a lot of dating does come off like an essentially consumerist enterprise in which people consume experiences, products and each other but I'm being a bit sarcastic here. People obviously want and need emotional connections. It's easy for a subset of suburban Christian types to talk about the selfishness of singles and consumerism in singleness but who's to say family life is not even more consumerist? Is consumerism the only way to discuss the impulse to pair off? So maybe pairing off does fetter some impulses to independence? No one is autonomous in the end, not even guys who get written about as not using money or people who do the sustainable living kick. Most of these people I hear about who obsess about this stuff tend to be physically fit people without disabilities who magically believe that "everyone" should embrace the kind of low-tech life they believe makes them less corporate. The human species always has been and always will be corporate in some sense. We all have some Eden we are attempting to regain despite any repudiation we may make of someone else's idea of Eden and thereby miss the salient point of the story that Eden has been lost as of so long ago it's like we never lived in it. Bingo. Meanwhile, people still want to know and be known, duh.
The church that has “kissed dating goodbye” is now attempting to welcome it back with a barrage of late night texts made after downing an entire bottle of wine. The church, as an institution, has place such an emphasis on the marriage relationship being “what a Christian does,” that it no longer knows what to do with actual single people who are dating, especially if these single people are older than college age.
ha ha ha ... oh I love that first sentence in the paragraph.
One of the things I've considered for a while is the "how do you know?" stuff. Not "how do you know you've found the right person?" I don't think there's as much discussion of "how do you know this is even something to be considering seriously?" It's a given that you "should" be pairing off at some point or that the evidence is that you really ought to pair off soon so as to avoid fornication or any number of other things. I've heard it said that nobody is ever really ready for marriage, ever. It just doesn't work that way. Yet people obviously want marriage or paired-off life and pursue it despite the nearly universal recognition that nobody's completely ready for what it entails.
Cards on the table, even before I was at my old church I got the distinct impression the way Christians talked about marriage was often about the good times or the fun stuff. Once I was at my former church there was the decade of "man up" for guys and I don't know what for gals. I began to get the impression the leaders sincerely bought into the idea that if they just made the guys shape up and fly right the women would pretty much just take care of themselves because if you get the young men, you know, you get everything and if you don't get the young men you get nothing.
The more I look back on a lot of useless teaching at my old church about dating, courtship, singleness and marriage the more it seems as though the goal was the evasion of heartbreak. A friend of mine who is staunchly in the "I'm not gifted for singleness" and "I'd like to be married" and I had some discussions over the last few years and something I mentioned is that there didn't seem to be a lot of planning for something in a discussion of dating and courtship and marriage? What is that?
Well, since certain places and communities love martial metaphors I'm gong to frame it this way, there's something called attrition warfare. Speaking, I admit, a bit too broadly, this can be thought of as the number of soldiers that may get lost in the battle to take a hill. It could be how many you lose or how many the enemy loses, the point I'm playing with is that most Christian teaching on dating and "relationships" I've heard has seemed useless because there's basically no accounting for probability and systemic failure on the way to success. You don't just win magically, you fight long and hard and wear down through continual effort. American Christians seem to approach discussing dating and mating as though the process were using some bomb sight to precisely line up and aim a nuclear weapon from the relative safety of a high altitude strategic bomber rather than instructing infantry who are about to go cross the trenches into mine-infested territory when they're being shelled by artillery at night what things they need to be alert for.
How much Christian advice about dating or mating accounts for the inevitability of failure, of missing the mark? To put it in grandiose theological terms, how much instruction considers that you will fail and often not intentionally? I know I've heard occasional lectures about how most people are going to marry. Dating is the pits, dating is lame, dating is exasperating but, oh, yeah, there's also absolutely no other plausible way to find a mate besides that. The disconnect is obvious, blindingly obvious. If we get told in Christian circles that dating is bad and prone to failure but people should hurry up and get married then maybe the starting point should be learning how to adapt to and anticipate failure as a natural part of things? It's as though some Christians harp constantly on "we live in a fallen world" and don't stop to consider how that might apply to "date night" which, in reality, has nothing much to do with planning "date night" as a single person might understand things and more to do with planning a night away from the kids with the hopes of activities that could lead to the conception of another child.
I suppose, though, that perhaps attrition is an important concept for this discussion in another way. Attrition can be defined as the flip side of contrition. Contrition can be thought of as a remorse arising from realizing relationship with God has been compromised. Attrition can be thought of as fear of perdition. Now I'm being sloppy here, I know, but if we step back and think about ethical instruction in wisdom literature the precept of attrition is actually hugely important. We're told who to NOT be like in the wisdom literature as much as we're told who to be like. That may be, in fact, part of the trouble with how Christians attempt to instruct the unmarried. We're known a bit more by what we're against than what we're for. Don't break our rules and then you're sure to succeed. So what does success look like in dating? Not "What does success look like in marriage?" Not "Intentionality leads to marriage". Nope, what is "success" in dating? Everyone knows that if the dates work marriage happens but that's sort of like saying the caterpillar turned into a butterfly without considering any of the segments of the caterpillar.
The lack of defining success compared to the concern to evade failure gets at why so much teaching from guys like Driscoll about dating and marriage seem useless or even worse, counterproductive. If we're going to talk about living in a fallen world we have to remember that failure, and adapting to failure, is central to the human experience. Not all failure to achieve is of the same kind or quality. Some failure is unfortunate, counterproductive and to be avoided.
Some failure, however, is essentially to ever learning something. Perhaps the reason so much American Christian counsel about dating and mating often seems so useless is that we fear failure (because, let's face it, we're apt to define failure as failure at best and sin at worst) and so attempt to teach "practical" things in a way where we don't want to affirm failure but do want to affirm success is a worthy goal without accounting for probabilities. Besides, failure hurts and failure in the realm of building a life with someone hurts even more. To belabor my earlier example, Christians teach the strategic nuclear option rather than infantry tactics.
As an air war/ground war metaphor goes this may be what stands out most glaring as a basic failure on the part of Mark Driscoll over ten years. It's not that he intended to fail, he just failed, that's all. The reason was simple, and he put it so himself, he has no idea what it's like to truly be single and so had no basis from which to really grasp what single people might deal with in the trenches of being actually unmarried. He probably couldn't help being a failure here but he could have helped avoiding discussing subjects that, by his own admission, he was not qualified either through knowledge or experience to seriously discuss. Then again, it's not like ignorance and youthful overconfidence stopped Joshua Harris.
I guess at the risk of ending on a pragmatic note that may seem disconnected to anything before, American Christians don't seem to discuss vocation well in connection to pairing. There's more emphasis on the kind of "who" you should partner with than any serious discussion of whether what you want to do would merit investing in a "life partner". A lot of people who were the recipients of biblical documents didn't have to fret too much about what they would do for a career. Your career could often be in some way connected to family. You might have skills that distinguished you in some way or other but the horizons were smaller for a lot of people. Your marriage, if you got married, might well not be something you had a ton of direct input in. This "might" explain why a lot of ethical instruction in biblical documents presupposes a lack of direct control either about vocation or about marriage. Paul went so far as to say that he who marries does well and he who did not marry does better.
Yet conceding the point that the biblical authors were unconcerned about the parts of marriage and vocation that Americans are most obsessed about (i.e. how you know you're about to choose the right person and what to decide to do with your career), and so unconcerned as to never directly mention these things seems too scandalous for American Christians to consider. There's useful indirect instruction but we don't want indirect instruction, do we? We'd rather let celebrity Christians spin fantasies of how the biblical authors were concerned with date night and satisfying sex lives when they were more obviously far more often concerned about whether or not everyone in their village was going to die because of a famine or because the Assyrians were back in town.
The advice that tells you to “dance with Jesus, and he’ll let the right man cut in!”
That first line I've heard but that second line? That's a new one to me. I don't really dance and I don't exactly "dance with Jesus". I know some nice people who dance or used to dance. I've even gone to a couple of ballet productions (Stravinsky/Ballanchine collaborations are full of win) but the "dance with Jesus" stuff sounds like a line that guys are not likely to hear.
The guy variation is to "man up" and that "he who finds a wife finds what is good and has favor from the Lord." I've seen fun (sarcasm warning) discourses on how he who finds means that "find" means an intent and earnest and active quest and not some passive something or other. Women may be told to stop looking and be pursued while men may be told that it's all on them. I've seen anonymous women post at the blog of a friend of mine about how the epidemic of singleness is on those guys who don't man up and pursue the women whose godly obligation is to wait to be pursued.
Is it? You folks do realize how many marriages were brokered and arranged in the ancient near east, right?
I've heard a guy take the aforementioned proverb and claim that because that proverb says that the man who finds a wife finds what is good and has favor from the Lord then it means that the man who doesn't find a wife does not have the Lord's favor. Only an idiot would reason like that because there's no shortage of proverbs about how a wife can be a bad wife and be rottenness in the bones of a man. There's even a proverb about things that are better than living with a quarrelsome wife. The idea that wisdom literature includes these life-rules is something I've discussed elsewhere. I don't intend to digress too much into that. I simply reiterate what I mentioned in the topic sentence for this paragraph, a guy can come to the delusional conclusion that because he's single he does not have the Lord's favor and let's never mind Isaiah's message to eunuchs, eh?
I'm nearing 40 and I've seen single guys get super bitter. I don't want to be one of those guys myself, and the big temptation I've seen guys succumb to is externalizing failure on to women or on to "relationships". I've seen a guy consider marriage an abomination and another guy consider breeding to be a moral evil. Whether it's some pseudo-Marxist critique of "consumerism" or a Rand-inspired rant against emotional dependence I've seen single guys who never had it in them to emotionally bond in "that way" in any observable way adopt ideologies in which their failure to pair off stopped being interpreted as failure and started being interpreted as moral superiority. I really don't want to be "that" guy because in the end either of those two paths looks pretty much like misogyny suited up as philosophical integrity.
Now I would say that a lot of dating does come off like an essentially consumerist enterprise in which people consume experiences, products and each other but I'm being a bit sarcastic here. People obviously want and need emotional connections. It's easy for a subset of suburban Christian types to talk about the selfishness of singles and consumerism in singleness but who's to say family life is not even more consumerist? Is consumerism the only way to discuss the impulse to pair off? So maybe pairing off does fetter some impulses to independence? No one is autonomous in the end, not even guys who get written about as not using money or people who do the sustainable living kick. Most of these people I hear about who obsess about this stuff tend to be physically fit people without disabilities who magically believe that "everyone" should embrace the kind of low-tech life they believe makes them less corporate. The human species always has been and always will be corporate in some sense. We all have some Eden we are attempting to regain despite any repudiation we may make of someone else's idea of Eden and thereby miss the salient point of the story that Eden has been lost as of so long ago it's like we never lived in it. Bingo. Meanwhile, people still want to know and be known, duh.
The church that has “kissed dating goodbye” is now attempting to welcome it back with a barrage of late night texts made after downing an entire bottle of wine. The church, as an institution, has place such an emphasis on the marriage relationship being “what a Christian does,” that it no longer knows what to do with actual single people who are dating, especially if these single people are older than college age.
ha ha ha ... oh I love that first sentence in the paragraph.
One of the things I've considered for a while is the "how do you know?" stuff. Not "how do you know you've found the right person?" I don't think there's as much discussion of "how do you know this is even something to be considering seriously?" It's a given that you "should" be pairing off at some point or that the evidence is that you really ought to pair off soon so as to avoid fornication or any number of other things. I've heard it said that nobody is ever really ready for marriage, ever. It just doesn't work that way. Yet people obviously want marriage or paired-off life and pursue it despite the nearly universal recognition that nobody's completely ready for what it entails.
Cards on the table, even before I was at my old church I got the distinct impression the way Christians talked about marriage was often about the good times or the fun stuff. Once I was at my former church there was the decade of "man up" for guys and I don't know what for gals. I began to get the impression the leaders sincerely bought into the idea that if they just made the guys shape up and fly right the women would pretty much just take care of themselves because if you get the young men, you know, you get everything and if you don't get the young men you get nothing.
The more I look back on a lot of useless teaching at my old church about dating, courtship, singleness and marriage the more it seems as though the goal was the evasion of heartbreak. A friend of mine who is staunchly in the "I'm not gifted for singleness" and "I'd like to be married" and I had some discussions over the last few years and something I mentioned is that there didn't seem to be a lot of planning for something in a discussion of dating and courtship and marriage? What is that?
Well, since certain places and communities love martial metaphors I'm gong to frame it this way, there's something called attrition warfare. Speaking, I admit, a bit too broadly, this can be thought of as the number of soldiers that may get lost in the battle to take a hill. It could be how many you lose or how many the enemy loses, the point I'm playing with is that most Christian teaching on dating and "relationships" I've heard has seemed useless because there's basically no accounting for probability and systemic failure on the way to success. You don't just win magically, you fight long and hard and wear down through continual effort. American Christians seem to approach discussing dating and mating as though the process were using some bomb sight to precisely line up and aim a nuclear weapon from the relative safety of a high altitude strategic bomber rather than instructing infantry who are about to go cross the trenches into mine-infested territory when they're being shelled by artillery at night what things they need to be alert for.
How much Christian advice about dating or mating accounts for the inevitability of failure, of missing the mark? To put it in grandiose theological terms, how much instruction considers that you will fail and often not intentionally? I know I've heard occasional lectures about how most people are going to marry. Dating is the pits, dating is lame, dating is exasperating but, oh, yeah, there's also absolutely no other plausible way to find a mate besides that. The disconnect is obvious, blindingly obvious. If we get told in Christian circles that dating is bad and prone to failure but people should hurry up and get married then maybe the starting point should be learning how to adapt to and anticipate failure as a natural part of things? It's as though some Christians harp constantly on "we live in a fallen world" and don't stop to consider how that might apply to "date night" which, in reality, has nothing much to do with planning "date night" as a single person might understand things and more to do with planning a night away from the kids with the hopes of activities that could lead to the conception of another child.
I suppose, though, that perhaps attrition is an important concept for this discussion in another way. Attrition can be defined as the flip side of contrition. Contrition can be thought of as a remorse arising from realizing relationship with God has been compromised. Attrition can be thought of as fear of perdition. Now I'm being sloppy here, I know, but if we step back and think about ethical instruction in wisdom literature the precept of attrition is actually hugely important. We're told who to NOT be like in the wisdom literature as much as we're told who to be like. That may be, in fact, part of the trouble with how Christians attempt to instruct the unmarried. We're known a bit more by what we're against than what we're for. Don't break our rules and then you're sure to succeed. So what does success look like in dating? Not "What does success look like in marriage?" Not "Intentionality leads to marriage". Nope, what is "success" in dating? Everyone knows that if the dates work marriage happens but that's sort of like saying the caterpillar turned into a butterfly without considering any of the segments of the caterpillar.
The lack of defining success compared to the concern to evade failure gets at why so much teaching from guys like Driscoll about dating and marriage seem useless or even worse, counterproductive. If we're going to talk about living in a fallen world we have to remember that failure, and adapting to failure, is central to the human experience. Not all failure to achieve is of the same kind or quality. Some failure is unfortunate, counterproductive and to be avoided.
Some failure, however, is essentially to ever learning something. Perhaps the reason so much American Christian counsel about dating and mating often seems so useless is that we fear failure (because, let's face it, we're apt to define failure as failure at best and sin at worst) and so attempt to teach "practical" things in a way where we don't want to affirm failure but do want to affirm success is a worthy goal without accounting for probabilities. Besides, failure hurts and failure in the realm of building a life with someone hurts even more. To belabor my earlier example, Christians teach the strategic nuclear option rather than infantry tactics.
As an air war/ground war metaphor goes this may be what stands out most glaring as a basic failure on the part of Mark Driscoll over ten years. It's not that he intended to fail, he just failed, that's all. The reason was simple, and he put it so himself, he has no idea what it's like to truly be single and so had no basis from which to really grasp what single people might deal with in the trenches of being actually unmarried. He probably couldn't help being a failure here but he could have helped avoiding discussing subjects that, by his own admission, he was not qualified either through knowledge or experience to seriously discuss. Then again, it's not like ignorance and youthful overconfidence stopped Joshua Harris.
I guess at the risk of ending on a pragmatic note that may seem disconnected to anything before, American Christians don't seem to discuss vocation well in connection to pairing. There's more emphasis on the kind of "who" you should partner with than any serious discussion of whether what you want to do would merit investing in a "life partner". A lot of people who were the recipients of biblical documents didn't have to fret too much about what they would do for a career. Your career could often be in some way connected to family. You might have skills that distinguished you in some way or other but the horizons were smaller for a lot of people. Your marriage, if you got married, might well not be something you had a ton of direct input in. This "might" explain why a lot of ethical instruction in biblical documents presupposes a lack of direct control either about vocation or about marriage. Paul went so far as to say that he who marries does well and he who did not marry does better.
Yet conceding the point that the biblical authors were unconcerned about the parts of marriage and vocation that Americans are most obsessed about (i.e. how you know you're about to choose the right person and what to decide to do with your career), and so unconcerned as to never directly mention these things seems too scandalous for American Christians to consider. There's useful indirect instruction but we don't want indirect instruction, do we? We'd rather let celebrity Christians spin fantasies of how the biblical authors were concerned with date night and satisfying sex lives when they were more obviously far more often concerned about whether or not everyone in their village was going to die because of a famine or because the Assyrians were back in town.
NYT covers legal fights within TBN
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/05/us/tbn-fight-offers-glimpse-inside-lavish-tv-ministry.html?_r=3&smid=fb-share&pagewanted=all
In the lawsuits and interviews, Ms. Koper, 26, also charges that TBN has spent millions of dollars in sweetheart deals with a commercial film company owned until recently by a son of the Crouches, Matthew, including poorly monitored investments made after he joined the TBN board in 2007.
“My job as finance director was to find ways to label extravagant personal spending as ministry expenses,” Ms. Koper said. This is one way, she said, the company avoids probing questions from the I.R.S. She said that the absence of outsiders on TBN’s governing board — currently consisting of Paul, Janice and Matthew Crouch — had led to a serious lack of accountability for spending.
...
As lawsuits and countersuits swirl, the Kopers are living in the basement of his father’s modest house in Elmont, on Long Island.
Mr. Crouch and an assistant, Matthew and his family, and two pilots are nearing the end of a six-week world tour in the larger company jet, visiting affiliates, taping programs and scouting new territory for evangelism in Rome, Dubai, Israel, Hong Kong and Hawaii.
“Others may do things differently, and may criticize TBN for how it operates, its look, its doctrine and belief,” Mr. May said. “But what is absolutely clear is that TBN, with God’s grace, has succeeded where most others have failed.”
Success in areas where others have failed sure seems like a popular defense of controversial ministries, doesn't it? It can be easy for me to forget the Crouches have been around since the 1970s and doing the TBN thing. Video venue preaching has really been around for a long time if you stop to think about it. Anyone who's ever watched somebody preach on TV, never mind TBN, knows that the prospect of going to church by way of watching someone preach via screen was with us for decades before anything like "multisite" became popular. Before there was "multisite" there was TBN, CBN, and any number of local access TV preachers. Compared to these men and women multisites that have developed within the last six to ten years are still, arguably, amateurs.
Salon: Joel Osteen worships himself
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/01/joel_osteen_worships_himself/singleton/
I don't know much about Osteen. What little I know leads me to not take him seriously. That the implications of his theology could be construed as symptomatic of narcissistic personality disorder I'm not going to contest. I suppose it's possible for a person to have a problem being narcissistic and even be able to critique Osteen's Word Faith approach as narcissistic, which could make for a remarkable but altogether possible paradox. Osteen, after all, would hardly be the only pastor or megachurch pastor completely sold on the idea of a particular divine mandate justifying his job both on the basis of large numbers and a certain amount of material prosperity.
The messages in the biblical texts do invite us to join in understanding that we are part of a larger story that is anchored in and founded on Jesus. What these biblical texts are not about is "you". A highly personalized ,idiosyncratic self-reading on to a biblical text is not really the way to go about reading the Bible. This isn't to say you can't pray Psalm 139. There are all sorts of ways to pray the texts of Scripture. This is to say that when you read a passage as a personal message that isn't exactly the point of reading the biblical text. It's not necessarily God's love letter to you as though it were an email just for you. One of the paradoxes of some preachers who have leveled criticisms of Osteen is that they themselves have at times evinced a habit of reading biblical texts in a way that suggests they are reading their own concerns and anxieties into a text and then exegete the text, if they do this at all, much later. But then it's very easy for Christians to do this where ever they may be. There's a fine balancing act that has to be done in which we can appreciate how, if we are Christians, we are included in the things discussed by the biblical books but also realizing that most of the books were not written to individuals, despite the individual instruction often assumed in a book like Proverbs or Philemon.
Tuesday, May 08, 2012
Interesting chain of links on fashion, eating disorders, and a rumination on toxic assets
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/05/04/vogue_bans_anorexic_models.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/09/americas_next_top_sociologist.single.html
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/07/how-supermodels-are-like-toxic-assets.html#more
This is interesting. The link titles tend to explain themselves. Vogue banning anorexic models (and also underage models) is described at Slate's Double X as a rare and pleasantly surprising concession by a big gun in the fashion industry that the precedent and example they set matters. The article on sociology describes a woman who embedded herself in modeling as part of sociological research on the nature of the industry. The final link is an article from said sociologist about how some models are like toxic assets and are taken on even though those who do so realize it is simple social conformity or market force response to do so.
I'm not sure I get everything in the articles because, and this may surprise no one, I haven't really paid a whole ton of attention to the fashion industry. I admit I read an article in Vogue once because Joan Didion wrote it but, another thing that will surprise no one, I am not in the habit of reading Vogue.
A friend of mine at one point considered fashion and design years ago but, she said, she decided against it. What she told me was she came to realize that the fashion industry exists almost entirely as a way to inspire women to covet and to feel insecure about their appearance and she did not consider it ethical, let alone Christian, to embrace such an industry.
Years ago when I was at Mars a subject was brought up about defining beauty. A certain guy said that if you marry someone you have to consider them hot. No explanation was given as to why this would be and there's nowhere in the biblical texts that mutual sexual attraction was ever considered a necessity within marriage, let alone as a prerequisite for marriage. The attempted discussion unfortunately didn't get off the ground and so bromides were brought up that were not well backed.
Some of those bromides are still around, such as "God doesn't give you a standard of beauty, he gives you a spouse." No on the main points because not everyone gets a spouse and while it's true there's no "biblical" standard of beauty beauty itself is described as an ultimately unimportant variable to consider in marriage and mating. Charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting ... so the advice from the wisdom literature does not seem to be saying that there is no standard of beauty so much as that whatever the standard of beauty may be beauty does not last. Time and gravity shall defeat us all and death will take us and there is no one who is beautiful when dead, is there?
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