http://www.theologyforwomen.org/2012/10/esther-victims-and-reformed-view-of.html
... Here's the issue with depravity. Scripture clearly presents that all have sinned and fall short of God's glory. This does NOT mean, however, that every person is as bad as they possibly could be. It does not mean that every person always makes the wrong decision. It does not mean that no person is able to help or be good to another. No, our depravity is better expressed as pervasive than total. Pervasive means it affects all aspects of ourselves. It is spread throughout, and we are unable to reverse it. But it does not mean that every response every time in every situation is 100% or totally wrong. I hear this wrong view of depravity discussed as Jesus wears the only white hat, and everyone else has black hats. [emphasis added] Or Jesus is the only hero, and everyone else is the bad guy. There's a sense in which that is pervasively true, but it is not totally true. *Note that such subtleties matter a great deal when discussing something as sensitive as sexual subjugation.*
This difference is crucial for understanding Esther's situation. If you think that all people make bad decisions all the time, well, first that is really depressing, and second it's just not true. In Esther's case, you then likely interpret the fact that she ends up in the king's harem and eventually as his wife due to her own poor choices, because, well, that's the nature of man (or woman) in your belief system. That paradigm has no category for the honest to goodness VICTIM. If you are totally bad all the time, then of course you made only bad choices along the way that led to your victimization.
...
It's very easy for someone with power who is not threatened to surmise
what they would do if they had NO power and were threatened. In contrast, anyone
who has been threatened sexually and feared for their life or the life of their
family will likely give a very different perspective when reading Esther than
the one that she contributed sinfully to her own situation. ...
In some circles this might be called a Monday morning quarterback approach to things.
Of note is the observation that it is a truncated view of what depravity means to say Jesus wears the white hat and everyone else wears the black hat. There are two very obvious problems to this approach. The first is that it's demonstrably not true, the second is that those who espouse it can't even show they consistently apply such an interpretive approach to biblical texts in their own discussion of them.
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Friday, October 12, 2012
More on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife and how it might have been forged.
HT Jim West
http://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/anthony-ledonne-why-im-glad-hes-joined-our-blogging-family-and-why-blogging-really-actually-matters/
http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2012/10/jesus-wife-fragment-further-evidence-of.html
How The Gospel of Jesus' Wife Might Have Been Forged: A Tentative Proposal
... I am going to cut to the chase and offer an "executive summary" of what I regard as the most important contention::
Line 1 of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment copies a typo from a website interlinear of Coptic Thomas
There's quite a bit more, of course, but that's the teaser for those interested in tracking this story.
Some light reading for your weekend, if you wish.
http://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/anthony-ledonne-why-im-glad-hes-joined-our-blogging-family-and-why-blogging-really-actually-matters/
http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2012/10/jesus-wife-fragment-further-evidence-of.html
How The Gospel of Jesus' Wife Might Have Been Forged: A Tentative Proposal
... I am going to cut to the chase and offer an "executive summary" of what I regard as the most important contention::
Line 1 of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment copies a typo from a website interlinear of Coptic Thomas
There's quite a bit more, of course, but that's the teaser for those interested in tracking this story.
Some light reading for your weekend, if you wish.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Mockingbird: The Authenticity Hoax--the perpetual Coolhunt & The Law of Keeping it Real
http://www.mbird.com/2012/10/exploring-the-authenticity-hoax-the-perpetual-coohunt-and-the-law-of-keeping-it-real/
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2012/10/08/yanss-podcast-episode-five/
People can’t stop themselves from competing for status. It is branded into the side of the brain before you are born. As a primate, status hierarchies are a part of life, and when you remove yourself from the competition in the mainstream you just join the competition in the counterculture. As long as there are clusters of people bent on avoiding what is most popular, within those clusters people will compete for status through conspicuous consumption of art and fashion, music and movies, furniture and gadgets, signaling to insiders the quality of their taste or the ingenuity of their search for the authentic, and signaling to the outsiders that they are not one of them. Whether you are a Juggalo in Kentucky or a Kogal in Tokyo, the internal affairs cool police are always on the prowl for posers.
The application of this to any community is apt, including religious communities. Ten years ago when I was still at Mars Hill Martians looked down on the outsiders. Now people who would fit in the label "alienated by the institutional church" look down on the religious institutions they used to give their money to. But the status-clambering has not changed on either side of the divide, has it? If it had then, perhaps, a person could provide help or encouragement to people on that other side of the institutional divide in a way that does not dehumanize them. Conversely, people still on that other side of the divide could look at those of us who aren't on their side and step back and think a moment about how we are not really any less "cool" than they are.
The quest for authenticity would be a whole lot easier if we didn't so often have a reflexive desire to not express sincere affection for something without seeming to appear as though we're complete suckers for something. We want to be "authentic" but if we seem "sold out" we might look a bit crazy or appear to be fools. I have so jaded a perspective on a certain megachurch that people who express zeal for it come off sounding silly and naive to me ... but it's equally true that anyone who is going to actually go watch Atlas Shrugged Part 2 comes off as just as much a sucker (because they are). We're all suckers for something but authenticity seems to be a stance through which we want to say "I'm all for this Subject X but I am not a sucker."
Adolescent passion seems to simultaneously be the measurement of "sincere" ardor and yet the measure of the coolest and cruelest dismissal of such ardor. There are few things that seem to simultaneously be so easy to sincerely attach significanct to in music and so easily satirized in the same as adolescent attraction. The self-authentication of our authenticity may be what dooms our authenticity more than anything else ... yet if we let others authenticate us we are subject to their judgment. I could try to do some trite thing here about how it will matter whose authentication of your self you seek ... and sometimes the trite thing is the best thing to end with, mentioned without irony and without an attempt to say more.
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2012/10/08/yanss-podcast-episode-five/
People can’t stop themselves from competing for status. It is branded into the side of the brain before you are born. As a primate, status hierarchies are a part of life, and when you remove yourself from the competition in the mainstream you just join the competition in the counterculture. As long as there are clusters of people bent on avoiding what is most popular, within those clusters people will compete for status through conspicuous consumption of art and fashion, music and movies, furniture and gadgets, signaling to insiders the quality of their taste or the ingenuity of their search for the authentic, and signaling to the outsiders that they are not one of them. Whether you are a Juggalo in Kentucky or a Kogal in Tokyo, the internal affairs cool police are always on the prowl for posers.
The application of this to any community is apt, including religious communities. Ten years ago when I was still at Mars Hill Martians looked down on the outsiders. Now people who would fit in the label "alienated by the institutional church" look down on the religious institutions they used to give their money to. But the status-clambering has not changed on either side of the divide, has it? If it had then, perhaps, a person could provide help or encouragement to people on that other side of the institutional divide in a way that does not dehumanize them. Conversely, people still on that other side of the divide could look at those of us who aren't on their side and step back and think a moment about how we are not really any less "cool" than they are.
The quest for authenticity would be a whole lot easier if we didn't so often have a reflexive desire to not express sincere affection for something without seeming to appear as though we're complete suckers for something. We want to be "authentic" but if we seem "sold out" we might look a bit crazy or appear to be fools. I have so jaded a perspective on a certain megachurch that people who express zeal for it come off sounding silly and naive to me ... but it's equally true that anyone who is going to actually go watch Atlas Shrugged Part 2 comes off as just as much a sucker (because they are). We're all suckers for something but authenticity seems to be a stance through which we want to say "I'm all for this Subject X but I am not a sucker."
Adolescent passion seems to simultaneously be the measurement of "sincere" ardor and yet the measure of the coolest and cruelest dismissal of such ardor. There are few things that seem to simultaneously be so easy to sincerely attach significanct to in music and so easily satirized in the same as adolescent attraction. The self-authentication of our authenticity may be what dooms our authenticity more than anything else ... yet if we let others authenticate us we are subject to their judgment. I could try to do some trite thing here about how it will matter whose authentication of your self you seek ... and sometimes the trite thing is the best thing to end with, mentioned without irony and without an attempt to say more.
J. S. Bangs: Toddler Language: Getting Past
http://jsbangs.com/2012/10/09/toddler-language-getting-past/
... So I don’t think this is something that he acquired as a fixed form, but rather appears to be him accurately applying regular past-tense morphology.
Go read the whole post. This particular sentence is very cute, though.
There are dads who are proud of their children for being able to use words and there are dads who are happy to report when a son appears to be accurately applying regular past-tense morphology.
That wins the internet for this week so far as Wenatchee The Hatchet is concerned.
... So I don’t think this is something that he acquired as a fixed form, but rather appears to be him accurately applying regular past-tense morphology.
Go read the whole post. This particular sentence is very cute, though.
There are dads who are proud of their children for being able to use words and there are dads who are happy to report when a son appears to be accurately applying regular past-tense morphology.
That wins the internet for this week so far as Wenatchee The Hatchet is concerned.
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Carl Trueman: The Culture's The Thing
http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/10/the-cultures-the-thing.php
I'm going to highlight a few spots of this to the degree where if you say any bold text that's my emphasis added, not Trueman's.
Looking back on the creepy cults of the 70s and the self-indulgent excesses of the televangelists of the 80s can be a little like watching an episode of some ghastly 'reality TV show': as the freaks and frauds parade on the television screen, that subtle sentiment of "I thank thee Lord that I am not like other men" is never far from the surface.
When it comes to cults and televangelists, of course, evangelical Protestants have an obvious foundation for assuming their superiority to the wild-eyed megalomaniacs and the superannuated mullet-haired mountebanks of the TV revival brigade: orthodox theology. The scoundrels are all deviant or downright heretical. We have the right theology, so we cannot be cultists or corrupt, can we? Sadly, that is not so.
In fact, as Paul himself makes clear, the gospel - the true gospel - can be peddled for power and for profit. To borrow Lutheran terminology, just because the product being sold is the theology of the cross does not mean that the salesman is not a theologian of glory. Cults and corruption are reflections of certain cultures, not of confessions. They can be as orthodox on paper as the Chalcedonian Definition but as perverted in their practices as a poker game run by a man called 'Honest John.' So just because somebody preaches the gospel, uses the name of Jesus every other sentence and cries when they talk about the lost does not guarantee that they are not a cult leader or simply in it for what they can get out of it.
The key is the culture. One must ask cultural questions of such men, not simply doctrinal ones. Is the culture of their church or organisation transparent? Are there clear lines of accountability which flow both ways, from the leadership to the grassroots and from the grassroots to the leadership? Is opposition to leadership decisions addressed in an open fashion or via thuggish backroom manoeuvres and public derision and isolation of critics? And one interesting question which I remember a pastor once asking in a pulpit when I was a college student: how far above the average economic level of the congregation or funding constituency does the leadership live? That little old lady putting her ten dollars in the plate each Sunday or sending in her pledge -- is she funding a lifestyle for functionally unaccountable leaders which is lavish beyond words and built on gospel rhetoric, on not-for-profit tax breaks and on an overwheening sense of entitlement? That can be quite an interesting gauge of whether the church or ministry takes seriously its role as steward of the money it receives. It is, after all, easy to prostitute yourself to the prosperity gospel when your own prophecies of material wealth are effectively underwritten by the desperate dreams of the poor and destitute which you yourself have helped to create and upon which you prey with a depraved and insatiable hunger.
Cultists and con-men are identifiable only by their culture, not by their confessions.
I'm going to highlight a few spots of this to the degree where if you say any bold text that's my emphasis added, not Trueman's.
Looking back on the creepy cults of the 70s and the self-indulgent excesses of the televangelists of the 80s can be a little like watching an episode of some ghastly 'reality TV show': as the freaks and frauds parade on the television screen, that subtle sentiment of "I thank thee Lord that I am not like other men" is never far from the surface.
When it comes to cults and televangelists, of course, evangelical Protestants have an obvious foundation for assuming their superiority to the wild-eyed megalomaniacs and the superannuated mullet-haired mountebanks of the TV revival brigade: orthodox theology. The scoundrels are all deviant or downright heretical. We have the right theology, so we cannot be cultists or corrupt, can we? Sadly, that is not so.
In fact, as Paul himself makes clear, the gospel - the true gospel - can be peddled for power and for profit. To borrow Lutheran terminology, just because the product being sold is the theology of the cross does not mean that the salesman is not a theologian of glory. Cults and corruption are reflections of certain cultures, not of confessions. They can be as orthodox on paper as the Chalcedonian Definition but as perverted in their practices as a poker game run by a man called 'Honest John.' So just because somebody preaches the gospel, uses the name of Jesus every other sentence and cries when they talk about the lost does not guarantee that they are not a cult leader or simply in it for what they can get out of it.
The key is the culture. One must ask cultural questions of such men, not simply doctrinal ones. Is the culture of their church or organisation transparent? Are there clear lines of accountability which flow both ways, from the leadership to the grassroots and from the grassroots to the leadership? Is opposition to leadership decisions addressed in an open fashion or via thuggish backroom manoeuvres and public derision and isolation of critics? And one interesting question which I remember a pastor once asking in a pulpit when I was a college student: how far above the average economic level of the congregation or funding constituency does the leadership live? That little old lady putting her ten dollars in the plate each Sunday or sending in her pledge -- is she funding a lifestyle for functionally unaccountable leaders which is lavish beyond words and built on gospel rhetoric, on not-for-profit tax breaks and on an overwheening sense of entitlement? That can be quite an interesting gauge of whether the church or ministry takes seriously its role as steward of the money it receives. It is, after all, easy to prostitute yourself to the prosperity gospel when your own prophecies of material wealth are effectively underwritten by the desperate dreams of the poor and destitute which you yourself have helped to create and upon which you prey with a depraved and insatiable hunger.
Cultists and con-men are identifiable only by their culture, not by their confessions.
Tuesday, October 09, 2012
Nathan, David, and Gad the seer: one prophet seems to show up when the other seems missing
It is a common colloquialism for Christians to ask where the Nathan is to speak to David about his wrongs. It's an understandable collquial expression but I have wondered where Gad the seer was when David took Uriah's wife and had him killed. Gad the seer was described as David's personal seer through 1 Samuel while David was on the run.
Gad is the name of a prophet who appears in 1 Samuel 22:5 instructing David to head to Judah. Gad the seer is described as David's prophet in 2 Samuel during the disastrous census. So "if" Gad is the same person in both books where did he go in the middle? If Gad was David's prophet or seer (David had a few advisors, it seems, one of whom was Ahithophel, who turned on David eventually and joined Absalom's insurrection) what was Gad up to when David took Uriah the Hittite's wife Bathsheba and arranged for Uriah's death?
Nowhere?
We know from Gad's role in talking to David during the census that he an important role but Gad is absent.
To piggyback on the colloquial question of where Nathan is for David perhaps we can introduce a new element for reflection, where was Gad the seer? Gad seemed to have played a role in advising David previously but was absent here. Perhaps a Nathan appears not simply because David had sinned but also because the prophetic voice David had relied on previously had also failed in some way. Nathan, to go by Samuel and Kings as a cohesive narrative, seems to show up when Gad may be out of the picture or drops the ball. Not that Nathan's scheming with Bathsheba to place Solomon on the throne isn't itself a little problematic but bear with me. I'm proposing that the need for a Nathan may not just involve a sinful king but also the failure of the king's prophet to confront the king. Maybe Gad was advising the soldiers on the field and didn't know of David's actions? I don't know, I'm just throwing that out as a question about the narrative given that both Gad and Nathan play significant prophetic roles in the reign of David. We've seen from the fitful hand-off Samuel oversaw in setting up Saul and then David as kings that even prophets and judges could mess things up.
Still, fallible as even they could be their role in challenging David was important, whether it was Gad who told David what he'd done wrong or Nathan. This may also be a reminder that no matter how great you think your accountability person/network is the reality is that if David's life in the books of Samuel is any indication, that network can fail you and the corrective challenge may come from another avenue you didn't select, didn't anticipate, didn't want, and that hits you with your guilt in an unexpected way by using your own moral outrage as a way to show you your wrongdoing.
Gad is the name of a prophet who appears in 1 Samuel 22:5 instructing David to head to Judah. Gad the seer is described as David's prophet in 2 Samuel during the disastrous census. So "if" Gad is the same person in both books where did he go in the middle? If Gad was David's prophet or seer (David had a few advisors, it seems, one of whom was Ahithophel, who turned on David eventually and joined Absalom's insurrection) what was Gad up to when David took Uriah the Hittite's wife Bathsheba and arranged for Uriah's death?
Nowhere?
We know from Gad's role in talking to David during the census that he an important role but Gad is absent.
To piggyback on the colloquial question of where Nathan is for David perhaps we can introduce a new element for reflection, where was Gad the seer? Gad seemed to have played a role in advising David previously but was absent here. Perhaps a Nathan appears not simply because David had sinned but also because the prophetic voice David had relied on previously had also failed in some way. Nathan, to go by Samuel and Kings as a cohesive narrative, seems to show up when Gad may be out of the picture or drops the ball. Not that Nathan's scheming with Bathsheba to place Solomon on the throne isn't itself a little problematic but bear with me. I'm proposing that the need for a Nathan may not just involve a sinful king but also the failure of the king's prophet to confront the king. Maybe Gad was advising the soldiers on the field and didn't know of David's actions? I don't know, I'm just throwing that out as a question about the narrative given that both Gad and Nathan play significant prophetic roles in the reign of David. We've seen from the fitful hand-off Samuel oversaw in setting up Saul and then David as kings that even prophets and judges could mess things up.
Still, fallible as even they could be their role in challenging David was important, whether it was Gad who told David what he'd done wrong or Nathan. This may also be a reminder that no matter how great you think your accountability person/network is the reality is that if David's life in the books of Samuel is any indication, that network can fail you and the corrective challenge may come from another avenue you didn't select, didn't anticipate, didn't want, and that hits you with your guilt in an unexpected way by using your own moral outrage as a way to show you your wrongdoing.
Matt Redmond: Why do they leave the church--vocation and opportunity costs?
AN EVANGELICAL WORLD WITHOUT OPPORTUNITY COSTS
http://mattbredmond.com/2012/10/09/why-do-they-leave-the-church/
Here is my theory – one reason why so many people, young and old, leave the faith is no one is helping them think about what the great majority of what their lives are made up of.
Christianity is given (sold?) to us, in the main, as a life of evangelism, morality and church activities. Evangelism is painful for most people. Morality is great but there are always unbelievers who are more moral. And church activities, even when profoundly helpful, are another spinning plate in already busy lives.
Honestly, I can’t help thinking this is not enough.
Lutherans might suggest that American evangelicals have so imbibed pietistic concepts of faith even in ostensibly non-pietistic settings that there's no theology of the ordinary and no theology of vocation. Not that I'm a Lutheran ... but I'm making a guess.
Sure, there are the gospel-hyphenated movements that get people to be gospel-centered, and these do some good in helping people see the big picture. But the big picture is not enough. It is not enough to see the big picture.
Our lives are made up of finely drawn details. Each day is full of countless ones. We do all these “little” things at home, at work, and in the marketplace and they just don’t get a lot of sermon time.
Yep. The big picture is inspiring and wonderful but try explaining the significance of what that big picture might look like in any setting besides a conference and see how long stuff gets discussed.
I've seen that spiel about "the tortured beauty of the cross" and it doesn't add up to much. Sorry. That's still too big picture. It's vision-casting without boots on the ground. If I were to do something as, say, a musician, then how I understand the big picture would need to inform how I handle even the minor details of putting together a musical work or playing a piece of music. A lot would depend on setting.
If I were playing music in a church then no matter how much I'd want to be able to play some sort of musical extract from Messiaen I wouldn't play it if it alienated listeners. I've put up with singing or playing songs I actually can't stand for the sake of being of some benefit to others. I'm an amateur musician but I don't doubt for a second that "vocational" musicianship can often involve being asked to play a piece of music you can't stand that you do because you're able to play it and because someone who loves some music you don't like is willing to pay you enough money for you to do a respectable job playing that music. This might be why Aranjuez keeps getting played even though a lot of guitarists get sick of it.
They walk away because we are answering the questions they are not asking.
This, I think, is key. Francis Schaeffer used to say that the problem with American evangelicals is they were busy saying "Jesus is the answer" without considering for a moment "What is the question?" You'd think after decades of evangelicals admiring Francis Schaeffer they'd have paid the slightest bit of attention to his warning but, nope, it seems a lot of folks used Schaeffer's life and work as a shortcut so that they will never have to struggle with any of the stuff Schaeffer struggled through.
For instance, this is a hobby horse I admit to having, in music if we take seriously that through Christ God is reconciling all things to Himself then there is no high and low, art and pop, serious and frivolous in the arts. The worship wars played out for decades on a supposition, it seems, that even though we will say there is in Christ no slave or free, Jew or Greek, male or female we're sure those distinctions are deal-breakers if things aren't observed the way we want them to be. That's neither an endorsement nor criticism of either traditional liturgical music or CCM as such but of a mentality that presupposes that all styles are not in some fashion capable of being legitimate musical possibilities.
When I was a kid and a teenager I'd hear this or that style was off the table for Christians, which would mean there'd be some other Christians, usually folks who already wanted to keep buying more of that music, who would come up with a set of rationales for why that music was more awesomer than the traditional old fuddy-duddy music. These days the catchphrases used would be "incarnational" (as in "I've heard of it before and i like it") and "missional" (as in if we play this music instead of forty strains of "Have Thy Own Way, Lord" people will sit through things long enough to listen to the forty-minute sermon). Well, some of them will, no doubt.
Once you get out of the plugged-in plan-to-be-leaders set even in the neo-Calvinist set what do most people do? Don't they potentially jsut show up, give on Sunday, hit the community group, and have pretty normal lives? Most people will not end up being community group leader material and don't need to be. Not that small groups are necessarily bad but small groups discussing what a preacher said earlier the same week is no more "community" than people trading pictures of cats and dogs on Facebook, is it? It's exactly "not" social interaction in any sense but it may well be no less "mediated", to borrow a media theory abstraction.
Now I could go on at some length about how I came to the conclusion that a Christian musicians can approach all musical styles as equally legitimate and get into points of comparative musicology and observing the way temperament and tuning systems laid a ground work for new approaches to music. I could try to explain how the old and new styles in the Baroque period paved the way for a polystylistic approach being possible within Church music centuries before the worship wars were happening in the U.S. I could try to demonstrate how common practice harmony ends up looking curiously the same across the pop and art divide where secondary dominant functions are or how contrapuntal invention is possible in more than one style.
But rather than do any of that I'm going to make a sweeping assertion, absolutely nobody in church leadership came up with even fifteen words to articulate any of this stuff. The whole lengthy decades-long process I'm describing was something I worked out privately and with influences and people I couldn't describe as having ever been in some kind of formal ministry. The official theologians and pastors and so on were generally not equipped to have any connection to any of this sort of process, at least not many of the ones I ever met in person. I mean, sure, I'd say a Harold Best or a Michael Card could have tackled both a musicological and doctrinal approach to how multiple styles could be approached and in what practical context but they're professionals on both fronts.
No, if I were to try to think of someone who proposed, for instance, that the musical divisions of the East and West may one day be broken down it was Toru Takemitsu I first remember reading making that comment. How many evangelicals who would opine on music in a seminary know who that was? A few, really, but they'd be in music departments, by and large. Experiments with juxtaposing sound and silence was not strictly the domain of Arvo Part, after all.
Now we could say that people miss the big thing about who God is. But let me bring it back to music again, how does saying God made all things inform your understanding of a non-modulating transition compared to a modulating transition? This is where the pious platitudes about the vertical seem more than anything to have no intersection with the horizontal. I've got some quibbles with the vertical/horizontal stuff but I'll save that for some other time. For now the distinctions are more useful than annoying. The vertical angle is great for people who are at the top of the pyramid and want everyone at the bottom to keep siphoning their money up to whatever the vision-caster wants done. The thing about the vertical is that it's great for people who are on the leadership track where ever they are at. I get that, but for the people who don't live to get more progressive plulgged-in into being on the mission and have normal lives tehre's a lot of talk about God that doesn't translate because the points of translation get to things that the people who like to talk about God really don't seem to care about.
For the never married this can become strikingly obvious. If you want people to avoid fornicating you have to do more than just camp out on the don't fornicate part. Suppose a guy has never dated anyone and doesn't feel like dating because all the people who pair off don't do anything much artistically? Now in a neo-Calvinist setting the stock reaction to that would be the guy hasn't manned up and realized that getting hitched and making babies to the glory of Jesus is his God-ordained designed role. But life is full of opportunity costs. Talking about Jesus and God doesn't eliminate the reality of opportunity costs.
There's a price for any investment and interest in life and it may be the big failure of evangelicals, per Matt Redmond's theory, is not simply that we haven't managed to discuss vocation but that we also don't care to talk about opportunity costs in normal ways. It's easy to talk about the opportunity cost (infinite) Jesus made for the atonement. If we are defined by what we say "no" to that's a weak spot but it also seems a weak spot that when we say "yes" to something there are things we have to say "no" to along the way. Evangelicals tend to think of the "yes" and "no" with respect to sin and righteousness while forgetting that there's a whole realm of conduct in which the "yes" and "no" are not about sin and righteousness so much as opportunity costs in which once you commit to something love of neighbor would enjoin you to keep your word even when it ends up being painful. Think of it as a "cheap grace" problem in discussing vocation. If you choose to marry and start that family you may have to give up the dreams you had of writing those books or songs.
Conversely, if you write those books or songs you may not have the spouse or the money to support kids. Are one set of options sinful and the other set not? No, but evangelicals seem unable to distinguish between competing goods as well as they find ways to polarize decision-making into the right and the wrong. Evangelicalism may have failed not merely for lacking a theology of vocation but for failing to address the reality that many of lives greatest disappointments and challenges are the result of decisions we regret where we see the opportunity costs of choosing one of two actually legitimate options. When Paul said that marriage or celibacy were equally legitimate options it was as though he gave way too much freedom and people have been trying to systematize a one-size fits all either/or option ever since.
Maybe the reasons people leave the church is not simply because we are answering questions that aren't being asked (per Francis Schaffer half a century ago). It may also be because we can't level with people about the reality that life is full of roads not taken and that many of these roads are equally legitimate; Most of life's regrets are not necessarily between a Christian choosing righteous option A when he or she wanted to choose sinful option B. We don't seem to know how to talk with people about the regrets that come from picking one of a couple of equally legitimate options. We have to talk to them as though whatever they didn't pick, or whatever they wanted, was probably a sin.
I've rambled enough on that topic for this post.
http://mattbredmond.com/2012/10/09/why-do-they-leave-the-church/
Here is my theory – one reason why so many people, young and old, leave the faith is no one is helping them think about what the great majority of what their lives are made up of.
Christianity is given (sold?) to us, in the main, as a life of evangelism, morality and church activities. Evangelism is painful for most people. Morality is great but there are always unbelievers who are more moral. And church activities, even when profoundly helpful, are another spinning plate in already busy lives.
Honestly, I can’t help thinking this is not enough.
Lutherans might suggest that American evangelicals have so imbibed pietistic concepts of faith even in ostensibly non-pietistic settings that there's no theology of the ordinary and no theology of vocation. Not that I'm a Lutheran ... but I'm making a guess.
Sure, there are the gospel-hyphenated movements that get people to be gospel-centered, and these do some good in helping people see the big picture. But the big picture is not enough. It is not enough to see the big picture.
Our lives are made up of finely drawn details. Each day is full of countless ones. We do all these “little” things at home, at work, and in the marketplace and they just don’t get a lot of sermon time.
Yep. The big picture is inspiring and wonderful but try explaining the significance of what that big picture might look like in any setting besides a conference and see how long stuff gets discussed.
I've seen that spiel about "the tortured beauty of the cross" and it doesn't add up to much. Sorry. That's still too big picture. It's vision-casting without boots on the ground. If I were to do something as, say, a musician, then how I understand the big picture would need to inform how I handle even the minor details of putting together a musical work or playing a piece of music. A lot would depend on setting.
If I were playing music in a church then no matter how much I'd want to be able to play some sort of musical extract from Messiaen I wouldn't play it if it alienated listeners. I've put up with singing or playing songs I actually can't stand for the sake of being of some benefit to others. I'm an amateur musician but I don't doubt for a second that "vocational" musicianship can often involve being asked to play a piece of music you can't stand that you do because you're able to play it and because someone who loves some music you don't like is willing to pay you enough money for you to do a respectable job playing that music. This might be why Aranjuez keeps getting played even though a lot of guitarists get sick of it.
They walk away because we are answering the questions they are not asking.
This, I think, is key. Francis Schaeffer used to say that the problem with American evangelicals is they were busy saying "Jesus is the answer" without considering for a moment "What is the question?" You'd think after decades of evangelicals admiring Francis Schaeffer they'd have paid the slightest bit of attention to his warning but, nope, it seems a lot of folks used Schaeffer's life and work as a shortcut so that they will never have to struggle with any of the stuff Schaeffer struggled through.
For instance, this is a hobby horse I admit to having, in music if we take seriously that through Christ God is reconciling all things to Himself then there is no high and low, art and pop, serious and frivolous in the arts. The worship wars played out for decades on a supposition, it seems, that even though we will say there is in Christ no slave or free, Jew or Greek, male or female we're sure those distinctions are deal-breakers if things aren't observed the way we want them to be. That's neither an endorsement nor criticism of either traditional liturgical music or CCM as such but of a mentality that presupposes that all styles are not in some fashion capable of being legitimate musical possibilities.
When I was a kid and a teenager I'd hear this or that style was off the table for Christians, which would mean there'd be some other Christians, usually folks who already wanted to keep buying more of that music, who would come up with a set of rationales for why that music was more awesomer than the traditional old fuddy-duddy music. These days the catchphrases used would be "incarnational" (as in "I've heard of it before and i like it") and "missional" (as in if we play this music instead of forty strains of "Have Thy Own Way, Lord" people will sit through things long enough to listen to the forty-minute sermon). Well, some of them will, no doubt.
Once you get out of the plugged-in plan-to-be-leaders set even in the neo-Calvinist set what do most people do? Don't they potentially jsut show up, give on Sunday, hit the community group, and have pretty normal lives? Most people will not end up being community group leader material and don't need to be. Not that small groups are necessarily bad but small groups discussing what a preacher said earlier the same week is no more "community" than people trading pictures of cats and dogs on Facebook, is it? It's exactly "not" social interaction in any sense but it may well be no less "mediated", to borrow a media theory abstraction.
Now I could go on at some length about how I came to the conclusion that a Christian musicians can approach all musical styles as equally legitimate and get into points of comparative musicology and observing the way temperament and tuning systems laid a ground work for new approaches to music. I could try to explain how the old and new styles in the Baroque period paved the way for a polystylistic approach being possible within Church music centuries before the worship wars were happening in the U.S. I could try to demonstrate how common practice harmony ends up looking curiously the same across the pop and art divide where secondary dominant functions are or how contrapuntal invention is possible in more than one style.
But rather than do any of that I'm going to make a sweeping assertion, absolutely nobody in church leadership came up with even fifteen words to articulate any of this stuff. The whole lengthy decades-long process I'm describing was something I worked out privately and with influences and people I couldn't describe as having ever been in some kind of formal ministry. The official theologians and pastors and so on were generally not equipped to have any connection to any of this sort of process, at least not many of the ones I ever met in person. I mean, sure, I'd say a Harold Best or a Michael Card could have tackled both a musicological and doctrinal approach to how multiple styles could be approached and in what practical context but they're professionals on both fronts.
No, if I were to try to think of someone who proposed, for instance, that the musical divisions of the East and West may one day be broken down it was Toru Takemitsu I first remember reading making that comment. How many evangelicals who would opine on music in a seminary know who that was? A few, really, but they'd be in music departments, by and large. Experiments with juxtaposing sound and silence was not strictly the domain of Arvo Part, after all.
Now we could say that people miss the big thing about who God is. But let me bring it back to music again, how does saying God made all things inform your understanding of a non-modulating transition compared to a modulating transition? This is where the pious platitudes about the vertical seem more than anything to have no intersection with the horizontal. I've got some quibbles with the vertical/horizontal stuff but I'll save that for some other time. For now the distinctions are more useful than annoying. The vertical angle is great for people who are at the top of the pyramid and want everyone at the bottom to keep siphoning their money up to whatever the vision-caster wants done. The thing about the vertical is that it's great for people who are on the leadership track where ever they are at. I get that, but for the people who don't live to get more progressive plulgged-in into being on the mission and have normal lives tehre's a lot of talk about God that doesn't translate because the points of translation get to things that the people who like to talk about God really don't seem to care about.
For the never married this can become strikingly obvious. If you want people to avoid fornicating you have to do more than just camp out on the don't fornicate part. Suppose a guy has never dated anyone and doesn't feel like dating because all the people who pair off don't do anything much artistically? Now in a neo-Calvinist setting the stock reaction to that would be the guy hasn't manned up and realized that getting hitched and making babies to the glory of Jesus is his God-ordained designed role. But life is full of opportunity costs. Talking about Jesus and God doesn't eliminate the reality of opportunity costs.
There's a price for any investment and interest in life and it may be the big failure of evangelicals, per Matt Redmond's theory, is not simply that we haven't managed to discuss vocation but that we also don't care to talk about opportunity costs in normal ways. It's easy to talk about the opportunity cost (infinite) Jesus made for the atonement. If we are defined by what we say "no" to that's a weak spot but it also seems a weak spot that when we say "yes" to something there are things we have to say "no" to along the way. Evangelicals tend to think of the "yes" and "no" with respect to sin and righteousness while forgetting that there's a whole realm of conduct in which the "yes" and "no" are not about sin and righteousness so much as opportunity costs in which once you commit to something love of neighbor would enjoin you to keep your word even when it ends up being painful. Think of it as a "cheap grace" problem in discussing vocation. If you choose to marry and start that family you may have to give up the dreams you had of writing those books or songs.
Conversely, if you write those books or songs you may not have the spouse or the money to support kids. Are one set of options sinful and the other set not? No, but evangelicals seem unable to distinguish between competing goods as well as they find ways to polarize decision-making into the right and the wrong. Evangelicalism may have failed not merely for lacking a theology of vocation but for failing to address the reality that many of lives greatest disappointments and challenges are the result of decisions we regret where we see the opportunity costs of choosing one of two actually legitimate options. When Paul said that marriage or celibacy were equally legitimate options it was as though he gave way too much freedom and people have been trying to systematize a one-size fits all either/or option ever since.
Maybe the reasons people leave the church is not simply because we are answering questions that aren't being asked (per Francis Schaffer half a century ago). It may also be because we can't level with people about the reality that life is full of roads not taken and that many of these roads are equally legitimate; Most of life's regrets are not necessarily between a Christian choosing righteous option A when he or she wanted to choose sinful option B. We don't seem to know how to talk with people about the regrets that come from picking one of a couple of equally legitimate options. We have to talk to them as though whatever they didn't pick, or whatever they wanted, was probably a sin.
I've rambled enough on that topic for this post.
The Elephants Debt, a website that discusses James MacDonald and Harvest Bible Chapel real estate and finances
http://theelephantsdebt.com/2012/06/13/hello-world/
I haven't had a chance to read through every single document on this one but since James MacDonald teamed up with Mark Driscoll to shake hands with T. D. Jakes this site might be of interest.
Link to the "howdy" page presented for your consideration.
I haven't had a chance to read through every single document on this one but since James MacDonald teamed up with Mark Driscoll to shake hands with T. D. Jakes this site might be of interest.
Link to the "howdy" page presented for your consideration.
Saturday, October 06, 2012
Andrew posts something on Ed Welch, counseling, and heuristics in counseling
http://www.cityofgodblog.com/2012/10/psychology-and-the-christian-difference/
For folks who haven't heard of a "heuristic" it can be thought of, broadly, as a mental shortcut. With that in mind, Andrew posted some comments from a friend on Ed Welch and on how "Christian counseling" can be understood.
Here's the snippet I want to quote and throw out for consideration to readers:
... The problem with many “Christian” approaches is that, as the Dooyeweerdians rightly note, they work with a picture of a “spiritual” man who is basically an angel in flesh, but ahistoric and simple. Thus, there is a tendency to want to reduce all psychotherapy to either a) exorcism, or b) church discipline. This is an enormously stupid mistake. [emphasis mine] In reaction, we now have Christian counseling which, although it might be fine philosophically (meaning, personalist and non-materialist), is hardly Christian at all, though in a secularist and materialist age, philosophical rectitude is already *so* different from the prevalent model that Christians can mistake it for being specifically Christian. ...
Well that doesn't sound like any Christian counseling we've ever heard about, does it? ;-)
For folks who haven't heard of a "heuristic" it can be thought of, broadly, as a mental shortcut. With that in mind, Andrew posted some comments from a friend on Ed Welch and on how "Christian counseling" can be understood.
Here's the snippet I want to quote and throw out for consideration to readers:
... The problem with many “Christian” approaches is that, as the Dooyeweerdians rightly note, they work with a picture of a “spiritual” man who is basically an angel in flesh, but ahistoric and simple. Thus, there is a tendency to want to reduce all psychotherapy to either a) exorcism, or b) church discipline. This is an enormously stupid mistake. [emphasis mine] In reaction, we now have Christian counseling which, although it might be fine philosophically (meaning, personalist and non-materialist), is hardly Christian at all, though in a secularist and materialist age, philosophical rectitude is already *so* different from the prevalent model that Christians can mistake it for being specifically Christian. ...
Well that doesn't sound like any Christian counseling we've ever heard about, does it? ;-)
Friday, October 05, 2012
Matt Redmond's Thursday's random thoughts this week ...
http://mattbredmond.com/2012/10/04/thursdays-random-thoughts-42/
2. We have moved on from bumper sticker theology to Twitter theology.
And we can all agree that Twitter theology is vastly superior to bumper sticker theology, can't we?
2. We have moved on from bumper sticker theology to Twitter theology.
And we can all agree that Twitter theology is vastly superior to bumper sticker theology, can't we?
love of music means having some life without it
Now if this were the only post you read you might mistakenly think that I write about Hilary Hahn more than I actually do. In an interview she once mentioned that she does other things besides playing the violin and has other interests. After all, if she became injured and couldn't play or got to a point where she could never play music again she'd want some kind of life not interwoven with music so that she'd have, you know, a life.
Now I'm hardly a musician of her caliber but I see her point. For composers of music you might think we listen to Beethoven a ton and try to find that mystical feely-touchy groove where music inspires us to make music. Yeah ... well ... no. I've often had my biggest moments of inspiration in a quiet room with pencil and paper scribbling out a chart in which I am seeing how many things I can do with a sequence of notes before I find one that sounds interesting. You read that correctly. I might start off by playing a riff on my guitar, or a few chords on the keyboard, and I might sing a melody or two to myself at first, but a lot of a composition can end up being worked out on paper.
If you're serious about this business of creating music then thinking through musical possibilities on paper and putting those sounds together in your head can get more done than hours at a keyboard or hours on a guitar. When I began to write what became 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar the vast majority of the most difficult but important work I did was just with pencil and paper away from any instruments, sometimes during breaks at the day job, sometimes during unexpected and unwanted hours where I couldn't get anything done at my real day job because the server or network crashed and the IT people didn't know when it was going to get fixed but I needed to be around in case things got fixed. Yeah, like that. Well, it was often in those kinds of moments I might work out entirely on paper and thinking through the options, what might become a prelude and fugue in A major or something like it.
That's to tell you that even for musicians important stretches of life, even important moments in life writing music, do not involve controlled vibrations of air.
The German emigre composer Paul Hindemith complained about how American culture saturates a person with hours of unwanted music in A Composer's World back in the 1950s. His complaint was that this ubiquitous use of music would drain any power or significance from our musical experiences. He also complained that all the American educational system seemed able to do was produce music teachers who would, in turn, produce the next generation of music teachers and that every American kid seemed to be taught music in a way tha tacitly suggested "YOU could become the next Beethoven." But Hindemith is not the topic of this blog post.
Instead the topic of this blog post is to piggyback on a post at Internet Monk.
Now I'm hardly a musician of her caliber but I see her point. For composers of music you might think we listen to Beethoven a ton and try to find that mystical feely-touchy groove where music inspires us to make music. Yeah ... well ... no. I've often had my biggest moments of inspiration in a quiet room with pencil and paper scribbling out a chart in which I am seeing how many things I can do with a sequence of notes before I find one that sounds interesting. You read that correctly. I might start off by playing a riff on my guitar, or a few chords on the keyboard, and I might sing a melody or two to myself at first, but a lot of a composition can end up being worked out on paper.
If you're serious about this business of creating music then thinking through musical possibilities on paper and putting those sounds together in your head can get more done than hours at a keyboard or hours on a guitar. When I began to write what became 24 preludes and fugues for solo guitar the vast majority of the most difficult but important work I did was just with pencil and paper away from any instruments, sometimes during breaks at the day job, sometimes during unexpected and unwanted hours where I couldn't get anything done at my real day job because the server or network crashed and the IT people didn't know when it was going to get fixed but I needed to be around in case things got fixed. Yeah, like that. Well, it was often in those kinds of moments I might work out entirely on paper and thinking through the options, what might become a prelude and fugue in A major or something like it.
That's to tell you that even for musicians important stretches of life, even important moments in life writing music, do not involve controlled vibrations of air.
The German emigre composer Paul Hindemith complained about how American culture saturates a person with hours of unwanted music in A Composer's World back in the 1950s. His complaint was that this ubiquitous use of music would drain any power or significance from our musical experiences. He also complained that all the American educational system seemed able to do was produce music teachers who would, in turn, produce the next generation of music teachers and that every American kid seemed to be taught music in a way tha tacitly suggested "YOU could become the next Beethoven." But Hindemith is not the topic of this blog post.
Instead the topic of this blog post is to piggyback on a post at Internet Monk.
J. S. Bangs on rhyme and reason, and the abjection of the past in fantasy literature
http://jsbangs.com/2012/10/04/rhyme-and-reason/
http://jsbangs.com/2011/08/17/time-travelers-or-the-abjection-of-the-past-in-fantasy-literature/
J. S. didn't exactly plan for these two to be bookends of an overarching idea but I'm presenting the links back to back because I think they do present an overarching idea, one that can be summarized by his use of Eve Tushnet's observation:
"Realism" only works for people whose worldviews are already accepted as realistic. The rest of us must make do with genre.
Everything old tends to get new again and if rhyme has become hip now it might be because after generations of poetry teachers telling you that you need to grow up and stop doing end rhyme so much a bunch of writers may have decided that that stance is silly. A lot of tedious music, art, literature, theater, dance and film has been made in the name of "progress".
If you read Alex Ross' book The Rest is Noise he wrote about the ascent of serialism and atonality in American academic music in the 1960s and 1970s. The Cold War was raging along and in reaction, partly, to the aesthetic ideology of "socialist realism" a lot of American composers decided (with some help from government funding and foundations) that writing music that was not at all traditionally tonal was the most democratic and intellectually honest thing to do. The champions of the European avant garde had, by and large, fled in the build-up to the Second World War and often settled in the United States.
It was almost a patriotic duty for a serious, academic composer to eschew the popular stuff like conventional melody and harmony. Even someone as popular as Bernstein could still have semi-nice rather than glowing things to say about Gershwin, who really came from the pop side of the pop/art divide and whose forays into concert music inspired some of the biggest names in "serious" music to be more than a little dismissive of Gershwin's work. I hardly need do more than ask readers how many of them have heard Gershwin's "Summertime" compared to hearing a Virgil Thomson work of any sort. I'm aware that given how I blog about music there's going to be a sample bias because anyone who comes here and recognizes the name Atanas Ourkouzounov has probably actually heard Virgil Thomson music.
But while in academia and "serious" music major and minor chords were being cast off right and left (there's a joke in there not just about the profligacy with which the high-brow cast off tonality, it's about the different ways in which different political interests contrived reasons for this) the popular culture in the West began to plug in and rock around the clock. Sure, you could point to all the stuff in pop music and talk about how bound it was to older styles but people were listening to it. For the advocates of atonality tonal music was about as bad as the 19th century. Some people caught in some kind of middle-brow snobbery would look down on popular music without realizing that compared to Stockhausen or Elliot Carter pop music was at least preserving some semblance of tonality, however expanded and attenuated it might be and this, really, no further than the harmonic devices employed by Debussy. There's not much in the heavy metal I've heard that can't be traced to folk music from Scandanaiva or central and eastern Europe, to get absurdly sweeping about that.
Neither the archetypal renegade nor reactionary is really representing the vast and fascinating continuum of the arts in any media. Even in the Baroque we can go back and see the old style and the new style and how composers could adapt to one or the other and synthesize.
In the 20th century the West was full of people trying to cast off the rules and break the mold. In the 21st century as digital storage and algorythmic analysis of cumulative works becomes more practical we are getting people philosopically musing on how nothing is original and how everything derives ins ome fashion from the past. All may be flux and Heraclitus may have been right to say you can't walk through the same river twice but let's suppose we ask another question, woudl he still have tried catching fish in that river a week after he uttered his axiom?
What Bangs has touched on thematically across two posts in two years is something I want to play with and bring into a bit more light, if possible. On the one hand in the 20th century there was an abjection of the past. The idea was that whatever the past was it was some benighted epoch of ignorance and stupid people doing evil things or making uninspiring this or that. There's a whole emotional/social narrative of a Dark Ages that is something you conveniently didn't have to live in or live through. We judge the past and consider ourselves better than it, however we define that past. That was often how things could be perceived and conceived and told in the 20th century.
But then at the other side there are those Baby Boomers who had kids growing up to love the Beatles and to consider it to have been a fantastic life to have grown up during the 1960s. Baby Boomers make movies congratulating themselves on having "changed the world" or "changed everything". There can be a praise of the past that is appealing to those who can look back and, in some way, call that past something connected to their present. It is something we all sahre even when we don't want to admit we share this impulse, too. There is somethign in which each of us can say with some pride and some nostalgia, "I was .... when X was ... and things aren't as good as they were back then." Alert and longtime readers won't have to make too many guesses as to where some probably unwarranted nostalgia might nest here.
Isn't it a bit strange to have a people that will abject the past of their ancestors while havinga nostalgia for their own individual past? I'm not saying it's impossible I'm just saying I don't quite get it. Americans may have a meta-narrative of overcoming the great obstacle or failure of one's own family and upbringing through the powerful discovery of "real" "community" or "logic". I admit to beign skeptical about that kind of stuff.
In the arts I'm not sure I could describe myself as a traditionalist or a proponent of new-(insert field here). Like I said earlier there's an amazing continuum of possibilities and options and it is that spanning of time and space that makes the arts so fascinating now. Anyone who would attempt to break the rules and defy conventions by now has to recognize that in the information era and the age of the internet it will be impossible to break any rules. This does not mean that nothing new can possibly be made. Even Arnold Schoenberg, champion of dodeccaphony, once remarked that there was still plenty of music to be written in the key of C major. That which seems to be old and even old-fashioned does not have to be tedious and pointless because billions of people have discovered or enjoyed things before. Put in very blunt terms none of us would have been born to be possibly reading or writing on a blog if the only things that were cosnidered worth doing were the things that haven't been done before.
But as a friend once complained about an aspiring writer, tehre's a writer who writes as though nobody had any idea what sex was before he started writing about it. I recall coming across a silly headline with a silly sentiment that Christopher Hitchens writing about death was finally an honest book about death. That author may have just been unaware or forgot that Ecclesiastes did a decent job being honest about dying being miserable and the end of everything. Since it was a book canonized into a religious text it would make sense why a Hitchens fan might have overlooked it, though. Part of why a lot of the "modern" from the 20th century can seem played out in every art form is because it could get too precious and too self-aware but the bad kind of self-aware of proposing something that "mattered".
Sometimes things happen that change the nature of an art form. Not everyone wants to admit the action/adventure film is an art forum but Raiders of the Lost Ark,with that one scene where Indy shoots the swordsman, did change action cinema. The protagonist was willing to skip to lethal force rather than fight a foe on equal footing. The protagonist was willing to press a substantial combat advantage and skip what was at that point the expected and for that time, "inevitable" sword fight. Or so the legend goes. For the sake of discussing how innovation happens in the arts the legend is useful for my point, that not all innovation is necessarily done on purpose. Innovation doesn't have to be done on purpose to be compelling. Conversely, as a survey of the work of J. S. bach goes you might be hard-pressed to find Bach's formal and conceptual innovations as a composer and yet no one could contest the significance of his influence.
If in the 20th century the great pioneers in the arts broke the rules, thought outside the box, and came up with things that were new the 21st century, 12 years in, may be full of an anxiety of influence stretched out on a massive canvas and painted in alternately dour or chirpy tones. What we often forget if we don't bother to study enough history of the arts is that cycles of fragmentation and consolidation are common. When fragmentation became the value it was important to be part of that iconoclastic, transgressive process. It was in the late 1990s, perhaps, that Leo Brouwer said that the academics have missed the boat on fusion as a movement, wasn't it? It was easy to dismiss jazz/rock fusion and other forms of fusion like progressive rock (and, really, it IS easy to be dismissive of a lot of progressive rock anyway). But generations of failure were not without success.
While we are primed by an emotional/cultural narrative in which the Beethoven or the Mozart is the "real" artistic hero we are coming into a time where the Haydn or the Bach could be a hero, in the sense that consolidation, assimilation, and summation are just as fun as iconoclastically pushing the envelope and breaking hte rules. In a global information network such as ours, I tentatively suggest, assimilation and consolidation is the more challenging task before us.
In many cases assimilation will happen in ways that are not easily grasped without a lot of research. For instance when anime began to trickle into the United States the big eyes got complaints. Never mind that the big eyes were simply one of a dozen ways in which anime was indebted to the saucer-eyed characters of Walt Disney. The British invasion in pop music was in many ways British boys repackaging the music of black American musicians in a way that made the music less exotic or intimidating to white audiences in the U.S.
Fast forward a few decades and the influence of Asian action films slowly worked its way into American action films so that The Matrix appeared and showed that if you assimilate enough of Yung-woo Ping's choreography into the gun-fighting people will respond to it like it was something never seen before. In an American cinematic context it was sorta kinda new. For anyone with even some exposure to Asian cinema it was basically not much different from what you'd have seen in John Woo's Hong Kong films. The early Beatles were not necessarily that far off from Roy Orbison but, hey, what's wrong with being influenced by Roy?
The hipster response, for want of a better way of putting it, may be to cast the net wider for stuff that's harder and harder to find. Indie music in the 1990s was in a sense very easy to get into. Liking stuff because you were privileged with the special intel nobody else had was easier when there was nothing like the internet or Google. This credibility was not just about the art if, at the risk of overstating things, there was nay point to the art as art. The credibility was also about the scene.
Back in my teens I didn't think there'd be any artistically significant thing to come out of rap or hip-hop. I didn't enjoy the music, didn't understand the music and I'll admit I still mostly don't get the genre. But I don't see it as not-music. I wouldn't have anticipated liking any country and I still don't care for "new country" because it sounds like warmed over "old rock" but I have come to enjoy Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Sr., some Willie Nelson, and some Merle Haggard. John Prine may not exactly be country but some of his stuff is okay, too. If you'd asked 17-year old me whether I would like either rap or country and consider them viable musical styles I would have scoffed at you. I've mellowed on that. I've come to a point where I may never like a certain style of music too much but I can find things in a musical style that I can respect or find interesting.
While I suppose there's something to be said for "remix" concepts of art and human thought I don't feel any obligation to commit to that or to an older Romantic idea of "genius". It's not like authors in the Enlightenment didn't consider the topic of genius. "Genius" may elude us and it may be in one age thought of as a capacityto put together the new, in another it may be the capacity to "steal" the old in a way that makes it seem as though it were the thief's own idea. Perhaps a review of even some of Bach's collected work could remind us that geniuses did make use of associative memory and recursive ideas. So often movements seem to be founded on schools articulating a fixed point and a set array of ideals.
If rhyme comes back in "literature" it never went away in other art forms. If I'm right, and I'll hardly make any bets about that, the 20th century's epic fragmentation may have reached an end point and the 21st century in post-industrial societies invites new possibilities for consolidation. For musicologists and music history fans we can remind ourselves that Baroque was not what the practitioners of that musical art called their stuff. There was the old style and the new style, wasn't there? There were those who made use of the Renaissance stylsitic heritage and also of the newer, emerging major/minor key system. By the dawn of the Classic era there was a big mess of ideas and styles and devices available. The emergence of the sonata cycle as an organizing set of forms for music didn't happen all at once.
But at this point I've run so far afield of what Bangs was blogging about I figure I'm done with this post. Go read both posts. They're fun.
http://jsbangs.com/2011/08/17/time-travelers-or-the-abjection-of-the-past-in-fantasy-literature/
J. S. didn't exactly plan for these two to be bookends of an overarching idea but I'm presenting the links back to back because I think they do present an overarching idea, one that can be summarized by his use of Eve Tushnet's observation:
"Realism" only works for people whose worldviews are already accepted as realistic. The rest of us must make do with genre.
Everything old tends to get new again and if rhyme has become hip now it might be because after generations of poetry teachers telling you that you need to grow up and stop doing end rhyme so much a bunch of writers may have decided that that stance is silly. A lot of tedious music, art, literature, theater, dance and film has been made in the name of "progress".
If you read Alex Ross' book The Rest is Noise he wrote about the ascent of serialism and atonality in American academic music in the 1960s and 1970s. The Cold War was raging along and in reaction, partly, to the aesthetic ideology of "socialist realism" a lot of American composers decided (with some help from government funding and foundations) that writing music that was not at all traditionally tonal was the most democratic and intellectually honest thing to do. The champions of the European avant garde had, by and large, fled in the build-up to the Second World War and often settled in the United States.
It was almost a patriotic duty for a serious, academic composer to eschew the popular stuff like conventional melody and harmony. Even someone as popular as Bernstein could still have semi-nice rather than glowing things to say about Gershwin, who really came from the pop side of the pop/art divide and whose forays into concert music inspired some of the biggest names in "serious" music to be more than a little dismissive of Gershwin's work. I hardly need do more than ask readers how many of them have heard Gershwin's "Summertime" compared to hearing a Virgil Thomson work of any sort. I'm aware that given how I blog about music there's going to be a sample bias because anyone who comes here and recognizes the name Atanas Ourkouzounov has probably actually heard Virgil Thomson music.
But while in academia and "serious" music major and minor chords were being cast off right and left (there's a joke in there not just about the profligacy with which the high-brow cast off tonality, it's about the different ways in which different political interests contrived reasons for this) the popular culture in the West began to plug in and rock around the clock. Sure, you could point to all the stuff in pop music and talk about how bound it was to older styles but people were listening to it. For the advocates of atonality tonal music was about as bad as the 19th century. Some people caught in some kind of middle-brow snobbery would look down on popular music without realizing that compared to Stockhausen or Elliot Carter pop music was at least preserving some semblance of tonality, however expanded and attenuated it might be and this, really, no further than the harmonic devices employed by Debussy. There's not much in the heavy metal I've heard that can't be traced to folk music from Scandanaiva or central and eastern Europe, to get absurdly sweeping about that.
Neither the archetypal renegade nor reactionary is really representing the vast and fascinating continuum of the arts in any media. Even in the Baroque we can go back and see the old style and the new style and how composers could adapt to one or the other and synthesize.
In the 20th century the West was full of people trying to cast off the rules and break the mold. In the 21st century as digital storage and algorythmic analysis of cumulative works becomes more practical we are getting people philosopically musing on how nothing is original and how everything derives ins ome fashion from the past. All may be flux and Heraclitus may have been right to say you can't walk through the same river twice but let's suppose we ask another question, woudl he still have tried catching fish in that river a week after he uttered his axiom?
What Bangs has touched on thematically across two posts in two years is something I want to play with and bring into a bit more light, if possible. On the one hand in the 20th century there was an abjection of the past. The idea was that whatever the past was it was some benighted epoch of ignorance and stupid people doing evil things or making uninspiring this or that. There's a whole emotional/social narrative of a Dark Ages that is something you conveniently didn't have to live in or live through. We judge the past and consider ourselves better than it, however we define that past. That was often how things could be perceived and conceived and told in the 20th century.
But then at the other side there are those Baby Boomers who had kids growing up to love the Beatles and to consider it to have been a fantastic life to have grown up during the 1960s. Baby Boomers make movies congratulating themselves on having "changed the world" or "changed everything". There can be a praise of the past that is appealing to those who can look back and, in some way, call that past something connected to their present. It is something we all sahre even when we don't want to admit we share this impulse, too. There is somethign in which each of us can say with some pride and some nostalgia, "I was .... when X was ... and things aren't as good as they were back then." Alert and longtime readers won't have to make too many guesses as to where some probably unwarranted nostalgia might nest here.
Isn't it a bit strange to have a people that will abject the past of their ancestors while havinga nostalgia for their own individual past? I'm not saying it's impossible I'm just saying I don't quite get it. Americans may have a meta-narrative of overcoming the great obstacle or failure of one's own family and upbringing through the powerful discovery of "real" "community" or "logic". I admit to beign skeptical about that kind of stuff.
In the arts I'm not sure I could describe myself as a traditionalist or a proponent of new-(insert field here). Like I said earlier there's an amazing continuum of possibilities and options and it is that spanning of time and space that makes the arts so fascinating now. Anyone who would attempt to break the rules and defy conventions by now has to recognize that in the information era and the age of the internet it will be impossible to break any rules. This does not mean that nothing new can possibly be made. Even Arnold Schoenberg, champion of dodeccaphony, once remarked that there was still plenty of music to be written in the key of C major. That which seems to be old and even old-fashioned does not have to be tedious and pointless because billions of people have discovered or enjoyed things before. Put in very blunt terms none of us would have been born to be possibly reading or writing on a blog if the only things that were cosnidered worth doing were the things that haven't been done before.
But as a friend once complained about an aspiring writer, tehre's a writer who writes as though nobody had any idea what sex was before he started writing about it. I recall coming across a silly headline with a silly sentiment that Christopher Hitchens writing about death was finally an honest book about death. That author may have just been unaware or forgot that Ecclesiastes did a decent job being honest about dying being miserable and the end of everything. Since it was a book canonized into a religious text it would make sense why a Hitchens fan might have overlooked it, though. Part of why a lot of the "modern" from the 20th century can seem played out in every art form is because it could get too precious and too self-aware but the bad kind of self-aware of proposing something that "mattered".
Sometimes things happen that change the nature of an art form. Not everyone wants to admit the action/adventure film is an art forum but Raiders of the Lost Ark,with that one scene where Indy shoots the swordsman, did change action cinema. The protagonist was willing to skip to lethal force rather than fight a foe on equal footing. The protagonist was willing to press a substantial combat advantage and skip what was at that point the expected and for that time, "inevitable" sword fight. Or so the legend goes. For the sake of discussing how innovation happens in the arts the legend is useful for my point, that not all innovation is necessarily done on purpose. Innovation doesn't have to be done on purpose to be compelling. Conversely, as a survey of the work of J. S. bach goes you might be hard-pressed to find Bach's formal and conceptual innovations as a composer and yet no one could contest the significance of his influence.
If in the 20th century the great pioneers in the arts broke the rules, thought outside the box, and came up with things that were new the 21st century, 12 years in, may be full of an anxiety of influence stretched out on a massive canvas and painted in alternately dour or chirpy tones. What we often forget if we don't bother to study enough history of the arts is that cycles of fragmentation and consolidation are common. When fragmentation became the value it was important to be part of that iconoclastic, transgressive process. It was in the late 1990s, perhaps, that Leo Brouwer said that the academics have missed the boat on fusion as a movement, wasn't it? It was easy to dismiss jazz/rock fusion and other forms of fusion like progressive rock (and, really, it IS easy to be dismissive of a lot of progressive rock anyway). But generations of failure were not without success.
While we are primed by an emotional/cultural narrative in which the Beethoven or the Mozart is the "real" artistic hero we are coming into a time where the Haydn or the Bach could be a hero, in the sense that consolidation, assimilation, and summation are just as fun as iconoclastically pushing the envelope and breaking hte rules. In a global information network such as ours, I tentatively suggest, assimilation and consolidation is the more challenging task before us.
In many cases assimilation will happen in ways that are not easily grasped without a lot of research. For instance when anime began to trickle into the United States the big eyes got complaints. Never mind that the big eyes were simply one of a dozen ways in which anime was indebted to the saucer-eyed characters of Walt Disney. The British invasion in pop music was in many ways British boys repackaging the music of black American musicians in a way that made the music less exotic or intimidating to white audiences in the U.S.
Fast forward a few decades and the influence of Asian action films slowly worked its way into American action films so that The Matrix appeared and showed that if you assimilate enough of Yung-woo Ping's choreography into the gun-fighting people will respond to it like it was something never seen before. In an American cinematic context it was sorta kinda new. For anyone with even some exposure to Asian cinema it was basically not much different from what you'd have seen in John Woo's Hong Kong films. The early Beatles were not necessarily that far off from Roy Orbison but, hey, what's wrong with being influenced by Roy?
The hipster response, for want of a better way of putting it, may be to cast the net wider for stuff that's harder and harder to find. Indie music in the 1990s was in a sense very easy to get into. Liking stuff because you were privileged with the special intel nobody else had was easier when there was nothing like the internet or Google. This credibility was not just about the art if, at the risk of overstating things, there was nay point to the art as art. The credibility was also about the scene.
Back in my teens I didn't think there'd be any artistically significant thing to come out of rap or hip-hop. I didn't enjoy the music, didn't understand the music and I'll admit I still mostly don't get the genre. But I don't see it as not-music. I wouldn't have anticipated liking any country and I still don't care for "new country" because it sounds like warmed over "old rock" but I have come to enjoy Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Sr., some Willie Nelson, and some Merle Haggard. John Prine may not exactly be country but some of his stuff is okay, too. If you'd asked 17-year old me whether I would like either rap or country and consider them viable musical styles I would have scoffed at you. I've mellowed on that. I've come to a point where I may never like a certain style of music too much but I can find things in a musical style that I can respect or find interesting.
While I suppose there's something to be said for "remix" concepts of art and human thought I don't feel any obligation to commit to that or to an older Romantic idea of "genius". It's not like authors in the Enlightenment didn't consider the topic of genius. "Genius" may elude us and it may be in one age thought of as a capacityto put together the new, in another it may be the capacity to "steal" the old in a way that makes it seem as though it were the thief's own idea. Perhaps a review of even some of Bach's collected work could remind us that geniuses did make use of associative memory and recursive ideas. So often movements seem to be founded on schools articulating a fixed point and a set array of ideals.
If rhyme comes back in "literature" it never went away in other art forms. If I'm right, and I'll hardly make any bets about that, the 20th century's epic fragmentation may have reached an end point and the 21st century in post-industrial societies invites new possibilities for consolidation. For musicologists and music history fans we can remind ourselves that Baroque was not what the practitioners of that musical art called their stuff. There was the old style and the new style, wasn't there? There were those who made use of the Renaissance stylsitic heritage and also of the newer, emerging major/minor key system. By the dawn of the Classic era there was a big mess of ideas and styles and devices available. The emergence of the sonata cycle as an organizing set of forms for music didn't happen all at once.
But at this point I've run so far afield of what Bangs was blogging about I figure I'm done with this post. Go read both posts. They're fun.
Thursday, October 04, 2012
CNN, conflict of interest, and international coverage
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/04/cnn-business-state-sponsored-news
It just so happens someone ran something by someone recently and someone decided to post a link to it.
Conflict of interest is a great (as in "terrible") way for the integrity of a journalistic enterprise to be compromised. While I've heard people complain about liberal or conservative bias causing this or that disaster in the "mainstream" or "establishment" media conflict of interest would be far more dangerous. Even a person with a significant bias may have to concede facts on the ground over against one's own bias. But a conflict of interest can end up having the function of a bribe in which the story is in some sense bought already. That's worse than "bias" because while a bias may blinker your vision a real conflict of interest can prompt you to lie and say that things are X when they are really Y and you know you're blowing smoke.
It's been a few years since I studied in journalism coursework but a teacher once said that you're going to have biases. Only a fool would think he or she has no biases. The thing is that if you're a responsible journalist you won't let your biases get in the way of discovering what the facts are, even if the truth points to something you find objectionable or appalling. If you're NOT willing to do that then you might as well admit that what you want to do is not journalism but marketing, advertising, or public relations. Then it's not a conflict of interest to put the best spin on anything and everything, it's jsut a matter of whether you can go to sleep at night really believing in whatever you're selling. That can still be honest, respectable work in a lot of cases.
Well, that's easier to grant in the abstrat than the concrete because there's something that feels weird about selling a bunch of people on stuff. How do people do that? By sincerely believing in what they're selling? Maybe? Meh, that's not the aim of a post such as this.
It just so happens someone ran something by someone recently and someone decided to post a link to it.
Conflict of interest is a great (as in "terrible") way for the integrity of a journalistic enterprise to be compromised. While I've heard people complain about liberal or conservative bias causing this or that disaster in the "mainstream" or "establishment" media conflict of interest would be far more dangerous. Even a person with a significant bias may have to concede facts on the ground over against one's own bias. But a conflict of interest can end up having the function of a bribe in which the story is in some sense bought already. That's worse than "bias" because while a bias may blinker your vision a real conflict of interest can prompt you to lie and say that things are X when they are really Y and you know you're blowing smoke.
It's been a few years since I studied in journalism coursework but a teacher once said that you're going to have biases. Only a fool would think he or she has no biases. The thing is that if you're a responsible journalist you won't let your biases get in the way of discovering what the facts are, even if the truth points to something you find objectionable or appalling. If you're NOT willing to do that then you might as well admit that what you want to do is not journalism but marketing, advertising, or public relations. Then it's not a conflict of interest to put the best spin on anything and everything, it's jsut a matter of whether you can go to sleep at night really believing in whatever you're selling. That can still be honest, respectable work in a lot of cases.
Well, that's easier to grant in the abstrat than the concrete because there's something that feels weird about selling a bunch of people on stuff. How do people do that? By sincerely believing in what they're selling? Maybe? Meh, that's not the aim of a post such as this.
Wednesday, October 03, 2012
what jobs are available to apply for at Mars Hill today?
http://www.facebook.com/notes/mars-hill-church/work-at-mars-hill-october-job-opportunities/10150391867595155
http://marshill.com/jobs
Church positions
http://marshill.com/jobs/executive-pastor
There doesn't seem to be an executive pastor at Shoreline since both James Harleman and Chad Toulouse stepped down from that role within just a few months. Then again, Mars Hill Tacoma is slated as "coming soon" and there might need to be an executive elder there at some point.
Central positions
http://marshill.com/jobs/director-of-kids-ministry
Kids ministry director functions at the level of a deacon now. There used to be a pastoral role that filled that slow but I may be mistaken in recollecting that.
Then there's senior accountant here.
http://marshill.com/jobs/senior-accountant
This was posted September 15, 2012
http://marshill.com/jobs/finance
This doesn't have a post-date but here's a LinkedIn profile for a previous Accounting Manager who became the Finance Manager. This position was listed as open for a time but isn't listed as one of the options in marshill.com/jobs today. The Accounting Manager may have recently been filled.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jarrodjob
Jarrod Job had the role of Finance Manager until November last year during what was apparently a big re-org where the financial staff changed and Munson stepped down and Sutton Turner joined.
For state law purposes, Mars Hill has a president, Mark Driscoll; a vice president, Dave Bruskas; and a secretary/treasurer, Sutton Turner. Mars Hill also has a chief financial officer, Kerry Dodd; and a chief legal officer, Chris Pledger.
http://marshill.com/jobs
Church positions
http://marshill.com/jobs/executive-pastor
There doesn't seem to be an executive pastor at Shoreline since both James Harleman and Chad Toulouse stepped down from that role within just a few months. Then again, Mars Hill Tacoma is slated as "coming soon" and there might need to be an executive elder there at some point.
Central positions
http://marshill.com/jobs/director-of-kids-ministry
Kids ministry director functions at the level of a deacon now. There used to be a pastoral role that filled that slow but I may be mistaken in recollecting that.
Then there's senior accountant here.
http://marshill.com/jobs/senior-accountant
This was posted September 15, 2012
http://marshill.com/jobs/finance
This doesn't have a post-date but here's a LinkedIn profile for a previous Accounting Manager who became the Finance Manager. This position was listed as open for a time but isn't listed as one of the options in marshill.com/jobs today. The Accounting Manager may have recently been filled.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jarrodjob
Jarrod Job had the role of Finance Manager until November last year during what was apparently a big re-org where the financial staff changed and Munson stepped down and Sutton Turner joined.
Finance Manager
Mars Hill Church
Nonprofit; 51-200 employees; Religious Institutions industry
August 2011– November 2011 (4 months)Seattle, WA
Accounting Manager
Mars Hill Church
Nonprofit; 51-200 employees; Religious Institutions industry
May 2008– August 2011 (3 years 4 months)Seattle, WA
Summary:
To connect the unified mission and vision of Mars Hill Church with the accounting function. Logistically building the accounting function in such a way that ultimately results in more opportunities for transformed lives for Jesus.
Detail:
Creating value for the eldership [management] through process and scalability improvements to the accounting function, opening more financial and human resources for our Pastors and Deacons to transform lives for Jesus.
Ensuring accurate and relevant reporting through solving logistical and communication challenges brought forth from being a high growth, multi-site church.
Building up team-members through intentional, confidence building feedback. Immersion in a high-performing, technical environment where mistakes are made and emphasis is on the grace and educational rebound from that mistake.
Utilizing social media and bleeding edge technology to increase our training and communication methodology resulting in stronger community upstream and downstream. An example of this is the creation of an library of iPhone ready screen-casts, which reduced the number of reporting queries by 50%.
Decreasing costs and creating efficiencies that result in annual decreases in professional service fees associated with accounting guidance and the external audit.
Other details of the position include managing capital and operating budgets, treasury function, financial reporting, fixed asset management, and the income and expense function.
To connect the unified mission and vision of Mars Hill Church with the accounting function. Logistically building the accounting function in such a way that ultimately results in more opportunities for transformed lives for Jesus.
Detail:
Creating value for the eldership [management] through process and scalability improvements to the accounting function, opening more financial and human resources for our Pastors and Deacons to transform lives for Jesus.
Ensuring accurate and relevant reporting through solving logistical and communication challenges brought forth from being a high growth, multi-site church.
Building up team-members through intentional, confidence building feedback. Immersion in a high-performing, technical environment where mistakes are made and emphasis is on the grace and educational rebound from that mistake.
Utilizing social media and bleeding edge technology to increase our training and communication methodology resulting in stronger community upstream and downstream. An example of this is the creation of an library of iPhone ready screen-casts, which reduced the number of reporting queries by 50%.
Decreasing costs and creating efficiencies that result in annual decreases in professional service fees associated with accounting guidance and the external audit.
Other details of the position include managing capital and operating budgets, treasury function, financial reporting, fixed asset management, and the income and expense function.
The current Accounting Manager at Mars Hill Church since November 2011 to the present (according to LinkedIn) is Jessica Pickett
Accounting Manager
Nonprofit; 51-200 employees; Religious Institutions industry
November 2011– Present (1 year)Seattle, WA
Kerry Dodd is the Chief Financial Officer at Mars Hill since December 2011
CFO
Mars Hill Church
Nonprofit; 51-200 employees; Religious Institutions industry
December 2011– Present (11 months)Greater Seattle Area
Who are the officers of Mars Hill Church?
Chris Pledger is gone so clearly Governance had to post-date Kerry Dodd becoming Chief Financial Officer and pre-date Chris Pledger's departure from Mars Hill.
For those who may have wondered about the governance series (if any) there "may" be some further posting about that stuff.
Tuesday, October 02, 2012
another xkcd, this one on "friends"
http://xkcd.com/513/
It could also be relabeled as the approach of the "nice guy" in some circles.
The punchline, of course, is that the "jerk" is more respectful overall than the "friend" could be.
HT Mockingbird: America the Anxious
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/america-the-anxious/
Cynicism is the British shtick. When happiness does come our way, it is entirely without effort, as unmeritocratic as a hereditary peerage. By contrast, in America, happiness is work. Intense, nail-biting work, slogged out in motivational seminars and therapy sessions, meditation retreats and airport bookstores. For the left there’s yoga, for the right, there’s Jesus. For no one is there respite.
a few more choice snippets.
... Even basic contentment feels like failure when pitched against capital-H Happiness. The goal is so elusive and hard to define, it’s impossible to pinpoint when it’s even been achieved — a recipe for neurosis.
A few more things could be quoted but this might be the most to-the-point proposal.
Happiness should be serendipitous, a by-product of a life well lived, and pursuing it in a vacuum doesn’t really work.
Old Life: Jihad if you do, Holy War if you Don't
http://oldlife.org/2012/09/jihad-if-you-do-holy-war-if-you-dont/
Darryl Hart points out that for neo-Calvinists who criticize the lack of distinction between the secular and sacred in Islam that Christian culture warriors don't seem to differ from Muslims on that very point except on the issue of which sacred text is considered canonical. This raises the question of how and if Christians who want their beliefs to encompass all of life are actually all that different in the political implications of their ideological approach from Muslims. Hart, being a bit of a two-kingdom advocate, obviously has a view he believes permits for a distinction but not all Christians like the idea or implications of two-kingdom theology for reasons we'll trust you may already know about. If not then there's nowhere like Reformed blogs to learn more than you could possibly want to know about those debates. :)
Darryl Hart points out that for neo-Calvinists who criticize the lack of distinction between the secular and sacred in Islam that Christian culture warriors don't seem to differ from Muslims on that very point except on the issue of which sacred text is considered canonical. This raises the question of how and if Christians who want their beliefs to encompass all of life are actually all that different in the political implications of their ideological approach from Muslims. Hart, being a bit of a two-kingdom advocate, obviously has a view he believes permits for a distinction but not all Christians like the idea or implications of two-kingdom theology for reasons we'll trust you may already know about. If not then there's nowhere like Reformed blogs to learn more than you could possibly want to know about those debates. :)
Monday, October 01, 2012
The Music of My Mind: liturgical use of music as cultural and spiritual formation?
Likewise he [Paul] does not establish Christian practice upon the renewing of the conscience, but upon that of the mind.
Adolf Schlatter
Romans: the Righteousness of God
page 62
Romans 12:2
Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.
A great deal of Christian teaching emphasizes the importance of proper action. Without attempting to cast any question on the significance of Christian ethical teaching Schlatter proposed that to frame Paul's instruction and theology in Romans on an assumption that the conscience is actually a guide is problematic. The conscience may excuse rather than accuse the self before God even though no one is beyond God's judgment. Instead Christians are urged to be transformed by the renewing of the mind.
A conscience may be a thing where we wish to feel differently and have different feelings about the things we want and do, but the renewal of the mind would seem to indicate a different way of thinking. The renewal of the mind and the transformation of the mind sure don't sound like swift Keswickian moments of sanctification as best I understand things. How is the mind transformed?
Very slowly, through a great deal of explanation and repetition, doing the same things over and over again until one thinks naturally about how to go about or think through a thing. We took this path in learning to ride bicycles or to draw cats or to play the guitar or to drive a car or to close a sale. How is this done? For Protestants with some pietist sympathies, perhaps, this might be done through "quiet time" or reading the Bible a lot. But simply reading the Bible a lot wouldn't necessarily accomplish anything, would it? Meditating is called for but what do we even mean by that? That's too long a topic to attempt to discuss. I am suggesting that a common way in which the mind is transformed and trained by dint of habit is through music.
Worship wars can be cast as battles over the music that is sung but since in theory all these songs are about God and the Christian faith the debates may not be about the music as music. You get the same sets of major and minor keys and chords and the same notes are essentially available to all humans whether they believe in any gods or not. Music can be seen as an "expression" of the mind or heart but the debates about music as a way to ENGINEER a particular mind or heart goes all the way back to, for instance, Plato's Republic. We simply don't sing about things we don't love with all or nearly all of who we are. There are satirical songs but these satires have their power becasue they take up what could be the sincere expression of affection, loyalty, and mental devotion in another and make fun of that.
A life of music that is entirely silly and satirical will not be a musical life that becomes more than a niche market. There is probably not going to be a time when Frank Zappa's songs actually have more longevity than Mozart symphonies because Frank Zappa rarely seemed to take the mask off long enough to have written songs about things he was sincerely for. His widow once said that Frank never wrote songs about love. So unlike the Beatles or Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones or even Led Zeppelin the music of Frank Zappa doesn't appeal to a larger audience than the audience it has. The music of Haydn and Mozart show that you can be possessed of a great deal of wit without that wit having to constitute an insuperable emotional distance between you and your intended audience. If you use wry, sardonic humor to invite the audience into a shared experience then your music will resonate with them. If you use wry, sardonic humor to establish a level of insulation between yourself and who you think your audience is they may still dig it. Whether or not your fan base may be like those metalheads who watched Beavis & Butthead and didn't realize they themselves were the object of Mike Judge's satire is for some other day and other people to think about.
In a majority of cases music is discussed as though it comes from the heart and goes to the heart. Sure ... but music begins in the mind and is worked out through the mind. A great deal of debate about what the role of music ought to be and how it works has strolled along as though the cognitive processes of even recognizing music are somehow a given. They aren't. It seems obvious to me that debates about music are debates about how music should be employed to condition the mind as well as the heart. Perceiving music and listening to music involves the brain at a level where more than just the "emotional" parts of the brain have to do a great deal of work for music to have its affect. When music "speaks" to us in a language we understand we may all be able to understand that music is a language but Stevie Wonder may have been too optimistic when he sang that music is a world unto itself with a langauge we ALL understand. I may love Duke Ellington almost as much as Wonder does but when I have sent links of "Les Bergers" by Messiaen I've gotten some respectfully bewildered reactions from some friends who just didn't understand what I found so engaging and fascinating about the music.
Since Internet Monk has kicked off a Christian Music Month I don't plan to write a book or anything about some of this stuff. I'm a layman at every level whether in theology or music but I would suggest, having played quite a bit of music, that we may want to reconsider "where" music really exists. Stevie Wonder's album title Music of My Mind is on target. The music that sticks around longest seems to be music in which the efforts of what we might call the "heart" are also balanced in some synergistic fashion with what we might call the "mind".
Adolf Schlatter
Romans: the Righteousness of God
page 62
Romans 12:2
Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will.
A great deal of Christian teaching emphasizes the importance of proper action. Without attempting to cast any question on the significance of Christian ethical teaching Schlatter proposed that to frame Paul's instruction and theology in Romans on an assumption that the conscience is actually a guide is problematic. The conscience may excuse rather than accuse the self before God even though no one is beyond God's judgment. Instead Christians are urged to be transformed by the renewing of the mind.
A conscience may be a thing where we wish to feel differently and have different feelings about the things we want and do, but the renewal of the mind would seem to indicate a different way of thinking. The renewal of the mind and the transformation of the mind sure don't sound like swift Keswickian moments of sanctification as best I understand things. How is the mind transformed?
Very slowly, through a great deal of explanation and repetition, doing the same things over and over again until one thinks naturally about how to go about or think through a thing. We took this path in learning to ride bicycles or to draw cats or to play the guitar or to drive a car or to close a sale. How is this done? For Protestants with some pietist sympathies, perhaps, this might be done through "quiet time" or reading the Bible a lot. But simply reading the Bible a lot wouldn't necessarily accomplish anything, would it? Meditating is called for but what do we even mean by that? That's too long a topic to attempt to discuss. I am suggesting that a common way in which the mind is transformed and trained by dint of habit is through music.
Worship wars can be cast as battles over the music that is sung but since in theory all these songs are about God and the Christian faith the debates may not be about the music as music. You get the same sets of major and minor keys and chords and the same notes are essentially available to all humans whether they believe in any gods or not. Music can be seen as an "expression" of the mind or heart but the debates about music as a way to ENGINEER a particular mind or heart goes all the way back to, for instance, Plato's Republic. We simply don't sing about things we don't love with all or nearly all of who we are. There are satirical songs but these satires have their power becasue they take up what could be the sincere expression of affection, loyalty, and mental devotion in another and make fun of that.
A life of music that is entirely silly and satirical will not be a musical life that becomes more than a niche market. There is probably not going to be a time when Frank Zappa's songs actually have more longevity than Mozart symphonies because Frank Zappa rarely seemed to take the mask off long enough to have written songs about things he was sincerely for. His widow once said that Frank never wrote songs about love. So unlike the Beatles or Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones or even Led Zeppelin the music of Frank Zappa doesn't appeal to a larger audience than the audience it has. The music of Haydn and Mozart show that you can be possessed of a great deal of wit without that wit having to constitute an insuperable emotional distance between you and your intended audience. If you use wry, sardonic humor to invite the audience into a shared experience then your music will resonate with them. If you use wry, sardonic humor to establish a level of insulation between yourself and who you think your audience is they may still dig it. Whether or not your fan base may be like those metalheads who watched Beavis & Butthead and didn't realize they themselves were the object of Mike Judge's satire is for some other day and other people to think about.
In a majority of cases music is discussed as though it comes from the heart and goes to the heart. Sure ... but music begins in the mind and is worked out through the mind. A great deal of debate about what the role of music ought to be and how it works has strolled along as though the cognitive processes of even recognizing music are somehow a given. They aren't. It seems obvious to me that debates about music are debates about how music should be employed to condition the mind as well as the heart. Perceiving music and listening to music involves the brain at a level where more than just the "emotional" parts of the brain have to do a great deal of work for music to have its affect. When music "speaks" to us in a language we understand we may all be able to understand that music is a language but Stevie Wonder may have been too optimistic when he sang that music is a world unto itself with a langauge we ALL understand. I may love Duke Ellington almost as much as Wonder does but when I have sent links of "Les Bergers" by Messiaen I've gotten some respectfully bewildered reactions from some friends who just didn't understand what I found so engaging and fascinating about the music.
Since Internet Monk has kicked off a Christian Music Month I don't plan to write a book or anything about some of this stuff. I'm a layman at every level whether in theology or music but I would suggest, having played quite a bit of music, that we may want to reconsider "where" music really exists. Stevie Wonder's album title Music of My Mind is on target. The music that sticks around longest seems to be music in which the efforts of what we might call the "heart" are also balanced in some synergistic fashion with what we might call the "mind".
i-IV, a dorian chord change for rockers who wonder
Now if you've played guitar for any length of time you may have come across those signs in guitar shops that explained that you would be politely required to not play some songs. For instance, it'd be common enough to get the friendly prohibition against Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven". In the Pacific Northwest an additional prohibition was leveled at "Smells Like Teen Spirit". It stuck with me a long time when someone explained that the Nirvana hit could be construed as Boston's "More Than a Feeling" in a minor key.
Well, anyway, "Stairway to Heaven" has been annoying guitarists in guitar shops for decades now and it makes me wonder whether we couldn't discuss a few elements about the song. That punning reference to Plant's line "and it makes me wonder" is an excuse to discuss what I'll call a i-IV alternating progression. If you're in A minor then this would come across as an A minor chord moving to a D major chord. In "Stairway" we could describe this as an A minor 7th chord going to a D major chord with a few decorative flourishes.
What's happening here? Melodically and textually Robert Plant is just doing his thing. Harmonically what we have is a chord progression that is just shifting back and forth between what can be called i and IV in the dorian mode.
So what is the dorian mode?
Well, famously, if you take all the white keys of the piano and play from D to the next D you get the dorian mode.
D E F G A B C D
The distances between the tones are in whole (W) steps and half (H) steps as follows
D E F G A B C D
W H W W H W
Now what you should be able to spot (if formatting doesn't betray me) is that there are half steps between E and F and B and C. The third scale degree is minor and the sixth scale degree is major while the seventh scale degree is minor. This can't be construed as a major or minor scale in common practice terms because there is no leading tone (as there is in harmonic minor). The reason this is significant in this case is that what we get is a symmetrical mode. The whole-tone scale is a symmetrical mode and the dorian mode is also a symmetrical mode, the intervals are the same whether we're going up or down through the length of the scale.
The dorian mode naturally creates a harmonically static and airless mood because of the symmetrical nature of the scale/mode. If you want an example of a stereotypically dorian mode solo the Doors song "Light My Fire" would be as stereotypically dorian as possible. For "Stairway to Heaven" that floating and weightless vibe fits as a backdrop over which Robert Plant can moan, "aawwwww and it makes me won-deeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" because the i-IV chord change brings in the dorian mode long enough to make a person feel like they're floating on some pot and LSD-induced magical cloud of wondering magicalness (or gearing up for more of Robert Plant's screeching by the end of the song).
You can hate the song all you want and it's not a personal favorite but as an explanation of why thee i-IV is so steady in rock thanks to the dorian implications of the harmony it's hard to find a better example.
Zeppelin wasn't the only band to exploit the floating dorian i-IV chord change, it's the magical floating chord change that opens up Pinkfloyd's masterful art-pop touchstone Dark Side of the Moon. If you're curious about how the dorian implications of i-IV can be heard as a structuring device in Dark Side of the Moon as a kind of musical triptych (but more in its current CD-era form than in its original LP playing form) .... .
If nothing else perhaps it'll just make you wonder how many songs use an alternation of a minor tonic and a major subdominant chord, that old A minor to D major switcharound.
Well, anyway, "Stairway to Heaven" has been annoying guitarists in guitar shops for decades now and it makes me wonder whether we couldn't discuss a few elements about the song. That punning reference to Plant's line "and it makes me wonder" is an excuse to discuss what I'll call a i-IV alternating progression. If you're in A minor then this would come across as an A minor chord moving to a D major chord. In "Stairway" we could describe this as an A minor 7th chord going to a D major chord with a few decorative flourishes.
What's happening here? Melodically and textually Robert Plant is just doing his thing. Harmonically what we have is a chord progression that is just shifting back and forth between what can be called i and IV in the dorian mode.
So what is the dorian mode?
Well, famously, if you take all the white keys of the piano and play from D to the next D you get the dorian mode.
D E F G A B C D
The distances between the tones are in whole (W) steps and half (H) steps as follows
D E F G A B C D
W H W W H W
Now what you should be able to spot (if formatting doesn't betray me) is that there are half steps between E and F and B and C. The third scale degree is minor and the sixth scale degree is major while the seventh scale degree is minor. This can't be construed as a major or minor scale in common practice terms because there is no leading tone (as there is in harmonic minor). The reason this is significant in this case is that what we get is a symmetrical mode. The whole-tone scale is a symmetrical mode and the dorian mode is also a symmetrical mode, the intervals are the same whether we're going up or down through the length of the scale.
The dorian mode naturally creates a harmonically static and airless mood because of the symmetrical nature of the scale/mode. If you want an example of a stereotypically dorian mode solo the Doors song "Light My Fire" would be as stereotypically dorian as possible. For "Stairway to Heaven" that floating and weightless vibe fits as a backdrop over which Robert Plant can moan, "aawwwww and it makes me won-deeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" because the i-IV chord change brings in the dorian mode long enough to make a person feel like they're floating on some pot and LSD-induced magical cloud of wondering magicalness (or gearing up for more of Robert Plant's screeching by the end of the song).
You can hate the song all you want and it's not a personal favorite but as an explanation of why thee i-IV is so steady in rock thanks to the dorian implications of the harmony it's hard to find a better example.
Zeppelin wasn't the only band to exploit the floating dorian i-IV chord change, it's the magical floating chord change that opens up Pinkfloyd's masterful art-pop touchstone Dark Side of the Moon. If you're curious about how the dorian implications of i-IV can be heard as a structuring device in Dark Side of the Moon as a kind of musical triptych (but more in its current CD-era form than in its original LP playing form) .... .
If nothing else perhaps it'll just make you wonder how many songs use an alternation of a minor tonic and a major subdominant chord, that old A minor to D major switcharound.
Sunday, September 30, 2012
I V vi IV Chords for heroes, whether winning or losing
I-V-vi-IV has gotten a bit of deserved internet attention thanks to the Axis of Awesome. They even do us the favor of putting the Roman numerals up front and in sequence at the start of this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ
We're discussing this set of chords today not just because Axis of Awesome did such a great parody of how many top 40 hits have used these four chords in some way. We have to talk about this set of chords because they form, in a few variations, the bulk of the most famous tracks on U2's The Joshua Tree. With a few shufflings and rearrangements these chords become the basis not merely for "With or Without You" but also "Where the Streets Have No Name". Pay attention to the bass line here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVKWNGSmdB8
I IV I IV vi V VII (2x)
I IV vi V I
Hear it? It's basically the same four chords rotated into a different sequence. It's still effective and arguably much more effective than in the more obvious and predictable sequence precisely because it's NOT exactly what we'd be expecting. The more famous sequence of the chords, in the usually expected order comes a few tracks later on The Joshua Tree in "With or Without You".
I V vi and IV by themselves are obvious enough. Don't stop believing even though I can't live with or without you and I was born this way. These can be considered the chords for the anthems of heroes and the triumph of the human spirit. In fact these chords show up so predictably in this sort of musical/textual moment, whether it's "Don't Stop Believing" or "Let it Be" that the chords can stand as a kind of musical shorthand or shortcut to telegraph all that is beautiful and triumphant about the human spirit.
But you see, dear reader, there's an equally potent derivative of this set of chords which can be spelled out as vi IV I and V (if we don't reconceive the chords into another key). If vi becomes i (our new tonic) then yet another variation presents itself i VI III and VII. The chords as chords won't change at all but by building the harmonic axis point around a minor triad we've got a brand new take on an old set of chords. The major key version of this rotation of chords is "Don't Stop Believing" and the triumph of the hero. The relative minor derivative can be summarily described as the hero falls and we're going to use these chords like a diamond-tipped drill that will dig into your tear ducts and unleash a sea of sentimental misty eyes.
Don't believe me? I've got some words for you, "Fall of Gandalf".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elc1ntXuWPY
And Frodo squeals "No!" just in case you didn't get the idea in advance what the musical cue was going to be. This is a classic example not only of the use of the heroic chords for the very literal fall of a hero but also for the time-honored Hollywood tradition of going on with instrumental music for an hour or so and strategically introducing the human voice at just that right moment calculated to make ya cry. But, hey, even I got misty-eyed the first time I saw the scene and I knew every second that it was brazenly strong-arming me with every musical and directorial and story-telling cliche in the book. But it was cleverly set up. Pacing and detail are important.
Shore was no dummy in saving this signature chord change until after Gandalf falls in a battle with the Balrog. This set of chord changes and the soaring treble voice are SO cliche that it's positively dangerous to even think of using this musical cue anywhere, except for the loss of a character that anyone who would pay money to see this movie would have been rooting for. Even though Boromir's death was more memorable Boromir was not that character and we're used to Sean Bean dying anyway (when I heard Sean Bean was cast in Game of Thrones I assumed his character would die by the end of season 1 and ... ). Since Ian McKellen absolutely brought his A-game to Gandalf and the pacing was solid and it's based on a fantasy classic then when the four chords of the fallen hero finally show up intoned by a chorus with a treble soloist wordlessly commemorating the fall of Gandalf you've been primed to cry like Pavlov's dog was primed to salivate at the sound of a bell. Curious how both dogs and humans can be manipulated to respond to musical cues, huh?
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Fighting for the Faith compares Driscoll on Xerxes to Driscoll on the Mars Hill bus
Or, as Chris Rosebrough asserts more bluntly, Mark Driscoll needs to repent of being a leader like King Xerxes.
http://www.fightingforthefaith.com/2012/09/mark-driscoll-needs-to-repent.html
Whether members or leaders of Mars Hill can concede that such a point is possible or conceivable remains to be seen. Not that many people from the original group of people who founded Mars Hill may even be left. There may not be many people left within Mars Hill who even remember what the 2007 firings were about or what they mean. One of the most significant obstacles for current Mars Hill members in considering that Rosebrough may have a valid point is that they do not have much by way of the history of Mars Hill prior to about 2009. Today's average Mars Hill member will have never heard of Mike Gunn or Lief Moi or even have heard much of anything about the 2007 firings. They won't be in a position to read the story of "Amy" for about thirty seconds and have a pretty good idea who she is. As for the 2007 firings here would be a good place to start.
If Mars Hill members want to defend the legitimacy of what was said and done by Mars Hill executive elders in the past they should educate themselves on what those words and actions were. They should ask who Mike Gunn and Lief Moi are, what role those men played in co-founding Mars Hill with Mark Driscoll and why there's no mention of either man now. Questions should be raised about by-laws compliance in 2007 not only with respect to the firings of Meyer and Petry but on the subjects of Tim Beltz' installation as an executive elder in October 2007; the bid on and purchase of Tabella as the real estate that would become Mars Hill Downtown; and the disparity between the salary and work situations of Bill Clem and Lief Moi during the 2007 firing period. Members should be aware if they aren't already about all of these things and elders should have some consideration of the roles they played in agreeing with what Scott Thomas and the EIT presented as credible grounds for the firing of Meyer and Petry. Did anyone contact Petry during the trial? Given what Scott Thomas told Petry and what Scott Thomas said to a member about the nature of the "conciliatory process" during that same period have Mars Hill members been told the truth about the nature of what was happening in the 2007 firings?
These are not matters for private reconciliation meetings but for public discussion now that the information has been made accessible to the public. For that matter that Scott Thomas took a job as Pastor of Pastoral Development at the Journey without, it seems, having resigned his membership at Mars Hill in violation of one of the clearest and most unequivocal prohibitions in the Mars Hill member covenant might be of concern to Mars Hill. In a year in which Andrew's disciplinary case made the news because he confessed to fornicating it matters that Andrew's breach of the member covenant seems to have been treated one way while Scott Thomas taking a job that would seem to have breached his then current Mars Hill membership was treated in another way. You can go read Matthew Paul Turner's blog for Andrew's story. While anonymous advocates of Mars Hill have actually implied Andrew gave his girlfriend a venereal disease and while advocates for Mars Hill have demonstrated a willingness to trot out arrests of former elders to defend Mars Hill as an institution Mars Hill advocates have wanted to keep things "private" when disciplinary procedures and the question of competence or good will in pastoral counseling or discipline threatens to become a public concern. For a more detailed consideration of those issues look up posts here tagged a context for a call.
The problem here is that there's absolutely no certainty Andrew's ex-girlfriend hasn't lied about things herself or that Mars Hill members have assurance of truthful statements from either Andrew or his by now ex-girlfriend. It's easy to say the first side seems right until the cross examination but the second side is not necessarily right, either. You can't be sure that Andrew's ex-girlfriend has been any more truthful than Andrew has been. What if Andrew's ex-girlfriend has had a history of lying about her sexual history to somehow bolster her reputation? If that were the case (and we can't be 100% sure anyway) it's as likely she had an incentive to lie as Andrew is said to have had. If the letter from Pastor XXXX hadn't been posted to The City this might have been moot (and the four X's narrow down the number of possibilities to whomever "may" have had a four-letter first name who was still a biblical living pastor in late 2011 at Mars Hill Ballard, unless the four X's don't mean anything about the length of a first name.
One thing we can be relatively sure about, whoever that biblical living pastor was wasn't James Noriega who wasn't employed by Mars Hill during the months when the Andrew situation blew up into a church disciplinary case. Noriega's star was on the rise during the period in which the 2007 firings took place and Noriega and Clem played a role attested by Mark Driscoll in the acquisition of Mars Hill West Seattle. Driscoll as yet has not discussed Noriega at all or whether any questions arose about whether Noriega's second marriage and history of felonies might have caused the elders to have reservations about his qualification for eldership at Mars Hill in 2006. Driscoll did, however, discuss the role Noriega and Clem played in getting for Mars Hill a piece of real estate Driscoll had wanted for the church for a decade.
Why do these things matter? Because how elder candidates were vetted, by whom, what questions were raised about elder qualification and what connections elder vetting may have had to real estate acquisitions by Mars Hill matter. If Tim Beltz did not qualify to be an executive elder under the pre-November 2007 by-laws when he was installed as executive elder in October 2007 and he was also known to be attending Mars Hill and simultaneously Chief Operations Officer at CRISTA Ministries when Schirmer Auditorium was lined up rent-free for Mars Hill to use that invites a question about who arranged for that rent-free deal and what role, if any, Beltz may have had in that process. Yet for the firings in 2007 Scott Thomas explained that the firings would be done in conformity to the by-laws. What about executive elder installments in 2007? What about the purchase of Tabella? Were those done in compliance with the by-laws of the time as well? Again, these are not matters to be clarified in some "private" meeting working toward "reconciliation". This is stuff that is on record and accessible to the public now. The pre-November 2007 by-laws indicating how Mars Hill was to be governed are publicly available and that is why this ...
Is deeply problematic. What Mars Hill chose to say about the governance of the church in 2007 is so easily disproven it's disappointing that Mars Hill leadership directly or indirectly has been willing to promote things that are false such as the dubious claim that all 20 elders had to agree on everything for things to get done.
The old by-laws that were sent to MH with the 145 document so easily disprove this assertion that it's absurd to think that MH leadership could even imagine that the claim that all 20 elders had to agree on everything could be sustainable. If you aren't aware of what the old by-laws actually prescribed then there's a discussion of the relevant by-laws articles in the link below.
It's hypocritical of Mars Hill to lament the misinformation that was allegedly circulating about Andrew's disciplinary case early in 2012 when they have presented a patently false claim about the nature of church governance and by-laws in 2007. If Mark Driscoll needs to repent the entire leadership culture of Mars Hill may need to repent for lying to its congregation as to the nature of its own church governance over the last seven years. For instance, if Noriega was fired and was one of two staff who were let go for "overstepping spiritual authority" who vetted Noriega's candidacy to begin with? Did Mark Driscoll have in recruiting Clem and Noriega into leadership within Mars Hill? What role did Clem and Noriega being at a church plant with real estate Mark Driscoll had wanted for ten years play, if any, in Driscoll's interest in adding Clem and Noriega to leadership at Mars Hill? If Driscoll vouched for Noriega was Driscoll aware of Noriega's felonies in addition to a recent second marriage? Wasn't Mark Driscoll church planting scout for Acts 29 in 2002 when Bill Clem planted Doxa? On what grounds was it justified to give co-founding elder Lief Moi a nearly 40 percent salary cut while Clem was given a full salary and the liberty to not show up to do any work for months at a time during the period when Driscoll was saying at a Q&A in early 2008 that some guys had to be fired because they weren't doing their jobs or pulling their weight? Were there at least four executive elders in place in September 2007 when the bid on Tabella was made? If there weren't the bid didn't comply with the by-laws. If there were was there 30 days written notice given about the purchase decision to the other elders?
Again, these are not points to be discussed in private but are matters that can be observed from records made available at Joyful Exiles and through local mainstream media coverage like the Seattle Times and the Seattle P-I and even Mark Driscoll's own public teaching. That Driscoll's team has been selectively excising incriminating anecdotes from "The Man" has already been established here. The trouble is that it's too late to remove the most incriminating things Driscoll has said. Setting up a massive information suppression project to preclude the possibility that outsiders could identify which pastor at Mars Hill Ballard was the father/stepfather of Andrew's ex-girlfriend is understandable but makes it part and parcel of a larger information suppression campaign on the part of advocates for Mars Hill in general and Mark Driscoll in particular. It has been the custom to say that if you really understand Mark's heart you'd see he's a good guy. Mars Hill leaders have said they have nothing to hid, particularly during the 2007 firings but if that's the case what has been going on with removing the woodchipper anecdote from "The Man"? What was with the emergence of "There's a pile of dead bodies ... "? Does Mark Driscoll plan to ever even acknowledge that he said that?
Chris Rosebrough has provided a general overview that Mark Driscoll needs to repent. Listeners will hear Rosebrough's case against Mark Driscoll using vision-casting theology as a basis for pastoral decisions and authority. Listeners will understandably wonder about other things. If Mark Driscoll needs to repent of abusing spiritual authority or throwing people under the bus what's that referring to? Who has been thrown under the bus? Why? I've atempted to provide the beginnings of information and documents that listeners to Fighting for the Faith may consult in the attempt to find more detailed answers.
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
and a detour, Cracked on 5 reasons Megatron should have fired Starscream
http://www.cracked.com/article_16954_5-reasons-megatron-should-have-fired-starscream-years-ago.html
G1 was simply not that good a cartoon if you can watch it without being blinkered by a mixture of childhood nostalgia and heavy doses of the sunk-cost fallacy for your creative and emotional investment. Which is not to say certain funny tropes developed from the show or that no versions of Transformers have been interesting. But all that would warrant more words of discussion than I consider necessary. Instead let's refer to TV Tropes on The Starscream. I would not endorse wiki-anything for a resource on something actually important like politics, religion, serious art or literature or the sciences ... but for Transformers lore or pop culture ... it's the age of the geek, baby (and there's a pop culture reference thrown in there, too, for that matter).
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheStarscream
but first ... Star Wars Re-enacted by Ponies (and Billy Idol)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYk1DgaeZC8&feature=related
Now has anyone else noticed this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmJvHILyeOo
That line "My little pony" refrain sounds curiously like a hook from Billy Idol's "Dancing With Myself"?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOpnyv6JqWc
Consider this a little observation in pop cultural generational comparative musicology.
Now has anyone else noticed this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmJvHILyeOo
That line "My little pony" refrain sounds curiously like a hook from Billy Idol's "Dancing With Myself"?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOpnyv6JqWc
Consider this a little observation in pop cultural generational comparative musicology.
compiling and future posts
I've got plans brewing for discussing Ecclesiastes again, particularly Martin Shields' commentary on the book. Interesting proposals are that the prophets and the sages represented conflicting classes or elites within Israel that competed for ways to influence royal policy, which is not a theory Shields proposed in such direct terms but which is a strong inference that can be made from his overall approach to Ecclesiastes.
I've also got some plans to continue a bit more writing on the prophet/priest/king matrix that is neo-Calvinism's variation of a David Keirsey style personality test, but for people who are already in the leadership tracks at neo-Calvinist churches. I do aim to compare the broad categories espoused by exponents of this pop psychology fad presented as having some modicum of textual support to what we can observe from actual Old Testament texts later.
Alert readers may have noticed that there's a smattering of pieces lately dealing with harmonic theory and practice in Western music. Expect a little more of that.
Chamber Music Week 3 is under a few rather lazy planning stages. Debating whether or how many album reviews to do dealing with some truly esoteric combinations of instruments. I still want to tackle writing more about Rebay's music but that may get pushed out to some other time. The quartets are interesting but I've been more intrigued by Rebay's solo guitar sonatas and so those would not, properly speaking, come under the domain of any chamber music week series.
By contrast I've been thinking a lot about discussing music for double bass and guitar and particularly the works of Annette Kruisbrink, who has single-handedly written more for this instrumental pairing than (as far as I know) anyone who has written for this pair of instruments. So I'd like to tackle writing about some of her work. Very long-time readers may recall I haven't written about the d'Amore Duo and their albums of oboe and guitar music. I still mean to get to that, too.
Then there's recent discoveries I've made in the realm of literature for mandolin and guitar and alto saxophone and guitar. Yes, I admit I'm thinking of these combinations because I've been sketching out ideas for both pairings. Because there's no rule here at Wenatchee The Hatchet that blogging about chamber music has to be about chamber music that includes the guitar I'm thinking of tackling chamber music from other settings. Maybe a string quartet by Hindemith? Maybe contemporary chamber music for banjo? Maybe some music by Lutoslawski? Maybe I haven't decided on that entirely just yet.
But that's a lot of stuff and there's still other stuff to be written. Still, this post can be considered a kind of preview of some coming attractions. A few posts on real estate acquisitions and observations about the mercurial employment roster in certain local institutions will also be likely to show up. But the stuff that will be more fun for me will be to delve into a few musical things.
I've also got some plans to continue a bit more writing on the prophet/priest/king matrix that is neo-Calvinism's variation of a David Keirsey style personality test, but for people who are already in the leadership tracks at neo-Calvinist churches. I do aim to compare the broad categories espoused by exponents of this pop psychology fad presented as having some modicum of textual support to what we can observe from actual Old Testament texts later.
Alert readers may have noticed that there's a smattering of pieces lately dealing with harmonic theory and practice in Western music. Expect a little more of that.
Chamber Music Week 3 is under a few rather lazy planning stages. Debating whether or how many album reviews to do dealing with some truly esoteric combinations of instruments. I still want to tackle writing more about Rebay's music but that may get pushed out to some other time. The quartets are interesting but I've been more intrigued by Rebay's solo guitar sonatas and so those would not, properly speaking, come under the domain of any chamber music week series.
By contrast I've been thinking a lot about discussing music for double bass and guitar and particularly the works of Annette Kruisbrink, who has single-handedly written more for this instrumental pairing than (as far as I know) anyone who has written for this pair of instruments. So I'd like to tackle writing about some of her work. Very long-time readers may recall I haven't written about the d'Amore Duo and their albums of oboe and guitar music. I still mean to get to that, too.
Then there's recent discoveries I've made in the realm of literature for mandolin and guitar and alto saxophone and guitar. Yes, I admit I'm thinking of these combinations because I've been sketching out ideas for both pairings. Because there's no rule here at Wenatchee The Hatchet that blogging about chamber music has to be about chamber music that includes the guitar I'm thinking of tackling chamber music from other settings. Maybe a string quartet by Hindemith? Maybe contemporary chamber music for banjo? Maybe some music by Lutoslawski? Maybe I haven't decided on that entirely just yet.
But that's a lot of stuff and there's still other stuff to be written. Still, this post can be considered a kind of preview of some coming attractions. A few posts on real estate acquisitions and observations about the mercurial employment roster in certain local institutions will also be likely to show up. But the stuff that will be more fun for me will be to delve into a few musical things.
Carl Trueman provides an observation of the shelf-life off hipster Calvinists
http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2012/09/pleased-to-meet-you-hope-you-g.php
HT The Brooks at City of God blog
Two things came to mind: the beautiful young things of the reformed renaissance have a hard choice to make in the next decade. You really do kid only yourselves if you think you can be an orthodox Christian and be at the same time cool enough and hip enough to cut it in the wider world. Frankly, in a couple of years it will not matter how much urban ink you sport, how much fair trade coffee you drink, how many craft brews you can name, how much urban gibberish you spout, how many art house movies you can find that redeemer figure in, and how much money you divert from gospel preaching to social justice: maintaining biblical sexual ethics will be the equivalent in our culture of being a white supremacist.
A couple of observations here. First, the "beautiful young things" of the Reformed Renaissance have, even in the last twelve years, turned into jowled 40-something megachurch pastors with a bit of pudge from time to time. They've gone from finding redeemer figures in Matrix movies to ripping into James Cameron's Avatar and the Twilight saga (if saga is the right word to use). And particularly in a region like Seattle conflating what are known for Christian conservatives as biblical sexual ethics with white supremacist ideology has already happened in the United States. It's a case of "oh I went there, took pictures, and came back."
The transition from "engaging culture" to spending more time commenting on what's wrong with culture could simply be a matter of hipster Calvinists being nearer to 40 than 20 and, as some of them keep mentioning, having children now. But my hope, purely personal and arbitrary as it might seem, would be that whether or not you are a parent should not catalyze a complete transformation of how you, as a Christian, assess and interact with culture where children are concerned. Just because I've never been married doesn't mean I don't know better than to show six-year old kids episodes of South Park. I know perfectly well they don't need to watch that stuff. I don't presume that my lifelong interest in animation as an art form means that anyone else would even have an interest in a show like South Park. Besides, the peak of the show's creativity was seasons 4-10 and they've lost what once made them interesting (for me).
But that's the thing, isn't it, everything has a shelf life and everything in this life eventually expires. That can include the degree to which the young, restless and nominally Reformed "engage culture" rather than participate in what still looks curiously like "consumerism". What was considered old hat and soon-to-be-phased out (intellectual property as a concept and copyright with associated licensing) at Mars Hill ten years ago has since become the basis for an imbroglio with a church plant considered to infringe on the Martian trademark. So very much can change in ten years and that change can have a lot to do with how well established a once little church plant ended up being and where it was in relationship to benefiting (or not) from application of current intellectual property concepts happened to be. Trueman's on the other side of that other pond (we're here over on the Pacific coast) so what Trueman describes as the future of the Calvinists hipsters we've already seen happen here in the land of Mars Hill. So whether or not Trueman reads this here's a former Mars Hill person who has already seen most of that stuff happen.
HT The Brooks at City of God blog
Two things came to mind: the beautiful young things of the reformed renaissance have a hard choice to make in the next decade. You really do kid only yourselves if you think you can be an orthodox Christian and be at the same time cool enough and hip enough to cut it in the wider world. Frankly, in a couple of years it will not matter how much urban ink you sport, how much fair trade coffee you drink, how many craft brews you can name, how much urban gibberish you spout, how many art house movies you can find that redeemer figure in, and how much money you divert from gospel preaching to social justice: maintaining biblical sexual ethics will be the equivalent in our culture of being a white supremacist.
A couple of observations here. First, the "beautiful young things" of the Reformed Renaissance have, even in the last twelve years, turned into jowled 40-something megachurch pastors with a bit of pudge from time to time. They've gone from finding redeemer figures in Matrix movies to ripping into James Cameron's Avatar and the Twilight saga (if saga is the right word to use). And particularly in a region like Seattle conflating what are known for Christian conservatives as biblical sexual ethics with white supremacist ideology has already happened in the United States. It's a case of "oh I went there, took pictures, and came back."
The transition from "engaging culture" to spending more time commenting on what's wrong with culture could simply be a matter of hipster Calvinists being nearer to 40 than 20 and, as some of them keep mentioning, having children now. But my hope, purely personal and arbitrary as it might seem, would be that whether or not you are a parent should not catalyze a complete transformation of how you, as a Christian, assess and interact with culture where children are concerned. Just because I've never been married doesn't mean I don't know better than to show six-year old kids episodes of South Park. I know perfectly well they don't need to watch that stuff. I don't presume that my lifelong interest in animation as an art form means that anyone else would even have an interest in a show like South Park. Besides, the peak of the show's creativity was seasons 4-10 and they've lost what once made them interesting (for me).
But that's the thing, isn't it, everything has a shelf life and everything in this life eventually expires. That can include the degree to which the young, restless and nominally Reformed "engage culture" rather than participate in what still looks curiously like "consumerism". What was considered old hat and soon-to-be-phased out (intellectual property as a concept and copyright with associated licensing) at Mars Hill ten years ago has since become the basis for an imbroglio with a church plant considered to infringe on the Martian trademark. So very much can change in ten years and that change can have a lot to do with how well established a once little church plant ended up being and where it was in relationship to benefiting (or not) from application of current intellectual property concepts happened to be. Trueman's on the other side of that other pond (we're here over on the Pacific coast) so what Trueman describes as the future of the Calvinists hipsters we've already seen happen here in the land of Mars Hill. So whether or not Trueman reads this here's a former Mars Hill person who has already seen most of that stuff happen.
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