A laugh for the evening

I tripped over this, and it just made me grin. This is how I like to play with my girls . . .




I'd never heard of this guy Eric Herman before, but this is just the tip of the iceberg; he has some great stuff. Check out his website and you'll see.

The fallacy of diagnosis

Bill over at The Thinklings has a truly excellent post titled "I've Identified the Problem and it's You", which I strongly encourage you to read, challenging a tendency he's seen among Christians to broadly blame pretty much all Christians but themselves for whatever problem they happen to be complaining about. (I would note that in my experience, this sort of approach is equally common among non-Christians.)

What particularly struck me here, and where I think Bill has expressed himself with particular aptness, was his use of the word "identified." In family systems theory—the application of general systems theory to human relational systems, following the work of Murray Bowen and Edwin Friedman—this is an important word. When the relationships between a group of people are broken—which is to say, when the system is dysfunctional—the system will tend to blame the problem on one person, to say it's that person's fault that things aren't going right. This is a form of scapegoating as a way of offloading responsibility ("There's nothing wrong with me, I'm fine; you just need to fix him!"), and the person on whom the blame is set is referred to as the "identified patient." The term used for this is "diagnosis": someone "diagnoses" the "patient" as having the problem, thereby implicitly asserting that everyone else is just fine.

In counseling, the key in responding to this sort of situation is to recognize that the diagnosis is in fact false, and that the problem rests not in one person (even if that person is the one showing the symptoms) but in the relational system as a whole. That's not the easiest thing in the world to do, even when you can get all the members of the family or group together in one room; what Bill has identified, though, is considerably harder to address, since it's so much more diffuse. Indeed, I'm not sure how to address it, except that (obviously) we must begin by naming and identifying the problem, as Bill so ably has. Beyond that, I'm not sure what can be done except to gently, patiently, graciously call people back to grace and humility, and to remind them that they, too, are sinners.

In light of that, I particularly like where Bill ends his post:

It breaks my heart because Christ died for the church, His Bride. And if someone is truly saved, they are part of the Bride and part of our family, even if they don't measure up to your definition of cool, even if they don't line up with your cultural tastes or ecclesiology,

Even if they say things sometimes that embarass you.

Even if they disappoint you.

There is a way to go, in grace, to specific people in your family and work out your problems.

But what Christ never gave us the option of doing was drawing our own lines in the sand to determine which of his children we'll call "brother" and which we won't.

This is an important truth, and something we really need to hear.

Further thoughts on prophecy and Jeremiah Wright

The discussion with Daniel C. in the comments on the previous post started me thinking. The biblical prophets laid their lives on the line time after time after time because when the kings and other powerful people of their land were unrighteous, they confronted the wicked with the righteous anger of God, to their face, in the sharpest possible terms. One of the reasons I disparaged (in my old Presbyweb piece) the claims of Presbyterian liberals to be speaking prophetically is that there was no risk involved—they were merely aligning themselves with one group of powerful people against another in an interparty dispute, saying things which had been said many times before.

The same surely cannot be said of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright. Any government which would turn biochemical weapons against a group of its own citizens and plan atrocities to justify policy decisions—for such and no less is what he has alleged—would never allow anyone who exposed its activities to live, at least without divine intervention. These are the sorts of things, if true, that one might expect God to reveal to one of his prophets. If the Rev. Dr. Wright's accusations are in fact prophetic revelations from God, then they're justified. If not, then he's a false prophet. Given that we know how AIDS entered this country, courtesy of Randy Shilts (who bears particular responsibility for publicizing the story of Gaëtan Dugas, the French-Canadian flight attendant who was one of those who brought the virus here from Africa), I'd say that test doesn't look too good for Sen. Obama's pastor.

At first blush, he would seem to look better on the test of boldness; certainly he pulls no punches in his language. Where he fails, however, is in his location. Jonah went (under protest, of course) to Nineveh; Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos and many others went into the court of the king. True prophets, when they have a condemnation to announce, do so in the presence of the one whom they are condemning, setting aside all earthly safety, trusting God to get them out. (Or not, as the case may be; tradition has it that Manasseh had Isaiah sawed in half inside a hollow log.) Put another way, true prophets speak to "us." The Rev. Dr. Wright, by contrast, denounced "them." He failed the test.

There's a deeper significance to this as well: denouncing "them" tells "us" that "we" are free to believe what we want to believe, both about ourselves and about "them"—and that's not something God's prophets do. Judgment begins in the house of God, and so that's where his prophets begin: by challenging and rebuking us. Before they let us pronounce the judgment of God on our enemies, they call us to pronounce it on ourselves—to fall to our knees in repentance for our sin and to rise in humble awareness of our fallenness, and our desperate need for grace. In so doing, they bring us to a place where we would be just as happy to see the repentance of our enemies as their obliteration.

The problem with self-anointed prophets is they don't stand in that place, because they don't have that humility. As I wrote in 2005, to folks like that,

the rest of the world divides into two camps: the righteous (those who agree with me) and the unrighteous (those who don't), which leaves only the question, "What fellowship is there between light and darkness? What agreement does Christ have with Belial?" There in a nutshell is the state of things . . . for too many folks, the presence of people who disagree with us, instead of serving as an opportunity for learning and self-correction, merely hardens us in our own positions, because "we" are light and "they" are darkness. This wouldn't be a problem for someone whose life and beliefs were already 100% in accordance with the will of God, but that isn't any of us; we all have areas where we need to grow, and beliefs (sometimes cherished ones) which are simply wrong, and we can't afford to set those in stone. . . . [We] need to set aside this self-aggrandizing nonsense that we're speaking "prophetically," which sets us above those with whom we disagree, and learn instead to approach them in a spirit of humility and grace. Our motives and vision just aren't pure enough to justify doing things any other way.

Speaking prophetically

Three summers ago, in a burst of irritation at a few of my colleagues in the Presbytery of Denver, I wrote a Viewpoint article in Presbyweb titled, “Speaking Prophetically.” (If you're not a subscriber to Presbyweb, you can also find the piece here.) At the time, I had had it up to my (receding) hairline with liberals claiming the “prophetic” mantle for what was, essentially, leftist boilerplate with a garnish of Christianese, and I felt the need to fire back. I wasn't exactly stunned to find that no one changed their ways in response to my objection, but at least it made me feel better.

Still, people haven't changed their ways, and it does continue to irritate. The whole flap over the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., though, takes the whole thing to a new and truly egregious level. More than a few writers have attempted to defend and excuse the Rev. Dr. Wright by calling him “prophetic,” and situating him in a supposed prophetic tradition in line with the likes of Frederick Douglass and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Diana Butler Bass, in her post on Jim Wallis' “God's Politics” group blog, is typical:

Throughout the entire corpus, black Christian leaders leveled a devastating critique against their white brothers and sisters—accusing white Christians of maintaining “ease in Zion" while allowing black people to suffer injustice and oppression. . . .

As MSNBC, CNN, and FOX endlessly play the tape of Rev. Wright's “radical” sermons today, I do not hear the words of a “dangerous” preacher (at least any more dangerous than any preacher who takes the Gospel seriously!) No, I hear the long tradition that Jeremiah Wright has inherited from his ancestors. I hear prophetic critique. I hear Frederick Douglass. And, mostly, I hear the Gospel slant—I hear it from an angle that is not natural to me. It is good to hear that slant.

There are two problems with that—what we might call the historical and the theological problem. The historical problem is that the equation Jeremiah Wright = Frederick Douglass presumes another equation: 2008 America = 1858 America. It presumes that our country hasn't changed at all in 150 years. And that just isn't true. We are, no question, still an imperfect country—but on matters of skin color, however far we have yet to go, we've come a long way.

The theological problem here is what concerns me more, however, because Dr. Bass' idea of the gospel is really screwy at this point. When the Rev. Dr. Wright declaims, “God damn America! That's in the Bible!” he's right as Dr. Bass is right to point us to the fact, as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus also notes, that “Biblical prophets called down the judgment of God on their people,” and often in harsher terms than those used at Trinity UCC. But there is a profound, a deep and profound, difference between what he was saying and authentic biblical prophetic language. As Fr. Neuhaus continues,

They invoked such judgment in order to call the people to repentance. They spoke so harshly because they had such a high and loving estimate of a divine election betrayed. The Reverend Wright—in starkest contrast to, for instance, Martin Luther King Jr., whose death we mark next week—was not calling for America to live up to its high promise. He was pronouncing God’s judgment on a nation whose original and actual sins of racism are beyond compassion, repentance, or forgiveness. He apparently relishes the prospect of America’s damnation.

That is the key point that every other commentator I've seen has missed; that's the point at which the Rev. Dr. Wright's message unequivocally ceases to be gospel, indeed ceases to be in any real sense Christian, and becomes something else altogether—something very, very ugly. There was a discussion on The Thinklings a while back about the imprecatory psalms, where David and the other psalmists similarly aim harsh, violent language at their enemies; these are psalms not often read in most churches. As one of the commenters pointed out, however (probably Alan), there's an interesting feature to most of these psalms: when David prays that God would destroy his enemies, he prays that God would do so either by slaughtering them or by bringing them to repentance. It's that either/or that brings this sort of bitter prayer within the compass of a Jewish/Christian understanding of God. Without it, it's nothing more than a pagan cry for vengeance.

In light of that, I pray that someone who has pull with the Rev. Dr. Wright—perhaps Sen. Obama, who I can't help thinking should have done this years ago—will draw him aside and call his attention to a couple passages from the Book he was supposed to be preaching from all these years:

You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. And if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you. You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same?
You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

—Matthew 5:38-48 (ESV)

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities,
against the cosmic powers over this present darkness,
against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

—Ephesians 6:10-12 (ESV)

Bumper-sticker philosophy

Driving in to church this evening for the Wednesday night stuff, I ended up behind a car (briefly) with a bumper sticker that read, "Question everything." I thought, "Really? Everything? Does that include questioning questioning everything? Why question everything? Question it how? On what grounds? And if you question everything, what sort of answer should you expect to get?"

I was of course partly being snarky (to myself); but I do wonder, does that person really mean it? What would they think if you started questioning science? "Are you sure the theory behind the internal-combustion engine in your car is sound? Why should you trust that gravity will hold your tires on the road? Can you be certain that turning the wheel actually makes the car turn? On a different note, why do you believe in the theory of evolution? Is there really the evidence to support it? Can you be sure that the people who support it aren't doing so from ulterior motives?" And so on, and so forth . . .

Then too, I saw recently, I don't remember where, that someone (Richard Dawkins?) had propounded a set of "Ten Commandments for Atheists." Leaving quite aside the question of why atheists would support having commandments in the first place, one of them was, "Question everything"; and yet, I know they don't mean that, because on the evidence, they certainly don't believe one should be commanded to question atheism. At least, Dr. Dawkins and his ilk tend to respond pretty sharply to those who do.

The truth of the matter is, no one ever means anything like "Question everything"; even René Descartes, who came the closest, didn't get that far (nor, I think, did he want to). Most people, when they say "Question everything," really mean something like this: "Let me question everything you believe that I don't want to believe in, and let what I want to believe right alone." Saying that would be far more honest; somehow, though, it doesn't have quite the same ring.

OK, so maybe I'm a sucker

and maybe at heart I'm still the ten-year-old who thought The Lord of the Rings was the best thing he'd ever read (there still isn't much that tops it) and that nobody was cooler than his Dad, except maybe for the people his Dad admired; and certainly, once a Navy brat, always a Navy brat, and there's no denying the effect growing up Navy has had on who I am. Whatever you want to make of it, this gets me every time:



I've said before that I have long had reservations about John McCain politically; based on the candidates' positions, he was no more than my third choice in this race. I also have to say, though, that about John McCain the person, though he's far from perfect, I admire him tremendously. Certainly Barack Obama has proven he can inspire people with his rhetorical gifts (much missed in recent American politics) and the vision he paints (though time will tell what his association with the Rev. Dr. Wright and his race speech has done to the potency of that vision); but I believe Sen. McCain is equally capable of inspiring our country with the ideals he upholds—and the way he has lived out those ideals in the service of his country—and the power of his expression. Maybe a few policy disagreements are a small price to pay for that.

Are we really this easy to play?

Check this out—my thanks to Jared for posting this.



Jared's right, that's freaky; it's also a little scary to think that we can be manipulated that easily. I like to believe I can think for myself—but this makes me wonder what influences are shaping my thought processes without my being aware of them. (And everyone else's, for that matter.)

Pray for Zimbabwe; please, pray for Zimbabwe

One of the deep joys of my years in Colorado was the time I spent as a member of the Partnership Committee of the Partnership of Zimbabwe and Denver Presbyteries. The Presbytery of Denver had ended up involved in ministry in Zimbabwe through the work of a couple in one of its churches, and decided in consequence to establish and build a presbytery-to-presbytery relationship with the Presbytery of Zimbabwe, which is part of the Uniting Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa (UPCSA). I was never able to travel to Zimbabwe (though I would have been offered the chance if we hadn't been leaving), which I regret, but I did have opportunities to meet a few of our partners on their visits to Colorado, and there are a couple whom I consider dearly-loved friends.

Which is why my heart breaks, and has been breaking, for the country of Zimbabwe. I could give you a long list of links about what Robert Mugabe has done to his nation over the last eight years—he was a good leader before that, as long as people kept voting for him, but once the voters began to tire of him, he turned on them; whether he rules well or ill, all that matters to him is keeping power—but I think Peter Godwin summed up the story well enough in the Los Angeles Times, at least for starters. Godwin, who dubbed Mugabe "Zimbabwe's Ahab," knows whereof he speaks, as a native Zimbabwean; he's written several books, including the memoirs Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa, and still laments what was lost.

The presidential election is this Saturday, and there are those who have hope that maybe this time, the opposition and the international community will prevail, and the election will bring about the end of the Mugabe government. Please pray that it is so, and with a minimum of bloodshed. Please pray for the peace of Zimbabwe.

Revelation 7 multiculturalism

One of the more interestingly problematic characters in contemporary SF is John Ringo. As the blogger over at Aliens in This World put it, “John Ringo is an odd bird, even by comparison to the normal oddness of science fiction writers. Ringo can write really really good, bad, and creepily-unwholesome-I-need-a-shower books. Often inside the same cover.” That captures it quite well, I think—particularly the way Ringo so often juxtaposes things I really appreciate with things I really don't. He has in some ways a very perceptive eye, but a deeply flawed worldview underlying it, which makes him one of the few people I've run across (along with Ann Coulter) who can articulate conservative conclusions in such a way as to make me react like a liberal. This all is probably why the only books of Ringo's I really like are the Prince Roger/Empire of Man series he's co-writing with David Weber. (IMHO, they fill in each other's weaknesses quite nicely.)

As I say, though, he does have a good eye, and little tolerance for nonsense (he'd use a much more pungent word there, of course, having a rather rough tongue), virtues which are often promiscuously on display in his work—along with his pronounced animus against received pieties of any kind. That animus can color and distort his perception, but at times, it can also inform and strengthen it; when it does, the attacks he unleashes can be devastating.

One good example comes from the fifth chapter of his latest project, a novel titled The Last Centurion, in which he takes a swing at multiculturalism. The novel is set in the future, but the examples on which he draws are from this decade, including this one:

Group in one of the most pre-Plague diverse neighborhoods in the U.S. wanted to build a play-area for their kids in the local park. They'd established a “multicultural neighborhood committee” of “the entire rainbow.” . . .

There were, indeed, little brown brothers and yellow and black. But . . .

Sikhs and Moslems can barely bring themselves to spit on each other much less work side by side singing “Kumbaya." . . .

The Hindus were willing to contribute some suggestions and a little money, but the other Hindus would have to do the work. What other Hindus? Oh, those people. And they would have to hand the money to the kumbaya guys both because handing it to the other Hindus would be defiling and because, of course, it would just disappear. . . .

When they actually got to work, finally, there were some little black brothers helping. Then a different group of little black brothers turned out and sat on the sidelines shouting suggestions until the first group left. Then the “help” left as well. Christian animists might soil their hands for a community project but not if they're getting [flak] from Islamics.

Now, maybe that sounds unfair to you; but if so, check out this piece (among others) by Theodore Dalrymple, based on his extensive experience working as a doctor in one of Britain's immigrant slums. I won't cite any of his stories—you can read them yourself; be warned, they aren't pleasant—but I can tell you the conclusion to which they've led him:

Not all cultural values are compatible or can be reconciled by the enunciation of platitudes. The idea that we can all rub along together, without the law having to discriminate in favor of one set of cultural values rather than another, is worse than merely false: it makes no sense whatever.

The problem here is the unexamined assumption that “the intolerance against which [multiculturalism] is supposedly the sovereign remedy is a characteristic only of the host society,” and thus that if those of us who belong to the dominant culture would just set aside our idea of our own superiority, then all the problems would go away. Unfortunately, life isn't like that. For one thing, this rests on the essentially racist assumption that all “those people who are different from us” are really all alike and thus all on the same side; but it ain't necessarily so. To be sure, this assumption isn't only made by white folks. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assumed that Hispanic immigrants would ally themselves with American blacks, and thus supported loosening immigration laws; Jesse Jackson assumed the same, which is why he proclaimed the “Rainbow Coalition.” As Stephen Malanga writes, though, it hasn't worked out that way.

More seriously, it isn't only Western culture that is plagued by intolerance, hatred, violence, and other forms of human evil; other cultures have their own problems, too. As Dalrymple writes, “many aspects of the cultures which they are trying to preserve are incompatible not only with the mores of a liberal democracy but with its juridical and philosophical foundations. No amount of hand-wringing or euphemism can alter this fact.” Nor will any number of appeals to the better angels of our nature; human sin is a cross-cultural reality.

Does this mean multiculturalism is hopeless? No, but it means it cannot be accomplished politically. If the divisions between people, and between groups of people, are to be healed, there must be another way; and by the grace of God, there is. It's the way incarnated in the ministry of the Church of All Nations, a Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation in Minneapolis which is founded and pastored by the Rev. Jin S. Kim. It's the way that says that our divisions cannot be erased by human effort, but only by the work of the Spirit of God—and that we as Christians have to be committed to giving ourselves to that work. We can't make it happen, but we need to do our part to be open to God making it happen. This is the vision God has given us to live toward:

“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number,
from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages,
standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes,
with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice,
‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’
And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders
and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne
and worshiped God, saying, ‘Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving
and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.’”

—Revelation 7:9-12 (ESV)

Untameable Christ, irreducible Easter

There was a remarkable little essay in Slate last week on "Why Easter stubbornly resists the commercialism that swallowed Christmas"; I think the author, James Martin, overstates his case somewhat, since there are commercial traditions around the holiday (Easter baskets full of candy, Easter eggs and the kits they sell to dye them, all courtesy of the Easter bunny), but his point holds: Easter is still primarily a Christian holiday, not a "consumerist nightmare," as he describes Christmas. I hadn't really thought about it before, but there's good reason for that—neither the crucifixion nor the Resurrection are commercial-friendly:

Despite the awesome theological implications (Christians believe that the infant lying in the manger is the son of God), the Christmas story is easily reduced to pablum. How pleasant it is in mid-December to open a Christmas card with a pretty picture of Mary and Joseph gazing beatifically at their son, with the shepherds and the angels beaming in delight. The Christmas story, with its friendly resonances of marriage, family, babies, animals, angels, and—thanks to the wise men—gifts, is eminently marketable to popular culture. . . .

The Easter story is relentlessly disconcerting and, in a way, is the antithesis of the Christmas story. No matter how much you try to water down its particulars, Easter retains some of the shock it had for those who first participated in the events during the first century. The man who spent the final three years of his life preaching a message of love and forgiveness (and, along the way, healing the sick and raising the dead) is betrayed by one of his closest friends, turned over to the representatives of a brutal occupying power, and is tortured, mocked, and executed in the manner that Rome reserved for the worst of its criminals. . . .

Even the resurrection, the joyful end of the Easter story, resists domestication as it resists banalization. Unlike Christmas, it also resists a noncommittal response. . . . It's hard for a non-Christian believer to say, "Yes, I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, died, was buried, and rose from the dead." That's not something you can believe without some serious ramifications: If you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, this has profound implications for your spiritual and religious life—really, for your whole life. If you believe the story, then you believe that Jesus is God, or at least God's son. What he says about the world and the way we live in that world then has a real claim on you.

Easter is an event that demands a "yes" or a "no." There is no "whatever." . . .

What does the world do with a person who has been raised from the dead? Christians have been meditating on that for two millenniums. [sic] But despite the eggs, the baskets, and the bunnies, one thing we haven't been able to do is to tame that person, tame his message, and, moreover, tame what happened to him in Jerusalem all those years ago.

Amen.

Hymn for Easter

Alleluia, Alleluia!

Alleluia, alleluia! Hearts to heaven and voices raise:
Sing to God a hymn of gladness, sing to God a hymn of praise;
He who on the cross a victim for the world's salvation bled—
Jesus Christ, the King of Glory, now is risen from the dead.

Alleluia, Christ is risen! Death at last has met defeat:
See the ancient powers of evil in confusion and retreat;
Once he died, and once was buried: now he lives forever more,
Jesus Christ, the world's Redeemer, whom we worship and adore.

Christ is risen, we are risen! Set your hearts on things above;
There in all the Father's glory lives and reigns our King of love;
Hear the word of peace he brings us, see his wounded hands and side!
Now let every wrong be ended, every sin be crucified.

Alleluia, alleluia! Glory be to God on high:
Alleluia to the Savior who has gained the victory;
Alleluia to the Spirit, fount of love and sanctity!
Alleluia, alleluia to the Triune Majesty!

Words: Christopher Wordsworth; vv. 2-3 alt. Jubilate Hymns
Music: Ludwig van Beethoven, adapt. Edward Hodges
HYMN TO JOY, 8.7.8.7.D

Meditation on Holy Saturday and Easter

The day after Jesus’ crucifixion must, in some ways, have been the hardest day of the disciples’ lives. For the rest of Jerusalem, the world was back to normal after the commotion of the three crucifixions; their fellow Jews would be getting up and going to the synagogue to observe the Sabbath, some of them probably with a sense of satisfaction that that Galilean gadfly was out of the way. For Jesus’ disciples, however, the reality and enormity of their loss was just beginning to sink in, and the world would never be back to normal; it would never be right again. Oh, they would adjust in time, learn to go on—but life would never be the same. Saturday was an empty day, all the color in life faded to a drab, dingy, depressing grey.

As such, I think Holy Saturday is a particularly important holiday for our culture, whether we pay any attention to it or not, because this is where many people in this country live. Why else is depression reaching epidemic status in America, especially among those of the younger generations? Why else could Elizabeth Wurtzel call her memoir Prozac Nation—and why else would that book have been a bestseller? Why else are our suicide rates so high? We live in a world that’s just getting by, most of the time, a world of people trying to cope with broken marriages, abusive parents, drug-addicted children, broken dreams, evaporated hopes, one failure after another . . .

I used to believe that most people sailed through life with no major hurts or disappointments, but three decades have taught me that’s an illusion; there are very few people like that, and most of those are fakes. Rather, there are a great many people in this world this morning who are standing exactly where Peter stood that Saturday: someone just pulled the rug out from under them, and they aren’t sure there’s a floor beneath their feet.

And it's at this point, into this moment, that Easter comes. After the darkest nights in human history, in the dirty grey light of not-quite-morning, the Son of God, lying dead on a stone slab, got up; and as the Christian singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson put it, “the sound of the fiery blast of Death exploding shook the firmament.” The entire world, all of creation, lurched sideways, and the chains holding it down snapped; the grey of the day shattered in a million pieces as the Light of God blazed forth from that tomb. Hope conquered hopelessness; life overcame death; love broke the power of sin; God had the last word; and indeed, nothing would ever be the same again.

But if Easter is a light to crack the sky and blind the very stars, it's still a light that far too many people don’t see. Perhaps they haven’t heard the message; perhaps they have only heard a distorted version of it that hides the light; but whatever the reason, they walk on in shadow. C. S. Lewis described Narnia under the reign of the White Witch as a land where it was always winter and never Christmas; for many in this world, it's always Saturday and never Easter.

And so we see people carrying on as best they can, seeking out scraps of meaning to paper over their doubts, snaring bits of hope to give themselves a reason to keep going, snatching fragments of answers to ward off the questions that haunt and torment them; and from our cities and our towns we hear the wail of grief and the shriek of rage, the moan of pain and the cry of fear, and running through them all the sad whisper of loneliness, isolation, and alienation.

As human beings, at some deep level we need answers to the questions of why we are here and what our lives are worth, and we need the promise that someone loves us no matter what; and apart from God, this world can't provide those. It can't offer any resolution to the discordant voices of grief and pain, rage and fear. But over and above the discord, the thunder unleashed that first Easter continues to sound, the blast front of that explosion continues to roll over us; as Peterson says, “Throughout the wail and shudder, over the shriek and moan of man, the thunder has sounded and sung, and it is both the answer and the promise. It sings still, and you can hear what it says if you listen: love never dies.”

Early returns on Obama's speech

On the practical question—did it work?—the answer appears to be: yes and no. Yes, as regards the Democratic primary; Hillary Clinton's campaign is still trying to leverage the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright Jr. against Sen. Obama, trying to convince superdelegates to line up behind her and throw the nomination her way, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen—Bill Richardson, former Clinton cabinet official and current governor of New Mexico, just endorsed Sen. Obama. It's a pretty powerful indicator, as PowerLine's Scott Johnson notes, that the Democratic Party establishment really wants to put the Clintons behind them; Sen. Obama just needed to do enough to allay their concerns to get enough support to put him over the top. He's been hurt by this whole situation, and he hasn't really repaired all the damage, but at least he's avoided derailment.

As regards the general election, though, that's another matter; and based on the current poll average, where he remains slightly behind John McCain (and significantly behind in certain battleground states) and isn't regaining ground—if anything, he's losing a little—it doesn't look like the speech helped him, at least to this point. Part of the problem is that his name remains tied to the Rev. Dr. Wright's in many people's minds; perhaps a bigger problem is that where he was trying to rise above the issue of race, to offer the American people a different bargain, that has collapsed; what Bill Clinton tried to do in South Carolina—to make Sen. Obama "the black candidate"—Sen. Obama has now effectively done to himself. Instead of "come transcend race with me," his pitch now is, "come talk more about race and about what whites have to do to make things right with blacks." That will work just fine in winning Democratic votes, but when it comes to attracting Republicans and independents . . . not so much.

This is only reinforced by the sense I'm getting that a lot of people are having the same reaction I am to Sen. Obama's speech: the more we think about it, the less well certain things sit with us—Sen. Obama throwing his grandmother under the bus, his offering justifications for the Rev. Dr. Wright's hateful language at the same time as he condemned it, and, fundamentally, the fact that he dodged the fundamental question: if you're really about what you say you're about, Senator, why attend that church? Why stay? As Charles Krauthammer asks,

If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? . . . Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

So far, only the crickets have answered; and that's just not good enough.

Hymn for Good Friday

Go to Dark Gethsemane

Go to dark Gethsemane,
You that feel the tempter's power;
Your Redeemer's conflict see,
Watch with him one bitter hour:
Turn not from his griefs away—
Learn of Jesus Christ to pray.

Follow to the judgment hall;
View the Lord of life arraigned.
O the wormwood and the gall!
O the pangs his soul sustained!
Shun not suffering, shame, or loss—
Learn of him to bear the cross.

Calvary's mournful mountain climb;
There, adoring, at his feet,
Mark that miracle of time,
God's own sacrifice complete:
"It is finished!" hear him cry;
Learn of Jesus Christ to die.

Words: James Montgomery, alt.
Music: Richard Redhead
REDHEAD, 7.7.7.7.7.7.

The heart of the matter

For the bedtime reading for our two older girls, we're in the process of working our way through the Chronicles of Narnia; right now, we're six chapters in on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is and always has been my favorite of the books. (Hey, I'm male, and the son of a sailor to boot, and it's the most classically adventurish of the lot.) This evening, I was reading ahead a bit, and in chapter seven I was struck by an exchange I'd completely forgotten about:

"I think you've seen Aslan," said Edmund.

"Aslan!" said Eustace. "I've heard that name mentioned several times since we joined the Dawn Treader. . . . But who is Aslan? Do you know him?"

"Well—he knows me," said Edmund."

Well—he knows me. Most of the time, it seems our focus is on whether we know God, or whether other people know God; but Jesus makes it clear that there are plenty of people who "know God" but God doesn't know them. As my friend the Rev. Tryg Johnson has put it, if we go up to the White House and ask to be let in because we know President Bush, we can talk all day and it won't get us anywhere; but if President Bush comes out and says, "It's all right—I know them, they're friends of mine," that's quite another matter. That we know God, if we truly do, is an important thing, yes; but the truly important question is, does God know us? And if we can say, in all honesty and assurance, that we are known by God . . . everything else is secondary to that.

Skeptical conversations, part III: The problem of evil

From the consideration of who God is and what he's like, the third section of my credo raises (and begins to address) the problem of evil.

Update: read the first section here, the second section here, and the third section here.

A remarkable speech

This morning in Philadelphia, Barack Obama gave his promised speech on race; and a remarkable speech it was, for many reasons. Reactions to it are all over the map, which is no surprise, and no doubt there will be many more to come over the next few days, but I think we can already say it was an excellent speech; and while it's always risky to try to write history in the moment, I think too that we can say that whatever becomes of Sen. Obama's candidacy, this will be seen as an important moment in American history. As Mark Hemingway wrote, Sen. Obama "spoke about as candidly and eloquently about race as one could hope of a politician." I would add that he did so in a way that I think does honor to the promise of his campaign of a way through, and past, our current racialized politics to a future in which race doesn't matter. I respect him for that. The question there is, given that Sen. Obama has now acknowledged and accepted race as an issue in this campaign—something he's largely been trying to avoid to this point (except when he could employ it backhandedly by accusing the Clintons of "playing the race card")—and thus consigned post-racial politics to the future, rather than seeking to embody them in the present, what will that do to his prospects? At this point, I don't think anyone can do more than guess.

There are probably those (though I haven't seen anyone yet) who will blast Sen. Obama for not disowning the Rev. Dr. Wright and cutting all ties with him. There's no question that the Rev. Dr. Wright's views are offensive—and not just superficially, as he counts as his theological mentor a man who wrote this:

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community. . . . Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy.

It's hard to swallow a presidential candidate being so closely associated with someone who thinks this way; so the argument that Sen. Obama should completely estrange himself from his pastor has force. Personally, though—and yes, I'm a pastor, so I'm biased on this one—I respect him more for not doing so. The Rev. Dr. Wright brought him to Christ, brought him into church, raised him as a Christian, performed his wedding, baptized his children, discipled him across two decades, and has been his mentor and friend for most of his adult life; in my book, anyone who could take a relationship that close and that important to them and sever it for the sake of expediency would be a person of no moral character and precious little courage. Whatever anyone might think of the Rev. Dr. Wright, he deserves better than that from Barack Obama, and I'm glad he got it; and like Paul Mirengoff, I respect Sen. Obama's courage in giving it to him. (Though, as I should have recognized, he effectively threw his grandmother under the bus for the sake of expediency, and she also deserved better from him than that; that's a move I cannot respect.)

That said, it still raises the question, which Sen. Obama didn't answer: why is Jeremiah Wright his pastor at all? This is, after all, a relationship of choice; Barack Obama didn't have to go to that church or develop such a deep relationship with its pastor. Why did he? One cynical explanation is that he did it to give himself credentials on the South Side, building his base for his political career. Another, which I find more compelling, is that he was looking for a sense of identity. It's easier now to call Sen. Obama biracial, but the man's 48 years old—when he was a kid, "biracial" wasn't an option. He was a black boy in a white family, and he felt it; and for all that his mother was white and his father from Kenya, most white Americans would still have seen him as just another black kid. It makes sense that he would have felt the need to identify with the African-American community, and that Trinity UCC under the ministry of the Rev. Dr. Wright would have been powerfully appealing; indeed, as Kathleen Parker suggests, given the prejudices and reactions of the white grandmother who raised him, "the anger Obama heard in Rev. Wright's church may not have felt so alien after all"—and from his speech this morning, still might not.

Taken all in all, I have to think Sen. Obama helped himself with this speech. It's always brutally difficult to give a message that you have to give and can't afford to screw up, especially when the stakes are this high and the subject is this difficult, but given that, I think he did about as well as could be expected. The question is, is it enough? Given that even if he has sufficiently addressed concerns about his church, that still leaves his association with Tony Rezko and all the fallout that may come from that, it's hard to say. At this point, the only thing we can be sure of is this: when they write the political science textbook on the 2008 elections, this will be another chapter.

Update: if Mickey Kaus' analysis is right—and he certainly has more of a track record than I do—then Sen. Obama may actually have hurt himself here, possibly badly.

David Mamet moves right

In what might be the strangest event yet of this truly bizarre election season, renowned playwright David Mamet has published an essay in the Village Voice on "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.'" This startling change of mind came during the course of writing a play titled November, which he describes as

a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

Indeed, it seems he has, as he goes on to write,

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read "conservative"), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

I suspect this essay will induce a fair bit more tooth-grinding on the part of a lot of liberals, but I hope people can get beyond partisan reactions (whether rage or glee) and read it for its own sake, because it's a fascinating essay in practical political philosophy (not least for the presence of that rabbi, who I think is spot-on). Plus, I appreciate Mr. Mamet's concluding paragraph:

The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler. Happy election season.

A matter of trust

A year and a half ago now, a colleague of mine, preaching at our classis meeting in Colorado Springs, hit me right between the eyes with his sermon. He was preaching about trusting God, and all the reasons God has given us to do so, and how our spiritual life really begins there, at that point; in the moment that etched itself in my mind, he said, "We hear God saying, 'Obey me, obey me, obey me'; but what God is really saying is, 'Trust me. Trust me. Trust me.'" As he went on to say, yes, God wants our obedience, but not out of fear, or duty, or desire for reward, or any of the other reasons we come up with; God wants us to obey him because we trust that he truly knows what is best for us, and wants what is best for us, and is at work to do what is best for us.

And that's the rub, isn't it? Most of us, at least, don't trust God for that, and don't particularly want to. At some level, in at least some things, we believe we know better than God, and that God is telling us "no" because he really doesn't want what's best for us—he has some other agenda, some ulterior motive, someone else he wants to benefit at our expense. We don't obey because we don't trust; and even when, time and time again, events prove us wrong, trusting God still doesn't seem to get any easier. And yet, through all of it, he remains faithful even when we are faithless; he remains trustworthy even when we refuse to trust him; and he keeps calling, in the stillness of our souls, "Trust me. Trust me. Trust me." If only we will learn to listen . . .

A bad week for Barack Obama

If you look at the polls, you see that in the last week or so, John McCain has surged; where he was once clearly behind Sen. Obama and trailing Hillary Clinton as well, now he's showing a narrow lead. Some of this is probably the ugliness that is the Eliot Spitzer story, which certainly hasn't made the Democrats look good (and which hits Sen. Clinton harder, given her ties to him); more of it, though, is that courtesy of ABC News, America has discovered Sen. Obama's pastor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright Jr. Those who were paying attention knew about him already, but as with any powerful preacher (and he certainly is that), reading is one thing, seeing is something else again. The result has been to raise some serious questions about Sen. Obama and his campaign; given that so much of his appeal has been his image as a post-racial figure who can be an instrument of racial reconciliation and healing, seeing him so closely tied to a mentor who decidedly isn't has done him serious damage. Mark Steyn, in his usual snarky fashion, has captured the reactions of many quite well.

Sen. Obama, of course, is trying to distance himself from the Rev. Dr. Wright—a problematic thing when this man has been his pastor for two decades, officiating at his wedding and baptizing his children—but it may not work. Really, it shouldn't; whatever specific words Sen. Obama may or may not have heard his pastor say, you can't associate that closely for that long with someone of such strong character and opinions and not know what that person is made of. Or at least, anyone who could would be grossly unqualified to serve as president of this (or any) country.

Unfortunately for Sen. Obama, l'affaire Wright hits harder because of the Rezko trial. Antoin "Tony" Rezko is of course a very different person from the Rev. Dr. Wright and has played a very different part in Sen. Obama's life, but his trial has already weakened the Senator and put some cracks in his image. In particular, when Sen. Obama has been arguing that people should vote for him because "in a dangerous world, it’s judgment that matters," it really hurts him to have to turn around and say, as he did regarding Mr. Rezko, that "his private real estate transactions with Rezko involved repeated lapses of judgment" (emphasis mine); when he's been running, essentially, on his character, the appearance of character flaws is particularly damaging. It raises the question: if, as Paul Mirengoff argues, Sen. Obama is "the quintessential self-made man," who is he, really, at his core? The kind of people with whom he associates closely suggests that we might not like the answer; and that suggestion, if it takes root in enough people's minds, may prove to be the one thing his campaign cannot survive.

See also:
Race and the Democrats, Part III
Race and the Democrats, Part IV
The Audacity of Hate, Part One, Two, Three, Four
The Audacity of Hype

Hymn for Palm Sunday

Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates

Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates;
Behold, the King of glory waits!
The King of kings is drawing near;
The Savior of the world is here.

O blest the land, the city blest,
Where Christ the ruler is confessed!
O happy hearts and happy homes
To whom this King of triumph comes!

Fling wide the portals of your heart;
Make it a temple, set apart
From earthly use for heaven's employ,
Adorned with prayer and love and joy.

Redeemer, come, with us abide;
Our hearts to thee we open wide;
Let us thy inner presence feel;
Thy grace and love in us reveal.

Thy Holy Spirit lead us on
Until the glorious crown is won;
Eternal praise, eternal fame
Be offered, Savior, to thy Name!

Words: Georg Weissel, translated by Catherine Winkworth
Music: Thomas Williams
TRURO, LM

Reclaiming the gospel?

I applaud the Evangelism and Church Growth arm of the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s General Assembly Council for taking evangelism and church growth seriously. All Christians should, after all, and particularly those called to lead a declining denomination like ours, which is declining in considerable part due to a failure to take them seriously. I applaud them for seeking to reach out to and inspire those “who have a passion for evangelism, for church growth, and a desire to share the gospel message with all God’s people.” I applaud them for holding a contest for middle-school and high-school students to produce a T-shirt design to help them do that; contests have a way of getting people excited, and unveiling the winner at the Evangelism Breakfast at General Assembly should stir up interest.

Where I have a problem is with the theme of that breakfast: “Reclaiming the Gospel.” There are a lot of things we might say we need to do with the gospel, but reclaiming it? In the first place, we don't need to re-anything the gospel. It is already “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes,” as Paul teaches us; it doesn't need anything done to it, and certainly not by us. We just need to stand up with Paul, declare that we aren't ashamed of it, and preach it.

In the second place, if we did need to re-something the gospel, it wouldn't be reclaiming it. We never claimed it in the first place—it claimed us, or rather Jesus did, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Theoretically, we as heirs of the Reformation understand that the gospel isn't about us—it's something God did for us by his grace, not any of our own doing—and that the power of its proclamation isn't about us either, it's about the Spirit of God. To talk of reclaiming the gospel, it seems to me, gets that seriously out of whack, as if we somehow appropriate it and put it to work to accomplish our purposes. No. God appropriates us and puts us to work to accomplish his purposes through us. It's Christ's ministry, not ours; it's the Spirit's power, not ours; our job is not to reclaim the gospel but rather to submit ourselves to the gospel, to place ourselves at Jesus' disposal, so that by the leading and power of the Spirit we may be used to carry out his ministry in this world.

I appreciate the heart being shown here for evangelism, but I'm seriously concerned by the fuzzy and human-centered way in which that heart is expressed. This is of a piece, it seems to me, with the very un-Reformed understanding of grace expressed in the Covenant Network's mission statement, which I think also shows a laudable heart skewed by a serious failure of understanding; it suggests to me that our theological foundations have eroded to a significant extent, such that our guiding assumptions come less from our Reformed heritage than from the world around us. In the end, that's no way to build up the body of Christ; it's no way to grow the church.

Rebuild the parties?

That's what RealClearPolitics' Jay Cost argues we should do, at the end of a long analysis of the perversities of the Clinton-Obama race. The analysis is quite interesting in its own right, especially in his demonstration that the Democratic nomination process gives more weight to states that vote Republican, but I'm most interested in his concluding remarks:

We ask, why is Congress broken? Perhaps it is because the parties—the greatest mechanisms ever invented for managing governmental agents—have been stripped of their power. They have been given over to what scholars call "candidate control." Candidates are not responsible to the parties and the voters they represent. Instead, the parties are in service to the candidates. There is no doubt that the parties of the 19th and early 20th centuries were malfunctioning, corrupt, and irresponsible. But rather than reform them, we decimated them.

I think this nomination debacle is, in part, the fault of our disregard for the political parties. They are these hollowed-out husks that cannot handle the simple task of resolving a two-way dispute.

Here's a question for you. Take the presidents of the last 40 years: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43. Granted, Ford was never elected, but neither were folks like Chester Alan Arthur. On my read, ranking the presidents, that's one second-tier great president (Reagan) and a bunch of folks who are mediocre or worse. Now compare them to the presidents of the previous 170 years—a list which, yes, includes failures like James Buchanan, U. S. Grant, and Herbert Hoover, just as much as it does the likes of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But still, taken all in all, compare the lists. Are we really better off for the primary/caucus system we have now for choosing presidential nominees than we were under the more party-dominated system of the past? And if you think we are, are we enough better off to justify the massive amounts of money spent on advertising for primaries and caucuses? (To say nothing of having to endure all that advertising, and all the rhetoric, and all the rest of it.) Our current setup is clearly more democratic than the way parties used to choose their nominees . . . but I'm starting to think we might actually be better off here with a little less democracy.

Henry Hyde, RIP

I've been meaning to post on this for several months now, and have kept getting sidetracked; which is unfortunate, because when Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde passed away on November 29 of last year, American politics lost both one of its most colorful and interesting characters, and one of its most profound conservative thinkers. Rep. Hyde was probably best known, and of greatest significance, for his long-running legislative advocacy of the pro-life movement, but his influence was felt across a great many subjects, perhaps most notably in his work as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and in his deep interest in foreign policy. He was a man of great gifts and great character, but what really made him a great American was his understanding of what his job required of him; as he once told a group of newly-elected members of Congress, “Permit me to suggest, on the basis of long experience, that if you don’t know what you’re prepared to lose your seat for, you’re going to do a lot of damage up here. You have to know what you’re willing to lose everything for if you’re going to be the kind of member of Congress this country needs.” Henry Hyde knew exactly what he was willing to lose everything for; and our country is by far the better for it. Requiescat in pace.

In defense of the church, part II: The institution

I had been intending to go a different direction with the second post in this series, but then Jared posted on "The Institution-less Church," and posted a chunk I'd forgotten about from the interview Eugene Peterson did a while back with Mark Galli in CT, "Spirituality for All the Wrong Reasons." Consider this, from Eugene:

What other church is there besides institutional? There's nobody who doesn't have problems with the church, because there's sin in the church. But there's no other place to be a Christian except the church. There's sin in the local bank. There's sin in the grocery stores. I really don't understand this naive criticism of the institution. I really don't get it.

Frederick von Hugel said the institution of the church is like the bark on the tree. There's no life in the bark. It's dead wood. But it protects the life of the tree within. And the tree grows and grows and grows and grows. If you take the bark off, it's prone to disease, dehydration, death.

So, yes, the church is dead but it protects something alive. And when you try to have a church without bark, it doesn't last long. It disappears, gets sick, and it's prone to all kinds of disease, heresy, and narcissism.

Then put that together with this comment from the Rev. Dr. Paul Detterman's sermon to our presbytery, on which I posted a couple days ago:

God's Word is also oblivious to cherished structures and institutions we have created in our own image and then attributed to God—like denominations, and presbyteries, and congregations, and sessions . . . These institutions seem very real to us. We even mistakenly call them "church." But not one of them exists with their own set of adjectives and attributes. There is no such thing as a "faithful" congregation or a "faithless" denomination. The structures that "organize" organized faith are simply that—organizing systems devoid of characteristics except what individual people bring in to them. This presbytery is only a gathering of individuals who are more or less committed to living as God's faithful children—working for God's shalom in God's world.

Then let me add one other reference, this more of a personal one. My father grew up in the Church of God (Anderson, IN), which arose under the leadership of D. S. Warner out of the Holiness movement. Convinced that denominationalism was a source of bad things, he intentionally founded a "movement" rather than a denomination. Now, they have a college and a seminary, they have a headquarters, they have a structure—by any definition, they're a denomination. By any definition except their own, that is; they're still firmly "anti-denominational."

I think one problem in all this, and one reason for the criticism Eugene doesn't get, is that we expect too much of the institution, whether it be the local congregation, the denomination, or anything in between. We expect the institution to reflect God, to carry out the ministry of Jesus, to attract people, and so on and so forth, which is a set of expectations it just can't carry. Dr. Detterman has the right of it—the institution is just a structure to organize our activities to help us function. Eugene has the right of it—the institution is a dead thing that protects and gives form to the live thing underneath. But that points us to the reality that the structure isn't going to do the work of the church, because the structure isn't the church; we together are the church, and the structure is there to enable us as we do the work of the church. To avoid facing that, though, we tend to pile those expectations on the institution instead, and then when it fails, we blame it, and denounce it, and set off to find a better way.

But what better way is there? Jared got it right when he noted, "the dudes most passionate about killing 'church institution' aren't exactly institution-less . . . their institution is just sexier." The example of the Church of God (Anderson) shows, I think, that the best we can do is replace one institution with another, because true institution-less-ness would be anarchy, and anarchy doesn't work; as Eugene says, a church without an institution is like a tree without bark, soon to stop functioning properly due to disease.

I also suspect that we object to the "institutional church" because it gets in the way of us doing what we want; but in reality, that's part of its purpose. Yes, there is a tendency for institutions to become self-justifying and self-serving, and that's a bad thing; but is that the fault of institutions, or of the people in them? That's a human sin, and attacking institutions won't change it. If anything, doing that makes it worse, because the existence of the institution, for all its faults, reminds us that it has a purpose. We can still do all the touchy-feely "spirituality" stuff that's all about us without any kind of formal structure, but a congregation that never really goes beyond that is about as self-justifying and self-serving as anything can be; what we need the institution for is to do the things that take us beyond ourselves, the things that actually require work and effort and need organization and structure to support them and keep them going. You know, all the "go into the world and make disciples of all nations, teaching and baptizing" stuff that Jesus commands us to do that we don't always find wonderfully comfortable and congenial. The institutional church cannot be just about us. Maybe that's part of our objection to it, too.

Is Richard Dawkins really an atheist?

Or has he simply rejected a watered-down version of God that isn't the God of the Bible and Jewish/Christian tradition? After running across this joint interview Time conducted with him and Dr. Francis Collins in November 2006, I'm not so sure. Check out this exchange:

TIME: Could the answer be God?

DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.

COLLINS: That's God.

DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small—at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that's the case.

How about, for starters, that if one goes to Scripture and to the history of Christian thought—perhaps especially to the Augustinian stream out of which the Reformers arose, but not only—what one finds satisfies Dr. Dawkins' conditions? This makes me wonder if he is in fact rebelling, not against true Christianity, but against one of the debased, culturally comfortable forms of the sort that moved J. B. Phillips to declare, Your God Is Too Small. (Interesting that he addressed the subtitle “to believers and skeptics alike.”) Certainly in a lot of ways, Dr. Dawkins sounds a lot more like St. Augustine and John Calvin there than he does an atheist.

Then there's this, the final word of the interview as printed:

DAWKINS: My mind is not closed, as you have occasionally suggested, Francis. My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about, nor can you, nor can anybody else. What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up. When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea. Refutable—but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect. I don't see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.

Three thoughts on this. First, Dr. Dawkins sounds here a lot more respectful of religion in potential than he ever has of any particular religion; which suggests that his mind is rather more open on the point than I ever would have guessed, and also seems to me to further support the thought I voiced above. I strongly suspect that if anyone asked the right questions, we'd find that the god Richard Dawkins doesn't believe in is a god the church doesn't believe in either, and that his view of what Christianity actually is would prove to be more than a little out of whack.

Second, his lumping Jesus together with the Greek gods fits in with that; it shows real ignorance and failure to understand. If he sees the Incarnation as of a piece with Greek mythology, I hardly blame him for rejecting it.

And third, I think the root of that failure is to be found in the one thing that doesn't occur to him: that that God he has powerfully described might have acted to reveal himself, rather than waiting for us to get smart enough to reveal him for ourselves. I almost think the only thing that divides Dr. Dawkins and orthodox Christian faith—and of course it's a very large thing—is the absence of a doctrine of revelation.

In case anyone suspects this interview might not be representative of Dr. Dawkins' views in this regard, he sounded very similar in a fascinating interview with Ruth Gledhill of the Times; he even told Ms. Gledhill, a Christian, “I don’t think you and I disagree on anything very much but as a colleague of mine said, it’s just that you say it wrong.” (Check out her blog for more thoughts and material.)

Lenten Song of the Week

The longer I go on and the more I learn, the more convinced I become that one of the great holes in contemporary Western Protestant theology, of all stripes, is the absence of any real understanding, let alone doctrine, of the priesthood of Christ. It's one of the reasons Ascension is pretty much forgotten even in most churches that otherwise observe the liturgical year. This is not good for our spiritual health.

He Was Heard
(Hebrews 5:7)

In the days of old, the priest would come
With a lifeless sacrifice,
While the crowd in anxious silence would wait outside.
As he entered in the Temple,
They only hoped he would be heard,
God would give them a tomorrow,
And the priest would stay alive.

Their only chance, their only hope:
Would he be heard?
The only way they might be saved—
Would he be heard?

In the fullness of the promised time,
The final priest did come,
And he offered up a living sacrifice.
Now we his children wait for him
With hope and joyful praise,
For we know that God has heard him,
For we know that he was raised!

He offered tearful prayers
And he was heard;
He offered up his life
And he was heard.

So let us fix our eyes upon
The priest whom God did hear;
For the joy that was before him,
He overcame the fear.
For once and all he paid the cost,
Enduring all the shame,
Taking up the cruel cross,
Ignoring all the pain.

Words: Michael Card
Music: Michael Card and Randy Scruggs
© 1984 Whole Armour Publishing
From the album Known By the Scars, by Michael Card

Blinded by the darkness

As I posted a few weeks ago, the Rev. Dr. Paul E. Detterman, past PC(USA) associate for worship and current executive director of Presbyterians for Renewal, preached an excellent sermon on 1 John 2:1-11 and Matthew 28:18-20 at our February presbytery meeting. His sermon has now been posted on PFR's website (note: it's a PDF), and I encourage you to read it. He's speaking in this message as a Presbyterian to Presbyterians, so it's addressed specifically to intra-Presbyterian issues, but it is by no means limited to them. There's a lot in this sermon, but I want to highlight a few things in particular.

You have invited me to preach the Word of God, and preaching God's Word can be a very dangerous thing. God's Word is liberal enough to make conservative people very nervous—but it is also conservative enough to make liberals squirm. And because most of us have our emotional/ideological feet far out in the aisle at any gathering like this, when God's Word rolls through, toes will be smashed. It happens.

This was part of Dr. Detterman's opening paragraph; I appreciated the reminder as he began speaking that we should never open the Scriptures assuming they're only going to tell us what we're comfortable hearing. God isn't limited to what we like.

We forget basic theology so easily—like who God is and who we are and why we should care. Theological amnesia is not a liberal problem or a conservative problem—it is a human problem. It is the human problem, to be exact, and it is exactly where our passage from John's letter begins.

Indeed, it's all too easy to go about our normal lives in a very ungodly forgetfulness, rather than living out the reality of who we are in God in the cold, hard facts of our daily circumstances and situations and choices. Specifically, Dr. Detterman identifies the three great inhibitors of our call to carry out the Great Commission as the inverse of 1 Corinthians 13:13: we have forgotten biblical faith, hope, and love. That doesn't mean we've forgotten those words—but we've forgotten what they really mean, and replaced their biblical content with our own.

We really don't know how dark our present darkness really is until we see flashes of God's penetrating light—then we see how much of God's reality we are missing.

The problem is, as John notes, there is something in us that prefers darkness and resists the light, and so we let the darkness blind us, congratulating ourselves all the while on how well we see.

It's a great sermon, and there's a lot more to it than this; again, I encourage you to read it for yourself, especially if you're a part of the Presbyterian Church (USA)—no matter where you stand on the conflicts that wrack this denomination, Dr. Detterman's sermon will challenge you toward greater faithfulness.

Is there an echo in here . . . ?

Or is it just me?

Hap tagged me in another meme (or maybe I should call that a Hap zap), of which the rules are as follows:

1. List at least two posts (with links) that have resonated with you. Do not include your own posts!
2. Give a brief explanation why you like the post.
3. Tag four other people.

Resonated. What has echoed in my thoughts?

The Foolishness of Preaching: I especially value this one as a preacher myself. Whether at his own blog (as here) or on the Thinklings, I really appreciate Jared Wilson's insight; this one was one of those “Why didn't I think of that?” moments.

Lukewarm: Jake's a friend of Hap's, which in my book makes him a friend of mine, at least of sorts, even though I've never met the man. Anyway, we've all read the letter to the Laodiceans in Revelation 3, but how many of us have ever taken the next step to see lukewarmness as a trial and temptation, and something the Enemy consciously uses against us? I'm still absorbing this one.

Why No One Here Is Laughing at My Jokes: Dr. John Stackhouse is a brilliant theologian, a good and godly man, and in his acerbically witty style, one of the funniest people I've ever run across. I enjoyed being around him at Regent, and I think he's wonderful. I do know, though, that some folks were put off by his sense of humor. This is a powerful piece of self-reflection on that subject; maybe it will inspire you, as it did me, to some of your own.

Doctrine as the “constitution for a community”: Confessing Evangelical is the blog of a British Lutheran lawyer who's not only pretty deep theologically, but draws in some very interesting cross-currents. When (soon, I hope) I get around to “Defending the church, part II,” I'll be drawing seriously on this post.

Lent: Dancing in Shadows & Light: This is something of a stand-in (what's the term I want? Metanoia?) for the Anchoress' ongoing reflections on Lent; I chose it as the newest up and as one of my favorites. I love the image.

Genesis 12:1-4 Pastoral Prayer: I've already noted that Doug Hagler and I don't agree on all that much; but he has written some beautiful prayers. This one especially moves my soul.

An early New Year's resolution from my wife which I, in many ways, am still trying to catch up with. “How different would our interactions with each other be if in looking at each other, our first thought was ‘Here is the work of God’s hand’”?

So, tags . . .

Sara
Barry
Erin
Wayne (what the heck, he's got to do one of them sometime)

The Islamic world is turning on al'Qaeda

So reports the Financial Times—and one big reason is the war in Iraq. Major religious figures, significant theologians of the Islamic world, who previously supported al'Qaeda and its jihadist ideology are now turning against it and denouncing it; what's more, the "awakening" that began in Anbar province of Iraq, as the people of Anbar turned to side with the US against al'Qaeda, has spread. For all those on the left who have insisted that the invasion of Iraq has done nothing but turn the hearts of people in the Middle East against us, crucially, it is al'Qaeda that is "losing the war of minds"—and if we will stay the course, that could make all the difference.

Lenten Song of the Week

This hymn isn't one of the best-known cross hymns, but I've always been very fond of it.

In the Cross of Christ I Glory

In the cross of Christ I glory,
Towering o'er the wrecks of time.
All the light of sacred story
Gathers 'round its head sublime.

When the woes of life o'ertake me,
Hopes deceive, and fears annoy,
Never shall the cross forsake me.
Lo! it glows with peace and joy.

When the sun of bliss is beaming
Light and love upon my way,
From the cross the radiance streaming
Adds more luster to the day.

Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure
By the cross are sanctified.
Peace is there that knows no measure,
Joys that through all time abide.

Words: John Bowring
Music: Ithamar Conkey
RATHBUN, 8.7.8.7

The real uniter in the race?

Well, if you look at the record, of the three remaining candidates, who's produced the most bipartisan legislative solutions?

Sen. John McCain. As Charles Krauthammer concludes, "Yes, John McCain—intemperate and rough-edged, of sharp elbows and even sharper tongue. Turns out that uniting is not a matter of rhetoric or manner, but of character and courage."

Concerns about Obama beginning to arise

I'm not one for links posts, but between the flu and this other crud, I have very little energy for thought, and the articles that I thought I might comment on are piling up. So, thematic links post on the Obama worries and caveats that are starting to percolate. (Which doesn't mean, btw, that he's a bad guy or unworthy to be president; it just means he's human. In his domestic life, of course, his wife has never let us forget that. As a politician, though, his essential appeal has been the image that he's better than everyone else, that he can lead us into a new political age, and all that; which makes relatively small black marks look much worse than they would for everyone else, because a large part of his campaign has been that he doesn't have any.) The majority of these I found through RealClearPolitics.

Sen. Obama: all hat, no cattle?

Obama the Messiah of Generation Narcissism (Kathleen Parker)

Obama Lacks Reagan's Audacity (Blake Dvorak): To wit, where Reagan won by proudly raising the conservative banner his party scorned and carrying it all the way to the White House ("Reagan's response to the charge of being a conservative was, Yes, I am. And here's why you should be, too'"), Sen. Obama has refused to do that for liberalism, despite being more liberal than Reagan was conservative.

Would President Obama really help our image abroad?

Certainly that's one of the cases he's making for himself, that he would restore America's international popularity (something Sen. Clinton is also saying she would do). Would his pledged actions in fact accomplish that? Maybe not.

"A senior Latin American diplomat says, 'We might find ourselves nostalgic for Bush, who is brave on trade.'" This from Fareed Zakaria, one of those observers who should always be taken seriously. This one applies to both Democratic contenders, of course.

Obama's First 100 Days (Michael Gerson)

The Myth of America's Unpopularity (Michael Gerson): The fact is, as the Pew report shows, we really aren't that unpopular in most of the world. (As long as we don't send troops, anyway.) I can attest to this, at least for some countries, and I know others who would say the same about other parts of the world.

Is Sen. Obama just another Chicago pol?

I don't know, and I hope the answer is "no," but I suspect we'll know more than we want to before all's said and done.

Barack Obama and Me (Todd Spivak): The brief memoirs of a journalist who covered Sen. Obama during his days in the Illinois State Senate.

Beyond that, go here if you want to dive into the Rezko story. I had thought Sen. Obama a Democrat I could respect, even if he's far too liberal to vote for; I hope I wasn't wrong.

And . . . can he handle the scrutiny?

Folks in the media are starting to wonder.

A children's Bible for grownups, too

"No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty—except, of course, books of information.
The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of
are those which it would have been better not to have read at all."

—C.S. Lewis

Given that, one would hope that children's Bibles would be books worth reading at the age of fifty; one would hope they would be a joy to read to our children. Unfortunately, however (at least from my experience), that isn't often the case. It's too bad, because our older two really enjoy the one we kept; it isn't great, but it's good enough. Still, you always want something better for your kids—and now, I think we may have found it. Ben Patterson, who was something of a mentor of mine during his time as Dean of the Chapel at Hope College, and whose judgment I trust implicitly, has a thoroughly positive review up on the Christianity Today website of The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name; Sara and I got halfway through it and decided we want a copy. It's not just the review itself, either, because there's a link to The Jesus Storybook Bible's version of Genesis 3, which I think validates Ben's glowing comments.

Of all the things for which he praises this book, I think the most important is that it "manages to show again and again the presence of Christ in all the Old Testament Scriptures, and the presence of the Old Testament Scriptures in the life of Christ." That's something too many adults don't see—perhaps, in part, because they never learned it from their children's Bibles.

Adolescent atheism and the nihilistic impulse

When I put up my earlier post on atheism, I didn't expect the response I got (though perhaps that's only because I hadn't run across Samuel Skinner before; as much time as he spends on other people's blogs arguing his position, he really ought to start his own). I probably shouldn't have been surprised, however; what I described as the adolescent atheism of the self-impressed isn't an attitude conducive to taking criticism well, or to having one's heroic self-image challenged. Given that, I probably should have expected someone to take umbrage; after all, when you consider yourself the only rational person in the room, as Mr. Skinner evidently does, it's a little hard to have someone tell you your thinking is shoddy, adolescent, self-deluded and shallow.

Given that there was a response, however, the arrogant, dismissive, and hostile tone of that response was no surprise at all. As R. R. Reno notes, that sort of tone is becoming de rigeur from atheists these days.

The intemperate, even violent tone in recent criticisms of faith is quite striking. Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens: They seem an agitated crew, quick to caricature, quick to denounce, quick to slash away at what they take to be the delusions and conceits of faith. And the phenomenon is not strictly literary. All of us know a friend or acquaintance who has surprised us in a dark moment of anger, making cutting comments about the life of faith.

This isn't how it used to be; atheists of past generations could be calmly superior, unconcerned in their certainty that religion was dying away. Voltaire, for instance, calmly predicted that Christianity would be extinct within fifty years of his death. (Of course, twenty years after his death, the Geneva Bible Society bought his house and started using it to print Bibles, but that's another matter.) Why the change?

I suspect the answer is to be found in part in this comment from historian Paul Johnson: “The outstanding event of modern times was the failure of religious belief to disappear.” The calm face of atheism past was founded on its smug certainty that religion was on its way out; that certainty no longer holds, so atheists must actually deal with religion, and as Dr. Reno concludes,

There is something about faith that agitates unbelief. . . . As Byron recognized, modern humanism can easily become cruelly jealous of the modest claims it stakes upon the noble but fragile human condition. To believe in something more—it can so easily seem a betrayal. And because the reality of faith cannot help but ignite a desire for God in others, it is not hard to see why our present-day crusaders against belief take up their rhetorical bludgeons. They fear the contagion of piety.

It seems to me, then, that the sheer persistence of religious faith is eroding the urbane face of atheism, exposing the violent impulse underneath; though Mr. Skinner tried to deny it in his comments, there is a link between atheism and nihilism, because atheism is ultimately a belief in nothing. It isn't alone in this, either; there are many who consider themselves religious believers who actually, at the core, share that faith in nothing; as the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has written, the common religion of our culture “is one of very comfortable nihilism.”

As modern men and women—to the degree that we are modern—we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in the nothing, or in nothingness as such. It is this in which we place our trust, upon which we venture our souls, and onto which we project the values by which we measure the meaningfulness of our lives.

This is, as Dr. Hart notes (in what is truly a brilliant article), the inevitable logical consequence of

an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess . . . a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. Desire is free to propose, seize, accept or reject, want or not want—but not to obey. Society must thus be secured against the intrusions of the Good, or of God, so that its citizens may determine their own lives by the choices they make from a universe of morally indifferent but variably desirable ends, unencumbered by any prior grammar of obligation or value.

As Dr. Hart goes on to demonstrate, this is the logical consequence of Christianity, which strips away all other gods, leaving only one choice: Christ, and the paradoxical freedom of the gospel, or nothing, “the barren anonymity of spontaneous subjectivity.” As already noted, there are many who would say they worship Christ who in truth worship at the altar of their own freedom of choice; but they at least have another option before them, however imperfectly or confusedly they may understand it. For the atheist, there is no other option than “an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.” Indeed, atheism is a commitment to want no other option; and faith, even as confused as it often is, threatens that commitment. That, our “present-day crusaders against belief” simply cannot tolerate, and so they “take up their rhetorical bludgeons” to destroy “the contagion of piety” once and for all; and when they march, they march under the banner of Nothing to eradicate belief in Something—or rather, Someone.