Pretzelbyterianism

Yesterday, the PC(USA)'s highest court, the Permanent Judicial Commission of the General Assembly (GAPJC), issued the most befuddling court decision I've ever heard of (at least since Rose Bird last served on the California State Supreme Court). Faced with a disciplinary case against a Presbyterian pastor, Jane Adams Spahr, who had conducted same-sex marriage ceremonies and made no bones about having done so, and a denominational constitution that forbids doing so, they decided, essentially, this:

• Presbyterian pastors cannot perform same-sex marriage ceremonies because this is forbidden by the church's constitution
• Therefore, what Rev. Spahr performed were not same-sex marriage ceremonies, because this is, by definition, impossible
• Therefore, she cannot be guilty of the charge, because she was charged with "doing that which by definition cannot be done," which, by definition, could not have happened
• Therefore, she cannot be disciplined for doing something she couldn't possibly have done

Never mind, of course, the fact that she did do it, or at least represent herself as having done it . . . The problem here is that the GAPJC confused a legal prohibition (it is not legally possible for you to do this) with an ontological prohibition (it is not intrinsically possible for you to do this), and thus concluded, essentially, that it's impossible for human beings to break the law because the mere existence of the law makes breaking it impossible. If this logic applied in our courts, no one would ever be guilty of anything—this logic makes the very concept of guilt impossible by definition.

Of course, they don't really believe that themselves; and so they also made it clear that "a same sex ceremony is not and cannot be a marriage . . . Officers of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) who are authorized to perform marriages shall not state, imply, or represent that a same sex ceremony is a marriage because under W-4.9001 a same sex ceremony is not and cannot be a marriage." Unfortunately, having said that, they then pretended to believe that the Rev. Spahr hadn't done precisely what they said she "shall not" do, thus enabling them to avoid the question of whether she shouldn't have been disciplined for that, at least; this, of course, leaves that question hanging wide open for the next case (and there will most certainly be a next case, if only to test whether GAPJC will have the stomach to discipline people for defying their "shall not"). For now, though, they've tied themselves into such knots to avoid having to discipline the Rev. Spahr, they aren't really Presbyterians anymore—they're Pretzelbyterians.

(Update: with his usual critical acumen, Ed Koster, Stated Clerk of Detroit Presbytery, has identified a few more major kinks in those knots that hadn't occurred to me.)

All this reminds me of a song by the great Steve Scott, whose album I happen to have been listening to this afternoon; this one struck me quite forcefully, given the current situation.

Ship of Fools

Some have called us heroes;
Others say we've lost our mind.
Some have called us visionaries;
Others say that we've gone blind.
But we're done with their traditions—
We don't want to get trapped—
So we've thrown away the anchor
And we've thrown away the maps.

Sail away (sail away) on the ship of fools;
Sail away (sail away) on the ship of fools.

The city quotes the jungle,
And the jungle quotes the heart;
In this wilderness of references,
We're lost before we start.
There's an aching contradiction
At the center of the search;
We're moving 'round in circles,
But getting closer to the edge.

Chorus

Are we prisoners of confusion,
Or are we masters of our fate?
Are we caught in this illusion?
Is it really all too late?
Shall we try at navigation,
Or are we victims of the tide?
Do we have a destination
Or are we just here for the ride?

Chorus

Words and music: Steve Scott
© 1990 Northern Sierra Music
From the album Lost Horizon, by Steve Scott

The God who speaks

“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also.
From now on you do know him and have seen him.”

—John 14:1-7 (ESV)

These words are much loved and much quoted, and I’m sure have been for as long as there has been a church. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this passage, though, is the basis for Jesus’ promise: it isn’t based on what he’s taught them so far, or even on his crucifixion and resurrection, but on the fact that he’s going to leave them. It’s his going away that makes the fulfillment of his promise possible.

There are various aspects to this, but perhaps the most reassuring is that when Jesus ascended, when he returned to heaven, he wasn’t leaving us, he was leading us; he was going ahead of us to prepare our way, to show us the way, to be our way. That’s why he says, “If I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am, there you may also be”; and that’s one reason why he sent us his Spirit, as the agent through whom he leads and guides us in this life, on the way toward the kingdom of his Father. Remember, “the earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it,” and he’s actively at work in and through all of it. Thus for us, the world is not silent, nor is God silent; rather, God is always speaking to us, and all of life is the medium through which he speaks.

Most basically, of course, and most importantly, God speaks to us through the words he inspired, which include the record of the life he lived for us on this earth; it’s through the Bible first and foremost that Jesus leads us by his Spirit, as he continues to speak to us by his Spirit through these words, and he will not say anything that contradicts what he has already said. But that’s not the only way he speaks to us; it’s not the only way he guides us. He speaks through us sometimes as we talk with each other, making us agents of his wisdom; sometimes he may speak truth to us through people outside the church; he touches our minds and hearts through his creation, the natural world; and sometimes he speaks to us directly, in the back of our minds and the quiet of our hearts. I’ll never forget one time I was absolutely furious at someone—a couple someones, actually—and in my mind I heard Jesus say, “Show them grace.” I knew it was God, since it wasn’t what I wanted to hear, and I protested angrily, “They don’t deserve it.” To which he responded, “I know. That’s why it’s called grace.”

Granted, most of the time God doesn't speak to us quite that clearly; I suspect I was being unusually dense that day. But he does speak to us, and he does lead us, and we can trust that fact no matter what; what’s more, we can trust that he’s good enough at leading us to overcome how bad we often are at following him. We don’t need to worry or be anxious about that, for we can trust God for his grace; we simply need to do our part. We need to spend time with him, in reading his word (the main way we come to know him and recognize his voice) and in prayer—not just talking to him, though that’s important, but also being silent, listening for his voice—so that we learn to know him when he speaks; and we need to learn to expect him to speak, because he is at work leading us by his Spirit every day, in every moment. Christ came down to seek us out in our sin and rescue us from the power of death, and he’s busy right now bringing us home; and what he starts, he finishes. Period. End of sentence.

(Note: those with a philosophical bent might find Edward Tingley’s article “Gadamer and the Light of the Word” a valuable reflection on this matter; though Gadamer was not a believer, he gives a better account of the Spirit's work than many Christians, and Tingley has some excellent things to say on this.)

Politics is crazy . . .

. . . and more so this year than any I can remember; but at least there are other places where it's even crazier than here. I'd hate to be Ehud Olmert these days.

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

When Steve Sailer wondered back in January if the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. was trying to submarine Barack Obama's presidential candidacy, I could see his logic, but I thought it was a classic case of logic subverting reason. When Michael Barone wondered the same thing a month ago, building on Sailer's argument, I started to consider the idea, because Barone's just too good an observer to dismiss—but still, the idea seemed crazy. Occam's Razor seemed to suggest that the Rev. Dr. Wright was saying and doing the things he was saying and doing not out of any ulterior motive, but simply because this is who he is; this is what he preaches because this is what he believes. (He also believes, it appears, that black folks and white folks have different brains, which is a bit of racist crackpottery I'd normally expect out of the very KKK he attacks.) He might have been damaging Sen. Obama's campaign, but it didn't seem necessary to conclude he was doing so intentionally.

After the Rev. Dr. Wright's media offensive this past weekend, however (I use the term advisedly), I'm not at all so sure. Marc Ambinder says that "Wright is throwing Obama under the bus" (an ironic return for Sen. Obama's attempt to save his pastor by throwing Granny under the bus), while Clive Crook, Dana Milbank and Joe Klein have now come to the same conclusion as Sailer and Barone. Indeed, Klein takes it a step further:

Wright's purpose now seems quite clear: to aggrandize himself—the guy is going to be a go-to mainstream media source for racial extremist spew, the next iteration of Al Sharpton—and destroy Barack Obama.

Certainly it's hard to come to any other conclusion than that the Rev. Dr. Wright deliberately "reignited a controversy about race from which Obama had only recently recovered—and added lighter fuel." Some people are even wondering now if the Clintons put him up to it.

The sad thing is, it may very well work—and I do truly believe it will be a sad, sad day for this country if it does. Granted, I had no intention whatsoever of voting for Sen. Obama, but I wanted to believe in his integrity and his vision even if I can't accept his political ideas; I wanted to believe that win or lose, he could help America take another step or two away from the racism of the past. Now, after all we've seen of his friends, his view of the people of this country (which echoes his wife's bitterness at America) and the way he plays politics, I can't respect him anymore, and I definitely want him to lose on his merits. That said, if 15% of the electorate votes for John McCain simply because Barack Obama has dark skin, as some sharp observers think will happen, that would be a shameful thing, and I don't want to see that. But that's where the Rev. Dr. Wright is heading us—that's where he's driving the bus—and it seems, increasingly, that he's doing so because he'd rather inflame and exacerbate our nation's internal divisions than be proved wrong about them. If so, that's despicable. Barack Obama should have exercised much better care in his choice of friends; he shouldn't have wasted his time on a pastor who could betray him (and his country) like that.

“Winning” doesn't mean “easy”

Unfortunately, our quick-fix minute-rice instant-oatmeal fast-food culture has largely lost touch with the fact that some struggles take a long time, and that even tough, long-term fights may well be not only worth fighting but necessary to fight. I think most of our churches have lost the stomach for that, which is why the long victory of discipleship, with the lifelong struggle to put sin to death in our lives and replace it with trust in Christ, is foreign to so many who consider themselves Christians; and I'm quite sure we've largely lost the stomach for it in our politics. We may talk the talk of long-term effort, but we don't often walk the walk. That I'm sure is at least part of the reason (along with partisan opportunism) why the war in Iraq became so unpopular: it stopped being easy. Once it no longer looked like a cakewalk, a lot of folks stopped supporting it.

I'm glad, though, to see President Bush (finally?) call that attitude out:



I have to wonder (not originally, I know) what that reporter, and our press corps as a whole, would have made of World War II, or the Civil War . . . (According to Wikipedia, the American death toll of the entire Iraq War through the end of this month stands at 4,058 deaths, 3,320 in combat. In World War II, the Battle of the Bulge alone claimed 19,000 American dead.)

HT: Ed Morissey

The relevance of liturgy

I argued yesterday that rather than trying to stop being alien to the world and start looking normal on its terms, we need to be forthright about our alienness; rather than trying to tame the strange language of Christian faith, we need to actively teach it to those who don't know it. This afternoon, I sat down to read Mark Galli's article in the latest Christianity Today, "A Deeper Relevance," and found this:

A closer look suggests that something more profound and paradoxical is going on in liturgy than the search for contemporary relevance. "The liturgy begins . . . as a real separation from the world," writes Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann. He continues by saying that in the attempt to "make Christianity understandable to this mythical 'modern' man on the street," we have forgotten this necessary separation.

It is precisely the point of the liturgy to take people out of their worlds and usher them into a strange new world—to show them that, despite appearances, the last thing in the world they need is more of the world out of which they've come. The world the liturgy reveals does not seem relevant at first glance, but it turns out that the world it reveals is more real than the one we inhabit day by day. . . .

In what's now an old essay, F. H. Brabant put it this way: "All liturgical acts . . . have a double function: one directed Godwards, expressing in outward form the thoughts and feelings of the worshippers, the other directed manwards, teaching worshippers how they ought to think and feel by setting before them the Church's standard of worship."

We have to pay attention to cultural context, no question. The history of liturgy has been in part about finding words and ritual that help people in a given culture express their thoughts and feelings to God in ways that make sense. The liturgy has always had freedom and variety within its basic structure.

But it has steadfastly refused to let the culture determine its shape or meaning. Liturgical churches know that as profound a reality as is the surrounding culture, there is an even more profound reality waiting to be discovered. The liturgy gently and calmly gets us to open our eyes to the new reality, showing us the "necessary separation" from the old. Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, we find our gaze directed away from ourselves and toward God and his kingdom. When we return to our homes, we are never the same.

That's thick stuff, and profoundly important for the health of the church. I look forward to the article going up; what's more, I look forward to reading the book from which the article was adapted, Beyond Smells & Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy. This is a message the American church needs to hear—and not only the "contemporary" churches that have stripped their liturgy down to the bare minimum, but also those churches being told they have to abandon their liturgy to be "relevant." Relevance is not about coming to the world on its own terms; to the contrary, we are most relevant when we tell the world what it needs to know and does not, and when we give it what it needs to have and does not. May we have the courage to stick to that mission.

Humble knowledge

A lot of people think that a belief in absolute truth necessarily leads to dogmatism; that is, it seems to me, the main thing that moves people to conclude that truth is relative, because the alternative produces such unappealing behavior. Really, though, it's not the belief in absolute truth as such that produces dogmatism, but the combination of a belief in absolute truth with a belief that the self is absolute; and it's to defend that belief in the absolute self that people declare the truth to be relative. For my own part, I believe that the truth is absolute, and I am relative; my certainty is necessarily limited, not by the absence of absolutes, but by my own limited ability to perceive and apprehend them accurately. As John Stackhouse says, we may be pretty sure we're right, but we lack the ability to get outside ourselves and our own limitations enough to be absolutely sure. We should believe what we believe firmly and with conviction; but also with humility. After all, the fact that we believe something doesn't guarantee that it's true; as Dr. Stackhouse says, it's about confidence in God who is truth, not about certainty in ourselves, who aren't.

The audacity of Bill Cosby

The May issue of The Atlantic is one of their best in a while, maybe the best since Michael Kelly's much-lamented death. Of all the articles, I think the most interesting is Ta-Nehisi Coates' take on Bill Cosby and his mission to transform the American black community. Read the article, watch the accompanying video, and see what you think:



I don't know enough to evaluate Coates' intellectual history, though his tracking of the arguments and influence and political descendants of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois makes sense to me on first read; and I don't think racism is as endemic (among people of any skin color or ethnic heritage) as Cosby thinks it is, though my pessimistic streak tells me it's probably more common in general than in my own experience. I find Cosby's mission largely admirable, even if there are points on which I would disagree with him; I'm not sure how concerned I should be about those points, especially when it seems to me his message is fundamentally one of encouragement, and encouragement is in far too short supply. There's a lot to chew on here—especially, I think, for the church.

HT for the video: Ray Ortlund

Shameless plug

I'm finally starting to get to work on my page on my church's website; I don't have a whole lot on there yet, but I do have the texts for this sermon series up. (No audio, though—at least, not yet.) Check them out, if you're interested; while you're there, feel free to explore the site a bit. It's an interesting congregation.

The best and worst of the Presbyterian Church (USA)

In a couple days' time, the denominational press managed to show me both the best and the worst of the PC(USA). On the one hand, there was a deeply inspiring story from Flint, MI about three congregations—from different parts of the city and different backgrounds; two were predominantly white, one mostly black—that voted to merge and build a new church together. What they're doing isn't easy; it involves a lot of sacrifice and a lot of time and a lot of unselfish hard work to set aside your comfort zones and your old identity and culture and come together to grow a new identity and culture. The fact that they're doing it, and committed to doing it, for the sake of the gospel is a truly beautiful thing.

On the other hand, I also saw a depressing story of the institutional greed that drives too many of the decisions of this denomination: the Synod of the Sun voted to establish an Administrative Commission to take away some of the responsibilities of the Presbytery of South Louisiana. Specifically, they're taking away the presbytery's right to make decisions regarding the property of its congregations. Why? Because the presbytery was showing too much grace to congregations which wanted to leave, and too much concern for the welfare of the church of God as a whole, and not enough two-fisted insistence on keeping everything of value it could possibly lay a claim on. As Bob Davis wrote in his post today, "If ever there was a statement of institutional distrust, this would be it. Presbyteries are not to be trusted with the decisions the constitution specifically entrusts to presbyteries." And why are they not to be trusted? Because they follow their own best judgment, not the diktat of the party apparatchiki.

(Update: according to a letter to Presbyweb from Greg Coulter of Eastern Oklahoma Presbytery, on the request of the presbytery council of the Presbytery of South Louisiana, the Administrative Commission was not given the authority to assume original jurisdiction. This is good to know, though I don't think it ameliorates the picture as much as Mr. Coulter thinks it does. He categorizes this as "one governing body invit[ing] another governing body to partner with them"; but given that the presbytery had, potentially, a gun to its head, and knew it, it seems to me that categorizing their letter as an invitation is dubious.)

This sort of thing is the reason why, as Davis also writes in that post, the effort to make the PC(USA) more missional by revising our polity is completely wrongheaded and doomed not merely to failure but to actively worsening the problem: it's an effort to use structure to fix a behavior problem. As someone has said, no constitution can withstand those charged to administer it; changing our constitution without changing the hearts of those in positions of authority may change their justifications for their actions, but it will not change those actions. To quote Davis, "polity reflects behavior. Polity does not initiate behavior."

In the end, it all comes back to that quote from David Ruis: "The worship God is seeking relies completely on His initiative, knowing that the only true expression of worship is through the abandonment of all our agendas for His, as we trust in His sovereign power and unlimited grace." The mission to which God calls us flows out of the worship to which he calls us. Until those who govern the PC(USA) are willing to abandon their own agendas for his, trusting in his sovereign power and unlimited grace—as those folks in Flint did, to their eternal credit—they will never be agents of his mission, no matter what else they do; and until that changes, the part of God's church for which they are responsible will never prosper.

HT: Presbyweb

Answering Islam on its own terms

Though I know he's out of favor these days, and I've learned not to trust his account of modern philosophy as much as I once did, I still must confess a great debt and greater admiration for Francis Schaeffer; though I might have learned the presuppositional approach to apologetics from Cornelius Van Til or other figures in my own Reformed tradition, I learned it from Schaeffer, and I'm deeply grateful for that.

For those not familiar with this approach, here's a very brief summary, taken from the Wikipedia article: “The goal of presuppositional apologetics . . . is to argue that the assumptions and actions of non-Christians require them to believe certain things about God, man and the world which they claim they do not believe. This type of argument is technically called a reductio ad absurdum in that it attempts to reduce the opposition to holding an absurd position.” I appreciate this approach both for its recognition that none of us ever really starts from a neutral position—we all begin with a particular point of view, from a particular standpoint—and for its understanding that we can't “prove” the Christian faith simply by piling evidence on people; we need to take their standpoints, their worldviews, more seriously than that.

This is, I believe, the best way to contend for the Christian faith in any context, but especially in the Islamic world, given the nature of the Muslim faith and its view of non-Muslims; which is why Fr. Zakaria Botros is such an amazing and critically important witness to Christ. A Coptic priest and Arabic TV personality, Fr. Botros challenges Islam in its own language, on the ground of its own teachings, from its own texts.

Each of his episodes has a theme—from the pressing to the esoteric—often expressed as a question (e.g., “Is jihad an obligation for all Muslims?”; “Are women inferior to men in Islam?”; “Did Mohammed say that adulterous female monkeys should be stoned?” “Is drinking the urine of prophets salutary according to sharia?”). To answer the question, Botros meticulously quotes—always careful to give sources and reference numbers—from authoritative Islamic texts on the subject, starting from the Koran; then from the canonical sayings of the prophet—the Hadith; and finally from the words of prominent Muslim theologians past and present—the illustrious ulema.

Typically, Botros’s presentation of the Islamic material is sufficiently detailed that the controversial topic is shown to be an airtight aspect of Islam. Yet, however convincing his proofs, Botros does not flatly conclude that, say, universal jihad or female inferiority are basic tenets of Islam. He treats the question as still open—and humbly invites the ulema, the revered articulators of sharia law, to respond and show the error in his methodology. He does demand, however, that their response be based on “al-dalil we al-burhan,”—“evidence and proof,” one of his frequent refrains—not shout-downs or sophistry.

More often than not, the response from the ulema is deafening silence—which has only made Botros and Life TV more enticing to Muslim viewers. The ulema who have publicly addressed Botros’s conclusions often find themselves forced to agree with him—which has led to some amusing (and embarrassing) moments on live Arabic TV.

Botros spent three years bringing to broad public attention a scandalous—and authentic—hadith stating that women should “breastfeed” strange men with whom they must spend any amount of time. A leading hadith scholar, Abd al-Muhdi, was confronted with this issue on the live talk show of popular Arabic host Hala Sirhan. Opting to be truthful, al-Muhdi confirmed that going through the motions of breastfeeding adult males is, according to sharia, a legitimate way of making married women “forbidden” to the men with whom they are forced into contact—the logic being that, by being “breastfed,” the men become like “sons” to the women and therefore can no longer have sexual designs on them.

To make matters worse, Ezzat Atiyya, head of the Hadith department at al-Azhar University—Sunni Islam’s most authoritative institution—went so far as to issue a fatwa legitimatizing “Rida’ al-Kibir” (sharia’s term for “breastfeeding the adult”), which prompted such outrage in the Islamic world that it was subsequently recanted.

Islamic leaders have proven unable to challenge him, because he's beating them on their own terms; combined with Fr. Botros' presentation of the truth of the gospel, the result has been millions of conversions to Christianity every year. There have been threats against his life in consequence, but he will not back down, and so far, no one has been able to make him. A billion cheers for Fr. Botros, indeed.

The success of Fr. Botros' flank attack on the Islamic world, coming as it does at the same time as the frontal assault Pope Benedict XVI launched with his Regensburg address in 2006, highlights an important point: the West cannot answer Islam by purely political means, whether military or diplomatic. Indeed, Islam cannot be addressed on any sort of secular grounds, because the liberal secular mind does not understand religion. As Spengler argues and as the case of Magdi Allam demonstrates, the West can only respond effectively to the Islamic challenge by returning to its Christian (and thus Jewish, and thus Eastern) roots, because “one does not fight a religion with guns (at least not only with guns) but with love” (a point made also by Chuck Colson) The great struggle for the soul of the West against Islam, though it surely must involve military efforts at times against the likes of al’Qaeda and Hizb’allah, will most basically be a struggle for the souls of individual Muslims, and thus for the lives of those who seek to leave Islam for Christianity. To quote Spengler,

Where will the Pope find the sandals on the ground in this new religious war? From the ranks of the Muslims themselves, evidently. Magdi Allam is just one convert, but he has a big voice. If the Church fights for the safety of converts, they will emerge from the nooks and crannies of Muslim communities in Europe.

The parallel he draws to the conversion of the pagans who overran the fading Roman Empire is a compelling one; those tribes conquered Europe, and thus the Western church, but the church in turn absorbed them by conversion. Faith conquered where military power failed. The key, as Wretchard points out, lies in your presuppositions, the foundations of your life, and having a place to stand that you know is worth standing for.

Challenging Islam's roots requires the challenger to have an irrational [or better, superrational] loyalty to roots of his own. Faith is a special kind of information that arises from providing answers to questions that are undecidable within our formal logical system; that lie beneath the foundations of our civilization rather than in a development of its precepts. It lies within our choice of axioms rather than the theorems that arise from them. And because axioms cannot be proved, “our way of life” will always rest on prejudice—or if you will—faith. Like Camus, we can never rise completely above all our attachments and still retain our capacity to act.

HT: Presbyweb, BreakPoint

An unexpected gleam of light

I don't know anything more about it than this link—the show isn't my cup of tea—but apparently Desperate Housewives decided to encourage the church to evangelism. Or something. One of the main characters, by the sound of things a woman who's never given the church a serious thought in her life, decides to go to church; predictably (both for Hollywood and, let's admit, for real life), the doing is harder than the saying, but despite that, she carries through. It sounds like a serious treatment of Christian faith, taken all in all, and an episode that was unafraid to point out something important: there are questions that we as human beings need answered that we aren't capable of answering.

It also sounds like a salutary reminder to Christians of just how alien the church is to those who stand outside its walls. That's something that's always been true, really, but in our culture it's much more obviously so than it used to be; which isn't entirely bad, but it means that if we're going to be serious about evangelism—which we need to be, because there are a lot of folks out there who need to hear the good news of Jesus Christ—we'll have to take that alienness into account, and be willing to answer questions seriously and respectfully. We can't assume people will understand us and how we talk and how we do things, because all too often, they won't.

Which doesn't mean, I don't think, that we need to stop being alien; I think by now we've pretty well demonstrated that that sort of approach doesn't work. The truth is, as Charlie Peacock pointed out, ours is a strange language; but it's strange for the same reason it's powerful, because "it’s haunted by an even stranger truth." We can't assume people understand it, but we can't set it aside, either; instead, we need to take the time and effort to teach it, because there are folks out there who need to learn it.

HT: grains of truth

Prosthetics, athletics, and the human future

The cover article in the latest issue of ESPN Magazine is on the new generation of prosthetics and the difference they're starting to make in the world of sports; not only are they becoming sophisticated enough to allow athletes who have had limbs amputated to compete on a level playing field with those who haven't, some folks are beginning to be concerned that they might provide a competitive advantage. In a classic knee-jerk overreaction, sports governing bodies have begun to respond, not by developing intelligent guidelines for the use of prostheses, but by banning them. Clearly, this isn't fair.

The bottom line is this: Sports do not need knee-jerk segregation, they need rational and fair regulation. Every organized sport begins the same way, with the creation of rules. We then establish technological limits, as with horsepower in auto racing, stick curvature in hockey, bike weight in cycling. As sports progress, those rules are sometimes altered. The USGA, for instance, responded to advances in club technology by legalizing metal heads in the early '80s. In Chariots of Fire, the hero comes under heavy scrutiny for using his era's version of steroids: a coach, at a time when the sport frowned upon outside assistance. So if we can adjust rules of sports to the time, why not for prosthetics? Create a panel of scientists and athletes, able-bodied and disabled, and ask them to determine what's fair. One example: We know the maximum energy return of the human ankle, so that measurement could be the limit for the spring of a prosthetic ankle. That type of consideration is much fairer than simply locking out an entire group of athletes.

If prosthetic technology can be used to enable people to compete on an even footing (so to speak), then it should be allowed for that purpose; obviously, the rules need to be carefully tuned to be as fair as possible, but the relative difficulty of that task should not be an excuse for not attempting it.

There is, however, a deeper concern here.

If anyone can predict what sports will look like in 2050, it's [Hugh] Herr, who lost his legs 26 years ago in a climbing accident. Herr wears robotic limbs with motorized ankles and insists he doesn't want his human legs back because soon they'll be archaic. "People have always thought the human body is the ideal," he says. "It's not." . . .

Bioethicist Andy Miah predicts that one day, "it will be an imperative, and the responsible course of action, to reinforce one's body through prosthesis when competing at an elite level." In other words, all pros will have engineered body parts. History will view the steroids witch hunt as a silly attempt to keep athletes from using technology to help regenerate after a season of pain. "In many ways, we're facing the advent of the bionic man," says MLS commissioner Don Garber. "It's something our industry has to start thinking about."

This is worrisome talk. The desire for a superhuman/post-human existence has done a fair bit of damage over the years, and as science starts to make "improving" ourselves a near-future possibility, we need to be very, very careful with that. We simply are not wise enough or knowledgeable enough to make playing God with our bodies a good idea; and I say that not only as a Christian but as a longtime reader of science fiction. The downside of trying to re-engineer the human body is just too great; and honestly, I don't think the upside is worth it. If we "improve" everyone, what have we really gained?; and if we only "improve" some, haven't we only taken the inequalities among people that already exist and made them worse? Do we really need more reasons for some people to think they're better than others? These are the things we need to think about very carefully before we start declaring our bodies obsolete.

The Ascension and the Second Coming

Over at The Gospel-Driven Church, Jared raised the question from N. T. Wright, "Is the Second Coming a Pauline Innovation?" Bishop Wright contends it is; I think, however, he's mistaken, primarily because there's an element missing in his reading of the Olivet Discourse: the Ascension. In John 14, Jesus bases his promise to his disciples on the fact that he's going to leave them—in order to prepare a place for them in his Father's house, it's necessary for him to go, and when the time comes, he'll return to lead them (and us) home to be with him; in the meantime, he will send the Holy Spirit to be the one who walks alongside us. In the context of Hebrews' teaching on Christ as our great high priest, it seems clear to me that this has to be a reference to the Ascension and the work Jesus is doing on our behalf now, and thus that his coming again must refer to his final return in glory, not to his resurrection from the dead.

Song of the Week

Flash

I'll chase the light at four o'clock
Until I glow, until I know
I'm draped in color like the trees;
It's beautiful to me.

I stare into the setting sun
On 35, until I find
A way to let it seep into my soul;
It's beautiful to me.

But You call me with a light more bright than anything I've ever seen—

Flash for a million miles or more
Until what is dead is swallowed by life;
Flash for a million miles or more
Until my whole life is clothed in eternal light.

Tonight the stars are whispering
A mystery while we sleep—
It's more than just another wish for peace;
It's beautiful to me.

But You call me with a light more bright than anything I've ever seen—

Chorus

Bridge
In a moment we'll all be changed,
And this dim reflection will fade away
Compared to the light that You offer us
And the glory we'll see on Your face.
You're beautiful to me; You're beautiful to me.

Chorus

Words and music: Allison Ogren
© 1999 Photon Music
From the album Follow the Narrow, by Clear

Don't be deceived: “Bad company ruins good morals.”

So says 1 Corinthians 15:33; and if there's a lesson from the Obama presidential campaign, increasingly, that would seem to be it. First we heard about Antoin “Tony” Rezko, and friends of Rezko's like Nadhmi Auchi; then we learned about the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright (anyone wanting additional context can find it here); then some folks started complaining about another black South Side pastor with whom Barack Obama is associated, the Rev. James T. Meeks; then it turns out Sen. Obama is good pals with founding members of the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn. Sen. Obama tried to brush that off by saying, in essence, that their bad side was ancient history, and now they're mainstream. Unfortunately, given these audio clips and these video clips of Ayers and Dohrn (to say nothing of Ayers' blog), that's not very encouraging. If this is Sen. Obama's idea of “mainstream,” we have reason to worry. No, no one accuses him of holding the exact views of Ayers and Dohrn or the Rev. Wright; but as Mark Steyn says, “this is the pool he swims in”. Then, finally, Sen. Obama received a new endorsement—from Hamas; and while he's tried to minimize that by denouncing Hamas, John McCain has a good point: that doesn't mean much when Sen. Obama has already said he'll meet unconditionally with the Iranian government, which controls Hamas.

No one denies Barack Obama is a good man; but the company he keeps is dragging him down.

Esteem for US rises in Asia, thanks to Iraq war

Seems counterintuitive to an American ear, given the dominant strain of reporting around here, but so says The Australian, which is certainly closer to the issue than we are. The article's actually based on the work of an American analyst, Mike Green, who specializes in NE Asia, but the article offers independent support (pointing out along the way that, against the narrative that "the world hates us because we're in Iraq/supporting Israel/etc.," the last couple years have seen the election of a new wave of pro-US leaders in countries like France, Germany, South Korea and Australia. It's an interesting and encouraging piece.

HT: Power Line

Iraq rising

However much the MSM tries to spin things to the contrary, the news from Iraq is good and getting better. It's getting so if Obama wins, he won't bring the troops home, he'll just get more favorable coverage and take credit for the victory. The Washington Post declared Basra a victory for Moqtada al'Sadr, but in fact it was al-Sadr who lost and is now backing down; now, because Nuri al'Maliki stood up to his fellow Shiites, Iraq's largest Sunni party has come back into the government, Iraqis as a whole have rallied around the Prime Minister, and the government has earned considerable respect around the Muslim world. The Iraqi Security Forces performed well on the whole, and al'Maliki is now stronger at home and abroad than he was before, with greater credibility in dealing with other internal challenges, such as al'Qaeda holdouts in the Mosul area. Meanwhile, as the Los Angeles Times points out, the Muslim world is turning decisively on al'Qaeda; in part, that's the result of the heavy damage we've done them, and in part, they've done it to themselves trying to respond to us. Peter Wehner is right: though our struggle isn't over, we've made "enormous and heartening progress."

The clans of Yale and the tribes of America

In the course of reading Redstate.com's analysis of the Philly vote in this week's Pennsylvania primary (an analysis which convinces me that, despite the smooth assurances that the Democratic coalition will come back together just the same as always once Sen. Obama limps to the finish line and finally secures the nomination, the Obama-McCain general election is going to look very different from what we've been used to seeing lately), I found a link to an old piece in the Village Voice written by Michael Gecan (a community organizer in the footsteps of Saul Alinsky, as Sen. Obama was) titled "The Tribes of Yale." It's a fascinating piece of cultural-political analysis; and if Gecan's assertion that conservative political leaders "don't know what in the world—in the bigger, broader world where most moderate Americans live and work, play and pray, and try to raise their kids—they are for" is inaccurate, as I'm quite sure it is, I think his broader argument that they're driven more by what they're against than by what they're for is thought-provoking, especially in the context of his overall understanding of the liberal/conservative cultural clash. Even if his conclusions are incorrect, the story he tells is an important one, I think, for those who would seek to understand American politics in the first decade of the third millennium AD.

All aboard!

Ready to Ride

Sixth Street, sun is going down;
Pavement's cool underneath.
A vagrant, so they say in town;
Seems like mercy can't compete.

Sleeping in a doorway
Near the docks of Oyster Bay.
Thirteen years of carrying shame,
Never hearing the voice of the One who took his blame.
A whisper—
He raised his head . . .

Surrendered out, do you believe,
Are you ready to ride the train?
Abandoned not by love, you'll see,
If you're ready to ride.

A one-piece paper suitcase;
A past whose future was foretold.
A life not made for dying;
Instead the mystery began to unfold.
Unfolding—
He raised his head . . .

Chorus

Bridge
Born into despair an orphan child—
Will You care for me?
And like the train that saved me,
Adopted in by love eternally.

Opening His arms, He wants you rich, you poor, you black, you white;
Receive His love that runs so deep and high and long and wide.

Chorus

Words and music: Matt Berry
© 1998 Photon Music
From the album Clear, by Clear

My thanks to Bill for directing my attention to this song; he posted the video and got the song stuck in my head, so I went out and bought the CD (which was dirt cheap on SecondSpin, at least). I've been thinking about the lyrics off and on ever since. It's not the greatest lyric I've ever run across (it seems to me the bridge gets a little muddled for a moment), but I love the song's central image, which I think the video captures quite well. In particular, I think there are two things this lyric gets at which we too often forget.

One, we are the vagrant in the face of God's mercy and grace; as Malcolm Muggeridge put it, we are the beggars at the foot of God's door. We none of us earn our way to God; we can only accept his unearned (and too often unwelcome) invitation. By mercy and that alone we live.

Two, God's invitation to us isn't to some private little one-on-one thing, it's to ride the train. When you get on the train, you share the journey with whoever else is on there, and the train goes where it's going to go; you have no control over where it's going—that was determined by the one who set the route for the rails—or who your companions are. You're all in the journey together; your only choice is to take it or get off. It seems to me that's a wonderful metaphor for the life of faith. It's not like driving our own car, because we don't have the freedom to pick the route or set our own speed—God does that—or to make the journey on our own, because we become fellow travelers with the rest of the people of God, whether we always appreciate that fact or not. The train, the church, is going, God knows who and where and why and how fast, and he simply invites us to climb aboard and take our part in what he already has in process.

"The worship God is seeking relies completely on His initiative, knowing that the only true expression of worship is through the abandonment of all our agendas for His, as we trust in His sovereign power and unlimited grace . . ."

Fantasy, science fiction, and the mysterium tremendum

I argued yesterday, commenting on an interview with Lois McMaster Bujold, that "fantasy and science fiction, at their highest, appeal to an essentially theological impulse in the human spirit." This morning I followed a link from that interview to the Mind Meld blog on SFSignal, where they asked a number of science fiction writers to answer the question, "Is science fiction antithetical to religion?" What I found is that, not only did very few answer "yes," several of them agreed with my thesis.

Gabriel McKee:

Samuel R. Delany wrote, and I agree, that "virtually all the classics of speculative fiction are mystical." Regardless of the stated beliefs of its authors—who aren't all atheists, by the way—SF works best as a genre about the Big Questions of being and meaning, and any halfway-satisfying answer to those questions has to have a bit of religious flavor.

Carl Vincent:

Speaking entirely from personal experience, one of the things that science fiction drives me to do over and over again is to step outside and look at the night sky. While doing so I not only dream of space travel and daydream about whatever world I was just reading about, but I also stand in awe of my Creator and the wonder of the universe He created. Science fiction has never been antithetical to my personal religious experience, it has always enhanced it. Science fiction makes me think, makes me question things, and makes me not only evaluate my universe but also makes me evaluate my place in it.

John C. Wright:

Let us be honest. Science fiction is not necessarily about the science. It is about the wonder. Any writer man enough to portray religion as a source of wonder, as Gene Wolfe does, can make it a fit matter for science fiction.

I doubt many of these folks have read Rudolf Otto's classic book The Idea of the Holy, but they have the clear sense that the best SF, for all its rationalist foundation, has at least a touch of the numinous.

Perhaps the most interesting response along these lines came from a chap named Adam Roberts, who contends that "science fiction as a genre has its roots precisely in the religious conflicts of the Reformation."

I think it's a complex and evolving discourse still determined by its Protestant roots, a mode of art that is trying to articulate a number of core fascinations essentially religious in nature: questions of transcendence ('sense of wonder' as we sometimes call it, or 'the Sublime' in the language of literary criticism); atonement and messianism in particular.

He makes a compelling thumbnail argument; I'm going to have to pick up a copy of his book, The Palgrave History of Science Fiction, in which he argues his case at length. If he's right, then it's not merely that "fantasy and science fiction . . . appeal to an essentially theological impulse in the human spirit"; rather, going a step further, they arise out of that impulse as an expression of our need for transcendence—which is to say, ultimately, our need for God.

Fantasy, science fiction, and the epic

Lois McMaster Bujold is one of my favorite fantasy/science-fiction authors, so I was glad to read this interview with her on the blog Fantasy Book Critic (which looks, btw, like a good one for those who enjoy that kind of literature). She's a sharply perceptive writer who doesn't simply write conventional “genre fiction,” but who takes full creative advantages of the opportunities of her genres. (For instance, in her fantasy novel The Curse of Chalion, she created what might well be the first truly believable serious theological setup in fantasy since Tolkien.) As such, I was particularly interested in her analysis of genres, an analysis sparked by her experience in writing The Sharing Knife, in which, as she says,

I wanted to see what would happen when I tried to make a romance the central plot of a fantasy novel—and wow was that ever a learning experience, not only about what makes a romance story work, but, more unexpectedly, uncovering many of the hidden springs and assumptions that make fantasy work. It turns out to be a much harder blending that I’d thought, going in—after all, I’d had romantic sub-plots in both my fantasy and my SF books before, and wasn’t it just a matter of shifting the proportions a bit?

Well, no, it turns out. The two forms have different focal planes. In a romance in the modern genre sense, which may be described as the story of a courtship from first meeting to final commitment, the focus is personal; nothing in the tale (such as the impending end of the world, ferex) can therefore be presented as more important. . . .

Viewing the reader response to the first two volumes of TSK, it has been borne in upon me how intensely political most F&SF plots in fact are. Political and only political activity (of which war/military is a huge sub-set) is regarded as “important” enough to make the protagonists interesting to the readers in these genres. The lyrical plot is rare, and attempts to make the tale about something, anything else—artistic endeavor, for instance—are regularly tried by writers, and as regularly die the grim death in the marketplace. (Granted The Wind in the Willows or The Last Unicorn will live forever, but marginalized as children’s fiction.)

I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy” is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset.)

There's a lot of truth in that, but I don't think it's quite right. As regards mysteries, I've written somewhere on the idea (which I ran across somewhere else—I'll have to track that down) that the appeal of mysteries is the restoration of order to chaos; justice is a central component of that (the restoration of moral order), but not all of it by any means. That's why so many of Agatha Christie's novels end with two members of the surviving cast heading toward marriage—it's another dimension of the restoration of order. With science fiction and (especially) fantasy, I think the appeal is the restoration of order to chaos on an epic scale; this scale demands political activity, but to characterize these plots as merely political is to overstate the point, for in fact they often transcend politics. One thinks for example of Guy Gavriel Kay's The Fionavar Tapestry trilogy or Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, in both of which the aim is nothing less than the destruction of the source of evil in the universe (though the two works construe that source drastically differently); these are nothing less than fantasies of theological agency. Another example would be the great exploration stories of science fiction, such as Arthur C. Clarke's Rama; I'm not sure how one would label that, but it's clearly not political in its appeal.

Though there are definitely fantasy and science fiction stories which can be accurately described as “fantasies of political agency” (most especially the classic “male teen power fantasy”), I think there's a broader story here. Fantasy and science fiction tap into the desire for the epic that we see reflected in literature going all the way back to works like The Illiad and The Odyssey, Beowulf and The Tain; it's the desire for a view of reality that's big enough to satisfy our sense of ourselves, our sense that "there's more to life than this." We want stories that are "larger than life," by which we really mean we want stories that show us that life is larger than the ordinary routines of the day-to-day; we want the sense that there really is a bigger story out there, if we can just find it. As such, I would argue that fantasy and science fiction, at their highest, appeal to an essentially theological impulse in the human spirit.

Worship as orientation

"The worship God is seeking relies completely on His initiative, knowing that the only true expression of worship is through the abandonment of all our agendas for His, as we trust in His sovereign power and unlimited grace. It is from this heart posture that true liturgy flows, that music and arts find their highest calling and that the light of a worshipping community shines as a beacon of hope to a suffering and searching world."

—David Ruis

My thanks to Jared for posting this quote from one of my favorite worship leaders (and also for the excellent post in which the quote is contained). This is why any worship service, whether "traditional" or "contemporary" (two labels which usually bear little or no resemblance to descriptions of reality), should begin with a call to worship: we gather to worship because God summons us. The initiative is his, not ours. Failure to remember that fact and take it seriously is, I'm convinced, the root of most of our squabbles over "worship style." We fall into the trap of thinking that worship is all about music and how we do things and other matters of style and preference, and forget that all those things, while not incidental, are secondary. Worship, at its core, is an orientation: specifically, toward God, flat on our faces. The rest should develop accordingly, as Ruis says.

This is, I think, the most important thing to remember for those of us whom God has called to lead his people in worship; what we are about is to lead people in precisely this. It's the reason I believe in liturgy, whatever specific content we may put in it (such as whether the songs were written three centuries ago or three weeks ago), because the ancient form of the Christian service was designed to serve this purpose; but at the same time, if we begin to value the form for its own sake, we make an idol of it and thus defeat that purpose. What matters is that we teach people to trust God's "sovereign power and unlimited grace" enough that they will be willing to abandon their agendas for his—that we teach them to come to worship out of that attitude, as an expression of that trust—and that we lead them in that by living and worshiping that way ourselves. Put simply, the most important qualification for a worship leader isn't skill or talent or charisma: it's a heart and life oriented in this way to the worship of God.

Hooray for the men of the docks

Last week, a Chinese ship anchored off Durban, South Africa to unload a shipment of arms from China for the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. The South African government refused to stop them—apparently siding with Mugabe's deputy information minister, who told a South African radio station, "Every country has got a right to acquire arms. There is nothing wrong with that. If they are for Zimbabwe, they will definitely come to Zimbabwe. How they are used, when they are going to be used is none of anybody's business"—but the South African people did what their government would not do. The workers of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union, who work the docks of their country's ports, refused to unload the cargo, effectively stopping the shipment. When a South African court declared that the arms could not be transported across South African soil, the ship raised anchor and set sail. The nearest non-South African port would have been Maputo, Mozambique, but the Mozambican government wouldn't let the ship into their territorial waters, so it headed off the other way instead, for Luanda, Angola. Here's hoping the dockworkers there do the same, or perhaps that Namibia and Zambia refuse the arms passage; however it plays out, here's praying they never get where they're going.

HT: Gordon Chang

The erosion of language and cultural decline

B. R. Myers, wielding his club like a rapier as usual, has an excellent piece up at The Atlantic on the work of Ian Robinson, a British critic (an evangelical, as it happens) who writes primarily on the ongoing collapse of the English language. The piece is partly a review of Robinson's latest book, Untied Kingdom, and partly a look back at Robinson's first book, The Survival of English: Essays in the Criticism of Language, but like any good review essay, it's as much about Robinson's subject as it is about his books—a subject on which Myers has a lot to say in his own right. I particularly appreciate his trenchant summary of why the state of our language matters:

Our language itself is losing its power to express moral disapproval. Obscene and sinful are headed the way of decadent and outrageous; perhaps depraved will be watered down next.

Such changes affect the way we think, because we do so in words. This is why Karl Kraus, the founder of modern Sprachkritik, or “criticism of language,” was so hard on the Viennese press of the 1920s and 1930s. He is alleged to have said that “if those who are obliged to look after commas had made sure they are always in the right place,” the Japanese would not have set Shanghai on fire. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but the New York Times article speaks for itself. People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.

Skeptical conversations, part IV: Considering humanity

Continuing the conversation . . . Parts I-III here.

R: Before we start talking about sin, though, I want to make a couple other points. One, our created purpose as human beings, our highest good, is to know, love and serve God, which means in part to serve others and to care for his creation. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism, one of the founding documents of the Presbyterian churches, puts it, “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” John Piper, a Minnesota pastor and author, has put a bit of a twist on that, rephrasing it as, “The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying him forever”; he captures the idea that true pleasure is only to be found in following God.

A: Pleasure? Since when does Christianity care about pleasure? It’s all about duty and self-denial and giving up pleasures because they’re sinful.

R: I’ll admit there are Christians who’d make you think so, but that’s not the truth at all. Remember, God created everything, and he created us as physical/spiritual beings; he created physical pleasures, from the smallest to the greatest, and he created them because he likes them. He’s a God of love, and of joy, and the pleasures of food, drink, sleep, sex and all the rest are gifts he’s given us for our enjoyment.

A: Sex? You’d better watch out, or your Puritan ancestors will rise up and throw you in the stocks.

R: Pure slander. The Puritans have been thoroughly distorted by later generations; you’d be surprised to see what they had to say about marriage. Yes, sex is a gift of God, one of the deepest. He created us as sexual beings—Genesis 1 tells us that he created us in his image, male and female—and that’s not merely a physical reality. I know there are people who argue that gender is socially constructed, but I have to disagree; our maleness and femaleness goes right to the core of who we are. It’s a way in which we represent the diversity in God. And sexual intercourse itself is more than just a physical act, which I think is a lot of the reason it’s so pleasurable; it really is, in a way, two people becoming one flesh, as Genesis 2:23 says. It’s our little experience of the unity in diversity that is God.

Which is why it’s so important that sex be handled rightly. That’s the problem with homosexual sex: it unites two people of the same essence, if you will, rather than bringing the male and female together as one. And that’s the problem with sex outside of marriage. The sexual union, to be what it is supposed to be, needs to be defended from invaders, for one thing; and because we’re human and imperfect, it needs to be supported and nurtured, to become a deeper and truer unity over time. Sex without that support—well, it’s like trying to put an anvil on a table, it’s going to do damage.

A: A doctrine of sex; I would never have thought to hear such a thing. I don’t know if I buy the argument, but at least I can see how you stand where you do.

R: I think much of it follows logically from taking human sexuality seriously. But you can see, though, that God’s strictures on sex aren’t born out of a desire to squelch our pleasure, but rather out of the desire to make that pleasure as full and deep as he created it to be. In general, that’s true. As C. S. Lewis put it in the essay “The Weight of Glory,” our problem isn’t that we want too much but that we’re too easily satisfied, that we settle for thin, weak imitations of pleasure; in his image, we’re like a child that wants to go on making mud puddles in a slum because it cannot understand what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea. When we take the easy way—whether with sex, or food, or sleep, or drink, or whatever—we don’t just debase ourselves, we debase the pleasure. You can see that most clearly with recreational drugs like cocaine and heroin, which are imitation pleasure in its purest form.

A: It seems to me that you’ve come back around to the question of sin.

R: True; but then, you can’t talk about human existence for very long without dealing with sin. There is one last thing that needs to be said about human beings, though: we are free, self-determining moral agents, and this is how God created us. This is the root of our moral responsibility, for clearly if we were not free to act we could not be responsible for our actions. But we are free to choose, free to say yes or no to God, and so our actions are our own—and thus we may be judged for them.

A: But I thought you said that God is in control of everything. Wouldn’t that logically mean that he determines the choices we make, and thus that we aren’t free?

R: Yes and no. If I go out and order a hamburger, for instance, two things are true at the same time: I ordered that hamburger because I chose to do so, and I ordered it because God willed that I do so.

A: But if God wills it, then your choice is fixed and thus cannot be free.

R: That’s not necessarily true, actually. Did you make any choices yesterday that you regret?

A: Actually, yes—I bought a hot dog at the game. It gave me indigestion.

R: Sorry to hear that. Why don’t you change your mind and buy something else instead?

A: Huh? That’s the past, it’s done—I can’t change that, obviously.

R: So that choice you made is fixed. Does that mean you did not freely choose to buy and eat that hot dog?

A: What does that have to do with this discussion?

R: I’m just trying to show that it’s logically possible for an action to be both fixed and free—because that describes every action we’ve ever taken in the past. Now consider my point earlier that God is outside our time stream—both our past and our future exist for him in the same way that our past exists for us—and the analogy I used to the author of a novel.

I don’t know if you know many writers; I have several good friends who are well on their way to completing novels, and one thing that’s true of all of them is that their characters are real people to them with minds of their own. My friends created those characters, but they aren’t puppets to be manipulated around the stage. Rather, they act out their own intentions according to their natures, sometimes doing things that their author didn’t expect, creating the story as they do so. And yet, it is the mind and hands of the author that produce the story, and the author who is completely in control. So in some sense, you see, everything that happens in the story is the product of two wills, of the author and the character; and authors will talk about their books that way, taking credit in one breath for writing a line of dialogue, but in the next crediting the character’s wit.

Now, this is only an analogy, and it’s limited; but I think it shows intuitively how it is possible for an action to be the result both of our will and of God’s will. God is outside the story of creation, while we are within it. From within, we are free agents, willing our own actions; from without, he is the author, writing every scene as he chooses. And after all, as free agents we are acting out our characters—and he is the one who created our characters.

A: I’ll have to think about this some more. I take it, then, that your explanation of human evil is that it is the result of human freedom?

R: More or less, yes. Adam and Eve, the parents of our race, chose to reject God. They alienated themselves from him and fell from the state of grace in which they were created; their actions left them guilty of sin and corrupted in their nature, and that is the nature their children inherited from them, and that the human race continues to inherit. Even in this, God was sovereign; he did not decree their fall in advance, as if he desired it, but he was still sovereign in their decision to rebel, though it grieved him. As Pascal said, he allowed us the dignity of causality, so that we might be truly in his image as free persons. In our fallen state, we are still free in the sense that our actions are not coerced by anyone else, but we are slaves in another sense: we cannot get free of the corruption in our nature, we are bound to it, and so we are slaves to sin. In everything we do, even at our best, sin is at work. This is what theologians call total depravity, that we are incapable of any action which is completely free from sin.

A: So you’re saying that we inherit our tendency to evil, as if it were in our DNA somewhere. Is that what the phrase “original sin” means, I assume?

R: Yes. We are born with our desires and motivations twisted and crippled, and this is the root of all the evil we do. It’s nothing we can fix or cure, because the damage runs all the way through us; only a radical change in our hearts can remove it. You might say that we need to start from scratch, to be born all over again.

A: Ahh, yes—“born again.” I’ve heard that phrase before.

R: It’s a phrase Jesus used in John 3, and it really is an apt description of what needs to happen if we are to be free from sin. It is, obviously, not a change which can happen through our own efforts, but only through someone else: Jesus Christ. I said earlier that God chose to respond to evil through self-giving love, and the coming of Jesus to earth was that response. The Father sent the Son, and the Son came willingly, and it is on that fact and its consequences that everything turns; T. S. Eliot called the cross “the still point at the center of the turning world,” and he was right.

Brief meditation: on art

What is art? It's a question that resists easy answers, in large part I think because it's beyond us to ever fully answer. Art is something we do after the image of God, because he who is Creator made us (to use Tolkien's term) sub-creators in his image; art then is something which partakes in some way of the nature of God, and so I suspect that just as we will never be able to fully define God, so we will never be able to fully define art. But then, what is a definition? It's an attempt to constrain something, to confine it to a purely rational and intelligible space so that we can say confidently that we know what it is, and thus have some control over it. For most things, that's good, because most concrete things and most concepts are small enough to be defined; but God isn't. We shouldn't seek to define God, because if we could define him, he'd be too small to be God. By analogy, I wonder if we should really want to define art. If it were that small, would it be worth pursuing? Rather, just as God calls us to know him not by definition but by recognition—"My sheep know my voice"—so too I think understanding art is a matter of learning to recognize it when we see it.

That does still raise the question, though: what are we looking for? Is art a matter of great skill and technique—is it something that can be graded empirically? I don't think so; skill and technique unquestionably have their part to play, but art is bigger than mere virtuosity. Art, I believe, is akin to priestly ministry, and the work of the artist is somewhat like that of the priest, in that art is an act of mediation. Much as the great Episcopalian preacher Phillips Brooks described preaching as "the communication of truth through personality," I would argue that the artist mediates a vision of reality through their personality, gifts, and chosen medium, to give that vision a particular expressive form which can be intuitively and sympathetically apprehended by an audience. That vision doesn't necessarily need to be objectively correct in order for the result to be art, just as one doesn't necessarily need to worship the true God in order to be a priest; I do think it helps, though, and that a truer vision makes greater art, just as better skill and technique makes greater art.

Meditation: on barbering churches

"A haircut is defined by its edges. That's what I was taught, that's what I believe, that's what I teach." So declared my barber the other day, going on to talk about how if the edges are ragged or uneven, that's what catches people's eyes; and since he's outstanding at what he does, and since what he said sounds perfectly reasonable to me, I believe him. He got me thinking, though: of what else could we say that? And specifically, is the church defined by its edges?

Of course, there are a lot of churches which quite deliberately define themselves by their edges, taking the "bounded set" approach to membership and identity: everyone who believes these twelve things is welcome, and anyone who doesn't, isn't. Keep the edges nice and neat, a sharp line between us and them, that's the idea. It's almost a way of defining the church by appearance. But what about churches which don't take that approach? Are they, too, in some way defined by their edges?

I incline to think so, for a couple different reasons. Most obviously, there are those which quite deliberately and self-consciously invert that paradigm; they would tell you they don't define themselves by their edges, but in fact, they do. It's simply that, rather than taking pride in their nice neat edge, they take pride in having a ragged one—it's their chosen mark of "authenticity." "We're open to x kind of people—we're Christ-followers, we accept everybody just like Jesus did," and so on. Certainly, sharing the desire of Jesus and Paul that the gospel should be preached to all people, regardless of any other considerations, is a good and noble thing; but focusing on the ragged edge for its own sake is unhealthy. For one thing, it can make us disinclined to challenge people to repent and pursue God's holiness; some people won't find that "accepting," and they'll leave. (Others, meanwhile, will answer the call, and grow in holiness, and as a consequence will no longer look different enough to remind everyone how accepting we are.) We need to remember that our purpose is to preach the gospel and make disciples of Jesus Christ, and that we can't subordinate those tasks to any other goal, however noble.

For another, a focus on the ragged edge can all too easily become a fetish, and an opening for spiritual pride and self-delusion—the delusion, if nothing else, that we actually are accepting of all people, when actually we're simply accepting one particular group of people who aren't accepted elsewhere. That's a noble thing in its own right, but it's not the same as building a church where all people are truly welcome; for one thing, it's much easier. Building a church to fit one "out" group really isn't all that hard, as these things go; building a church in which the goal is that anyone who comes will be welcome is extraordinarily difficult (in fact, it's impossible by human effort), because it means accepting people who don't accept each other, and teaching them to get past that and accept each other as well.

Even leaving aside intentional self-definition, however, I do think that in part, the church will always be defined by its edges whether it wants to be or not. Most basically, the edges are where the church interacts with the world around it; thus, whether a church sees itself as a bounded set (defined by its boundaries, and thus by whom it chooses to admit or shut out) or a centered set (defined by its collective focus, on which its existence is centered), whichever of those two models it uses to define itself, the world is always going to be looking at the edges, and drawing its conclusions from them. Do we maintain a nice neat edge by only welcoming people who are just like us, or do we make room for people who stick out? (And if we do, do we allow them to continue to stick out, or do we set to work changing them?) Granted the difficulty of truly accepting people who "don't fit," do we try? Are we willing to pay the price to minister to people who are "extra grace required"?

It seems to me that if the church is being the church, we should expect some ragged edges. (This is the truth that gets exaggerated in churches that take pride in them.) After all, the only way to prevent that is to focus on the edges ourselves, and that's not what we're called to do; the church should be not appearance-driven but (to quote Jared Wilson) gospel-driven. As Jesus defines us, we are a people on the way, his disciples traveling together down the road through life, "following Christ in mission in a lost and broken world so loved by God" (to quote my denomination's mission statement). This is why my own mental image of the church is rather like a comet: there are those who are farther along and more mature in their faith, leading the way for the church, and then others who haven't come as far yet, and then the trailing edge is rather ragged indeed; but the key is that we're all traveling the same direction, and that those who join us aren't left to trail along behind, but instead are nurtured and discipled and mentored until they too are mature and strong in their faith and ready to do the same for others.

In a way, then, pastoring is a matter of barbering churches, but with a bit of a different emphasis than most people would probably expect. Being a pastor isn't a matter of keeping the ragged edges trimmed; rather, we have to be careful to allow them, lest we end up trying to shut people out of the kingdom of God—and we need to make sure that the church as a whole understands this as well. At the same time, though, we need to make sure people aren't left hanging around on the ragged edge, as if that was good enough; we need to bring them toward the center, toward the focus: toward Jesus. The movement of the church, and of everyone in it, must always be toward Jesus.

The Ascension, the body, and the kingdom of God

Barry posted a comment on my post on heaven expressing his ongoing surprise that "the whole immortal soul/heaven idea has become such an immovable foundation of the faith of most Christians when there's no evidence for it in the Bible." I agree, and I think it's unfortunate, but I can understand it. Gnostic and quasi-Gnostic ideas of spirituality and the body are just very natural to us, I think, going all the way back to Genesis 3 (it would be a stretch to call Gnosticism the original temptation, but I think it's a very close descendant); it just seems obvious to us that if we're going to have eternal life, we must be immortal, and if any part of us is immortal, it must be our spirits. Throw in that a lot of folks don't want to have to take the body seriously (either because they want to transcend it and become "more than human," or because they want to be free to do whatever they like), and you have a pretty strong pull to this sort of thinking. It's easy for people to drift into it (since that tends to be the way the times go) without ever really realizing that it’s less than what God promises us.

Whether people realize it or not, though, it is less, because our bodies aren’t unimportant, and they aren’t incidental to who we are. We exist as body and spirit together, and our bodies, though fallen and subject to sin, are beautiful and precious; certainly, to live forever in bodies that aged and fell ill and broke down would be no good thing, but to leave them behind forever would be no good thing either, for it would make us less than ourselves. That’s why God promises to raise us, whole, from the dead, in imperishable, incorruptible bodies, because our bodies are part of us, and every part of us matters to God, in every aspect of who we are and what we do.

This means that what we do with our bodies matters, because our bodies are sites of God’s redemption; his Spirit is alive and at work in our bodies as well as in our spirits, for they are inseparably woven together, to remake us into the people he created us to be. This is why Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6 that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, and why he tells the Corinthians that they need to watch what they do with their bodies, because there are no merely physical acts. Every act is spiritual, because every act that affects our bodies—food, sex, exercise, sleep, slipping and falling, getting back up—every act affects our spirits, and we won’t be leaving these bodies behind. They’ll be transformed when God makes all things new, but they’ll still be our bodies, and what we do with them matters, to us and to God.

To some, this might not seem like good news, but I think it is; it’s the good news that because Jesus ascended into heaven in the body, as a human being, there is room for us in our full humanity in the presence of God. There is no part of us God will not redeem—no good thing he will not purify, no bad thing he will not transform. There is room for us in the kingdom of God as whole people, scars and all, because he has redeemed us as whole people, scars and all; when the kingdom comes, even our scars will no longer bring us pain, or shame, for they, too, will be the marks of the redemptive work of Jesus in our lives.

The old made new—not replaced

As I noted a few days ago, God doesn't promise us an escape from this world—he promises us the world remade new, and ourselves remade new within it, to start all over again. Sort of. Surprisingly, though the human story began in a garden, when God remakes the world, it will center on a city, the new Jerusalem; we aren't going backward to be Adam and Eve again (contrary to Michael Omartian's classic song), with all our mistakes erased as if they had never been, but rather, forward, with our mistakes redeemed—and with them, our accomplishments. To be sure, there are many of us who don't care for cities, but as a whole, as Jacques Ellul has written (thanks to John Halton for his post on this), “The city is . . . our primary human creation. It is a uniquely human world. It is the symbol that we have chosen.” For God to center his rule on a city (especially when the city is “the place that human beings have chosen in opposition to God” [emphasis mine], as Ellul notes), is a sure sign that in remaking the world, God will take our works into account and redeem the works of our hands, even to the point of turning the center and hub of our fallen civilization into the center of his perfect reign. This tells us that the good that we have made, the good things we have built, the honorable works of our hands, will not be swept away in the final judgment; even as God will redeem and perfect us, so too will our accomplishments be redeemed and perfected. The gifts God has given us, and the good things we do with them to his glory, will also be saved. This is what it means that Jesus is preparing a place for us—that who we are and what we bring with us matter, and will remain.

Of course, that redemption and perfection are an important part of the picture. The late great Dan Quisenberry once quipped, “I have seen the future, and it is much like the present, only longer”; but if that tends to be drearily true in human history, it will not be true at all of the new creation. We will be raised in our own bodies, but our bodies will be different in kind. Now, they are perishable; our bodies erode, they wear out, they catch diseases, they break, they fail, and we die. In the new creation, they won’t be subject to any of that; they will be imperishable, what Paul calls “spiritual bodies.” Flesh and blood as we know it now cannot endure the glory of God, it cannot stand up to the brightness of his presence; it’s too frail and flimsy and shadowy a thing to breathe the air of heaven. It must be made new, remade, along with the rest of creation, in order to be solid enough and real enough to stand in the very presence of God. So too the works of our hands, those things we have forged out of our own hard work and the raw materials God has given us; that which is worthy will endure, but not as we have known it, for it too will be remade by the hand of God.

This is the promise of the gospel—the promise we see realized first in the resurrection of Christ, whom Paul calls “the firstfruits,” the first harvest, “of those who have died”; as the first one to be raised from the dead, as the one who went before us to show us the way, he shows us the new life that waits for us. We will be raised from the dead, not merely as we are now, but as he is, and the sting of death, the victory of the grave, and the power of sin in our lives will be no more, forever and ever and ever.

Holy discomfort

E. J. Dionne has a good column up on the message with which Pope Benedict XVI is challenging America on his first papal visit. Given that Dionne is such a conventional American liberal Catholic, he's surprisingly open to that message, with little more than a ritual genuflection to the "the Church needs to become more like us" altar; by and large, he seems to understand that the change needs to run the other way. To be sure, part of that is his recognition that the Pope's message is in fact as countercultural and challenging in many ways for conservatives as it is for liberals, but even so, I'm glad to see him close with this:

For myself, I admire Benedict's distinctly Catholic critique of radical individualism in both the moral and economic spheres, and his insistence that the Christian message cannot be divorced from the social and political realms. . . . Perhaps it is the task of the leader of the Roman Catholic Church to bring discomfort to a people so thoroughly shaped by modernity, as we Americans are. If so, Benedict is succeeding.

This is good news, because indeed, an important task for the church is to bring us to a holy discomfort with our lives and our world—to inspire us with a sacred disquiet with the selfish, reductionist assumptions we absorb from our culture, and with the ways in which that culture shapes us; and (as Dionne's Washington Post colleague Michael Gerson notes) because of its size, ubiquity, and theological tradition, the Roman Catholic Church is and must be one of the chief standard-bearers in that work. It's good to see that standard carried well.