Parenthood is disciple-making

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.”

—Deuteronomy 6:4-7 (ESV)

That might sound like a tall order, but think about it: those of us who are parents are always teaching our kids, when we’re at home and when we’re on the road, when we go to bed and when we get up—we’re teaching them by everything we say and don’t say, by what we tell them to do and don’t tell them to do, by what we let them get away with and what we enforce. Everything we do teaches them something, and helps shape them into the kind of people they’re going to be. In biblical terms, by the things we say and the things we do, whether we’re intentional about it or not, we are most assuredly making our children disciples, followers, of something. The only question is, what?

In the end, everybody comes up with their own answer. Some people answer it by not bothering to answer it, or by not even considering the question; that very rarely ends well. Some answer it just by going along with what the world around us thinks; that also often doesn’t end well, since the world is fickle and unstable, not to be trusted. Some answer it by imposing laws and rules and harsh punishment; that may produce good behavior, but it often produces rebellion in the end, and it does not breed love, because it does not know grace. Children need grace. We all need grace, children are just more aware of it; we adults aren’t really any better, just better at faking it.

People come up with a lot of answers, but the Bible’s answer is consistent: if you want children who honor you, raise them to honor God—and not as a harsh taskmaster, but as the one who is love, and as the giver of grace; yes, he disciplines us, but he does so because he loves us, so that we will grow. Raise them in the gospel, to understand the gift they’ve been given, that they may learn to love the giver more than the gift. Point them to Jesus, and the rest will follow.

(Adapted from “The Ministry of Parenthood”)

On art that can truly be called "Christian"

We in the church in this country tend to throw around terms like "Christian music" and "Christian fiction" pretty carelessly, without really thinking much about them, or what they mean, or even if they actually can mean anything at all. There's a good argument to be made that only people can truly be called Christian; and as for culture and its various components, W. H. Auden once declared, "There can be no such thing as 'Christian culture.' Culture is Caesar's thing." I'm beginning to understand what he meant, I think, and his point is one with which we must reckon.

That said—as Christians, as people made in the image of God, we are most definitely called to be culture makers; in Tolkien's terms, we were made to be sub-creators working under our great Creator, and we have both the need and the responsibility to do so wisely and well, in a way that is true to our faith. As I wrote a while back,

Stories matter. They matter because they're the stuff of our life, of our reality and our nature, and the expression of the creative ability we've been given by (and in the image of) the one who made us—and we matter. They matter because they affect us, moving our emotions and shaping our view of the world, both for good and for ill. And as a Christian, I affirm that they matter because everything we do matters, because the best of what we do will endure forever. And if they matter, then we need to take them seriously, both as readers and, for those of us so called, as writers—for our sake, and for everyone's.

The same can be said, in a bit of a different way, for music, the visual arts, and for the other media in which we create; and if we want to call that "Christian art" as a shorthand, then the shorthand has value, assuming we realize that's all it is. But that still leaves us asking, how do we do this—and when we do it, what exactly are we doing?

Among the folks who are wrestling well with this interlocking set of questions are the writers at the group blog Novel Matters; my wife pointed me this morning to a post there by Patti Hill that I think is particularly good. Of course, she has a real advantage because she starts off quoting Flannery O'Connor, which is always worth doing:

Ever since there have been such things as novels, the world has been flooded with bad fiction for which the religious impulse has been responsible. The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns, getting himself as little dirty as possible.

To really understand where O'Connor is coming from in writing this, I think it's important to add a couple other quotes from the same book:

Dogma is an instrument for penetrating reality. . . . It is one of the functions of the Church to transmit the prophetic vision that is good for all time, and when the novelist has this as a part of his own vision, he has a powerful extension of sight.

Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.

For O'Connor, then, I think we can fairly say that it's our obligation as Christians to see the world truly and deeply, as it is rather than as we would like it to be—and that for those gifted and called to write or to create art in other ways (and if you are gifted, then you are called, in whatever way and to whatever degree), there is the further responsibility to represent reality in such a way that others can see more truly and deeply than they did before. Too many people (not just Christians, by any means) shy away from that, because as O'Connor says, it requires getting dirty—really digging into and dealing with the dirt of this world, because you cannot know this world and you cannot see it truly and you cannot portray it rightly without knowing and dealing with its dirt. There's dirt all over the place, and in every human soul; you just can't avoid it.

So then, how? Hill nails it, I think:

We look to Jesus.

No one saw the world more concretely than Jesus. A whore washed his feet with her tears. He not only made wine, he drank it. He touched leprous skin. He invited himself to a tax collector's house for lunch. And, I'm thinking, he heard naughty words there. Caked with blood, spittle, sweat, and dirt he took the nails for us. Gruesome. Violent. Definitely off-putting. That's crucifixion, the purest act of love.

To follow in the steps of Jesus, to write in a God-honoring, "dirty" way, we must see the world—as best we can—as Jesus sees it, with empathy, detail, and love. And so it is for the Christian writer to observe and portray the beauty and brutality and pain and suffering and redemption all through the eyes of love.

Yeah—that's spot-on.

And if it's occurring to you that this all sounds like it's not just about art, you're right; after all, in a way, what we're really asking here is how we're supposed to create art as disciples of Christ—which is to say, how do we understand creation as discipleship—and that inevitably flips us around to the corollary: how do we understand discipleship as creation, as a process in which we stand under God our Creator as the sub-creators of our own lives, as the process of making our lives a work of art for God? As I've asked elsewhere, what does it mean for our lives to be poems for God?

Putting sin to death

I've read a lot of books on the Christian life over the years—that tends to be an occupational hazard of being a pastor, after all—and I can't say I remember most of them; but one of the most important books I've ever read, one which has had a profound effect on my thinking, is a little book by the great Puritan pastor/theologian John Owen entitled On the Mortification of Sin in Believers. It's a collection of sermons he preached on Romans 8:13: "For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live"; Owen was a practical and pastoral theologian, and his concern was to lay out exactly how it is we may go about doing that.

It's a splendid book, and of great value to anyone who wants to live a life pleasing to God, which is why I was pleased recently to discover two things. First, the full text of the book is available online through the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (which, by the way, is linked in the sidebar here; I'm not sure why it hadn't occurred to me to look there for this book). Second, since Owen is a dense writer and no simple stylist, I was glad to find that Robert Thune has posted a brief outline of Owen's argument, one which links in turn to a longer and more thorough outline of the book. I wouldn't encourage reading either in lieu of Owen's work, because there is so much good in the book; but they provide an excellent orientation to his argument, and the longer outline in particular is a valuable reader's guide.

What Owen is on to is a matter of great importance, and much neglected in the American church, which tends not to want to talk about the struggle against sin (or to take that struggle seriously); as such, his book may well be more important now than it was when it was written, for it provides a necessary corrective to our self-indulgent consumerist culture. It isn't light reading, but it's more than worthwhile, especially with Thune's work to help, and I recommend it to anyone who's serious about the Christian life.

Reflecting

As I noted last week, I've been sick, tired, and busy, which is a bad combination; at this point, there's nothing for it but to punch through Christmas, and then I can take some time to rest and recharge. Thinking about it, though, I realized that that's not the only issue: this interruption has knocked me off the discipline of writing. When I took up the thought of blogging as a spiritual discipline, that made a major difference in the frequency of my writing (as a look at the blog archive clearly shows), and I think it's done me some good; and part of that has been the most basic part of the discipline, that of just sitting down and posting something, even if I don't have anything particularly profound or significant to say. I've lost that in the last several weeks, and unfortunately, the last seven days of Advent aren't a great time to recover it, especially with a wedding to do right after Christmas. That, I think, will need to be part of my more general recovery time through the Christmas season proper. That discipline has been too valuable for me—I don't intend to let it go; and if it's occasionally been valuable to others as well, then so much the more reason.

So, yes, I'm still around, still breathing, and still experiencing an occasional flash when one neuron is willing to talk to another; and while I can't claim I'll be back to normal posting frequency tomorrow, I fully intend to be soon. In the meantime, God's richest blessings be upon you this Advent.

The prosperity gospel and the bursting of the American bubble

The latest issue of The Atlantic has a big cover picture of a cross against a blue sky with a “Foreclosure” sign on it, and the lurid main headline, “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” As is so often the case, the article in no way justifies the headline; it does, however, make a compelling case that a particularly pernicious American heresy, the so-called “prosperity gospel,” may have been a significant contributing factor.

Many explanations have been offered for the housing bubble and subsequent crash: interest rates were too low; regulation failed; rising real-estate prices induced a sort of temporary insanity in America’s middle class. But there is one explanation that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture—a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.

In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his “success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.” The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man—a “speculative confidence man,” Lears calls him, who prefers “risky ventures in real estate,” and a more “fluid, mobile democracy.” The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with “grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God.” The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: “The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I’ve done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me—that I’ll be the one.”

THEOLOGICALLY, THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL has always infuriated many mainstream evangelical pastors. Rick Warren, whose book The Purpose Driven Life outsold Osteen’s, told Time, “This idea that God wants everybody to be wealthy? There is a word for that: baloney. It’s creating a false idol. You don’t measure your self-worth by your net worth. I can show you millions of faithful followers of Christ who live in poverty. Why isn’t everyone in the church a millionaire?” In 2005, a group of African American pastors met to denounce prosperity megapreachers for promoting a Jesus who is more like a “cosmic bellhop,” as one pastor put it, than the engaged Jesus of the civil-rights era who looked after the poor.

More recently, critics have begun to argue that the prosperity gospel, echoed in churches across the country, might have played a part in the economic collapse. In 2008, in the online magazine Religion Dispatches, Jonathan Walton, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Riverside, warned:

Narratives of how “God blessed me with my first house despite my credit” were common . . . Sermons declaring “It’s your season of overflow” supplanted messages of economic sobriety and disinterested sacrifice. Yet as folks were testifying about “what God can do,” little attention was paid to a predatory subprime-mortgage industry, relaxed credit standards, or the dangers of using one’s home equity as an ATM.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled that state attorneys general had the authority to sue national banks for predatory lending. Even before that ruling, at least 17 lawsuits accusing various banks of treating racial minorities unfairly were already under way. . . . One theme emerging in these suits is how banks teamed up with pastors to win over new customers for subprime loans.

The emphasis there is mine, of course. Read the whole thing; it makes me think that part of the crash this country suffered may well be God’s judgment on the idolatry of his people.

What we don't get about the gospel

This is just spot-on:

It’s no wonder that self-help books top the charts in Christian publishing and that counseling offices are overwhelmed. Our pride and our neglect of the gospel force us to run from seminar to seminar, book to book, counselor to counselor, always seeking but never finding some secret to holy living.

Most of us have never really understood that Christianity is not a self-help religion meant to enable moral people to become more moral. We don’t need a self-help book; we need a Savior. We don’t need to get our collective act together; we need death and resurrection and the life-transforming truths of the gospel. And we don’t need them just once, at the beginning of our Christian life; we need them every moment of every day.

—Elyse Fitzpatrick and Dennis Johnson, from Counsel from the Cross

(Emphasis mine.) That is, I think, the crux of the American church’s cultural resistance to the gospel; that’s the thing we don’t want to hear.

HT: Of First Importance

Sin and the gospel

When the devil comes and says, ‘You have no standing, you are condemned, you are finished’, you must say, ‘No! my position did not depend upon what I was doing, or not doing; it is always dependant upon the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ.’ Turn to the devil and tell him, ‘My relationship to God is not a variable one. The case is not that I am a child of God, and then again not a child of God. That is not the basis of my standing, that is not the position. When God had mercy upon me, He made me His child, and I remain his child. A very sinful, and a very unworthy one, perhaps, but still his child!

And now, when I fall into sin, I have not sinned against the law, I have sinned against love. Like the prodigal, I will go back to my Father and I will tell Him, ‘Father, I am not worthy to be called your son.’ But He will embrace me, and He will say, ‘Do not talk nonsense, you are My child,’ and He will shower his love upon me! That is the meaning of putting on the breastplate of righteousness! Never allow the devil to get you into a state of condemnation. Never allow a particular sin to call into question your standing before God. That question has been settled.

—D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Legalism tells us that we are still under the Law, that we must be good enough or we will be rejected. Lawlessness tells us that the Law is gone and we’re free to do as we please. The gospel tells us that when we fall into sin, we have not sinned against the law, we have sinned against love. The Rev. Dr. Lloyd-Jones, in this quote from his book The Christian Soldier, captures the heart of this about as well as it can be captured. We’ve been set free from the fearful, fretful tyranny of being good enough; the point of our sin is no longer that we’ve broken the Law and might be cast out from God’s presence, but rather that we have grieved the one who loved us and gave himself up for us, to whom we owe everything, and have contributed to the weight and agony he bore on the cross.

This is not, it should be noted, an easier truth to bear . . .

HT: John Fonville via Ray Ortlund

The keystone: humility

The connection between my last two posts—the first on why we should talk with those with whom we disagree, and the second on the nature of wisdom—may not be all that obvious, but I think it’s a profoundly important one. Specifically, the connection is humility, which is necessary for both, and which comes from both. It takes humility to talk with those we believe are wrong, not so that we can demonstrate to them how wrong they are, but in a receptive way that is open to what we might learn from them; and doing so teaches us humility, which helps us to grow wise. Wisdom in its turn breeds humility, and teaches us how much we have left to learn from others.

This might sound like a strange thing to say, but it’s true: wisdom is humble. Humility even more than wisdom is underrated, not the sort of thing we tend to praise people for, because it doesn’t draw attention to itself—and because we often tend to consider pride a good thing. From the point of view of the Scriptures, though, humility is one of the virtues which is supposed to define the people of God. The Catholic priest and philosopher Ernest Fortin went so far as to call it “the Christian virtue par excellence . . . humility first of all of a God who would humble Himself to take on our humanity and give His life as a ransom for the many. But humility as well for the believer—to understand that all is grace; that we have no right to claim anything as our own—not our life, not our gifts, not even our faith. We are at every moment God’s creation.”

Think about that: we worship “a God who would humble Himself to take on our humanity and give His life as a ransom for the many.” That’s straight out of Philippians 2. No one ever had more reason to put his own interests and desires first, or to glorify himself, than Jesus; and yet he let go of glory, he let go of all the things pride values, and humbled himself to become a mere human being—and not even one who lived a rich, comfortable life, but a vagabond from the working class; and even beyond that, he accepted the horrible death of a convicted criminal. And he did it all for us, out of love, and set us his example to follow—and Paul points to that in 1 Corinthians 1 and calls Jesus our wisdom from God.

Does this mean, then, that God calls us to look down on ourselves, to put ourselves down and dismiss ourselves as unimportant? No. Those sorts of attitudes are counterfeits of true humility, and are really just pride in disguise; they still focus our attention inward, on ourselves, and they still put us at the center of everything we do. True humility takes our focus off ourselves altogether; it’s what Paul means when he writes in Romans 12:3, “Don’t think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you.” Humility is seeing ourselves clearly, in the light of God’s holiness and grace, and accepting what we see; it is the place where we are well aware both of our weaknesses and failures and of our glories and strengths, and don’t make too much or too little of either, because we know that our value and importance rests not in what we have done or what we can do, but only and always in the fact that God made us and loves us. As C. S. Lewis put it, someone truly humble could design the most beautiful cathedral ever built, and look at it and know it to be the most beautiful cathedral ever built, and enjoy it just the same as if someone else had done it.

This is why the Scriptures consistently associate humility with wisdom—to take another example, Proverbs 11:2 says, “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but wisdom is with the humble.” Wisdom begins with the understanding of our own limits—that is, I think, part of the reason for the declaration in Psalm 111:10 that the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; one of the reasons for that is the recognition of just how great God is, and how small and limited we are. Wisdom requires the acceptance that we never know as much, we never understand things as well, we’re never as smart or as far ahead of the game, as we think—and that in consequence, we need each other. That requires humility.

We must humble ourselves before each other if we are to learn from each other; we must humble ourselves before God if we are to grow in his wisdom; we must humble ourselves to receive correction and rebuke if we are to learn from our mistakes; we must humble ourselves to confess our immaturity if we are ever to mature. We must humble ourselves to accept and admit our incompleteness, our brokenness, our sinfulness, if we are ever to be made complete, whole, and holy. And in the last analysis, we must humble ourselves to understand that “all is grace,” that none of us are self-made, but that “we are”—all of us—“at every moment, God’s creation,” if we are ever truly to be ourselves.

(Partially excerpted from “True Wisdom”)

What is wisdom?

Looking over my previous post, it seems to me that lurking under the surface of my argument there is a deeper concern: how do we move beyond trying to feel that we’re right, and actually begin to become wise? In that, I think I might be moving a bit against the grain of Western culture; in this place and time, calling someone “wise” is still considered to be a compliment, but it’s not necessarily the sort of compliment that breeds emulation. We may recognize wisdom as a good thing in the abstract, but I don’t know that it’s something our culture really prizes all that much.

Indeed, I’m not at all sure that as a culture, we’re even all that clear on what wisdom is. We tend to get it mixed up with the other things that we think of as related to our minds, with knowledge and understanding and intelligence—which isn’t helpful, because wisdom isn’t any of those things. Granted, to exercise wisdom, it helps to have a lot of knowledge, but there are many people for whom great knowledge just means the chance to be greater fools. Similarly with intelligence; intelligence can amplify wisdom, but it can’t increase the number of wise options available. It can, however, allow for the invention of lots of new ways to be foolish. Understanding is good and necessary, but we can begin to take pride in our understanding, and when that starts to happen, it can lead us astray very quickly. As the saying goes, logic is often nothing more than a way to go wrong with confidence.

Wisdom, by contrast, is all about being able to separate the wheat from the chaff. It’s about facing the questions, “Is this a good idea, or not? Is this the right thing to do, or not?” and being able to answer those questions correctly. It is the ability to perceive the best thing to do—and then to go and do it. If someone can tell you what they ought to be doing but doesn’t go out and do it, we don’t call them wise, we call them a very particular sort of fool. Wisdom isn’t wisdom until we put it into practice; it’s all about how we live. Wisdom is about doing truth, not just knowing truth.

(Partially excerpted from “True Wisdom”)

Growing to identify with Christ

Identity is a complex set of layers, for we are many things. Our occupation, ethnic identity, etc., are part of who we are. But we assign different values to these components and thus Christian maturing is a process in which the most fundamental layer of our identity becomes our self-understanding as a new creature in Christ
along with all our privileges in him.

—Tim Keller

What an absolutely brilliant way of putting it. I've written before (at least with regard to politics) that as Christians, we are to find our identity in Christ and Christ alone, and that when anything or anyone else holds that place in our hearts, that we're guilty of idolatry; but the Rev. Dr. Keller has the right of it in pointing out that in fact there are multiple levels to our identity and always will, and that learning to find our identity first and foremost in Christ is a process. It remains true, though, that whenever anything sidetracks us into finding our identity first and foremost in anything or anyone else, that is idolatry, and must be corrected.

HT: Of First Importance

Worldly wisdom and the idolatry of happiness

Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.

What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.

—James 3:13-4:3 (ESV)

True wisdom, James says, produces peace, while the wisdom of this world produces strife and disorder. This is because the wisdom of this world is characterized by envy and selfish ambition—it is focused on getting more. What that “more” looks like is different with every person. Some desire more pleasure. Some want more money and possessions. Some seek more power. Some long for more recognition. Some crave more excitement. Whatever it is that people want to get, that’s where the world focuses its idea of wisdom: on how to get what it is that you want, or feel you need.

The problem is, as James points out, that such “wisdom” leads to disorder, conflict, and all sorts of evil behavior. The world justifies this in many ways, telling us it’s a dog-eat-dog world, that you gotta do what you gotta do, that all’s fair in love and war, that you have the right to stand up for yourself—whatever it is we need to tell ourselves (and others) to justify us in going out and doing what we’ve already decided we want to do. At bottom is this idea that if I’ve determined I need that in order to be happy—whether it be that car, that man or woman, that job, that house—then whatever it might be, I have the right to have it, because I have the right to be happy. We seem to have forgotten that even the Declaration of Independence only tells us we have the right to the pursuit of happiness, not to be guaranteed to catch it and mount it on the wall with the rest of our butterfly collection.

And what happens? Conflict and pain and heartbreak as people fight over things, over opportunities, over relationships. Marriages are broken up, families torn apart, lives ruined; careers are wrecked and reputations destroyed as rivals sabotage each other; souls disappear into the maw of drugs, sometimes never to emerge again, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. Whenever my fulfillment is my highest goal, and the way to achieve that is by getting more of whatever it is I think is going to fulfill me, I will necessarily treat you not as my equal to be respected but as an object which relates in some way to my need for fulfillment. You might be the person through whom I hope to find fulfillment by one means or another; you might be an obstacle to my fulfillment, which I must go around or find some way to remove from my path; you might be a rival who threatens my fulfillment, in which case I must find some way to defeat you; but whatever the case, you are at the most fundamental level a thing to me, not a real person, and deep down I will feel myself justified in doing whatever it takes to make sure that I get what I want with regard to you, because my happiness is at stake, and that has become my idol.

(Excerpted from “True Wisdom”)

On the blessed inconvenience of children

The quote atop The Thinklings' front page today is one of my favorites, from Gary Thomas:

Kids' needs are rarely "convenient." What they require in order to succeed rarely comes cheaply. To raise them well will require daily sacrifice of many kinds, which has the wonderful spiritual effect of helping mold us into the character of Jesus Christ himself. God invites us to grow beyond ourselves and to stop acting as though our dreams begin and end with us. Once we have children, we cannot act and dream as though we had remained childless.

We've been thinking about that here this week, since our older girls' parent-teacher conferences were last night. It's interesting talking with their teachers (and listening between the lines a bit) and realizing how many of the parents they have to deal with who really don't get this, or perhaps refuse to get this. I wonder if perhaps we're seeing a spillover effect of the abortion regime—after all, if it's legally acceptable to kill an unborn child because letting that child live would be too inconvenient, that deals a heavy, heavy blow to the idea that we have a responsibility to put the needs of our children ahead of our own. The sad irony is, this means that many adults never learn how much better life can be once we "stop acting as though our dreams begin and end with us"; it's the children who have the most to lose, but their parents' lives are impoverished as well.

Embracing the wildness of faith

Bill over at The Thinklings put up a post yesterday quoting Chesterton at length (something almost always well worth doing) on the value of fairy tales for children, and concluding with some additional thoughts of his own:

This really resonates with me, because from a young age I rode like a squire through the Arthurian legends, crouched quietly in the belly of the horse with Odysseus, galloped alongside Centaurs in Lewis' Narnia, and went into the dreadful dark of Moria with Frodo and Sam. These led me one day to open up a Bible and begin reading what Lewis would call the "true myth" of the ultimate, and fully historical, defeat of the dragon.

As parents we should, of course, protect our kids. But I think Chesterton makes a compelling case here for not limiting them with politically correct, neutered fiction that contains no dragons. How will they ever know that the dragon can be killed?

I think Bill's absolutely right about that. As Chesterton says in the essay he quotes,

Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

This is much the same point Russell Moore makes in the post I quoted Monday, and so it's no surprise that Bill follows up today by quoting Moore as well. He also adds an extended quote from Danielle at Count the Days on the absurdity that passes for "Christian education" in so many places. It's a great post:

The other day, in my Religious Education class, this question was posed to us:

"What do you want to teach a child by the time they are 12?"

During class we were supposed to get in groups and discuss what we thought kids need to know by that stage in their lives, and honestly, I was kind of appalled by the answers I heard. . . .

One girl had the audacity to call me "harsh" because I said that they need to know that they are sinners. How can anyone have an appreciation or understanding of salvation without first knowing what sin is and that they are a sinner? I understand that the average child cannot comprehend the intricacies of theology, but what Jesus-loving Children's Minister can look at the kids in their ministry and knowingly keep the whole Truth from them? Bible stories are great and important in building a foundation for these kids, but knowing who Zaccheus was, or being able to sing the books of the Bible in order isn't going to get anyone any closer to Heaven. Just sayin'.

I guess the reason it frustrated me so much was because I was thinking of my own (future/potential) children. I don't want my ten/eleven/twelve year old thinking that "being a good person" or being "obedient" means anything without having a personal, intimate relationship with Christ. I mean sure, I want obedient children ;), but in the grand scheme of things that would not be on the top of my list.

And then perhaps the most important point she makes is this:

Children can be taught all kinds of things as long as they are taught in love and kindness. Give kids the opportunity to understand, instead of withholding Truth from them. Offer them the whole Gospel, not just cartoons or cut-and-dry facts. I know I probably sound like some hardcore beat-truth-into-them type of lady, but I hate the thought of kids wasting what can be the most influential years of growth on pointless trivia or partial Truth.

Amen. This is something of a soapbox of my own, and has been for a while—I don't post on it a great deal, just on occasion, but it's something I care quite a bit about in my congregation, and with my own kids—that so much of what we call "Christian education" in the church is just awful, trivial, milk-and-water stuff aimed at teaching kids to be nice, dutiful little serfs rather than at raising them up as followers of Jesus Christ.

The problem is, I think, that too many adults—and not just adults in the church, either—have lost touch with the wildness of the world, and the wildness of their own hearts. Part of it, as N. D. Wilson says, is that our rationalistic and rationalized, scientific and scientistic, we-are-civilized-and-we-can-control-everything culture tends to teach us to see all things wild and perilous as evil; we have tamed immense swaths of our world, made it comfortable and predictable, orderly and obedient, and so we see these as good things, and anything that threatens them as bad.

This logically leads us to lose sight of the wildness of evil, both within us and outside us. Hannah Arendt had an important insight when she wrote of "the banality of evil" (an insight which I believe is much less understood than quoted), but it's equally important for us to understand that while evil is indeed dreary and banal, uncreative and far less attractive than it likes to pretend, it is not thereby tame and predictable and contained. We get reminders of this when things like 9/11 happen, but if we can convince ourselves that such things are outside our own experience—that their lesson doesn't apply to us—then we do so as quickly as possible, convincing ourselves that our own lives are still safe and tame and under our control.

The consequence of this domesticated worldview for the church is that too often, we've tamed our faith. We have trimmed it to fit what this world calls reality instead of letting our faith expand our souls to fit God's view of reality, and we have ended up with a domesticated faith in a domesticated God. After all, if we don't see our world as a big, wild, uncontrollable world that threatens us and makes us uncomfortable, we don't need a big, wild, uncontrollable God who makes us uncomfortable and calls us to fear him as well as love him; a god sized to fit the tame little problems we'll admit to having will do nicely.

There are various antidotes to that, but one of them is, to bring this back around to Bill's post, to Chesterton, and also to Tolkien, a keen acquaintance with the world of faerie. We need stories that do not only show us the wildness of evil somewhere else (for many of our movies and books do that much), but that show us the wildness of evil in our own hearts, and also the wildness of good. We need stories that powerfully communicate, not only rationally but also viscerally, the truth that (to borrow a line from Michael Card) there is a wonder and wildness to life, that true goodness is a high and perilous thing, and that the life of goodness is an adventure. We need to learn to hear the call to faith as the call expressed so well by Andrew Peterson in his song "Little Boy Heart Alive":

Feel the beat of a distant thunder—
It’s the sound of an ancient song.
This is the Kingdom calling;
Come now and tread the dawn.

Come to the Father;
Come to the deeper well.
Drink of the water
And come to live a tale to tell . . .

Take a ride on the mighty Lion;
Take a hold of the golden mane.
This is the love of Jesus—
So good but it is not tame.

Grace for the poison tongue

We do amazing evil with our words. “The pen is mightier than the sword,” our folk wisdom tells us, and to hear the way people tell it, you’d think they’re mostly opposed, that the pen mostly seeks to resist the sword; but in truth, the pen is at its mightiest when it’s egging the sword on. It’s easier to exhort people to evil than to good; it’s easier to tear them down than to build them up; it’s easier to wound than to heal; it’s easier just to let our tongues flap in the breeze of our thoughts than it is to control them (thoughts or tongues, take your pick). Indeed, James 3 argues at some length that no one has ever yet succeeded in controlling the tongue, and I think the apostle is right; we can control it to some degree, but it always escapes us in the end.

Which means we need grace; we need to be forgiven for the evil that we do. It’s beyond our power to be good enough on our own. It also means that we need to show grace to others, even (and perhaps especially) when they show us none. Just as we struggle to control our tongues, and sometimes fail, so too others are going to fail sometimes, for we all stumble in many ways; that’s just life in a tomato can, as my old organist would say. We have been given grace, because we desperately need it; in return, we must show grace to others, because they also desperately need it, whether they acknowledge that need or not.

If someone says something they shouldn’t, it may be my responsibility to correct them, but if so I’m called to do so with love and grace; if I do so harshly and gracelessly, am I not as much at fault as they? Or if I upset or offend someone else, and they speak harshly to me, what is my responsibility to them? Because they spoke without grace, is it okay if I respond in kind—or do I need to show them grace anyway? Clearly, I need to control my tongue whether they’ve controlled theirs or not.

It’s not my place to decide whether they deserve grace—none of us deserves grace. Grace doesn’t come from what we deserve, it comes from the love of God; and it’s only as far as the love of God fills us and motivates us that we’ll be able to control our tongues and show his grace to others. Which means that the bottom line here isn’t “try harder,” it’s “submit yourself to God, draw close to him, and let him do in you what you can’t do in yourself.” The only way to live in grace is to live by grace.

(Partly adapted from “A Greater Judgment”)

Sticks, stones, and poisoned arrows

How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.

—James 3:5b-10 (ESV)

When you were young, and someone insulted you or made fun of you, did your parents tell you to say, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”? You know, most pieces of folk wisdom, I can see where they came from, but I have no idea why that one showed up; whoever came up with that one must have been someone who never heard a negative word in their life—or who was too thick-skinned and thick-skulled to notice. Honestly, that’s the dumbest famous saying that ever got famous; to borrow a line from Mark Twain, it’s “the most majestic compound fracture of fact which any of woman born has yet achieved.” Granted the harm that sticks and stones can do, it’s generally a lot easier to heal the body than it is to heal the spirit, if only because we can see what we’re working with; and often, it’s a lot easier to wound the spirit than it is to wound the body. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but only words can break me.

This is why James describes the tongue so starkly—it’s a restless evil, a poisoned arrow, a small fire that can set the whole forest ablaze; but though we might find his picture bleak, it’s hard to argue with. Yes, we also say many good things, and yes, we do much good with our words; but as he says, with our tongues we bless God, and with the same tongues we curse those he made in his likeness, and that should not be. For all the good we may do, we can undo many good words with one ill one. Winston Churchill famously said that a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth has finished putting on its pants; or to go back to Twain again, “the history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidences that a truth is not hard to kill, and that a lie well told is immortal.” We might also say that for many people, self-confidence is a fragile flower, but self-doubt is a weed; sow a few seeds of the latter in the garden of their soul, and they may take years to recover. It is far easier for us to speak evil powerfully than it is to speak good powerfully, just as it’s easier to roll a boulder down a mountainside than up it; this is why Shakespeare could write in Julius Caesar, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

(Excerpted, edited, from “A Greater Judgment”)

Faith against the grain

I made the point in a post Monday that faith works—that faith in God, by the essence of what it is, produces action. It’s not just a matter of mental assent; it’s not enough just to agree with the proposition that God exists—the demons believe that more strongly than anyone, and they’re certainly not saved. Their faith, if you want to call it that, doesn’t change anything for them, except to cause them great fear. True faith, by contrast, changes everything, because it’s not just believing with our mind, it’s believing with our whole being. It produces action in the same way that acorns produce oak trees—it’s simply the nature of the thing. If someone claims to have faith in God but shows no evidence of it in the way they live their lives, that faith is like a body without a spirit: dead.

This is not, however, the common understanding of faith in this country, even among many in the church. In truth, this understanding of Christian faith is really quite countercultural these days. The idea is widespread nowadays, even among Christians, that our faith should be a private matter, between us and God, which really shouldn’t mess up our public lives. It’s fine to be a Christian and go to church and all that if that’s what works for you, but people around you shouldn’t have to deal with that if they don’t want to; out in the “real world,” you ought to go about your business the same way as everybody else.

This is the way of thinking James calls “friendship with the world,” living in such a way as to keep the world happy; and as he makes clear, this is the exact backwards of the way of life to which God calls us. True faith cannot be merely a private matter; it cannot be something we keep restricted to safe times and places when there’s no one around who might object. It changes everything we say and everything we do, at every time and in every place, in every aspect of our lives. True faith isn’t concerned with whether we’re telling people what they want to hear, it’s concerned with whether or not we’re being faithful witnesses to the truth and the life of Jesus Christ—who, after all, often made people thoroughly uncomfortable by telling people exactly what they didn’t want to hear, because it was the truth they needed to hear.

(Excerpted, edited, from “No Private Matter”)

Scandalizing the church

Over a couple weeks of being head-down with the congregation, one of the things I didn't do was keep up with Jared Wilson's blog, The Gospel-Driven Church; so now I'm catching up. I was interested to note that at the top right now is a post, which I think is a repost, dealing with the need to convert the church to the gospel. As Jared sums things up,

We are in a weird—but frequently exhilarating—position where the gospel is scandalous even to Christians.

The main thing I would suggest is that you go read the post—and also the one a couple posts down, which is a critical evaluation of Rob Bell's statements in a recent interview, because I think they really tie together. Why is it that the gospel is scandalous to many in the church? Why is it that people have learned to look to the church for things other than the gospel? Because we've had an orientation in the American church for several decades now toward focusing on and addressing felt needs, whether in individuals (the conservative wing) or in society (the liberal wing), which makes people comfortable (and thus more likely to come, give $$$, etc.), rather than challenging people and making them uncomfortable by driving them to consider their true, deep need: their total inability to do anything on their own to please God, and their total need for the gospel of salvation through the grace of God alone, by faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone, through the power of the Holy Spirit alone, "not by works, lest anyone should boast."

What's the solution? Well, to complete the trifecta, I think Jared lays it out well in the next post down, a comment on his approach to preaching:

I believe our flesh cries out for works, we are wired to worship, and we want to earn salvation, so we know what deeds are good deeds. And we need to be helped with specific advice in specific situations and we need to be reminded to do good, but our most pressing need is to be challenged on that which we forget most easily, which is not more tips for a successful life, but that we are sinners who need grace to have life in the first place.

We all know what good works look like. We just don’t want to do them. And that is a spiritual problem exhortations to good behavior cannot solve. The clearly proclaimed gospel is God's prescription for breaking a hardened heart. . . .

What I strive for (imperfectly, fallibly) in my teaching is to uphold Jesus and his atoning work as all satisfying, all sufficient, all powerful, all encompassing, and call others to uphold it as such in their hearts. My belief is that when someone really loves Jesus and has been scandalized by God's grace, they will really follow Him into a life of scandalizing others.

Some will contend that spending most preaching time calling for listeners to savor the work of Christ, cling to the cross, find satisfaction in Christ's work alone, and trust His grace for salvation does not offer real help because it doesn't give a "takeaway," it doesn't tell people what to do. I say it does tell people what to do: it tells them to savor, cling, find satisfaction, and trust. That is real help. And that's what I want people to take away. And my trust is that if people are actually doing that, because their affections have been transferred in repentance from self to Christ, their repentant hearts will bear the fruit of a living faith, by which I mean a faith that proves itself with works.

That's right on.

Honestly?

My wife has a good post up on honesty, commenting on a post by MckMama; I think she has a lot of good things to say (which would be one of the many reasons I married her), but I particularly appreciated this:

We want honesty, but we're not prepared for it when we get it. It's too raw. Too scary. Too boring. Too threatening. We want to think we understand. Honesty shows us we don't. We want to think we have the answers. Honesty shows us we don't. We want the world to be a safe, manageable, controllable place. We know that we ourselves are buffetted and thrown about, but we want to think that someday, somehow, we'll get to a place of answers. But when we really interact with each other, we discover that none of us is one self-help book or one good sermon, or one inspirational song away from having it all together. We discover that giving or receiving a bellyful of honesty requires humility and commitment far beyond what most of us are willing to give most days. It means saying things like "I'd never thought of that before," and "I don't understand, but I'd like to." It means expecting to find that we're all sinful, complex, broken people in a sinful, complex, broken world.

Too often, when we say we want honesty, we just want to be voyeurs. Too often, when we get honesty, we try to trim off the edges so that it will fit back in the box. But we were made by a God bigger than we are, who placed us in a world too complex for us to understand. And he made each of us unique. Different. Should it be any surprise to us when other's individual experiences and stories seem alien to us? When our finite interactions with an infinite God seem too big to handle and comprehend?

Read the whole thing.

The upside of trials

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that
the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. . . .

Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test
he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him.

—James 1:2-4, 12 (ESV)

From a human perspective, this sounds ludicrous. Consider it nothing but joy when your back gives out, or your knee, or your hip, and you need surgery? Consider it nothing but joy when you fight temptation? Consider it nothing but joy when someone you love is sick? Consider it nothing but joy when you’re threatened and your home is attacked? That takes a lot of nerve to say; but that’s what James says. He’s not saying we should be happy when trials come—it’s not as if we’re supposed to say, “Oh goody, I’ve just been evicted from my home, isn’t this wonderful”—but in the midst of trials and the struggle and suffering they bring, we should find joy. Why? Because unlike happiness, which is rooted in our circumstances, joy is rooted in the promises of God through Jesus Christ, and in our certainty that he who made those promises is faithful to keep them.

One of those promises is that God is in control in everything that happens to us, using it for our good; and so James says here, “Count it all joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness”—or, we might translate that, endurance. It has been often and truly said that the Christian life is a marathon, not a sprint, which means that if we’re running to win, we have to be able to keep up the pace, even when it’s hardest; and just as exercise tries our muscles in order to force them to respond and grow, building physical strength and endurance, so trials force us to respond and grow as whole people, building strength of character and the ability to endure difficult times without losing our faith. Of course, if you overstress your muscles, you’ll hurt yourself, and a trial too great for us to handle would do the same; but we can trust that God won’t send us any trials we can’t handle—even if, as Mother Theresa once said, we might sometimes wish he didn’t trust us so much. It’s simply that the only way to build endurance is to reach what we think is our limit—and keep going.

As we face trials, the testing of our faith produces endurance in our faith; and as we grow in endurance, we mature in the work God has called us to do, bringing that work ultimately to completion. And note the purpose James declares for this—not simply that we each might do good things, but so that we ourselves might be perfect and complete. Ultimately, it’s not only the things we do that are the work in view here, but it’s us—we are the finished product. The idea is, as NT scholar Luke Timothy Johnson puts it, that the deed perfects the person: as we endure trials and act in faith and hold fast to God and do his will, God works in us through these actions to transform and perfect us, to bring his work in us to full maturity, so that we may be perfect and complete, with no areas in which we fall short.

(Excerpted from “The View from Saturday”)

The power of grace

I'm reading Larry Crabb's book Real Church right now—I was given a copy by one of my fellow pastors here in town, and I expect we'll be talking about it; I also expect I'll be writing some about it, once I've finished it. I'll have to, if I want to process it fully. For right now, I just want to post this quote from the book, which really struck me:

Grace has no felt power in our lives until it surprises the hell out of us.

Yeah, that's the way of it, alright.