Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, RIP

The world of scholarship, and particularly of historical scholarship, lost one of its great figures recently, as did the American church; as the Salvation Army would put it, on January 2, 2007, Dr. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese was promoted to glory. I envy her eulogists, who knew her as a friend; I only knew her through her writings, which were wide-ranging and often brilliant, but by all accounts she was as remarkable a human being as she was a scholar. Her account of her conversion to Catholicism (she had been a convinced Marxist) is a marvelous piece; while she will probably be remembered best for her scholarly works (such as the magnum opus she co-wrote with her husband and fellow historian, Dr. Eugene Genovese, on the psychology and ideology of Southern American slaveholders, The Mind of the Master Class), I'm probably not the only one who will remember her conversion story with the most gratitude. A great scholar and a great Christian, she is and will be greatly missed.

Lenten Song of the Week

This isn't the most lyrically deep or complex hymn, to be sure, but in its simplicity it's an excellent one for reflection and prayer--rather like many of the Psalms in that respect. I have a deep fondness for Appalachian folk hymnody, both texts and music, and this is one of my favorites. If you're not familiar with the tune, the link is below.

What Wondrous Love Is This

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul,
What wondrous love is this, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this that caused the Lord of bliss
To bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,
To bear the dreadful curse for my soul!

When I was sinking down, sinking down, sinking down,
When I was sinking down, sinking down;
When I was sinking down beneath God's righteous frown,
Christ laid aside his crown for my soul, for my soul,
Christ laid aside his crown for my soul!

To God and to the Lamb I will sing, I will sing,
To God and to the Lamb I will sing!
To God and to the Lamb, who is the great "I AM,"
While millions join the theme, I will sing, I will sing,
While millions join the theme, I will sing!

And when from death I'm free, I'll sing on, I'll sing on,
And when from death I'm free, I'll sing on!
And when from death I'm free, I'll sing and joyful be,
And through eternity I'll sing on, I'll sing on,
And through eternity I'll sing on!

Words: Appalachian folk hymn
Music: Southern Harmony, 1835
WONDROUS LOVE, 12.9.12.12.9

Simply Wright

One of my frustrations as a pastor is that with everything else I need to do, I can't do the reading I wish I could do. As Ecclesiastes says, "Of the making of many books there is no end," and while many that come out each year are of great value, I have neither the time nor the energy to read as many as I'd like to read--or indeed, arguably, as many as I need to read.

It's not a problem unique to me, of course; which is why, I think, God invented journals and review essays. There are a number of periodicals to which I subscribe, and a handful in particular which I find critically important in keeping up with things and highlighting the books I need to make time to read. The most important are First Things and Books & Culture, which you'll find linked over on the left side of the page; not far below them is Touchstone, which describes itself as "a Christian journal, conservative in doctrine and eclectic in content, with editors and readers from each of the three great divisions of Christendom — Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox . . . [designed to] provide a place where Christians of various backgrounds can speak with one another on the basis of shared belief in the fundamental doctrines of the faith as revealed in Holy Scripture and summarized in the ancient creeds of the Church."

Personally, I find Touchstone a bit more erratic than First Things (and also shorter), but the editors find (or write) and publish some wonderful pieces. In the latest issue, perhaps the best is a review essay on C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity by the Anglican Bishop of Durham, England, the incomparable N. T. Wright. Bishop Wright might just be the perfect person to do this, since like Lewis he's an Englishman, an Anglican, a scholar (though his field is New Testament rather than Renaissance literature) and a writer who recently wrote a small work of popular apologetics, Simply Christian, which can be profitably compared with Lewis' book. (I know this because it's been done.) What's more, Bishop Wright also happens to be extremely good at what he does, and a man of real grace and humility. (I know that from people I know who are friends of his.)

As one would expect, then, he offers an excellent and quite thorough appraisal of Lewis' work, pointing out its great strengths and not sparing its weaknesses. There's no need to recapitulate his points here--go read the article (and give Touchstone some page hits); but I do want to call attention to Bishop Wright's closing paragraphs:

[Despite the book's flaws,] the bee flies, and gets the honey. Credit where credit is due. Lewis himself would have been the first to say that of course his book was neither perfect nor complete, and that what mattered was that, if it brought people into the company, and under the influence (or “infection”) of Jesus Christ, Jesus himself would happily take over—indeed, that Jesus had been operating through the process all along, albeit through the imperfect medium of the apologist.

And, as another imperfect apologist, I salute a great master, and can only hope that in sixty years’ time children yet unborn will say of me that, despite all my obvious and embarrassing failings, I too was used, in however small a way, to bring people under the influence and power, and to the love and kingdom, of the same Jesus Christ.

In a mirror, darkly

Since I don't get HBO, I haven't seen Alexandra Pelosi's documentary Friends of God, though I'd be interested to watch it; at this point, though, I don't know much more than what I read in Michael Linton's post on the First Things blog, On the Square. Linton's post, though, is plenty and enough to spark reflection—mostly grieved reflection, unfortunately. I'm in no position to pass judgment on Pelosi's work one way or the other, but it seems that those of us who call ourselves evangelicals (and really, any serious Christian) ought to take a long, hard look at what she shows us of ourselves. The parking-lot scene Linton cites, in which Pelosi is talking with Ted Haggard and two of his church members about their sex lives, looks particularly painful, and not just because of the subsequent revelations of Haggard's gay infidelity. As Linton puts it,

The possibility that it might be deeply indecent for a Christian minister ever to ask a man to reveal the most intimate nature of his relationship with his wife in front of anyone else—let alone in front of a camera—is apparently not within his ken. And the idea that these men should protect their wives’ privacy and refuse to answer isn’t in their ken either. They boast about their . . . well, you fill in the blank (we’ve all been in locker rooms). It feels so great. It’s all for the Lord. High fives, everybody.

Yeah. For all the fuss many evangelicals make about our country's moral decline, we too often accept the same assumptions and impulses that have driven that decline; as someone put it, instead of being in the world but not of it, too often we manage instead to be of the world but not in it, creating our own little subculture with "Christianized" versions of everything the world has—including, all too often, its misdirected desires. As such, there's all too much truth to Linton's charge that

We, "us," the Evangelicals with the capital E, have become thoughtless, sensualistic braggarts. . . . What doctrinal rigor we might have had has been progressively smothered by sensuality draped with arrogant irresponsibility. We don’t think; we feel. If it feels right, it’s the Lord’s working, and if it’s the Lord’s working, we can be proud of it.

I don't want to beat up on evangelicals; I am one, and I make no bones about it. But we have enmeshed ourselves far too deeply in the culture and system of this world, this present age, and we have come to think far too highly of ourselves. To quote Linton again,

We’ve forgotten the Scriptures and allowed ignorance to characterize our preaching, and delirium our worship. In our confidence in God’s grace, we have become presumptuous in our salvation. And we’ve too often confused salvation in heaven with right voting on earth. We need to change. We need to repent.

We need, I would say, to remember that the true gospel is countercultural and costly; we need to set aside the idea that we can, or should, be comfortable with God. We need to go back to Isaiah 6 and remember the reaction of that great prophet when he really saw the glory and holiness of God: he cried out in terror, for he saw his sinfulness for what it really was. And maybe, just maybe, we need to stop singing "worship" songs about how wonderful we are and put the worms back in our hymnody. May God have mercy on us for our presumption.

Lenten Song of the Week

This being Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, it seemed appropriate to move this to a Lenten theme; and given that, the logical place to start seemed to be with the first hymn we sang at our Ash Wednesday service this evening. (If you aren't familiar with this hymn, check out the Oremus Hymnal website; the link is below.)

Lord, Who Throughout These Forty Days

Lord, who throughout these forty days
For us didst fast and pray,
Teach us with thee to mourn our sins,
And close by thee to stay.

As thou with Satan didst contend
And didst the victory win,
O give us strength in thee to fight,
In thee to conquer sin.

As thou didst hunger bear and thirst,
So teach us, gracious Lord,
To die to self, and chiefly live
By thy most holy word.

And through these days of penitence,
And through thy Passiontide,
Yea, evermore, in life and death,
Jesus! with us abide.

Abide with us, that so, this life
Of suffering over-past,
An Easter of unending joy
We may attain at last!

Words: Claudia F. Hernaman, 1873
Music: Day's Psalter, 1563
ST. FLAVIAN, CM

An insurgency divided against itself cannot stand

From the "Things the US Media Won't Tell You" Dept.:

Our Islamicist opponents in Iraq are turning on each other, and their "premier jihadist propaganda tool" has now launched an all-out attack on al-Qaeda. This shouldn't surprise us--one of the best arguments for standing firm in Iraq is that the uneasy alliances among our enemies there can't hold together if we keep the pressure on--but unfortunately, it also shouldn't surprise us that no one in the West is interested in reporting this. Kudos to Nibras Kazimi, a visiting scholar at the Hudson Institute, for breaking this story on his blog Talisman Gate; this is the sort of thing we need to know if we're going to have any chance at all to evaluate the situation in Iraq rationally and helpfully.

Wretchard at The Belmont Club picked up on this, via a thread on Small Wars Council in which it's noted that al-Qaeda's actions on the ground have outraged not only fellow jihadists but at least some of the tribes on whose cooperation they have depended. The key for us in Iraq, it seems to me, is to use a sort of large-scale judo on al-Qaeda and on other groups involved in the insurgency, to do everything possible to use their strength against them and assist them in defeating themselves; and if Wretchard's right, that might be just what we're doing. Now might not be a bad time at all to significantly reduce our troop presence, but it's definitely not the time to pull out and abandon the field to our enemies. Stay the course, but sneakily.

Atheism and its discontents

Interesting meditation over on the First Things website by one of their junior fellows, Ryan Anderson, on the question, "Are Atheists Victims of Discrimination?" He concludes that in some ways, yes, they are, but that much of it is self-inflicted (and much of the rest is in reaction to the public bloviations of folks like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Peter Singer); and he ends with this:

Atheist discontent still bears a seed of redemption, though, as it points to the fundamental human longing for community, shared values, and shared lives. That they feel this need goes unfulfilled isn’t surprising, since it’s a large element of what religion is all about. Far from unjustly discriminating, then, believers ought to water that seed by charity and prayers so that its seedling might one day be grafted onto the one true Vine.

Amen.

Song of the Week

Andrew Osenga is probably best known as the guy who replaced Derek Webb with Caedmon's Call; others might recognize his name from his work with Andrew Peterson. To an unfortunately small number of us, though, he is first of all the frontman for The Normals, who released three albums between 1998 and 2002 before breaking up; with strong lyrics and a sound all their own, they naturally weren't a big hit. After all, what do you expect a DJ to do with a song titled "We Are the Beggars at the Foot of God's Door," anyway?

We Are the Beggars at the Foot of God's
Door

We are gathered in cathedrals on a Sunday;
We are shrouded in our pride and lust's despair.
We have heard that You said, go to where your hearts once were,
Trusting we'd arrive to find You there.

We have known the empty senses of a funeral;
We are haunted by the promises of death.
We have asked to see Your face and noticed nothing
But a well-timed honest smile from a friend.

O we of little faith, O You of stubborn grace . . .
We are the beggars, we are the beggars,
We are the beggars at the foot of God's door.

We have grown cold to the kisses of our lovers;
We have rolled the windows up and driven through
The forests of the autumn, the innocence of snow,
The metaphor of Jesus in the dew.

We have known the heated passion of the cold night;
We have sold ourselves to everything we hate.
We're hypocrites and politicians running from a fight;
We've cheated on a very jealous mate.

Chorus

We have known the pain of loving in a dying world,
And our lies have made us angry at the truth--
But Cinderella's slipper fits us perfectly,
And somehow we're made royalty with You.

Chorus

And You have welcomed us in.

Words and music: Andrew Osenga and The Normals
© 2000 Starstruck Music/BMG Songs/Northern Shore Music
From the album Coming to Life, by The Normals

Not a bad appetizer

One of our elders here at Trinity has asked me several times over the last number of months if I'd read David Gregory's book Dinner with a Perfect Stranger. I hadn't, nor did I want to (though I didn't say that--no need to be rude, after all); it struck me as something of a Christian parallel to Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet in Heaven, just a piece of well-intentioned schlock.

Well, it seems Steve finally decided I'd had long enough, or something, and loaned me his copy. At least, he gave me his copy with the expectation that I would read and return it; can you really call it a loan when the other person doesn't want to borrow it? Whatever you want to call it, though, the book was on my desk, and it's short enough (100 small pages) that I didn't have any real excuse not to read it; so I did. I was pleasantly surprised--quite surprised, in fact. It's not great literature by any means, nor is it likely to be mistaken over the long haul for one of
C. S. Lewis' works (though Gregory clearly admires Lewis--I caught a couple nods to Mere Christianity over the course of the book); for that matter, I wouldn't even put it with Peter Kreeft's work. Still, it's clearly and cleanly written, and far shorter than I feared on the preciousness one so often finds in Christian fiction. More importantly, the book goes far beyond the sophomoric popular theology I expected to find; Gregory manages consistently to be simple without being simplistic, which is an important and difficult line to walk, and his apologetic is wide-ranging and thoughtful--and deeper than most contemporary Christian nonfiction. On several points (such as the discussion of heaven), his book can even serve (and will, I hope) as a useful corrective to the poor theology served up in many places around the American church.

All in all, I was pleased and impressed: Dinner with a Perfect Stranger is indeed an "invitation worth considering," for non-Christians and immature Christians alike. It's not great fiction, but it's probably good enough writing and storytelling to please most non-academics these days, and it's not just milk (or chicken soup), either--there's a lot of good, solid food for the soul here. Recommended.

Note: fans of Dinner with a Perfect Stranger might be interested to know that there's a sequel, focused on Nick's wife Mattie, called A Day with a Perfect Stranger.

Knocking on Heaven's Door

For the last few weeks, I've been working my way through David Crump's book Knocking on Heaven's Door: A New Testament Theology of Petitionary Prayer. Dr. Crump's a religion professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, and he's written a truly superb book; there's more meat in the introduction alone than you'll find in many books on prayer. I picked it up after reading Lauren Winner's review, thinking it could give me a useful frame for a sermon series, and that's been one of the better decisions I've made lately. I will indeed be leaning on this book in my preaching this summer, but it's done me a lot more good than just that; I can honestly say my prayer life is stronger and deeper as a result of the reading I've done so far, and I look forward to seeing what Dr. Crump draws out of the rest of the New Testament. Highly recommended.

Song of the Week

Another favorite of mine is fellow member of the Regent College community Carolyn Arends. There's a lot of good songwriters up there in Canada, and she's one of the best. She's way under the radar at the moment because she went indie and stopped touring a few years ago to give herself time and space to raise her kids, but she's still writing and singing and putting out albums (which are available through her website); her recent albums are more uneven than her studio work, but still well worth listening to, and better than a lot of the material out there. After all, to say that an album isn't as good as Feel Free or This Much I Understand isn't exactly an insult. Here, for instance, is my favorite lyric off Arends' second album, Feel Free (a cut which reminds me of the late, much-lamented Rich Mullins):

Do We Dare?

The prayers that we pray in foxholes and funerals,
The songs that we sing in delivery rooms,
The questions we ask when nobody's listening
But the man in the moon . . .
The way our hearts beat--faced with a sunrise,
Like maybe they know something we don't;
But it's all in code, and we can't decode it--
Or maybe we won't.

Do we dare pay attention, dare even mention
The mystery we find ourselves caught in?
And do we dare to remember
All that we have forgotten?

Each breath that we take, we take for granted,
So if there are clues, we remain unaware.
All the days of our lives burn down like matches--
Vanish into thin air.
But there are dreams that we dream when we least expect them,
And memories that come like unbidden tears,
All the things we believed when we were still children--
It's been so many years . . .

Chorus

Bridge:
We are battered and torn from the day we are born
In a world that has blinded and bound us;
Is it any surprise we don't open our eyes
To the truth that's disguised all around us

Like the secrets we keep we don't know we're keeping
From before there was time, before there were lies;
Can we find you again, this far from the garden?
Do we dare even try?

Chorus

Words and music: Carolyn Arends
© 1997 Running Arends Music/New Spring Publishing (a division of Brentwood Music Publishing, Inc.)
From the album Feel Free, by Carolyn Arends

Washington politics at their oddest

No, I don't mean D.C., I mean my home state; which tends, politically speaking, to be strange, but not as strange as Oregon to the south or British Columbia to the north. This gambit, though, is the sort of thing you might expect to see come out of Oregon:

New initiative: No children? Then no marriage
'Absurd' idea aims to start discussion

I may comment on this later; right now . . . I'm speechless.

Song of the Week

These days, I think my favorite active solo artist (with all due apologies to Sufjan Stevens, who was a couple years behind me at Hope College) is Andrew Peterson; I enjoy his music, and I appreciate the depth and thoughtfulness of his lyrics. His second album, Clear to Venus, is still his best, I think, with several songs that are as good as anything he's written; here's my favorite, which opens the album.

No More Faith
1 Corinthians 13:13

This is not another song about the mountains,
Except about how hard they are to move;
Have you ever stood before them
Like a mustard seed who's waiting for some proof?

I say faith is a burden—
It's a weight to bear;
It's brave and bittersweet.
And hope is hard to hold to;
Lord, I believe,
Only help my unbelief

Till there's no more faith,
No more hope;
I'll see Your face and Lord, I'll know
There's no more faith,
No more hope.
I'll sing Your praise and let them go,
'Cause only love,
Only love remains.

Have you ever heard that Jesus is the answer
And thought about the many doubts you hide?
Have you wondered how he loves you
If he really knows how dark you are inside?

I say faith is a burden—
It's a weight to bear;
It's brave and bittersweet.
And hope is hard to hold to;
Lord, I believe,
Only help my unbelief

Chorus

So I will drive these roads in thunder and in rain,
I will sing Your song at the top of my lungs,
And I will praise You, Lord, in glory and in pain
And I will follow You till this race is won.
And I will drive these roads till this motor won't run
And I will sing Your song from sea to shining sea,
And I will praise You, Lord, till Your kingdom come
And I will follow where you lead

Till there's no more faith,
No more hope;
I'll see Your face and Lord, I'll know
There's no more faith,
No more hope.
I'll sing Your praise and let them go,
'Cause only love,
Only Your love remains.
Hallelujah!

Words and music: Andrew Peterson
© 2001 New Spring Publishing (a division of Brentwood-Benson Music Publishing)
From the album Clear to Venus, by Andrew Peterson

Musings on the missional church

The latest issue, Winter 2007, of Leadership magazine showed up last week bearing a big close-up of a green cinder-block wall with a hole sledgehammered through it into the outside world--lots of open space with a city skyline in the distance; superimposed on the picture was the headline, "Going Missional: Break free of the box and touch your world." In one way, this was confirmation of a wry remark I ran across recently about all the trendy adjectives floating around the church these days, including "emerging/emergent" and "missional"; yes indeed, Leadership is on it, and "missional" is a hip thing to be. In another way, though, this was very encouraging, because it's an excellent issue with some truly valuable articles. Tim Conder's piece, "Missional Buzz," and the article by Wade Hodges and Greg Taylor, "We Can't Do Megachurch Anymore," are the only ones up on the Web so far, leaving several excellent pieces still only available in print; I'd encourage you to keep an eye out for them (or just go buy the magazine).

The reason this is so encouraging is precisely because "missional" is a hip thing to be, fashionable but ill-understood. The fact of the matter is, as Alan Roxburgh observed in the September/October 2004 issue of Theology Matters, while "almost everywhere one goes today the word missional or the phrase missional church is used to describe everything from evangelism to reorganization plans for denominations, to how we make coffee in church basements and denominational meeting rooms . . . [this language] is still not understood by the vast majority of people in either leadership or the pew. This is a stunning accomplishment: from obscurity to banality in eight short years and people still don’t know what it means."

Dr. Roxburgh should know, since he was one of the people, along with Darrell Guder, Craig Van Gelder, and George Hunsberger, who collectively wrote the book Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America, which kicked off the whole discussion back in 1998. The book was the product of a network of missiologists and theologians called the Gospel and Our Culture Network, or GOCN, who sought to build on the seminal work of Bishop Lesslie Newbigin. Their aim was to address "issues of Gospel faithfulness in North American culture," and it was in this process that the term "missional church" was born, to define the way the church needs to operate if it is indeed to be faithful to the gospel message in the context of Western (not merely North American) culture.

The problem, as Dr. Roxburgh notes in his article, is that until recently, this work has largely "remained a relatively theoretic and abstract academic conversation about the church. Its books and ideas have been shaped more by internal conversations within the missiological academy than attentiveness to the needs of the churches." Missional Church, for instance, is easily among the small number of truly essential Christian books of the last decade--but it's also very dense, not easily absorbed or understood, and primarily theoretical in its orientation, short on practical application. It's to this problem that the September/October 2004 issue of Theology Matters is addressed, as it features Dr. Roxburgh's article--a concise explanation of what it means for the church to be missional--followed by two pieces arising out of the efforts of College Hill Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati to remake itself into a truly missional congregation. The unfortunate thing is that Theology Matters, while an excellent publication, is little known outside the PC(USA)--or within it, for that matter. That's why it's so encouraging to see Leadership step up to address the same problem, and particularly to see it do the job so well. As College Hill's associate pastor, the Rev. Stephen Eyre, put it, “The missional process is the shift from the church as an institution in a Christian culture, to a community in mission in a non-Christian culture”--and that's a shift the American church badly needs to make.

Note: Theology Matters is a publication of Presbyterians for Faith, Family and Ministry; its website is http://www.theologymatters.com. I mentioned, a few posts back, the Covenant Network and their newsletter; PFFM is another affinity group within the PC(USA), in this case working the orthodox side of the aisle, and Theology Matters is another of those publications which is sent to every pastor in the denomination (and probably only appreciated by those who agree with it). In this case, it's a publication which I consider one of the real benefits of ministering in the PC(USA). I would note that a free subscription is available to anyone who's interested; just go here to sign up.

Inaugural Song of the Week

I decided to take a page from others around the blogosphere and start doing a Song of the Week. I figure it will keep me active, and there are a lot of great songs out there. I'm kicking it off this week with a lyric off the great Charlie Peacock's next-most-recent album, Kingdom Come (his most recent, Love Press Ex-Curio, is instrumental jazz)--it's an uneven album, imho, but with a few great moments, of which this is perhaps the best.

Wouldn't It Be Strange?

I’ve got a question for your consideration;
I’ll make you privy to my contemplation.
Let me say in my defense, I know it goes against all common sense . . .
It’s not our nature, nothing we’ve been taught,
Flies in the face of every line we’ve bought.
It’s hard to see it, harder to explain;
I know it cuts against the grain:

Wouldn’t it be strange if riches made you poor,
If everything you earned left you wanting more;
Wouldn’t it be strange to question what it’s for?
Wouldn’t it be strange?

I know we’ve got some interests to protect,
A set of dots we’re committed to connect.
It makes us nervous in light of how it’s been
To play a little game of pretend:

Wouldn’t it be strange if power made you weak,
Victory came to those who turned the other cheek;
Wouldn’t it be strange to welcome your defeat?
Wouldn’t it be strange?

Wouldn’t it be strange to find out in the end
The first will be the last and all the losers win?
Wouldn’t it be strange if Jesus came again?
Wouldn’t it be strange?

Words and music: Charlie Peacock and Douglas Kaine McKelvey
©1999 Sparrow Song/Andi Beat Goes On Music/Songs Only Dogs Can Hear
From the album Kingdom Come, by Charlie Peacock

The parable of the three little pigs

The day of the Lord is like three little pigs who went out into the world to make their fortunes. Knowing the stories, they traveled until they found a place where no wolf had been seen for hundreds of years; then they settled down to build homes and earn their living.

The first pig just wanted to enjoy life, so he wasn’t interested in spending too much time building his house. “What’s the fastest way to get my house built?” he asked himself, and quickly settled on a straw house with no real foundation. In a short time, his house was finished; it was a little flimsy, but that didn’t bother him—he was rarely there, except to sleep.

The second pig sniffed with disapproval when he saw the first pig’s house of straw. “That’s simply not appropriate,” he said to himself. “Granted, there’s no need to go overboard—you shouldn’t take your house too seriously—but it’s important to have a nice, solid, respectable house, as befits a nice, solid, respectable member of society.” So the second pig built himself a house of wood, with which he was very pleased. “It’s no flimsy, disreputable shack like the first pig built, nor is it overbuilt like the third pig’s house; it’s just a good, practical house, enough and not too much.”

The third pig, meanwhile, wanted to build the best house he possibly could; he made sure he had the best possible foundation, then built his house of solid stone—top-quality granite, in fact—doing everything he could to ensure that his house would stand no matter what happened. He knew the other two pigs thought he was taking this whole house-building thing much too seriously, but he didn’t care; he wanted a house worthy of honor.

The three little pigs lived for some years in contentment, each pleased with the choices he had made, until one day a great wildfire swept unexpectedly through the area. The first little pig ran to his house of straw to save his valuables; but while he was in the house, the fire swept over it and it immediately burned to the ground, killing the little pig. The second little pig ran to his house of wood to save his valuables; but while he was in the house, the fire swept over it and it began to burn. The little pig dropped everything and ran; he escaped alive, but with everything he owned lost in the fire. He ran to the house of stone, where the third little pig let him in; while they were in the house, the fire swept over it—and passed on by. The house was scorched by the flames and smelled of fire and smoke, but was otherwise undamaged, because stone doesn’t burn.

For those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

(1 Corinthians 3:10-20, 6:19-20)

The butterfly effect and the providence of God

You've probably heard of the butterfly effect—the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Asia can cause a hurricane in the Caribbean—which is an illustration of one of the key elements in chaos theory, that of sensitive dependence on initial conditions. The idea is that a small change, such as a butterfly's wingbeat, can produce large results. This sort of sensitivity to initial conditions is one of the things which makes a chaotic system chaotic. (Chaos is not in fact disordered or random, merely highly complex and unpredictable.)

Now, I don't know much about chaos theory, not being the mathematical type—I leave that to my brother-in-law the chemical engineer. Theology is more my line; and in that line, what I do know is that God works his will through chaotic systems as well as through obvious order, using small events at one point to bring about significant results at another point.

I was reminded of this, in a small way, over the course of the last several days. Last week, as I was sitting in my office planning the Sunday service, I wanted to doublecheck the lyrics to Charlie Peacock's song "The Harvest Is the End of the World" (from which I had pulled the title for that week's sermon). I didn't feel like going home to grab the album (strangelanguage), so I figured I'd look it up on the Internet. I found it, in the archives of two blogs I'd never heard of before, one called Mysterium Tremendum (scroll down to November 12, 2003), and its parent blog (for lack of a better word), The Thinklings. You'll notice the latter blog heading the links list over on the left; it's a great blog, and was a completely unexpected and equally welcome discovery.

In the course of exploring The Thinklings, I noticed a post headed "Pachelbel Is Haunting Me," with the YouTube video of an incredibly funny rant on Pachelbel's Canon in D, courtesy of a comedian/musician named Rob Paravonian. (If you check the January 2007 archives, it was posted on January 5.) I finally got around to watching it today, laughed hysterically, and played it for my wife, who did the same. She also suggested sending the link to a friend of ours. Said friend called us maybe 20 minutes later, declaring that it was the funniest thing she'd ever seen, that she'd had a terrible day which was now "a zillion times better." She's been having a rough couple of weeks, of which today was worse than average, and needed a boost; clearly, this was God's provision for her to lift her spirits. And it all began last week when I didn't feel like walking back to the house to grab a tape.

OK, so maybe this doesn't seem like a big deal—but it was to my friend, and it was to me; and it's an illustration of how God weaves everything together to bring about the good of those who love him and are called according to his purposes, even in the little things. To Him be the glory.

Umm, what was that about grace?

I just got the latest Covenant Network newsletter yesterday, which included the note that they will no longer be sending their publication to every pastor in the PC(USA), but only to those who pay for it. (For those not familiar with the Presbyterian Church (USA) and its internecine strife, the Covenant Network is one of the affinity groups working for the ordination of self-affirmed practicing homosexuals.) I can't say as I'll miss it all that much; maybe I should, for a number of reasons, but I won't. The smug "we're on the right side of history" tone annoys me no end, especially when married to the low-quality theology and exegesis I so often find in their work.

Now, some might read that and think I fault them primarily because of their advocacy of homosexuality, but that's really not the case. There are much deeper issues here, a point signaled by the slogan printed across the front of every CovNet publication: Toward a Church as Generous and Just as God's Grace. Anyone see a problem with that? For my part, I see two. The first is minor: while we want the church to look as much like God as possible, it is simply beyond human capacity for the church to be as generous as God's grace. Aim high, sure, but the fact that they so blithely take aim at an impossibility suggests to me that they don't realize it's impossible. That in turn suggests that their doctrine of God isn't high enough by a long shot.

The greater problem is that word "just." Who in the world ever said, or thought, that God's grace is just? The very idea is ludicrous. Justice is all about what we earn; God's grace is all about what he gives us that we have not earned and could never even begin to hope to earn. Confusing the two, as CovNet evidently does, is a major theological error, a fundamental misunderstanding of who God is and who we are (and pretty much everything in between). Attempts to set aside the Scriptural witness on homosexuality are symptoms; this kind of thinking is the true disease. Christianity isn't about our rights, or what we deserve; it's about the fact that all we deserve is Hell, and God gives us his kingdom anyway. Maranatha--come, Lord Jesus!

Barack Obama and the case for faith in the public square

I most often vote Republican for a number of reasons. One is that as a whole, the positions taken by the Republican Party line up better with my own beliefs. Another, however, is the frequency with which the Democrats nominate people I find it hard to respect. Thankfully, that isn't the case in our congressional district, the 2nd of Colorado; unfortunately, it's all too often the case at the presidential level. I don't expect the national Dems to nominate someone I could be happy voting for, but I wish they would at least nominate someone I could respect. They're out there, politicians like Virginia's Mark Warner or New Mexico's Bill Richardson—or, perhaps most intriguingly (though not for 2008), Illinois' Barack Obama, who showed why in his recent keynote address to the Building a Covenant for a New America conference.

As Slate's Amy Sullivan writes, "Obama's speech, delivered to an audience of the frustrated religious left, . . . was, for the first time in modern memory, an affirmative statement from a Democrat about 'how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy,' as Obama put it. . . . [H]e doesn't defend progressives' claim to religion; he asserts the responsibilities that fall to them as religious people. Americans are looking, Obama said, for a 'deeper, fuller conversation about religion in this country.' He started that conversation. A few others are joining in. It's time for everyone else to catch up."

I appreciate this speech (and Obama for giving it) because I consider the increasing secularization of the Democratic Party—and its concomitant effects on the Republican Party—unfortunate for the health of our nation. The increasing identification of our political parties with a sacred vs. religious split marginalizes the Christian Left (and while I may not agree with them on many points, that's unfortunate for the democratic process), while turning the demands of folks like the Chicago Tribune's Eric Zorn for a thoroughly secularized public square into a fundamental plank of American liberalism. Which, in my point of view, it shouldn't be, because that privileges one religious outlook over all others. That's religious discrimination, which we all know is a Bad Thing.

Of course, Zorn and others would deny that. When he writes, "Speaking as a secularist—I don't like that word, really, but it'll do for now—and presuming to speak for them, what we ask of believers—all we ask—is that they not enter the public square using 'because God says so' as a reason to advance or attack any policy position," he doesn't believe he's "asking believers to abandon their values or beliefs as a prerequisite to engaging in political debate"; indeed, he writes that "the idea that this demand is hostile to religion is a common and popular strawman . . . it's also completely wrong. " Clearly, he understands his own secular presumptions as religiously neutral, rather than as a set of presumptions which compete with religious ones.

With this, I cannot agree; where Zorn writes, "Whatever beliefs or philosophies shape your values or guide your personal conduct are of no nevermind to us," I have to say that he's wrong. As any mathematician or philosopher could tell you, it's not just your conclusions which matter—your reasoning, which provides the foundation for those conclusions, matters just as much, and it really is significant if you get to the right place for the wrong reasons. It's significant because it means you're right as much by accident as anything, and that getting one point right is no indicator that you'll get anything else right. As such, the "beliefs or philosophies [that] shape your values or guide your personal conduct" do matter—they matter a great deal—and for people like Zorn to insist that people like me pretend otherwise is precisely to "ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square," as Sen. Obama put it.

So what's the alternative? Sen. Obama is completely correct when he says, "Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King—indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history—were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their 'personal morality' into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition." The problem, though, as any preacher knows, is application: what do we do with that? That's the tricky part, and I think the senator himself wobbles in saying, "Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values." I understand his concern here, "their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason" (and on a side note, shouldn't that be "our proposals"?), and I agree with that; but who gets to define what values are "universal"?

The fact of the matter is, requiring religious folk to make arguments only on grounds of "universal . . . values" will be translated right back into saying "that men and women should not inject their 'personal morality' into public policy debates." As a recent Christianity Today editorial noted, "What Obama fails to see is how often specifically Christian or religious reasoning has been at the core of social movements," and how often his test would invalidate precisely those reformers whom he praises. There needs to be room for people of all stripes to make arguments for their positions on the basis of their own values, rather than restricting them to arguing on the basis of values pre-approved by others. It should no more be necessary for Christians, Muslims, and Jews to pretend to be secularists than for secularists to pretend to be Christians, Muslims, or Jews. We should all be free to make our arguments on the basis of who we really are and what we truly believe.

Of course, if we do so without trying to establish common ground with those who stand in different places—if, for instance, Christians make political arguments without trying to connect them to values held by at least some secularists—then we wind up only preaching to the choir, building very narrow movements, and that's not a good thing. From a pragmatic point of view, then, while I don't think it's wrong to "enter the public square using 'because God says so' as a reason to advance or attack any policy position," if that's our only reason, we ought not expect to get very far. Christianity Today addresses this point in its editorial, arguing that "what Lincoln, King, and others did . . . was use a variety of reasons—some religious, some pragmatic—to motivate social change. Thus, listeners with or without a religious bent could find some reason to buy into the cause."

To be sure, there are those on the conservative end of American Christianity who would object to such an approach; but their objection, I believe, rests on their failure to take seriously Augustine's insight that all truth is God's truth. When we as Christians approach political issues from that perspective—and when we understand that God is not capricious, that he has reasons for everything he tells us to do and not to do—then we come to understand that "pragmatic" arguments which appeal to values we share with those who don't share our faith aren't merely pragmatic, but are in fact theological. We are never called to say, "Thus says the Lord," without explaining why "thus says the Lord"—what the reasons are, as best we understand them, for the commands God has given us—and this is no less true in the political realm than anywhere else. It isn't our place to "defend the ways of God to man," as Milton put it, but it's certainly our responsibility to explain them as best we can. To do so is both good theology and good politics; to fail to do so is arrogance, and nothing makes for worse politics—or theology—than arrogance. May God be glorified in our lives.

Taking off the plastic

After a long time away from this--due to illness, technical problems, and a whole host of other circumstances--it feels like walking into a house that hasn't been lived in for a year and a half: the air has gone flat, there's dust everywhere, and all the furniture is covered with clear plastic. Time to take off the plastic, sweep and vacuum the floors, dust the mantle, and get back to work.