We’re still around, and I’ve been getting the itch to start blogging again. I won’t make any promises–I’ve done that too many times and not followed through–but hopefully anyone still left out there will see something in this space soon…
You are currently browsing Rob’s articles.
I’m sitting in Terminal 3 in NYC’s JFK airport, waiting to get on a plane back to Cleveland. It’s really, really good to be back on American soil. I liked Buenos Aires–and a quick jump into summer felt great–but I’m glad to be going home.
Tags: travel
In no particular order, the discs I enjoyed the most this year. Not all were released in ‘08, but these are the ones that I spent the most time with:
- Anathallo/Canopy Glow: Fans of Sufjan Stevens will enjoy this record. Layered orchestral instruments, unusual song structures, girl/guy harmonies. I’ve been really taken by the percussion on this record. The lyrics, however, are pretty silly–thankfully, it’s pretty tough to make them out.
- Black Keys/Attack and Release: Another great blues-rock record from my city’s biggest band.
- Bon Iver/For Emma, Forever Ago: Maybe my favorite record this year. I caught these guys live at the Grog Shop in Cleveland and was very impressed. I love the layered vocals (except when they get too whiny), the acoustic experimenation, and pulse that runs through these songs.
- Horse Feathers/House With No Home: Folkier, but in the same general vein as Bon Iver.
- Kate Rusby/Girl Who Couldn’t Fly: I listened to this record a lot early in the year. Traditional English/Irish folk tunes, sung beautifully.
- French Kicks/Swimming: This is good indie rock.
- Anything by Low: I’ve been listening to this band for years, but somehow they got under my skin in a new way this year. Slowly creeping their way into my favorite bands of all-time.
- Ra Ra Riot/The Rhumb Line: Poppy, fun, strings.
- The Walkmen/You & Me: These guys aren’t for everyone, but they hit a sweet spot for me. They’ve bottled the beer-soaked reverb that spills out the open entrances of grimy dives on summer nights. Every song is drenched in it. Now that I read that over, it doesn’t sound pleasant. But I like it.
- The Long Winters/Putting the Days to Bed: At first, this disc didn’t grab me at all, but I threw it on my iPod and kept it there. Then, on a very long flight back from Germany, they were exactly what I needed to hear. Have enjoyed this record since.
- Shearwater/Palo Santo -and- Rook: Both these records are pretty good. I think I enjoy Palo Santo a bit more. Sometimes overwrought, but when they get it right, they really get it right.
- Dr. Dog/Fate: Left this one off of the list originally. This was a great record–really fun, and a few of the tracks are strong lyrically. If you’re not familiar with Dr. Dog, they’re throwback lo-fi, roughly in the same vein as M. Ward, though a bit more ramshackle. A lot of Beatles influences in their tracks.
It has been too long since I’ve posted here–two months–but Love and Blunder is not dead. I’ve got two weeks vacation and hopefully can get a few things written before I have to head back to the office grind. If anyone is still out there, thanks for not deleting us from your reading lists!
Joe Bagaent–a fantastic left-wing writer whom I always enjoy but rarely agree with–has an interesting theory on the rise of religious fundamentalism and its relationship with the right in America (emphasis added):
The primary motivating factor in the development of the religious right is a defensive response to the challenges posed by the power of popular consumer and entertainment culture and not a backlash against progressive or liberal ideas and social movements.
And he provides the obvious example:
Religious fundamentalism is revolutionary because it represents the only movement in American public life openly critical of American culture and society.
If the latter point seems strange to some, I would advise them to listen to an hour’s worth of programming from Dr. James Dobson’s daily broadcast on Christian radio. He is perhaps the most influential voice of the religious right on the broadcast medium. During that time, you will hear far greater criticism of American society and Americans on subjects such as greed, materialism, alienation caused by rampant individualism and the lack of supportive communities than you will hear on the purportedly liberal airways of Air America’s Radio Programs.
Bageant goes on to explain why the religion of pop culture is destined to triumph over fundamentalism, because it demands so little from us, keeps us so distracted, and is largely disconnected from ground-floor reality. Obviously, this analysis will bring to mind the utter chaos surrounding our current economic crisis. If the credit crunch isn’t a mass crisis of belief–belief that our bank accounts will keep expanding, that our luck will never run out, that we will never have to actually curtail our consumption–then what is it?
Make sure and read Bageant’s entire essay.
Give a listen to this conversation over at Mars Hill Audio Journal between Ken Myers and Patrick Deneen. Deneen teaches political theory at Georgetown University, and he and Myers discuss the philosophy of Wendell Berry, democracy, and the nature of contemporary politics.
Myers observes–with particular poignancy to our current election–that in the early years of this country, the Americans thinking deeply about the nature of governance and legislation were also the ones governing and legislating. In the last hundred years, the particular tasks of politics (and really, the particular tasks that make up all our lives) have been atomized into distinct specializations performed by experts, so that many politicians spend careers focused on the specializations of campaigning and legislating without dealing with communities as a whole.
The philosophy of specialization and the metaphor of the machine have brought a similar fragmentation to every corner of our lives; our daily jobs, families, and our selves.
Demophilus sums up my own thoughts on McCain’s response to the evil question at the Saddleback forum:
I cringed when McCain said he wanted to “defeat” evil, but its worth noting he immediately talked about hunting down bin Laden and winning the War on Terror. I think both formulations are wrong in their own way (I don’t much care about bin Laden, and I think the phrase “War on Terror” is stupid), but he wasn’t literally talking about the removal of evil from the world in a metaphysical sense. In fact, he was responding to Rick Warren’s formulation of picking between “ignoring, negotiating with, containing, or defeating” evil — I would have chosen “contain,” but isn’t nuance lost in most multiple choice settings?
If you’re going to compare cringe-worthy quotes from the debate, though, Obama’s “above my pay grade” comment regarding giving human rights to babies made me wince far more. Gene Veith discusses that one here.
Tags: election 2008, evil, politics
Now this is some serious preaching. Don’t read the transcript, go straight for the MP3. And hold on to your seats, girls and boys.
Some really pretty stuff on Daytrotter this week.
Pr. Cwirla has an absolutely bang-up post on the fruits of the Spirit and Lutheran trepidation:
We Lutherans live under a terrible burden of having to be right all the time. We value purity above all things – purity of doctrine, of practice, of hymnody, of programs, of purpose. Yet purity is never held out to the sinner-saint as an attainable goal. It’s a forensic-given in Christ, and utterly impossible in ourselves. If we claim to be “pure” in what we do, we will ever be on the defensive justifying ourselves against those who claim otherwise and constantly measuring ourselves against the next guy. Defensiveness tends to bring out the worst of our sinful selves. Defensiveness and fear open the door to the anger, strife, party spirit, and dissension that war against the fruit of the Spirit.
I believe that much of our Lutheran anxiety has to do with defensiveness and fear. We want to present our denarius back to the Master pure and undefiled. And so we don’t take risks, we play it safe, we hedge our bets, we hide behind the skirts of our institutions, we circle our wagons to ward off the challengers. We wrap our shiny denarius in a sock and tuck it safely in the back of a drawer. But the Master said, “Do business,” not “keep it pure.” We are fearful and defensive, not trusting the Word to do His work, not trusting that God justifies the unjustifiable and ungodly, acting as though Jesus needed us to defend Him. Poor Jesus. And in our fear and unbelief, we stunt the fruit the Spirit wants to produce in us for the benefit of others.
My thoughts have run along the same lines as Cwirla’s critique lately, especially where he points out our common tendency to use treasured doctrines to defend ourselves from the work of the Spirit, rather than being worked on by the Spirit through them:
I worry about my fellow Lutheran pilgrims who have become so wrapped up in defending their “being Lutheran” that they have lost the sense of wonder and joy at being justified for Jesus’ sake. I wonder whether we haven’t become the Ephesian church of the Revelation, doctrinally pure yet loveless, able to spot a heretical Nicolaitan from a mile away, yet flagging in the love that once characterized life together.
I wrote about about this in this post (shameless plug!), where I argued that:
The proper distinction of Law and Gospel is not a method for keeping God out of our lives, but for seeing how He has already gotten in. Even the finest doctrine, hermeneutic, or slogan can be misused to avoid vulnerability to the Word. The moment we’ve done so, we’ve turned a blessing to a curse.
In many ways, I see this misuse of God’s promises is one of the central struggles the people of God face. Look at Israel’s history in scripture: If they weren’t wrestling with absolute debauchery, they had become completely consumed with ticking a doctrinal checklist in order to save themselves. Sure, theirs may have consisted of a set of ritualistic rules, but how much does that really differ from our own list of requirements for right-standing with God? Scripture (and Jesus!) makes it clear that it wasn’t the Law that was Israel’s problem, but its misuse. I think the same goes for our catechisms, confessions, and liturgies. Properly used, they are blessings. Wrongly used, they are our own distinctly Lutheran brand of works-righteousness, and a litmus test for admission into our club. But if Israel was entrusted with the very oracles of God, as St. Paul says, how much more richly have we been gifted with the body and blood of Jesus in Word and Sacrament? That’s not something to be frightened over, it’s pleasure and joy, joy, joy.
Michael Spencer linked to this good read from Michael Horton on the ascension of Christ, and the work left to the church. I nodded along with Horton for his sharp analysis of American Christianity and its revivalist tendency:
So when a conservative Southern Baptist like Rick Warren embraces “new measures” in church growth by advocating a vision of the church as an army of reformers who can end the plagues of disease, war, and poverty as well as promiscuity, abortion, homosexuality, divorce, and alcoholism, he stands in a long line leading from Finney to Strong to Sunday to Graham. “Deeds, not Creeds!” used to be the mantra of the social gospel of mainline churches, but Warren has revived it today as if it were newly minted. After a brief dispensationalist interlude, American evangelicals returned to their more positive and triumphant (postmillennial) message of transforming American culture into “a shining city upon a hill.”
… Ironically, in the land that prizes the legal separation of church and state, the identification of church and sub-culture, each with its political agenda, is nearly total: white suburban evangelicals, the Black church, mainline social gospels, and the more recent “new urbanism” of the emergent movement. Yet in spite of their different agendas, each of these ecclesiastical demographics is largely dependent on the heritage of American revivalism.
But by the end, I wanted him to say something more clearly. He writes on the word “incarnational” here:
… “Incarnational” is becoming a dominant adjective in evangelical circles, often depriving Christ’s person and work of its specificity and uniqueness.[9] Christ’s person and work easily becomes a “model” or “vision” for ecclesial action (imitatio Christi), rather than a completed event to which the church offers its witness.[10] We increasingly hear about “incarnational ministry,” as if Christ’s unique personal history could be repeated or imitated. The church, whether conceived in “high church” or “low church” terms, rushes in to fill the void, as the substitute for its ascended Lord. In its train, the sacramental cosmos returns. As Christ and his work is assimilated to the church and its work, similar conflations emerge between the gospel and culture; between the word of God and the experience of our particular group; and between the church’s commission and the transformation of the kingdoms of this age into the kingdom of Christ.
Horton is on the money when he points out that the church must be careful not to replace Christ. But what I’m longing for him to describe is how the church is in Christ, never replacing Him, but fully and presently partaking in His life death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and even his future return, through the mystery of Word and Sacrament. What Horton needs to point out is that all of the effort the American church throws into transforming culture could never properly be called incarnational action anyway. While Christ was present in the flesh, He could hardly have been called an activist of any sort. Jesus’ exposition of the power of God was something completely different: St. Paul makes clear that the ultimate earthly realization of God’s glory was, paradoxically, Christ’s brutal suffering and death on the cross. The contemporary fad of hybrid-driving evangelical political activism is in a category altogether separate from the bloody sacrifice of the Son of God. In short, it’s not being incarnational that’s the problem, it’s that the church has no idea what that word even means.
Incarnational living is not our life (with the emphasis on our). It is Christ’s life in us (with the emphasis on life and Christ). It is to struggle to find our identities completely in Him–in His Word and in His Sacraments. That is not to be misinterpreted as a way of making Christianity a private existential struggle. This is a public declaration of our present death and resurrection in the Spirit and soon-coming death and resurrection in the flesh. It is, essentially, to end ourselves and be begun in our new-in-Christ selves day after day after day. It’s tone is, by definition, humble. And it happens wherever we are: Our homes, workplaces, neighborhoods. I would use the word local if it hadn’t started showing up on so many t-shirts lately, but maybe I’m too cautious.
Incarnational living is not our project. Our engagement with culture is not informed by a vision or formula, but flows out of our baptism–a baptism that we do not always consent with, but to which we must learn to say “Amen.” St. Paul’s discourse in Romans 8 tells us that this already/not-yet tension is shot through the entire created order. The entire cosmos waits in eager longing for freedom from its bondage to corruption and decau, just as we groan for our relief from struggles with sinful flesh. And that freedom is something no political platform or activist movement can deliver.
Incarnational living is not whatever we’re most comfortable with. The Corinthian church, much like the American, was puffed up in its arrogance. Certain of its importance and focused on its achievement, it wasted time on theological bickering and personality cults (I follow Paul! I follow Apollos!) and turned a blind eye to the Corinthian culture’s grip on its life. And St. Paul’s sharply sarcastic rebuke leaves me stinging every time:
Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Without us you have become kings! And would that you did reign, so that we might share the rule with you! For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things.
The way the world looks at things, it’s pretty tough to build a city on a hill out of scum of the earth. Horton puts it well here:
Where we might hope for triumphant calls to “redeem culture,” the New Testament epistles offer comparatively boring yet crucial exhortations to respect and pray for those in authority, to treat employers and employees well, and to be faithful parents and children. We are called “to increase more and more” in godliness through the ordinary means of grace in the church. And in our secular vocations we are called to “aspire to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you, that you may walk properly toward those who are outside and that you may lack nothing” (1 Thes 4:10-12).
Not sure how to close off this rambling post, I think I’ll just post a bit of the hymn “I Bind Unto Myself This Day,” a Lutheran take on St. Patrick’s Breastplate. It doesn’t get much more incarnational than this:
I bind unto myself today
The strong name of the Trinity
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One and One in Three.I bind this day to me forever,
By power of faith, Christ’s incarnation,
His baptism in the Jordan River,
His cross of death for my salvation,
His bursting from the spiced tomb,
His riding up the heavenly way,
His coming at the day of doom,
I bind unto myself today.
Tags: incarnation, Theology
Over the past six months, and especially in the past three weeks, I’ve been relearning what it means to pray. The process started when our family began to try and worship regularly using the Prayer at the Close of the Day service in the Lutheran Service Book prayer card.
The Close of Day service is simple: A benediction, a responsory reading drawn from Psalm 92:1, a scripture reading, the Creed, a common reading of the Song of Simeon, the Lord’s Prayer, prayer for others and ourselves, and finally Luther’s close of day prayer from the Small Catechism. Ordinary as it is, we were doing far less beforehand, and going through an entire prayer service felt like a stretch at first. Now, a few months later, I daily look forward to this family worship time.
Though I didn’t realize it at first, adopting a prayer service was a complete turn around from the meager way we spent our time before. Our prayers basically consisted of a few words before bedtime with our daughters, occasionally including the Lord’s Prayer, or a confession of the Creed. On a given night, we might have used some of the same elements the Close of Day service includes, but the structure was always spontaneous.
The prayer service, on the other hand, is always the same. Once tedious, I now find this a great comfort. Regardless of my mood, the leftover stress from a long day at work, or the unpredictable tempers of my children, the structure remains the same. This creates a rhythm that steadies us. Especially as we continue to pray many of the words time and time again, associations with the syllables and phrases build in and between us, so that we come to know the service as we know one another.
Some of you may wonder if praying in this way is doomed to become empty ritual. I’m certain that we’re capable of sucking all the life out of this good gift if we approach it mindlessly. But night after night, I’m refreshed because the form of the service is declarative. Evening worship not our activity, but God’s event. Nightly, I hear myself say “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” and I and my family echo back “Amen.” In our little house in Akron, we have again heard God put His name upon us, and in that one “Amen,” we have answered back “Yes, yes. It is so.”
Understanding family worship as an event–God’s event, not our own–blows my mind. Where prayer for me used to consist of running down a well-worn list of requests out of some sense of responsibility, I now find myself coming to hear again what God has to say. We open up His Word, and what it has to say is good. And when we bow our heads to voice our petitions, we pray in Christ. In the mystery of our baptism, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ is our mediator, petitioning the Father for us. The drama in worship goes far beyond our own words on our lips; but in Christ, God’s words are upon our tongues! As we ask in the first words of the service:
It is good to give thanks to the Lord,
to sing praise to your name, O Most High;To herald Your love in the morning,
Your truth at the close of the day.
What is it that’s good about this? Not that we all happened to read some scripture together, but that we hear God’s great love again, our ears are filled with his truth. The heralds are not giving this simple evening prayer service its oomph, the action of God is! And this is obvious when we speak together Simeon’s beautiful response to laying eyes on God-in-the-flesh, Christ:
Lord, now You let Your servant go in peace;
Your word has been fulfilled.
My own eyes have seen the salvation
which You have prepared in the sight of every people:
A light to reveal You to the nations
and the glory of Your people Israel.
Of course you’d want to say the Gloria Patri after that!
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit;
as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.
God’s event don’t work like human events. They don’t go hand-in-hand with some kind of emotional rush. In fact, it’s common that we say the final “Thanks be to God,” without feeling a thing. And the Word of God that we hear doesn’t sound like we think it should–a booming thunderclap from the heavens, or even a still, small voice in the bossom. Instead, the Word of God sounds like our own weak and humble words, occasionally faltering and stammering over the Lord’s Prayer, a Psalm, or the words of Simeon I quoted above. It sounds like my daughter’s tiny voice announcing to those of us gathered in the bedroom “…for Thine is the Kingdom! and the Power! and the GLORY!” This may not be what we expect, but yet we say “Amen,”–this is most certainly true.
For the first time in my life, I find myself genuinely loving prayer. I pack my little prayer card in my laptop bag and take it to work, then sneak out and sit and my car and say the noon prayer service aloud to myself. We’ve even begun going through the morning prayer service together before or after breakfast. This excitement may not last forever, but it is a good gift, and I thank God for it.
Tags: family worship, prayer, Theology
This story in this morning’s USA Today is heart-wrenching. We must pray for soldiers. Lord, have mercy.
We haven’t seen it yet, but Dreher’s review of Wall-E makes me think we ought to soon.
Tags: entertainment, movies
Sasse:
Whenever the Lord’s Supper has been permitted to decay, the boundary lines between church and world have universally disappeared and the church has been absorbed into the world.
Amen.
Last week, Devona and I chaperoned our church’s youth group to the Higher Things conference in Scranton, Pennsylvania (I hope to write more about this in a few other posts, too). The conference was such a blessing, and it’s very possible that we got more out of it than even the kids did.
Specifically, though, the conference gave me the chance to recollect some of my most formative experiences growing up heavily involved in a modern evangelical church: Summer camps and conferences were a huge part of my Christian identity when I was young. I have fierce memories of crowding together into a darkened, sweaty gymnasium with hundreds of other teenagers, a stage washed in concert lights, the roar of electric guitars, raised hands, tearful repentance, the ultimate conviction that this was where we belonged.
It’s hard to shake off moments like that, and years of them piled up to convince me that I was called to be a minister–after all, that fire in my heart had to be a calling from God, right? Night after night, with the echo of those drums ringing in my ears, I’d lay awake with my certain future in ministry spreading out in front of me.
When it came time to pick a college, I was sure I needed to attend one of our loose denomination’s Bible colleges (later shot down by my parents). I wanted to join up with a good worship band. Maybe become a missionary. I hardly gave a future in the secular world a thought–I was certain I would be doing something in the church.
But then real life woke me up. As I finished high school and began college, leading worship services, mentoring newer Christians, and guiding Bible studies, I began to have real questions. Struggles with sin. Doubts. It just wasn’t always easy to stay on the mountaintop. I began to loathe the fire in my heart. I was angry about it, ashamed. How could someone called by God feel so conflicted?
it only got worse, and my wife (at that time, my fiance) and I came to a spiritual crisis. We were burnt out. We needed the Gospel, and we needed it desperately. And though it was being preached in some form all around us, we were deaf to it. The message was too mixed. Grace didn’t seem free, and we felt like we were in chains.
By the time we ended up in the small LCMS church we still attend, I’d walled off my heart from any hope of becoming a pastor. I was bitter with my Christian experience, certain that I’d fallen prey to my own emotions at a vulnerable age. I convinced myself that work in the church was something I could never do, someone else’s job, someone else’s problem. The ache to serve, though, never left. And over the last five years I continued to struggle with anger and sorrow at its persistence. Time and again, the desire would well up inside me. And in all that bitterness I had only one answer: “No.” Considering a life in ministry, after the emotional wringing I’d felt I’d been through, was impossible. But why couldn’t I get rid of this burden? Get on with clocking in and out of my nine-to-six job, living in my vocation as father to my kids, husband to my wife, and hard-working employee at my job?
At some point during the conference last week, though, something changed. There were no sweaty gymnasiums, no flood-lighted stages, no roaring electric guitars. No calls for tearful emotional repentance, and no emotional revelations. I laid awake in my bunk in the University of Scranton dorms, listening to the sound of teenagers talking outside–teenagers so much like I must have been years ago–and laying my spiritual past alongside these similar, but so tremendously different experiences at Higher Things. Day after day I heard the preaching of Christ, Christ, and Christ again. I received Christ, again, again, and again. I went to confession and absolution, I laid down my pride and heard that I was forgiven. And somehow, all that anger started to disipate. The six-foot thick concrete walls I’d built between myself and the possibility of a life serving the church started to crumble.
It’s so hard to put into words, but I guess I just started feeling alive again. And when I asked myself why I felt so alive, the obvious answer was because I’d just stopped saying “No. Not that. Anything but that.” Somehow, I found myself open again. Open to possibilities. And no longer afraid that caring about the truth of the Gospel would lead me over a cliff. Not certain of anything, to be sure, but I find myself with a heart that is more tender, rather than bitter. And a temperament that is more patient, not angry.
And the burden is gone. The weight I felt every morning when I woke up, and every night when I came home weary from the office has lifted. And for now, that’s good enough. I don’t know if I’ll ever pursue the ministry, but wondering, thinking, talking, and most of all praying about it does not seem so hard any longer. And if that means I can be a little more at peace, then that’s good enough for me.
Worth remembering:
While genuine zeal in the discharge of one’s office is necessary and important, this cannot be said regarding any kind of zeal. There is a false, ungodly, carnal zeal that does not come from God and is not produced by the Holy Spirit, but is rooted either in animosity against those who teach a different doctrine or in the selfish thought that a display of zeal will bring the minister honor, at least in certain congregations, or in fanaticism.
- CFW Walther, Law and Gospel
Tags: Theology
Goose Island’s 312 Urban Wheat Ale has got to be my favorite summertime brew. Light, creamy, smooth, and genuinely refreshing.
Anyone else have a favorite summertime drink?
T-Bone Burnett discusses recording techniques and a sense of place on this week’s All Songs Considered. This is essential listening if you care at all about music, or if you wonder why listening to most of the stuff on the radio today just feels so exhausting.
Tags: Music
I’ve been floored by this set of images from the Library of Congress, showing American life throughout the Great Depression and World War II. The addition of color makes it clear in a new way just how much life has changed, and how much more comfortable we all are now. I’m not so sure that we’re better for it.
Some really good stuff was put up on Daytrotter this morning. Listen.
Tags: Music
The Black Keys have just put together their best record yet: Attack & Release. I’m proud to say that these guys are from Akron, our hometown. Even with their huge success (supermegastar producer Danger Mouse worked on this album), they’ve stayed here, and have no plans to move–which is pretty cool, considering the mass exodus of young people to places that occasionally enjoy sunshine. They developed their sound to match the abandoned rubber factories and gray skies of our dear old city, and it’s great stuff (trust me, I know that music birthed from a blue collar rustbelt town doesn’t exactly entice, but it’s good. Really.)
Here’s a little video tour the duo gave to a Wall Street Journal reporter. I was happy to see shots of our neighborhood (Square Records and Highland Square is right around the corner).
Update: The related article in the Wall Street Journal is decent, too.
This evening, in a Bible study with some friends, we read:
Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. During supper, when the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper. He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was wrapped around him.
John is not explicit about it, but an image of Christ’s coming sacrifice for sin is hidden in the Upper Room foot washing. As he goes round the table, washing each of the disciples, he wipes the dust and grime from each of them onto the towel tied around him as a garment. When he has finished, he stands before them. On his garment he wears their filth, and thus foreshadows the cross. By contrast the disciples, though uncomfortable with the action of Christ, are reclined leisurely, freshly washed and prepared to partake of the Passover Feast.
Tags: Gospel of John, Theology
Note: I’d been working on this post for a few days when this helpful discussion sprung up on John H’s blog. Though I’m echoing many of the remarks from that conversation in the words below, I figured I ought to post this if for no other purpose than to get it off of my chest.
In my four short years as a member of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, I have been perplexed by the way the church addresses questions of Christian practice, the day to day, living and breathing parts of Christianity. Though written on a completely different subject (postmodern philosophy), the following quote from Albert Borgmann’s book Crossing the Postmodern Divide, struck me as a appropriate to the subject:
The dominant discourse about the future of our society is composed of the vocables of prognoses, projections, extrapolations, scenarios, models, programs, stimulations, and incentives. It is as though we had taken ourselves out of reality and had left only objectified and disavowed versions of ourselves in the universe we are trying to understand and shape.
For many confessional Lutherans here in the US, something like this contemporary gnosticism dominates our thinking about Christian practice. When it comes to all the things that the scriptures say about living, we have a way of addressing ourselves at arms-length, reflecting on our behaviors, desires, passions and afflictions as if they weren’t our own. We read Christ’s words about loving our neighbors, but we clam up when someone wants to talk about actually cultivating love in our daily lives. We pray “create in us a clean heart, O God,” but discussions on holiness or discipline are received uncomfortably. I’m not going to go out of my way to provide evidence on this point, I’ve spent enough time reading Lutheran blogs and talking to Lutherans across the US to know that what I’m identifying is not unusual, and perhaps has even become the norm for some conservative churches (see the comments on the post I referenced in the note above if you’d like to read more on this).
This fracturing of faith from tangible practice (other than the Divine Service) appears to be the consequence of the habit to decontextualize and mechanically divide Law from Gospel, then use the Law only as a sort of pre-game commentary before the Gospel.
When practicing these habits, we read scripture and listen to sermons with scalpels in hand. One friend of mine, a lifelong LCMS member studying to serve in the church, explained how a particular pastor was his favorite because every phrase from that pastor’s mouth could be divided into equal portions Law and Gospel. Pastors who diverged from this formula, in my friends view, were out of line with the Confessions. I couldn’t help but wonder of Christ would pass my friend’s test.
This Law/Gospel slice-and-dice–and the way use of its associated language has become a litmus test for Lutheran orthodoxy–can be absolutely debilitating to a vibrant congregational life. The consequence is unintended, to be sure: Our desire to properly distinguish Law from Gospel is appropriate. We are cautious , lest we upend justification. Throughout mainline and modern evangelical churches, we’ve seen a misapplication of the Law kill vulnerable spirits and turn Christ into an afterthought. But rather than helpfully correct the missteps of other churches with a more nuanced and truthful articulation, we’ve tended to dodge the conversation entirely.
What we need to recover is a proper conception of Christian identity. A discourse on spiritual formation with its starting point in our identity in Christ has an entirely opposite trajectory to the failed project plans and task lists of the withering megachurch. Our identity cannot be documented in a Gantt chart: Though identity is wholly who I am, I cannot create it, build it, trade it, or buy it. It has been given to me.
The approach I want to illuminate is found again and again in Paul’s letters. Paul’s response in Romans 6 to the antinomian question “Since we’re saved, can’t we just keep in sinning,” isn’t to drag out the a set of rules or collection of self-improvement handbooks. No, Paul starts talking about baptism:
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
That last paragraph is no attempt to sneak the Law in through the Gospel’s back door, but a pronouncement of absolute freedom–freedom founded in our new selves in Christ. “So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” Christ’s work in baptism has fundamentally altered us. We have been struck down and raised up in Christ. This is not just new life someday, this is new life now. Some days, it doesn’t feel much different. But Jesus says it is, and he doesn’t lie.
There is no warning here, no curse, no hidden agenda. Paul does not follow his “Let not…” with an “Or else…”, the only concern he has is implied by the letter’s existence: He wants to make sure the readers believe it.
Our membership in Christ is not a depersonalized principle but a fundamental, tangible truth. Just as I am a member of my earthly family–proved all the way down to my DNA, tangible in every cell and follicle–so I also am a member of Christ. This is intensely personal and present.
In Ephesians, Paul’s language is even richer:
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
and:
For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.
The Gospel, for Paul, is a fantastic expanse: A new world bursting forth from Christ and consuming us absolutely. By grace, through faith, we are swallowed up into God’s holy plan. What we so often sum up in the word “saved” is rich new humanity coming into full bloom in our own frail and afflicted bodies, in our own meager lives. Again, his concentration is on identity. This is not only a message about Christ, but membership in Christ.
The building/growing metaphors strike heads and set off sparks. Christ is cornerstone, and we the structure grow up in Him. And here God dwells. Church in Ephesus, he says, this is who you are.
Breathing deep of this new humanity in the bowels of a Roman prison, Paul then urges:
… walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift.
Notice something: Paul’s exhortation does not tiptoe, waffle, or skate. A poor use of the Law/Gospel hermeneutic may convince you that after all that glorious Gospel news, Paul has just brought out the Law, both barrels blazing (I can almost see a certain contingent of Lutheran seminarians ticking points off of his sermon score card). But for everyone hearing this letter as a whole, Paul decimated the Law miles ago. Taken in context, this is no interruption to the Gospel celebration. The soaring melody has not turned sour. And he has certainly not turned to religious moralizing. He has said, “You are alive in Christ,” and now he says again: “You are alive in Christ.”
There is no warning, no threat, no curse. No matter how much we want to read it this way, Paul is not saying “Welcome to Club Jesus, here is your list of responsibilities.” The passages that follow (“be imitators of God, as beloved children”,”husbands love your wives”,”put on the full armor of God”) are not a rehashing of the rules that Paul so strongly declared abolished at the beginning of the letter. They are reflection on lives hidden in Christ, and Christ hidden in every nook and cranny of those lives, in every sorrow and joy, in every time and place. Lives drenched and drowned in Christ.
It’s worth saying here: These passages could certainly be misused to pound out another Christless religious project, devoid of Gospel entirely. But that is not Paul’s use, and that is never a right use. Paul’s words here are a working out of Christian identity.
The Law and Gospel labels may have their place here, but they cannot be used poorly. Scripture doesn’t exist so we can sit around labeling it, Paul wants us to live inside it.
We can’t retreat to a basement-level reading and trade earth-shattering magnificence for comfortable familiarity. I say basement-level in order to propose an improved model, perhaps only for bettering my own scripture reading, perhaps for something more. I suggest we add another layer to the classic Lutheran movement from Law to Gospel: The movement from death to life.
Law and Gospel are grounding truths, foundational to a right understanding of scripture. But unpacked, they are too familiar and abstract. Death and life are immensely personal, intimate, and tangible. Both pairs of terms are Biblical. The movement of the former pair is called justification, the movement of the latter is called resurrection. Neither movement is ours, both are Christ’s. This two-dimensional model I propose provides firm doctrinal ground in its Law/Gospel component, firm footing when faced with the tides of a withering American consumer-Christianity. Yet Death/Life component gives us room to feed on scripture, breathe God’s truth, and be active in our new humanity. Without some sense of this resurrection life, some pockets have American Lutheranism have created a new brand new command of Law/Gospel score keeping.
The proper distinction of Law and Gospel is not a method for keeping God out of our lives, but for seeing how He has already gotten in. Even the finest doctrine, hermeneutic, or slogan can be misused to avoid vulnerability to the Word. The moment we’ve done so, we’ve turned a blessing to a curse.
Tags: Theology
Sorry for the lack of recent posts. Work has heated up, and I’ve less time to work on writing. Still, I hope to post some things in the next few days.
Thanks for your patience.
With images like these, you know it’s a great blog.
In no particular order, these are the records I most enjoyed listening to this year. Most are from 2007, others are older.
- Blue Bell Knoll/Cocteau Twins… Without a single discernable lyric, Carolyn’s Fingers warm the soul that wanders another brown dead Ohio winter.
- This Place/Ellie LaVeer… smelling the new CD that we’d all waited for so long to hear, putting it in the tray, and being happy from end to end.
- Transient Warehouse of Damaged Goods/Jonathan Penn… Dead Flowers on the highway, night driving.
- Children Running Through/Patty Griffin… Heavenly Day ushered in spring with the voice of an old friend.
- In Rainbows/Radiohead… waiting until release day, listening end to end, satisfied.
- Boxer/The National… the crescendo of Slow Show, waiting on the platform for the train in Barcelona, feeling with every fiber a citizen of Berninger’s fake empire.
- Sky Blue Sky/Wilco… south to West Virginia, bright sky, absolutely no work in sight.
- The Cost/The Frames… Irish rock and the swell of sound from downtown Cairo at 1am, knowing I would be home soon.
- Fox Confessor Brings the Flood/Neko Case… route 340 from Front Royal, stepping into my dead grandmother’s house for maybe the last time, and knowing the places we call home can never completely be home.
Others well worth the hearing:
- We Walked in Song/Innocence Mission
- Armchair Apocrypha/Andrew Bird
- We All Belong/Dr. Dog
- All Hour Cymbals/Yeasayer
- The Swell Season/Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova
- self-titled/The Cake Sale
- A Year in the Wilderness/John Doe
- The Stage Names/Okkervil River
- The Trumpet Child/Over the Rhine
- Challengers/The New Pornographers
Post your own in the comments.
This is a pretty accurate demonstration of what it’s like to be awakened by Elise.
Over at the American Scene, Alan Jacobs posted his thoughts on how the internet might be changing the way we read:
I don’t think that the internet makes reading skills worse — in fact, as Crain reports, there are studies indicating a positive correlation between internet use and academic performance — but I think the internet does help us to understand just how poorly many people read. The key, I think, is that when we’re surfing the web we are in such close proximity to the tools of writing.
He continues:
I can only speak personally and anecdotally here, but it’s continually surprising to me how often people commenting on online articles or blog posts respond to something the author never said — in some cases never even came close to saying. People gather an impression from their reading, and then formulate a response based on that impression — but how often do they pause to test that impression, to re-read to discover whether the impression was right?
Speaking from my own experience, I’m certain the internet has made me a poorer reader.
The problem for me is not the proximity of tools for writing, as Jacobs suggests, but actually the foundational element of the web itself: the hyperlink. The basic way the web ties content together fundamentally interrupts content’s stream, and interrupts our concentration.
Look at it this way: Every hyperlink is a doorway, prompting readers to make a decision. Do we click, and see what lies beyond, forgetting what’s immediately at hand, or do we stay and finish what we started? Just when the imagination is whirring up, focusing in and blocking out distraction, the hyperlink offers a rabbit trail only a click away.
Just try reading this sentence and staying focused. The highlighted and underlined link has become a form of punctuation itself, but rather than giving further meaning to the current text, it can only become meaningful if the reader shifts attention to something else. Bolding or underlining letterforms used to provide emphasis or forcefulness to the meaning of a word in its larger context of the sentence or paragraph. But on the web, these symbols actually weaken the word and its surrounding context. The hyperlink fractures reading.
When I worked in the newspaper business, there was (and still is) a huge push to make papers more competitive with the web in their presentation and style. This meant shortening stories, printing bigger photos, moving a lot of news from traditional story presentations to punchier, bullet-point forms, shrinking page sizes, etc. (for a good example, see the Chicago Redeye). The papers assumed that the web (along with television) destroyed our ability to concentrate. Unfortunately, making this assumption means that newspapers are giving up the things that make them unique in the ranks of modern media: the long, engrossing story and the possibility of an uninterrupted read.
UPDATE: I realized I forgot to link to Alan Jacobs’ original piece. Error corrected!
This may be the greatest game ever made. 
Ah, Christmas dramas. I’d almost forgotten they existed, until I heard about Willow Creek’s 2007 production: Imagine Christmas.
From a quick search on the internet, I can tell you one thing: You’ve never seen anything like this. And somehow you’ve seen everything like this. It’s a smorgasborg of modern Christmas grandiosity, chock full of American Christmas touchstones familiar to anyone who has ever watched television between Thanksgiving and December 25. Cute kids in snow hats quote Linus’ best lines of scripture from the Charlie Brown special. The stage is bathed in a wintry blue and covered in swirling snowflakes. Attempts to hint at the current market for C.S. Lewis fantasy material are thrown in: Shots of a Big Ben-ish clock tower tolling Christmas morning, and scriptures projected on-screen in a typeface that matches the one used in the recent film version of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Dancers descend from the ceiling on ropes of billowing cloth a la Cirque de Soleil, angels trade pithy remarks, and dance teams backflip across the stage. Those looking for something more traditionally small-church American get a Gospel number of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” And then there’s that guy playing Trans-Siberian Orchestra-style violin backed by squealing electric guitars. This is not your local church’s Christmas drama, but it probably takes a stab at representing it.
Actually, maybe it is your local church’s Christmas drama. The Willow Creek Association’s website–which sells Willow’s ministry materials to other churches–lists Imagine Christmas and its associated promotion DVD as the third and fourth top-selling items in their store (see here). And a quick search on Youtube shows a bunch of our brothers and sisters in Christ are spending a lot of time trying to pull this thing off.
Church leaders are encouraged to purchase and produce Willow’s production, though the advice on method varies from “complete rip-off” to “do your own thing.” On this page, Willow declares that “Your Biggest Programming Decision of the Year Just Got Easier.” The package contains “everything your church needs to create an imaginative and highly-visual program or outreach event for the upcoming Christmas season,” and the site suggests that you may just want to “show it entirely on video.” On the same page, however, they encourage church leaders to “make a Christmas program that’s uniquely yours.” Willow leaders interviewed for the promotional trailer admonish purchasers to do something that fits the particulars of their community (and the size of their stage).
(As an aside, I have to chuckle at the thought of my own church performing Imagine: The altar guild ladies being lowered from the ceiling amid carol swells played by the hand-bell choir, the elderly couple with the hearing aids cringing to the wail of the guitar…)
The psychology behind the entire production is a plain example of consumer-driven church thinking. Bill Kinnon’s excellent post on Imagine quotes from the Chicago Tribune, which interviewed Willow’s PR rep, Susan Delay:
“In today’s world, the church must compete with movies and even restaurants for audiences. Everybody wants to be entertained. People who might not go to church might come to see a Christmas pageant, and if we can share Christ through this, then yeah!”
(I’ll leave any comments on church PR reps who end sentences in “then yeah!” for another time.)
I sound like a broken record for saying so, but the real shame here is that Willow Creek has assumed that the decline of American Christianity is a problem of attention span; that the solution is upping the ante with spectacles comparable or even larger than those the secular world offers. But this approach accepts without criticism the entire framework of marketing and American consumerism; that what we desire should be our foremost concern, that what we do with our time should satisfy our desires, and that we ought not feel guilty for any of it. Of course in all of this Willow is making an effort to communicate Gospel of Christ, but more now than ever before the medium is the message. What are the implications of communicating the Gospel in a way that is so much like the world’s anti-Gospel?
Please understand that my goal here is not to point out how so-and-so has done it better, or somehow say that Willow Creek is something other than part of the church. Certainly, the Holy Spirit uses even Imagine Christmas to give life. In the post I linked to above, Kinnon helpfully responded to a reader offended by his post, and it’s worth echoing the following:
I’m not sure who has said Willow is “bad for everyone.” The critique is primarily of the Consumer Church and how Willow is very much a part of that “style.”
It is pure pragmatism to suggest that because you became a Christian at Willow’s Imagine, and three family members prayed the prayer, that the spectacle of Imagine is beyond sincere criticism.
I became a Christian twenty-five years ago after watching a two person, one-act play based on Revelation 3:20. Someone I know became a Christian listening to Jesus Christ Superstar. On Christmas Eve, whilst we attended service in an Anglican Cathedral, my eldest son told me of a friend of his who became a Christian simply visiting such a place. In each situation, our Father drew us to himself. There are millions of stories of Christians coming to Christ in the oddest of ways. Because He worked in those situations does not mean that they are somehow anointed. (I listened to Jesus Christ Superstar hundreds of times as a teenager with little or no impact on my spiritual life.)
And as one commenter followed up:
Can we discuss the methods without invalidating the genuine things that God has done?
After all, this side of the resurrection, the church should be absolutely concerned about message and medium. God has promised to rescue his people, and I have no doubt he will do so even if Willow Creek merges with Starbucks, Joel Osteen becomes the next pope, and McDonald’s starts including N.T. Wright action figures in their Happy Meals. But the church is called to be a foretaste of a soon-coming kingdom, not of this world. Let’s spend some serious time talking, thinking, and praying about what recipe gives His people the truest flavor; all the fragrance, nuance and intensity of the supper of the marriage feast of the Lamb.
N.T. Wright gives this simple explanation of Christ as the foundation of the priesthood of all believers in a sermon on Hebrews:
God chose the human race to be the priests of all creation, offering up creation’s worship to him and bringing his wise order to it. When humans sinned, God chose the nation of Israel to be the priests of the human race, offering up human praise and putting into operation God’s solution to the problem of sin. Israel herself, however, was sinful; God chose a family of priests (the sons of Aaron) to be priests to the nation of priests. The priests themselves failed in their task; God sent his own Son to be both priest and sacrifice. The inverted pyramid of priesthood gets narrower and narrower until it reaches one point, and the point is Jesus on the cross. The sacrifice of Jesus is the moment when the human race, in the person of a single man, offers itself fully to the creator.
- From his book, Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship
Travis Prinzi gets it right. This is exactly what I was trying to get at in my last post.
Michael at the BHT recently linked to this post, which discusses John Piper’s critique of N.T. Wright’s definition of righteousness. Wright has long held that righteousness is best understood as God’s covenant faithfulness; the covenant being God’s promise to deal with sin finally and set the world right. Piper, on the other hand, calls Wright’s approach reductionistic, and has this to say in response (from his book, The Future of Justification):
“The essence of the righteousness of God is his unwavering faithfulness to uphold the glory of his name. And human righteousness is the same: the unwavering faithfulness to uphold the glory of God. (64)”
Piper’s statement is typical for his brand of thoroughly reformed theology, which sees God’s glory and sovereignty as the fundamental principal from which all time and history springs. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking often leaves Christ in the role of gatekeeper to God’s glory. In this model, the person and work of Christ is important because He allows us to get in line with God’s glory. God’s glory has become this disembodied thing, an other-worldly standard which must be maintained.
A better reading of scripture, in my mind, is to start with Christ first, then re-imagine ideas like glory and righteousness through Him. Re-read Piper’s statement on righteousness through the fulcrum point of the cross, he ends up a lot closer to Wright. It goes something like this:
- The essence of God’s righteousness is his unwavering faithfulness to uphold the glory of His name.
- He accomplishes this only through the cross and resurrection.
- Throughout the New Testament, the cross and resurrection are explicitly for the life of the world.
- Therefore, God’s righteousness is his unwavering faithfulness to uphold (and resurrect!) the life of the world.
- … and in Wright’s book, that’s pretty much the covenant.
Piper’s approach goes awry when it begins considering God’s glory as an object somehow separate from the communion of the Trinity. We’re headed for trouble any time we try to divorce an attribute of God from the person of Christ.
Jesus is speaking with the Pharisees. He has just healed a man on the Sabbath, and when questioned, identified Himself as God’s Son, completely justified in his work. It’s blasphemy to their ears. After an explanation of the source of his authority, Jesus tells them they can search the Scriptures all they like, but He is the one who gives life. He closes His response with this:
Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words? – (John 5)
This passage is foundational to a right understanding of Scripture, and particularly to a right understanding of the Law: A failure to believe in Christ is a failure to believe in the Law. And likewise, failure to believe in the Law is a failure to believe in Christ.
John the Baptist reviles the Pharisees with a similar remark:
You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. “I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. – (Matthew 3)
I sat up straight in the pew this past Sunday when, after reading this scripture aloud, our pastor closed the reading with the standard declaration, “This is the Gospel of the Lord.” Somehow I’d fallen into a stupor. I’d forgot that the Gospel has edges this jagged. There’s an identifiable line of thought which says something along the lines of “We have Luther as our father…” Fruit in keeping with repentance? Winnowing fork? Baptism in the Holy Spirit and fire?
Christ-centered theology cannot be weak on the Law; to weaken the Law is to weaken Christ. If we are to put the cross and resurrection at the fulcrum point of our theological framework, we cannot forget why it had to be the cross, why it had to be blood, why it had to be the Son of God Himself.
… Listening to this fantastic Neko Case concert on NPR’s new music site. You’ll be glad for it.
I’ve continued to kick around the ideas I put down in this post about the use of the phrase “spiritual journey,” and the journey metaphor as a way of understanding our lives as people of faith: It seems to me that the idea of a journey isn’t really a bad one–there’s enough mention in scripture of similar terms–but it’s the idea of my spiritual journey that really messes things up. God is certainly taking us somewhere–as he took the Israelites out of bondage, etc.–but it’s us, not me.
Spiritual growth (sanctification) is never an independent project. All of scripture’s sanctification language is inclusive, rather than exclusive: People of God, the church as body of Christ, the vine/branches metaphor, the list goes on.
Scripture’s sanctification language is also relational. This is fitting for a religion that worships a God-in-three-Persons; God-in-Communion. The Church is called the bride of Christ, we are called sons and daughters of God. Indeed, we cannot come to know Christ apart from the work of the Church, and knowing Christ means union with Christ.
Lutherans talk about the church as the “priesthood of all believers”. As Dr. Wollenburg has written:
Individual members of the priesthood receive their identity when the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is put upon them. The nature and character of the royal priesthood is that of a community or society. The identity of each member of the priesthood is determined by his or her relationship to the community in which God lives with his Spirit (Eph. 2:22). In contrast to idolatrous baalism, paganism, animistic religions, and gnosticism, both ancient and modern, no one can know or belong to God as an isolated individual. The worship of the community of the priesthood is not a crowd of individuals coming together, each to have his own religious experience.
In this light, the language of “personal spiritual growth plans” to help on “your spiritual journey,” is really counter-Christian, regardless of the appeal to a culture defined by its icons of segmentation. If I want my family to participate in music together, I give them all instruments, not iPods.
Our sanctification is in communion with Christ and His Church. This doesn’t mean that individuals can’t each be at different places in a life of sanctification. Quite the opposite–the diversity-within-unity of the church is what makes it a community, and the blood of Christ for all is what makes it His bride and body.
In the comments to this recent post, Mike made some great remarks (emphasis mine):
For American Evangelicals, it seems that the journey metaphor is dominant, though not in as much in the sense of an ascent. I don’t know how to articulate this entirely, but it seems as if there is a sense in which people expect “growth” and “sanctification” to include, perhaps not secret knowledge, but maybe, secret feelings or secret insight. People expect change in their spiritual lives. Granted that change is inevitable, but I’m wondering if this has anything to do with the willingness of people to follow fads and change church bodies so readily.
I know exactly what Mike means about “secret feelings or secret insight.” In a lot of ways, throughout my teen years in nondenominational megachurches, this is what it meant for me to be faithful. It was very important that I always be learning something new–without those flashes of light, I felt like I was losing all vitality as a Christian.
I’m glad I don’t see things this way any longer. Learning new stuff is certainly not a bad thing. But keeping a list of our theological insights as a barometer for the work of the Holy Spirit just doesn’t work. In fact, scripture emphasizes time and again that we ought to be fools for Christ. I don’t know all that phrase entails, but I can bet it’s not code for “becoming more insightful.”
While writing my last post, one phrase used over and over by Hybels and Hawkins has been sticking in my brain: “spiritual journey.” There’s nothing uniquely Willow Creek about this term, it’s pretty much everywhere you look when it comes to American spirituality. Christian or otherwise, everyone’s talking about their spiritual journey; it’s as much a New Age term as anything else.
So, some rambling thoughts on the phrase: Is this a term Christians should be using? Does “spiritual journey” really capture the Christian hope in the resurrection of the body, the restoration of earth and heaven, the union with the Christ and all saints? The journey underscored by Christ and the disciples isn’t some sort of traversal of higher planes of Christian understanding, but a move from life to death to new life. And I mean physically, too.
To my ears, these words have lost a lot of their saltiness. In the context of the video clips Willow Creek leadership summit, they somehow sounded more gnostic and narcissistic than Christian.
Eugene Peterson has done a lot of work in his writing to recover this phrase, and really to recover the word “spirituality” in general. I highly recommend his books “Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places,” “Eat This Book,” and “The Jesus Way” on the subject.
Peterson’s primary thrust is that you can’t go talking about spirituality without talking about a Christianity that’s lived. Not lived in the sense of a life that follows some sort of principles for success, but a Christianity that’s lived in places, conversations, meals, lived while driving the minivan, walking the dog, tending to your sick children, getting up and going to work and coming back and lying down again. That’s not to say the Christian spiritual journey is the “same old” life. No, but it’s life where the journey happens, life shaped by the cross.
Maybe it’s worth saying that the Christian spiritual journey has more to do with waiting than escaping. The Apostle Paul’s image of the long and painful footrace of perseverance is also a good one, if you can put yourself in the mind of the runner trudging along mile after mile, and not the spectator tuning in only to catch him crossing the finish line.
I’m still digesting what I’ve read and watched about Willow Creek’s latest project: Reveal. To really understand what this is about, you really have to go watch this video presented by Greg Hawkins, the executive pastor at the church.
The basic premise Hawkins lays out is as follows: Megachurches like Willow have defined themselves with the following method:
- Churches exist to make disciples of Christ. Hawkins describes a disciple of Christ as someone who has “increasing love for Christ, and increasing love for others.” (Jesus used a similar formula when asked to sum up the Law…)
- Churches make these disciples by creating stuff for people to get involved in: Service projects, small groups, worship services, bible studies, etc. After the initial step of belief, involvement in these programs turns people from new believers into disciples.
- Taking these first two points, you can then make the case that a church’s success is going to be determined by the congregation’s head-count. The more people are involved in more programs, the more disciples are produced.
But Willow’s recent research indicates that things don’t actually work out this way. Instead, those who consider themselves most devoted to Christ are those also getting the least out of the programs and activities provided by the church. In fact, in Willow’s own surveys, they found that people self-described as “fully devoted followers of Christ” were the most likely to be thinking about leaving the church. Individuals who had gotten past the initial rush of exploring and diving into faith were progressively less and less interested in all the “stuff” that had brought them into Willow Creek in the first place.
In this video, Willow founder Bill Hybels talks about the new direction the church is going as a result of these findings. He offers the opportunity for other churches to run the same survey, gather the same data, and join along on Willow’s course. Maybe I’m missing something, but the new direction Hybels lays out doesn’t look that different from the old.
Hybels talks about how his team is going to begin providing “customized personal spiritual growth plans,” explaining “You go to a health club, and you get a personal trainer who tells you how can do physical conditioning in the way you need it. Well, we need to provide customized personal spiritual growth plans to people at Willow to get them to become self-feeders.” Hybels goes on to say, “We’re gonna up the level of responsibility we put on the people themselves so that they can grown, even if the church doesn’t meet all their needs.”
To be blunt, this whole thing is pretty gut wrenching. All the standard megachurch criticisms can be made–that the whole thing is boardroom-slick and marketing-savvy–but what particularly gets me is how it leaves no room for the Holy Spirit to just do His work. Would C.S. Lewis’ growth plan have read “marry a divorced woman with a terminal illness”? Bonhoeffer’s, something like “join a secret organization dedicated to rescuing Jews and speak out against Nazi power.” Lazurus’ would be short and sweet: “Die. Trust us.”
Even while watching the videos, I was holding out hope. I kept expecting a record-scratch sound effect to interrupt. An old woman to start pounding out “The Church’s One Foundation” on a creaky upright. Someone to open up a Bible. Anything that might snap the whole thing back to something close to orthodoxy. I guess I was just expecting to see the cross.
These guys just rock.
And, no; despite the title, this post has absolutely nothing to do with Lutheran heritage.
I’ve been streaming this fantastic record. Glen Hansard, Lisa Hannigan (formerly of Damien Rice’s band), Josh Ritter, and more singing mid-tempo rock. Maybe too mellow for some, but I’m Irish; this sort of stuff is in my blood.
Give it a listen here.
And I, too, went on my way, the winning and losing, or what
Is sometimes of all things the worst, the not knowing
One thing from the other, nor knowing
How the teeth in Time’s jaw all snag backward
And whatever enters therein
Has less hope of remission than shark-meat
- passage from the poem American Portrait: Old Style, by Robert Penn Warren
This exchange between Jesus and Nathanael at the end of John 1 sticks out to me:
The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him and said of him, “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!” Nathanael said to him, “How do you know me?” Jesus answered him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” Nathanael answered him, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” Jesus answered him, “Because I said to you, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe? You will see greater things than these.” And he said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”
Nathaneal’s response to Christ reveals a way of thinking completely unlike our own. He goes along with his brother to meet Jesus, skeptical, expecting to be disappointed. Jesus catches him off guard with a sarcastic comment–he could probably see Nathaneal’s furrowed brown a mile off. Nathanael asks (maybe defensively?) “How do you know me?” and Jesus fires back a bit of Nathaneal’s personal info, revealing that he knows more than Nathanael ever expected.
Here’s where Nathaneal responds as only a monotheist could: He immediately calls Jesus the Son of God, the King of Israel. He’s ready to worship Him on the spot. He has no doubt that a man with this kind of power must be from God. He doesn’t call Jesus a psychic, and he doesn’t double-check Jesus’ Jewishness. He believes, then and there, that this man is God.
For Nathanael, it seems, real power must come from God. There’s just no other source.
The numbers prove it can work. Radiohead has permanently changed the way people will get music in the future:
Radiohead, which offered its latest album as free downloads last week, has seen 1.2 million downloads of “In Rainbows.” With no label, no promotions, and direct access to fans, Radiohead gave up its music for free and asked for donations, whatever fans deemed reasonable, in return. What the band got was an average of $8 per album sold, bringing estimates of profit to about $10 million. Not too shabby for one week. The number of albums sold in the past week exceeded the launch week sales of its three previous albums combined.
Full story here.
One of my favorite musicians, Andrew Peterson, has just launched a new site that looks pretty exciting. From his opening entry:
I believe strongly in the value of the artists in this world. I believe that when someone who was made to strive to create beauty in the world is, as Brennan Manning said, “ambushed by Jesus,” the art that results bears a God-given power that draws men to Christ. I have encountered that power in the sub-creations of Christ-followers countless times. (I’ve also encountered it in the works of those who haven’t yet succumbed to the source of their gifting.) Those works of art have helped me to better understand the Bible and its author, they have given me the tools with which to worship, to serve, to revel in the greatness of the Maker.
It looks like it will become a great place to discuss books, music, and art of all kinds. Join in on the C.S. Lewis-inspired fun at The Rabbit Room.
I picked up John Doe’s record, A Year in the Wilderness, on a whim last month. After a few listens, I’ve resolved to be more whimsical. Doe, former member of 70s LA punk outfit X, belts out some pretty gritty songs, perfectly penned. I really like Golden State, available for listening below. Share your take in the comments.
[audio:The_Golden_State.mp3]
Crunchy Canadians call their generation to come home:
Wallace would agree:
Now, it is just here that true poetic civilization differs from that paltry and mechanical civilization that holds us all in bondage. Bad customs are universal and rigid, like modern militarism. Good customs are universal and varied, like native chivalry and self-defence. Both the good and the bad civilization cover us as with a canopy, and protect us from all that is outside. But a good civilization spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilization stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella – artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform. So it is with the contrast between the substances that vary and the substances that are the same wherever they penetrate. By a wise doom of heaven men were commanded to eat cheese, but not the same cheese.
Make certain to read the entire thing.
I’ve been through a kind of inspirational winter. Where I once saw greenery and new life and felt light breaking open inside of me, there was for a long while an expanse of ice and snow. Things die in the winter. They curl up and decay and molder and traces of themselves and traces of other things all coalesce until there is only dark earth.
That happens with the imagination, too. Passion, hope, fierceness of belief grow brown-edged, curl inward and crumble.
But “there lives the dearest fresness deep down things.”* The dying and dead things are a humus of memory. And somewhere there is life. Breathing silent, pushing slowly upward.
One more reason to loof forward to the resurrection of the dead, the life of the world to come: The complete renewal and redefinition of work. Man’s curse becomes pure pleasure, great glory to God.
The New York Times reports:
After weeks of insisting that food here is largely safe, regulators in China said Tuesday that they had recently closed 180 food plants and that inspectors had uncovered more than 23,000 food safety violations.
The story continues:
Regulators said 33,000 law enforcement officials combed the nation and turned up illegal food making dens, counterfeit bottled water, fake soy sauce, banned food additives and illegal meat processing plants.
“These are not isolated cases,” Han Yi, director of the administration’s quality control and inspection department told the state-run media.
China Daily, the nation’s English language newspaper, said industrial chemicals, including dyes, mineral oils, paraffin wax, formaldehyde and malachite green, had been found in everything from candy, pickles and biscuits to seafood.
Hungry?
In the battle between solidarity and dislocation, conservatives should naturally be on the side of the former, and it should be conservatives who benefit from the public’s interest in “strong community” and even, yes, “a sense of togetherness.” (For some reason, the latter sounds much less ridiculous when you call it solidarity.) Conservatism’s “failure” has been that conservatives have defined themselves or allowed themselves to be defined as individualists and advocates for the interests of the self.
- From Eunomia, Good New for Conservatives
The more Peter Leithart writes, the more he sounds like a Lutheran. And then he doesn’t. Either way, I can’t get enough of it. The vigor of us confessional Lutherans occasionally has the unfortunate side effect of making everything we tell you about doctrine sound like we’re holding a rod above your heads of all our fellow Christians. Or an axe.
But Leithart. He has the tone of someone who’s diving into scripture feet first. And acknowledging that it’s really, really messy. Scripture’s darker passages, winding stories, and odd comments just don’t wrap up nicely–it’s encouraging to hear someone admit that. And admit that without immediately claiming to have figured it out.
And this isn’t to say that Leithart’s opponents and critics aren’t diving into the pool just as deeply. Plenty of them are, and that’s why they’ve been so impassioned in their critique. As painful as this can be, it is the way of the church. What else do we mean when each Sunday we confess “one holy, catholic, and apostolic church?”
One church from Peter and Paul all the way up until the 34th PCA General Assembly 2007. One church that has trouble building consensus, trouble talking, trouble being polite, trouble even getting an informal show of hands. There’s a reason Jesus didn’t run for election. Jesus is not a member of your congregation. You are a member of His. And although it might surprise some to hear an LCMS Lutheran say it, when we each come to eat and drink, we’re not served with our own personal Jesus, a la (depeche) mod. “Given and shed for you” was not the precedent for “Have it your way.”
Scripture has this way of knocking the wind out of you, kicking your doors clean off their hinges, and sticking around in your craw long after you’ve asked it to take a hike. And just wait until it starts rifling through your desk drawers. Leithart sounds like a guy who’s watching Scripture rearrange his furniture. And knock a hole in the living room wall with the sofa. For the sake of the church. I like that.
I just finished a first listen of Andrew Osenga’s 6-song EP, Letters to the Editor, Vol.1. I don’t think anything’s made me so happy in a while.
Osenga has been one of my favorite songwriters since his old band the Normals put out their first record, Better Than This. Something about that record caught me–I think it was the song “Apron Full of Stains,” and all the stuff that went along with being a confused, Christian teenager–and by the time the band released Coming to Life I was hooked.
Some of my most heartfelt memories are tied to his music. Driving home a van full of sleeping strangers south across Ohio cornfields after a fantastic Normals show in Toledo. Ending my relationship with my first serious girlfriend in the dead of winter and feeling all my own sadness and heartache echo back to me in songs like “Coming to Life.” Listening to “Romeo on the Radio” with Devona, a long time before she was ever my wife. Arguing with Andy that the production on “Black Dress”–well, yeah it’s noisy, but it makes sense.
It’s been years since The Normals split up, but Osenga has kept making excellent records. This latest EP is something competely different. From his blog, where the seed germinated:
Here’s what I’m thinking: I’m going to write and record the songs, that’s my part. What I would love for you guys to do is to inspire me. Send me ideas for songs, whether they’re stories you’ve heard, a word you think sounds cool, an idea you’ve wished somebody had written about. Send me paintings or drawings you’ve made, a photo you took that you can’t stop looking at, whatever you think could inspire a song. I’m going to make my goal for this project to base every song off something from you guys.
The 6-song result is a fine listen. I especially liked “Wanted” and “Swing Wide the Glimmering Gates,” which bookend the collection.
Many are saying that we should expect more artists following Osenga’s approach. Others artists are being similarly inventive. Podington Bear releases three new songs each week. Paleo crossed the nation, recording a song every day for a year, and posting them all on his website.
Andrew takes things a step further, providing instructions on his blog allowing fans to record their own background vocals (or Webground vocals, as he calls them). The chorus of fans ring out the final notes of “Gates”.
These are exciting ideas, and the music is exciting stuff. Give it a listen.
Since the PCA has recently knocked them around a bit, maybe Leithart and the rest of the Federal Vision crowd can just become Lutherans. They like baptism well enough.
I’m not encouraging anyone to ditch their confession. I just find myself nodding along with much of what Leithart and others have to say. Far more than many of the products of my own denomination, the Federal Vision discussion constantly reminds me what is so refreshing about being (in John H’s terms) an Augsburg Evangelical.
The more than 100-year-old roots of Eldridge’s mega-popular book, Wild at Heart:
Eliot was justifying the inclusion of athletics in college education as a way of making education appealing to boys who would rather be fly-fishing than studying. That same justification was at the root of a nearly contemporaneous movement within British and American Christianity, the movement most commonly known by the name assigned by English novelist Charles Kingsley: “muscular Christianity.”
What do you think of the new theme? Let us know!
The first half hour of this episode of Issue Etc. is excellent. I’m looking forward to reading Wright’s book.
It’s especially good to hear Todd Wilken engaging with Wright’s material. Up until this point, I’d found few in the LCMS who were actually willing to give any consideration to Wright’s work.
This must be absolutely clear: The Gospel is not abstract, it is not a method, it is not a timeless principal. The Gospel is not a philosophy. Read the rest of this entry »
These have been recently on my mind. Both are by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
God’s Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And, for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastwards, springs–
Because the Holy Ghost over bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
“As kingfishers catch fire”
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves–goes its self; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is–
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
I devote my rare and free moments to a work that is close to my heart and devoted to the metaphysical sense and mystery of the person. It seems to me that the debate today is being played out on that level. The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed a pulverization of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person. This evil is even more of the metaphysical order than of the moral order. To this disintegration planned at times by atheistic ideologies we must propose, rather than sterile polemics, a kind of “recapitulation” of the inviolable mystery of the person.
- John Paul the Great, 1968
This last month, fond readers had to say goodbye to one of the finest sites the web has seen, The New Pantagruel. The parting lines of editors Dan Knauss and Caleb Stegall have been ringing in my ears ever since I read them:
Ours can largely be summed up as a localist, decentralist, anarcho-Christian and authentically conservative approach to politics and culture. As we have written previously, we believe that to suffer one’s place and one’s people in the particularity of its and their needs is the only true basis for finding love, friendship, and an authentic, meaningful life. This is nothing less than the key to the pursuit of Christian holiness, which is the whole of the Christian adventure: to live in love with the frailty and limits of one’s existence, suffering the places, customs, rites, joys, and sorrows of the people who are in close relation to you by family, friendship, and community–all in service of the truth, goodness, and beauty that is best experienced directly. The discipline of place teaches that it is more than enough to care skillfully and lovingly for one’s own little circle, and this is the model for the good life, not the limitless jurisdiction of the ego, granted by a doctrine of choice, that is ever seeking its own fulfillment, pleasure, and satiation.
What the Pantagruelists really got–and so many others miss–is vocation. Too often we use the word in only its most narrow sense, usually referring to our specific professions, our “day jobs.” But that hardly captures the depth of the idea that God has called each of us to our varied and particular times and places. Our surroundings, with all their mundane tribulations and seemingly meaningless tasks, are no accident.
It’s been a very long time. Welcome to the new site.
As most anyone reading this knows, my wife and I have been running Love & Blunder over at Blogger for quite a while. If you know that much, you also know that it had been a while since I’d posted much of anything on the ol’ blog; something I regret.
Hence, the website you’re looking at now. This is the new Love & Blunder. I’ve had a longing to get back into blogging–though my motives may be a bit different than they were just over two years ago when I began–and starting a new site was just what I needed to get me excited about the prospect of writing again.
We’ll probably keep the Blogger site around for a while. Neither of us want to abandon it, and Devona thinks she’ll still post over there every now and then. But look forward to seeing lots more of us over here.
Let me know what you think of the new design, too. I think I’m happy with it, but I’m still deciding. Comments are much appreciated.
Talk to you all soon.
Recent Comments