Tag: Christianity

The Prosperity Gospel

~ Vincent

In worship, I’ve been preaching through John 6. In overview, Jesus makes bread for hungry people, the people get excited, the people chase Jesus down for more miracle bread, Jesus says he’s the bread of life and all they really need, and finally people get disappointed and leave. Here’s a crowd of people that legitimately witness a miracle, but instead of bowing down before Jesus, they want to put him to work. They don’t really want the bread of life; they want a life of bread.

Naturally, I started thinking about people that have that sense of religiosity today. There are plenty of popular speakers who claim that God wants to lead you to a life of bread. The prosperity gospel preachers are the most obvious example. I didn’t want to misrepresent them when talking about them, so I started digging through some of the their writings to get a sense for the kinds of things they say and believe. Let me tell you, it was a wild ride. Not only was it broadly ickier than I expected (you’ll see), but there were a lot of little dots I got the chance to connect.

Prosperity gospel preachers are overwhelmingly nondenominational. They’re also well represented by people of every race. Neither of these first two items surprised me. I can’t imagine most of these pastors being open to denominational oversight, and no race is immune from the temptation of money. What did catch me off guard was the religious background that most of these preachers had. There’s a surprisingly strong tie between prosperity gospel preaching and the Charismatic/Pentecostal tradition. Not every prosperity gospel preacher has a Pentecostal background, but the modern American prosperity gospel did get its start there (Oral Roberts tends to be the usual starting place for religious historians), and it still has really, really strong ties to it today. As a non-Pentecostal/Charismatic looking at their tradition from the outside, the connection seems pretty logical when I think about it. Charismatics often put a really high premium on miracles in a Christian’s life today. It’s not wild to assume that you can get to, “God wants to give me money if I have enough faith,” pretty quickly from there if you go off the rails. Pentecostalism also lacks the clear denominational structures that can prevent obvious false teachings from reaching the pulpit, and it tends to have a really low emphasis on (and even active skepticism about) education. I didn’t expect the connection between those two entities, but it makes good sense.

History aside, I was shocked at how shameless prosperity gospel preachers can be. Legitimately, wholeheartedly, shameless. Here are some quotes that just broke my heart:

  • “Sow a seed on your MasterCard, your Visa or your American Express, and then when you do, expect God to open the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing.” -Oral Roberts (“Success in Life” broadcast on the Trinity Broadcasting Network September 21, 1990)
  • “The best thing you can do for the poor is not become one of them.” -Rev. Ike (“The Gospel According to Rev. Ike,” Ebony Magazine, Dec. 1976)
  • “Don’t wait for the pie in the sky by-and-by when you die. Get yours now with ice cream and a cherry on top!” -Rev. Ike (“The Gospel According to Rev. Ike,” Ebony Magazine, Dec. 1976)
  • “If you’ve got one-dollar faith and you ask for a ten-thousand dollar item, it ain’t going to work.  It won’t work!  Jesus said, ‘according to your [faith,]’ not according to God’s will for you, in His own good time, if it’s according to His will, if He can work it into his busy schedule.  He said, ‘According to your faith, be it unto you.’  Now, I may want a Rolls Royce, and don’t have but bicycle faith.  Guess what I’m going to get?  A bicycle.” -Rev. Frederick Price (Fredrick K. C. Price. “Praise The Lord” broadcast on TBN. 21 Sept. 1990)
  • “God works by faith. You must believe first, and then you’ll receive” -Joel Osteen (Your Best Life Now, p. 33)
  • “You will often receive preferential treatment simply because your Father is the King of kings, and His glory and honor spill over onto you” -Joel Osteen (Your Best Life Now, p.40)
  • “Remember, only what you give can God multiply back. If you give nothing, and even if God were to multiply it, it would still be nothing!” -Oral Roberts (The Miracle of Seed-Faith, p.27)

And my personal favorite, when Oral Roberts told all of his followers that he was going to die unless they sent him eight million dollars. There are a million newspaper articles about it, but that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted something more incriminating. I wanted to read about the incident in his own words. I didn’t have to look far. He literally wrote about it in his own autobiography:

  • “The Lord spoke to me near the end of 1986 and said, ‘I told you to raise $8 million to carry on My medical work. You have from January 1 to March 31 to get it done. If you don’t then your work is finished, and I am going to call you home.'” -Oral Roberts (Expect a Miracle: My Life and Ministry, p.289)

Yikes.

You read quotes like this and can’t help but feel angry. When the anger subsides, you worry about the people that they’re taking advantage of. Sure, some of them might be able to afford a donation here and there to support a charismatic speaker, but what about the people who are desperate? What about the woman who has cancer, trying to juggle her medical bills, sending “Rolls Royce faith” checks in the hope that thing will turn around? What about the poor man with brain damage who sends in any little bit of cash that he can in the hopes that God will miraculously restore him? I believe in miracles and tithing as much as the next pastor, but I’ve known people in these circumstances, and I’ve seen the damage that prosperity gospel preachers can cause. Here is a pack of wolves on the prowl for desperate, down-on-their-luck people. Not everyone has the gift of discernment, and they’re counting on that. It reminded me of another certain historical preacher that assured people that God would give them blessings if they forked over some cash:

You should know that all who confess and in penance put alms into the coffer according to the counsel of the confessor, will obtain complete remission of all their sins…. Why are you then standing there? Run for the salvation of your souls! Be as careful and concerned for the salvation of your souls as you are for your temporal goods, which you seek both day and night…

Don’t you hear the voices of your wailing dead parents and others who say, ‘Have mercy upon me, have mercy upon me, because we are in severe punishment and pain. From this you could redeem us with a small alms and yet you do not want to do so.’ Open your ears as the father says to the son and the mother to the daughter, ‘We have created you, fed you, cared for you, and left you our temporal goods. Why then are you so cruel and harsh that you do not want to save us, though it only takes a little?

-Johann Tetzel , Sermon on Indulgences

Where’s a Martin Luther when you need him?

The History of Power

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on November 20, 2022
Scriptures: 1 Samuel 26:1-12, 1 John 4

I want to read to you the dust jacket of a book I read long ago. The name of the book is King David: A Biography.  It’s written by Stephen McKenzey, a professor of Old Testament over at Rhodes College.

“Through a close and critical reading of biblical texts, ancient history, and recent archeological discoveries, Steven L. McKenzie concludes that David was indeed a real person. This David was not the humble shepherd who slew Goliath and became king, however, but was a usurper, adulterer, and murderer–a Middle Eastern despot of a familiar type. McKenzie shows that the story of humble beginnings is utterly misleading: “shepherd” is a metaphor for “king,” and David came from a wealthy, upper-class background. Similarly, McKenzie reveals how David’s ascent to power, traditionally attributed to popularity and divine blessing, in fact resulted from a campaign of terror and assassination. While instituting a full-blown Middle Eastern monarchy, David was an aggressive leader, a devious politician, and a ruthless war chief. Throughout his scandalous reign, important figures who stood in his way died at convenient times, under questionable circumstances. Even his own sons were not spared. David’s story, writes McKenzie, ‘reads like a modern soap opera, with plenty of sex, violence, and struggles for power.'”

That is a very different story than what is contained in Scripture!  In the Bible, we see King David as someone who is kind, gentle, and devout.  That doesn’t mean he always gets it right. There are some pretty bad stories in there about him too, but the overall vision of David is very different, especially in his ascent to power.  We see a young kind musician that is able to drive away the anger of someone as brutal as King Saul.  McKenzey imagines the opposite.  David is someone who is not at all kind.  He’s horrible!  He’s cruel, he’s vicious, he’s conniving.

How does McKenzey find a David that is the opposite of what the Bible says?  Well, a lot of this particular project comes from taking modern historical trends towards ancient documents and applying them to the Bible.  His first question: cui bono?  Who benefits from what happened in the story of David’s ascent to power?  Well, David did.  His second question: what biases might the author have?  The Biblical account was written by the royal scribes of Israel who worked for David.  The third question he asks is, “Where are they a little too insistent that something is true?”  Because if they had to keep telling people repeatedly that something was the case, maybe it wasn’t.  Maybe it was a lie, and they had to sell that lie with propaganda.  And that’s how McKenzey sees large portions of the Biblical narrative: royal propaganda to make the population think that David’s rise to power wasn’t as violent and brutal as it really was.

For example, in Samuel 24, King Saul is worried that David is more popular than he is and he could usurp the throne if he really wanted to, so Saul tries to kill him and David goes into hiding.  He’s hiding in a cave at one point, and Saul and his men are just outside, searching for him.  And the text says that Saul, “had to cover his feet,” which is a euphemism.  In our time, it might say something like, “Saul had to relieve himself.”  So Saul goes into the cave to relieve himself, and David is hiding right near him in this very vulnerable state, but David is not the kind of person that would murder the king that God put over Israel, so instead, he cuts off a piece of his robe.  When Saul gets back to his army, David comes out and shows him the fragment, essentially saying, “I could have killed you, but I didn’t.  I am not your enemy.”  So Saul gives up and goes home.  But then, Saul gets jealous again almost immediately.  He tries to kill David again, and again David has to go into hiding, and we end up with another story about how David could have killed Saul if he wanted to, but didn’t.  In Samuel 26, Saul and his men set up camp right by David’s new hiding spot.  So David sneaks into Saul’s camp in the dead of night, and, lo and behold, there’s Saul sleeping, his spear right next to his head.  One of David’s men whispers that David could kill him if he wanted to, but again, David is not that kind of man.  He will not kill God’s anointed.  So again, he doesn’t kill Saul.  Two instances where David has a very clear opportunity to take out his enemy; two times where he decided that he wouldn’t do that.  Mackenzie would look at that with suspicion.  Isn’t it convenient that David repeatedly had the opportunity to kill the man that he took the throne from but was just too good to do it?  Don’t trust the propaganda of Israel.  Look for the real story by sifting through their lies.

There’s nothing particularly unique about what McKenzie has done here, and I don’t say that to be dismissive.  By no means.  I only mean to suggest that this sort of reading technique is exceptionally common among modern historians.  It’s not surprising that he applied it to the Bible.  He wasn’t the first, and he won’t be the last.  It’s not any new methodology that makes me hesitate.  It’s the cynicism of that modern methodology.  How cynical is it to imagine that people are so incapable of good that the whole of a story is really just about power?  It’s not about God!  It’s not about being devout!  It’s not about being kind!  That is all nonsense.  No one is really like that.  No, people want to gain power.  That’s what David was really like.  

The last sentence on the dust jacket is particularly telling: “David’s story reads like a modern soap opera with plenty of sex violence and struggles for power.”  I just met with someone last week that was complaining about how hard it is to find a good show on tv today.  Every time a new show comes out, it’s darker and grittier than the last one.  More sex!  More violence!  The popular stories in our world, the stories that we see on tv and read in cheap paperback novels, are the ones we find to be the most comprehensible.  We can imagine people doing things to gain power, sex, and money.  Of course!  That’s what people do.  Stories about people doing things for God?  That’s a little hokey, don’t you think?  It’s unbelievable.  That cynicism bleeds into the stories from the past.  If stories aren’t about power, it’s because someone must have lied to cover up the real story.

This way of reading history isn’t uncommon. It’s not just for authors.  I’m sure you’ve run across it in random places.  I certainly have.  I remember being at a pub once with a friend of a friend.  He asked me if I was Christian.  I said yes.  He then asked whether or not I was Anglican.  I told him no.  He responded, “Good.  That one is so fake it’s ridiculous.  Everyone knows the Anglican Church was made when King Henry VIII wanted a divorce and the Pope wouldn’t give it to him, so he created his own religion to make it ok and now millions of people today believe in it.  Why?  Because they don’t know history.  If they knew their history, they would know how fake all of it is.”  To give some credit to the gentleman, King Henry VIII was the one who started the Anglican church and his interest in getting a divorce was the deciding factor in many ways, but at the same time, the actual historical narrative is a little more complicated than that. When we reduce such a massive story to something so small, we miss a lot of it. 

It was common practice for the Pope to grant divorces to rulers who were looking for an heir and had a spouse that wasn’t able to provide one. Kings need an heir, and if they don’t have one, things get messy.  Mind you, the king was expected to ask the Pope with all due respect to show that he respected the faith and wasn’t being frivolous, but a divorce under those circumstances was considered a reasonable ask.  When King Henry VIII wanted a divorce, his wife was Catherine of Aragon.  She was older than him and had already shown that she had some significant issues when it came to bearing children, so the divorce didn’t seem all that wild… but the Pope said no.  A lot of the Pope’s good friends and supporters were her relatives.  If the divorce was approved, they would feel that she had been humiliated.  He would lose a lot of support.  Naturally, he chose to make sure that his allies were happy at the cost of Henry VIII and did not approve the divorce.  So  beyond lust, you already have some more motivations.  You have a king who wants to hand over his kingdom peacefully.  You have a church leader that needs to win points with powerful friends.  You have relatives protecting someone they love.  Now consider church tradition.  For all we know, the Pope really was sincere.  Maybe he was genuinely concerned about the institution of marriage and wasn’t willing to approve of sin just because the world found it convenient.  I mean, I can relate to that.  I’m not going to approve of any of your divorces, even if you do woo me a bit first!  So now we have tradition and faith added to the mix.  But beyond that, we have to remember that Protestants didn’t just pop into existence in England because the King was interested in talking to them.  They were already there!  They were already evangelizing!  It was hard to be a Protestant in England.  You risked martyrdom daily, but a lot of people risked a lot to tell the English that their church was leading them away from what God wanted and the Bible could steer them right again.  There were people who had lived and died hoping to see England embrace Protestantism like this.  When someone suggests that one man wanted a divorce so he made up a religion, it implies the whole thing was about lust and power, but really, it was about so much more.  There was fear of a succession war!  There were the obligations of leadership!  There was the love of family!  There was the weight of the Scriptures and hundreds of years of church tradition!  There was the rugged witness of the martyrs!  There was a lot that went into the creation of the Anglican Church.  It wasn’t  just a story about sex and power.

And we could get even closer to everyday life.  How many people say that churches are a scam?  I can remember a friend saying, “You know it’s a scam because they ask you for money every time you show up.  If it was really true, they wouldn’t want any money for it.”  Not an unpopular opinion, but a lazy one.  Most churches have pretty open finances.  If you want to learn more about them, you can ask and someone would be delighted to talk about where the money is spent, but that takes effort.  It’s much easier to just say it’s all about power and people are lying to get your money.

When people look at the world today, there’s this clear, repeated tendency to be cynical about motivations.  History looks like this long series of stories about people trying to get a leg up on one another.  This particular way of reading the world and its history really has its root at the beginning of the 19th century.  Last week, we talked a little about the shift from the pre-modern world to the modern.  How we went from seeing the author as the one with authority, to seeing the work as having its own authority, to seeing ourselves as the only authority.  That shift changed the way people told history, because there were no distinct inarguable causes that people needed to rally around sincerely.  There wasn’t even an objective framework to say what was good anymore.  If someone did something for love or beauty or God, that was just their opinion.  Their take.  Their way of obscuring their real motivation: they were promoting their personal thoughts and trying to twist the world to benefit themselves and those like them.

Things get a lot more cynical right around here.  There’s a quote from one of the most famous tellers of history in the modern era, Karl Marx, that comes to mind.  And if you’re wondering why your pastor is sneaking communism into the sermon this morning, stick with me.  Marx is such a good example of a cynical historian.  Right from the beginning of his most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, he attempts to explain the history of everything, and he starts like this:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.  Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In other words, he’s claiming to summarize every history book ever written right here.  There are people in power and they want to stay in power, and there are people who aren’t and they need help.  His big pitch is that we need to overthrow the people at the top so we can create a new society without these wealthy oppressors.  He may not have pulled off his utopia, but that big idea was very influential: history is about power.  There are wolves, and there are sheep.  There are oppressors, and there are oppressed. There are people who will hurt others to get what they want, and people who are too weak and disenfranchised to seek power.  It’s all very disenchanted; hopeless even.  

As we’ve been exploring the postmodern world, we’ve noted not only the challenges that we have in expressing Christianity to the world around us, but the advantages that we have.  Even if they don’t always understand us, we possess things that the world craves.  Last week, it was the simple fact that we know that there’s a point to all this.  There’s a real, actual point to life!  So many people in this world don’t know why they bother to wake up every morning.  They get up and ask, “What am I doing?”  They have to invent reasons to exist because they have no objective framework!  Nothing to wake up for!  We know that there’s a point.  There is something bigger than ourselves worth existing for: there’s God.  This week, it’s clear that we can offer a better reading of history.  The world is not just mired in selfishness and greed.  There’s more in this world than that.  People do things for so many reasons: hope, fear, courage, strength, weakness, and love.  There is so much more to the human heart and all of history than just a cynical drive to accumulate for ourselves.

This passage we’re looking at, 1 John 4, is one of the most famous passages of Scripture of all time.  It’s known for its beauty and quoted time and time again, but you’ll notice I grabbed a little more than normal.  People often start quoting from verse seven forward, when the language about love kicks in, but there’s an advantage to going back to the beginning of the chapter.  If you don’t have the context, it’s easy for a modern person to interpret this passage in a way that ironically doubles back on self-centeredness.  You’ll see what I mean.  Let’s begin at verse one.  

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world.

That’s odd, right?  This is right before the “God is Love” bit that we all know and love!  You go up just a few lines and BOOM!  We’re talking about the Antichrist.  Nice, normal people may not talk about the Antichrist, but the Bible sure does, so we’ve got to look at it.  What is he really trying to get at here?  John is trying to address the fact that not all ideas religious ideas that people have are good ones.  Sometimes, people have bad ideas.  Sometimes, what people say is bogus.  Just because someone says, “Well I prayed and I really feel that God is saying XYZ,” does not mean that God has suddenly decided XYZ.   Sure, sometimes people get things from God, but sometimes people get them from other places, so John tells us to test the spirits.  See if this is legit before you buy in.

The test he proposes is asking people about Jesus.  People that are going to go off script and do something weird in their faith often have a warped understanding of Jesus.  They invent their own Jesus because the real one is too challenging for them to deal with.  To domesticate Jesus and his Gospel, they craft an idol in Jesus’s image.  You’ll see that he specifically warns about people in their region that are saying, “I believe Jesus is God, but I don’t believe he was really a man.”  Orthodox Christianity has always held that Jesus is fully God and fully man, but in the first three centuries, the “fully man” thing was really hard for people to accept.  Some people claimed that even though Jesus may have looked human, he must have really been a spirit.  If you touched him, your hand would have gone right through him.  Even his death on the cross was just an act!  He pretended to be crucified to teach us how to be a kind person, but he wasn’t actually crucified, because gods don’t become people and gods don’t die.  That school of thought was called docetism, and docetism was one of the first heresies.  

And what is a heresy?  Heresy comes from the Greek word haresis, which means to choose.  When the Church deemed something a heresy, they were saying that the people involved in those thoughts had not actually received the faith that was passed down by the apostles from Jesus himself.  Instead, they chose to pick out the bits that they liked and invent new ideas to cover up the things they didn’t like.  Heretics choose their faith, rather than inheriting it.  The docetists chose their own vision of Jesus, rather than accepting the real one.  That’s why John encourages us to test out ideas by asking people about Jesus.   If their vision of Jesus does not line up with what Scripture shows us, be wary.  Be very wary.

Today, I doubt we’d find many people that would claim that Jesus was pure spirit. That’s  just not a trendy idea anymore.  If anything, you’d be likely to find the opposite!  There are plenty of people that believe that Jesus was a good man, but not God.  Isn’t that interesting?  As much as things have changed, people still find it hard to believe that Jesus was fully God and fully man.  Here, John is warning us about people who have created an idol in the image of Jesus, but don’t have any interest in the real thing, and he says this only verses before his famous speech about love.  

He goes on:

You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of falsehood.

Now, we start that classic build to the most famous line:

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.  This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.  This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

The center of everything Is love.  Love is the beating heartbeat that keeps everything flowing. Love is what keeps everything from collapsing in on itself!  Love stands at the center of time.  It is the most dominant force.  Is there still selfishness and oppression?  Sure, but there’s a force better than that, bigger than that, and more powerful than that.  It’s not just this sort of background entity that has no real power.  It’s not just a matter of taste and aesthetics that justifies the people who are seeking to oppress.  No, it is a real, legitimate force at work in the world.

This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

People become truly capable of loving when they have a relationship with God.  That’s a bold claim, right?  We’ve all known Christians that sure don’t love very well, and we’ve all known non-Christians that seem to love a whole lot better.  How could he say something like that?  It seems absurd!  Where’s the logic to it?  He boils it down to three words:

God is love.

This is the section I warned is easy to misread.  It says, “God is love,” but it’s easy for people to reverse it in their head.  They think, “love is God.”  That would mean that whatever we think about God ought to be subjugated to our understanding of love, and we tend to think we have love figured out pretty well (at least, on a conceptual level).  We love watermelon!  We love our spouses!  We love running.  We love all sorts of things that make up our daily life.  If love is God, we don’t have to worry, because as long as we’re enjoying something, we’re being driven by love, and love is God, and we don’t have to change anything about our lives or anybody else’s.  But it doesn’t say love is God; it says God is love.  We should be subjugating our knowledge of love to what the Bible reveals about God.  What we know of love is so small so incomplete we’re just barely scratching the surface.   As we start to explore this thing called love, we become aware of a greater mystery; something that invites us forward beyond our shallow understanding and that is God. That is God.  

All of that can be a little confusing.  One theologian that said it very well is a man named Dionysius the Areopagite.  I can tell you guys want to say that one too!  That’s all right!  Try it with me: Dionysius the Areopagite!  Once more!  Dionysius the Areopagite!  There we go!  Don’t let anyone say we don’t have fun in church.  Dionysius the Areopagite was someone that wrote about this passage.  He taught that there are two ways to know God: we know God by what he is but also by what he is not.  There’s positive knowledge, and there’s negative knowledge.  Positive knowledge is used by comparing God to things that we know.  He uses this exact example!  God is love.  What does that mean?  This thing we know as love?  That is something like what God is.  But he also encourages us to be aware of the opposite which is equally true: God is not love.  By no means is he saying that Scripture is wrong.  He has tremendous respect for Scripture, but he says the point of making a statement like that is remembering that what we know as love is so rarely the fullness of what love really is.  Our love is often tainted by self-interest, lust, and ignorance.  It’s not really the kind of love that God has for us.  If we say, “God is love” and compare our paltry understanding of love to the fullness of the transcendent God, that’s not enough.  No, God is love, but that’s just the beginning.  God is also not the kind of love that we know because he is more than that.  The love that is God is infinitely more pure than we can imagine.  It is infinitely better.

John is writing in that same spirit.  He was saying that true love begins with God because nothing else is capable of bringing out pure love.  It’s not a matter of effort.  If you try your hardest, you might be able to capture something that is somewhat like love, but it won’t be pure love.  It’s also not a matter of knowledge.  Even someone who has studied the theory of love for years won’t be able to love perfectly.  Effort and knowledge might get you close sometimes, but it’s not either of them that truly allow us to love.  The fullness of love is something that can only be known through a relationship with God.  God is the only source of that pure, perfect love in creation, and it’s not effort or knowledge that can really bring us to that kind of love.  It’s faith in God.  Through faith, we can become instruments of the Holy Spirit, channeling that perfect love into this world. That’s what he’s saying.

He continues:

Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus.  There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.  We love because he first loved us.  Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.  And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

Modern readings of history are stuck.  They are mired in cynicism.  Since we assume genuine goodness can only come from acting as our authentic self, it is so easy to read any attempt at communal action as a power-grab by the few to oppress the many.  King David becomes a tyrant.  Anglicanism looks like nothing more than an excuse for a divorce.  Churches start to be seen as schools for aspiring con artists.  If all action involving others is an exercise in oppression, the only thing we can hope for is an ideal future date where we can all be free from each other.

Christianity tells a different story.  It’s not about getting away from one another; it’s about coming closer together.  It’s not about subduing the world with our own affections; it’s about allowing our affections to be subdued by something far greater and purer than us.  It’s not about trying hard enough to love or learning something about love; it’s about living in God and allowing that love to show through.  The world is not mired in hopelessness.  There are more powerful things than self-interest afoot.  There is love.  God is love.  Amen. 

Questioning Authority

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached on November 13, 2022
Scriptures: Psalm 119:161-168, Judges 17:1-13

Comedy of Errors at an Elegant Downtown Restaurant
The chair is really a table making fun of itself. 
The coat tree has just learned to tip waiters.
A shoe is served a plate of black caviar.
“My dear and most esteemed sir,” says a potted palm to a mirror, “it is absolutely useless to excite yourself.”

I remember my English teacher reading this poem by Charles Simic to the class back when I was a junior in highschool.  When he was done, he asked us what it meant.  One student said that maybe Simic was trying to talk about how objects take on their own personalities over time.  Not a bad guess, but the teacher just nodded his head and kept waiting for more answers, so we kept going.  Another raised their hand and suggested that the author was talking about how we treat objects better than we treat people.  Again, solid guess.  But still, the teacher just kept waiting with that stoic look on his face.  A few other people took a stab, but nothing seemed to satisfy him.  Finally, an uncomfortable silence settled over the room.  He said, “I noticed all of you were trying to tell me what the author meant.  What if he didn’t have anything in mind when he wrote this?  What if this is just a random thing he wrote down?  What if YOU’RE the one who has to decide for yourself what it means?”

He was introducing us to that classic dilemma within literature: where does the authority to declare the meaning of a piece lie?  Is it with the author, is it in the work, or is it with the audience?  If the author is the person who has the right to tell us what their piece really means, the best way to learn more about it is to read a biography about them.  The more we can learn about them, the more we can figure out what it was they were trying to get at.  But if you think the work itself has authority, you may not want to waste your time with a biography.  The author might have created something that they didn’t even fully understand!  Spending more time with the work itself will reveal things that they might not have dreamed of.  Pablo Picasso was famously in favor of this way of looking at things.  He would paint something and then critics would say, “Ah were you trying to get at this?” and he’d respond, “You know, when I painted it I didn’t think I was, but now that you pointed out it’s very clearly there.  You’re right.”   And then, of course, the meaning might rest with the audience.  Who cares what the creator wanted to say?  What do you experience when you’re engaging with the work?  How does it make you feel?  How does it help you to see things in a new way?  That’s what it’s all about.

Where does meaning lie?  Where is the authority: the author, the work, or the audience?  This question broadly correlates to three different eras that we’ve been talking about (premodern, modern, and post-modern).  In real life, we have those same three possible sources of authority available to us today.  We’ve got an author (God), we’ve got a work (creation), and we’ve got an audience (ourselves).  Where does authority lie?  Each era answered the question differently.

In the pre-modern world, especially from the Middle Ages until around 1700, it was broadly assumed not only that there was definitely an author of all of creation, but that author had the authority over everything.  If you look at the way their society was structured, it was deeply, deeply religious.  Political theory was steeped in faith.  The economy was highly religious.  Even their everyday language was constantly pointing to God.  Something as tiny as a basic greeting had a religious dimension to it.  Instead of “hello,” you might get something like, “God be with ye,” or “God save you.”  And why?  Because they assumed if you really want to understand things, you look to God.  God knows the meaning of everything.  Look to Him and you’ll know what’s going on.  You can see that attitude reflected so clearly in their writings.  I’m going to stick with poetry to explore the thought processes in each era because, you know, pick a motif and go with it.  John Dunn’s poem, Death, Be Not Proud, is a great example of thought in the Middle Ages:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me…

It goes on from there in that same general spirit.  What’s he drawing trying to draw attention to?  God.  We see this thing called death, and it might look scary, but it isn’t as bad as we think.  If you have faith in the author of creation, in God, you have to recognize that death isn’t anything to fear.  Look up to God and you’ll know how everything works out in the end. God makes sense of the world, even in the face of death.

Now let’s move forward to the Modern Era.  In the 17th through the 20th centuries, people started to think differently.  They said, if there is an author out there (and who can say whether there is or not), he doesn’t seem to do much.  Let’s not worry about authors.  Let’s worry about the work: creation.  Clearly creation has certain laws, regardless of where they come from.  If we understand those laws, we will understand existence.  So people set about uncovering those natural processes that governed creation.  

Some people think of this as a great scientific revolution.  A time of light, as opposed to the darkness that came before it.  I mean, the movement was called, “the Enlightenment,” so that’s certainly what they were trying to invoke, but I would push back on that.  Yes, there were some great advances in technology during this timeframe, that much is undeniable, but was it really as totally unprecedented as some make it out to be?  I don’t think so.  Science was advanced in startling ways in a lot of timeframes.  If it weren’t for the accomplishments of Medieval scientists that came before them, people like Alcuin of York, Roger Bacon, William of Ockham, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and others, much less the thinkers of antiquity and before them.  No, the heart of the movement wasn’t nearly as scientific as it sometimes presented itself to be.  No, the biggest difference was that philosophical change in perspective: the world is its own authority.  We just have to understand it’s laws if we want to live well. To see that in action in a very unscientific way, let’s take a look at Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

What’s Whitman excited about?  Nature!  This air!  This soil!  This blood!  Natural things are good.  There’s an earthiness that makes all of creation worth paying attention to.  It has value in and of itself.  Don’t look up!  Look out.  Look to creation.  It will tell you all of the meaning that needs to be known.

And then, of course, we have the Postmodern Era which we have discussed at length throughout this series.  That’s where you end up with poetry about shoes getting fed caviar.  What’s the point?  It’s up to you.  What does the work bring up in you?  What journey do you undertake internally when you encounter creation?  That’s what matters.

As you go through each era, you can see how people think about meaning and order.  The pre-modern mind saw a sacred order.  God at the top, everything goes around him.  The modern mind saw a natural order.  Keep the order in mind and you’ll figure things out as you go.  In the postmodern world, you make your own order, because there’s no natural logic to the things out here.  The world is what you make of it.

I know some of you may not be big fans of poetry, so thank you for suffering through those examples with me.  You can see these philosophical elements in any artistic medium, though.  I just chose poetry because I liked it and it’s short enough to get to quickly, but you can choose anything you like.  Think about literature.  Dante’s Divine Comedy is a perfect example of a pre-modern story.  A man goes through Hell, Purgatory, and then Heaven, detailing things along the way.  We’re literally observing the divine order at work.  You move into the Modern Era and you have Walden.  It’s just a guy living in the natural world.  The whole point is showing the beauty of living well within that natural order.  And then take something from today, for example, A Song of Ice and Fire a.k.a. Game of Thrones.  It may not be exactly a literary classic but it’s a story that got a lot of people’s attention.  Who’s the good guy in Game of Thrones?  No one.  There’s no divine order.  There’s barely any order at all.  Everyone is trying to seize power for themselves because where does power lie here? You.  You decide what the world is and you try to make what you can of it. 

You start in the medieval section and you will see art everywhere depicting divine beauty: Jesus, saints, and angels.  Then you move forward a little and what do you see?  Landscapes.  People want to capture the beauty of the natural world.  And the further on you move, the more you see the landscapes start to vary.  Artists like Monet and Van Gogh start to paint landscapes from perspectives that earlier artists would never have imagined.  And then, of course, you get to contemporary art and things just fall apart.  I saw one exhibit that was just a fence leaning against the wall.  If they didn’t have a plaque with the artist’s name next to it, I’d have assumed they were just doing construction!  I even googled it and found that exact fence on sale at Home Depot for $219.  You too can have an art installation in your home for the low, low cost of $219.

As we move through these different philosophies in each era, from seeing the authority in an author, to seeing authority in the work, to seeing it in ourselves, you would think it would be like a process of taking off shackles.  Theoretically, we should be the freest people of all time.  We should feel lighter than air!  We should be freer than ever since we’re only answerable to ourselves!  But if that’s the case, why is our Postmodern Era so typified by existential dread?  Why do so many people wake up in the morning and ask themselves, “What’s the point?  What am I even doing here?  What’s the point of any of this?”  It turns out, when we’re the only ones with authority and we invent our own meaning, it’s really easy to remember that it’s all nonsense.  We made it all up!  It’s pointless.  If we get frustrated or bored by what’s going on, the sheer arbitrariness of it all is right there, staring us in the face.  Is it any wonder that people can’t be bothered to enjoy a meaning that they know they’ve made up?  Why bother reading a book or a speech or short story when all of it is nothing more than an opportunity for me to expound upon myself.  Things feel pointless because in many ways, they are.  When the world is bound by the smallness of our own horizon, it seems so tiny.  We have nothing to live for!  We have nothing to die for!  It’s all tremendously shallow.  

This is not the first time that these sorts of ideas have taken hold.  There’s this temptation to assume that whenever something happens, it’s happening for the first time ever.  That’s rarely the case.  Here, we can see in the Scriptures a period not so very different from the one we inhabit; a period where people see no legitimate authority outside of themselves.  Let’s read through Judges chapter 17 carefully.

Now a man named Micah from the hill country of Ephraim said to his mother, “The eleven hundred shekels of silver that were taken from you and about which I heard you utter a curse—I have that silver with me; I took it.”

Then his mother said, “The Lord bless you, my son!”

Right from the beginning, this story should strike you as odd.  What a strange opening!  A man steals his mother’s fortune.  It’s 1,100 shekels of silver.  We don’t need to do any kind of ancient conversion rate to figure out that this is a lot.  Near the end of this story, someone is promised ten silver shekels of silver annually for a job and he takes it without complaint.  If ten shekels a year is a decent wage for one year, this is massive!  He’s set for life!  But he stole it from his mother, who curses whoever took the silver, so he brings it back.  And what’s her reaction?  To bless him.

Why?  Returning the money you stole because you’re worried about a curse is better than keeping it, of course, but it’s not exactly an example of sterling behavior.  Maybe it’s worth lifting the theoretical curse over, sure, but giving a blessing?  Why?  He hasn’t done anything good!  He barely managed to avoid the obvious evil that he was headed towards!  He hasn’t earned anything!  Even though he’s a sketchy guy, he gets a blessing.  I’m sure only good will come of this.

When he returned the eleven hundred shekels of silver to his mother, she said, “I solemnly consecrate my silver to the Lord for my son to make an image overlaid with silver. I will give it back to you.”

So after he returned the silver to his mother, she took two hundred shekels of silver and gave them to a silversmith, who used them to make the idol. And it was put in Micah’s house.

There has been some debate among commentators about what exactly was intended by the word “idol” in this particular story.  Is this idol intended to represent a being other than God, or is this idol a visual representation of the god of Israel?  I tend to assume the latter.  She essentially says, “Thank the Lord! I’ll have this idol made,” so to me that tips the scales towards an idol designed in service of God, rather than Baal or someone like that.  But here’s the thing, it doesn’t actually matter in the end. Either you’re making an idol for some other God, in which case you are guilty of breaking God’s law because you made you’re worshiping some other God, which is wrong, or you’re breaking the law by making an idol, which is against God’s law regardless of the intent you had when you made it.  

God explicitly forbids idols multiple times throughout the Scriptures.  It’s in the Ten Commandments!  Don’t make idols!  Why?  Because even if the idol is intended to serve God, idolatry fundamentally reverses the divine order.  God created us.  We are in his image.  When we turn around and create idols, in some sense we’re turning around and creating God.  We’re designing him in our image.  God is not subject to the smallness of our understanding.

The pattern of disordered behavior continues.  At first, a blessing went to a thief.  Now an idol goes to God because someone wants to thank him.

Now this man Micah had a shrine, and he made an ephod and some household gods and installed one of his sons as his priest. 

Even if I was right earlier and that first idol was intended to serve God, Micah has decided that one god wasn’t enough.  He’s filling out a little pantheon for himself, giving his main god some little friends.  Then he designs his own priestly garb and finds a priest to hire.  He’s got his own little religion going on!  And then we see the through line for the whole book of Judges:

In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.

This line appears throughout Judges, and it’s one of the last lines of the entire book: in those days, Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit.  It’s not necessarily a reference to a physical King.  Not long after Judges ends, Israel does get someone to be king and God warns them that they don’t need a king over Israel.  He warns them that he should be their king and that any king other than him is going to make all kinds of mistakes.  But they tell God, “That’s a little abstract for us.  We’re not really into the whole ‘king we can’t see’ thing. We’d rather just get a physical king just like every other nation.  Thanks!”  So they get a king, and he’s pretty rotten.  The point here is not just that there’s no physical king; it’s that there’s no authority.  There’s no god that anyone really acknowledges.  They are their own authority.  They do what they want.

A young Levite from Bethlehem in Judah, who had been living within the clan of Judah, left that town in search of some other place to stay. On his way he came to Micah’s house in the hill country of Ephraim.

We’re introduced to this Levite, a priestly figure, out traveling around.  He’s looking for somewhere to stay.  We don’t know why, but we know he has responsibilities back home.  For whatever reason, he’s out and about and he meets Micah…

Micah asked him, “Where are you from?”

“I’m a Levite from Bethlehem in Judah,” he said, “and I’m looking for a place to stay.”

Then Micah said to him, “Live with me and be my father and priest, and I’ll give you ten shekels of silver a year, your clothes and your food.” So the Levite agreed to live with him, and the young man became like one of his sons to him.

Micah hires this Levite away from his responsibilities in Bethlehem. And notice that at the end, it says that this Levite became like a son to him. In Roman Catholic churches today, people refer to priests as “Father,” partially to show reverence to a religious authority, but here this Levite is just the opposite! He’s “like a son.”  This priest isn’t someone he’s going to submit to.  He’s hired a false authority for show, but he retains authority over this Levite. 

Then Micah installed the Levite, and the young man became his priest and lived in his house. And Micah said, “Now I know that the Lord will be good to me, since this Levite has become my priest.”

What an absurd statement we get to end this story.  This man has done nothing but break the God’s law since the story began.  He stole money from his own mother, he made an idol, he invented new gods, he started his own religion, and then he hired a corrupt priest to serve as the head of this new religion.  And he sits back and thinks, “Yeah, God must be pretty happy right now.”  Why?  He’s never done anything that God wanted.  He’s only done what he wanted.  He imagined what he thought a good divine order might look like, he usurped traditional elements and ritual to make it look like it had some dignity to it, and now he’s bought in to what he himself invented.  He’s not interested in worshiping God!  He’s only interested in legitimizing his own self-worship.

All too often, that is the way Christians approach church today.  Is there an interest in God?  In church?  In his divine order?  No.  But there is an interest in legitimizing self-worship with traditional elements and ritual.  We come to church with our lives just the way we like them and tell God, “I’m happy with the way I’ve arranged things.  I just need you to sign off on it.  Please tell me it’s ok to break your law.  You want me to be happy, right?  So approve of what I’ve done!  Tell me you’re happy.  Tell me you’re happy!  Tell me you’re happy!”

The whole thing reminds me of a theory by the famous mystic Evelyn Underhill.  She once explained the goal of life by telling people to map their lives out on paper.  Write the central element of your life in the middle, and then everything that serves that center all around the page.  For most people, their name goes in the middle of the page, and most events in their lives are intended to serve them.  God ends up in a corner of the page, propping up their ego.  In this model, the assumption people carry is that God exists to serve them.  People assume that if everything serves them, they will be happy.  Ironically, it makes them miserable.  We long for something greater than ourselves to serve.  As long as we’re using all of the elements in our lives to serve ourselves, we’re eternally frustrated by just how shallow everything seems.  If we want to make a better map, we start with God in the center and design everything in our lives around him. How are we serving him?  How is our life a part of something greater than ourselves?  Serving God brings joy!

I think she’s right. I think she’s absolutely right.  In a world where there’s a sense that we ourselves are the ultimate authority and there’s no meaning outside of ourselves, we Christians have the meaning of life at our fingertips!  But there’s a temptation to slink back and say, “Maybe they’re right.  Maybe I am the authority.  Maybe all of these religious trappings are intended to serve me.  God is here to endorse my order.  He’ll like what I do.  He’ll sign off on it.”

But if we do that, we are denying the world something it desperately needs.  People are waking up every morning asking, “What’s the point?”  People desperately crave to know that there’s a point to all of existence.  For crying out loud, they’re reading poetry about feeding caviar to shoes and they’re staring at gates!  We can do better than that!  People are seeking legitimate beauty!  Legitimate truth!  Legitimate authority!

We have to accept God’s authority to understand any of that.  We have to seek to serve Him, rather than ourselves.  There is an authority outside ourselves.  There is an author, and he carries incredible authority over creation, revealed to us most completely in his word.  The great missionary, Leslie Newbiggin once said, “If we cannot speak with confidence about biblical authority, what ground have we for challenging the reigning plausibility structure.” In other words, we can’t present a genuine Gospel to the world if we can’t trust that God’s authority, as put forth in his word, is actually legitimate.  No, we need to look to Scripture and see how the God that we claim to serve is communicating with us!  Talking to us!  Telling us what the point is!

Of course, sometimes, it’s hard.  Sometimes, the things God asks of us in Scripture are incredibly difficult.  Some of his ways don’t seem to serve our wants at all.  The world might look on and say, “What are you doing?  Why don’t you just live an easy life?”  Nobody remembers people who live easy lives.  Nobody writes stories about people that did nice, easy, normal things.  Nobody writes a book about someone who went and got coffee one day.  People read stories about heroes that slay dragons and save kingdoms.  People crave stories about people who overcome the odds for something greater than themselves.  That’s something we have the opportunity to do: to serve something greater than ourselves. 

For the past three sessions (not counting our Reformation Day detour), we’ve talked about Postmodernism.  We’ve talked about the ways that the church is, in many aspects, on the back foot.  We’ve talked about truth; in the postmodern world claiming to know objective truth is seen as arrogant.  How do we communicate in a way that seems humble without giving up on truth?  We’ve talked about sin; in a world where the assumption is society is the sole corrupting force, how do we acknowledge the sin that rests in the human heart?  Both truth and sin are complicated to discuss honestly with people outside the Church.  It violates popular thought in ways that are often seen as offensive.  But when it comes to authority, I think we may have something intriguing on our hands.  It’s something that doesn’t violate the orthodoxy of secularism in a way that’s obviously offensive, but is still outside of the norm enough to make people hesitate and ask, “What?”

If we started to live into God’s authority, REALLY started to live into it, we would probably be perceived as pretty weird people.  We’d be those Christians; the ones who take it a little too seriously.  Too often, we try to distance themselves from those Christians.  We try to seem religious, but not too religious.  We try to be approachable and cool.  That’s proven pretty ineffective.  Looking at attendance rates in larger denominations, the more a church ignores the uncomfortable bits in Scripture to seem cool, the more their attendance rates plummet.  The more a church presents a Biblical counterculture to the world, the more likely they are to grow.  I don’t mean to oversimplify things by suggesting that attendance proves that something is right.  Obviously popularity is a poor substitute for truth.  But I do mean to suggest that people outside the church are seeking more than just an institution willing to rubber stamp the dominant cultural order.  They’re actually more interested in a weird place that they don’t fully understand than they are a safe place where that affirms their own authority.  Weird isn’t all bad.

When you’re weird, you show that you’re willing to break from a status quo that’s proving itself ineffective.  You also become the kind of group that earns a second glance from people.  Have you ever stopped to look twice at something normal?  No!  Of course not!  You see a million normal things every day.  Why on Earth would you stop to look at one more normal thing any longer than you have to?  But something weird?  You may well stop and look for a minute!  This thing, foreign though it may seem, is different.  It’s got something to say.  That’s a huge advantage to the Church, if we’re willing to take it.

Some churches do, and it proves surprisingly effective.  I remember one Pentecostal girl in seminary that spoke very well on this.  When I met her, I asked her about tongues because that’s what you do when you’re talking to someone who’s Pentecostal!  You talk about tongues!  It’s a rule somewhere I think.  We chatted about it a bit before I said, “You know, it must be really hard to evangelize because that’s really out of the norm.  I mean I think it’s weird and I’m a Christian!  I already agree with you on like a huge chunk of things that non-Christian people don’t, and I think your understanding is, forgive my saying it, strange.  It must be infinitely more challenging to talk to non-Christians about your faith, since this is a significant part of it.”

She responded, “Are you kidding me?  It’s so much easier for me to evangelize.  People want to talk to me.  They come up and say, ‘You’re Pentecostal, right?’ and I say, ‘Yeah.’  And they say, ‘But you obviously don’t believe in that tongues stuff, right?’ and I say, ‘I don’t just believe in it; I’ve seen it.  Come and see!’”

I may not agree with the way Pentecostals understand tongues, but wow, that’s a good sell.  I almost went to church with her there and then.  “Come and see!” 

In a world that isn’t used to accepting authority outside of themselves, there’s a shallowness that many feel.  Increasingly, people crave something bigger than their own thoughts and whims, and we have something they’re looking for.  Something weird.  Something that should be forcing us to live in a way that’s totally different from the people around us.  If we’re honestly accepting the authority of God as presented in the Scriptures, people should have to look twice!  If we’re living the way that we’re supposed to, there should be conversations a lot like the ones she experienced.

“You’re a Christian, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But you don’t believe in any of that weird stuff do you?”

“Yeah.”

“Wait, so you actually think there’s a God that you can talk to and outdated laws he wants you to keep and an objective point to all of this?”

“I don’t just believe it; I know it.  Come and see.”

Going Global

~ Vincent

For about a year now, I haven’t posted all that often on the ‘ol bloggerino. Some of that was because I had just moved and was settling into a new job (which I wrote about here), some of it was because I just had a son (which ironically was a couple days before the entry on birthdays, which I didn’t plan at all), but the biggest reason was because of what’s been going on in the United Methodist Church. The church split in a super-political mess and evangelicals and traditionalists left and started a new denomination: the Global Methodist Church.

Unsurprisingly, a guy who regularly blogs about classic theology is very much a theological traditionalist, so I found myself navigating the tricky politics in all of this. I led a church through a discernment process to see if they wanted to leave. I constantly stayed up-to-date on the circumstances as they unfolded and shifted. I managed the gross politics of it all. Needless to say, it was really stressful and hard. Frankly, I don’t plan on writing about the specifics of it here anytime soon, if ever. It was ugly and there’s no immediate need to relive it. A quick google search will help you discover just bad the politics of leaving the UMC were/are. There are already very skilled people with a greater knowledge of the political circumstances than myself writing about this, so I’ll leave it to them.

But why didn’t I write anything about historic church splits? After all, I did a ton of research on the topic of church splits in America over the past hundred or so years. There were several times I wanted to blog about it, but it would have been pretty imprudent to openly talk about church splits with an orthodox/traditionalist bias when I was still working for the United Methodist Church. There were even a couple articles that I posted that I ended up taking down, just because I knew that if a congregation member stumbled across them and felt that they reflected my own opinion too clearly, it might cause trouble down the road. I had to play my hand close to my vest until their discernment process was done. If they wanted out, I’d help them navigate the process. If they didn’t, I’d head out on my own. Sadly, the final vote from church members ended with them choosing to remain United Methodist (they needed 66.6% to leave and only managed 62%), so I had to say goodbye and move on to the Global Methodist Church.

I won’t pretend it wasn’t a terrifying transition. So many of the churches that leave the UMC are able to do so because a supportive pastor helps guide them through the disaffiliation process. It only takes 34% of people to block a disaffiliation vote, and if the pastor isn’t interested in helping you leave, drumming up 34% tends to be pretty doable (if they even present disaffiliation as an option to them in the first place). I wasn’t sure if there would be an open church that I could get a job at, but God is good. Not only were there multiple opportunities available, but one of them was perfect. Sometimes, you just go to a place, meet the people and realize, “Yeah, this is it.” I’m off to Kenton, Ohio to work with Walnut Grove GMC, and I’m incredibly grateful to God for that opportunity.

It’s been a hard year, but I’m a few weeks away from being a part of a new denomination with a new church and a new future, and I’m so excited. The simple fact that clergy are actually expected to affirm the Apostle’s Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Chalcedonian definition is music to my ears, but on top of that, language in church law concerning Scripture is elevated, language concerning tradition is more reverent, church rites have been rewritten to be in-line with historic norms, there are more listed reference documents for historic orthodoxy, and the church bureaucracy is slimmer. I’m happy as a clam (assuming, of course, that clams are pretty darn happy on the whole).

For those reading this that are United Methodist, no hate. I’m dear friends with many of you and have grown a lot during our time together. That being said, we know we believe different things. It’s time to go our separate ways. I’m sure we’ll still be friends and learn from each other, but we’ll have more integrity working seperately than we would together.

For those that are looking to jump ship and haven’t made it quite yet, hang in there and keep excited. It’s worth it.

For those that aren’t Methodist at all and are wondering why they should care about this, just remember that for Christians in any denomination under the sun, orthodoxy has a cost. No matter what tradition you’re in, no matter how sure you are that it could never happen there, it absolutely can. A friend told me that when he joined the UMC, he warned them that he would resign if they ever changed the definition of marriage in church law. Everyone laughed because “it could never happen here.” They were wrong. There is, as good ‘ol Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught us, a cost to discipleship. That cost is fighting for the faith. Don’t shrink away from heresy and call it “a matter of opinion.” Confront it with love and compassion. Correct it if you can. Leave if you must. But don’t give up. It’s worth it to keep the truth that was entrusted to us by God.

As hard as the battles can be, there comes a day when the battles end and you can beat your swords into plowshares. I found that ending, and I pray that you do too.

Translation and the Gospel

~ Vincent ~ 2 Comments

A few years back, I read a really helpful article by a sociologist about different cultural communication styles.  Communicational norms were rated on two axes: direct-indirect and formal-informal.  The first axis (formal-informal) is mostly about structure.  Formal communication involves certain levels of decorum, contains some form of hierarchy, and moves at a slower pace.  Informal communication is freer and quicker, but it leaves a little more room for error.  The other axis (direct-indirect) has a little more to do with efficiency and manners than form.  A direct communicator says exactly what they mean, but it’s not always pretty.  An indirect communicator dances around the point a bit, but they don’t run much of a risk of offending anyone.

Everyone has their own expected style of communication based on the norms that they’ve worked within, but when we enter areas with other dominant communication styles, we have to pay really close attention.  It’s easy to misunderstand or be misunderstood!  An example that was offered up involved a German analyst that was working at a British company. His manager stopped by his desk one day and asked if he’d ever considered doing his reporting a little differently.  The analyst said no.  The manager gave a bit of a sigh and wandered away.  A week passed.  New reports were filled out.  The manager was back at his desk.  “Hmm, I really do imagine we’d all be able to read the reports much more quickly if the format was a little different.  Have you ever thought about that?”  The German admitted that he hadn’t thought about that before and went back to work.  The manager walked away.  Again, reports were filled out.  Again, they were the same.  The manager come to the worker and told him that he would have to be let go.  He was shocked!  Why?  The manager told him that he’d been asked repeatedly to change the way he was reporting and he had failed to do so.  The German was legitimately baffled and insisted that he’d never once been asked to change the report!  He’d only been asked if he had considered alternative methods.  It seemed like a really theoretical question to him, but to the British manager, he was practically barking orders.  The German was used to a much more direct style of communication (as Germans tend to be), while the British manager had a comparatively more indirect way of communicating (as is the norm for many Brits).  In this case, the difference in expectations cost the German his job.

Was the story true?  No idea.  It certainly could have been.  And I think it highlights how important recognizing communication styles can be.  Not that this particular model is the end-all be-all of communication styles.  There are all kinds of models out there.  This one seems considerably less arbitrary than some others, but I’m sure there are alternatives worthy of consideration and more axes you could add.  Either way, it made me think of my work in ministry and how I communicate effectively (or ineffectively) because of these expectations.

My speech style tends to be informal-indirect.  This was the dominant way of speaking in the region I grew up (central Ohio), and I think it’s relatively common throughout the midwest.  To us, informal language shows that you don’t think you’re better than anyone else.  You’re just a regular person trying to get a message across without any bells and whistles.  Formal communication seems comparatively stifling.  For example, when I worked in banking, I remember people sending e-mails that said, “Please advise on this project’s status,” and rolling my eyes.  They could  have just swung by my desk and asked, “Hey, what’s going on with this?”  I’m no grand vizier.  No “advising” seemed necessary.  As for the indirectness, it just seems so much more polite than the alternativve.  If you dance around the point just a smidge, you can say something without stepping on any toes.  For example, if you asked if I wanted a slice of pie that you brought over, I might say, “That pie looks phenomenal!  I wish I had room in my stomach, but if I ate one more piece of pie, I’d burst.”  That means no.  Further asking will not result in a new answer.

My move to Appalachia has thrust me into a region where the most common communication style is a little different.  The dominant axis of communication down here is informal-direct, and my words require some translating at times.  I remember someone asking me in my first few weeks if I wanted them to do some task around the church that I didn’t really want them to do.  I responded with the perfect informal-indirect response: “Gosh, I love your energy!  We need more of that kind of passion!  And you’re looking to address something that’s so needed around here.  My only concern is… is this the right time for that?  Because if we do the right act at the wrong time, it may well be worse than no action at all.  Why don’t we hold on that for a while and wait until we can really find that perfect opportunity.”  

The poor congregant just kind of stared at me.  “Soooo… you want me to do it next week then?”

Someone else in the room translated for her: “He says he doesn’t want you doing that.”

I was horrified.  How rude!  I didn’t say that!  I mean, I did, but I danced around and made it way prettier.  A “no” in such uncertain terms was practically a gunshot in my mind, but the congregant didn’t seem to mind.  “Oh, ok,” she responded.  And she went about her day as though nothing had happened.

There’s been a few occasions like that where what I say requires translation from a native speaker.  Which leaves me excited as I’m digging into Schleiermacher’s “On the Different Methods of Translating.”  This is a classic in translation theory and theology.  He opens by acknowledging that translation is far more than just switching one language to another:

Are we not often compelled, after all, to translate for ourselves the words of another person who is quire like us, but of a different temperament and mind?  …Occasionally we must translate even our own words, when we want to make them our very own again.  And this skill is practiced not only for the purpose of transplanting into foreign soil what a language has created in the fields of scholarship and the rhetorical arts, thereby expanding the horizon of power of the mind, but it is also practiced in business transactions between individuals of different nations, and in diplomatic exchanges of independent governments, in which each is accustomed to speak in its own language to ensure strict equality without making use of a dead language.

”On the Different Methods of Translating,” (ironically) trans. Waltraud Bartscht, Theories of Translation, 36-37.

Translation is a vast project of getting an idea to one person to another in a comprehensible way.  How do we do it well?  What are its boundaries?  And is he stretching the word “translation” further than it should be stretched?

There are massive implications here for our Bibles.  More importantly, I think there are massive implications for the way we share our faith.  Are we “translating” Christianity to each person when we share the Gospel, seeking to explain it in a  way that both honors the original intent, yet can exist within the region’s dominant social imaginary?  What constitutes a valid translation of the Gospel message and when has someone left the original intent so far behind to appeal to the dominant social imaginary that their “translation” ceases to be legitimate translation?

The Flight of Gregory Nazianzen and the Challenge of New Beginnings

~ Vincent

It’s been ages since I last posted. Life has been crazy. I’ve gone from being the associate pastor at Bexley UMC to the pastor at The Plains UMC. I moved about an hour and a half south for the new position and, right now, all of my life is in boxes. Needless to say, I’ve not had a lot of spare time for reading.

Once I got a moment to myself, naturally, I wanted to find a saint who had been through the same sort of challenges and read up about how they handled their big transition. I landed on one of my favorites: Gregory of Nazianzus. This is the fourth post I’ve written about him. Previously, I’ve written about his poetry, his take on theosis, and his refreshing melancholy in the face of the modern obsession with happiness, but this is the first time I’ve ventured out of the poetry of his retirement years.

In his younger days (32), Gregory was chosen for ordination a priest. His dad (also named Gregory) was the local bishop in Nazianzus and he found his son’s help invaluable in his ministry. His son managed to help him navigate the political and doctrinal challenges of the Arian Creed of 359 (Gregory Senior signed on as a supporter of a heretical creed and made a bunch of enemies until his son convinced him to apologize and withdraw his support), and besides that, he was incredibly capable as a theologian and pastoral care provider. Unfortunately, Gregory Jr. had no interest in actually being a priest. He wanted to be a monk! His ordination moved forward anyway, which was kind of a thing at the time. Ancient theologians are always getting priest-ed without wanting it. It’s humility trope—the most suitable person to put in power was supposed to be the guy who is too humble to want it. It’s usually reasonable to assume it’s being exaggerated for the sake of a good story. In Gregory’s case, it’s safe to assume he REALLY didn’t want to be ordained. He ran away for a few months, leaving his church really peeved at him, and after he finally did return, he called his ordination a “noble tyranny” in his first sermon (Or. 1, par. 1). If he was just trying to come off as humble, he went a little too hard.

In any case, Gregory was someone who knew what it was like to have his life uprooted for the Church and learned to thrive in the midst of it. How did he do it? I picked through his first two orations. The first is the sermon he gave when he returned to Nazianzus on Easter after a few months of hiding. The second is something he wrote to explain himself when people weren’t so thrilled with him after he returned (nobody came to church for a while in protest—church politics never change). I found a few gems in each.

The first one was certainly the lesser of the two. He doesn’t dwell much on his flight and spends most of the time talking about Easter. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he didn’t make the Easter sermon all about him. That’s a great move. At the same time, I’m here for that juicy personal drama. The fact that it’s not here limited my interest. Nevertheless, I liked his biggest reference to his flight:

A Mystery anointed me; I withdrew a little while at a Mystery, as much as was needful to examine myself; now I come in with a Mystery, bringing with me the Day as a good defender of my cowardice and weakness; that He Who to-day rose again from the dead may renew me also by His Spirit; and, clothing me with the new Man, may give me to His New Creation, to those who are begotten after God, as a good modeller and teacher for Christ, willingly both dying with Him and rising again with Him.

Or. 1, par. 2

How eloquent! I appreciate his willingness to name his flaws. To call yourself a weak coward is pretty intense! But he didn’t shy away. It wasn’t that the task was too great; it’s that his courage failed him and he needed to step away and reevaluate himself. God’s grace is enough to cover it.

There are also several references to mysteries. As I read it, the first mystery appears to be his ordination. He withdrew because of the weight of the sacrament bestowed on him. Now, he returns proclaiming a second mystery, which is the mystery of the resurrection of Jesus and the new life bestowed on us all. By this promise, even one who was a coward can be born into the new man that God desires.

The second oration was a little juicier. This one wasn’t a sermon and was explicitly intended as an explanation of his absence, so I got pages upon pages of him giving personal details about his challenge in facing a big transition. This is what I came here for. It starts out:

I have been defeated, and own my defeat. I subjected myself to the Lord, and prayed unto Him.

Or. 2 par 1

What a bombastic opening. He immediately reasserts the best of what he said in his sermon for those who didn’t attend worship that day. Why was I gone? Because I was at war with God. I have laid down my weapons and been defeated. I am subjecting myself to him. I’m no longer running. I’m digging in.

In the ensuing paragraphs, he discusses his respect for God’s sacred order, his meager qualifications, and his emotions through it all. The big crescendo of his argument builds as he points to the duty of a priest:

[T]he scope of our art is to provide the soul with wings, to rescue it from the world and give it to God, and to watch over that which is in His image, if it abides, to take it by the hand, if it is in danger, or restore it, if ruined, to make Christ to dwell in the heart by the Spirit: and, in short, to deify, and bestow heavenly bliss upon, one who belongs to the heavenly host.

Or. 1, par. 22

He goes all out after this, going on for paragraphs about how this is, “the wish of the prophets and the law…why God was united to the flesh by means of the soul…why the new [covenant] was substituted for the old…” etc. (or 2, par 23-25). This is, in his eyes, the summation of it all. The whole of the job of a priest is to assist God in healing the core essence of a person. In light of this incredible duty, how could anyone be surprised that he balked for a moment? And yet, he ultimately accepts his new priestly responsibilities, saying, “I fell down and humbled myself under the mighty hand of God… now I am commissioned to exalt Him in the congregation of the people and praise Him in the seat of the elders,” (or 2, par. 115). What once seemed like a terrifying possibility is now a duty. The weight of the task may be heavy, and the responsibility unexpected, but he now recognizes that it has fallen to him to glorify God in this way. God put him in this place. Who is he to argue? And who is any detractor to deny him this place that God gave to him?

I don’t know that a lot of modern people can relate deeply to being stolen away from the monastery and ordained against their will, but Gregory still lays out a lot of great principles that are worth embodying. First, he’s honest! He owns his initial shortcoming and doesn’t try to cover it up. The whole thing could have been a total disaster, but he acknowledges his mistakes (something especially difficult when you’re under immense pressure) and ends up making the whole thing a moment that reflects the weightiness of God’s calling and the heights of God’s mercy. More importantly, he learns to trust God all the more after being called to something new. Big transitions are hard. It’s easy to get nervous, upset, frustrated, weirded-out, etc. But God isn’t just randomly switching things up. He’s placed us exactly where we are for the sake of our own holiness and the deification of those around us. Sometimes we might get negative. It’s certainly not ideal, but even some of the greats had their moments of despair. We need to bounce back and recognize the importance of the duties he’s given us. The heights of what God calls us to are greater than anything we could possibly imagine for ourselves.

I hope I can keep the spirit of post-flight Gregory as I adjust to my new setting down here in The Plains. I know God put me here for a reason, and I hope I can do work that brings him glory.

Christian Resentment and the Good News of Martyrdom

~ Vincent

I’ve been reading a fair few cultural critiques lately (C.S. Lewis, Philip Rieff, Charles Taylor, Andrew Root, and Rod Dreher). Each of these authors is trying to articulate what makes faith in the modern world challenging and the cultural forces that make conversion so unlikely for the average Westerner. And honestly? It’s been kind of a bummer. To be clear, I think there’s immense value for Christians in each of these writers. To share the gospel effectively, we have to understand the people around us. What do they long for? What do they expect? What do they think is reasonable? What parts of the faith will they find to be a challenge? Given the massive cultural shift over the past 50 years, churches need to realize that the mission field has changed and they have to adapt to be effective ministers of the gospel. At the same time, reading these books repeatedly can breed a sense of desperation. It’s clear the Church no longer has the privileged status it once had.

Certain eras just had a tremendous energy around faith. For example, if you’ve ever read the diaries of old Methodist preachers from the earliest days of America, you know that their experiences are totally incomprehensible for a modern Christian. “I preached the gospel in a field today. Five-hundred were converted through the grace of God. Huzzah!” Seriously? How on Earth did you pull that off? To be fair, the diary entries tend to end in mass conversions or the preacher having tomatoes hucked at them, but still! There’s that sense that things are MOVING! Today, there’s not that same movement. Cultural critiques can help us put our finger on some of the factors that have made things harder, but they can’t make them go away. A truth that once seemed so obvious that people might convert on the spot is now so challenging for people to accept that there are active, identifiable cultural barriers preventing people from hearing that good news. It can all start to feel a little hopeless. When you put all those thinkers together, you end up with one massive decline narrative about Christianity in the West.

It’s not just reading philosophy that can lead you to feel hopeless. A lot of churches have pretty strong decline narratives themselves. Mind you, not all. There are some big churches that are doing very well for themselves! But converts to those churches are often drawn from smaller churches, rather than from the ranks of non-Christians. The shrunken churches that are left behind end up with a distinct decline narrative. “There used to be so many more people here.” “Those are the classrooms we don’t use anymore.” “What gets young people to go to church? Why aren’t they coming?” Again, some of this is good. Congregations need to look at the tough realities of their situation! But a lot of it feels hopeless. Looking at the bad is only helpful insofar as it can direct us to the good.

So where’s the hope for Christians in a post-Christian era? How can we stay excited when it feels like things are going downhill?

It can help to remember that the challenges we face aren’t anything near the persecutions that other believers have experienced. There are countries where you can get killed for being Christian. There are places where evangelizing is illegal. What we’re facing? It’s nothing compared to that. And so many of them didn’t face their harsh realities with hopelessness. They were joyful to suffer for the one they loved.

The Martyrdom of Polycarp is a beautiful second-century story of someone was joyful in the face of wild adversity. The culture that second-century Roman Christians were living in was openly hostile. If you couldn’t tell from the title, they killed Christians. In this particular account, they’re going to kill Polycarp (a Christian bishop) if he doesn’t deny his faith make a sacrifice to the emperor (spoiler: he doesn’t). Here’s a community that has EVERY REASON to be frustrated by the philosophy of their day and is facing challenges to ministry that we can’t even fathom— but they don’t express any hopelessness in the story. Just look at this excerpt:

All the martyrdoms, then, were blessed and noble which took place according to the will of God. For it becomes us who profess greater piety than others, to ascribe the authority over all things to God. And truly, who can fail to admire their nobleness of mind, and their patience, with that love towards their Lord which they displayed?— who, when they were so torn with scourges, that the frame of their bodies, even to the very inward veins and arteries, was laid open, still patiently endured, while even those that stood by pitied and bewailed them. But they reached such a pitch of magnanimity, that not one of them let a sigh or a groan escape them; thus proving to us all that those holy martyrs of Christ, at the very time when they suffered such torments, were absent from the body, or rather, that the Lord then stood by them, and communed with them.

Martyrdom of Polycarp, Ch. 2

They saw their bishop get stabbed to death by the authorities, and they’re praising God! Because God is in control. Even if circumstances are horrendous, they trust him. If he wants them to endure, they’ll do it with a smile. There’s not even a hint of fear. All of this is coming to pass because of God, and it will all turn out right because of God.

I’ll skip the bulk of the middle, but feel free to read it over at New Advent here if you’re curious.

After the story of Polycarp’s death, the final chapter ends with this:

We wish you, brethren, all happiness, while you walk according to the doctrine of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; with whom be glory to God the Father and the Holy Spirit, for the salvation of His holy elect, after whose example the blessed Polycarp suffered, following in whose steps may we too be found in the kingdom of Jesus Christ!

Martyrdom of Polycarp, Ch. 22

They wish their readers happiness. Not worldly happiness, but the kind of happiness that Polycarp had. The kind of happiness is the kind Paul felt when he wrote, “Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain,” (Phil 1:20-21). Real happiness isn’t rooted in culture or circumstance; it’s rooted in God.

The world is different. Converting to Christianity isn’t the obvious choice. Going to church isn’t as common. We won’t likely won’t enjoy the cultural clout and full buildings that we used to, but the happiness that we’re aiming for was never in full buildings or philosophical ease. It’s in loving Jesus and trusting him no matter what.

The Historic Challenge of Christian Parenting

~ Vincent ~ 3 Comments

I just ran across this quote from the famous 4th century Christian preacher, John Chrysostom:

We spare neither labors nor means in order to teach our children secular sciences, so that they can serve well the earthly authorities. Only the knowledge of the holy Faith, the service of the Heavenly King are a matter of indifference to us. We allow them to attend spectacles but we care little whether they go to Church and stand within it reverently. We demand an account from them of what they learned in their secular institutes—why do we not demand an account from them of what they heard in the Lord’s house? 

as cited by Theophan the Recluse, The Path to Salvation, trans. Fr. Seraphim Rose, 331

It was kind of a shock to read! Here’s a man in our heralded Christian past, preaching in an era which I all too readily assume was full of devotion and piety, and he’s addressing the same thing that we face today: parents often care more about secular education than they do the Christian faith. After all, life is long! A child has a whole lifetime to think about God. The window for getting into a good school? That’s approaching fast. So should their child attend church or piano lessons? Wake up early on Sunday for an entry-level job, or head over to worship? The piano lessons and job look better on a college application than anything the Church has to offer. A good application means a good school. A good school means a good job. A good job means a stable income and a higher chance of job satisfaction. Job satisfaction means a higher chance of being happy! And what more could a person ask for than a happy child? Conversion can happen anytime; the road to happiness is happening now. Children need to get on or get left behind.

It’s easy to suggest that this is a phenomenon that only really effects nominal Christians that attend church on Christmas and Easter, but it’s not quite as simple as that. Even the great Augustine of Hippo, bishop and theologian extraordinaire, had parents that prioritized his academic education before his faith journey. When he took a concubine (or started living with his girlfriend, to try to translate a weird ancient idea into a modern one), his Christian mom was surprisingly calm about the whole thing. If anything, she was glad they weren’t getting married:

The reason why she showed no such concern was that she was afraid that the hope she placed in me could be impeded by a wife. This was not the hope which my mother placed in you for the life to come, but the hope which my parents entertained for my career that I might do well out of the study of literature. Both of them, as I realized, were very ambitious for me: my father because he hardly gave a thought to you at all, and his ambitions for me were concerned with mere vanities; my mother because she thought it would do no harm and would be a help to set me on the way towards you, if I studied the traditional pattern of a literary education. That at least is my conjecture as I try to recall the characters of my parents.

Augustine, Confessions, trans. Chadwick, p. 27

In Confessions, Augustine almost NEVER says anything bad about his momma. She is the shining pinnacle of saintliness that follows him around, praying for his conversion and hoping that her son might know God! But even SHE buys in to the theory that he needs to put his studies first while he’s young and then maybe someday he can convert when he’s nice and settled. This isn’t just a thought pattern for nominal Christians; this is a pervasive way of thinking for a lot of Christian parents.

Andrew Root talks extensively about this in his book, The End of Youth Ministry. He suggests that each society has a different vision of what a parent is supposed to be. Obviously, a good parent produces happy children. That tends to be universal. But what does it mean to be happy? Is happiness luxury? Elevated social standing? Religious identity? What does the culture say that happiness is? Because regardless of whether or not you personally affirm it, you’re going to find yourself influenced by it:

It would be super weird for even me (the theologian and husband of a pastor) to say [to my next-door neighbor], “Yes, [my children are] doing very good. Owen fasted all week and saw two visions. And Maisy felt the deep conviction of the Holy Spirit and has entered a time of confession and penance. She wore our family hair shirt to school today. It made gym class difficult, but that’s the point: doing penance for sin isn’t easy!” There was a time in history when this might have been exactly how a person would respond. But not today. The moral imagination has changed, and if I did respond like this, even a churchgoing neighbor would make all sorts of moral interpretations about me… My neighbor might even call social services, assuming that I’m some crazy religious freak, because my sense of the good feels wrong to her. And what would give her the moral high ground is her assumption that my poor kids are being kept from living a full life.

Andrew Root, The End of Youth Ministry, p. 25

So what is good parenting today? What is that thing that our society strives to achieve? For people in the eras of Augustine and Chrysostom, it was clearly tied to an increase in wealth and standing. Are things so different today? Not to suggest that the core of all goodness is located in a person’s pocketbook, but we clearly assume that more money will lead to better opportunities for happiness. Augustine’s parents got all kinds of admiration for saving up and sending him off to a top-notch school! That made them good parents in the eyes of the world. Good parents just like that were being lectured by Chrysostom: don’t let material success take priority over faith, regardless of how good it makes you look in the eyes of the world. If we want to avoid being good parents and be godly parents, it’s going to be a challenge that we can’t embark on alone.

I have no kids. It’s easy for me to say that Christians need to find ways to push back against the presiding social imaginary and put faith first when raising children. That being said, I’m still a church member. I’m responsible for helping raise children within my church community, and I’m responsible for supporting their parents. I hope I can can help them on that difficult journey, and I hope I can find a community to help me when that time comes. Raising children faithfully been a challenge for thousands of years, and the lure of defining parenting by the measure of secular success isn’t going away anytime soon.

Great Thinkers and Produce Theft

~ Vincent

I won’t pretend that I knew who Jean-Jacques Rousseau was before this past week.  Makes sense.  Enlightenment-era philosophy and Christian theology tend not to have much in common.  He’s probably best known as the guy with that memorable quote, “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.”  I’ve started digging into his stuff after running across him in Carl Trueman’s latest book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (a brilliant attempt to trace the history of thought that led the modern Western mind).  Apparently this Rousseau guy went toe-to-toe with Augustine!  Not only did he write his own Confessions, but he even included a section about stealing produce and what it meant for his soul!

For those that aren’t aware, Augustine (father of Western Christian orthodoxy) has a really famous moment in his Confessions where he steals some pears.  He’s with a bunch of his rowdy teenage friends when they see this big, beautiful tree of pears.  They steal as many as they can, and then they throw them to the pigs.  The act is pure sin.  There’s nothing to be gained.  There’s nothing logical about it.  Augustine even has better pears at home!  The point isn’t to gain something; the point is to destroy something:

It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error–not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself.

Augustine; Henry Chadwick. The Confessions p. 29

It’s a vivid illustration of man’s innate drive towards sinfulness.  Who among us hasn’t done something stupid in their youth?  Something that was destructive for the sake of being destructive?  For me, I think about the cafeteria at undergrad.  When you were done eating, the popular thing to do in my friend group was to grab an extra apple or banana on your way out and just throw it as far across campus as you could.  And why?  Because destroying was fun!  Cleaning staff be darned!  Let the fruit smash commence!  Augustine is saying, “let’s not let ourselves off the hook for the destruction that we wrought as teens.  We did it for a reason: humanity innately longs to sin.  Don’t let the fact that you were younger and more overt prevent you from seeing your fundamental nature in those stupid acts of destruction.”

Meanwhile, in HIS confessions, Rousseau ALSO tells the story of stealing produce!  This time, it’s asparagus.  His boss, Verrat, has a mother that’s been growing a little garden, and he’s decided that young Rousseau is the perfect man to steal asparagus from it and sell them on his behalf.  Rousseau steals asparagus for relatively benign reasons at first: “seeking only to please my employer,” he claims.  But what began as a little way to help his boss get some extra luxuries starts to warp him.  He starts skimming a little off the top.  After all, he’s the one that is taking on the risk, and nobody would believe him if he said that his boss put him up to it!  So to make things fair, he takes a little.  Then he starts stealing other little things that he finds: apples, tools, trinkets he finds laying around the house.  More than that, he feels utterly justified in doing all that he does:

A continual repetition of ill treatment rendered me callous; it seemed a kind of composition for my crimes, which authorized me to continue them, and, instead of looking back at the punishment, I looked forward to revenge. Being beat like a slave, I judged I had a right to all the vices of one.

Rousseau, Confessions, Bk 1, Gutenberg Edition

Note the change in culprit!  Augustine saw his crimes as proof of a deep-seated inclination to sin within his soul.  Rousseau looks outward to find the culprit.  Verrat convinced him to start stealing to feed his need for luxury.  The sin was reinforced by unjust risk, the beatings that he suffered, and the way he was treated after his crimes.  If Augustine’s pear-thieving was proof of an inward problem, Rousseau’s asparagus theft is a testament to the power that society has to warp an individual towards evil.

This brings us to one of Rousseau’s major ideas: society is the primary force responsible for corrupting the average human. If left alone, people are basically good!  They don’t know how to lie, deceive, compare themselves to someone else, or take advantage of people.  They’re unique, gifted, and ready to live in a way that suits them.  But when they’re introduced to society… well… they learn to lie:

As long as men remained satisfied with their rustic cabins… they lived free, healthy, honest and happy, as much as their nature would admit, and continued to enjoy with each other all the pleasures of an independent intercourse; but from the moment one man began to stand in need of another’s assistance; from the moment it appeared an advantage for one man to possess the quantity of provisions requisite for two, all equality vanished; property started up; labour became necessary; and boundless forests became smiling fields, which it was found necessary to water with human sweat, and in which slavery and misery were soon seen to sprout out and grow with the fruits of the earth.

Rousseau, Second Discourse, Gutenberg Edition

People’s lies help them get along with others.  They help them accumulate wealth and power.  They help them appear better than they are.   All of humanity ends up living a lie and drawing each new person they meet deeper into that lie.  The people who are best at lying benefit tremendously, regardless of who is actually moral:

While government and laws take care of the security and the well being of men in groups, the sciences, letters, and the arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains which weigh men down, snuffing out in them the feeling of that original liberty for which they appear to have been born, and make them love their slavery by turning them into what are called civilized people. Need has raised thrones; the sciences and the arts have strengthened them. You earthly powers, cherish talents and protect those who nurture them. Civilized people, cultivate them. Happy slaves, to them you owe that refined and delicate taste you take pride in, that softness of character and that urbanity of habits which make dealings among you so sociable and easy, in a word, the appearance of all the virtues without the possession of any. 

Rousseau, First Discourse, Gutenberg Edition

Trueman suggests that philosophers like Rousseau set the stage for modern thinking about morality.  There’s a presiding sense in the West that the greatest thing humanity can do is stop oppressing one another and redesign our systems of governance to minimize societal injustice.  Political debates are increasingly built around terminology like social justice, systemic oppression, and intolerance.  Rousseau would be proud of our willingness to tackle society head-on! But what have Christians lost by adopting so much of his thinking? We’re taking on the thought processes of someone who directly contradicted one of our greatest thinkers! We have to stop and ask, what will we be left with when we strip away all the chains we’ve heaped on one another?  Will the final product be capable of glorifying God?  Or was Augustine right? Is there a force beyond societal injustice that causes us to stray? Is sin much more embedded in the human soul than we’d like to imagine?

Apologetics Battle: Simon Magus vs Peter the Apostle

~ Vincent

Apologetics (the art of defending the faith) hasn’t changed nearly as much as you’d expect over the past 2000-ish years. Well… parts of it have certainly changed. After all, if you had a question about Christianity today, I assume you’d look for a pretty official looking book with basic questions and good answers in response. Makes sense. But in the third century, a perfectly legitimate option was picking up a dramatization of a fantasy debate in which the apostle Peter and the sorcerer Simon Magus wage an epic war of words about the big questions in Christianity (as based on the story in Acts 8:9-24). And it’s every bit as awesome as you could imagine.

Ok, a public debate might not sound all that exciting to everyone, but trust me, if those two legendary figures going head-to-head doesn’t get your blood pumping, the details will. Simon Magus rolls into town and becomes the leader of a local cult by explaining to them that he’s God. When the current cult leader (who also claims to be God) objects and tries to beat him with his stick, the stick magically goes through Simon’s body, which leads to the cult leader immediately stepping down from leadership and handing his position over to Simon. Simon also claims to be able to do all kinds of wacky things. He can fly! He can make children grow beards! At one point, he claims to have created a boy out of thin air and then turned him back into air again. Not only did he do this magnificent feat (supposedly), but he claims it as proof that he’s more powerful than the God of the Old Testament. That guy only created humans out of earth and everyone knows that’s way easier than making people out of air.

See? It’s the details that really bring this epic story to life.

The verbal smackdown is just as fun to read. Our debate begins with Peter offering peace to his opponent. Simon’s response?

Do not invoke peace, but rather battle, which is the mother of peace; and if you can, exterminate errors. And do not seek for friendship obtained by unfair admissions; for this I would have you know, above all, that when two fight with each other, then there will be peace when one has been defeated and has fallen. And therefore fight as best you can, and do not expect peace without war, which is impossible; or if it can be attained, show us how.

The Recognitions of Clement, 234

Simon has no chill at all.

All of this is from The Recognitions of Clement, a part of the larger body of work known as the Clementia. Basically, it’s an ancient historical fiction. The author wanted to talk about doctrine, but they spiced things up by using Bible characters. The resulting narrative is surprisingly fun. And effective! I couldn’t help but be a little moved by Peter’s response when one of his assistants asked how God could blame anyone for leaving him if the devil offered them more power:

If your son, whom you have trained and nourished with all care, and brought to man’s estate, should be ungrateful to you, and should leave you and go to another, whom perhaps he may have seen to be richer, and should show to him the honour which he owed to you, and, through hope of greater profit, should deny his birth, and refuse you your paternal rights, would this seem to you right or wicked?”

The Recognitions of Clement, 229

All of the grand spectacle aside, it’s shocking just how relevant most of the the questions that Simon Magus asks Peter are for people today. If Jesus is so great, why does he contradict himself in the Gospels? If God is so good, why did he create evil stuff? Why did God give humans free will? How could the being written about in the Old Testament truly be called a good God? I don’t want to pretend like all of the answers that Peter gives would be totally satisfying to modern ears, but they hold up pretty well on the whole.

In pop culture, there’s this strong sense that we’re so far advanced from the primitive thinkers of the past. The progress that we’ve made over the past 2000 years puts us lightyears ahead of our foolish, backwards ancestors, but when you crack open their books, you can see how ridiculous a statement like that is. We may have some new tools and some new insights into the way the world works, but we’re still fundamentally the same beings working out the same questions. Our ancestors’ thoughts on religion, philosophy, mathematics, and any one of a million other disciplines are often far more advanced than we give them credit for.

As Christians, we have so much to gain from looking back at ancient apologetics. Not only are the historic responses insightful, but reading these documents reminds us that we haven’t entered into a new age in which all of our collective wisdom is outdated. We’re more equipped than we know, and the questions that people are asking aren’t as groundbreaking as we think. There’s truly nothing new under the sun.

Source: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/s/schaff/anf08/cache/anf08.pdf