Here is an excerpt from Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis. It is the chapter called The Great Sin, and it is about pride. Every time I read this I get a fresh view of what pride, or "spiritual cancer" as he calls it, is and how far the cancer is advancing in my own soul. It is a great analysis of something no one is free of, and points toward a way free of it.
Again, I have highlighted sections for discussion/thought.
Now I come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most sharply from all other morals. There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which everyone in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards. I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. And at the same time I have very seldom met anyone, who was not a Christian, who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it in ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.
The vice I am talking about is pride, or self-conceit: and the virtue opposite it, in Christian morals, is called humility. You may remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, that I warned you that the center of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now we have come to the center. According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison. It was through Pride that the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every other vice; it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
If Christians are right, it is pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began. Other vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But pride always means enmity – it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.
In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that – and, therefore know yourself as nothing in comparison – you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people, and, of course, as long as you are looking down you cannot see things that are above you.
That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with pride can say that they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how he approves of them and thinks them for better than ordinary people. That is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to him and get out of it a pound’s worth of pride towards their fellow men. I suppose it was one of those people Christ was thinking about when he said that some would preach about him and cast out devils in his name, only to be told at the end of the world that he had never known them. And any of us may at any moment be in this death trap. Luckily, we have a test. Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good – above all, that we are better than someone else – I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil. The real test of being in the presence of God is that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.
It is a terrible thing that the worst of all vices can smuggle itself into the very center of our religious life. But you can see why. The other, and less bad, vices come from the devil working on us through our animal nature. But this does not come through our animal nature at all. It comes direct from hell. It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly.
Before leaving this subject I must guard against some possible misconceptions:
1.) Pleasure in being praised is not pride. The child who is patted on the back for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by her lover, the saved soul to whom Christ says, “Well done,” are please and ought to be. For here the pleasure likes not in what you are but in the fact that you have please someone you wanted (and rightly wanted) to please. The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, “I have pleased him; all is well,” to thinking, “What a fine person I must be to have done it.” The more you delight in yourself and the less you delight in the praise, the worse you are becoming. When you delight wholly in yourself and do not care about the praise at all, you have reached the bottom. That is why vanity, though it is the sort of pride which shows most on the surface, is really the least bad and most pardonable sort. The vain person wants praise, applause, admiration, too much and is always angling for it. It is a fault, but a childlike and even (in an odd way) a humble fault. It shows that you are not yet completely contented to want them to look at you. You are, in fact, still human. The real black, diabolical pride comes when you look down on others so much that you do not care what they think of you. Of course, it is very right, and often our duty, not to care what people think of us, if we do so far the right reason, namely, because we care incomparably more what God thinks. But the proud man has a different reason for not caring. He says, “Why should I care for the applause of that rabble as if their opinion were worth anything? And even if their opinions were of value, am I the sort of man to blush with pleasure at a compliment like some chit of a girl at her first dance? No, I am an integrated, adult personality. All I have done has been done to satisfy my own ideals – or my artistic conscience – or the traditions of my family – or, in a word, because I Am That Kind of Chap. If the mob like it, let them. They’re nothing to me.” In this way real thoroughgoing pride may act as a check on vanity.
2.) We may say in English that a man is “proud” of his son, or his father, or his school, or regiment, and it may be asked whether “pride” in this sense is a sin. I think it depends on what, exactly, we mean by “proud of.” Very often, in such sentences, the phrase “is proud of” means “has a warm-hearted admiration for.” Such an admiration is, of course, very far from being a sin. But it might, perhaps, mean that the person in question gives himself airs on the ground of his distinguished father, or because he belongs to a famous regiment. This would, clearly, be a fault, but even then, it would be better than being proud simply of himself. To love an admire anything outside of yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin, though we shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God.
3.) We must not think pride is something God forbids because he is offended at it, or that humility is something he demands as due to his own dignity – as if God himself was proud. He is not in the least worried about his dignity. The point is, he wants you to know him; he wants to give you himself. And he and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with him you will, in fact, be humble – delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which as made you restless and unhappy all your life. He is trying to make you humble in order to make this moment possible; trying to take of a lot of silly, ugly, fancy dress in which we gave all got ourselves up and are strutting about like the little idiots we are. I wish I had got a bit further with humility myself; if I had, I could probably tell you more about the relief, the comfort, of taking the fancy dress off – getting rid of the false self, with all its “look at me” and “aren’t I a good boy?” and all its posing and posturing. To get even near it, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.
4.) Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call “humble” nowadays; he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.
If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Art Every Wednesday (20)
I was talking about the gifts of God the other night with a friend and it reminded me of a great Art Every Wednesday post: stained glass windows.
The gist of the conversation was that God has lavished his grace on the world - literally you cannot open your eyes without encountering his gems. The sky, the trees, the seasons, the lives of others, cities, art - all of it trumpets the grace of God. The gifts can be viewed as essentially competing with God for our devotion to God, or they can be seen as a means by which our enjoyment of him is expanded. This is the lesson I draw from stained glass windows.
Stained glass divides white light into the whole spectrum of colors. Cathedrals have been using it for a thousand years to instruct believers and draw their eyes and hearts toward transcendent beauty. They played a vital role in churches before the printing press and widespread literacy because windows were an easy way to reproduce Biblical stories for an illiterate population.
I've included some incredible examples of stained glass (organized chronologically) below. To sit under these windows would be a lesson in worship. Think of the windows - they are only made beautiful by the light behind them, at night they become opaque, but full light of the sun they dazzle. The window itself does not create beauty, but it creates an extra work of beauty; it teaches the viewer to see the beauty that light contains. The viewer is drawn to that beauty and also drawn beyond it to the beauty of light itself. The glory of light is increased, not decreased, by passing through the stained glass. So also with the glory of God. It passes through the world and explodes into a million various colors - a million ways which we experience it. The gifts do not compete with God any more than stained glass does so with light. They reveal the beauty that was always there in an infinity of ways which, otherwise, would have passed simply as white light.
The Jesse Tree. Chartres Cathedral. 1145
Rose Window. Basilique Saint-Denis. 12-13 century
Saint Chapelle. 13-14 century.
Calke Abbey Church. 19th century.
Meiningen Church. 20th century.
Catedral do Sao Sebastian. 20th century.
The gist of the conversation was that God has lavished his grace on the world - literally you cannot open your eyes without encountering his gems. The sky, the trees, the seasons, the lives of others, cities, art - all of it trumpets the grace of God. The gifts can be viewed as essentially competing with God for our devotion to God, or they can be seen as a means by which our enjoyment of him is expanded. This is the lesson I draw from stained glass windows.
Stained glass divides white light into the whole spectrum of colors. Cathedrals have been using it for a thousand years to instruct believers and draw their eyes and hearts toward transcendent beauty. They played a vital role in churches before the printing press and widespread literacy because windows were an easy way to reproduce Biblical stories for an illiterate population.
I've included some incredible examples of stained glass (organized chronologically) below. To sit under these windows would be a lesson in worship. Think of the windows - they are only made beautiful by the light behind them, at night they become opaque, but full light of the sun they dazzle. The window itself does not create beauty, but it creates an extra work of beauty; it teaches the viewer to see the beauty that light contains. The viewer is drawn to that beauty and also drawn beyond it to the beauty of light itself. The glory of light is increased, not decreased, by passing through the stained glass. So also with the glory of God. It passes through the world and explodes into a million various colors - a million ways which we experience it. The gifts do not compete with God any more than stained glass does so with light. They reveal the beauty that was always there in an infinity of ways which, otherwise, would have passed simply as white light.
The Jesse Tree. Chartres Cathedral. 1145
Rose Window. Basilique Saint-Denis. 12-13 century
Saint Chapelle. 13-14 century.
Calke Abbey Church. 19th century.
Meiningen Church. 20th century.
Catedral do Sao Sebastian. 20th century.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
ReThink the Bible (3)
Something has gone wrong. If it had not we would read the Bible and find it a certain shape and find that shape perfectly corresponds to the shape we are like hand and glove. As it is, parts of it poke and prod us. There is a tension like two puzzle pieces that don’t fit. And the true one must grind against the false one. The Bible must wear away at our ragged edges.
The question is what to do with it. To paraphrase Jerram Barrs, “It is exactly the places in the Bible which create in us the most tension that we must return to, meditate and pray over, study, and learn from.” The only thing to do with the Bible is to become a disciple of the Voice from Outside.
If that scares some part of you, then, in a sense, you are right. I just said that your happiness lies in not being in control, but in giving that control to a voice outside yourself. All that is well and good until that voice leads you away from your own self-protection, which it will, if Christ is to be any example.
There is a quote by Francis Schaeffer from True Spirituality that is appropriate here. He said, “We would be less than truthful, I think, if we failed to acknowledge that often we do not offer ourselves to God’s use for fear of what will come. But fear falls to the ground when we see before whom we are standing.”
Christianity is about Jesus, and that all the Bible is about. Christ is the Gospel. When the Bible grinds away at you, when it cuts you, when it makes your cultural presuppositions uncomfortable, it never does so apart from this. That is what Schaeffer is saying. All the other questions about the Bible are very important, but when come this far all the questions change. “Is the Bible true?” and “What will it’s truth cost?” fade, and this question rises: “Is Jesus good?”
If the fear of losing control comes when the Bible becomes an authority then we have come this far at least. If that same fear does not dissipate when we see before whom we are standing, then we still have not yet come far enough. We are standing before Jesus, and his heart for us is on display on the cross.
If that is true then in seeking to read the Bible is not following a book of arbitrary rules, but it is to seek the person behind the book, it is to encounter God there. And this is a God who is radically committed to your flourishing. This is a God who has sacrificed more for you then he will ever ask you to sacrifice. A God who knows you better than you know yourself, and as a result of this knowledge he will desire to change you in ways that you would not desire to change yourself. But there is no fear in this. Fear falls to the ground when you see before whom you are standing.
[Series: Rethink the Bible (1), Rethink the Bible (2)]
The question is what to do with it. To paraphrase Jerram Barrs, “It is exactly the places in the Bible which create in us the most tension that we must return to, meditate and pray over, study, and learn from.” The only thing to do with the Bible is to become a disciple of the Voice from Outside.
If that scares some part of you, then, in a sense, you are right. I just said that your happiness lies in not being in control, but in giving that control to a voice outside yourself. All that is well and good until that voice leads you away from your own self-protection, which it will, if Christ is to be any example.
There is a quote by Francis Schaeffer from True Spirituality that is appropriate here. He said, “We would be less than truthful, I think, if we failed to acknowledge that often we do not offer ourselves to God’s use for fear of what will come. But fear falls to the ground when we see before whom we are standing.”
Christianity is about Jesus, and that all the Bible is about. Christ is the Gospel. When the Bible grinds away at you, when it cuts you, when it makes your cultural presuppositions uncomfortable, it never does so apart from this. That is what Schaeffer is saying. All the other questions about the Bible are very important, but when come this far all the questions change. “Is the Bible true?” and “What will it’s truth cost?” fade, and this question rises: “Is Jesus good?”
If the fear of losing control comes when the Bible becomes an authority then we have come this far at least. If that same fear does not dissipate when we see before whom we are standing, then we still have not yet come far enough. We are standing before Jesus, and his heart for us is on display on the cross.
If that is true then in seeking to read the Bible is not following a book of arbitrary rules, but it is to seek the person behind the book, it is to encounter God there. And this is a God who is radically committed to your flourishing. This is a God who has sacrificed more for you then he will ever ask you to sacrifice. A God who knows you better than you know yourself, and as a result of this knowledge he will desire to change you in ways that you would not desire to change yourself. But there is no fear in this. Fear falls to the ground when you see before whom you are standing.
[Series: Rethink the Bible (1), Rethink the Bible (2)]
Saturday, September 20, 2008
ReThink the Bible (2)
As I said in the last post, until the prerequisite of omniscience is met the Bible is such a thing that the very last thing you can do is cut things out of it. Which brings us to the next question: what is the Bible? Paul tried to answer that same question for Timothy in 2 Timothy:
“All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.”
Paul’s answer implies to things: 1. The Bible is an authority and 2. The Bible is life-giving. The fact that it is useful for correcting, teaching, rebuking, etc. implies that it is in its rightful place when it is standing over a human life, not the other way around. But this is not only an impersonal book of rules; it is life-giving. It is breathed out by God. Think of the creation story: God makes a man from clay and then “breathes into his nostrils” and the clay man comes alive. Paul is saying that this is the right way to view the Bible: life breathed in from the outside. It is not a one time event at creation, but an on-going process of God making the world right all over again, and this is exactly what the Bible is.
There is a catch though. The life is contingent on the authority. You don’t get the one without the other. If it’s not an authority which is able to correct, rebuke, teach, and cut you, then there will be no life breathed in.
In essence, this is the problem with what Thomas Jefferson did. In other words, the problem is: what if Perelandra is right?
Perelandra is the second book of C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. In it the main character meets an angel that appears as a shaft of light. The shaft of light is not straight up and down, but is slanted at an angle that makes it feel like vertigo to even look at, but as he continues to look he begins to realize that it is not the angle of the light that is at a slant, but himself. He realizes that here is something from Outside, which appears bent and slanted because it is being viewed from the Inside, but if he could but see all the way through he would realize that this light was aligned with the plumb line of Deep Heaven. It is the voice from Outside spoken into the world. I love this scene because it fits the Biblical worldview so well. This is what the Bible says about itself, that it too is the voice spoken from the outside.
According to the Biblical worldview that description fits the universe like a lock fits a key. A few things follow from this. First, as we read the Bible parts of it will appear slanted, bent, twisted at times. It is not a question of If but of When. Read it and you will encounter those places which rub against the grain of your natural preferences or tell you things you don’t want to hear. Also, if that is true, the last thing you can ever do it cut it out. If it is really the Voice from Outside then those very things that rub at your natural preferences are the things that you need to be told, it is those things that are wrapped up in the way the Bible imparts life. If you cut it, it becomes a dead end. You will be left with a handful of things you think of as “diamonds,” but it will only be a mirror. You might as well record your own voice and play it back to yourself over and over again. It will be comfortable, but it will be a prison in the end. The Bible will no longer be able to come after you. It can’t cut you. It can’t take you by the shoulders and shake you. It can’t make you uncomfortable ever again. And if it is the Voice from Outside then it absolutely must, in fact, that is exactly what it means to do to you. It is God-breathed for the purpose of unbending you, of aligning you to the plumb line of Deep Heaven. It will feel like vertigo, of course. We’ve all grown in a broken world and grown broken ourselves, and we only want to be given things that look like what we’ve always had. But God means to give us more.
[Series: Rethink the Bible (1), Rethink the Bible (3)]
“All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.”
Paul’s answer implies to things: 1. The Bible is an authority and 2. The Bible is life-giving. The fact that it is useful for correcting, teaching, rebuking, etc. implies that it is in its rightful place when it is standing over a human life, not the other way around. But this is not only an impersonal book of rules; it is life-giving. It is breathed out by God. Think of the creation story: God makes a man from clay and then “breathes into his nostrils” and the clay man comes alive. Paul is saying that this is the right way to view the Bible: life breathed in from the outside. It is not a one time event at creation, but an on-going process of God making the world right all over again, and this is exactly what the Bible is.
There is a catch though. The life is contingent on the authority. You don’t get the one without the other. If it’s not an authority which is able to correct, rebuke, teach, and cut you, then there will be no life breathed in.
In essence, this is the problem with what Thomas Jefferson did. In other words, the problem is: what if Perelandra is right?
Perelandra is the second book of C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. In it the main character meets an angel that appears as a shaft of light. The shaft of light is not straight up and down, but is slanted at an angle that makes it feel like vertigo to even look at, but as he continues to look he begins to realize that it is not the angle of the light that is at a slant, but himself. He realizes that here is something from Outside, which appears bent and slanted because it is being viewed from the Inside, but if he could but see all the way through he would realize that this light was aligned with the plumb line of Deep Heaven. It is the voice from Outside spoken into the world. I love this scene because it fits the Biblical worldview so well. This is what the Bible says about itself, that it too is the voice spoken from the outside.
According to the Biblical worldview that description fits the universe like a lock fits a key. A few things follow from this. First, as we read the Bible parts of it will appear slanted, bent, twisted at times. It is not a question of If but of When. Read it and you will encounter those places which rub against the grain of your natural preferences or tell you things you don’t want to hear. Also, if that is true, the last thing you can ever do it cut it out. If it is really the Voice from Outside then those very things that rub at your natural preferences are the things that you need to be told, it is those things that are wrapped up in the way the Bible imparts life. If you cut it, it becomes a dead end. You will be left with a handful of things you think of as “diamonds,” but it will only be a mirror. You might as well record your own voice and play it back to yourself over and over again. It will be comfortable, but it will be a prison in the end. The Bible will no longer be able to come after you. It can’t cut you. It can’t take you by the shoulders and shake you. It can’t make you uncomfortable ever again. And if it is the Voice from Outside then it absolutely must, in fact, that is exactly what it means to do to you. It is God-breathed for the purpose of unbending you, of aligning you to the plumb line of Deep Heaven. It will feel like vertigo, of course. We’ve all grown in a broken world and grown broken ourselves, and we only want to be given things that look like what we’ve always had. But God means to give us more.
[Series: Rethink the Bible (1), Rethink the Bible (3)]
Friday, September 19, 2008
ReThink the Bible (1)
Thomas Jefferson thought it was hard to read the Bible because there were so many unbelievable things in it, so he made a new one. He took the 4 gospels and literally cut everything supernatural out of it, creating his 46 page book Morals and Teachings of Jesus of Nazereth. He said this in a letter to John Adams in 1813:
In extracting the pure principles which [Jesus] taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled…I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently [Christ’s], which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.”
Jefferson liked the morals of the Bible, but didn’t really like the Bible itself. I think this is a problem for lots of reasons, but this is the one I want to address in these three posts: Jefferson thought it was hard to read the Bible because it was wrong and he needed to cut things out of it to make it right, but the Bible’s answer is that it is hard to read because we are wrong and it needs to cut things out of us to make us right. You might say, of course that is what the Bible’s answer is, it is speaking of itself. But look at what Jefferson did closer and it begins to unravel.
The prerequisite for doing what Jefferson did was attaining a certain height of knowledge form which he can look down and discern right from wrong as he looked at the Bible, from which he would be able to separate that “diamonds from the dung.” That is exactly what he was claiming with his scissors, that he had reached this height of omniscience. That is what every culture thinks, whether it be 18th century Enlightenment, Easter Buddhism, the worldview of the American New Age spirituality, Postmodernism, etc. Every worldview and every culture thinks it’s finally hit on the truth, and every culture is wrong. Every culture is wrong.
No culture in any time period has had a stranglehold on truth. If this is true of a culture, it is certainly true of an individual. Jefferson wasn’t speaking out of omniscience, he was just speaking from cultural arrogance. He was a product of humanistic (counting man as the center of all things), rationalistic (all things can be known through the reason) Enlightenment thinking which discounted the supernatural from the beginning. He made the mistake of assuming the boundaries of his knowledge were the boundaries of all knowledge and he cut out what didn’t fit his preconceptions.
What of the Bible’s answer to the question “Why is it hard to read the Bible?” It says that the Bible itself is not what is wrong, but it is we who read it that need correction. The truth of this answer is in its humility and its realism. It’s humble because it recognizes that no one culture or individual is omniscient. If we are too see beyond the horizon we need someone from that country to return from there and describe it to us. There is always much we do not know. It is realistic because it assumes that we don’t want to hear what we don’t want to hear. The engine of censorship doesn’t’ stop just because we are reading the Bible.
So what needs to be re-thought? Rather than scissors, we ought to approach the Bible with that same humility and realism, living with the questions and holding out the possibility that it may be we who are wrong, not the Bible.
[Series: Rethink the Bible (2), Rethink the Bible (3)]
In extracting the pure principles which [Jesus] taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled…I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently [Christ’s], which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.”
Jefferson liked the morals of the Bible, but didn’t really like the Bible itself. I think this is a problem for lots of reasons, but this is the one I want to address in these three posts: Jefferson thought it was hard to read the Bible because it was wrong and he needed to cut things out of it to make it right, but the Bible’s answer is that it is hard to read because we are wrong and it needs to cut things out of us to make us right. You might say, of course that is what the Bible’s answer is, it is speaking of itself. But look at what Jefferson did closer and it begins to unravel.
The prerequisite for doing what Jefferson did was attaining a certain height of knowledge form which he can look down and discern right from wrong as he looked at the Bible, from which he would be able to separate that “diamonds from the dung.” That is exactly what he was claiming with his scissors, that he had reached this height of omniscience. That is what every culture thinks, whether it be 18th century Enlightenment, Easter Buddhism, the worldview of the American New Age spirituality, Postmodernism, etc. Every worldview and every culture thinks it’s finally hit on the truth, and every culture is wrong. Every culture is wrong.
No culture in any time period has had a stranglehold on truth. If this is true of a culture, it is certainly true of an individual. Jefferson wasn’t speaking out of omniscience, he was just speaking from cultural arrogance. He was a product of humanistic (counting man as the center of all things), rationalistic (all things can be known through the reason) Enlightenment thinking which discounted the supernatural from the beginning. He made the mistake of assuming the boundaries of his knowledge were the boundaries of all knowledge and he cut out what didn’t fit his preconceptions.
What of the Bible’s answer to the question “Why is it hard to read the Bible?” It says that the Bible itself is not what is wrong, but it is we who read it that need correction. The truth of this answer is in its humility and its realism. It’s humble because it recognizes that no one culture or individual is omniscient. If we are too see beyond the horizon we need someone from that country to return from there and describe it to us. There is always much we do not know. It is realistic because it assumes that we don’t want to hear what we don’t want to hear. The engine of censorship doesn’t’ stop just because we are reading the Bible.
So what needs to be re-thought? Rather than scissors, we ought to approach the Bible with that same humility and realism, living with the questions and holding out the possibility that it may be we who are wrong, not the Bible.
[Series: Rethink the Bible (2), Rethink the Bible (3)]
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Art Every Wednesday (19)
The first time I heard the song, "Bukowski" on Modest Mouse's Album "Good News for People Who Love Bad News" I think I turned it off. Years later I've gotten back into Modest Mouse and this is one of my favorite songs on the album, for exactly the reasons I turned it off the first time I listened to.
I've put the lyrics up and a video with the audio of the song. Read the lyrics and listen to the song all the way through. The song is raising serious questions and the Christian response should not be to shut it off. Modest Mouse has made a song that frankly and honestly handles doubts about God. It raises good questions. If God has a plan, can it be trusted? If God is powerful, does that make him a control freak? Does his plan bring flourishing? Does our greatest happiness lie in freedom or God's plan? Why is there suffering if his plan is so wonderful?
Every serious and thoughtful person has to wrestle over these questions if they are going to explore Christianity. I would say that this song, no matter what the eventual conclusions are, is simply art made in the thick of that process, and as such, it deserves listening. As Schaeffer said, "There is nothing more ugly than a Christian orthodoxy without understanding and without compassion… dare we feel superior when we see their tortured expressions in their art? Christians should stop laughing and take such men seriously. Then we shall have the right again to speak to our generation. These men are dying while they yet live, but where is our compassion for them?” If we do not listen, we have not right to speak. And again, “This is sensitivity crying out in the dark”
Don't turn it off. • The gospel brings us near those who ask these questions (and not with a quick answer like a bandaid) but with love that leads the people of God to become incarnate in this world just like God himself became. The light doesn’t shine in the darkness until it enters the darkness. And it really does shine. As a person convinced the gospel does bring flourishing and proscribes a way to live which leads to greater, not lesser, freedom I can only say there are reasonable answers within the Christian worldview. In fact, that why I am a Christian (one reason). It's answers make sense of life, and you can take questions like these to the Gospel and find them satisfied and still have a world worth living in.
Lyrics:
Woke up this morning and it seemed to me, that every night turns out to be a little bit more like Bukowski. And yeah, I know he's a pretty good read. But God who'd wanna be? God who'd wanna be such an asshole? God who'd wanna be? God who'd wanna be such an asshole?
Well we sat on the edge of the river, the crowd screamed "Sacrifice the liver!" If God takes life, he's an Indian giver. So tell me now why you'll tell me never. Who would wanna be? Who would wanna be such a control freak? Well who would wanna be? Who would wanna be such a control freak?
Well see what you wanna see. You should see it all.
Well take what you want from me. You deserve it all.
Nine times out of ten, our hearts just get dissolved.
Well I want a better place or just a better way to fall.
But one time out of ten, everything is perfect for us all.
Well I want a better place or just a better way to fall.
Here we go!
If God controls the land and disease, and keeps a watchful eye on me, if he's really so damn mighty, well my problem is that I can't see, well who'd wanna be? Who'd wanna be such a control freak? Well who would wanna be? Who would wanna be such a control freak?
Evil home stereo, what good songs do you know?
Evil me, oh yeah I know, what good curves can you throw?
Well all that icing and all that cake, I can't make it to your wedding, but I'm sure I'm gonna be at your wake. You were talk, talk, talk, talkin' in circles that day, when you get to the point make sure that I'm still awake, OK?
Went to bed and didn't see why every day turns out to be a little bit more like Bukowski. And yeah, I know he's a pretty good read. But God who'd wanna be? God who'd wanna be such an asshole?
I've put the lyrics up and a video with the audio of the song. Read the lyrics and listen to the song all the way through. The song is raising serious questions and the Christian response should not be to shut it off. Modest Mouse has made a song that frankly and honestly handles doubts about God. It raises good questions. If God has a plan, can it be trusted? If God is powerful, does that make him a control freak? Does his plan bring flourishing? Does our greatest happiness lie in freedom or God's plan? Why is there suffering if his plan is so wonderful?
Every serious and thoughtful person has to wrestle over these questions if they are going to explore Christianity. I would say that this song, no matter what the eventual conclusions are, is simply art made in the thick of that process, and as such, it deserves listening. As Schaeffer said, "There is nothing more ugly than a Christian orthodoxy without understanding and without compassion… dare we feel superior when we see their tortured expressions in their art? Christians should stop laughing and take such men seriously. Then we shall have the right again to speak to our generation. These men are dying while they yet live, but where is our compassion for them?” If we do not listen, we have not right to speak. And again, “This is sensitivity crying out in the dark”
Don't turn it off. • The gospel brings us near those who ask these questions (and not with a quick answer like a bandaid) but with love that leads the people of God to become incarnate in this world just like God himself became. The light doesn’t shine in the darkness until it enters the darkness. And it really does shine. As a person convinced the gospel does bring flourishing and proscribes a way to live which leads to greater, not lesser, freedom I can only say there are reasonable answers within the Christian worldview. In fact, that why I am a Christian (one reason). It's answers make sense of life, and you can take questions like these to the Gospel and find them satisfied and still have a world worth living in.
Lyrics:
Woke up this morning and it seemed to me, that every night turns out to be a little bit more like Bukowski. And yeah, I know he's a pretty good read. But God who'd wanna be? God who'd wanna be such an asshole? God who'd wanna be? God who'd wanna be such an asshole?
Well we sat on the edge of the river, the crowd screamed "Sacrifice the liver!" If God takes life, he's an Indian giver. So tell me now why you'll tell me never. Who would wanna be? Who would wanna be such a control freak? Well who would wanna be? Who would wanna be such a control freak?
Well see what you wanna see. You should see it all.
Well take what you want from me. You deserve it all.
Nine times out of ten, our hearts just get dissolved.
Well I want a better place or just a better way to fall.
But one time out of ten, everything is perfect for us all.
Well I want a better place or just a better way to fall.
Here we go!
If God controls the land and disease, and keeps a watchful eye on me, if he's really so damn mighty, well my problem is that I can't see, well who'd wanna be? Who'd wanna be such a control freak? Well who would wanna be? Who would wanna be such a control freak?
Evil home stereo, what good songs do you know?
Evil me, oh yeah I know, what good curves can you throw?
Well all that icing and all that cake, I can't make it to your wedding, but I'm sure I'm gonna be at your wake. You were talk, talk, talk, talkin' in circles that day, when you get to the point make sure that I'm still awake, OK?
Went to bed and didn't see why every day turns out to be a little bit more like Bukowski. And yeah, I know he's a pretty good read. But God who'd wanna be? God who'd wanna be such an asshole?
Friday, September 12, 2008
Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization
This article, Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization, appeared in Adbusters. It is a critical look at one evening in hipsterdom. No idea what a hipster is? Take a look. His point in the article is that "cool" is made up of a patchwork of styles from taken from counter-cultures... with the coolest being the most counter-cultural. This could only happen in a postmodern culture, which is completely comfortable lifting a manner of speaking, of dressing, of living from it's native context regardless of its original meaning. The underlying belief here is that those symbols have no meaning, thus, taking them from their original context is not a problem.
An excerpt from the article:
"It’s an odd dance of self-identity – adamantly denying your existence while wearing clearly defined symbols that proclaims it... We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new."
If you are really interested in diving in to postmodernism and its influences on culture check out Jerram Barr's lecture: Postmodernism and Style.
Also, here is a blogger who wrote a post about this article. The Style of Subversion by Mark Van Steenwyk. He offers some interesting criticisms of the tyranny of cool.
An excerpt from the article:
"It’s an odd dance of self-identity – adamantly denying your existence while wearing clearly defined symbols that proclaims it... We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new."
If you are really interested in diving in to postmodernism and its influences on culture check out Jerram Barr's lecture: Postmodernism and Style.
Also, here is a blogger who wrote a post about this article. The Style of Subversion by Mark Van Steenwyk. He offers some interesting criticisms of the tyranny of cool.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Art Every Wednesday (18)
In 1968 The Beatles release The White Album. In 2003 Jay-Z released The Black Album. In 2004 DJ Dangermouse combined the two of them and release The Grey Album. Dangermouse used sounds from The White Album and interlaced them with beats and lyrics from The Black album and made a new piece of art out of the hybrid.
Below is Rocky Raccoon by the Beatles, Justify My Thug by the Beatles, and the hybrid by DJ Dangermouse.
Rocky Raccoon by the Beatles (obviously not an original video... but a very good one)
Justify My Thug by DJ Dangermouse
Below is Rocky Raccoon by the Beatles, Justify My Thug by the Beatles, and the hybrid by DJ Dangermouse.
Rocky Raccoon by the Beatles (obviously not an original video... but a very good one)
Justify My Thug by Jay-Z (NeMo Remix)
Monday, September 8, 2008
Things I will Read Forever (2)
For the second post in the series I chose the first chapter of Dietrech Bonhoeffer's book "Life Together." I first read this section when my notion of Christian community was exactly what Bonhoeffer says it must not be, and I hated it. I thought he was wrong. Since then I have come to realize that he is not. This is a long excerpt - I just couldn't cut out so many things - but it is still abridged. I have highlighted sections for discussion or that just seem particularly poignant to me. Print it out and take some time to read it. Every time I do by the end of the section I am saying to myself "Why haven't I read this sooner" and promising myself that I will read it over and over forever.
Life Together. Dietrech Bonhoeffer
Community
“Behold, how good and pleasant it is for the brethren to dwell together in unity.” (Ps 133:1) In the following we shall consider a number of directions and precepts that the Scriptures provide us for our life together under the Word. It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians. Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. At the end all his disciples deserted him. On the cross he was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers. For this cause he had come, to bring peace to the enemies of God. So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes. There is his commission, his work.
Between the death of Christ and the Last Day it is only be a gracious anticipation of the last things that Christians are privileged to live in visible fellowship with other Christians. It is by the grace of God that a congregation is permitted to gather visibly in this world to share God’s word and sacrament. Not all Christians receive this blessing. The imprisoned, the sick, the scattered lonely, the proclaimers of the gospel in heathen lands stand alone. They know that visible fellowship is a blessing. The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer. The prisoner, the sick person, the Christian in exile sees in the companionship of a fellow Christian a physical sign of the gracious presence of the triune God.
If it is true, of course, that what is an unspeakable gift of God for the lonely individual is easily disregarded and trodden under foot by those who have the gift very day. It is easily forgotten that the fellowship of the Christian brethren is a gift of grace, a gift of the kingdom of God that any day may be taken from us, that the time that still separates us from utter loneliness may be brief indeed. Therefore, let him who until now has had the privilege of living a common Christian life with other Christians praise God’s grace from the bottom of his heart. Let him thank God on his knees and declare: It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren.
Through and in Jesus Christ
Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. No Christian community is more or less than this. Whether it be a brief, single encounter or the daily fellowship of years, Christian community is only this. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ. What does this mean? It means, first, that a Christian needs others because of Jesus Christ. It means, second, that a Christian comes to others only through Jesus Christ. It means, third, that in Jesus Christ we have been chosen from eternity, accepted in time, and united for eternity.
First, the Christian is the man who no longer seeks his salvation, his deliverance, his justification in himself but in Jesus Christ alone. He knows that God’s word in Jesus Christ pronounces him guilty, even when he does not feel his guilt, and God’s word in Jesus Christ pronounces him not guilty and righteous, even when he does not feel that he is righteous at all. The Christian no longer lives of himself, by his own claims and his own justification, but by God’s claims and God’s justification. He lives wholly by God’s word pronounced upon him, whether that word declares him guilty of innocent.
Not what a man is in himself as a Christian, his spirituality and piety, constitutes the basis of our community. What determines our brotherhood is what the man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us. This is true not merely in the beginning, as though in the course of time something were added to our community; it remains so for all the future and to all eternity. I have community with others and I shall continue to have it only through Jesus Christ. The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ do we have one another, wholly, for all eternity.
That dismisses once and for all every clamorous desire for something more. One who wants more that what Christ has established does not want Christian brotherhood. He is looking for some extraordinary social experience which he has not found elsewhere; he is bringing muddled and impure desires in the Christian brotherhood. Just at this point Christian brotherhood is threatened most often at the very start by the greatest danger of all, the danger of being poisoned at its root, the danger of confusing Christian brotherhood with some wishful idea of religious fellowship, of confounding the natural desire of the devout heart for community with the spiritual reality of Christian brotherhood. In Christian brotherhood everything depends upon its being right from the beginning, first, that Christian brotherhood is not an ideal, but a divine reality. Second, that Christian brotherhood is not a spiritual, but a psychic reality.
Not an Ideal, but a Divine Reality
Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.
By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a god of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered , permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community an must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more that the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.
God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of the his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.
Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients. We thank God for what he has done for us. We thank God for giving us brethren who live by his call, by his forgiveness, and his promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what he does give us daily. And ins not what has been given us enough: brothers, who will go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of his grace? Is the divine gift of Christian fellowship anything less than this, any day, even the most difficult and distressing day? Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the communal life, is not the sinning brother still a brother, with whom I, too, stand under the word of Christ? Will not his sin be a constant occasion for me to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Jesus Christ? Thus the very hour of disillusionment with my brother becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one word and deed which really binds us together – the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship.
When a person because alienated from a Christian community in which he has been places and begins to raise complaints about it, he had better examine himself first to see whether the trouble is not due to his wish dream that should be shattered by God; and if this be the case, let him thank God for leading him into this predicament. Let him pray God for an understanding of his own failure and his particular sin, and pray that he might not wrong his brethren. Let him, in the consciousness of his own guilt, make intercession for his brethren. Let him do what he is committed to do, and thank God.
Christian community is like the Christian’s sanctification. It is a gift from God which we cannot claim. Only God knows the real state of our fellowship, of our sanctification. What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as the Christian should not be constantly feeling his spiritual pulse, so, too, the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be constantly taking its temperature. The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more surely and steadily will fellowship increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.
A Spiritual not a Human Reality
Because Christian community is founded solely on Jesus Christ, it is a spiritual and not a psychic reality. The basis of all spiritual reality is the clear, manifest word of God in Jesus Christ. The basis of all human reality is the dark, turbid urges and desires of the human mind. Human love has little regard for truth. It makes the truth relative, since nothing, not even the truth, must come between it and the beloved person. Human love desires the other person, his company, his answering love, but it does not serve him. On the contrary, it continues to desire even when it seems to be serving. There are two marks, both of which are one and the same thing, that manifest the difference between spiritual and human love: Human love cannot tolerate the dissolution of a fellowship that has become false for the sake of genuine fellowship, and human love cannot love an enemy, that is, one who seriously and stubbornly resists it. Both spring from the same source: human love is by its very nature desire – desire for human community. Where it can no longer expect its desire to be fulfilled, there it stops short – namely, in the face of an enemy. There it turns into hatred, contempt, and calumny.
Right here is the point where spiritual love begins. This is why human love becomes personal hatred when it encounters genuine spiritual love, which does not desire but serves. Human love makes itself an end in itself. It nurses and cultivates an ideal. Jesus Christ stands between the lover and the others he loves. I do not know in advance what love of others means on the basis of the general idea of love that grows out of my human desires – all this may rather be hatred and an insidious kind of selfishness in the eyes of Christ. What love is, only Christ tell in his word. Contrary to all my own opinions and convictions, Jesus Christ will tell me what love toward the brethren really is. There for, spiritual love is bound solely to the word of Jesus Christ. Where Christ bids me to maintain fellowship for the sake of love, I will maintain it. Where his truth enjoins me to dissolve a fellowship for love’s sake, there I will dissolve it, despite all the protests of my human love. Because spiritual love does not desire but rather serves, it loves an enemy as a brother. It originates neither in the brother nor in the enemy but in Christ and his word.
I must release the other person from every attempt of mine to regulate, coerce, and dominate him with my love. The other person needs to retain his independence of me; to be loved for what he is, as one for whom Christ became man, died, and rose again, for who Christ bought forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Because Christ has long since acted decisively for my brother, before I could begin to act, I must leave him his freedom to he Christ’s; I must meet him only as the person that he already is in Christ’s eyes. Human love constructs its own image of the other person, of what he is and what he should become. It take the life of the other person into its own hands. Spiritual love recognizes the true image of the other person which he has received from Jesus Christ; the image that Jesus Christ himself embodied and would stamp upon all men. Human love breeds hothouse flower; spiritual love creates the fruits that grow healthily in accord with God’s good will in the rain and storm and sunshine of God’s outdoors.
There is probably no Christian to whom God has not give n the uplifting experience of genuine Christian community at least once in his life. But in this world such experiences can be no more than a gracious extra beyond the daily bread of Christian community life. We have no claim upon such experiences, and we do not live with other Christians for the sake of acquiring them. We are bound by faith, not by experience.
Life Together. Dietrech Bonhoeffer
Community
“Behold, how good and pleasant it is for the brethren to dwell together in unity.” (Ps 133:1) In the following we shall consider a number of directions and precepts that the Scriptures provide us for our life together under the Word. It is not simply to be taken for granted that the Christian has the privilege of living among other Christians. Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. At the end all his disciples deserted him. On the cross he was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers. For this cause he had come, to bring peace to the enemies of God. So the Christian, too, belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life but in the thick of foes. There is his commission, his work.
Between the death of Christ and the Last Day it is only be a gracious anticipation of the last things that Christians are privileged to live in visible fellowship with other Christians. It is by the grace of God that a congregation is permitted to gather visibly in this world to share God’s word and sacrament. Not all Christians receive this blessing. The imprisoned, the sick, the scattered lonely, the proclaimers of the gospel in heathen lands stand alone. They know that visible fellowship is a blessing. The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer. The prisoner, the sick person, the Christian in exile sees in the companionship of a fellow Christian a physical sign of the gracious presence of the triune God.
If it is true, of course, that what is an unspeakable gift of God for the lonely individual is easily disregarded and trodden under foot by those who have the gift very day. It is easily forgotten that the fellowship of the Christian brethren is a gift of grace, a gift of the kingdom of God that any day may be taken from us, that the time that still separates us from utter loneliness may be brief indeed. Therefore, let him who until now has had the privilege of living a common Christian life with other Christians praise God’s grace from the bottom of his heart. Let him thank God on his knees and declare: It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren.
Through and in Jesus Christ
Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. No Christian community is more or less than this. Whether it be a brief, single encounter or the daily fellowship of years, Christian community is only this. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ. What does this mean? It means, first, that a Christian needs others because of Jesus Christ. It means, second, that a Christian comes to others only through Jesus Christ. It means, third, that in Jesus Christ we have been chosen from eternity, accepted in time, and united for eternity.
First, the Christian is the man who no longer seeks his salvation, his deliverance, his justification in himself but in Jesus Christ alone. He knows that God’s word in Jesus Christ pronounces him guilty, even when he does not feel his guilt, and God’s word in Jesus Christ pronounces him not guilty and righteous, even when he does not feel that he is righteous at all. The Christian no longer lives of himself, by his own claims and his own justification, but by God’s claims and God’s justification. He lives wholly by God’s word pronounced upon him, whether that word declares him guilty of innocent.
Not what a man is in himself as a Christian, his spirituality and piety, constitutes the basis of our community. What determines our brotherhood is what the man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us. This is true not merely in the beginning, as though in the course of time something were added to our community; it remains so for all the future and to all eternity. I have community with others and I shall continue to have it only through Jesus Christ. The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ do we have one another, wholly, for all eternity.
That dismisses once and for all every clamorous desire for something more. One who wants more that what Christ has established does not want Christian brotherhood. He is looking for some extraordinary social experience which he has not found elsewhere; he is bringing muddled and impure desires in the Christian brotherhood. Just at this point Christian brotherhood is threatened most often at the very start by the greatest danger of all, the danger of being poisoned at its root, the danger of confusing Christian brotherhood with some wishful idea of religious fellowship, of confounding the natural desire of the devout heart for community with the spiritual reality of Christian brotherhood. In Christian brotherhood everything depends upon its being right from the beginning, first, that Christian brotherhood is not an ideal, but a divine reality. Second, that Christian brotherhood is not a spiritual, but a psychic reality.
Not an Ideal, but a Divine Reality
Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.
By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a god of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both. A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered , permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community an must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more that the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.
God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of the his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.
Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients. We thank God for what he has done for us. We thank God for giving us brethren who live by his call, by his forgiveness, and his promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what he does give us daily. And ins not what has been given us enough: brothers, who will go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of his grace? Is the divine gift of Christian fellowship anything less than this, any day, even the most difficult and distressing day? Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the communal life, is not the sinning brother still a brother, with whom I, too, stand under the word of Christ? Will not his sin be a constant occasion for me to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Jesus Christ? Thus the very hour of disillusionment with my brother becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one word and deed which really binds us together – the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship.
When a person because alienated from a Christian community in which he has been places and begins to raise complaints about it, he had better examine himself first to see whether the trouble is not due to his wish dream that should be shattered by God; and if this be the case, let him thank God for leading him into this predicament. Let him pray God for an understanding of his own failure and his particular sin, and pray that he might not wrong his brethren. Let him, in the consciousness of his own guilt, make intercession for his brethren. Let him do what he is committed to do, and thank God.
Christian community is like the Christian’s sanctification. It is a gift from God which we cannot claim. Only God knows the real state of our fellowship, of our sanctification. What may appear weak and trifling to us may be great and glorious to God. Just as the Christian should not be constantly feeling his spiritual pulse, so, too, the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be constantly taking its temperature. The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more surely and steadily will fellowship increase and grow from day to day as God pleases.
A Spiritual not a Human Reality
Because Christian community is founded solely on Jesus Christ, it is a spiritual and not a psychic reality. The basis of all spiritual reality is the clear, manifest word of God in Jesus Christ. The basis of all human reality is the dark, turbid urges and desires of the human mind. Human love has little regard for truth. It makes the truth relative, since nothing, not even the truth, must come between it and the beloved person. Human love desires the other person, his company, his answering love, but it does not serve him. On the contrary, it continues to desire even when it seems to be serving. There are two marks, both of which are one and the same thing, that manifest the difference between spiritual and human love: Human love cannot tolerate the dissolution of a fellowship that has become false for the sake of genuine fellowship, and human love cannot love an enemy, that is, one who seriously and stubbornly resists it. Both spring from the same source: human love is by its very nature desire – desire for human community. Where it can no longer expect its desire to be fulfilled, there it stops short – namely, in the face of an enemy. There it turns into hatred, contempt, and calumny.
Right here is the point where spiritual love begins. This is why human love becomes personal hatred when it encounters genuine spiritual love, which does not desire but serves. Human love makes itself an end in itself. It nurses and cultivates an ideal. Jesus Christ stands between the lover and the others he loves. I do not know in advance what love of others means on the basis of the general idea of love that grows out of my human desires – all this may rather be hatred and an insidious kind of selfishness in the eyes of Christ. What love is, only Christ tell in his word. Contrary to all my own opinions and convictions, Jesus Christ will tell me what love toward the brethren really is. There for, spiritual love is bound solely to the word of Jesus Christ. Where Christ bids me to maintain fellowship for the sake of love, I will maintain it. Where his truth enjoins me to dissolve a fellowship for love’s sake, there I will dissolve it, despite all the protests of my human love. Because spiritual love does not desire but rather serves, it loves an enemy as a brother. It originates neither in the brother nor in the enemy but in Christ and his word.
I must release the other person from every attempt of mine to regulate, coerce, and dominate him with my love. The other person needs to retain his independence of me; to be loved for what he is, as one for whom Christ became man, died, and rose again, for who Christ bought forgiveness of sins and eternal life. Because Christ has long since acted decisively for my brother, before I could begin to act, I must leave him his freedom to he Christ’s; I must meet him only as the person that he already is in Christ’s eyes. Human love constructs its own image of the other person, of what he is and what he should become. It take the life of the other person into its own hands. Spiritual love recognizes the true image of the other person which he has received from Jesus Christ; the image that Jesus Christ himself embodied and would stamp upon all men. Human love breeds hothouse flower; spiritual love creates the fruits that grow healthily in accord with God’s good will in the rain and storm and sunshine of God’s outdoors.
There is probably no Christian to whom God has not give n the uplifting experience of genuine Christian community at least once in his life. But in this world such experiences can be no more than a gracious extra beyond the daily bread of Christian community life. We have no claim upon such experiences, and we do not live with other Christians for the sake of acquiring them. We are bound by faith, not by experience.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Should Discerning Christians Throw Out The Shack?
Denis Haack recently received this question on his facebook page and wrote a response to it on his blog A Glass Darkly. If you have not heard of The Shack you are in a diminishing number of people, I think. Haack offers some good thoughts on discernment in general. We wrote a review of The Shack itself, check it out for more discernment resources.
An excerpt from Haack's response:
Question: "The people from my church who love the book, when asked about its flaws, say they are rampant and if you read it analytically then you will probably throw it away, but that one shouldn't analyze it; one should simply read it for the great story it is."
Answer: "The process of discernment allows us to engage a book more fully. The purpose is not to throw out books that are flawed, but to more deeply appreciate what is true and beautiful while more deeply understanding how what is less true or untrue can be made so attractive and plausible... One of the ways we have found to teach discernment skills to Christians is to lead discussions on something (a book or short story or film) in which they will be certain to find things with which to disagree. But then mention in your invitation and begin the discussion by saying the goal is not just to address the book or film, but to also deepen our skill in being discerning (rather than being reactionary). So, we will answer the discernment questions in order—no exceptions. Begin with “What is said?” (emphasizing that objectivity is required, so much so that no opinion of ours is even hinted at, and if the author was present they would say our answer to this question is correct and fair). Then ask, “With what do we agree?” and after that, “What is made attractive?” Only when those things are fully explored, can anyone address, “What might we challenge?” (and then do so in the form of creative questions we might address to a friend, Christian or non-Christian, in order to keep a winsome conversation going)."
An excerpt from Haack's response:
Question: "The people from my church who love the book, when asked about its flaws, say they are rampant and if you read it analytically then you will probably throw it away, but that one shouldn't analyze it; one should simply read it for the great story it is."
Answer: "The process of discernment allows us to engage a book more fully. The purpose is not to throw out books that are flawed, but to more deeply appreciate what is true and beautiful while more deeply understanding how what is less true or untrue can be made so attractive and plausible... One of the ways we have found to teach discernment skills to Christians is to lead discussions on something (a book or short story or film) in which they will be certain to find things with which to disagree. But then mention in your invitation and begin the discussion by saying the goal is not just to address the book or film, but to also deepen our skill in being discerning (rather than being reactionary). So, we will answer the discernment questions in order—no exceptions. Begin with “What is said?” (emphasizing that objectivity is required, so much so that no opinion of ours is even hinted at, and if the author was present they would say our answer to this question is correct and fair). Then ask, “With what do we agree?” and after that, “What is made attractive?” Only when those things are fully explored, can anyone address, “What might we challenge?” (and then do so in the form of creative questions we might address to a friend, Christian or non-Christian, in order to keep a winsome conversation going)."
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Keller at Google
Tim Keller, author of The Reason for God, talks about belief in an age of skepticism and fields questions from the audience.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Art Every Wednesday (17)
The Lives of Others" (2006)
I heard about this excellent film through R. Greg Grooms review in Critique magazine (one of the best magazines I know of which discusses culture from a Christian worldview. If you do not receive Critique, follow this link and subscribe now. It's absolutely free.) Check out the review, watch the movie with friends, then have a discussion about what it means to be human and what steps you can take together to become more human.
That is the key idea in the movie, without ruining anything for you, it is the story of a Stasi agent set to listen to the "lives of others" and the slow change he experiences as he peeks into the lives of two artists - it is the erosion of the hard surfaces of his heart to unearth the soft, living flesh beneath it.
I recommend this movie on its own merits and as a chance to practice discernment in art with friends. It is rife with themes worthy of discussion.
I heard about this excellent film through R. Greg Grooms review in Critique magazine (one of the best magazines I know of which discusses culture from a Christian worldview. If you do not receive Critique, follow this link and subscribe now. It's absolutely free.) Check out the review, watch the movie with friends, then have a discussion about what it means to be human and what steps you can take together to become more human.That is the key idea in the movie, without ruining anything for you, it is the story of a Stasi agent set to listen to the "lives of others" and the slow change he experiences as he peeks into the lives of two artists - it is the erosion of the hard surfaces of his heart to unearth the soft, living flesh beneath it.
I recommend this movie on its own merits and as a chance to practice discernment in art with friends. It is rife with themes worthy of discussion.
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