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Realism and Christian Political Involvement

Saturday, April 7, 2012

For the past two weeks or so, I’ve been reading through John G. Stackhouse, Jr.’s Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World. It is not a new book, having been first released in 2008, but is nonetheless timely and quite profound in places. While I hope to interact with the book in future posts, I will primarily quote from his writings at present.

As the title implies, the book is concerned with the participation of believers in exercising “dominion” over creation — which is perhaps better thought of as a “stewardship” to avoid any negative connotations associated with “dominion.” To whatever extent possible in whatever spheres Christians find themselves, we are to be bringing shalom to our environment and culture. “Shalom,” he explains, includes peace, wholeness, and goodness.

In a chapter entitled “Principles of a New Realism,” Stackhouse addresses the reality of the world in which we live and the corresponding reasonable expectations Christians should have. He quotes the parable of the wheat and the tares in Mt 13 and applies principles found there to our current situation. He writes:

‘The field is the world,’ Jesus teaches, and that field is mixed indeed, populated by the children of God and the children of the devil — two constituencies that could hardly be more different. Yet those two populations are so intertwined that somehow uprooting the latter would also damage or destroy the former. The economy of the world as it is, therefore, somehow requires that these two sets of inhabitants, these neighbors, be allowed to become fully themselves, maturing until the time of harvest, when all is uprooted, judged, and rewarded with blessing or cursing.

He reminds us that we should expect from the world (among other things) sin, waste, stupidity, absurdity, vanity, and promiscuity (p 263). He continues,

Expecting sin does not mean accepting it, much less ignoring it. Expecting sin means something practical: planning for it. It means refusing to live as if we were in Eden or the New Jerusalem, and instead intentionally structuring our lives, individually and corporately, with the expectation of evil . . .

“The field presents not only evil to us but ambiguity as well . . . Christians have not taken the reality of ambiguity seriously enough to actually expect it and thus to plan for it. For not only is the world out there mixed, but we ourselves are mixed as well with motives great and small, good and evil. . . . The line distinguishing good and evil does not, as Solzhenitsyn warned, run between countries or peoples or classes, but within our own hearts.

“We must reckon, then , not only with what is bad out there, but also with what is bad in here: in our individual selves and in our most sacred institutions, whether families, churches, or other Christian organizations. And reckoning with those things means structuring and conducting our lives so as to restrain the evil within us and the evil without us as best we can, and to respond properly when those restraints give way, as they so often do. Such reckoning also means that we do not wait until our motives have resolved into perfect purity before we attempt to do God’s work, since few of us consider ourselves entirely sanctified as of yet. Furthermore, such reckoning means that we not only are not shocked by impure motives in others but that we presume impure motives in others. Doing so, we yet will decide sometimes to support them, cooperate with them, and praise them for their successes, since we do not demand of them an unrealistic purity . . .

“We will always wish it were otherwise, and we will demand legality at least and high principle at best, but we will not merely wring our hands and despair of politics until a truly good political option appears. For we will then have to wait for Jesus’ return and remain useless politically in the meanwhile (except perhaps contributing the limited blessing of chiding everyone else for failing to be as good as he or she ought to be) . . .

“One of the oddities of so much American evangelicalism is its simultaneous commitment to American political institutions and to an ecclesiastical culture of [popularity]. To reverse the order, American evangelicals typically [praise] the entrepreneurial spiritual leader who boldly leads an institution by force of character, vision and talent: a Billy Graham, a James Dobson, a Charles Colson, a T.D. Jakes, or a Bill Hybels . . . These same Christians typically also revere the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Yet these latter documents articulate a vision of leadership that is profoundly at odds with the paradigm of the [popular] leader wielding great personal command and responsible only to his followers. For the Founding Fathers — despite their general, if not universal, lack of Christian orthodoxy — shared a much stronger expectation of sin among the powerful and feared above all the concentration of power that would enable tyranny. They therefore built the distinctive American system of checks and balances with this expectation and fear in mind. Yet these evangelical leaders typically head organizations with precious few such curbs on their authority . . .

“God set up institutions to bless us, despite their corruption, and he continues to work through them. God also rules history, and aids those who press for greater shalom in those institutions. God is not discouraged by the evil evident in ourselves and our world . . . He works away at it, knowing that his labor is certain to produce fruit. And he has called us to do the same, as human beings and as Christians.

“God’s expectations do indeed include fruit, but they also include weeds. We disciples of the one who told this parable, then, must also develop appropriate expectations. Realism requires that we expect good results: Jesus is Lord. But until his Kingdom comes in glory, we do not expect perfect results, and we are not surprised or discouraged by bad results. The combination of evil, ambiguity, and our own ambivalence tempers our expectations from the utopian and conforms them better to what Jesus told us to expect: persecutions and progressions, sins and successes, accidents and accomplishments, resistance and renewal.” — pp 262-266

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The Social Gospel & The Anti-Social Gospel

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

This is about two approaches to Christianity that I don’t have much use for.

The first is the Social Gospel, developed in the United States and having its origin in the difficult years between the Civil War and World War I. Protestant churches attempted to employ biblical precepts and principles to rectify problems stemming from the dawning of the Industrial Revolution and the growth of cities — with all the struggles included in both.

Initially and in theory, the Social Gospel was thoroughly biblical, rooted as it was in the examples and teachings of both the Old and New Testaments. In a time when post-millennialism was in vogue — post-millennialism being the doctrine that the Church will usher in the Kingdom of God through its advances in the world, to be follow by the return of Christ when the thousand years were over — optimism was surpassed perhaps only by arrogance. Nevertheless, the good that was, could be, and might have been done through the application of biblical teaching was impressive.

But the proponents of the Social Gospel acquired some unfortunate bedfellows, most notably higher criticism; being in bed with such critics led to two things: conservative Christians shunning the movement and the gospel being largely lost by the movement.

A social gospel without a Savior, intended to revive and save society at large, eliminating the evils in a fallen world, is no gospel at all. So I don’t have much use for it.

But neither do I have much use for those who, without knowing it, are practitioners of the Anti-Social Gospel, which is my clever way of labeling a form of Christianity that has little interest in engaging and transforming the world and worldliness around it. Being regular believers, the conservative leaders and their congregations overreacted to the Christless Social Gospel, rejecting anything and everything even remotely associated with it.

In my own community, there are pockets of social degeneracy and wickedness existing in the shadows of some of the larger churches. Attempts to evangelize consist of little more than driving through neighborhoods and throwing tracts out the window; actual ministry to alleviate social ills and injustices are all but ignored.

Do not misunderstand what I am saying: the gospel — the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ — has to do first and foremost with the salvation of sinners. It is not done in mass (I am not referring to Mass) but through contact with individuals and sharing the good news. The notion that any society or subculture can be changed apart from the salvation of its individual members is just so much liberal, humanistic hubris.

But while people may be saved as individuals, there is no such thing — by my reading of the New Testament — as individual Christians. Christians have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ but not an individual relationship. We are meant to be part of a community; that community, in turn, is called to “do good to all people, and especially those who are of the household of faith.” If we struggle achieving the latter, we completely miss the former.

The presence of a church in a community should make a difference. If it does no more than function as salt to preserve what is good, it will accomplish much. But if it remains separated and isolated from the more distasteful aspects of the society, it will make no difference whatsoever.

The Kingdom of God in the world will not be inaugurated by the successful ministrations of local churches. But beachheads for the Kingdom should surround the church as it sanctifies the community in which it gathers. People may come to Christ through such efforts — and thank God that they do — but the motivation for such ministry should be love for suffering people. Not just or even primarily love for lost people, but simply love for people.

To alleviate suffering or to confound evil, even without the salvation of a single person, is nevertheless effective ministry and glorifying to God. The gospel in its entirety is about saving the lost, but it is also about much, much more than that.

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Capitalism, Terrorism, and Christianity

Saturday, February 18, 2012

In 2008, Terry Eagleton was invited to Yale University to deliver the Dwight Harrington Terry Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy. Eagleton chose as his topic, “Faith and Fundamentalism: Is Belief in Richard Dawkins Necessary for Salvation?” and his lectures were later published as Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. While admitting that he was an expert in neither science nor theology, he nevertheless allowed,

All I can claim in this respect, alas, is that I think I may know just about enough theology to be able to spot when someone like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens — a couplet I shall henceforth reduce for convenience to the solitary signifier Ditchkins — is talking out of the back of his neck.”

Although Eagleton is a noted literary critic and professor, he is also an insightful observer of culture and history. His lectures addressed far more than the polemics of Dawkins and Hitchens; it was one of his digressions that is the subject of this post.

Before quoting Eagleton in depth, I feel it is important to point out that he is a noted Marxist and sees the world through lenses that are at least in part distorted – or corrected, perhaps – by that worldview. He has been described by novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard as “a rather lethal combination of a Roman Catholic and a Marxist … He strikes me as like a spitting cobra: if you get within his range he’ll unleash some poison.”

Such comments, however, should by no means disqualify everything he says but only forewarn or prepare the reader of his vantage point. That his statements or interpretation of history might be overdrawn or biased should not cause us to reject his observations completely. Even if only half of what he describes is true, it should be enough to warrant our attention and give us pause.

With those disclaimers and caveats in place, I will now allow Professor Eagleton to speak to the matters of capitalism, terrorism, and Christianity.

It is striking how avatars of liberal Enlightenment like Hitchens, Dawkins, Martin Amis, Salmon Rushdie, and Ian McEwan have much less to say about the evils of global capitalism as opposed to the evils of radical Islam . . . One has not noticed all that many of them speaking out against, say, the appalling American-backed regimes in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. It is a familiar fact (though not, apparently, all that familiar to the U.S. media) that, thirty years to the day1 before the attack on the Twin Towers, the United States government violently overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile, installing in its place an odious puppet autocrat who went on to massacre far more people than died in the World Trade Center. The United States also supported for many years a regime in Indonesia that probably exterminated more people than Saddam Hussein did. Those who wrap themselves in the Stars and Stripes as a protest against Islamist atrocities should keep these facts steadily in mind.

“There is good reason to believe that the outrageous violence of Islamist terrorism is among other causes a reaction to this imperial history. As Aijaz Ahmad has argued, extreme Islamists are those in whose overheated puritanical imaginations the West is nothing but a sink of corruption and debauchery . . . all these potential recruits to Al Qaida stem from countries that have long, discreditable histories of European domination or colonial occupation. In the Arab world, these dissidents have seen their rulers ‘mortgaging their national resources to the West; squandering their rentier wealth on luxury for themselves and their ilk; and building armies that may fight each other but never the invader and the occupier.’ Finding no credible armies to join themselves, they proceed to fashion one of their own: secret, stateless, devoted to the propaganda of the deed. ‘They have seen so many countless civilians getting killed by the Americans and Israelis,’ Ahmad adds, ‘that they do not deem their own killing of civilians as terrorism, or even comparable to what their own people have suffered. If anything, they would consider themselves counter-terrorists’ . . .

“Ahmad also reminds us that ‘Taliban rule was hideous but it was the only time in post-communist Afghanistan when no women were raped by the ruling elite, no rulers took bribes, no poppy was grown or heroin manufactured.’ The relevant contrast is with the previous, U.S.-armed rule of the warlord mujahideen. If the Taliban turned the whole of the country into one vast prison for women, in conditions of mass starvation and destitution, the reign of the mujahideen meant mass orgies of rape, cesspools of corruption, and mutual annihilation.

“In the past half century or so, Ahmad points out, the great majority of politically active Islamists have begun as pro-Western, and have then been driven into the anti-Western camp largely by the aggressiveness of Western policies. Among the Shia, the Khomeinist doctrine that civil government should fall under the sway of religion, and that armed insurrection was a legitimate means for achieving this end, was a stunning innovation in an Islamic tradition that had for the most part viewed political change in electoral terms. Those who sought to impose Islam through the gun constituted a very small minority. The Islamic faith forbids both suicide and the killing of civilians. What brought this violent doctrine to birth in Ahmad’s view was a combination of factors. There was the suppression of the leftist and secular anti-imperialist forces in Iran by the CIA-sponsored coup of 1953, which restored the monarchy, eliminated the communists and social democrats, and created a bloodthirsty internal security force. The extreme autocracy of the Shah’s regime, along with its intimate ties to the United States, were later to trigger a radical religious backlash in the shape of the Islamist revolution of 1978. With the assistance of the CIA, Iran had traveled from a nation which included secular leftists and liberal democrats to a hard-line Islamic state.

“In Indonesia, a nation with the largest Muslim population in the world but also once with the largest nongoverning Communist Party as well, the secularist anticolonial government of Sukarno was overthrown in 1965 by a U.S.-supported coup, involving the single biggest bloodbath of communists in post-Second World War history — half a million or more dead — and the installation of the Suharto dictatorship. In Afghanistan, it was the United States which fostered and unleashed Islamic jihad against both native communists and the Soviets, thus laying the basis for the warlord Islamist government of the mujahideen . . . Algeria — a state threatened by a democratically elected Islamist party poised to form a government — called off the electoral process to loud applause from the United States and Europe . . . In Egypt, the U.S.-backed regime of Mubarak repressed the parliamentary party of the Muslim Brotherhood, jailed its leaders, and rigged elections . . .

“None of this, in Ahmad’s opinion or my own, provides the slightest legitimation for the use of terror. Nor is it to suggest that the West is responsible for suicide bombing. Suicide bombers are responsible for suicide bombing. It is rather to point out that the West has had an important hand in creating the conditions in which such crimes seem worth committing.” — Reason, Faith, and Revolution, pp 100-104.

To repeat what I stated earlier: it is likely that Eagleton has exaggerated or distorted some facts to support his anti-capitalist beliefs. But those facts, i.e., the history of the last half of the Twentieth Century, remain. The foreign policies of the United States, Europe, and Israel have too often been as immoral and bereft of justice as those from whom they are ostensibly protecting us. The radical Islamists, if Eagleton is to be believed, have merely adopted and adapted the West’s foreign policy in attempting to destabilize those who are perceived as enemies.

Now, I have not sampled the Kool-aid: I continue to believe that the United States is the best country in the world in which to live, its model of government superior to all others, and its moral basis to be closer to the truth and justice of Christianity than almost all others. Or, to paraphrase another, the United States is the worst nation in the world, except for all the rest.

But like the experience of each Christian, there is among the greatness and wonder of the United States some depraved, sinful tendencies that too frequently overcome the “better angels of our nature.” What I would suggest is that there are many beams and planks in America’s own eyes that need to be attended to. It is a wonderful country; it can be an even better one.

Part of the problem and one of the reasons America is not progressing morally, however, is the failure of the church to stand outside the political, economic, and ethical systems that combine to produce the fabric of our national disposition and spirit. By imbibing too deeply at the well of American values, the church has become blind to the evil that has been perpetrated by our country. The United States is in desperate need of a prophet, but there is no prophet at present who can logically, rationally, and passionately call it to task. Aligning ourselves with those who have conducted or supported such evils in the world weakens both our moral standing and voice.

Here in my subculture of central Texas, Christians identify closely with Republicans and Republican values. To the extent that Republicans espouse and implement the rule of justice and righteousness, that is a good thing: even rattlesnake venom is eighty percent protein. But Christian support has too often been ignorant of or turned a blind eye to the poison of the venom because of the benefits of the protein. It is qualitatively no different with Christians enamored with and accepting of Democrats: like their Republican counterparts, the Democrats are right about some of their ideals and policies but fatally and morally flawed about others.

The church is called to be salt in the world. The possibility that it might lose — or has already lost — its saltiness is quickly moving from a possibility to a probability to an inevitability. The future well-being of the United States is dependent upon the American church standing up for what is right and, just as importantly, standing against the sinful policies and practices that stain the honor and nobility of our country.

1 Eagleton, if referring to the overthrow of President Allende of Chile, is wrong about the year. It actually occurred on 9.11.1973, 28 years prior to the attack on the WTC. A very minor error, however, given the facts of the CIA-supported coup.

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Why the Presidential Election Is So Important This year

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

The outcome of this year’s presidential election is one of the most important in perhaps a century. It will determine the course and identity of the United States for decades to come.

The race is not merely about who will occupy the White House for the next four years. It is about something far more fundamental and vital than that. This election will tell us whether the U.S. will remain uniquely American or will continue on a path of becoming the Europe of the West.

I’ve said this before many times – to the point where some of you may feel like I need to move on – but I’m not sure people are listening or paying attention. It’s not just about healthcare, fiscal policy, defense, or judicial appointments. It’s about our identity as a country and what our national personality will be in the years to come.

In 2008 our country chose as President a man who wanted to lead United States down a path previously trodden by the nations on the European continent. President Obama’s vision and values were not then and are not now American in the historical sense: the president is more European in his worldview than he is American.

This does not mean that he is evil or anti-American; it means that he believes our country’s destiny lies in an entirely different direction from what it has been in the past. But it also means and explains why he so often felt and feels the need to apologize for the United States being American. In his mind, it seems, we are an embarrassment to the world due to our uncivilized and unenlightened attitudes. President Obama has no use for cowboys; he much prefers the genteel manners and dispositions of Europeans.

This year’s election is a referendum on the direction he has been leading us for the last four years. If Obama is reelected, it means that the country will continue on the path of the “Europeanization” of the United States. What has made us different from the rest of the world historically – and has contributed to both our greatness and our horrors – will continue to be eroded. We will continue down that path that leads to the eradication of American values and character and the erection of European values and sensibilities in their place.

My thoughts have been fostered and fueled on this by a small group of writings of Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But this time his insights are found in his second book, the little-read and uneven story call Lila.

As is his wont, Pirsig wanders far afield in the book. It is in his comments about Native Americans, the American identity, and Europe that the source of my thinking can be found. He writes,

. . . the Indians were the originators of the American style of life. The American personality is a mixture of European and Indian values. When you see this you begin to see a lot of things that have never been explained before.

“What is seen in the true American style of life is a cultural adaptation of the American Indian: ‘the famous old traits of the American Indian: silence, a modesty of manner, and a dangerous willingness to sudden, enormous violence.’

“If you take a list of all the things European observers have stated to be the characteristics of white Americans, you’ll find that there is a correlation with the characteristics white American observers have customarily assigned to the Indians. And if, furthermore, you take another list of all the characteristics that Americans use to describe Europeans you’ll get a pretty good correlation with Indian opinions of white Americans.

“. . . One often hears ‘frontier values’ spoken of as though they came from the rocks, the rivers, or the trees of the frontier, but trees, rocks, and rivers do not by themselves confer social values. They’ve got trees, rocks, and rivers in Europe.

“It was the people living among those trees, rocks, and rivers who are the source of the values of the frontier. The early frontiersmen such as the ‘Mountain Men’ deliberately and enthusiastically imitated Indians. They were delighted to be told that they were indistinguishable from Indians. Settlers who came later copied the Mountain Men’s frontier style but didn’t see its source.

“Freedom was the topic that drove home this whole understanding of Indians. Of all the topics [this] study of Indians covered, freedom was the most important. Of all the contributions America has made to the history of the world, the idea of freedom from a social hierarchy has been the greatest. It was fought for in the American Revolution and confirmed in the Civil War. To this day it’s still the most powerful, compelling ideal holding the whole nation together.

“The idea that ‘all men are created equal’ is a gift to the world from the American Indian. Europeans who settled here only transmitted it as a doctrine that they sometimes followed and sometimes did not. The real source was someone for whom social equality was no mere doctrine, who had equality built into his bones. To him it was inconceivable that the world could be any other way. For him there was no other way of life. That’s what Ten Bears was trying to tell us [see below].

“The struggle between European and Indian values is still the central internal conflict in America today. It’s a fault line, a discontinuity that runs through the center of the American cultural personality.”

The central, unacknowledged issue in this year’s election is the preservation or elimination of the American Spirit.

I do not believe most people understand or are aware of the origin of the deep divide in the country. Perhaps it is clearer for me because I live in Texas, where the influence of the Indian is still seen in how many true Texans live out those values daily. The contrast between Texas and most states east of the Mississippi is stark. Again, this doesn’t mean that people in those states are bad people; it does mean that the American Spirit remains strong in Texas, but that in many other places it is being replaced with a European mentality.

People need to be made aware of what is really at stake this November. It’s not really Democrats v Republicans – unless we paint with so wide a brush as to conclude that all Democrats want to be European. It is about whether the U.S. will continue to be American or will slowly become a distant member of the European Union and an adopted child of the European spirit.

(Continued)

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from “Fire in the Belly”: Man in the Image of God

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Throw out the pious Sunday school pictures of Jesus, the tortuous theology of the church, and one bright image and clear gospel remains. Man is spirit incarnate, at once a citizen of two kingdoms — the here and now and the there and then. As an archetype of man, Jesus exemplifies the notion that virtue and divine inspiration can never be separated because man is created in the image and of the substance of God.

The problem of manhood and the consequent tragedy of history, from the Judeo-Christian perspective, is that men misidentify themselves. They act out the drama of their lives before the audience of their contemporaries rather than before the all-knowing and merciful eye of God. They get mired in the limited perspective of their immediate desires rather than seek harmony with the will of God.

The image of Jesus on the Cross is central to the Christian notion of manhood because it dramatizes the issue of will, a recurring theme in any discussion of manhood. The days popular professional cheerleaders see seminars that teach how to develop willpower. A century ago Nietzsche was preaching the Zarathustrian gospel of “the will to power.” Before that, Socrates assured us that will automatically followed vision and that to know the good was to do it. The genius of Christianity is that it interconnects the heart, the will, and the divine spirit, and links virtue to surrender. The lesson of Gethsemane is that a man is most virile not when he insists upon his autonomous will but when he harmonizes his will with the will of God.

Discussions about manhood in Western culture cannot avoid the figure of Jesus. He is the most frequently used mirror in which generations of Western men — philosophers from Augustine to Tillich, evangelists from Paul to Billy Graham, novelists from Renan to Kazantzakis — have seen their own faces reflected. Like the ink blogs used in the psychological Rorschach test, Jesus is a historical X on which men project their own self-understanding. Every generation discovers a different Jesus — the magical savior, the wonder worker, the mystic, the political rebel, the labor organizer, the capitalist, the communist, the greatest salesman who ever lived, the proto-feminist, the ecologist. As Albert Schweitzer said, men searching for the historical Jesus look into a deep, dark well, see a reflection of themselves, and call it “Lord.”

Without debating the question of the person of Jesus or getting our feet mired in ecclesiastical matters and denominational issues, we may liberate a single insight about manhood that continues to be as revolutionary as it was two millennia ago. A man finds fulfillment (spiritual and sexual) only when he turns aside from willfulness and surrenders to something beyond self. Virility involves life in communion. When we try to discover the principle of manhood within the isolated self, we will end up not fulfilling the self but destroying it. Manhood can be defined only in relational terms. How large and generous we may become depends on the size of the Other we take into ourselves.

The question Christianity, as well as every religious tradition, puts to men and women yesterday and today is: do I find my fulfillment in asserting my will to power over myself and others, or in surrendering to myself and others in a spirit of empathy and compassion? And if I can only be myself by surrendering, to what, to whom do I surrender?” — Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly, pp 101-103

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Drugs, Motorcycles, and Jesus

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

For many years now I’ve made a distinction between those of us who did drugs back in the 60s and 70s. Those who wore the clothes, styled their hair, and got high on the weekends were “Hippies”: posers, wannabes, and trying-to-be-cool people. Those who wore the clothes, had long hair, rejected the establishment, got high hourly, and truly wanted to tune in, turn on, and drop out were “Freaks.” I was a Freak. Shocking, I know.

I’ve come to realize that the same kind of distinction can be made about motorcycle riders. There are the weekend riders who wear the leathers, go to popular biker bars, make pilgrimages to Sturgis to see the scene; these are the Hippies on Bikes. Then there are those who ride when they feel like it regardless of the day, wear leathers, go to biker bars, and are the scene that the Hippies go to gawk at once a year at Sturgis. We – for I am one of them, I think – are Freaks on Harleys.

The difference between such groups, whether drug-addled or on two wheels, is the attitude. Hippies dabble and have bumpers tickers; Freaks are totally immersed and don’t need bumper stickers.

My mind being what it is, I was compelled to apply the same distinctions to the Christian subculture here in the States. There are Christian Hippies and there are Christian Freaks. My personality requires me to be fully committed and given over to whatever I deem significant, and I am therefore a Christian Freak. Christianity is, for me, a 24/7/365 thing. Not that I’m perfect by any stretch: even in my drug days there were days and even weeks when (sadly) I wasn’t stoned, and even now I don’t always ride my Hog even though I could. But when I wasn’t stoned I was thinking about when I would be, and when I’m not riding I’m thinking about it. And when I’m not living the Christian life I’m haunted by my sin and lack of love for Christ and Christians. I’m evolving, I guess. I hope.

But this – as pretty much everything else in my experience – brings me around to the local church. Most – with a notable exception – of the churches in my experience have been and are being run by Christian Hippies, not Christian Freaks. This isn’t limited to pastors but includes elders, deacons, Sunday school teachers, and – that most insidious Christian Hippie of them all – the witch doctors in the pew that have power without position.

This state of affairs is why I don’t care much for most local churches (and by “local churches” I mean the 301.c.3 organizations that a sprinkled here, there, and everywhere in the U.S.), although I do care for the people who have been taught that Christianity is a good thing as long as you don’t, you know, “take it too seriously” – which, being translated, means to apply it to yourself and others.

So who runs your church? A Hippie or a Freak? A National-Guard-type weekend warrior or a gung-ho, hoorah, no nonsense Ranger or SEAL? And which are you? Hippie? Or Freak?

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Garland: “the spirit of the age” and man’s lust for power

Saturday, December 24, 2011

If you haven’t read David E. Garland’s 1 Corinthians in the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, you’ve missed out on the best modern work on the epistle. It surpasses, in my opinion, Fee’s effort in the NICNT series (Garland takes Fee to task a bit over the latter’s treatment – or lack thereof – of 14.34-35 (p 675)), that of Barrett, and many others.

The following is taken from his introduction to the letter of Paul in his treatment of social relations in the city of Corinth. I would suggest that you focus on the things that might be an issue for you rather than what you hope others will pay attention to. For example, since I prize information and education, I need to consider what is said about knowledge and wisdom instead of thinking how some people need to listen to what is said about spiritual gifts.

The ‘spirit of the world’ (2.12) is synonymous with the ‘wisdom of the world’ (1.20, 3.19; cf ‘wisdom of this age,’ 2.6), and Pickett (1997:63) contends, ‘The latter phrase demystifies the former in that it shows that to be under the influence of the ‘spirit of the world’ is to be guided by the values which constitute its wisdom.’ It makes clear that the conflict pits God and God’s ways, exhibited in the weakness of the cross, against the world and its ways, exhibited by its fascination with displays of status and power. Pickett (1997:64) continues, ‘Thus the world which stands in opposition to God is a real social world, and the “spirit of the world” refers, in some sense at least, to the values which govern the attitudes, judgments and behaviour of the people in that world.’

“It is the baneful influence of this secular wisdom on members in the church rather than some overarching theological misconception that lies behind most of the problems that Paul addresses in the letter . . . It – not some imagined theological dispute swirling around Peter, Apollos, Paul, or the elusive Christ party – sparked off the rivalries ripping apart the fellowship. It is behind the Corinthians’ attraction to flashy displays of knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual gifts. It throws light on why someone pursued a lawsuit against a brother Christian (6.1-11), why some sought to justify eating food sacrificed to idols so that they could participate fully in their society (8.1-11.1), why the issue of headdress during worship became a problem (11.2-16), and why some wished to vaunt their spiritual gifts above others (12.1-14.40) . . .

“Paul cannot deny [the Corinthians'] spiritual experiences (2.4), nor does he want to denigrate them. But he will not address them as spiritual ones: they instead are fleshly (3.1), too much caught up in this world and its values . . .

“The Corinthians’ problems are more attributable to a lack of a clear eschatological vision of the defeat of the powers of this age and the final judgment of God looming on the horizon. They did not view this world as decisively evil and consequently were ready to make compromises with it.

“For Paul, the spiritual life of the church is not to be found in the visible things alone – healings, glossolalia, eloquent preaching . . . The most central work of the Spirit is something that is unexpected. It leads believers to the crucified Christ (2.2) and to the glory that awaits the end of the age (2.9-10) . . . The key result of the Spirit is communication about God and Christ that others can understand and that builds up the community of faith (14.1-5)” – Garland, pp 7, 14, 16

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