Archive for May, 2008

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John Hagee and God’s Plan

May 29, 2008

Every Sunday, flights of lunacy from pulpits make sober Christians cringe. I guess, sooner or later, a maniacal statement was bound to go viral. For one thing, lunacy in preachers is so common. For another, the presidential campaign this year demanded a Republican sacrifice to balance Jeremiah Wright. And for another, the reliable men who provided self-satire in the past have either retired or gone to their reward.

So, in the providence of God, John Hagee became the guy who took evangelical lunacy to the next level.

Major news organizations had been eying him suspiciously ever since he endorsed John McCain for president, principally because Hagee has described Roman Catholicism in the pungent terms of whoredom. But his elaborate support of Israel had been in his favor, at least freeing him from the taint of anti-Semitism. Alas, there was a sleeper.

Hagee had preached that the holocaust was part of God’s plan to get the Jews back to the land. As reported in the New York Times, he said,

How is God going to bring them back to the land? The answer is fishers and hunters. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and forces you. Hitler was a hunter. . . . That will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, be offended: I didn’t write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, “My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.”

Late last week, McCain dumped him.

By Monday evening, Joe Liebermanwas pushed to answer whether he would speak to Hagee’s group supporting Israel, becoming the latest politician to wish he hadn’t consorted with preachers. (Lieberman said he will speak to the group.)

Hagee’s comments about Hitler provoked debate that almost reached theology. There was, for instance, a post by Claire Hoffman on Sunday about the many “plans” God seems to have for the world.

The offense Hagee gave was in making God the author of Hitler’s genocide. His statement as reported is exegetically indefensible. Jeremiah (the prophet from Jerusalem, not Chicago) never wrote that the murder of six million Jews would bring the Israelites back to the land. That idea is pure Hagee.

Doctrinally, Hagee’s statement is loose — at best. While he did say that God allowed, rather than caused, the holocaust, Hagee still explained the holocaust as God’s calculation that Israel’s return to the land was more important than six million lives. That explanation is, as theologian John McCain might say, “crazy and unacceptable.” (Necessary qualifier: it is possible that Hagee makes other statements elsewhere in the sermon, or in other sermons, that clarify his understanding of God’s wisdom and justice.)

But a neglected aspect of Hagee’s offense is pastoral. His statement minimizes the unspeakable human cost of Hitler’s genocide, a cost that is still within living memory. It’s a clichéd spiritualizing of loss to say to the grieving that God had better things in mind for them than living with the ones they love. God does not call his pastors to glorify him by trivializing human suffering.

Inhumanity is entirely human. God has no complicity in it. The only reason there are not holocausts in every nation, every day, is that the good hand of God restrains human malice.

It is tempting to pronounce woes against the gotcha culture that has claimed Hagee. But I think the current animosity against preachers could be part of God’s plan. Preachers must now remember that we can be YouTubed, and that our fulminations can reach those who won’t interpret us charitably. We may learn how significant our words really are. We may discover a godly caution that is appropriate to teachers (James 3), and may find boldness in truths instead of self-indulgent abstractions.

But that, of course, will require us to study.

Posted in Bible, Christianity, churches, evangelicals, pastors, politics, theology | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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A.W. Tozer, the Anti-Populist

May 22, 2008

Three weeks ago, my dad gave me a book, which the old man almost never does. From the early seventies, when he devoured The Lord of the Rings, to the mid-nineties, when he discovered that Calvin and Luther agreed with him about predestination, Dad was not a reader. Even now that he has books going much of the time, he doesn’t talk about them much. So, for him to haul off and give me The Root of the Righteous by A.W. Tozer — not just recommend it, but hand me a copy — was urgent enough that I started it immediately.

That night, I sat in the orchestra pit during the dialog of the Sondheim show I was playing, and devoured page after page — only putting the book down when the conductor insinuated that a downbeat was headed my way.

I have been writing in a meandering, bloggish sort of way about evangelical populism. I have described it as a mindset of suspicion and resentment, of “us versus them,” that has shut down cultural interaction between evangelicals and other Americans. I have also noted populism’s emotional shallowness, as well as its conformism and corruption.

To close this theme (and the blog’s readers sighed with relief), I sum up my problem with evangelical populism: it has fostered a damning self-complacency.

When we present Christianity as a social program, as one side in a protracted culture war, we commit several crimes simultaneously. We mistake the cultural legacy of biblical faith, Judeo-Christian civilization, for the gospel itself. It is a well-worn heresy, though wrapped now in the old red, white, and blue. We also take a rhetorical posture that is alien to the New Testament, that of the debater who scores points off the gaffs and weaknesses of his opponent. This vandalizes the office of preacher.

But most alarmingly, we teach ourselves by rote, election after election, that we stand for the truth, that we defend God’s holiness, that we are the Lord’s people doing the Lord’s work. That is to say, we teach ourselves a lie. A mere glance into the family lives of church-going people these days confirms their utter lack of spiritual power.

To foster such self-complacency is to freeze souls against the grace of God.

Which brings me back to Tozer’s book. The Root of the Righteous is a collection of editorials he wrote for his denominational magazine during the 1950s, and their dated quality as artifacts gives them, for me, a kind of prophetic unction, as if the Spirit makes the dust of the decades say amen.

Take the very first sentence of the book:

One marked difference between the faith of our fathers as conceived by the fathers and the same faith as understood and lived by their children is that the fathers were concerned with the root of the matter, while their present-day descendants seem concerned only with the fruit. (p 3)

That alone is a lot to ponder. Tozer meant that, in the 1950s, believers regarded a “serious-minded approach to sacred things” as something to smile at. He said, “Much that passes for Christianity today is the brief, bright effort of the severed branch to bring forth its fruit in its season.” (p 4)

Take this blunt assessment: “Probably the most widespread and persistent problem to be found among Christians is the problem of retarded spiritual progress.” (p 7) Or this observation about “the inordinate attachment to every form of entertainment” in the 1950s:

The average man has no central core of moral assurance, no spring within his own breast, no inner strength to place him above the need for repeated psychological shots to give him the courage to go on living. He has become a parasite on the world, drawing his life from his environment, unable to live a day apart from the stimulation which society affords him. (p 31)

Churches in the 1950s surrendered to the consumer mindset. Tozer says (p 33) that they “have become little more than poor theaters where fifth-rate ‘producers’ peddle their shoddy wares with the full approval of evangelical leaders who can even quote a holy text in defense of their delinquency.”

Tozer also makes the striking observation that religious life in the 1950s showed “a lack of integration in the religious personality. There seems to be no vital connection between the emotional and volitional departments of the life. The mind can approve and the emotions enjoy while the will drags its feet and refuses to go along.” (p 56)

Tozer fed people with an exalted view of Christ that nurtured reverent fear, not prim judgmentalism. He wrote and spoke with authority about the God who had won his submission.

Imagine strong words like his in a denominational magazine today. It’s impossible: such publications have become mere public relations pieces. They would never warn Christians against dead spirituality, or its specific symptoms. That would be way too preachy.

This is a measure of how much leaders flatter us, and how deeply we need their flattery.

It’s also a measure of my old man’s good taste. Calvin, Luther, Tolkien, Tozer.

Posted in Bible, churches, evangelicals, pastors, politics, populism, theology | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

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Texas Pastor Caught In Sting

May 17, 2008

In view of the arrest of a pastor, Joe Barron, in Texas yesterday, I thought I would link to a post from some months ago about the distrust of pastoral authority. The issue of sexual immorality hit home this week with our family, as my wife found out that a former pastor of hers had been conducting affairs for years. Only individual repentance from all forms of sexual sin will save the church from these scandals. These are moments not to judge, but to pray for the Lord’s mercy on his church.

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Graham Greene and the Sinner’s Prayer

May 15, 2008

I’ll put one of my fears out there: I fear that, week after week, we pastors describe an experience of conversion that no one has.

The Authorized Conversion happens when someone “asks Jesus into his heart.” The act of praying this prayer, evangelicals have taught, transfers a person from darkness to light. It is the moment of salvation. Preaching drives toward it, and testimonies feature it. When we ask each other how we “got saved,” we are asking about the circumstances that led to praying the prayer. We count the people who pray it, and we tell them to write the date and the hour in their Bibles.

But in my own experience, praying the sinner’s prayer was only one step in my salvation — a defining step, a step that summed up what the Lord had been doing in my five-year-old soul, but not decisive. As I remember growing up, I can see many points that were clearer, more specific. There was a day in the fifth grade, for instance, when I was in despair because I had no friends. At recess, I retreated to a far corner of the schoolyard to pray, and found friendship from Jesus.

For me, salvation is the fruit of many defining experiences and decisions, not one. And we seem to induce spiritual lethargy when we teach people to rely on a single prayer.

In high school, I saw how people went forward for tearful prayers, but almost never showed any change later. I constantly meet Christians who, in an effort to know that they’re saved, have repeated the sinner’s prayer so many times they’ve lost count. Like many of my generation, I’m suspicious of conversion numbers, even cynical that anything good comes of guiding more people through the steps. Indeed, evangelical doubt over the sinner’s prayer seems to be a primary cause of the movement’s splintering. Emergents and Calvinists both put the altar call at the top of their lists of “what’s wrong with us.”

There are modern Christian movements that have connected more vigorously with people’s experiences.

Graham Greene wrote a novel decades ago called, The End of the Affair. He told the story of an adulterous woman whom God lures out of sexual immorality. It was a story that reflected not just Greene’s experience, but the experience of many English contemporaries — Evelyn Waugh, Malcolm Muggeridge, and C. S. Lewis being only the most prominent.

While I might have problems with Greene’s theology, there is no question that literature like his shows how conversion happens in post-Christian culture far better than anything evangelicals have written.

Evangelicals need to make a lot of changes. They need to separate their political and cultural resentments from their proclamation of the gospel. They need a revival of the arts so that they can nurture people emotionally with truth. They need to understand the real characteristics of the people in their churches.

But, fundamentally, evangelicals need to rearticulate what conversion is.

The conversions I see are slow. There’s the young woman who attended church in Orland for three years before startling her friends by announcing that she believed in Jesus. She told me she found Christ not by being miserable, but by being happy — and realizing that it wasn’t enough. Then there’s the older man who had “prayed the prayer” decades ago, but who only found assurance of salvation when he went camping alone last summer to seek the Lord.

So one of my goals is to describe the conversion experience that people actually have: the slow, step-by-step acquisition of an art under the direction of the Master. Real Christians fumble with faith, making crude brush strokes and mixing their paints poorly. But the Master keeps instructing and the apprentice keeps fumbling. Sometimes the apprentice slips into the zone with his faith, but he slips out again. The Master just keeps him painting, painting, painting, until one day the apprentice realizes that his faith lives.

Posted in emergent, evangelicals, literature, pastors | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments »

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“Child of the Secret God” by Christopher Raley

May 15, 2008

When I was asleep in the dark heat,
A dove cooed and woke me.
When I blanched with sweat on my sheets,
A breeze stirred in the oak.

When I was lost for want of love,
I had met her years before.
When I felt a touch on my shoulder,
I found her where she’d been.

When they despised me for a dime,
They were hidden from my view.
When they praised me for my works,
I had changed very little.

When I drove that road ‘tween hills and river,
I never thought of life or death.
When he crashed in the tangle of trees,
I was the man that drove him home.

When I was guilty and covering my deeds,
The Ghost came hard on my mind.
He directs the secret traces of my actions.
He haunts the secret corners of my motivation.

A basket with a baby inside slides onto the breeze-touched river.
Crocodiles swim hungrily in the sun.
I was born into a world of doom, but for the wind,
Which nudged me towards the gently bending reeds.

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Do You Know This Man?

May 8, 2008

Every pastor is sure he knows how to talk to this guy:

It’s easy. With Biff, here, you talk tractors, nail guns, and torque. You slip into saying “dese, dem, and dose.” You use football analogies. Better yet, you tell your own football stories, if you have them. You try to pull off the coach routine. You go easy on the Bible because he doesn’t care. You don’t try to teach him. You keep it real concrete, because Biff’s a hands-on guy, and if you try to talk theologically you’ll lose him.

I don’t think most pastors know this guy at all. I think most try to reach Biff with populist clichés only from laziness — or because they’re too intimidated to sit down and talk with him. I think that if pastors realized who Biff actually is, and if they began to connect with him, their churches would be revolutionized.

Here are a few things I’ve learned about him.

1. Biff’s a genius.

Forget about losing Biff with your sermon. He’s way ahead of you. That’s why he stops listening. I know a contractor who hardly says a word, and who looks like he wouldn’t try to follow a theological inference past the second “if.” But he has a deep, sharp intellect. He figured out how to install a Czechoslovakian engine in an airplane he built — without a manual. He reads the social patterns in a room faster than anyone else, and he can articulate what the patterns are. He has keen, biblically informed doctrinal priorities.

Pastors need to know that Biff has no trouble dealing with complexity. But he can tell when you’re using complexity to disguise ignorance. And he won’t sit for it.

2. Biff knows how to interact with all kinds of people.

Yeah, he looks narrow. But there’s a good chance that Biff went to college. In all probability he has lived in many different places, perhaps even worked internationally — and not just in the military. If Biff is over forty-five, you may find that he has some history with the counterculture in the sixties or seventies. In his business, he either learns how to deal with many different subcultures, or he fails.

I know a lumberman who lives to cut down trees. He just loves being alone in the woods with a saw and some timber. To look at him, you’d say he was the original good old boy. And if you only talked with him for five minutes, you wouldn’t learn anything to shake that impression. You’d never know he once worked in computers. Near San Francisco.

3. Biff learned early to conform.

There are guys who are no deeper than tractors, nail guns, and torque. But Biff is not one of them. In my experience, he got the message as a young kid that he wasn’t supposed to be a dreamer, that dreamers were worthless sissies. So he constructed a persona that enabled him to get along with the other guys. He talks about tractors, nail guns, and torque because that’s what they talk about. But the dreamer never completely died. In fact, the persistence of that dreamer, maybe in despair, is a key to his emotional life.

In the back corner of a closet, Biff may have a world-class collection of jazz LPs, which he will only show you if he thinks you’re safe. It will astound you what Biff reads, what he ponders, what he responds to. I’ve had guys that look exactly like Biff, lots and lots of them, become fans of my classical violin playing. That’s one way I accidentally got underneath Biff’s conformity.

Interesting things start to happen when Biff decides that God wants him to exercise his creativity.

4. Biff respects masculine analysis.

He likes his categories hard and neat. They can be complicated. They can be paradoxical. But they cannot be soft. Which is too bad for evangelical sentimentality, because Biff has no respect for Ned Flanders.

With all these points, I’m not saying Biff yearns to hear lectures on Schleiermacher, or that he secretly watches Masterpiece Theater, or even that he is fully conscious of himself. I’m just saying that he’s smarter than we think, broader, more open, more curious than we think. I’m saying that the potential in any church for significant interaction with other subcultures is far greater than most pastors imagine.

We can nurture that potential if we ditch our cramped view of people — perverted by demographics, marketing tactics, and Meiers-Briggs tests – and see them for who they really are.

Posted in churches, evangelicals, pastors, populism | Tagged , , | 1 Comment »

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“From Here To the Coast” by Christopher Raley

May 8, 2008

Narrow road scars high mountains.
Green-yellow grass bends with the wind.
We’ll never know what lies tucked into the folds of trees.

We cut through the passes that hold themselves strong
and wind down sharp into blind ravines, then back up,
climbing slow like pilgrims on the steep angles of a foreign land.

Wood and wire fence stakes the rounded edge of some forgotten boundary.
Gray, splintering posts have stood so long they can only stand still.
We crest another pass and sink a little seeing the mountains to come.

The hardest part of anything is just before the end.
All the hours and all the miles multiply their fatigue,
but I know the sun will dim in the salt mist of ocean spray.

Narrow road scars high mountains.
Green-yellow grass bends with the wind.

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Sondheim As a Preacher

May 1, 2008

I’ve spent many hours this week in an orchestra pit rehearsing for Chico State’s production of A Little Night Music by Stephen Sondheim. Between keeping track of key changes, being anxious for the physical safety of our percussionist as scenery collapses above him, and enjoying the great voices of the cast, I have been evaluating Sondheim’s success as a preacher.

A preacher has to do more than convey information about “how one ought to live.” In my view, he has to show listeners how their lives are inextricably bound to God, and how that bond impacts their decisions. That mission calls him to engage listeners with drama, emotion, narrative, and especially characters. His preaching has to display individuals who struggle with God, both rightly and wrongly.

To fulfill this mission, the preacher has several tools: the Bible (source for the dramatic material), doctrine (derived from the Bible, and delivered as principles), life experience (his own, his listeners’), etc. In a sermon, he uses these tools to redirect the motivations of his audience Godward.

I’ve written about the inability of the evangelical populist to go deeper than sentimentality. So much of the spiritual deadness of evangelicalism, the dearth of transforming love, goes back to the shallow emotional range of its preachers. Most, it seems, can’t convey anything higher than healthful living habits.

Sondheim, though he presents what I find to be a spirituality of hopelessness, is skilled at preaching the worldly word. He has his source of dramatic material, a combination of what I’ll loosely call European tradition and American showmanship. His symbols, dramatic and musical, all derive from such sources, of which he has intuitive knowledge. Sondheim also shows keen insight into life experience. He flirts with audience expectations by using stock characters whom he later rounds out with humane understanding.

Which leaves doctrine.

There is a principle that animates the story of Night Music. The characters are all troubled, some driven to morose contemplation, others to flippancy, still others to cynicism. They struggle to find what a main character calls “a coherent existence,” and the field of their struggle is sex. Their escapades are often funny, usually humiliating, and occasionally moving. But each learns the doctrine by the end, learns it in his or her own way.

Night Music’s doctrine? You recover a coherent existence when you find the object of your true desire. And to recognize that object, you must know yourself. The god this musical preaches so effectively is inside the human personality.

A few qualifications. Audiences don’t go to musicals for spiritual training. Tony awards like those lavished on this show are not given to productions that “make a point,” and this show is not “preachy” in that way. Sondheim’s goal was to give people something to enjoy, not to teach them. He may or may not believe the principle this story shows.

But Sondheim is a skillful preacher.

He shows how people’s lives are inextricably bound to the god of their desires, and how that bond impacts their decisions. His characters speak to people’s struggles.

My wayward imagination wonders how an evangelical, with his grab-bag of practical tips, would preach the Night Music doctrine. “Five Steps to Open Communication With Your Mistress.” “What Would Ibsen Do?” “Your Best Adultery Now!” If evangelicals preached sin the way they preach Christ, sin might go into as deep a decline as Christianity.

A preacher’s job is not to entertain, as Sondheim’s is. But evangelical preachers would teach and exhort with more potency if their Bible, their doctrine, and their life experience spoke to people’s struggles. The God of the Bible is not the God of easy answers. Jesus Christ struggles with us just as we struggle with him, if the Gospel of John is any guide. He is no stranger to relational agony. And he does not use gimmicks.

I notice that when I preach this God, using the Bible’s drama as powerfully and truthfully as I can, listeners take heart. They renew their struggles with greater insight, and they see God’s blessings. Their certitudes gained in struggle are earned, not purchased in bulk.

So I learn something about preaching from Sondheim. But I leave the orchestra pit relieved that the living God is larger than the gods of Broadway.

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