What’s Missing From the Needy Self
October 9th, 2008 § 1 Comment
Sermon audio (October 5, 2008): Jesus Invades Your Experience
The other day, I was riding with our old Dutch dairyman Pete in his massive red truck. Over the grinding of the diesel engine, we talked about today’s young men, and Pete observed that they seem to take years to figure out who they are, and what they should be doing with their lives. “I see it over and over, even in good families. There’s something missing in these guys.”
His comment made me think of my three-year-old son Malcolm, a tough, thick-set package of nuclear energy. He knows what he wants and he lunges for it. He had wanted, for instance, a ride in Pete’s red truck, thinking it was a fire engine, and he cried angry tears on my porch when we left. I wondered why our society dissipates boys’ drive and potency, and what I need to do to ensure that Malcolm keeps a healthy sense of self and grows up strong.
The woes of boys are getting increasing comment these days, but the problem of the formless, unmotivated, needy self is everywhere. Many people seem to lack solid identities, to be unable to form healthy relationships, seem to drift from one thing to the next like so much channel-surfing through life.
In this context, a pastor’s temptation is moralism. Every month or so, after surveying someone’s personal wreckage, I think, “I really need to do a series on time management,” or, “I’ve got to preach on financial priorities.” I wonder whether I give enough “practical application,” telling people what’s what.
If moralism is a temptation as a pastor, it is doubly so as a father. It is enticing to think that I can build up my son’s identity through his submission to my authority.
Moralistic preaching and parenting tries to rebuild crumbling boundaries using precepts. Thou shalt and Thou shalt not. If you allow entertainment to suck your time, then of course there won’t be enough hours in the day for your responsibilities. Thou shalt turn off the T.V. If you blow your money on toys, restaurant food, and mortgage-backed securities, then of course you won’t have a financial chair when the music stops. Thou shalt not go into debt.
But moralism has been the downfall of contemporary Christianity. The precepts of godly wisdom nurture life in those who already have life; but among the legions who do not, the Get a clue! method of preaching doesn’t edify. The “practical applications” of moralism merely compound people’s guilt.
Moralism has been the downfall of Christianity because it is not the gospel.
For the needy contemporary self, the only hope is God-focused individuality, the unique expression of God’s glory in a reborn personality. As we are seeing in our series on the man born blind in John 9, Jesus himself has to invade a person’s life, not merely to reset what a person does, but who a person is.
Consider an observation: Human beings cannot define themselves, but are only defined in relationship.
There are two common myths about the self. One is that you can be true to some wisdom or potential inside your personality, wisdom defined by you alone — the Oprah storyline. The other is that you can improve yourself, work hard, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps — the moralistic storyline. The two myths are equivalent in the sense that they both portray individuals having potential on their own.
Malcolm is growing up in a society that preaches these myths, and that requires him to invent himself according to one or the other, and sometimes both.
The reality is, Malcolm doesn’t have any sense of self autonomously. His definition of who he is comes from his relationships — and it always will. He learns about himself through the process of relating to me, to his mom, to his grandparents, to other adults in the community like Pete. His self-awareness as an adult will grow in the context of interaction. He defines himself in relationship.
If I surrender to the temptation of moralism, then I will raise Malcolm using precepts. I will portray Jesus as the person with high standards, who is forgiving of Malcolm’s faults, but who is all too frequently “disappointed.” Malcolm’s relationship to this Jesus will teach him a sense of self that is sickened by failure.
This is not the Jesus of John 9, who heals the blind.
Jesus is Malcolm’s creator, and designed Malcolm to display the works of God. All of Malcolm’s traits have the potential to make God’s glory visible. Because Malcolm has this potential, Jesus is invading his experiences. Jesus is not waiting for an invitation. Having paid for sin, and bringing new life with him, Jesus is able to slather Malcolm’s eyes with mud and give him spiritual sight. As Malcolm is defined more and more by his interactions with Jesus, even Malcolm’s limitations and faults will become visible marks of divine love.
The gospel calls for a new individuality in Christ, a uniqueness forged by loving relationship. The gospel resets who people are. I don’t know if the passive, disappointed Jesus who is just waiting for people to be interested in him is the sole cause of today’s unformed, unmotivated, needy self. There may be more causes than Christian moralism.
But I do know that what’s missing from people today is Jesus himself.
Tough Questions 2008: Should Faith Influence Politics?
August 28th, 2008 § 3 Comments
Sermon audio: Should Faith Influence Politics?
I once tried to be a speechwriter for a gubernatorial candidate in Oregon.
The former five-term congressman was fighting to win the Republican nomination, and his staff thought he needed help in the English language department. He began speeches by saying, “You all know I’m a straight shooter. So what you hear tonight is coming straight from the shoulder and straight from the heart.” His researcher winced every time she heard it.
Since I was a recent graduate of the congressman’s alma mater, someone recommended me to the campaign manager as a speechwriter. So, by and by, I showed up at the headquarters wearing chalk stripes and carrying a portfolio of political stuff I’d written, and I got the volunteer position.
At one point during the interview, the manager left me sitting alone in her cubicle. I happened to look up, and was startled to see the congressman, his hand in the trouser pocket of his Brooks Brothers suit, chewing gum and staring at me without any intention of saying hello.
He didn’t want a speechwriter.
The first meeting I attended was with the congressman, the manager, and the researcher. The goal was to produce an op-ed about the release of a murderer because, that year, the crime issue was a good bet for mobilizing voters. But we got stuck on the first line. “The first line,” said the congressman, “has to be, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’”
Silence. The researcher offered, “We could start by stating what we’re objecting to.” The manager nodded.
“No. Just, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’”
The meeting lasted all of ten minutes. He didn’t want to be told what to say.
There were road trips. Several of us would pile into a Lincoln and roar down the I-5 at 90 mph, the radar detector blinking on the dashboard. One would think it was an ideal time to get to know the man whose voice I was supposed to capture in writing. But the candidate took numerous calls, chatted with the driver, and read position papers. I had very pleasant conversations with his wife — number three, very smart.
I watched and listened to the congressman for a day, and returned a week later with a draft. I handed the speech to him, the manager smiling, and without so much as a glance, he handed it to the driver. “I won’t be using it today.” And we were off again.
But a few miles up the freeway, the phone rang. It was the manager. She asked the congressman if he was on the speaker phone, which he was. So he switched to the hand-held. “Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh huh. Yeah.” Click. He reached into the pile of papers his driver had put in the car and read through my speech.
“It’s good. Yeah. I like it. Some good lines in there.”
But he went back to “straight from the shoulder and straight from the heart.”
Evangelicals have savored their few moments of influencing politics. But they haven’t achieved the cultural change they were hoping for. The country hasn’t turned to Christ. Families are not measurably stronger because of any legislation passed. The main evangelical successes have been in opposition to gay marriage and abortion, not in advancing a vision for the country.
The lack of progress boils down to resources.
In politics, you have to influence a five-term congressman. You have to be big enough, mobilizing a large enough constituency or having the money to lobby him. Or, you have to have access to the person who influences how much funding goes to his district. Or, you have to have helped elect him in the first place.
Fundamentally, he must want to listen to you. And even that is not enough. He can think of many reasons to listen to a lot of other people too.
Evangelicals have committed vast resources — not just financially, but in terms of grass roots organization, media time, and depth of experience — to influencing five-term congressmen. They have been successful at becoming big. But now they are experiencing again how hard it is to move a nation from the top.
What would have happened if, for the last twenty years, they had committed the same resources to making disciples for Christ? Imagine the impact on American culture if local churches had been successful at saving marriages, nurturing new generations of Christians, deepening people’s knowledge of the Bible, and developing their capacity to pray. Imagine the impact if local churches had been as passionate about God’s priorities as they’ve been about ballot initiatives.
When confronted with what it really costs to make disciples, most evangelicals for the past twenty years have said the same thing. “We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the time, the money, or the patience. We can barely make disciples of our own kids.”
The sad reality of these two decades is that political parties have been able to attract evangelical resources, but the cause of making disciples has not. We will talk about the political implications of this reality on Sunday morning.
My candidate for governor got the nomination, but went down in flames that November. My effort to influence him didn’t even survive the primaries. He fired the campaign manager.
There is one thing that will make a five-term congressman want to listen. A cultural transformation in his district. The question is, how much do evangelicals really want to influence politics? Are they willing to move a nation from the bottom?
Tough Questions 2008: Should a Christian Question Authority?
August 14th, 2008 § 1 Comment
Sermon audio: Should a Christian Question Authority?
I’ll tell you about the time I got sent away for counseling.
When I matriculated at Willamette University in 1989, freshlings were herded through a course on world views. That year, the powers assigned readings from Victorian England — Mill, Dickens, Marx, et al. — and we were supposed to discuss them seminar-style. This was intended as a perspective-softener. We would get points of view from other times, other social strata, and other students, and we would come to the breezy but Correct conclusion that the world is not as we assumed.
But what the powers intended as a means of softening my perspective, I took as a means of expressing it. Well, I thought, they said we should discuss. So I did discuss. I discussed what I thought of Darwin’s theory, Mill’s utilitarianism, and the university’s relativistic world view — all of which I’d had the distinct impression was relevant. But I discussed my perspective without the least intention of softening it, which meant I wasn’t really obeying the powers.
My professor took me aside after about two weeks and said, “I want you to go talk to Charlie.” She meant Charles Wallace, the university chaplain. She was nice about it, but she’d clearly had enough. You’re a Christian, she seemed to say. Maybe Charlie the Christian will know what to do with you.
2008 is the third year I’ve collected questions from the community about spiritual and moral issues for a sermon series. (The link to the two previous years is on my blogroll.) The first question that jumped out at me from this year’s batch was, “Should Christians question authority?”
I have to admit my bias.
I have a contentious personality. For me, arguing is fun, and arguing with authority figures is even better. Winning those arguments is so much fun that it’s probably immoral.
So I chose to address the question about authority because it appealed to my baser instincts.
In addition, trouble-making is part of my heritage. My grandfather, my great aunts and uncles, my dad and his sister, have all been contrarian and stubborn. On vacation, I took my family to visit Aunt Jan, who has used her genetic sonar for absurdity well and often. Over breakfast (french toast battered with eggs and whiskey), we sounded off against Mel Gibson’s Passion, the evangelical mania over it, and its theology. We also shared precious moments of confrontation with the film’s devotees.
In the end, however, we had to agree that the underlying reason we hated it was that everybody loved it. Tell me the last time everybody was right.
But personal and familial biases aside, I also chose to address the question about authority because of the questioner’s sensitivity. The woman asked specifically about the virtue of meekness. Can a Christian habitually criticize those in authority without becoming arrogant? Don’t we owe submission to those over us?
I have learned valuable truths by over-exercising my critical faculties. I’ve learned, for example, that the vast majority of people hate arguing. Contention fills them with dread, and they will not voice their opinion if they fear that someone will debate them. This has led me to nurture discussion by shutting my mouth. I’ve also seen that the process of learning must go deeper than mere questioning. If I am really going to learn a subject or a skill, I have do things contrary to my experience and instinct. That means, again, shutting my mouth so that I can submit to my teacher.
These are good arguments for meekness.
But I have learned something else. While critical questioning is a terrible way to discover whether an authority is speaking the truth, it is a great way to discover whether the authority is interested in nourishing, imparting, engaging, and being understood, or whether he is merely interested in conformity. The authority figures I’ve known who nurture life in their students have all embraced criticism as a sign of a living mind.
What we face today is not the authority of a few. We face the authority of the masses, the despotism of the People. We face the unrelenting tyranny of everybody‘s opinion. We used to wear what displayed our place in our culture. Now we wear the latest fad. The legacy of ethics used to teach us how to make decisions. Now, our decisions are dictated by fashion, and our ethics are retrofitted rationalizations.
I think that churches, in this environment, need to focus less on controlling people’s behavior than on educating their consciences. This means using the authority of parents and elders to earn submission and to empower people to question. I believe that the church where this is achieved will continue to make new Christians, generation after generation. That is the theme I will preach on Sunday morning.
At Willamette, I went to the appointment my professor had already scheduled with Charlie. I don’t remember much about our session, except that we ended up trading favorite scenes from Monty Python, and that I continued in class as usual. Charlie the Christian did indeed know what to do with me.
But I wouldn’t have known what to do at Willamette if I hadn’t been given a trained conscience.
Emergent Intellectuals and Their News From Nowhere
July 17th, 2008 § 4 Comments
Intellectualism has long said, to coin a phrase, “Everything must change.” Will emergent intellectuals be any different from the utopians of the past? Not so far. Their knowledge seems enslaved to ideology:
Evil is built into our social structures. Racism is systemic. Economic inequality is institutional. War is the result of the military industrial complex. Poverty in the developing world is the legacy of imperialism, imposed first by Western colonial powers and then by cold war superpowers. So, if we’re serious about addressing all these problems, the world has to be reorganized.
Fortunately, this is now possible.
A new generation has outgrown the confines of the Enlightenment and is emerging into postmodernity. We no longer think in outmoded ways. We’re no longer shackled by the prejudices of ye olde puritanism, or the bigotry of Western thought, or the obsession with proving others wrong. We know that we can change everything because we have what previous generations lacked: dialogue about theoretical models.
And all God’s people said, “Yes we can!”
Utopianism of this kind has a pretty well-documented history. Michael Burleigh’s recent book about the decline of Christendom, Earthly Powers (HarperCollins, 2005), narrates how political schemes for restructuring society gained religious authority. Among the vast collection of intellectuals Burleigh sketches is Auguste Comte (pp 229-230):
One of the fathers of modern social “science”, who in 1839 coined the term “sociology”, Comte sought to establish the philosophical basis for the sciences and for the scientific ordering and reform of society, a formula calculated to appeal to the right as well as the left. . . . [Comte's] Positivism was supposed to be a third way between the outmoded theologically grounded world of the ancien regime and an abstract, critical rationalism that had become anarchic and incapable of creating anything.
Burleigh continues:
The essence of his Religion of Humanity was to redirect mankind’s spiritual energies away from the transcendental and towards the creation of a happier and more moral life here on earth through the worship of the best in man himself.
The idea that science must direct cultural change led to an array of horrors.
Burleigh narrates the course from Saint-Simon and Comte, among others, to the totalitarian regimes of the early 20th century. Turning to older scholars, Russell Kirk, in The Conservative Mind, showed the many responses of Anglo-American thinkers to the destruction of culture by utilitarian reformers. In The Road To Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek argued that centrally planned economies lead to tyranny. Jane Jacobs documented the dehumanizing impact of urban renewal dogma in The Death and Life of Great of American Cities. Paul Johnson scandalized the chattering classes with his book Intellectuals, which did the extreme disfavor of comparing the ideals of famous thinkers with their actual behavior.
And the emergents?
Infatuation with causes on the left is deepening, especially among younger evangelicals. It is now God’s work to protest the war in Iraq, to bring about world peace, to end poverty all over the world, and to advocate environmental regulations. A renewed identification of the gospel with social justice can be heard in many churches, as well as impatience with the idea that salvation is for heaven and not for this world.
I am not saying that emergents are simply latter-day versions of Comte. But I will say that many of them are intellectuals in the old style. Their obsessive theorizing about the course of history and their absorption with grand political change are characteristic of alienated model-mongers. I see two problems with their leftward tilt, just as I see other problems with populist conservatism among evangelicals.
1. The evils of this world are not systemic, but spiritual. Reorganize, restructure, reform all you want, but the power of wickedness will merely shift. A culture is only transformed as the individuals who live in it are reborn in Christ. The reason evangelicals are failing spiritually in America is not that they have ignored progressive political causes, but that they have ignored the Holy Spirit’s call to their own souls.
2. Evangelical pastors should not surrender their authority to intellectuals. Every generation since the French Revolution has seen vicars of “progress” emerge. These parsons, whom Malcolm Muggeridge used to call “tame clergymen,” bow from their pulpits to the greater authority of Comte’s social sciences, giving their benediction to whatever totalist model has favor this year, whether it’s emissions caps or a UN war crimes tribunal. A pastor’s authority is in his fidelity to the Bible, not to the consensus at Davos.
The linkage between the Kingdom of Christ and earthly power is an old, old folly. If emergents are unable to shake the euphoria of knowing how to change everything, they will end in the enclaves of bitterness, and nothing will have changed.
New Doctrinal Statement Shows Integrity
July 3rd, 2008 § 1 Comment
The headline in the New York Times on Sunday read, “Anglican Conservatives, Rebelling on Gays, Will Form New Power Bloc.” Conservatives from Africa, South America, India, Australia, and the United States met in Jerusalem to “create a new ecclesiastical province in the United States and Canada to absorb the parishes that have been outraged by the American church’s consecration of an openly gay bishop in 2003 and the Canadian church’s blessing of same-sex unions.”
The story put my week at the conference of the Evangelical Free Church of America in perspective. As we debated a thorough revision of our statement of faith in St. Louis, there were none of the Anglican agonies.
My Episcopalian brothers and sisters have endured a crisis of doctrine, conscience, and fellowship for years, a crisis induced by an American leadership determined to remake Christianity in their own image. Only now do conservatives have a chance to emerge from the crisis with a communion they can embrace. My friends with Episcopalian parishes would affirm the work God has done among their people, but the strain in their voices when they describe meeting with machine-driven bishops tells some of the cost of that work.
I continue to be inspired by their example while thanking God that I don’t have to carry their burden. I am blessed by the godly leaders of the EFCA.
When I first heard about the proposal to revise the EFCA statement of faith, I was suspicious. I have little confidence in organizations. One of my largest challenges as a leader is my own cynicism about institutional goals: I can’t bring myself to use the lingo of teams, which I associate with conformism. So when the word unity shows up on banners, I’m chiefly interested in discovering the agenda behind it.
But now I can honestly say –
I interrupt this repentance just to emphasize that my suspicion of many leadership practices in institutions is unchanged. I don’t like grand visions, glossy marketing, rah-rah speeches, videos, ads disguised as magazine articles, groupthink disguised as fellowship, the exaltation of the team player as the ultimate example of godliness, or the permanent smile of the mass communicator. Just so that’s clear.
I like networks of people in relationship with each other. I like to see those people, as unique individuals interacting with other unique individuals, make corporate decisions on the basis of biblical principles and their shared history. I like leaders who understand that this kind of process can’t be reconciled with marketing, but only thrives on good old deliberation.
The reason I was won over to the revised statement of faith is that the EFCA’s leaders — President Bill Hamel, the board of directors, credentialing director Greg Strand, and the Spiritual Heritage committee — showed that unity was not their slogan but their goal. They showed their integrity with patient engagement and transparency.
To strengthen our unity, we need a statement of faith that stirs us with its truth and timeliness, and the proposed revision certainly delivers. Its statement on the doctrine of God slams the door on open theism, letting the Lord’s full glory out:
“We believe in one God, Creator of all things, holy, infinitely perfect, and eternally existing in a loving unity of three equally divine Persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Having limitless knowledge and sovereign power, God has graciously purposed from eternity to redeem a people for Himself and to make all things new for His own glory.”
The new statement on the Bible is specific and sweeping:
“We believe that God has spoken in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, through the words of human authors. As the verbally inspired Word of God, the Bible is without error in the original writings, the complete revelation of His will for salvation, and the ultimate authority by which every realm of human knowledge and endeavor should be judged. Therefore, it is to be believed in all that it teaches, obeyed in all that it requires, and trusted in all that it promises.”
Paragraph #4 on Jesus Christ is filled with terms evoking the biblical narrative of redemption, and paragraph #8 on Christian living is a needed affirmation of God’s purposes for salvation. As a confession of the biblical heritage of Evangelical Free churches, this statement will deepen our unity for decades to come.
But more important than producing a strong document was how the leaders produced it. A key issue for many pastors and lay leaders around the country was whether an affirmation of the premillennial return of Christ (#10) should be included in the new statement. At first, the spiritual heritage committee recommended that the term premillennial be dropped. They had good reasons, and at first I agreed with them. It is not an essential doctrine for a person’s salvation, and it does pose difficulties for our cooperation with outside ministries.
But as I listened to older pastors in the movement, the significance of my own commitment to premillennialism deepened. This particular teaching was a passionate focus of the fathers of our movement more than a century ago. It has relevance today as evangelicals decide whether their engagement in politics is a matter of Christianizing the State or evangelizing souls. The EFCA is not among those calling for Christian laws in order to hasten the return of Christ. Christ will set up his own law, in his Father’s time.
The EFCA leaders said they would listen to input from the churches. When that input showed a strong desire to retain premillennialism in the revision, the leaders did listen. They put the term premillennial back in the statement. Then they won over most of those who had originally supported dropping it. They impressed me with their reverence for history and fellowship.
The 2008 conference adopted the revision by an 86% vote. I am proud to have been a part of it. I’m grateful for the consistent orthodoxy of our movement. And I’m encouraged to have witnessed the deliberation of a network of people, not the operations of a machine.
Answering Questions About My Novel
June 19th, 2008 § 2 Comments
Last week, someone showed me a review of my novel Fallen on Amazon. The reviewer, Keith Hammond, made my day with some very generous praise, and then raised an issue that I’ve encountered often:
My only complaint is that the story seemed too personal and allegorical to be completely fictional. I would have preferred the book to have an addendum where the author directly talks about the issues or situations that caused him to write such a compelling book.
The first person to make this kind of comment to me was one my editors at Kregel, who, during our line-by-line slog through the manuscript, said that the dialog was “a little too good.” He wondered what experiences I had plundered. After the novel was released, my secretary gave it to a relative, who finished it and made the hair-raising assertion, “Obviously, Raley’s had an affair.” Then there are the youth at my church, who have dissected the story with frightening precision, tracing eccentricities and obsessions from my habits into my narrative.
If only they were so devoted to their schoolwork.
So I guess I’d better tell all.
From start to finish, Fallen is invented. I didn’t model any character on a person I’ve known, nor have I ever had to endure what Jim, the narrator, goes through. I’ve found that fictionalizing real-life scenarios and personalities almost always yields a flat story because there is too much authorial judgment on the characters and too little sympathy. A novelist needs to keep his cool.
Yet, for me, Fallen is a personal book. Mr. Hammond and others are right. The book is personal in this sense: almost every vile act I portrayed in the story was invented from what I have seen in my own soul.
When I drew characters for the story, for example, I tried to load them with contradictions. Jim loves his wife and daughter, but also treats them with selfish disregard. He wants to be gracious, but gives favor with calculation. Pastor Dave is an emotionally driven man, yet he disguises his motives by intellectualizing. Also, Dave wants to see himself as compassionate towards others, yet his core motivation is self-pity.
Each of these contradictions — and many others in my characters, male and female — has its origin in some struggle of my own for integrity. I simply implanted my hypocrisies within the quite different personalities of my characters. I hate confessing this procedure, because it makes the story feel like public nudity. But that’s what I did.
The same is true of the relational struggles that the book portrays. I put my follies into all of the marriages and working partnerships. I invented the male characters’ misconceptions of women, from their flippant infatuations to their ordeals in marriage, out of similar misconceptions of my own. While the power struggles among church leaders in the book grew out of the invented scenarios, my own anger in sympathy with each character showed me how the struggles would deepen.
The crimes in Fallen, then, were not written as veiled reports but as shame-faced extrapolations.
There are two important differences between my approach and the method of fictionalizing personal experiences.
First, as a matter of technique, memoirs-as-novels start with scenarios and create characters to fit, which yields a false story. A human being is not a robot. Fictional human beings cannot be robots and be true. So I started with characters and then shaped the scenarios. Every day I wrote, the characters surprised me.
Second, I would only write a memoir-as-novel to vent bitterness. I may be unusual in this tendency, and other authors might have other motivations. But, as a matter of repentance, I don’t write to vent. I used to. Creating a little world in which all of my judgments are validated can be satisfying. But writing such things does not edify anyone. I found the method of spreading my darkness among many characters to be sanctifying. Instead of judging the sins of others, I was able to examine my own.
This is a method that I feel bound to follow. The subject matter of Fallen does not need more angry scribblers. But, I hope, a repentant one might do some good.
Church Doesn’t Work
June 12th, 2008 § 4 Comments
Sometimes I find a post that hits me in the gut. On Tuesday I saw “Confused Christian” on the new and anonymous My Bloggerings, and read expressions of what many evangelicals feel these days. It made me ask whether God’s eye has left his people.
MB, the blog’s creator, wrote that she grew up charismatic but turned away from the sign gifts movement after she got married. “I just didn’t think that is what the Bible was all about.” But now she feels that she can’t replace it with anything.
At her current church, she says, “I am so unsatisfied with watered down preaching and ‘anything goes’ philosophy because God after all will still love you. I want more than this.” She sees professing Christians living as immorally as non-Christians, being focused on their careers rather than their children. “My church has lost the art of mentoring younger people and feeding them spiritually. Instead, the goal is to make friends who drink and have poker games at their house and hit on girls at the Champs restaurant in our city.”
MB says she wants a deeper community where life with Christ is more vibrant. “But I’m afraid that this is only a dream. For I have visited so many churches only to be let down by them all. Am I just expecting too much?”
Her experience is depressingly common. I often look at the demands of ministry and echo her question, adding another of my own. Is there any tool for nurturing spiritual life that works?
Morality doesn’t work. Parents and church leaders who focus on raising standards of behavior only have scare tactics to motivate people. There’s a wealth of material to use — a culture that is spiraling into anarchy, case after case of self-destruction, evidence from medicine and social science about the effects of vice. But the reality is that people are not primarily motivated by fear. If future danger and immediate pleasure compete for people’s attention, who wins?
Community doesn’t work. The old line that embers burn when they’re close together is true as far as it goes. But a pile of sticks won’t make its own spark. Strong community without vibrant spirituality just strengthens people’s selfishness under the cover of love and loyalty.
Family doesn’t work. The fumes of human sin are most toxic when inhaled up close. The flame of the tongue, the heat of anger, the slow burn of bitterness have a way of suffocating all godly aspirations. Far too many families, if we’re honest, have a well-preserved skin of faith, but their vital organs have been pickled.
Doctrine and preaching don’t work. Neither do programs, buildings, or media. Truth be told, I can’t think of a single spiritual tool that makes any impression on a heart that refuses to seek God. The tools only make that heart worse. Which means that, when people will not listen to the claims of God on their lives, the tool that is so useful at so many other times, the church, doesn’t work.
There is only one thing that affects hearts like we have among evangelicals today. It is a single moment, the moment when the presence of Jesus Christ becomes frighteningly real, when a professing believer raises his face and discovers that God’s eye, far from leaving him, has been locked on him all along, and has seen everything.
For that, MB and the rest of us have to pray.
John Hagee and God’s Plan
May 29th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
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.
A.W. Tozer, the Anti-Populist
May 22nd, 2008 § 2 Comments
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.
