Gustav Dore, “Nehemiah Views the Ruins of Jerusalem’s Walls” (1866)



I started reading the Book of Nehemiah again the other day, and I got to thinking about walls.

Walls are unfashionable in our time. “Open plan” homes are trendy (or maybe that trend has passed. I’m not exactly up on architectural fashions). For years, businesses have believed – in the absence of any evidence whatever – that productivity and morale can be improved by putting employees in big bullpens instead of giving them offices (management, of course, gets to have offices). When people talk about “tearing down walls,” they generally mean walls of prejudice and misunderstanding. This trend of thought goes back a long way, at least to Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall”: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down!”

I myself, on a far lower level, wrote a song with the same sort of theme back in my college/musical group days. And no, I won’t tell you the words. You’ll never hear it, and I’m fine with that.

There’s an assumption in a lot of Christianity, too, that walls are uniformly bad. All walls need to go. Joshua knocked down the walls of Jericho. Christ, as we are told in Ephesians 2:14, destroyed “the dividing wall of hostility.” So the reflexive assumption is that Christians are against all walls, at least in the moral and cultural sense.

But it’s not at all that simple in reality. If you actually read the Bible (and one of the problems I’ve faced increasingly, on the rare occasions when I can be lured into an argument, is that I’ve found myself arguing a book I’ve actually read with people who only know it by hearsay) you’ll see that walls in Scripture are just like any other temporal thing. They’re good in the right place, and bad in the wrong place. The whole Book of Nehemiah is about restoring a wall that’s been torn down. The wall itself is a symbol of the religious law that stands between the Jews and their pagan neighbors. This wall is a necessity if the nation is to survive; it has God’s blessing. In the parable of the vineyard in Matthew 21:33-41, Jesus tells of a man who plants a vineyard and builds a wall around it. This land owner represents God, and his wall is a perfectly reasonable barrier to keep unwanted pests, human and animal, out.

There’s a perception about in the world today that Christians have no sense of nuance. Everything is black and white for us. We can’t see shades of gray.

But that’s only true if you’re selective in your observations. In the matter of walls, for instance, Christians see them as either good or bad, depending on who builds them, where, and for what purpose.

Or, as G. K. Chesterton said in Why I Am a Catholic, “There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

Amanda Thatcher, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s granddaughter, sent many media voices chattering by her reading of Ephesians 6:10-18 at her grandmother’s funeral yesterday.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to all those affected by the appalling violence at the Boston Marathon today.

Let us turn now to our Hubris Corner. I’ve decided to make another of my legendary long-term predictions.

As you may recall, I have (or believe I have) a kind of knack for spotting long-term social trends. I’m no good at picking lottery numbers (actually I’ve never tried), and I generally get elections wrong. But over the long haul I seem to be able to sight along the lines of current events and predict what’s coming in a decade or two. I have a good record with that sort of thing. Or so I believe.

So here’s what happened. I woke up from a dream early Saturday morning filled with a sense of conviction about the future of the liberal churches and their seminaries.

I speculated a while back about why liberal churches even exist anymore, since their theology makes piety unnecessary and their social views turn charity over to the government. I read an article recently – wish I remembered where – which pointed out another aspect of the same situation. That was that, while conservative churches seem to be winning what might be called the “church wars” (in that conservative churches are experiencing growth, at least in some areas, while liberal churches are steadily declining everywhere), the liberal churches are winning – or have won – the culture war. That means that while a majority of the people in churches may believe what conservatives believe, the majority of people not in churches believe what the liberals believe. And there are more people not in churches than in churches.

So will the liberal churches just die, like a salmon that spawns and expires? Continue reading Looking down the road →

Thabiti Anyabwile, Senior Pastor of First Baptist Church of Grand Cayman, has been blogging his critique of Douglas Wilson’s 2005 book, Black and Tan: A Collection of Essays and Excursions on Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in America. Wilson has joined in freely, and the two have charitably and thoroughly argued on the important issues of slavery in the American South, the authority of Scripture, and how the issues of 1860 were handled in relation to issues today.

Anyabwile posted a round-up of links to the whole discussion here. It isn’t a simple argument, so I don’t think I can adequately summarize it here.

Hunter Baker has blessed Christians on the Internet by posting this letter, “An Astonishing Message from a Gay Sister in Christ” and his personal response. I feel provoked to share my reflections also.

“She sees herself as a sinner and reaches for the bracing, redemptive, and cleansing blood of Christ rather than the lukewarm saliva of evolving culture.” She is like I am, though the labels differ.

Let me come out of the closet. I am an idolater.

I believe I have an idolatrous orientation. At one time in my life, I would have said one cannot be a true follower of Christ and an idolater, but I see that I am one. I was born this way. I have followed Christ since age seven, but as I became an adult, I realized I made and loved idols regularly. I worshiped (never in church–wait, I don’t think I can say that) myself, my dreams, the attention of others, my books, my relative grades, and other things over the Lord God who made me and rules heaven and earth. I have confessed of this sin, felt free of it, and returned to it within the course of a week.

Many people like me have tried to change the church to accommodate them and succeeded. Some have changed entire denominations. But I don’t want accommodation. I want redemption.

On this day, when we remember the death of the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, I want to take shelter in His bloody side. I can’t change myself.

G. K. Chesterton wrote, in Orthodoxy, “Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.”

As evidence of that contention, I offer this article from CTV News:

Hamlin said the findings suggest that babies feel something like schaudenfreude, a German term describing the pleasure experienced when someone you dislike or consider threatening experiences harm.

Personally I’ve never trusted babies. Shifty eyes.