David Masciotra says you can find faith in modern literature by reading crime novels. “The case for faith in fiction is to be made by those who deal with cracking cases for a living—the fictional detectives, private investigators, and troubled protagonists who inhabit the scandalous, seductive, and serpentine setting of noir.” Take Hit Me by Lawrence Block
Mascoitra praises James Lee Burke
Something from my devotions today: 1 Corinthinas 12: 4-6: “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men.”
The devotional I was reading from used the old King James terminology – “diversities of gifts, diversities of working,” etc.
And I got to thinking about word “diversity.”
If there’s any word that’s been abused in our time (and there are plenty) it’s “diversity.” Whenever a contemporary American hears the word diversity, he tenses up, figuring some bureaucrat is about to impose another form of uniformity on him. We’ve made diversity about race, and that’s just stupid.
Snatch up a dozen people from random spots around the world, and set them down together in a room. It’s my certain conviction that the least important thing about any person in that group will be his or her race (their views on race may have significance, though). Gender will matter. Politics and religion will matter, as will cultural tradition. I don’t know for a fact whether general racial traits actually exist in people (apart from physical appearance), but if there are such traits they will have little or no significance, except in terms of how people respond to them.
And yet we talk as if diversity were just about race. A university proudly points to its multi-racial faculty, calling it diverse, even though every single member of that faculty holds ideas and beliefs almost indistinguishable from any of the others.
All this is not what St. Paul is talking about here. The big racial divide in the early church was between Jews and Gentiles, and I’m quite sure the presence of both wasn’t what he meant by diversity.
What he meant was a wonderful truth, a truth Christianity has given as a gift to the world, which the world now takes for granted and thinks it came up with itself.
Paul declared that every human being – however weak, poor, and thickheaded – had a special, precious gift to give the Church, the Body of Christ. However little some individual seemed to have to offer, he did have a gift to share, according to Paul. All members of the Church were like organs in a body. The kidneys might be a little ashamed of their humble function, and the other organs might make jokes about them, but take the kidneys away – put their owner on a transplant waiting list – and it suddenly becomes clear how much those kidneys matter. Everybody matters in the Church.
This truth – in spite of centuries of officious attempts to make the Church an aristocracy where only the elite organs counted – could not be forgotten, and kept (and keeps) pushing through. Everybody matters. The one lost sheep counts. The widow’s mite counts more than the rich man’s endowment.
That’s what diversity actually means.
I’m feeling a bit better now, thanks for asking, having seen a doctor last week and gotten antibiotics and a steroid for my lungs. But a day at work still wipes me out, and I’ve got stuff I need to get done tonight. So, in lieu of the hard work of thinking out a blog post, I’ll just post another short excerpt from Williams’ Through Norway With a Knapsack, last night’s subject.
In this episode, our hero has gotten lost and spent a long day on the mountains, finally finding a guest house late at night, exhausted.
On awakening, I found a stout gentleman sitting at my bedside. He was the pastor of Lom. A Norwegian pastor is not merely a preacher; he is clergy-man, physician, magistrate, arbitrator, and general friend and father, to whom all his scattered parishioners appeal. In a country where there are none but peasant farmers – no aristocracy, no gentry, no towns and villages, no shopkeepers, no professional class – a highly educated man must be strangely isolated, and, unless endowed with the true spirit of Christian benevolence, must be one of the most miserable of men; but, if suited to his work, he may be one of the happiest, for his opportunities of doing unmistakable good, and of witnessing the full fruits of his good deeds, are almost unlimited. Most of these Norwegian pastors are, I believe, excellent men, and render great services to the people around.
In the present instance, the paternal relations of the good pastor of Lom were illustrated in my case, for he sat at my bedside, where he had evidently been watching for some time, as though he feared that some fever or other ailment might result from the over-exertion, excitement and fasting….
Anthony Bradley talks about the rap song “Precious Puritans” by Propaganda. He explains how the song criticizes puritans for condone slavery (which frankly is news to me and troubling), but goes on to say he, the singer, is no better. We all have flaws and blind spots.
However, by singing about puritans in an unflattering way Propaganda has raised the ire of many reformed writers. Bradley suggests this may be typical tribal thinking.
Strachan considers the Puritans “forefathers” and in a tribalist way, some would argue, seeks to protect their legacy. Had Propaganda dropped a track critiquing Roman Catholics, Jeremiah Wright, Rob Bell, Brian McLaren, or preachers of the prosperity gospel, he’d be called a hero. During my seminary years I was rebuked once for mentioning Martin Luther King Jr. in a sermon because of his sins. Why? Because King, like the others, are outside the tribe and are fair game to be critiqued in any form. Since they are not “one of us” there is no expectation of extending grace. Grace is reserved for those with whom we agree.
“Does love demand freedom?” he asks in chapter one. That’s the idea we get from many stories and some ministers. “What we are asked to believe is that God doing whatever he wants with whomever he wants is a simplistic, fatalistic view of love, and that God letting us do whatever we want is a more compelling vision of his love.” But God, who is the author and giver of life itself, whose character defines love, peace, joy and other virtues, could not be more loving than he is. God is love, though love is not God, as some would have it. “Maybe the reality is a love more multifaceted than we can understand with finite, fallen minds… that the God of the Bible is as transcendent as he is imminent, that his ways are inscrutable, that his love is glorious and astonishing precisely because it is too wonderful for us” (pp. 27-28).
Jared isn’t a mystic on a frozen Vermont hillside. Continue reading Gospel Deeps, by Jared Wilson
There’s a good chance you’ve seen this short film already. Paperman is a black-and-white, almost silent production done by Disney animators using only traditional (non-computer) animation techniques. Everybody loves it, and with good reason.
I have to admit that, being me, I had a mixed reaction at first. Then I realized I was wrong. I want to explain why, because it has to do with the nature of Story.
(Spoilers below. Do not read until you’ve watched the film through.)
My initial, self-oriented response was to say, “Life isn’t like that. The Universe does not step in to make your dreams come true.”
Then I saw that I’d missed the point. The point is that when the Universe took a hand in this couple’s story, it was only after the young man had done everything he could from his own end. He’d made his boss mad, and may have sacrificed his job, for the girl. It’s a little like the merchant in Jesus’ parable, who sold all he had in order to purchase the Pearl of Great Price.
If you’re writing a story, you can permit a Deus Ex Machina (I’ve written about this before), but only after you’ve let the character suffer and fail a whole lot. If the audience feels he’s tried his best, and not gotten the reward he deserves, then you can bring the Cosmic Hand in to set things right at the end. If you handle it carefully.
That’s a narrative principle only, by the way. It’s not theological, or only partly theological. Christianity does not teach that you gain God’s acceptance through trying your hardest, followed by God’s pleased intervention to finish the job for you. In Christianity it’s all grace from first to last.
Still, from the experiential point of view, the two things are hard to tell apart. The moment of grace is when the merchant falls in love with the Pearl, when the young man falls in love with the girl. All their efforts afterward are not actually their own accomplishments but entirely the work of God’s grace within, doing business as Love.
It’s a mystery.
Everything is.
/>
Derelict Methodist Church, Walsall, England. Source: geograph.org.uk.
The old formula goes, “If a dog bites a man, that’s not news. If a man bites a dog, that’s news!”
So when one of my Facebook friends posted an article about another theologian of the Very Large Church Body Which Shall Remain Nameless denying the virgin birth of Christ, that was hardly surprising. What purposes do mainline churches serve nowadays, if not to be platforms for the proclamation of heresy?
Which led me to a question I’d never thought about before. What purpose, exactly, does a liberal church serve today? What is its mission?
Traditionally, the business of the church has been to follow the two great commandments, as taught by Christ (Matthew 22): “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and soul, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” So the church has understood its business to be a) worship and evangelism, and b) service to those in need.
But for a liberal, those bases are already covered. For liberals, God’s love is unconditional and given equally to all, so there’s no need (besides, it’s sometimes offensive) to proclaim the gospel. Worship as an aesthetic experience may be a function of the church, but honestly, who wants to get up on a Sunday morning when God’s happy with you whatever you do?
And as for service to the poor, well, the last election certainly made it clear that liberals don’t think any assistance is worth a thing unless it goes through government. When conservatives argue for private charity, we’re condemned as uncaring.
So why should liberal churches exist at all? Just to provide sources of income for spiritually-minded intellectuals?
The bottom line for liberals, it seems to me, is “Look to Europe.” You see how the churches are dying over there? It’s coming here, and sooner than you think.
Andrew Ferguson talks with Mars Hill Audio Journal Host Ken Myers for The Weekly Standard:
“I’ve always thought that beautiful art was a great apologetic resource,” Myers says. Beauty is the chief attribute of God, said Jonathan (not Bob) Edwards. “Beauty points to a Creator.” Yet the church, Myers says, “capitulates more and more to the culture of entertainment.”
“It’s a way of keeping market share. But they’re digging their own grave. There’s a short-term benefit, but in the long term the kinds of cultural resources they need to be faithful to the Gospel won’t be there.”
This recalls the MHA Journal (#114) interview with Gerald McDermott who said Jonathan Edwards has been marginalized by Modernists (if I remember correctly) who successfully made the sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Edwards’ signature work. By doing so, they hid their students from the beauty and glory of God which Edwards often discussed.
Theodore Dalrymple, in my opinion one of the most interesting writers today, writes over at City Journal about two separate books written about famous English serial murderers. Though the authors were born only a decade apart, they write as if from different worlds. Dalrymple contrasts the two accounts in order to highlight how western culture has changed within living memory.
But the woman of lesser education and humbler occupation displays in her book a much higher level of intellectual sophistication and moral intelligence than her more educated junior. Where one is modest, self-effacing, and straightforward, the other is grandiose and egotistical, her capacity to see clearly clouded by a combination of self-importance and obfuscatory pseudo-intellection. I believe that this contrast results not only from individual differences between the two women but from the different cultural environments in which they grew up and subsequently wrote. A week, said Harold Wilson, is a long time in politics; and it seems that ten years is a long time in the history of a culture.
I’m not sure I entirely agree with Dalrymple’s analysis of the Christian virtue of forgiveness. But I do agree with him that the concept has been entirely corrupted in modern times. I sometimes think that although western culture proudly regards itself as having cast off the shackles of Christianity, it has in fact only sunk into Christian heresy, with the labels switched to confuse the rubes. The theological act of forgiveness has been transformed into a vague principle that we are all morally obligated to forgive everything – even the most horrific crimes – because in fact they’re not crimes at all and there’s nothing to forgive. Our enemy, our tormenter, our murderer, is not a heinous malefactor but merely a fellow victim, the object of forces over which he had no control.
That’s not what Christian forgiveness means. Christianity grants to the sinner the dignity of responsibility. It has been argued that the doctrine of hell is the greatest compliment Christian theology ever paid to the human race. To say that someone is responsible, and to hold them responsible, is to attribute to them the dignity of free agency, declaring them a person capable of choice, rather than just an object subject to blind manipulation.
As in so many cases, it all comes down to what you think human beings are.
