The Christian Web Conference, which is happening this September at Biola University, has started a monthly newsletter for “web pioneers.”  It’s designed to feature articles of interest to Christians who are actively engaged in new media, who simply have an interest in the intersection of technology and Christianity.  You can sign up for it on the main page of their website. 

I am humbled and honored to be featured in their first offering.  I am also curious to see how these ideas, which I admit are a work in progress, are received.  To the essay, then.

Any critic of online church is in the unfortunate and unenviable position of critiquing a new and apparently effective means by which the Gospel—the hope of salvation—is communicated to the world.  It is important to acknowledge this from the outset:  unless we have some reason to doubt the conversion of those who have been saved through attending online church, which only a cynic would do, then the presumption must be on the side of the affirmative.  Proponents of online church clearly have the upper hand.

A comprehensive case against online church is impossible in such a short space, and is a nearly impossible case to make without teasing out the differences between understandings of ecclesiologies, soteriologies, anthropologies and notions of the reality of the ‘virtual.’  While important, such an extended analysis of online church is best reserved for another format.

Instead, I would like in the short space remaining to point out one potential objection to online church on technological and sociological grounds.  To fully participate in online church, one needs a working computer, knowledge of how to operate that computer, and an internet connection fast enough to stream video.  These requirements preclude important segments of society from participation in church, namely, those without the material means to purchase and maintain the requisite technology, and those—like the elderly—who lack the technological know-how to join and participate in an online church.

Simply put, the bar for entry into the online church is too high.  I suspect, though could not prove, that the barriers result in online congregations composed of upper-middle class millenials, Gen-Xers, and boomers. 

The obvious rejoinder is that these elderly and the poor will simply attend elsewhere, and they may.  But the absence of the elderly from the congregation deprives the community of an important voice.  The older men, after all, are to teach the younger men, as the older women teach the younger women.  If parishioners are forced to turn outside of their congregation to find those willing and able to disciple them, then the church community is failing to provide a critical component of Christian discipleship—the task that God bestows upon the Church in the Great commission.

Additionally, while economic homogeneity may not be unbiblical, the technological barriers to ecclesiastical life mean that ministry to the poor can only result in full participation if church ceases to be strictly ‘online’ and instead becomes geographically rooted.  We must provide either provide them the technological means to participate in online church, or facilitate a way for them to gather together in some sort of campus or community to participate.  But both options require a local presence, either to install and support technology or to facilitate a campus, which should make us question the foundational premise of online church, which is that the church can be fully the church—since the full church is always present in its local manifestations—without regard to geographical ties.  If online church precludes the poor from full participation because of their lack of means, as it seems to do, then it is no church at all.

As the argument is still in development, allow me to be the first to point out its shortcomings.  This is not an ‘in principle’ objection against online church, since it rests on certain demographic and technological realities.  For one, as the elderly among us depart, they will be replaced by a generation that is much more technologically sophisticated.  Secondly, as technological development progresses, costs will continue to drop and the lower classes will have improved access to the requisite technology.  So fundamentally, the argument is limited in its scope.  The thesis is simply that because of its current limitations, Christians should not pursue online church here and now.  Only when we turn to examine the theological anthropology beneath online church, and whether a human church can ever be a disembodied church, will the argument move into the arena where we might universally exclude a particular expression of worship.

Yet while limited, the argument has some intuitional appeal.  It is important for the church to minister to the poor as the church¸ and to bring the poor into the church community.  Some missionary agencies, for example, proclaim the gospel through and after meeting the physical needs of the impoverished, a strategy I think most effective.  At best, it seems counterintuitive to include the absence of a computer and reliable internet connection as one of those physical needs.  At worst, such a position falls prey to the sort of technologism that characterizes modernity and post-modernity.

Whether Christians should engage in online church is still an open question, but it has been my hope here to raise additional grounds for caution.  More work clearly needs to be done if critics wish to overcome the presumption in favor of online church, but that work will have to be reserved for another time and space.

I’ll doubtlessly be putting more thoughts on this and related issues out there over the next few months as I prepare to discuss these issues with Andrew Jones of TallSkinnyKiwi fame at the Christian Web Conference.  I hope you can join us there!

In case you missed it, First Things got a facelift last weekend.  A few of my favorite blogs now reside there, including Wesley J. Smith’s Secondhand Smoke and the ineffable James Polous’ cohort of Postmodern Conservatives.   

Second, the brilliant ladies of Intellectuelle have (finally!) come out of Joe Carter’s immense shadow at Evangelical Outpost to launch their own site, the creatively named Et Elle, et. al.  Bonnie Lindbloom, Sarah Flashing, Letitia Wong and others are some of the blogosphere’s most gifted female writers, and it’s great to see them move into their own digs.  

And like any savvy internet site, they set the expectations low early on by posting an interview with…me.  Do take a look.   

And speaking of Joe Carter, EvangelicalOutpost got a snazzy new web design, and some new staff members.  It’s a treat to be working with Joe on the project, and while I may occasionally deploy some of my thoughts over at EO, I plan on continuing to use Mere-O as my primary outlet.  

Thanks, as always, for reading.  Here’s hail to the rest of the road.

Last Thursday, Maggie Gallagher pronounced that the trouble with social conservatives is that they “have had bad models for political action” and that they “lack institutions that can defeat our enemies and directly assist our friends.”

Gallagher’s analysis is interesting and insightful.  But for whatever shortcomings social conservatives have politically, Gallagher’s point masques the true problem with the social conservative alliance with the Republican Party.  Fundamentally, it is an uneasy union, for the principles driving the major wings of the Republican party–the libertarians and economic conservatives–are undercutting the social conservative case in the public squre.

The social conservative position on controversial issues like abortion, stem cell research, and homosexual marriage has largely been driven by Catholic natural law theorists like Robert George, Francis Beckwith, and others.  Whatever persuasiveness one thinks these have–and I find them very persuasive–it’s impossible to deny that their effect is muted in a legistlative system with a metaphysic that assumes the individual, and not the family, is the basic unit of governance.  When preserving the autonomy of the individual is the  criterion for whether legistlation in a given area is appropriate or not, the reasoning for conservative positions on issues like abortion, stem cell research, and homosexual marriage must necessarily adapt, or falter.  Arguments against homosexual marriage on grounds that such marriages are intrinsically incapable of producing children will necessarily fail.  A government that governs individuals, and not families, will have no incentive to promote a traditional family.

What’s more, when the basic duty of the government is to protect the autonomy of the individual, then in a liberal democracy, the government ought not legistlate on matters on which significant moral disagreement exists.  Here the case is set against social conservatives:  by virtue of the theory of governance, moral argumets in themselves will not suffice to legistlate a particular position.  Additionally, to establish a moral case against a behavior, social conservatives must demonstrate that the given behavior harms another or somehow restricts their autonomy.

All this is problematic for social conservatives, since it means that to establish their case in the public square might entail changing the rules by which the conversation is conducted away from an unrestrained individual autonomy.  While possible, such an ideological shift is highly unlikely, especially when social conservatives main political allies would be foes in the fight.

This is the irony of the Republican alliance: the very principles that undercut the social conservative position drive the economic conservatives and libertarians.  As such, any alliance will be uneasy at best.  The philosophical principle that the government is supposed to get out of both business and individuals’s way cuts against the social conservative notion that the government has a positive role in promoting a certain social order.  Or frame it negatively, if you must:  if the (natural) family is the basis for governance, then the government has an obligation to protect the natural family from social decay.  Either way, social conservatives will likely be sympathetic to a more expansive view of government than economic conservatives or libertarians would like, which explains the success of Mike Huckabee, an individual with economic policies that most economic conservatives find distasteful.

None of this is to say that the social conservative view of the state is correct.  It is simply to point out that while it is fine to say that politically social conservatives are behind the times, the analysis does not go far enough.  Because social conservatives have been rejected by the Democratic party, we must make friends with people who philosophically are our enemies.  We must defend the individual against the state on economic matters, while critiquing unrestrained individual autonomy on ethical matters.  While political institutions would help, then, our best weapon is to break the alliance with economic conservatives, which a European style Christian Democrat party would do.  Intuitively, social conservatives have understood this, which is why Dobson et. al. are so routinely threatening to do precisely that.

What’s more, Republican power brokers need to realize that such a party would be welcome by most young pro-lifers.  While it may be easy to accuse young people of deep inconsistencies–I have done so myself–the ascent of the pro-life position and leftist economic policies among America’s young people reveals, I think, an ideological core that is more unified than most Republicans would be willing to admit.  Institutional Republicans shun those like Huckabee (or Douthat) who are comfortable with a neo-compassionate conservatism to their own detriment.

While I am an economic conservative, my ties to the Republican Party are built on political expedience alone:  if the Democrats were to ever nominate a viable pro-life candidate to the Supreme Court, I would in good conscience consider voting for him.  In this, I know I am not alone.

On Memorial Day, we remember the dead. 

It is an uncomfortable holiday.  There are few moments in our culture that prompt thoughtful, considered reflection about the meaning of our lives.  Memorial Day-to the serious observer-is one, for on it we are confronted by mortality.  As we remember those who too early journeyed to the undiscovered country, we acknowledge that we too shall someday be united with them. 

But on this day we do not simply remember the dead, but honor their sacrifice, for these dead gave themselves in service to our country.  And so we are confronted not simply by death, but by a particular sort of death, and so a particular sort of life.  It takes a peculiar virtue to lay down one’s life for another.  “No greater love,” it has been said, “than when a man lay down his life for his friends.” 

It is for this reason that the proper observance of Memorial Day is so essential to American culture, for it demands we recognize the tragedies of war and the importance of liberty, and that we display as heroes those who demonstrated the virtue of self-sacrifice.  Few ideals are so crucial to the promotion of the public good, or so dissonant with the surrounding culture.

But the memory of the faithful fallen also poses to us a question:  would we, when confronted by terms that involve life and death, have the strength of character and of will to lay down our own lives for the good of another?  Or would we shrink back to seek our own comfort, security, and safety? 

In the shadow of this question, we discover ourselves.  Death is our final and greatest test, and it is the capstone and culmination of our lives.  We either prepare to die well, or not.  But in that final test, our true character is made known.  For the Christian, this is most clear in the story of the Cross:  only through the sacrificial death of One is Death defeated and the identity of God made known. 

In remembering, then, those who died in service of America, we are reminded that now is our opportunity to shape our character, to cultivate virtue, to pursue honor, so that if called we will have the courage to respond as they. 

On Memorial Day, we remember the dead, and so seek to bring to life the virtues that made them honorable.  They have died to make our country great; let us live to make it greater.

I haven’t had many blog-length thoughts of late, but here are a few of the things I’ve read recently and found interesting: 

The Ten Most Pressing Issues For Evangelical Theology Today.  Click through to see the order.  While I agree with the bulk of Jensen’s list, I would argue that a few of his items don’t quite belong (election?  apologetics?).  Additionally, Jensen misses the doctrine of sanctification and the spiritual disciplines, which evangelicals are starting to recover after long neglecting them.  

The End of Conservatism?  Yes, just like the last time conservatism ended.

How David Beats Goliath:  Malcolm Gladwell doing his Malcolm Gladwell thing–finding unities out of seemingly unrelated stories and fields.

Thoughts on Thoughts on Machiavelli:  The Inconvenient Truth of Modernity.  I’ve re-read this twice, and I still only understand 25% of it.  But what I do understand is very, very good.

Continuing from our previous thoughts:  the question of technology and our modern understanding of it is a question of whether the pursuit of scientific reasoning is to be bounded by any limits in nature.  And, of course, whether generalizations about the distinctions between ancient and modern are accurate or helpful.

On this issue, Robert Cheeks at Pomo Conservative found this by Robert Walsh:  

“In his discussion of the idea that while we love technology and its benefits [Walsh writes that] we steadfastly refuse “to submit to the demands of rigorous efficiency. Nostalgia for the old, monuments of spiritual aspiration, the worldwide revival of ancient religious forms, the power of orgiastic political movements of destruction, and the protest impulse that has driven artistic expression for more that a century all testify to the profound ambivalence with which the success of instrumental rationality has been greeted.”

Walsh adds, “The problem, is that we seem to have struck a Faustian bargain. We have been able to obtain this vast technical prowess only because we have been willing to override all presumptive limits.”

Andrew Feenberg, who specializes in the philosophy of technology, points out that the crucial difference between modern and pre-modern conceptions of technology.  He writes:

“In the Greek view of things each techne includes a purpose and a meaning for the artifacts the production of which it guides.  Note that for the Greeks, technai show the “right way” to do things in a very strong, even an objective sense. Although artifacts depend on human activity, the knowledge contained in the technai is no matter of opinion or subjective intention. Even the purposes of things made share in this objectivity insofar as they are defined by the technai.”

This view of technology is grounded in their particular metaphysics, which acknowledged that the existence of a thing was separate from its essence.  The chair, in other words, has a form that can be either be conceptually or actually separated (as in Plato’s theory of the forms) from the existence of any particular chair.

Abstract theorizing, yes, but it matters.  The implication of this metaphysics is, as Feenberg points out, that the arts were “intended to bring existence to its essential form.”  The idea of essences necessarily imposes limitations on technological development–not limitations from without, as a political body might limit development, but limitations intrinsic to the pursuit itself.  The form implies a certain function, and consequently technological development will have an end.

Descartes, Bacon, and others (one is tempted to blame Duns Scotus) effectively killed this view of the world.  Rather than working within nature, when we pursue technological development we become (as Descartes puts it) the “masters and possessors of nature.”  Again, Feenberg:

“For us essences are conventional rather than real. The meaning and purpose of things is something we create not something we discover. The gap between man and world widens accordingly. We are not at home in the world, we conquer the world. This difference is related to our basic ontology. The question we address to being is not what it is but how it works. Science answers this question rather than revealing essences in the old Greek sense of the term…The goals of our society can no longer be specified in a knowledge of some sort, a techne or an episteme, as they were for the Greeks.  They remain purely subjective arbitrary choices and no essences guide us.  This has led to a crisis of civilization from which there seems no escape we know how to get there but we do not know why we are going or even where.  The Greeks lived in harmony with the world whereas we are alienated from it by our very freedom to define our purposes as we wish.”

In a world without essences–where nature is subject to the shaping and fashioning of human desires–then technology will inevitably be the new queen of the sciences, subordinating even science to its demands.  Additionally, the modern technological project leads inevitably to the crisis of bioethics.  If things in the world have no nature or no essences, then the same must be true of humans.  What began as inquiry ends in destruction.

What implications might this have for Christians?  It is tempting to hear echoes of God’s command to Adam in the garden in Descartes’ line that we become the ‘masters and possessors of nature.’  However, I would suggest that a more robust doctrine of creation–one that gives creation a worth proportionate to its ability to exist independent of the will of God–is necessary to help navigate many of the ethical challenges we face.  Additionally, it is worth considering whether the critiques of modernity and liberalism are actually happening from outside its presuppositions, as those who are post-modern sometimes claim.  The logical extension, after all, of the death of essences is that we become arbirters of truth.

Finally, it is worth asking whether our sometimes indiscriminate use of new technologies–one thinks of Twitter, blogging, and new media–is worth the cost.  While we contextualize the Gospel using the tools of the world around us, we potentially erode the Gospel in favor of the technocracy of modernity.  Here, I think, evangelicals have much to learn from the critical distance of the Amish, the Orthodox, and the Catholics in their respective communal lives.

(Editor’s Note:  During the Lenten season, we have invited guest writers to post reflections here at Mere-O.  Micah Hoover is an engineer by day, and a blogger by night.  He posts Kierkegaardian-style meditations on the Christian life at his blog Mere Devotion.  We are happy to have him here.)

Children were asked to describe God in a survey.  One child described God this way:

I think He’s an old man with a long, gray beard. And He sits
on a throne like a king, and drinks all the Dr. Pepper He
wants.

Adults forget the difficulties of being a child. Children are given few options in their choices, and they are responsible for much less than adults.

Children describe God as a being who does whatever he wants and takes total responsibility for His choices. This is a radical notion to them, like something they cannot fully grasp.

Perhaps God seemed radical to all of us when we were younger. Instead of acknowledging the radicalness of God, many adults try to defend him in a way that belittles and undermines His power.

For example, I read a commentary once on the episode in the Bible where the Ark of the Covenant was about to fall. In the story, a man named Uzzah (who was not a Levite) stretched out his hand to steady the ark, and he fell dead.

The twenty first century reader struggles to understand these passages. Such readers say to themselves that there is some defect in the translation or even in the Scriptures -when they are the ones full of defective thoughts.

The commentary on the passage claimed that the man’s death was like dynamite or a nuclear bomb. It wasn’t that God chose for the man to die… it’s just like when TNT is ignited or uranium is slammed together.

Such commentary, of course, leaves open the possibility that God wanted to save the man, but he was too weak and powerless on his own to do anything about it. Or maybe he was just too shy. Or it was just the nature of the ark.

The politically correct God described by this age never chooses for anyone to die. He never chooses for people to lose their homes, or to get sick, or to read newspapers that are racially-tinged. He would stop all of this if he could, but he’s too weak (or he leaves it up to us, or he’s bashful, etc.).

And the politically correct God never drinks more Dr. Pepper than the government permits him to drink. He never drinks more than his accountability partners allow him to drink. He never drinks more than everyone else so he doesn’t look selfish.

And he never drinks more Dr. Pepper than his nature allows him to drink.

But is this the real God? Is this God who lets things happen without ever intervening the same God who delivered the children of Israel from Egypt?

Is this the God who told Moses to call him “I am”?

Perhaps the divine subjectivity is the most offensive claim of the Bible to us.

We take issue against anyone who is not able to provide external explanations. We want to hear people defend themselves saying, “I filled out all the paperwork”. We want to hear them say, “I did this because that’s what everyone else wanted me to do.” Or to hear them say, “I was just following the System, the pattern of this world.”

But then Job or Peter or somebody approaches God and says, “Who or what is responsible for this?” And the fullness and completeness of God answers back:

I am.

The radical answer that offends and scandalizes us is that God does whatever he wants to do. His divine subjectivity has laid the foundations of the earth. All the scientific rules and objective principles of physics hold together so long as Christ allows them to.

The preachers cannot polish him into doing anything. The theologians cannot confine him into the doctrines they invent. The Hollywood directors cannot invoke him with their talented actors and costly scripts.

God is not a formula, so that scientists and mathematicians could manipulate Him like an equation. God is not a history book so that we could revise him as the scholars revise history. God is not a politician that He should be bribed by the company of famous people or money.

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!
Romans 11:33-34

God is spirit, and he demands that those who come to him worship in spirit and in truth.

And He drinks all the Dr. Pepper He wants.

Sometimes conservatives are right to feel about silly or ashamed of their values and beliefs: the old Bill Gothard-esque penchant for oversized down jackets and dressing children in matching outfits or the thankfully short-lived movement to ban interracial dating at Bob Jones University.  But these days, it’s the orange sunglasses and the cowboy hat  of U2’s Irish cowboy that have got to go.

Celebrity aid to Africa was amped up to new levels in 2006 when Bono went on tour with a promise to “make poverty history,” while promoting his ONE Campaign to fight social injustices.  Following in his footsteps, Madonna and Angelina Jolie decided to save Africa by adopting its children and exporting them to the notoriously safe haven of family values…Hollywood.

Dying orphans, the shattered dreams of children-turned-soldiers, and the heartbreaking cries of a young African widow don’t just play well in the Academy; they also turn in breathtaking ratings for major media outlets, celebrities, and not-for-profit organizations that still manage to keep their staffs paid and happy.  Cynicism is not my favorite attitude, but I’m beginning to wonder if the reason the poor will always be with us has to do with the fact that human hubris hinders truly sacrificial love.  That and the poor turn remarkably lucrative profits for charity concerts, campaign advertisers, and international development and “non-profit” organizations.

Cynicism aside, there are other plausible explanations for the Western infatuation with the poverty-stricken continent.  It could be that the collective soul of America and the wealthy West are the underlying cause of the continuation of poverty and pain in the developing world.  It could be that our communal desire for catharsis and absolution is standing in the way of development and progress.  It could be that we need a little less sentimentality and a lot more business sense.

Compare our response to Africa with the notoriously unsentimental, no-nonsense, Chinese government.  While we play the altar call music one more time and pass the plate, Chinese investors have begun treating Africans like business partners and are turning profits that benefit both parties.

Consider this remarkable report from free-lance blogger Jennifer Brea:

While Americans are pestering their leaders to Save Darfur–an unlikely prospect absent full-scale military intervention–the Chinese are busy building roads and hydroelectric power dams. China believes Africa is a huge economic opportunity and deals with Africa like a business partner. The Chinese see Africans the way many would like to see themselves.”

In a previous article she cites some amazing stats: total trade between China and Africa nearly quadrupled from 2000 to 2006; Chinese trade and investment are a driving factor in Sub-Saharan Africa’s record 5.8% growth rate; China accounted for $900 million of $15 billion in foreign direct investment to Africa in 2004.

Leaving aside the eyebrows this should raise for American citizens concerned with national defense, we should pause and note that free trade on the capitalist model, which takes into account human personality, creativity, dignity, and accountability, is able to do more than doling out handouts to an enforced beggar-class will ever accomplish.

Take a look at the results and ask yourself which is going to provide lasting change in the lives of the bottom billion…emotional catharsis rocking to U2 angst and buying a MakePovertyHistory bracelet, or very unglamorously studying viable business alternatives and then opening up a market with African trading partners.  I think the answer will be determined by the results you’re looking for.

Hat tip to Jordan Ballor for highlighting Time’s 10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now.

Mention the country of Turkey and most people think of exotic carpets and rugs, crusader castles and the Blue Mosque, Ottoman potentates, and the missionary journeys of the apostle Paul, but I submit to you that these are mere accidental images, nothing more than the deceptive work of extravagant and over-zealous poets and tour guides.  The crusader and the saint and the poets who extol or damn them, are fringe elements to the central symbol of the Turkish people: the entrepreneur.

The Turkish entrepreneur is hard to distinguish from the general populace at first glance.  He dresses like his companions, spends a good deal of his free time drinking hot, excessively sugared tea from a tiny glass, and will chat amiably on a variety of subjects of national and local interest.  The odds are in favor of him wearing a black-bristle moustache and a stern smile.  He most likely works hard to provide for his wife and two to five children, while keeping a few of his earnings aside to bet on his favorite soccer teams.  What makes the Turkish entrepreneur stand apart from his peers are his unfathomably deep wells of creativity, his keen eye for a profit, and the flexibility with which he adjusts to changes in the market.

Kahrahman is something of a fixture at the Hodja Inn.  Every gentleman who has spent more than one night in the officer’s quarters has been greeted on his jaunt towards the dining hall with a loud smile and “good morning!” followed immediately with a blunt but reasonable, “Shoe shine, friend?”  Kahrahman successfully used this simple business opener for years to ply his trade as a boot and shoe polisher for Air Force officers.  The man can make boots shine like glass, and probably outshine the best efforts of the most dedicated military Training Instructor.  His genius, however, is not in his skill (the trade is a fairly easy one to master) but in his ability to find, keep, and match his skill to the market demand.

Recently the Air Force switched it’s standard Battle Dress Uniform (BDU) to the updated Airman Battle Uniform (ABU).  The ABUs are intended to function in any battle environment and include suede leather, easy-care boots that require very little attention from the warrior who is too busy saving the world to stop and polish the toes and heels of his footwear.  The general who made the change had nothing but the safety and well-being of his troops in mind, I’m sure, but his uniform policy threatened to undercut Kahrahman’s thriving shoe shine business.

A socialized economy may have resisted the prudent change from BDUs to ABUs, arguing that the net benefit of a time-efficient, versatile uniform didn’t outweigh the social cost of putting smooth leather shoe polishers out of business.  After all, Kahrahman and his friends had devoted a large portion of their lives to mastering a specific trade and, the argument would go, were now so confirmed in their vocation it would be unreasonable and unkind to allow the whim of a military leader to put them out.

Op-ed papers would clamor for restitution and justice, claiming that unless the government created a safety net for the shoe shine guild our streets would be filled with the unemployable boot polishers and their young families.  No doubt images of school children drop-outs flooding the streets as beggars or filling dangerous factory jobs to help their families make ends meet would be flashed on internet pages and be included among the Associated Press’ top photos of the year.  Special interest groups and compassionate charity organizations would lobby for government subsidies for shoe shiners, and Kiwi and other major polish manufacturers would look for government handouts to keep their businesses afloat amid the turmoil of the sharp drop-off in demand for their products.

Not so among the indefatigable Turkish entrepreneurs.  Kahrahman continues to greet the 21st century officer with his loud smile and canned pitch.  As far as is visible to the outsider, he hasn’t suffered from the declining boot polish market.  His moustache remains as black and bristled as his shoe brush once was and he continues to provide for his wife and children a steady income.  His business plan, while a simple one, provided room for a shift in the market.  Now he comes to work each day with a stiff leather brush, a can of scotch-guard, and a simple rubber cleaning solution.  The fifteen minutes he used to spend spit-shining leather to a glassy hue have been cut to a five minute job that includes dirt and stain removal and leather protection, increasing his productivity by 60%.  And he accomplishes all of this without the slightest support from his government.

A simple lesson in the remarkable adaptability of the human spirit that makes the imposition of external controls masquerading as compassion doubly lamentable.  Not only do those controls fail to produce their stated ends, they also rob men of their right to face challenges, struggle, and know the exhilaration of victory.

Editor’s Note:  During the Lenten season, we have invited other writers to join us to help remove the pressure to produce content from us regulars.  On that note, I am pleased to introduce Cate MacDonald, a friend, a graduate of Biola University and the Torrey Honors Institute, and a current student at the Institute for Spiritual Formation.  She keeps a personal blog at misscate.com and will be blogging here periodically for the near future.

Fasting is a troubling discipline. It pretends to be to be about something other than it is. When we fast, we remove food or another source of material comfort from our lives in order to… well, I suppose it is there that the trouble starts.

Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure,

and oppress all your workers.

Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight

and to hit with a wicked fist.

Fasting like yours this day

will not make your voice to be heard on high.

Is such the fast that I choose,

a day for a person to humble himself?

Is it to bow down his head like a reed,

and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him?

Will you call this a fast,

and a day acceptable to the LORD?

For an unrelated purpose, I was assigned to read this passage in Isaiah 58 two days before Ash Wednesday. The prophet seems to be saying that a fast filled with contention and anger, mourning and false humility is no fast at all. Well, Isaiah, you make no sense. I “call this a fast” when I am not eating what I would like to eat in order to focus my energy and my body on the sustenance the Lord provides. That is the discipline I have been taught, that is the discipline that thousands (millions?) of Christians are participating in throughout the world these coming weeks. Have we missed something?

Is not this the fast that I choose:

to loose the bonds of wickedness,

to undo the straps of the yoke,

to let the oppressed go free,

and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry

and bring the homeless poor into your house;

when you see the naked, to cover him,

and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?

Then shall your light break forth like the dawn,

and your healing shall spring up speedily;

your righteousness shall go before you;

the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.

Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer;

you shall cry, and he will say, ‘Here I am.’

It appears that the Lord has chosen a fast that is no fast at all. He does not tell us what to give up, but instead what to do. The fast the Lord has chosen is charity, justice, and generosity. And so this makes me wonder, what exactly are we supposed to be fasting from after all? I don’t know. It doesn’t say.

In fact, it seems that fasting is irrelevant, or at least it could be considered as such depending on how you use it. And as I write this personal revelation, it occurs to me that all spiritual disciplines are in exactly the same position.

Any discipline that the Lord asks of us is no good by itself. We are not like the yogis or the secular ascetics who believe that certain practices themselves have the power to enlighten. Nor should we believe in a genie of a god who responds best to particular demonstrations of admiration or affection. Any discipline is undertaken with much prayer and hope. It is a way of quieting the world, the flesh, or the devil, only in order to hear God a little more clearly and to speak to him a little more honestly. His response remains an act of his mercy and goodness, based on nothing but his love. Fasting is an attempt at listening to a Being who can speak very quietly, and there is nothing more noisy than our own wickedness. How will we hear his response to our prayers when our own voice uses the fast that was meant to quiet it as a loudspeaker, happily abusing the downtrodden or making a show of our self-denial for the benefit of those more easily fooled than the Almighty.

Aristotle famously said, “The soul rules the body like a despot.” I wish this were truer than it seems. In my case, it is often the other way around. The church has set aside these forty days so that we can join together in quieting our bodies for the benefit of our souls. Let it be a fast that the Lord has chosen.

Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues. Niceness presents itself as benevolence, but is often merely an evasion of hard decisions that the realities of human nature require. And it has spread throughout our societies because it is often popular with voters. The road to hell, it is said, is paved with good intentions, and so is a good deal of democratic politics.”

The writer of this headline article at Standpoint, a British mag aiming to “to celebrate our civilization, its arts and its values – in particular democracy, debate and freedom of speech – at a time when they are under threat,” takes a frontal shot at the politics of “nice”.  While he is particularly interested with the collapse of family and school life, or at least the collapse of well-ordered and socially beneficial families and schools, he makes a larger critique of contemporary politics and public thought, both of which have taken “niceness” as the gold standard and determine policy and action by asking, “Now, what’s the nice thing to do?”

The history of this trend towards niceness would be interesting to explore—the hows and whys of a moral sentiment that has blossomed in a pluralistic society that is otherwise opposed to moral governance or restriction, almost on principle.  The cultural revolution of the late sixties and early seventies was the historical moment of rebellion against established societal norms as an expression of contempt for universal norms, natural laws, or morals.  In light of this rebellion, one might wonder how it is that a new morality has emerged, a public morality of compassion.  My hunch it that this, and the historical movement of political compassion has a great deal to do with anthropology and theology, but I’ll leave that discussion for another time.

The empirical fact remains that many political debates take place in the context of a culture of “nice.”  Is the proposed solution a nice one?  Does it implement and promote social compassion?  Does it give the public those warm and benevolent feelings that often follow on the heels of generous action?  If the answer to these and similar questions is “yes”, then the debate is usually over.  The problem, though, is that compassion is not the lone guide to effective social policy.

Political compassion, or niceness, was never meant to serve as rubric for social action; indeed, compassion is a feeling or sentiment of concern and pity, not a substitute for prudence or empirical research.  Feelings and sentiments motivate a general action, but are useless in the determination of the specific action to take.  Examples abound, and a simple one drawn from common experience should suffice.

A child comes to her mother, math homework in one hand while wiping away tears of frustration with the other.  Mom, being the loving and caring sort, sees her daughter’s predicament and is filled with pity.  Her pity motivates her to try and help her daughter, but her prudential wisdom, her understanding of her daughter’s real needs, and her beliefs about growth and education will determine if her pity moves her to do her daughter’s homework for her, or to sit down and help instruct her on the finer details of long division.

Pity alone will not determine action.  Pity combined with other character traits, beliefs, and desires result in specific plans, courses, and results.  The current exaltation of political compassion shines a spotlight on the collective character, beliefs, and goals of political body—and judging from current social maladies the revelation is discouraging.  We can expect compassion combined with complacency, pity, self-love, and an enthrallment with personal experiences of catharsis to lead to social solutions and actions that yield a great deal of positive feelings, but that generally fail to deliver permanent goods.

Short-term solutions to long-term problems don’t worry people who like the sense of accomplishment that comes from having a solution, any solution, and allow them to bustle along to each new problem with a great deal of self-congratulation.  The Western world’s approach to poverty and hunger in developing nations, and especially Africa, is a fine example of societies acting out of compassion with the goal of national catharsis rather than securing permanent wealth for the nations in need.

Are politicians, NGOs, and social leaders are asking us all to be compassionate, but compassion alone is of little benefit when determining a course of action.  It’s nice to ask questions like these, but political decisions ought to ask a whole lot more.

The past few weeks, I have had an ongoing conversation with a friend who has experienced traumatic evils and has questions about how to respond to them as a Christian.  This is the latest installment in that series:  it begins with their questions, with my reply following.

Now, believing that God’s character means He would seek to have a horrifying situation like this brought to an end, and being assured from Scripture and Christian history that He often works in situations like these through His children, my question then turned to right: if vengence is God’s, yet He works through His servants, how can I know if He would have me act in this situation?  As I’m oft inclined to do when I’m having trouble trusting God, I turned to Lewis.

I remembered Perelandra and the concept that sometimes God seems to give us “jobs” (for lack of a better term) that are entirely for us; succede, fail, something in between, it’s in your hands.  That made me even more confused.  How could I even come close to figuring out if this was a job God gave me to tackle, or if I should step back and “give it up to God” (a loaded phrase that I’ve never understood)?

A few months later, I believe I found the answer quite accidentally. I reread LOTR, and ended up with this: “Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”  Yeah. I don’t know if I *can* do anything, and God may well choose to use another instead of me or work in some crazy way that I cannot even begin to guess or understand. But somehow it seems that the people hurt by this situation are about as close to “the fields that [I] know” as I can get.

That was long, but I think it’s important.  My spiritual question for you is how do I come by faith/belief/trust that if I wait on the Lord He *will* answer? I get that I should believe that, and I truly do wish that I did…but I find myself praying that He would show me something, do something, anything to help me believe that.  Right now it’s just intellectual lip service; I believe that Scripture is true, and it says He will (whatever that means), so I guess He will (whatever that looks like)…

I’m going to go straight to the heart of the your struggle (it seems) by answering your two questions (which were very well put).  First, you wrote:  “Now, believing that God’s character means He would seek to have a horrifying situation like this brought to an end, and being assured from Scripture and Christian history that He often works in situations like these through His children, my question then turned to right: if vengence is God’s, yet He works through His servants, how can I know if He would have me act in this situation?”

This is a difficult problem.  Allow me to offer a few thoughts.  For one, it’s clear that when you ask the question, you are thinking primarily of ‘acting’ through legal (or extra-legal) channels to bring about justice.  That is, you feel impelled to do something to put an end to this situation.  The impulse is certainly noble, though I suspect it might be tinged with more of a desire for retribution than you might admit.  To that extent, you should hold that impulse up with a grain of salt–it too needs purification.  More to the point, should we not think that prayer is doing something?  Andrew Murray, a great saint, wrote that there is no higher act of love than intercessory prayer.  I am persuaded by this, for it seems that even what is demanded in the eradication of great evils is the cultivation of love, both in us and in those whom we would seek to help.  For you, intercession must be your primary activity–all else must be secondary.

None of this entails, of course, that the crime should not be prosecuted or that those in danger should not be rescued.  That intercession should be your primary activity does not entail that it should be your only activity.

Tolkien’s answer, then, is precisely right and I think your intuition that this situation is near enough to you to warrant involvement correct.  The question for you is whether anything should be pursued beyond what you have attempted.  In other words, if legal action and recourse is taken without results, should the Christian pursue extra-legal means of remedying the situation?  I would argue that they should not–the law and the State have been placed here by God for the preservation and the pursuit of public justice, and a matter such as this falls under its authority and dominion.  While you might seek to remove those being harmed through persuasion, financial support, or other means, I am persuaded that our position as Christian citizens demands working within the rule of law whenever possible.  If nothing else, shadow-justice systems make me queasy:  they are built on the assumption that an individual has the moral vision to discern what is right in any given situation, and the moral stamina to avoid the temptation to pursue vengeance instead of justice.  The rule of law and the State are meant to act as safeguards against individuals abusing their power, safeguards which I think important to maintain in a world infected by original sin.

As a model, then, for engagement of the sort I am proposing, I would suggest Wilberforce.  Perhaps this is your calling–to work to bring justice here and now through legal and social engagement.

As for your second question, it is extremely difficult to answer.  You wrote, “My spiritual question for you is how do I come by faith/belief/trust that if I wait on the Lord He *will* answer? I get that I should believe that, and I truly do wish that I did…but I find myself praying that He would show me something, do something, anything to help me believe that.  Right now it’s just intellectual lip service; I believe that Scripture is true, and it says He will (whatever that means), so I guess He will (whatever that looks like)…”

The question of faith is difficult, and I am not surprised to hear you say that it feels like intellectual lip service.  The difficulty of faith is that it is an event in us which we can not engender–it can only be given to us from outside, from God.  So the answer to your question is that you cannot come to faith.  It will seem like intellectual lip service, yes, but you have to realize that it is God who gives Himself to us in His Spirit, and it is God who determines what level of comfort we need to remain faithful to Him.  If you do not feel the Lord’s presence, you may walk away, but to what?  Alternatively, you may rejoice in the reality that God has seen you fit to endure (for now) without a sense of His presence.  Had you needed it, He would give it to you.

The question, then, is whether we will throw a fit like a child might and rebel against that which we know to be true and demand that God meet us in the way in which we want and have come to expect. I am persuaded it is God’s intention to wean us off our dependancy upon experiencing his presence in a particular way.

I am often reminded when struggling with this issue of T.S. Eliot’s lines from The Four Quartets:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

What might you do, then?  I would suggest immersing yourself in Scripture–and not just isolated verses selected at random, but a book of the Bible that you read twice a day for a month.  Choose Phillipians–it has much to say about these issues, I think.  Faith, after all, comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.

Second, I would suggest asking the Lord to show you where in your own life you are holding on to idols and have not allowed Him to speak to you.  Your desire for justice is good–perhaps as you seek fulfillment the Lord would show you areas in your own life that need submission to him.  I sometimes wonder, after all, whether we actually want to hear the voice of the Lord–it may be the case, after all, that he would have you pause in your pursuit of justice in this case because you are not yet ready for it.  Opening yourself to that possibility may be more difficult than you anticipate (a sign, I would argue, of a heart that has not yet surrendered this area to the Lordship of Jesus).

Third, I would continue to meet in worship at your local church.  Go to church intentionally–ask the Lord beforehand simply to help you pour yourself out before him in worship.  And if you are unable, ask the Lord to open your eyes to see what He’s doing in the church around you.

All of these are ways of reinforcing the point that the faith that you have is faith in Jesus Christ, in whom God demonstrated himself faithful to his covenant and in whom God has judged the world.  And he will come again. You ask that the Lord would show you something:  he has in Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. It is there that your faith is grounded.  It is not in the experience of faith, or in the experience of Scripture, but only in the reality of Jesus’ death and resurrection which the Spirit makes known to us (albeit through Scripture).  This is the reality to which you must open yourself.   All this you know:  it is simply that the faith in this is not something you can produce through strength of will (or even through the activities listed above).  It can only be produced when the Holy Spirit engenders it in you (new creation!).

One final point:  you say that you feel more hopeful after writing your email.  I am not surprised.  At the end of Til We Have Faces, Lewis writes that Orual (in her dream) finds herself in a law court before the gods, reading her complaint against them over and over.  She is cut off by the voice of a God, who asks her whether she is answered.  She answers, of course, “yes.”  It is one of the most significant moments in the book.  My sense is that Lewis is suggesting that the ability to speak our complaints to God is itself the answer. It is precisely in and through the speaking of our complaints against God that we realize how inadquate, how poorly equipped, how insufficient we are to offer a viable complaint against God.  But it is his patience with us that allows us to offer them, and it is his grace that helps us to see that our offering them is simply an acknowledgment that Jesus is Lord. If he were not, for what reason would you complain to Him?  The Lord knows your trials–”my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  It is precisely through offering your complaint to God that you are able to identify with Jesus on the cross, and it is precisely through listening to your complaint that God gives you your answer.

Please let me know if this helps at all, and feel free to let me know if it doesn’t.  As always, I will continue to pray for you.  I look forward to your reply.