February 17^th is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent. Around this time last year I wrote a reflection on fasting as it is portrayed in Isaiah, wondering at the nature of a true fast. I think it’s sort of funny that I end up writing about this stuff, because fasting (like most spiritual disciplines) has never, until very recently, been a big part of my life, and I am not very good at it. I’ve not grown up in churches that observed the church year, nor do I attend one now, so my reflections on the ancient practices such as Lent are usually entirely my own, for better or for worse, written as a newcomer. I say this as a sort of caveat, since, in the coming weeks, I will be posting four or five personal and observed reasons why Lent’s extended period of fasting and willing deprivation is good for you, Oh Evangelical Protestant (and of course by you, I mean me and hopefully you).

As I’ve been shaping the drafts over the last week, I’ve realized that this is, at its core, an attempt to understand the spiritual importance of hard times. I know it’s rough out there for a lot of us. I’ve spent the last three months sicker than I can ever remember being before, and compared to what some of my friends and family have gone through this year, I got off easy. Wouldn’t it be of great comfort to know that God can use such things to enliven and deepen your soul? I think Lent might show us how if we let it.

More to come…

Or at least on life support.

Andrew Jones suggested that 2009 represented a decisive year for the movement, and he’s been as careful observer of it as any.  Of course, people disagree with him–but then, when it comes to that conversation, everything is up for grabs, isn’t it?  Which, I gather, has been one of the central problems.

At any rate, Ben Simpson (whose blog I have been enjoying of late) pointed me this afternoon to this promise to take-down the emerging church by Jeremy Bouma, a 29-year-old participant in the movement who has grown a bit disenchanted with it.  Jeremy’s only one person, of course.  But he is an insider, and he’s not exactly going to hold back.

First, I am posting a series based on a theological examination I undertook for my Early Church Th.M class called, “Pagitt and Pelagius: An Examination of a Neo-Pelagianism.” Many have suggested Doug Pagitt is dishonest about his Pelagianism, an early church teaching that was declared heretical. I thought it would be interesting to read all of Pelagius‘ known works (including an interesting, little read commentary on the Book of Romans) along side Pagitt’s. These posts will explore their writings on human nature, sin, salvation, discipleship, and judgment. It will drop Wednesday, February 10.

Second, I will post on the soon-to-be released book by Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity. In it he discusses the top 10 questions facing the Christian faith. In some ways it’s a tell-all that should finally give his critics what they’ve asked and wanted for years: answers. From what I have read so far in an advance copy, this is truly going to be a line in the sand that will determine where people are in their understanding of the nature of salvation and commitment to the historic Rule of Faith, which is why I want to tackle it question by question. Along the way I will provide a theological assessment in order to understand his take on human nature, sin and rebellion, the nature of Jesus Christ, the cross and salvation, resurrection, judgment, and God. Look for this interaction at the start of March. (A friend of mine has already begun such an interaction, here.)

I’ve stood on the outer fringes of the emerging church conversation, rarely interacting with it directly but always cognizant of its critiques of traditional evangelicalism.  For evangelicals, the emerging church has moved the window of conversation the last decade by focusing our attention on the questions and problems of truth, social justice, and ‘post-modernism’.

In that sense, one way of understanding what I’ve tried to make happen at Mere-O is against that backdrop.  We have attempted to offer a different, m0re substantive remedy (see: G.K., Lewis, and the rest of the Christian tradition) than that offered by the dehistoricized, subjectivist, anti-creedal approaches of many in the emerging church, while also trying to model reflective engagement with culture and politics that is captive to neither.

But the advantage we have is that if the emerging church conversation goes away, we’ll still be around, doing our thing. Our aspirations, thankfully, don’t have to die with the original motivations for them.  They can be constantly renewed and deepened, as we continue to explore the depth and grandness of the mere orthodoxy of the classical, conservative Christianity.

“The universe,” C.S. Lewis once wrote, “seems to be sharpening to a point.”  So also the conversation about the emerging church.  A hipper, cooler form of Protestant liberalism will still be as vacuous and unfruitful as Protestant liberalism has been.

But then, I should leave those lines of direct critique to Jeremy.  But you can bet I’ll be reading with interest and curiosity as he makes his case, and with optimism and joy that a renewed, historical orthodoxy is alive and well in Grand Rapids.

(I also feel obligated to point out to readers that he has some lectures on Bioethics and Christian Spirituality by Nigel Cameron that promise to be interesting.  I haven’t listened to them yet, but Cameron is a fantastic ethicist who is worth taking very seriously.)

]]> http://mereorthodoxy.com/?feed=rss2&p=2354 0 http://mereorthodoxy.com/?p=2351 http://mereorthodoxy.com/?p=2351#comments Mon, 08 Feb 2010 02:59:19 +0000 Matthew Lee Anderson http://mereorthodoxy.com/?p=2351

One of the main themes of Evangel’s early days was evangelicals’ complex relationship to culture.

I recently came across Evangel contributor Dr. Russell Moore’s astute analysis on the question from 2007 in the pages of Touchstone, the other ecumenical magazine of record.

Dr. Moore’s piece really needs to be read in its entirety, as he manages to thoughtfully engage the question without degenerating into overreaction or hyperbole.  He is in favor of evangelical ‘engagement’ with culture, but cognizant of its limitations.

But what struck me was this bit near the end:

Often at the root of so much Christian “engagement” with pop culture lies an embarrassment about the oddity of the gospel. Even Christians feel that other people won’t resonate with this strange biblical world of talking snakes, parting seas, floating axe-heads, virgin conceptions, and emptied graves. It is easier to meet them “where they’re at,” by putting in a Gospel According to Andy Griffith DVD (for the less hip among us) or by growing a soul-patch and quoting Coldplay at the fair-trade coffeehouse (for the more hip among us).

Knowing Andy Griffith episodes or Coldplay lyrics might be important avenues for talking about kingdom matters, but let’s not kid ourselves. We connect with sinners in the same way Christians always have: by telling an awfully freakish-sounding story about a man who was dead, and isn’t anymore, but whom we’ll all meet face-to-face in judgment.

This is a crucial point, and similar to one I made while speaking to a group of homeschoolers.  I argued that their unique experience as homeschoolers–a sometimes derided and disenfranchised population–would better prepare them for being comfortable in the discomfort that can come with believing and proclaiming the remarkable and surprising fact of the Gospel.

But for those of us who work in the church, Christian universities, or Christian non-profits, we tend to lose sight not only of the ‘freakishly bizarre’ nature of the Gospel, but also the weird nature of the lives that bear witness to it.  I will never forget my first job as a mature believer in a secular environment, which was the first dominantly secular environment I had been in for a sustained amount of time since high school.  There was simply no avoiding the reality:  I felt, and was, odd.  I didn’t live with my wife prior to marriage, I took religious holidays with the utmost seriousness, I was engaged in prayer and attempting to cultivate a meditative, thoughtful life….none of which fit well in my overwhelmingly unChristian environment.  While not the Gospel per se, these behaviors are an outgrowth of it, and fit no better into most people’s framework than the reality that grounds them.

But attempting to build bridges also fell woefully short.  Conversations about movies, music, and other cultural artifacts rarely proceed for most people beyond judgments of taste and emotional responses.  They don’t lead to the sort of conversation that Paul had with a bunch of trained philosophers on Mars Hill.

But we are not without hope.  The most meaningful tools we have to ‘build bridges’ are not the shared experiences of, music, or the news, but rather questions about family, frustrations, and the various dynamic that make up those aspects of our lives that extend beyond our entertainment choices.  They are a listening ear, and a keen attention to discern the deeper dynamics of the heart that are always bubbling to the surface.  We build bridges by cultivating a heart that listens to the movements of the Spirit in our own lives, and the lives of others.

And, as Dr. Moore points out, we build bridges most of all by talking honestly and candidly about the content of our faith, a faith which still has the power to command attention and inspire curiosity.

Note:  I cross-posted this over at Evangel.  I was going to offer new thoughts tonight, but am simply feeling too sad to write after the Colts got walloped (even though, oddly, I didn’t watch the game).  So, enjoy.

Like Matt Milliner, I’m impressed by David Schaengold’s post over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, wherein he relates observation decks, science, and the joy of observation:

Being happy merely to see and to understand, as scientists are, is the feeling responsible for observation decks, whose most intellectually incurious and aesthetically stolid visitors thrill with joy as they marvel at the works of Man and discover how familiar neighborhoods tessellate. Though surmise about the psychology of ages past is hazardous, I’ll venture to guess that the civilization of the modern West has privileged and encouraged joy in the way the universe works more than any civilization in history.

Schaengold’s point is well made, which is why I find his criticism of medieval science unfortunate and unnecessary:

Nothing like the scientific method was found in antiquity, and what glimmers of it appeared in the Middle Ages were feeble. The systematic use of the method, institutionalized in journals and laboratories, is characteristically modern, but the psychology of the scientists who employ it represents a Christian ideal.

There are, of course, some differences between the moderns and the medievals with respect to science.  But Schaengold’s dismissal of the medieval understanding of the scientific method as “pretty feeble” is an injustice to the work that went on during that period  Most famously, the work of Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon were using experiments to do remarkable work in optics (motivated as they might have been by the medieval emphasis on the notion that God is light), and in the case of Bacon advocating for something that very closely resembles the contemporary “scientific method.”

In fact, while the relationship between the medievals and the moderns with respect to science was contentious in the 20th century, the bulk of scholarly opinion seems to have moved toward thinking that the scientific revolution wasn’t a revolution at all, but rather a modification of what they inherited from the medievals.

Consider the judgment of David Lindberg, a leading historians of medieval science, on the matter:  ”The underlying source of revolutionary novelty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries…was metaphysical and cosmological, not methodological.”  Lindberg’s work even challenges Schaengold’s claim that “nothing like a scientific method was found in antiquity,” at least if we’re discussing the actual practices of experimentation and not its rhetoric.  In fact, his entire chapter really is worth reading.

One way of telling the story of science in the late-modern period, then, is that these metaphysical changes eventually dislocate science from its proper position in our understanding of the world and (ironically) begin to impinge upon the scientific method itself by calling into question the rational basis of the universe.  But that moves toward the source problem of (as Schaengold aptly puts it) the alienation of man from himself in the late modern world.

All that aside, Schaengold’s basic point about the joy of observation is well made, and clearly a point of contact between the later modern scientists and their medieval forerunners.  While I doubt Schaengold’s point that our modern period empahsizes that joy more than any period before, I for one am glad that Schaengold has found it, and even more glad that he is intent on spreading it.

Heather MacDonald’s latest piece at National Review explores some of the questions surrounding gay marriage, and the difficulties that arise when parental status and identity is established solely by intent, rather than by biology–as it is in the case of homosexual marriage.

The question, of course, that MacDonald has to answer is why this separation matters at all.  She answers:

The institutionalized severing of biology from parenthood affirms a growing trend in our society, that of men abandoning their biological children. Too many men now act like sperm donors: they conceive a children then largely disappear, becoming at best intermittent presences in their children’s lives.

If parental status is a matter of intent, however, not of genes, absent fathers can say: “I never intended to take on the role of that child’s parent; therefore I’m not morally bound to act as a parent.”

The separation of biology and parenthood, then, has two problematic effects:  on the one hand, it undercuts the argument that fathers have obligations to any offspring they do not conceive intentionally, further perpetuating the social problems absenteeism has caused.  On the other hand, it undercuts the complementarity that men and women have in raising children, a complementarity that MacDonald thinks can be established even at a biological level.

MacDonald realizes the muted force of her argument, as she hedges her position on the final page. But it is still an interesting line of thought.

And if it’s right, it might have significant repercussions for younger evangelicals who want to claim that they are pro-life while still allowing homosexual marriage.  The force of MacDonald’s piece is that she establishes a link between the technological subordination of procreation (as expressed through making procreation only valid when it is intentional) with marriage practices, arguing that, “The primary challenge to traditional notions of parenthood comes from gay conception, not gay marriage.”

The first line of argument indicates that intention alone is not the sole criterion for parenthood, a position that the pro-life community has vigorously asserted and that homosexual child-rearing has to deny. This, however, might call the coherence of simultaneously being pro-life and pro-gay marriage into question.

I say “might” because McDonald’s line of argument might also cause problems for the adoption movement, which also establishes child-rearing on a non-biological basis.  But even on that front, it’s not clear that encouraging adoption and including adoptive children as regular, normal children on the same level as biological ones makes adoption normative in the way biological children might be.  And it preserves (in most cases) the biological complementarity of a mother and father.

MacDonald’s piece is by no means conclusive, but it does move one up some important lines of inquiry that are worth reflecting on.  At the least, it offers up a few more questions for proponents of gay marriage and explains the cautiousness of social conservatives to give weigh to libertarian ideals.

I’ve watched this trailer three times now, and I just can’t quit.

HT:  Josh Trevino

The Oscar nominations came out Tuesday morning. Pixar’s Up already won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Film. It shouldn’t have. The movie is on par with Pixar’s others, which of course means it is very good: characteristically inventive, incisive, and attractive. But Up was not the best animated film of 2009. The best animated film of 2009 was Fantastic Mr. Fox. We can hope the Academy recognizes this fact in March.

Fox was directed by auteur Wes Anderson, the patron filmmaker of young white aesthetes everywhere. His other movies (Rushmore, The Royal Tenebaums, The Life Aquatic) feature manicured sets populated by Bill Murray and a rotation of clever narcissistic oddballs, often posing in slow motion to the beat of the British Invasion hits. The standard critiques can be found here and here. You either love it or you hate it.

With Fantastic Mr. Fox, which was created using stop-motion animation, Anderson’s talents are nearly perfectly utilized. In his usual movies, Anderson’s obsessive visual style can make the characters feel very arranged, like they know we know this is a movie, and they must pause for effect before saying this so-ironic-it’s-not-ironic-line—now! In Fox Anderson’s creativity is given more natural expression, as every single detail, puppets included, responds to his little artistic fingers. By making the visual material less representational (this does not mean fake—compared to Up the 18-inch puppets nearly beg you to pet their little twee outfits and fur) the occasional dramatic dialogue is refreshingly resonate. When Mrs. Fox tells Mr. Fox “I love you, but I shouldn’t have married you,” the sentiment feels more human than most in Anderson’s other movies.

Saying this usually induces eye rolling, but the movie really is worth catching in the theater. Anderson has said he plans on filming humans in his next project but does not rule out attempting another film in stop-motion. We can hope this happens. In the mean time, if you’ve already seen the movie or want just a sample before committing an evening, watch this animated acceptance speech Anderson created for the recent National Board of Review.

The report that Mark Sanford didn’t want to include a vow of fidelity in their wedding vows is the least surprising, and the saddest, news I have heard in a while.

According to his wife, the discredited governor of South Carolina whose liaisons with  an Argentinian woman last summer were a national scandal was worried about his ability to keep such a commitment.  His premonition, unfortunately, came to pass in an unseemly and destructive way.

It is tempting in such situations to become cynical about marriage, and its prospects.  Sandra-Tsing Loh took that route after her own failed marriage, while Caitlin Flanagan weakly tried to avoid it.

I offered my own take on marriage and divorce in the latest issue of The City.  This was my final paragraph (though you should read the whole thing):

This is why Mark Sanford and the Gosselins matter. As Caitlin Flanagan points out, they reinforce our common cynical disposition toward marriage. But in doing so, they also reinforce that marriage still matters. This is the territory of subversive truth: it is precisely the threat of infidelity and betrayal that provides so much drama in modern marriage. The covenant could really be broken, a man’s word could come to nothing. And when it does among our society’s most visible members, we collectively identify with their moral weaknesses and justify our own failures and shortcomings. But only within a world steeped in marriage is that sort of cynicism possible—a world that doesn’t care would have ignored Jon and Kate altogether.

When I wrote the article, I had no idea the next scandal that would capture our attention would be Tiger’s.  But that had its own unique dynamic, in that Tiger was a manufactured man from beginning to end, which only heightened our fascination with his undoing.

But we’ve reached a point where the obvious needs saying, and repeating:  a lack of interest in vowing to remain faithful isn’t a “moment of self-doubt” or cold-feet.  It signifies a lack of courage and a gross misunderstanding of marriage itself.  The whole thing hangs on the very vow that Sanford wanted to cut out.

The stream of public figures ending their marriages is never ending, and neither is the threat of cynicism about marriage. Defending the glory and romance of marriage is a battle that requires vigilant repetition.  I hope to play a tiny part in that fight.

Son of God. Prince of Peace. Son of Man. Cagefighter? While the first three masculine titles given to our Lord Jesus are biblical and sufficient enough to express the wonder of Jesus, the last title seems to be ever-more increasingly projected onto Jesus by evangelical churches which have long struggled with the over-feminization of the church. Any brief inspection of some of evangelicalism’s top blogs seem to tout Mixed Martial Arts as the next great out-reach strategy for men. Forget Promise-Keepers, let’s have a fist, iron, and blood.

On the Sojourners blog, a blog I disagree with 99% politically and theologically, Eugene Cho draws our attention to an article written in the New York Times over the growing popularity of MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) or more commonly known as Ultimate Fighting Championship and various other leagues. Like myself, he condemns the sport.

Now, permit me to speak on this topic. In a former life, I was a proud and militant pacifist. I would have argued that to equate Jesus with any type of struggle or legitimating of defense would have been heretical. I was wrong. And so is this position casting Jesus into a male-affirming machismo injecting repressed masculinity with capricious sport.

It has been suggested that evangelical male fascination with cagefighting is simply allowing men to tap into their inner masculinity and thus celebrated as a recovery of biblical manhood. While gender distinction and masculinity are to be applauded and upheld as biblical statutes, current attitudes amongst evangelical men suggest that men have taken their divine mandate to protect and twisted it into a carnality salivating with brutality. Cagefighting and warring are not synonymous. Cagefighting is sport, drawing upon the unbridled angst of man which seeks to overwhelm his opponent through unhealthy submission (or unconsciousness). Warring is the act of protection and defense and entails, in its proper execution, honor and restraint.

Jesus was fully man and fully God. The Chalcedonian definition is two natures, one person. Let that be sufficient in all its simplicities and complexities. To propose, as one very popular evangelical preacher has done, that he could not worship a Jesus he could beat up is pure nonsense. The vision of Jesus presented as a warrior in Revelation is not sufficient evidence to base one’s desire for a combative life. Yes, Jesus was no doubt a rugged man well acquainted with the difficulties of nomadic life, but this same individual wept (John 11:35). Jesus never waged malevolent war over the grounds of blood-lust with earthly enemies; instead, he rose to challenge and combat far superior Powers which rage against each of us in constant tumult to devour (1 Peter 5:8). This enemy, interestingly, is not of flesh (Ephesians 6:12).

Am I making too much of this sport? Perhaps. But, I cannot understand the virtue of a sport which images the graphic and brutal aspects of human behavior.

No doubt many of our readers are very familiar with all the quotable (and some unquotable) C. S. Lewis, so they should not be surprised to be reminded that the eminently understandable academician said, “The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.” Our own intellectual blind spots can be uncovered by availing ourselves of the perspectives of the living and the dead.

This is one reason I’ve been reading Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine on poli-sci. Every time CNN or Fox News makes a claim about politics they both operate with certain assumptions that quietly unite them against the ideas of past and future ages; in order to uncover those assumptions and critically assess them we must compare the general outlines of our thought to those who held very different opinions.

Augustine’s City of God against the Pagans is a massive compilation of twenty-two volumes attempting to shift the Roman empire’s cyclical and pagan interpretation of history and government to a linear interpretation based upon the Christian theology and anthropology. While the tome addresses much more than political science issues, it lays a foundation for centuries of later political thought.

Among the major concepts that form this foundation is Augustine’s formulation of the summum bonum or Supreme Good, a formulation that expands upon previous classical thinkers like Plato and that shapes subsequent political discourse by directing it toward its appropriate end.

Eternal life is the Supreme Good, and eternal death the Supreme Evil, and that [in order] to achieve the one and avoid the other, we must live rightly.” (City of God, XIX.4).

In other places he argues that God is that Good by which all things are made good and is that good which we desire for its own sake. Augustine distinguishes between the Good, or God, and the highest and best human good, which is sometimes described as clinging to God, as seeking God, or that life of perfect peace and fellowship with God. He recognizes, as does Plato, that there is a difference between the Good Itself (or Himself) and the highest good of man, which is to commune with, or be in fellowship with, or contemplate the Good. Plato argues that the highest good is to live according to virtue and that the true and highest good is Being and the source of all things. Like Augustine, Plato acknowledged a difference between the Good Itself and the highest good of a man, which is to contemplate the Good.

While Augustine and Plato agree on the Good as Being (though they may have semantic disagreements as to its/his proper name), they disagree on the highest good for man. Plato holds that the highest good is to live according to virtue and contemplate, as much as one is able, the Good. Augustine, on the other hand, contends that the highest good for man is eternal life, the life in which he will dwell in a state of peace and felicity in pure and true worship of God. Augustine notes this difference between the Christian and Platonic positions, and characterizes it like this, “with wondrous vanity, these philosophers have wished to be happy here and now, and to achieve blessedness by their own efforts.”

By placing the final and supreme end of all human action in the afterlife, or eternity, Augustine raised the sights of political inquiry from analysis of human institutions and actions confined to field of human effort in the present, to a political analysis that included reference to God. The arguments of the City of God were directed at Romans who blamed Christians for the fall of Rome to the Visigoths and who argued that, in order to return to her former splendor, Rome needed to renounce the Christian God and restore the older civic institutions and civic religion. However, Augustine argues that a proper political order includes reference to God—to that Supreme Being Who is and is Good; all other political endeavors are destined to fail (as the Roman empire did) since they fail to account for all the relevant data affecting human action.

No doubt our society rubs its eyes in amazement at the suggestion that men must include the fact of God’s existence and nature in their analyses of the proper ends of political bodies and governments. It seems preposterous to suggest that the discussions about God be moved from the highly privatized realm of religion to the public forum of politics. However, for the millions of individuals living in the West in AD 476—philosophers, statesmen, and citizens—it was assumed that immaterial beings existed and influenced the affairs of men. For brilliant thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, it was preposterous to act as though there was no Supreme Good that ordered and affected the course of human affairs.

As we come to recognize the limitations of our political systems we ought to consider whether a contributing factor to their failures is due to our refusal to admit all the facts to our inquiry.