(Bumped–I realized I put in the wrong timestamp when I set it to automatically post!).

For many evangelicals, the idea of regular and church-legislated engagement with spiritual disciplines such as Lent impinges upon the freedom of the individual believer. In its worst and most ignorant forms, the objection isn’t even formulated—rather, the idea of Lent evokes the sneer that is afforded to all things “Catholic.”

Of course, such a dismissal ignores the relaxation of the Lenten rules and Church discipline in general by the Catholic Church in the 20^th century.

That is not to say that there are not valid worries to be had about whether the Catholic Church’s obligations surrounding Lent infringe the freedom of the believer and the basic nature of an individual’s relationship with God. That is, there is a question about whether making Lent a requirement for believers is a proper use of churchly authority.

As an evangelical, the freedom of the individual and his relationship to God are of utmost importance to me. Of course, that is why I will practice Lent again this year.

The idea that the Church calendar and the authority over the individual believer’s religious life that goes along with it is at odds with religious freedom is akin to saying that the laws of marriage are at odds with a man’s freedom to choose a wife. That’s clearly not the case. While some people may criticize marriage as destroying a man’s freedom, it is rather the ultimate expression of it—in marriage, a man freely limits himself to loving one other woman. That is, he willingly and (we hope) joyfully accepts the reality of an order that he did not make himself.

So in adhering to the Church calendar. Rather than surrendering to a ‘man-made’ authority presuming to be divinely inspired, those who follow Lent—and, I might argue, the Catholic Church’s adherence to it—appeal to an order behind the calendar itself. It is the same order that prompted the Preacher to proclaim, “To everything, there is a season.”

In following the Church calendar, we are routinely reminded to focus on the various aspects of the Christian life—the second coming, the reality of sin, the miracle of redemption, the power of the resurrection, the outpouring of the Spirit, etc. And the Church calendar orders and structures our relationship to God, just as the celebration of anniversaries, birthdays, and other special days structure our human relationships.

In Lent, we are encouraged to focus on our sin, and to repent for our rebellion against God. But we do not focus on our sin in the abstract—rather, we are encouraged to look forward to the celebration of Good Friday and Easter. That is, we look at our own sin in a certain way—namely, within the context of the Gospel and the reality of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As we mourn for our sin, we look for the comfort of God.

Despite roundly panning Gary Thomas’ book Sacred Marriage last week for it’s fundamentally questionable premise, I have to admit that he has a lot of good things to say in response to the historic trend among Christians to look down their noses on marriage—preferring to view it as something that is necessary because of the incontinence of humans, rather than as a means through which people come to know God in deep and profound ways.

As far back as I can remember, I was fully aware of the long-standing tradition of celibacy—monks and nuns who lived out their dedication to God by pledging to abstain from marriage and sex…Most of the Christian classics [on spirituality] were written by monks and nuns for monks and nuns. The married could at best feebly try to simulate a single pursuit of God; the thought of pursuing God through marriage wasn’t really given serious consideration; instead, the emphasis was largely on pursuing God in spite of marriage.”

It is in light of this historical fact, and against the comments of respected theologians like Augustine, who wrote,”Marital intercourse makes something good out of the evil of lust” that Gary Thomas takes up his pen and forges the way forward towards meaningful ways to unite the spiritually devout life with the marriage covenant; two notable forays below the fold. (more…)

 “By expecting the Apostles to conform to modern assumptions we run the
danger of missing the theological and kerygmatic richness of the Apostles’ use of
the OT.”

Continuing a line Matt started, here is an interesting article (about 25 pages) by Peter Enns, an evangelical scholar at Westminster Seminary, on the Apostolic manner of interpreting scripture. This “Apostolc Hermaneutic” is remarkably distinct from the widely-used and, in many cases, uncritically relied-upon “historical-grammatical method” that Protestants have inherited from the Enlightenment and Renaissance.

(Thanks to Energetic Procession for the link.)

When the Oscar nominees were announced, I was mildly surprised to see “Michael Clayton” among the nominees for Best Picture.

After seeing it, that mild surprise turned into astonishment. The idea that this film could win Best picture over No Country for Old Men or Juno is perplexing to me.

Michael Clayton is a well-made film that tries too hard to be a great film.

The acting performances are predictably fine—Tom Wilkinson is particularly strong in his supporting role—but the director’s decision to show a key sequence at the end of the film first robs the film of the suspense it could have had otherwise. Rather than waiting for the unexpected to happen, I sat knowing what the end result of it all was, making the film seem predictable.

In addition, the camerawork was a too self-consciously “artistic” to be effective. At points, it felt as though the director was trying to overcompensate for a weak storyline with “interesting” visuals.

As for the content itself, I left the theater wondering what Michael Clayton was about. The plot progresses in haphazard fashion, with the director throwing numerous pieces of information at the audience, only to tie them together later on. But even then, the pieces hardly form a conflict and resolution that the audience cares about much. The climactic scene is consequently remarkably unsatisfying.

In all, Michael Clayton is moderately entertaining, but hardly worth nominating for Best Picture. Whatever credibility the Academy has as a barometer for cinematic excellence is on the line this time—with two excellently crafted films in the running against George Clooney, whether it is an actual popularity contest within Hollywood will be on full display in 2008.

Gary Thomas’ Sacred Marriage is a well-reasoned and thoughtful response to the centuries-old tradition of viewing spiritual formation as primarily taking place between an individual and God—a tradition that often celebrates being celibate while marginalizing marriage. It is also fundamentally wrong.

The basic premise of Sacred Marriage is that “God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy.” By this he means that our selfishness and our general lack of sanctification are the things that God intends to address, and has designed marriage to be the primary playing field on which these issues are dealt with (unless, of course, you are single). It is this premise that I take issue with, for two reasons.

The first reason is blatantly theological and goes back, like so many things, to the creation of the world and the creation of man. If marriage existed in a sinless world (it did) then it strikes me as fairly obvious that it cannot have been primarily designed to address the sinfulness and selfishness of human beings. Given the fallen condition of man, marriage certainly is one among the many facets of human existence that force us to confront the sin and wickedness in our hearts and habits. However, it is no more correct to say that God’s primary design in creating physical appetites was to teach us to curb our gluttony than to say that God designed marriage to teach us to curb our selfishness.

The second, and perhaps less obvious, reason I disagree with Thomas’ basic premise has to do with the assumptions about the purpose of life that undergird it. Thomas largely views marriage (and life) as being a training ground for eternity. Life is, in his parlance, primarily about making us holy rather than making us happy. That may be true enough: insofar as God is concerned with the development and well-being of His people He allows us to be unhappy in order to become more holy, more virtuous, and more like Christ.

However, what if life has some meaning of its own? What if life is not simply a laboratory or test-tube in which human beings are evaluated and cultured like so many petri dish specimens, but rather has its own place and meaning because it was created by God to be good in its own right? I tend to take Jesus quite seriously when he said, “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” Eternal life—that thing that Thomas’ believes we currently are preparing ourselves for—apparently has less to do with one’s temporal position to the grave and much more to do with knowledge of God. But consider the ramifications of this fact: If eternal life doesn’t start once we die, but begins once we know God, then all the glorious things that God has to say about eternal life and the blessings, knowledge, and riches that go along with it, are not things that are primarily other-worldly; they are things that can, in large measure, be part of our lives…here and now.

Of course there are things to be learned from marriage and recognizing that such an intimate relationship will challenge us to step outside of ourselves, to die to ourselves, will no doubt go along way towards giving meaning to the struggles, pain, and confusion that sap a marriage of a portion of its happiness. But there are things to be learned from every experience, every day, and it is dangerous to view life as being primarily about learning things largely because such an attitude hides a very insidious (because so easily justifiable) selfishness that seems to be, of all places, most out of place in the context of the sacred marriage—the marriage that is meant to picture the self-sacrificing Divine love.

You might get fired. Or worse, Expelled.

“All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigourous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.” Henry David Thoreau

I am no shining crown of practical virtue. In this my twenty-fifth year I am still struggling to eat fruits and vegetables every day, to exercise five to seven times a week, to plan out my week ahead of time and actually stick to the plan. Sometimes I still write reminders on my hand.

Especially sticky, a thorn in my side, has been the simple habit of going to bed at a reasonable time. Insomnia and late-night life has kept my bedtime somewhere between late, very late and extremely late.

I am amazed at the number of practical and spiritual consequences to not rising with the sun. Staying up, I have spent countless hours on internet browsing and Facebook checking. Sleeping in, I have been late to important meetings. I have forgone prayer and exercise for the sake of a rushed bowl of cereal and breathless Patre Nostrum. I have
avoided or ignored pressing commitments until the last minute. This has not been working.

Then it struck me! It all comes back to not getting up early, which all comes back to not going to bed early. Do I deserve an award for Noticing the Obvious? I did not realize that Benjamin Franklin meant it. To hear the true meaning of a platitude or truism, reverse it: “Late to bed and late to rise makes a man unhealthy, stupid and poor.” That’s three for three!

Perhaps there is no such thing as a “night person.” (more…)

On a day when we honor a man committed to racial reconciliation, Fred Sanders offers this responsible analysis of Martin Luther’s theological tradition,  strengths and weaknesses:

But mainly, MLK saw a big issue coming his way and knew to lean into it rather than avoiding it. From a conservative theological perspective, I could always wish he had received better teaching, and hadn’t felt the need to deny so much of what God has revealed about himself in his word. But I can also thank God that MLK had such a good grasp of a few crucial elements of Christianity: a personal God, the depth of sin, the possibility of transforming civic life. Compared to the fullness of a more robustly biblical variety of Christianity, what’s left for liberal theology doesn’t seem like much. It doesn’t seem like enough to build anything on. But see what Martin Luther King Jr. did with it! As Piper says, seeing it isn’t hard: “All you have to do to find some good word from MLK is Google his name.” Whatever he may have felt he had to give up from the fullness of the Christian faith, there’s still so much residual force left that it’s in every line of every speech. He did something with what he had. And since there’s still something to be done, MLK is still a resource. Don’t waste his words, his arguments, or his day.

Read the whole thing.  It’s a balanced and sympathetic assessment of a man’s complex history.

The story of South Carolina’s Republican primary has been written.

Mike Huckabee’s campaign is in serious jeopardy, while McCain’s road to the White House looks better than ever.  Mitt Romney is still spending a lot of money, but can only seem to win when no one else campaigns or he has a family tree.
Joe Carter offers this bit of analysis:

If McCain is smart he’ll offer the VP slot to Huckabee. If Huckabee is smart he’ll turn it down. The failure of John Edwards campaign is a reminder that the country doesn’t like general election losers. Rather than being on the losing ticket in ‘08, Huckabee should sit out the race and wait until 2012.

I’m not sure I agree with this assessment.  No ticket would anger the Republican punditocracy more than this one, which McCain probably can’t afford to do.  In fact, the Corner may just explode if McCain wins and Huck is VP.  He would probably be better served by making Mitt his VP, though that will probably never happen.

In addition, it’s not so clear that second attempts go well for anyone.  While McCain’s chances have clearly improved over last time, Republicans were going to pick a compromise candidate this year, and McCain seems to be that guy.  That’s hardly a resounding endorsement from the party.  The odds that the field are this weak in the future are (I hope!) low.  Huckabee got this far in part because of his anonymity–next time, he would have to overcome serious opposition among Republican elites from the beginning.  He might do it, but it isn’t likely.

Huck’s best shot is now.  If Giuiliani wins it all, he has to choose Huck to even prompt social conservatives to think about voting for him.  Of course, Huckabee couldn’t accept without destroying his credentials as a social conservative.  Hence, I don’t think he’d accept.

If Romney wins it all, he may as well choose Huck to broaden his appeal beyond the Republican elites.  While he clearly has the organization in place, his supporters lack the zeal that wins elections.  For whatever reason, his robotic personality and desire to do anything for political gain rubs people the wrong way.  Choosing Huckabee would be a significant step toward remedying those problems.  In addition, it would satisfy any lingering concerns about his conversion to pro-life issues and effectively eliminate the “Mormon question” (which doesn’t really exist, but we’ll acknowledge it here for argument’s sake).  If anyone should choose Huckabee as their VP, it’s Romney.
If McCain hangs on, he won’t choose Huck.  He may get his kicks from angering the Republican base, but he is smart enough to know he needs them to win in 2008.  He’ll work to pacify the Republican elites, and choosing Huckabee is probably the worst choice for that.

For Huckabee supporters, then, Romney is the best hope for four years of Huckabee on a national stage, and for a plausible second chance at the Presidency.  It’s an unlikely pairing given the primaries, but Republicans are supposed to put everything behind them for the generals, right?  Romney needs someone like Huckabee to win the general election, especially if Obama and Hillary join forces (though any Republican winning the general against that tandem is a fancy).

Hence, as a Huckabee supporter, I support Mitt Romney for President.*

*This is mildly tongue-in-cheek.  When my turn to vote comes, I’ll still vote Huckabee.  But only because I have very low hopes that the above scenario would happen.  Mitt Romney hasn’t displayed much political acumen during the primaries, and I have no reason to think that he would be that savvy in his choice of his VP (or that Huckabee would agree to do it).

How should we then read?

It is a question with which I have occasionally wrestled. My freshman year of college, I was introduced to the world of hermeneutics, which seemed at the time to be the discipline of debunking other people’s interpretations of the Bible.

Every time I am confronted with a scholar as careful and erudite as Anthony Esolen, however, the answer to how we should read becomes momentarily clear: “just like him.” His playful dexterity with literature is remarkable, which is why I take statements such as this one very seriously:

Nowadays, typological reading is dismissed as childish by the professional Bible interpreter, who prides himself on what he calls, in a stunning bit of question-begging, his more accurate “history.” What can the bronze serpent in the desert (Num. 21:9) really, which is to say historically, which is to say according to a naturalistic interpretation of causes and effects, have to do with the death of Christ on the cross? But the typological reader is more historical than the historicist, because he sees the story in the history, while the historicist rules the story out from the start.

Typological reading has been rejected, it seems, because of the purported lack of norms governing the interpretation. Of course, that objection is better framed as a caution—typological reading (like all reading) is an activity which must be governed by the Spirit of God. Not only that, but it is a practice of reading that presumes the Spirit’s activity in the formation of the text. We can look for typology in the text because history is governed by providence—the story has an author. As Esolen writes:

A world governed by so playful—I can find no better word—a providence abounds in meaning, a cascade of it, from every least word or action. If God is no miser of his blessings, neither is he a miser of meanings: they burst from every tree and leaf. It follows that we cannot know the full significance of what we say and do, but that God does know and can choose to reveal that significance to others, especially by means of events that reenact the past and reveal it to have been far more, or far other, than what the actors themselves supposed.

What does this type of reading look like in practice? Esolen continues:

A charming insance of this cascade is given unwittingly by the inspired author of the Abraham and Isaac episode. Abraham, he says, carried the knife and the fire-pot. Isaac carried the wood. A deft Anglo-Saxon poetic rendering of the scene, in the so-called Genesis A text, makes the connection swiftly and explicitly: Wudu baer sunu (2887B). “The son bore the wood,” the poet says, calling attention to his line by the rhyme, most unusual in Anglo-Saxon composition. Or, since wudu and sudu posess identical forms in the nominative and accusative cases, “The wood bore the son.” Without dropping any other hint, the poet recalls to his audience a new field of significance, one unknown to Abraham and Isaac. The lad—from whom we hear not one word of protest against his father—foreshadows Christ, who carried the wood up another hill for a sacrifice, his own. Christ was Isaac, was the ram; Christ bore the wood to the altar, and the wood bore him. God spared the son of Abraham, but he did not spare himself, so great was his love for the world.

If we cannot see the typology in the text, we may be looking through a broken sets of glasses.

Flying is really quite simple—all you really have to know is that when you pull back the houses and trees get smaller, and when you push forward the houses and trees get larger; that and a judicious use of the throttles or power control is all that any budding pilot needs to know. I still remember the first time I flew. I spent no more than thirty minutes with the instructor pilot prior to flying and we mostly talked about things related to engine starts and radio calls. As we walked out the door together he casually mentioned the simple flying formula to me. We both laughed. I laughed a nervous laugh, knowing that, in all my ignorance, there certainly had to be more to flying than that. I suppose he was just laughing at me and my nervous attempts at feigned self-confidence. After a few pathetic attempts at radio calls and a smooth taxi, I found myself on the runway, looking at the instructor and expecting him to take the controls and demo the takeoff. I looked at him. He looked at me. I glanced down. “Well,” he said. “Are you going to fly this thing or not?” Feigned self-confidence or pride, I don’t know which, motivated me to push up the throttles and, after reaching the proper airspeed, pull back on the yoke. We were airborne…we were AIRBORNE! It really was that easy.

But things become more difficult after you master the simple formulas. Besides learning how to recover from power-on and power-off stalls, turn around a point, and accomplish emergency landings, one of the most complex puzzles of aviation is navigation. The relatively simple hand-eye coordination needed to pilot an airplane pales in comparison to the mental math gymnastics and intricate interplay between pilot, aeronautical chart, and plotter required to travel from Abilene to San Antonio by Cessna. The many variables of aviation that exist even at takeoff, become much more important once you decide you want to do more than make houses and trees increase or diminish in relative size. Winds aloft, weather patterns, navigational radios, fuel burn, propeller pitch angle, airspeed and groundspeed all conspire to create particularly thorny problems for budding pilots and seasoned aviators alike. (more…)

Esolen’s Ironies of Faith hangs upon the premise that the Christian understands irony differently than his secular neighbor.  Esolen writes:

Contemporary literary theorists have attempted to distill the essence of irony, that which underlies both the winking assertions of ignorance made by Socrates, and concatenations of events that seem (but only seem) to suggest design, or that demolish any sense of design. Irony, they assert, is a universal solvent: no theology or epistemology can contain it. It dissolves—it “deconstructs”—every assertion of absolute truth.

He continues:

But in fact, irony commonly is used to exalt rather than undermine. It can stun us with wonder and raise our eyes to behold a truth we had missed. All kinds of unsuspected truths, particularly those combined in paradoxes, await our attention, but we are too dulled by habit to notice. Then irony—verbal or dramatic—awakes us….

It is, then, not the unexpectedness of a thing that produces irony—a violin flung at a man’s head is unexpected, but not ironic—nor is it ignorance that produces irony—after all, if he saw the violin he would duck. Irony arises, rather, from the ignorance of unseen or unexpected order (or, as it may happen, disorder), from the failure to note subtleties, or from seeing subtleties that are not there, especially when the ignorance and the failure are highlighted before observers in a better position to see the truth. That is the sort of thing we feel as ironic. A violin flung at a man’s head is not ironic. A man missing a sharp as he tries to hum the Kreutzer sonata is not ironic. The same man botching Beethoven as the violin sails his way—now that is ironic.

Christian irony, then, does not undermine the ordered world or look behind it. Rather, it breaks us free from our habits of thought and allows us to notice the world in a new way. It is a heuristic device—but when removed from its proper context as a tool for understanding, it becomes a bludgeon that destroys objectivity.

One of the more useful aspects of Anthony Esolen’s Ironies of Faith (see my review here) is that his exploration of Christian literature highlights the disparity between their worldview and our own.

At points, it becomes clear that Esolen has no sympathy for many of the modern intellectual bastions. Consider, for example, his analysis of Milton’s Paradise Lost and its implications for modern feminism.

In his sympathetic defense of Milton’s depiction of Adam and Eve in the garden, Esolen contends that the hierarchical nature of male/female relations—“Hee for God only, she for God in him”—is a paradoxical relationship that entails the raising of women to the same status as men:

So if Adam is to rule like the Father, he must exalt Eve and give her authority next to, sharing in, and proceeding from his own. He must rule by love. Modern man, reversing Paul’s hymn to love, too often believes in nothing, hopes in nothing, and endures nothing, seeing in all love the machinations of power. But Christianity sees in true power the heart of love; for love, not power, is the defining ultimate for God: “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

It is this paradox—that strength is displayed in weakness—that the modern world fails to understand (“out of the mouths of infants, though has declared praise”). It is in the weakness of flesh that God appeared—and it is this “weakness of flesh” that male/female relationships hang upon. Adam and Eve, after all, have an erotic relationship.

Yet in Milton’s account of the fall, it is precisely this dignified status of corporeality that Satan undermines. As Esolen points out,

Satan will tempt Eve not only to ‘usurp authority over the man’ (1 Tim. 2:12), but to scorn all creatures beneath her and, subtly, to scorn the physical basis of her union with Adam. For though Satan can see, as from the outside, the beauty of bodily things in Eden, he cannot feel it within him. He is like Lewis’s Weston in Perelandra, who idles his hours pulling apart the limbs of small animas because for the moment he has nothing better to do….Satan hates the animals, the plants, the rivers, the very dust he will be compelled to lick. He hates food; he hates sex.

In other words, Satan is too pure for corporeality. His pursuit of raw power—power, that is, not expressed in and through weakness—necessitates a rejection of the corporeal. And it is precisely this error, according to Esolen, that modern feminism commits:

I have long believed there is something antiseptic and sterilizing about feminism. The modern feminist critic, preoccupied with raw power, misses Satan’s contempt for the corporeal. So Satan describes what life was like, as a serpent, before he ate the apple. His thoughts, he says, were low (if we write “humble” here, we catch his prideful fastidiousness immediately), fixed upon food and sex. The first question Eve should ask is, “What is wrong with thoughts of food and sex?” What else should you be thinking about, if you are a serpent? For a snake, for any animal, those thoughts are what God has willed: they are innocent and blessed. How else should the animals be fruitful and multiply?

Esolen’s thoughts on this matter are clearly challenging. But as his reading of Milton shows, we are a long ways from his Renaissance worldview. Whether we have gone forward or backward in the subsequent years is probably an open question for most of us, but for Esolen the answer seems positively obvious.