Still Eating Sausages: Reservations Regarding Evangelicals and Lent

Matt’s discussion of the Radicals and their revolution against comfortable and convenient Christianity has emerged, perhaps fittingly, during the liturgical season of Lent. The annual forty-day fast has always focused on the sacrifice inherent to the Christian call. Therefore, it should be no surprise that many of the same believers latching onto David Platt & Co.’s message have also begun to incorporate Lenten fasts into their worship practices. This devotional expression, long a hallmark of more liturgical churches, is now a growing trend among low-church Evangelicals.

The Evangelicalism of my parents’ generation lumped Lenten fasting together with saying the Rosary as the dead liturgy of a works-based religion. In other words, they didn’t do Lent. But now many of my friends, including lots of the fine folks here at Mere-O do. The question “What are you giving up for Lent?” is as common at hip church plants as skinny jeans and references to UFC fights. It is so cool that the really cool kids are giving up the practice in order to stay ahead of the trend.

The whole fad has me thinking: was the old-fashioned Evangelical opposition to Lenten observance just one more relic of an irrational anti-Papistry, or is there some real wisdom in abstaining from abstaining?

The Affair of the Sausages
Our parents weren’t the first Protestants to resist Lent. The suspicion of Lent emerged at the very dawn of the Reformation. In fact, less than five years after Martin Luther posted his 95 theses, an intentional violation of the Lenten fast was the event that brought the Reformation to Switzerland. Zurich pastor Huldrych Zwingli had been teaching on Christian liberty and his congregant, Christoph Froschauer, had just published a new translation of the Pauline Epistles. To celebrate the publication, Froschauer shared two sausages with his employees. This violated the terms of the church’s fasting requirements, which at that point completely forbade the eating of flesh meat.

Christoph Froschauer the Younger (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At that time, the secular authorities enforced church doctrine. Froschauer was arrested. Zwingli subsequently defended Froschauer’s action as a proper exercise of Christian liberty. Roman Catholic authorities were not immediately persuaded. The citizens of Zurich were; the following year the city became officially Protestant.

In the following decades, English Puritans went even further in their opposition to feast days not commanded by scripture. Their opposition culminated in a 1647 parliamentary act abolishing Lent as well as the rest of the liturgical calendar:

Forasmuch as the feast of the nativity of Christ, Easter, Whitsuntide, and other festivals, commonly called holy-days, have been heretofore superstitiously used and observed; be it ordained, that the said feasts, and all other festivals, commonly called holy-days, be no longer observed as festivals; any law, statute, custom, constitution, or canon, to the contrary in anywise not withstanding. (link)

The Puritans banned all of these holidays because they found them unsupported by Scripture and to be the occasion of superstition. By the latter, they meant that common people would confuse the feast and fasts for the essence of Christianity and would mistake the simple Gospel. This concern also drove Zwingli’s opposition. In his sermon defending Froschauer, he noted that “simple people” may get the impression that if they comply with the Church’s Lenten commands they may think that they are good for the rest of the year. Yet, in truth, “one should at all time confess God, live piously, and do no more than we think necessary in the fast” (Zwingli, p. 107).

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Gray Matters

In my first book, Hipster Christianity, I attempted to explore the relationship between Christianity and popular culture by examining the phenomenon of “cool Christianity” and how the realities of trendiness and the notion of “cultural relevance” have been interpreted and enacted by contemporary evangelicals. Among the several motivations for writing that book was a perception I had that many of my contemporaries (Millennial Christians) had mistook relevance for rebellion/edginess and had replaced a pursuit of holiness with a pursuit of “authenticity.” While it is true that in many cases the hyper-legalistic, Christ-against-culture approach of our parents was off the mark and needed to be moved away from, my concern was that the pendulum had swung (as it so often does) too far in the other extreme, replacing conservative legalism with a distorted form of “liberty” that essentially becomes legalism in the opposite direction.

Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty (coming out on August 1, 2013) is my attempt to address this “pendulum” problem head on and present an approach to cultural engagement that thoughtfully resides in the vast, glorious terrain between the extremes to which we are so prone to default. Christians have a hard time with nuance. Gray areas are not our strong suit. It’s way easier to just say “yes” or “no” to things, rather than “well, maybe, depending…” But there are many areas where it’s not that black and white. God gives us minds with the capacity for critical thinking so that we might navigate the complexity of these less- straightforward areas of existence.

Popular culture, and what we consume or abstain from within culture, is one such gray area. There aren’t easy answers in the Bible about whether this or that HBO show is OK to watch. Scripture contains no comprehensive list of acceptable films, books, or websites. Contrary to what some Christians maintain, the Bible neither endorses nor forbids all sorts of things it could have been clearer about.

But scriptural silence about the particularities of 21st century media habits is no reason to just throw up one’s hands and indulge in an “anything goes” free-for-all. Rather, it’s an invitation to think about the gray areas more deeply, to wrestle with them based on what Scripture does say and what we’ve come to know about the calling of Christians in this world. The gray areas matter.

I wrote Gray Matters to give Christians tools to better wrestle with a few of the gray areas that have sometimes proven divisive for evangelicals. More broadly, I hope it helps us to take more seriously our habits of cultural consumption–considering how they enrich, corrode or conflict with our Christian identity. Even if we aren’t tempted to be legalists or libertines, many of us are simply apathetic about the things we consume and the manner in which we consume them. Some of us are downright gnostic in the way that we divorce our media/entertainment habits from the faith we purportedly practice.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but I believe that following Christ and appreciating the goodness, truth and beauty of culture are not mutually exclusive endeavors. Reasonable integration, rather than convenient compartmentalization, should define our engagements with culture as Christians. We must go about it thoughtfully, with moderation, and in community. We must do it well because the world is watching; a reckless posture toward culture can impair our witness. More importantly, a healthy consumption of culture can bring glory to God.

I’ll be sharing more about Gray Matters in the coming months (pre-order if you’d like!), but for now I’ll leave you with the endorsements the book has received thus far.

“Brett McCracken is one of this generation’s leading thinkers on the intersection of faith and culture. In Gray Matters, he explores Christianity’s natural extremes with his feet firmly planted in Scripture. He charges headfirst into controversial questions and leaves no stone unturned. The result is a truly spectacular book that carves a path between an oppressive, rules-based religion and a powerless, free-for-all ‘faith.’ If you start reading it, beware—you won’t be able to put it down.”

—Jonathan Merritt, faith and culture writer; author, A Faith of Our Own: Following Jesus Beyond the Culture Wars

“Idealism is all the rage among bright young evangelicals today, but Brett McCracken brings something all too rare to the table: he holds his earnest idealism in tension with lucid good sense and winsome moderation. May his tribe increase!”

—John Wilson, editor, Books & Culture

“Martin Luther said the world was like a drunken man, first falling off one side of the horse and then the other. With a fresh and thoughtful look at challenges such as food, music, film, and alcohol, Brett McCracken has offered a new generation a way to stay on the horse.”

—Roberta Green Ahmanson, writer and speaker

“In Gray Matters, Brett McCracken does something quite refreshing—he serves as a wise and discerning guide to the consuming of culture. Many books condemn ‘secular’ culture, just as many books advocate (consciously or unconsciously) accommodating ourselves to culture. Brett has written something much different: a biblically informed and culturally savvy approach to consuming culture in a God-honoring, community-building, and mission-advancing way.”

—Mike Erre, pastor; author, The Jesus of Suburbia: Have We Tamed the Son of God to Fit Our Lifestyle?

“Brett McCracken has long been my favorite reviewer of both music and movies, so it’s no surprise to me that he has written this needed book on consuming culture. A number of wonderful books have been written encouraging readers to create culture, but Brett takes the reader into the everyday world of consuming culture. Brett is an incredibly capable writer, thinker, and connoisseur, and all of this shines through in his work—bringing back into focus that how we engage the world around us matters deeply.”

—Tyler Braun, worship pastor; writer; author, Why Holiness Matters: We’ve Lost Our Way—But We Can Find It Again

“This book is not only clear and engaging, but also careful and wise. Gray Matters is a helpful, critical, reflective exploration of how we should consume culture as Christians that is neither reactionary nor defensive, triumphalistic or despairing. Few younger Christians have navigated these turbulent waters with as much even-handed clarity as this book does, which makes it an important read.”

—Matthew Lee Anderson, MereOrthodoxy.com; author of Earthen Vessels: Why our Bodies Matter for our Faith

Epiphany, Obscurity, and New Year’s Resolutions

This past weekend, many Christians around the world celebrated the feast of Epiphany. The day commemorates, among other things, the visit by the “wise men from the east” to the birthplace of Jesus. The celebration highlights the paradoxes at the heart of the Christian faith: those with great learning come to pay tribute to one who can not yet speak. God enters the world with his glory veiled, the light of truth shining out of the darkness of a cave. It is a remarkable turn: God himself collides with the ordinary, mundane realities of human life.

The feast, of course, happens in our culture against the backdrop of a season of reflection and recommitment. With the self-reflective posture that the turning of the calendar invites us all to, we look behind us and inquire about whether our last year was all we had wanted and, more importantly, whether we were all we had hoped to be. And as we face up to our successes and acknowledge our disappointments, we resolve ourselves to do better, somehow. Such resolve is a serious matter that none of us should denigrate.

Yet many of us are now beginning to feel the weight of our new resolutions. (Or should I perhaps say instead that we are beginning to feel the sweat and difficulty of trying to lose our new holiday weight?) Habits are notoriously difficult to overturn: inertia and the status quo often prove more difficult to escape than we imagine when we set out. As we return to the normality of our work and stress imperceptibly returns to govern our thoughts, our willingness to be kinder to our neighbor, or to be more patient while waiting in line, or to give more to those in need, no longer has the force it did amidst the post-Christmas relaxation. The reasons why we wanted to do better slowly become more distant and opaque and we allow the hurry and urgency of our tasks to justify sliding on the seemingly trivial opportunities to do good before us.

Yet such mundane moments when we choose between kindness and anger, between graciousness and envy, set our lives on courses with endings that we often cannot forsee. Just as we often gain weight without realizing it until we find ourselves before a mirror, so our character is being shaped and molded without us knowing with any finality the end to which we are hurtling. We learn to do the right thing long before we reach situations that call for heroism—or not. And such learning almost always happens well out of the public eye. For most of us, our “doing better” may remain invisible to those around us, despite our secret hopes that we would be found out.

Of course, we do tell others. We “humblebrag” on social media. We slide our successes into conversations. It’s affirmation that we’re eager for and we’ll broadcast it any way we can.

It’s partly this temptation explains why we are so moved by acts of anonymous kindness. We were reminded again by their power late last year when New York Police officer Lawrence DiPrimo was caught on film buying shoes for a homeless man—or so DiPrimo thought. While later details complicated the story, DiPrimo’s momentary act of sacrifice arrested our attention, as it was clearly done without any concern for the fame or praise that would follow. DiPrimo suggested afterward that the act was what “anybody would do,” which is touching but probably false. Many of us would have walked on by and rationalized our choice. (Let us here resolve to do better!)

Nearly none of us will have the celebrity or fame that comes from deciding to act kindly toward those we come across in need. Nor will we ever have stars over our homes or books written about us. Our lives will probably not attain the sort of glory of being immortalized in song or legend, because for most of our good deeds no one will be there to photograph them. We will not be called, as Frodo was in The Hobbit, to go on adventures and defeat dragons or save lives. The resolutions that we undertake are almost always more mundane, more normal, much less likely to make the headlines of newspapers.

The promise of anonymity, though, does not mean we should give up doing good. As George Eliot puts it at the end of Middlemarch, “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” It is precisely because of how many people obey traffic laws (or near enough!) that most of us will arrive safely at work. It is those parents who labor and sacrifice in ways that we often forget who allow us to stand on their shoulders. Friends who help us move, colleagues who give up their time to aid us in completing a project, those saints who cheerfully yield in line to those about to miss their plane—these are the forgotten, hidden acts that the news will never report but that subtly remind us that the light still shines despite the all too palpable darkness of the world.

Christians, of course, should take this one step further and embrace the temporary darkness of obscurity and allow fame come and go as it may. For as this season reminds us, our Savior enters the world through the mundane realities of childbirth. His coming is cloaked to most everyone by the secrecy of a cave. It takes a star to guide the wise men from the East, but there are not many who show up. His is a public revelation, but not one that is universal (in the sense that everyone in the world sees it straightaway). That comes later. Meanwhile, the light grows slowly, often imperceptibly, within the accumulating subtle acts of love and kindness.

Yet we too struggle to keep up with our resolutions. “Doing better” is a task that we find brings us to the end of ourselves and leaves us wondering why we bothered to begin with. And in that recognition, the Gospel of peace is held out to all and we are reminded that the light has already brought us rest from our labors. For the Christ child, who those wise men come and worship, grows up and becomes the one whose sacrificial goodness covers those who feel the lack.

What Christmas Bells Might Mean

On my way home from work today, my favorite Christmas mix CD was playing, and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” came on. It had been a long day at work, I was homesick and eager to get on my plane tomorrow, I had lots of packing to do, and twenty-seven people had been killed at an elementary school for no reason.

There have been too many senseless mass-killings during my short life. Well, even one would be too many, and at 28, I can vividly remember Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Fort Hood, and now this. And this one really hurt. I felt like I’d been punched in the gut when my friend told me: this time it’s a grade school. I stayed off the news sites and, worse, social media, and still cried throughout the day. 20 elementary school children. 20.

And so it was hard to listen to Frank Sinatra as he crooned about making the Yule tide gay. But then he sang, “From now on our troubles will be miles away.” And I realized, oh, he doesn’t believe it either. Nobody would.

As much as the Hallmark Channel might say otherwise, there’s nothing about Christmas that keeps us safe. There’s nothing about it that keeps evil at bay. There’s nothing about it that could keep 20 kids from being shot to death, and hundreds of others shocked, scared, and forever changed.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow realized this during the Civil War. It was during one of the greatest, deadliest, crises of our nation that he wrote what would become my favorite Christmas carol, though we don’t sing most of the verses.

christmas bells tockholes 2009 (Photo credit: jack berry)

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,

and wild and sweet

The words repeat

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom

Had rolled along

The unbroken song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,

A voice, a chime,

A chant sublime

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

In the first three verses he writes the vision of Christmas we celebrate. This is the Christmas day into which Scrooge bursts from his bedroom window and bids the errand boy to buy the biggest Christmas goose for the Cratchets. It’s the Christmas that Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney sing about. It’s the day the Bishop’s wife gets her Christmas wish, Buddy the Elf comes to town, and Virginia believes in Santa Claus.

But it wasn’t the whole story of Christmas in 1863, any more than it is in 2012. He continues, Continue reading →

On Thanksgiving and the Act of Gratitude

I have taken to joking in recent months that given the shape of my life at this particular moment, I’ve lost every right to complain–ever.

And it’s true: I have a great deal to be thankful for. I am in the midst of being a student again, I live in C.S. Lewis’s house, I am working on a second book, and somehow we haven’t managed to drive all of Mere-O’s readers (you) away. And that’s simply the surface. The parts of my life I don’t write about, my marriage and my friendships, make everything else possible. It’s really a wonderful season for me, though unlike other such seasons I feel more humbled and intimidated than I do deserving.

And therein lies a point. Gratitude lies in contingency, in the recognition that the goods we have might not have been. I was recently asked by a friend what single thought they should take away from reading Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, and I answered along these lines. Joy comes conditionally, as the recognition and response to the limits on our lives. But it also comes conditionally in a deeper sense. The contingency of the world is tied to its goodness, and our celebration of joy is inextricable from the wonder that all might have been different than it is:

I have explained that the fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness.

Our non-necessary existence is itself the miracle, a fact that should liven the most troubled heart. We exist. We know of many sorrows and troubles in this world and we cannot escape its pains. But even the most troubled soul and body remains a life within a universe of goods that are so awfully, wonderfully strange. Which is why Chesterton understood the problem of suicide so well: it is not only acting the traitor against the fundamental oath of loyalty to the goodness of life itself, but it is the denial of the universe and scorning of all its goods. ”The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.”

As Christians, we are taught to meditate on our death to remember that all is less permanent than it seems. But such meditation is the furthest thing from a nihilistic annihilationism: it is a joyful affirmation that all we have is a gift. And as Karl Barth has argued, gratitude is the creaturely response to that grace. (And yes, I am pretty sure that this is the only Thanksgiving post that will remind us of our mortality.) For the Christian, the question is not Hamlet’s morose “To be or not to be” but one of joy or more joy, the joy of living now with Christ or the joy of being permanently reunited.

Chesterton notes in Orthodoxy that it is only when we made a holy day for the gods that we found ourselves with a holiday for man. But while the religious dimensions of Thanksgiving are these days somewhat dubious, we might go the other direction and find ourselves this holiday with something a bit more than we bargained for. For the act of gratitude opens the heart to be confronted by grace, as it disposes us to see and attend to the goodness of the world that might otherwise lay forgotten and neglected.

Happy Thanksgiving, then. I hope that your day is a joyous one. We will return with more words on Monday.

The End of our Exploring: Announcing Matt’s new book on Questioning

What does it mean to ask a question?

That’s a funny way of putting it, isn’t it? I mean, it seems perfectly obvious: people want to find something out, so they make an inquiry. What else could a question mean, if it’s more than that?

It’s pretty popular these days to say that Christians ought to ask the Hard. Questions. And for good reason: it’s true. There are challenges that deserve serious attention, questions that we should carefully consider. Faith isn’t the sort of thing that will endure as long as our eyes are closed. The opposite, in fact: faith helps us see, and that means not shrinking from the ambiguities and the difficulties that provoke our most profound questions.

I’m a fan of questioning. In fact, I have been ever since I entered the Torrey Honors Institute, a place where questioning is treasured more than anywhere else I know. My education was built on the notion not only that we need not fear questions, but that by the grace of God we had the safety and security to rush headlong into them and find ourselves better for it on the other side.

The past decade of my life I have, in one form or another, continued that process of inquiry and exploration and discovery. This little corner of the internet has played a key role in that, as my own questions have often played out in various ways through my writings here. I can’t claim to have always had the right sort of disposition about my inquiries. (And all his friends and his spouse said “Amen!”). But I have never once quit caring about the learning, about the growth that is before us and the questions that will lead us into that.

Which is why I want to turn the question in on itself, to step back and examine how questioning fits within the Christian life. It’s not enough to simply announce that Christians should question everything. We have heard that message before, as it has been very ably stated. My concern is that in our embrace of questioning we learn to question well, that even in our uncertainty and our exploration we not give up the task of walking worthy of the calling which Christ has placed upon us.

What does it mean to question well? That’s a good question. I’m working out an answer, over 30,000 words available in the early summer of next year. The whole thing even has a title. The End of our Exploring: Questions, God, and the Confidence of Faith. Which is, frankly, a title that I love.

———

Writing is a dangerous practice. The last time I set out to compose a book, I failed in serious and soul-damaging ways. I became consumed by sales, turned Mere-O into a platform for sinful self-aggrandizement, and reduced readers–you–into conduits for recommendations to friends or links on social media.

Writers are witnesses. Their role must be self-effacing: they point beyond themselves and the words, toward the substance and matter of the subject at hand. The last time my hopes that the book would be welcomed as a Really. Important. Work. actually had the paradoxical effect of undermining my ability to simply say what I saw and to say it with the distinctive voice and witness that I have been given. And that, in turn, had the corollary of commoditizing all my relationships in order to make up the gap. “Error’s endless train,” I think Spencer’s line is. I found myself in it, and the witness is ultimately what suffered.

That’s a lot for a book announcement, but I say it to make a point: my concern this time around is different than the last. In a real sense, I am not worried about this book “starting a conversation” or “making a dent” or whatever other sorts of big-splash type language I used last time around. My goal is to say something true about the subject, and to say that truth with as much beauty and life as my words can convey. And that is enough. All the marketing strategy, all the building of a tribe, all the requests for links on Facebook to drive Amazon rankings and sales—the sort of tactics and techniques that the marketers will swear by but which I place no hope in. Let the work speak for itself and if it cannot move an audience to tell their friends and neighbors, then I can die knowing that in the vocation to which I have been called I have only sought to be faithful. One man plants, another reaps: the same is true of books and the fields they enter as it is of anything else.

I have more thoughts about how our mindset as writers relates to marketing, and maybe we can talk about all that on another day. But let me close with one other thought and then a few requests.

———

I am really humbled to have this opportunity. I can’t tell you how humbled. And excited. This has been a very difficult year for me. I don’t write about my personal life here much at Mere-O, because I am a big fan of maintaining a large domain of privacy so as to avoid making the online world all about me (still, it doesn’t seem to work!). But suffice it to say, deciding where to go to graduate school, uprooting my life, and then trying to pay for it all has posed a number of challenges that at points worn me thin.

But this, well, this has been invigorating at points in ways that I haven’t felt in my writing in quite a long time. I am really humbled to even have the chance to explore the subject. I mean, me! It’s hilarious and awesome, all that same time.

The chance is really due, in fact, to two people in particular. One is Erik Wolgemuth, who for some bizarre reason offered to become my agent. He’s been invaluable, not only in terms of helping me secure the contract for this, but in terms of putting up with my idiosyncratic rantings and encouraging me along the way. I like to joke that I must be the strangest client he has. It sounds narcissistic, but trust me: I’ve got good reasons to believe it.

The second is Randall Payleitner at Moody Publishers. In fact, Team Moody is doing simply fantastic work these days. They’ve published my friends Rhett Smith and Tyler Braun’s books, and they’re about to publish Scott McClellan’s new book on narrative, which I’ve not yet read but looks really sharp. Randall, particularly, had me from the first moment we talked about my proposal. When we got down to business, he said very clearly, “Well, we really hope you publish this book with us. But frankly, I passed it aroud the office and we all decided that it didn’t matter who published the book—we wanted to read it.” I mean, how do you top that as an encouraging word? Frankly, to me, you don’t. It’s humbling to work with folks who like your project as much as you do.

Finally, there’s you, Dear Reader. We’ve had a terrific year, filled with plenty of ranting and raving by me and lots of great stuff by other folks. I am so grateful for all the kindness you’ve shown us, and for the questions you have posed and the conversations you’ve had in the comments. Every time I see people on Twitter rant about how terrible commenters are, I smile because I know that the loyal crew that does show up in the comments happens to be among the most interesting on the internet.

———

Now, for a request. Or rather, three requests.

First, I want to seriously and quite candidly ask for your prayers. And by “ask for your prayers,” I mean ask you to actually and intentionally remember me and your wife when you are talking with Jesus. Especially between now and the end of December, when my first draft is due. My term ends December first and my draft is due two weeks later. Your prayers for the words, for my writing, and for our marriage are precisely the sort of gift that you can give that goes far beyond anything else.

Second, I would ask for your help. Not your help marketing the book, because you’re my “tribe.” No, your help with the book because you want it to be a book befitting of the subject. If you are interested in reading an advance copy and doing some critical feedback sessions on it, leave your name in the comments and I’ll get in touch. I am not sure yet how it’s going to go, or how many I’ll ask. But I am pretty confident that it will require reading the book through the holidays and talking with me in early January (which is a short turnaround).

Finally, you can help in this way: I’m just curious to hear (a) your favorite question from a novel, (b) your favorite question you’ve ever asked, (c) any quotes about questions that have been particularly meaningful to you, or (d) any thoughts about questions that you have. I won’t be able to respond to all of them, but I am thoroughly interested to hear what you’ve read and thought about on this subject before.

These are fun days to be working. Now then, back to the task of learning to question well.

Charmlessness unto Godliness

I have recently found myself immersed in learning a hard lesson, much too slowly.

It seems to have started with a lecture I heard at Wheatstone, in which John Mark Reynolds urged, as a side note to his topic, to “let your enemies just be your enemies.” In less controversial (I think) terms, he was saying that we should not strive to manipulate (an underhanded form of domination, the only form to which I am prone) people into liking us when our tastes, actions, beliefs, or very self would naturally incline them not to. This, to me, was a brand new idea.

Perhaps this is what the Proverbs are telling us in, “Charm is deceitful.”

I have taken it upon myself to make most people in the course of my life like me. I am a close enough observer of human behavior to know how to act around different groups of people, to know how to be with them in a way that will ensure their approval of me. This is certainly a useful skill, but I am realizing it is not always (ever?) good.

I am a long-term relationship person—the youngest of my significant friendships are about 5 years old, the oldest are still happy, active, and intimate after 21 years. Longevity is often a mark of a healthy relationship for me, and, given that I’m introverted and stubbornly unwilling to meet many new people, it’s also a necessity.

My tendency towards long relationships meant that I was a bit late in learning what it felt like to lose a friend. It wasn’t until I was 22 that I first intentionally broke relationship with friends, mutually, and full of strain and enmity. All of the sudden, I knew I had people in my life who really didn’t like me, and, from the reports I was getting back, they were influencing more.

My overwhelming impulse was to try and repair all damage, to make them like me—whether they liked it or not. For other reasons, I was not able to act on this impulse, which saved me from the sin of manipulation, and saved them from my attempts at controlling how they felt about me. It is only now, faced with a more complicated and nuanced relational problem, that I am realizing what it means to let people have the freedom to dislike me as much as they please. It kind of sucks. Continue reading →

Why Holiness? A Conversation with Tyler Braun

Tyler Braun is one of the rising class of younger writers and has taken on one of the more difficult areas one could write about: holiness. It’s a crucial topic and one that does not get nearly enough attention in the midst of all our chatter about Christianity and culture.

Here is my endorsement for the book: At the center of the universe is a God about whom the angels repeatedly cry, “Holy, holy, holy.” Rather than being entranced by holiness, however, many younger Christians have ignored it altogether. Why Holiness Matters is an honest, refreshing, and wise book that avoids stunted visions of holiness while graciously and firmly calling younger Christians to pursue a more Christ-like life. It’s a very helpful and challenging read.

I invited Tyler to Mere-O for a conversation abou the subject. Go get Tyler’s book today as he is giving away a lot of good stuff along with it.

So Tyler, you’ve just written a book on holiness. Which means I’ve gotta ask: feeling any more pressure to be on the up-and-up these days?

Yes, absolutely. In fact, before deciding to write a book, much less a book on holiness, I knew God was going to give me a voice that could either lead toward a positive or a negative end. So last summer before I started writing the manuscript I made changes to my daily schedule to make sure I had rhythms that would influence my living. I spend each morning in Scripture, prayer, silence, and meditation. And most evenings I spend time in prayer reflecting in the past day to consider where I missed out on how God was trying to get my attention.

I didn’t go about trying to change any one or two specific bad habits, but I did want to root my life in practices that would flow into a healthier way of entering into life through Christ, rather than on my own.

I certainly haven’t cornered the market on holy living for Millennials but I did want to have a sense that God was working in my life and I could sense His presence daily. If I wasn’t even interested in pursuing after holy living, then the book should have been written by someone else.

So of all the books to write, then, why on holiness?

I had a conversation with a writer friend of mine almost 18 months ago and she mentioned a concern about my generation’s lack of desire for holiness. To her, the idea of holy living had been completely abandoned. I couldn’t disagree with her because much of my life was more about doing what would satisfy in the moment rather than seeking Christ’s power in my life.

As I thought back to times in my life when I became comfortable with sin, I saw how sin had the power to change my affections away from God toward my latest vice. This allowed me to see that much of my life story could be summarized in a misunderstanding and ignoring of holiness.

I’ve read countless books that dive into a theological and Biblical focus on holiness. But I’ve never read a book where the author shares their own struggles with holiness. As I began to see my life through the lens of holiness (or lack thereof) I knew it went from being a conversation with a friend to a topic I needed to pour myself into. God wants us to be holy. We can’t just ignore it.

You mention your struggles. This is a pretty transparent book, but it opens with a chapter on innocence. What do you think we lose and gain, if anything, by facing the reality of our sin?

A couple things come to mind. First, engaging the reality of our sin has the possibility to bring us to brokenness, confession, and then ultimately to healing. So even though I speak negatively about engaging our sin in the book, there are positive components. I just see it happen this way so rarely.

The problem with this engagement of our sin-filled reality is that sin isn’t neutral. We don’t sin once and in the next moment move past it. Sin wants to take over every part of our lives, slowly. We’re more apt to sin in the next moment rather than being able to overcome it. Sin is so deceptive that it can mask itself as us “engaging the reality” when really we’re just getting sucked in more deeply. I don’t think we just ignore the reality of sin, but we have to recognize that it is a ferocious beast not meant to be dealt with loosely.

You end up writing about art and culture and all sorts of things. How does the thread of holiness lead there?

The discussion on art felt like the logical conclusion for me. Eugene Peterson’s take on Paul’s words in Galatians 6 are etched in my brain: “Each of you must take responsibility for doing the creative best you can with your own life.” The Creator God has given us this creative ability to live out the holiness He is working within us. Not all of us are writers, painters, or musicians, but we each have lives we can create beautiful art through.

I liken this idea to the Eastern Orthodox practice of iconography—the use of paintings as windows to the Kingdom of God during corporate worship. Our lives are meant to be windows to the Kingdom, just as the paintings are representative for Orthodox believers. To me, holiness is not complete unless it extends beyond a private relationship with Christ, into the way we live. We have an opportunity to engage the world around us through the new creation God is bringing to life within us.

Why do you think holiness has been neglected among our peers, and how in calling for more of it can we avoid the hellish trap of moralism?

I imagine many will disagree with me about this, but I believe many younger Christians have neglected holiness because they have not understood it. Whether it be poor teaching or the poor example of those who had influence over us, we’ve come to see holiness as something it is not. Holiness is not a behavior. Rather than trying to pursue this perfect living, we, right or wrong, found it easier to pursue following Christ without having Him be anything more than someone we believe in.

Avoiding the trap of moralism is not easy when it comes to holy living. Once we have found the what holiness means for us we want to fit everyone else in that box. Two things immediately come to find:

1) Fix our eyes on Jesus. If holiness starts in this place of relationship with Christ, this doesn’t mean holiness ends somewhere else. With our eyes on Him we are less likely to start trying to do the right things and more apt to continue giving our affections to the right person.

2) Focus on relationships, not deeds. I find in my own life I want to boil life down to what I have or have not done. And this is a form of moralism, where my life is defined by my deeds. But time and time again I’m reminded that God initiated a relationship with us and made us communal beings. Holy living must reflect this.

On Leaving Home: Vocation, Eternity, and Texas

Three weeks ago, in preparation for my move to Houston, TX, I moved out of my apartment. My beloved apartment. My beautiful, quiet, charming, perfect apartment.

These next two weeks I am saying a lot of goodbyes; goodbyes to people I hoped never to part from (and, in a larger sense, still hope never to part from). I am giving last hugs, parting words, and wondering when we’ll see each other next (At the wedding! Christmas! Next summer! October? Don’t worry, I’ll fly back constantly! Let’s have a reunion!). It’s pretty terrible.

Leaving a dear home for a new and good opportunity is unavoidably bittersweet. I find myself often near tears for the change. Southern California is my home. I was born, raised, and educated within a 100 mile radius off the South Orange County coast. My parents are here, my sisters are here, the dearest friends I’ve ever had are almost entirely here. Even my darn dog is staying here. So why am I leaving?

It is easy for me to convince myself that I shouldn’t go. People matter more than ideas, and my people are here. Family trumps work, and my family is here. True friends come but rarely, and they surround me here. It is difficult to leave a place that has been good to me and my time here has been very good to me. So why do I go?

Well I guess there is only one reason to leave one’s happy home: the hope of Heaven. If this life were all we had then we should spend it enjoying the people closest to us, relishing every second of our time with them, ensuring that our life be happy, safe, and secure for as long as we can make it such. And yet, with the hope of Heaven there is both freedom and responsibility; freedom to know that I will have, quite literally, all the time I need with my family and friends, and the responsibility to know that now might not be the time for it. There is work to be done.

Nothing but the strongest sense of vocational calling could have removed me from my happy cocoon, a cocoon I had spent many years intentionally building up to keep me safe and life pleasant. Moving to Texas to take on my new job is not safe, and not guaranteed to make me happy. In fact I think I can be quite certain that I will not be as happy there for a while. But I go there because I believe that I have work to do and Houston Baptist University is the place for me to do it.

Were it not for an eternity of time to spend with our loved ones than it would be foolish to spend any time working rather than sitting at their feet. But with the hope of the world to come, it becomes clearer that we now live in a world where much needs repair, many need hope, and even more need love. Our time can wait. Our rest and our true community will come. It’s time to get to work. In Texas.

The Trouble with Talking about our “Identity in Christ”

When it comes to explaining the Christian life, these days the premier conceptual tool that evangelicals are deploying is that of “identity.” And in doing so, we’ve turned the affirmation of people’s “identity in Christ” into a cliche, neutering it of its force and stripping “identity” of any meaningful, positive content that people can actually understand and interpret their lives through.

Let me, though, back up a second. For a long time, I’ve been touting the language of people discovering their “identity in Christ.” The wisest, most Godly person in the world I know started drilling it into me some eight years ago, and I haven’t quite recovered from it. I make use of the concept in my chapters on sexuality in Earthen Vessels, in part to try to separate out the ways in which our sexual lives intersect with the reality of Christ’s work. So I think I know whereof I speak here and am as sympathetic as they come.

But these days, our affirmation of people’s “identity in Christ” is more often a sort of negative theologizing, a way of stripping away all the unhealthy and sinful forms of life and practices that are contrary to the plans and purposes of God. Work too much? Thankfully your identity isn’t in your job, but in Christ. Struggling with sexual desires (of any sort)? Well, good thing that your identity isn’t in your sexuality, but in Jesus. Wrestling with some “daddy issues,” or some other family problem? You’ve been rescued out of all that and your identity is in Jesus.

Unfortunately, the positive content of our “identity in Christ” rarely gets filled in much beyond that. Instead, we are left with a void, an empty hole that can neither guide nor instruct us in how we should live in the world. Our “identity” may be “in Christ,” but given that every dimension of our lives has been separated from that identity we are left with no imaginative possibilities for conceiving of what our new lives in Christ might actually look like.

Take, for instance, this interesting post by Jeff Buchanan at The Gospel Coalition:

Understanding our identity in Christ is essential for Christian living. When we were born again, we received a new identity, and we are complete in Christ (Col. 2:10). We will share in Christ’s inheritance, and as we grow in the revelation of our new identity, we will increasingly be enabled to live according to God’s will. If our identity is “in Christ,” can we add to this identity without implying that Christ is somehow deficient?

With every additional label–whether it is occupation, gifts, interests, or sexual orientation—we detract from the complete work of Christ in our lives and splinter our identity into fragments. We become defined by our actions and our desires, which plays into the pragmatic mindset of “I am what I do.” Rather than looking in a mirror that is complete and unbroken where we can see a perfect image, we are content with piecing together a distorted mirror of our own making. In Christ we have an identity far greater than the sound-bite descriptions commonly found on dating services.

I find it surprising that additional labels would “detract from the complete work of Christ.” What if, you know, I am a writer and it’s part of my identity to write? What if I’m not Matt Anderson unless I’ve the room in my life to hammer out words on a keyboard and raise a ruckus like I might do here? God might take it all away and I would still be content, but when we all get to heaven if writing is the sort of thing that I’ve been called to, that it’s somehow tied to who I am in this world, then I might someday make my way to a keyboard.¹ To use a biblical example, St. Paul seemed to call himself an apostle and the New Testament seems fine with that. Is that a “label”? Sure seems like it to me.

English: Jesus Christ – detail from Deesis mosaic, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In short, incorporating my social role, my desires, my actions, my life into my understanding of who I am in Christ doesn’t diminish the work of Christ. It’s for the sake of reforming all of it that Jesus made me his own, and for the sake of jettisoning those parts of my life that are sinful and corrosive to my human flourishing and the flourishing of the community around me. Whether my work can be incorporated as is remains a separate question, though, than whether it is my “identity.” And, dare I say, a considerably more helpful one at that.

Let me try to drive at this from a different angle, by introducing a difficult question: is it the case that Jesus would still be Jesus if he did not do what he did? We know him as the second person of the Trinity precisely because of his death on the cross and his resurrection from the dead: he is more than his history and his words and deeds, but we have no access into his identity or life except through those very same things.

In short, it seems we should get to our “identity in Christ” by a road other than negation. Suppose, for instance, we say something like we are “children of God.” That fills things out quite a bit more, for to be a child is to be something. There’s a social role there that can be filled, a role that imposes duties (play!) and obligations (play nicely!). One of my concerns with the language of identity is that by separating out the reality of our union with Christ from the roles, duties, and obligations that seem to constitute identity-bearing things, we actually create conditions where sanctification and the recognition of our real responsibilities to conform every part of our lives to that of Christ’s is more difficult than it would be otherwise.

How does all this work out with respect to sexuality? Well, there’s a tricky set of questions that we should take up sometime. But in the meantime, let’s reconsider not just the language of “sexual identity” but that of “identity” altogether. Because the help it is providing may be less than we think.

***Before you overreact here, let’s remember that here at this blog we try to think out loud. I’m trying to work my way through the above and would appreciate feedback.

1. This uses the language of vocation, which isn’t exactly the same as the language of “identity.” But there is conceptual overlap, as well. Certainly one of the things we are (or might be) is called to do something in the world, such that our doing something becomes a constitutive part of our identity. [↩]

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