Author: Matthew

Not wanting to stir up the usual debates over the Lord’s Supper, N.T. Wright keeps his comments short in his introductory apologetic. Nevertheless, they are very good. I have to say I feel robbed that nobody told me anything like this growing up. The Lord’s Supper was held in remarkably low regard. It meant almost nothing. Bummer.

Three opening remarks. First, we break bread and drink wine together, telling the story of Jesus and his death, because Jesus knew that this set of actions would explain the meaning of his death in a way that nothing else – no theories, no clever ideas – could ever do. After all, when Jesus died for our sins it wasn’t so he could fill our minds with true ideas, however important they may be, but so he could DO something, namely, rescue us from evil and death.

Second, it isn’t a piece of sympathetic magic, as suspicious Protestants have often worried it might be. This action, like the symbolic actions performed by the ancient prophets, becomes one of the points at which heaven and earth coincide. Paul says that “as often as you eat the bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26). He doesn’t mean that it’s a good opportunity for a sermon. Like a handshake or a kiss, DOING it SAYS it.

Third, therefore, nor is the bread-breaking a mere occasion for remembering something that happened a long time ago, as suspicious Catholics sometimes suppose Protestants believe. When we break the bread and drink the wine, we find ourselves joining the disciples in the Upper Room. We are united with Jesus himself as the prays in Gethsemane and stands before Caiaphas and Pilate. We become one with him as he hangs on the cross and rises from the tomb. Past and present come together. Events from long ago are fused with the meal we are sharing here and now.

-N.T. Wright, Simply Christian, p. 153

Merton has this to say on hoping in God, not man:

We are saved by hope for that which we do not see and we wait for it with patience.

The holy spirit is the one who fills our heart with this hope and this patience. If we did not have him speaking constantly to the depths of our conscience, we could not go on believing in what the world has always held to be mad. The trials that seem to defy our hope and ruin the very foundations of all patience are meant, by the spirit of god, to make our hope more and more perfect, basing it entirely in god, removing every visible support that can be found in this world. For a hope that rests on temporal power or temporal happiness is not theological. It is merely human, and has no supernatural strength to give us.

-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, Ch.9 Sec.16

So for the coming year, 2009, put your hope in God. I’m sure your hope in Wall Street is already dashed, but put away whatever hope you still have in your savings and your job, if you still have one. Put away that hope in Obama. It can’t pan out. If you go to a really cool church, put away your hope in that or in the pastor. Put your hope in the only thing that has a well of supernatural strength. Your creator and redeemer.

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G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is one of those books that is like a bag full of gemstones. At the same time, it leaves you wondering “where was the editor?” One paragraph will have you saying, “incredible!”, and the next, “um, huh? What does that have to do with the topic in this chapter… or with ANYTHING for that matter?” Anyway, I’ve been rereading this one as well. Again, last time I read it was before I was blogging and wrote anything down. I’m finding it difficult to reduce to posts. Some sections of it are superb, but would need to be quoted in several pages of context to really have much potency. Nevertheless, I will try with a few sections.

At the end of his essay on how rationalism drives men insane, he answers with a statement about what keeps men healthy:

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man whas always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot on earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his phsyical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also.

The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. The determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear, and then finds that he cannot say “if you please” to the housemaid. The Christian permits free will to remain a sacred mystery; but because of this his relations with the housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness.

-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ch.2

Listen to what Miller is describing here. If you’ve lived in ANY sort of community (you high school, college, dorm, office, military unit, and of course church).

The real issue in the Christian community was that it was conditional. You were loved, but if you had questions, questions about whether the Bible was true or whether America was a good country or whether last weeks’s sermon was good, you were not so loved. You were loved in word, but there was, without question, a social commodity that was being withheld from you until you shaped up. By toeing the party line you earned social dollars; by being yourself you did not. If you wanted to be valued, you became a clone. These are broad generalizations, and they are unfair, but this is what I was thinking at the time.

The problem with Christian community was that we had ethics, we had rules and laws and principles to judge each other against. There was love in Christian community, but it was conditional love. Sure, we called in unconditional, but it wasn’t.

-Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz, p. 214

We shouldn’t be surprised that this happens. If you’re often on the “reject” side of things, this is all very apparent and painful. But if you’re on the successful side of things – well liked, with social capital – then chances are you’ve done your share of shunning to get there, even if you don’t realize it. You might actually be quite nice, AND in with the right people, but unless you actively are pushing against the sinful nature to do this to each other, then you end up feeding the system. I’ve been on both sides, depending on the context. That this happens in church is offensive to the spirit of love, to the spirit of Christ. Bummer. Push against it.

I few weeks ago I was surfing blogs and Facebook and found that Leithart’s Against Christianity was listed as a favorite book on many profiles. I decided to reread it last week, and it is a winner! Especially the first two chapters. Last time I read it was before I had a blog, so this time I’ll be posting my favorite excepts here for easy recollection.

On theology, Leithart (a theologian), writes:

Theology is the product of [worldly] Christianity and aids in its entrenchment. If theology deals with “timeless truths,” then all the temporal things we encounter in life are outside the range of theology.

But EVERYTHING we encounter in life is temporal. Therefore, all life is outside of theology.

All that remains within the realm of theology are (perhaps) ecstatic and “timeless” encounters of the soul with God, God with the soul. Theology keeps Christian teaching at the margins and ensures that other voices, other languages, other words shape the world of temporalities. Politics is left to politicians, economics to economists, sociology to sociologists, history to historians, and philosophy to madmen.

Theology ensures that Christians have nothing to say about nearly everything.

-Peter Leithart, Against Christianity, Ch.2 Sec. 4

Here, Merton declares again that the follower of Christ CAN be a sort of renaissance man. Both skilled and hardworking at a trade, but also a scholar of the holy word:

The scholar-farmer.
The welder-theologian.
The programmer-pastor.
The accountant-psalmist.
The warrior-poet.

It often happens that an old brother who has spent his life making cheese or baking bread or repairing shoes or driving a team of mules is a greater contemplative and more of a saint than a priest who has absorbed all Scripture and Theology and knows the writings of great saints and mystics and has had more time for meditation and contemplation and prayer.

But, although this may be quite true-and indeed it is so familiar that it has become a cliche-it must not make us forget that learning has an important part to play in the contemplative life. Nor should it make us forget that the work of the intellect, properly carried out, is itself a school of humility. The cliche about the “old brother making cheese” in contrast to the “proud intellectual priest” has often been used as an excuse to condemn and to evade the necessary effort of theological study. It is all very well to have many men in monasteries who are humbly dedicated to manual labor: but if they are also and at the same time learned men and theologians, this very fact may make their humility and their participation in manual work all the more significant.

-Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, Ch. 35 “Renunciation”

N.T. Wright, Peter Leithart, and others have repeatedly made the case that following Christ was never meant to be a personal, private, behind closed doors kind of religion. It didn’t just touch all parts of life and spheres of influence, it engulfs them. It was a threat to Cesar because it refused to acknowledge him as Lord. It declared that Jesus is Lord. Relegating Jesus to the realm of personal faith and morality, ensures that he won’t intrude into the worldy domains of politics, economics, and so on. It stuffs Jesus in the closet right where the world wants him.

How would telling people to be nice to one another get a man crucified? What government would execute Mister Rogers or Captaion Kangaroo? – Philip Yancey

We cannot be satisfied to just hang out with him in the closet.

A would rarely repeat another post in intereity, but I think what Seth Godin is saying here is increasingly very relevant. In our internet information-crazy age, think about this whenever you read any news about anything. Little things get amplified. Things that really are big get lost in the noise. Not keeping this in mind can throw off your internal sense of discernment.

When you notice, it’s news.

I just read a post that said that some musicians were reporting that their perfect pitch (the ability to know exactly what a perfect A sounds like) is fading away. What could be causing this?

I don’t think anything is causing it.

Out of every 10,000 musicians, it’s not hard to imagine that throughout history, a few (2, 5, 10?) have had their pitch fade away. But in the old days, we never heard about it. Word didn’t spread. Perhaps you told your husband or the ensemble, but that was the end of it.

As word (about your product or your brand or your career or anything) is amplified and spread, it bumps into other news and becomes a trend.

This is a subtle but huge change in the way we think about the world. The connection of customers and employees and users and citizens and good guys and bad actors and everyone… it means that the way we see and understand information is changed forever.

I would take two things away from this:

1. Just because you heard about something happening for the first time doesn’t mean it’s the first time. It may just mean that it’s the first time it’s been widely reported. Sort of like what happens after you get a digital thermometer in your house–everyone suddenly gets a fever.

2. Be prepared for everything to be widely reported.

This was posted by Philip Winn at the Boar’s Head Tavern about a year ago. It’s some of the best commentary on submission in marriage I’ve ever read. Marriage is to be modeled on the love of the holy Trinity. But people forget that the trinity is a mystery. How is the love of marriage supposed to be any less mysterious? As he mentions, it’s almost like part of the trick is to not think about it too much. I’m not an egalitarian, but the more we try to define or systematize what submission and headship looks like, the less it actually end up looking trinitarian, which is still mysterious. (emphasis mine below)

Submission post-fall is an interesting thing. Looking at the model of the Trinity tells us a lot of how things are likely to be at the end of time, but doesn’t seem to help much when it comes to the here and now

The thing about the mutual submission of the Trinity is that God is worthy of submission. That is, the Father could elevate Christ because Christ is worthy of elevation, Christ could undergo humiliation to point to the Father because the Father is entirely faithful and trustworthy, and so on. The thing that makes submission difficult in human relationships is that the husband (going with the gender roles at hand) is often completely unworthy of submission in any objective sense.

If I were perfect, I don’t think the question of submission would ever even have come up between us. If my wife were perfect, I’d have no problem submitting to her in everything. The problem is that neither of us are perfect!

I remember seeing this lived out when I was a young lad, and I saw families utterly destroyed by — from my admittedly youthful perspective — this submission issue. Take a couple I knew in which a money-savvy woman was married to a man with zero financial acumen; after being told she needed to submit all things to her husband, including the family budget, she turned it over to him. The same teacher convinced him he had to take care of it himself. The wife wasn’t allowed to pester or nag him, either. I guess the theory was that he would rise to the challenge, especially with the wife’s confident support. That isn’t what happened, of course; their finances were utterly destroyed by the husband’s bumbling, and when she finally resumed management, they both felt that they were somehow failing God. The whole thing seemed bizarre to me at the time, and still does. If she’s better with money, why on earth would he be required to manage the budget? Have these people never read Proverbs 31?

Of course, that’s a problem with application, not theory. But of course that’s the rub. It’s easy to say “submit” in theory, but what do you say to the woman whose husband is a complete loser? Or abusive? I’ve heard people say that submission should be complete and total regardless of the worthiness of the husband, and that bruises and scars and suffering will be somehow credited in heaven. This may be true, but it hardly seems to be what Jesus or Paul had in mind, and I don’t think it is related in any way to what we see in the Trinity.

It’s one thing to say that well, there are problems when the husband is an unbeliever. But we’re all unbelievers! We are all enemies of God, rescued despite ourselves, continually struggling to surrender to God and conform to His ways. The difference between that wife-beating drunk and me is one of degree, not substance. The degree is important (don’t stay with a wife-beater, ladies, please!), but sweeping the issues that are still present in my relationship under the rug isn’t kosher.

For the record, my wife and I have never particularly struggled with this. To external observers, I suppose it looks like she submits to me and I love her, in obedience to scripture. Just between you and me, that really isn’t our intention. I love her and she loves me. I consider her and she considers me. We agree on most things anyway, and the rest can easily go one way or the other on any given issue. She submits to me and I to her, but not because of any gender roles — at least not intentionally — but because the submission is a natural result of our mutual love.

And of course, we’re broken people, so it doesn’t always go so smoothly as I’ve just described.

I have to say that the majority of couples I know that talk about submission as an important biblical principle are semi-psycho. Not all, and not dangerously so (except maybe to their children), but it’s creepy and unhealthy. On the other hand, the majority of couples I know that seem to make life work well don’t ever talk about submission on their own, and when asked will generally say its unimportant.

(This is generally also my experience.)

I have ideas about what Paul is talking about, and why, and I think it all makes good sense, but I don’t think that most people writing about submission on the net are anywhere close to on-target on the issue. Life may work very well for them and their spouses, but it’s impossible to give any advice on the internet without it being taken too far by a large percentage of readers.

On the early group of American’s trying to travel and meet with coffee growers to find good coffee:

Back in 2001, Peter [Guiliano of Counter Culture Coffee], and Geoff [Watts of Intelligentsia], had not idea how all [of their travelling] would develop. In fact, they didn’t know much except that they were deperate to get their hands on great coffee. “We were bewildered by all we had to learn as coffee buyers, and we were making it up as we went along,” remembers Peter. “When you are faking it, you work extra hard. You don’t want to be exposed as a fraud. That drove a lot of us at this time.”

-God in a Cup, p.69

The best people though can make it up as they go along. I’m in a room full of people right now who are faking it, but that’s OK. Eventually they won’t be faking it anymore. This is why learning how to LEARN is worth a lot more than technical training in a specific field. This is why studying classic literature is maybe help you be a good welder more than taking a skills class on welding. The one will give the fish and the other will teach you how to go get your own fish. You have to work hard to fake it, but it’s not being dishonest unless you intend to just sit on your butt. How do you learn anything? By just jumping in and doing it.

I love the story about Walt Disney as a young man. It goes something like this: He was broke and looking for a job. A circus band he knew of needed a trombone player. Walt told asked the leader for the job, without telling him he’d never played a trombone before. After it became clear he didn’t know what he was doing, the band leader asked why he didn’t tell him he’d never played before. He said, “Hey, I didn’t know if I could play it or not. I’d never tried.”