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In this passage Donal Miller explored why he didn’t like church, at least ones he went to for the first few years.

Here are the things I didn’t like about the churches I went to. First: I felt like people were trying to sell me Jesus. I was a salesman for a while, and we were taught that you are supposed to point out all the benefits of a product when you are selling it. That is how I felt about some of the preachers I heard speak. They were always pointing out the benefits of Christian faith. That rubbed me wrong. It’s not that there aren’t benefits, there are, but did they have to talk about spirituality like it’s a vacuum cleaner? I never felt like Jesus was a product. I wanted Him to be a person. Not only that but they were always pointing out how great the specific church was. The bulletin read like a brochure for Amway. They were always saying how life-changing some conference was going to be. Life-changing? What does that mean? It sounded very suspicious. I wish they would just tell it to me straight rather than trying to sell me on everything. I felt like I got bombarded with commercials all week and then went to church and got even more.

And yet another thing about the churches I went to: They seemed to be parrots for the Republican Party. Do we have to tow the party line on every single issue? Are the Republicans that perfect? I just felt like, in order to be a part of the family, I had to think George W. Bush was Jesus. And I didn’t. I didn’t think that Jesus really agreed with a lot of the policies of the Republican Party or for that matter the Democratic Party. I felt like Jesus was a religious figure, not a political figure. I heard my pastor say once, when there were only a few of us standing around, that he hated Bill Clinton. I can understand not liking Clinton’s policies, but I want my spirituality to rid me of hate, not give me reason for it. I couldn’t deal with that. That is one of the main reasons I walked away. I felt like, by going to this particular church, I was a pawn for the Republicans. Meanwhile, the Republicans did not give a crap about the causes of Christ.

-Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz, p.131

It’s pretty much all standard things from the evangelical circus. Nearly all developments within the last 40 years. Is it any wonder there are so many movements against this kind of setup? (House churches, neo-litergical movements, neo-reformation movements, neo-monasticism movements, etc. All over the board too. Young people, old people, intelligensia and non. A lot of people want to follow Christ, but really can’t stand it looking like THAT anymore.

The online arts and culture blog The Rabbit Room has a great interview up with Steve Turner, author of The Gospel According to the Beatles and Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts.

This part sounded familiar:

We have just developed a very narrow idea of what “Christian” is. I saw an entry in a directory for Christian artists where someone had advertised themselves as writing “poetry both Christian and non Christian.” I think he meant poetry that was specifically religious and poetry that was about everday life but he had unconsciously betrayed the fact that, when he wrote asbout ordinary events in his life, he thought of these things as somehow outside his experience as a Christian. As though God is not interested in us walking, eating, fishing, playing ball, shopping, etc.

Where have we heard that? To quote Leithart again:

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

Turner goes on, raggin’ on the monks and the fundamentalists for being like the monks. Actually I think he’s right on in this case:

Hank Rookmaaker the Dutch art historian used to say, “Christ didn’t die in order that we could go to more prayer meetings.” People would gasp at this. Then he would add, “Christ died to make us fully human.” That’s right. He didn’t die to make us religious, but to make us human. In our fallen state, we lack the completeness of our humanity. The monastic tradition makes the mistake of thinking that God is best pleased with us when we cut ourselves off from the world, deny ourselves pleasure, refrain from marriage and devote ourselves totally to religious activities. This almost assumes that God made a mistake in putting us in a world of pleasure, culture, art, nature, work, companionship, etc. Fundamentalists would hate to be compared with medieval monks but, in many ways, they suffer from the same split.

A couple days ago I posted Chesterton’s answers to these questions:

“What are you?” – God knows

“What is the meaning of the Fall of Man?” – That whatever I am, I am not myself.

Along these same lines, Merton describes how God knows our innermost thoughts – not as an outside observer reading our mind like some kind of alien on Star Trek, or as a lover who we confide our secrets to, but from INSIDE, just as we know ourselves, only without the fall limiting that ability.

God knows us from within ourselves, not as objects, not as strangers, not as intimates, but as our own selves. His knowledge of us in the pure light of which our own self-knowledge is only a dim reflection. He knows us in Himself, not merely as images of something outside Him, but as “selves” in which His own self is expressed. he finds Himself more perfectly in us than we find ourselves.

-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, (forgot the reference)

Often it seems skeptics want an answer for why we believe what we believe. And they snort when we aren’t able to give them an 2 to 3 sentence answer right away. Bah! As if complexity or variety somehow made things less true. That if God is real then he must be a simple God. How simple is love? Love for a wife, or for a child? They may be simple in some ways, and very complicated in other ways. That it can’t be explained in one breath in no way means it is weak or unfounded.

If I am asked as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in Christianity, I can only answer, “For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity.” I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case, as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts. The secularist is not to be blamed because his objections to Christianity are miscellaneous and even scrappy; it is precisely such scrappy evidence that does convince the mind. I mean that a man may well be less convinced of a philosophy from four books, than from one book, one battle, one landscape, and on old friend. The very fact that the things are of different kinds increases the importance of the fact that they all point to one conclusion.

Now, the non-Christiaity of the average educated man to-day is almost always, to do him justice, made up of these loose but living experiences. I can only say that my evidences for Christianity are of the same vivid but varied kind as his evidences against it.

-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ch. 9, p. 143

I can hear by wife saying now “Well of course that’s how we come to believe things. That’s just common sense.” Oh, but so easily forgotten I think. I’ve been in many Christian circles where intellectual argument was promoted as the primary tool of evangelism. Beating down the devil’s strongholds in the mind and all that. Now that’s just great but it neglects how people came to their (non) faith in the first place.

Hitting them over the head with good theology and philosophy might make some headway, but that’s like assuming they believe what they do from reading four books, as Chesterton mentions above. But what if their hate of Christianity is a combination of many things (and it almost certainly is). Consider this young man:

1. His father was a “devout” Christian, but also a hypocrite who verbally abused him.

2. In school, he was regularly taught that man is simply a highly evolved animal. The creation myths in the Bible can’t possibly be real.

3. He has been living with their girlfriend for a couple years, likes sleeping with her, has a good job, and things are getting on just fine. Gettin’ religion would just screw that up. Why bother?

4. He had a roommate in college who converted to Christianity. He used to be fun to hang out with, but now he’s kind of a jerk.

Now, if he’s open to a long enough conversation, talking some good foundational ethics might undermine his beliefs in #2 above. But that’s about it. And that’s the bulk of our evangelistic endevour? Sorry try again. No wonder that has almost no effect.

A lot of Christians have realized this, and have tried to come up with something else. Call it “friendship evangelism”. Well, meeting several people who are Christians that are also friendly, intelligent, charitable, and have a good sense of humor could go a long way to undermining problem #4. That’s cool.

You’re still only halfway there at best though. What could you possibly do about #3? Probably nothing. Losing his job or having his girlfriend upset about something would probably be the best thing to shake that up.

And what about #1? He might become a Christian and STILL have trouble with this. Not uncommon, eh?

So why do we believe what we do? Lots of little things. Maybe 100 little things.

C.S. Lewis wrote The Pilgrim’s Regress as an allegory about how he came to faith in Christ. It was only later he realized that almost nobody could relate to his book. It turns out virtually nobody he ever met, even his close intellectual friends like Tolkien, had walked a long philosophical journey resembling what he had experienced. You’re unlikely to find this early work of his on many shelves.

Be yourself!

In Sir Oliver Lodge’s interesting new Catechism, the first two questions were: “What are you?” and “What, then, is the meaning of the Fall of Man?” I remember amusing myself by writing my own answers to the questions; but I soon found that they were very brken and agnostic answers. To the question, “What are you?” I could only ansswer, “God knows.” And to the question, “What is meant by the Fall?” I could answer with complete sincerity, “That whatever I am, I am not myself.” This is the prime paradox of our religion; something that we have never in any full sense known, is not only better than ourselves, but even more natural to us than ourselves.

-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ch. 9

Just got back from watching The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

I cried at the end.

I’ve never thought about death so much as then.

That, and the craft of film making is golden right now.

Chesterton ends his Orthodoxy with a curious thought on Jesus and his personality as portrayed in the Bible. Others have touched upon this before. It warms me to think of it. Perhaps the scriptures could have used a little more of this (read on). I guess he knew what he was doing though.

The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels [Jesus], towers above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up on a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon the earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.

-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ch. 9 (last page)

Everyone is talking about Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers, where, among other things, he declares that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to actually get really good at something. It turns out that “talent” is mostly just the talent to keep practicing when other people get sick of it. He also declares that being born in the right place and time actually ARE really important. Most rags-to-riches stories never happen because they start with, well, rags. The ones that do happen, it turns out they started out with rags + a heck of a lot, though not necessarily money.

In a blog post at Signal vs. Noise talking about cool stuff Gladwell says/does, this was mentioned:

In the interview, Gladwell also mentioned he meets with Nathan Myhrvold once a month to discuss ideas. Myhrvold sounds like quite a character: formerly Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, began college at age 14, worked under Stephen Hawking studying cosmology, is a prize-winning nature and wildlife photographer whose work has appeared in scientific journals like Science and Nature, is a master French chef who works at one of Seattle’s leading French restaurants, and he won the world championship of barbecue. Talk about a renaissance man!

To which a commentor snapped back:

Again, a closer look at the historical context of the New Testament will usually reveal that Christianity was NOT a private religious movement. It was accused from the beginning of being in opposition to the secular rulers and world system (and it is!).

Philippi…[was made a full colony of Rome] – the highest privilege obtainable by a provincial municipality. Since their city had this status, Philippians could purchase property and were exempt from certain taxes. When he was in the city, Paul got a glimpse of the Philippians’ pride in their standing as a Roman colony. Paul and Silas exorcised a girl who was being used as a fortune-teller, and as a result her owners became enraged and brought Paul before the magistrates. Their charges are revealing: Paul and Silas, they said, were “throwing our city into confusion” by encouraging “customs (ethe) which it is not lawful for us to accept or to observe, being Romans” (Acts 17:1-9), the apostles were seen as subversives, both of the POLIS and the empire.

And further on:

Paul’s claim that Christians are citizens of a heavenly politeuma [greek – state/commonwealth of citizens] further indicates that the Philippian Christians are to consider themselves a colony of heaven more than as a colony of Rome. Paul imitated Christ by giving up his privileges as Hebrew of the Hebrews, and he exhorted the Philippians to follow his example by treating their Roman citizenship and attachment to the Roman emperor as “rubbish” for the sake of Christ and His heavenly politeuma.

In short: throughout Philippians, which some identify as one of the least political of Paul’s letters, Paul was treating the Church as an alternative to the politico-religious oranization of the city and of the empire.

-Peter Leithart, Against Christianity, Ch.1 Sec.11

Since this is a scrapbook of sorts, I don’t mind occasionally posting other’s posts/comments in their entirety. If I were to just keep them in my list of bookmarks or on Delicious, chances are I’d never actually see ’em again.

John Halton at the Boar’s Head Tavern posted this excellent insight into why so many Christians are so weird about the bible sometimes. In general this applies more to academic leaning or fundamentalist traditions, but could be any pocket of protestants.

I think the anxieties about “what does it really say?” stem partly from having narrowed the semantic range of the expression “the Word of God” to the point where it refers primarily, or even exclusively, to the printed word of the Bible. This means that the only way to “hear God speak” is through a correct interpretation of the Bible. And if you misinterpret the Bible, you won’t be hearing God speak.

That certainly used to be an anxiety of mine, and led to my despairing at times when hearing sermons that (it seemed to me) misinterpreted the text. God’s voice was being silenced by poor exegesis!

It seems to me that the cure for this is not to seek an authoritative, Magisterial interpretation of the Bible, but to widen our understanding of what “the Word of God” is. In particular, to remember that Jesus did not send his apostles out into the world to exegete the Bible, but to proclaim the forgiveness of sins in his name. To quote what I’ve previously described as the nearest thing I have to a life verse, Jesus’ own summary of what the Bible teaches:

“Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” (Luke 24:46-47)

The church’s proclamation of that message (in word and sacrament) is itself the Word of God to us. (It’s certainly what Luther had in mind when he said, of his own ministry, that “the Word did all”, as he simply sat and drank beer.) And as long as the church is clearly proclaiming that message, it’s not all that important if the preacher occasionally misconstrues a particular passage (though clearly it is better if preachers don’t do so – embracing the AND rather than the OR, and all that).