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I don’t have a proper conversion experience to point to when I reflect on my own history – not the kind to make contemporary revivalist evangelicals happy anyway. I prayed some sort of prayer of repentance and acknowledgement of Christ when I was five years old. I remember praying with my father one evening before bed, but I don’t remember much else. When I was about fourteen and questioning, I remember asking God to give me a sign (I know, I know, this is forbidden, right?) but I immediately looked up and saw three shooting stars in the sky in quick succession. That has always made me smile. I’ve never doubted that was an answer.

There was never a time when I did not have some sort of faith in the Triune God as my creator, and Jesus as redeemer. But the world is a terribly broken and confusing place and for some theology only serves to further muddle it. For me though, and for others who think along these lines, it can serve to console. That is why we study it, even if obliquely.

The right explanation can help heal a mind distressed beyond endurance by events whose significance it cannot grasp.

– Robert Hammilton-Kelly

With this in mind, I might ask, what exposure to theological ideas have been the most profoundly influential to me? I’m 31 now. Perhaps this list will be different when I am 62. I suspect that it will only be longer. I will attempt to enumerate them as an exercise in reflection.

1. I grew up hearing bible stories and sermons told several times a week from infancy. The starting point for all of these was always a piece of scripture. Subjects like “logic” and “rhetoric” were utterly foreign in the schools I attended, both public and private. This was also the case in the schools my own parents attended as well, so such “clear thinking” techniques were only a distant rumor to me. So when, somewhere around the age of 12, I was given C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, it was as if someone shone a 1000 watt spotlight in my face. Here was someone articulating (in ridiculously tight prose) classic Christian reasons for, first just generic theism, and then finally for the special uniqueness of Christ. I know it’s a popular work, but at the time I had never been exposed to something so formal before. As a late adolescent with a thousand voices screaming for my future allegiance, someone giving a calm and steady apologia for why all that stuff I had learned about God was actually pretty legit made a very lasting impression in how I thought about nearly everything afterward.

2. Though I believe I am a Christian because God himself has laid out the way for me to follow and caused my feet to walk in that way, from an outside perspective, I’ve often told people that one of the main reasons I am a follower today can be traced back to a handful of highly influential summer camps. These were the camps up in the woods with chapel twice a day for an entire week with games of capture the flag every night. I was in a room of about 150 kids singing Shine Jesus Shine about a hundred times along with an overhead projector and one college guy with a guitar. Cold showers. Foosball. Making new friends, some of them even girls (which was unprecedented for this awkward teen), and being surrounded by young adults who talked incessantly about Jesus, scripture, and missionary work rather than girlfriends, cars, and the NBA playoffs, was like living on another planet – a better planet. Andrew Jones once asked, “Why does summer camp have to end?” in a post he wrote advocating new monastic communities. Alas, it did have to end, but it was not to be taken lightly and the memory remains.

3. My freshman year of college, I joined a young and energetic congregation. I remember one early weekend, before much homework had been assigned and before I got the memo that I was supposed to actually be at some church work party (sigh), I stole away to a cafe and sat down to read my bible. I ended up reading all of the Gospel of John in one shot. I remember reading all the red letters off the page and my body shaking as with electricity. Never before had the scriptures seemed so alive, it was if they were moments away from biting my fingers. That day it became tremendously obvious to me that there was no person in all human history more important than Jesus Christ – not even close. I haven’t changed my position on that. I don’t think this sort of thing generally happens reading other books. It’s like magic.

4. My second year into college, I was introduced to the work of Larry Crabb through a class offered at church. Digging deeper past the provided materials and handouts, I discovered his rather groundbreaking work of Christian psychology called Inside Out. Though I would recommend that to anyone as a first read, it was actually a later books of his, with the incredibly generic and somewhat misleading title ‘Finding God’ that really had a profound effect on me. Crabb presents a cognitive analysis of desire, frustration, anger, and love that is substantially different from other psychological positions on sin within evangelicism. Though I didn’t know it at the time, his work actually provides a legitimate gospel-infused blueprint for unilateral love. This stuff has, probably more than any teaching or piece of pastoral advice I’ve ever received, helped me to find a way forward when my thoughts have been very, very dark.

5. Several friends I met along the way after college recommended that G.K. Chesteron’s Orthodoxy was worth reading. This is where growing up baptist really has it’s disadvantages – Roman Catholic authors are forbidden and their works absent from libraries, shops, and pastor’s bookshelves. What a shame. I tell people that Orthodoxy is kind of like Mere Christianity on crack. In it, I was first seriously introduced to the idea that the ‘boring’ world we know in our day-to-day lives is actually enchanted and crazier than our Modern minds can imagine. Reading it, especially the second time, made me excited to be alive, excited to be a Christian, and even excited to study theology. Ha! People who have drank the Chesterton kool-aid often get a lot of mileage out it, and for good reason.

5. Robert Capon, Robert Webber and Thomas Merton via Michael Spencer. In a season of life when I felt weighed down by health problems, money problems, multiple screaming babies, and no church congregation as the previous one had been largely emptied of friends and mentors, I turned to the wild and sketchy internet for some answers or at least company. To my delight, what I found was the blog of Michael Spencer, the ‘Internet Monk’, a reluctant baptist minister working his way through many of the same “post-evangelical” theological and ecclesiastical difficulties that I was grappling with. His many writings and podcasts were what kept me hoping and stable through several very difficult years. I speak with no hyperbole when I say that I owe him a great debt both for his work and his friendship, though we only conversed via email on a few occasions. Sadly, Michael died suddenly of cancer three years ago. Along the way he introduced me to the three authors I’ve mentioned above. They formed the basis of much of his approach to spiritual formation, along with the Gospel of Mark.

6. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Rene Girard. Despite my differences with some of the thought of Doug Wilson, I have to give him credit for introducing me to Girard’s work through a series of blog posts years ago. (Ironically, I don’t think Wilson has near as much use for Girard anymore.) On a whim I decided to dive in and read Girard’s key work from the late 197os – Things Hidden. What I found was a crazy theory about human culture. The thing is, once you get used to it, you start to see it everywhere. Everyone thinks their philosophy explains stuff the best, but it turns out that 9 times out of 10, Girard’s theory does a better job of accounting for the mystery of war, hate, desire, religion, and, well, you name it. And at the very center of his work, is Jesus. He is the corner stone, the stumbling block that the whole human race trips over and falls upside-down into the future. Alright, so that’s nice, it tickled my brain, but has it changed my life? I think so. It’s given me peace in a post-9/11 world where confrontation with Islam sometimes seems like a terrifying possibility. It has helped me to both dismiss politicians and world leaders and also forgive them. It’s significantly helped me to not get tripped up on the issue of theodicy (why does God allow evil to happen?) and therefore to deepen my trust in Him. It’s helped me to not worry about the future and to more easily ignore naysayers. So God bless Girard and his helpful disciples such as Gil Baile, James Alison, and Jean-Michel Oughourlian. I little bit of right explanation goes a long way toward healing.

7. Two years ago, I visited Ethiopia for a week while in the process of adopting my forth child. Prior to that, I had never even been outside of North America. I heard stories told of Africa my enter life, but nothing could really prepare me for the actual experience. To recount them would probably sound cliche. I’ve written about them plenty elsewhere on this blog. Things have never really been the same since I came home. I feel a connection to the people I met as my brothers and sisters, more than I sometimes feel to my own neighbors. It seems more like home than my own pacific northwest U.S. where nearly nobody fears God. Their poverty is not as deep as ours. Many people report similar experience on short-term mission trips and whatnot. I used to poo-poo them. It’s actually really popular to deride these experiences lately, and the kind of criticism presented in books like When Helping Hurts should be seriously considered. Still, I have to say that visiting Africa is impossible to forget. I may not get to go back, but I would really like to.

8. What’s next? My children are growing up. My wife and I are growing older. Those things mean more than anything I’ve mentioned above, but they are highly personal. I can’t share those things much with you, the reader. I’ve only given you an account of the lesser, potentially transferable things. God uses things like this to ‘convert’ us to slightly different people, whether we are able to articulate what happened or not. I suspect I left out at least twice as many formative events as I have listed. No matter. What does the future hold? More challenges and more surprises – wonderful and terrible. My trust resides in the same one as before.

Theologian and Anglican priest Robert Capon passed away today. His writing has had a substantial influence on me and on Michael Spencer, who first got me into blogging. I’ve quoted him many times here. Oddly enough, one of his best-known works is a quirky cookbook called The Supper of the Lamb. It is probably more widely read than the work he considered his most important, an odd piece titled Between Noon and Three. May he rest in peace and I hope to meet him and chat when we both wake in the end.

I’m going to repost a couple of my very favorite Capon quotes below in his honor.

I’ll start with what is probably the best reflection on parenting ever:

I find that my fine generalities have dashed themselves to pieces against the six very concrete children that I have. I live surrounded by a mixture of violence and loveliness, of music and insensitivity. I take my meals with clods and poets, but I am seldom certain which is which. Nowhere is my life less reducible to logic than in my children; nowhere are my elegant attempts at system ground more violently to powder than under the stumbling stone of the next generation. Far from having advice to give you, I am dumbfounded by them and admit it. And yet I rejoice too, for nowhere is there so much to keep me sane. I apologize in advance but I know only one word to describe it: It is absurd.

-from Bed and Board

Then there is this wonderful passage on the nature of grace:

Grace is wildly irreligious stuff.  It’s more than enough to get God kicked out of the God union that the theologians have formed to keep him on his divine toes so he won’t let the riffraff off scot-free. Sensible people, of course, should need only about thirty seconds of careful thought to realize that getting off scot-free is the only way any of us is going to get off at all. But if all we can think of is God as the Eternal Bookkeeper putting down black marks against sinners–or God as the Celestial Mother-in-Law giving a crystal vase as a present and then inspecting it for chips every time she comes for a visit…well, any serious doctrine of grace is going to scare the rockers right off our little theological hobbyhorses.

-The Romance of the Word, p.11

A proper take on the value of theology:

Theology – an enterprise that, despite the oftentimes homicidal urgency Christians attach to it, has yet to save anybody. What saves us is Jesus, and the way we lay hold of that salvation is by faith. And faith is something that throughout this book, I shall resolutely refuse to let mean anything other than trusting Jesus.

-from Kingdom, Grace, Judgment

And finally this oft-quoted passage on the nature of Christ’s work:

“Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; He did not come to improve the improvable; He did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things works.”

Here, from Desiring the Kingdom, James K.A. Smith describes the social implications of the gospel and the kingdom that Christ inaugurated

Through baptism, God constitutes a peculiar people that makes up a new polis, a new religion-political reality (a “baptismal city”) that is marked by the obliteration of social class and aristocracies of blood. It is a motley crew: “Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth” (1 Cor. 1:26). But that is the mark of the city of God, God’s upside-down kingdom: “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are” (1 Cor. 1:27-28). The citizens of the baptismal city are not just have-nots; they’re also “are-nots”! And yet they are chosen and commissioned as God’s image bearers, God’s prince(sse)s and priests empowered to be witness of a coming kingdom and charged with the renewal of the world. (p.184)

A motley crew indeed is the church! The gospel undermines the stratification of humanity into classes (rich/poor, slave/free, noble/common, etc.) far more so than anything else ever has or could. Institutions of democracy, for all the good they can facilitate toward this just end, cannot forgive sins or change hearts. Ultimately, voting and other forms of theoretically equal representation or governance will always end up being more or less rigged by whoever has the money, the media, and the guns. To the degree that the community of little Christs behaves in the same strophic way, it is worldly – an earthly kingdom dressed up in platitudes. But not so with you He says.

Don’t be afraid of a magic world. God made it. He set it up that way.

Christian “materialism” (i.e., sacramentality) sometimes feels as if it teeters on the brink of paganism and superstition – because it sees the world as charged with the glory and grandeur of God.
-James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, p.32

“Charged with the glory and the grandeur of God”. That’s what the world is. It’s downright enchanted. Read Chesterton’s Orthodoxy if you don’t believe me. Contra this is the belief held by some Christians (Reformed Baptists in particular, but they are not alone) that absolutely NOTHING magic is EVER going on NOWHERE, NO-HOW. Baptism is just an outward physical action of something going on in your brain. The bread and the wine at the Lord’s table are just there to help us remember (with our heads) something important. Charismatic continuationists are crackers 100% of the time, no exceptions. Mystical union? Bunchacrap. Everything with real power happens in the space between your ears. The power of the universally creative incarnate God becomes “the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ”. Icons are forbidden – how dare you insinuate there could be anything remotely special about a picture? That’s just idolatry pure and simple, right? Wine and beer are forbidden – they seem just a bit too magical in what they do to your head so they are definitely out, along with mushrooms and cocaine and anything else that might confuse us. The only icon allowed is the Word, which still retains a sort of incantational spell power, at least in the King James Version. God is the only source of wonder and he was in the distant past and in the (hopefully near) future. Right now, in the present, we must be utterly Modern and affirm a disenchanted, sterile, decaying world.

Ugg. No thanks. I’ll take the enchanted reality that Triune God made any old day, even when it sometimes makes absolutely no sense.

So near and yet still so far, far away
So close, and yet still to come
Concealed, the seed is mysteriously growing
In hearts that will listen and hear
A treasure that’s hidden, a pearl of great price
A fortune for fools who believe

A kingdom of beauty, a kingdom of love
A kingdom of justice of justice and peace
A kingdom that holds all the wilds of creation
A kingdom where children will lead

-Michael Card, The Kingdom

 

Today at lunch I paged through an anthology of Seamus Heaney’s works from the university library. This is part of one of the best poems I came across called ‘From the Canton of Expectation’. I love the imagery of the children discarding their history for the modern fast life, only to wish or hope for it back. I am, and have been, all the people in this story at one moment or another.

—–

Books open in the newly wired kitchens.
Young heads that might have dozed a life away
against the flanks of milking cows were busy
paving and pencilling their first causeways
across the prescribed texts. The paving stones
of quadrangles came next and a grammar
of imperatives, the new age of demands.
They would banish the conditional for ever,
this generation born impervious to
the triumph in our cries of de profundis.
Our faith in winning by enduring most
they made anathema, intelligences
brightened and unmannerly as crowbars.

I yearn for hammerblows on clinkered planks,
the uncompromised report of driven thole-pins,
to know there is one among us who never swerved
from all his instincts told him was right action
who stood his ground in the indicative,
whose boat will lift when the cloudburst happens.

 

The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney passed away yesterday. I like this poem of his where he compares working with a pen to working with a shovel. The idea is, I think, the same as what I’ve discussed in other posts such a The Joy(?) of Intangible Work, here, here, and here.

——

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

In the past couple of decades, it’s been common to hear the phrase “God-shaped hole” used to refer to our deep-seated need to be in some kind of communion with our creator, or at the very least, to “rest” in some sort of minimal knowledge or assurance of the divine. Even those who do not fear God acknowledges this hole as a natural psychological need of human-kind.

The phrase has been around for a long time, though it was more often referred to as the God-shaped void in previous centuries. Pascal called it a God-shaped vacuum and located the empty space in our “hearts”, which is more accurate than locating it in our heads. The idea goes all the way back to Augustine though and he uses the word “know” to describe what we do with God. We know him. But again, here we are subject to our contemporary vernacular where “knowing” something mostly takes place in your brain. This notion should not be so fully read back into history. When we know God, the desires of our heart change more than the articulated propositions of our mind. The first is better evidence of His presence than a wealth of the second.

As Augustine put it, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” This is not a matter of intellect; Augustine doesn’t focus on the fact that we don’t “know” God. The problem here isn’t ignorance or skepticism. At issue is a kind of in-the-bones angst and restlessness that finds its resolution in “rest” – when our precognitive desire settles, finally, on its proper end (the end for which it was made), rather than being constantly frustrated by objects of desire that don’t return our love (idols).

-James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, p.77

Incidentally, “Being constantly frustrated by objects of desire that don’t return out love” is probably the best definition of “idol worship” I’ve ever heard.

There is a pervasive modern idea that if you can dissect someone’s history and trace how they learned something or how they came to hold to a certain idea, then you have effectively “explained away” the legitimacy of their beliefs. “Oh, you only believe that because ______” is the standard form of this cynical line of reasoning that seeks to debunk.

You see this all the time. “I believe God speaks to me through the bible.” “No, you just think that because you spent several thousand hours in church as a child with people hammering that into your head. How could you think anything else?” This ignores any sort of personal experience the person may have had actually reading the bible. Perhaps they are careful thinkers that came to this conclusion through years of careful study and observation of the world around them. But those sorts of “legitimate” reasons are ignored if a particular history or list of mundane formative events can be produced.

Say you encounter a young scholar who is enthusiastic about post-modern deconstructionism. (I have some artist friends who seem to hang out in this head-space.) “But did you really take in everything and come to this conclusion?” I could ask them. “Or do you just think that because all your professors in college spent years assigning you to read Derrida and then analyze James Joyce? How much time did you spend studying the Aeneid or The Faerie Queen? Yeah. That’s what I thought.” See what I just did there? I’ve dismissed their thinking because I was able to explain HOW they got there. If it’s all about the journey, then reverse engineering the journey just proves you have the epistemology of a raft tossed on the waves.

In contemporary evangelicism, I think we see a funny guarding against this sort of criticism. This protective stance manifests itself as a preference for the spontaneous and a shunning of what can be traced. Prayer’s composed on the spot without forethought are thought to be more “authentic”, or “powerful” than prayers more slowly composed the previous day or especially than old written prayers. In the same way, a conversion to Christ that involves Jesus appearing to you in a dream or speaking to you in the depths of your suicidal despair are highly valued. Coming to faith through the slow steady teaching of your parents is sometimes even disregarded until “proven” by a more individual and personal spiritual experience at a fixed point in time. Baptism as an infant is especially suspicious. If it can be traced, then it might be a “dead” work of man. If it CAN’T be traced, then it must be the invisible work of the holy spirit. The assumption is that when God really moves, He covers his tracks.

Other Christian traditions have instead chosen to embrace this modern dissection technique and apply it enthusiastically to their own beliefs so they may hold up to this kind of scrutiny. WHY do we believe this? HOW did we come to believe this good thing? Let’s give lots of bullet points outlining it’s historical development. Jesus died on the cross as a substitution for our punishment. Why? Well because Paul, and Augustine, and Anselm, and Luther, and so forth. Why do we sing this song? Well because the text comes from Psalm 1 and then the music was written by J.S. Bach (better than anyone since), and finally because the bass line is easy to sing.

The trouble with the first reaction is that it dismisses our history, forgets our ancestors, and pretends that we are isolated individuals. I’ve listened to, quite possibly, hundreds of sermons in baptist churches where substitutionary atonement was taught, but only quotes from Paul were ever used. It’s as if Christian thinkers and leaders from 100 AD until the last decade have had their name redacted from the record. Their influence and legacy is very palpably there, but their names have been crossed out with a sharpie and the bibliography erased. Folks, that is NOT what sola scriptura is about. If we desire to be a community reconciled with our parents and grandparents then we need to acknowledge how their lives and work formed us today – going all the way back.

The trouble with the second reaction is it concedes to play the modernist’s post-enlightenment game. It provides no room for the ineffable mystery of God, and no affirmation of Him personally, mystically, meeting with us. “Oh, but we have made room for divine mystery in our tracing!” Oh, sure you have, but the problem is there will always be someone quite willing to dissect things further than you wish to break them down. There will always be someone touting the latest neuro-prefixed research to chalk up your ideas about God as mere brain waves. Someone will always be there to break humanity down to a subset of mammalia. Some in your own family may find they can’t sleep at night until they’ve broken an idea like ecclesiastical authority or predestination down to individual grains of silt. But the love of God is not well represented by sand castles.

If your car is sputtering, tearing the engine apart and cleaning the valves and pistons can be very healthy for it. A deeper understanding leads to real benefits. But taking the engine block and melting it down to see what percentage of the metal is iron, chromium, and carbon does NOT help your car run better. You’ve taken things apart too far. Never opening the hood is stupid, but you can insist on being stupid in the other direction as well.

Spelunking your memories and history to unearth your “reasons why” can be immensely valuable. But it will always have its limits. The Holy Spirit of God works now, in your heart this moment. Seeing how he blew in the past and how those before you swayed can never negate him pricking your conscience five minutes ago or whispering impossible hope to you last night. “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” (Hebrews 3:7-8)

Where am I going with all of this? In a 2011 symposium headed up by James K.A. Smith, Randall Holm presented a paper titled Tongues as a Blush in the Presence of God exploring, as a scholar and third-generation Pentecostal, the nature of speaking in tongues. The piece is really interesting and draws on the work of Martin Buber and Abraham Heschel to expand the possibilities for what is going on when we pray to God in an unknown language. I am not going to look at most of the piece here, but rather just deal with one point mentioned in passing.

It was not long before my own intellectual curiosity and the realities of pastoral ministry combined to raise some questions for which my previous college education offered little help. I spoke in tongues; now what? Or in my darker moments, I spoke in tongues; so what? And in my quiet moments, I wondered what all good Pentecostals wonder at one time or another: whether tongues-speech could simply be learned behavior. Are the sounds emitted divinely imparted by God, or are they better classified as learned behavior? To be sure, if asked by the uninformed, I knew the answer to these questions, but I was a long way from being satisfied with my own response.

Is glossolalic speech a gift of divine origin…or is glossolalic speech a tonal human expression of “sighs to deep for words”? Or is the distinction artificial? … [If] the content of tongues-speech is ‘basically irrelevant’, that raises the inevitable question, could not the effect of tongues-speech be the same through mimicry or divine impartation?

And the key idea comes in the footnote:

Or to rhetorically frame the question in another way, ‘Are children two years of age aware that they are learning a language through mimicry?’ If they understood this process of language acquisition, would it make any difference in achieving their results? Would they think any less of their acquired speaking skills?

Critics of speaking in tongues in prayer to God will often undermine it using the tools I discussed earlier. It can be argued that it isn’t hard to learn to speak nonsense syllables by imitating those around you. When someone prayed with you to “receive the baptism of the holy spirit”, that’s what they did and you followed suit. It’s not unlike memorizing the Lord’s Prayer. That’s how you “learned” to speak in tongues, and you continue to adjust the practice within your church community where it is practiced openly. A older friend of mine once commented that in the 1980s someone would often work a “rondo shondo!” into their glossolalia at bible studies but apparently that phrase has fallen out of use as of late. Cessastionists roll their eyes at such commentary. If tongues is a spontaneous action of the Holy Spirit (as it is typically claimed), then any self-realization that the practice was learned by mimicry should completely rule out it’s legitimacy.

But look what has just happened here. The dissector is demanding that something be impossible to dissect for it to be valid. Suddenly he is the one calling for pure ineffable spontaneity. “If the Holy Spirit is going to have someone saying something crazy, then He had better not leave any tracks. If I can trace what’s going on then it must be fake!” Things are flipped around. They suddenly sound like godless scientists demanding miracles. Do we really want to be so quick to throw our lot in with them?

Think about Holm’s footnote example again. Would a child of two learning to speak think any less of the new words they learned each day if they were abstractly aware of how they were being taught them? For a long time, they literally do not know what they are saying. We think that if we pray Psalm 73, we know what we are saying and if we pray in tongues then we do NOT know what we are saying. But what if we don’t really know what we are saying in either case? God is our Father and we are his children. I think it’s clear from our history that we are often very LITTLE children. The apostles were with Jesus first-hand. The fire dropped in their laps. But their teaching to us is not diminished by the distance in time and space. We don’t need the message to drop in our laps fully-formed for it to “count”.

I love written prayers – both writing my own and praying through ones written by others. I also pray in tongues. Sometimes it’s the only thing I can do. In reflecting on my own formation, I think I can say with certainty that I was taught to pray in tongues a particular way. Sometimes I find myself following that pattern and sometimes I am surprised by the different directions it takes. I observed the same when I would attend charismatic prayer gatherings. Friends would often repeat similar phrases every time, but occasionally they would sound dramatically different and unique. Was that the Holy Spirit saying something there for a moment? I’d like to think so.

I think it’s time that all Christians embrace and acknowledge their history. Don’t just quote Paul and act like you came up with everything else yourself. At the same time, don’t quote the early fathers and act like nothing has happened since. Quote Augustine and Lewis, and maybe your own mother too. Don’t write a “statement of faith” for your new church plant using a blank sheet of paper. Start with the Nicene Creed at least and don’t be shy.

Along with this, I think that the sooner charismatics admit that prayer in tongues as it is typically practiced is a “learned behavior”, the better. Be honest. Sometimes your ecstatic utterances are just going through the motions. It’s OK! Sometimes the high liturgists are (as you suspect) just going through motions too. But you know what? That’s a good start. That’s a good start to every day. You’re moving. I believe God does something with people who are moving. Waiting for lighting to strike is for fools. Embrace the trace. You don’t have to be afraid when the dissectors come along. You can acknowledge how you were discipled and still embrace the mystery of God.

Here in the footnotes of James K.A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom, we find an unexpected apologetic for “Jesus is my Boyfriend” worship music.

I think a philosophical anthropology centered around affectivity, love, or desire might also be an occasion to somewhat reevaluate our criticisms of “mushy” worship choruses that seem to confuse God with our boyfriend. While we might be rightly critical of the self-centered grammar of such choruses (which, when parsed, often turn out to be more about “me” than God, and “I” more than us), I don’t think we should so quickly write off their “romantic” or even “erotic” elements (the Song of Songs comes to mind in this context). This, too, is testimony to why and how so many are deeply moved in worship by such singing. While this can slide into an emotionalism and a certain kind of domestication of God’s transcendence, their remains a kernel of “fittingness” about such worship.

That is to say, there is a sense in which the closeness God has to us, the desire we have to be close to him is sometimes more analogous to that of a lover, instead of the (admittedly more frequent) images of God as king or father. As God clearly relates to us this way sometimes (with plenty of examples in scripture) it is indeed “fitting” to write worship prayers or songs in this vein.

While opening such doors is dangerous, I’m not sure that the primary goal of worship or discipleship is safety….this thin fulcrum that tips from sexual desire to desire to God – that on the cusp of this teetering, “dangerous” fulcrum, one is closets to God. The quasi-rationalism that sneers at such erotic elements in worship and is concerned to keep worship “safe” from such threats is the same rationalism that has consistently marginalized the religious experience of women – and women mystics in particular.

-p.79

I have come to really like that Jamie Smith is not quick to dismiss Christians outside his tradition. He may in the end, dismiss some of them, but he doesn’t ever fast track it. Mystic women? Legitimate until proven otherwise. Charismatics? My peeps! Reformed eggheads who write unbelievably long books? Just keep doin’ your thing. “Rationalism that sneers at ______” is what we should be suspicious of.

It seems to me that a common theme of church renewal movements is to make worship a bit more “dangerous” as Smith describes above. Luther used secular melodies to encourage congregational participation contra a “sacred” tradition that had become too walled off from the people. I have a lot of Reformed friends who get excited about making worship “dangerous” by singing every psalm verbatim – including all the violent and vengeful imagery. They are pushing against the decay by bringing the full force of God’s wrath back into view in our music. It’s there in the bible so should not be ignored. But their way of being “dangerous” is within certain well-defined limits. God may be bloody, but he definitely isn’t sexy. Except that sometimes he is. Wait.

I have to admit I am not a fan of much “Jesus is my Boyfriend” worship choruses. I remember a church service in college where I had to excuse myself from singing “My Jesus, Dreammaker”. (No, I am not making this up, and no I am not going to look up who wrote that song. I don’t care.) But other times, I have been deeply affected by this sort of worship. Some of the more “intimate” songs by Darrel Evens (who seems to have dropped off the map in the last 10 years) come to mind.

I think what makes these sorts of songs either powerful or a giant train-wreck is the context. When they are led by young and buoyant (and perhaps not entirely modest) 22-year-olds in the spotlight, the lines get too blurry with regards to their meaning regardless of how well you KNOW what the words are supposed to be about. This setting would ruin St. John of the Cross too, even though there is not a thing wrong with his beautiful writing. In the same way, when the psalms about God destroying his enemies are set to a march and sung by soldiers carrying actual guns – then it’s impossible for “vengeance is mine saith the Lord” to NOT get buried. (See some Civil War-era hymns for examples.)

I think if we are going to be truely “dangerous” in our worship, and truly scriptural, we need to find a place for this stuff – at least some of it. Being safe is too easy, and incomplete.

In John 14:27, Jesus says to his followers,

“Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

The World DOES give peace. So does Jesus. But the peace that Jesus gives is not like the peace that the world gives. What is the nature of the peace the world gives?

To the people listening to Jesus saying this, the first “peace” they would have thought of would have been the Pax Romana – the Roman peace. The empire would protect you from barbarians and also keep order with a beefy police force. The catch is, you just had to do exactly what the emperor said and keep your head down in submission. It was an enforced peace. Fascism and Marxism offer a similarly enforced peace. The room is quiet because everyone had better keep their mouths shut or else!

In a more fundamental way though, Girard explains that the world does indeed have a peace to give its people. It is the Satanic peace derived from scapegoating. How does the world keep calm and carry on? By taking out it’s frustrations on an innocent sacrificial victim. One person gets to take all the blame and die so that neighbors no longer fight with each other, at least for a season. The peace the world gives is an endless dose of blame-shifting. Lost your job? Blame the President (Bush or Obama, it doesn’t really matter). Trashy culture corrupting your daughter? Blame Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Such easy targets! Unrest and war? Blame Muslims. Live in Egypt and the latest coup didn’t go your way? Blame Christians – just ’cause.

Christ does two things that are totally different. He takes all this on himself. He lets himself become the scapegoat and take all the sin away. But then, BOOM, he comes back for good to dwell among us. He not only stands in heaven as our advocate, contra the accuser, but also dwells with us as a new model for peace. In this model, we don’t blame others, but confess our own sins, BUT then they get forgiven – first by our gracious heavenly father who can’t stop loving us, and secondly, to an imperfect degree, by our family, friends, and neighbors as the Holy Spirit works in their hearts as well. When you admit your own failure, the devil smells blood and will stir up a crowd to stone you, perhaps from within your own family. But in the Kingdom inaugurated by Jesus Christ, when you admit your own failure, you lay down and die – the perfect prerequisite to be raised to life.