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Jenkin’s brings up an interesting point that I wasn’t aware of. I’d always had the impression that modern liberalism was a 20th century invention, contra Machen, contra pre-war conservatism. Driven largely by evolutionary biology, it came to dominate political discourse and undermine the “mainline” churches in the 1960s. It turns out though, that all of this stuff had arisen 100 years before… and been subsequently smacked back into oblivion. Secularists today honestly think the church is on the brink of becoming completely insignificant. But they thought that last time too, and the time before that. Yawn.

The rationalism prevailing in many Protestant churches was overwhelmed by a new evangelical revivalism, which received an enormous boost from the revivals that began in 1798. Far from dominating the American scene, Unitarian-Universalists today comprise around 0.2 percent of the U.S. population. So thoroughly was eighteenth-century liberalism obliterated that many modern writers tend to assume that its ideas were invented anew by Victorian skeptics and rationalists, or perhaps grew out of the controversies over Darwinian evolution. Then as now, the triumph of secular liberalism proved to be anything but inevitable.
-Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom, p.11

A while ago, I sat down and tried to come up with a theology of sin that would jive with the work of Rene Girard. I failed, but came up with a few decent questions along the way. This was my unedited stream of thought.

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I think, if you want to have a very robust Girardian anything, you are going to need a Girardian conception/definition of sin. What then is lust? Some sort of accelerated envy? Sexual lust is a perfect example and we might as well deal with it head-on.

The common, popular view of sexual desire is that it is something with its origin inside, solely inside the lusting ones body and mind and it projects outward and desires to possess outside things, objectify women to satisfy this internal fire. But if Girard is right about anything, then we must be imitating an outside model first. I think its really easy to fit this with beauty and aesthetics. Outside things shape and mold the desire into a particular image, but I do not believe they are the ROOT cause. I also reject raw biological need, though it clearly plays a part. It is likely the most truly “independent” force in the mix. Where though, does the chief mimetic source lie? What exactly are we imitating and who is it?

The who must be God and the what must be creating in our own image. The greatest of all God’s acts at the beginning, the most desirable thing and the most desirable thing for Satan to twist, was creating man. When we procreate, we bask in it’s glow. We feel for a moment like God, back on the virgin earth, shaping the soil into someone like… himself. We cannot downplay the existential power of the false substitute of sexual lust.

How does Christ free us from this? A new creative model? No envy? Huh?

No, this doesn’t work at all. For what is more distant from a man’s mind than children when his eyes are full of flesh clicking through porn? It much more closely resembles a heroin addict shooting up. Is there a deeper anthropological explanation to this? The chemical neuroscientists appear to have it nailed down. It seems that I must take a different approach. What the hell is the man desiring when he is in the throws of lust? Where did he pick it up? Why does it run so deep?

In contemplating this for some time over a drink, I am no further along. I think that many men do not ever venture past this point. The artist writes a song which is probably far more appropriate. The rest? They must dismiss it as unsolvable, or assign it to the bin marked “mysteries”. I suspect that even bookish Presbyterians do this, all the rest of their puritan talk notwithstanding. Can Girard contain the propellent to catapult one beyond into the “mysterious distance between a man and a woman” (to quote U2 again)? Lust proper has no procreative end. There seems to be no long-term in mind, except perhaps long term possession – a prolonging.

The traditional, non-Girardian view seems to ring true. The desire is born from this animal, testosterone-driven instinct and then we imitate others in how we aim to satisfy it specifically. In our youth we discover and experiment with what arouses us and we eventually pursue it within the bounds of our conscience and social constraints.  As (and this is important) we pursue many OTHER things as well. We have a lot of irons in the fire with regards to our self-fulfillment and meaning-derivation agenda.

It must begin with Eve. Even before the serpent arrived Adam slept with Eve. Why? Perhaps he longed to get back to himself? He was split. But their fusion is sloppy and prevented by – you name it. More than their own sin. This is why there will be no marriage in heaven (according to Jesus). Even that can not be “fixed” by the removal of selfishness and death. For a better unity it must be torn down utterly and made new. It’s original purpose was not it’s original purpose. Behold the Lord will make all things new – but not this. In place of this He will make a new thing – at the dawn of a new humanity. OR will He LEAVE it in place, just to make heaven a more interesting place? Lord knows there must be more action there than the typical water colourist give it! Reconsidering, I think it must be the formal institute of marriage that gets the axe, not all gender distinction. Then again, why was Adam split in the first place? He was too alone? This sort of thinking gets dicey pretty fast.

“Help the starving children in Africa” has become a cliche fundraising phrase. It seems to get tossed around by charities even when their goals are only distantly related to doing just that. In the same way, conservatives and liberals, Christians and secularists have tried to leverage the 3rd world in their rhetoric – to tell a certain kind of story.

Over the past half-century or so, whenever global South Christianity has gained attention in North America or Europe, it has been through the form of what might be termed two dreams, two competing visions, each trying to deploy that new religious movement for its own purposes. For the Left, attracted by visions of liberation, the rise of the South suggests that Northern Christians must commit themselves to social and political activism at home, to ensuring economic justice and combating racism, to promoting cultural diversity. Conservatives, in contrast, emphasize the moral and sexual conservatism of the emerging [3rd world] churches, and seek to enlist them as natural allies. From their point of view, growing churches are those that stand farthest from Western liberal orthodoxies, and we should learn from their success. A liberation Dream confronts a Conservative Dream. For both sides, though, the new South is useful, politically and rhetorically.

Both expectations, liberal and conservative, are wrong, or at least, fail to see the whole picture. Each in its different way expects the Southern churches to reproduce Western obsessions and approaches, rather than evolving their own distinctive solutions to their own particular problems. One difficulty is deciding just what that vast and multifaceted entity described as the Third World, or the Two-Thirds World, actually does want or believe. The South is massively diverse, and conservatism and liberalism are defined quite differently from the customary usages of North American or European churches. Conservative theological or moral stances often accompany quite progressive or radical economic views. As Southern churches grow and mature, they will increasingly define their own interests in ways that have little to do with the preferences and parties of Americans and Europeans.

-Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom, p.16

This all rings true, having observed exactly what Jenkins is talking about, from both side, very often. In reality though, these African’s and other third world Christians have their own ideas about how to do things.

There is a considerable group of Episcopal congregations in the United States who have broken off from their newly elected gay and feminist bishops and have instead subjected themselves to black African bishops in Rwanda and Nigeria. The AMIA is one such group that I would enjoy the opportunity to work with at some point. In this way, they we found a conservative ally. What’s funny though is the reversal of what we imagined our new African relationship to be like. It’s not us adding them to our crew. It’s them adding us to THEIR crew. We have to be the humble, teachable ones.

Everywhere the Gospel goes, everywhere Christianity goes, it encounters existing people and cultures. These established people were shaped by their current religion (the one being supplanted) as well as the kind of work they do, the kind of music they like, how literate they are, and even by things as simple as what they eat or what the weather is like in the region. Their genetics even play a role. Everywhere, Christians take on a certain shade of the surrounding culture. And in general, this is good. Red and Yellow, Black and White, they are previous in his sight, etc. Africans have got to MOVE during worship! Highly education Britons would rather sing 4-part harmony while standing still.

syncretism: The amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought.

The church of the first century as described in the New Testament epistles is one divided by geography. Each regional church had absorbed some cultural and folk religious beliefs into it’s culture. This is why the Judaizers (who wanted to keep much of the Levitical law intact) were denounced in one letter and the intellectually elite gnostics in another. Corinth had trouble with long established sexual promiscuity leaking into the congregation. Some were rich, some where poor, some were really poor. No matter how hard beliefs are codified and written down, there will always be significant variation on the ground. Theology affects life and just as often, vice versa.

In Latin America and Africa, the devotion to certain local pagan deities was sometimes morphed into the veneration of the saints. In the worst cases, the Virgin Mary took on side-effects of the regional fertility goddess. In more innocuous cases, the local heroes of the old paganism were canonized and their biographies reinvented. Early Chinese Christians had a Saint Confucius. This made the new church seem a bit more homey and less alien to the locals. Opinions vary among scholars and church leaders as to whether this sort of thing is really terrible or no big deal. That it can be distraction from the core of the Gospel is indisputable though.

This sort of thing happens with all other religions too. I was intrigued to discover that Buddhism in southeast Asia is filled with local folk religious elements – belief in evil spirits, magic amulets, etc. None of these have anything to do with the core beliefs of Buddhism. These sorts of supernatural elements are seen as ridiculous by the more intellectual branches, such as the Zen Buddhism more common in northern China or Japan.

Now we Americans are a Christian nation based on the Bible itself! The founding father’s didn’t have a folk religion! We have a clean theology. Just look at how nice and tidy our confessions are! OK. Not really. So what has American Christianity absorbed? “Rugged American Individualism” – certainly an idea with some positive qualities, but one that can be convincingly traced to a “just me a Jesus” soteriology that is completely unaware of the larger community – even our own children. “The American Dream” of capitalism and opportunity combined with Christianity leads to the prosperity gospel (God wants you to be rich) – a rather unique (and destructive) export from the United States.

The Roman Catholic church modeled it’s authority structure on the Roman government. This seemed to work great for a couple centuries but after the empire’s collapse seemed, in hindsight, like a pretty flawed way to organize the priesthood. Congregationalism is church ruled by a formal democracy. That can be a mixed bag too.

In both of the history books I am reading, the development of an indigenous Christianity is promoted as having a much more permanent and powerful effect on the people. Demanding doctrinal purity on lots of small details has historically alienated the new excited converts. Africans were very interested in Jesus, but less interested in all the details of Anglican or Roman liturgy, which seemed to have more to do with British Colonialism than God. The same is true with every other group of western missionaries. Ethiopia in particular took a rather isolationist stance. It’s version of Orthodoxy and later Protestant Pentecostalism are pretty unique. Many accounts of the underground church in China also emphasize how little input they have taken from westerners.

Jenkin’s gives an interesting example here to demonstrate:

We must be cautious about seeing such new movements through the lens of our own conflicts. As an analogy, imagine the situation in the seventh or eighth centuries in what was still, numerically and culturally, the Near Eastern heart of Christianity, in Syria or Mesopotamia. Picture a meeting of church leaders who have gathered to hear a report from a traveler from the remote barbarian world of western Europe.

The traveler delights his listeners by telling them of the many new conversions among the strange peoples of England or Germany and the creation of whole new dioceses in the midst of the northern forests. Impatiently, the assembled hierarchs press him to answer the key question: This new Christianity coming into being, is it the Christianity of Edessa or of Damascus? Where do the new converts stand on the crucial issues of the day: on the Monothelite heresy, on Iconoclasm? When the traveler tells them, regretfully, that these issues really do not register in those parts of the world, where religious life has utterly different concerns and emphases, the Syrians are alarmed. Is this really a new Christianity, they ask, or is it some new syncretistic horror? How can any Christian not be centrally concerned with these issues? And while Syrian Christianity carried on debating these questions to exhaustion, the new churches of Europe entered a great age of spiritual growth and intellectual endeavor.

-Philip Jenkins, The New Christendom, p.16

So how much of this sort of thing is OK? I’m not sure, but I think my initial position is that for a burgeoning Christianity, some of this mixing is not that big of a deal. Immature Christians may have genuine belief in Jesus Christ, but still believe all kinds of silly things on the side. These are rooted out through teaching and love from caring pastors and positive peer pressure. The Holy Spirit will also lead people to abandon their old ways as their hearts change. When these folk elements are institutionalized, then reform over the coming years and decades will hopefully improve things. I believe that it is completely impossible to not mix in something. Only robots could have an untainted faith. Still, some syncretism severely undermines the Gospel by tacking on works righteousness. These elements need to be expelled from the get-go. Our dead works need to be repented of, not integrated.

I’d like to briefly tie together three sources regarding the work of Christian missionaries working among indigenous peoples.

Last night, my wife and I watched the first part of Ken Burn’s documentary on the history of the western United States. Christian missionaries, usually in the from of Spanish Roman Catholic priests are a regular presence in the story. They are nearly always function as terrible bad guys in the narrative. They are occasionally well-meaning, but generally destructive – forced conversions and confessions at gunpoint, whipping the natives down the road to church, etc. There was awful abuse in the name of Jesus Christ.

It’s the same story of American conquest that I heard all growing up and I don’t doubt that much of it was terrible and true. But is that the whole story? Philip Jenkins, in discussing the explosion of Christianity in Latin America thinks this MUST only be one side of the coin. It couldn’t have been all conquest or Christianity would not have “stuck” so hard and fast among the millions of natives.

“The new Christianity was unquestionably associated with robbery and tyranny, leaving a sinister heritage over the coming centuries. In the initial decades, the depth of conversions was questionable. Moreover, native converts were granted admission to communion only on the rarest occasions, a policy that acknowledged the shallowness of conversions. Just as seriously, natives were almost never ordained to the priesthood.”

-Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom, p.35

Sounds like a train-wreck, right?

“Far from being a formula for effective conversion, the record of colonial Latin America sounds potentially like a story of disaster, so much so that it is baffling that Catholicism would ultimately plant such deep roots in this continent. Yet the ordinary people who were ignored and despised by the churches created their own religious synthesis, which became the focus of devoted loyalty. Lacking priests and access to church sacraments, Latin American people concentrated instead on aspects of the faith that needed no clergy, on devotions to saints and the Virgin, and they organized worship through lay bodies… Catholicism not only established itself, but became an integral part of the cultural identity of Latin Americans, in all parts of that very diverse landscape. As an institution, the impact made by the church was partial and often inadequate, but Christianity itself flourished.“

He returns to this idea quite often. There is something special about Christianity that makes it remarkably appealing, even when it is obscured by abusive rulers. It takes on a life of its own and grows, especially in the ignored rural areas. Jenkins, in writing a scholarly piece of history and sociology doesn’t come right out and say it, but I believe that he (along with myself) would attribute this “special appeal” to the work of the Holy Spirit.

I am also reading a recent book by Ethiopian scholar Tibebe Eshete concerning the rise of Evangelicism in Ethiopia during the past century. In his introduction, he mentions something that really caught my attention. Though protestant pentecostal churches were established in the 1920s, evangelicals only claimed a tiny slice of the population for a long time. It only took hold in a few rural areas among poor farmers. Then, in the 1960’s, it exploded and now accounts for nearly 20% of the whole country. And this is the fun part: The explosion took place during a time of persecution, when all the western missionaries had been kicked out by the last emperor and then kept out by the communists. Eshete describes the current pentecostal church as

“largely an independent initiative pioneered by young Ethiopians, whose followers came mainly from an Ethiopian Orthodox background, and has sustained itself because of its indigenous roots, voluntaristic nature, and enthusiastic embarkation on evangelization programs of national import.”

-Tibebe Eshete, The evangelical movement in Ethiopia: Resistance and resilience, p.12

The author himself is an insider to what went on. He grew up Orthodox, then got excited about communism and helped organize socialist rallies while he was a university student in the 1970s. After the communists took over and crushed everyone, he was very disillusioned. Through the witness of a friend he ended up becoming a Baptist and has been very active in the church there ever since.

So here again we have Christianity thriving without clergy – driven by locals. Theologians often freak out about how this inevitably means that folk religion is absorbed into the faith. Well, yes, but I think that is going to happen regardless. New churches aren’t doctrinally mature. If they were, Paul would not have bothered to write most of his epistles. I think it is better to rejoice that they worship Jesus and assume that the leftover paganism (or secularism, etc.) will be reformed out during the coming century or two.

Philip Jenkins opens his book The Next Christendom by providing some intriguing examples of the nearsightedness of Americans and Europeans. This goes both for the general public and for scholars who should know better.

When the popular evangelical magazine Christian History listed the “hundred most important events in Church history,” the only mention of Africa, Asia, or Latin America occurred in reference to the British abolition of the slave trade. Missing from this top hundred was church growth in modern Africa, where the number of Christians increased, staggeringly, from 10 million in 1900 to 360 million by 2000. If that growth does not represent the largest quantitative change in the whole of religious history, I am at a loss to think of a rival.

-Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom, p.4

A growth of 350 million Christians in one century? Holy smokes. And it’s almost completely outside of our consciousness. I had barely ever heard of this. I remember, as a young man in 1997, all the publicity and hubbub surrounding the “Stand in the Gap” gathering where evangelical leaders worked very hard to get 1 million Christian men to show up at a rally in Washington D.C. They were able to pull it off, effectively bankrupting the Promise Keepers organization in the process. I had attended a conference of theirs in Boise the year before with my father. (I really enjoyed it.) I don’t think deriving value from numbers is a wise game to play, but this ought to make us take a bit of notice. 1 million! Go us! We’re so awesome! We’re the main event when it comes to the work of God on earth! Once again, it’s eye-opening to zoom out and look at the big picture (350,000,000 growth across the pond.)

He gives another example that I’ve also experienced first-hand on many occasions.

When I was working on the first edition of this book, I described its general theme to friends and colleagues, many of whom are well education and widely traveled. When I said, though, that my theme was “the future of Christianity”, a common follow-up question was, in effect “So, how long do you think it will last?” or specifically, “How long can the Catholic Church survive?” In their own way, secular, liberal Americans have a distinctly apocalyptic view of the future, with a millenarian expectation of the uprooting of organized religion. A the least, there is a widespread conviction that Christianity cannot survive in anything like its present form.

-p.10

In most academic circles, Christianity is laughed off as a bad joke from the past. But again, zoom out, and you’ll find that liberal secularism is quickly becoming yesterday’s bad joke. They still have enough money and political clout to insulate them from noticing. Give it a few more generations and things could look pretty different. I think we, as Christians, make a mistake when we buy into their own picture of the world. We spend hundreds of hours of sweat to combat atheism and win one convert. We spend that time and money again getting the city council to implement a particular shade of moralism. Perhaps, if we were to glance at Africa for a model, we could spend less on toys and use that time and money to have a few more babies! Just sayin’.

I’m listening right now to The Ancient Muse. Last time I was fixated on this album was about 3.5 years ago, right after I started blogging. I remember sitting in Silos cafe listening to “Never-ending road” while wrestling with Live Journal. Now, 840+ posts deep, I have a better idea what I think about many things. A scratch on the surface is now visible, even if it be just a divot in a gold course the size of South Dakota. I hope so anyway. I turn 30 come Sunday.

The old Ralph “Ray-FFFF” Van Williams wind ensemble orchestration of English folk tunes contains a fun rendition of “Seventeen Come Sunday”. Who? What? Anyone who played a band instrument with any fervor past high school knows exactly what I speak of. The rest can just forget it. This gem belongs to adult “band geeks” alone and cannot be wrested from them. (Half points if you sang the Percy Grainger choral arrangement.) Now the tune was set with words extolling the excitement of youth and the hope of romance (and later dashed romance, if you make it to the last verse).

I must hum a different melody come this Sunday, when I turn thirty. I have past the days of being cynical or disillusioned about love, romance, sex, or being a rock star or an astronaut. About these we have been lied to so steadily that when a true word is spoken, it is difficult to discern over the ringing in our ears. By God’s grace, and that alone have I grasped some sense of what steadfast love is really analogous to in my mortal flesh on this broken earth.

In addition, my faith in God, and Christ in particular has never slipped. Nay, it has more traction than ever. I am glad to have this as I tackle the remaining decades. I no longer believe in what my elders called “the saving knowledge”, as if I could think my way into God’s arms. If I am in his arms, it is because he has reached out and embraced me. What I know of his Trinitarian ways is also a gift. I am thankful for it immensely. Thinking is so exciting!

What has been a bit slower to die is the naive strength of youth. My body doesn’t kick like it once did. I no longer dream of living in Manhattan. Pulling an all-nighter now has consequences. Each day the horizon shrinks to hold a sun the same brightness and luster as the real sunrise in the true east – not a false glory. Still, I am much motivated to complete more than one lasting work before I die. Chief of these are my children, though they are in God’s hands more than my own. The rest is yet to be determined, though I am fairly confidant that by the “full stride” of 40 some of these will be fully formed.

With me is my loving wife, who has had to grow much in patience just to bear living with me. I am glad she has stayed as without her, so many hopes would be dashed. God has all of human history to work his redemption, but I have only a sliver of the timeline to act. He has compelled me to act. I can not deny him.

I have what seems to be a pretty good idea of where I need to be in 10 years, but I don’t know if I can do it. I feel that I lack the motivation to push through all the hurdles. If Luther was right, and I highly suspect so, then I DO NOT HAVE the motivation to push through all the hurdles. This can be a comforting thought and not a despairing one. It is not yet. I know what to pray for. Does He have other plan then to grant this grace? I doubt it.

As a youth, I remember being fascinated by an idea that a preacher once presented. He said that in heaven, it won’t be that everyone has good behavior all the time, but that sin will be unthinkable.

How is that possible?

OK. I say to you, don’t think about elephants. What are you thinking about?

Elephants.

(From the movie Inception, but used in various forms much earlier.)

How could sin be unthinkable? By brainwashing us? That would be dehumanizing. It doesn’t seem to jive with “the knowledge of good and evil” which was arguably for mature man (though not the infantile man who grasped it unlawfully in the beginning.) I think philosophers of language may be on to something though.

Words sitting in a dictionary sit still and stale. They are the husks of meaning. Put into action, they take on life and animate. They can not do so without drinking the water of their context and breathing the air that passes through the lips of the one speaking it. In this way they change. In this way will evil be undone and Christ Jesus redeem all of creation. Even the words used to describe evil and the void – HE has the power to subvert even these and make it so that sin becomes even unthinkable. the knowledge of him will go through all the earth, hovering like the spirit did over the waters – hovering over his children warming the tiny seed in them that will grow into the new creation.

It was … declared by Aquinas that it was of the nature of God to know all possibilities, and to determine which possibility should become fact. “God would not know good things perfectly, unless He also knew evil things … for, -since evil is not of itself knowable, forasmuch as `evil is the privation of good’ as Augustine says, therefore evil can neither be defined nor known except by good.” Things which are not and never will be He knows “not by vision”, as He does all things that are, or will be, “but by simple intelligence”. It is therefore part of that knowledge that He should understand good in its deprivation, the identity of heaven in its opposite identity of hell, but without “approbation”, without calling it into being at all.

It was not so possible for man … To be as gods meant, for the Adam, to die, for to know evil, for them, was to know it not by pure intelligence but by experience.

-Charles Williams, He Came Down from Heaven, Quoted by Sayers in the preface to Ch.7 of The Mind of the Maker

I like very much how Williams puts it. God can “know” evil without bringing it into being. We, on the other hand, to know it is to give it pneuma. Without the law though, we could not articulate it. It seems that in some sense, even the law will be undone.

This is for some of my favorite (and not so favorite) Girardian scholars.

“In this is love, not that we loved God but that He loves us and sent his son to be an atoning sacrifice for our sins” 1 John 4:10

I hold the apostle John in pretty high regard to say the least. If he says Jesus’ death was an atoning sacrifice then I am not going to participate in textual, linguistic, or typographic gymnastics in an attempt to show that that’s not precisely what he meant. Sorry “no violence in God” folks. Try again. Jesus is awesome. He can die and come back on HIS OWN TERMS. These are the terms he has chosen. He is not so misunderstood as to render “atoning sacrifice” theological nonsense.

What is the chief end of man?

To create a Utopian super-race perfectly at balance with nature, reproducing itself at exactly the proper rate to keep the population in equilibrium with the earth’s ecosystem and rate of resource renewal? Only tyrants dream of enforcing such a utopian dream of domination – if they think their subjects so gullible as to trust their leaders in the face of oppression.

Only immortals, like Tolkein’s elves could manage to find such a proper balance with nature, but they lived for thousands of years. Man was gifted with a “strange doom” and fueled with an urgent creative ambition that, given enough time, the whole earth could not contain. What more evidence is required to prove that this age must end? That it was in fact DESIGNED to end with the first puff of air that inflated Adam’s lungs? Our age has always been a terminal one. Even after death be vanquished, the creator has a place further up and further in for us, his children to thrive. Not an unwordly place, but a hyperwordly place, even more earthy than our own earth.

Lying spirits did not fashion Plato’s cave. Only the Lord could make such a place and the sun shining outside its mouth. Plato just got so many details wrong because he wasn’t Trinitarian.