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So what do you do about it? Everyone and their dog can point out the world’s problems, but what sort of curative action do they take?

It seems like there are several routes folks nearly always follow, and these go for ANYONE trying to change the world. They can be divided up by how far-reaching their influence is. Keep in mind here that I am generally talking about religious and cultural change.

• National/State level – Political activism. Get out the vote. Campaign support. Write your congressman.
• Local/Regional level – Congregational and parish ministries and services. Build up church programs.
• Family level – Focus on raising and educating your (many) children, keeping your marriage and family together.
• Highly personal level – Quietism. Join a monastic order or the peace corps. Traveling evangelist types.
• Forget it – Who cares? Just consume as much as you can get your hands on.

Now days the most popular way to change the world is to “raise awareness!”. This, as many have pointed out if it wasn’t already painfully obvious, is often a pile of crap. It’s form over substance. Then I had to stop myself and ask, is writing a book “form over substance” as well? You can raise awareness in a very shrill way, or you can do it in a calm, wise, reasoned way, even engaging other ideas head-on in the academic and public realm. Hopefully, writing a GOOD book on the subject really can spur others. I hope so. Putting on another bumper sticker won’t do much except make you feel better about yourself for a minute. Much more useful would be to lead by example yourself.

Looking back to this list of ways to change the world, at the national level we have organizations like the Moral Majority or Dobson trying to push state and federal politics in a certain direction. Pros: The potential to effect sweeping changes backed up by law enforcement. Cons: Waking up one morning to find yourself in bed with big-money politicians, most of whom don’t actually fear God at all. Oops.

At the local level, we have church and para-church ministries. Soup kitchens, crisis pregnancy centers, youth programs, foreign schools and orphanages, Christian schools, Alcoholics Anonymous and the like, money-management classes, etc. Pros: A much more direct effect on people you actually know and your own community. Cons: Has been proven to frequently make the church organization, especially if it is a mega church with a lot of resources, the central focus of our time and energy. This, it turns out, brings with it a host of problems that I’m not going to go into here.

I can personally think of a LOT of individuals (myself included) who have largely abandoned politics and even ministry organizations and are instead pouring our time, energy, and creativity into our family. This usually means first HAVING lots of kids, then raising them well, often homeschooling them, abandoning careers and potential career advancement to spend time teaching and playing with them. Abandoning some hobbies in favor of theirs. Family worship. Don’t neglect your marriage. Don’t volunteer too much at church – that might mean zero volunteer work, depending on the context. Muslims have been accused of taking over Europe with this technique. Maybe. The same could be said for Christian conservatives in America. Someone might be saying it more in 50 years. Pros: Stability of the core God-husband-wife-family unit, upon which a great Cathedral of other things (see above) can be built. Cons: Like anything, it can backfire real bad if done in a foolish manner. Outsiders are NOT qualified to make these judgments. I could go on and on about this one.

There is always something going on at the highly personal level. This is your spiritual life, your internal life, the part nobody sees. It is your thoughts, your prayers. The fruit of the spirit. Anyone following God is going to be “working” on this stuff to some degree all the time. Advocates of personal piety have often pushed this as the only way to make anything happen at all. The world gets holier one person at a time. It comes back to the great dilemma of sociologist: Is a community a living organism of it’s own? Or is it just a collection of individuals? Whole books are still being written about this. Whether you think Constantine was the worst thing to ever happen to Christianity (or not) will provide some guidance as to where you stand on this.

The final one on the list is simply to do nothing. Make as much money as you can. Advance your career as much as you can. Buy as many cool cars and iPads and vacations as you can swing without getting into trouble with your boss or the bank. If you like your wife, than treat her just nice enough that she won’t leave you. If you later decide you don’t like her anymore, then ditch her. Have a couple of kids if you think that will make you happier. Don’t be a jerk because it’s nice to have some friends. Go to church sometimes if if will help you feel better. There are some meds for that too. Just do your thing. Sure, the world has problems, but they aren’t your problems.

What is really going on is that every “cure” involves two or more of these strategies, though there is usually one sector where most of the attention is focused.

In part three, I’ll talk about what sometimes fills the void in the event of a short or insufficient cure.

I’ve been reading more Wendel Berry. His insights into how the rise of industrialism and “agribusiness” in America has served to undermine families, communities, father-son relations, churches, etc. are pretty well reasoned. I’m not on board with everything he’s saying, but there is a hefty amount of good stuff in there. And yet… what do you do about it all? It all seems so hopeless. One reviewer of “The Unsettling of America” on Amazon said that the book is “long on diagnosis, short on cure”. I couldn’t agree more. I also think that phrase pretty much sums up MANY books, especially books pertaining to religion and culture.

(Fill in the blank) is going to hell in a handbasket and here’s why. What follows is often a more or less accurate detailing of some of the reasons behind the decline in (marriage, literacy, tithing, savings, employment, churches, dental hygiene) or the appalling rise of (consumerism, debt, porn, deadbeat dads, the prosperity gospel, motorcycle accidents). If the author is a good writer, the ride can be witty and include interesting anecdotes and case studies. If the writer is a sufficiently deep thinker, perhaps they articulate some of the underlying philosophical or psychological things going on. If the writer is NOT so good, you’ll see the word “unfortunately” a lot usually followed by a paragraph of statistics.

Near the end of the book, often just in the last one or two chapters, they will try to shift gears and offer some kind of solution. It’s often a half-hearted attempt – just a desire I think to end on some kind of a positive note. They’ve spent the last two hundred pages explaining how difficult the problem is, now what the heck are they going to come up with that is going to fix it? Something concise that will really blow your mind? Probably not.

The result is a wholly depressing and unsatisfying read – like watching the news only with a lot more effort involved. Sure, the research may be sound, their conclusions agreeable, and the importance of the cultural phenomenon being discussed relevant and even quite serious. So what do you freakin’ do about it? And if you can’t come up with any kind of solution, why did you write a whole book on it in the first place? Long on diagnosis, short on cure.

I wrote this down in my notebook in a rather stream-of-consciousness fashion. I’m trying to break it up here into three parts. In part two I’ll take a closer look at the forms cures actually take and in part three I’ll put forth a Girardian theory as to what happens naturally when the cure is short, at least in some cases.

Organizational overhead. It provides control or at least an illusion of control within a nation, a business, a marriage. It brings peers together since everyone can complain about the government. It’s easy to find camaraderie in complaining about the boss behind his back. The degree to which the government or the boss is actually responsible for the hardship is irrelevant. It’s unifying and completely “safe” to blame big brother.

Within a marriage though, any sort of control mechanism immediately becomes a personal at-odds with the spouse. There are only two people in the group. There is not an abstract beuracracy or semi-abstract “The Man” to rail against. There is only the beloved.

How many kids should we have? What should we spend this extra money on? Where should we go out to eat? Where should we go to church? How much is too much to drink? Can you take a few days off work to visit my mother? Can I play pool with the guys tonight?

The “rules” and agreements of the couple aren’t set in stone. They are all only 50% of the vote away from changing or being repealed.

This, I think, reveals a way that marriage is challenging. It would be unifying if together we had some sort of overhead structure to channel our frustrations at. But we only have each other. To avert our own destruction, we must be more selfless.

Technology and determinism.

I’ve been reading some Jaque Ellul and also just cracked open Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America last night. I’ve only gotten a little ways into each, but I was struck at how both of them see the introduction of technology as absolutely, unavoidably, leading from one thing to the next. It can’t be stopped. He quotes at length from historian Bernard DeVoto and mixes in his own comments here:

“The first belt-knife given by a European roan Indian was a portent as great as the cloud that mushroomed over Hiroshima. . . . Instantly the man of 6000 B.C. was bound fast to a way of life that had developed seven and a half millennia beyond his own. He began to live better and he began to die.“

The principal European trade goods were tools, cloth, weapons, ornaments, novelties, and alcohol. The sudden availability of these things produced a revolution that “affected every aspect of Indian life. The struggle for existence. . . became easier. Immemorial handicrafts grew obsolescent, then obsolete. Methods of hunting were transformed. So were methods and the purposes of war. As war became deadlier in purpose and armament a surplus of women developed, so that marriage customs changed and polygamy became common. The increased usefulness of women in the preparation of pelts worked to the same end. . . . Standards of wealth, prestige, and honor changed. The Indians acquired commercial values and developed business cults. They became more mobile. . . .

“In the sum it was cataclysmic. A culture was forced to change much faster than change could be adjusted to. All corruptions of culture produce breakdowns of morale, of communal integrity, and of personality, and this force was as strong as any other in the white man’s subjugation of the red man.”

He goes on to state part of his major thesis here:

I have quoted these sentences from Delfoto because, the obvious differences aside, he is so clearly describing a revolution that did not stop with the subjugation of the Indians, but went on to impose substantially the same catastrophe upon the small farms and the farm communities, upon the shops of small local tradesmen of all sorts, upon the workshops of independent craftsmen, and upon the households of citizens. It is a revolution that is still going on. The economy is still substantially that of the fur trade, still based on the same general kinds of commercial items: technology, weapons, ornaments, novelties, and drugs. The one great difference is that by now the revolution has deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water. Air remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution has imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat. The Indian became a redskin, not by loss in battle, but by accepting a dependence on traders that made necessities of industrial goods. This is not merely history. It is a parable.

Now Berry is (was) a farmer and a pastor and so he has a bone to pick with “commerce as religion”. Ellul was a French academic and philosopher and so he deals with a much more abstract idea of “technology” that is not necessarily evil. Nevertheless, in reading both of them I feel they are often talking about essentially the same thing.

I think the great challenge both of them present is “How are Christians, and the Christian Church going to redeem this sort of damage at the ground level when we are absolutely saturated in this technology and mammon culture ourselves?”

In Genesis 10, immediately before the Tower of Babel narrative, the people’s of the earth are listed. The immediate decentans of Shem, Ham, and Japheth number 70 new families that will become 70 nations of sorts.

As the Jesus Storybook Bible puts it, when introducing Abraham: “God’s world was still full of tears. It was never meant to be like this. But God was getting ready to do something about it. He was going to make all the wrong things right, and he was going to do it though… a family.”

So the people of Israel are God’s special and exclusive people but finally with Jesus salvation is brought to the gentiles. No. The salvation of the gentiles is all over the Old Testament!

In Leviticus 23:33-44, the Lord describes the rituals that are to take place during the Feast of Booths, which is also called the Feast of Tabernacles or the end of harvest feast. A different number of bulls are sacrificed each day during the 7 days of the festival. They total 70. Why? They 70 sacrifices are for the gentile nations. Israel is mediating for them as priests before God. Even way back then, His family was instructed to stand between the unknowning rebelious pagan people and their creator. He never forgot them for a moment and even as he turned his back on them, he kept them in his thoughts as he grew up his plan to redeem them in history.

(HT to Bible Matrix, Michael Bull, p.117 for this idea.)

I’ve been reading Bible Matrix, by Michael Bull. A better name for this book would be “An Introduction to Biblical Chiasms”. Honestly, I had never heard of them until about a year ago. None of the Bible teaching traditions I grew up with ever mentioned the idea once. As even the Wikipedia article on it is pretty weak, it appears to not be very widespread among Christian scholars. I’m not sure if that’s because it’s a relatively “new” idea (it’s not new really) that has been largely ignored by scholars over the centuries, or one that has only recently been developed and fleshed out more fully, or one that all the scholars are aware of but have actively rejected. I highly doubt the third option as chiasm analysis seems to be a pretty obvious help in some cases and doesn’t tend to lead to anything particularly heterodox.

I really don’t have the patience right this moment to write an explanation the system itself. I suggest checking here, here, and here for some examples.

It functions as a particular theory of biblical interpretation, recognizing that the Bible authors used certain literary conventions over and over again. Keeping this in mind, it gives us insight into what the author thought was the most important part of a particular passage and where he was going with it. It can also be used to explain a bunch of the typology in the temple and festivals. It’s very useful in the Old Testament, but doesn’t see much action in the New.

I must admit I’m not exactly sold on it. When it works, it seems to work very well. Scholars who are really interested in chiasms are definitely on to something. While describing chiasms to my wife though, she remarked “But couldn’t you find something like anywhere you looked?” She’s right. Even some of the examples given in this book seem like a stretch.

Still, I really like where Bull, the author and Leithart, who wrote the forward for the book and who often blogs about chiasms, is going with much of this. It makes a lot of sense and seems to be a more legitimate and consistent lens for understanding the Old Testament typology and flow.

Is there a motivation behind this? I think that it is ultimately used to prop up postmillenialism. You can use the recurring chiasm structure in SO many bible narratives, especially the creation ones to make a hefty case that God’s plan for man always looks like:

Creation
Division
Ascension
Testing
Maturity
Conquest
Glorifiction

Eschatologies like premillenialism (including the rapture) don’t fit this pattern at all. They tend to stop at “Testing” for a long, long time, with a sudden Glorification tacked on at the end. Postmillenialism claims that the church is maturing right now. As bad as things may be in the world, beneath it all, the bride is maturing. It could be a couple more thousand years until Jesus comes back. Not that their aren’t lots of problems with this view, but it IS a closer fit to the larger themes of scripture.

 

Thousands of cups of coffee or a bottle of wine each weekend.

Thousands of drinks from now, will you be a different person? Will any of of those sips slowly change your mind about anything? We know they’ll change your liver or your blood-sugar, but will it change anything else? More likely the one person you drank with that one time will have far more influence than that.

You are what you eat. Girard would say, you are who you imitate. Jesus told us who he imitated and his apostles told us to imitate him.

But Jesus also gave us something to eat, bread and wine, even himself.

Owen Barfield, in his most important work, Poetic Diction, explains how all words carry with them a history, an embedded memory of sorts. This memory retains some of it’s power even if the user of the word is not fully aware of it. This is the key (or at least one of the keys) to understanding the effectiveness of poetry.

Tolkien (a close friend of Barfield) thought the same thing and says so here while talking about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, though he is speaking about the larger genre of fairy-story:

Behind our poem stalk the figures of elder myth, and through the lines are heard the echoes of ancient cults, beliefs and symbols remote from the consciousness of an education moralist (but also a poet) of the late fourteenth century. His story is not ABOUT those old things, but it receives part of its life, its vividness, its tension from them. That is the way with the greater fairy-stories – of which this is one. There is indeed no better medium for moral teaching than the good fairy-story (by which I mean a real deep-rooted tale, told as a tale,and not a thinly disguised moral allegory). As the author of Sir Gawain, it would seem, perceived; or felt instinctively rather than consciously: for being a man of the fourteenth century a serious, didactic, encyclopaedic, not to say pedantic centry, he inherited ‘faerie’, rather than turned deliberately to it.

-J.R.R. Tolkien, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Essay from The Monsters and the Critics, p.73)

What struck me is how different the poet’s natural situation was to our own. What have we inherited? The enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the information age, the cults of science, materialism and nihilism. When we turn to faerie, it must be deliberately. Perhaps our children will not need to make so great an effort.

“Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.”

– John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book I, Ch.11

If Calvin says we are idol factories, then he is saying the same thing as Girard.

A DEFINING characteristic of man is that he makes idols. A lot. All the time. How does he do this exactly? Mimesis – imitative desire.

This all fits and provides wonderful insight and confirmation into the confession of Peter:

Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.

-Matthew 16:13-17 (ESV)

Who is Jesus? Here, idol-factory Peter is ready to borrow something from the people around him. John the Baptist. Elijah, Jeremiah, etc. But he doesn’t. He tells the plain truth, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”.

Was Peter really smart to put all the pieces together? Did he know the scriptures really well and figure out all the signs? No. The Pharisees and teachers of the law maybe should have been able to do that, but they had a major mental block.

Is Peter just repeating something Jesus already told him earlier or strongly hinted at? No. This is new stuff. He’s not just spitting back canned answers.

“Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you.” Peter got the right answer, but not by imitating anyone else or fashioning an ideal in the image of his own hopes. He knows it because of the direct intervention by the Father who is in heaven right now. It was a truly original idea.

I’ve mentioned this passage before, but it’s good so I’ll do so again:

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

This came to mind again recently while a friend was discussing the “non-overlapping magisteria” idea that says that science (biology, psychology, physics, etc.) have NOTHING to say about spirituality and religion and that religious people have NOTHING valid to say about science. Of course I think this is obviously just a ploy to stuff religious people in the closet and exclude them from virtually any meaningful discussion.

My friend was concerned over Leithart’s use of the word “theology” in this passage and I’ll admit, he is using a specific definition of it here so he can be “against” it, as well as using a certain definition of “christianity” so he can be against that too, as the book title implies. It’s a bit controversial by design. The theology he is talking about is the kind that has decided to play the secularist’s game and ONLY talk about abstract spiritual things that can be easily disconnected from any real people, places, or things. When you hear a liberal Episcopalian minister preach about “the Christ”, then you know this sort of thing is going on. Equally so though, a thoroughly orthodox theologian can get carried away with pie-in-the sky discussions of the Trinity or concepts like election or even purgatory. They can find themselves with nothing to say about anything temporal. By default they’ve handed off healing to the pharmacist, parenting to the psychologist, and their wealth to the banker, none of whom are likely to fear God.

To the degree that we’ve trusted economics to economists and politics to politicians is the degree that we, as Christians, have abdicated. Christians should have something to say about all these things – something Trinitiarian even. A theology that is mostly abstract and deals in “timeless truths” is essentially gnostic. We need a theology with some dirt on it, with some flesh and blood, that means something vital for what you are doing right now, whether it’s sitting on your butt at the keyboard thinking and typing (like I am right now) or in the kitchen eating a burrito, or yelling at your kids to brush their teeth, or a thousand other things.

When we talk about God or “what the Bible says” in a fashion where it’s all this “out there” knowledge that we are then going to bring in and apply to life, complete with a power point slide for each element, we are playing on Dawkin’s and the other secularist’s own turf. We give them a place to stand from which to say that we shouldn’t bring that stuff in and “apply” it.

But God is actually tied up in everything we do and have ever done. I love this passage from Chesterton on this matter:

It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, “Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?” he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, “Why, there is that bookcase . . . and the coals in the coal-scuttle . . . and pianos . . . and policemen.” The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex. It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.

-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ch.6

I feel that way when someone asks me why I am a Christian! Answering something like “because the Bible says so” is so insufficient it sounds almost silly. A more careful answer about the historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is probably more technically accurate, but is still only one piece of the puzzle, even if it is the central piece. It is difficult to answer because all the real reasons are tied up in a million different things.

If I am going to “do theology”, I think it’s going to have to be tied up in a lot of temporal things. It must be earthy.

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