I checked out a copy of the 1559 edition of the Anglican Book of Common prayer.
This was the time of William Shakespeare. During this age, going to church was compulsory! (Wouldn’t that be something…)
In the appendix, the author has this to say about it’s influence:
Indeed, without knowing it we may find ourselves using phrases derived from the Book of Common Prayer. “Throug fire and water,” “outward and visible,” “inward and spiritual,” “picking and stealing,” “pomps and vanity,” “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust” – these and like words and phrases heard over and over again have become a part of the heritage of English-speaking peoples. it could be argued that the Prayer Book has had a disproportionately high degree of influence when compared with the influence of the Authorized [King James] Version of the Bible.
-John E. Booty, History of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, p.327
I think if I got digging, I’ve got enough material to write an entire thesis on how most church divisions can be explained almost completely as function of various social dynamics.
When protestants typically start a new church, the usual M.O. is to use a lot of rhetoric about how it is a “new move of God” or some other sort of spiritual language.
Churches splitting for (seemingly) theological differences often describe themselves as the remnant of the pure church keeping the faith while the mothership sinks into the deep waters of heresy.
Sometime the reasons can be very complicated. Luther split from Rome over justification by faith at the start of the reformation. But thousands of people followed him. Judging by the simple fact that a LOT of people just really don’t care about theology very much, it has to be assumed that many of these folks that first joined with Luther and his major followers did so primarily for OTHER reasons. These reasons are most likely the influence of family and friends, geography, or any number of other motivations. Didn’t like the priest in your town? While for years you’ve been stuck with him. Now suddenly there is an alternative down the street! See ya! Never went to mass much anyway and then your best friend’s husband (who really does care about theology) starts taking his family to the protestant church. You follow along. I’m sure you can think of lots of other examples.
Of course the single most important factor is probably geography. In fact, it’s pretty much a given. Church’s are SUPPOSED to be divided by geography, right?
Next on the list of the influences is family. The Catholics often get accused of having children who grow up going to church but don’t care one bit for Christianity. The truth is though, this phenomenon can be observed in all the other churches too, to varying degrees.
Do you have any “friends” that are just hangers on? What about the obnoxious co-worker who drives you (and plenty of other people) bananas with their ineptitude, gossip, or astonishing lack of social skills? Who wants to be around these people? Almost nobody. And whaddayaknow, some of them go to your church! You get enough of these people together (or get one in leadership) and they start to drive people away.
When people start hanging out at a different bar, they probably have the honesty to say, “Well, I used to hang out there until a lot of drunk frat guys starting hanging out there too. The place got too loud. John’s Pool Hall is more quiet even though it’s kind of smokey.”. But when we leave a church, we have to say something like “I just didn’t think the gospel was being proclaimed there.” or “We wanted a richer spiritual environment for our kids” or even “We really felt God was leading us to join this new congregation. Everyone is so close! It’s like a real warm community.” When the whole freakin’ time, the real reason was that the new worship leader wouldn’t let your wife sing back-up anymore and that really obnoxious guy was always trying to accost you after every service and gripe about what he saw on Fox news last night.
Again, I’m not saying all splits are over petty things. The Anglican’s splintering over gay ordination is pretty significant. The local Assembly of God’s new youth pastor breaking off and taking all the cool kids with him is something else entirely. Splits don’t have to necessarily be over personal conflict either. If a new factory was built near your neighborhood and your church saw an influx of blue-collar workers, you think that might change the environment a bit? If the pastor decided to change his sermons to be aimed more at folks who never went to college and suddenly your children don’t know half the kids in youth group after the congregation went from 200-300 people, you suddenly find yourself shopping around for somewhere more comfortable. Somewhere were people are more like you. This is bound to happen.
Now, please understand me. I think a LOT of these sorts of divisions are not inherently sinful or petty. The are much larger sociological forces at work here. Listen to this recent commentary by Seth Godin:
Dunbar’s Number isn’t just a number, it’s the law
Dunbar’s number is 150.
And he’s not compromising, no matter how much you whine about it.
Dunbar postulated that the typical human being can only have 150 friends. One hundred fifty people in the tribe. After that, we just aren’t cognitively organized to handle and track new people easily. That’s why, without external forces, human tribes tend to split in two after they reach this size. It’s why WL Gore limits the size of their offices to 150 (when they grow, they build a whole new building).
Facebook and Twitter and blogs fly in the face of Dunbar’s number. They put hundreds or thousands of friendlies in front of us, people we would have lost touch with (why? because of Dunbar!) except that they keep digitally reappearing.
Reunions are a great example of Dunbar’s number at work. You might like a dozen people you meet at that reunion, but you can’t keep up, because you’re full.
Some people online are trying to flout Dunbar’s number, to become connected and actual friends with tens of thousands of people at once. And guess what? It doesn’t scale. You might be able to stretch to 200 or 400, but no, you can’t effectively engage at a tribal level with a thousand people. You get the politician’s glassy-eyed gaze or the celebrity’s empty stare. And then the nature of the relationship is changed.
I can tell when this happens. I’m guessing you can too.
A lot of newer missional church planter’s realize this last point. Once their church gets to 150-200 people, that’s IT. They pull the plug. Take 20 and start a new congregation. If you don’t initiate it, it won’t be long before some of your members get fed up (with each other or YOU the glassy-eyed pastor) and do it themselves and the results aren’t always pretty.
Mark N at the Boar’s Head Tavern recently made this comment. He was reading my mind.
Try and follow me on this one. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that 99% of churchgoers could care less what your church’s theology is. There’s only one out of every hundred in your church who really cares, and he/she probably has a blog. What average joe does care about is your church’s culture, which is a combination of theology driven ecclesiology, covenant community, and the vision cast by leadership. So theology acts as a rudder, but the current (culture) plays a part in shaping your church into what it really is. This is how I see it, correct me if you think I’m wrong.
I’ll go out on that limb too.
Theology is a rudder. Bad theology will drive the ship into the rocks eventually. Wise folks on board will likely start jumping ship as the coast gets closer. But what the ship IS, that’s YOU! The people in it. That is, the ship is shaped by your church culture. It might look like a clipper ship. Or an ocean liner. Maybe a cruise ship. Possibly a space ship? Nevermind. That metaphor needs some work.
Church splits and divisions are just a really opportune time to analize these things. However, they affect every aspect. Check out this post about the singles culture at a particular church. I’m sure some of you can relate.
The Mars Hill [Seattle] vision Driscoll has repeatedly articulated that “young men would love Jesus, get jobs, take wives, and make babies” is totally a Social Gospel idea, a vision that through the preaching of the Gospel society will be transformed by Jesus into a better society. The fact that this is not a LEFT-leaning social gospel does not make it any less a social gospel.
How much of our post-millenialist-Jesus-will-subdue-the-earth theology is highly dependant our congregants having lots of babies? Is that a real move of God, or just us gettin’ moving? Maybe both, but watch out for rhetoric like this.
To shift gears a bit back to the theory, here is another post from the BHT, this time by Harmless Anarchist:
The advocacy by theological networks, coalitions, and all that rot, whether formal or informal, are 95% explicable as the expression of psychological and social needs and pressures of the particular religious society. Posts such as the one linked have a near ritual character and function [a rant about how right their theology is versus everyone else]. They build community identity. They are how a particular social species leverage technological means to construct their ecological niche.
Here on the interwebs, the theology-phile seems to have pride of place in the order of things. I don’t think anyone will contest the fact that theology sites are ubiquitous. While sites that talk about discipleship, community, and healthy church culture are there, they’re in the minority. Why is this?
Why is this? Well, talking theology is an easy front to avoid loving your neighbor. Studying the bible and the reformers is easy compared to summoning the emotional energy to listen to that obnoxious guy at church one… more… time.
In the first chapter of her literary criticism of Charles Williams, Agnes Sibley writes
Charles Williams led an outwardly uneventful life. He never took a holiday, and only once did he leave England, to give a lecture in Paris. It was as if he needed no external stimulus to make ife interesting; an inner excitement about ideas carried him through what same would have regarded as boring days.
Fascinating. I aspire to travel, but I also aspire to what she is describing here.
The more and more I read of William’s works and about him, the more I am convinced that about 80% of what was cool about Williams was lost when he died in 1945 at the age of 58.
All accounts of Williams are of an amazing personality. And yet… his actually writing? I’m going to step out into the light here and say that Charles William’s work are of dubious value.
I read a recent essay on how Bob Dylan can produce (intentionally maybe?) a horrible new album and people will rave over it anyway. I’m afraid people are slow to denounce Williams for similar reasons. C.S. Lewis absolutely gushed over him at every opportunity. Out of respect for Lewis, nobody is able to read one of William’s novels and say (out loud) “Hey, wait a minute. This is crap”. Well, I’ll say it. Actually crap is maybe a bit too strong. You could do a lot worse. But it’s still pretty lousy.
I’m serious!
His ideas were original. He took romantic idealism to mind-blowing new heights. Heights that I’m afraid could only be sustained as long as he was personally in the room maintaining the energy through sheer enthusiasm.
I have TRIED really hard to like Williams. I really have. It seems like I should like him. Some of his stuff has been great. His introduction to Arthurian legend was top notch. His poetry has it’s moments. But for the most part? I’m tired of trying. On to something else.
Chesterton’s Orthodoxy is growing on me after digesting it several times in the past few years.
Some sections of it are just OK but a few of the chapters are absolutely marvelous. I’m beginning to think the section titled “The Paradoxes of Christianity” is possibly the best thing I’ve EVER read anywhere.
This excerpt isn’t even close to the best stuff in there. It just happens to be what I’ve thinking about today.
I rolled on my tongue with a terrible joy, as did all young men of that time, the taunts which Swinburne hurled at the dreariness of the creed —
“Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean, the world has grown gray with Thy breath.”
But when I read the same poet’s accounts of paganism (as in “Atalanta”), I gathered that the world was, if possible, more gray before the Galilean breathed on it than afterwards. The poet maintained, indeed, in the abstract, that life itself was pitch dark. And yet, somehow, Christianity had darkened it. The very man who denounced Christianity for pessimism was himself a pessimist. I thought there must be something wrong. And it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.
-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, The Paradoxes of Christianity
Describing the praise the Inklings sometimes gave each other, Glyer recounts Lewis’s comments on a lecture Charles Williams gave at Oxford. The topic was Comus, a masque (pageantry/play) written by Milton on the subject of chastity. I find this to be a marvelous image!
“On Monday, C.W. lectured nominally on Comus but really on Chastity. Simply as criticism it was superb – because here was a man who really started from the same point of view as Milton and really cared with every fibre of his being about ‘the sage and serious doctrine of virginity’ which it would never occur to the ordinary modern critic to take seriously. But it was more important still as a sermon.”
Lewis continues, describing the effect on the students: “It was a beautiful sight to se a whole room full of modern young men and women sitting in that absolute silence which can NOT be fakes, very puzzled, but spell-bound.”
“It was ‘borne in upon me’ that that beautiful carved room had probably not witnessed anything so mportant since some of the great medieval or Reformation lectures.”
“I have at last, if only for once, seen a university doing what it was founded to do: teaching Wisdom”
-The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, V.2, p.345
The modern critic never takes Christianity (or even theism) seriously. He is always baffled by how many of the greats of any discipline DID take it seriously. And still do.
Roger Green read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe before it was published and suggested several minor but notable changes:
“Being rather more in touch with contemporary children, Gree was able to suggest a number of small alterations and improvements, ranging from the deletion of “Crikey!’ as a common exclamation among the young to the omission of bird’s-nesing from among the Pevense children’s occupations – Lewis being unaware of the revolution against ‘egg-collectors’ achieved by Arthur Ransome”
-Green, Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Biography (taken from Gyler’s The Company They Keep, p. 210)
Well now, how nasty of young Lucy to go raiding poor defenseless bird nests and carting away their defenseless young as trophies.
As someone once said, “You can’t swing a dead cat around here without hitting some animal rights activist!”.
A description of an argument the Inklings had with each other sheds light on their theology of salvation:
At another meeting, an argument arose about the proper interpretation of Matthew 7:14, which reads, “Because stait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”
Lewis writes, “I had a pleasant evening on Thursday with Williams, Tolkien, and Wrenn, during which Wrenn almost seriously expressed a strong wish to burn Williams, or at least maintained tat conversation with Williams enabled him to understand how inquisitors had felt it right to burn people. Tolkien and I agreed afterwards that we just knew what he meant: that as some people at school, college punts, are eminently kickable, so Williams is eminently combustible” (Collected Letters 2:283)
The juxtaposition of moods is particularly interesting: in the context of a pleasant evening and agreeable conversation, which happened to e about the proper interpretation of a passage of scripture, the discussion gains such intensity that Williams is deemed “combustible” by a group of his dear friends.
Regarding the debatable passage, Lewis says that the group concluded, “Our Lord’s replies are never straight answers and never gratify curiosity, and that whatever this one meant its purpose was certainly not statistical”
-Diana Gyler, The Company They Keep, p.78
While the anecdote about burning Williams at the stake is amusing, their conclusion about the passage is really quite interesting to contemplate.
Many theologies really DO treat this verse statistically.
Narrow is the way and few who find it. “Few” could be reduced to an actual percentage, right?
Of course, if you’re a universalist, that number is 100%, which just goes to show how silly it is to try and pull universalism out of the Bible.
Calvinists would say this number is a mystery that was already set before the earth was created. Some of the Puritans probably thought it was around 5%? The more optimistic post-millenialists would say God has PLENTY of time to jack that “few” up to maybe even 70%. Those who study the “remnant” principal in the Old Testament are more likely to land on scarier numbers, like 10%.
If you’re an open theist, than that number is still up for grabs. It depends on you. If we work hard in our missionary efforts, God has granted us the opportunity of raising it a few points. Eeek.
The only thing I have to say is that “few” implies less, not more. So that would be under 50% at least, which doesn’t tell us much.
On the other hand, is “finding the narrow way” synonymous to eternal salvation? Calling on the name of Jesus is supposedly all you need and that seems easier to me than finding (and walking!) the narrow way. Perhaps the verse is really about discipleship.
Interesting though, despite having four strong opinions, none of them thought it’s purpose was statistical? Clever.
Tolkien had an idea that we don’t really make up new stories. We pull them as leaves off the great “tree of tales”.
This sounds like the idea that when the conductor drops the baton, he’s is pulling an already-running beat out of the invisible river and not making one up on the spot. Well, on one hand I think that’s baloney. I don’t believe in a Platonic metronome. However, he may have subconsciously had the beat running in his head for some time. Perhaps it is associated with a particular memory. It seems to come from somewhere deeper than he can put his finger on. But this is about writing on the large scale, not one element of music.
Here (on p.221), Gyler references an interesting image (that is apparently pretty well-known):
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
-Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action
She also points out that Sayer’s expressed a similar notion about poetry:
“Poets do not merely pas on the torch in a relay race; they toss the ball to one another, to and fro, across the centuries. Dante would have been different if Virgil had never been, but if Dante had never been we should know Virgil differently; across both their heads Ezekiel calls to Blake, Milton to Homer”
-Dorothy Sayers, Further Papers on Dante
Bach died in 1750. His musical output hugely impacted others. But we know him differently through the rediscovery of his work by Mendelssohn when he reintroduced Bach to the world with the 1829 performance of the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin. We know him differently again by hearing his works transcribed for guitar or contemporary marimba – instruments that didn’t even exist in his time. It’s a complicated web and it’s changing even now. We project things back on him. When Pablo Casals played Bach with 1000 gallons of romantic rubato poured on thick, would Johann himself have recognized his own notes? When we listen to a performance of Bach, the light is being passed through many lenses.
This is from the concluding paragraph of Gyler’s book on the Inklings:
I am persuaded that writers do not create text out of thin air in a fit of personal inspiration. I believe that the most common and natural expressions of creativity occur as part of an ongoing dialogue between writers, readers, texts, and contexts.
This truth is exemplified by the weekly meetings of the Inklings. It is manifest in their relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. And it is expressed in many of teir own statements about the creative process. As Williams reminds us, an emphasis on isolated individuals must give way to an interactive view of life, culture, and creativity. Explaining Williams’s view, Roma King summarizes, “The parts are so related that the slightest vibration in one is felt throughout the whole…”
