A Great Poetry Blog

It seems to me that my friend Justin wishes to be an ascetic. So strange to me... how the modern poet (whom we have so often been told likes to draw his sustenance from excess of stimulus and deep inner turmoil) is much more prone these days to speak in admiration of simplicity, retreat, solitude and deprivation than about anything else. Poets have become sick of the modern ruckus and clamber and have sought to say something quiet instead.

I think I like this trend in poetry (the contemplative monastic rather than the eccentric aesthetic hedonist). Sometimes we must walk in "a way in which there is no ecstasy" if we want to move toward purity of soul and true knowledge of God. Sometimes we need to become empty to be filled... Methinks that such poets should be reading their Desert Fathers.

As I said, very interesting. Anyway, check out this blog on a regular basis if you have a taste for some good modern poetry on mostly metaphysical subjects.

Good Preaching...

I am truly perplexed when I think about the criteria for determining a good evangelical church. Perhaps strangest of all is this concept of "good preaching" (a concept which I have myself employed to evaluate the churches that I have attended). There is, perhaps, no single factor in church practice that receives such a strict level of scrutiny by parishoners as this concept, though when I think about exactly what "good preaching" is, I must admit that I find myself in a difficult situation.

Of course, the impulse to have pastors "preach the word" at Sunday service is completely understandable, given the evangelical belief in the Scriptures as the Supreme Authority for the Christian - the living, active speech of God to man. What is confusing is not this emphasis, but rather why we need (or desire) a preacher to preach this Word to us at all... as well as how we evaluate the "excellence" of his delivery.

If the Scriptures are the active, self-revealing speech of God, then it seems to me that no "exposition" is necessary in preaching - only the opportunity of the congregation to hear and to humbly receive. This, however, makes the role of the preaching pastor almost ridiculous. "Good preaching", under this definition, is nothing more than articulate reading, and the believer would do well to put CDs of recorded bible reading on infinite repeat wherever he or she goes.

If, on the other hand, the Scriptures are an impedingly natural text, containing treasures of Divine wisdom locked away in historical contexts, thematic devices, cultural euphemisms and oblique inter-textual connections, then our access to God through the one point of reliable contact we have with the Divine will is rather restrictively contingent on the active work of a uniquely brilliant and well-educated biblical scholar. Woe to the developmentally disabled person, whose spirituality is, by this creed, necessarily restricted by his mental and linguistic capacity.

Under both conceptions the idea of "good preaching" becomes problematic in my estimation. I cannot help but think that the usefulness of this factor in determining the relative worth of a particular church is, at best, highly suspect, if only for the reason that I am loath to accept that such a tenuous practice as preaching appears to be could, in fact, be a cornerstone of church practice. By the first example, preaching is mostly unnecessary. By the second, preaching is so exceedingly complicated that the human element becomes largely more pivotal than the Divine... and only a handful of preachers in the world (judging by the ubiquitous disagreement of modern theologians) could "get it right" anyway. Is this indeed what our church is founded upon? Has God left us all stranded and dependant upon our own resources to discover the key to His revelation to us (being mostly illiterate for the first 1600 years of Christianity, and woefully inaccurate in our biblical interpretation until the wisdom of the Protestant Reformation)?

To me, this seems unlikely...

The Devil and Harley-Davidson

So admittedly this post is not exactly in keeping with the theme of the blog... but every once in a while it is nice to comment on excellent experiences, and riding through the back roads of Maui on a Harley Davidson definitely qualifies by my reckoning!

A few weeks ago my wife and I were able to take a trip to the island of Maui with our relatives, and while we were there we rented a motorcycle to tour the northern coast. There was a light, warm rain the whole trip (which was actually quite pleasant), and we wound through the lush tropical scenery around cliffs and through valleys on the narrowest, one-lane, semi-paved country road that I would care to navigate on a street bike. Experiencing the countryside in this way was probably the greatest touring experience that I can imagine. It was an excellent ride on the most gratifying vehicle made by man in the most delightful atmosphere thinkable. The thrill of skillfully navigating a well-crafted, elegant, powerful machine around back-country roads in the relative solitude of North Coast Maui by means of a mode of transportation that makes the connection of the rider to his or her environment (as well as to the power of the vehicle) truly "hath no brother".

A friend of mine once bemoaned to me (in a conversation about poets and poetry) the way in which the introduction of the motor-vehicle was a detriment to the healthy living of mankind and the production of poetry. Motor-vehicles, he argued, only encouraged modern man's frantic pace of life and helped to disconnect him from the natural rythm of an agricultural lifestyle... and in one way, I agree with him. The crowded freeways of L.A. could not be conducive to a proper peace of the soul, and the desire to travel quickly from one place to another in an isolated container that is equipped with increasingly complex methods of distraction from the tediousness of whatever short journey we do still have to endure does, in fact, seem to carry with it a long list of painful consequences for the average human, not least of which include disconnection from the outside world, a fostered pathological impatience, lack of meaningful time for reflection, lack of investment of personal effort in progress, compartmentalization of reality and experience, etc.

But I don't think my friend is completely right. There is an element of the human experience that the radical dismisal of all vehicular innovation seems not to account for - and I don't think that this element is a particularly bad one. There is something compelling to me about the fascination that humankind has always seemed to have with machinery and harnessing great powers. There is some pure kind of joy that we have always had in the wonder of a well-designed machine that goes beyond considerations of simple functionality. It was not for expediency's sake that we went to the moon, and it is certainly not for expediency's sake that we make Harley-Davidsons! There is something more to it...

For some reason, humans enjoy experiencing powers greater than their own. Anyone who loves riding Harleys will tell you that a great part of the enjoyment comes from the loud noise coming from the roaring engine that is right below your seat when you're riding... and the fact that it has a LOT of horsepower. There is something interesting to me about that particular enjoyment and the fact that it is so ubiquitous in humankind. We like brilliance of careful design when we find it in machines, and we feel a great fondness for methods of exceding our normal, physical contraints. Whether this is a symptom of the fall in man (a desire for power beyond reasonable limits) or an indication of a pure, childlike enjoyment (a desire to create that comes from the image of our creator and a comical, humble acceptance of our relative weakness compared to the great forces present in nature that allows us to appreciate a taste of something more), it is an interesing human phenomenon... and until I have reason to believe otherwise, I will continue to have feelings of great gratitute and wonder toward the Harley-Davidson motor company.

Evangelicals and Evidentialism

I was very surprised the other day when I was arguing with one of my Orthodox friends and they accused me of being an "evidentialist". I was, at the time, cynically and rather grumpily poking at the traditions of the Orthodox church (such as church hierarchy and the veneration of Mary) and calling into question the validity of their historical claims. It seemed to me, I told him, that there was no certain way to know that the traditions of the Orthodox Church were (as they claim) passed down to them from the Apostles pure and untainted, and I insinuated that, having no way of being certain about the historical "earliness" or "validity" of these claims (on the basis of a multitude of conflicting scholarship), that it was difficult for me simply to "take the Orthodox scholars' word for it".

The resulting accusation of evidentialism shocked me because I realised (as he later pointed out to me) that my arguments took me into dangerous (though common) theological ground. Evidentialism is an attitude toward epistemic justification that considers knowledge to be directly related to the amount of available evidence about the particular claim. Beliefs require sufficient evidence to be justified, and beliefs without evidential justification do not constitute knowledge. The great irony is, as blogger Matt Anderson points out in several of his latest posts, that this belief is radically opposed to our Christian faith, as it is both practically impossible (i.e. "what if all of reality is just a big computer program designed to fool our senses and our reason into believing a set of falsehoods, and we are really just a brain in a vat or a complex set of electrical impulses... how would we know it?"), and also theologically flawed. Our belief that the bible is the inspired Word of God is not based on historical and forensic evidence gathered to support this conclusion. We believe in the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures because we trust the testimony of God about His work... and we believe that God has testified about His Scriptures that they are inspired by Him.

This belief is one that runs contra to much current evangelical work and interest, which attempts to set itself apart from the post-modern and ultra-modern forces in our culture by making the effort to base Christian truth-claims on the justification of historical fact and empirical evidence. The ironic tension of our age converges nicely in this central issue of justifying our faith, as we simultaneously attempt to denounce Islam and L.D.S claims through evidential trumping and to claim the supremacy of the Holy Scriptures as authority in our lives (a claim that is made invalid if the scriptures themselves need to be in any way justified by external sources... if the bible is the supreme authority then it is necessarily prior to any means of validation). When it comes down to it, our faith is based on a belief in the testimony of God that is self-evidently present in our faith itself. We are witnesses of that which we believe, and this witness and obedience to the self-speaking presence of God is the basis of all of Christianity.

On these grounds, disarming the claims of my Orthodox friend become surprisingly difficult. We would certainly like to argue about dates, manuscripts, historical revision, cultural influence, interpretive communities, etc. But what our faith comes down to is not this evidential pandering but rather the simple question of what means God sanctified for the ends of His life-giving self-revelation. Could He have spoken through the teachings and the traditions of the historic Orthodox Church? Most certainly. Did He speak through his saints in the gospels and the teachings of St. Paul in his epistles? Most definitely. The two claims are not mutually exclusive... and if it was, as the Orthodox claim, the inspiration of the Church (Christ's true body on earth) that facilitated the inspiration of the Scriptures, then as followers of Christ we certainly need to pay attention to the Orthodox claims...