Give Lacan A Cookie

I've been reading Lacan as a part of a survey course, and I was quite amused to run into this critique of "evolutionism". I've thought something like this before, but it's interesting to hear it coming out of the mouth of a radically skeptical psychoanalyst:

"It is paradoxically only from a creationist point of view that one can envisage the elimination of the always recurring notion of creative intention as supported by a person. In evolutionist thought, although God goes unnamed throughout, he is literally omnipresent. An evolution that insists on deducing from continuous process the ascending movement which reaches the summit of consciousness and thought necessarily implies that that consciousness and that thought were there from the beginning. It is only from the point of view of an absolute beginning, which marks the origin of the signifying chain as a distinct order and which isolates in their own specific dimension the memorable and the remembered, that we do not find Being [l'etre] always implied in being [l'etant], the implication that is at the core of evolutionist thought." - Jaques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

In other words, evolution implies a movement from "worse" to "better" - a system of valuation with a definite, preexisting goal. Such an austere philosopher as Lacan can hardly bear this kind of mushy, rhetorical nonsense. Far from letting his philosophical brethren have their cake and eat it too, he is only too eager to remind them that the choice must remain clear - either there is Meaning or there isn't. Either something came from nothing at some point (and of course he thinks it did, even if the only thing that came into being was the false perception of order due to an arbitrary and ultimately illusory function of our psyche), or there has never been anything at all. "Nothing exists" cries Lacan. "It's all a sham - a chain of chaotic representations that make 'objects' out of random fields of energy."

We can only thank him for making the stakes clear, and remember our dear friend Puddleglum, whose words, as timely now as they were when Lewis wrote them, always seem to make the choice clear:

"Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand for the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper... we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say." - C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

Selah...

Self-Image

This past Sunday we celebrated the miraculous birth and the prophetic ministry of St John the Forerunner (John the Baptist). Though many topics seem to come to mind when thinking of St. John, perhaps the most striking to me on this particular Sunday was the one most directly in front of my nose (though it took me a while to notice it). When Fr. Wayne started into his homily on "owning up to the self that we are and that we are becoming", I have to admit that I was a bit puzzled. "What does this have to do with John the Baptist?" I thought to myself. Though I am never one to knock a homily on the topic of self-reflection, I couldn't see the connection to the scripture reading.

Only then did I notice the text on the scroll that St. John is pictured as holding in the large icon at the front of our church. "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!" it reads. And at once it struck me that John's message on this earth (like the message of so many Old Testament prophets) was pretty much entirely bound up in the call to repentance.

I think that it is interesting that repentance almost always seems to be the response of people that come into contact with God. No matter who it is that you are reading about (even men described as righteous and/or blameless before the Lord), an encounter with God seems to bring about a rapid confession of worthlessness and a cry of repentance.

In their own encounters with God, John the Revelator cried out that he was a "man of unclean lips", and Job went as far as to say "I despise myself utterly, and repent in dust and ashes". Listening to Fr. Wayne's homily on conforming ourselves to the likeness of Christ, it was interesting for me to note that the process of becoming Christlike almost always starts with this kind of crises. I had thought often before about the fear of those that encountered the holiness of God, and a lot even about the terror of those that were allowed to experience a small bit of His awesome power. I never had trouble imagining the terror of such situations... but it never struck me quite so frankly that the flavor of this particular fear was an acute and overwhelming recognition of the true image of God - an image always confused, smudged, distorted, broken, twisted, and blurred in our own souls (though still present) when viewed through our own petty self-reflection, but perfect and glorious and convicting when witnessed in the perfect image of the Son of God. Before meeting Jesus we might be tempted to think, through the decay of His image in ourselves, that we are doing pretty well in our sanctification... or we may not even think about our sanctification at all, and instead wander around in frustration, wondering why our lives have become so miserable. But both of these feelings - both ignorance and apathy, pride and sloth - become impossible the moment we behold the face of God.

"Oh!" we say as our heart leaves us, and we turn pale and hit the floor as though dead (indeed, we feel dead in comparison with the energy of that life), "that is what it is supposed to look like..." and a rush of repentance floods quickly to our lips, because no matter what me might have made of ourselves on this earth, we have not made that... and we realize that we have failed in our stewardship. Whether we were given ten talents, five, or even one, we have not made a profit with it... indeed, we have not even managed to return the initial gift undiminished.

"So you too, when you do all the things which are commanded you, say, `We are unworthy slaves; we have done only that which we ought to have done.' " (Luke 17:10). These are sobering words from our Savior and Lord, and they lead me to dread more than a little my own immanent encounter with God. As far as the verse goes, I'm still working on the "do all the things which are commanded you" part... and it doesn't look as though that will be done any time soon.

May our Lord have mercy on us...

Suprised by Skepticism: Our Amazing Capacity for Misery

I am always shocked when I come face to face with a real, well-spoken, committed atheist, like Mr. Adam Gopnik over at the New Yorker.

I guess that after living for so long in a small community of Christian friends, I just begin to suppose that everyone lives and thinks the way that I do! I find it hard to believe that there are people out there that have read the works of Christians like G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis and have not been moved by their articulate faith and convicting common sense... I find it hard to believe that someone could come face to face with such robust representations of the truth and find the strength to be skeptical, and I have to thank the boys over at lex orandi for reminding me that such people do, in fact, exist!

Of course my experiences with half-hearted agnostics have been far more plentiful than my encounters with such atheiests. The average American seems to have a kind of vague hostility toward serious religion that is based more upon the fear that we might try to take their toys (and tiny pleasures) away from them than on anything else. But every once in a while I meet an atheist that is really committed to being miserable when faced with the alternative, and it slaps me back into an awareness of just how serious our spiritual battle is... and how lightly I have tended to take the plight of the earnest doubter.

There are people out there that have looked at the best evidence and simply refuse to believe that it points to God! It is not so much that the arguments of these "serious" atheists are any more compelling than those of the half-hearted agnostics - both stances ultimately boil down to a kind of preference in the end - but rather that these arguments are very articulate in their slight of hand... they lead a person that is not listening very closely (or doesn't want to listen very closely) into believing that religious people are just "up tight" dreamers who obsinately fight for the truth of a metaphysical reality that works just as well as a personal fantasy. The mystical, they argue, can make people just as happy when they "know" it to be false as when they believe it to be true... so why argue about it?

The hole in this argument is, of course, obvious to any religious person when it is stated in this way! People like C.S. Lewis who, in finding the Faith, have found what they had been searching for their entire lives do not experience their conversion as a kind of compromising wish-fulfilment... the encounter is greater than any other experience before it, and it reveals all of their little hopes and dreams to be mere echoes of their adoration for the true love of their souls. The new convert, likewise, is not fooled into believing that his religious experience is important primarily because it is a fantasy that makes him happy. Such arguments may be plausible to skeptics in their dark caves of isolated thought, but one of the really surprising things about our daily encounters with the average "man on the street" is that the Faith really does ring true to created ears. As many times as I forget this when I flinch at sharing my faith, most people (including myself) are able to put up with very difficult doctrines when they finally come into contact with the solid reality of Christ - and they would never buy the idea that the objective truth of God's existence is an unimportant factor in their belief! To the great consternation and confusion of ardent atheists, our faith is such that we feel it must be obstinately asserted, because the tangible reality of our claim is exactly what matters about it!

So why do these "serious" atheists persist in downplaying our experience, and why do so many people seem to scoff and excuse their way out of dealing with real religious conversion? It is, I fear, not so great a mystery! Each of us have an astounding capacity for enduring misery in the name of maintaining control of our own world. If the skeptical atheist is right about anything, it is this very tendency in human nature to ignore reasonable solutions in favor of clinging to a personal hope. We have all been victims of this kind of pride to some extent or another, and lest we start to point fingers we should be reminded of exactly how widespread this kind of sickness actually is!

How many of us have given up happiness at one point or another in order to settle for a world that we can control? How many have ended a healthy, helpful relationship by trading a friend's offer of forgiveness for the personal control of staying angry? How many have endured addiction and poverty of all kinds rather than submitting to the kind of help that would make us call these things wrong, admit our defeat, and give them up for a better life? We are proud creatures! And as complicated, educated, refined and articulate as our excuses become, we cannot avoid the ultimate reality that our choices are often motivated by this very tendency to reject what is good in favor of what we feel we can control.

So are we right when we say that there is a God? Mr. Gopnik will tell us that we simply like this story because it makes us feel safe, and he will go on to recast every Christian experience in this light. A free mind can choose to compare the wonderful fantasy of C.S. Lewis and the robust faith that he holds and decide that the fantasy is the real part and the faith is just an awkwardly tacked-on fabrication. He can read the wild stories of G.K. Chesterton and smirk in the belief that it was natural human enthusiasm that inspired this joy in spite of his forgivable religious delusion. But what he cannot honestly claim is that this conclusion is any more accurate or less subjective than that of his religious opponents... and in the end it is he, and not the religious person, that the burden of proof falls upon.

An atheist like Gopnik refuses to accept the witness of millions of Christians throughout history, who have all claimed to experience a level of communion with the supernatural. While Christians are able to acknowledge all of the skeptic's experiences of earthly happiness and joy as valid, Gopnik's principles will not allow him to acknowledge the Christian's claims as even possible. Such a dilemma forces the atheist into a tight spot... he must either hold to his personal belief and choose to ignore or explain away experience, or he must give up his personal belief and entertain the idea that the world may not be completely explained and under control - that he may be subject to a being that he cannot overpower and that he may never come to fully understand!

May God have mercy on the souls of us who are faced with this dilemma! We are all capable of extreme denial in such cases, when our pride is on the line. We are all vulnerable to the kind of skepticism that would rather be master of our own small, dead world than except the reality of that which we cannot master. As much as we would like to believe it impossible, there are many, many people (even people who call themselves Christians) that will willingly take hell over Heaven when they realize what it really means for Heaven to require the death of self. If sin is a sickness, it is a sickness that we can learn to love as we love our own being.

The devil originally dwelt in the presence of God, and the demons still know that Christ is king... but all of these beings found it in themselves to choose to turn from this knowledge for a chance at their own kingdom. Whatever ignorance there is in such a decision, we cannot downplay the role that real choice plays.

C.S. Lewis himself writes, at the end of his Narnia chronicles, of such severe skepticism when the dwarves are faced with heavenly realities at the end of time. Like our own Mr. Gopnik, these dwarves sit in the middle of Aslan's country and obstinately deny that they have left the little tent on their own world. Where there is light and beauty they see darkness. Where there is luscious landscape they see canvas walls. All the beauty is, to them, merely tricks of their imagination, and all of the joyful calls of those around them are merely jealous mocking or deluded fantasy. Their presuppositions will not let them see the promised land or the goodness of Aslan, so they are bound forever by their own delusion to sit on the ground and miserably assert that they are great and wise to see through all of the silly talk of "Aslan's country". They are confident that they know all there is to know about the world, and they content themselves with the thought that even if they are not very happy, they are at least very right!

May God save us all from such delusion!

The Dark Arts: Or, Why I Still Don't Like Depressing Poetry

It seems to me that, after my last post on John Mayer, I might take a little time to fill out one of the concepts that was assumed in the post (and a lot of my criteria for judging art), but wasn't argued for very persuasively.

I despise a certain kind of depressing art. Agree with me or call it a fault if you like, but I have always had a bone to pick with artists who feel good about foisting their morbidity upon us without giving us a way out... and I think that I have good reasons for feeling this way!

Quickly, let me clarify that I DO NOT MEAN that I don't think there is a place for stories with darker themes or sad subject matter. My distaste isn't as simple as not liking to mourn with those who mourn (I actually believe that this kind of charity is vital in a culture with as much heartache as ours, and those of us who, for reasons of maintaining their own personal happiness, refuse to comfort others in pain or to deal with the real problems that exist in the world have a serious problem of their own). Pain and sadness are a real part of life, and as creators we make art about these experiences too.

What I AM talking about is a certain tendency in all of us sub-creating beings to "modify" our stories in order to make ourselves the heroes of our own tragedies... and also a certain kind of weakness that seems to let us prefer to wallow in our pain rather than to seek a way out of it.

I am melancholy all the time. Nothing is more painfully apparent to me than the problems of the world, the gravity of my sin, and the terrible plight of those born into bad circumstances. But it is Hell that chooses to dwell on these things because it has nothing better to expect. It is Satan that chooses to be satisfied with becoming the hero of his own tragedy rather than allowing himself to humbly assume a supporting role, and I guess that I always tend to find a slight tinge of this false martyrdom in every melancholy artist I have met - not the desire to cope with the pain that is experienced, but rather the kind of pride that would give up Heaven in order to cling to their claim of injustice. Though I often struggle with pride, I cannot imagine the sort of sickness that would move a person to "love" their own brokenness enough to choose "authenticity" over the humiliation of healing. The kind of artist I admire is one who can look at all of this filth and mire in the face and refuse to give up on hope. The kind of artist I admire has an inexplicable joy that just cannot be crushed. Is there anything in the world more poetic than this?!

The kind of hero I want to follow is one that can go to the cross "for the joy set before him". If our hearts cannot hold within them the hope of glory even as we walk through the valley of death, then we are souls better fit for condemnation than for Heaven. The great saints chose to give themselves up for the life of the world and laughed for joy as they did it. It was not because they were sick and grieved, or because they preferred the company of sombre people, that they visited the sick and comforted the grieving... it was the deep and all-pervading joy of their hearts - the truly supernatural life of Christ within them - that moved them to tend to the pain of their brothers and sisters in need.

I have nothing to speak against people who suffer genuine, undeserved pain. These people deserve all of our genuine, earnest help and charity. But as storytellers, we have the responsibility to lead the way toward life and truth. The devil may sulk and pity himself, but we must be beacons of the very real hope that we possess (by no merit of our own). If we tell dark stories, let them be about the shallow futility of our sin, the patiently enduring goodness of saintly men and women, and the ever-available redemption of Christ that bashes its way through even the darkest parts of our nature.

More than anything, I love the hero that is able to say "peace be with you" before he goes into battle. There is nothing more "real" than this hero, even if he doesn't seem to fit in our world. The melancholy artists will sneer and barely be able to stomach such a sentiment... and they have good reason to feel this way. They are sick down to their very core, and the world that they live in does not operate on such principles of hope as we have described above. They think that we are cheating in our analysis, and by the rules of this sick reality they are right! The feeling of nausea in the face of hope is a "natural" one, given this sickness... and the only thing we can hope is that this sickness will eventually lead to death - unto the death, that is, of this so-called "natural" state of decay and corruption, knowing that the core of our being, after all, does not belong to this world we have described.

If we feel a little queasy when redemption is mentioned, perhaps it is an indication that we have yet to fully realize the life of Christ within us. On earth, the most "real" things we experience may in fact be pain and suffering... but let us not be fooled into thinking that these are the most real things that exist! I feel the thrill of other-worldly intrusion every time I read Christ saying "blessed are the poor in spirit"... not because it makes sense in our world, but because it bears witness to an intruding and redemptive truth. It is only in a Christian world that an artist can make the story of a tiny hobbit that takes the One Ring to Mordor. Though Nietzsche would scoff at this "pitiful" case of "wish fulfillment", I wonder could he stand to look into the eyes of the martyr and to see the beatified smile on his face - a smile not of desperate delusion but of knowledge, love, pity and blessing - or would he be undone by the reality of otherworldly joy?

I will take this kind of storytelling over merely natural morbidity any day. I despise the small artist that desperately clings to the little glory of his own decay... and I bless the artist that is willing to admit that the natural result of coming to realize the utter bankruptcy of one's own being (as well as the utter mess that one has made of one's world) is not to justify it or to glorify it or to "accept it" (may God curse that terrible modern conclusion) but to eagerly look for the hope that first preached to us the resurrection of the dead and the supernatural life that we can find in Christ.

John Mayer... that's what you're missing, bro... and even if you don't realize it yet, I'm glad that you aren't letting yourself be satisfied with less.

Heavier Things

Without a doubt, this is John Mayer's best album to date. Sure, it lacks the musical enthusiasm of his younger days and the musical polish of his latest work, but thematically this is really John at his best... and before you start to argue with me, let me give you three reasons to believe me.

1. The album sits, like everyone's best album, right in the middle (thematically) of the creator's two crazy extremes, holding in remarkable tension his thirst for significance and his longing for home. It is remarkably tempting for all of us (much less an artist like Mr. Mayer with his fame on the line) to cop out of dealing with one or the other of these extremes, or to paint oneself as a martyr in one's failings or hardships, but this album is John in the best possible place he can be... where it is still possible for him to see both extremes clearly before him, and where we feel his understanding of life has caught up with his earnestness of expression just enough to produce a real honest look at his own priorities, experiences, shortcomings and failures. It is his own choices that have taken him away from happiness and brought him to the edge of being disgruntled, and he has both the sense of irony to doubt the purity of his own aspirations in songs like "Something's Missing" and "Split Screen Sadness", and the youthful drive and eagerness to hope for a real solution in songs like "Clarity" and "Home Life". Like Switchfoot's Learning to Breathe, this album represents the pinnacle of the artist's unique creative power and identity, falling into the neither the flat and sometimes shallow immaturity of the early work nor the self-indulgent lamentation of later efforts. The struggle of the album has exactly the virtue of bringing the artist to a breakdown or an impasse without hardening him to the natural response of hopeful longing. Here one finds both responsibility and hope, and I'm all for an honest look at something like that!

2. The album has some beautifully crafted moments. John Mayer has a remarkable way of capturing the essence of a struggle in music and clever lyrics. To reprint them here would be to do a great injustice to the effect, but listen to the seventh track ("Split Screen Sadness") and tell me that you aren't moved by the rendering of the song to feel a certain kinship with the man. You root for him in this album, and listening to his desire for change makes you want to change yourself!

3. This album is the best because home wins. Anyone who really listens to John struggle feels that fame and self-service leave one with "something missing"... and that if anything is worth "kissing the ground" and putting down roots for, it's got to be something like "home". Of course there is a lot to be said about the insufficiency of earthly homes... but in our day and age one really can stand to hear a lot more about settling down and giving up our pursuit of "greatness" for the acquisition of loving, rooted relationships. Personally, I have a hard time keeping myself from tearing up every time I listen to "Clarity". It's worth it, John! It's worth it! Let's both have the courage to make that eternal vow and to hope for something unchanging! Let's give up our seflishness and personal aspirations and look to protect something real instead!

Hooray for divine discontent... and hooray for any album that leaves us unsatisfied with ourselves and makes us want to be more than we are!

The Danger of Demonizing: Truth and the "Other Guy"

Though we would all like to think that we are "just being reasonable" in holding to our own particular beliefs, the truth is that, no matter what you believe, there will always be many, many intelligent people out there that disagree with you! If you are anything like me (or most radio talk show hosts), this poses a persistent and irritating problem - namely, how to account for these people and their aberrant beliefs. Certainly you can ignore those who disagree with you, or simply choose not to think about the fact that they do disagree, but chances are that sooner or later you will have to come to grips with the difference and decide both what you think of "the other guy" (i.e. what his "problem" is), and how you are going to deal with his disagreement. Holy Wars and Abolitionist Movements aside, I believe that most of us have already, in fact, made several of these subtle decisions in our minds and are already experiencing, to some extent, the (good or bad) consequences of our own particular choices. I do not think, however, that we have always made the right decision with regard to the treatment of our fellow contender!

As far as I can tell, we have three options regarding what we think of those who disagree with us - we can choose to believe that they are intentionally ignoring the truth because of a character flaw in themselves (i.e. their pride will not let them tolerate the idea), we can sympathetically insist on their ignorance of the truth (i.e. they simply haven't heard that one compelling argument for the idea), or we can (perhaps too humbly) assume that the other person must disagree because she or he knows more about the subject than we do (i.e. their vast scientific research must have offered compelling proofs for the validity of the idea that I am simply not aware of).

Of course, all three of these options have their own unique faults and virtues, and it would be easy to argue that most of our actual encounters with the people that hold to these opposing beliefs actually evoke a complicated mixture of two or even all three of these responses in us. Obviously, we will not always consider other people experts in every field of belief, just as we should not consider all people to be willfully ignorant of the truth! More often we will listen to disagreement with a kind of sincere curiosity, aware of the many factors that play into both our own and the other person's beliefs and assumptions. I think that this is healthy... Most of the time charity will require us to hold on to our own beliefs tentatively, knowing as we do that though we must act on what we believe to be true, we are often mistaken about the details of our understanding through our own faults and ignorances! All too often, however, I feel that we do not offer all people this "benefit of the doubt".

Where most of us tend to get into trouble is where our deep and cherished beliefs (those that we consider to be vitally important) come into question. Here we feel that we must bare down and refuse to give up ground. Here it is that zealots on both sides put their feet down and start enlisting soldiers for the Crusade... and to some extent this makes sense! If there is anything that is too important to budge on, it is certainly the fundamental basis of our thought and action (such as the existence and nature of God and/or our origin and purpose as human beings). Over such things even "rational" Atheist writers like Hitchens and Dawkins take the gloves off and prepare to relentlessly pummel the opposition without prejudice to education, vocation, or background. If a wrong idea, after all, is causing thousands of people to perish in futility, isn't it worth fighting? If a source of revelation about the nature of the world seems to present itself clearly and articulately to our understanding, aren't we somewhat justified in our adamant insistence that our opponents attend to this source? Occasionally this kind of relentless zeal even spills over into inter-denominational Christian debates, with proponents on both sides refusing to budge.

My wife and I have been bemoaning the poor treatment that many of our High Church leaders have been giving Low Church Evangelicals as of late. Of course, when we ourselves sat on the other side of the fence we bemoaned the grief that Evangelicals gave the High Church leaders with equal distaste, but thankfully the humility of my wife has always pointed us toward our own faults first! On both sides it seems that a certain "demonizing" tends to occur, where we begin to downplay the role that ignorance or differing perspective plays in an opponent's beliefs (even zealously held beliefs), and defensively begin to feel that our opponents are wicked masterminds - orchestrators of destructive and manipulative conspiracies - instead of people that are fighting for what they believe to be important. This rendering of our brothers and sisters can hardly bring about any good! Even if a person is truly wrong in their beliefs, the humility of our Christian faith certainly demands that we first react to our brothers and sisters with kindness and charity, knowing that we ourselves were rescued from a pitiable ignorance and wickedness of heart by the unmerited grace of God! Orthodox Christians especially ought to feel no personal entitlement when it comes to correct personal knowledge, begging the Lord as we do to let us not "judge our brothers" but rather to "see our own sin". In every case, charity demands that we see those with opposing views as honest seekers of the truth - fellow men and women who hold to their beliefs out of the same mixture of sincerity and ignorance that motivates our own understanding. When we do this, we frequently find that particular issues are not as simple and "straightforward" as they seem to be upon first glance! People with radically different perspectives than our own have, in fact, rather strong and compelling reasons for believing what they believe, and if these reasons seem rather less compelling than our own reasons for believing the opposite, we must nonetheless allow these reasonable persons the uniqueness of their particular backgrounds, training, and values.

This, of course, plays into the second part of our original question, which was how we ought to deal with those that disagree with us. There are, without a doubt, people who are mistaken about very important things. The existence of multiple perspectives by no means invalidates the existence of absolute truth... it only complicates our understanding of it! Like others of my own faith, I feel that we must, as witnesses of the revelation of God, stand firm in our belief, both that He exists and that our purpose is to be united to Him in His body, which is the Church. Outside of this understanding I can make no sense of the world or our purpose here. This belief does not, however, preclude my imagining the circumstances that would lead a person to believe the opposite! It is my duty as a Christian - indeed as a human being - to treat the Atheist with the same respect and kindness that led me to the Church of Christ in the first place (including a genuine sensitivity to the person's fears and hesitancies), knowing as I do that my own beliefs are shaped greatly by my encounters with other people. If wickedness is leading a person to ignore the truth, then no amount of hatred or forceful argumentation will change their mind, and they ought to be loved or even pitied rather than abused, as they are victims of their own sin and no worse than any of us in our own sin. If sincere ignorance is keeping a person from knowing the truth, then stern rebuke and "straw man" lampooning is only a great cruelty that will sooner turn that person away from the faith than draw them to it. If superior understanding is leading a person to disagree with you, then you make yourself ridiculous by refusing to listen to their perspective! In any case, it is safe to assume that every person has sincere (or at least understandable) reasons for believing what they believe... and before we "demonize" them, we ought first to see what has led them to their conclusions!

As Christians we need fear no truth. The great saints of our faith had the humility and wisdom to see that "innovations" like the doctrine of the Trinity, rather than representing a departure from the belief in one God, actually affirmed that belief and helped to deepen our understanding of the Godhead. St. Paul had the good sense to trust the vision of the Lord that He received, to turn from his zealous persecution of the Christians (inspired as it was by his admirable zeal for God!), and to accept the very doctrine that had led him to persecute the Church in the first place. As firmly as we hold to our articulations of the truth, we have lost our way if we come to the place where we cannot undergo a similar roadside conversion...

The Hope of Glory: Do We Want It?

Last Sunday, Fr. Wayne mentioned the trial of the ointment bearing women as they traveled to the tomb of Christ for what they thought would be a service of love performed for a dead master. These women went to the tomb without any means of removing the great stone that stood in the entrance, and were, in fact, fretting about this quite practical concern as they neared the place where Christ had been laid to rest.

I cannot help but be struck by the conspicuousness of this practical worry. I cannot help but feel that it stands for a far greater sign of a pitiably human spiritual struggle. As Fr. Wayne points out, the hope of the Christian rests entirely on the power of Christ to move the unmovable and to set Himself (and us, by extension) free from the dark bonds of death and prison. But how many of us can actually and eagerly bear to hope for such a hope?

As I sat and listened to this sermon, I thought to myself "what would I do if Christ actually broke from the tomb where I have buried Him, out of pious devotion, in my heart, and started demanding that I take up my cross and follow Him into fullness of life?" Would it be a joy to see Christ rise, or a terror?! Would I be exultant at the resurrection, or would I be struck down in fear like the soldiers at the tomb (or hide myself in the rocks like the poor wretches in the Revelation of John). It is an easy thing to bring oil and spices to anoint the body of a dead lord... after all, there is nothing scary or demanding about something dead. How many of us go day after day to church, bringing our simple (if costly) gifts of prayer, time, money and service, comforting ourselves with the thought "oh well... of course we will never be able to remove the stone... but God could never expect that of us, could He? We will bring our little gifts and come back next week, and even if we are a little sad that He is dead, at least we know what we have to do now! There is nothing simpler or more straightforward than our duty to the dead... we must bring our spices and mourn our loss and comfort ourselves with the hope of the distant resurrection at the end of time... but there is certainly nothing eminent to be demanded of us - nothing to disturb our daily routine! God is here... he is shut inside this tomb, and I am free to go about my business as I please and, when I miss Him, to go and seek Him, for I always know exactly where He will be and what He will require me to do."

But oh... a risen God?! What may He require of us?! What if it is more than we have?! What if it is everything?! Where may He take us?! What if it is somewhere we do not want to go?! What if it is through martyrdom to the presence of angels and before the face of God (whom all in history have fallen down before as though dead and fainted in fear of being "undone")?! What if He wants to make us stay there!? What if He wants to give us more life than we would like to have? What if He will put us through any pain - any denial of pleasure or lack of rest - that is necessary to make us fit for such a life? And what if He wants to start now...

Does this prospect not strike terror into your soul? Would we not do anything... settle for anything... to have our little comforts and conveniences back, and to live a safe and uneventful life? Would we not try to convince ourselves of the great advantage of our current way of living, and cling to our sorrows and disappointments as sweet in comparison to such a monumental ordeal? When Christ rose from the dead, what He gave us was something that we were certainly not looking for... and something that we almost certainly did not want! To have God rise in the future is safe hope of future bliss, but God did not give us safety.

The capacity that we have for apathy is astounding!!! We are so desperately afraid of that which lies outside of our own experience... and we are so wickedly content with our self-centered, fallen lives on this earth. Though we are convinced that we desire fullness of life in Christ, really we have never even thought about the reality of this idea. It is one of those ideas that we are able to embrace only because we have put it off into a vague kind of "other-world" - an idea that is comfortable because it is not "here"- and have not considered the prospect of facing the trial today, in our present state! We are like the pompous knights of the old fairy tales, going about in our shiny armour and boasting about what we would do if we ever encountered a dragon... never really thinking of what fighting a dragon would be like! But what if our commission involves giving everything to this transformation now... this from this very hour? I think that we all too quickly speak of "adoring His third day resurrection".

If this resurrection (and our participation with Christ through baptism) is an actual event that takes place in our hearts as well as in history, and requires the resurrection of our whole being, then it is not a comfortable religious remembrance or a fond story that gives us a comfortable hope! It is a radical break from all things natural, normal, weak and fallen... and it is a call that leads us up into the terrible presence of God, where we will have to be made fit to be sons, and not slaves. If God can raise humanity from the grave and join us to Himself through Christ, then what may He not require of us? A slave can complain that, after all, he is only a slave... and the master cannot expect too much of weak laborers. "The stone is too big," we say, "and He cannot possibly expect us to move it. We will do what we can." But the man Jesus Christ removed the stone. Is any task too difficult for us through the power of Christ's resurrection? What is the measure of the riches that are given to us in the partaking of the Lord's Supper, and what will be our excuse on the Last Day when the Lord finds us feeding at the trough with the pigs, and not yet acting like sons?

Imagination and Supermodernity

Someone once said that chance is the word we use for processes too complex for us to understand. While this quip is hardly helpful in a practical sense, in a very important way to be a Theist means to believe just this - that the universe is essentially ordered according to the nature and will of a supreme being, and that all events, no matter how seemingly chaotic, are in some sense governed by the will of the one that brought all things into being. On the micro-level, of course, this seemingly simple idea can spawn rather interesting and tricky thoughts!

I just watched The Science of Sleep last night, and I must say that I had a delightfully thoughtful viewing experience. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I have a weakness for "artsy" and somewhat melancholy indi films such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (another Gondry film) and Garden State. But perhaps the most striking thing to me about this particular film was the tension raised by the very theme that I mentioned above... a theme that has become an increasingly common one in modern film (Gondry can't seem to get away from it).

At one of the key moments in "The Science of Sleep", the female antagonist (?) muses that "randomness is so difficult to achieve... things are always falling back into pattern and order". This sentiment serves as an essential tension in the film, as Gondry's characteristic interplay between imagination and reality works itself out in the story through the struggle of the main character (Stephane) - who is continually confusing the rather vivid imaginary events of his dreams with events in real life - to wade through his own imaginative commentary and arrive at a true understanding of the woman he loves. The filmmaker, of course, seems to indicate that chaos is the essential nature of reality, and that our difficulty in achieving understanding in our life is due to the fact that we, as creative beings, are always going about sorting these truly random details into structures and trying to make sense of the world. On the downside, of course, this stance must necessarily paint a bleak outlook of our chances for forming coherent "beliefs" about the world we live in. The cosmological confusion, however, is hardly the most interesting part of Gondry's project. In painting the struggle of Stephan, the movie rather brilliantly portrays the very real danger that we face as subcreative, organizing beings when we set out to make sense of the world around us.

Stephane's dreams, like many of our own, are epic amplifiers of feelings and events in his day to day existence , and are always "sorting" the elements of waking life into strange, sometimes hopeful, sometimes depressing, and often fantastic renderings. The difficulty that Gondry highlights here is the very real sense in which our life as limited human beings is a product of our own creative filtering, organization and commentary. While we may be certain of the existence of absolute order in the cosmos, we are not always objectively privy to an understanding of the true meaning or significance of the events that occur in every day life. Many details we simply ignore, and many interactions we choose to view, like Stephane, through the tinted lens of our own presuppositions.

This difficulty often gets us into trouble. Our prejudices can blind us to the good intentions of others. Our fears can keep us stubbornly trapped inside of a small construction of reality and can lead us to "villainize" and avoid true and beautiful elements that simply do not fit into the picture that we have made. We are constantly facing the danger in our lives of willingly letting our creative impulse overwhelm or confuse our perception.

So what does the film suggest as a antidote to this dilemma? What else, but an open eye and a moderation of the impulse to draw unwarranted conclusions. The universe is a remarkably complex thing, and it is fascinating to note the way in which our imagination can so brilliantly boil things down to delightfully tidy packages. It is important, however, that we remember to separate these simplifications of reality (these stories, if you will) from an ultimate understanding of the universe. No merely human story is an exhaustive retelling of reality. No ideology can capture the fullness of the God-created cosmos. When Stephane collapses in frustration at the end of the movie, he notices that his would-be-love has actually fulfilled every promise that he, in fear, did not believe she had fulfilled.

It is important that we remember, as much as possible, to trust in the wisdom of our all-powerful God, to doubt as much as possible our sinful and deceptive hearts, and to learn to keep an open mind about how the world is ultimately ordered.

Neo-Gnosticism and Easy Theology

The truly remarkable thing about Christianity is the fact that it refuses to be nailed down by simple philosophical or doctrinal presuppositions. Try as some have over the ages, they simply have not been able to fit this faith of ours into any tidy categories or comfortable social gospels... the true witness of the Apostles in Scripture and church tradition has soundly resisted all attempts to do so.

The Gospel of Christ is always expanding itself beyond comfortable norms and smug simplifications, convicting the slothfully content and preaching humility to the proud and the arrogant.

This is why debates about things such as predestination are so frustrating and even ultimately dangerous. While it may be important to be able to articulate (in some sense) the nature both of God's true and real sovereignty over His creation and our troublingly apparent ability to set our will against our Creator, it is ridiculous to settle for any position that makes no practical sense of either the nature of God or our own human experience! Both strict determinism and Armenian free will are drastically simplistic philosophical positions that fail to articulate either the fullness of the revealed nature of God or the aim of the Christian life in a way that is helpful to mere humans that are struggling through daily life and apparent freedom. When we settle for such articulations, we do not merely expose ourselves to pride and error, we also run the risk of letting everything that our simple philosophical positions ignore actually dominate our lives and our thinking behind our backs.

A perfect (and more dangerous) example of this phenomenon is the apparent neo-gnosticism of much of our own popular Christian culture. Most Christians will say that they believe in the incarnation of Christ and the bodily resurrection of the dead... but how many of us truly understand the implications of this reality? How often do you find in the church a reasonable understanding of the significance of physical and material presence in the reality of our spiritual life?

In the righteous ardour of our "sola fide" thinking, it seems that a subtle error has crept into our theology (though once again, not into our daily living). We say that in Christ the fullness of the Deity dwelt bodily (Col. 2:9), and we acknowledge that it is through Christ's physical death and resurrection that we have obtained life... but somehow we are unable even to hear a strong statement about the effective power of baptism or holy communion without falling into a panic. My point here is not so much a theological one - that baptism , for instance, is actually necessary or not necessary for salvation. My point is that our immediate suspicion of the power of physical processes may be more suspect than the power of those physical processes themselves. Do we believe that the bodily aspect of Christ's salvific actions were irrelevant to our salvation? Do we really think that "grace through faith" means that faith entails mere cognitive acceptance of theological propositions? I think that this whole train of belief smells of gnosticism.

The belief that body is bad and spirit is good may be far from the living practice of modern-day Christians, but our denial of any physical instrumentality in spiritual processes indicates that something is rotten with our theological presuppositions. The fact that no one actually lives as though gnosticism is true can be seen clearly by the great care that we take to keep our bodies fed and clothed and content. The great majority of our time is spent looking after bodily needs, and we fully acknowledge the spiritual aspect of physical actions such as addiction and adultery. How then in our thinking have we come to deny the power of bodily action for the good of our souls! How have we left off of fasting and kneeling and verbal confession... of denying ourselves and taking for our salvation the true body and blood of Christ?

What I am not saying is that we can build a tower up to heaven... No one in their right mind really believes that we creatures possess saving power inherent to ourselves, and that we are able to thus "work" our way to heaven by our own physical strength. The issue here is not an issue of "works vs. faith" in salvation. The issue is whether or not we allow our understanding to acknowledge that the grace of Christ uses physical processes to accomplish spiritual ends.

The inherent danger in denying this principle is great. I have Christian friends who pray and meditate and think nothing of their addiction to pornography or their damaging relational isolation. They are convinced that their cognitive assent to theological principles has been credited to them as righteousness, and they wait patiently for the free gift of sanctification, trying desperately to ignore their spiritual loneliness and deep inner turmoil. The true Gospel of Christ is radically against such false notions of grace and the power of God. We are physical beings as well as spiritual beings, and there is no salvation of our souls that does not include an element of salvation for our bodies as well. To say that God "declares" us righteous - as though our fall had only to do with an arbitrary penalty imposed by abstract legal considerations - is to completely ignore the true and dire ramifications of both the fall and of salvation, and serves ultimately only to numb the mind of the modern Christian with vague notions of metaphysical transactions that make no sense of the present and actual guilt, error and brokenness of our fallen humanity.

What our modern age needs to see is that what we do (or do not do) affects our spiritual condition. If we are to trust God to make us righteous, this work of grace must change our bodies if it is to change our souls, and the bodily change requires the same active obedience that we take for granted in our mental progress. All of the well-meaning and theoretical assent in the world would not have worked for our salvation if Christ had not consented to undergo the physical trial of death and resurrection. This spiritual end was obtained by a physical means because there is not a tidy separation between the two. Any dichotomy that we work to create in this regard does not change this fundamental truth of reality... it serves only to hamper our ability to truly discern our own spiritual condition, and as we hinted at earlier, this very denial of reality makes us blind to the ways in which our souls are truly being affected, and lets our spiritual sickness spread through neglect. So why aren't we thinking about what our bodies are doing? And why don't we want our Scriptures, our holy men or our church to be telling us what the Gospel has to say about what we ought to be doing with our bodies to be saved?

The Passions and Mere Humanity

I think it is safe to say that I have always been troubled to understand the role of "earthly" activity in the Christian life. In my early years, the tension was between playing games with my brother (the earthly activity) and praying or sharing my faith with others (the "spiritual" activity). Now it is between seeking after spiritual discipline, pursuing pure prayer, practicing quiet contemplation of God, or giving alms to the needy and watching movies, writing poetry, listening to music and riding my motorcycle. Some of the spiritual growth achieved at the Torrey Honors Institute has helped me come to more fully understand the sense in which God's redemption, beauty, goodness and truth can be present in these "merely human" activities... but at the end of the day there is still a difficult tension there.

Perhaps I have been reading too much Philokalia, but I am truly confused as to the worth of human amusements and earthly pleasures. Certainly there is nothing inherently sinful about enjoying a scoop of ice-cream or a well-composed song... but what about this "race" and "fight" terminology that keeps creeping into Paul's epistles. There is a strong sense in the teachings of Christ (and the early monastics who sought to take His words quite literally) that all earthly pursuits are vain and dangerous - at best a waste of time and at worst the tyrannical workings of the devil that seek to mire you down and bring you into bondage. There is a clear danger in any "merely human" enjoyment of becoming a slave to that enjoyment... of letting it rule you and being content to serve it with your body while confessing Christ with your lips. So how do we, as Christians, avoid this danger if we are to continue living in the world? How do we keep ourselves from confessing Christ in word but seeking earthly pleasure and entertainment in our thoughts and actions. How do we kill the selfish monster inside of us? Do we swear off of music, backyard discussions, potato chips and football games, devoting ourselves instead to continual prayer and acts of love?

What spawns these worries, of course, is the fact that we actually want these things. On any given Sunday there comes a time when I have had enough of praying and focusing my mind on God and I want to go play some catch. My heart becomes weary of giving its attention to God and others and begins to think of itself and its own desires. Stated this way, such pursuits seem rather unacceptable! Our faith is one of self-sacrifice after the example of Christ, and one wonders if a heart that wants comfortable, lowly pleasures will really fit in very well with the saints and martyrs that sit in adoration around the throne of God in heaven!

Is God ok with my love of lower things? Am I free to feel comfortable before God as I muse my time away exploring poetic metaphor and literary theme? Some Christian authors have valiantly posited that human beings are made to enjoy the little world that God has made for them, and that our natural activity (though tainted by the fall) is to purely enjoy the things on earth, giving glory and praise to God always for their creation. The monastics, on the other hand, would say that the fall destroyed all hope of earthly happiness, and that we cannot properly enjoy anything on earth without letting our hearts turn from God to our passions.

At the core of this issue is the concept of a pure soul. Whether a pure soul desires to contemplate God only, or to encounter God in a meaningful way through the daily activities of "merely human" life, it is necessary that it first learn to abandon its hope of self-satisfaction. What the rigor of the monastics and the ardor of the Evangelicals both put forth as the greatest enemy to the human soul is the kind of self-love that leads a person to feel comfortable and content as their own god. If I must endure a little fasting and a little less dragon ball z to see this end realized in my life by the power of Christ's sanctification, then so be it...

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...

Unavoidably Postmodern: The Emergent Church and Individual Authority

Recently I have been somewhat compelled to consider what I think of Emergent church movements such as this one. It is kind of a difficult subject for me, as I am often sympathetic to attempts made by earnest Christians to actually deal with the current ideological framework of their age. The evangelical church had a difficult time, for instance, when it refused to acknowledge the claims that modernism was making in the 18th and 19th centuries. Instead of actually avoiding the pitfalls of enlightenment and post-enlightenment romantic thought, it seems to me that it simply alienated itself from the culture, set itself apart as an anti-intellectual establishment (which is a true travesty), and then went on to be subtlety influenced by the modernist culture surrounding it until it ended up where it is now - studying scientific evidence and employing literal-historical hermeneutics in a frantic attempt to validate the authority of God's revelation (I hope that the absurdity of this attempt comes across). Instead of understanding modernism, the evangelical church at large simply fell prey to bad and simplistic modernism. The emergent church, in similar fashion, has come along somewhat behind the times (postmodernism already being on its way out and the church having spent most of its time railing against extreme forms of relativism that no one in the culture actually holds to). But it has nevertheless been trying to address the actual concerns that postmodernism has raised, and is working to build a coherent system of belief around an ideology that includes the essentials of Christian doctrine without offending modern sensibilities. While this attempt seems admirable to me, I am not sure that the postmodern framework has left the possibility for sound Christian doctrine intact, and thus I find it doubtful that the best solution has been reached by the current emergent attempts...

Lest you think that my generalization is unfair as directed toward the emergent church, I think that a helpful comment may be that I believe postmodernism, whatever we think of it, to be decently hard to avoid for a generation raised by postmoderns in a postmodern society. As any five minute Google study will make adequately apparent, the emergent church is at great pains NOT to let itself be subject to definition (a good old postmodern tradition), and while the churches that foster this post-definitive position may hold firmly to the idea that this reluctance to be defined is simply reflecting a helpful (dare we say accurate?) understanding about the uniqueness of individuals and the nature of reality, I cannot help but feel that this honest belief stems from a very particular (and dangerous) philosophical stance. Allow me to explain:

Postmodernism (as I understand it) holds firmly to the sovereignty of the individual. Personal choice and personal authority (and consequently personal responsibility) are essential to the operation of the world-view. Because the Moderns convinced us that reality is very complex and hard to interact with directly, postmoderns tend to mistrust generalities, creeds, traditions, or anything else that tries to simplify reality and apply itself to the world universally. To the postmodern there is no universal. Everyone is an isolated individual with a distinct and separate perspective. One person's perspective may differ from another person's, and as a result there is no authoritative understanding of the world. Even Divine revelation must be filtered through individual perspective (which can be colored by individual experience, knowledge, context, and even mood). Who hasn't played the "telephone game" and watched how what one person thinks to be a clear message can be "muddled" by the ability of other people to understand your intended meaning and communicate it to others? Postmoderns clean up this little problem by denying the possibility of access to intended meaning at all. You cannot, they would say, strictly "know" anything. You can only offer your perspective on a given experience.

As a result, Postmodernism venerates personal opinion and encourages sharing methods of interpretation within a community. Though they mistrust universals, they value dialogue and communication. Multiple perspectives allow for a more "rich" experience of an ultimately incomprehensible world. By sharing personal experiences, a community may gain a more complete (though never exhaustive) picture of this great, complex and multifaceted thing we call reality.

Notice that this does not exclude the possibility of objectivity. There may, indeed, be an absolute, objective reality. The question, however, is not whether or not this objective reality exists, but whether or not we can have any reliable knowledge about it from our own limited perspectives. Ultimately, this skepticism about knowledge leads the average person to avoid questions of objectivity altogether and to focus instead on the experience of reality within a particular sub-culture or community. The postmodern is extremely interested in understanding how groups of people form shared conceptions of reality and establish interpretational norms that make sense of their experiences. The focus, once again, is on what "works" in a certain context instead of what "is".

Honesty is the supreme (perhaps even the only) Postmodern virtue. By denying the presence of universals (which includes morality because it tries to apply one set of rules to everyone) they feel that they are simply being honest about the state of the world. To believe that one has an understanding of reality is, for the postmodern, simply lying. It is trying to force your perspective onto another person by pretending that your perspective is, in fact, authoritative. To act in a way that is inconsistent with your feelings and desires is, therefore, also believed to be dishonest. One cannot try to live by another person's perspective or pretend that they do not want the things they want. A person should simply do what he or she wants to do, and completely accept the choices and desires of others. It is the only "honest" way to go about living.

This worldview has, for apparent reasons, had a huge impact on the functioning of modern society. The power of authority and tradition has been all but removed from the art and the stories of our culture. It has become vitally important to us that every one make their own decisions, and we are very, very hesitant to make our opinions sound authoritative. The search for standards of virtue and holiness has been replaced by the admiration of creativity and ambition, and the foundationalism of the church has been replaced by the search for multi-everythingism (insert generational/cultural/etc) in a wild attempt to gain a "rich" and "authentic" community. The fact that this doesn't, perhaps, seem like a very shocking revelation only serves to strengthen my original assertion that postmodernism, whatever we think of it, is certainly not a stranger to us. Most of us were raised with this mindset and, in fact, personally value many of the tenets Postmodernism espouses. The question to me (irony intended) then, becomes not "what is Postmodernism's place in the church" but rather "where do we Postmoderns go from here?"

I would like to think that the next step involves a rebuilt understanding of authority and a de-emphasis on the individual. The problem with the modern evangelical church's acceptance of postmodern values is that those values shift the locus of God's revelation to the heart of the individual person. Even the claims of the scriptures, which have been the bastion of truth throughout the entirety of the evangelical tradition, must, under postmodern constraints, ultimately be filtered through personal interpretational methods and revealed as unique truth to the individual. The scriptures, in other words, lose their authority as universally accessible objective revelation and fall subject to the personal revelatory work of the Holy Spirit on a person by person basis.

Of course, authors like John Webster will go to great lengths to describe how the self-revelation of God is beyonds the constraints of modern criticism... but the question remains, for me, not whether it is possible for God to reveal Himself perfectly through creaturely circumstances, but rather what form that revelation takes and by what means we creatures may receive it. Webster's perfect and sanctified Holy Scriptures must be received by people in incredibly diverse and unique circumstances, and it is this necessity of communication between Creator and various unique creatures that puts the postmodern concerns into effect.

Lest you think that philosophers or doctrinally robust theologians are exempt from this problem, we need only to look at the standard of authority that these persons inevitably fall back upon when push comes to shove. Wide interpretational and doctrinal differences amongst even the most kindred of biblical scholars do not seem to phase them, or even dissuade them from thinking that their particular stances are correct. Though they are quick to proclaim that the standard of authority in their life is the self-speaking reality of the Holy Scriptures, they ultimately place the seat of authority and decision within their own hearts and minds. They will not defer to authority, tradition, or some greater body to speak the answer to them, and they even reject the idea of subjecting the individual will when it appears in Holy Scripture itself... they will, in every case, reserve their right to make the decision for themselves as to what they will believe and what sources they will accept as valid. Try as you might, you will not get them to give up this personal authority.

Save in cases of extremely reductionist forms of determinism, such a refusal to give up personal autonomy of decision seems to pose distinct problems when it comes to the idea of "paying attention to the Holy Spirit" or "obeying the Spirit's leading". Indeed, if there is any part at all that the human individual will plays in adequately receiving the self-revelation of God, then it is terrifying to think that the seat of all authority is the stubborn will of the limited, perspectivaly-challenged individual (who so often gets important things wrong...).

It seems to me that what we should be wishing for is neither this very sloppy postmodern acceptance of individual authority (which in its rejection of the above mentioned sources of authority has often and inevitably led to very terrible doctrinal confusions, limited or shallow ideas of the person of Christ, and woefully anemic conceptions of the meaning of life in Christ) nor a return to the stubborn denial of postmodern claims (which leads to brittle dogmatics, an absurd denial of individual differences, and ultimate alienation from the people that we are trying to save). The evangelical church cannot maintain right doctrine, sound teaching, and robust ecclesiology if it continues to place the seat of authority within the individual. Though a few highly educated church leaders may be able to preach sound, meaningful Christian doctrine to individual church bodies, there is (and I think that this concept has been born out in the state of the modern evangelical church at large) simply no way to preserve the purity and integrity of a "church" when we insist on placing the locus of authority within individual hearts. How are we to insist on the unity of Christ's body when every individual person reserves the right to decide what is meant by "unity" and "Christ's body"?

What we need, I believe, is a truth-speaking, self-revealing person to interact with us in our differences. What we need is something that is both one and many - both made up of unique parts and whole in its mind and heart. What we need is Christ here on earth to reason with us and lead our separate hearts into unified truth. What we need is an authority to tell us how we ought to think about the Father. What we need is a Church - a Holy, Catholic Church that is truly the body of Christ in every way... truly one and truly relevant to all individuals... truly knowing and truly known... and able to speak with authority. We need to bite the bullet and look into the idea that Divine self-revelation may be first given to the Church and not to the individual - to the whole body of persons that Christ has sanctified for His purpose and not to the feeble will of each person that attempts to articulate the mysteries of Christ... and that we are able to receive this revelation only inasmuch as we submit to the authority of the physical and spiritual body of Christ here on earth. We need to find a Church that is bold enough in the Holy Spirit to make this claim and that actually has the right to claim it...