Category: Worship

Whatever it is, it isn’t football

The recently-departed Andy Griffith had a great routine, Football, as a stand-up comic before his long decades on television. It starts off with this:

It was back last October, I believe it was, we was gonna hold a Tent Service off at this college town ….

From there, he goes on to recount his first encounter with football. Like most humor, it’s less funny on repeat hearings, but I laughed until I cried first time. Treat yourself if you’ve never heard it.

I thought of it this morning as I learned that Jason Peters, Front Porch Republic’s “Bar Jester,” is taking a sabbatical from weekly, systematic blogging. To him I owe the tag “Krustianity,” derived initially from my favorite of his blogs, Mere Krustianity (if you’re not in “the club,” that’s an allusion).

Here is, for my tastes, the key excerpt:

If you find yourself in bars, as I sometimes rarely do, and if you find yourself in heated conversation therein with people hostile to religion, as I often do, you may have a strong desire, as I always do, to establish a widely agreed-on way of distinguishing between what you believe and what Colorado Springs believes. Well at long last I’ve done it:
If someone were to shorten the field by forty yards, widen it by twenty, give you thirteen downs to advance twelve yards for a first down, and award you six points for doing so, you’d rightly object to his calling this new game “football.” You’d say to him, “that one’s taken. Find another name.”
I think the same applies to that fairly old, solid, and stately religion known as “Christianity.” Those who have altered the faith beyond recognition should come up with a new name for what it is they’re practicing. I suggest “Krustianity.”

Yup. Whatever the new game is, it isn’t football. It seems almost providential that Andy started his story with a Tent Meeting, a progenitor of today’s chapels-cum-coffee-bars in improbable places like former big box stores, the apotheosis of Evangelical Krustianity. The “’Bible Harvest Chapel,’ which is a kind of movie theater retrofitted to a former big box electronics store” was the Bar Jester’s launch pad.

But with even Colorado Springs now trying to distinguish between what it believes and “what Colorado Springs believes,” there perhaps is room for hope that Krustians will again become recognizably Christian. My habitual pessimism has been challenged by lots of little signs, the size of a man’s fist, that people are starting to “get” things of various degrees of importance – things about which American culture generally, and American religious culture in particular, started on a real bender many decades (or even centuries) ago.

One such sign is the establishment of a Patristics Center at Wheaton College, which I grew up seeing as the Evangelical’s Jerusalem. Another is the widespread influence of Orthodox theology through western academic theology over the past century or so. Once you get to know the early Church writers, it’s hard to argue in sincerity – and I’ll give credit for a redemptive dose of sincerity to many Evangelicals (though fewer than I once thought) – that early Christianity was essential Evangelical, especially in its ecclesiology, its doctrine of the Church.

There are people with a financial interest in, indeed a livelihood tied up with, running places like Bible Harvest Chapel, but if the GOP can collapse in a decade, so can Krustianity.

The odds of “New Christians” getting it right will rise dramatically if they cease ignoring or even despising Christian history. “To be deep in history is to cease being Protestant,” Cardinal Newman said, but that’s a risk a person of integrity will take.

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A side note may be in Order. I rarely write about mainstream Protestantism, and there are a couple of reasons for that.

First, I never was a mainstream Protestant, whereas I was unequivocally Evangelical for 29 years and equivocally Evangelical for an additional 20. I’m still connected, as closely as one can be connected to anyone, to an equivocal Evangelical.  In two weeks, I will be recovering from the 45th-year reunion of my class at an Evangelical boarding high school, which was and remains very formative in my life.

These people remain, in a sense, my spiritual family. I care about them. I want them to get it right without further ado.

Second, old habits die hard. As an Evangelical, I wrote off mainstream Protestantism as moribund. I now suspect there was more life there than I thought, but I still think it’s dying and, rightly or wrongly, I give its members less credit for sincere Christian faith than I give Evangelicals (as I said: old habits die hard), and thus have lower hopes for them becoming Orthodox instead of just lapsing into … oh, never mind.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Inscrutable Justice

There is a media ritual that I detest even more than most media rituals: the televised thrusting of microphones into the faces of bereaved crime victims to get their opinions on what should be done to the accused. The bereaved, true sons and daughters of our extraordinarily punitive culture (compare our rates of incarceration), almost always take the bait and express some blood-curdling call for vengeance.

I wish I could rush through the screen and say “No! Hold that thought! Don’t say it! You don’t need to prove you loved the victim! Don’t debase yourself!”

As one who prays regularly “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” few phrases so terrify me as “I will never forgive,” which is the gist of what those cameras, microphones, and prosecutor-solicited “victim impact statements” encourage.

Victim impact statements are, now that I mention it, another, er, pet peeve. The criminal court system works on the theory that the “State of Indiana” (or whatever) is prosecuting the Defendant because he breached the peace, security and good order of the State by his deed. It is not “Family of Victim” versus Defendant. Victim Impact Statements thus are a solecism on the grammar of the criminal law, and, once again, merely invite vindictive expressions that imperil the souls of victims and their families as they’re incited not to forgive.

Oh: do you have any doubt that crimes against victims with articulate white family member/victims end up seen as particularly heinous?

A mediation-type setting, where victims could tell the offender how his act affected them outside the hearing of judge or jury might actually serve restoration of the offender. Victim impact statements, in contrast, are oriented more toward exacting extra retribution and trying to assure that the offender never gets out, never gets restored.

These concerns flooded over me as I browsed my blog feeds while waiting for lunch to come today:

The [Church] fathers have a term for insatiable desires: passions. What human beings experience as a desire for justice is not a virtue – it is a passion, a disordered desire of the soul.
Virtues, the desires that are rightly ordered, have a proper end to their desire. They can be satisfied because they have a proper end. The experience of hunger, when rightly ordered, is perfectly natural and is able to know and experience a sense of completion. Enough is enough. When hunger is disordered it cannot rightly discern its end. The desire for food becomes confused. The result is gluttony – experienced by too much or too little food. I recall a friend, a recovering alcoholic, who said that the problem with alcohol was that “there was never enough.”
The Law in the Old Testament recognized the disordered character of human justice. It placed limits on our desire for justice. The Lex Talionis, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” is not a prescription for what must be paid for an injury: it is a limit on the maximum that may be extracted. Our desire for justice is never satisfied with an eye for an eye. We would like two eyes, a hand, a foot, an electronic ankle bracelet and 6 million dollars in punitive damages (and even then we are not actually satisfied).

But Father Stephen isn’t out to reform the criminal justice system. He’s using an analogy to introduce some truths about God.

But first, let’s start with a near-slander of God from Jonathan “Sinners in the Hands of Angry God” Edwards:

…if the obligation to love, honour, and obey God be infinite, then sin which is the violation of this obligation, is a violation of infinite obligation, and so is an infinite evil. Once more, sin being an infinite evil, deserves an infinite punishment, an infinite punishment is no more than it deserves: therefore such punishment is just; which was the thing to be proved. (Jonathan Edwards, “The Eternity of Hell Torments” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards (vol. 2, Edinburgh, Banner of Truth, 1974) 83.)

Even Father Stephen admits:

His reasoning appears flawless. Our obligation to God is infinite, so its violation is infinite. Infinite crime warrants and infinite punishment: ergo eternity in the torments of hell.

Theology that ends with “Q.E.D.” There was a time when I’d have eaten that up.

Time out: Might such Calvinism, which sees God as the possessor of an infinite victim impact statement, have something to do with how we view, and pursue, criminal offenders?

Time back in: But what if God is not a thin-skinned medieval lord (the medieval period being when this notion gained currency)? What if He’s not “infinitely offended”?

Infinite is simply an inappropriate adjective to use in our relationship with God. It brings inappropriate and incommensurate results in its train. It is more accurate to say of our relationship to God, and those things that belong to it, that they are “immeasurable.” What is required is not without limit (for the infinite cannot be required of the finite), but it is beyond our finite ability to measure.
This is a far more accurate way to approach the justice of God. His justice is not properly described as infinite (what would that mean?). His justice is inscrutable – we simply cannot know it, fathom it, or understand it. It is a useless concept when it comes to understanding our obligations to God. God is just – because He is not unjust. But what it means to say that “God is just,” is beyond our ken.
The result of the distortions caused by faulty theologizing about God’s justice, is a God who is not worthy of worship. There are those who not only glibly consign sinners to hell, but also postulate that the righteous will rejoice in the torment of sinners because of their delight in the goodness of God’s justice. Those with normal human sensibilities are repulsed by such notions. Those who embrace such heresy have their soul’s perverted desire for infinite justice confirmed. Such theology does not heal the soul – it corrupts it further and feeds its passions.

Yes, I think we’re back to things like what God do atheists “not believe in”? A “God” who consigns people to hell because of his anger problem? I don’t believe in that one, either. I don’t think people believed in that one for the first millennium or so of the Christian era.

How can anyone say “God is love” if that’s what he has in mind? How can anyone “worship” him? Is it worship or toadying?

Much more quoting and I’ll transgress (not infinitely) against the dignity of Fr. Stephen. If you have any concern with (a) justice and forgiveness among humans or (b) the nature of God’s justice, I commend the whole article to you.

Friday, August 24, 2012

  1. Mr. Rogers as you’ve never seen him!
  2. Go ahead, sucka! Sue me!
  3. America’s exceptional vulgarity.
  4. Bulverism lives!
  5. Why do some people “get it” so quickly?
  6. “Religious Right” ≠ Evangelicals
  7. Indiana New Urbanism.
  8. Legitimized Rapes.

Continue reading “Friday, August 24, 2012” →

… and nobody came?

What if they gave a Church service and nobody came?

To 10% of Protestant Churches, the answer is “preemptively cancel if you think that will happen.” That’s what’s happening this Sunday, as Christmas inconveniently falls on Sunday: Sunday yields to the commercial bacchanalia (“cherished domestic traditions” if you prefer sentimentalist delusion).

This is related to the tension between two Christmas calendars, the shopping mall calendar and the ecclesiastic calendar. The former officially starts on “Black Friday,” but may be creeping backward, the latter on December 25 (anticipated by Advent in the West, the Nativity Fast in the East).

… Washington Post scribe Hank Stuever, author of that snarky but fine book called “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present[]” … told me that, while he was researching that book, he decided that big event is the day that the National Retail Federation releases it’s first official forecast of precisely how many billions of dollars Americans will be spend during any particular Holiday marketing season. Once that press release hits reporters’ email in-boxes, he said, “there’s no stopping it. Here comes Christmas, whether you’re ready or not.”

…

And what about the other Christmas, the supposedly religious one?

The problem on the religion side of this equation these days is that the overwhelming majority of American churches — especially the so-called megachurches of evangelicalism — are essentially doing Christmas according to the shopping-mall calendar, not the calendar of the church year.

Stuever thinks that’s the truth, and so does the dean of the School of Theology at the very, very conservative Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. Pause and roll that duo over in your mind for a moment.

Moore told me:

Many evangelicals fear the “cold formalism” that they associate with churches that follow the liturgical calendar and the end result, he said, is “no sense of what happens when in the Christian year, at all.” Thus, instead of celebrating ancient feasts such as Epiphany, Pentecost and the Transfiguration, far too many American church calendars are limited to Christmas and Easter, along with cultural festivities such as Mother’s Day, the Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving and the Super Bowl.

(Terry Mattingly, emphasis added.) If the shopping mall calendar says that the morning of December 25 is for gift giving and cookies, well how dare the Bride of Christ a mere church say otherwise?

I guess canceling church makes perfect sense once Church becomes theater. No audience, no show, right?

But what if Church isn’t theater? What if it’s Liturgy and Eucharist? What if there’s always a great cloud of witnesses waiting for us to join them? I reflected on this early in the life of this blog, and it seems like a good time to reprise it.

Merry Christmas. Hope your Church is open. If not, mine is.

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Standing advice on enduring themes.