List of who you may or may not marry in the UK.
Michael Gershon on Obama’s announcement on same sex marriage. Also Gershon on marriage debate on CPJ.
Matt Appling: Why I have a complementarian egalitarian marriage.
Michael Horton weighs in on Same Sex Marriage.
The Story
In Acts 13 when Paul and Barnabas respond to a request from Sergius Paulus to hear the message they are bringing Elymas, a Jewish Magi stands in their way. Elymas is struck with blindness and Sergius Paulus is impressed.
Paul and Barnabas travel to Pisidian Antioch, possibly because of a connection between that city and Sergius Paulus and preach in the Synagogue there. They went to the synagogue on the Sabbath and were invited to speak and the book of Acts records an account of the sermon as well as the response. The following Sabbath the synagogue is packed out by all kinds of people from the city to hear Paul and Barnabas but this time there is a backlash and the reason Luke gives for the backlash is envy.
Envy and the Reflected-Self
Let’s talk a bit about envy. Let’s imagine a new preacher comes to the neighborhood and starts drawing crowds whereas I’ve been laboring in this small church for years. This new preacher is attracting not only people I’ve been unable to attract but is also winning influence among people who have been faithful and loyal to my ministry. How would I feel? What kinds of things might I do in response to this?
Why would I feel this way? Why do I like what I judge to be success or popularity? I have to admit that this is all about me. I have a self down deep inside and I use the world around me to try see my self. If the church is large I construct a favorable picture of myself. If the church isn’t doing well I see myself in this judgment and I may not like what I see so I will do some things to try to re-align the world so that I can once again see myself in a better light. None of this is hard to understand.
Theism and Circumstantial Evidence
If I’m a theist (which I am) I’m probably also looking for God’s favor in the circumstance. At a deep level one of the narratives I believe in is that God’s will is reflected in the world around me and God’s favor is sometimes reflected in things going well. We have a lot of language from the Bible like this and a lot of tradition that supports the notion. In fact Luke seems to intimate it here in the text.
This is often rightly seen to be a rather self-serving mental game that Christians can play. When circumstances go well we say “God is blessing this”. When circumstances go poorly we say “the devil is persecuting us, this must be really important to have the devil work so hard to thwart our efforts”. Again, it isn’t hard to see that either way we choose to interpret the circumstance we can do so in a self-serving way that creates a narrative where I see my self through the circumstance in a favorable light. Again, the ego is served.
On one level we can see this story as simple envy playing itself out. The synagogue leaders have influence in the town and they use it to get Paul and Barnabas removed. In the end, however, the “damage” is done (according to the synagogue leadership) and a group of people persuaded by what Paul and Barnabas had to say persists and even begins to spread in the region enjoying the blessing of the Holy Spirit.
I want to be fair in my judgment on the synagogue leaders in the town and also note that their motives may not be purely envy but also a desire to “protect their flock”. Paul will in subsequent letters in the New Testament have some pretty strong language against others who are trying to influence people in churches in ways that Paul does not agree with. I don’t know that we can assign purely negative motive to the synagogue leadership.
The Holy Spirit Lets it Play Out
I would like us, however, to see in this story that something as important and dramatic, from the perspective of Luke and the New Testament is challenged and threatened by something so obviously common and something not in any way alien to our experience within the church. We all understand envy and none of us would say that the gospel has somehow banished it from our midst.
I’d also like us to note what did not happen in the story, there was no miraculous intervention. This to me is very interesting. Elymas not too long before gets struck blind by the Holy Spirit for trying to thwart Paul and Barnabas from presenting the gospel to Sergius Paulus. In my sermon on that incident I played out some of the nuance of this strange, punitive miracle. What interests me here is that there is no such intervention in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch. The leaders are not struck blind, the conspiracy achieves the end it desired, Paul and Barnabas are expelled and they re-enact the Jewish liturgy of wiping the dust from their feet as a declaration that according to Paul and Barnabas the synagogue leadership is aligning themselves against the work of Yhwh and his son Jesus.
The Old Testament has a number of stories of God exacting judgment upon a rebellious group of people. These stories were no doubt behind the suggestion of Jesus’ disciples when a Samaritan town refused to extend Jesus and his disciples hospitality. Jesus is grumpy at their suggestion and tells them to move along. Here there is no miracle, no overt divine intervention, just silence and in a sense loss (Paul and Barnabas are indeed expelled from the town.)
On one hand we can say that miracles are just what we know them to be, highly unusual instances that are what we define them to be, the exception rather than the rule. What we have here is a story of the rule and the rule is the mundane, petty, common dynamics of human ego and conflict.
Jesus and Circumstantial Evidence
The text then takes a strange turn and starts to focus on the mission to the Gentiles. The language of the Elymas story of being “filled with the Holy Spirit” will be repeated here. Remember how Luke notes that Elymas was a Jew? Earlier in the chapter the Holy Spirit strikes Elymas blind. Now later God takes no action to protect Paul and Barnabas nor to harm those who are resisting them to bring the gospel to Gentiles (like Sergius Paulus) but in the end in fact the results are greater still. There is no miraculous intervention to the Jewish resistance to Paul and Barnabas but the Gentile response is that they are filled with joy and the Holy Spirit, hallmarks of conversion for Luke.
Whenever we find ourselves doing the circumstantial inference game of try thing read God’s mind we must always remember Jesus. The crowds that follow Jesus are testimony to his uniqueness and importance in the eyes of the people but in the gospels the crowds are almost always portrayed as fickle and not discerning. Something that we know and experience regularly. The judgment of circumstantial observation also fails to yield direct revelation of Jesus’ standing before Yhwh because he was hung on a tree which as every good Jew knew was a sign of him being cursed. Paul of course picks up on this in his letters. Judgments based on circumstantial evidence must be held loosely.
Attachment and Idolatry
Why could Gentiles invest in the new worldview Paul and Barnabas were presenting? Why were they spared the experience of envy that the synagogue leaders were subject to?
This can go in two directions.
1. They didn’t have the investment in the old system. Circumcision it seems was clearly (and understandably) a barrier to God-fearing, synagogue attending men in the 1st century diaspora. Christianity it would seem would have an obvious attraction to this group. So is the lesson here to not keep things at arms length? Kind of a Buddhist or Stoic detachment strategy?
2. Watch the investment of ego in the things around us, even (or especially) religious things. If the Stoic or Buddhist strategy is “don’t let your heart attach” the Hebrew idolatry avoiding tradition is “don’t let your self find its image in the things around you.”
The response of people at the synagogue after the first Sabbath of Paul and Barnabas’ presentation was a very sound one. The people hadn’t heard enough to believe, but they wanted more information. They needed time to check it out. The envy impulse of the leadership forced the issue, injected a lot of ego into the situation and raised the heat level. The Holy Spirit did not intervene in the situation like he did with Elymas, but the Holy Spirit it seems continued to work behind the scenes even through the conflict to bring the Gentiles to faith, which again according to Paul was his plan long before Jesus came onto the scene.
Focus on the Family’s Predictions for what the Obama Administration would do to America. Oops. Better stay away from Deuteronomy 18.
Garry Wills on “The Myth About Marriage”
Finally, the help I’ve been looking for: http://pastorfashion.com/
Part 2 of Tim Keller’s review of Douthat’s “Bad Religion”
Mark Hilbelink’s post on the CRC Confessional Postings
Dan Brown on the CRC Confessional Discussion
John Suk’s piece on the confessions.
Following up on the TC Review of 50 Shades of Gray another good blog review of the book.
10 Misconceptions about the development of the New Testament Canon. part 4
Rachel Held Evans stirs the pot again with another killer title: “How to win a culture war but lose a generation”
Long time church consultant Bill Easum on the centrality of the belief in the uniqueness of Christ for the flourishing of the Christian church. And there was a follow up by a Bill Tenny-Brittian about Jesus and issues.
The authenticity of an apology by a female offender is filtered through the respondent’s judgment of her attractiveness. Fascinating. If she’s attractive, men believe her more, women believe her less.
William Willimon from 1986, Making Christians in a Secular World
I wrote this for the CRC-Network.
Church services are for worshipping and Synod is for fighting and Synod season is upon us.
Two of the hot topics for this year are the update to the Form of Subscription and the Belhar confession. Whatever you think of the Belhar one of the things it has done for us is to bring the question of our status as a confessional community to a head. Pragmatic concerns about numerical church decline, aging, gender of office bearers and denominational revenue put questions about confessional identity in the background. Since the Belhar became a cause celebre our community we have been trying rouse themselves from confessional slumber.
The Denominational EULA
At the start of every meeting of classis there is a call to for first time delegates to sign the Form of Subscription. New delegates queue up, sign their names in a book, and take their seats. It’s all rather perfunctory. There are no comments, no questions, no sign of struggle or process. All we know is that in order to participate at the meeting you’ve got to sign in the book. It’s almost an ecclesiastical version of clicking on the EULA before you install that new piece of software. Are you aware of what you have really ceded to Google, Apple or Microsoft or do you just know that you must click “OK” to proceed?
Maybe something has happened at the local church level when you signed it at your council meeting, or maybe it hasn’t. At Classis we engage the confessions at a different level than we do in the local church.
Do We Have A Confessional Problem?
This tiny classical liturgy grooms us for a sort of “I’m sure it’s all OK” complacency that over decades has borne some unhealthy fruit. We have a culture of confessional “don’t ask, don’t tell” that is inhibiting confessional and theological growth and development which is sorely needed for our missional future.
Three Banner editors (Kuyvenhoven, Suk, De Moor) in my lifetime have publicly advocated scrapping or overhauling the confessions or our confessional system. This week James KA Smith, professor of philosophy at Calvin College (wait, I thought they were supposed to be a bunch of liberals there… 🙂 ) fired back with his own screed. Perhaps we’ve got enough heat generated to actually do some productive cooking.
While you were Sleeping: Confessions and Missions
In case you forgot my statement two paragraphs ago with all the heat of conflict, I said that confessional and theological growth and development are sorely needed for our missional future.
If you’re over 50 and have a dreamy picture of Bill Hybels on your wall next to your Rick Warren autographed copy of “The Purpose Driven Life” this statement may sound strange. If you’re under 50 and moon over Calvin, Luther or some other dead theologian this goes without saying.
In 2006 a group of brother pastors and I from Sacramento traveled to NYC to meet with Tim Keller to explore the work of Redeemer Presbyterian. We had a chance to speak privately with him. He said to us “Oh, you are CRC guys. You’ve had this stull all along but you just haven’t done anything with it.” In the back of my mind I thought “I don’t think I knew exactly WHAT to do with it.”
Much of the CRC in its angst over numerical decline and lost people mattering to Jesus took pilgrimages to Crystal Cathedral, Willow Creek and Saddleback to learn technique about doing church. The subtext of these conferences was pretty clear. “Oh doctrinal purity is important, but we can kind of assume that (like Apple and Google’s innocence in their EULAs). What the church really needs are new techniques for getting the attention of slumbering Christ haunted Americans and attracting them to our religious service delivery systems (“church” can sound so archaic and scary).”
I don’t want to be too hard on the seeker movement. It did a lot of good for a generation that had enough Christendom still in them to be able to assume a number of things, but as Dr. Smith (Calvin College, not “Lost in Space”) points out, the boomer’s suspect-of-authority, suspect-of-institutions and perhaps anti-intellectual cultural hang-ups began to show. The next tick on the generational demographic clock revealed a host of post-boomer adults eager to talk theology because for them it was a more important thing than mere technique.
Christianity can no longer be assumed. What Christians actually profess is central to who we are and what we do must flow out of those theological professions.
Confessions are Complex and Change is Needed
At this point conservatives may be cheering but please hold your decision to applaud until the end. Part of the deceit of conservatism is the idea that you can go back again. You can’t. The way forward is not to cut and paste past applications back into the present (as if we were cutting and pasting text with keyboards before 1980), it is to appropriate what was good and helpful from the past and apply it to our own context. This is the project we need to undertake and that process will require change, something many of us simply don’t like.
Confessions are supposed to be multi-taskers. (See Karin Maag’s good piece in the Banner on Confessions.) We want them to be:
1. Teachers of Orthodoxy
2. Expressions of Piety
3. Definers of Community Boundaries.
The Form of Subscription is supposed to put some institutional teeth behind this but from what we’re seeing both at our classical signing liturgy and at Calvin College, the only place where in the last three decades people seem to lose their jobs over confessional conflicts, the bite is uneven and in terms of specific application I think unhelpful. The system isn’t delivering what we want nor what we need it to deliver for us and I’m not sure that simply changing our short signing statement will be enough to do the trick.
Belief is not Cleanly Subject to Volition
Forgive me a bit of philosophy but I think we need to recognize that beliefs aren’t really subject to the will (they often hold us more than we hold them) and that in our present individualistic context they are assumed to be expressions of unique expressive identity more than communal submission. If you combine this cultural context with an inherited system of confessional conformity you have a recipe for missional confusion. Commonly assumed culture asserts that beliefs are not received but rather constructed from authentic individual experience and journey. Our inherited confessional culture (thanks to the Reformation, which is partially responsible for the commonly assumed culture of individual expressivism) is a combination of free confession, “this I believe”, with “for the Bible tells US so”. The lack of nuance in quickly signing off on three short creeds and three long confessions invites us into our current “don’t ask, don’t tell” culture of public formal assumption and private sometimes non-conformist disclosure.
Missiologically we acknowledge that right now for many we need to belong before we believe. This requires that we figure out how to wed this reality with our inherited confessional system and make these new practices intelligible to those who have no experience in our inherited confessional system. As someone trying to do missional work in the CRC in an area devoid of CRC public knowledge, this is an urgent undertaking. This is a central task if the CRC is going to grow beyond its immigrant roots.
Time To Revisit
Every time this subject pops up on Facebook my friend Randy Blacketer cries out “we have this problem because we’ve neglected to teach the confessions in the local church!” and he is exactly right. It’s important though when we reflect on Randy’s cry to realize that it’s not a function of a lack of jug to mug instruction indoctrinating ignorant and empty vessels, it’s a process of clergy and community wrestling with the texts we have received in order to consider, update and apply them to our present context. An examination of our confessions will reveal their value, raise important questions and critiques, and challenge our community to achieve, avoid, preserve or even eliminate what we have received. Our tradition prescribes constant attention and revision of our confessions against the canon. We have been inattentive to this and allowed a “don’t ask, don’t tell” culture to emerge.
Proposal One: A Confessional Year of Examination
One of the lessons I think we may have learned from the Belhar push was that we need to learn how to do process confessions together again. We have more tools and less time to do so than our ecclesiastical ancestors had. What if we as classes and a denomination devoted three years, one for each confession, to teach, examine, explore them together. The Faith Formation committee I think helped show us that if something is important we need to devote some time and resources to it and I think three years for confessions and perhaps an additional year for the 3 creeds would do us some good. In these years we would encourage local pastors and churches to preach them, teach them in Sunday School and educational classis, use them in liturgy, etc. In that year classes could hold forums, discussions, and debates on matters that arise from them.
Proposal Two: Structure for Confessional Maintenance
We would use those years of confessional examination to harvest new materials from the local churches and make them available electronically for others to benefit from. We need more and newer material, lessons, guides and discussions on our confessions than we currently have.
I would love to see the new CRC Internet Network (which is hosting this blog) adopt an entire segment simply to confessions. I fear part of the reason it wouldn’t get much commenting is because of our culture of fear, which leads me to the next point.
An Alcoholic Father
Not only do we need to be talking more, writing more and discussing more, but we need to develop a new culture that encourages frank, honest and helpful discussion. Part of the problem of our present system, as I mentioned above, is that the bite of the Form of Subscription is uneven. You can be a pastor of a local church and openly violate the Form every week, maybe knowingly or unwittingly and nothing will ever happen. If you teach at Calvin College and publish something in an area that is hot for other reasons, someone may find a confessional angle on your writing and the bite of the Form of Subscription may cost you your job or your career.
Why is this unhealthy? The worse kind of parent is inconsistent in discipline, unpredictable in behavior, erratic in temperament, and excessive in punishment. This is the parent our current system has become. Our confessional disciplinary system is something analogous to an alcoholic father.
Proposal Three: Signing Statements
Our confessions are too lengthy, nuanced, complex and important to only offer people a binary choice for subscription. I know the gravamen process is available but our experience over the last number of decades I think demonstrates that it is insufficient for our present need.
During the presidential administration of George W. Bush a lot of attention was paid to signing statements the president would attach to bills that he signed. Apparently this was a practice for a number of years but it came to light during his administration. A signing statement was a way of still giving a bill the force of law, but also publicly registering the president’s own take on the legislation. I wonder if something like this might help us.
I would propose that each office bearer be invited (not mandated) to develop their own signing statement to their subscription of the creeds and confessions. This statement would provide a sort of safe harbor for the office bearer and give them space to publicly emphasize, endorse, explore, critique, nuance or protest something within the confessions. The statement would be public (available upon request in most cases, more public in others at the signer’s discretion) but continually available to revision by the signer.
It might sound like the Signing Statement would undermine the effect of the subscription, but I don’t think so. I think it would afford a number of things:
1. It would give room for people to belong before they believe.
There are a lot of things that can may or may not be connected to confessional statements, from evolution to women in office to infant baptism to ideas about global warming. We want people to have room to explore the confessions in a safe context where they have room to express their sincere convictions while also self-consciously being aware of the communal standards. If we are to make progress on difficult issues we need to explore them without fear of unpredictable retribution or reaction.
2. It would encourage people to actually study and discuss the confessions
Randy Blacketer is right that the confessions are dying a death of neglect. I think it’s a bit crazy to adopt a fourth confession when we neglect the three we already have. If confessions were children CPS might take them away from us. If we made some Signing Statements public, in some ways like blogs, we might actually start to do some productive work on confessional issues that we are ignoring today. I know that this process sounds scary and chaotic for some, but I think in the long run it is what we need.
3. It would allow institutions to nuance and process confessional employment issues better
Confessional conflicts today really only arise it seems when employment is on the line. Again, that is why the area is dormant in churches but hot at Calvin College. Churches are often asleep at this switch but the switch goes live at denominational fights. With more public disclosure about issues in process institutions (churches, agencies, schools, etc.) could figure out what they are willing to flex on and what they are not. Perhaps this particular person can be given some leeway on limited atonement for now but for this position here we must hold the line on infant baptism. Right now our binary choice is assumed, dormant but at times exceptionally, erratically and publicly inflamed. An institution might not be able to tolerate dissent on a particular point but that process could and probably should be a public, measured, reasoned one with some buffer from unhelpful blunt-instrument politicking that binary confessional signing encourages.
4. Classis would be the ideal place to process this
Classis is large enough to afford a pool of competent, theologically trained and articulate persons, but small enough to afford face to face relationships.
We need more and better confessional attention, process and proclamation. I hope we can get there. Perhaps some of these ideas may help.
Tim Stafford’s blog post on “Why Marriage?”
T.M. Luhrmann, author of “When God Talks Back” does a shorter piece in the NYT trying to explain “evangelicals” to outsiders. If Dems want to speak a language that “evangelicals” can hear then they need to rework their talking points to address a “self-improvement” narrative. This is really telling about the state of evangelical identity at least according to Luhrmann. I don’t doubt her BTW.
Richard Mouw with a nice piece on how Congregants wished their pastors understood their work lives.
NT Wright sings Bob Dylan. http://vimeo.com/41782945 Love it! 🙂
How positive do you need to be for: Happy marriage? 5 positive to one critical, business? 3:1, if you’re over 13:1 you lose credibility with people. Fascinating.
How to love people you disagree with.
Our language problem. When something is easy we think we’re “good at it”. When something is hard we think “we’re bad at it”. Kristen T. notes that this isn’t true. When things get hard they get real. Good observation.
ThinkChristian.net has a really wise write up on “50 Shades of Gray”. Something I vaguely remember hearing something about. The comments are wise too.
I flew down to Ontario CA today for meetings. Got some time in the airport to do some blogging, mostly following up on CiC conversations.
Nice piece in CNN religion blog about returning to church and how faith and doubt cohabitate. It’s far preferable to CNN on the TV that is on way to loud here in the terminal by the power outlet.
Shazzam, Jamie Smith wrote a screed against the Banner Editor Bob DeMoor about the confessions and the Form of Subscription. It’s a buster on boomer CRC steel cage match. 🙂
Jeffrey Overstreet’s review of the Avengers
I also wanted to follow up on Bont’s questions with respect to Pagels and Borg. I don’t feel I’m qualified to pass judgment on either of their scholarship or the character of their beliefs. My complaint for the theologically liberal wing of the Christian church is often that I’m afraid they give too much away and the little schema I articulated in the previous post I think is helpful in understanding what I mean.
Elements of the Apostle’s creed like the resurrection of the dead and the second coming of Jesus I think change the nature of the Christian religion. I can appreciate the fact that we can play tricks on ourselves to make us feel better in hard times, but at a certain, deeper level we can’t and shouldn’t try to fool ourselves about what we belief. Human belief is not purely a volitional matter.
We don’t simply believe what we want to believe, we believe what we actually do believe, often at a sub-volitional level. Religions address the reality of that worldviews are often sub-volitional by controlling and prescribing intentional experience (prayer, meditation, worship, community, fasting) in order to groom our believing faculties along the lines of our religious community of choice/persuasion. Think James KA Smith’s work on cultural liturgies.
Having doubts about very difficult to believe elements of the Christian faith, such as the resurrection and the second coming are common for those of us inhabiting our present cultural space, but denial of these concrete historical assertions I think is a game changer. What tends to happen I fear (and I’m open to correction on this) is all religion enters the class of distraction or entertainment.
I have friends who are professing agnostics or atheists who spend time and money pursuing Buddhism, Yoga or other California mixed New Age spiritualities. If you ask them what they are doing they’ll tell you they may not believe the metaphysics of any of it but they find the experiences interesting, at least interesting enough to pursue in kind of a vacational manner. They may find in time that participation in these liturgies leads them to believe in more metaphysics than they bargained for, but that is the nature of religious conversion. Belief is far more communal than individualistic Americans like to acknowledge.
So at what point does a firm and certain hope (type 3, “the sun will come out tomorrow”) become simply a type 2 religious distraction or entertainment? I suspect the answer is both individual and communal and is tested in suffering and the basic choices of how we treat our neighbors and our enemies.
If our deepest convictions are really that we only have one life to live, then when conflicts arise or suffering increases we begin to do value computations that ask us to choose between life or ending life, our own or our enemy’s. What kind of deep convictions are required for a person to sacrificially pour out their life for their friend?
Recently when that cruise ship ran aground off of the Italian coast and the Captain abandoned ship ahead of the passengers (something more common than we would hope) the world derived his decision. His decision was, however, either cowardly or rational depending on one’s frame of reference. What is one’s motivation for heroism and risking one’s life for another? It could be fame, honor or love. Fame and honor both rely on there being an audience to the virtue, love can work in the dark.
and what is needed to sustain a liberal democracy. This follows the transcript of the video done by Nick Wolterstorff and Miroslav Volf.
I thought the whole interview was terrific, but the part that really caught my imagination was the question of the resources required for losers in a liberal democracy to resist the urge to burn down the house because they lost an election, their voice or their dominant position in the culture. Liberal democracies require that those out of power tolerate and to a degree accept losing. This is no small thing.
I can see three classes of reasons for those out of power to resist the urge to upend the system: 1. pragmatic calculations, 2. “it doesn’t matter”, and 3. “the sun will come out tomorrow”.
1. Pragmatic calculations. This is probably the most common reason those out of power tolerate their second class position and I think the most uninteresting. If you don’t have the opportunity or power to change your lot but burning down the neighborhood seams less appealing and will in your calculation afford you greater misery, you’ll simply figure out how to deal with your lot in life probably by resorting to one of the next two options.
2. “It doesn’t matter” There are secular and religious versions of this.
American culture has mastered the technology of distraction and diversion. Western entertainment industries qualify as far more efficient and successful pushers of a public opiate than Marx could have imagined.
More interesting to me are the religious resources that allow people to endure suffering. Helping people deal with suffering and powerlessness is a mainstay of much religious pursuit. On the religious side Buddhism was able to reduce suffering management to a pretty clear syllogism in its four noble truths.
3. “the sun will come out tomorrow”
Most of the Old Testament seems to have been written out of the need to come to grips with the failure of Israel as both a divine project and a political entity. How could this assimilation resistant people endure enslavement and exile of one form or another (Egypt, Philistia, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome) and maintain their cultural and religious identity?
The three Abrahamic religions all look to their god to deliver them and to effect their vindication. All three have been forced to develop a prayer shaped endurance as they await the climax of their journeys. All three have to deal with the question of how the activities of the waiting faithful (or unfaithful) relate to the timing of the climax and resolution of the interregnum.
I really don’t know enough about Judaism and Islam to get too specific with them, but Christianity has some pretty impressive resources to deal with suffering and questions of eschatology. In Christianity the climax of history and the vindication of the faithful has already begun in the first coming of Jesus Christ setting Christians up for their “now and still not yet” dynamic. Because of the overlap of the ages Christians suffering and work is both cruciform (seemingly pointless but mysteriously fruitful) and connected with a hopeful destiny (you labor not in vain). Both of these visions do not require power or success to be maintained.
The poverty of a purely secular worldview
It seems to me that if you hold a materialist worldview you are really only left with option 1, half of 2 and 3 to the degree that you can employ something like the power of positive thinking (which is really more religious than materialistic).
The latest Books and Culture has a review of a book on WWII on “the bloodlands” between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. If in fact you only have one life to live, and if in fact your life is determined by your concrete circumstance in the now then power is the chief end of man (and woman). I am hard pressed to imagine what holds us back from power pragmatism to simply play an end game to get what we can right now.
Again, Miroslav Volf’s book is really helpful on these issues, especially his perspective on God’s violence of ours.
The Obvious and More Important Question Not Asked in the Same Sex Marriage Debate
A Better Question
The dual events of Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage and the North Carolina amendment has inflamed Internet comment streams on the subject. The debate is predictably about rights, access, equality, morality, separation of church and state, etc.
The larger question is usually not asked, “What is marriage for?”
The American answer to that question is “happiness” and this of course is the warm water that fuels the hurricane of the debate.
We might add a bit of light to the heat if we start swapping other things into the same question, give it the same answer, and see how we feel about it.
Q. What is a car for? A. Happiness.
Q. What are children for? A. Happiness
With the car question I get images of a guy (mostly) who is spending his time, money, energy, and investing his ego into a set of wheels. His reflected-self mechanism is fully engaged and he is deriving identity from that car within an imagined and perceived cultural context. If that guy has other responsibilities in his life, a wife perhaps, children, friends and family, we might begin to question where “happiness” is really what a car is for.
“Children” is of course an even more complex answer because with that answer we begin to realize that the equation is anything but simple. We also realize that if children are loved merely for happiness’ sake larger problems develop. We pull back from this because we realize that “having children” cannot be approached as we approach consumer goods. Children are not consumer goods and the parenting relationship needs to be far more nuanced and complex.
Identity: Happiness through a vision of a reflected self
To delve a bit deeper we can begin to see that the goal of “happiness” for marriage, cars or children has a lot to do with the reflected-self and identity. The power of a car to make us happy, beyond simple utility and comfort, is its power to impact our perceived identity. Nearly every car commercial plays to this. Cars can make us appear and feel (these are connected) powerful, wealthy, attractive, important, great. We will go to great lengths to attain these assets of identity far beyond what we will to acquire the simple utility of a motor vehicle to meet transportation needs.
Now how about children? Don’t we have children to address deeper identity issues and narrative issues? We all recognize, however, that when we do so, children suffer.
Marriage in America has become an identity devise for reflected selves in pursuit of happiness. This cultural value changes marriage, happiness and its outcomes and is leading to the same sex marriage debate, rates of out of wedlock cohabitation, and our high divorce rates.
If we ponder this reality some other realities, such as Andrew Cherlin noted. He writes.
Marriage is our battleground. Only in America, Mr. Cherlin says, are gay people campaigning so determinedly for the right to marry. Most gay men and lesbians in Europe, he maintains, view marriage as another oppressive heterosexual institution.
So what is marriage for?
For more see the follow up posting “Why anything you want it to be for” isn’t a good answer.