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Interesting blog post on a blog pointed out to me via Twitter: http://praxishabitus.blogspot.com/2009/09/instant-cool-explaining-diffusion-of.html
His point about what this says about network and presentation is correct, but I think about it in terms of shaping our view of the gospel itself in this culture. I pastor a church that has near zero “instant cool” and I am troubled by the implicit associations created by this vocabulary of images. I’m really not so sure how far it is from some sort of a health and wealth gospel not of money but of hip and chic. As often happens I browsed this while musing over Revelation 13, that dramatic chapter about the unholy trinity of the dragon and his two beasts. On one hand it is clear that these churches are producing a sort of art, something powerful and evocative whose power these churches are generously sharing with church plants and smaller groups that via see this power and hope to leverage it into their desperate desire for attendance, mindshare and coolness. Everyone knows marketing is all about the control and manipulation of expectations. An Ipod may not sound any better another mp3 player at a fraction of its cost, but what you purchase with your Apple tax is participation in cult of the white headphones, black turtlenecks and bars that serve up geniuses. You want to create an undertow that draws people in, part of it is connecting to legitimate longings all of which are powered by the God-shaped vacuums of our hearts, yet the marketing images are so deeply associated with our present idols of youth and the accoutrements of the now. I fear a whiplash inducing “bait and switch” moment when the chicness-seeking spiritual consumer discovers that the Christian life is no walk in the mall (or glowy world-saving sojourn into multi-identity, greenish self-expression) but rather a relentless crushing of all idolatrous dreams into a life of simultaneous suffering and joy.
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Words matter and the current lack of restraint (by both sides of our political binary system) of the word “lie” troubles me.
To be wrong, in error, or deceived is to not speak the truth. To lie is to intentionally deceive. It is to say something you know isn’t true. Those are two very different things.
Why is it important to recognize the difference between being wrong and lying?
We are all often wrong. In fact being a Calvinist means that you know you are always at least a little off on everything, and sometimes greatly off on a lot of things. The word “sin” means “missing the mark” and none of us are perfect marksmen/women.
To accuse someone of lying is
a. charging them with something more malicious than just being wrong
b. presuming to know the intentions of their heart. We can know at times that people are lying, but that usually requires some pretty detailed, specific and “insider-like” information.
I remember when Democrats were claiming that Bush lied about Iraq. I never charged Bush with lying about that war because I didn’t know what he knew and what he did not know. I believe he was wrong about WMDs, and that his judgment was faulty, but I couldn’t make the charge that he lied.
To make the charge that one is lying is a serious charge and the word should be taken seriously.
“That’s a lie” is a charge that deserves examination and the obligation to deliver evidence lies with the accuser.
“You are a liar” is a more serious charge still. It charges a person not only with telling lies (see above), but also with a pattern of lying, a more difficult charge to produce evidence for than one or a few lies. It is a charge against a persons character.
Dan noted that in some professional therapy contexts a person making such a charge is often suspected of having a personality disorder prone to that type of suspicion, paranoia or conspiracy thinking. In other words the charge often communicates more about the accuser than the accused.
Tim Keller in a number of places notes that people are quick to charge others with being liars, but when they themselves are demonstrated as having spoken lies their justification is “well my reasons were complicated.” GK Chesterton noted that most people can agree on the list things that are evil, they immediately disagree on what evils they imagine to be justifiable. In other words the standards by which they judge themselves are very different from what they extend to others. CS Lewis in Mere Christianity saw this dynamic as being directly addressed by Jesus when he commanded us to “love you neighbor as yourself”. We presume the best intentions for ourselves but hold our neighbors in suspicion.
The charge of lying or being a liar is a serious one and should be taken seriously. The use of these words without due seriousness undermines our ability to work together and reveals a lack of the kind of generosity we need in order to allow institutions to do their jobs.
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Our Knowledge of God's Agency and our Free will
Rachel Held Evans is a young author whose got a book coming out from Zondervans. In a blog post she talked about “why Calvinism makes her cry“. It’s an amazing piece of self-disclosure.
There’s been a discussion on the subject and I wanted to save one of my responses, partly because I have to give bits and piece of it regularly.
I’d like to make comment on God’s agency that is clearly a piece of Rachel’s working on this issue.
On one hand Rachel you object to a very strong view of determinism, God micro-managing every last detail of human history. This idea too gets labeled as “Calvinism” sometimes, even among Calvinists. Technically it is a separate subject than the question of divine election. A more Arminian approach seems more compatible with a more “open” view of history with respect to God’s agency. Most North Americans born in the twentieth century culturally prefer a more open view. Neo in the Matrix says he doesn’t like the idea of fate because he doesn’t like the idea that he’s not in control of his own life.
OK, so we say we’re more comfortable with a more “open” system, where God more or less sets the stage and we run around on it exercising our supposed “free will”. I can understand that.
I do notice, however, that we also want the other system around. How often haven’t you heard someone say, often as a poor attempt to comfort someone who has suffered some misfortune “everything happens for a reason.” Hmmm. Do we believe that? What happened to our stage setting God and we as free will exercising players?
Or take this one for example. Something really bad happens to someone. Let’s say a parent was killed or they were sexually molested as a child. What’s one of the first thoughts that comes along? “How could God let that happen to me?” This question gets asked by lots of people and is seen as a ground for there not being a loving, all powerful creator God.
Or another one. “God made me.” This one gets pulled into the homosexual debate. “God made me this way.” OK. Did God make that still born child that way? Did God decide to make you in the womb of a crack addict? Why does God decide to make so many babies in wombs in third world countries where any statistician could easily forecast a high infant mortality rate?
Yet at the same time, we also assume an interventionist God. Christian Smith’s “Therapeutic, moralistic deism” is pretty popular. We expect cries of “help me” to be answered by divine intervention and churches, Arminian or Calvinistic encourage people to pray in such a way.
So which way is it? Does “everything happen for a reason” or is the system open? If you are consistent in either direction there are some pretty difficult mental consequences to face in terms of how we feel about God. Would it be responsible for God to allow us to develop nuclear weapons? To emit sufficient greenhouse gasses to destroy the planet and ourselves?
Free will itself is another conundrum. People like to say “free will” but not a lot of observation will show you that are wills are hardly free. Why are there fads? Why are so many little girls named “Emma”? Was that name chosen freely? When I was in my 20s “Maddy” was the popular girl’s name.
How free are our choices really? Check out one of my favorite podcasts WNYC Radio lab: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/11/14
And here’s another one. One of the real problems for Christian exclusivism is the person born in Saudi Arabia, India, or in the Amazon years before Jesus came to be. “God can’t hold them accountable for not becoming a Christian if they never had the chance to pray the sinner’s prayer.”
OK, but then haven’t you already admitted that there is no such thing as “free will” or at least limited it greatly. We can easily see that many don’t “choose to follow Jesus” if they’re born into a Muslim family, or at least the statistics are far lower. Then you are also admitting that history is NOT such a thing where at any given moment an infinite range of possibilities are open to us of which we may chose freely.
Once you have a child you know this. Parents regularly very accurately predict the outcome of their children exercising their wills. How? People can be fairly predictable. So do we really have “free will” or is it better to say we have “real agency”?
And if there is huge amounts we don’t know about our “real agency” given the fact that all of us have lived with it for 100% of all of our lives, how much can we really pretend to have a grasp on God’s agency and specifically how he works around us in an unseen way?