restless reformer

My favorite hymn is “The Church’s One Foundation.” If it came up for a vote, I’d vote to add it to biblical canon. I’m almost serious.

There’s one verse in that hymn that came to memory tonight as I sat with fellow believers and talked about the church, her flaws, her failures, and her struggles:

Though with a scornful wonder, men see her sore oppressed
By schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed
Yet saints, their watch are keeping, their cry goes up “How long?”
And soon the night of weeping shall be the morn of song!

There’s a lot of wisdom in those lines. Samuel J. Stone chose his words carefully; he knew the church. “Scornful wonder” - how many times do we lament the church’s failures?

• “People accuse us of being hypocrites, so we need to stop to prove to them Jesus is real.”
• “What do we do when people point to all the church’s failures?”
• “I know someone who might consider believing in Jesus if it weren’t for the fact that the church is so messed up.

We respond very strongly to the scorn of the world. But do you notice what Stone has them scorning us for? Division. Heresies. In other words, inner conflict in the church. Stone takes it as a given that the church will be in conflict, not living up to what she has been called to be.

It’s shocking. It’s scandalous. But it’s true.

You’ll notice that Stone’s remedy for this is not, “Get better, do better, live better.” Those are exhortations we need to hear and heed. But Stone sees the only final hope as “the morn of song.” In other words, Christ’s return.

Quite plainly, Stone calls the New Covenant age “The Night of Weeping.” Tolkien called history “the long defeat,” in which we get occasional glimpses of the ultimate euchastrophe, the “sudden joyous turn” in the story which is the return of Jesus. All the time the Church is on earth doing her work imperfectly, messing stuff up but by the grace of God spreading the gospel as she stumbles along - this is the night of weeping.

This wisdom flies in the face of denominational hubris, which believes that if all the other believers would just sign on to our confession, the church would finally work as it should. It’s sadly ironic that Paul’s words about the church - that she is “the pillar of truth” - has been used to support claims to denominational and confessional superiority. The church is the “pillar of truth,” and by the church of course we mean our church, our magisterium, systematic theologians, confessions, whatever. But if you read how Paul actually defines the “truth” for which the church is supposed to be a “pillar,” you might be shocked to find that he’s not quoting the Pope, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, or Piper:

1 Timothy 3:16 Without question, this is the great mystery of our faith:

Christ was revealed in a human body
and vindicated by the Spirit.
He was seen by angels
and announced to the nations.
He was believed in throughout the world
and taken to heaven in glory.

It’s a “great mystery;” and it’s entirely about Christ. All the elders and deacons Paul writes about in the preceding verses are supposed to be upholding this confession. Christ: incarnation, death, resurrection, witness, gospel proclamation, faith, ascension and kingship. Surprise! We all believe this. Calvinists, Arminians, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Catholics. We all uphold that confession of Christ; and when we add to Christ, making other things “absolutely necessary” in order to either be saved or to get the church functioning as it should, we’ve gone beyond Paul; and we’re murdering the phrase, “pillar of truth” if we think that quoting it justifies our exclusion of anyone who doesn’t jive with the finer points of our confessional documents. It really is all about Jesus.

Someone once told me that the Jesus who didn’t accomplish the Calvinist “limited atonement” is a “different Jesus.” That’s nowhere to be found in this confession.

This is the Night of Weeping. It’s not a competition. It’s not a battle over who’s got the real church. We can only really discuss those matters when we quit excommunicating each other over them. The real church, the real pillar of truth, is the one that confesses Christ as Paul did. If we don’t weep together during this prolonged Night of Weeping - and weep over our own divisions and schisms and sins against one another - and vow to love one another and uphold the confession of Christ together despite our inability to come to agreement on so many theological questions; if we keep to our own sidelines, pretending we’ve nothing to weep over except the other church’s seeming inability to see how right we are about this or that point of doctrine; if we can’t love one another until everyone who’s “wrong” has repented and signed our confessional document, then the weeping will be greater than it need be.

Jesus is who we confess; He is the truth. Jesus is what holds us together despite our disagreements during the Night of Weeping. Jesus is the one who will return to show us how foolish all of our tightly-reasoned systems of theology were…but when he shows us how foolish we were, graciously and mercifully, there will be little time to weep over it, for the “Morn of Song” will have dawned.

Note: This is probably the last thing of any great length I’ll write here until the end of May. The manuscript for my book on Harry Potter is due May 25, so I need to focus exclusively on that. At the end of May, I’ll most likely be changing names/domain names. It may seem silly, but I’ve hated “restless reformer” for some time, and now that “Young, Restless, Reformed” is getting applied to all the obnoxious cage-stage Calvinists, my name has been hijacked, and there’s no rescuing it.

There will still be consistent activity at The Hog’s Head, my Harry Potter site. 

I’ll be there.  Here are the details, copied straight from Bill Chellis at De Regno Christi:

If you live in or near Rochester allow me to invite you to the Old Toad this Thursday at 5:00 p.m. Bill Kauffman will be joining us to discussion his recent books. Bill is a Western New York legend and has a great following among the Presby-Cons (a term coined by Kauffman to describe us).

Bill will be speaking to The Club, a circle of friends and associates that gathers quarterly at the Old Toad for finely crafted beverages, excellent food (the bangers and mash are amazing), and civilized company. Talks cover a range of topics, political, literary, philosophical, and theological. Conversation follows and it is always stimulating. If you come you will enjoy it.

If you cannot come, buy Bill’s new book Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism. It will be good for you and it will help stimulate rural Western New York’s stagnant economy.

I wrote some time ago about the unpredictable God, wrestling with the concept of a God who doesn’t work according to transactions, who decides not to answer prayer, who allows and creates disaster, entirely messing up my own comfort.  Some better reflections on the theme come from two places:

First, iMonk writes about hitting a wall, and abandoning belief in the God who guarantees anything other than the steadfastness of Christ.

Then, Mark (aka “grub”), reflecting on that essay, writes the following at the BHT:

As stopped relying on Him to fix my problems, keep my family safe, and make all my infertile friends have babies, I had a frightening realization: I had always relied on God to produce results, now I was going to have to trust not in His results, but in the process of Him working in me.  That’s harder, much harder.  Instead of my friends becoming fertile, I was going to have to learn to be a comforting friend.  Instead of my family having a ‘hedge of protection’ around them, I was going to have to grapple with death and violence.

Thanks, Mark…I was trying really hard to keep the conversation on important things like gardening, and you have to go and be all spiritually challenging…

Wow.

When I was 4 years old, I was in the hospital for several days with pneumonia, and it took something like 19 tries to get an IV in me. I would wake up in the middle of the night crying, “No more needles!” No surprise, that led to an irrational fear of needles.

Which led to an irrational fear of bees. As far as I’m concerned, bees are just mean little critters with needles.

Which makes this my worst nightmare.

Tomorrow, April 25, is a Day of Silence. I’m just learning about this, and in conjunction with it, I’m learning about the Christian protest. I learned about the Christian protest while I was preparing dinner. I was using a knife. I was angry, and it’s a wonder I didn’t cut myself.

I believe that we are all sexual sinners. I believe that all sexual sin is bad. I believe that homosexual activity is a sexual sin. I believe that lots of stuff I’ve done in my life was sexual sin. The difference is, I could confess, and in some circles celebrate, that sin, and no one would have said a word. If I were confessing, Christians would have come alongside me and helped. If I were celebrating, the world around me would have celebrated with me. In neither of those situations would I have to be concerned that someone might ridicule, deride, punch, spit on, kick, or murder me.

That’s the point of the Day of Silence. I don’t have to agree with the position on human sexuality of LGBT groups to agree with them that folks who experience those desires shouldn’t get murdered. Do Christians have any idea how they sound when they protest things like this? When they call the school to inform them their children will not be coming to school as a protest?

Here’s a little mock conversation to get the point across.

School Principal (SP): “April 25, our school will be honoring the wishes of those willing to participate in the Day of Silence. We do not believe LGBT teens and children should be bullied or hurt.”

Christian Parent (CP): “I don’t agree with your agenda.”

SP: “Excuse me, what agenda is that? Stopping murder?”

CP: “No, this is clearly a celebration of the gay lifestyle, and that’s not right.”

SP: “Who’s celebrating? It’s a Day of Silence. It represents those who have been murdered, whose voices can no longer be heard because someone killed them just because they were gay.”

CP: “That’s just deception. My child won’t be coming to school. We’re protesting this celebration of the gay lifestyle.”

Come on, folks. You have to realize what this looks like. It’s manifestly true that kids who are “gay” get bullied, beaten, and sometimes killed. When you protest an event like this, because of some supposed hidden insidious agenda, it’s bad. Unless you’re willing to say that Christ would deal with the sin of homosexuality by ridicule and beatings, send your kids to school, and let them be representatives of Christ - the one who took the ridicule, the beatings, and the death on our behalf. Don’t be so caught up in the culture war that fear of an agenda overrules mercy.

Canon press is offering their books in full on Google Books. When I discovered this, I intended to read just a few pages of Leithart’s Against Christianity. A third of the way into the book, I realized I hadn’t stopped after a few pages.

HT to Mike Frizzell

For some reason, I can go a week without a single good thought, and then I have about 37 I want to blog in one day.  Today, it’s all politics-dominated (which I guess makes sense, as they’re voting 2 hours south of me).

I’ve been surprised over the past couple years to discover how many more types of “conservatives” there are than I had realized back in 2004.  I’ve stumbled upon several conservative journals, articles, and blogs that are in favor of good ecological practices (even if they aren’t part of the Al Gore-style global warming crusade), believe that family and tradition are more important than a financial version of the American Dream, were against the Iraq war from the start, and are as skeptical of big business as they are of big government.  Fascinating.

Limbaugh-Hannity conservatism is something I can hardly call conservatism anymore.  There are still some pop conservative pundits I like to listen to, even if I don’t always agree (I don’t always agree with anyone, even myself really…), Glenn Beck being an example.  But here are a few conservative and libertarian blogs that I read regularly now which are broadening my perspective on conservatism:

• Reason: Hit and Run
• The American Conservative
• Liberty and Power
• Eunomia

It’s always nice when someone is able to discern the absurdity of political spin.  Here’s Jesse Walker of Reason on the political spin of the Obama-Ayers “connection” -

The point of Sunstein’s comments, obviously, is not to “equate” Epstein with Ayers, just as the point of Obama’s earlier comments, obviously, was not to “equate” Ayers with Coburn. The point is that Obama associates with a lot of very different people and that it’s foolish to assume his loose connections to one of them define his politics. Serving on the same board as Bill Ayers doesn’t make Obama sympathetic to Marxist terrorism any more than shooting hoops with Epstein makes him a libertarian.

If there’s a legitimate story here, it isn’t that Obama is one of the many Chicago politicians (even the mayor!) who have interacted with Ayers. It’s that Ayers, after playing revolutionary for a spell, has managed to find a place in the Chicago establishment. The Weather Underground was made up of the children of the elite, and after all the shouting of the ’60s and ’70s died down those Weathermen who managed to avoid prison or self-immolation have often been able to return to high-status professional positions. I’d love to see a Marxist analysis of that class dynamic.

Just brilliant.

Washington Irving embedded a comical criticism of the way people in modern society uproot in his classic story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow:

There is no encouragement for ghosts in most of our villages, for, they have scarcely had time to finish their first nap, and turn themselves in their graves, before their surviving friends have travelled away from the neighborhood; so that when they turn out at night to walk their rounds, they have no acquaintance left to call upon.

I submit than when conservatism becomes primarily about a certain ideology and not about unique, longstanding, commitment to a location and its traditions and well-being, it ceases to be conservative and has already passed on into liberalism. There is no metanarrative of conservatism; there are only local expressions.

Stay put, and have a chat with the ghost of great-great grandpa.

(Added: Which is not to say, of course, that all conservatives who move are automatic liberals.  I’m talking about the Limbaugh-trajectory of conservative thought in general which has abandoned family, community, and tradition in favor of anything that makes money or looks like the so-called “American Dream.”)

…and in the interest of truth and fairness, here’s proof that (a) the recent ABC debate was absurd and by far the worst yet, and (b) that all the Clinton-Obama debates have been overwhelmingly biased against Obama as far as “scandal” and “gotcha” questions go.

And yes, the person who conducted this little study needs a hobby.  But still.

I know the seventh ecumenical council would have something to say about this, but I like C.S. Lewis on this point. From A Grief Observed:

Images, I must suppose, have their use or they would not have been so popular. (It makes little difference whether they are pictures or statues outside the mind or imaginative constructions within it.) To me, however, their danger is more obvious. Images of the Holy easily become holy images – sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are ‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not.

Who knew an Anglican could be so Presbyterian?

(HT to Bob Myers at BHT)

Bill Kauffman lives about an hour from me, in Batavia, NY, where I spent my first two years of undergrad (good ol’ GCC).  Politically, he’s a conservative/libertarian and a localist, and he’s written a few books that are on my reading list.  I’ll be able to meet him in a few weeks, as he’ll be speaking at a regular pub gathering that I attend (I was the speaker at the last one…I’m going to start referring to myself as “having opened for Bill Kauffman” now).

Yesterday in CounterPunch, his article “Politicians Without Roots” made the following claim, and I think it’s right on the money:

Why does this matter? What’s wrong with electing competent but rootless people to public office? Because just as one cannot love the “human race” before one loves particular human beings, neither can one love “the world” unless he first achieves a deep understanding of his own little piece of that world. America is not, as the neoconservatives like to say, an idea: it is a place, or rather the sum of a thousand and one little, individuated places, each with its own history and accent and stories. A politician who understands this will act in ways that protect and preserve these real places. A rootless politico will babble on about “the homeland”–a creepily totalitarian phrase that, pre-Bush, was not applied to our country.

People lacking strong identifications with specific places-a block, a village, a city, a state, a region-will transfer their loyalties to abstractions. Woodrow Wilson, a displaced Southern minister’s kid, renounced the traditional American practice of neutrality and tossed the First Amendment in the scrap heap in his crusade to “make the world safe for democracy.” George W. Bush, the Texan-cum-Yankee prep-school cheerleader, has wasted astronomical sums and thousands of lives in a campaign whose ostensible purpose is to democratize the Middle East and “rid the world of evil.” The costs of such grandiose schemes may be measured in billions of dollars and acres of corpses. In addition, political power is centralized, citizens are uprooted, and the economy undergoes wartime distortions. These are reckoned acceptable prices to pay for the achievement of mighty (if ultimately unachievable) abstractions. But democracy was no safer despite the First World War, and I daresay evil will exist long after U.S. troops come home from Iraq.

After a pretty lengthy discussion at the BHT on race and several posts here, I decided to try to root myself in some Christian thinking on race, and it’s been helpful. This discussion is so multi-faceted and complex that it’s difficult enough to get all the assumptions on the table in the first place, let alone gain understanding.

I’m finding that John Perkins et al (the CCDA folks) do what I’m attempting to do (though they, of course, have actually lived it for decades, whereas I’m just starting that process), and that I’ll have a lot to learn from them: they take contemporary sociological thinking on race and put it into a Christian context with a Christian solution. I’ve written before of “color-blind racism” and the impossibility of not seeing color in a society so marred by racism. That I learned from Bonilla-Silva, in an essay that is sadly no longer freely available through Google scholar.

But Spencer Perkins and Chris Rice make the point well in their essay on racial reconciliation in Restoring At-Risk Communities. This part of the essay is Rice, who is white:

But a new twist on the definition [of race] was introduced…in those years. Though four hundred years of the old, overt racism is gradually disappearing, a subtle but lethal strain of the disease remains. While its effects are still separation and distrust, its symptoms are not as obvious as lynchings, forced segregation, or telling ethnic jokes. We call it passive racism. And we need to learn how to detect it in ourselves and in our institutions.

Passive racism is a way of looking at the world that is much like wearing racial blinders - not bothering to see and understand the effects of race because we don’t have to in order to survive…

Probably the most glaring example of White blinders is the fact that as the majority culture, we don’t have to deal with race. We say “I don’t see color,” but the reality is we don’t have to see color. I can walk away from…Black people and the whole mess of race any time I like. I can cross town tomorrow and enter the White world and know I will be treated well and not be denied opportunities because of my color. But my Black friends don’t have that option. (p. 116-17)

There’s great discussion on “passive racism” in Beverly Daniel Tatum’s book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? But the work of Perkins and Rice here in this essay gets at some of the same themes being talked about even in Critical Race Theory, but set within a Christian context of thinking.

Both analyses are needed. We cannot get beyond race problems without rooting ourselves and our identities in God’s story, but neither can we bring the message of the gospel to our contemporary racial issues without deep understanding of how sin has manifested itself specifically in racism, specifically in our culture.

For those following this series: thanks for sticking with it and offering your comments as I struggle through it.