Last week's news included two contrasting articles touching matters of faith. Links follow, but be forewarned: Remonstrans is not responsible for injuries from any whiplash that you experience as you juxtapose these stories.

The first is an article by a man who learned about tithing several years ago when he was trying to follow all the rules in the Bible. He determined to tithe that year by giving a tenth of his income to the needy. He has not tithed every year since then but continues to make tithing a goal. The noteworthy point is that this man is an agnostic. Though apparently of Jewish descent (according to his web site), he questions whether God exists. Would that he would come to know the God behind the rules in the Bible, the one of whom the Shema speaks, and to love that God with all his heart and soul and might.

The second is an article about a priest in the United Kingdom who has endorsed shoplifting. To vulnerable persons in need, he is quoted as saying, "My advice, as a Christian priest, is to shoplift." (We kid you not. Read for yourself.) Recognizing that the Bible says, "Thou shalt not steal" (Exo. 20:15), he says, "My advice does not contradict the Bible's eighth commandment because God’s love for the poor and despised outweighs the property rights of the rich."

The priest continues, "Let my words not be misrepresented as a simplistic call for people to shoplift. The observation that shoplifting is the best option that some people are left with is a grim indictment of who we are." Not only do we dispute his premise, we note that the "grim indictment" strikes closer to home than he recognizes. Isaiah spoke of words such as these when he said, "Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!" (Isa. 5:20).

I saw the article about the priest just a few minutes after reading the article about tithing, and I was struck, not only by the contrast, but also by the irony. On one hand we have a man who calls himself an agnostic who, albeit imperfectly, is seeking to follow some Biblical rules. On the other we have a man who calls himself a Christian priest who is counseling persons to flout some Biblical rules.

Yet this article is not intended to laud the agnostic or scorn the priest. Reflect for a moment. On what basis has the priest pushed the commandment aside? He has put together some ideas of his own (relating to the relative property rights of the "rich")  to justify a course that seems right to him, and on that basis, he has effectively nullified the clear statement of Scripture. He calls it consistent with God's Word, yet saying this does not make it so (proof by assertion is no proof at all). This type of problem is not new, of course. Jesus addressed something quite similar when he spoke to the Pharisees in His day:

[B]y this you invalidated the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: 'This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.'" (Mat. 15:6b-9).

It is easy to say that the priest is wrong, which he is. Yet dare we fail to consider whether we are doing similar things? Are we not also prone to make up our own ideas? Let me mention just one example that is a major issue in many congregations that label themselves Christian churches of fundamental or evangelical persuasion: music. The God who said, "Thou shalt not steal" also led Moses to say, "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." (Deu. 6:4-5). Considering this, it is evident that Jehovah alone is God, that only He deserves worship, and that proper worship is about Him and Him only. Think about the arguments that you have heard in the "worship wars" in our day. How much revolves around what appeals to those who may attend the services? Yet such arguments presume that worship is about us. This makes no more sense than the priest's notions of why shoplifting from large national chains to meet needs is not really stealing after all. Both involve man focusing on his own ideas.

Please do not view this only in the music context, however. Many other examples could be given. Too often, if we would reflect and be honest with ourselves, we are making things up and substituting ideas that we have created for those God has given. When we do that, we have swallowed Satan’s big lie, "Ye shall be as gods." May God deliver us from such evil.

All my heart this night rejoices,
As I hear, far and near, sweetest angel voices;
"Christ is born," their choirs are singing,
Till the air, everywhere, now their joy is ringing.

Forth today the Conqueror goeth,
Who the foe, sin and woe, death and hell, o'erthroweth.
God is man, man to deliver;
His dear Son now is one with our blood forever.

Shall we still dread God's displeasure,
Who, to save, freely gave His most cherished Treasure?
To redeem us, He hath given
His own Son from the throne of His might in Heaven.

Should He who Himself imparted
Aught withhold from the fold, leave us broken hearted?
Should the Son of God not love us,
Who, to cheer sufferers here, left His throne above us?

If our blessèd Lord and Maker
Hated men, would He then be of flesh partaker?
If He in our woe delighted,
Would He bear all the care of our race benighted?

He becomes the Lamb that taketh
Sin away and for aye full atonement maketh.
For our life His own He tenders
And our race, by His grace, meet for glory renders.

For it dawns, the promised morrow
Of His birth, Who the earth rescues from her sorrow.
God to wear our form descendeth;
Of His grace to our race here His Son He sendeth.

Hark! a voice from yonder manger,
Soft and sweet, doth entreat, "Flee from woe and danger;
Brethren, come; from all that grieves you
You are freed; all you need I will surely give you."

Come, then, let us hasten yonder;
Here let all, great and small, kneel in awe and wonder,
Love Him Who with love is yearning;
Hail the star that from far bright with hope is burning.

Blessèd Savior, let me find Thee!
Keep Thou me close to Thee, cast me not behind Thee!
Life of life, my heart Thou stillest,
Calm I rest on Thy breast, all this void Thou fillest.

Thee, dear Lord, with heed I'll cherish;
Live to Thee and with Thee, dying, shall not perish;
But shall dwell with Thee for ever,
Far on high, in the joy that can alter never.

---Paul Gerhardt

I sing the birth was born tonight,
the Author both of life and light:
the angels so did sound it;
and like the ravished shepherds said,
who saw the light and were afraid,
yet searched, and true they found it.

The Son of God, the eternal King,
that did us all salvation bring,
and freed the world from danger,
he whom the whole world could not take,
the Lord which heaven and earth did make,
was now laid in a manger.

The Father's wisdom willed it so,
the Son's obedience knew no "No,"
both wills were in one stature;
and, as that wisdom hath decreed,
the Word was now made flesh indeed,
and took on him our nature.

What comfort by him do we win,
who made himself the price of sin,
to make us heirs of glory!
To see this Babe, all innocence,
a martyr born in our defense--
can man forget this story?

---Ben Jonson

Emergents tried their level best to be appropriate for Halloween, and here Dave Hayward labors mightily to ensure jolliness at Christmastime. (Dave is not sure if he is Emergent in any official sense, so I think of him as more of a free agent emergent. What follows is the sort of thing that justifies bringing couches into the church. This is why we should listen to more heretics.)

This theological reverie "means a great deal" to him. It may not mean much to anyone else, but he judged it worth his writing down:

The bible itself testifies to the self-emptying of God, the "kenosis", the sacrifice of his own transcendence (read Philippians 2). In a radical movement, God unfolds himself into the world which he loves. The incarnational event, the Christ story, not only reveals and relates this love of God, but actually demonstrates it as God entering into the world and the life of humanity. No longer, then, is God remotely enthroned on high, separated from his creation. Now, he is invested completely, compassionately incarnated into the actual life and history of humanity. The post-crucifixion God is no longer God the Father, for God the Father emptied himself, nor God the Son, for the Son, having completed the incarnational work, proclaimed, "It is finished!" The post-resurrection God then is the Spirit. Where we are gathered in love, there is God, but as Spirit. It is within the time and space of the cosmos, history, our human interactions, the God has condescended to live and move and have his being. It is within the affairs of people where God dwells, where God is found, where God is loved, and where God is served.

Just take a moment to let that sink in. If you've been to seminary, you might want to allow more than a moment.

Vahrael thought my response was offered in a "flipant mannor" and was too harsh for a world that would take more interest in theologification if only...if only it weren't for scrooges like me.

John is worried no one will take me seriously. At first I was afraid that that possibility might throw me into a deep depression so I went looking for some pharmaceutical countermeasures. Between my study and the medicine cabinet I found a plate of warm pfeffernusse, and by the time I'd licked all the crumbs from the plate, I'd forgotten all about John's worries.

Tiggy doesn't really cotton to patriarchal theology because of her view of fatherhood. She's given this serious thought and she expresses her view here with such tenderness and sympathy. It makes me think of the Virgin Mother, who probably had just the sort of father we know existed through "most of history".

In many ways fathers are better now than in the rest of history, but it's only recently that fathers have begun to behave in the ways you talk about. For most of history, fathers have despised female children and wanted sons. They have seen daughters as a burden and as only having value for breeding purposes or in higher circles for forging political alliances. You have to look at this historically - what we see now is only the tip of the iceberg.

Fathers dont' show respect by - not listening, humiliating, being scornful, not taking seriously, being dismissive, perceiving a daughter as a xexual t hreat, dominating through physical abuse and aggression.

Hmmm. And that's just the tip, a tiny fraction of the whole, and why it probably was not such a good idea for God to have revealed himself to us as a father.

In addition, Tiggy suspects "we are all preincarnate".

I don't think humans can really deal with stuff about time, given what we know of time from physics. I had enough trouble getting my head round ‘Back to the Future'. John [that would be John the Beloved Disciple] seems to be suggesting something archetypal.

"Archetypal".

Yes, I think so. Now that I reflect, archetypal is just the right word here.

Definitely archetypal.

For those of you who've been hovering around Santa's Punchbowl for too long, may I remind you that an archetype is "the original pattern or model from which all things of the same kind are copied or on which they are based; a model or first form". So I think we all know where John was going with that.

_______________

Observe the contempt for Revelation. In spite of their desire for community, register the disregard for the larger community of faith beginning with its Apostles and Fathers. Relish the irony of David Hayward (who can't maintain a local community of faith there in Rothesay) cutting himself off from the real community of faith which traces back to Abraham.

Note the expectation that everyone will accept this theological hairball with respect and theological engagement.

And then recall the words of St. Peter—who was at one time perceived to be connected with a certain community of faith—"These are wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever."

Before the Happy Holidays get here and we meet in the streets and malls for our seasonal riots of self-indulgence, before our keen spiritual perceptions become dulled with a thousand movies about Camden Town and Mount Crumpit, we might reflect on recent events.

It is obvious to both church-attenders and church-abstainers that there is something seriously wrong with pulpit and altar.

We can't help observing that when a gang of religious celebrities ostentatiously signs a declaration on life, marriage and religious liberty, religion is not in the bloom of its youth. That there should follow a raging debate about how some came to sign it and others did not, we might wonder if religion is worth our notice. From what I've learned, this statement reveals a significant disagreement over the meaning of the Gospel!

Isn't that inspiring? I think we can put to rest any looming threat from "organized religion".

I love it when Fundamentalists tell us they are serious and then continue marketing the same insipid, meaningless, irritating rituals their children have rejected and which we'd be humiliated to bring our friends to watch. Do serious people trivialize their god like this?

Almost as much, I love it when an Evangelical grand poobah steps out of the movement's baronial publishing houses to express concern over the superficialities he's discovered on the internet.

Some day—and it won't be today—it may occur to believers that if churchmen make a statement on life, marriage and religious liberty and it only succeeds in revealing their misperceptions of the Gospel, we'll have rounded a scenic bend.

If the Evangelical church cannot identify the Gospel it was given, can it be trusted to carry it to the world? If it persists in its mawkish self-indulgence and trinket-mongering, does it even have a message of repentance worth bringing to us? And if it has no call to repentance, why should people listen to anything it says? Because it claims "a 2,000-year tradition of proclaiming God's word, seeking justice in our societies, resisting tyranny, and reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed and suffering"?

Instead we get "devotion to human dignity"? How Dickensian.

Please! I can't speak for every last soul on the earth, but just speaking for myself I don't care to hear what these people have to say about dignity.

When the Son of Man cometh, will he find devotion to human dignity on the earth?

Roger Scruton is a writer, a philosopher and, shockingly, a blogger.

I'm not sure if Scruton's writing meets the high standards of Evangelicalism or Dr. Packer with respect to things that have staying power, but you may have come across some of his thinking in bookstores that are not Christian. I can't think of a single Christian bookstore that carries Scruton's works, but there could be one.

It isn't impossible; I just can't imagine an evangelical walking into his local religious bookstore and asking for something by Scruton when he could buy a Happy Birthday, Jesus mug or some littabit creepy representation of a spirit being with cleavage. (Landscape Sleeps Winter Angel Figurine)

Some of his books I've already recommended, but any on this list would be worth a careful read.

An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture
An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy
Beauty
Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged
Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life
The Aesthetics of Music
The Meaning of Conservatism
Understanding Music

Almost a year ago now Scruton addressed a change that he suspects is irreversible. I am certain it is irreversible in the church unless God decides to reverse it—and I don't expect him to do that if we aren't willing for it to be reversed. (And we do seem to be fighting Him on the whole singing of psalms, hymns and spiritual songs idea.)

On the disappearance of public music-making:

Music is going the way of meals, drinks and sex, all of which are ceasing to be occasions for bonding and becoming sources of solitary addiction instead. Humanity is being divided in two by its own inventions. On the one side are the IT-savvy nerds, who do not relate to each other directly, but have mastered all the ways of achieving satisfaction from digital substitutes. On the other side are the savages, as Aldous Huxley might have called them, who sit down to meals with their families, and who drink and sing madrigals with their friends like Samuel Pepys. And the two classes are increasingly estranged from each other, since the moments in which they might have united, as people unite through singing, no longer exist.

And if this is true, where does this leave public worship? How does worship among estranged people work, exactly?

I'm amazed at the amount of time people spend on the internet. I'm not against technology, but all tools should be used to their best advantage. We should be spending our time on things that have staying power, instead of on the latest thought of the latest blogger-and then moving on quickly to the next blogger. That makes us more superficial, not more thoughtful.

---J. I. Packer

Does he have a point?

No, sadly, he does not have a point. If he had stopped with "We should be spending our time on things that have staying power..." he would not only have had a point, he would have offered us some very helpful and timely advice.

What we have here, I'm afraid, is an opinion on the order of the 4-year old who delivers himself of his judgment on spinach by throwing his spoon to the floor. I'd be inclined to give Dr. Packer a more patient hearing if I knew him regularly to tell people "we should spend our time on permanent things instead of reading the vapid opinions of church functionaries in the official organs of their religious institutions" or "we should be spending our time with those Samuel Davies called ‘the venerable dead' rather than wading through the swill and swagger of Christianity Today, Christian Century, Eternity, Leadership Journal, and World Magazine."

J.I. and his ilk have not given to my generation a very compelling example of a serious world of letters. Had they done that, bloggers would not have an audience.

You won't sell many rhinestones to people who already have diamonds.

Sorry, Dr. Packer, but it must be asked: have you been in a Christian bookstore in the last 20 years? Have you read the books your own publishers have marketed? Have you taken a fair sampling of the magazine that now quotes you?

Blogging is not the problem. The problem is much, much larger than that.

Let us be serious for just a moment, shall we? If you leave us a world full of Dan Rathers, don't be amazed to find bloggers; amazement is unbecoming.

There is not a place for us to look in this wide world where we don't see falsehood, hypocrisy, idolatry, and pretense. There is hardly a show, a commercial, an advertisement, a church ad, a magazine article, a religious publication, or weather report that isn't superficial about race, gender [sic], religion, beauty, happiness, piety or truth. In fact, yours is the generation above all others that has "branded" the truth. Why should you dare to be amazed that there is a reaction to this state of confusion?

My own advice is to see blogging for what it is: a necessary, an inevitable, and even a reasonable reaction to the shambles that was left us. Could blogging be done better? Of course it could; and I wish it were. We follow some blogs that are travesties of reason and crimes against language. But let's recognize blogging for what it is; when blogging is done right, it is a conversation where there was none. And I'll put some blog conversations I have seen up with anything found in the Letters Section of most magazines, certainly the religious magazines that have made your name well known.

Imagine a blogosphere populated with men like Swift, Pope, Milton, Herbert, Eliot, Chesterton, Muggeridge, Charles Williams, Barfield.... The fault is not with the blogging, the fault is the deformed and flabby Evangelicalism you left us. The real problem is a superficial Christianity.

Blogging is very much the unflattering consequence of your negligence toward "things that have staying power".

I enjoyed myself immensely over the Thanksgiving holiday. The only way it could possibly have been better is if the Food & Drinks Committee had thought to pack a 55-gallon drum of eggnog.

Sociologists have long known that when you put eight fun-loving, games-playing adults in one cabin and when it's known that there will be no permanent record of what was said to whom and about what, people tend to unclench, as it were.

So the drive home was a bit worrying for me. I could feel some of my neck and shoulder muscles re-clenching. What in the last few days could the emergent church have announced that might compare with the happiness I'd enjoyed in Homer?

So Monday morning I sifted through the usual emerging internet dumpsters and learned some things that sparked a hope.

First of all, Doug Pagitt's run for public office in Minnesota has hit a snag. To hear Doug tell it, Governor Timothy James Pawlenty ripped him off for the funds necessary for his run for Senate District 41. All expressions of gratitude should be sent to:

Office of the Governor
130 State Capitol
75 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
St. Paul, MN 55155

Steve Knight, "Kingdom Journalist", is out of a job, so he's had more time to do some blue sky thinking—which I thought is just what he's been doing all along. He's not as happy as he once was: Kingdom Journalism is "...not quite as accessible conceptually as I'd like it to be for a broader range of people". He's now inclined to devote himself in a more intentional way to telling stories and throwing parties. Maybe he can become a Kingdom Party Planner; that should broaden his support.

No news is good news, Steve.

EmergentVillage announces no plans for any Frisbee Smackdowns or Barbecues of People. There are no plans for doing theology on a single lawn, but there is a "Call for Voices" here. "...social object theory states that worthwhile social interactions tend to center around an object, described by social media theorist Jyri Engeström as ‘the reason people connect with each particular other and not something else.'"

So there's the on-going search for worthwhile social interactions among emergents.

If any of you have "Kingdom-stories that are meaningful social objects at a local level" (and even if you're not sure your Kingdom-stories are meaningful social objects at a local level), please contact Amy at amymoffit42@gmail.com. She would love to help you with that.

Last night I listened to this. Tripp Fuller and James F. McGrath chatter about conceptually inaccessible things and tell us why they don't believe the Bible. There's nothing new here, there's nothing interesting here, there's nothing coherent here. I don't necessarily suggest that you listen to all 64:28 minutes; I just listened to the whole thing to test my stamina. Three days and three nights in a cabin with Double Twelve Color Dot Dominoes can make you soft.

The emerging "communities of disbelief" continue their search for meaning and their struggle for existence. It has been about a decade and we still don't detect anything emerging. We recall the bright, promising days of Trucker Frank and Marie, but things move very slowly with emergents; glaciers go by in a blur. It takes forever to get out a print artifact, they still search for their Kingdom-stories, and leaders continue rebranding themselves.

Yes, it's sad and pathetic, but it's sad and pathetic in a comical sort of way.

That's my Kingdom-story and I'm sticking to it.

Our seasonal gratitude and holiday celebrations afforded us a measure of respite from any serious review of Recent Events of Great Consequence (like the Manhattan Declaration and emergent's pursuit of "art" and "conversation"). Generate published its first issue, and the three most responsible culprits excuse their "print artifact" here at TheSchmooze.

These fashion hounds of the emerging church explain why their conversation justifies the cutting down of perfectly good trees which might have been better used to make nasty splinters.

Anyhow, we forsook the dubyahdubyahdubyah and travelled with friends over to Homer, L'zzyanna, to disguise ourselves as typical holiday revelers on Lake Claiborne. In Cabin #7 the traditional jigsaw puzzle was set out, we ate food, we played games, we ate food, we exchanged gifts and awarded prizes, we ate food, we watched football, we ate food, we taunted one another for personal discrepancies, failings, idiosyncrasies and youthful misjudgments.

Some of us played a round of dimpleball at the Homer Golf Course. Halfway through the first nine we found the putting green next to some picnic tables and the restrooms! (I don't always take a putter into the Men's Room, but when I do, I prefer a Ping.)

We took a stroll around and a gander at the Claiborne Parish Courthouse, one of the very few remaining ante-bellum civic buildings.

We stopped in the PigglyWiggly on North 2^nd for a bag of Claey's Horehound hard candies which constituted my entire Louisiana Purchase.

We built many fires.

But it was pleasant, it was relaxing, it was enjoyable and we harmed no one.

All that is history now as we return to the disturbing world of theologians and church-tinkerers and where little is pleasant, relaxing or enjoyable and where many are grievously harmed.

Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things has done, in Whom this world rejoices;
Who from our mothers' arms has blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us,
With ever joyful hearts and blessèd peace to cheer us;
And keep us in His grace, and guide us when perplexed;
And free us from all ills, in this world and the next!

All praise and thanks to God the Father now be given;
The Son and Him Who reigns with Them in highest Heaven;
The one eternal God, whom earth and Heaven adore;
For thus it was, is now, and shall be evermore.

We believe that beauty, art and creativity should be valued, used, and understood as coming from or being connected to the Creator.

Evangelicalism has successfully extinguished any artistic impulse. Not only has it failed to produce anything that rewards serious aesthetic reflection, it has erased any memory of what the religious imagination once did for the pious.

Emergents say they feel this loss very keenly, and one of the things they hoped to do was "bring Art back into the Church".

And how's that working out for them, you ask? Other than the transcendent works of Soupiset, Scandrette and McLaren, what sort of splash has Emergence made in the art world?

"Well," I reply, "there are always the wood-roasted salsas, the urban tribal T-shirts, the mittens and the totebags of Solomon's Porch, Doug Pagitt's suburban flea market of inspirational bric-a-brac."

I'd hoped to make it up for the Minneapolis show to visit with all my art critic friends from New York and Boston, but Remonstrans' travel budget took a big hit after the Christianity21 fiasco and the Dallas book signing. In addition, the editorial board failed to see any connection between art and, as they refer to them, "those disgusting postmodern rodents". Our Fine Arts editor, Ms. Prudence McSpigot, suggested in a piercing soliloquy that I stop annoying her. She said that she could not even imagine under what loathsome circumstances she would need to talk with me, but should that contingency ever arise she would give self-disembowelment a try. She said I should content myself with Doug's little 12-second docudramas here.

I pass them along for your edification and inspiration.

The molested spirits of Chagall, Masaccio, Dürer and Giorgione now shriek, wail and sob through the streets of Minneapolis.

When we last left our hireling-without-raiment he was telling us that we should question everything, especially our theology and our ideas of church and ministry. Well, that was utter nonsense and we all knew it immediately. It was so obvious that even David recognized it as nonsense, and he very helpfully came over and amended his insight: what he should have said, he now guesses, is that "we need to question all of our theology and reject all that which endorses power, etc."

And this was most helpful.

Or rather not helpful at all, but perhaps well-meaning. As it must have occurred to you all, questioning everything is impossible: the logical place to start questioning everything is with questioning the questioner. But if you say you are going to question everything and then promise to reject only certain elements, you have already aroused the suspicion of sane and honest people. If before you begin the questioning you name the bits you will reject at the end of the questioning, you are not doing the work of a completely healthy mind.

And to question everything and then reject only those bits that "endorse power" is both intellectually impossible and morally wicked. Even mentally retarded people know that some power is necessary and good. The asylum orderly keeps the big retard from eating the little retard's lunch. Even kids on academic probation in their Sunday School know that God has all power and that he dispenses it according to his will and wisdom.

So for one to comb through all his theology and then "reject all that which endorses power, etc." is—how can I word this delicately?—hmmmm, no, I don't think there is a way to word this delicately, so I'll just say it's asinine.

Is it any wonder that this guy's church is cannibalizing itself?

So in a subsequent episode—and I think here I can use the word episode in its psychological sense—Dave offers this:

The Christian culture I found myself in couldn't give me peace about how other religions fit into the scheme of things, or how people of other faiths or non-faiths were also on a valid path.

My Christian culture, on the other hand, has a ready and perfectly reasonable answer, and it gives me a bowlful of peace garnished with large dollops of hope: "other religions fit into the scheme of things" by providing an occasion for God to dispense either mercy or justice according to his eternal decree. And people of "other faiths and non-faiths" most certainly are on a valid path. As post-modernity has taught us, all paths are equally valid!

We call this the path to Hell. It is not a desirable path, maybe, but it certainly has validity.

It might not be a path that gives Dave peace, but in my own Journey of Questioning I've questioned the need for (or benefit in) David Hayward's getting any peace. I doubt that Dave will ever question that, but who knows? Perhaps there lives in the tropical rain forests a little frog which secretes a goo soon to be harvested to create a wonder drug. Then Dave's prognosis might improve.

So after much prayer, meditation, and contemplation and after taking what he thought were all reasonable measures, Dave finally realized something he knew all along. Here is how he describes it:

The apparent divisions were all unfolding of a deeper and mysterious Oneness. I apprehended the truth that I had to die to all my brain's attempts to grasp for knowledge. I had to humble myself, die to self, and, in a sense, give up the search. It was necessary for me to, in way, stop struggling to stay on the tumultuous surface and sink, sink way down.

I'm tempted to say that Dave's dying to all his brain's attempts to grasp for knowledge was probably as close as he got to a bona fide epiphany. Tragic, is it not, that Dave humbled himself only in his imagination. Humbling himself before Jesus was asking too much.

Pharisaism flourishes in the heart of every degenerate.

Most wise and generous Father, we acknowledge and confess our self-indulgence. We have abandoned your paths and we have foolishly chosen a way that seemed good to us. We have looked on your goodness and counted it a small thing. We have despised your word and pursued our own vanities. We have squandered your blessings and hoarded our own conceits. We are false in our convictions, presumptuous in our speech, insincere in our confessions, perfunctory in our repentance, tardy in our obedience, and casual in our worship.

Have mercy upon us.

Amen.

I am fascinated by the Intelligent Design argument as Stephen Meyer articulates it, and I am entertained by the shrill and doctrinaire "new atheists". I can't decide who is funnier, Tony Jones or Richard Dawkins.

Following his visit to Dallas I asked Meyer (with his knowledge of the history and philosophy of science) what might become of science as a discipline. Given recent discoveries, explanations and repercussions, what future is there for honest exploration and real science? He suggested that aspiring scientists would simply "move on to more productive efforts". I don't doubt that he is right: who wants to devote his time to pursuing answers that might cut the career short?

Still.

I'm not sure that the matter is quite so simply resolved. It's not just the work of the Discovery Institute that should have materialists worried. Materialists can surmise forever about matter and energy and chance, but I think Meyer's critique is—at this point—a mortal wound. Information does appear to exist and it does not appear to have an explanation materialists are willing to cough up. Materialism tells us precisely nothing. All the chance and necessity in the universe can't make this dog hunt. If you read Signature in the Cell you come away with the sort of hopelessness Dante spoke of.

Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.

I'm certainly not enough of a scientist to guess what possible answers might be offered in the future. I'm certainly not prepared to say Signature in the Cell will be the last book published on the subject (I do say it is a comprehensive introduction), but no answers even seem possible given what we now know.

As I say, it's not just ID narrowly defined. You should want to read about this, and you might want to pursue this line of thinking further. The very least that can be said is that "Darwinism is no longer alone in this world".

It may not be the greatest news I've heard all day, but it is now a fact of life for thoughtful men. We've been encouraged to become more reflective: here is one place to start.

Eternal things now cast a discernible shadow.

A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death than the day of one's birth.

--- King Solomon

If I were to tell you to listen to this—and I will definitely tell you to listen to this—you might well put your mousepointer over the linktext, look down at your status bar and think to yourself, "Oh, great, not another hieratic lullaby from the Central Sleep Clinic". Thinking that would be a mistake: go and listen.

Listen to all three addresses by Robert Delnay; even if you have a profound religious commitment to halfway measures, then at least listen to the last of the three.

There is a lowering mist, a morbid cloud, hovering among the ruins of fundamentalism, and the reflex of many has been to huddle up and pretend the problem is one of definition: perhaps one more mighty wind from the platform will blow it away. If we suppose that the world has forgotten what a fundamentalist is, then perhaps we can solve the problem with more bafflegab.

What could one more lecture hurt, right?

But if the problem is not just a misunderstanding of fundamentalism or separation, then more lectures will not help. If fundamentalism has lost its good name, then it needs to inquire as to how that happened. If future usefulness is a problem, then saluting the cap one more time is not a solution. And if you've lost your young people, then your day has well and truly ended. You have enjoyed the book so far, the protagonists have been captivating, the plot has been riveting, but as the fingers of your right hand fan through the few remaining pages you begin to suspect that things cannot end well. There is not nearly enough space left for things to end with a bang, and there is barely enough space for things to end with a satisfying whimper.

Those of us who have suggested this was the case have been dismissed as being too conspicuously celebratory. In my case, I don't care. In the case of others, I'll let them find their own words to describe this last, pitiable self-justification.

What you will not do, I guarantee, is dismiss Delnay's thoughts as party chat.

For those of you still dubious or ambivalent about all this last-minute scrambling for identity, bear in mind one thing: Delnay sees no solution in Evangelicalism or Conservative Evangelicalism or Emergence or any other death gurgle within earshot. He is not motivated by anything so small as the loss of the young to Dever, Piper, MacArthur, Mohler.... If what he says about fundamentalism is true, then the solution belongs to those willing to learn from history and act rationally.

Think about what he says. I know the man well enough to know when he is amused and when he is not.

Take it from me; I've seen him much happier.

10. Start to seriously question everything, especially your theology and your ideas of what church and ministry is. Let your theology deconstruct, realizing that much of what we are taught and have learned endorses power, authority and control, and is contrary to freedom. Begin to discover what the truth is for yourself. Your search, it is promised, will not go unrewarded.

---David Hayward

Some people think I have way too much fun at the expense of emergents. [My wife holds to a variant of this view: she thinks I have way too much fun period!] And I have to agree that in the religious world right now, Emergence is probably the funniest thing going. There is nothing funny about Fundagelicalism anymore; and there isn't going to be anything funny about it until fundagelicals can figure out what they believe. Until fundamentalists agree on what they are separating from, they cannot be funny. And until evangelicals agree on what the euangelion is, they cannot be funny either. They can be only pathetic and desperate.

Emergents can still be funny because they are not yet desperate: their naïveté makes them oblivious to the absurdity of their errors. They think they are going somewhere very fast, but they keep not getting there. That's genuinely funny.

Take Dave Hayward's statement above. Tell me that's not hilarious.

But I'm not in this just for the giggles, I'm also up for a little instruction, and Emergence is quite instructive. In fact, it would not be unfair to say that I am not as much amused by Emergence as a cause as I am intrigued by Emergence as an effect.

Fundagelicalism made some serious errors, and we knew when it made those errors there was going to be a price to pay. When fundagelicals fell off the pot that was on top of the stool that was on top of the laundry basket that was on top of the ladder that was on the top of the table...we knew it would leave a mark.

Emergence is that mark.

Once Fundagelicals swapped truth (which is eternal) for plausibility (which is ephemeral) it was only a matter of time before their children would be chasing the wind.

Mark Galli thinks that by pursuing "commitment" evangelicalism can rid itself of nominalism, and that doesn't even make sense on paper.

Tremper Longman III is embarrassed by a historical Adam. He thinks Adam's central rôle in our theology is just a result of "programming".

I sat under another troupe of grifters from Dallas Theological Seminary which was more interested in distancing itself from Young Earth Creationism than it was in a genuine understanding of the first three chapters of Genesis. Ironically, at the very moment it was engaged in this chancel farce, useful inquiries were being made into Darwinism.

So what the Church once believed was fact Evangelicals now hold to be metaphor. Unfortunately for everyone, these losers cannot share with us the tenors and vehicles of their metaphors. They not only assault faith, they debase metaphor! It's like listening to Danielle Shroyer talk about story.

Extremely disappointing.

So Emergence should not surprise us. Christianity has been a culture of disbelief for quite some time now. David Hayward flatters himself to think he is prepared to question everything, but we know he won't. He won't question his own competence—in spite of the fact he has practical reason to do just that. He will not question his own intelligence, evidence notwithstanding. He will not question his own premises. I mean what rational person in the 21^st Century can really believe that "what we learned about theology" (how's that for a convenient ambiguity?) serves only to endorse power, authority and control?

I suspect there are more people who believe in martians than there are people who believe all theology and church and ministry are priests' grab for power, authority and control.

It's fascinating that Hayward's advice comes in a convenient list of ten things. The first step in deconstructing your church is:

1. First of all, you have to really want to. It has to be an inner necessity.

I wonder if Dave will start at the beginning and question his will or his inner needs? I wonder if questioning all theology, church and ministry can possibly be grounded on something as rock-solid as any individual's wants and needs.

In the meantime, I'd like to question his psychiatrist.

We hope you each had an invigorating Halloween. My wife and I threw every reasonable caution to the wind and invited over some emigrés from the ancient land of Ouaouiatanon.

It wasn't as scary as a trip to Minneapolis, but it was still pretty frightening.

We also hope you enjoyed the Emergent Halloween Special on vimeo. For those of you who found that entertaining and might want more, I can do no better than send you over to that preacher-what-ain't-got-no-clothes-on. He's got his own ecclesiastical dance macabre goin' on, and he will share with you how he is preventing things from happening and what steps he has taken to resist success:

Our worship music is raw and unprofessional. The preaching and teaching is unrefined, crude and informal. Our community is made up of a diverse mixture of regular people. We aren't a big deal.

Sounds fundamentalist to me. I still don't see how that makes him different.

Anyway, David Hayward (who regards himself as average in intelligence) promises to devote some time to explaining his failures, how he goes about destroying his church, and how it is becoming more free and more human. Those seeking more freedom and humanity will be amused to read his upcoming posts.

Spencer Burke has been meditating in his garage. You remember the Sparkhouse smiling simpleton who wants us to listen to more heretics? Here he re-examines "success". His target generation regards the Bible as less sacred and less accurate than preceding generations.

And this is a good thing.

This is an improvement.

Ultimately we may need to let the next generation define "the power of God's Word"...

Why this man is permitted to have shoelaces still troubles the mental healthcare professionals.

Tomorrow is that day of the year when the immature among us dress up in fun costumes and say scary things in order to frighten us. I know if Shane Claiborne came to my door, I'd give him a Snickers.

And here are some Trick-or-Treaters now.

Don't they look more seasonally appropriate than a wagon full of pumpkins?

We have turned a corner, I do believe. We can't yet say what all we'll find around this corner, but it is clear that the scenery has changed drastically and our grandchildren will live in a different landscape from the one we grew up in. Nineteenth Century scientists made some preposterous assumptions about man, nature and society, and those assumptions have led us down a very inhuman path. (Read Eric R. Pianka, Steven Pinker, William Provine, Michael Ruse, and Steven Weinberg.)

But by what I take to be a conspicuous divine grace, 21^st Century scientists have found evidence for the thing they feared most and the last thing they ever expected to find in their derelict cloisters. Scientists discovered the sign of a very big bogeyman in their microscopes, and they have that bewildered and unmanned look that one likes to see in his enemies' eyes.

Uncommon Descent holds that...

Materialistic ideology has subverted the study of biological and cosmological origins so that the actual content of these sciences has become corrupted. The problem, therefore, is not merely that science is being used illegitimately to promote a materialistic worldview, but that this worldview is actively undermining scientific inquiry, leading to incorrect and unsupported conclusions about biological and cosmological origins. At the same time, intelligent design (ID) offers a promising scientific alternative to materialistic theories of biological and cosmological evolution - an alternative that is finding increasing theoretical and empirical support. Hence, ID needs to be vigorously developed as a scientific, intellectual, and cultural project.

Yesterday we took a break from our profoundly inane Sunday School discussion to trek down to Park Cities Presbyterian Church to hear Stephen C. Meyer talk about the cultural relevance of Intelligent Design. He didn't go through Signature in the Cell, but he explained to a roomful of people the cultural significance of what is afoot in the world of science.

I have recommended both Meyer and David Berlinski in the past, but I would encourage all of you who can find an opportunity to give them a serious reading and, if possible locally, hearing. Yesterday's class ended with an odd expression of faith: a roomful of believers in a fervent and earnest singing of the doxology.

Very rare. That alone was worth the drive.

A lot of our time on Remonstrans is spent observing the antics of dimwits and propagandists. We know of the profane and depraved antics of Emergence, and we are not unaware of the recent convoluted and disordered thoughts about separation and the gospel up in Allen Park.

But Christendom is different, dear reader, and keeping up might be nice for a change.

You might have had reason to see some of those TV shows where mental defectives try to ride skateboards off rooftops onto trampolines, or they stand on ladders resting on the very tree branches they are trying to cut down with chain saws, or they ride bicycles backwards down metal handrails set in concrete. If there is ever a time and place in the Christian life for schadenfreude, this must be the time and place. It would be an ungenerous faith for a reader of Solomon to withhold the laughter these fools seem desperate to provoke.

If a person of middling intelligence thinks riding a bike down a handrail is a skill he hopes will someday land him a lucrative position with the circus, he might start out with helmets, mats and spotters; but you don't need to go to that expense if you just want to have fun.

I think the Emergent church is also made up of people hungry for the thrill of stupidity. That is why I think you owe it to them to watch their show: Xtreme Idjits Visit Sparkhouse.

Here you have a movement devoted to "empowerment", and the Jo in JoPa Productions suggests that we disempower the clergy. The Pa in JoPa Productions wants people with a Call (whatever that means...he professes not to know) to get up and do it.

Here's David Huth:

"Ok, here's what I think: We have a chance of sparking new life if those of us who for generations have been blah blah talkin' a hole in God's head can shut up and listen so that those of us who for generations have been silent can stand up off their [sic] asses and speak the truth as they see it, we have a chance."

Pam Heatley tells everyone not to be afraid of chaos. When the Spirit moves, unexpected things happen. We shouldn't be afraid to let the "Spirit move in that chaos moment". Don Heatley wants broader ideas about theology and the Bible to come into our churches. Laura Arp wants us to "light our dreams". Phyllis Tickle wants us to "return to the disciplines". Jay Bakker wants us to be honest with one another. Jake Bouma tells us that biological life is really diverse. Danielle Shroyer wants us to be more imaginative. Kevin Ewing wants us to connect through a service project that creates "a bond that is pretty cool."

Spencer Burke is the bobblehead over at TheOoze; he wants us to "listen to the other voice" and to listen to a few heretics. "There's power in listening to the heretic." Spence believes "all of our orthodoxy started as heresy."

Now I ask you: you are sitting in the large conference room and Phyllis and Laura and Danielle and Pam and Jo and Pa and Jake and Jay are all drinking fair trade coffee around the big table, they've twittered their obscenities to one another, they've listened to other voices, they've conferred with truckers and juvenile delinquents, the spirit of their god has moved in the chaos moment, and now they have just shared with you their dreams for the future of Christianity. What do you do? (I mean what do you do if you're not fortunate enough to have a cyanide capsule in your pocket?)

How do you move ahead with this input? Could you perhaps even prioritize this input? What are you prepared to do with the truth as they see it?

You may think this nightmare is not possible, but that just goes to show you don't understand the postmodern Christian. The new Christians want to sit around and compare journeys and listen to other voices and listen to a few heretics. What we hear these Sparkhouse svengalis saying is exactly what we should expect to hear. They are into community and collaboration; well, this is their community and Phyllis and Laura and Danielle and Pam and Jo and Pa and Jake and Jay are the ones they will be collaborating with.

And if that doesn't make your heart merry, then I just don't think you really want a merry heart.

I was asked to revisit an idea that came up in a recent comment. A reader entirely innocently, and even to a point quite rightly, compared Emergents to Liberals. There are very good reasons to make that comparison, and I would even say that at some points it is commendable to make those similarities explicit.

Unfortunately similarity is not identity. It is clear that Emergents have pitched their tent toward Liberalism; there is a traceable lineage and a recognizable attitude that I'm not eager to dismiss. So if someone says, or if you have ever said, that Emergence is repackaged or renovated Liberalism, that doesn't land you in the sin bin. I would say we have no quarrel worth mentioning.

By the same token there are some pretty drastic differences between Emergence and Liberalism. Differences that should not be lost in the shuffle or we will handicap our own efforts at understanding.

To those who will still think this is an unproductive quibble, consider the profound differences between the Emergence and Liberalism.

It is true that Emergence and Liberalism have a similar contempt for Scripture, but recall that Liberals wanted to retain the moral essence of the Gospel even as they eviscerated the writings of the Evangelists. They were wrong, of course, and they failed. But what they failed at was preserving a religious sensibility during the collapse of a worldview. Who looks to Emergence to preserve a worldview? What worldview could survive deconstruction?

Some Liberals were devout men. Don't take my word for this: I didn't know them. But J. Gresham Machen knew them, studied under them, and had the utmost respect for some of them. Emergence hasn't produced any such people.

As for sympathies with the Enlightenment or appreciation of reason, listen to Jones and Pagitt on the topic of Plato. You will choke with laughter.

Liberals were nothing like Emergents. They didn't cuss like sailors, they didn't get pierced and tattooed like aborigines, they spoke the language of the church and they understood its symbols. They had a culture. They were not hell-bent on destroying Western virtues and they didn't offer us doggerel as liturgy.

Emergents don't want to preserve a moral essence at all; they want to impose a political agenda. Look at the leftist activist agenda that defines the McLaren and Jones blogs.

And we may call a Hindu squatting beside the Ganges devout; no one calls an Emergent devout. An Emergent is committed. And the only use Emergence has for the fruits of the Spirit is as a counter-accusation.

Emergents have nothing but contempt for any religious sensibility. They flaunt their contempt for and ignorance of culture. Emergents celebrate the destruction of all moral constraints, even those acceptable in secular society and in foreign religions. They clearly have no use for education except to gain social status.

Why is this important? Is this quibble worth the trouble? It may not be, as I called it, a quarrel worth mentioning, but it may nevertheless be a distinction worth maintaining.

I think it is. I think so because of the obvious difference between people who preserve religious sensibilities and those who destroy them. People who want to maintain the moral essence of a religion are better than those who don't. People who want to inculcate moral sensibilities are superior to those who merely push a temporal and carnal agenda. Respect for culture is good and contempt for culture is perverse.

The difference between these things does not get you into Heaven or keep you out, but real Christians are interested in more than getting people into Heaven; there is a long list of good things the church ought to be preserving while it evangelizes the world. People who read the New Testament respectfully have picked up on that fact.

For thousands of years, actually.

I think these things are especially important because of our times. We live with people who can't define anything. We cannot distinguish between different things; we cannot compare like things.

Movements cannot declare their beliefs. Fundamentalism cannot define itself, and Evangelicalism is a totally useless word: if you use it you have to tell people what you mean and what you don't mean. What does justice mean any more? One Emergent told us justice means not flushing a toilet! What does holiness mean? What is Art? What is worship? How do we provide community? What is the eschaton? What is the meaning of the Incarnation? What is the Christian hope?

I do think that the first step toward reform is to recover the habit of using the right words to say the right things. If we had a fixed, common understanding of any of those italicized words in the previous paragraph, no one would be giving Emergence a second look.

As it now is, these words have only tribal definitions, and that is the confusion we cannot encourage.

I should begin this (way too long) post with some explanation of what I do believe. It shouldn't necessarily be important to you that I believe this, but it will be helpful for you to know how my predisposition is relevant to the confrontation I am about to relate.

I believe that Revelation is more informative and far more interesting than I was ever taught. I was taught that it was important in a theological way, but I was not told much—certainly not enough—about how its importance should be appreciated in a literary way. I was sternly told not to mess with the content of Revelation, but I was not helped to understand the form of Revelation. I learned since that when Moses wrote the first five books of my Bible he said much more to his contemporaries than he ever did to me.

Poetry and narrative are never just decorative or entrancing ways to convey information; the poetry and the narration are essential to understanding what Moses wants us to know. Without making this post interminable, you can get some idea of the scope of what I mean by reading The Art of Biblical Narrative by Robert Alter.

And if you refuse to do even that little thing for me, at least go to the bookstore, find a chair and read through the introduction to his translation of the Pentateuch in The Five Books of Moses.

Read about the hands in the Joseph story.

I say all this to say that if you talk to me about the importance of biblical "story", you will have my interest, and not just because I've grown up reading Æsop and Grimm and Homer and Chaucer and Poe and MacDonald and Twain and Wodehouse and.... You will have my undistracted attention because I've grown up misreading Moses.

_______________

So I'll move this along by telling you I heard that Danielle Shroyer (just back from that happening/ event/gathering in Darkest Minneapolis) was going to be signing her new book at Tuesday's "Very Exciting Meeting of the Cohort".

Emergence right here in Dallas!

So I told my wife she could have my evening crust, I was driving my pickitup truck down to hear the preacherette talk about story. I'll give you a sample of the insights she takes from Moses' exodus story by quoting the close of her second chapter.

Nobody is allowed to get in the way of God's call for us to go. And when we see injustice, we are called to act like Moses and confront the pharaohs of our own day. We are called to be people who practice exodus day after day after day. We have seen freedom fighters decry the pharaoh of American slavery. We have seen Martin Luther King Jr. galvanize the fight against the injustice of racism and suffragettes denounce the injustice of sexism. We can tell stories of economists working in the Two-Thirds World to bring about economic exodus in small villages through sustainable efforts. We can hear about American teenagers emboldened by the plight of child soldiers in Uganda and raising their voices to a shout. In each of these ways, and in countless more, we declare and demand the future of God to be made more present among us. When we practice exodus, we declare our allegiance not to the powers that be but to the God of Green Lights.

I had a reasonable suspicion that Moses would not have recognized his own work in Danielle's book.

But back to the story.

The discussion out on the patio of the Northwest Hwy Tin Star was meandering in a predictable way when the topic of "the Flood Story" came up and the preacherette said that the lesson of the flood story was that "no matter how bad man got", God would not destroy him again.

"But that's not true, is it?" said I.

"What's not true?" said she.

"It's not true that that is the lesson of the Flood Story," said I.

"How do you mean?" asked she.

"Moses didn't tell us any such thing. What he told us was that God set the sign of a covenant in the sky that he would never destroy man with a flood, not that he would never destroy man at all," answered I.

"Well, that is just your interpretation!" accused she.

"That is what the text says!" retorted I.

My mind was immediately taken by two thoughts. First was her complete ignorance of (or dishonesty about) what Moses actually wrote into his Flood story. Second was her unexpected abandonment of the postmodern understanding of texts: like she had some special understanding of Moses' writing. Or even that Moses meant anything at all which we could determine in our unique times.

This from a professing Emergent?!

I went with the first; I mean what's the point in pursuing story if it's just become interpretation? My interest in story took a back seat to my interest in fact, but she persisted in dismissing my reading as mere interpretation. Then she went on to inform everyone at the table that I like to "come and mix things up".

(If an Emergent wishes to reject orthodoxy he is "asking the hard questions" and "challenging our traditional perceptions". If I ask inconvenient questions, I "like to mix things up". As you all know, I do like to mix things up, but I also like to have serious and productive conversations. Which one I get is part of the serendipity of life.)

When I got home I sent her an email which included an excerpt from the Septuagint in which Moses says three times in the space of three sentences how God would not destroy man again with a flood. In Wednesday morning's email she finally agreed that that is what Moses wrote, but then she quoted a second passage which she thought supported her misunderstanding of the first passage.

It's possible she was re-embracing a postmodern hermeneutic, but I had lost interest in this woman's literary insights and I wrote her this reply:

Among mankind's great institutions are the war college and the insane asylum.

It is inevitable that people will disagree. If those people are rational and authentic, some understanding is possible: they can talk about it; if they are irrational and deceptive, then talking is a total waste of time. That's when the war college and the insane asylum come in handy.

Last night you said something that was untrue about God's judgment. When I defended my objection by referring to the actual "flood story" you said that it was merely my interpretation of the story and that you had a different interpretation. (I came home and emailed you the text and you finally agree that it does say what I claimed it said: it was not "my interpretation" of what it said.) But even before we can honestly approach this disagreement there is something even more interesting. If you were an honest person and if you were consistent and rational, you would have accepted "my interpretation" as being just as valid as "your interpretation". You would have said Namaste, you would not have dissolved the importance of story with the word "interpretation" and you'd've avoided an interruption to the more serious conversation about the usefulness of the Biblical narrative.

You pretend that you are open-minded but you are not; yours remains the privileged "interpretation".

So last night was a total waste of time. It was just your chance to dump on your ideological opponents and cast aspersions on hermeneutics, theology, fundamentalism and a few other oversimplifications that polluted the conversation.

But the point remains. Your enemies do not fail to appreciate "story" or "biblical narrative"; what they fail to do is allow you to prejudice the case with a pretense that you have some special appreciation for story that the rest of us do not. You get the story; we get the interpretations.

This really is contemptible, not just because it is a subtle abuse of another human's conscience and faith, but because it ruins whatever valid conclusions we may draw about narrative in Revelation.

I think you should be ashamed of yourself. I know you're not, but I still think you should be.

I also think you are a careless reader. I did not say our discussion was violent; I said our disagreement was violent. If you read the flood story to mean that God promises never to judge mankind again no matter how bad he gets, and if I read the flood story to mean that God will not destroy man again by means of a kataklusmos udatos but that that kataklusmos udatos stands as a precedent for an even greater judgment, then that is as violent a disagreement as we can have. We have read the same story and drawn contrary conclusions.

This really is intolerable, Danielle.

Her reply took me to task for not demonstrating the fruit of the Spirit, and she said that she would not continue this discussion "in this email forum". She suggested we might talk about this over coffee or a meal.

At first I thought to ask her if we could discuss this at a barbecue or during a round of Frisbee golf, but I decided to take Solomon's advice about answering questions.

_______________

All of this is more important than you may think. If we just listen to these people cuss and spout their jargon, we will miss an important fact of our religious life. We are dealing here with a people who claim to have a special appreciation for Story and Narrative and Art, but in story and narrative and art they have no skills. Check out the works of Soupiset, McLaren, Scandrette, and Shroyer.

Shroyer does not have any interest—or competence—in story. Don't take my word for it; read her book or have a young child read her book. People, like Alter, who have an interest in story know what they are talking about. And that knowledge sticks out a mile. I can read Alter for hours and hours and never learn his political commitments.

Shroyer has a need for a pretext, and biblical stories are just a point of departure for conversations about Martin Luther King, Jr., racism, sexism, the Two-Thirds World, sustainability, child soldiers in Uganda, blah, blah, blababa, blaba, blah. She has no interest, as her Sparkhouse sound bite suggests, in our using imagination or in being creative, and she certainly made it clear that there is no room in God's story for me. And I don't take this personally; I'm sure there is no room in God's story for anyone else who insists that the storytellers in the Bible meant what they wrote.

Talking with Emergents is about as hostile and judgmental an experience as approaching the RAs in a fundamentalist Bible college about the possibility of having a kegger in the chapel.

So I didn't get Shroyer to sign my book, and I wasted gas making the trip down to Dallas—which I'm sure was bad for the environment.

* * * WARNING * * *

This post contains puerile observations and offensive language.

We know our civilized readers will make allowance for the fact that we are reporting on Emergents' recent activities and will therefore expect gratuitous profanity as the preferred means of expressing their deepest theological insights.

Please understand that this is just them keepin' it real.

* * * WARNING * * *

Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt have formed a production and consulting company which, sparing no strokes of genius, they have named JoPa Productions. Their most recent failure took place this weekend in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and it was called Christianity21.

The plan was to invite 21 females to talk for 21 minutes about the future of 21^st Century Christianity—and I think all of us of the masculine persuasion spotted the flaw immediately. Jo and Pa intended for it to be "less a conference and more a happening, an event-a gathering of voices and ideas that will shape the future of our faith".

Confusing interconnectivity with community, this bunch of Sunday School dropouts began twittering in public. I include a couple twitterings for your edification. The first is from c_w_s, a talkative woman but not much of a looker who really knows how to twitter after a religious happening/event/gathering. After the first evening she could be found in the bar calling to everyone online:

c_w_s: not quite ready for bed but don't want to drink alone. Anyone else in the Marriott bar? I'm on the couch by the fire.

We hope she found the "community" she was looking for.

Mike Stavlund, ranking Emergent thinker, wanted everyone to do the environmentally responsible thing, especially when using the facilities:

MikeStavlund: make a statement for justice by not flushing @ #C21 (if it's yellow, let it mellow...)

Makeesha Fisher, one spokesbimbo of the 21, was quite entertained by Paul Soupiset, her colleague at Generate, and the artwork he was doing on site:

makeesha: @soupiset just sketched flowers that looked like little sperms lol #c21

Three other attendees celebrated an idea voiced from the stage by Debbie Blue:

moffou42: God the Almighty, sucking at his mother's breast, unable to hold His own head up. A God who has an anus... it seems like blasphemy. #c21

jakebouma: Debbie Blue on incarnation: God had an anus. Naturally, @soupiset draws "Anus Dei". Perfect. #c21 #c21 http://twubs.com/c21

dtrigueros: death & decay, bacteria, shit, phlegm:the Body of Christ. We eat & drink this ev week so complicated gives us life #C21 (via @Mad_Curls)

Then it occurred to the spiritually sensitive happydaydeadfis that these epiphanies might not be leaving the best impression on everyone in the world observing from his computer:

happydaydeadfis: remember, folks who are reading the c21 tweets, that these quotes are OUT OF CONTEXT. they are good, but... #c21 http://twubs.com/c21

Killjoy.

Elsewhere mlgregg wrote:

mlgregg: Holiness is characterized by profound joy... i.e. the Dalai Lama and Tutu #c21 http://twubs.com/c21

And one last quote from mojojules:

MoJoJules: #c21 fucked my shit up. I feel almost torn a part. Needing for when I come terms w/ it to look someone in the eye and tell them the gift

It's difficult to quantify the impact that was made on a person who feels almost torn a part [sic].

But one of my favorite features of the happening/event/gathering was the "Sparkhouse", a little white playhouse with a red chair and a welcome mat. Whatever time was left over after coming up with a name for the JoPa Production company was given over to this brilliant innovation.

People were asked to sit in a special chair and offer ways to "spark new life in Christian communities". We got the considerable wisdom of

Doug Pagitt
Tony Jones
Phyllis Tickle
Julie Clawson
Spencer Burke
Steve Knight
Philip Shepherd
Jay Bakker
Jake Bouma

I cannot imagine your not wanting to hear these emerging philistines and degenerates explain their ideas on sparking new life.

Before the Emergents barbecue their last rib and their throw their last Frisbee, let's not fail to notice what passes for their liturgy. Here is Brian McLaren's shot at immortality with his own Kyrie Eléison.

Let's Confess It (Em, c, b) 106bpm
(a prayer of confession)

Let's confess it: there's a lot of evil, lust and greed in our world. Oppression and sin build up pressure within until there's an eruption of corruption. Beneath the skin, we skid and spin in spiritual crisis where vice is the norm, and justice, kindness, humility, and civility are all too rare.

Unaware of our despair, we smile in denial and say "It's all OK. No need to change, no need to grow, just have another drink or smoke, tell another joke, and don't think or rethink. Make another buck, with some luck you can buy a bigger house, store more stuff, drive fast, look good, keep up."
Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy.

Meanwhile, addiction, rejection, and a lack of reflection spawn friction, dejection and a loss of direction. Every family, community, and nation are shaken. Creation's resources are carelessly taken. And pollution scars every ocean, mountain, breeze, and shore, with visible symptoms of our inner war.

We're all victims. We're all villains. We're stuck in the web that we spun ourselves. But God lights a spark of hope in the dark to help us cope with all that's wrong and needs to be made right. God has come into all our pain, shame, and loss through the cross, and calls us to a path of life, love, purpose, and peace.
Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.

If we humble ourselves to believe and receive, a river will flow and a candle will glow in a secret sacred place within us, very deep, where we have been wasting in shadows, half-dead or half-asleep. We've been falling in a vicious viral downward spiral that leads to death. Let's wake up, hear God calling, take a deep, fresh breath.

Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

"We confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart and we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. For the sake of your son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and please forgive, that we may finally and fully learn to live in dignity and unity, integrity and harmony, delighting in your will and walking in your ways, to the glory of your name. Amen."

Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy.

Emergents have recently floated some rumors suggesting the possibility of having meetings on restarting the non-bureaucratic machinery of their undenomination; their great conversation as ebbed and their great experiment in decentralization has produced some underwhelming results, and they think that barbecuing some people might rekindle an interest in their religious commotion.

Time will tell.

Fundamentalists continue their riveting debate on what a fundamentalist was, what a fundamentalist is, and what a fundamentalist should look like. We wish them the best of luck with that.

And up in Chicago's suburbs, Mark Galli bangs his head against a wall and speaks about what it means to be an evangelical:

Some use strict definitions that include a complex set of beliefs and behaviors, and so define evangelicals as a step above the ordinary mortal. Others use loose definitions in which the word seems to mean nothing more than "nice religious person." Evangelicals by these definitions fare pretty badly when compared with the rest of the world.

In this article, I lean toward the looser definition. We might feel better about ourselves as a movement if we restrict the word to the most committed-that would eliminate the problem of nominalism anyway.

(I think referring to evangelicals as those who hold to "a complex set of beliefs and behaviors" was intended to be vicious sarcasm. The one thing we know is that evangelicals do not entertain complex beliefs, and no one thinks of an evangelical as "a step above the ordinary mortal".)

I can't predict what will make evangelicals feel better about themselves, but I would feel better about evangelicals if they could tell us what it is they believe, not how committed they are to it.

You may remember Mark Galli. He wrote this about evangelicals:

In this sense, the history of the Christian faith is littered with evangelicals, from the apostle Paul to Antony of the Desert, from Francis of Assisi to Teresa of Avila, from the monastic movement to camp meetings, from Beth Moore to Mimi Haddad, from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association to Evangelicals for Social Action.

In the current article Galli takes the typical CT approach:  he throws together a collection of blurbs, casual summaries, glib stereotypes and superficial characterizations, pretends that doing this constitutes historical research and then he pontificates vapidly. In this case he pontificates about the need for having "a vertical relationship with God". He has nothing at all helpful to say about what it means to have a vertical relationship with God—and a few of his readers have noticed this. Having a vertical relationship with God is just one more empty metaphor by which he can continue misapprehending and misrepresenting the faith.

Imagine going to The Great Hall of Evangelicalism to sign up only to be told by some drooling clerk that it is irrelevant what you believe; whatever it is you believe, your application has been denied because you lack sufficient commitment.

I think it is worth your reading Mark Galli: clearly he has no answers, but if you want to catch some sense of the spirit of the age, this should do the trick. If you want to get a feel for the modern evangelical's intellectual incapacities, Galli is your man.

Ignorant armies clashing by night.

Some time ago now there was a loud noise, and after the dust settled it became apparent to all that whereas there had been nothing, now there was something. With the passage of significant amounts of time this something changed, expanded, morphed, mutated, developed, grew, survived, and advanced into everything there is, seen and unseen. It was not hard for scientists to explain the sequence, and basically it boiled down to a rather straightforward account of matter and energy and chance.

Scientists did not give an entirely satisfactory account of everything, but as defective an account as it was it was still preferable to the account we got from preachers which featured a Meddlesome Intruder.

Then I came along.

Yes; as I view it, my advent spurred two unpromising scientists to find some more suitable explanation for the miracle of life, and shortly thereafter Crick and Watson worked out what DNA looked like, and from their conclusions grew a realization that matter and energy could produce nothing without information.

Dr. Meyer doesn't give a full treatment of my involvement, but he compensates for this snub by telling a very interesting story about the essential rôle of information in the origin of life.

You ought to read this book. You should be able to find it in a bookstore, but it could take you billions and billions of years if you look in the Science section. If you go to Barnes&Noble, where I went, you will find it in the Comparative Religion section.

Silly me, I didn't think to look there first. I asked the nice lady behind the computer and she took me right to it.

There is also a programmer's rendering of the process here which is intended to help us visualize what Meyer is describing.

Chance and random mutation are looking more and more like a pathetic wheeze.

Meyer demolishes the materialist superstition at the core of evolutionary biology by exposing its Achilles' heel: its utter blindness to the origins of information. With the recognition that cells function as fast as supercomputers and as fruitfully as factories, the case for a mindless cosmos collapses. His refutation of Richard Dawkins will have all the dogs barking and the angels singing.

--- George Gilder

____________________
Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design
Stephen C. Meyer
Harper Collins, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-147278-7

It is very difficult to take religious people seriously; and I say that as a religious person. Fundamentalists, for example, tell me they are serious. Can you believe that? After reading their books and listening to their music? Surely evidence of seriousness could be detected in their art and literature. Can you take their claims as truthful?

I can't.

Now we hear from an evangelical who "hasn't completely resolved in his own thinking" the existence of a historical Adam. A guy by the name of Tremper Longman III is posing as a professor of literature and Old Testament and, much like another academic charlatan I know here in Dallas, is suggesting that he knows better than the Apostles and Fathers.

I think he's a twerp. He looks like a twerp for sure, he talks like a twerp with no lunch money, and just between us, he honestly reflects badly on masculinity everywhere. He regularly casts his argument in the most dishonest way and he invites us to indulge his skepticism. Well, I don't; and I think he's a twerp, as I say.

If you listen to this clown—and I use the word clown in a way that might be seen to reflect unfavorably on a lot of very good people who wear big shoes and a squirting boutonniere; and I do regret that—he posits his ideas by beginning with "a lot of people stumble with the creation account" or "a lot of people believe that Genesis 1 and 2 sort of insists..." or "many people have a picture of..."

I think if Tremper Longman III has any friends, they should schedule an intervention.

"A lot of people" believe a lot of unbelievable things. A lot of people believe believable things. The number of believers does not reflect at all on the truth (or the plausibility) of the belief. What a lot of people believe is not the basis for any argument worth considering.

A lot of people have seen Elvis Presley at their 7-11; a lot of people think that they can better sell their house if they bury a statue of St. Joseph in the back yard; a lot of people believe they will get rich by playing the lottery, a lot of people believe everything came from something over a long period of time and that that something came from nothing a short while before that; a lot of people believe space aliens abduct humans.... I personally believe that if aliens abducted Tremper Longman III, they would conclude from their extensive medical inquiries that he ought to be listed at the top of the column marked "TWERP".

Those of us who think Adam was a real man came to that conclusion by reading and by thinking. Some of us who believe Adam was a historical man can give twelve (or more) reasons for thinking Scripture justifies that belief. Tremper Longman III tells us we come to our conclusions by being programmed.

This is what passes for scholarship these days. These marginal intellects cannot distinguish an argument from an academic fad, and they cannot even detect a simple argumentum ad hominem when they use one.

A lot of people reading this post no doubt took offense at my calling Tremper Longman III a twerp. That's just not the proper way to dialog, is it? How can you fairly consider another man's ideas if you start by calling him a twerp and by suggesting he lacks masculine traits to a conspicuous degree?

Well, my answer is simple enough for Tremper Longman III to understand: I can consider the ideas of twerps just as fairly as he can consider the ideas of programmed believers. If Tremper Longman III wants to be thought an academic he should start talking like one.

I mention all this for a reason. I don't much care what uses Tremper Longman III puts his understanding of ancient near eastern literary forms to. There is something nefarious going on here, so it is worth our consideration. I'm not dismissing those who take Tremper Longman III to task for his shabby thinking.

But what interests me right now is this religious environment, the culture of our religion. As I was reminded again in Sunday School class yesterday: when we behave like Tremper Longman III or when we blame Finney for our deplorable worship, or when we misrepresent the motivations others have for adopting a certain form of worship, we are not thinking. We are not being academic or scholarly or erudite or learned or even intelligent. We are putting lipstick on a pig.

Ours really is a culture of disbelief. We love to think we are drawing rational conclusions when in fact we are just attaching facile rationalizations to our prejudices. We are not committed to truth, we are devoted to pretense.

Just about a month ago Adam Walker Cleaveland needed help with a sermon (something I suspect is a recurring problem). I truly regret that our readers weren't notified of his needs sooner. I'm sure you all could have been a big help to Adam. It's my fault entirely for not bringing this to your attention in a timely way.

AWC already had his sermon; all he needed was a text! And the text of his sermon was to be the collaborative part of it.

One reader of his blog, a real pearl among lunatics, suggested one of the Evangelists, saying:

Take a new look at Mark 7, particularly the Syrophoenecian woman. She's helping Jesus "rethink church"-and it is not just the man whose ears are healed whose ears are opened. She changes Jesus. What kind of church would we have if we truly acknowledged that God can learn, and change, and grow?

Between the idea and the reality falls the Shadow.

Some time ago I mentioned my delightful day at the anti-CIA demonstration on the campus of Colorado University in Boulder. I spent a long day strolling from one place to another listening to tepid speeches about the evils of American foreign policy by desperate people trying to appear revolutionary. The farce had two main characters: one hadn't washed his hair in about a week and wore a long army coat, and one cute girl, an unpersuasive feminist, went around telling the few amused but unimpressed listeners to "keep their energy up". Obviously the frenzy was not adequate to their outrage.

Representatives of the CIA were in the Coors Event Center interviewing aspiring spooks. The hippie wannabes believed that by dumping their posters and pamphlets next to the main entrance and by shouting into their 5W megaphone they would inspire virtue and disrupt business. It eventually occurred to the pot-heads that promising spies were being secreted into the building through tunnels. Recruitment was going along smoothly inside while outside the dimwits exhausted their double-A batteries and our patience.

In a contest between a hippie and a spy, bet on the spy.

At about 3:30 a handful of campus conservatives drove up in one car, engaged the local press and gave them the only usable footage of the day. I still remember that unpersuasive feminist whining at the cameramen that this was their demonstration. She ordered them to swing their cameras around and shoot what she thought was the important story. It was the perfect picture of irrelevance, naïveté and miscalculation.

It is amusing that when an idea is getting no traction, conspicuous efforts must be made to control the image, not at all unlike 21^st Century religion.

Here was Jim Wallis speaking of another idea which is getting no traction.

The New Christians shows how the influence of Jesus of Nazareth is moving among a new generation hungry for something real and desperate to move beyond simplistic polarities inherited from the past. Tony Jones stands at the crossroads of theology, philosophy, and culture, tackling the issues facing this ‘emergent' generation with the depth, humility, and grace, only a sojourner intimately familiar with the journey could provide.

It has been ten years now—by their reckoning—since Jesus of Nazareth moved among this new generation hungry for something real. This was a generation desperate to move beyond inherited simplistic polarities blah blah blah.... Since the days of this move of Jesus of Nazareth, Tony Jones—nobody's theologian, philosopher or culture guru—shuffled off to more promising career possibilities. The change was spun as a "decentralization of power", but as one disappointed follower put it: the movement a) was unable to define itself, b) misled us into believing that everything would change, c) promised "revolution and movement" but only became "less potent".

As for the "simplistic polarities", you should give a listen to McLaren's Dummkopf Lied here. No simplistic polarities in this enchanting campfire song!

Now we are being told about an explosion of energy and intentionality and we are promised picnics and "barbeques of people" and theology-on-the-lawn and unfolding discussions and even more generative friendships. Apparently this "conversation" couldn't survive on its blogging, twittering, blog-talk radio, Ooze-TV, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Skype and, greatest of all, its map! It needed a picnic, some barbecue sauce and more people from different backgrounds and traditions.

Wouldn't it be helpful if we could distinguish between real ideas, things that really matter, and momentary infatuations and political theater?

If the emergents don't soon find a way to actually emerge, Remonstrans may be forced to start a fund to help Brian, Tony, Doug, Dan and Phyllis retire their act to Branson, Missouri.

Please don't let that happen!

Word has been leaked to anyone who will listen that the emergents are thinking about planning to sometime possibly come out of their hibernation. We should like to help these emergents by providing a list of suggestions for conducting their Woodstock/picnic/frisbee smackdown/theological conference.

Things To Take To An Emergent Picnic:

Backpacking Lanterns
Bong
Bottle Opener
Corkscrews
Flashlights
Folding Chairs
Hemostats
Insect Repellents
Kool Aid
Paper Cups
Paper Plates
Picnic Basket
Picnic Blankets
Picnic Lunches
Smelling Salts
Sunscreen
Trash Bags
Votive Candles

How To Plan An Emergent Picnic:

• Choose an appropriate venue for your outdoor meal. Nearby parks, rooftops, back alleys, loading docks or crack houses are just a few ideas. You can have an emergent picnic almost anywhere except a police station.
  
  
• Invite someone of a different color to join you. Won't he be astonished? Won't you be astonished if he shows up?
  
  
• Plan a menu based on the number of people anticipated.
  
  
• Deputize some officious person to serve as National Coordinatrix.
  
  
• Collect the necessary equipment. A picnic basket filled with plates, utensils, and cups is recommended, as well as a digital camera so you can Facebook everything about the occasion for your social network.
  
  
• Pack the necessary equipment. Place heavier items on the bottom, lighter items in the middle, and your theological perceptions on the very top.
  
  
• Bring along a picnic blanket and/or folding chairs for your sitting and dining comfort. Also pack flashlights or lanterns for nighttime picnics, or in the event that your designated driver is busy explaining to the police that packet found under his dashboard.

Fun Things To Do At An Emergent Picnic:

Compare tattoos and nose studs.
Sponsor a swearing contest for the children.
While tossing a Frisbee, find a clever way to suggest you've read Jürgen Moltmann.
Have jello-wrestling matches for all the pastorettes.
Compare porn videos.
Inform everyone that you don't have all the answers.
Discuss, as though you knew what you were talking about, HIV suffering in Kenya, human trafficking in Thailand and genocide in Rwanda.
Hug all the trees in the park or highway rest area.
Discuss how U2's new album oozes redemption.
Debate "missional".

Theological Questions To Be Discussed At An Emergent Picnic:

1. Did Adam have a bellybutton?
2. Will we be able to burp in Heaven?
3. Will there be knit caps in the Kingdom?
4. Would the Apostle Paul have driven a Prius?
5. What was King David's carbon footprint?
6. What sort of pet (or animal companion, rather) would Isaiah have had?
7. Does Doug Pagitt have like a black belt in yoga?
8. What is a fair price for a pair of factory-distressed Pilgrim Sandals?
9. What exactly is the connection between resurrection and digestion?
10. Whatever happened to Trucker Frank?

On March 21, 2008, Tony Jones was talking to Krys Boyd about the "changing face of Christianity". Krys is a local PBS infobabe; she's short on thought and long on those stage affectations which are intended to convey thoughtfulness to witless audiences. And by witless audiences I mean the unthinking consumers who have actually believed that PBS represents quality television. Krys tells non-readers here in Dallas what they might find in recently published books—if they read books.

It helps greatly if these books are pointless because studies show that lengthy pointlessness on camera tends to come across to PBS viewers as erudition, and lengthy pointlessness is something Tony Jones brings to the table.

I hold Texans accountable for a lot of wicked things (like J. Frank Norris, Clyde Barrow, Lyndon Johnson, and Dan Rather), but I don't hold it against Texans for not reading Tony Jones's book: Tony Jones's book ain't fit readin' even in Texas. I'm guessing Tony would not even have been in the KERA studio if the producer had been fortunate enough to schedule an interview with a local potato.

Jones was telling Boyd all he knew about postmodernism and emergence. He said emergence was not so much about doctrine as it was about the church leaving the era of big, about a vibe and an ethos, and about the church becoming more egalitarian and participatory (like Wikipedia). He also suggested that the church of Jesus Christ might be called upon to deal with the looming problem of whether to allow human clones to attend their churches. Although if emergence has a problem with getting the participation of real people, what are the chances it will be inundated by the clones of real people?

You think I just made that up, but I didn't. It was one of those ideas Tony would think is far-sighted, Krys would think is relevant, and both would be prepared to discuss intelligently on a program called Think!

But it is worth remembering Tony's words about emergence being egalitarian and participatory because as of 8 September, 2009, participation has not been a conspicuous problem for emergence.

The EmergentVillage's Tim Hartman took a break from inhaling helium to tell us what he thinks is going to happen—eventually—to EmergentVillage.

First he offered a brief report on the inactivity of the last six months: Tony Jones became noticeably less participatory as the National Coordinator of Emergent Village, and while many emergents got on YouTube to declare themselves the new National Coordinator, apparently none of them showed up for work on Monday morning. In the last year or so, Hartman reports, the Emergentvillage has been "asleep or possibly even worse".

Anyway, Brother Tim expects more participation in the future, in the next "iteration" of EmergentVillage. A lot has been happening behind the scenes and the village now prepares to emerge from its "hibernation". It has not emerged yet, but it is preparing to emerge. More precisely, discussions as to the possibility of its emerging from hibernation are being had. The bear has not come out of its den, but it dreams of the day when it will.

The same EV link includes a contribution from Danielle Shroyer, the aforementioned pastorette of Journey Church of Dallas, wherein she expresses her excitement with the unfolding discussions, discussions on the impending possibility of emergents coming out of hibernation. "Energy and intentionality" have emerged since April, and she's encouraged about the "events we hope to plan over the next two years".

No events were actually announced, you must understand. The events are not even yet planned. But there is the hope for the planning of events, and this could possibly occur in the next two years, or hibernation periods, as I like to think of them.

Sister Danielle looks forward to a more "communal place of connection", to more impromptu Frisbee games, to "good conversations of theology done while sitting on a blanket in the grass".  She can imagine picnics and "barbeques of people" [a concept I hope is run by some lawyers and chefs], and she anticipates eating and laughing together at a common table. She hopes for great things from people "from a variety of different traditions and backgrounds".

Emergents will be gone in a thick cloud of buzzwords and shallow sentiments; and if things go according to their highest hopes, amid the fragrance of "barbeques of people".

Do plan to attend.

Mistah Kurtz -- he dead.


     A penny for the Old Guy

     I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

     II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

     III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

     IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

     V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

     For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

     Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

     For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

--- T. S. Eliot

James Moore, 46 year old theologian and prose stylist, delivers himself of some tacky thoughts on a simpleton's faith.

I am intrigued by emergence for many reasons. I haven't yet ranked all the reasons for my interest—my wife wants me to get started on that—but high on the list has to be its daft theology: things like Moore's thoughts on Mister Rogers, McLaren's daffy commentary on Resurrection & Digestion and Scandrette's pathetic beat poetry.

But I have noticed not just its discontinuity with orthodoxy, which leaps out at anyone who's read the Bible, but its continuities with American evangelicalism. Like the fundamentalists and the neo-evangelicals before them, emergents have nursed this provincial attitude toward "community". Take a look at any of the three movements and you are struck by the insularity of them all, and each successive eccentricity has been touted as a remnant's reach back to some pristine Evangel. Yet what survives is conspicuously unattractive, unsuccessful, and isolated from the whole. Fundamentalism didn't preserve orthodoxy, neo-evangelicalism didn't preserve orthopraxy, and emergence can't even preserve meaning.

Emergence is Storytime-Over-at-the-Asylum. It is a demand that the testimony of the Evangelists be overpowered by the telling of a unique personal narrative we'll dignify with the word journey. So now we can all pretend that James Moore has something relevant to tell us about what is "right and correct with the world".

In the fog of the culture war we have overlooked one of the most important gifts of culture.

In a democratic culture people are inclined to believe that it is presumptuous to claim to have better taste than your neighbor. By doing so you are implicitly denying his right to be the thing that he is. You like Bach, she likes U2; you like Leonardo, he likes Mucha; she likes Jane Austen, you like Danielle Steele. Each of you exists in his own enclosed aesthetic world, and so long as neither harms the other, each says good morning over the fence, there is nothing further to be said.

But things are not so simple, as the democratic argument already implies. If it is so offensive to look down on another's taste, it is, as the democrat recognizes, because taste is intimately bound up with our personal life and moral identity. It is part of our rational nature to strive for a community of judgment, a shared conception of value, since that is what reason and the moral life require.

Of all that might be said about the inadequate aesthetics of contemporary liturgy, probably the most immediately recognizable fault is its austere parochialism. It would not be at all unfair to observe that for the last century the Christian religion has lacked any community of judgment. Not in the pulpit and not at the altar.

Whatever new remedy comes down the pike, examine it to see if it gives a fig about preserving a community of judgment worth handing down to our children.

Put your hands in the ay-uh,
Wave 'em like I just don't kay-uh.

I know some of you have been reading through Roger Scruton's Beauty; I hope you are getting a broad sense of what has been thought on the subject. I suspect the discussion will leave you struck with the disparity between what thoughtful people have said and what religious cranks have said. It turns out that we have been betrayed by our bumpkin clergy, and that old platitude that "the music should match the words" was an excuse to smuggle in some dubious prejudices at the cost of real understanding.

I hope you have learned something about the depth of thought involved in discussing "form and content". We now learn that these matters are a little more nuanced than we've been led to believe. Perhaps orthodoxy and 19^th Century stage and parlor entertainments were not a match made in Heaven after all.

I believe some of you might even be a tad disillusioned with the state of affairs wherein we are being encouraged to abandon "special music", look condescendingly on aesthetics, and blame Charles Grandison Finney for the last six score and fourteen years of dim-witted distractions now sold as worship. It may begin to look like we are being advised by the least informed and most addled teachers ever to scratch a blackboard.

Now what do we do? What can be done if in fact a contemplation of art does order our feelings and frame our enjoyments? Where does that leave us as we look across the living room at our collections of Elvis Presley, Bev Shea, Bill Gaither, Ron Hamilton, and Amy Grant "Christ-honoring" music? Can there be some benefit in pretending our feelings have been ordered and our enjoyments really were framed by kitsch?

Seems unlikely, does it not?

As most of you know, I think the chances of our reforming worship are exactly equal to the chances of a rich man getting into Heaven. Youthful optimism and naïve activism are only salving our discontent and prolonging the scandal.

__________

I spoke briefly with a crackpot pastor who at last came to realize that he has not enjoyed the success he anticipated. Being a post-Christian moralizer he of course interprets this failure not as a repudiation of his insights but as a confirmation of them. His failure is a success of a different sort, he has now learned. It's true his church is not attractive to outsiders, it cannot sustain itself, and it does not draw in the unredeemed. In fact, whatever imaginary virtues he imputes to this clutch of novelty-whores he himself concedes have also been learned in a prison camp. Surely that is the mark of a successful church!

I expect that a larger number of American religious dabblers will come to a similar conclusion. Whether through persecution or sheer fatigue or by the inevitable exasperation with mountebanks, I expect we will be forced to examine first things.

Culture is all about the care of the soul, and it is time that we begin to show an interest. Complaints about "the culture around us" must stop serving as a prelude to the infliction of personal opinions and the sale of inferior products.

Should God grant us a reprieve, will we in a position to recognize it? and will we have the determination to pursue what is good?

Did you not hear My Lady
Go down the garden singing
Blackbird and thrush were silent
To hear the alleys ringing...

Oh saw you not My Lady
Out in the garden there
Shaming the rose and lily
For she is twice as fair.

Though I am nothing to her
Though she must rarely look at me
And though I could never woo her
I love her till I die.

Surely you heard My Lady
Go down the garden singing
Silencing all the songbirds
And setting the alleys ringing...

But surely you see My Lady
Out in the garden there
Rivaling the glittering sunshine
With a glory of golden hair.

All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

St. John presumably would include beauty as one of those made things. The alternatives to the Christian view are disturbing.

It's possible that we ourselves made beauty. This would perhaps be the view of the naked pastor, Thomas Kinkade, Steve Pettit and Mark Scandrette. Or perhaps there is no such thing as beauty at all; what attracts us may all be personal preference and culturally determined prejudice.

But to discuss beauty would require that we familiarize ourselves with the explanations offered by those who actually made beautiful things. And if we did this, we would be doing aesthetics.

A Remonstrans reader sent me this atrocity. I don't know exactly what is wrong with this unsupervised simpleton and his fellowship of bouncing cretins, but I hope they were quickly cornered and tranquilized without incident. I encourage you to watch this, and take the trouble to read the sorts of critical judgments offered in the comment column. Many, many people found this offensive.

But why did they find it offensive? To me this is more frightening than the show.

If it is at all possible, I suggest you do this before going to bed. Brood far into the morning hours: what does this portend?

"...there is a right feeling, right experience and right enjoyment just as much as right action."

Can we reasonably assume that God is interested only in our actions? Is he indifferent to the matter of right feelings, right experiences and right enjoyments? And is this a conclusion justifiably drawn from a reading the Psalms?

I think it is not.

Most of our contemporaries believe that whatever limitations are imposed on us by a decadent ambient culture will somehow be adequate to the task of right living. Most assume that reform can be measured in millimeters when in fact it will be measured in metric tons, by which I mean to say that we are not only wrong in thinking that our change can be incremental, we have not yet grasped the proper unit of measure.

I thought about this again yesterday as our choir led us in a rather silly contemplation of the Promised Land. If the realities of the Christian life cannot be conceived in a culture of misguided activities and misapprehended artifacts, there will be no way to correct the sensibilities of all those kids who heard our choir sing. We will not fix in a classroom what we broke in our public worship.

If Scruton is correct in seeing culture as a way of conveying right feelings, and if Eliot is properly concerned that the loss of faith is preceded by a distortion of sensibility, then these are issues of ultimate significance.

Sentimental forms are not adequate to express a very, very unsentimental faith.

For those of you who are (or will be) reading Scruton, pay special attention to what he has to say about judging art.

These things are interesting for their own sakes. But they also confer other benefits. They create a frame of reference which permits us to communicate our states of mind. They offer consolation, amusement, enjoyment, and emotional stimulation in a thousand ways. But we do not judge them by measuring those good effects. On the contrary, we judge them on their intrinsic merits. The question before the critic is not: "does this have good or bad effects?" but "is this a proper subject of interest?"

He then discusses the defects in art that is obscene and art that is sentimental.

It is possible that the commercialization of the human heart by the modern media is responsible for the hysteria with which modern traumas are greeted. But it is not such bad effects to which a critic refers, in criticizing a sentimental work of art. Sentimentality is there on the page, on the canvas, or in the notes: it is an intrinsic property of the work itself. The task of the critic is to reveal it for what it is, and to show also that a work with this defect does not justify the attention for which it clamors.

I suggest you do two things. First, give some thought to how your liturgy addresses "proper subjects of interest". What is being clamored for?

Second, compare this type of criticism with the sort you find here. Note the points of contradiction. If the church is going to dither over bringing art into the church, you'd best prepare yourself for the sort of "art" some people have in mind. Mark's views are as intellectually stimulating as a sideline interview with an NFL player.

It is easier to spot the discrepancies between what the church has done historically and Scandrette's apery, but then make the same comparison of the work of, say, Faber, Milton, Newton and Watts with today's fundagelical kitsch.

What, exactly, has been aped, and why?

Elsewhere Roger Scruton describes the sphere of culture. For those who want to pursue the matter, I think Culture Counts is also not a bad place to start.

What should we include in the category of culture? The answer is suggested by my argument, which has pointed to a certain kind of judgment as central to the phenomenon. A culture consists of all those activities and artifacts which are organized by the "common pursuit of true judgment," as T. S. Eliot once put it. And true judgment involves the search for meaning through the reflective encounter with things made, composed, and written, with such an end in view.

It is hard to conceive of the activities and artifacts of contemporary Christianity ever rewarding a search for meaning. The activities and artifacts of contemporary Christianity certainly are not organized with such a pursuit in mind.

And it is no easier to come up with a persuasive argument that Christians should be averse to looking. But I can promise you won't find many fellow-pilgrims; I think you will find religious people fond of kitsch the way a pig is fond of muck.

They will also be suspicious of any loathsome second books you bring to the discussion. I'm suggesting you may have to think this through by yourself. You might meet with interested people in a local broom closet.

But I think it is worth it.

We spoke some time ago about the place of criticism in culture. Criticism is essential to the true judgment Eliot and Scruton talk about. What we often see today is the sort of reform that fixates on revamping hymnals or writing newer hymns or marketing slightly less dated nonsense by "people you can trust". By criticism we don't mean personal opinions about the proper proportions of melody to rhythm, and we're certainly not talking about abandoning aesthetics.

It doesn't matter if we come up with 500 new hymns by Friday if they are all bad hymns. If they merely preserve the emotional attachments of yesteryear, we will not be better off.  And if they just update religious meaninglessness, how will we have benefitted?

Scruton will help you understand the relationship between knowledge and feeling, the uses of criticism, and how one teaches culture.

It's worth your time.

_____________________
Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged
Roger Scruton
Encounter Books
ISBN: 978-1-59403-194-6

 

Art, nature and the human form all invite us to place this experience in the centre of our lives. If we do so, then it offers a place of refreshment of which we will never tire. But to imagine that we can do this, and still be free to see beauty as nothing more than a subjective preference or a source of transient pleasure, is to misunderstand the depth to which reason and value penetrate our lives. It is to fail to see that, for a free being, there is a right feeling, right experience and right enjoyment just as much as right action. The judgment of beauty orders the emotions and desires of those who make it. It may express their pleasure and their taste: but it is pleasure in what they value and taste for their true ideals.

 

There was, and still is, the philistine who wants to introduce for public amusement some meaningless innovation which he says he "can relate to"; something in a fresh "style". He should have been told in crisp and unsubtle words, "This is not a style, and for the sake of your reputation you'd be wise to keep to yourself the fact that you can ‘relate' to it."

That didn't happen.

To some small degree we've sensed that we made a mistake, but we're not crystal clear about what the mistake was. We decided to saddle all the horses we could find across the prairie and ride off at a dead run in whatever direction the horse thought was promising.

So the horses are lathered and thirsty and we now have two problems: we have the meaningless innovations and we also have the preposterous reactions to the meaningless innovations. I'm thinking here of that chart I showed you from someone who worked it out that rhythm related to the body and melody related to the spirit, therefore Spiritual Man would listen to music that was predominantly melodic and he would reject music that was conspicuously rhythmic. I think also of the observation that aesthetics has made our worship loud and skillful (and Catholic) when it should be soft and unskillful.

And now that I say we have two problems, I realize that I've miscounted; we actually have three problems. We have the meaningless innovations, we have the preposterous reactions to the meaningless innovations, and we have the excitable zealots who incited the preposterous reactions to the meaningless innovations.

A coma would be refreshing right about now.

Or, if a restorative coma isn't covered by your health plan, you could read Scruton on beauty. What I quoted above will be much more meaningful to you after you read the book, but even still, it wouldn't hurt for you to think through this: "The judgment of beauty orders the emotions and desires...".

Beauty doesn't do this; the judgment of beauty orders the emotions and desires. Think about that. A philistine could get lost in a museum and still stagger out onto the street with disordered emotions and desires. Keep this in mind as you read the book.

I'm not asking anyone to accept it; I'm sure many (almost certainly all the fundagelicals) won't. I'm saying that if Scruton is right—and you're free to dismiss his conclusion only after you've read the book—then this piffle about subjective preferences and culturally determined perceptions is profoundly harmful. You are oblivious to how reason and value penetrate your life.

What we do, or fail to do, in the presence of beauty must be ominous for one who claims to honor God and enjoy his creation.

 

It is not only in the world of art that we observe the steady advance of kitsch. Far more important, given the influence on the popular psyche, has been the kitschification of religion. Images are of enormous importance in religion, helping us to understand the Creator through idealized visions of his world: concrete images of transcendental truths. In the blue robe of a Bellini virgin we encounter the ideal of motherhood, as an enfolding purity and a promise of peace. This is not kitsch but the deepest spiritual truth, and one that we are helped to understand through the power and eloquence of the image. However, as the puritans have always reminded us, such an image stands on the verge of idolatry, and with the slightest push can fall from its spiritual eminence into the sentimental abyss.

--- Roger Scruton
The Flight from Beauty

We pointed recently to some examples of well-intentioned blunders. I will repeat for those who may have misunderstood: I agree with Piper's prejudice against drama in the church. When most people think of me they think of someone who condemns drama everywhere: I object to drama in the Globe Theatre—that goes to show how monomaniacal I am about it. I stand with the Puritans and against fundamentalists, that separatist-when-it-suits-them bunch. I can't imagine Piper ever saying anything against drama that I could not agree with. What I take exception to is his observation that this desire for drama in the church can be both "a token of unbelief in the power in preaching" and also fall in the category of liberty in Christ.

This makes no sense at all. I think we all know that Piper is a better theologian than that, and I think most of us suspect he is just trying to answer a question in as politically unobjectionable a way as he can. The unthinking mob is not going to reconsider its indulgences on the strength of that characterization.

Peter Masters said many good things. I agree with his correction of Frame: I think it is idiotic to be delighted by simple, repetitive songs because there are very few thoughts in them. When someone prefers banal choruses to the Psalms we begin to wonder if this preference for "few thoughts" isn't especially suited to John Frame's own mind. Anyone who thinks Wesley and Watts are too sophisticated needs to get a library card on the very first occasion that presents itself.

"Sophisticated"?!

So I am on the same side of the barricades as Piper and Masters. On the general questions we are hunkered down in the same trenches.

What provokes my dismay is the solution.  If drama-as-liturgy stands or falls on the influence of John Piper, we are in a very bad way. If music cannot be used to express worship, we are reading different Bibles.

I've suggested in the past that we are beyond a human solution. Culture is not a hat we can throw away because next season the style will have changed anyway. It is more like a birthright: you get to discard it only once.

We now live in the Wild West, and we ain't seen no law in these here parts for neerly a hunnert-n-fiffy years, you young whippersnapper!

It's not just the rustlers and the train robbers who do what is right in their own eyes. We've enjoyed decades of this sort of vigilante worship and tribal piety.

Imagine telling Pascal that drama in church is a matter of Christian liberty. Conjure the image of J. S. Bach flying into a rage on hearing that he cannot use music to express worship. We are not only at the mercy of the bandits here, we are at the mercy of the lawmen. We're being offered these draconian remedies, ad hoc fixes and punitive solutions which will ensure that we never get it right.

This would be an ideal time to come to our senses. There is a Law. There has always been a Law. There is a law about what is good, there is a law about what is true and there is a law about what is beautiful, believe it or not. And since most people do not, you ought to become conversant with it.

Here is a place to start. I hesitate to mention it because we live among yahoos who, on the strength of reading one short book, are more likely than not to go out and shoot up the neighborhood again and confiscate everyone's pennywhistle. But if you want to be rational about it, you should read something about beauty.

Here are 197 pages about

• Judging Beauty
• Human Beauty
• Natural Beauty
• Everyday Beauty
• Artistic Beauty
• Taste and Order
• Art and Er­os
• The Flight from Beauty
• Concluding Thoughts

Please; read something thoughtful.

Please.

____________________
Beauty
Roger Scruton
Oxford University Press, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-19-955952-7

I honestly think I never read such undiluted nonsense as when I read religious folk who, having embraced those bits of pop culture they liked and thought would be evangelistically productive, proceed to condemn those bits of pop culture they dislike. It's as though they just don't care about being taken seriously.

We would naturally suppose that upon seeing the error of their ways, they would stop, retrace their steps, and try to determine where they left the path. What we have in fact is a bunch of severely disoriented people certain they know the way out, and they are all shouting through the woods to one another.

I read recently that "special music" is to blame for our distraction from worship.

According to one inflatable spokesman, the first problem with our worship is that it has become aesthetic.

Surely not!

Yes, and "aesthetic" is a bad thing:

Contemporary worship, however, is fully aesthetic in purpose and practice. God is the audience and the worshippers are performers. Skilful instrumentalism is part of the offering of worship. We repeat, that many evangelical churches have, in this way, gone back to Rome, but they have actually surpassed Rome both in intricacy and decibel count. At the dawn of world history Abel's offering was accepted by the Lord because it was the very act God had commanded - a humble offering representing the need for atonement. Cain's offering, however, was rejected, because it presented his own skill, labour and artistry. It was a ‘works' offering. To parade before God our skills as an act of worship is surely nearer to the offering of Cain than that of Abel.

Back to Rome?

It sounds like Dr. Dan Sweatt has taken up the study of the fine arts.

As fun as it is to bash the Roman Catholics, the use of aesthetics in worship is not fairly attributed to Rome. Talk to the nice Orthodox people. Or the Coptic church. Or...

In fact, I'm willing to bet that the writer of Psalm 33 was not a Roman Catholic, and he spoke quite pointedly about playing instruments both loudly and skillfully.

"Music may only assist at a practical level; it cannot be used to express worship."

People, we are getting more desperate, more frantic, more audacious, and more tyrannical.

But we are not getting out of the woods.

Cigarettes will not give you cancer in the short run.

John Piper began his answer with a platitude about "the freedom that we have in Christ". He ends by saying, "Nobody's going to go to Hell because of this...in the short run."

He opines that Scripture is not explicit on forbidding "using a screen to put the lyrics up or to put the scene of a waterfall behind it or to make the waterfall actually move behind it...". He claims to be—and I believe he is—persuaded of the power and validity of preaching, and he thinks the use of video and drama largely is a token of unbelief in the power of preaching. It is hard to draw a crisp line from this "freedom in Christ" to an accommodation of tokens of unbelief.

As I said Friday, this is a perfect picture of our time: a threadbare phrase to mollify the crowd followed by a passionate assertion about the primacy of expositional preaching.

Couple this with the predictable incompetence of Evangelicals when it comes to "the arts in the church". Anyone who requires pictures of your fishing trip in order to understand the metaphor of fishing for men does not need art, he needs a caring nursery worker with a diaper bag. And recall the excitement of the philistines over on Gundersen Drive when they discover a "story of redemption" embedded in an R-rated trivialization of the human condition.

If you want to experience an imaginative and beautiful articulation of the Christian faith, I will tell you what you should do. First, stay away from churches. You're not likely to stumble across very many hymns of the church there; instead you'll get some sappy, effeminate doggerel superimposed on a film about a waterfall.

Second, go to the library and read what Christians have written.

Third, go to the concert hall and listen to the art of Bach, Mendelssohn, Cucu, Rachmaninoff, Balakirev, Pärt.... You will get to hear some pretty persuasive stuff partly because music directors who are serious about culture won't indulge your appetite for garbage with some piffle about your freedom in Christ.

It's true that Scripture does not explicitly name moving pictures as something to be condemned; nor does it say anything explicit about passing out methamphetamines in the Primary Sunday School class. Strangely, though, Scripture is pretty unambiguous about any attempt to trivialize God, his word, or our faith. It doesn't take a Walter Pater to work out that this might well include the inept mimicry of adolescents with film cameras.

Whoever thought that using dramatic entertainments would "backfire" and work against the preaching of the cross? Who could ever have anticipated that long-term harm might occur if we confused preaching with theatrical amusements?

Who beside the Church, I mean?

"The Bible doesn't forbid it."

I hate to pick on John Piper: everyone seems to have some reason to take pleasure in kicking him, but I mention this little confrontation in order to help you understand something about "culture", which, I am always pointing out, is not about tuxedos, opus numbers, the allure of the fugue, or wine & cheese with the artist after the concert. Culture is about what we believe and why. It is also about preserving what was once loved and knowing how that too is a good thing. The tuxedos, opus numbers, the allure of the fugue, and wine & cheese with the artist are just aids to understanding.

I agree with Piper as to the risk of the theater in the church, but anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that I disagree with him about why it should be opposed. And as I've said both in person and on the blog, this is no longer a battle to be fought. We ignored the wisdom of our parents and decided we were smart enough to "use this drug for medicinal purposes only".

Now we observe someone with a real care about preaching as he tries to explain to philistines why skits, video clips and drama are not "illustrations", as Matt Stephens supposes. They are in fact distractions.

Piper knows this because he understands preaching better than most; it is sad that he can't explain it to the yobbs at Christianity Today and its ADHD readership.

Again, I really don't want to reopen this whole anti-theater argument with unread and undiscriminating bumpkins. The Bible forbids an awful lot of things we'll never perceive as harmful until we stop being stupid. What I do want is for our readers to remember Ephraim Stoltzfus, the poor guy who shaves his upper lip every day but doesn't know why. You may argue that his church was misguided; I am prepared to argue they were being perceptive and that no small disobedience is trivial.

Obedience without understanding is good for children. It's rather sad in adults, and it's even worse for the children of those adults.

The Bible may well forbid many things we are indifferent toward. Our history is full of pious and discriminating saints who perceived a real danger in those things that distract us from spiritual matters. Piper is a discriminating saint trying to warn the blithering ignorant.

It is extremely difficult for fallen men to worship a holy God. You'd know this if you attended church anywhere. To allow distractions in a liturgy is just stupid.

It is beyond the ability of decadent post-Christians to recognize a distraction when they see one. Piper is right; it is tragic that he can't make them understand, but it is better that he be right than that he satisfy their adolescent curiosity.

View the YouTube clip and read the comments it provoked. This is a picture of a sensitive soul trying to warn us and a depiction of the rabble that resists what it cannot understand.

Last week we cited the work of William Law. You really ought to read A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life.

This one book produced a memorable impact on Dr. Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon, John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, William Wilberforce, Henry Venn, and me.

I can't speak at length to the impact it made on those great men, but I can tell you I found the book in the Tarheel library while looking for something else: having just witnessed five years of the evisceration and defamation of essential Christian virtues, finding this book was like getting smacked in the face with a life preserver while bobbing in the middle of the storm.

...Christianity is so far from leaving us to live in the common ways of life, conforming to the folly of customs, and gratifying the passions and tempers which the spirit of the world delights in, it is so far from indulging us in any of these things, that all its virtues which it makes necessary to salvation are only so many ways of living above and contrary to the world, in all the common actions of our life. If our common life is not a common course of humility, self-denial, renunciation of the world, poverty of spirit, and heavenly affection, we do not live the lives of Christians.

Renunciation of the world and poverty of spirit, or as some called it, "spirituality", took a merciless beating from fundamentalists. Evangelicals picked up a stick and beat it in places the fundamentalists forgot to look. Now, in a kind of monkey frenzy that makes us giggle, emergents have tried to put a philosophical face on "conforming to the folly of customs".

If you ask me, you can forget all the redefinitions of fundamentalism, evangelicalism and emergence; read them out of curiosity if they amuse you as much as they do me, but after you've laughed, read Law.

We have colleges and seminaries but we lack learned men, we have mission bureaucracies but we lack converts, we have rich churches but we lack worshipers. If you want to get some sense of what heavenly affection really is, read this book.

And I recommend you read the original version. There is an abridged version out there by Westminster Press, but I don't know why anyone would bother with it. You can get the original, far more powerful version here.

The hour cometh, and now is, when the cockeyed unbeliefs of McLaren and Corcoran and Hayward and Pagitt and Tickle and Burke will be dumpstered, and true worshipers will want to know something about the life of the Christian. And contrary to the cockeyed unbeliefs of McLaren and Corcoran and Hayward and Pagitt and Tickle and Burke, there is such a thing as a true Christian, a knowable truth and a heavenly affection.

 

Is it not therefore exceeding strange that people should place so much piety in the attendance upon public worship, concerning which there is not one precept of our Lord's to be found, and yet neglect these common duties of our ordinary life, which are commanded in every page of the Gospel? I call these duties the devotion of our common life, because if they are to be practised, they must be made parts of our common life; they can have no place anywhere else.

[...]

Thus it is in all the virtues and holy tempers of Christianity; they are not ours unless they be the virtues and tempers of our ordinary life. So that Christianity is so far from leaving us to live in the common ways of life, conforming to the folly of customs, and gratifying the passions and tempers which the spirit of the world delights in, it is so far from indulging us in any of these things, that all its virtues which it makes necessary to salvation are only so many ways of living above and contrary to the world, in all the common actions of our life. If our common life is not a common course of humility, self-denial, renunciation of the world, poverty of spirit, and heavenly affection, we do not live the lives of Christians.

But yet though it is thus plain that this, and this alone, is Christianity, a uniform, open, and visible practice of all these virtues, yet it is as plain, that there is little or nothing of this to be found, even amongst the better sort of people. You see them often at Church, and pleased with fine preachers: but look into their lives, and you see them just the same sort of people as others are, that make no pretences to devotion. The difference that you find betwixt them, is only the difference of their natural tempers. They have the same taste of the world, the same worldly cares, and fears, and joys; they have the same turn of mind, equally vain in their desires. You see the same fondness for state and equipage, the same pride and vanity of dress, the same self-love and indulgence, the same foolish friendships, and groundless hatreds, the same levity of mind, and trifling spirit, the same fondness for diversions, the same idle dispositions, and vain ways of spending their time in visiting and conversation, as the rest of the world, that make no pretences to devotion.

---William Law, A Serious Call

I suspect, given the recent examples we've cited, that it would be fair—even generous—to call this the Age of Incoherence. It's not that we haven't previously seen some very silly apostasies, it's not that we haven't seen crippling denials of the truth, and it's not that these apostasies and denials are more ruinous than ours. But it seems to me that the sheer goofiness of today's leaders and this peloton of the deranged that trails them represent a special problem for us.

There have always been kooky heresies, but I didn't read too many people saying in public that "‘God' does not exist, and this is his choice", or "Jesus had a male body but a very feminine soul". And I don't find too many theologians suggesting that our digestive systems represent a "major dimension" in the meaning of Christ's resurrection. One comes away with the impression that these doctrines could only have been professed by St. Vecordius of the Reformed Church of Bedlam.

(It's enough to make one wonder if Cabela's doesn't carry a line of sturdy butterfly nets.)

But I fear that in our attempt to parry this nonsense and in an effort to make the Gospel relevant to the modern loon we will forget Law's point. Our first problem, our most conspicuous problem, is not that we live among nitwits, it is that we've forgotten how a Christian ought to live.

Tozer wrote of the Incredible Christian, but I wonder when our church will rediscover first things and restore a sane attitude toward the common life of the devoted Christian.

And if you will here stop, and ask yourselves, why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.

 

Becoming apparent to all, emergents are not sufficient to their own principles. Here we have the new, "biblical" sexism. This sort of twaddle, were it located on the right end of the theological spectrum, would be hooted down like David Horowitz at Brown University: if fundamentalists were heard making such shallow and dismissive generalizations about femininity, we would never hear the end of it.

But this is just another example of the parasite theology of emergence.

Here are Fr. Richard Rohr, crackpot priest and blowhard spokesman for "the inner knowing of the feminine womb", and his dim-witted disciple, Brian McLaren, getting in touch with their inner Walter Mitty.

"Jesus had a male body but a very feminine soul, which was genuinely new."

Pictured here is Brian McLaren modeling "Roman-style dominating/conquering/violent masculinity".

Your options are severely limited.

The sort of blather we read Monday will dissipate in the wind. Jamie Arpin-Ricci will go away and leave nothing for the archeologists but a celtic cross and a knotted cord, Doug Pagitt has already started to go away, Mark Scandrette doesn't have many more pomes [sic] in him, and he doesn't have what it takes to re-imagine anything workable. Shane Claiborne will vanish. David Hayward will certainly give up his doodles and his Trinitarian Pontifications.

This, for instance, will be forgotten:

Here we can dialog. For The Unknown is unknown to everyone. No one has special knowledge. We are all as infinitely ignorant as The Unknown is infinitely unknowable. And, The Unknown reveals and is received indiscriminately, crossing all borders, designations and divisions, accessible and available to everyone. It is the intersection of The Other with the world. Then, the truth, love and justice of the The Unknown is for every creature.

I'm not on drugs.

People will eventually move on and leave Dave to monologue in the rec room of the sanitarium, and all these open-source crackpots and assorted theological droolers will be replaced with even less persuasive Messiahs of the Unknowable.

Established religious institutions will continue to drop like snowflakes and they will try to redefine their essential purposes, but it will not help.

It will all be very tedious, and people will want something real. For those who still have an audience interested in the truth there will be the major task of building some dilapidated shelter against the storms.

Before you start on that, take a look at this. Pay no attention to the narrators; they don't know what they are talking about, and ABC has no clue either. Just take to heart the dilemma of the subjects of the film and consider the relationship between conscience and culture.

You've got some serious thinking ahead of you.

John Calvin has been known to get a bit technical at times. So as a counterweight, and to put our own times into some sort of context, I thought we might consider the religious speculations of a seriously disheveled mind.

Committing his doctrine to the internet, the pastor without raiment seeks to offer solace and enlightenment to the modern pilgrim:

...I have many friends who have left the church altogether because they've changed their minds and no longer feel like they could stay and keep their intellectual integrity.

Luckily for us, intellectual integrity is exactly what David Hayward brings to the table. (Or perhaps I should say it is what he brings to the high-chair that someone else pushes up to the table.)

As an introductory summary: "God" does not exist, and this is his choice. "Jesus" is the history of a suffering humanity longing and striving for truth, justice and love. The "Spirit" is the united community of people, the fullest and final incarnation.

So this god does not quite exist, but he exists just enough to choose not to exist. Think of a lighthouse that was never built but which nevertheless blinks in and out of existence on a distant shore.

The second person of the trinity was misnamed at an early age. He is not a person at all, he is the history of a collective longing; not the longing, mind you, the history of a longing. Kind of like a memory of a longing but with footnotes and important dates to memorize.

And the third person of the trinity—also misnamed—is really a community of people doing the longing and making the history of doing the longing. Apparently the second non-person of the trinity proceeds from the third non-person of the trinity, which may seem counterintuitive, but don't worry about it. This is not science, this is theology.

You must bear in mind that this is just a summary; of course there is much more to be unknown about this intermittent god. For instance, we now have a pretty good idea where he is not:

God does not exist. God is above and beyond. Evidence can be mounted and presented, but that's all it is: evidence.

Evidence can be mounted and ignored because, obviously, it is merely evidence of his existence in the above-and-beyond. So god is not, but he can be located in the above-and-beyond, and at one time he was, but he became manifested as something else: the human drama. As to whether this was by choice we are not told. Maybe like Humpty-Dumpty he fell off the above-and-beyond and broke apart into five acts.

So the ultimate and final work of the divine is in the unity and community of all people... a reality that awaits manifestation in our history as we work toward it.

So we see that this non-existent god actually does some work. We don't know to whom the paychecks are made out or if they are ever cashed, but the manifestation of the work of this non-existing god who exists in the above-and-beyond will be realized as we work toward it, as we become the Spirit, who is also not god but who is in the here and now working to manifest a longing for this not-god who chooses to be not-god to become a reality we work toward. And by we I mean the community of all people.

But I know I don't have to explain that to you! It's all pretty basic, first-year seminary stuff.

I could go on to develop this theology a good deal further but, as it happens, I'm busy working on another time-consuming theory wherein I become my own grandpa.

First things first.

Calvin, a reverend father, and worthy ornament of the Church of God.

--- Bishop Jewel

Five hundred years ago to the day, Jean Cauvin was born in the north of France in a town called Noyon. He did not lead the sort of life that would later capture Mendelssohn's imagination as Luther's did, which I think is a bit of a shame. I'd like to have another symphony as moving has his 5^th.

Philip Schaff said of him:

Calvin's character is less attractive, and his life less dramatic than Luther's or Zwingli's, but he left his church in a much better condition. He lacked the genial element of humor and pleasantry; he was a Christian stoic: stern, severe, unbending, yet with fires of passion and affection glowing beneath the marble surface. His name will never rouse popular enthusiasm, as Luther's and Zwingli's did at the celebration of the fourth centennial of their birth; no statues of marble or bronze have been erected to his memory; even the spot of his grave in the cemetery at Geneva is unknown. But he surpassed them in consistency and self-discipline, and by his exegetical, doctrinal, and polemical writings, he has exerted and still exerts more influence than any other Reformer upon the Protestant Churches in the Latin and Anglo-Saxon races. He made little Geneva for a hundred years the Protestant Rome and the best-disciplined Church in Christendom. History furnishes no more striking example of a man of so little personal popularity, and yet such great influence upon the people; of such natural timidity and bashfulness combined with such strength of intellect and character, and such control over his and future generations.

Of all the Reformers, Calvin was unmatched as a theologian. He braced the church against the assault of the Roman Church and held it together through the corrosive effects of sectarianism.

I have been a witness of Calvin's life for sixteen years, and I think I am fully entitled to say that in this man there was exhibited to all a most beautiful example of the life and death of the Christian, which it will be as easy to calumniate as it will be difficult to emulate.

--- Theodore Beza

And, boy, didn't Beza's last phrase hit the nail on the head?

On the theory that the recent IED has blown off all the FBF legs it is going to, I think it might be time to reflect on a prejudice that crept in during that discussion.

Several people made suggestive reference to the "www" and the blogs. There was the insinuation that our computers have turned political differences into something unique or something especially pernicious. This bias is pure poppycock. It is just the scuttling of roaches when the light comes on.

Our computers have not made us bad people; we are naturally bad people. We have always twittered, but now we can twitter while the blood still runs hot.

Anyone who thinks the writing on blogs is inferior has not read those church papers, those "pastoral letters", and those denominational magazines which were used to manage the flow of public sentiment. (I recall one national representative using the editorial page of a magazine to complain that he was picked up at the airport by people in sweat pants and sweat shirts. Not an especially great literary moment.) There was a time when an independent view had no place in the public imagination. It was just stomped out or edited away.

There was a time we trusted the "gatekeepers" and we believed the information we received through designated liars. Dan Rather made a similar condescending judgment about blogs. We didn't listen to him then either.

Anyone who has read an emergent blog knows that this is not a literate generation. Anyone who has read a fundamentalist blog can see that fundamentalists still take a dim view of thinking. Anyone who studied history enough to rifle through dead people's mail will know that blogs are not a sign of decline, they just expose the same human heart to a wider audience.

A wise person will wonder why it is unobjectionable for an FBFI or a Maranatha Baptist Bible College or a Northland International University to disseminate their novelties and superstitions on the web and not face criticism from the web. Blogs don't make criticism better or worse, they just make both kinds more accessible.

We should start thinking about how we do business. I don't think blogs are going to bring in an Augustan Age, but neither should they be dismissed as pulp fiction. Now what is said in Brevard, North Carolina, can be sitting in everyone's mailbox when he wakes up and be coming out of his printer while he brushes his teeth.

This is not something to be resentful of, it is something to be prudent about.

Browning! Since Chaucer was alive and hale, no man hath walkt along our roads with step so active, so inquiring eye, or tongue so varied in discourse.

--- Walter Savage Landor

Wednesday we oozed on down to Belton, TX, for The Inspired Line, Selected Prints of Albrecht Dürer and Rembrandt van Rijn. The nice part about looking at great art in Belton, TX, is that no one down there is interested, and because no one is interested, no admission is charged and there are no lines at the front door, and there are no people getting in your way as you go right up to masterpieces and examine them closely with a magnifying glass almost as large as your steering wheel.

If you're smart, you will drive down to Belton, TX, before August 11 and see for yourself.

After that we scooted back up to Temple, TX, to check out a Czech museum, but it was being moved to another building. That was a real bummer and my travel agent will pay dearly for this lack of due diligence.

So we shook the dust off our feet and left Temple for Waco. We got into our Marriott Courtyard third-floor room overlooking the Brazos River and the first bridge ever built to cross it, the Waco Suspension Bridge. The plaque on the south end said it was—at the time it was built—the longest single span suspension bridge in the world. I have reason to doubt this, but I did take a picture of the claim just to remind Texans not to lie to a Brooklyn boy about suspension bridges.

We are very sensitive about that.

You can see the bridge on Google Earth here:  31°33′40″N 97°07′39″W.

So I and my bargain-basement travel agent got in the car and drove through the Baylor campus and over to the Armstrong Browning Library pictured below.

If you look high on the opposite wall as you walk in, you read Landor's statement. If you pass through either of the two doors through that wall you will come to The Foyer of Meditation. If you are ever in Waco, you should go to this library and get some sense of the minds, loves and worldly possessions of the Brownings. And you must go to the Foyer of Meditation. However cultic and vainglorious the name, you must see this room. I know Heaven will make that place look like a derelict outhouse, but still, until Heaven, you need to see this room. If you've ever had any noble thoughts, take them with you.

The rest of our time was spent cruising Waco for pictures of historic homes, gardens and churches. Then tragedy struck and we had to visit to the Dr. Pepper Museum.

Do not ask me why we did this. Apparently the travel agent spent a good amount of her childhood at a soda fountain with her friend, Jeanne, drinking Dr. Peppers.

You take the bad with the good.

There are more outrageous doings in the land than we have had opportunity to reveal.

It has now come to light that Al Mohler, Mark Dever and others have conspired to honor a most wicked man by the name of Duke McCall. A welcome pavilion—yes, you read correctly—a welcome pavilion! was named after him, and worse still, kind things were said about him during the ceremonies.

This almost slipped by without notice and very nearly deprived us of an occasion to express our disapproval, but Agent Doran of the Detroit Office exposed this mind-boggling departure from the faith.

This is what boggles my mind. Here you find a staunch theological conservative (Al Mohler), backed by other staunch conservatives (e.g., chairman of the SBTS board, Mark Dever), naming a pavilion in honor of a man whose service at SBTS produced the mess which Mohler is credited for reversing. Recognizing him at the event is one thing, but naming a pavilion after him? What biblical justification can there be for something like this?

I think it is fair to assume that Dr. Doran and Detroit Seminary will be not be extending the right hand of fellowship toward the SBC for much longer. Fundamentalistic persons must continue to maintain their own high standards of fellowship.

Mark Rogers doesn't know quite what to make of Doran's dudgeon and offers some pretty rickety excuses for this blatant apostasy, but I'm not sure how much of an explanation is really necessary: I think Doran's reasoning pretty much speaks for itself.

I've been involved in a few discussions recently having to do with Dan Sweatt's diatribe at The Wilds. Some have suggested that the whole mess was no big deal in the sense that it represented nothing unique in fundamentalist behavior. And this is true; this fits onto a recognizable continuum. I'm sure many people, insiders and outsiders, breathed a heartfelt Ho Hum, this is not news, let's flip over to the Sports Section.

But not all breathed that heartfelt Ho Hum, and sometimes the distance between what is and what ought to be is so great that we are forced to reflect. Had this happened twenty years ago, it would have gone straight down the memory hole. It's true.

One of the people I talked with [not C. Anderson] questioned my use of the McCune quotation. How was that appropriate? he wondered. It is true that McCune said it, but it is also true that he was not talking about the Sweatt affair. So I went back and reread the post in light of that question.

Perhaps because the question didn't occur to me when writing the post it still seems foreign to my point. But I can—to a slight degree—see how it might confuse a reader. So I'm happy to offer an explanation.

I quoted McCune not because his remark was contemporary with, or a commentary on, the current squabble but because it was relevant. McCune was dismissing the Young Fundamentalist critique of the movement; he perceived in it an ignorance and a political motivation that stood in the way of progress. (There was some truth to that perception: some of those guys were ignorant and resentful. But not all: Young Fundamentalism is not monolithic. It is also true that their criticisms were factual. The way fundies do business is wrong, and criticism should not be so peremptorily dismissed. I maintained at the time that it was inflammatory, and that "getting over it" and moving on was now less likely.)

My reason for repeating the McCune statement was not its timeliness but its relevance to the current situation. What Sweatt did was conspicuous in its ignorance and its political motivation, and this was obvious to everyone. He himself made it obvious with his introduction. A shirt that seemed tailored for a Young Fundamentalism in January of 2006 seemed to fit established Fundamentalism quite handsomely in June of 2009.

My salient objection, then and now, to the notion that some indiscretions of the past should be forgotten is simple: they are not yet in the past. They are the stuff of today's business. It is fundamentalism's culture.

_______________

At the risk of turning too long a post into an annoyingly interminable post, let's rehearse the most conspicuous public offenses.

First came Sweatt (with whom everyone claims some disagreement), then came Bixby's public complaint, then there was Bauder's raising the ante, then Doran jumped in and did his cheerleading for Bauder, then there was the FBFI's tardy and inadequate response, then there was Sweatt's church-site response, then there was the goofiness of Martuneac's call for Bauder's disinvitation, and then there was the fallout of the Schaumburg meeting—which so far seems to have resolved nothing for anybody.

• Sweatt didn't offend just Bixby, he transgressed the policy of the FBFI. Explicitly. And FBFI made no public comment on that transgression.
• Bixby clearly responded in an immature way and certainly made it harder for anyone to proceed in a deliberate, thoughtful way. He himself labeled his stuff rants.
• Bauder might have been the worst of all. With no direct involvement at all, he publicly insinuates himself and tries to define this notion of a fundamentalism worth saving. Then he published a string of private correspondences in support of himself. Pure opportunism, pure manipulation, pure politics. The very first resolution to be passed by a fundamentalism worth saving: Outsiders don't try to co-opt the crisis of the moment by redefining the movement and in doing so raise more resentment among the belligerents. Bauder might as well have said sic'em. And, we note, the blogosphere registered that incitement. Doran followed suit in such a way that this thing, which began as a Sweatt/Bixby nexus, turned into a brawl which now included two extraneous seminary presidents. Like handlebars on a basketball!
• Then the FBFI refused to recognize the significance of Sweatt's infraction and piously advised everyone to be fair and charitable. After what Sweatt did on their platform? That impertinence was not lost on many.
• Martuneac was clearly piling on. Since when does a member of an organization publicly demand such a thing? Do rational people behave like this in your workplace?

So. That overview illustrates what I take to be the essential point: What fundamentalism did in the past cannot be consigned to history because it is not history at all. We may well be humbled by the failures of Shields and Norris and Gray and Bell and Hyles and...but what we live with is this style of leadership, activism, bellicosity, grand-standing and political interference by those who should be humming to themselves all the verses of Blessed Quietness.

This is a problem that is not going away. Only the young fundamentalists will be doing that. Some of the old guard seem to think that would be a good thing, but a little thought would be worthwhile: what comes of separation when that happens?

CODA:

I was asked by a correspondent how it should have been handled. Given that they don't tolerate a board making autocratic decisions, what might have happened? I know that no one "over there" wants to hear from me, so some of you can stop reading now. But in fairness to the questioner I will answer him and tell why I think it would have lessened the impact of Sweatt's remarks.

Had I been in a position to speak for the FBFI (perish that nightmare), I would have posted this on the website as soon as I was able to get my computer turned on:

Pastor Dan Sweatt said some things this evening, and from our platform, which egregiously mischaracterized a certain theological viewpoint. It is important to us that you understand our position. It is still our policy that Calvinists and non-Calvinists can be members in good standing within the FBFI, and it should be important to you that we regard the opinions voiced tonight as a violation of that policy. We regret that our organization was implicated in their dissemination.

It is not necessary for us to ventilate our relationship with Pastor Sweatt, and we meekly—even obsequiously—request that no more be made of this than is good for the integrity of the organization. We shall handle private matters privately, but we shall make very public our hospitality toward all those who have legitimate reason to have taken offense tonight.

It seems to me, however unsatisfactory this would be to the principals, such a statement does what needs to be done and it does no more than should be done. It doesn't scold, it doesn't incite, it does not provoke, it does not advantage one faction or the other; it merely clarifies the legitimate position of the organization and discourages the intrusion of members and non-members, pastors and seminary presidents and meddling bystanders. And if this statement were posted the same night, none of the massacre witnessed on the blogosphere would have been persuasive. Additionally, the 89^th Annual Fellowship would not have met under lowering clouds and many would not have sat at home on the 19^th disappointed with the result.

If this were indeed a fellowship of individual Baptist Fundamentalists, there would be no place for this string of political acts. This should never have taken on the spirit of a battle in the ongoing

TOTAL WAR FOR THE SURVIVAL OF SEPARATISM IN OUR GALAXY!!!

We could do with a bit less of that, I think.

Are we really simply looking for objective facts in order to induce healing, or perhaps vindication if not some form of vicarious retribution?

 ---Rolland McCune

Well, ok, it's not much of an empire, and if this constitutes a strike, we guess the rebel alliance can relax and smoke ‘em if they got ‘em.

In one sense this whole affair of the last month is a nearly insignificant matter and of interest to a very small number of people. And of that small number of people there may be an even smaller number who know the history and spirit of the Fundamental Baptist Fellowship International. But for that small number there is something here to reflect on.

It will be important for those who care about this institution to note the sort of manipulation and the underlying defiance shown throughout. In fact it would be worth your time to listen to all the sermons and it would be especially helpful to get hold of Dr. Robert Congdon's innovative ideas as soon as they are committed to CD.

This is what the movement has come to.

Again, for most this is a very small matter. For some it is more important that there might be a fly in the garage. But for those who will want to reflect on the final disintegration of a notable—if not beloved—segment of American separatism, it is most useful. Here we view a religious movement which has lost its bearings and is content to watch its offspring looking for less embarrassing accommodations elsewhere.

For my part it is sad to watch. It is not as painful for me as it is for others: it's not my house that has fallen into a heap and they are not my delicates that are blowing through the neighborhood. But it is the house of some friends, and I'd like to hope they are thoughtful enough to take note of how things begin, how things change, and how things end.

Emergents aren't quite ready to wear long pants, but they are giving some thought to the day they will have to.

Tripp Fuller is asking for "input" here. He needs your help coming up with a definition. Maybe you can help him out. It is going to be tricky, though. Definitions have a way of nailing down a position to be defended, and, as emergents are always reminding us, defense of doctrine invariably yields schism. There will be no more of this it's-just-a-conversation-don't-get-all-bent-out-of-shape wheeze.

_______________

So, Dear Brother Tripp:

I am reasonably sure that I'm not the sort of person you had in mind when you started scavenging the internet for a description of your movement, but I've been on a good works binge lately and I see in this situation the possibility of getting yet another star in my crown.

So here are some simple tips.

First, try to keep your name out of it altogether. If people notice your name, they might check out your blog and read:

....that is Down Low.  Both Alecia and I's hard drives died within 12 hours of each other so I have been out of action.  With the death of both hard drives went the texts for all my final papers for my first semester in a phd program.  Now that you know all the HBC Deacons out there can rest assured that at the completion of my papers (for the second time) I will be back giving you adequate blogging attention. Tim Conder's podcast is safe on the HBC network and will be reeditied for your listening pleasure soon.

Most guys working on a Ph.D. find a way not to write like that. "Both Alecia and I's hard drives died..." will almost certainly leave readers of the Handbook of Denominations with the impression that you all are a bunch of boogey-eating PBS Kids. You should say instead: "Alecia's and I's hard drives died..." otherwise they may think Alecia is dead.

Second, the less you say about "post-modern philosophy" the less dated you will appear. People who haven't mastered first person possessive pronouns tend not to have a firm grasp of philosophies, especially the out-dated and abandoned ones.

Third, don't submit your definition in all uppercase letters. Mankind has used the lowercase alphabet to pleasing effect since roughly the time of the Carolingian Renaissance. Uppercase text is most useful for short messages on important signs like BEWARE OF DOG or HIPPIES USE SIDE DOOR.

Fourth, I think you do a great disservice to EV by failing to mention the pivotal rôle of Trucker Frank. Meister Schutzwohl's fine work in the field of truck stop evangelism ranks right up there with the ministries of St. Paul, St. Patrick, William Carey and David Livingstone.

Fifth, the hair and beard are just not working. They make you look like one of those balloon twisters at children's parties. While it may be appropriate for your emergent cohort, you need to think of the wider world of religious people.

I could suggest some other improvements but I'm sure you have many more e-mails to read and balloons to inflate.

Seven o'clock Saturday morning I left with my current wife for Ellis County. The next day was to mark our 34^th year of marriage, and she thought it was time for me to take a break from my Fort Remonstrans Heresy Awareness Project and bring her up to speed on the rôle of cotton in Texas history.

After turning off 35-E for Waxahachie we stopped for a slurp and a nibble so the sleepy citizens could get out of bed and begin adding local color to our holiday. I invested in a cinnamon bun as big as my steering wheel and began my lectures.

I told her that before the Civil War there were only a few settlers scratching the land for corn, oats, sweet potatoes and wheat. According to the 1860 Agricultural Schedule, only 389 bales of cotton were produced. In ‘79 the Waxahachie Tap Railroad laid some track. Then came the Fort Worth and New Orleans in '86, the M-K-T in 1889, and the Trinity and Brazos Valley Railroad in 1907. Ellis County discovered a world which showed a keen interest in its cotton-related industries. By 1900 Ellis County produced more cotton than any in the nation. In 1910 the Agricultural Schedule recorded that 106,384 bales of cotton had been raised, processed and shipped.

There was a little economic boom that lasted until the Depression. Thirty-two saloons sprang up around the Square. The Shelton Opera House opened in 1880 to satisfy the great Texas thirst for "culture" and entertainment. There was a racetrack, there were fairgrounds, there were bawdy houses and there was a Chautauqua Auditorium for showcasing Will Rogers, John Philip Sousa, William Jennings Brian and collateral American embarrassments.

Some of this wealth went into an interest of mine: residential architecture, and some of it went into an interest of my wife's: the decorative arts. So we checked the batteries in our cameras, hit the Gingerbread Trail and started collecting photographic evidence of the Courthouse, "Carpenter Gothic" homes, some local commentaries on the Arts & Crafts movement and the Chautauqua Auditorium at Getzendaner Park.

By this time I had finished my cinnamon bun and we began looking for a restaurant to do lunch in. Eventually we moseyed northward through Texas until we found our own personal hovel located in what used to be a Texas cotton field.

The wife and I agreed that our marriage had not been the unmitigated failure her mother and the Dean of Men expected it would be and we decided to extend the relationship into the foreseeable future.

But a day spent thinking about Arts and Crafts reminded me of William Morris and his words on the decorative arts—and sentiments not at all foreign to the Chautauqua circuit:

Now if the objection be made, that these arts have been the handmaids of luxury, of tyranny, and of superstition, I must needs say that it is true in a sense; they have been so used, as many other excellent things have been. It is also true that, among some nations, their most vigorous and freest times have been the very blossoming times of art; while at the same time, I must allow that these decorative arts have flourished among oppressed peoples, who have seemed to have no hope of freedom; yet I do not think that we shall be wrong in thinking that at such times, among such peoples, art at least was free; when it has not been, when it has really been gripped by superstition, by luxury, it has straightway begun to sicken under that grip. Nor must you forget that when men say popes, kings, and emperors built such and such buildings, it is a mere way of speaking. You look in your history-books to see who built Westminster Abbey, who built St. Sophia at Constantinople, and they tell you Henry III., Justinian the Emperor. Did they? or, rather, men like you and me, handicraftsmen, who have left no names behind them, nothing but their work?

Sometimes looking at even the humblest of these works elevates the soul.

We must admit we were warned: we were told that everything had to change. So sure enough, change started kicking in. McLaren vamoosed. Pagitt is off pretending to be an economist. Tony Jones (who with no evidence at all regards himself an over-educated white man) magnanimously stepped down as National Coordinator of the Emergent Village. Then we saw a bunch of wannabes posting announcements on YouTube of their intentions to step up and fill the vacancy.

This was a "decentralization of power".

Now come the complaints, the whinging, and the back-stabbing. It's like an FBFI annual "fellowship" after they pass out the namecards and knives. Villagers are disillusioned, energy is down, spirits are low. You can examine the debris field thither and yon.

Two extremely intelligent and very articulate Villagers published a real thoughtfest on the web. It began with Zach Lind, a drummer, saying to Nick, his good friend:

Basically I was like, you know, I read what you said, and I had like, cuz see, I kinda come at it from a different perspective, like I totally don't begrudge frustration or anything like that, but I'm kind of wondering like, I guess for me it was sort of like, I understand it, but like, what is, what was your expectation, you know, like I guess, that's me, it seems like the hardest part to swallow about what you're saying is you sort of said that you and your friends expected everything to kind of change and it's not really changing you know. Do you think it's not changing at all, or do you think it's just not changing as quickly as you would like it to?

Emergence is a "conversation", ironically.

Then we read this from a hopeful skeptic:

Emergent is de-centralizing, loosing leadership, and ten odd years into it, it still hasn't been able to define itself completely. As it struggles to define itself, some of us loose faith in it.

So what am I saying, that I don't like Emergent? No. Just that I guess some of us where hoping that everything would change, and it seems that the only thing that has changed is we have seen the group get dispersed and less potent.

Maybe it's our fault for not putting in our two cents early on. Maybe it's the fact that the leadership of Emergent was too accommodating to really define themselves in a way to produce a movement. Maybe I was stuck on the idea of revolution and movement, and it was only a conversation.

They where [sic] hoping everything would change, but that didn't happen. So we still have a bunch of friends with a website and a 501(c)3 tax-exempt classification, but we now also have a map.

And good luck with that map thingy! That looks like something that could really help you retain leadership and define the conversation/movement/ethos/whatever.

Let us all fervently hope the Villagers can sort through this loss of faith so they can focus their mighty intellects on ending poverty, war, and environmental destruction.

Friday I quoted Paul Gerhardt. Gerhardt was born in Grafenhaynichen, suffered much during his ministry and earned a reputation as one of the greatest of the German hymnists. I suspect he was the greatest, and I gather there weren't many who would qualify to clean his boots. In fact, your devotional life will be deepened by reading through some of his surviving hymns here. Wackernagel asks, "Where is the Evangelical congregation that does not know Paul Gerhardt?

"Well, Herr Wackernagel," I might respond today, "how long a list would you like?"

Some of Gerhardt's suffering was the result of persecution which followed his refusal to obey an edict of Elector Frederick William prohibiting the mention of sectarian differences in Reformed and Lutheran homilies. It seems Paul Gerhardt continued to treasure and disseminate those differences.

But I conjure the memory of this man of principle because of our moment in history. As some of us have noted recently, we suffer a serious misapprehension of authority. Indeed, I suspect we don't really know the meaning of the word. It has very nearly gotten to the point that the only people who mention a lack of authority are those merely demanding our conformity.

There was a time when, if people yammered like McLaren and Pagitt, they would be given a cookie and told to go outside and play. There was a time when the strutting recently observed among fundamentalists would have been infra dig. To look at fundamentalism now you could be forgiven for believing that anything goes so long as you line up behind the right personalities, and the whole point of the movement is to maintain certain political loyalties.

These days there are a lot people who resent your bringing this fact to their attention. They suppose you are just an eccentric running around as though your shirt were on fire, but they would resent this behavior even if your shirt were on fire. Even if you are permitted to disagree with heretics you must still assume a respectful attitude toward heresy.

Here on Remonstrans we speak about our own culture. We are occasionally—not often, but it happens—dismissed because many think culture is just nattering about opera and traditions and wearing ties. In fact, our culture is the first thing that determines which ideas are worth entertaining and who is worth listening to.

Our culture now lacks that function, and it will be crucial for anyone doing real ministry to consider how one will feed the flock when authority is in such disrepute and when its abusers hold high office. We can pretend there aren't people like McLaren vaporizing about the resurrection, Corcoran conjecturing about the eschaton, Sweatt surmising about Calvinism....

Men like Gerhardt have our respect because they knew something about authority.

His work thou must consider / If thine is to endure.

On Him place Thy reliance
If thou wouldst be secure;
His work thou must consider
If thine is to endure.

--- Paul Gerhardt

And the fratricide continues.

The I-70 Roach Paradise closed its doors briefly so local crime scene investigators could set out some numbered cards, collect blood samples and take photos. Management took this opportunity to rearrange the carpet stains and swap out the dingy orange curtains for dreary blue ones.

But now the pandemonium has resumed with fair vigor.

Elsewhere Lou Martuneac unveils the richness of the English language with his innovative use of bold, italicized, red and underlined Statements of Special Alarm. He shows the reading public no consideration at all with his posting of a quartet of fundamentalist eyesores. He also issues "a call for the removal from the platform" of one of the proponents of a fundamentalism worth saving for, I suppose, conduct unbecoming a proponent of a fundamentalism worth saving.

And this is the best fundamentalism to date?! Maybe this is a step up from calling someone a monster in human flesh as Dr. Bob, Jr., ("a widely respected man from our own IFB heritage") might have done.

I don't know what authority Lou has to call for this removal, it's not specifically addressed anywhere in the Big Book of Fundamentalist Protocols—but then neither was Bauder's general call for speaking up against Dan Sweatt's misbehavior. So I guess we have achieved some sort of equilibrium. We are slouching briskly toward June 16-18, and I get a sense of Lou's annoyance not from his cogent arguments but from his bold, italicized, red and underlined Statements of Special Alarm.

Very persuasive, yes?

I reproduce here a black-and-white transcription of Matuneac's complaint:

With an opportunity before him (Bauder) to promote unity, healing and reconciliation in the IFB community Dr. Bauder chose to pursue a different tact [sic]. Instead he further polarized factions, alienated many and fueled further division among men in and around the FBFI. I can't imagine a more unnecessary, unwise and ill-timed moment as this juncture in the chain of events for Bauder to publish sharp criticism of widely respected men from our own IFB heritage.

I have found fitting moments to suggest that there is no such thing as a fundamentalism worth saving. I can believe in unicorns, ladies fine and wingéd swine, fauns, gorgons and three-headed dogs, but I draw the line at a fundamentalism worth saving. I could offer a complete list of reasons with footnotes, but I just gave you two very compelling links by way of preamble.

So this is what we find under one end of the religious rainbow: a good old-fashioned test of loyalties. It looks like a meeting of the politburo.

Under the other end we find this Brian D. McLaren guy coming up with a theological reverie we might expect from someone who buys lotus plants in bulk.

I am going to suggest, again, that we have put our trust in horses. We could do without fundamentalists and we could certainly lose the drooling McLaren, but even if we were to subtract these unreasonable men, what would remain?

Now more than ever is the time to fix our attention on what is good and true and beautiful, raise children who can appreciate the difference between the ministry and complete foolishness, and reflect on Mr. Gerhardt's idea.

And off in an entirely different wing of the religious loony bin we hear nutritionist Brian D. McLaren delivering himself of some helpful thoughts on the relationship between digestion and resurrection.

McLaren (after drinking some fair trade coffee) began exploring a major dimension of the meaning of the eucharist. It is only right that we inform our readers that Mr. McLaren has a bachelor's degree and a master's degree, but neither of them is in theology or the health sciences.

In Jesus' death, his blood was drained from his body. That is, crudely put, what death meant to most people in Jesus' day - especially violent death: the separation of blood and body. Today it struck me that in instituting the eucharist, Jesus was saying something like this: "My blood is about to be separated from my body, but when you take my body and blood into your body and blood, you will reunite them. I will live again in you. I will be resurrected in you." This is not to minimize Jesus' Easter-morning resurrection, but to suggest a major dimension of its meaning.

(Please don't laugh...at least not for an inordinately long time.)

We have seen that man can only begin to "read" the meaning of nature, when instead of merely copying and describing what he senses, he begins to apprehend it as a series of images symbolizing concepts. Now the word "imagination" has come to mean, for most people, the faculty of inventing fictions, especially poetic fictions; but in its deeper sense it signifies that very faculty of apprehending the outward form as the image or symbol of an inner meaning, for which we are looking. It is therefore not surprising that the first stirrings of a movement of thought in this direction should have occurred among those who interested themselves in the deeper significance of art, and especially of poetry. Thus it was held by Coleridge that the human imagination, at its highest level, does indeed inherit and continue the divine creative activity of the Logos (the "Word" of the opening verses of St. John's Gospel), which was the common origin of human language and consciousness, as well as of the world which contains them.

--- Owen Barfield

We read a quatrain:

this poem is lousy, yes / but it is mine / my creative act / a yelp for the world to hear

and we see something is very wrong. We listen to sermons like Dan Sweatt's and we hear the prating of a highly-esteemed crackpot. We observe the political consequences of these things and it gets even worse: we know we've awakened in a howling wasteland where words are useless and where only yelps and shrieks and moans and screams memorialize our terrors.

These are like a soundtrack for Dali's Temptation of St. Anthony.

And it is very difficult to sympathize. These people have brought this down on their own heads, and to find warring philistines singing the songs of Zion would be an odd surprise.

That peace—but who may claim it?
The guileless in their way,
Who keep the ranks of battle,
Who mean the things they say—
The peace that is for heaven,
And shall be for the earth;
The palace that re-echoes
With festal song and mirth;
The garden, breathing spices,
The paradise on high;
Grace beautified to glory,
Unceasing minstrelsy.

There are those whose first religious impulse to say whatever they want to say, and then there are those for whom the word is a true apprehension of meaning. Wouldn't it be so ironic to hear their judgment on their own lips?

We at Remonstrans might be forgiven for asking some questions (somewhat related, perhaps, to the recent spasm within American Fundamentalisticism).

It's not likely...but it could happen!

1.   Whom might orthodoxy attract if it had a venerated tradition making a genuine appeal to the imagination of modern believers?

2.   What is essential to modern piety that fundamentalisticist institutions lack?

3.   When would be an ideal time to consider the impact one's ministry makes on a younger generation?

4.   Where might a contemporary separatist go to enjoy a quiet, respectful exchange of ideas?

5.   Why are fundamentalisticists committed to attitudes which have stigmatized and discredited the movement so thoroughly?

6.   How might future stooge-like provocations be met by those who appreciate the difference between a love of the good and a love for politics?

A recent harangue of the brethren was delivered at a place most appropriately called "The Wilds"—and for which nothing remotely like an apology has yet been detected.  This "message" has produced grubby strife and soapy pontifications, so in that sense I suppose we could say it was a success except that the haranguer began by expressing some incoherent desire to be respected by younger preachers who are now falling under the sway of less—ummm—"intense" pulpit personalities.

The man clearly has an ironic streak.

I am virtually certain that no good will come of it. I am so convinced of this that I would be willing, if Las Vegas could set the odds, to bet my worldly all on it. I could finally close on that luxury home in an enchanted forest I promised my wife.

I actually recommend against attending the theater and getting tattoos, but since some of you will do both anyway I'd like to suggest that all you fundamentalists get at least two tats. Across the back of the fingers of your right hand you should apply the letters F E A R. On your left forearm you might consider an artful rendering of Mr. Moe Howard. Why quibble about what is a mote or what is a beam if instead you can just poke your fingers in your brother's eye in the manner so humorously depicted by Messrs. Larry, Curly and Moe?

No sweat, right?

About a score of great, formative voices have shaped my thinking. Some of those were preachers. One was Edmund Clowney, another was Alan Redpath. Alan Redpath believed that the most discerning question you could put to any issue was, "What is happening in this place that cannot be explained in merely human terms?"

So for the more cerebral/spiritual clergymen desirous of a tattoo, I suggest that question might be placed on the inside of the left hand for easy reference. "What is happening in this place that cannot be explained in merely human terms?" The text could be transfixed by a Cupid's Arrow if you so choose.

But of course I don't want to offer too many attractive options because I don't advise tats in the first place.

So to return to the topic: what follows is the "official" retort—or response, rather—of Dr. Vaughn, president of the fellowship that sponsored the conference, the fellowship which invited its speakers and the fellowship which takes money from its Calvinist and non-Calvinist members for questionable services rendered.

There has been a lot of interaction and discussion over the past few days related to fundamentalism, Calvinism, and how men who disagree with one another ought to express those disagreements. The FBFI has always included both Calvinists and non-Calvinists because we recognize that godly men can agree with one another on the fundamentals of the faith while disagreeing with one another in this area. In any disagreement, we must represent one another fairly and treat one another charitably. To make this a test of fellowship among fundamentalists has not been the position of the FBFI and will not be our position.

The only way we can maintain unity on the fundamentals of the faith is if we learn how to express our disagreements on other points in a way that does not damage that fellowship through unbiblical communication. We must honor our biblical responsibility to use speech that edifies and displays Christ-like love. We must demonstrate an unwavering commitment to humble integrity. Caricatures and personal attacks do not honor the Lord or advance His work. Neither pulpit nor keyboard exempt us from these biblical obligations.

I love the passivity in that first statement. "There has been a lot of interaction and discussion...", he says looking around innocently. Who knows where this comes from, how it caught on, or what foul resentment it signifies? These things are certainly a mystery to us! And by the way, we also believe men should be represented fairly and treated charitably. What all is going on out there is of deep concern to us.

Uhhh, yah, dude. Thanks for clarifying your position for us. Most helpful.

So here we have the provocateur(s) now telling everyone about fairness, charity, the advancement of the Lord's work, and biblical obligations.

Fundamentalists wonder why their star is in retrograde? No public statement is offered which is to the point, and no public statement is made of any private rapprochement. They get to instigate the fight and then scold the belligerents.

Reminds me of the episode where Moe sets the house ablaze and then scolds Larry and Curly for mishandling the fire hose.

Just keep picking at those scabs, brethren.

Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellow men bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.

---Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say

I repost last Monday's epigraph for two reasons. First, we've had some emergents loitering on the premises and for them the English language is a fathomless mystery. I'm hoping another reading might help them re-imagine something. Second, these words are true for everyone and they bear repeating.

this poem is lousy, yes
but it is mine
my creative act
a yelp for the world to hear

There are 19 words right there. And contrary to our unconsidered response, they have not failed. They have succeeded. The poet Mike Stavlund has succeeded in telling us something.

And here is Makeesha:

Or maybe, a better way of saying it is that I have words but I'm afraid to write  them for fear that they will be misheard, misunderstood, criticized or worse. I'm afraid that people will read them and consume them like a day old happy meal wrenched from it's [sic] chipboard box instead of scooped up with decadent care and enjoyed with the ecstatic pleasure I feel.

Makeesha has written words she fears to write because they might be misunderstood or criticized. This prose artist is afraid that her reader will not share her ecstatic pleasure with them. [I wonder if that was just a lucky guess.] I should confess that by comparison, a day-old happy meal would taste like an Auguste Escoffier triumph.

Emergents are fond of illiteracy and they love to build their castles in the trash. This is what my visit to Journey Church taught me. For the emergent it is not what words mean, it is all about their feelings about them. A meaningless sequence of acts, for example, needn't constitute worship so long as some claim these were "personal opinions or subjective assessments" of worship. Not unlike Steve Pettit's view of sacred music.

I think we have exceeded Mitchell's minimum dose of inanity and we dwell in the midst of a people who have exceeded Mitchell's minimum dose of inanity.

This poem is lousy, yes/but it is mine/my creative act/a yelp for the world to hear.

This is self-expression without art. This is indeed sitting around and saying anything you want. This is Frank Garlock, this is Dan Sweatt, this is Jamie Arpin-Ricci, this is Joel Osteen, this is Majesty Hymns, this is the Northland International Overarching Entity, this is Mark Galli: speech that does not bestow reason on us.

This is "seepage".

Now I make these comparisons for a reason. I fully realize this will make no sense to emergents: they are not my audience. (A fact they pretend to be troubled by.) If they truly believed what they said, then they would see my post is also lousy, mine, a creative act and a yelp at the world. What Plato, Augustine, Knox, Beza, Calvin, Edwards and Machen have said are lousy, theirs, creative acts and yelps at the world, and emergents would accord them the same dignity they reserve for their lousy poems, their creative acts and their yelps.

But it will have to occur to us sooner or later that all words, though perhaps not as bizarre or grotesque as emergents' words, do not fail either. Stavlund has told us something, Garlock has told us something, Mark Galli, "the evangelical mystic", has told us something, and we live downstream of them all.

You, dear reader, live downstream of them all, and to comprehend this horror is to begin to be cultured.

No, I must retract that statement. It is not to begin to be cultured; it is to begin to understand what culture is. To actually become cultured would, for one thing, put an end to all this yelping.

 

Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellow men bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.

---Richard Mitchell, Less Than Words Can Say

We've been keeping an eye on the deconstruction of Emergence which most recently took the form of "a re-imagination of Emergent Village".

I'm aware of the fact that this doesn't excite the imagination quite like the Grand Canyon, the Super Bowl, or a fundamentalist movie excite the imagination, but it is something we should keep an eye on anyway. I can also understand—to a point—why someone might be slow to devote a lot of time watching a few renegade dimwits using bad philosophy as a pretext for abandoning the faith.  What, you ask, do these degenerates have to tell us about religion?

This is where our problem starts, of course. It is vanity that prompts us to suppose that only cogent, prudent, well-articulated ideas will move people, and we may feel that crackpots who don't deserve a hearing shouldn't get our attention. I think this is a mistake. People interested in religion will also be curious about the thing that has supplanted religion.

McLaren, Jones and Pagitt are clowns, no doubt about it, but no matter how inept they may be as philosophers, historians and theologians, they are nevertheless disordering thought in the church. That should concern us for the same reason Dr. Mitchell was concerned about inanity on campus.

It will never be enough for a few academics to publish a couple of explanatory volumes on the meaning of post-modernism. Academics are the sort of people who will go to conferences to argue over what differences might exist between the sexes or who's to blame for international terrorism. Academics can pontificate about anything, and for every one part perception you get nine parts poppycock.

Emergence was a movement that pretended to care about language, art, respect for narrative, imagination and conversation, but what have we gotten in the way of language, art, respect for narrative, imagination and conversation? The poetry of Emergence ranks right up there with the liturgy of fundamentalism and the relevance of neo-evangelicalism. Imagine what sort of poetry, narrative, art and conversation we'd have if they were indifferent to these things; imagine a religious world informed by the sensibilities of Mike Stavlund, David Hayward, The Ooze, Mark Scandrette and Jon Birch.

What we get from Bronsink, Buist, Hartman, Scott and Stavlund is bafflegab; large hairballs of prejudices and platitudes. Gobs of tribal language, code words and verbal signals which merely identify us and them, which, oddly enough, is the attitude they hate in other people. Theirs was a cheap virtue in despising the commercial success of Amy Grant or Sandi Patty; the harder work of producing something less childish than A Lament for Creativity proves to be beyond their powers.

There is something inherently unconvincing about a klatch of bureaucrats working through their talking points or obsequiously reciting their hypothetical remedies. Men who know the life of the spirit do not talk like that.

Psalmists don't yelp at the world.

*  *  *

Thy loveliness oppresses all human thought and heart; and none, O peace, O Syon, can sing thee as thou art!

 

Word has it that some "intensive time" and uffish thought was invested in discerning the unique contributions of Emergent Village to the wider world. The conversation has changed in important ways since EV began ten years ago; it is broader, deeper, more diverse, more complex, and much has come whiffling through the tulgey wood in the last decade. Different forms are therefore needed.

(No specifics were furnished; perhaps a codicil will emerge.)

So here's what happened—near as I can tell: a bunch of third- and fourth-tier doggerelists and cacklehags met in Washington, DC, to engage in the process of re-imagining The Village. You can go here to get their word on it.

The "process" was "deeply relational". Stories were shared, dreams were shared, hopes were shared, and hurts were shared. Shoes were doffed and vorpal blades went snicker-snack . The whole thing, organism-wise, is about friendship, and so deeper friendships are now being fostered and the current emphasis on friendship is being strengthened.

"Everyone is expected to make their [sic] unique contribution."

New dreams will be dreamt, ideas will be flung around, and The Friendly People In The Thin Space will continue to maintain their focus on the centering work already happening "on the ground".

In other words, they got nuthin'. After all those promises and poems and after the Great War between the Nouns and Verbs, only three things "emerged": the 501(c)3 status will be retained, some of the current board members will continue to serve before stepping down, and the website will continue. Re-imagination meets mind-numbing continuity.

So basically what we have here is a bunch of friends with a website and a 501(c)3 tax-exempt classification. Re-imagination is not for the faint of heart.

I suspect the people who cooked up the Northland International Overarching Entity had a hand in this. I see their fingerprints all over it. But you'll have to keep your head on a swivel because the fundamentalists are going global and the emergents are going local. There's a lot of change and a lot of staying the same all within the strict confines of the ongoing processes of intensive, globalizing, vision-casting communication, all of which are moving toward unprecedented opportunities on the horizon, and all mimsy are the borogoves.

No mention was made of Trucker Frank or his fine work at the nation's truck stops. Perhaps he rests by the Tumtum tree.

Here is an inarticulate grasp for the ineffable in a weed and a delusional fellowship with a jogger. One holy man to another, as it were. And lest you think this is merely an elitist dismissal coming from an one reared on Longinus, Coleridge and Eliot, read the "lament" that follows. This "creative act" is his own personal (not to mention solipsistic) yelp at the world.

Sadly, its lousiness is apparent even to him.

dandelion

out of the chaos
the dissonance
the caucaphony all around
pushing, pulling, striving, yearning, milling
there is a resonance
a harmony

an eco-system
people inhale
trees exhale
people exhale
trees inhale
one great grand collective cooperative
will to live

walk down the hill
nod at the person
running up the hill
namaste:
the holy in me
honors the holy in you

U
down in to death
and back up to life

life
from the trammelled earth
emerge flowers
(or are they weeds?)
grand acts
of audacious creativity
scattered across the ground
hope giving life
life giving hope

a lament for creativity

creativity ought to be contagious
a spark that starts a blaze
not the privilege of a few
but the lifeblood of many
yet ours is a world
of museums and bookshelves
a wasteland of ideas
sterility, observation,
ascent, interest

inspiration is an invitation
to adventure
grab the rudder,
take the wave,
pick up a pen,
sing your song

we're starving out here
and you're hoarding
speak, share
lead, feed
unburden yourself

* * *

this poem is lousy, yes
but it is mine
my creative act
a yelp for the world to hear

by Mike Stavlund

And here we see the savage clutching at his enemy's spear as it protrudes from a sucking chest wound, and he exults, "Aha! I have deprived you of your weapon".

I recently had a conversation with someone who was really frustrated about the emerging church. He was really upset about what he saw as a consistent squishiness, which I completely understand. The emerging church conversation takes a little getting used to because it is such a radically different way of operating. He assumed all we were doing was sitting around talking. From his perspective, our pretension was so deep that we had been reduced to not just talking about the emerging church, but talking about talking about it.

Which brings up the joke:

Q - How many emerging church bloggers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A - 1 to change the bulb and post about it. 315 to lurk around and make no comment. 2 to propose that a flashing colored bulb would be more in keeping with the culture of the day. 34 to retort that all talk of ‘light' and ‘dark' is just relative, and purely down to the culture, context and personal experience. 18 to weigh in with quotes from Derrida, Baumann and McLuhan and discuss the essential duality of light.

There's this fascinating myth that all we do is talk, to which I would offer is one of the most basic forms of relating to each other. It is in communicating that we are learning to work out our own expressions of faith.

When I offered him my definition, or really my limited understanding of it in words - the emerging church is a collective search for a wholistic expression of following in the way of Jesus through love - he didn't like it. His first question was instantly, "What do you believe?" And when I said, "In Jesus," he responded with, "But what do you believe about Jesus?"

And then it hit me. In refusing to be defined by "traditional" methods of definitions, the emerging church has taken away the traditional means of arguing. And it pisses people off. I would offer that the emerging church absolutely believes in truth, but it doesn't go by traditional means. It's called love, which then defines everything.

My friend was looking for our differences. And in doing so was participating in a means that would eventually exclude. At some point our differences would emerge and a barrier to relationship would be created. When we begin with defining people by what they believe, as opposed to who they are, we create natural barriers that instinctively create exclusion even when we don't want to. And those barriers end up excluding US at some point. What we end up with is 27,000 different version of church. Our desire for unity becomes impossible because we are beginning with a method that is broken to begin with.

When we begin with love we create, what I think Jesus was really trying to get to, which is a circle of inclusion. Love begins with our similarities, not our differences. It draws people in as opposed to pushing people out. It looks past our brokenness to discover the best of who we are. It destroys barriers as opposed to creating them.

But when we begin with love, we step into a very different way of operating. We begin with the idea that we are each created in His image. Differences don't define us. They express the subtle facets of a different part of God's image working its way out. We can't control it. We can only participate in it. And when we do, we engage what Jesus said was the only true way to live. We create an unshakable foundation that fulfills what it means to be human: to love.

by Jonathan Brink

"I am a graduate of Starfleet Academy. I know many things."

--- Worf, son of Mogh

The next generation of the emerging church is being called upon to re-imagine itself, and it is not pretty. It appears that vibes and ethoi don't have much of a shelf life, the road show bombed and American Christianity was underwhelmed with the whole postmodern fragrance. There was a lot of cussing, a lot of saying whatever they wanted and a lot of religious trinkets thrown about, many pictures of hip people in knit caps were published throughout the land, candles were lighted, but nothing really caught fire.

So they went to Washington, DC, to re-re-imagine. As for the shape of things to come we still have nothing official to report. I was hoping for some movement on the suggestion to let emergent die, but I shall wait patiently to see the color of the smoke.

In the meantime the participants are struggling with their feelings about it all. I think you should read a bit of it and get a sense of what life is like where the centre has not held and where under-educated people struggle with the English language.

Here are some of the feelings of selected participants, and I am on pins and needles to learn how this undisciplined gibberish might be incarnated in a functioning institution. When the time comes for function to bring forth form, it will be helpful to hold these thoughts in one hand and the shape of Emergent 2.0 in the other.

But as simple as it was beforehand to say that I was going to help discuss the future of EV, it is much more difficult to express what actually happened.

[...]

So we shared ideas and spoke of what emergent has meant in the past - the good and the bad. And we spoke of what values of emergent we truly do hold dear. We shared with each other what our wildest dreams were for what is emerging and how best to achieve those dreams. And there was debate, there was push-back, but there was also a lot of harmony as the group understood the language of the whole. I admit there were times during the process when I was scared. There were voices there suggesting that perhaps to achieve our dreams and avoid commoditizing the message we need to let emergent die.

[...]

We share and give away power and the voices of the many are heard. How that will look and which structures will be created or retained is yet to be determined.

--- Julie Clawson

Or maybe, a better way of saying it is that I have words but I'm afraid to write them for fear that they will be misheard, misunderstood, criticized or worse. I'm afraid that people will read them and consume them like a day old happy meal wrenched from it's chipboard box instead of scooped up with decadent care and enjoyed with the ecstatic pleasure I feel.

[...]

Today I am thinking of evdc09 in words and phrases that feel disembodied from the experience as a whole but are so vital to the experience.

Sacrifice the Self
Submit to the Process
Submit to the Collective
Release Expectation
Listen and Hear
Be Present
Engage Fully
Trust
Value the Spaces
Celebrate the Other

--- Makeesha Fisher

I'll share just one significant shift forward for now: it is clear to me that once again the vision of Emergent Village will be rooted deeply in generative friendships. This is a rooting in story, diversity, authenticity, vulnerability and co-laboration in an on-going incarnation of the gospel. There is a wonderful simplicity admist the complexity of relationships that is Emergent Village. In some ways this is a shift back to how this all began or perhaps a re-affirmation of what has been there all along. The story of Emergent Village will continue to be authored among soul friendships.

--- Tim Snyder

The Kingdom of God, breathing and naturalized among us, was dreamed outloud (to which the Spirit and the Bride say ‘Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly'). Communities of restorative justice that lent themselves to transformative coalitions among groups that God is already using were birthed in the language of hope. The artist and dreamer were invited once more to cultivate their gifts and tend to the thing of beauty that is to come. Theology and Philosophy, those most subversive of all talents that Emergent has hoped to possess, were re-imagined as drawing from new and collective voices. These were the optimisms of the moment.

--- Brittian Bullock

The word for glory used by the Hebrews is akin to the word for "heavy." The heaviness of Yahweh landed on Mount Sinai to speak to Moses. The heaviness of Yahweh rolled through Ezekiel's vision of the moving worshippers of God. When that gift was given to us something deep happened for Emergent Village. I think (and here I'm taking editorial liberties) we found our collective voice of "Worship." I need to take a little rabbit trail here to make my point...

I am a novice in the healing arts of Tai Chi and Qugong. But I did it for a while at a church and now and then I run over to the YMCA to join a community in these ancient stretching, breathing, attending practices. Something happens in these disciplines to the connection between my body and my imagination and my spirit. They become more integrated. After a hard Tai Chi work out, when I put my right hand in front of my chest facing the earth and my left below it facing the sky and imagine I'm holding a ball, I begin to feel heat/energy/life between my fingers... The martial artist calls this energy "Chi." And sometimes you can push that energy between each other, you can feel something physical and yet not-concrete happening in the room. When we had surrendered Emergent Village, as we stood in a circle, I felt that energy in the middle of us all, but larger and teaming with greater life. Inside the hallowed out circle that once held our individual ideas and the dreams/ambitions of Emergent's founders had come the Presence of energy/life/wholeness. And we realized that God was near. It felt heavy. And our hands formed around that largeness as if our individual chi/lives had been consumed by Life Eternal. Now, no one else was thinking of Tai Chi but slowly folks hands came out of their pockets, off of their hips, or uncrossed. Some of our hands opened like the liturgist standing at the Lords Table reaching out in invitation, who says "the Lord be with you." And some of our hands raised like the abbot and preacher who sends a benediction to a congregation only we were blessing and being blessed by God. In that moment I (re)discovered worship in front of the glory/heavy of God. We were hushed, like the sound when snow falls. We were humbled like standing in front of Mt Rainer on that rare clear Summer day, or looking over the Grand Canyon, or hearing someone you've wronged say, ‘I know, I forgive you.' We were free like a mass of college graduates throwing their mortar boards into the sky or someone receiving the news that the tumor is benign or the news that grandma's long fight against dementia had ended.

It was thin space.

We were silent.

Michael Toy suggested we take off our shoes. We sang a song of praise...

--- Troy Bronsink

Excitement builds as emergents make a fresh start at an identity. (At least they had the goal of a fresh start. We'll soon learn if they met that goal.)

One of the nice things about imagining the future is the endless possibilities: will you be petite or XXL? Will you wear a plain scarf or a smart bonnet? Will you drive a Rolls or ride a bus? Will you wear heels or flip-flops? Will you carry a .357 magnum or a Lady Smith?

The non-executives of the EmergentVillage made um heap big pow-wow in the land of the Nanticoke Indian to decide the shape of their future, or as they say in their native tongue: "...transition along with other internal leadership structures that have existed".

Believing that form follows function, the old forms must be laid aside while new directions are discerned. Thus, the Emergent Coordinating Group, the National Cohorts Team, and all other groups and structures used to "run" Emergent Village—which have been largely inactive for quite a while—have been discontinued. This change is a continuation of the process which was started when the National Coordinator position was eliminated and only affects structures internal to Emergent Village.

So please be advised that neither the ECG nor the NCT will be returning your calls.

This change is a continuation of a process that began when one position was eliminated—back when Tony boogied. So now there is no coordinator, no coordinating group and no cohorts team. Technically I don't know if we can call this change a fresh start or a fresh ending. Maybe it's both.

Maybe they are just trying to build suspense over there in the EmergentVillage.

In following the emergence (or "rollout", as it was interestingly called) of the Northland International Overarching Entity, I was impressed with the sheer professionalism of it all. It was slicker than snot on a glass doorknob. It was motivated, in the words of the president of the Northland International Overarching Entity, by "better communication".

We are all for better communication, but we don't see merely changing our name as the soul of eloquence either; so we are taking this opportunity to remind all our readers of the many non-changes that are taking place daily at Remonstrans and to reiterate our unwavering commitment to the same old same old.

See what others are saying about Remonstrans:

"Here in the 21^st Century it is vital that Remonstrans advances, moves forward, becomes aggressively global and stays pretty much what it always was. Our fervent prayers are with you!"

Dr. Basil Elderflower
Founder and Director, Backwoods Globalism

"Remonstrans has a passion for the long-term outreach of entering global doors via global entities. The vision and global implementation of this canopy in the darkness, this parasol in the encroaching shadows, is a testimony to a kind of strategic thinking that is biblically rooted, missionally inspired and visionally visionary. A bold initiative has been taken not to change even a little bit."

Dr. Phil Burke
Pastor, Inexpressibly Dreadful Independent Baptist Church

"Never has remaining in one place been so forward-thinking. No place is more globally visionary than Remonstrans."

Dr. Joey Calishart
Oberkommander, Wasteland Hymns

"They are quite the vision casters over there at Remonstrans. I anticipate many more years of watching them stay exactly where they were when they started."

Dr. Cicely Bogtrotter
Teaching Pastor, Precious Moments Memorial Chapel

"Shiver me timbers. Not since I was a cabin boy on the high seas have I ever lowered me eyeballs on such an overwhelming horizon of global forwardthinkingness.

Aaargh!!!"

Dr. Tommy Evinrude, III
Executive Vice President, Pirates of the Apocalypse

"I'm excited to watch these ever-growing ministries not change. I will always enjoy rubbing shoulders with people not going anywhere (no matter how many strange looks we get)."

Dr. Chuck Huffenpuffer
Department of Theatrical Catastrophes, Mumbojumbo Evangelism

"I have forever been impressed with the fact that Remonstrans never moved an inch. That place makes a fire hydrant look fidgety. In a world that is always changing, Remonstrans now has unprecedented opportunities to stay the same."

Dr. Billy Bob Shmuckhausen
President, Last Wheeze Seminary

"Remonstrans is striving to better articulate what it has already become."

Dr. Ed Wallapalloo
Pastor, Yeehaw Bible Tabernacle

Nat slouched in his chair, chin nearly resting on his chest and his left hand wrapped around a glass of ginger ale. He was staring at the Turner. The waitress brought the cremeschnitte, set it on the table and left unacknowledged. Patrons eclipsed the painting as they headed for the door and Nat never saw them pass. After a time he became aware of a bystander. He was a little embarrassed by his preoccupation and sat up as he was told to do in the first grade.

Nat: I'm sorry, Ester; I was far away.

Nat stood up, grabbed a chair from a nearby table and pulled it close to his own. She sat down.

Ester: Thank you.

Nat: What can I get you?

Ester: That looks good to me.

Nat caught the waitress's eye and waggled his index and little finger at her and she nodded.

Ester: You are unhappy today.

Nat: A bit morose, perhaps.

Ester: About?

Nat: Empires. Small, stinky, unimaginative empires.

Ester: Do they matter?

Nat: Only if you don't want your children to grow up in them, in which case they haunt me.

Ester: What can you do to fix the problem?

The waitress brought a ginger ale and another plate of cremeschnitte.

Nat: I don't suppose anything can be done, but even if something could be done, I can't do it. So, I suppose it's not a problem, really; in a technical sense. I just prefer to feel bad about that rather than the price of bad government.

Ester: Who could fix the problem?

Nat: No one but God, I think.

Ester: God?! This coming from one who scorns religion?

Nat: Well, these days have not been kind to religion and religion has not been kind to God. What thoughtful person would take his grief to a cleric these days?

Ester: And all clerics are bad?

Nat: Oh, no! There will always be a few diamonds, but it seems diamonds lose some of their attraction in an age of rhinestones. The people who most need a religious man tend to be the ones who can't tell the difference between the real and the fake.

Both of them tucked into their desserts.

Nat: We have one major herd of religionists which prides itself on preserving the gloried past even as it sits around and giggles at unholy things and sings profane chanties. The very virtues it touts are the virtues it actually repudiated. These people love their tired novelties and they think of themselves as "conservatives".

Herd #2 set out to repair the damage caused by a stampeding herd #1 and committed itself to preserving a minimal orthodoxy and exercising a trite orthopraxy. It has done neither. And spectacularly well: you could almost keep a publishing company afloat with the frequent confessions and feigned lamentations.

And most comically, group #3, a few bleating stragglers who don't even pretend orthodoxy or orthopraxy exist; it is a random collection of pathetic Guitar Hero Reformers who can't even underwrite a conversation.

That's pretty much the answer religion offers these days. All of them treat God as a means, morals as irrelevant and the imagination as trivial.

Ester:  Certainly truth speaks to every generation.

Nat: Apparently not. Only those generations which are thoughtful enough to value truth, it seems. Most just dither over what is true today, proving they don't yet grasp the concept.

I suspect it's not first a question of truth; first will come a love for the beautiful. I don't see that happening now, but I suspect it would be a beginning.

Ester: How do you help someone love something?

Next Friday through Monday some chatty cathies will muster in Foggy Bottom to re-imagine the Emergent Village, or emergent movement, or the emerging church movement, or missional generative friendships.

Or maybe something else altogether.

But I must warn you: it will not be easy. There are hurdles. This movement often finds itself at odds with conventional organizational leadership structures. Increasingly it is left wondering: How do you fundraise for a conversation?

An interesting question, isn't it? (I can't recall that Plato touched on this difficulty in The Republic.)

On the up-side, Emergence has moved closer than ever to open sourcing. Wide open. Re-imagine the Russian steppes. As of this date the movement lacks organizers, a coordinator, and board mandates, but it desires to speak the future into being and to see what form the movement will take. Now that sounds like the sort of work best done in this nation's capital.

I can hardly wait for the report.

As a first step, the Emergent Village board of directors has already begun a transitioning process toward repopulating a new board.

So one board has begun a transitioning process toward repopulating another board. What are those hippies smoking?

This movement still doesn't know what to call itself, and after a decade it is still in search of a form. Some might see this lack of identity and an absence of a recognizable shape as bad news. Some might see it as an especially amusing—dare I say ironic?—problem inasmuch as such progressive and imaginative people are saddled with it. 

Last summer, the Emergent Village board put out a survey to see what Emergent felt itself becoming. The overwhelming result of that survey was that people wanted this network of generative friendships to continue.

So they did a survey to find out "what Emergent felt itself becoming". The result of that study was overwhelming: people wanted the network of generative friendships to continue.

I hope that study didn't cost too much.

I can't wait to see the results of next week's chinwag.

Some of you may have sung—or had sung to you—the words "They spat upon the Saviour, so pure and free from sin".

Mark "evangelicalism-is-a-mood" Galli over at the appropriately-name "Christianity Today" and bookend dingbat Camerin Courtney bring you the inspiring spiritual journey of Mandisa. You should read it. It and her YouTube video tell all about how God and scripture are helping Mandisa with her obesity and her singing career.

Some will no doubt want to vomit, but I think you should read this gibberish from beginning to end, and then answer a question. Is this your Christian culture?

I know how Phil Burke would answer.

Friday, often the most hopeful of all the weekdays, was promising to fall well short of its potential: Nat saw Phil get out of his car and start following his Jesus Saves belt buckle toward the café. He gave some thought to the feasibility of shouting FIRE! and running from the building, but he feared that next time Phil might turn it into some personal evangelism schtick.

Phil: Beautiful morning, isn't it, Nat? Hardly a cloud in the sky.

Nat: And those no bigger than a man's hand. Did you give any more thought to our discussion?

Phil: Yes I did, and I think you're being unfair relating the things you despise with all of fundamentalism. It's not monolithic, you know.

Nat: So people keep telling me. You'd be surprised how many fundamentalists tell me there is nothing wrong with their culture until I show them some loathsome example; then all of a sudden that's not part of their fundamentalism. They don't have to answer for that! It's a very modular movement apparently. They can run radio stations, publishing houses and recording labels, and the only people truly responsible can't be touched because they are "God's anointed", and the people who scarf it up can deny their complicity.

Phil: So you deny their claims.

Nat: Nonsense; I don't deny their claims. I just know they aren't valid arguments and they won't distract me from what is important. These people were not especially eager to exercise this gift of facile distinctions when they condemned others. All their enemies were conveniently monolithic. If one of them sneezed they all had the Plague.

No, my point is not about the exceptions, it's about the rule. Anyone can try to give an explanation for a part, but it takes a certain level of integrity and critical acumen to explain the whole. I think this is where the movement really savaged itself. And as I said last time, this is why the movement is dead. It is not we who suffered from this adolescent evasiveness, ultimately it was the movement.

Phil: I don't see it that way.

Nat: How do you see it?

Phil: We were fighting to preserve essentials, non-essentials may have gotten lost in the scuffle. No one is perfect.

Nat: What essentials did you preserve?

Phil: The essentials of the Faith.

Nat: The Fundamentals.

Phil: Yes!

Nat: But that's really not true, is it? You attempted to preserve a small subset of those essentials; a thumbnail sketch of all that is necessary to preserve true faith during a particular moment of crisis. Were it not for Modernism those "essentials" might have been very different. A different enemy would have produced a different reaction. And that would have been a necessary thing! I'm not saying that those doctrines were not at risk, and I'm not saying that they weren't worth defending; I am saying that you succeeded in defining the conflict of a historical moment. What was not preserved was an entire orthodoxy. Look at your liturgy. Look at your entertainments. Look at your power structure. Look at the institutions that are unsympathetic to the sensibilities of their people.

Phil: That's very easy for you to say with the benefit of hindsight.

Nat: Yes and No; it is easy for me to say because many of these shortcomings didn't require my own observations, but neither do those observations come from hindsight. This is what people like Machen anticipated when they embraced your idea yet rejected your movement. This is what people like Tulga reported when these "essentials" began morphing to include things like pre-trib and pre-mill eschatologies, and when he noted the "dominating and domineering" spirit which was reading out of the movement people who nevertheless embraced those infamous "essentials".

This is what people like Tozer were talking about when they criticized this headstrong and spiritually inattentive strain of Christianity.

You felt very put-upon by critics outside your movement: you should have been more sensitive to the criticism of those who still embraced the "essentials". But that didn't happen. Now you are free to bicker over Bible translations, which schools tend to produce "neo-evangelical" graduates and which schools are too influenced by Calvinism or Finneyism.

And this just addresses the matter of your so-called "essentials". No, I don't think you preserved any essentials in a productive way. Furthermore I think that failure is just a rough schematic for the larger problem today. Even if you did enjoy solidarity on all those issues you presently squabble over, you still have the problem of a generation of fundies who don't begin to share the sensibilities of their forebears.

People don't love God because their doctrines pass muster. Look at this movement now being entertained by bad knock-offs of The Office, The Music Man, and any number of operas. Have you ever read a libretto, Phil?

Phil: Not really; I know some general storylines.

Nat: You dismiss all this as stylistic differences and non-essentials, but we know now in 2009 what you didn't know in 1925.

No, your vaunted "orthodoxy" is a necessary but insufficient ground for modern piety, and your leaders are oblivious to that fact; they even resent having it pointed out to them. Our kids will now grow up with Calvary's Blood and similar Steve Pettit fluff.

But tell me about your fundamentalism. Where would I go to find a culturally informed and aesthetically appropriate form of Fundamentalism? Bear in mind: it doesn't much matter what you like or dislike. I'm not asking what your family listens to around the dinner table. What matters is that larger set of shared virtues and ideas, that metaphysical dream that will shape the worship of the next generations.

Where would I find that, Phil?  Where does this Fundamentalist style come from? Greenville? Minneapolis? Detroit? Dunbar? Cedarville? Pensacola? Watertown? Clearwater? It is as easy to dismiss your critics today as it was yesterday, but I think the burden falls on you to a) show us an acceptable Christian culture for the 21^st Century, or b) explain why it has become unnecessary.

Nat looked over the just-refurbished café and chose a table with a view of the large print on the north wall. He sat down, sipped his drink and studied the print of Turner's Decline of the Carthaginian Empire. The waitress soon interrupted his thoughts with a plate of roasted onions, goat cheese and a toasted baguette.

Two displaced rubes walked over to Nat's table.

Male Rube: Hi, I'd like to give you a tract and answer any questions you have. Mind if we sit down?

Nat did not answer but watched them both sit down as though they'd found place cards with their names on them. Their intrusion foreshadowed nothing nearly as rewarding as the Turner.

Male Rube: My name is Phil Burke and this is my wife, Barb.

Barb: Hello.

Nat: Phil and Barb, how ironic.

Phil: What's ironic?

Nat: I was just looking at that painting behind you when a phil and barb sat down in the foreground.

Barb: Oh yes; very pretty. Lovely sunset.

Phil: I'm the preacher over at Inexpressibly Dreadful Independent Baptist Church. We're reaching out to the community.

Nat: Ahh. The chapel at Pooh Corner!

Barb: Pooh Corner? From the cartoon.

Nat looked at Barb who seemed chirpy in an insincere way. There was a severity to her plainness that conveyed disapproval.

Nat: From the book. It's faded from memory somewhat, but I recall a house was built for Eeyore at Pooh Corner and the wind blew it to a different location.

Barb: I don't follow.

Nat: Well, that's the story of your church, is it not? You've built a house and the winds have blown it to a new address?

Phil: You speak in riddles.

Nat:  Metaphors, I hope.

Phil: I want to ask you, if you were to die tonight, why should God let you into his heaven?

Nat: I believe, Phil, that when you sat down at my table you offered to answer my questions. So before I answer your silly question, maybe you could make good on your offer.

Phil: Why is it a silly question?

Nat: Is that another question?

Phil tried to recall what he was taught in personal evangelism classes.

Phil: Ok, I'll play your little game. What do you want to ask me?

Nat: Jonathan Edwards distinguished between true and false religion. He says the fair shows and glistering appearances of false religion have the effect of gratifying the devil and encouraging multitudes to offer to God abominations in the place of service.

Are you familiar with Edwards' thought?

Phil: I remember reading Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God back in high school.

Nat: Ahh. Do you think it is advisable to gratify the devil and offer abominations to God?

Phil: Of course not. Why do you ask?

Nat: It's good to hear you say that. I was listening the other day to some of the things your little fellowship of saints has produced and I thought I should probably seek some clarification on that point.  Just for my records.

Phil: What were you listening to?

Nat: As near as I can tell, they were advertisements for your god cast in the form of nostalgic piano pieces reminiscent of Jo Ann Castle and Bob Ralston.

Phil: You didn't like them and you want to blame me?

Nat: Can I blame you, Phil?

Phil: I'm not responsible for what other people do.

Nat: Are you responsible for what you do? and are you responsible for your collaboration with those who market those little disgraces?

Phil: I don't see how.

Nat: As I recall, your brand of Christianity was very vocal in criticizing others for the same thing; back when you were running buses all over town and when you had the largest Sunday Schools in the country and the most aggressive evangelistic programs, you had rather pronounced opinions on the matter. "Discernment" and "separation" were the needs of the hour. Now, not so much.

You appeared competent and very eager to pass judgments on the culture of Murphy Brown, CCM and MTV. Cultural values were very important and you had lots of Bible verses that condemned your enemies' sins, I'm just asking to see how the same exegetical rigor and reasoned argumentation applies to your own stuff.

Phil: I think you are making too big a thing out of stylistic differences. I think this is just a ruse; a way to express your contempt for something you don't like. You just want to see our religious ideas die.

Nat: Well, on that point I can put your mind at rest: I think your religious ideas are already dead. I think that the debris your movement has produced is beyond repair. My interest is not in you or your movement or even the idea of your movement. I'm curious about the shape piety will take after you've trashed the religious culture. What church will our kids have to go to? What "stylistic differences" will they be saddled with?

If you're still interested, give it some thought and the next time we meet, I'll enjoy hearing your insights.

Phil: Then will you answer my question?

Nat: I think by the time you answer my question it will be clear why your question is silly.

Today's post has been moved to Monday in order that we may bring you this gem. It came to us over the transom, as it were.

From the people who showed the good sense to bring Oscar Wilde to the Upper Middle Provinces of American Fundamentalism comes The Admissions Office. For those unfamiliar with The Office, Dunder Mifflin is a paper company doing business in an increasingly paperless society. The show is set in Scranton, a branch office. For those unfamiliar with Maranatha, it is a fundamentalist Bible college doing business in an increasingly irrelevant religious society. The show is set in Watertown, a branch office.

While purporting to be Admissions for a fundamentalist institution of higher learning, it strikes us that it also serves as an admission of true fundamentalist sensibilities.

Enjoy.

Over recent weeks we have been peering into various crannies of American Christianity. While each little corner offers its own distinctive litter and unpleasant smells, it is not the distinctive parts that should concern us so much as the unsightly whole. Institutions come and—mercifully—go, but in all the coming and going we tend to overlook larger, unanticipated consequences.

We see in current fundamentalism a movement which flagrantly contradicts the sensibilities of earlier fundamentalism. It was bad enough the movement became unappealing to outsiders; it's worse that it became a contradiction of its own principles. It was not enough that its enemies hated it, the movement wanted to offer them a larger selection of things to despise. Imagine Machen attending a fundamentalist production of The Importance of Being Earnest or Francis and Edith Schaeffer showing up in a tux and opera glasses for a Steve Pettit "concert". The incongruity is lost on modern fundamentalists because they are preoccupied with The King James Problem or what is to be done about the effective ministries of conservative evangelicals. And the movement gives every promise of losing its institutions the way a leper drops off limbs in the last stages of his illness.

To hear the senior managing editor of "the magazine of evangelical conviction" tell it, the movement has become a "mood". That's right, a mood. As irritated as some of us are that guys like Harold Ockenga and Carl "Free Hand" Henry indulged in novelties which turned out worse than our fathers imagined, they would be frozen in horror to read that their movement was now a mood. It's just not polite to reject someone because she's in a mood, even if she's amusing herself with Sex And The City.

Seeker-sensitives are doing a new study to find out why their means and ends did not quite connect in the productive way their earlier studies claimed they would. And good luck to them with that.

Emergence promised all sorts of things like poetry and imagination, and in this climate of general hostility none was more attractive than "community". Ask an emergent what the general opinion is of Mark Driscoll to get a sense of a self-sacrificing fraternity and a taste of "a generous orthodoxy". Ask Dumb and Dumber what they think of "New Calvinism".

I recall the observation of one observer of American Christianity: "History should remind us that when a society begins to drift, doctrine is usually the last evidence of that drift. The churches must not suppose that professions of orthodoxy are proof against drift."

A drifting society is very much the problem, and to get another sense of that drift, you might want to read D. G. Hart:

By leaving the religious ghetto to right the mainstream society, the likes of a Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson undermined older taboos that had nurtured among evangelicals a sense of being resident aliens, pilgrims on a journey to a different homeland, enduring hardships now for untold future comforts. In effect, the politics of the Religious Right turned evangelicals from otherworldly saints into this-worldly citizens. The indication being, perhaps, that this transformation of born-again Protestants is no better for cultural life in North America than it is for the Christian religion.

Amidst all the innovations of our times it is good to think through this relevant point. And it isn't just Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. It's the Bakkers and Crouches and Siders and Campolos and Wallises and Halls & Slaters, Norths and Rushdoonys....

On Remonstrans we have spoken at some length about the abject philistinism of American Christianity. But beyond this cultural apostasy there has also been a failure to separate from the world along the lines addressed by D. G. Hart.

Despite what James 1:27 tells us, we have not kept ourselves unspotted from the world. In this regard we have been negligent and we are paying the price.

Professions of orthodoxy have not saved us.

What will?

Those famous couches were supposed to generate conversation, provoke a frank exchange of views and encourage the swapping of journey-tales. It was all about openness, diversity, acceptance, and "creative theological imaginations."

It was all going to be a kind of Woodstock without the keen intellects. It would be a place where you could say whatever you wanted, even if you were higher than a kite.

But some of you—and I won't name names—have been much too frank and liberal with your views, and some of you apparently tossed out way too many scriptural references for these freethinkers. They are slamming the door on your fingers over at queermergent dotcom; now there will be "other places for you to express these views".

Check out this incoherent announcement:

Commenting Policy

i have received a number of comments that have been inappropriate for this conversation. These comments will NOT be posted. If you do not have anything helpful to further the conversation along, the comments will NOT be posted and will be DELETED, as i have comment moderation enacted on this blog. Honest questions are welcome but preaching and spewing scripture in a an obnoxious way will not be tolerated. If you vehenmently disagree, fine, but there are other places for you to express these views. THIS space is a safe place for honest dialogue and conversation between those in the LGBTQ community, our allies, and those seeking to engage us in an honest manner.

And queermergence is building a kind of bunker/spider hole thingy. There will now be a secret place where planners and networkers can peep, mutter, and whisper in safety.

I gather it will be much like the forts I built as a child: a secluded place where I could plan my insurrections and eat all the candy I wanted. Not really a community kind of place.

We hope that this site develops as an ‘invite only' safe space for LGBTQ persons involved in the emerging church to network and plan for an international gathering. As some on this list work within traditional church structures, we do ask for confidentiality regarding this site and its content.

Obviously we will want to keep this just between us; confidentiality is essential.

My hidden ambition is to live outside under the stars, damp with dew, reading holy texts in forgotten alley ways, chalking my pithy sayings on the sidewalks and boulevards after hours. When I am not needed by my family and compatriots, I will steal away to that secret and abandon place to build my castle in the trash, cherishing every piece.

--- Mark Scandrette, March 2009

Some of you might remember Mark Scandrette from the Three Stooges tour called "The Church Basement Roadshow" which bombed everywhere a surprisingly small number of religious dropouts were desperate for a good time. Tony Jones has since high-tailed it for Beliefnet and Doug Pagitt is running for political office. (Whether the abuse of the trombone continues I cannot say.) Mark, on the other hand, continues his making of a life in the way of Jesus by writing numbered pieces of doggerel. The epigraph you just read is Saying of the Wanderer #21.

I gather Op. 21 might have been written at a time when his family did not need him, and for that reason I'm surprised it isn't a bit longer. I would have thought we'd get something roughly the length of War and Peace.

But why?—the sensitive reader is asking himself—why are we being reminded of this Dumpster Duke? What terrible crime did we commit? What orphanage did we burn down? What litter of shivering kittens did we throw down a well? What possible purpose could be served by reposting his drivel? Couldn't we be just as edified with a picture of an urban pigeon eating a wrinkly French fry?

Well, maybe, but our art department doesn't have such a picture on file.

Besides, I thought I would show you what passes for relevant these days. This is poetry for the postmodern Jesus follower. That's why I put the date underneath it. So you would know.

If I didn't tell you this was cutting edge poetry appropriate to the 21^st Century imagination, you might well guess that it was a cheap imitation of the beat poetry found in the middle of the previous century. Yah, the 40s and 50s: Harry S. Truman vs. Thomas E. Dewey! In nine years Spud Melin will manufacture and market the hula-hoop.

Incidentally, if you want to get a sense of real beat poetry, of passionate engagement with the grit of life, uninformed spiritual appetites and social insurrection, read William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac.

I say this to remind us of something very, very important. Not everyone who is hawking relevance can be trusted to know what is relevant. Reading Scandrette is as hip as listening to John Dowland's Seaven Teares for lute and viols.

And why is this important to us?

It is important because everywhere you turn these days someone is telling you that we need to speak to the postmodern seeker. We have to speak his language; even if that means profanity.

So why is this new church so ineloquent? And it's not just Scandrette. I cite Scandrette because he is so derivative and pathetic that even fundagelicals can spot the joke. We were promised "intentional communication with God through sacred acts of prayer, communion, worship, art, music, silence and meditation on Scripture". Sacred? What we got was goofy hand-me-downs which no one wants to wear because he will be laughed at on the school bus and he will probably lose his lunch money.

There is something very wrong here, whether it is Scandrette's fake beat poetry, fundamentalism's Lawrence Welk schlock or evangelicalism's boy bands. No one is seeking this stuff! This isn't a big secret anymore. This is not "a new song".

This is just playing in yesterday's garbage.

Remonstrans began four years ago tomorrow, and much has changed in that time.

In 2005 I had very little knowledge of blogging and I certainly had no inkling that this exchange would go on for 208 weeks, provoke 528 posts—and I have no idea how many comments. (That's not counting the contributions of my colleagues.)

Things progressed better than expected; our influence spread to parts of the world I didn't even know satellites flew over, and world leaders called incessantly to grill me for my secrets on winning friends and strengthening old political alliances. And the bags of money piled up to the barrel vaults. I was able to acquire a modest retirement fastness pictured below [photo snapped this year before the Christmas decorations were taken down], and many was the night I paced the western parapets trying to decide which fresh religious indecency illustrated most eloquently the faithlessness of this century.

(My wife had no idea she would have to dust so many balustrades and iron so many pajamas.)

On the other hand, much has stayed exactly the same.

It seems that the church has become quite accomplished at drifting through the Seven Seas, its scurvied shipmates brandishing nerf cutlasses and bragging about what effective seamen they'd become. The ship always comes to life when a new poll is released and everyone meets on the quarterdeck to decide who should wear the albatross.

High seas; good times.

And of course the completely indigestible devotional life of the believer continues: the booklets, the tapes, the vibes, the CDs, the soul patches, the skits, the ditties, the couches, the speculations about the eschaton, the conferences, the resolutions....

And the institutions keep grinding out new justifications for their existence and we, like devoted worshippers of Moloch, keep giving them our children.

Evangelicalism, I read recently, is more of a "religious mood". Can you believe that? A mood. It's a pessimism, a longing, some mystical moments, a conviction that things are redeemed through suffering and a passion to make a difference.

It is a spiritual sensibility that includes pessimism about human nature, a longing to be converted from the worst of our selves, mystical moments when Jesus Christ is experienced, a conviction that nothing can be redeemed without suffering and that resurrection is ultimate reality, and a passion to make a difference in the world.

So this is the faith of St. Paul, is it?

Anyway, I can't promise that Remontrans will be around four more years, but for however long it lasts I hope it will continue to reject the spirit of the age and oppose the philistines.

The Internet Monk recently wrote a piece predicting the collapse of evangelicalism. He gives it ten years. I honestly thought his post was intended as a kind of Monty Python's Flying Circus historical comedy; I didn't think it was very funny and it certainly was not properly documented, so I blew it off. The Christian Science Monitor and a few other internet swill shops picked it up, which I thought was cute.

One evangelical took exception to the notion and set himself the task of predicting evangelicalism's looming survival.

That's when it started to get a little funnier.

Mark Galli is one of the vacant drones over at Christianity Today. Senior managing editor, actually. He started out his piece by telling us that Michael Spencer [the Monk] sees the Roman and Orthodox communions benefiting from the exodus of evangelicals. Here's what Galli said:

Spencer might have added Anglicanism as a beneficiary. As an Anglican, I wish it were true. But in my experience, the number of evangelicals entering these communions is not as great as those leaving these communions for evangelical faith. I don't know of any studies that have, or even can, measure this phenomenon accurately. So we might have to simply debate our impressions.

Fascinating brainwork here. I wondered two things: 1) how much Mark Galli is pulling down per annum for his important work, and 2) how stupid does one have to be to get hired as a junior managing editor at CT?

Had Spencer said evangelicals were fleeing to Anglicanism, I could see why Galli might want to quarrel. But since Spencer said no such thing, one wonders how desperate (or lonely) a man Galli must be to make this response a matter for discussion. And on top of that, Galli concedes he doesn't know of any studies that support anyone's impressions about the number of evangelicals becoming Anglican, Roman or Orthodox. So Galli is taking issue with something Spencer never said and for which he has no evidence to support either side—assuming there were two sides.

I think I wasted part of my life reading that third paragraph.

From the fifth paragraph:

For all our cultural influence and religious impact, evangelicals are "like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales ... [they] are as nothing before him, they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness." This quotation, from Isaiah 40:15-17, refers to "the nations," but it applies just as well to the "evangelical nation."

While I am impressed that Mr. Galli could find this quotation in his Bible (or that he has a Bible to find stuff in), it hardly makes a relevant point. It seems to me that Spencer is not intending to show the significance (or lack of significance) of evangelicalism as compared to God, his piece has to do with the movement's significance in this historical moment. No movement when compared to God himself carries more weight than dust on the scales. All the movements throughout the whole of human history multiplied by ten thousand are still "as nothing before him".

And Galli goes on like this for 16 paragraphs!

Here's another one:

In this sense, the history of the Christian faith is littered with evangelicals, from the apostle Paul to Antony of the Desert, from Francis of Assisi to Teresa of Avila, from the monastic movement to camp meetings, from Beth Moore to Mimi Haddad, from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association to Evangelicals for Social Action.

Oy, vey!

I can assure both these chaps of one thing: evangelicalism is not going to collapse. It is not going to collapse for the same reason the Hindenburg is not going to burst into flames.

If anyone wants insight into the failure of evangelicalism, I could suggest nothing more informative than three easily-obtained documents:

No Place For Truth, by David Wells
Evangelical Affirmations, May 1989
An Evangelical Manifesto, May 2008

and for a brilliant exposé on the quality of thought amongst evangelical apologists:

http://www.markgalli.com/galliblog/?p=125

Another non-scholar, this one from the other end of the spectrum from Matt Olson (but a soulmate in intellectual exertions) steps forward with some insight into what God likes.

God likes movies. Loves, actually. He loves them.

Brian Godawa says "the dominant means through which God communicates His truth is visually dramatic stories". Brian surveyed the scriptures and calculated that thirty percent "of the Bible is expressed through rational propositional truth and laws". So he subtracted 30% from 100% and came up with 70% which was, "therefore" [his word] not "rational propositional truth and laws".

If you have a scientific calculator you can crunch the numbers for yourself.

Presumably there are only those two (mutually exclusive, hence the math) means of conveying truth:

       1) rational propositional truth and laws
       2) visually dramatic stories

and "modernist Christianity has neglected to understand how much more important visual imagery, drama and storytelling are to God". "More important". Some pretty close reasoning is going on here, and I wouldn't want you to miss it. I'm guessing maybe if God thought his Revelation was extremely important he would have used visually dramatic stories 100% of the time.

The next step in his reasoning is to equate movies with "visually dramatic stories". There are no movies in the Bible that textual scholars or archeologists have been able to identify; no scripts have been found and no directors are known to have worked either in Israel or Judah, so dreams, illustrations, visions, analogies, types, poems and parables will have to serve as a justification for "movies".

Godawa says that all those miracles God performed for his people were "sensate visual displays of God's glory". And by sensate I am reasonably sure he doesn't mean sensate; he means sensuous. No Evangelist tells us that "signs and wonders" were ever sensate.

I'm thinking that by Godawa's reasoning Oscar Wilde was a blockbuster in Heaven. I know he is a favorite among fundamentalists, and those people are pretty strict about what entertainments will "check".

So all you fundamentalists who love movies can ignore what you where told by St. Augustine, Tertullian, Pascal, and all the Puritans. You can follow this simpleton. What did those guys know? And men like Dante and Milton failed to appreciate visually dramatic stories.

Frank Peretti, Janette Oke, Thomas Kinkade and Brian Godawa: the winds of a true Renaissance are blowing.

Things are falling apart on this terrestrial ball; things that cannot be fixed.

I have been accused of being pessimistic. (I know, I know; where's that coming from?) And there is a class of people out there which will tolerate bad news only as prelude to a glib, uncomplicated solution. I myself have occasionally even been called a curmudgeon!

It's rare, but whenever it happens it hurts me deeply.

I blame television for this. I sometimes think that TV is not so bad for its gratuitous sex and violence—which by its very nature is compelled to shock us to continue achieving its end. With that shock might come recognition and repugnance. But where the idiot box really destroys the soul is in its facile description of a problem and its brainless promise of a solution.

Anyway, I recently chatted with someone who wondered what would have to take place before liturgical reform could take place. I told him I thought maybe a Vesuvian pyroclastic flow might do the trick. Obviously I'm way too much of a Pollyanna to qualify as a curmudgeon. Any qualified volcanologist will tell you there aren't enough volcanos in the world.

But I do think some preliminary tremors, some wisps of white smoke, might come as signs of hope.

When we begin to take note of our heritage and when we recognize our obligation to that heritage, perhaps then something useful can happen.

There is this old, creaky article on the web by Calvin Stapert which might help. This was posted over eight years ago, but most of you know by now that if you want some swank, cobbled nonsense, you need to click on Christianity Today dotcom. I think this remembrance of JSB's thought might help you sort through our mess.

And I will remind you of some truths voiced on these premises. A solution might emerge, d.v., when:

     a) we dedicate ourselves to art
     b) we elevate our theological knowledge, and
     c) we perceive that we are rooted in a tradition

We can repeat the twaddle about being relevant, but we know after 60 years of pursuing relevance that we haven't got the stamina. Relevance means nothing without a context in our tradition. Any change worthy of our attention will necessarily be a synthesis of what is fresh with what is permanent.

P.S. And lest bmp (or any of our readers) misapprehend the meaning of this poem, I can tell you it was written by George Herbert. George's mother was a patron of John Donne. This graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, and beloved rector at Bemerton also said, as Stapert reminds us: "With my utmost art I praise thee". The thee spoken of in that sentence is presumably the same one with whom Ron Hamilton and Clif Boyce claim some acquaintance.

Go figure.

We've been examining from several angles what art does in worship. Of the many failures of Novelty Christianity, I think the atrophy of art is probably the most significant; certainly the most conspicuous. There was a time when "the chief obstacle to the Christian religion [lay] in the sphere of the intellect", and I think in that day Machen spoke eloquently to the problem. Today our problem is somewhat different. It's not that we enjoy a purer stream intellectually, even in those back-eddies where comparatively more intellectual rigor exists—if only in the memory—there is a consequent problem.

It is not just that we no longer think about God as we ought: even false prophets blather on about "the normality of dysfunction" in American Christianity. Now it's worse, now even the orthodox cannot feel toward him as we once did. Thinking properly about God involves more than orthodoxy, and all those who spoke to us of orthopraxy and orthopathy certainly cannot lead us out of this desert. We hear people suggesting remedies in the form of "fellowship gathering power", "vision casting", "spiritual formation", or some cure for "hurry sickness". We listen to piffle about agendas and organizational solutions arising from "newly emerging forms of our life together". Imagine Dante or Bunyan or Milton talking like this.

Out went the poet and in came the scold. We sowed to the wind and we reaped a toxic cloud.

Monday I posted a hymn which I think vividly illustrates the problem. I appreciate the responses we've gotten and most of them are helpful. I think some of you offered more particular answers to a more general question.

Which is perfectly fine.

But let me point you toward the forest.

The point I wanted to illustrate was somewhat broader. I agree with someone who said that the ocean as a metaphor for God's love has become a bit stale. I can understand that, but only to a point. I don't think the metaphor is bad, just ineptly and thoughtlessly reproduced. Actually in this song, I think it is apt and powerful. And it only starts with the ocean.

The metaphors are the ocean, the flood, fountains, floodgates and mighty rivers. This is more epic than the Flood. What the writer helps us imagine is an effusive grace. Grace and love, like mighty rivers poured incessant from above. I love that line. Torrents of judgment have become cataracts of grace. But where has all that water gone in the last two stanzas? They are dry as a bone. They are plodding homilies compared to the first two stanzas.

I am not suggesting that this is the worst of all mistakes songwriters can make: this is a perfectly usable song. I have spoken freely and eagerly about some atrocities which are genuinely offensive and which consistently fail to reward reflection.

But what I think is interesting about Here Is Love is the stark abandonment of useful images in favor of a very mundane exhortation, especially the last stanza.

It's not that I am opposed to exhortation; certainly some hortatory stanzas might follow which preserve the imagery and strengthen the whole. But notice how at some level they fail so spectacularly.

It seems we cannot make people worship. The only thing we seem competent to do is to keep them from worshiping; all we can succeed at is blandness. If God is awesome, don't you think we could find a way to express that to one another?

Art is how this was accomplished in the past.

Some have been alarmed to read that there is art in our worship. They should not feel anxious: art is a good and natural thing. It is as natural to find art in man as it is to find a river in a valley, and art is an absolutely essential thing when it comes to talking about God. They would know this if they read their Bibles.

We think the Oxford English Dictionary stumbles across an important truth when it calls art a skill that results from knowledge and practice. David, Isaiah and Hannah had skills that resulted from knowledge and practice. We would know this if we'd read them. Religious philistines have learned nothing from them, from creation or from history. God made our lives to stand over us with a whip and a prod demanding our scrutiny. Some do not look because they do not care.

It is by nothing other than numbness of heart that we attempt to worship without art; without skill and without knowledge of expression.

There is no such thing as an anesthetized worshiper, and for those in danger of becoming anesthetized while at church, we have a question of art for you. What happened with this song? What broke? What went seriously wrong, and how might someone with skill repair it?

Here Is Love Vast As The Ocean

Here is love vast as the ocean,
Loving kindness as the flood;
When the Prince of life, our ransom
Shed for us His precious blood
Who His love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing His praise?
He can never be forgotten
Throughout Heaven's eternal days.

On the Mount of Crucifixion
Fountains opened deep and wide;
Through the floodgates of God's mercy
Flowed a vast and gracious tide.
Grace and love, like mighty rivers
Poured incessant from above.
And Heaven's peace and perfect justice
Kissed a guilty world in love.

Let us all His love accepting,
Love Him ever all our days.
Let us seek His Kingdom only,
And our lives be to His praise.
He alone shall be our glory,
Nothing in the world we see.
He has cleansed and sanctified us;
He Himself has set us free.

In His truth He does direct me,
By His Spirit through His Word.
And His grace my need is meeting
As I trust in Him, my Lord.
All His fullness He is pouring
In His love and power in me
Without measure
Full and boundless,
As I yield myself to Thee.

I was going through an old file box last week and found the official publication of one of the schools I attended. I cherish a delicate hope that this school is concealing every record of my association with it. I'm fairly certain it is: enough time has passed and I have sent them no money. I feel reasonably certain that if I were to visit the campus today I would find no statue of me on the quad, and if there were a statue, I'm sure my toes would not be worn smooth from many kisses. But in spite of my mother's dying wish, I regard this as a good thing. The fewer people who know of my connections with fundamentalist and evangelical institutions the less stressed I'll be and the fewer pots of Taylors of Harrogate Organic Chamomile tea my wife will have to brew.

But that's about all of my shabby past I am prepared to concede today.

The school published a paper regularly which I read only occasionally and filed very rarely. I filed this one for sentimental reasons. I had friends who were commiserating over the way their service institutions abused their trust according to a schedule suggested to them by a cesium atomic clock. I remember listening to their reasons for thinking that these institutions were a good idea. I remember these as halcyon days filled with fervent diatribes, silly ideas and serpentine ambitions.

Following a short description of pros and cons, the writer of this article applied some lessons from history. One had to do with the nature of power, but he also wrote this:

History should remind us that when a society begins to drift, doctrine is usually the last evidence of that drift. The churches must not suppose that professions of orthodoxy are proof against drift.

(Ironic that that lesson should have found its way into that school paper while under the administration of that president. But that takes us down a very different unpleasant path.)

What we had here was a brilliant example of misdirection; illusionists and spies could have learned much from fundagelicals. Here was a movement obnoxious in its reminding everyone of its fidelity to a doctrinal statement even as it savaged some other necessary but undervalued virtue.

More than ten years after those words were published I heard a pastor recount a confrontation with the president of a mission agency over reports of adultery and embezzlement on the field. A decade later we have the plays of Wilde and the ditties of Pettit and a Bumpkin Hymnody.

It seems to have escaped our interest that statements of faith tend not to be acts of devotion. Of the two, the latter is more difficult to retrieve once it has been lost.

Hostile readers will now leap to the inference that we are cavalier about orthodoxy. These would be the readers who have not understood what we have already said about Machen or Tozer or Wells.... We are not cavalier about orthodoxy, we are dismissive of institutions intended to preserve it, institutions neglectful of what is good, true and beautiful.

How many ways are there to drift? and given a choice, which ways should have exercised our outrage first?  In this respect I think we are all being "amished". We are more and more excluded (or more and more withdrawing ourselves) from the eccentricities, abnormalities and deformities of this very American religion.

Whether it is Matt Olson or Tony Jones or Hugh Hollowell or Richard Foster, diversity is not really diversity, community is not really community, and faith is not really faith.

Willkommen! I hope you know how to hook up the horses and get where you want to be.

This week I found a doorknob hanger on my front entry. There was a picture of what looked like a hotel headboard and two sets of pillows. Below the photo was written: "DO NOT DISTURB—stay in bed on Sunday mornings! Attend Lake Pointe Church Saturday night at 6 p.m."

I thought this was most helpful. I find that after a week of lugging around a cross and repetitive self-denial I am sometimes too worn out to drag my weary bones into church for their 11 a.m. Sunday service. Clearly some dear shepherd of the flock is holding my needs close to his heart.

If it turns out that this church has adequate parking, reclining theater seats and cup holders, I think I might go hearken to some shyster telling me how to become all that God wants me to be.

Also this week I heard someone expressing his wish that the entire church be more diverse in its liturgy. This too sounds helpful. Diversity is something we all long for.

I was blessed to be born into a non-fundamentalist home where a respectful distance was maintained between the children and honky-tonk piano-bangers. (Emergence hadn't yet come into existence due to an insufficient number of idiots in the population.) It wasn't until I got a bit older that I realized liturgical diversity meant permitting the most banal twaddle in the church house.

It occurred to me that it would be a rich blessing if your kids were raised along the same lines I was raised, where diversity meant more than an excuse to savage tender sensibilities; where the pieties of past Christians were considered rather than the shallow self-interests of contemporary reprobates.

For those of you who might care to try real diversity, check this out: One Thousand Years of Ukrainian Sacred Music.

I don't imagine most of you will like it, and I don't suppose anything here will find its way into a contemporary "hymnbook", but it will leave you prepared to discuss diversity with the next kid you see in church with a bass guitar.

Monday we showed you one of the many dead-ends of modern Christianity. It would not be inaccurate to say that Christendom has become a maze with the exit boarded up, plastered over, painted, and holding a picture of Aunt Thistledrawers. You can go anywhere you want, but you will not get anywhere you want to be.

If you took the time to read "Magenta", you observed a resentful black woman share with us how, as a bisexual, she suffered the slings and arrows of outraged lesbians for what they called her hypersexuality. Magenta cannot make it as a spouse. She lacks what it takes to a) form the simplest, most intimate and most rewarding of communities, and b) exercise Christian graces toward one person of her own choosing. The Apostle taught us how to behave as husbands and wives even when the choice of a spouse is not ours. We have in Magenta a bi-sexual (perhaps even an omni-sexual) who is not limited to the members of half the population; she reserves the right to date and wed from among the total number of hominids. Still she cannot succeed.

That's gotta leave some nasty bruises on one's self-image.

And she's 45, so the chances of a success late in life seem remote, and the likelihood of a rewarding motherhood and grandmotherhood even more remote.

So this is the basket case that storms through a church door demanding love, approval and acceptance. And there are places—I will not call them churches—where the indigenous peoples think they have love, approval and acceptance to offer. Like here.

Here is Hugh Hollowell having his first communion. His first communion is not a remembrance of the violent death of his Lord and a symbol of a precious Covenant between God and Man but a place where "we sang songs of oppression and liberation together" on a Pride weekend.

One could almost feel sorry for Magenta if it is through the doors of Hollowell's church she should storm. Here is a place where they will celebrate—and even validate—her very real and painful failures, but not a place where she can find the greatest love and acceptance mankind has ever witnessed.

One could even feel sorry if Magenta should storm through the doors of Clif Boyce's church.

As it has turned out, Novelty Christianity offers precious little to anyone. Contemporary Christianity has no more to offer either to the sexual deviant or the dreamers of Clif Boyce's Honky-tonk Heaven than the New Testament extends: the washing that follows repentance. This is the one "personal reality" that matters.

Contrary to what Brian McLaren claims, everything cannot change: the only Christian community worthy of the name includes the saints of the past: the total number of degenerates who have thrown themselves on the mercy of a forgiving God and pilgrims slogging it out for the Celestial City.

It may be a narrow way, but it does have an exit.

We slowly drive by another of the many Emergent culs de sac.

Here is the end of "community". A movement that began as a plea for generosity, acceptance and diversity now decays into an adolescent demand for indifference on the part of others. Like Marie, like Trucker Frank, there is no personal deficiency the "love of Christ" must not endorse. The church must validate all their personal defects.

The problem is always other people and their "boxes". Here you have yet another resentful woman who cannot build a community with one other person in order to form a simple marriage. In this she has failed twice. And emerging from this personal failure she demands a new kind of community.

It is hard to imagine a more aggressive egoism. And there are precious few who can fully "appreciate her reality".

The problem is never their own, it is always "the paradigms people try to confine you to".

Finally, at the ripe old age of 45, i've come to accept that most people aren't going to be comfortable with the fact that I don't fit their boxes; and that I will never fit them. So be it. I've stopped proclaiming or explaining myself to people, unless they are among the precious few I feel can truly and fully appreciate my reality, whatever it is.

[...]

I have been in churches of all stripes, organizations, bands, and multiple intimate relationships, but I never found on anywhere near this scale the profound acceptance I have among these people whom I see only once a month, for the most part. It has been literally life-changing.

Our calendar has chosen to concatenate its horrors by putting Friday the 13^th and Valentine's on consecutive days. But I will not be intimidated; I shall return serve with a little heat.

Horror #1 solemnizes Maria's love for her sugardaddy god.

I purchased a beautiful 2-toned burgundy/gold pickup truck back in December. When I first saw it on the lot, I never dreamed it would be mine-but God has a way of spoiling me! The day before Valentine's Day, I was driving home from work and suddenly heard a loud CRACK. I knew that I'd taken my first rock and would probably have a horrible scratch on my vehicle. When I looked for the damage I found it on the windshield, just left and well below my field of vision. When I studied the hit, I realized it was in a heart-shaped design. What others may see as a fault is now an awesome sign to me-a reminder of my Savior's love. As I drive, I not only thank God for this wonderful truck, I thank him for this symbol he's etched in the glass just for me!

Horror #2 is the honky-tonk Blessed Hope of an influential fundamentalist church musician. It falls, unsurprisingly, a tad short of the ardent anticipations found in The Celestial Country, but it's a hit with east coast worshipers.

Horror #3 comes from Oaf & Twinky, two renowned American ecclesiolologistics experts known more commonly by their stage names, Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones. This is a bit of imbecile improv in the shape of some post-platonic flossfy. As they astutely perceive, "all sorts of crazy stuff happens".

So there you have it, saintly reader: faith, hope and love in reverse order. Christianity American Style.

Happy Holidays.

For those of you who haven't been following the fortunes of the emergent church, you might want to give this a listen. But do pay attention, there's a lot of english on the ball. (You know the emergent church has already given up when its spokesblokes tell you it "is not giving up." I believe this is the moment the coroner hangs the toe tag on the corpse.)

More opinions can be found thither and yon. Most are amusing, but all are instructive. It's become the story of the incredible imploding deconstruction crew. It would be funny on its own merits, but on its own merits the part is not as informative as the whole. It was like watching a bunch of hippies trying to set up NASA. Nothing's been properly deconstructed yet, and what sprouted as an emergence has turned into a departure.

What began as a vibe, an ethos, a website, and a few cheesy YouTube videos has become a comical collection of knit caps and soul patches pretending to understand biblical narrative. Incidentally, if you want to sample their exegetical skills, read this.

I think for many of us we read the scriptures and pass over verses and sometimes whole chapters and not realize the explicit graphic sexual and violent content that is found within them. With the help of Queer Theory and a bit of Poststructrualist pizzazz, I seek to disrupt a normal reading of Revelation 17 as an attempt to bring about more dialogue and to help others to see the divinely inspired horror that lies within some of our sacred biblical passages.

Particularly entertaining is the complaint—I think it was from Tony—that, having refused to define themselves they can now complain that their opponents misrepresented their positions. Gotta tellya, that's about as poignant as a rubber crutch.

And we hear again the claim that it is not about the movement, it is about the idea.

Here we had a media fad, a collection of couches, some very stale philosophical pretentions, some wobbly insights into the doing of "deep church", and an open source theology...until differences of opinion began cropping up; then it started looking like a bunch of Baptist women arguing over whose Tupperware^TM it is.

But we should not be amused for long. Something new is coming and I'm sure everyone will again focus on the silly novelties and overlook the significant continuities in American evangelicalism. From fundamentalism's Billy Sunday side-show heyday, through evangelicalism's crazyquilt of agendas and programs to emergents' open-source apostasy, there is one line that haunts them all:

Despite all we can do, the desire to know and the love of beauty cannot be entirely stifled, and we cannot permanently regard these desires as evil.

There is a relationship between knowledge and piety that bears a second look.

Somebody really should get started on that, y'know.

Thirty years ago Richard Foster wrote Celebration of Discipline, and things have proceeded from there: the weathered saints who call CT the magazine of evangelical conviction with a straight face have published an edited version of a talk Foster gave to celebrate its birthday.

Bit of a hiccup, though. "Finally, a general cultural malaise touches us all to one extent or another." I must giggle at this point. Evangelical "culture" has been flat-lining for decades and Dr. Foster writes malaise on the patient's chart.

"We"—and by we I take it he refers to himself and the doddering chatterboxes at CT—have "become accustomed to the normality of dysfunction". They—and by they I mean not me—needed to "revive the great conversation about the formation of the soul" and "incarnate this reality into the daily experience of the individual, congregational, and cultural life".

(Usually when I am dealing with this much gas I like to have firemen standing by with their hoses all connected and their helmets strapped on, but today I'm feeling pretty lucky.)

It appears to Richard that this Thirty Years' Chat has been somewhat more successful than the actual incarnation of the reality into the daily experience of the individual, congregational and cultural life.

So, what they're asking you to do for the next thirty years is roll up your sleeves and give it a bit more wiggle. The trick, Foster thinks, can be found in what he calls "fellowship gathering power".

If in our churches we do not do the hard work of spiritual formation, we will not get spiritually formed people. So this is a vital arena of labor, and I am speaking of both congregations as traditionally understood, as well as newly emerging forms of our life together.

This will involve three things. Naturally.

First, you'll just have to do something about your "hurry sickness". Second, you have a Christian entertainment industry masquerading as worship. And finally, the consumer mentality dominates your American religious scene.

So there you have it! The "spiritual formation agenda" as articulated by Richard Foster in the pages of Christianity Today.

An agenda, for those who might have forgotten, is a list or program of things to be done or considered. We should remind ourselves, every thirty years or so, that spiritual maturation is not achieved by following an agenda. An agenda is the very last consideration of a genuine pilgrim.

The first refreshing thing about reading the Prophets, Apostles and Martyrs on the topic of spiritual formation is that they don't write like Richard Foster and they don't write for CT. Real prophets, apostles, and true witnesses of the disciplined life have a much firmer grip on reality.

So rather than suffer this symbiotic relationship between the piffle-mongers, movie reviewers, church growth witch doctors, and incessant advertisers on 465 Gundersen Drive, why don't we get down to brass tacks here?

Let's dump the dysfunctional prose, put forward a clear statement of orthodoxy and acquire a reputation for moral rectitude.

It'll surprise everybody.

Heinrich Friedrich Ludwig Rellstab bobbed along on a beautiful lake, waxed romantic, and blithely misnamed a Beethoven sonata. I suppose a certain amount of dishonor should fall on his head for that, but I think what is even more dishonorable is that generation after generation after generation of performers should preserve that mischaracterization by simply not taking the composer at his word. Now what seems like a casual and harmless personal observation turns out to have obscured a great work of the imagination. Millions of listeners have imagined a nocturne when the composer described a death scene, and having misunderstood the part, they could not possibly have rightly understood the whole.

For most people this is a very small thing, and given the many other inhumanities pianists have inflicted on mankind, it seems hardly worth mentioning. After all, the pianist is just sharing what the sonata means to him.

Right?

I hope that by now we begin to get some sense of the horror of liv