"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.