Emergents have told us all about the blessings of "conversation" and the benefits of "open-sourcing" on the Internet. It's been over a decade and we haven't noticed any benefits or blessings worth jotting down on a napkin, but we like to keep our eyes peeled and our minds open.

So this week we were amused to witness a bizarre but enthusiastic exchange between ardent men and women of meager intelligence who desire a better world. They developed their views on topics they supposed were relevant to the discussion, and they did that for us here.

Mike Morrell, a celebrated Emergent dunce and occasional Remonstrans visitor, concedes he's "done a poor job at unfolding [his] hermeneutic". We'll all agree, I think, that Mike has not exaggerated in the slightest; he did an atrocious job. But now he's trying to fix that with a 1,764 word essay wherein he spreads out assorted religious trifles, ideological knickknacks and theological fetishes in something he must believe to be a helpful arrangement.

He speaks of Jeremy Rifkin, Walter Wink, John Howard Yoder, René Girard, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dame Julian and Paul Young. I hope this clarifies Mike's hermeneutic for you; it strikes me as an appropriate summation of everything he said, everything he thought he said, everything he wished he'd said, or anything he might have meant by what he said.

Normally a misinformed person with incoherent fantasies culled from selected readings tends not to shed much light, but if there is a first time for it to happen, we should like for it to be here on Remonstrans.

You might also take to heart the insights of the soft and serious Sally Apokedak. Her concern is that we offer something to a suffering, tired, dying world. You can judge for yourself what this exchange has offered to a suffering, tired, dying world, and whether that suffering, tired, dying world should be grateful.

I leave you with a few personal faves from Mike's meanderings. The first is about an eschaton in our mist, and the second is about the latent energies of consciousness we might discover in inanimate matter. What a dirty, rotten shame we get no promise of the latent energies of consciousness we might discover in Mike's brain.

I know that it's a paradox: The suffering and mystery of this life, combined with what I hear when my soul is still - that reality of the ever-present eschaton in our mist, [sic] echoing Dame Julian's Showings from God: "Sin is necessary, but all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well."

I think we're on the cusp of the next stage of human development, where our circle of care extends to humanity and then to non-human sentient life. Then we might discover that inanimate matter is itself charged with the latent energies of consciousness - the very heavens declaring the glory of God, as it were.

I remember in junior high school I used to think that the history of human thought would turn out to be one sorry sequence of intellectual spasms at the end of which man would be forced to accept the truth; that each gimcrack lie and any vain falsehood would be exposed as unworkable and would have to be abandoned. That is when, I thought, mankind would see the whole, trace the course of his descent, and at that moment every knee would bow and every tongue would confess.

What was I thinking?!

The only plausible defense I might offer is that I was a teenager and this was the Sixties: I never smoked marijuana, but I did ride in friend's and co-worker's cars. I probably inhaled. I'm hoping I can blame second-hand pot for this dereliction of reason.

Now, of course, I know better. The history of human thought has been a descent into a thick fog. Clarity is the last thing we can expect.

Kids today will not be able to blame second-hand pot because they have John Caputo, a tedious noise, being interviewed by Callid Keefe-Perry, a dreary racket. I didn't get to hear this back in the day. Anyone who thinks philosophy is a way to enlightenment is wheezing on something stronger than a nearby doobie. Callid sums up his interview by saying:

Man, was it amazing. The entire time he was like building up energy as if he was about to kind of take out into the, like, atmosphere of theology. It was incredible.

Getting "out into the, like, atmosphere of theology" just never happened. Grope with John and Callid through the thick fog of Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Heidegger, Kearney, Lacan, and Lyotard. And ask yourself again why "progressive theology doesn't point to anything important".

Pretend anything Caputo says makes sense. I dare you.

The last few posts were intended to bring us to a comment on our times. We interrupted ourselves with Mike Morrell's complaint—or should I say—we were ably assisted in making that point by Mike himself.

Mike then took offense at our interruption and tweeted: "So apparently it's now cool to make fun of mental health difficulties in the Reformed Discernmentalist..." and that tweet accounts for the weekend flutter of outraged illiterates and pottymouths who came by to give us all a demonstration of what they understand to be a commitment to God in the way of Jesus.

Those gifted enough to read the English language will have discovered that we were not "making fun of" Mike's mental health difficulties. If we wanted to pass comedic judgment on Mike's mental difficulties, it would not have been fair to limit ourselves to a single post of 519 words. In addition to which, the subject of Mike's mental health difficulties was never raised at any of the meetings of the Reformed Discernmentalists I ever attended.

We were marking his own observations and his own behavior. First, he connected his malady with the times he claims to be "keenly interested in and dispositionally calibrated toward". Second, he invited open source psychological advice on the internet. We not only linked to Mike's post, we even quoted him. Even the title directed the reader's attention not to an illness but to the sort of treatment being sought.

And this is not an aberration. Hugh Hollowell is also experiencing problems:

I feel lethargic. Listless. Depression is not the right word - but it is close. Very, very close. I feel overwhelmed. Out of control. Like I am sinking, and just dont have the energy to swim.

Notice the seventh comment by none other than Mike Morrell. He hopes at some later date to "compare madness", but a lot of the people who talk to him report that "Cod Liver Oil" is the way to go.

Cod liver oil.

But we should not let the hilarity of these examples distract us from the problem they illustrate. This is the world you live in. It is probably the only world your children will know; not that everyone is a crackpot of equal rank to Mike Morrell and Joel Hunter, but they certainly occupy a conspicuous place in the large assortment of crackpots. They certainly represent a threat to a coherent orthodoxy. People who get their dogma from Oprah, Animal Planet and the internet might not be the very best authorities on creation, the omniscience of God, sexuality, inspiration, or the qualifications of the clergy.

As we pointed out earlier, we cannot glibly dismiss current theological differences as "the finer points of theology". At stake are the essentials of at least three faiths; one would expect proponents of diversity to have picked up on this.

D. G. Hart has a relevant point: Machen was right and Noll was wrong in thinking that "contending for the cause" is unavoidable. Machen wasn't compelled by a desire to fight. History has shown that Machen was correct. And it is worse now than it was then.

So today we find ourselves in a special bind. Fundamentalism did (very much) discredit the ideas of a) contending for the faith and b) a trustworthy authority. It is hard to argue with anyone—from Fundamentalist to Emergent—who finds its record objectionable. And yet our moment certainly demands a contending for the faith.

Some fundamentalist organizations are trying to finesse this difficulty. One group resolved to meet the challenge by initiating relationships and establishing networks. That's not at all like taking a flyswatter to a tank battle, is it?

If contending for the faith is advocated by St. Jude, Martin Luther, J. Gresham Machen (and a few other notables), how will it be distinguished from the Fundamentalism of Curtis Lee Laws? Who will compare this madness?

Or will these differences just clarify themselves in the fog of war?

Our weekend fracas illustrates yet again that nothing ever changes—except perhaps to get even more ludicrous. It's been centuries now and the vicar of the Church of St. Sisyphus still hasn't had to come up with a fresh sermon.

Check out D. G. Hart on Assessing Machen. Machen was also a man accused of being too grumpy for his times. If only J. Gresham had been able to open up a relationship with his opponents and if only he'd tried to steer them in the right direction!

I do not think that we can avoid contending for his [Christ's] cause just because there are dangers to our souls in that contention.

In contending for Christ's cause there are most certainly dangers to the soul. As we have discussed. But as we reflect on the current congregation of heathens, we are compelled to ask again: Did the Fundamentalist Movement matter? If so, how?

Have the last 90 years been a total waste, or are there lessons we might learn from this long and dreary dance?

This was a week with some interesting juxtapositions. I was observing a discussion about whether Fundamentalism mattered. When one asks if the Fundamentalist Movement mattered, there are those who will leap to the conclusion that to reject the consequences of the Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy is to argue that it didn't matter. This is not a conclusion anyone should leap to.

Then there was this cartoon—which works less well as a cartoon than it does as evidence for a psychological evaluation, and one of the responses was posted by someone (dc3) muddling through life without a functioning brain. American churches, he said, "...argue the finer points of theology"?

Not even close. American churches are most definitely not arguing the finer points of theology. Twenty-first century churchmen wouldn't know a finer point of theology if it drove in wearing a red and white striped hat and speaking in droll rhymes.

There was a time when some were fascinated—obsessed even—by the ten toes of Nebuchadnezzar's image, or the seven heads with the ten horns, or the Four Beasts. That has gotten a bit old. If dc3 over on the nekkid ex-pastor could tear himself away from his Clarence Larkin dispensational charts long enough to look out the window, he would observe a church arguing over Creation, state-sanctioned sodomy, church-approved sodomy, the ordination of sodomites, the omnipotence and omniscience of God, feminism, open theology, the inspiration of scripture.... The entire Evangelical movement just recently bifurcated over a definition of the Gospel.

Do you know how stupid one would have to be to judge these things "finer points of theology"?

Some rebound-fundamentalists like Tony Jones are just as dogmatic and doctrinaire about, for instance, why the PCUSA should follow a particular church policy. This in spite of a two-millennium proscription. Whatever happened to Tony's commitment to open source theology and to valuing all voices in the conversation?

"Sure," you say, "but that's Tony Jones. Isn't he that dimwit who goes around blathering about animalism and church membership for clones and theology after Google?" Yes, that's the one. And where is he making these laughable statements? In a mimeographed church newsletter? In the Skunk Holler Baptist revival tent?

No, these are the hot topics in Mainline and Evangelical Christianity.

Which brings us back to the question you must answer: Did the Fundamentalist Movement matter? If it did, how so? Did it offer anything more than a caricature for illiterate people like dc3? If some group like the GARBC wanted to revitalize Fundamentalism, would a good man be implicated in the attempt?

Consider the distinction T. S. Eliot gave us. If a loss of belief in God is important, how significant is it that entire generations came to misplace proper feelings toward God?

We interrupt our regularly scheduled commentary for this emergency announcement: Mike needs your help. His fears are becoming a way of life for him.

You might remember Mike Morrell from the time he spent here on Remonstrans clarifying absolutely nothing. Mike is

"a wannabe mystic and prophet, husband and father, lover and friend. I live in Raleigh, NC, with my wife Jasmin and little girl, Jubilee Grace. I'm also a friend of God in the way of Jesus - like many other scoundrels, ne'er-do-wells, and would-be saints."

Mike claims to have a Master's degree in "Strategic Foresight", but that hasn't helped him with his problem. Mike presents with a phobic lifestyle.

"For growing numbers of us, anxiety, panic, and phobia are a way of life."

At first he had problems with highway driving, and, he says, "rather simultaneously with this, I was becoming an increasingly troublesome passenger."

He has experimented with a variety of remedies to no avail. They just made things worse.

"I'm trying some alternative therapies too bizarre to share with you just yet (though I certainly will if they yield results).

"I tend to think that, in all of this, I'm a living embodiment of the zeitgeist - full of the promise and perils of this age. We're living such intense lives now, sped up by technology, depthsof knowledge and empathy; its bound to take its psychological and physiological toll. Not all of us have adapted yet; not even (or especially not) those who are most keenly interested in, and dispositionally calibrated toward, these exciting and tumultuous changes happening in our cultural milieu. So we are God's misfit children and evolution's maladjusted innovators. God help us all. I only hope that my pain and eventual breakthrough can play some small part in the transfiguration of the world.

"Feel free to share your philosophies of anxiety and fear, or the crazy remedy that you hear worked for your cousin, though please understand that I'll give far more weight to phobic people themselves weighing in and sharing stories. With open source collaboration and the discover of Divine ubiquity amidst our mess, perhaps we'll all learn something in the process!"

As we all might anticipate, Mike places a fanciful interpretation on his malady: he is a "living embodiment of the zeitgeist". His intense life (sped up by technology) as well as his depth of knowledge and empathy has taken its toll—and not just on his unnatural prose! In spite of the fact that he is "dispositionally calibrated toward" these tumultuous changes in our cultural milieu, blah blah blabba blooey...he is rapidly coming unglued.

If you would like to help Mike in "the discover [sic] of Divine ubiquity amidst our mess", or if you would just like to share an interesting recipe with eye of newt or a fillet of a fenny snake, please leave the information here and we will forward it statim.

Let's help cure Mike so he can resume publishing his folderol over on zoecarnate dot wordpress dot com.

If you were ordained through an ad in the Rolling Stone Magazine or if you are connected in any way with the Emergent Church or if you have suffered severe head trauma at some point in your intellectual development, you might well benefit from the pulpit helps Joel C. Hunter offers here.

(This, by the way, is the quality of work being offered on the Biologos Forum. Please be warned.)

How does one explain the book of Genesis to modern parishioners, you may ask.

It is a very big risk for pastors in conservative evangelical churches to venture forth and say, "Look, let's be humble about this." But the other side of this is, we have, probably, I would say the vast majority of our people sitting in those pews, who are very uncomfortable with, "Look, it was six 24-hour days and if you think anything else, then you don't believe in Scripture." These are science teachers, these are scientists, these are bright businessmen and businesswomen and people who have been thinking and they just say, "Wait a minute, you know, God is God. God could choose any way he wants to create the world," and it doesn't make it any less marvelous, in fact it makes it more marvelous because he would be so intricate in its creation.

When people say, "Look, if the Scripture's not plain to the uneducated mind, if the Scripture can't be understood by what it says to somebody like me, then is the Resurrection really just a story? Is it just a metaphor for rising up out of constraints and overcoming the death that we face in everyday life and so on and so forth and was there really a Resurrection?" and so that's what's at risk for many people, and I don't, again, want to dismiss or denigrate those who hold a literalist view because they honestly believe that if they vary off that, then they themselves will have to question the truth of Scripture. You don't ever want to bully or somehow feel the hubris to call someone a name because they won't believe what you believe. And that goes for someone who is a literalist as well as somebody who is a liberal.

Having said that, there are those with a lot more capacity intellectually than they're using, and they need to be given permission to use that intellectual capacity to understand the fullness of God, and the great mystery of God.

The Regular Baptists had a regular conference in Schaumburg. On their website you can find lots of pictures of informally dressed people smiling, singing, preaching, gesturing with their hands, and riffling through sheaves of paper.

There were fun activities for young people which involved, it pains me to report, guitars. A lot of people wore badges, but I see nothing harmful in badges per se, so I won't belabor the point. Evidently a Princess put in an appearance; from what kingdom I was unable to determine.

But all was not as well as we might have supposed judging from these happy photos.

Kevin Mungons, managing editor of the Baptist Bulletin, hearkened back to a day when the name Fundamentalist meant something. There were, he claims, core doctrinal beliefs, lines were drawn, positions were staked, and ink was spilled.

But language is elastic, meaning is elusive, and words wear out. Kevin did not specify who was in charge of the language, the meanings and the words, but he did seem to be disturbed that they—the Fundamentalists—can't get along.

"These issues", Kevin says, "were addressed in the ‘Resolution on Revitalizing Biblical Fundamentalism'."

I'm pretty sure they weren't. But you can go here to try to find them for yourself. According to the document I was linked to, 355 words were used to explain (in the most general, unhelpful and imprecise terms possible) Regular Baptists' understanding of what the Fundamentalist movement was about. Then the next 134 words were used to express their intention to advance and defend doctrines, initiate relationships, and establish networks.

Some of our readers might have good reason to be irritated by this document, and they may start tossing around terms like balderdash, bafflegab and poppycock, but I would counsel them not to be too hasty; I think the word they are groping for is taradiddle.

Taradiddle is silly, pretentious speech or writing.

The word fundamentalist has always meant something, and it means something today. If you wish to know what the word means today, read church history, not GARB resolutions on revitalizing biblical fundamentalism. This movement needs historians, not apple polishers.

Some glib minds tend to want to equate fundamentalist with conservative. This is not helpful at all; in fact it's criminally misleading. Conservatives conserve something; fundamentalists weren't conservatives, they were hoarders. Those are very different things. Hoarding is not conserving. Even TV viewers will recognize this difference. Allowing cheap and unusable rubbish to collect in your home is not an act of conservation.

This post is not an official notification that GARBeepers are badly informed about their history and are oblivious to the gravity of the problems they face, I think this is pretty generally accepted these days.

These days the entire American church is thrashing. It is not possessed of a truth it is capable of articulating; its enemies (from McLaren to Hitchens) are less rational and more aggressive. Its friends are eviscerating the Gospel (consider the Manhattan Declaration and BioLogos controversies). Meanwhile the brethren seek to:

Establish networks of labor and ministry to meet the challenges of the future, equipping older organizations for the present task where possible, or establishing new ministries  where restoration of the old is either impossible or inadvisable.

Do these not sound like the words of men marching off to war?

Recent events have again brought this Darwin obsession to the attention of some in what we laughingly call "the household of faith".

The debate is of no special interest to me, but the fight wages on in spite of that. Darwinians seem determined to set sail in that colander they call Evolution.

For those of you who might be interested, take a gander at this. It's an old posting, but perhaps it strikes you as timely.

America's two most astute social commentators, the political philosopher Harvey Mansfield and the novelist Tom Wolfe, have weighed in on the debate over the neo-Darwinian view of evolution. They agree that the real controversy in our country is not between rationalists who preach evolutionism and fundamentalists who live in Darwin-denial, but between those who still believe that evolution can account for the whole of human behavior and those who see with their own eyes that it does not. The Darwinians, they observe, cannot properly account for the natural human quality that Mansfield calls "manliness" and that Wolfe, following the sociologists, describes as each individual's concern for his own status or ranking. The Darwinians do not recognize what genuinely distinguishes the human individual from everything else in nature, so they cannot account for such admirable phenomena as Carson Holloway's defense of transcendent human nobility against Darwinian reductionism.

I will cede the remainder of my time to Peter Augustine Lawler.

The Huffington Post wants there to be no doubt that it is not serious about religion. And just so there would be no confusion on this point it has chosen Frank Schaeffer to blather on the topic. Since we haven't been notified of any fresh bleeding at Christianity Today or theological developments from Mark Galli, I thought we might read another biblical scholar of comparable stature. Mr. Schaeffer wants Revelation to be edited by—and at this point I'd prefer to preserve his thought in its natural gases—"people of goodwill who are informed by the spiritual truth we carry within our evolving ethical selves."

And the next time you are tempted to express gratitude for the contributions of Francis and Edith Schaeffer to Evangelicalism, remember the fine work they did with their own son.

I think all this is especially ironic given what Frank's father had to say about Christian authority and culture.

"...the answer to fundamentalism, literal-minded religion and all the horror and absurdity they create is to work on the evolution of religion: reject false certainties rooted in myth and embrace myth as a window into the unknowable."

_____

"The truth is that interpreting religion is just that: interpreting. All that means is that common sense and compassion are the filters through which we look at religion, as we do with all of life. There is such a thing as freedom of conscience and the right to think!"

_____

"If these same anti-gay or anti-abortion advocates actually took their Bibles literally they would be weighing people at their church door to check for gluttony and excommunicating half the parish for being overweight."

_____

"Or what of Romans 13:13: "Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy." In this verse orgies and quarreling are denounced as equally evil.

"So that's it folks: since the very existence of competing seminaries is in its essence a quarrel about theology, therefore all theologians that oppose the views of other theologians have been dismissed by Paul as working against God's will in the same way that participants in orgies are denounced. So let's pick on quarreling theologians and not on gays!"

_____

"Admit it: the Bible is nuts in many places. Who follows this stuff? No one! So why stick it to people for choosing to not follow homophobic nonsense?"

_____

"We're morally evolving as a species and each new stage is always in tension with the prior stage. For instance, how would even the strictest of churches apply this teaching to one of their parishioners who had just had a bad car accident? ‘No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut off shall enter the assembly of the Lord.' (Deuteronomy 23:1)"

_____

"My proposal is this: To be true to the heart of the gospel message -- redemption through selflessness, hope, justice and love -- necessitates a new and fearless repudiation of parts of the same book (and tradition) that also bring us a message of hate.

"To find the spiritual truth that is hidden within the Bible it must be mentally ‘edited' by people of goodwill who are informed by the spiritual truth we carry within our evolving ethical selves."

It often helps to use images, symbols, metaphors and similes to explain profound truths. The incarnation is a profound truth which has been illuminated many ways. Its significance has been pondered by poets and artists.

Mark Galli, senior managing editor of Christianity Today, had an unpleasant experience with a urinal and his blood recently, and it opened his eyes to one of the profound truths of Christianity. He overworks his imagination and our patience by sharing his thoughts here.

Too many deadlines, too few ideas?

One is forced to wonder, after reading Christianity Today, if this is the sort of Evangelicalism Carl F. H. Henry, F. F. Bruce, Frank Gaebelein, John Warwick Montgomery, and Harold Lindsell thought was worth saving.

Resolve in your own mind how this corruption of sensibilities came to be and how it might have been anticipated and averted.

And for those who might use a little nudge toward Williams' fiction, here are the opening paragraphs of Descent Into Hell. For many, it would be worth it to read at least one serious work to cleanse the palate of the inspirational fiction of Janette Oke, the simpleton fantasies of Frank Peretti, and the melodramatic nursery art of Thomas Kinkade which capture perfectly the senescence of modern Christianity.

The Magus Zoroaster

"It undoubtedly needs", Peter Stanhope said, "a final pulling together, but there's hardly time for that before July, and if you're willing to take it as it is, why——" He made a gesture of presentation and dropped his eyes, thus missing the hasty reciprocal gesture of gratitude with which Mrs. Parry immediately replied on behalf of the dramatic culture of Battle Hill. Behind and beyond her the culture, some thirty faces, unessentially exhibited to each other by the May sunlight, settled to attention-naturally, efficiently, critically, solemnly, reverently. The grounds of the Manor House expanded beyond them; the universal sky sustained the whole. Peter Stanhope began to read his play.

Battle Hill was one of the new estates which had been laid out after the war. It lay about thirty miles north of London and took its title from the more ancient name of the broad rise of ground which it covered. It had a quiet ostentation of comfort and culture. The poor, who had created it, had been as far as possible excluded, nor (except as hired servants) were they permitted to experience the bitterness of others' stairs. The civil wars which existed there, however bitter, were conducted with all bourgeois propriety. Politics, religion, art, science, grouped themselves, and courteously competed for numbers and reputation. This summer, however, had seen a spectacular triumph of drama, for it had become known that Peter Stanhope had consented to allow the restless talent of the Hill to produce his latest play.

He was undoubtedly the most famous inhabitant. He was a cadet of that family which had owned the Manor House, and he had bought it back from more recent occupiers, and himself settle in it before the war. He had been able to do this because he was something more than a cadet of good family, being also a poet in the direct English line, and so much after the style of his greatest predecessor that he made money out of poetry. His name was admired by his contemporaries and respected by the young. He had even imposed modern plays in verse on the London theatre, and two of them tragedies at that, with a farce or two, and histories for variation and pleasure. He was the kind of figure who might be more profitable to his neighbourhood dead than alive; dead, he would have given it a shrine; alive, he deprecated worshippers. The young men at the estate office made a refined publicity out of his privacy; the name of Peter Stanhope would be whispered without comment. He endured the growing invasion with a great deal of good humour, and was content to see the hill of his birth become a suburb of the City, as in another sense it would always be. There was, in that latest poetry, no contention between the presences of life and of death; so little indeed that there had been a contention in the Sunday Times whether Stanhope were a pessimist or an optimist. He himself said, in reply to an interviewer's question, that he was an optimist and hated it.

Recent reference was made to Charles Williams. I don't want to insinuate myself in any point another commenter was making, but between that reference and a few private questions from another reader, I got to recalling my own enjoyment of Williams' fiction.

It is interesting that Williams' work should come up at this moment given our interest in Emergence and its present distress; cf. this.

If Emergents had read—and if they'd understood—Williams, they would not have embarrassed themselves with their absurd oversimplifications of modernism and Christian orthodoxy. If non-Emergents had read Williams, they would have been better prepared for the short-lived enthusiasms.

I think all our readers would benefit from reading Williams, especially his novels, but rather than share my own perceptions (which I myself regard as idiosyncratic and therefore not the best introduction to him), let me quote Thomas Howard.

The peculiarity of Williams' novels lies in the way he handles these questions. [i.e., Should a man pursue his desires by any means? or shall he try to discover the rules and submit to them in his quest?] Modern novels ordinarily explore human behavior in terms of manners, as Jane Austen did, or William James; or by social protest, as did Dickens; or by satire, in the manner of Swift or George Orwell; or psychological analysis, like James Joyce. Williams, like Dante, tried to carry the exploration further in order to see what the end of it all might be, and in that end he saw only two alternatives: salvation or damnation. * (p. 22)

[...]

The point for Williams was that all life functions in obedience to this principle of exchange and substitution and co-inherence whether I happen to observe it or not, or whether I happen to be pleased by it or not. It presides over all life, so that to resist or deny it is to have opted for a lie. For Williams, hell is the place where such a denial leads eventually. To refuse co-inherence will reward me with solitude, impotence, wrath, illusion, and inanity. I will have reaped the harvest I have sown in my selfishness and egotism. I will have got what I wanted. I will be a damned soul. * (p. 26)

I am especially intrigued by the post-moderns' debilitating solitude, impotence, wrath, illusion, and—especially—their inanity. Their obsession with the self and their infatuation with self-actualization really has left them alone, confused and incoherent. (I'm thinking here particularly of "the spirituality coach", the "social and theological entrepreneur", and the "independent scholar of postmodern theology".) Usually when movements reach this stage of decomposition they have an institutional infrastructure to maintain a kind of morbid life-support. It will be interesting to see what happens to Emergence.

But I do think you should read Williams. Some of you may really like him. He is an example of the Christian imagination, which, as I have said repeatedly, is something which failed us. If you feel a bit wary about plunging into Williams, feel free to read some helpful commentary on him, such as that of Howard. If you are a literate Christian, just plunge in.

*  The Novels of Charles Williams, Thomas Howard, ISBN: 0 89870 349 2

E-mails keep pouring in to the Remonstrans e-mailbag. Myriads and myriads of myriads are, or have recently become, desperate to know how not to worship. Everyone admits that we have either flaky worship or no worship at all, but the amount of chatter the subject has provoked has some people very nervous; they fear that if a determined effort is not made soon, worship might break out. And once real worship happens, people will lose interest in the cheap substitutes it has taken decades to insinuate into our liturgy.

These people have nothing to fear, of course, but you tell some people that a thing will never happen and they demand to know five ways it might happen. Not unlike Dreher who, when explicitly told what culture does, blithely suggests that a culture might also emerge if we pick through more garbage.

Somewhere in that seven-county landfill there is a delicious wedge of camembert.

So to set a multitude of minds at ease, we give our readers a short list of things they can do that will ensure that worship never ever happens again. Not even once, and not even inadvertently.

(I don't normally claim to be infallible, but I'm feeling lucky today, so I will assure you with confidence that you can write these rules in the flyleaf of your Bibles. In ink. You might want to lightly pencil into your Bible the names of people who got married till death doth them part, but you'll never have to worry that these suggestions aren't a trustworthy guide right up until the end of time.)

Listed in order of importance:

First, and most important of all, go to church. Worship never happens there. Church people aren't interested in worship; instead they are eager to indulge the imagined expectations of the "unchurched". (That's really what they call them! Not "unregenerate" or "spiritually dead". Unchurched.) What you find in church is a desperate attempt to sound relevant; it's as though they know they can't worship God themselves, but if they crowd enough unbelievers into the room, worship might happen by spontaneous generation.

Second, live a noisy life of the spirit. Fill your soul and your days with very tiny, trivial, even infinitesimal things. Like sports or movies or news or sitcoms—even weather reports. The more ephemeral and the more rapid the change the better. Do not read literature, do not listen to serious music, do not travel. And whatever you do, don't look up at the sky. The sky is very large and very quiet; best not think about that.

Third, become preoccupied with yourself and your feelings. Make them your life's calling. If there is something out there in the world that is uninteresting to you, common sense tells you it can't be very important. You are the most important thing; don't let this commitment waver for an instant and don't put yourself in a situation where a doubt might pop up.

Like in an art museum.

If you spend any serious time in a museum, it might occur to you to wonder why people in a different place and time might have thought this (painting or statue) was beautiful or true. Don't worry about them and their feelings, worry about yourself and your feelings. Let's say Grünewald painted something gruesome, don't ask yourself why others might have thought it worth contemplating. Instead, go hang a Thomas Kinkade painting of a stone chapel nestled in an evening glade.

Fourth, share your idols with others and show a genuine interest in their idols. This shows the breadth of your diversity and the depth of your compassion.

Fifth, whittle truth down to a manageable and reasonable size. Pocket-sized is best. If something seems unlikely, it must be false, and if something gratifies you, it must be true. Why complicate matters unnecessarily?

If the trinity sounds farfetched, dump it. If Hell strikes you as an over-reaction, trust your instincts on this. Who else is in a better position to judge? If God has full and perfect knowledge, and if you don't understand how that squares with your decisions, pitch it! Open up your theology.

There are many more suggestions we might make, but people tend to want to keep the number of their obligations to a minimum. A short list is also easier for slow-wits to remember. I think if you're going to limit your list to five things, these are the most effective.

And the perceptive reader will notice immediately that he can mix and match these suggestions. When you go to church, for instance, take your noisy, cluttered life in with you. Before the service starts, don't sit quietly and pray or read a hymn scribbled by some 14^th Century French bloke with dirty fingernails. That's just tempting fate. You could fill this time by selling fruits and vegetables, necklaces and yoyos. Or even better! combine the first suggestion with the second. When you must go to church, find another non-worshiper and distract him with your knowledge of sports or movies or news or sitcoms.

And before we leave the children of postmodernism and the question of their cultural reach, you might want to listen to this. I would strongly suggest that if you keep loaded guns on the premises—something I normally consider a perfectly good and prudent policy—you might want to put them out of reach for the next hour, ten minutes and 31 seconds. Depression is no laughing matter.

Here are Callid (the spoken word artist), Adele, Mojo, Mike, and Pastor Nar at TECGOMCF, [the Transform East Coast Gathering On Missional Community Formation] which, I shouldn't have to tell you, took place in Washington, DC.

It all happened under a tree.

It would be irresponsible of me not to remind you that there will be indecent language.

There will also be a song at the end. I say this just so all you animal rights activists don't think any animals were tortured during this production.

If you scroll down on the zoecarnate site to just above the R.E.M. YouTube video, you will find the phrase "here is the free-flowing conversation". Click on that phrase to start things up.

Finally, there is a little trick I learned from Odysseus and Circe: if you put wax in the ears of your family members and have them tie you to a sturdy kitchen chair, I think you will find the experience survivable.

We are still considering the hope that the children of postmodernism might yet reclaim an earlier tradition. Friday we observed that a culture is not made up of a few things you can pick up at a Super Walmart. A culture makes us what we are, it is a complete set of coherent choices, a collection of judgments about everything. It is something held in common with other people. You don't get to concoct a culture for yourself and a few friends who like votive candles and think U2 is a cool band.

Culture is not like a new hat you can buy when people start laughing at your old hat. Culture is what tells you whether a hat is worth having, what sort of hat is appropriate and which store will have the hat you need. Some of you will remember the beginning of the story when Bertie Wooster brings home a silly hat, an inappropriate hat for a man of his station. And you will remember that by the end of the story he finally accepts the judgment of Jeeves and allows him give it to a hobo who has lost all self-respect.

But let's set this fact aside for a moment and recall the words of these children of postmodernism and the choices we've seen them make.

• At the TAG conference it was important to answer the question: "Christian theology after Google says what about what you can put in your mouth and where you can put your genitals?"
  
  
• One pervert—who has even been to seminary and has a full selection of views on Hell to choose from—said: I don't believe in hell, if your definition of hell is a burning pit where bad people go for all eternity. (I reserve the right to wish for a hell for child rapists. I do wish it for them. I want no forgiveness for them. They deserve to go to hell, in the classical sense. Other than that, I don't believe in it.)
  
  
• Dave Hayward goes on and on and on about how he has outgrown his church, how he is free, and how he has "found his voice". He contrives this Z-theory which would embarrass even the man who ended up wearing Bertie's hat.
  
  
• Jana Riess asks "What Can We Say About God in 140 Characters or Less?"and then takes the opportunity to pass snarky judgment on the very text that reveals God.
  
  
• Dave Henson thinks he knows more about Pentecost than the Apostles, Evangelists and the billions of us who have believed the Apostles and Evangelists.
  
  
• Danielle Shroyer extrudes a religious ideology from stories Moses never told.

But notice the commonality: as ridiculous as each of these beliefs is on its merits, notice how they all emerge from an obsession with the self, with a rejection of the institutional church (which they often call the IC). This talk about community is a ploy: they have rejected the largest, most intellectually coherent community of faith they've ever known. It is impossible for these people to create community out of cultic impulses and spastic stabs at self-actualization. It can't be done.

Where is the postmodern impulse to understand and preserve a culture?

A reader sent me something you should probably read. Rod Dreher posts on beliefnet.com, and beliefnet being what it is, nobody should be disappointed to learn that this is all pretty facile and misguided stuff. Dreher is dissenting from Ken Myers. Sometimes this is a good thing, but in this case Dreher falls off the high bar with a predictable but still painful thump.

I don't want to make too big an issue over Dreher because he himself suspected that he was making his point "rather badly". He said some wrong things and he said some right things. One of the right things he said was, "I have what I fear is a rather feeble response to Ken's point, but I think it's the only hopeful response possible in this culture at this point in its history."

Obviously if his response is a feeble one, then it most certainly cannot be a hopeful one. But again, I'm not so concerned that he is making this response; it's more disconcerting that many people are making it in one form or another.

Fundamentalists, for instance, have finally taken note of their liturgical and aesthetic catastrophes, glanced furtively at one another, and these days are speaking rather bumptiously about art and beauty. Some very entertaining data can be collected and catalogued: the people who once judged music by how well plants grew and how productive cows were have turned out to be prodigies and surprisingly gifted connoisseurs.

That's their story and they appear to be sticking to it.

Evangelicals know something smells foul and they mutter occasionally that something should be done, but right now they're busy having a big party in the cesspool. First things first.

If you need to check your gag reflex, you can read all about Evangelicalism's sulfurous culture in Christianity Today. There's your "inauguration into a community" right there.

Dreher's hope (in his own words):

But here's why I have hope. Because the means of transmission of cultural values and knowledge has so fragmented now, we are able to access that which our parents, and even our grandparents, generation denied us by rejecting it. I don't know classical music, but I do know something about food. The industrialization of American food production was a modernist act. Traditional cultural knowledge, in all its regional and ethnic diversity, was marginalized and in many cases lost outright. But now it's coming back, in large part because the great fragmentation of the mass media made it possible for voices of protest and traditional renewal to get the word out, and to pass knowledge on to others interested in learning these traditions.

Sadly, our problems were not caused by defective "means of transmission" or absence of regional and ethnic diversity or marginalization or fragmentation or the mass media or any other conventional poppycock. And Dreher really should know this; if he'd read what he quoted, he'd know that:

...there is an order of beauty in the cosmos that they [children] need to learn to perceive and according to which their affections might be properly aligned...

Awareness that there is a tradition, a canon (however open and revisable), a body of honored artifacts that orient our imaginations well is the way that people first become aware of larger cosmic order. Marion Montgomery has said that "Education is the preparing of the mind for the presence of our common inheritance, the accumulated and accumulating knowledge of the truth of things." A good education isn't just the acquisition of sound abstractions; it is the inauguration into a community that has been wrestling with reality, and the assumption of the obligation to acquire its inheritance with the obligation of preserving and improving it.

Having access to more books, musical performances, and paintings does not properly align our affections. Regional and ethnic diversity, grand as those buzzwords sound to our philistine neighbors, will not prepare the mind for the presence of "our common inheritance". Indeed our "diversity" is the enemy of this common inheritance.

Modern religion is in desperate pursuit of a kwanzaa-culture which will be fanciful, narcissistic, tribal and impotent. More books, concerts and museum visits won't orient the imagination any better than more tubes of Winsor & Newton will make one a greater artist than Rembrandt. Only a philistine could hope such a thing.

And all of this is true not because Christian Smith says it or because Ken Myers or Roger Scruton or T. S. Eliot wrote it. This is the simple fact of human culture. We threw away our common inheritance, and it really doesn't matter how many options we now have to choose from, our quandary lies in our disoriented and unprepared choosers.

He is thomas, doubter. He is judas, betrayer. He is nicodemus, reluctant in the night. And he lives in the twilight zone; Main Street, by the look of things.

He is David Henson, and judging from his Facebook picture he was cruelly abused as a child.

Roughly a century ago we were warned that we were lacking a historical perspective and that we were beginning to substitute skeletal creeds for historic confessions. Certain people ignored that warning. It seemed good—to them—to allow the crises of the moment to define their faith. They had no concept of where that road would take them.

We are slightly more fortunate: we were on that road when the pavement turned to gravel and the gravel turned into two parallel ruts and the parallel ruts turned into a bog. Historic perspective is completely gone and historic confessions have become idiots' playthings. In fact the testimony of eye-witnesses and participants is twisted into the least plausible fiction.

Peter offers an interpretation of his experience, an interpretation through what God had spoken to him. He intended to clarify. Instead, he institutionalized. Peter's sermon is the message of religion, of humankind's response to God, its attempt to control the ecstasy of God's untamable, boundless love that trespasses into realm of heresy.

That and other daft wordclots can be enjoyed here.

God spoke in many languages. Peter spoke in one.

God speaks in many languages, one of which is Christianity. 

Isn't this ironic?

Christianity is a language, and we learn this from a man whose mother tongue is gibberish; this man who must wring nonsense out of Luke's account of St. Peter's explanation of the many languages spoken on the day of Pentecost.

Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius.

Henson should be institutionalized.

A Better Resurrection

I have no wit, no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numb'd too much for hopes or fears;
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
I lift mine eyes, but dimm'd with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is in the falling leaf:
O Jesus, quicken me.

My life is like a faded leaf,
My harvest dwindled to a husk:
Truly my life is void and brief
And tedious in the barren dusk;
My life is like a frozen thing,
No bud nor greenness can I see:
Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring;
O Jesus, rise in me.

My life is like a broken bowl,
A broken bowl that cannot hold
One drop of water for my soul
Or cordial in the searching cold;
Cast in the fire the perish'd thing;
Melt and remould it, till it be
A royal cup for Him, my King:
O Jesus, drink of me.

---Christina Rossetti

We thought we would direct your attention to one of two things which can be relied on to have meaning for the believer.

Last Sunday evening the wife and I visited Highland Park Presbyterian Church to hear a performance of Bach's Mass in b. The work is an act of devotion even if performed by hired musicians and untrained church choir members.

It is hard to convey the greatness of this work briefly. You could study the work for an entire semester in order to appreciate the significance of what you might hear at the end. If you ever get a chance to hear it live, you should take it.

To understand Bach and the scope of his faith, think of the WTC, the violin sonatas, the cello suites, the Brandenburg concertos and Die Kunst der Fuge as snappy little doodles. In fact, I don't think it would be too much to say that for you to appreciate this work, you ought to become a better person first.

You can listen to Herbert Blomstedt speak about it here (in three segments), and you can even hear the work performed at Thomaskirche.

If on the other hand you want to completely waste your time and rot your brain, and if you live near Detroit, you could abuse your spirit with a lighthearted musical production being performed at the Inter-City Baptist Church, a Fundamentalist institution which "exists to honor God by making and maturing disciples who are becoming like the Lord Jesus Christ".

The high school drama department invites you to Wash Your Troubles Away! Join us on Friday and Saturday, May 21-22, at 7:00 pm, for a lighthearted musical production that's great entertainment for the whole family. Advanced tickets are available at a discounted rate through your ABF.

I cite a beautiful promise God makes to Israel by the pen of Hosea. I have some reason to suspect that neither Fundamentalist nor Emergent will approve of the form Hosea's work takes. I must warn everyone that we may get some outraged comments from Fundies who would prefer essays to convey material that is "biblical or scripturally-based". And from Emergents, who I suspect will complain that Hosea's writing isn't raw enough to be credible to the 21^st Century john, I anticipate some profanity.

Please show caution in reading any comments which might follow.

But in spite of the terrible risk, I timidly reproduce a piece Hosea's work because I think it has merit. I will go so far as to say it is inspired.

Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her.

And I will give her her vineyards from thence, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope: and she shall sing there, as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt.

And it shall be at that day, saith the LORD, [that] thou shalt call me Ishi; and shalt call me no more Baali.

For I will take away the names of Baalim out of her mouth, and they shall no more be remembered by their name.

And in that day will I make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven, and [with] the creeping things of the ground: and I will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the earth, and will make them to lie down safely.

And I will betroth thee unto me for ever; yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in judgment, and in lovingkindness, and in mercies.

I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness: and thou shalt know the LORD.

And it shall come to pass in that day, I will hear, saith the LORD, I will hear the heavens, and they shall hear the earth;

And the earth shall hear the corn, and the wine, and the oil; and they shall hear Jezreel.

And I will sow her unto me in the earth; and I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy; and I will say to [them which were] not my people, Thou [art] my people; and they shall say, [Thou art] my God.

Whether this prophecy might have been better published as an essay I leave to Observer and his fellow editors to decide.

I kinda like it as a poem.

Fair city of delights, the bride in raiment white and clean,
when shall we see thee loving eyed, sun girdled, happy Queen?

I've mentioned on several occasions the ministry of Edmund Clowney, Jr. There are three talks in particular which you really should listen to. They will quickly scandalize many of our readers, but I seriously doubt there's any hope for those who will be scandalized: compared to them the proverbial snowball will have a promising career and a comfortable retirement, probably on a yacht resembling Onassis's Christina. Clowney's ideas may distress a good many more, but I think those who are distressed will survive. (It would certainly help anyone to appreciate what Clowney says if he'd heard him before and has some feel for his character and his intellectual heritance, but either way, you should consider his thoughts.)

I don't think that it is at all unfair to say that the modern church doesn't give a fig about meditation even though it is explicitly commanded in Scripture. The modern church cares more about appearing relevant to a world that has never been less serious, less meditative and less thoughtful.

When we consider the exquisite silliness that surrounds us on the left and on the right, we are compelled to believe that meditation is Satan's tool rather than God's command.

We tried not to laugh when Emergents attempted to be insightful and pithy. It was very difficult, and any fair-minded judge would have to say we failed. Then we had a Fundamentalist post some thoughts for Mother's Day which, had they been composed by an eight-year-old, would have prompted a rather tense and spirited parent/teacher conference and perhaps even a review of teacher certification.

I point this out because it struck me while listening to Clowney for about the fourth time now, that any skills we might need ought first to have been encountered in worship.

Ought to have been.

By no stretch of the imagination could we say that a good hymnody or a good liturgy is sufficient for an obedient life of meditation. By the same token, true worship should quite naturally be the easiest and best introduction to this interior life of the Christian.

One of our readers professes never to have known what I have described as Fundamentalist culture, and no matter how many examples are offered, we were expected to believe he was sheltered from all its trivialities, mediocrities and banalities. In fact we have a published example of the level of incompetence his ambient Fundamentalist culture has left him.

In two days you will be sitting in your church. Look for ways your children might catch a glimpse of this loving eyed, sun girdled, happy Queen in meditation.

Quoted without immediate comment, but apropos of our on-going discussion:

Mothers' Day

In a day that worships vanity and mocks maternity,
Gladly we confess God's plan for the home is right.
Humanity's vain attempt to defy God's authority
Has hurt our families and is to society a blight.

God's order for the home-father, mother, and child-
Though mocked as old-fashioned, stands the test of time.
To ignore God's plan has caused society to run wild,
Families are in ruins, morality on a downward climb.

Like his lie in the garden long ago,
The devil continues to question what God has willed.
"Submission and motherhood, it can't be so,
God doesn't want your life to be fulfilled."

Like Eve, many daughters have believed the lie,
And followed a pattern not found in God's Word.
They chase after career, for leadership they vie,
And to question such thinking is seldom heard.

The devil must laugh at this oft-repeated sight,
As generation after generation heeds his lie
And of the forbidden fruit foolishly they bite.
First, he destroyed the parents, now the family must die.

Much better it would be to believe God is right,
And follow His plan laid down from the start.
The devil spreads darkness and death, claiming it is light.
God provides peace and joy when His Word rules the heart.

Whether ancient or modern, women must come to know
The lies of the tempter that have filled this day
Are not the words of a friend, but of a deadly foe.
God's truth brings life; you must follow His way.

The woman is God's gift to complete humanity
Without her, man would be alone and incomplete.
To ignore her true worth is to embrace vanity,
To reject her true work is to follow deceit.

On this day we gladly honor motherhood
And the moms with which we have been blessed.
Against the tide of this world, you always stood
And showed us by example, that God knows best.

 

Some of you will remember when the three stooges of Emergence toured the country talking trash, selling their balm of Gilead, and speaking dismissively of Plato's writings.

Doug Pagitt did speak with a contrived enthusiasm about hopes and dreams and aspirations, about the "three-car train of faith" and about participating "with God in the here and now". Doug made a run for political office in the here and now but apparently he and God ran short of spondulix before the days of their candidacy were accomplished. Now Doug has a radio show out of the Twin Cities: "religious radio that's not quite right".

Tony Jones has divorced the wife of his youth, and Mark Scandrette, last I saw him, was doing some sort of queer schtick for transformnetwork.org. How much closer we are to the Kingdom is hard for the poor and the eschatologically informed to determine.

But while Larry, Curly and Moe went right on wasting their time, Brian McLaren kept publishing books that irritated Bible-believers and Scot McKnight. Now Marianne Meye Thompson is irritated by Brian's selective readings and slovenly hypotheses. (Ms. Thompson is a professor at that Fortress of Faith West, Fuller Theological Seminary.)

Marianne thinks Brian is full of hooey and should read a book or two on theology and church history. She doesn't say that exactly, though, because she is an academic. What she says exactly is:

But my larger objection to McLaren's reconstruction is that the narrative that he puts forward as the "biblical narrative" is remarkably contemporary and as equally the product of a selective reading as the one that he rejects. According to McLaren, in the Genesis narrative the disobedience in Eden does not bring about an ontological fall - a point I am happy to grant; rather, "God pushes [Adam and Eve] out of the nest" (p. 50) - a point that seems far harder to sustain. According to McLaren, Eden in fact is a "classic coming-of-age story, filled with ambivalence - a childhood lost, an adulthood gained" (p. 51). The flaming sword preventing a return to the tree of life apparently is God's version of "tough love" to insure that his children "grow up" into responsible adulthood. But no ancient Jewish or Christian commentator read Genesis in this way. McLaren goes on to depict the movement from Eden to Babel as a movement from hunter-gatherers, through nomads, agriculturalists, city dwellers, to empire dwellers, a movement that corresponds (perhaps all too neatly) with the increasing moral corruption of the human race, so that the pinnacle of human sin (oppression, genocide) corresponds to "empire," and thus also to the view of God as "dread cosmic dictator." Here McLaren does acknowledge that the story of humankind subsequent to Eden smacks more of increasing immorality than dawning maturity. The children have run amok. But McLaren's account links, far more neatly and simplistically than the Bible, the peak of human corruption (genocide) with the distaste for all that "empire" represents.

She also says that:

McLaren himself admits that his construal of the Greco-Roman narrative is both an "invention" and an "abstraction" that is "fraught with vulnerabilities."

Imagine that; an invention fraught with vulnerabilities! From Brian McLaren!

I'm sure you smacked your gob as we all have.

Not only has Brian misapprehended the biblical narrative, he has misunderstood the church's historic view of that narrative. There is a lesson in this for all of us, I think: if you are an aspiring false teacher, please do get a seminary degree.

We spent last evening under fluted arches, hammer beams and pipes. Highland Park Presbyterian Church celebrated the refurbishment of their Casavant Frères organ.

It is a bitter shame that modern churchgoers can't hear a harpsichord without thinking of The Addams Family, and it's even worse that they cannot listen to an organ without thinking of a funeral. If you put more than 50 heartily-singing adults in a stone nave, there is only one instrument that can make sense of it, and that is a pipe organ.

It was ironic that last night's recital came right after I'd watched a few ustream videos of emergents at the trans4m conference [most appropriately called the "East Twitter Feed"]: that was like listening to 20 monkeys locked in the band room. This recital was like a palate cleanser.

Here in Texas a performer gets a standing ovation even if he makes it on and off the stage without tripping over his shoelaces, but I think the organist last night earned it. It wasn't about him, it wasn't about grand gestures; it really was about the organ.

The program went from a Bach (1685-1750) fugue to a Charles Callahan partita on Hyfyrdol (1986) which included the audience singing out of a hymnal! It included an Alec Wyton arrangement of Billy Strayhorn's Lotus Blossom and William Bolcom's Sometimes I Feel (1984). And it closed with the very accessible Symphony No. 5 by Charles-Marie Widor. And all of it was done by the competent and informative Michael Shake.

Wish you could have been there.

There are many, many views of Hell. Some believe Hell is real but no one ever goes there. Some believe Hell is not real, some believe Hell is real enough but the fire is not, and some believe even the fire is real. I could easily be tempted to believe that the fire is metaphorical and that to speak of "the smoke of their torment" rising forever is just a vicious stab at picturesque writing, but all of the people I know—or have read—who hold to that view are unimaginative idiots. So as supportive as I try to be of metaphors wherever I find them, I wouldn't want to be lumped in with that bunch.

In fact, the Hell that I imagine is worse than fire: so much worse that I suspect the people in Hell are in such pain they haven't yet noticed there is a fire. And I dare to guess that there are more views about Hell among those in it than there are among those determined to get there.

There is a ministerette, a plus-size, lesbian ministerette who believes some of the things Jesus said but not others. She feels that, as a lesbian, she is "oppressed". She thinks Jesus came to free her of that oppression. About what Jesus had to say on the subject of Hell she is flagrantly illiterate.

In a cadenza of giggles that alarmed my wife I read her views on Hell:

I have a congregant who is in his late eighties, like my dad a veteran of the 2nd World War, also a paratrooper, but one who dropped into France. This man has become obsessed with the idea that he is going to hell when he dies because he killed men in the war. How do I tell him that he has already been to hell, that every hell that exists is a human creation? Having to kill was his hell (it is still his hell, he is still living it). I don't believe in hell, if your definition of hell is a burning pit where bad people go for all eternity. (I reserve the right to wish for a hell for child rapists. I do wish it for them. I want no forgiveness for them. They deserve to go to hell, in the classical sense. Other than that, I don't believe in it.)

Here we have a blithering soul who does not believe in Hell if it involves eternal fire, but she "reserves the right" to wish there were an eternal, fiery Hell if child rapists could suffer there. Not the wife-beaters, the slave-traders, the abortionists, the death camp sadists or the people who take God's name in vain.

So one kind of sexual pervert is willing to accept a fiery Hell, but only for another kind of sexual pervert, and this preacherette of the Gospel wants "no forgiveness for them". Whether a sin offends God is less important to her than how miffed she is, and salvation is not a gift of God, it is an expression of her sentimental prejudices.

No wonder people are showing less and less interest in religion.

I spent last week with my nephew, his wife, and their two-year-old, Elijah, who likes water, birds, flowers, and pulling my beard. I enjoyed playing with his toys. We visited the zoo where he rode a camel, saw penguins, lemurs, elephants, tigers, turtles, reptiles and apes.

He brought from my library a couple of Wodehouse novels for me to read to him. I read a few lines to him and he turned the page...read a few more lines and another page-turn...more lines and another page-turn; it reminded me of how postmoderns do theology.

The week was a pleasant break from the routine for a couple of reasons, but it wasn't all relaxation. We played enough dimpleball to keep the stress levels up in spite of the fact that it was a week without the inanity of Emergence. Aside from a few links in the e-mailbox, I had no idea what the religious flakes were thinking. We did visit a local Fundamentalist church for a Sunday evening service. That was a little like visiting an Inquisition torture chamber but without the stimulating theological Q&A.

I gather Christendom got itself into a lather over Jennifer Knapp's conversion. I'm sure CT published some useful insights, but I have no links to add to that debate.

I did notice that over on the ISI web journal they put together a list of the best 50 books of the century. I've read most of them, but I did notice one that tickles my interest: The Triumph of the Therapeutic, by Philip Rieff. That looks tantalizing.

Go through the list, pick a book, and get understanding.

But as I sat in church yesterday it seemed like a bad time to be two years old.

We were recently infiltrated by some Sesame Street atheists who thought they had proof of the inexistence of God. It got me to thinking about this god they imagine. And what sort of god would there have to be for them to concede his existence?

It's clear to everyone that their criticism of Yahweh is based on their misunderstanding of the Bible, but perhaps that's not a reasonable assumption.

From the conversations I've had with these History Channel theologues, the god they think can be proven not to exist appears to be a snaggletoothed buffoon in need of cash and human attention. He must be someone who forever indulges man's vanity, appetites and ambition without annoyance. He would have to be a janitor, apologist and therapist for every flood, earthquake, holocaust and venereal disease. He would have to be plausible to the stupidest, greediest most short-sighted human on the planet, and he must answer every human demand for understanding of his works. He would have to come every time a believer beckoned and obey every time he was beseeched. (As we all learned as children, if we call our mothers and they don't come, the only reasonable conclusion is that our mothers never existed. And if they didn't give us everything we wanted, it was completely rational to suppose they were malevolent or incompetent.)

Can you think of any other qualities they would find admirable in a god?

If you have any thoughts, please post them in the comments below. Who knows?—maybe you could help me write an Atheist's Systematic Theology and win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Wouldn't that make life worth living?

Hey, there's another one:

What purpose ought our lives serve? How would a creature know when he'd served his creator's purpose?  I mean, how would he know a meaningful existence when he found one?

Our art betrays our love. The recently displayed carping and quota whinging of Emergence doesn't begin to offer the dreams and beauty of orthodoxy.

Savor the difference.

"Now they desire."

There is a sleep we have not slept
   Safe in a bed unknown;
There hearts are staunched that long have wept
   Alone, or bled alone:
Sweet sleep that dreams not, or whose dream
   Is foretaste of truth;
Sweet sleep whose sweets are what they seem
   Refreshing more than youth.

There is a sea whose waters clear
   Are never tempest tost;
There is a home whose children dear
   Are saved, not one is lost:
There Cherubim and Seraphim
   And Angels dwell with Saints,
Whose luster no more dwindleth dim,
   Whose ardour never faints.

There is a Love Which fills desire
   And can our love requite;
Like fire it draws our lesser fire,
   Like greater light our light:
For It we agonize in strife
   We yearn we famish thus—
Lo, in the far off land of life
   Doth it not yearn for us?—

"Oh fair oh fair Jerusalem,"
   How fair how far away,
When shall we see thy Jasper Gem
   That gives thee light for day?
Thy sea of glass like fire, thy streets
   Of glass like virgin gold,
Thy royal Elders on their seats,
   Thy four Beasts manifold?—

Fair city of delights, the bride
   In raiment white and clean,
When shall we see thee loving eyed,
   Sun girdled, happy Queen?
Without a wrinkle or a spot,
   Blood cleansed, blood purchased once:
In how fair ground is fallen the lot
   Of all thy happy sons.

Dove's eyes beneath thy parted lock,
   A dove's soft voice is thine;
Thy nest is safe within the Rock,
   Safe in the Very Vine;
Thy walls salvation buildeth them
   And all thy gates are praise
Oh fair oh fair Jerusalem
   In sevenfold day of days.

---Christina Rossetti

We are back in the sixth grade, people.

Glenn told a bunch of his friends that they should be mad at everyone who talks about "social justice". Jimmy—who talks about nothing else—started crying and is now passing out a list he wants everyone to sign. Signing this list tells everyone in the whole wide world that you promise to be nice to everyone in the whole wide world.

Tony is mad at George for wanting him disinvited to a party. Tony still went to the party, but he wants everyone to know that George was mean to him.

George doesn't want to sign anything with people on it he doesn't like. He wants to be nice to some people, but he doesn't want to have to be nice to everyone in the whole wide world.

Everybody in home room is arguing about whether George is cool or not cool.

No one is laughing at Jimmy for being the biggest sissy since the day Toby cried because Joey smeared white paste on his bookbag.

Anyway, if you want to sign the list, it is here. Please use a pen and remember that neatness counts.

And if anyone wants to trade his chicken salad sandwich for my meatloaf sandwich, please meet me out by the swing set before the bell rings.

Over the years we've picked over a few fragments from the debris field known as the Emergent Church. We should probably tell any new readers that we are curious about the Emergent Church because it is the best measure of the spirit of the age. Not that its people are knowledgeable about the spirit of the age; it's more like they are unwittingly possessed by it.

When, for instance, Trucker Frank and Marie tell us that people should go to church and say whatever they want, that we can all do theology on couches, most of us naturally thought that that had to be the stupidest thing we'd ever heard and when the recreational chemicals wore off they would be able to clarify.

No clarification ever emerged, we're not even sure the emergent church has emerged, and I'm still waiting for the first picnic we were promised.

When the TAG conference degenerated into a tedious discussion about the percentage of the dark noses that could be counted among the white noses, we enjoyed hearing the least diverse collection of ideologues speculate about why white males dominated the blogosphere. Maybe we can check back with them when they manage to achieve the racial balance Liberty University has.

One of the basket cases emergence left in its wake is David Hayward (whom you might remember as the one who rejects "the assumption that we can even have a systematic theological comprehension of everything"). David has left his church, the Rothesay Vineyard. He has dribbled out some disconnected reflections hither, thither, yonder, and yon.

We are not even a little surprised that a pastor would part ways with his congregation; we have seen this before. We know many pastors who've used churches to advance their career, to spread their fame, to pad their resumés.... We've even known pastors to use churches as tax dodges and dating services.

But Dave's story is perhaps special. By his own count hundreds of members came and hundreds of members went, "most of them" [his words] in a messy manner. But he is grateful:

Rothesay Vineyard has been a wonderful training ground for me in all kinds of areas. Most of all, the church has actually helped me get to this place of freedom I am now experiencing. They allowed me to continue to grow, stretch and challenge in all kinds of ways until I realized I don't fit anymore. They gave me the freedom to find myself, my voice, and my call. I emerge from the crucible better suited to do what I know I must. And I'm grateful to them for that.

So Dave was allowed to grow and grow and grow until he no longer fit. He has now found himself, his voice, and his call. He is now free. And Rothesay Vineyard has helped Dave emerge from that particular crucible better suited to do what he knows he must.

You won't find this idea in the New Testament any more than you will find his Z-theory in the New Testament, but the nice thing about the contemporary church is that that doesn't really matter. It's not about the Bible, it's not about the church, it's all about us and our own freedoms.

If you want to know something of a person, pay attention to what he thinks is important. What is it he will fight about?

After the TAG conference Callid Keefe-Perry, independent scholar of postmodern theology and improv actor, dashed off an exceptionally shabby video in order to address an important topic about which he "didn't know what to say". Being a spoken word artist he naturally made a video. If you want to get a fuller sense of what he doesn't know, check it out. It is brief and somewhat humorous. If it were me, I think I would have preferred some sock puppets for dramatic effect, but I'm big enough to allow for another's artistic vision. The "talking half-head" is another way to go.

Callid links to Bob Cornwall's "ponderings". Bob is a fellow-simpleton who wants to "expand the conversation partners" and "democratize the conversation". Why, he wonders, do white men dominate in the blogosphere?

We've all wondered about this, haven't we? We should stay tuned in case any of these thumb-sucking reformers gets an idea while someone has fresh batteries in his camera.

I don't know if it keeps you awake at night, but the whiteness of EC has become a national concern. It's not that black folk don't ever show up, but when they do they whine about there not being a politically correct percentage of them. Statistically insignificant representation by certain people groups was not a complaint the Apostles had to contend with on Pentecost. Why is it an issue now?

So a catfight has broken out: Sojourners asks if the Emergent Church is for whites only, and Tony Jones (a man who never lets an honest question violate the sanctity of his ideologies) then asks if Sojourners is for straight people only. Snappy comeback, hunh? I bet the people back in DC are still smarting from that!

You always find high-quality debate when Tony opens his yap.

The racist views of Soong-Chan Rah are quickly dragged into it, and here on a blog where the typical post gets comments numbering in the single digits we have a firestorm. As of a minute ago there were 61.

Maybe this is theology after "theology after Google".

Perhaps we could all form a large circle and join hands; let's all pray that this religious abnormality, if it be possible, as much as lieth in it, live peaceably with all men. Let us beseech the almighty that black and white, straight and bent, dog lovers and cat aficionados, Ford drivers and people who own cars, can all get along and stop being so silly.

By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, that ye have the appropriate melanin content in your gatherings.

I was asked recently for a clarification of this statement:

When this is all over there will be Christians who'll have learned that the neither the Gospel nor separatism are adequate adhesives for the Church.

In speaking about the fractured state of the modern church it is necessary to admit both the centrality of the gospel and the necessity of separation. Without both you don't have a New Testament church at all; you can watch evangelism devolve into a collection of platitudes or you can view separatists degenerate into a mob of belligerents, but you can't have a healthy church. And what has always been true is now merely becoming obvious.

I should anticipate the objection some will make: not everyone has succumbed. (That's true—although it is also true that we would learn a thing or two from a discussion about who has and who has not succumbed.) But here I'm not talking about every member of the group, I'm talking about the banner under which each movement marches. And I'm really not saying anything surprising: Fundamentalists are fighting over their definition of separation and Evangelicals are fighting over their definition of the gospel. Take as an example the dust-up over Rick Warren's trip to Minneapolis.

Neither a preoccupation with the gospel nor with separation has preserved the most important thing: real piety. No one will ever confuse either Fundamentalism or Neo-evangelicalism with the great movements in church history marked by piety. I'm thinking of groups like the Moravians, the Puritans, the local revivals such as the Wesleyan and Welsh, 17^th-18^th Century Lutheranism...

The fundagelical world has divided itself by making each of these two necessities an organizing principle, and it has, in any number of ways, put these two obligations in opposition to one another. I think our first observation must be that making secondary things primary has actually debased them.

But the point of my original comment—made weeks ago now—is that these ideals have not only failed to preserve an essence, they have even failed to hold the church together. We should like to think that if they didn't stir piety they at least produced unity.

I think this distinction is important to people who care about the future of the church.

But I don't think there's much point in debating which (evangelism or separation) is more important...and if it were important there are enough people still squabbling about it to meet our quotas of bloodshed.

What interests me more is that a preoccupation with this difference has allowed another essential to go unattended: our habits of right feeling. Just because it is essential to keep our beliefs about God pure does not mean our feelings about God are inconsequential.

Neither the gospel-adherents nor the separation-adherents have helped us much, and I think the advent of Emergence is a sneering reminder of that failing. It takes no genius to see that postmodern camp-followers don't care about either the gospel or separation; and what makes them so bizarre by comparison is the total absence of right feeling. They are offensive long before we parse their progressive gospel or their hatred of separatism. Emergents seem to be not just Philistines but Canaanites as well. The interest in oral sex at TAG was not accidental.

I suspect we are following our hoary tradition of fighting battles that have already been lost. Doing that seems to be what makes us feel vital.

Where would defenders of Adele Sakler be in a throng of Christina Rossetti admirers? Who is going to teach Christians that grief is a pleasure with a subtle taste? Who will show us a robust 21^st Century hope rather than trying to simulate a 19^th Century Christian virtue?

Lord Jesus Christ, grown faint upon the Cross,
  A sorrow beyond sorrow in Thy look,
    The unutterable craving for my soul;
      Thy love of me sufficed
To load upon Thee and make good my loss
  In face of darkened heaven and earth that shook:—
    In face of earth and heaven, take Thou my whole
      Heart, O Lord Jesus Christ.

---Christina Rossetti

I'd like to give a big shout-out to all my emerging friends and give props to all those responsible for the TAG fiasco in Claremont, CA. I've never seen that quantity of gas put to so spectacular a use since the Hindenburg passengers disembarked in Lakehurst, NJ.

TAG, or "Theology After Google", was a stroke of genius, and whoever thought that one up should get a commemorative whoopee cushion. That was the work of a commanding intellect.

For my part, after experiencing the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions, I like to recollect in tranquility and make some small record of my personal journey. (People are always asking me about my personal journey, and this strikes me as something that would really hold their attention.) And it was in the midst of this tranquil recollection that I began to recap what were for me the high points.

I think there were four, really.

First, I admired the wordplay. I do not believe that a group of people ever enjoyed saying so little while spewing so much jargon; and where would emergence and progressive Christianity be without the jargon? Even the crude language, I felt, put presenters and attendees alike at ease. It was like listening to children using their first profanities: these were not the honest expletives of intemperate minds; this was the shared, self-conscious celebration of naughtiness.

I think the western church has not fully explored foul language as a spiritual discipline. Thanks for pointing the way.

Second, I thought the impulse to invite a rag-tag bunch of inarticulate moonbeams up to the platform to share their mental spasms was priceless. Watching eager but disordered minds grope for a complete thought turns out to be high-order comedy.

Third, I very much enjoyed "A Theological Firing Squad". A series of banal questions was aimed at a number of bland intellects. Questions like "Christian theology after Google says what about what you can put in your mouth and where you can put your genitals?" will strike your typical American Fundamentalist as gratuitous, but I think it's clear he'll have missed the deeper point you were trying to make.

But it was, I must say, painful to watch these underachievers desperately trying to sound breviloquent, epigrammatic, and pithy. That session should have come with a shot of novocaine.

Fourth, I feel like I was introduced to some seminal thinkers. I'll forever cherish the time spent listening to Callid Keefe-Perry. I have met a few gnomes in my life, but I don't think any of them claimed to be a "spoken word artist" or an "independent scholar of postmodern theology".

I think the world has too few spoken word artists and independent scholars of postmodern theology, and if Callid Keefe-Perry's name does not soon gain world-wide attention, I will suspect foul play in high places. That this man hasn't won a Nobel Peace Prize shows we are doubtless in the End Times if not the actual Great Tribulation.

I have been a creator my entire life.  There are dozens of photographs of me making and crafting as a child: creating games to play with my brother and sister,  reveling in paste and paper, and imagining worlds that I could explore on my own, dazing off into the middle distance as I envisioned far-away lands.  That child is still very much a part of me, and given the pressure of society to Consume instead of Create, I am very glad that he has survived.

If there is any possible way to bring a similar conference down to the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, please let us know. Our metroplex has several venues which might accommodate the crowds such an event would draw, and I can't imagine a more fitting response to the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo, especially what we like to call "Bull's Night Out".

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

If you want to see something quite uninformative, check out this assortment of clodpates. These intellectually homeless people are not saying anything important, but they think they are. And that's significant. If you want to know something of a person, pay attention to what he thinks is important.

Here is a collection of people who've met to discuss what they think is important: the ramifications of Google on their theology. Technology liberates theology, one of them says. And while the speakers are doling out their insights, people in the room are twittering, and when a speaker says something the more reflective ones think is especially trenchant, they shout out "TWEETABLE".

Very festive.

Doug Pagitt's shirt came fresh from the hamper, obviously, but do not let that distract you: keep uppermost in your mind the fact that Doug is a "Social and Theological Entrepreneur"—what in the "Agrarian Age" was referred to as a snake-oil salesman. He is talking about our "Inventive Age". You'll probably find that unhelpful.

Listen to Steve Knight give his take on the gospel and, ironically, watch him struggle with his presentation software.

And listen to Jana Riess as she introduces her Twible: "What Can We Say About God in 140 Characters or Less?" She apparently doesn't like much about her god, and she offers a few reasons she considers him OCD.

At some point there was a designated time for audience response: everyone ("even a white male", Tony Jones reminded them) was invited to the podium to "say what you learned/say what you think", and of course a resentful black woman got up to complain that there weren't enough dark googlers to suit her sense of racial justice. One little sweetheart inarticulately expressed her hope that we "use these tools responsibly and ethically". Another black guy rose to talk about his "thought revamping" and to convey in a very relaxed and meandering way his "grave concern for the impoverished community...very sensitive to the divide that continues to increase...how much of a minority I am...this could be sort of representation of the obstacle of getting to the black church and how we think about things but I don't think about things like that...interesting to see how this gets into the different color communities..." blah blah blah

One guy expressed gratitude: "I have thoroughly enjoyed as much as the conference I have enjoyed the relationships", and then he went on to say something totally incoherent but which was very important to him personally.

Another white guy got up to opine about why black people were under-represented...at which point Tony inserted himself to ask for people to share ways they hope to use these tools in the local church.

Another guy, having seen pictures of the earth from outer space, expressed a great sadness that we here on earth fight over the lines which can't even be seen from space!

I don't suppose there has ever been a more tedious, banal, self-absorbed, profane, cliché-ridden, and resentful religious movement since the Cenozoic Era.

So, yeah, you should go watch. If you don't believe in Hell before you watch, you will after.

Since the first of the year we have looked at three poems by Christina Rossetti, all short.

They've touched, in some fashion, on resignation, worldliness, and suffering: traditional Christian ideas. Each of these poems offers an honest perception of real Christian experience. None of them is beyond the ability of the average Christian to understand. I don't think the unstrained metaphors will tax any literate mind, and I don't think their relevance will be lost on anyone.

Emergents might break a fingernail on words like satiety and foambow, but they could understand these in time. You should ask yourself why we don't have this sort of poetry anymore. Why do we have Sakler, Scandrette, and McLaren instead?

Notice how Rossetti deals with reality; these are not shallow, pep-rally rhymes like Fundamentalist songs, and they are not thumb-sucking epiphanies like Emergent blog-doggerel. Is it just a lack of skill, or is it a lack of skill plus something else?

We asked the question two Mondays ago and what followed was a lively inquiry into the differences between Doran and Bauder. While that junior varsity competition does shed some light on the Fundamentalist movement, I wouldn't want us to forget the bigger problem.

Are we left to wander the Fife & Bean wasteland by ourselves, or is there some transcendent religious sensibility it's our job to preserve? It is clear our institutions won't do it; it's clear they resent the expectation.

Do we still have something helpful to say about resignation to the first century Christian? Are their subtle tastes something our children should enjoy?

"Surely He hath borne our griefs."

Christ's heart was wrung for me, if mine is sore;
   And if my feet are weary, His have bled;
   He had no place wherein to lay His Head;
If I am burdened, He was burdened more.
The cup I drink, He drank of long before;
   He felt the unuttered anguish which I dread;
   He hungered who the thousands fed,
And thirsted who the world's refreshment bore.
If grief be such a looking-glass as shows
   Christ's Face and man's in some sort made alike,
      Then grief is pleasure with a subtle taste:
      Wherefore should any fret or faint or haste?
Grief is not grievous to a soul that knows
   Christ comes,--and listens for the hour to strike.

---Christina Rossetti

I don't really know the right way to respond to the recent accusation that I am a critic. On the one hand I'm tempted to thank my mother who always encouraged me to express myself, to thank my wife for sticking with me through the lean years, to thank the Academy....

On the other hand, being critical of fundamentalist culture doesn't seem to justify such a high honor. I might have been just as honored by receiving a Nobel Peace Prize for putting on my socks.

But it does give us an opportunity to repeat what I take to be an important point.

We are speaking here about a culture: a set of virtues, values, and aspirations, a presumption about what is permissible and what is unacceptable. Fundamentalism has a culture; it permits things, it honors things, and it condemns things. This is not news. We were saying this in April of 2005, and it wasn't cutting edge stuff even then.

A few are curious to know how I'm different from Fundamentalist culture. To satisfy that curiosity would involve a cumbersome list of dissimilarities, but one of the more obvious dissimilarities is cunningly concealed in the word culture. I am not a culture. I have never been a culture, and I've made no preparations to become a culture.

This is surprisingly important to bear in mind. As objectionable as I might be to some, it's a bit of a reach to equate what I write with what a culture does.

When we look at a culture we see three essential components. Culture isn't limited to the arts, but I will use the terms from the art world. It won't be hard for you to make the applications.

There are the poets, the painters, the dancers, the artists; the people who give expression to ideas the entire society considers. Then there are the critics who bring a certain skill at explaining how successful that expression is. And finally there is the audience. We may tend to think that the audience is the least important because it is the least skilled. In a sense it is the most important because it is really in the audience that these ideas live healthy lives. What an artist makes and what a critic judges is really not all that significant if it doesn't help the people in the audience make widgets, enjoy their leisure, and bury their dead.

Some resent the presence of the critic. We know fundamentalists do.

But before we accept their judgment we should think about what a society would be like if it didn't have critics. We at Remonstrans had the uncanny prescience to arrange a demonstration.

You will recall our suggestion that you read the poetry of Adele Sakler. Some Emergents came over to thank us for recommending her work, and they did this with a view to discouraging us: they thought that by letting us know that we unwittingly advanced her reputation, we'd think twice about doing that again!

But if you read their justification of Ms. Sakler's work, you'll notice that they had nothing to contribute on the subject of its quality. No one could tell us what was good about it. What did they say?

They commended her for being strong enough in her faith to share her struggles and her doubts. If she'd howled at the moon they would have been satisfied. They respected her blog for being a place where people can come to discuss theology, experiences, and feelings. Even they do not like her work; they engage in exercises of personal validation. How Sakler compares to Rossetti is beyond them.

If you want to see a culture that celebrates drivel, check out Emergence: the dead end of American Evangelicalism. They don't do art over there, they validate personal expression. And while we're sure they see personal validation as a great thing, they forget that the audience gets nothing out of it.

And all of this is not too unlike Fundamentalists who honor inept leadership because they prefer "men of action". They validate activism irrespective of what it produces. Don't ask them what kind of action we should honor, just validate the activism.

Whether the audience is helped? whether the whole is benefitted by the blunders of the few? that escapes their concern.

I'm wondering if this is wise.

I recently spoke with a young composer about what I think music does. What do good musicians try to do? It is not as easy as you may think to explain what great music does. It is harder to explain to someone in our historical moment because so few great artists still walk among us.

It is hard to explain because it is an abstract thing, and if two people sitting in a noisy restaurant can't share concrete examples, the discussion can slip like sand through fingers.

And part of the reason it is hard to explain is because it doesn't happen predictably. It doesn't happen on cue. Not every performance is good; some are not even adequate. Sometimes we are not ready. Sometimes we are ready but we stifle a good thing by expecting the wrong thing; sometimes we can walk right by a wonderful thing because we are looking for something else. An awful lot of people really just "use" music.

Part of the reason it is hard to explain is so few people even know how to listen to music. If you don't know a canon from a rondo, you really don't know what you are hearing. The string of notes that makes for a great fugue doesn't tend to make for a great berceuse. If you don't know what the music is trying to do, you are just left to your own devices. And given today's entertainment environment, people tend to do what I call tune-scavenging.

While looking for something tangible to help make the abstract more comprehensible, I found this.

This is David Stern, son of Isaac Stern, talking about Ivry Gitlis. It may help you to watch it. Here a real, live musician and the son of an artist talks about the work of another artist. Stern is talking about a man who worships music. And before some among us run off to choke on their tongues, remember he is using the English word worship "in the original": weorthscipe.

We used to gather at weddings before God and men to hear someone say, "With my body I thee worship". We don't worship a wife as God, and we don't worship music as God. We worship a wife as a wife, music as music, and God as God. And notice how profaning things and people has led us down a path to profaning God himself.

Can we worship God with profaned things do you think?

These comments may at least get you to look for something you haven't been looking for, and so much of art is a matter of simple looking.

It is ironic that I had that discussion the Monday evening after Monday morning's post; among men for whom labels mean nothing, it is hard to feature a place in the imagination where "every note means something".

Watch it.

Here are two guys perplexed by labels, rubrics and categories and the difficulties attending their use.

Tony Jones sat down and puzzled at length before writing: [Emergents] "have a particular antipathy toward rubrics, labels, and categorizations. They seem to us convenient ways of boxing someone in, which all too often leads to writing someone off."

First is Dave Doran, the Barney Fife of Fundamentalism, a man who has devoted his life to the confusion of seminarians, (often by means of boxing in and writing off). Now those seminarians are seeking accommodations in a part of town he disapproves of. He attributes this emigration to confusing labels.

I guess I find myself back at a spot where most of these discussions end for me these days. I think they are all handicapped by the use of labels from the 20th century which no longer fit and, therefore, don't serve the discussion well. By thinking of three circles-new evangelicalism, conservative evangelicalism, and fundamentalism-all of the energy of the discussion goes into who's in and who's out. The unavoidable problem, though, is that nobody can define in and out at this stage of the game. So, where I differ with Bauder is that I don't think that we can say anything definitive about a group. We need to look at individual men and ministries, find out what they believe and how they apply those beliefs, and then draw our conclusions.

---Dave Doran, president of a Fundamentalist seminary

The second is Tony Jones, the Mr. Bean of Emergence, who understands conservatism just as well as Mike Morrell does. He too boxes in and writes off, but he does it from the other end of the spectrum.

Please allow me a tangent: Was Thomas Aquinas a "liberal" or a "conservative"?  Well, we might at first paint him a conservative, for he rescued orthodox Christianity from a particularly stagnant period by recovering - i.e., conserving - scripture and tradition.  But how did he do that?  By entering into a thoroughgoing dialogue with the Aristotelian philosophy of medieval Islam.  I daresay that if a theologian today were to admit that he or she was dipping into the wells of Muslim philosophy in order undergird Christian theology, that theologian would be condemned as having slipped off the slippery slope.

My point is that the question, Was Thomas a conservative or a liberal? is nonsensical, because "liberalism" and "conservatism" are modern categories, linked to modern (read, analytic) philosophical presuppositions.  If I can make the point even more strongly, they are not theological categories.  Thomas was not a liberal or a conservative, Paul was not a liberal or a conservative, Jesus was not a liberal or a conservative.  And, if I may be so bold, I am not a liberal or a conservative.  Those non-theological categories become less helpful each day.  I suggest we stop using them.  OK, end of tangent.

---Tony Jones, ex-national coordinator of Emergent Village

How do you suppose a good man might live in a world defined by Deputy Fifes and Mr. Beans?

When error comes to us all spry and apple-cheeked, it promises hope to the naïve. But soon it will move to Florida and spend its senior moments in a rocker. We were promised a generous orthodoxy, now we are told that if we don't share their hope, we have no hope at all.

Brian McLaren's blog turned out to be a shameless exercise in self-promotion consisting of the trivia of one man's life and mind told in two basic sentences: those that contain the phrase my new book and those that don't. This is leadership for a generation which violently rejects crass commercialism?

On the other hand, here is the work of another woman courageous and vulnerable enough to express her heart through creative means. Here is the eye of a woman with more to tell us about the world than a church bus full of Fundamentalists.

Ironic in a cruel way, is it not?

The World

By day she woos me, soft, exceeding fair:
  But all night as the moon so changeth she;
  Loathsome and foul with hideous leprosy
And subtle serpents gliding in her hair.
By day she woos me to the outer air.
  Ripe fruits, sweet flowers, and full satiety:
  But thro' the night, a beast she grins at me,
A very monster void of love and prayer.
By day she stands a lie: by night she stands
  In all the naked horror of the truth
With pushing horns and clawed and clutching hands.
Is this a friend indeed; that I should sell
  My soul to her, give her my life and youth,
Till my feet, cloven too, take hold on hell?

---Christina Rossetti

• Brian McLaren continues to develop his views of the entire Christian religion with the conspicuous erudition we take for granted in Doug Pagitt, Tony Jones, and Mr. Bean—assuming those last two are not the same person. Christianity Today has published a review by Scot McKnight, and I do think you should make the time to read it. You should also sample the reaction of CT readers. It's not that McLaren has said anything helpful or that CT is offering anything perceptive, but I don't think we should overlook any attempt Evangelicals make at recognizing blatant heresy.

• Up in the attic of the Emergent Funhouse Adele Sakler tries to make some pomes. Adele is an admittedly distraught woman of perverted views, deviant sexual practices and peevish attitudes. I won't link to her entire collection (you can scroll through a number of her unconsecrated refrains), but I will point you toward something she considers an "acrostic poem"—and I guess it could, given the state of Emergent literacy, be considered acrostic. Or it could also be that she recently discovered the word and still doesn't realize that the strength of an acrostic poem lies in recognizable spellings. All rights have been reserved, but if you want to know why, you'll have to ask her.

• And in closely related news, Maranatha Baptist Bible College promises to make good on its threat to install its fifth president on 18 March. Our editorial staff met together with the landscaping crew to determine whether MBBC chose March 18 in order to commemorate the First Lateran Council in 1123, the burning at the stake of 39 Knights Templar in 1314, or the opening of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in 1861. I suggested that with the word Baptist figuring in the school's name, Thursday might have been chosen because Spurgeon was himself a Baptist. It pains me to tell our readers that my suggestion was laughed to scorn. "Have you ever," I was asked amidst howls and jeers, "ever signed a book on Baptist history out of the library?" I tried to put forward a feeble case but it was hopeless as the meeting turned into a melée of laughter, table-pounding, hooting and head-patting.

Some people are now wondering if the emergent church is dead. I'm prepared to go only so far as to say it is brain dead; I'm keeping the toe tag in my pocket for now.

If I were an emergent, I'd certainly resent the sorry leadership we witnessed, but the rabble that didn't get a book deal doesn't know how to fix anything: they speak of their efforts as iterations because they don't want to call them failed attempts or gimmicks soon abandoned. Certain people used EV as a step-ladder to celebrity and have left everyone else listening to The Crickets' Abendlied.

Sad for them; possible career advancement for the crickets.

But we cannot forget that bad ideas tend to linger. Recall the early, hopeful days of Modernism? I don't, but my grandfather did, and I've read about them. If Modernist leaders had had any intellectual integrity, they would have called Modernism an iteration and they would have abandoned it after November 18, 1916. They didn't; they actually defended it!

Lined up here—like in a museum display case—are 17 flaky fossils telling a camera what is wrong with "Progressive Theology". I think you will enjoy watching this. If you know anything about the history of the Western Church, I know you will. I'm going to watch it again with a big bowl of popcorn.

Donna Bowman thinks the problem is a surfeit of knowledge. Gary Dorrien thinks progressive theology lacks spiritual conviction and is full of "innocuous church talk". John Thatamanil thinks their theologians "confused ethics and politics with the sum and substance of Christian life".

I wonder what Emergents will make of that observation.

Ignacio Castuera admits they don't have final answers and invites us to write our own creed. Dawn DeVries supposes that the message of progressive theology "doesn't point to anything important". (Now there is one sharp theologienne!)

But I won't ruin it for you.

And as you watch it, reflect on how different things would be if there had been a church that for the last century had not tinkered and diddled and doodled with the old kind of Christianity. And wonder about what sort of faith will be left after this wave of innovators gets tenure.

It is a common—but perhaps understandable—misconception that Emergents desire that everything should change.

God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men [are] who go on too long and not make good points.

Hanna: I wanted to tell you how impressed I was with the way you handled the man, [Joe], at our [event] who stood up and talked about how we need to put your ideas into action. I felt uncomfortable as he was speaking, like he was going on too long and not making good points. He even told you that we all knew what you were saying already. You were totally unthreatened by him and you actually had all of us applaud when he was finished. I was so surprised by that response from you. You didn't shut him down or belittle him in any way. In fact you did the opposite. You thanked him for his comments and even went back to them later when you were answering another question. I loved all your stories and listened intently to what you said in your lectures, and the way you handled [Joe]'s comments was the thing that really stuck with me.

I realize that all of this is probably about me and my own issues and where I'm at.

Last night I attended the Zydeco Mass at the Cathedral, which is a riotous Eucharist with a zydeco band playing. It draws our most colorful members out of the woodwork. Afterward, I attended the Cajun dinner and was seated next to two men who at first made me uncomfortable because they were a little bizarre. One man kept referring to women in his life as "prostitutes," the Latinos in his life as "Mexicans," and he even knew some "lesbians." He referred to others who were "living in sin," etc, etc. The other man was a professed alcoholic who was drinking wine. So at first I was uncomfortable. Then I thought about how you were so unthreatened by [Joe] and you actually welcomed him. I tried it out. I just listened, because they both seemed to want to talk. As I listened I felt my usual misgivings about these men and I almost said to the one man, "if you're in AA and you understand your alcoholism, then why are you drinking tonight?" But I decided to just listen because that was clearly what they needed. They both had been through a lot of hardship. They both had sparks of divinity shining through all their weirdness. A couple times friends attempted to rescue me from their conversation but I stuck with it. And it turned out that we were the last people to leave the hall. The alcoholic paid me a compliment saying, "thank you for being who you are. Just your presence is wonderful," which is about the best compliment I've ever received. I felt totally safe and unthreatened. It was such a neat experience. Thank you for inspiring me to accept people on their own terms. It ended up being really good for me!

I feel like it's the start of an interesting journey in my life.

Brian: I've experienced this again and again in my life too - when I'm tempted to pull away, but I remember that a follower of Jesus always "moves toward the other" with nonjudging love and respect and a willingness to listen ... and, as Hannah says, a desire to see the image of God in people who at first seem to us unlikely.

It might be wondered if it is quite fair to characterize Emergence by quoting an airhead like Tim Soerens. We might be asked if Soerens wouldn't make a better poster child for ADD/ADHD than for a philosophical or theological school of thought.

We all know that if we had been told to write a definition of Romanticism and we handed in a slip of paper reporting that Romanticism came after Classicism, that Classicism appealed to ideal forms and concerned itself with order, balance, proportion...and then if we coughed up some extremely vague platitude about "the myth of" order, balance and proportion so as to suggest that Romanticism didn't have its own sense of order, balance and proportion, we would know exactly what kind of grade to expect.

So, getting back to my question, could we not be accused of finding the least credible proponent of emergence?

It's an intriguing thought, but I don't believe that case really could be made convincingly; not after the swashbuckling ignorance of guys like Mike Morrell, Tony Jones, Doug Pagitt and Tim King.

Let's take the case of Brian D. McLaren. Here is Brian posing the first of ten questions. Bear in mind that this is not a lecture or even a conversation, this is an episode. An episode with a sweepstake! It is an advertisement; it is a marketing device. In fact McLaren's blog is nothing but a marketing device.

(It's really all about gimmicks. It has always been about gimmicks. Gimmicks like Trucker Frank, the Church Basement Roadshow, the couches, the finger-painting, those daffy Sparkhouse chatterboxes, and that post-modern documentary video shot, presumably, for a basket-weaving class at Mars Hill Graduate School.)

In this episode coal cars are rolling along the horizon as Brian, standing appropriately among piles of organic material, introduces us to his first cage-rattling question: What is the Shape of the Biblical Narrative? Brian's complaint is that we don't understand the shape of the biblical narrative. According to this freelance dolt, we see Jesus only through St. Paul, St. Paul through Augustine, Augustine through Aquinas, Aquinas through Luther, Luther through Wesley, Wesley through Calvin, and Calvin through Hinn. Brian thinks we need to discover the real narrative of the Bible. He thinks we can hopscotch our way back to Abraham and "the Jewish narrative into which Jesus comes".

I hope you can appreciate the scope of McLaren's lunacy.

First the obvious falsehoods: we do not see Jesus only through St. Paul; we see him through Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter, James, Jude, the author of Hebrews.... Likewise, we do not see St. Paul only through Augustine and we do not see Augustine only through Aquinas.... Brian McLaren might have learned this if he ever went to seminary. And Brian's oversimplification will make sense only to other seriously uneducated people. The shape of the biblical narrative is far more complicated, far more elaborate, and far more interfused than Brian can tell you.

Some of us understood this complexity a long time ago, and that's why we bothered to study Greek, Hebrew, Church history and systematic theology. We knew there would be disputes over texts, we knew there would be disagreements between theologians, and we knew there would be conflicts in our approaches to doctrine. We are not the ones who need to be told that our theology comes to us mediated by Prophets, Apostles, Evangelists, Fathers and Doctors, and Brian McLaren is not qualified to tell anyone which of our beliefs are assumptions and which are reasoned conclusions and which are inspired revelations.

Second, it is hilarious that the man who wishes to understand the shape of the Biblical narrative by going back to Abraham can't even read the language. I'm all for going back to Abraham, Moses, David, and Isaiah to understand the shape of the Biblical narrative. In fact I've recommended highly the work of Robert Alter for just that purpose. Who will be making the more preposterous assumptions about the shape of the Biblical narrative, Alter (who translated the entire Pentateuch) or McLaren? Is McLaren even able to draw all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet?

A significant pronoun begins this statement by McLaren:

We bring an assumption about what the big story is about. If we are willing to loosen up on those assumptions and let the Bible itself generate a narrative for us, I think what that will do is open up immense new territory for us.

The truth is that we all bring some assumptions. All we can do is work to eliminate as many assumptions as possible and draw as many reasonable conclusions as possible. Brian McLaren is dismissive of that work.

What this emergent episode tries to do is suggest that there is no difference between what Alter does and what McLaren does. Emergence is the superstition that what uneducated people do on couches can produce a useful understanding the shape of the Biblical narrative.

One begins to appreciate Mr. Pye's sentiment if not his choice of words.

So I would define post-modernism as the thing after modernity, and when I think of modernity I think principally of the enlightenment, I think of reason, I think of progress, umm, or what I would probably say is the myth of progress. And so when I think of post-modernity I think of whatever, as far as philosophy, as far as uhh, zeitgeist of the age, whatever is going to come after that.

And for myself, I'm a pastor in a downtown neighborhood, and when I reflect on post-modernity I'm actually quite excited about it because I think that it, for what I do, it breaks open the possibility of getting beyond...well, I guess I would say...what I said earlier about, umm, thinking that science and reason is going to provide an ideal way in the future primarily. I think the 20th century has proven that's not the case and that's primarily why we even have post-modernity.

So I'm a pastor of a new, smaller church and umm, we're taking the neighborhood...we're really wanting to narrow in on this neighborhood, and crafting a way of life within the neighborhood, that connects local service and relationship amongst the people that have signed up for this journey, with Christian spirituality. So, what we're trying to do is, what we believe is joining God's work in the neighborhood by integrating a way of life that connects service, relationship and spirituality.

---Tim Soerens

For those of you who might desire some light diversion, here is a hilarious video.

Also for those who have friends suffering from clinical depression or if you have co-workers who casually raise questions around the water cooler about effective means of suicide, or if you know someone who keeps a picture of Dr. Kevorkian in his wallet, you need to pass on this link.

Their problems will vanish inside of 18 minutes and they will skip home whistling What A Wonderful World.

Here are four young brainiacs: a graphic artist, a student of architecture, an owner of a coffee bar and Pastor Tim Soerens to define post-modernism.

Tim Soerens has worked out that post-modernism is that thing that comes after modernity. He is also knowledgeable about "the zeitgeist of the age" and is an ardent proponent of "otherlyness".

Tim actually holds two degrees, believe it or not: a B.A. in Rhetorical Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Masters of Divinity from Mars Hill Graduate School, Seattle, (both of which I think make this video especially moving).

You might save a life today.

This is an interesting time for Emergence or Emergent Church or post-modernism or post-orthodoxy. I guess the name historians will put to this little episode may depend on their sense of humor.

For a while emergents could pretend that their critics didn't get it. Guys like Carson, MacArthur, Mohler, Sproul, and Wells just didn't understand our times; not like these wunderkinder understood our times.

Turns out that when the Church Basement Roadshow bus ran out of gas, it was something of a metaphor. Not even those schooled in strategic foresight saw what was coming.

Actually, the movement has been out of gas for quite some time. People have drifted off, blogs went dead, posts were vacated, promises were made, complaints were aired, affirmations were offered, moments of excitement were occasionally reported, energy was up (we were told)...and nothing continued happening at a pretty fast clip.

But now certain internal voices are raising questions about this "conversation", and asking questions of Emergence is very different from asking questions of Evangelicalism. If you questioned Evangelicalism you were creative and imaginative, if you question Emergence you are fearful and unloving.

...Brian McLaren said in a video that those of us who take them and others to task are held in bondage to fear and thoroughly un-loving; my motivation for analyzing the theology and beliefs of leaders within the emerging church is fear-based and inherently un-love. One word: ridiculous. I am not fearful; this has nothing to do with fear. In fact, the loving thing to do is in fact confront, prod, and question.

Jeremy Bouma says nothing doing, he ain't no scaredy cat, he's confronting, prodding and questioning. You ought to take a peek at Bouma's theological musings. It might be worth getting his take on it. He came into, passed through and has gone beyond. You might say he is one of the few who've actually emerged from the other side.

Mike Morrell, our own dim-witted futurist, sat down and placed a lot of words end to end pretty much in a random fashion so as to put a smileyface on all this. He's linked to quite a few—what should we call them?—judgments of the work of Brian McLaren. Some of them borrow quite heavily from the Emergent style handbook, if you know what I mean: you might not want to click on those links if an impressionable child is at your elbow.

If you go down his post about three screens or so, you will find three links. One is calling McLaren a true son of Lucifer (an insult I can't imagine Lucifer finds flattering), the third one I won't repeat, and Mike tells us that he left "some of the worst ones out".

Yikes. Blogging in the way of Jesus.

Mike ends his post with this whimper:

May all of us - missional and emergent, evangelical and mainline, Catholic and Pentecostal, gay and straight, deconstructionist and Radically Orthodox - fling ourselves upon the Throne of Grace and mercies of the Father, Son, and Spirit, one God, who alone saves and restores.

Amen?

Well, we'll see, Mike, but I don't think that's a throne, I believe that's just one of those ratty emergent couches.

Maybe it's just time for another rummage sale.

What are you guys asking for Pagitt's trombone?

The theological ignorance of emergents (assuming the term emerging church still describes a non-imaginary thing) is mildly irritating. One of the many things that escaped emergents' attention was the actual patterns of worship established by earlier generations of believers. They paid paltry lip service to Robert Webber and his ancient future idea, but when these posers spoke from their hearts they quoted U2 and Bruce Springsteen. Brian McLaren wrote a little pre-adolescent verse. Then there was Mark Scandrette and his faux beat poetry and the Church Basement Roadshow—which wouldn't have been invited back to a karaoke bar for Free Beer Night even if members of the audience agreed to tune their instruments for them.

All these people did was hang cheap prints of a few saints, light some votive candles and sing In The Garden at me.

So as I say, this is mildly irritating, but I can handle it because I'm a patient man. It's unfair to expect anything more from clergyfolk who don't even know the significance of the rainbow in "The Flood Story". From flunkies like this you don't expect great devotional insights or a moving liturgy.

What is completely insufferable is a "conservative church" (assuming the term conservative church still describes a non-imaginary thing) that does precisely the same! We expect illiterates to miss the importance of the Psalms of David just as easily as they miss Christ's teaching on Hell or St. Paul's on the atonement. What beggars an imagination raised on Homer, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany, Charles Williams and J. R. R. Tolkien is that fundamentalists who proclaim their highest regard for an inerrant Scripture should abandon it for fluff that Lawrence Welk would have been embarrassed to play.

You owe it to yourself to read about the place of the Psalter in the history of the Church. If you are a fundamentalist, you may not know where to begin, so I will recommend this. Recent archeological discoveries have shown that David's collection of Psalms was not collected by the Roman Catholic Church or Calvinists who lacked evangelistic zeal.

Do the purveyors of "conservative Christian music" believe the Psalms are "archaic, irrelevant, or even unchristian", or is there some other explanation for this conspicuous wickedness?

I'm certainly grateful for the people who—having the greatest respect for Scripture—had the good sense to tighten the thumbscrews on people with too-long hair and too-short skirts. That was most helpful. And having dealt so prudently with those larger issues, they might now turn their attention to the smaller details of actually introducing the inspired Psalter to their worship.

Please understand: I'm not trying to persuade anyone to my way of thinking on this. This is just a suggestion to consider.

Watching someone in the "foresight field" struggle with simple definitions and elementary ideas was like watching a live fish in a dry bucket: frantic, violent and noisy.

Part of his problem is illiteracy and part of his problem is ideology and part of his problem is general gullibility, samples of which you can find on his blog. When Howard Zinn, Dorothy Day and Tom Sine sit in the honored seats around the table, it's not hard to spot the serious handicaps.

By way of amusing example, you may not know that the cell phone is "the single most transformative tool for development" of the global poor. Yes, people, the cell phone. They might as well pass out mood rings.

But there is another explanation, one that almost provokes our sympathy: where in christendom was a persuasive case being made for conservatism? Where was the attraction in the culture of the orthodox, separated church?

The FBF? Soundfroth? Steve Pettit's Hoedown Kings? The fine thespians of Maranatha Baptist Bible College? The seductive beauty of Majesty Hymns? The homiletics and liturgy of a movement still losing its own young people?

Tell me again that culture is not important.

Recently we were poking through emergent's casual thoughts and verbal pranks when one emergent gremlin came forward to help us illustrate the point.

I'd said previously:

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.

I went on to make what I believe to be a necessary distinction, and I think that distinction must be observed for us to understand our times. As for the traceable lineage I spoke of, I think Mike Morrell helps us with some of those tedious begats and son-ofs.

These people do think in stereotypes and speak in jargon. When Tim King and Spencer Burke make their dichotomy between Conversion or Contribution, they themselves spell out the difference between Christianity and Emergence. Emergent belief is that if you take Modernism and stir in some contemporary buzzwords like empowerment, global, inclusion, mystery, humility, multi-cultural, sacred narratives, gender, climate...you have something new, fresh, vital and attractive.

You really don't.

Some things never change, even when uttered from a couch.

Here is a Puritan's observation to remind us of the obvious: the world has a lot of pretty, painted baubles to bewitch the gullible.

O LORD,

The world is artful to entrap,
approaches in fascinating guise,
extends many a gilded bait,
presents many a charming face.

Let my faith scan every painted bauble,
and escape every bewitching snare
in a victory that overcomes all things.

In my duties give me firmness, energy, zeal,
devotion to thy cause,
courage in thy name,
love as a working grace,
and all commensurate with my trust.

Let faith stride forth in giant power,
and love respond with energy in every act.

I often mourn the absence of my beloved Lord
whose smile makes earth a paradise,
whose voice is sweetest music,
whose presence gives all graces strength.

But by unbelief I often keep him outside my door.

Let faith give entrance that he may abide with me forever.

Thy Word is full of promises,
flowers of sweetest fragrance,
fruit of refreshing flavour when culled by faith.

May I be made rich in its riches,
be strong in its power,
be happy in its joy,
abide in its sweetness,
feast on its preciousness,
draw vigour from its manna.

Lord, increase my faith.

For those with an interest in the pig's breakfast that is American Evangelicalism, you might want to read a slice of its history (and politics) here.

It is a very small slice, and it's unfortunate that Dr. Mouw can't be a little less superficial about the issues in play, but I think we all know better than to expect more from Christianity Today.

Wouldn't it be fascinating to go through the correspondence of CT's editors and trace the movement's failures on this point right up to the Manhattan Declaration, which by the way, as of 5:54 this morning, had only 412,931 signatures in support. A pitiful number of signatures out of a desired million.

There is no published count of the number who signed and then withdrew their signatures, but you might want to follow that line of inquiry over at Pyro.

Once again Evangelicals stumble into the Public Square, stare into the bright lights, tap the microphone, take out their note cards and embarrass themselves.

So not like a mighty army...

  ...then let me be what I profess, do as well as teach, live as well as hear religion.

--- Puritan prayer

In our recent posts we have glanced around at the casual thoughts and verbal pranks of people who pretend to be voices in the emergent church. These people suppose they have probing minds capable of expressing deep thoughts which we are interested in hearing about. They fancy themselves great independent thinkers of such brutal honesty that they can tell us the virtues of doubt and the consolations of disbelief. They think they are our spiritual heroes.

And they talk like this in public:

The reason that I got involved with the Presence families of ministries is largely because I'm a student of Strategic Foresight; Transmillenial eschatology sees the future as an open book, in which we have the sacred privilege of co-creating with God, one moment at a time. While the foresight field is ‘faith neutral' (its actually historically a tad hostile to faith, though that is changing as more nuanced and integral views effect the discipline), its view of an open future is quite compatible with this "way of seeing."

I have no doubt these people will someday get honorable mention in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and I wish them well with that. I also hope that that transmillenial [sic] eschatology thingy works out for them.

I suspect we can already see the general shape of a strong delusion. This is a day made for the Dan Browns, Wayne Dyers, David Haywards, Spencer Burkes, Barack Obamas...and has there ever been an hour more suitable for nonsense about our shadow self, about the false self becoming attached to form, about hope and change, about biblical story?

Have people ever been so deluded about the essence of that thing Tozer called a Christianity of the pure New Testament kind?

St. Paul said the Gospel was the power of God unto salvation. We must wonder who still believes that.

According to Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, a diet heavy in fish will make a person more intelligent. Bertie was convinced that his valet's intellectual prowess was attributable to fish for breakfast, fish for lunch and fish for supper. If this theory is correct (and his Aunt Agatha didn't believe any of Bertie's theories were correct) then the only rational conclusion we can draw is that Doug Pagitt is not much of a fish-eater. Taking into account what Doug has written recently, he never ate so much as a single filet of minnow.

Someone took Doug Pagitt to task for being an apostate, and Doug responds here.

Take a look at his response.

I suggest this view is a distorted version of faith that does not reflect the Biblical story at all, but that argument is part of our ongoing conversation. What I am sure of is that their reactions are driven from fear. I am not sure where the fear come from, but, in my opinion, it causes them to look at people with suspicion and distrust which taints everything.

In the very act of whining about the accusation that he distorts the faith, Doug accuses a person of distorting the faith.

Hello.

Doug is "sure" this hostility toward apostasy is a) a distortion of the faith and b) is not reflective of the Biblical story at all. Doug doesn't know where the fear comes from, but it is his considered opinion that this fear induces suspicion and distrust in his critics.

Like Danielle Shroyer, Doug Pagitt isn't familiar with the real Biblical story. I have often heard him give his views of the Biblical story, and they are not worth your time. So Doug cannot deal with his critic's understanding of the Biblical story; what he does instead is convey the words of a song by Bruce Springsteen.

You know: Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Springsteen, Colossians...

If I were to tell you the words were comically irrelevant to the question of apostasy, you might think that was just a conclusion I drew for myself. So here are the words; you decide:

I got my finger on the trigger But I don't know who to trust
When I look into your eyes There's just devils and dust
We're a long, long way from home, Bobbie Home's a long, long way from us
I feel a dirty wind blowing Devils and dust
I got God on my side
  And I'm just trying to survive
What if what you do to survive
 Kills the things you love
Fear's a powerful thing, baby, 
It can turn your heart black you can trust
It'll take your God filled soul
 And fill it with devils and dust

Pagitt then misapplies Matthew 12:22-24; how it relates to this discussion he does not say, but he does noodle it out enough to anticipate objections. Then he cites I John 4:17-21, taking no notice of how that very same chapter begins. The man's skill in hermeneutics is heartbreaking.

Minnesota is sometimes called the "land of a 10,000 lakes". If there is anyone up there with a fishing pole and some time to spare, please send a fish to Doug at:

Solomon's Porch
100 W. 46th Street
Minneapolis MN 55419

Tell me what kind of fish you caught and I will send him a recipe.

Let's do what we can for Doug, people.

It's fair to say that we learned something about Evangelicals from the Manhattan Declaration, but we learned as much from its fallout. Likewise we learned something from the recent flurry of indignation from "emergents" following Andrew Jones's farewell. What began as a conversation and an ethos is now being defended as though it were a movement. Very few have been creative, radical, controversial, imaginative or progressive enough to engage in authentic conversation. Emergents are as open to dialogue as J. Frank Norris was with the Pope. It's all very amusing.

Everything must change...but only to a point, for Pete's sake! All points of view are valid except those that challenge our particular dualisms.

Of what I've read so far, many are nervously blogging and twittering their loyalties, but I've yet to read anyone prepared to discuss A. Jones's essential critique. Has the movement become sectarian or has it not? Has it taken on theological emphases inconsistent with its early claims or has it not? I see no intelligent discussion of these points. Just like everywhere else in the known world, they line up to deny or confirm and then to manage the impact of conspicuous defections.

Tony Jones is a modernist in postmodernist's clothing!

Get a rope.

And once again we are forced to consider the fragility of reform. It is sexy to have a revolution, everybody wants to throw Frisbees in the park, and the best lawns are littered with half-wit theologians. It will be useful to watch how this "conversation" weathers self-criticism.

Jonathan Stegall wants to continue to "flow within multiple streams" and he would prefer for us to blame the "heresy-hunters", but this sort of bafflegab isn't going to survive the criticisms Andrew Jones has made.

You might want to take notes.

If you've been following the Emerging Church at all, you'll have noticed that the word emergence was probably not the happiest choice to describe this religious innovation. It appears that sustainability was just not in the cards.

This whole gag began with an already outmoded idea and one which probably would not have been useful even in the hands of competent leaders. In the hands of McLaren, Jones, Pagitt, Trucker Frank, McKnight, and Burke, inter alios, it became a slow-motion calamity. Over in The Village the highest ranking stooges abandoned the movement to create their own little enterprises, and to this day their blogs are works of patent vanity and personal ambition.

Tony Jones vacated his position at EV and JoPaproductions made room for women—at least some women—to emerge. (And in that there is another irony that now threatens to come to light.)

EV is making Haiti look like an attractive vacation destination.

Tim Hartman and Danielle Shroyer tried to do their Weekend at Bernie's schtick: they promised that EV would sponsor theology in the grass and barbecues of people. They spoke of "things they hoped to plan".

The excitable Danielle was enthusiastic about the "energy" and "intentionality" as they all worked together for "God's Kingdom in our own context". She was eager to hear from many of you about your experiences and about your "places of emergence".

As it happens, tsk (tallskinnykiwi, A.K.A. Andrew Jones) has said his goodbyes.

I wasn't at Christianity21 but I have been watching as new theological emphases and sectarian attitudes towards church emerge and it is just not something that I can lend my name to or my time.

"Theological emphases" and "sectarian attitudes"?! At EV? So much for the vibe and the ethos. It's somehow become all theological and sectarian.

You just gotta laugh.

My favorite preacherette responded by asking what happened to their sexy revolution, and in the comments below you can read some desperate attempts at crisis management. Phyllis Tickle weighs in with a typically gaseous observation, and following that rumble A. Jones responds by saying:

It never ceases to amaze me how my poorly worded miscommunications can produce such clarity and depth of thought.

Yes, I'm sure that's what all that was: clarity and depth of thought. Perhaps that is just some antipodean humor there.

Over on tsk's blog, Dennis Coles wrote disparagingly of Tony Jones:

Note the binary: all/nothing. This kind of thinking pervades T. Jones' book, whereby he reveals himself a modern wolf in a postmodern wool vest.

So it is about personalities as well; personalities, theological emphases and sectarian attitudes.

It couldn't have happened to a more naïve bunch of platitudinarians.

And there go my hopes for the Kingdom, world peace, and a goat for every Burundi family.

I decided, after having directed your attention to the tormented language of men like Dave Hayward, Spencer Burke and Tim King, that we deserved something enjoyable by way of contrast.

I enjoyed this by Christina Rossetti and wanted to remind everyone what a blessing language can be and how pleasantly a thought can be expressed.

I will tell you that the title comes from Habakkuk 3:8, but I won't ruin it for you any further.

"Was Thy Wrath against the Sea?"

The sea laments with unappeasable
   Hankering wail of loss,
     Lifting its hands on high and passing by
       Out of the lovely light:
No foambow any more may crest that swell
  Of clamorous wave which toss;
    Lifting its hands on high it passes by
      From light into the night.
Peace, peace, thou sea! God's wisdom worketh well,
  Assigns it crown or cross:
    Lift we all hands on high, and passing by
      Attest: God doeth right.

The times are turbulent,
And the Holy Church is rent,
And who tremble or repent?

_{---Christina Rossetti}

I have said that religion has become a nest of private desires and political expectations; it fails as a consolation for our sorrows or an affirmation of our hopes.

I found someone else to help Dave Hayward explain this to you. You might remember the tender place Spencer Burke has in his heart for heretics. Here the simpleton host asks for help from his simpleton guest.

(And if you happen to be drinking a sticky beverage while viewing this, I strongly recommend you throw a towel over your keyboard.)

Burke:

Seems that all religions have these doomsday scenarios at the end, which seems kind of the antithesis to at least the Christian message of love, care, compassion, you know, versus fear, suspicion. Help me out. Why do you think many religions kind of fall into that angle?

King:

If we would take on a persona of saying, "Look, since our belief systems are merely pointers to that which is beyond and unnamable and unknowable, let's meet beyond our belief systems in this area of mystery and humility. And I think if the world started coming together and the world religions started coming together to celebrate the dignities of each sacred narrative, all meeting beyond our belief systems at the feet of mystery, then I think you've got phenomenal potential to really begin to create this tipping point toward celebration instead of doomsday."

"If we would take on a persona of saying..."?

I really can't tell you if Tim is using persona in its literary or Jungian sense. I can't even tell you if he knows the difference. I cannot explain in any way the appalling Babel of his brain.

Sorry.

Either way, this reminded me of a helpful editorial written long ago and far away by A. W. Tozer. When he wrote it he was talking about evangelism. I'll suggest that today it takes on ominous significance. I don't know who was responsible for little Timmy's religious instruction, but I think he should be fitted with a millstone and taken for a boat ride.

The task of the church is twofold: to spread Christianity throughout the world and to make sure that the Christianity she spreads is the pure New Testament kind.

Theoretically the seed, being the Word of God, should produce the same kind of fruit regardless of the spiritual condition of those who scatter it; but it does not work that way. The identical message preached to the heathen by men of differing degrees of godliness will produce different kinds of converts and result in a quality of Christianity varying according to the purity and power of those who preach it.

Christianity will always reproduce itself after its kind. A worldly-minded, unspiritual church, when she crosses the ocean to give her witness to peoples of other tongues and other cultures, is sure to bring forth on other shores a Christianity much like her own.

Not the naked Word only but the character of the witness determines the quality of the convert. The church can do no more than transplant herself. What she is in one land she will be in another. A crab apple does not become a Grimes Golden by being carried from one country to another. God has written His law deep into all life; everything must bring forth after its kind.

Tozer ended the same column with:

Evangelical Christianity...is now tragically below the New Testament standard. Worldliness is now an accepted part of our way of life. Our religious mood is social rather than spiritual.  We have lost the art of worship. We are not producing saints. Our models are successful businessmen, celebrated athletes and theatrical personalities. We carry on our religious activities after the methods of the modern advertiser. Our homes have been turned into theaters. Our literature is shallow and our hymnody borders on sacrilege. And scarcely anyone seems to care.

We must have a better kind of Christian soon or within another half century we may have no true Christianity at all.

 

Fundamentalism is not a movement towards orthodoxy but a movement away from orthodoxy.

Reading people like David Hayward is always helpful. You should read more of David Hayward. In fact, I don't believe you can really understand Western Christianity if you don't consider the consequences of its ideas, and Dave is a result of some very stupid ideas which Christians now embrace.

If you don't read about Billy Sunday or Bob Jones or Lonnie Frisbee or Ted Haggard or Bill Hybels or Kent Hovind, you might think these are occasional exceptions to the rule, and the rule is men like Polycarp, Augustine, Aquinas, Ambrose, Calvin and Merton. My own theory is that one of the purposes of Christian academia is to foster that misapprehension. When you bring home your diploma and show it to your wife as some feeble explanation for why you spent all that time in your study away from her, you'd like for her to come away with the belief that you are prepared to discuss the men on the second list. If you tell her you were something of a classroom authority on Jimmy Swaggart, you will soon be talking to the hand.

Christians really don't believe ideas have consequences any longer. They have some vague notion that there are bad ideas out there and that they won't sleep peacefully until they are squelched with extreme prejudice, but unless the ideas come from other academics they are not really dangerous, and to treat them as lethal is a little unbalanced.

The truth is, every error is fatal—eventually. All errors aren't immediately fatal, and we lose track of the small errors in our battles over the big errors, and I'm sure that can't always be helped. But one result of this misperception is that we organize our objections according to the size of the errors and the threat we perceive in them. And what literate person is going to read David Hayward and perceive any real threat? A guy still struggling with his adverbs can't really grasp our reasons for studying systematic theology.

Clearly we need more perceptive people.

We used to have some perceptive people, but unless their ideas dovetailed nicely with pressing agendas, they didn't really require us to change anything. So that when men like Machen and Tulga and Tozer pointed out the bizarre and caustic aftereffects of fundamentalism, no blustering fundamentalist needed to reconsider his tangents. Even after the publication of Majesty Hymns! How much of church liturgy and history has been savaged and abandoned to bring fundamentalists to the point where they could fracture over which Bible translation was inspired?

Similarly with Neo-evangelicalism: so long as there was sufficient bowing and scraping toward evangelism and relevance and "reaching the world in our generation", it didn't really matter what differences it entertained about what the Gospel included or excluded. And this confusion was recently documented for us in the Manhattan Declaration. What began as a pious pose on "seeking justice in our societies, resisting tyranny, and reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed and suffering" ended up dividing the evangelical world over a definition of the Gospel.

Excellent work, gentlemen!

Having resolved all the disgraces addressed in the Evangelical Manifesto of May 7, 2008, we move on to the grand imperatives of the Manhattan Declaration of October 20, 2009.

I'm going to suggest that we are not being led by thoughtful men who understand ideas at all; we are led by hysterical men gripped by obsessions and personal needs. Whether it is a fracas over what homosexual actor played in what religious movie or whether it is about how many goats we can buy for the people in Burundi, we are adrift in the worst possible way. The center has not held. In fact we have forgotten what a center does.

So we have made a home for people like David Hayward and Doug Pagitt, and these latter-day divines are not just comical, they have become typical. The faith they seek to share, or the faith they are losing and then finding and then losing and then finding is not really a faith by any classical definition. Religion today is not a culture of ideas; it is a battleground of obsessions. It is a nest of private desires and political expectations. It is not a consolation for our sorrows or an affirmation of our hopes.

David Hayward helps us see that.

When we last looked in on our free agent heretic it was just before St. Rudolph took to the holiday skies. You may recall his thoughts about how his morphing god found accommodations "within the affairs of people".

Luke the Evangelist tells us that "in Him we live, and move, and have our being". Dave tells us that God "lives, moves, and has his being" in time and space of the cosmos, history, our human interaction.

Which is nice, I guess, for him, but it is in no conceivable way orthodox Christian teaching. I suspect you could probably select at random any decade from church history to find a condemnation of that heresy.

I told myself we were rid of this nonsense for the year of our Lord 2009; he might resume his god-fantasies in the new year, but if I wanted more religious poppycock before the stores closed, I would have to rifle McLaren's or Jones's dumpsters.

Clearly that was the eggnog talking.

On the 18^th he issued an apology to his critics wherever they were vacationing. He made ten points. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he made a list containing ten items.

Six are interesting to me because of they tell us about Dave Hayward and his peers (if we can abuse the language enough to say that Dave has peers).

1.  I'm accused of inconsistency. I am not trying to be consistent. I'm trying to be honest. I question the assumption that we can even have a systematic theological comprehension of everything.

Just for the record, I haven't read a single theologian, pastor or theological writer who ever assumed that he had a "systematic theological comprehension of everything". (If any of our readers know of such a theologian, pastor or theological writer, please drop us a note containing bibliographical particulars: I've been given gift cards to several large bookstore chains. I have a long list of books I want, but I'm prepared to drop the last one on the list for a book by—or about—anyone who thinks he has a systematic theological comprehension of everything.)

That is just silliness, and probably a lie as well. What men have assumed—or reasoned—is that whatever little they might know could be put into a system. Those are two very different things. Owning all the diamonds in the world is not the same as taking the diamonds you do own and organizing them according to carat, clarity, color and cut.

Mathematics deals with numbers which, like concepts about God, extend into infinity. Only fools pretend that balancing your checkbook is a waste of time and brain cells because we cannot comprehend the infinite. And only fools say that systematizing our knowledge of God constitutes a claim of comprehensive theological knowledge of everything.

2. I'm accused of not telling people what to believe. I'm not trying to tell people what to believe. I am trying to respect each person's responsibility for their [sic] own faith.

This also misrepresents the facts. When we tell our children not to reach up and grab the stovetop, we are not telling them what to believe, we are telling them the truth about stoves, and we too are respecting each person's responsibility for his own actions. Indeed we are expanding this child's sphere of responsibility by introducing him to a distinction he has not yet appreciated. Hot stovetops will burn little fingers no matter what children believe.

3. I'm accused of being a universalist. I know we are all connected. That we are all one. I'm trying to understand this and articulate it theologically.

Given that non sequitur, I can only assume Dave doesn't know what the word universalist means. Everyone is connected in some way, of course: we are all sons of Adam, we are all heirs to his estate, we are all immoral creatures, we all have a Judge at the door.... What we want to know is if we are connected in any particular way that will survive the Judgment of the Living and the Dead.

4. I'm accused of being unorthodox. I'm not trying to be orthodox. I want to know the truth for myself for which I can live and die.

I think the question that leaps to every rational mind is: Are you willing to live and die for a falsehood? That is what is at issue. No one is saying that Dave shouldn't look; what many are telling him is that he won't find truth where he is looking.

5. I'm accused of not being missional. In fact, I think I am more missional! Believing we are all one, I am trying to find an articulation of this unity that bridges the illusory gaps between me and everyone else, including non-believers.

Just because a person thinks he is missional does not make him missional any more than my thinking I live in Buck House makes me the King of England. An impressive host of people are telling Dave that the gaps that exist between people are not at all illusory. I think maybe he should look up the word illusory on the way to checking out the word universalist.

8. I'm accused of being confused. I admit I don't understand. Yet. But I'm desperately trying. I am seeking, and in seeking I will find.

We did actually pick up on the "desperately trying" part, and that is the relevant point. Many people are "desperately trying" and abysmally failing. If they are confused and if they lack understanding, they should be told. And not just because we want to. This is what Jesus did, this is what Jesus told his Apostles to do, it is what the Apostles did, and it is what the Apostles to us to do.

We could even call this "making a life in the way of Jesus".

_______________

Dave Hayward is not just a lonely crackpot. He may well be—and we could certainly wish he were—a lonely crackpot, but you must consider that he is not alone. Dave is groping in a dark place, but he has plenty of company.

If you want to understand your hour in history, you must understand, at some basic level, where the David Haywards and Brian McLarens and Doug Pagitts came from. These fruits don't just fall from trees no one planted.

How did we ever get to the point that simpleminded people would glibly dismiss what no one ever assumed to be the case [that theological systems represent a comprehensive knowledge of everything] and take as a virtue this blind groping for a theology to accommodate the bag of grubworms they call their minds? I mean, who does this?! Who confuses speaking the truth with "telling people what to believe"?

Who tries to extrude a soteriology from this pre-adolescent wish that "we are all connected"? Who thinks wheat and tares are "all one"? Did Jesus ever believe or teach this? In what sense exactly are the children of light connected to the children of disobedience? Where do we find this indifference toward orthodoxy? Where does this denial of truth come from and what makes this search for "truth" outside orthodoxy plausible and realistic to them? Who even wants to build a bridge to span a gap which is merely illusory? These aren't snarkisms, they are serious questions. What set of ideas or what historical moment produces this sort of person?

We will all recognize that there is a disordered mind at work here. We might suggest to Dave some lifestyle changes or treatment options, but Dave is one of millions who has turned his back on reason and feels most comfortable trying to build a faith out of platitudes and mood swings.

Where does this view of reality come from?

Monday I should like to give a partial answer.