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.