Divine Plagiarism

There are hundreds of thousands of weddings worldwide on any given day. That fact is generally lost on those who are having a wedding on that given day. To them, it is a completely new thing, unlike anything that has ever happened before. While it may be the thousandth wedding for the church, and the hundredth wedding for the pastor, it is the first wedding for the couple. It is different from every wedding, because it is their wedding. The novelty found in the immediacy of the experience is part of the magic, part of the joy‘s foolishness. But sometimes joy’s foolishness can turn into plain old foolishness. Certainly, every couple is unique, but none are so unique that they cannot benefit from the experience of older and wiser couples. So the foolish couple, losing themselves in their own uniqueness, ceases to seek the council of others.

In some ways, we take the foolish couple’s approach to history. On some level, this is a consequence of the teleology bequeathed to us by Augustine. The City of God progresses ever upwards, following its diagonal slope upwards to the inevitable end of history. So each day is new, completely unlike any other day. No one has ever been here before, no one will ever be here again. And we are the pioneers, pushing back the frontier of history; alone and unafraid, with only our wits to sustain us. But I wonder if we didn’t lose some deep truths when we broke from the confines of the cyclic view of history. Each year is different from the last, but each year has spring, summer, fall and winter. The days of a man’s life follow a path, but that path is composed of ten thousand cycles of sunrises and sunsets. Perhaps history is Ezekiel’s wheels within wheels, corkscrewing their way up Augustine’s slope along Salvation History. Perhaps we progress in cycles, and all things return in their changed form.

New school versus old school, I think it goes. Still, the new school inevitably gets old. In this is the great irony of revolution: after they win, the revolutionaries find themselves the new enforcers of the status quo. There is a certain stability to the cycle. The old school defines themselves according to existing power structures, and the new school defines themselves in opposition to those same structures. And in this, both schools end up needing each other. Plagiarizing Andy Crouch’s brilliant comment, the younger generation’s abandonment of bourgeoisie values is financed by the profits of the older generation’s bourgeoisie values. One can almost imagine an Aboriginal ritual wherein the father trains his son to grapple, so that one day the son can overcome his father in a wrestling match and claim his independence. In the same way, the old school and the new school are inexorably intertwined, and history is written in the steps of their grappling bout.

We think of new names for things, and rightfully so. It is the first time these things have happened. Still, it looks a lot like the last time these things have happened. Listening to a symphony, you hear the same theme repeated many times, yet new each time it is new; once piano, another forte; one minor chord resolves, another does not. Even if only by its placement, each time the theme is played it is different than the last, even as it is the same each time. So our names are now Modernity and Post-Modernism. And it is new. Just as it is old. Recognizing the novelty of it all, let’s listen to the symphony and see if we can hear the same theme again.

If ever there was an experiment in modernity, it was the Soviet Union. The state religion of ‘Scientific Socialism’ was built upon a faith in progress. It was a teleological faith, teaching that history led inevitably to a Communist utopia. It was a faith of miracles, first bringing running water and electricity to serf villages, ultimately escaping the Earth’s gravitational field. And a faith of hierarchies, centrally planning the economic and political life of the faithful. Therefore, it is all the more surprising that this pinnacle of philosophical modernity would give rise to many of the post-modern movements of the twentieth century. Che Guevara, spoken of so highly by Sartre, was ultimately resourced by the Soviets. The ‘National Liberation’ movements were the post-modern external expression of the modernistic Soviet vision. FARC, Red Army Faction, Sendero Luminoso, and the Khmer Rouge; emotional, relational and low-tech, these all bear the marks of post-modern thought. So, intertwined, modernity finances post-modernism. In turn, following Mao’s revolutionary model, post-modernism develops into modernity. Modernity and post-modernism intertwined, they feed off of each other.

Rebellion is one of the hallmarks of post-modernity. Question the existing paradigms. Fight the power. I am reminded of the Rebel Alliance. Overthrow the oppressive, fascist structures of the evil Galactic Empire. And replace them with what? In this we find the intertwining, once again. The rebels are hardly the nihilistic Bader-Meinhoff Gang. Led by the Old Republic Senator Mon Mothma (yeah, I’m a Star Wars geek,) the Rebel Alliance fights for the New Republic. In the remembrance of the order that once was, the Rebels bring about chaos in the existing order to create a new order. Order collapses, bringing chaos, which in turn brings order.

This dialectic plays out daily in our headlines. The majority of the American armed forces are organized along conventional, modernistic lines. Heavily reliant on command, control, and advanced technology, they are the modern experiment with teeth. While tremendously successful in the highly modernistic Gulf War, the conventional forces find themselves mismatched to the post-modern insurgency. Relationally based, driven by an inchoate mix of ideologies, the rat seems to continue to exhaust the elephant. Still, the modernist experiment does not capture the entirety of the military. Special Forces express a strong sense of post-modernity both in structure and in outlook. Forgoing heavy armor for language and cultural training, excelling in relationally driven solutions to ill-defined problems, SF have been described as ‘masters of chaos.’ Ad-hoc solutions often take precedence over regulations, and command structures generally are much more horizontal and much more flexible. Not surprisingly, these post-modernistic forces find themselves quite relevant in our present conflict. Still, there is a dialectic: without the conventional forces, the unconventional forces would have a difficult time sustaining themselves for extended periods of time. (Though not a conflict-free dialectic, as evidenced by the constant squabbling for funding.)

Broadening our horizons beyond history and myth, we see the same dynamics in engineering, philosophy and physics. Chaos and order must be intertwined in order to create motion. Igniting fuel releases entropy and enthalpy, which must be directed through a system of pistons and shafts in order to do turn wheels. The structure alone is dead, the chaos alone is meaningless, yet together they accomplish work. The intertwined corkscrew that propels history is reflected in the systems we use to propel cars. In an engine, pistons push against each other in order to create motion in a perpendicular dimension. In the same way, thesis and antithesis push against each other to create a synthesis. The dynamic tension propels structures toward evolution. Maxwell’s Equations tell us that electricity and magnetism move in opposition to each other, causing a wave to propagate along a perpendicular axis: the intertwined corkscrew, yet again.

Therefore, it should not surprise us the same dynamics exist in the church: the Body of Christ is grows amidst the tension of cycles. Too many times, a lack of reconciliation within that body has caused that tension to tear churches apart. The church faced a vast change of culture five hundred years ago. The new school and the old school find themselves at odds, and neither side could find the humility to understand each other. The tragic consequences of that collision still haunt us today. One wonders how different history would have been if both sides abandoned their pride.

It is hardly a new question. Paul talks at length about the consequences of the ecclesial cultural collision in the early church between the Jews and the Greeks. The Greeks see the world through Aristotelian eyes, ordering their cities and their lives along rational lines. Understandably, they bring that same mindset to their understanding of God. The Jews see the world through the eyes of prophecy, where God is experienced through eyes of awe, not dissected through equations and logic. It is not surprising that the two groups would come into conflict, neither is it surprising that the fault lines would extend to the political and the economic (such as providing for widows.) Though there is one Gospel, Matthew tells it with an undeniably Jewish flavor, while Luke tells it as a Greek. In the reconciliation of that collision of cultures, the church is all the richer. As Lewis tells us, Christianity calls both the mystic and the logistician outside of themselves: an English academic is called to participate in a ritual of blood sacrifice, while an African tribesman is called into a ordered system of ethics. Theology alone is dead, praxis alone is chaos, but in their fusion in the fullness of our faith. So now we are the Baptists and the Emerging Church; the suburban modernists and the young urban post-moderns. We collide now, but we have always collided. Yet there is a difference between a dance and a rugby scrum. And the tension and passion in a dance may make it all the better.

[Christ Himself embodies this power of paradox. The carpenter who is the King of Kings. He is fully God, and fully man, infinitely intertwined. Perfect Justice and Perfect Grace, all at once. The clean perfection of the old law, completed with the warm embrace of the new.]

How, then, should we live? I think of Paul. A Greek to the Greeks, a Jew to the Jews, he took the time and effort to learn relevance to both cultures of his time. Whether invoking his Roman citizenship or a Pharisee’s privilege to preach at a synagogue, Paul becomes a hundred things to spread the Gospel. Still, we are not all so gifted as he. I, for one, cannot quote Greek poets in one breath, and in the next the prophet Isaiah. So we must rely on each other. If I cannot be a Greek to the Greeks, then I will pray for my brother who is a Greek. If I cannot be a Jew to the Jews, then I will support my brother who is a Jew.

So perhaps we are Jews and Greeks again, perhaps Moderns and Post-Moderns. But we are reconciled in Christ, and we are both necessary. In recognizing that fact, we learn to support each other. The moderns provide the stability for the post-moderns to flourish. The post-moderns provide the energy to revitalize the moderns. The cycle will inevitably continue, as the emerging church becomes the established church, from which another emerging church will come.

There is always re-discovery. The Emerging Church finds the monastics of old, their lessons relevant to contemporary and ancient culture. Yet the next emerging church may glean lessons from our establishment churches. Culture and economics are forever intertwined, and the age of industrialization that nurtured modernity is rising in the two-thirds world, even as it sets in the West. We would do well not to discard so lightly blades that were forged at such cost, we would do well not to forget the rational apologetics refined in a hundred years of combat. Certainly they will have to be adapted, just as we are adapting Brother Lawrence. We do well to unearth medieval treasure troves, to rediscover the sacraments, to learn from the great mystics. Yet the next generation may do well to unearth Lewis, Zacharias and Stroebel. After all, who would have thought that the first major land battle of the twenty-first century would have been a charge on horseback? Today’s anachronism may be the key to tomorrow’s victory.

I’ve heard many discussions of North America as a missions field. I wonder what every tribe and every tongue looks like in a post-industrial economy. Where a mountain range would have sundered one agrarian people into two, we live in the same space but are sundered by class and career. In terms of cultural norms and language, the people of Suburbia may be as different from Urbanites as Chaldeans are from Kurds. So we must reach both groups. The most effective missions models empower indigenous believers to reach their own cultures. We should do the same, and should support each other in the effort. We self-select into our tribes and tongues, and they become our missions field. So to the Harvard Sociologist, the Post-Moderns they feel comfortable with. And to the Civil Engineer, the concrete disciples of Modernity. This is not new. To the Jews, we go as Jews. To the Greeks, we go as Greeks. And always we go as Christ.

We are the Body of Christ, and we are here today, in the Emerging Churches and the Established Churches. Our story is neither as new nor as unique as we think it is. We live in a collision between cycles of Salvation History. We were Jews and Greeks once, and we transformed the world. We were the East and the West once, and it was a tension we could not manage in our sinfulness. We have been here before and we have seen different endings. The endings we find together are always the best.

[Extract from Amazon Framework: Culture Navigators.]

Biblical Design Principles.

Before we set out plagiarizing the work of the Grand Designer, let's read His autobiography. Understanding His Word better will lead us to better understand His works. Fortunately, He leaves us lots of bread crumbs.


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"Four things on earth are small, yet they are extremely wise: Ants are creatures of little strength, yet they store up their food in summer; coneys are creatures of little power, yet they make their home in the crags; locusts have no king, yet they advance together in ranks; a lizard can be caught in the hand, yet it is found in the king's palaces." - Proverbs 30:24-28 (NIV)


Self-Generating Complexity. A decent programmer can make a program to accomplish a given task, but it would take a brilliant programmer to make a program that adapts itself to any task it is given. God has designed His universe in this way. Clouds come into being at the margins of dewpoint and temperature. Ecosystems adapt themselves to their inhabitants. The best business ventures find wealth on the margins, multiplying it many-fold. There are three levels of optimization: choices, rules and systems. The most basic of optimizations tells us to make one choice vice another. The next level of optimization analyzes what choices work and what choices don't, and sets forth rules to make choices. The final level creates systems, which in turn create rules, which in turn create choices. Stated in calculus terms, the derivative of a system is a rule, and the derivative of a rule is a choice.


To take this from the abstract into something a bit more practical, let's say that we're a river engineer.

We want to build a path for water to flow from the ice-capped mountains to the ocean. Optimizing choices, we can climb all the way up to the top of the mountain, and start walking down to the ocean. As we go, we decide where we want the river to flow based on what we think looks right. Unfortunately, this will take us a very long time and we will not be able to correct mistakes very quickly. Our span of control is very small. So, just as Jethro tells Moses to do, we appoint administrators to carry out rules. We find that water flows better down inclines, it carves its way through sand easier than through rock, we realize that as it runs down hills it makes ox-bow. So we make rules, and we tell the river design administrators to move water down hills, and to favor sand over rock as they make rivers. And this works better for a time, until our bureaucracies keep growing. At some point, call it cross-over, the next rule creates more inefficiency in its administration than it creates in its implementation. At cross-over, it becomes exceedingly difficult for the system to adapt to any changes, for its institutional inertia has past a critical point. This is the toxic paradox that plagues many Western programs: rules paralysis. Instead of solving it with another rule, we need to go back to the drawing board.


Returning to our river puzzle, lets look to the Grand Designer's solution: engineering systems. Instead of making five-hundred rules to govern His rivers, He makes two or three meta-rules, and allows self-generating complexity to run its course. He makes water molecules, gravity and pressure gradients. He then turns them loose. The water melts from the ice cap, and gravity starts pulling it down to the ocean. As it starts to make its way, it finds obstacles in its path. Following simple pressure gradients, it seeks out the path of least resistance, which is incidentally the optimal path. Let the water keep going, following very simple meta-rules, and it will make you a nearly perfect river on its own. As an added bonus, your system will adapt to changes real-time without having to redesign itself. Meta-rules plus time equals optimized systems. This is the math of a Creator.


Application: Extant Economic Structures.

Just as God has built rivers to distribute water, He built markets to distribute money. A bayou may look tremendously different from white-water rapids, but both are accomplishing the same purpose in different contexts. There is an economic structure to any tribal community because there must be. There is some means by which resources are collected, refined and distributed. For someone who is used to rapids, it is difficult to understand water-flow through a bayou, so the temptation would be to pave the bayou and cut a trench for a river. This would not be the most effective solution. To a typical Western mind, business as missions generally takes on a very distinctive flavor. A more effective model realizes that there are extant business structures, analyzes them, and optimizes them within their own unique context.


Application: Adaptive Systems.

There is a temptation toward pyramid scheming in economic system design. Basically, once we find an idea that seems to work, we multiply it over and over in its current form. This plan works well as long as the initial conditions are maintained, but rapidly loses its relevance as those conditions change. Hence the rise and fall of various political and corporate empires. Windows is on Version 8-point-something, depending on how you count, and that's over the course of twenty years. The Field Rabbit is still on version 1.0 (2.0 if you count the Fall, but that was really our fault.) Therefore, a true adaptive system must not only be self-sustaining in its current form, but self-adaptive, sub-consciously redesigning itself as conditions change. Such a system would then be self-propagating, able to jump between different environments geographically and chronologically. Such a system would be sustainable, in its truest sense.


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"For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength. Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things--and the things that are not--to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him." - 1 Corinthians 1:25-29 (NIV)

Asymmetric Engagement. If we were to build a religion from the ground up, we would probably try to assemble a team of the best philosophers, the most renowned lawyers, the most notable priests and ministers, and the wealthiest financiers. God did this feat far more effectively with eleven barely literate fisherman and a turn-coat preacher named Saul. Certainly, it is a testament to the power of God that so few did so many in such little time. But part of that testament is in the brilliance of His choice. If He had used the best and the brightest, He would have had to push against the inertia of all the power structures of the time that named and trained those best and the brightest. The lawyer can't come out strongly on the issue of circumcision, because his mentor wrote the caselaw for the opposition. The Ephesian nobleman can't disturb the political structure of the town too much without losing his position. The best and the brightest were often shackled to their institutions, hence 'it is more difficult for a rich man to enter Heaven than for an camel to pass through the eye of a needle.' But twelve men that would leave everything they knew to follow a Rabbi are free. They can go where they want, and do what they want. For a Caesar to visit Spain, there would have to be all sorts of political, diplomatic and security arrangements. Paul can go by simply hopping on a ship.


Everything has its strengths and weaknesses. It is the sign of the expert general to take the things generally considered weaknesses and use them as his strengths. It is also quite an effective tactic, as your enemy will rarely have a counter. When we leave behind our soul's investment in the things of this world, we will see those things as they are. We will also see them as God can use them. Abandon all pride, consider outcomes with humility, and you will find victory.


Application: Asymmetric Technology.

The problem with technology is that it is a shackle as often as it is a solution. It may fix your problem, but you are now indentured to a system that requires tremendous support and maintenance. Additionally, your technological choices for your current problem may limit your choices for future solutions. For this reason, a traditional Western application of technology may be largely inappropriate for reaching a low-tech culture. Bringing in a computer will require bringing in a generator, and a printer and a lot of paper and cartridges and ink and tech support and so on. High-footprint solutions are impractical. However, low-footprint solutions can accomplish tremendous good. If we can bring a few critical pieces of technology in, which can enhance the extant community life with minimal support, we can multiply our effectiveness. For instance, bringing in advanced farming techniques, along with plans for farm implements that can be manufactured with existing resources could do great good, enhancing current activities rather than overwriting them. Even something like plans for a home-built ultra-light constructed largely from readily available materials would allow a tribe to watch over herds or find resources more effectively. Some technology may be irreplaceable, where its asymmetry is found in its effects rather than in its employment. An example of this may be an IRIDIUM Sat-Phone serving as a Comm link between an operator and his support networks.


Application: Carterian Instruction.

For some reason, people have bought into the idea that something must be smart if it is hard to explain. Academia plays to this stereotype, often obfuscating the simple, using phrases like 'I'd like to nuance that by adding some dynamic tension,' that don't mean anything but add a lot of syllables. We think that making things complicated is intelligence. We forget that the smartest Man that ever lived told farmers about the Kingdom by speaking about crops. The true mark of brilliance is the ability to explain things with simplicity, not syllables. George Washington Carver was a brilliant botanist, but the true make of his genius was his ability to explain advanced peanut farming techniques in simple terms to people with little if any formal education. If we are to use technology as a ticket for spreading the gospel, we need to be able to apply that technology using simple concepts and simple instruction. This is not pedantic pride, but simple respect. Invoking the authority of syllables and complexity muddies our message, only to indulge our intellectual pride. Words have contexts. The missions field is not the context for Turabian writing style.


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"Send me, therefore, a man skilled to work in gold and silver, bronze and iron, and in purple, crimson and blue yarn, and experienced in the art of engraving, to work in Judah and Jerusalem with my skilled craftsmen, whom my father David provided."…"Send me also cedar, pine and algum logs from Lebanon, for I know that your men are skilled in cutting timber there. My men will work with yours 9 to provide me with plenty of lumber, because the temple I build must be large and magnificent. I will give your servants, the woodsmen who cut the timber, twenty thousand cors of ground wheat, twenty thousand cors of barley, twenty thousand baths of wine and twenty thousand baths of olive oil." - 2 Chronicles 2:7-10 (NIV)


Diversity of Economies. Basic laws of economics: everybody produces and consumes something. Everyone has a comparative advantage. In the construction of the temple, Solomon recognized this fact. Cedars from Lebanon. Gems and gold from the four corners of the world. The temple was made rich by the combination of many things, not by the consolidation of a few. We have a tendency to over-look this fact in the industrialized world. Ricardian economics talks about comparative advantage, and on the purely mathematical level, he is quite correct. Unfortunately, we usually apply these theories to tell us that one American worker is worth many workers from another country. The Hescher-Ohlin model seems to favor traditional forms of capital, chalking up lesser developed countries to the 'labor-intensive' category. And while this may be true for 'cars vs. lamps,' fictional goods, I wonder if there are not alternate forms of capital. A tribe's story-teller has generations of the human capital of experience invested in his words. It is not that the models are incorrect. It is just that we have a hard time applying them outside the contexts that we know.


Application: Linking of Markets.

There is a temptation to 'modernize' an indigenous economy, to transform it into terms we can easily understand and then bring it 'up to speed.' We think we are creating an economy, but we are really overwriting an existing indigenous economy. A better approach is to analyze the existing economic structures, identify comparative advantages, and link those advantages to the outside world to turn a profit. That profit, in turn, can be used to purchase goods for which the tribe has a comparative dis-advantage, such as vaccines and the like. Instead of paving over existing markets, find the niche goods supplied by the tribe and demanded by the outside world, and trade them for the niche goods demanded by the tribe and supplied by the outside world. Of course, the initial steps of any such linkage would be establishing the availability of these goods. It is remarkably difficult to demand tribal clothing if the outside world does not know it exists and is available. It is remarkably difficult to demand vaccines if a tribe does not know much about immunology. So there must always be an initial investment in establishing relationships. But that investment should turn a profit once the links are flowing. Stated simply, we need to understand needs and wants in a cultural context, and then allow existing skills to provide for those needs and wants.


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"And [the Queen of Sheba] gave the king 120 talents of gold, large quantities of spices, and precious stones. Never again were so many spices brought in as those the queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon… King Solomon gave the queen of Sheba all she desired and asked for, besides what he had given her out of his royal bounty. Then she left and returned with her retinue to her own country." - 1 Kings 10:10,13


Investing in Relationships. There is a vast difference between simply giving someone money and using that money to start a mutually beneficial relationship. If you just give me money, then there will forever be a power imbalance between us. We can never truly be peers if there is no future expectation of reciprocity. But if you give me some money now in order to establish a positive working relationship in the future, there remains an equivalency of power. When you have the expectation of reciprocity, I will move into a mutually beneficial peer role as I get off the ground. This is a much better model for all involved, as there is mutual gain to be made. The Queen of Sheba realized this, cementing a long-term economically profitable relationship with the wealthy King of Israel through a short-term economically unprofitable tribute.


Application: Initial Trade Subsidies.

USAA Savings Bank provides loans to Air Force Academy cadets at 1.0% interest. The company actually loses money on the loans, but they write it off as an advertising expense. They almost always make it back many-fold over the course of the cadet's officer career, as he is more likely than not to choose USAA for any future banking endeavors. As long as USAA continues to provide good service, they have a customer for life. It is in their economic interests to subsidize initial interactions. The same is true for any economic relationship with an indigenous group. It makes sense to subsidize things such as vaccines and medicine, not just in the public interest, but also in sheer economic interests. Additionally, it makes sense to pay above-market for goods produced initially (as the market may actually correct to a higher price once established.) Initial capital placed into training and linkages evolves into a profitable bilateral relationship.


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"The LORD said to Gideon, "With the three hundred men that lapped I will save you and give the Midianites into your hands. Let all the other men go, each to his own place." So Gideon sent the rest of the Israelites to their tents but kept the three hundred, who took over the provisions and trumpets of the others." - Judges 7:7,8 (NIV)


Quiet Professionals. Numbers can be as much of a liability as an asset. In Gideon's Special Operation, thousands of troops would have made hundreds of decibels of noise. There would be no way for them to effectively infil the enemy camp, nor to cause mass chaos. God did not choose randomly, though. Those who cupped the water to their mouth were alert and on guard even while resting. Their motivation and their preparedness showed them to be the elite of Israel's army. God accomplished tremendous people through these few people. This principle holds true for the military today, where Special Operations Forces are highly selective, preferring a few elite individuals, dedicated to the mission, to a massive bludgeoning force. One reason for this preference is the investment in human capital. Ten dedicated men who will stick around for a decade are worth training to a very high level, while a hundred who will be there for a year are hardly worth training at all. Highly trained SOF operators are able to effectively navigate dynamic, complex situations in ways that conventional forces could not. In many situations, large numbers of conventional forces would do more harm than good. This principle holds true on the missions field as well. It is critical to have a small footprint and a subtle impact realized over time. Better one highly trained missionary who can train a hundred indigenous believers for leadership than a thousand one-week missionaries who cannot speak the language and do not understand the culture.


Application: Highly Selective, Highly Trained Missionaries.

There is already a limited pool of applicants with the legal credentials to return to their tribes. But there already was a limited pool of soldiers in Gideon's army before he started sending people home. Better a few on fire, willing to make a ten year investment in their people group than many who do more harm than good, poisoning the well for any future efforts. Taking only people willing to live with their people for ten years or more allows you to profitably invest up to two years of intense, personalized training in them.


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"As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. "Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men." At once they left their nets and followed him." - Matthew 4:18-20


Eternal Investments. One of the cardinal rules of the Special Operations community is 'humans are more important than hardware.' It is certainly true in the battlefield of the Great Commission. Jesus never died for a computer or an airplane. A well thought through plan or book can do something to advance the Kingdom, but it is not indwelt with the Holy Spirit (save one book, of course.) Our primary investment must then be in people. The American body of Christ probably could afford to write less books and train more people. That's what Christ did, after all. The Word from which all other words came, Veritas embodied, certainly could have written an excellent book. After all, He wrote history. Instead, He chose to write Himself on the lives of His followers. Books turn to dust, and they will pass away with this world. People live on, for they are made in the Image of God.


Application: Training.

Capital is a factor of production, according to economics. It is comprised of all things that are not labor that go into producing a good. Labor is time invested. Capital is computers, looms, factories and anything else that helps someone make more stuff. People throw around the term 'human capital,' usually incorrectly. They tend to confuse it with labor. But there is such a thing as human capital: it is all the things that stay with someone that allow their labor to return more productivity, such as experience, education and training. This form of capital is a better investment, as it is self-sustaining. Someone who uses their training keeps it fresh, experience builds on experience, and education grows with time in a fertile mind. And someone who is highly trained can pass on much of that training and experience to the next generation, magnifying the original investment in their training.


This brings us back to the idea of sustainability. Training is the most sustainable investment possible. It maintains itself, it appreciates on its own, it can pass itself on many-fold. The second most sustainable investment is the building of linkages, as those linkages tend to grow with time, and they sustain themselves with use. Investing in physical goods is generally only useful insofar as it supports either of these two investments, at least in this context.


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"To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some." - 1 Corinthians 9:20-22.


Culture Navigators. In Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Strider mentions to Frodo that it is quite a trick to be able to disappear and re-appear wherever one wants. Paul seems to achieve this feat without the use of a Ring of Power. It is really quite a useful skill to be able to put on or take off cultures at will. All of us do this in little ways. An apostate academic pilot, I will use words like 'problematic' around scholars, so as to be understood, and I will use words like 'pull chocks' around pilots, so as to be understood. An IT professional will put on words (TCP-IP, Baud, and the like,) to communicate with his work peers, but he will take off his work words when he comes home to his wife (hopefully.) The people of God have done this far more effectively historically. Joseph was brilliant as an Egyptian Prime Minister, but he spoke the words of a tribesman to his brothers once revealed. Daniel was a cornerstone of the Jewish exile population, but he served superbly as Belteshazzar, the Persian administrator. The Apostle Paul was Paul the Jew when speaking to a synagogue, and Paul the Roman when speaking to Imperial officials. He abandoned his cultural pride, becoming all things to all people so that he might win some. Because he was able to put on and take off cultural robes as will, cultural conversion never got in the way converting someone to Christ.


Application: Tri-Cultural Fluency.

One very common mistake in applied Cultural Anthropology is the failure to recognize 'multicultural' as its own culture. We assume a multicultural person will automatically be fluent in the two (or more) constituent cultures. Consider the case of a third-generation American Latino. To a typical white American, he might be considered an ideal missionary to Latin America, assuming that he would be able to instantly put on or take off Latino culture. Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with this assumption. First, the amalgamation that is 'Latino' exists largely within Norteamericano borders, and exists largely as a function of the Norteamericano collision of cultures. To an Ecuadorian, a Cuban-American may be as foreign as a Haitian or an Eskimo. Second, even if he were to return to his grandparents country of origin, an American term such as 'Mexican-American' may imply a false singularity within the originating culture. There were some reasons that his family left three generations ago. While understood well by other Mexican-Americans with similar experiences, those reasons may be seen in a much poorer light by Mexican-Mexicans. For instance, in the case of Cuba, if his family left because they were part of the landed elites driven out by Castro, then he may be a worse candidate for missionary to Cuba than some random person off the street, depending on the group being ministered to. Finally, since many multicultural people invest much of their identity in their differences from the majority culture, they are often blind to their similarities with the majority culture. Our missionary may arrive in Ecuador only to find that people see 'Norteamericano' when they see him, not 'fellow Latino.' For a more extreme example, it would be ludicrous to send a tenth-generation Irish-American to Ireland assuming some special 'in.' Due to these reasons, a multicultural person requires cross-cultural training, possibly as much as a mono-cultural person, especially as generations progress.


All of this is a very long way of going about saying that any missionaries sent out need to be able to communicate in a number of cultural contexts, starting by recognizing their own. An urbanized tribesman needs to be able to recognize his actions in their cultural context of 'bi-cultural urbanized tribesman,' and then be able to translate those actions into the 'mono-cultural tribesman' and the 'mono-cultural urbanite' contexts. In order to do so, applied cultural anthropology training is likely in order. I recommend MBAs with specializations in cross-cultural business (or former Special Forces personnel,) or applied Christian cultural anthropolgists as a source of cross-cultural trainers.


//


"As the Philistine moved closer to attack him, David ran quickly toward the battle line to meet him. Reaching into his bag and taking out a stone, he slung it and struck the Philistine on the forehead. The stone sank into his forehead, and he fell facedown on the ground. So David triumphed over the Philistine with a sling and a stone; without a sword in his hand he struck down the Philistine and killed him. David ran and stood over him. He took hold of the Philistine's sword and drew it from the scabbard. After he killed him, he cut off his head with the sword. When the Philistines saw that their hero was dead, they turned and ran." - 1 Samuel 17:48-51

Critical Point Targeting. There are often layers and layers to a story. One layer of the story of the Shepherd-boy David has him standing on a battlefield across from a giant. All of that battlefield is focused on these two men, and the fate of the fight rests on their shoulders. They are standing at the critical point, and at that point one well-flung rock will be more important than a thousand spear-thrusts. There are layers of critical points, in this story, it is not just the battlefield. One level down, the story is decided when one small rock impacts a fairly small but absolutely vital nerve cluster on Goliath's forehead. The rock finds the critical point and becomes more important than the entirety of the giant's sword. One level up, this story is the beginning of the ascendance of Israel's second most important king, a man who plays a critical role in salvation of history and the line of Christ. Layers inside of layers of critical points found themselves focused on one smooth river rock, and an ounce and a half of common stone changed the course of history. A thousand years later, the fate of the entire universe hung quite literally upon four ounces of metal and two common boards of wood.


The servants of God have a unique habit of showing up at those critical points. An army turns upon a shepherd boy, but the shepherd boy finds himself there because of his faithfulness. Joseph finds himself in Egypt just in time to save the lives of his family, and hence the Messiah. Daniel finds himself the chief scientist in the Persian court, the man who trained the predecessors of the Magi to read the stars, so that the gifts of the Wise Men pay for the newly born Christ's life-saving flight to Egypt. The Author places His characters, if we will ask Him our roles. Surely the Author of critical points can teach us how to find them, if we ask.


One little piece of stone can change a whole battle. Trumpets and marching, done in a certain order a certain number of times, can conquer a well-defended city. Wood, cloth, and metal arranged in a certain fashion can reach an unreached people group on the wings of the wind. We call things different names, but really they are not. Remember that a sling was a weapon in David's day, nothing mystical. Just as an airplane is today. Yet the owner of that sling took on mythical proportions in the hands of God, inspiring his army to fight and win. Just as the owners of that airplane took on mythical proportions in God's hands, inspiring generations of missionaries. Stephen was just a man, a scribe, a man of little import by the world's accounting. Yet his words echo in the mind of Saul, over and over, until the martyr Stephen is fully avenged upon the man Saul, who dies at the hands of the new man Paul at his baptism. The blood of Stephen purchases salvation for many, for His blood is not His own. His is the blood of Christ, the same blood that pours from his murderer many years later upon the stones of Rome, the witness himself made witness. The question is not so much what a thing is, but what can it do in God's hands.


Application: Critical Point Analysis.

The first step in critical analysis must be to ask the story's Author. Pursuing Him in faithfulness, He will take us to the places where we need to be. The Author gave us minds as well. Therefore, we must use our hearts and minds in concert. The analytical piece of this puzzle calls us to examine any choices with an eye to multiplication. This is the Parable of the Talents. If a given investment does not have a possibility of multiplying itself several times over, then it should only be considered if it is critical to another endeavor, if its collateral impacts are more significant than its direct impact.

[End Excerpt.]

I couldn't quite make the Sunrise service. It's hard to fit into a day schedule when you work nights. It ended working out, though. So I am here, instead, at the evening service on my compound, sitting in a canvas tent with wooden floors, singing praise songs projected slightly askew onto canvas. I look to my left, and there is a gunner, to my right is a navigator. Two rows ahead, a doctor, two back, a lawyer. We are Latino, White, Black, Asian, men and women, and we are all here together. There are no racial reconciliation seminars here, but by necessity and by choice, we are one tonight.

We lucky few, we band of brothers? Perhaps. Once more into the breach, certainly. But it is not Saint Crispin's day, and we need no King Henry to lead us. We are here because we choose to be. And we choose to be here together. So in the bond of arms and honor, we are brothers and sisters.

But in this tent, we are twice brothers and sisters. All of us under this roof share in the blood of Christ, and we may be called to shed it together. We are the house of the Centurion, the Christian community at war. I cannot help but recall Dietrich Bonhoeffer's experiences in Life Together. I wonder if the great minister and pacifist would approve. In his younger years, with his head full of Karl Barth, probably not. But maybe the full-grown Bonhoeffer, co-conspirator in Admiral Canaris' plot to kill Hitler, might understand.

A week ago, Palm Sunday, I was able to get to the morning worship service. And there I see a number of TCNs, third country nationals, who work on the base. Many of them were from African countries. We praised God together. 'Peace be with you' takes on a much more immediate meaning here. I think of how they, too, are separated from their families. I pray that God would comfort them, and that I would keep them safe, along with my charges.

I just finished reading a compilation of C.S. Lewis' personal letters. Hard reading, but quite fascinating to crawl around inside his head. I was particularly intrigued, given the circumstances, by his letters about going off to war. It strikes me that he faced the same chlorine and machineguns that are now arrayed against us. War seemed to pull him away from God. The inhumanity of it all eroded his faith in a Creator. It seems to have the opposite effect on me. The inhumanity of it all shows me how tremendously important our humanity is. To
steal a phrase from Switchfoot, the shadow proves the sunlight.

Each of us has reasons that brought us here. I can only speak to my own. Perhaps I still have something of the dreamer that pulls me here. If Middle-Earth has its Rangers of the North, then I will find a place with the Rangers of Mogadishu. If Han Solo has his Millennium Falcon, then I'll find an airplane with a couple of tricks up its sleeve, but probably one you need to kick sometimes to get it to work. But it is not some childhood fairy-tale that brings me here. I believe in what we are trying to do here. Seeing it unfiltered, seeing the reality of it all only serves to clarify things in my mind. There are people here who need us still. They may need us to be smarter and subtler, but they need us nonetheless. But there is something even deeper. I think Black Hawk Down says it the best: we came here for each other.

Do not think me a fool. I am not some gullible victim of propaganda. I can wield my Kennedy School degree, analyzing the near-infinite policy considerations for this conflict. I can recount both sides' reasons why we should be or should not be there. I know things are complicated. But I am old enough to know, or perhaps young enough not to have forgotten, that some things are still simple. We have lost so much to our steamrollers of deconstruction, reducing and paving away all of our myths. But myths exist to remind us of the simple things.
And one of those simple things is justice.

I now understand what King David meant when he said that he loved the Law of God. David was a warrior. He would not stand to see a giant stand and mock the Most High. So he used what power he had, strengthened by the Almighty, to cast down that giant. It is a mockery of the Laws of God for men to use precious children as
camouflage for a car bomb. Insofar as I am able, I will fight men such as these. Blessed be the name of the Lord, who trains my hands for war.

I know the counterarguments, I know the objections. 'If we weren't here none of this would have happened.' Perhaps. And if the woman had not been there, perhaps the man would not have eaten the fruit. And if the serpent had not been there, perhaps the woman would not have fallen. And if God hadn't had the audacity to place humanity above the angels, perhaps the Enemy would not have fallen. At least that's what we tell ourselves. I no longer buy it. It is true that all actions exist in context, and that almost all actions are a mix of
a great many things. But no amount of Verstehen can ever convince me that it is ever okay to gas a marketplace full of innocents. I have been blessed with the power to do something about it. So I will.

Justice is not the only simple thing: Love is simple. And on this side of the fall, it is wrapped in war. Christ stands in testament to this: we must fight through hell for love on this side of the fall, for all the forces of hell oppose all forms of love and reconciliation. Ultimately, we must fight through hell for each other. Christ arms us to do so, for He has conquered hell. But the fight is never without casualties… the Cross speaks to this clearer
than I ever could. Suffering and sacrifice must always accompany love. It looks clean and linear in some systematic theology textbook. But seeing it is the difference between The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed. I heard a man die across the radios a few nights ago. It all happened too quickly to do anything about it. That man is a hero. I refuse to believe that his death was meaningless. He died; fighting for a people who were not his own, in a land that was not his own, training and equipping those people to fight for their land. It is then appropriate that he died alongside those men he trained. 'There is no greater love than this, that a man lays down his life for his friends.' I am honored to be counted amongst men such as these.

I cannot help but think back to the discussions over lattes, the pressed suits and the policy experts, the sophomores who felt compelled to throw their hands up and stop traffic. And then, I think of J., my classmate from the Academy. His wife sits a few rows ahead of me in church back home. He gave his life a few years back in much the same way. He loved Jesus, I know that much. And I'll see him again, I have no doubt.

J. chose to go. He understood love. He understood that it was worth fighting for. I choose to believe in a world that Cantabrigia told me no longer existed, a world of valor, of myth, of honor. A world of heroes. So I leave behind the artfully carved benches on the banks of the Charles; instead, I choose a pilot's chair overlooking the Tigris and the Euphrates. Instead of philosopher's quotes carved into marble, I choose plywood painted with the words of the great prophet Isaiah: 'Who shall I send, and who will go for us?… Here am I, send me.' I am honored to be sent.

I wrote this a while back after a number of 2 A.M. arguments about Aquinas. Good times. Hope it’s useful. I don’t so much like the pseudo-academic tone I used, complete with awkward grammar. Whatever. I’m too lazy to rewrite an idea that I already wrote out.

When analyzing Scripture, as with any other document, what one sees in it has much to do with what one brings to it. When considering the authority of Scripture, we must be careful with our interpretations, especially when we seek to hold others to that authority. On one hand, we need to avoid blasphemy, to avoid claiming Scriptural authority for our own preconceived notions. On the other hand, we need to avoid idolatry, to avoid bending the authority of Scripture to make room for our preferences. Given that these reciprocal errors stem from the same source: the idea that ‘God says what I want Him to say,’ our solution must be one of humility in our approach to God’s Word, a realization that we have not cornered the market on knowledge of God (after all, if we could understand all of His mysteries, we would have to be Him.)

Central to our methodology is the concept of the ‘tabula rasa’ reasonable man. Imagine an individual equipped with rational thought and the ability to understand language, well intentioned but completely unencumbered by experience and unaware of any Theology. That individual then reads the relevant Scripture in the context of the entire work. (Context is assumed to mean directly relevant passages, not higher level extrapolations.) He then derives possible interpretations of a given passage and compares those interpretations to the doctrine in questions, and determines how much Scriptural authority that doctrine can claim.

Doing so, our observer can reach one of three conclusions about the Scriptural authority of a doctrine: 1) Indisputable, 2) Reasonable, or 3) Traditional.

The first of these, the indisputable standard, carries with it the highest degree of Scriptural authority. The indisputable standard is achieved when our observer approaches the passage and reaches the conclusion that there is only one reasonable interpretation of the passage. An example of this would be the teachings in Romans 3 about the fallen-ness of man. If our observer were asked ‘what do the Scriptures tell us about the sinfulness of man,’ he would answer ‘the only reasonable interpretation is that all men are sinful and fallen.’ The indisputable standard would be typical of a Creedal statement, and hence one who denies an indisputable doctrine is outside of the authority of Scripture. These are the ‘fight to the death’ truths.

The second standard is the locus of most of our theological arguments. The reasonable standard carries with it a degree of authority, but tempers it with a degree of humility. The reasonable standard is achieved when our observer analyzes a passage in context and determines that a given doctrine is a reasonable interpretation of a passage, although not the sole reasonable interpretation. Therefore, multiple interpretations can exist for a given passage within the larger context of Scripture, and hence one can only claim Scriptural support for the doctrine, not full Scriptural authority. This is not to say that one doctrine may not be a better explanation than another, only to say that both are reasonable. Hence, one may state their position emphatically, but must also take into account the possibility that they are the one who is wrong. Examples: transubstantiation, Calvinism, Gifts of the Spirit. Most Catholic/Ev/Pent disputes. One who disputes may be considered wrong, but may not be considered a heretic.

The third standard is the least restrictive, but grants the least authority. Under the traditional standard, the Scriptures say nothing a priori on a topic, either for or against. The doctrine is then a cultural tradition, around which verses may be built to enrich and sanctify the tradition, but no authority can be claimed, for it is only a tradition made by men. Our observer would look at the Scriptures and see nothing on the doctrine, and hence would not be able to make any authoritative statements on it. Examples include worshipping on Sunday/Easter, Free Markets, and Drinking. The standard of proof becomes prudential, rather than Scriptural, and the Spirit may lead in different prudential directions with different people. One who disputes is then neither wrong nor a heretic, although the charge of unwise may be leveled if justified. More than likely, it would not be, and the disputants would merely have different preferences.

Without such a framework (in essentials, unity, in non-essentials, liberty, in all things, charity,) we fall into the two incarnations of the same sin of blasphemy. On the ultra-conservative side, when we claim authority for matters of tradition, we speak for God where He does not speak. I question how many of us would submit to God’s standard for proof of prophecy (100% right or death) as easily as we claim His authority. One the other hand, there is the liberal mistake of discounting the authority of Scripture and making all interpretations a matter of preferences. This is the same error, as it applies a ‘Thus Saith the Lord’ stamp to all the things people wanted to do anyways, in effect declaring oneself to be God. Only in approaching God’s Word with humility can we avoid error.

Once upon a time, people used to tell time from a device called a sundial. The sun’s rays would strike the timepiece at a certain angles at certain times of day. Judging from the shadow on the sundial, you could tell exactly what hour it was. There was, of course, a slight problem: at night, it is remarkably difficult to find the sun. So we thought of a solution. The planets turn on the wheels of their orbits though the gears of gravity, so we captured of those wheels and gears in a little metal case that we could put on our wrist. While this solved our sunlight dilemma, it created a new problem. Our microcosm of the solar system was not exactly perfect. While the rounding errors were never great from moment to moment, they summed over time into huge discrepancies. Fortunately for us, we found a better answer than buying new watches every week. We could resync our clocks from time to time with a master clock, which was in turn synched to the sun. That way, our watches would never be too far off of the true time, and they would be trustworthy as timepieces.

Compasses have a similar problem. A magnetized needle will always point North, so we attached a card to the top of the needle to tell us what direction we are facing. All of this is well and good if we are planning on walking a couple hundred meters to find a road. It is neither well nor good if we are planning on finding the Azores on our way across the Atlantic. You see, our compass cannot perfectly represent the magnetic fields of the Earth any more than a clock can perfectly represent the Earth’s rotations or revolutions. Changes in magnetic declination, nearby concentrations of metal, and slight imbalances in the compass itself will all conspire to skew our reading from our true heading. Maybe just one degree, but one degree off over three thousand miles is fifty miles of error, more than enough to miss an island port. From one hour to the next the compass will rarely lead you astray, but over two weeks you may become completely lost. So we must resync our compass to our true position in space, just as we resync our clocks to our true position in time.

Imagine you are Cristobal Colon, about to set out in the Nina (or the Pinta, or the Santa Maria. I forget which one was his ship.) Sailing beyond the limits of the known world, you must place a great deal of trust in your navigational instruments. In the modern world, we take precision chronography (telling the time) for granted. Early mariners did not. They needed to know the exact time in order to effectively navigate, as they determined their position from the relative position of certain stars at certain times. (This tradition is carried on with the Naval Observatory‘s atomic clocks.) So before leaving port, you prudently calibrate your instruments. You set your clock according to the master clock, you reference your compass against a known heading. You synch your chronological instrument with a more accurate chronological instrument, and you synch your magnetic instrument with a more accurate magnetic instrument. And here is the point of this whole exercise: you cannot synch up a watch with a compass, nor a compass with a clock. The instruments exist in different spheres, and while those spheres interact, they must be calibrated with something from their own sphere.

When creating man, God saw fit to give him both a heart and a mind. We were made to have the mind of Christ, and made to have a heart in the image of God. We were made to think and feel. So in the garden, we were the sundial, in the forever noon of a never-setting sun. In God’s presence, our minds were constantly calibrated with the mind of Christ. We were a compass in the presence of the strongest of magnets, our hearts forever pointing to Him. And we loved Him with all of our hearts and all of our minds. Well, for a time, at least.

On this side of the fall, we look quite different. We are the wristwatch that hasn’t been wound in ages. The needles still point to numbers, but those numbers have little to do with the true time. Our minds are fallen, corrupt and untrustworthy. They will lead us off into nowhere. We are the compass that has lost its magnetism. We may still move from side to side whenever something rocks our case, but we can no longer tell North from South. As the Scriptures tell us, nothing good comes from the hearts of man. They will lead us off into nowhere.

The clock cannot wind itself, neither can the compass regain its magnetism through its own power. So we are lost at sea. That is, until Christ comes along. He rewinds our mind, He remagnetizes our hearts. He sparks in us the mind of Christ, He ignites in us the burning heart of God. But even a rewound watch needs to be set to the correct time, and even a remagnetized compass needs to be recalibrated to true North.

Paul tells us that we have been given the mind of Christ. In a way, we have been given it back. When we were originally made, our minds were made in His image. Our words reflected The Word, and in that Word, the outpouring of our mind was good and trustworthy. When we forgot The Word, that outpouring became toxic in the darkening of our minds. Since it was the One Word that kept our thoughts true, He gave us the many words of Scripture to keep our minds fixed on Him. Like the watch, we need to constantly recalibrate our mind with His Word. He gives us the Bible in order to reshape our thoughts back into His. The good news is that, like the watch, once properly calibrated our minds are trustworthy again. When our mind is true to His Word, we should listen to it.

Our hearts are no different. Christ gives us back the heart of God. Once, our hearts burned in His presence. We could taste His goodness; not just see it but feel it as well; our desire was for Him and it was good. When we forgot Him, our desires became choked with our own selfishness. Stagnating in our hearts, they became putrid and evil. Since it was our desire for God that kept our thoughts pure, He teaches us to desire Him first. He gives us prayer and fasting, for in prayer we yield all of our desires to Him, and in fasting we allow Him to re-order our desires. In His presence, we recalibrate the compass of our hearts, and our desires become trustworthy again. When our heart is true to His Presence, in the context of Christian authority, we should listen to it as well.

Trustworthy words check with Scripture. Trustworthy feelings burn in His presence, and in the hearts of other believers. This is not to say that the heart and the mind have nothing in common. A compass used in concert with a clock will help a mariner find his destination far better than either used alone. Nonetheless, you must calibrate the magnetic with the magnetic, and the chronographic with the chronographic. Similarly, we must calibrate our words with His Word, allowing the Scriptures to transform our minds. We must calibrate our desires with His desires, yielding our hearts to Him through prayer and fasting. Then, and only then, will our hearts and minds be trustworthy. But if they are trustworthy, then it is cowardice not to follow them. All of us needs to be conformed into His image. It just happens that different parts of us do so in different ways.

The father of a friend of mine makes a quite profitable living by finding slight imperfections on the driveshafts of Big Rig trucks. When my friend first told me about his dad‘s job, I thought it a bit frivolous to pay someone a hefty sum to nit-pick about scratches in steel. (I had the good sense not to mention that particular thought.) I realized my error as my friend explained that those trucks are designed to run for almost a million miles. When you’re building a truck for a hundred thousand miles, microscopic defects don’t really have enough time to grow into major problems. Over the course of a million miles, though, the smallest of scratches will become a catastrophic fracture, eventually destroying the entire engine.

I do not think the rest of the universe is so different. Trickling from melting snow pack, a mountain stream becomes a thunderous rapid before it finds its way to the ocean. Just one neutron hits just one nucleus, fractures it, and releases three more neutrons. A trillion neutrons later, you’ve released enough energy to put stars to shame. And just one word spoken in spite, fermenting for decades in the psyche of an angry young man, becomes genocide. Cracks always start small. One sideways glance, a cruel barb spoken in a moment of weakness, one piece of gossip that makes it back to its victim, brokenness rarely starts with drawn swords. It often ends there. Once time has taken its course, those first words can be taken back no more than the rapid can be tamed back into the stream, no more than the neutron can be calmed from the fury of fission. Entropy multiplies our cruel words until nothing remains but rubble.

There is a cycle to cruelty, a cycle to the curse. Venom and rage are something like Tolkien’s Ring of Power, I think. They wait patiently for the moment where they can inflict maximum pain on others. So a high-schooler spits vicious words in passing to the girl in the honors classes who gets on her nerves. Though the sender forgets the words almost immediately, their venom haunts the recipient for a decade, festering and fermenting. The venom finds its moment when she chooses to rid herself forever of a guy who generally gets on her nerves. She spits that same venom at him, along with fifteen years of compounded interest. Like her own accusers, she could not have known how her words would have been taken. So that guy finds himself in positions of authority. Where justice might have been tempered with mercy, he finds that the venom has sapped his reservoirs of compassion, as it had its previous victims. And in his cold, calculating analysis, he passes on the pain he inherited from her, multiplied many-fold. This is how we pass down the fall. Welcome to entropy.

People like to say ‘what goes around comes around.’ Eastern thought formalizes this idea with the concept of Karma. Certainly there are parts of this concept that hold true. Unfortunately for us, it is all the worst parts. You see, Karma makes a critical and incorrect assumption. It presumes that our actions are graded on a curve. The goodness of your actions can be judged by racking and stacking them with everybody else’s actions. Like in the running of the bulls, if you beat the mean you‘ll probably be okay. The problem is that very little in nature is graded on a curve. You need water to live. Your life span would not be lengthened by even one second if everyone else was dying of thirst. The fallen and broken things of our own creation are often graded on curves. Nutrition is not graded on a curve. Gravity is not graded on a curve. There are a few things graded on curves, I suppose. Like war and envy. But I hesitate to use the average amount of war or the average amount of envy as benchmarks for measuring paradise.

Lets do a quick mathematical exercise. 99% is a very good grade on a calculus test. Certainly it beats the mean (unless you are at a grade-inflating Ivy League school.) Say you get three scores in the high nineties. You average out to about a 95%. Not bad. Except for one slight problem: as we have seen, human actions are multiplicative, not additive. My actions are multiplied in you, and yours in me. I do not just take what you gave me and pay it forward; I generally up the ante, as do you. (Fundamental Attribution Error ties in here.) So back to our calc grades. Instead of averaging my three grades, I multiply them by each other. The more times I multiply, the more one simple fact becomes apparent: their product is decreasing, not increasing. Even with great grades, we’re getting worse. Imagine throwing in a 50% into the mix. And here is our problem: we can never climb back up to a 100%. The spiral staircase Karma promised us starts to look more like a twisting slide to a place Dante described quite well. It’s ‘Chutes and Ladders’ in the worst possible way.

You see, we have another problem. We are rarely good judges of our own performance. We have too much at stake. Let’s go back to our calculus test. Imagine that our student attends a highly experimental and highly unpleasant school where poor academic performance is punished by eternal detention, yet pupils get to grade their own tests. Surely our student would always give himself the benefit of the doubt, minimizing any errors and finding all sorts of partial credit for himself in the midst of wrong answers. Under those circumstances, the student can hardly be expected to be objective. And neither can we. We minimize or entirely overlook our shortcomings, while magnifying our perceived successes. We benchmark our actions against the remarkably convenient standard of ‘at least I’m not like X.’ But we only convince ourselves.

Consider the chain smoker. He may himself believe that his vice is harmless, or ‘at least its not as bad as weed,’ or any of a number of things, but Nature is not impressed. At some point, a cell in his lungs will prove particularly susceptible to the chemicals he chooses to expose himself to, and that cell will decide that it needs to reproduce more than it needs to do anything else. The man’s cancer is a consequence of his vices. What is true for individuals is true for societies. A society may decide that in the name of free speech or free expression or whatever, pornography is acceptable. After all, there are rules and restrictions on its sale. And its not as bad as some other things. And, really, its harmless. And a hundred other excuses. But none of them matter when the sexual predator proves particularly vulnerable to the drug, pursuing his addiction without regard for the laws of God or men. His cancer is the consequence of the vice of the society. Mother Theresa of Calcutta once asked how one could expect peace on their streets when there is violence in the womb. Our cancers come from our vices. The Natural Law is a quite objective judge of our actions, and their verdict is guilty.

We need something better. All we can do is multiply imperfections by imperfections. We need Someone else to give us the perfection we can never find on our own. Our hearts are decaying. We need new hearts. We cannot find our way to paradise when there is no paradise within us. We need a Cycle-breaker. We need a Savior.

Christ must breaks our cycles. In the not-entirely-hypothetical example of the girl-guy collision, I remember reading that letter written in venom and rage. As her words burned off the page, I asked Jesus for the strength and love to forgive her. I asked Him to give me words of blessing for her, for I had none. He gave me those words. He still does. I thank God that venom never had a chance to fester in my heart. I thank God that I was freed from inflicting it on another. I would almost sat the cycle ended with me, but that isn‘t exactly true. It ended with Christ. I spat my venom at Him on Calvary’s tree. And it stopped there. All imperfect cycles end with Him, and in Him perfect cycles begin. Praise God that my reservoirs of compassion are still intact, that my desire for justice is still tempered with mercy. It is only by His grace.

In a world of entropy, small actions can have tremendous consequences when given enough time. Words are small things, but so are pieces of fruit, and just one bite landed us in this mess. The fate of a people may rest upon just one word. Ask Hadassah about that. So we must guard our tongues. You never know what you words may become. Words can turn to daggers, and daggers to very real bullets. Kind words cost you nothing. Cruel words, given a hundred years, may cost others their lives. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the tongue is deadlier than both. Insults, then, are assaults with a deadly weapon. If we considered our words in this light, perhaps we would find the patience to give each other words that are a little more loving. Perhaps we would ask the Word who is Love to give us a better vocabulary.

It is amazing how two different people can remember the exact same event in two completely different ways. This is especially true when that event was an argument between those two people. Retold a hundred times in the minds of each combatant, the story becomes sharper, the hero nobler, and the villain crueler. Of course, one story’s hero is the other’s villain and vice versa. Anthropologists call this legendary development. It usually takes about two hundred years for legendary development to reshape a historical text. It usually takes about two weeks for it to happen to our individual histories. So it should take somewhere between two weeks and two hundred years for legendary development to reinvent the history of a people group.

On some level, we all assume that if the Apostles to show up today, they would all be found safely within the confines of our own denominational group. We all claim to be the legitimate successors and heirs to the early church. The problem is that we all say that, and many of us belong to denominations that are not in full communion with each other. We cannot all be right. We could all be wrong.

I wonder how different it is from a spat between once-friends. ‘When he admits that it is all his fault, then we can be friends again.’ ‘When all the ‘born-agains’ come back to Rome Sweet Home, then we can be in unity.’ Perhaps more a family feud, where one sibling does not respect anything the other does that he does not understand. ‘If all the Catholics became Charismatic, then I’d be glad to call them brothers. Until then, they are step-children.’ Really, both sides are saying the same thing: we will accept you if and only if you become like us. If there is a more direct expression of pride, I am not aware of it.

Pride is the diametric opposite of love. Love is patient and kind, it always hopes, it keeps no record of wrongs. Pride is not patient enough to pursue understanding, not kind enough to be gracious in the interim, it does not hope enough to pursue others, it forever keeps records of wrongs. Where love seeks to redeem those outside its reach, pride mocks and destroys the things it cannot grasp. The lifeblood of the Church is the self-giving love of Christ. Only by His blood is man reconciled to God, and only by His blood is man reconciled to others.

Praying for reconciliation is really quite dangerous. God promises that He will give us whatever we ask in His will. In praying, we clear Him to tear down all the parts of us that get in the way of that prayer. So when we pray for patience, He tears down our impatience with trying times. When we pray for humility, He tears down our arrogance with a good dose of reality. And when we pray for reconciliation, He tears down our pride. This is the trouble with asking God to adjudicate something: He is rather like Solomon. The true mother of the child puts aside her pride, even in the face of tremendous injustice, to save her child’s life. In doing so, she shows herself the rightful parent and is hence reconciled to her baby.

It is rare that God reconciles two people by telling one, ‘you were right and they were wrong.’ Instead of magnifying the pride of one party at the expense of the other, God casts down the pride of both parties and glorifies Himself. He generally answers, ‘both of you are fallen and need my grace.’ In the abundance of that grace, both find the love to find each other again. Joseph was reconciled to his brothers in this way, and what was true for the children of Jacob will be true for his tribes. Only in humility will the Body of Christ will regain its unity.

I imagine that in the unpleasant parting of Joseph and his brothers, there was a breaking of stories. To Joseph’s understanding, he was betrayed and sold into slavery by his cruel brothers, simply because they were jealous of the love that their father Israel lavished upon him. Perhaps to his brothers, Joseph forced their hand. In telling them that he would rule over all of them, Joseph made clear his intention to usurp the inheritance, and they did the only thing they could do. Perhaps, to their eyes, selling him into slavery was not less wrong that the slavery that Joseph had promised to impose on all of them. Better one man a slave than all men slaves. In the hundredth retelling, doubtless all the nuance had long since passed from either side of the story. The two narratives were separated by an ever-widening chasm, across which no love or compassion could pass.

We, too, have our spilt narratives. The Council of Trent was no less bloody than Joseph’s day in the desert, and we all have our version of what happened. Retold by different people in different places over the course of five hundred years, all we really remember is that we were right and they were wrong. As with an argument between lovers, only the facts that support that conclusion make it to the final cut of the story. It is strange that the things that were the least clear in the initial telling of the story are the most clear in the legend that develops from it, and the things that were most clear become the least remembered.

We have different stories. One is a story of transference, of rebirth through grafting. That retelling of the story is the passing of the gospel to the Gentiles. The Pharisees, the inheritors of Moses‘ seat, bent the laws of God to the selfish ends of men. The commandments were twisted until they were unrecognizable, while those entrusted with the law used it to enrich themselves. The teachers of the law made sure that their robes were beautiful adorned, without a thought for the fatherless or the widow. When confronted with the Word of God, they silenced the Messenger with death threats, demanding that he repent from His blasphemy. So the law was torn from the hands of that people and given to another.

So the inheritors of the seat of Peter forget the words of the Rock. They hid the law of love from those it was meant to save, twisting and distorting it to enshrine their positions of power. And the red-breasted Cardinals in their gilden palaces knew nothing of the poor in the streets of their cities, as St. Peter’s was built with the blood of their parishioners. When a messenger armed with the Word confronts them, they demand recantations on pain of death. So the chair of Peter is ripped from their hands, and given into the hands of others. As Gamaliel would say, we would still be growing five centuries later if God was not with us. While there may still be a remnant from the old covenant, it is the Protestants who are in the center of God’s story.

Of course, there is another retelling. This one is a story of legitimate authority and rebellion, of those willing to submit to the fullness of God’s Truth, and those who only wanted Him on their terms. It is a story of Israel and Samaria. There was one Ark of the Covenant, passed down from the days of Moses. It had one legitimate resting place: the Temple in Jerusalem. There was only one Temple, only on Holy of Holies where the Spirit of God chose to dwell. And there was only one tribe of Levi, empowered to serve and celebrate the presence of God. There was only one faucet from which the grace of God flowed to His people, and you had to place yourself under that faucet to find the fullness of His grace. You could choose to worship at the Well of Abraham if you wanted to, but you were choosing to distance yourself from the center of His blessings. Still, there was such an overflow from the faucet that grace may splash all the way to Samaria. Nonetheless, the Samaritans were a proud people, unwilling to submit to the authorities established by God, and hence they cut themselves off from the fullness of His grace.

So there has always been one Faith, passed down from the Apostles, one Seat of Peter, passed down from one Holy Father to another, one Holy Communion, entrusted to the new Levites. There are those who find the humility to submit to the grace that flows from the one true Church, and there are those who refuse it because of their own pride. There is only one faucet, and under it grace flows down through the sacraments to the People of God. You can choose to worship outside the confines of the true Church, but you are choosing to distance yourself from the center of His grace. Still, there is such an overflow of His grace that it may splash all the way into Baptist and Pentecostal churches. Nonetheless, the Protestants are a proud people, unwilling to submit to the authorities established by God, and hence cut off from the fullness of His grace. While there may be some of them who truly pursue God as revealed in nature and Scripture, it is the Catholics who are in the center of God’s story.

Though told from two seemingly irreconcilable perspectives, something about these stories seems striking similar. They both sound a lot like, ‘I was right and you were wrong.’ Perhaps there is a different story, one that sounds a lot more like, ‘both of us are fallen and in need of a Savior.’ Perhaps there is a story we can tell together, one where we are humbled and Christ is glorified.

That story is one of Israel and of Judah. It is a story of a kingdom of God divided by the sin of men. There was once one Israel, a land of milk and honey, of prophecy and promise. The land of Joshua and of David and Solomon. A land with one King, one law and one tribe of priests. But Salvation History is written at the intersection of the perfect will of God and the sinfulness of men, and so it was here. The kings of Israel fell away from God, and in the process fell away from each other. And so Israel was divided into two. Both Israel and Judah had legitimate claims to the inheritance. Judah claimed Jerusalem, Israel claimed the majority of the tribes. The Northern and the Southern Kingdom both claimed to be the true people of God, and in a way, they both were. It just that neither of them were all of the true people of God. Because the kingdom is divided, both claims are incomplete. In a united kingdom, all the claims would have been reconciled to each other, for there would only have been one Claimant. One Man unites the claims.

In Return of the King, Tolkien tells of Aragorn, the Ranger who becomes King of Men. There are many kings, princes and stewards of men in Middle-earth at the end of the third age, many claims to the various thrones. Aragorn reconciles all those claims to each other. He is last of the line of Numenor, the legitimate heir to the kingship of men. He saves the Kingdom of Rohan, earning the allegiance of Theoden and Eomer, the rulers of Rohan. He saves the Kingdom of Gondor, winning the allegiance of Faramir, the Steward. He is the one man that all the princes of men will recognize as their rightful ruler, and he is the one man that unites all the free men of Middle-Earth.

Tolkien’s Aragorn reflects something of Jesus Christ. The Lamb of God unites all the claims, and all of His children are united in Him. He is the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the prophesied King of the line of David, the Alpha and the Omega, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He is the Savior of the Catholics and Evangelicals, the Savior of Luther and Erasmus, of Hus and Ignatius, of Billy Graham and John Paul the Second. One Man would have restored the kingdoms of Israel. One day, He still will. That One Man will unite the church. As we draw in to Him, the claims become reconciled, and we start telling one story again. Therefore, in reconciliation, there must be a fusion of stories.

On this side of the fall, any great good is almost always associated with a great deal of friction. Without the terrible War of the Ring, Aragorn would not have been able to unite the claims to the kingship of Middle-Earth. His greatest enemy in doing so was not the armies of Mordor, but the pride of Denethor, the Steward of Gondor. Accustomed to the power and the position of ruler, Denethor is unwilling to relinquish Gondor to Aragorn, the rightful King. Instead, the kingdom is pried from his dead hands. The Pharisees were to be the Stewards of the Seat of Moses until the return of the King. When He came, like Denethor, they were unwilling to relinquish their position as rulers. And like Denethor, rulership was wrenched from their dead hands, as the Romans tore the Temple apart, brick by brick.

We are hardly immune to the temptation of the Steward. Pastors and priests grow accustomed to their position and their influence. Make it through Seminary, pay your dues as a youth pastor or a parish priest, and you finally find yourself in a good place. It is hard to let go of such a place. After all, that time should count for something, right? It should count for something to learn the entire Torah, to be of the tribe of Benjamin, to be circumcised in accordance with the Law, to be the Pharisee of Pharisees. Paul counts it all as loss. (Of course, only after having been wrenched off his horse by the Hand of God.) I wonder how hard it would be for many in the ministry to submit to a loss of power and prestige were God to reunite the claims of His Church. I wonder how much Faramir versus how much Denethor lives within each of us.

There is still a question of understanding. Imagine a restaurant with a newlywed couple sitting right across from an older couple. The newlyweds are all googly-eyed, hands all over each other, almost making out right at the table. The older couple sits all prim and proper, talking about how much they enjoy the weather this time of the year, and about their plans to go to the museum the next day. Looking at the older couple, the newlyweds can’t understand how two people who love each other can sit across from each other so bereft of emotion. The newlyweds express their love in their passion, and they are not wrong to do so. But they would do well to learn and appreciate other ways to express love. Looking at the newlyweds, the older couple doesn’t understand how two people who know so little about each other can truly love each other. You see, the older couple started going to the museum every Tuesday when they were a younger couple. As years of Tuesdays passed, museums were one of the things that lasted, along with their respect and appreciation for each other. Therefore, to them, that tradition is a more meaningful expression of love than is adolescent groping. But they, too, would do well to re-discover their springtime passions for each other.

We are like the two couples. Neither of us are particularly interested in learning how the other expresses their love for God. Until we do, neither of us will truly learn to respect each other, certainly not enough to call each other family. I venture to say that much of this has to do with our love affair with comfort. But Agape is hardly comfortable, it sends you across railroad tracks and across oceans. Agape teaches us to pour ourselves out as a drink sacrifice for others. Part of this is understanding the story of the other. A bigger part of it is letting go of our own.

For this, we return to Joseph. Sitting in a slaver’s pit, Joseph certainly had time and reason to ruminate over his side of the story. Instead, he does something far wiser. He lets go, and asks God to tell the story instead. Trusting in God, Joseph believes that God will work all things for good, and through that trust the Lord frees him of the power of pride and vengeance. God brought Joseph to a place where he could lead his brothers into that same freedom. It is for freedom that Christ sets us free, and Joseph uses his freedom to free his brothers. Through Joseph, both he and his brothers enter into God’s retelling of the story, and in that retelling are reconciled. Only when they found themselves back in the same story could they turn to the next chapter. Only in that next chapter does the rest of the story make any sense: Joseph was sold into slavery so that the lives of many, including his own family, could be saved.

We would do well to let God tell our stories. Trusting in Him, we will find ourselves free of pride and vengeance. We will find ourselves in a place where we can lead others to freedom. In that freedom, we will find reconciliation. We will once again be one people under one King. And when our stories becomes one again, we will finally be free to turn to the next chapter. I have a feeling it will be a good one.

‘I pray also for those who will believe in me… that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.’ - Jesus (as told by John.)

It is one thing to have a tarnished mirror, quite a different thing to have one that is cracked. Not better, not worse, just different. Tarnish robs the reflected image of its clarity. The more tarnished the mirror becomes, the less you can make out the thing being reflected. Cracks rob the image of its completeness. You can see the image quite clearly, but it no longer lines up with itself. Where lines should connect to lines, they instead shift along jagged edges at the fault lines of the crack. Each shard reflects a different and incomplete perspective of the whole. What was once one complete picture is now reflected in many fragments, each no doubt with its own idea of ‘fullness.’

We are the Body of Christ. We are meant to reflect Him to this world. So we are mirrors, both individually and corporately. And we are cracked, both individually and corporately. Individually, we are a hundred different and incomplete people, depending on who is watching us. We wear a hundred masks because we forget the one Person who always watches over us. We want to be seen as righteous in everyone’s eyes but His. Rather than trust His conception of us, we trust more in our own self-conceptions and self-deceptions. So instead of reflecting a complete picture of Him, we only reflect Him in jagged bits and pieces.

We stay shattered even as we come together in His Name. A hundred different churches, all reflecting Him in bits and pieces, all arguing about how their piece contains the true fullness of the Gospel. One is the church of the mind, where we pursue Him in Truth. One is the church of the heart, where we pursue Him in Spirit. One the church of compassion, another the church of orthodoxy; one the church of grace, another the church of justice. Is Christ divided? He is not. He is the Lion and the Lamb, the reigning king and the suffering servant all at once. Yet we are divided.

We are all made differently. Therefore, we will understand Christ in different ways; one may lead with the heart, another with the head. Consider the apostles. In many ways, Peter was the apostle of the heart, while Paul was the apostle of the mind. Paul illustrates a point using the various declensions of a word from the Torah; Peter simply says what he is feels. This is hardly a bad thing; only together are they all things to all people. Unfortunately, when Peter and Paul have a disagreement, the group hug hits a snag. Many people held the opinion that you first had to become Jewish in order to then become Christian. Peter, always the man of the people, allows himself to be swung to that viewpoint. So he and Paul are now at loggerheads. There is no way around the fact that somebody is right and somebody is wrong.

The wrong somebody happens to be Peter. To his great credit, when Paul confronts him, he yields. These two pillars of the early Church are reconciled in Spirit and in Truth. Peter and Paul were brothers, and each cared more about proving Christ right than about proving the other wrong. They both go on into their roles in Salvation History. I cannot help but wonder if their reconciliation is not in some part due to their membership in the same church. I wonder if they would not have gone their separate ways in a world of schism. Even then there was Paul and there was Apollos, even then there were fault lines. Nonetheless, there was one Jerusalem Council. There was one Name we were called, and one Name we called each other, even if there were different pronunciations. Nazarene Jews, Followers of the Way, we were all Christians.

Today we are Evangelicals and Pentecostals, Catholic and Orthodox, we are a hundred different fragments all arguing about who has the fullness and who does not. And here’s the rub: none of us are so much wrong as incomplete. All of our shards have different pieces of the reflection. A True Christian is an evangelical Christian: he preaches the Gospel to the nations. A True Christian is a Pentecostal Christian: she is filled with the fire of the Spirit. A True Christian is a catholic Christian: he is united with the universal Body of Christ in Spirit and in Truth. A True Christian is an orthodox Christian: she practices the one true faith passed down from the Apostles. A True Christian is all of these and more. He is known by many names, but the first of those names is always the Name of Jesus.

This is not to say the other names are not still important. Saul is renamed Paul. He is not renamed Jesus. He reflects Jesus as Paul in a way no one else can quite match. As does Peter. As do we all. So he is Paul, the Christian. The names converge over time, but as Christ becomes more real, so does Paul. He remains Paul, but Paul becomes more and more like Christ. Paul was made to uniquely image Christ, so it is only in Christ that he finds his true self. And so it is with Churches. The Church in Ephesus. The Church in Nigeria. The Church in America. Each are meant to be unique collective expressions of Jesus Christ.

Paul’s experiences mold the uniqueness of his reflection of Christ. Time, space and experience shapes Paul the Christian. His history has something to do with the way he fits into Salvation History. It also has something to do with the places he falls short of God’s plan. What is true for us individually is true for us corporately. Church history is writing in the intersection between the work of the Holy Spirit and the acts of fallen men. Constantine presides over the Second Nicean Council, weaving something of the Imperial bureaucracy into the fabric of the Church. It is neither inherently good nor inherently bad, merely a function of being the Church in Rome.

Imagine you are a Christian on the American frontier, circa 1820. In your town, there are basically two mutually exclusive options for entertainment. You can go to the saloon, dance with prostitutes, get completely plastered, and then come home and take out your frustrations on your family, or you can go to church. Paul talks about food sacrificed to idols and abstaining from things that cause a brother to stumble. For this reason, most of the Russian Christians I knew didn’t drink. Kind of hard to manage a functional model of moderation in a culture which lacks any other conception of drinking other than getting smashed. The newly-saved frontier Christian faces a similar dilemma. Dancing and drinking are inextricably linked with his previous lifestyle. It just makes sense for him to abstain from drinking and dancing, and it just makes sense for the frontier church to do the same. So a hundred years later, Baptists were abstaining from the same things, often without remembering the original reasons for doing so. In this way, tee-totalling was woven into that branch of the Church in America. This, also, was neither good nor bad, merely a function of being Christian in that place and that time.

Languages move along with the streams of history, as well. When one language becomes divided by a mountain range, though, it generally branches off into different streams. Rarely do the streams come back together, as the journey of the two streams takes them farther and farther from each other. The same is true for the Church. Our mountain ranges are our corporate sins. As they break our fellowship, we begin to follow divergent paths. So it is sin that always leads to schism. And like anything else that happens in relationship, rarely is that sin one-sided.

Sin is schism with God. The Church exists to reflect God to the world. Therefore, sin within the church is schism in the church. And it is more schismatic to pretend that it doesn’t exist rather than name it. Our Anglican brethren are discovering this even now. Sin gives birth to division one way or other. Adam chose unity with his spouse in sin, rather than schism with her. He instead chose schism with God. In sin there is schism, one way or another. If we choose to ignore the sin, the schism will be with God, instead.

Bend a mirror, you distort the reflection. Bend it even more, it breaks. You end up with a shattered picture, but the individual pieces may have a less distorted reflection. It will instead be incomplete. Sin always creates disunity, for the first unity is with and in Christ, and sin breaks us from Him. So there are many flavors of Schism. There are the declared Schisms, the break at the turn of the first millennium, ostensibly about filioque, but really about the tremendous pride of the Western and Eastern halves of the remnants of the Roman Empire. Pride was the sin that broke the Church the first time. It was that same sin that broke the Church the second time at Trent. And as beautiful as St. Peter’s is, we must ask ourselves if it was really worth the cost. We must ask if the indulgences which paid to gather the stones of that building were worth the scattering of the stones of the Church. Certainly, this sin was not one-sided. But it was sin, nonetheless, and it gave birth to division, nonetheless.

So we are a broken mirror. And while we are made whole in Christ, we are not all whole together. We are each incomplete in our shards. Yet God still works through us, such as we are. And He reconciles us to each other. The Holy Spirit draws all men toward Christ. Those who follow find themselves closer to each other.

I recently attended a Charismatic Catholic conference. Singing Vineyard worship songs there, I realize something. Vineyard churches have endeavored to bless the Body of Christ by reconciling Evangelicals to Pentecostals, but here God used them to bless Christians beyond the boundaries of those original intentions. Where there is brokenness, God seeks to heal. Where that brokenness is not ready to be healed, God works despite it. Where there was one land, there are now canyons. But He has made bridges across those canyons. And sometimes, where no bridges could be made, He does airdrops.

I have a few friends who were formerly Evangelicals and chose to convert to Catholicism. This was hard for me to reconcile at first. After a good deal of prayer, I feel as if God granted me a measure of understanding. Imagine a great military commander. He has a problem. His army, navy and air forces all don’t get along with each other. They seem more interested in fighting each other than fighting alongside each other. The forces were all designed to work with each other, but they are hardly willing to talk to each other. Say the air forces have some tactics that would be useful for the army. If you merely have the air forces write down their tactics and send them to the army, there’s no way the army will take the tactics seriously. It might work better to send an air force exchange officer to the army, and have him explain the tactics. He will run into the same problem, though. The army guys will instinctively distrust anything that comes from someone in a blue uniform. Really, there’s only one way to get the message through. You have to choose an air force officer and completely transfer him into the army, uniform and all. Then the message will get through in a language where it can be heard, understood and acknowledged.

Scott Hahn is one of the most prolific and influential contemporary Catholic authors. He writes clearly, using simple terms and simple analogies. He breaks down the Catholic faith into examples that can be easily understood and communicated, much like an Evangelical. There is a good reason for this: he used to be an Evangelical. Growing up Evangelical, attending an Evangelical college, involved in Evangelical ministries, he found himself drawn to ‘Rome Sweet Home,’ as he describes it. While thoroughly and undeniably Catholic, and very much of the opinion that other Evangelicals should follow a similar path, it is undeniable that God is using his Evangelical background to bless the Catholic Church. And praise God for that.

Really, the different branches of the Body of Christ owe more to each other than any of them care to admit. Without Evangelicals, there would be few Catholic Bible studies or praise songs. Without Catholics, there would be little of Evangelicals being salt and light in their nation on behalf of the weakest amongst us. We each have a place where we fit. In that place, we mesh perfectly with the believers around us. It is like a puzzle. When we find our place in the bigger picture, we become united with the pieces around us.

Continuing the military example, it is the mission that ties a combat crew together. It is not in symposia, not in discussions of differences or in debates or anything else where a crew finds their unity. It is in doing their job. The crew sorts out their differences because they need to do the mission. If they forgot that mission, pride and social dynamics would tear the crew apart. But they remember that their fates are tied together, one way or another. As ours should be. We were given marching orders, as well. Our mission was the Great Commission. In that mission, we have to reconcile ourselves to each other. We are forced to realize that there is something more important than our pride. We were to find each other in the harvest. If we sit here and try to sort things out it wont work. If we find each other on the missions field, we’ll have to make it work. And we will, through the power of the Spirit.

Returning to Paul, he was the most complete when he was the most Christ-like. Only then was he of one mind. Before, he was Paul the Pharisee. Paul the Scholar. Paul of the tribe of Benjamin. Paul of a hundred other things. Like the in Greek theater, our masks take one feature of the face and make it the only feature. But faces have many features, so we must have many masks, all of them incomplete. But in Christ, he is Paul the Christian. Paul the Christian is still a scholar, still of the tribe of Benjamin, still a Pharisee. But he is complete. Only in Christ does he leave behind his hundred masks and put on his real face. That face was Christ.

What was true for Paul is true for all of us. It is true for us as a Church. We wear many masks. One Catholic, one Evangelical, one Orthodox. And all these things are true of us. But they are all incomplete. We cannot face God until we have faces, to steal Lewis’ line. As a Church, we are to have one face. It is to be the face of Christ. Surely we will all reflect different aspects of that face, but we must reflect Him together. If this fractured army can stand against all the forces of darkness, imagine what a united army could do. If a cracked mirror can still reflect enough of the light of Christ to change lives, imagine what a reforged mirror would look like. It might just shine bright enough for the blind to see.

So it occurs to me that I wrote a bunch of serious stuff. Someone reading it might think I was some sort of philosopher, citing sources and speaking Latin over some half-caf double hazelnut macchiato. Tragically, that’s not me at all. I’m generally pretty retarded, and I find myself amusing nearly all the time, whether I actually am or not. In order to prove that beyond any doubt, in this post I’m just going to write about random, stupid crap that nobody probably cares about but me. In other words, it will read like a normal blog.

Kahlil Gibran was a famous poet from Lebanon. He wrote in the late 1800s. He looks a lot like Borat. He writes this book ‘Jesus, son of man,’ which describes Christ from the perspective of John, Pilate, Caiaphas and many others. And I can’t help but think about Larry Norman’s ‘The Outlaw.’ Of course, Gibran is one of the people Lewis talks about, hating on Paul but loving Jesus. He describes it like a proto-revolutionary who goes after all the king’s advisors, saving for the last step actually dethroning the king. But whatever. I don’t know Gibran’s heart. It just strikes me that two people from such different worlds and times end up saying the same thing in two completely different media. And it strikes me that a lot of the time the words are the same, and the words are what is important, not the medium. But most of the time, because we are arrogant, we spend a lot of time arguing why our favorite medium is cool and everybody else’s sucks.

Through a convoluted series of events, I was reminded of a post I read a year ago from someone who used to be my friend. They were talking about how unoriginal Top 40 stations were, and played two Nickelback songs simultaneously, where you could see that they used exactly the same rifs and chords. I’m not a big Nickelback fan, so whatever, but I think they’re actually hard rock, not top 40. Anyways, so I think its weird when people who are all ‘Im so multicultural’ only are sensitive towards the cultures they already like. After all, you can watch multi-culti dance from a safe arm‘s length, but actual multi-culturalism happens when the Manhattanite has to interact with the Campesino-American wearing the cowboy hat and boots, where people have to overcome actual prejudices, instead of jousting after institutional racism and the man. But that’s hard, so we do easy things that we want to do anyways and call them hard instead.

Things all have contexts. I can quote Durkheim or Weber or whoever you want, but it should be totally obvious. I think that citing sources is really just invoking power. It doesn’t add anything to the argument, really. Like saying ipso facto or q.e.d. It doesn’t say anything. It just invokes power. Like the court languages of the middle ages. A power language, used by the intelligentsia and the elites for self-identification. Language to power, would make an interesting post. Ill mull it for a while first. Regardless, I shouldn’t have to quote some guy to validate a statement. Judge it on its merits. Do the same for me. I get so sick of people looking at the groups I am part of and trying to do some freakin’ multi-variate regression, and then telling me who I am based on the results. Sure, people have backgrounds, and you can assume certain things. But leave your assumptions open to revision based on the data. If you think something about me because of where I’ve been or what I’ve done, than whatever. That makes sense. Just realize those thing may mean something quite different for me than they mean to an observer. And if you have a question, ask me about it. Ill be glad to explain. I’ve been trying to learn to do this with others. But I’m forgetful. So if I do that to you, please call me on it.

So the point, which I already forgot, is that I dislike snooty people who disdain things they don’t even try to understand. So Top 40 music is unoriginal to a Tchaikovsky listener. Kenneth Copeland’s works all sound the same to most Linkin Park fans. Baroque listeners disdained the early Classical composers for their vulgarity. So a passage of Rachmaninoff moves you? Social Distortion moves me. Who are you to tell me that my reaction is invalid? I don’t tell you your music sucks. I just don’t prefer it. But if you like it, and it moves you, then cool. Good on you. I hope you enjoy it. I am sure that Beethoven writes from his heart and from his passions in the symphonies he composed while deaf. I am also sure that Everclear writes with just as much passion when they’re singing about how their dad left them. Where do people get off illegitimating others just because their means of expression do not mesh with their own? So Brahms has stood the test of history? How many other people did he have to beat to win his recording contract (or equivalent of the time)? How many garage band composers were in competition with him? He was playing for the wealthy in courts. That’s a small slice of the population. The rest of the people were playing folk songs on improvised instruments. And the snooty types were looking down on them even then.

Yeah, its postmodern. Sort of. There is a difference between preferences and values. We should all eat some sort of food. But I really don’t care if you don’t like my sort of food. And I am not lessened in any way if you enjoy food that is not at all like mine.

As for the whole McWhorter thing, on good and bad music and all, you have to look at things in context. Im not saying that he does or he doesn’t. It was just a segue way. Most rap music is disrespectful toward women and authority. But Cross Movement is awesome, both in their technical musical skills, and in their message. I’m not judging context. I’m judging in context. I doubt that Mozart’s indiscretions were not reflected in his syncopations and chord progressions. And, oops I forgot, Wagner was appropriated by the Nazis, much to Lewis‘ chagrin. It‘s in God in the Dock. If music kills people, then it didn’t start with rap. So if punk rawk has a lot of yelling and like four power chords, then judge a punk rawk band by how well they capture the essence of the medium, and how well they use it to convey their message. And if Gregorian chants have like one chord, then do the same. Psalm 150, y’know. And the foolish things of this world. The pulse of a people can be found in their music. If you’re too cool to learn how to read that pulse, you will blind yourself to them. And the revolution may not be televised, but you’ll probably hear it on the radio.

It’s the same crowd that thinks using the word ‘problematic’ instead of ‘bad’ makes you smart, regardless of the content of your statement. Harvard-itis, I think it should be called. Just because you can inject obscure latin phrases doesn’t mean your argument doesn’t suck anymore. People want to say it’s booksmarts vs. common sense. I don’t think it’s that at all. I think it’s straight-up intellectual horsepower applied in a context. And I know some people who grew up surrounded by the practical who then applied their intellectual gifts toward practical uses, and excelled in doing so. And just because they don’t like expending 3.6 more seconds to use a word with more syllables to describe the concept of ‘bad’ doesn’t mean they’re one bit less smart. And they usually end up with something to show for it. Refer to Lewis’ ‘Good Works’ essay in God in the Dock.

Here’s another thing. I really dislike the ignorance of social scientists, ethicists and lawyers toward other academic disciplines. People who have no idea what a Fourier Transform is want to consider themselves the intelligentsia, and claim a lock on the ‘enlightened opinion.’ There’s one specific result of this I really don’t like: the stereotype of Evangelicals as uneducated. It is usually made by social scientist types, who took introductory college algebra at some liberal arts school, and would never make it through Georgia Tech or Cal Tech or wherever. If they had ever seen the inside of a Civil Engineering doctoral program, they would have likely noticed the significant number of Evangelicals occupying the adjacent seats. But whatever.

I’m so this. I’m so not that. Whatever. Poseurs all. Everybody’s so concerned with being better than each other. Its really stupid. Even if you could prove that you were better than everyone else, who would you hang out with? After all, you just proved you were too cool for everyone else. So now you get to be too cool for everybody alone. Have fun, schmuck. Just do what you like. Care less about what other people like and whether it sucks or not. It is childish to diminish other people’s identities in order to raise your own stock. Any identity based on that is impoverished.

So back to the ‘I’m retarded and I don’t care because I think it’s funny’ main theme, me and one of my friends who is still in training and his master’s program at the same time, because he’s crazy hardcore like that, and we were having a standard conversation that covered Augustine, Blade Runner, Quantum Physics, Epistemology, Gestalt, Race and Ethnicity, and Psychoanalysis within the course of five minutes, which includes a good amount of laughing and repeating things we found funny like fourteen times, and we started talking about how most philosophers were really talking about girls (except for Wittenstein, who was probably talking about guys. I’ll leave that one alone.) So, to the chagrin of the other guy at the table, who honorably endured an education in the classics, we start thinking of alternate titles for framing works of world history. Like ‘I’m okay even though I’m an Athenian general,’ by Thucidides, or alternately ‘Please don’t kill me.’ Also ‘I wish I hadn’t been a playa’ by Augustine. It was awesome.

Which brings me back to the title of the whole thing. ‘Awesomeness and Ontology.’ My and my friend decided that we would make a new philosophical system. It was almost as cool as the time some other guys decided to make up a rumor. No hostile intent, no slander, just pure social experiment. Just ‘cause it was stupid and it was funny. Anyways, so we decided that we could divide the world into ‘awesome’ and ‘not awesome.’ All things could be classified as belonging to one of the two categories. We’ll call it the ‘polarized dichotomy.’ So we decided that the best graduate thesis ever would be ‘How to Be Awesome: an Ontological Approach.’ And then we laughed about it a while. And then we repeated it. And then we laughed some more. And that all took about ten minutes.

So that should prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I am not a sage philosopher. Really, I think stupid things are funny. And I almost always think I’m funny. Hmm. I’m intentionally not going to do the math on those two last statements. Anyways, so that’s that. Seeya. Out.

Faith and Reason. The Heart and the Mind. People talk about them like they are entirely separate. Different, to be sure, but they are hardly separate. Quite literally, the heart without the mind soon becomes a vegetable; the mind without the heart soon becomes a corpse. An incandescent light makes more heat than light, a florescent bulb more light than heat. Increase the heat of either, you increase the light, cut out all heat and you lose all light. The more you are in love with someone, the more you want to know about them. The more you know about them, the more you fall in love with them.

The Classical Greek philosophers never really trusted the heart. Plato and Aristotle tell us that the passions war against the reason, and the only basis for civilization is the triumph of reason in that war. In their masterworks, Augustine and Aquinas did a tremendous job of adapting Aristotle’s works into a Christian context. Perhaps, though, we went a bit too far. Marcus Aurelius thought along Aristotelian lines, seeking balance in all things. He was right to hate Christianity. We upset all existing balances. Jesus does not bring peace, but a sword; He breaks all of the truces we have made with the brokenness of this world.

There was no St. Aristotle, any more than there was a St. Gautama. His may have been be a useful civic faith, but it was not Christianity. It is not the faith of Abraham, the great Middle Eastern mystic, into whose line we are grafted. It is not the faith that causes the great king David to dance undignified through the streets of his polis for sheer joy.

Surely the heart runs wild. Surely it runs astray. But no more than the mind does. All things are darkened after the fall, Paul makes that much clear. But our minds are no less darkened than our hearts. The atrocities and deceptions brewed in the mind of man are no less evil than the hatred that bubbles from our hearts. We need Jesus to redeem both of them. We need Him to give us the heart of a Savior and the mind of Christ.

Until He remakes us, though, our hearts and our minds run rampant. So we are given fences. Electric ones, sometimes. Our minds are bounded by the consequences of our actions. You can believe what you wish about aerodynamics, but if you build an airfoil upside down, your plane will crash. You can believe what you wish about sociology, but if you make a society where the most innocent are murdered freely, you will have violence on your streets. Pascal calls it the ‘dignity of causality.’ In a fallen world, that dignity is generally expressed in negative consequences. But the alternative is worse. Without concrete consequences to actions, we would get so lost in our own minds that we would never be pulled back out. So from time to time, our thoughts are broken by the laws of His universe. They prevent us from becoming satisfied with any answer that is not Him.

He does the same for our hearts. Laws will not break hearts, though. There must be something else. Something has to move us from the places where our hearts grow comfortable, something has to stop us stagnating. Something has to break all answers that are not Him. So He gives us the curse. He thwarts our desire, showing us the incompleteness in loving anything but Him.

We try to drown out the curse. It is trying to tell us something. Maybe we should listen. Love a friend, and he will hurt you. Love work, it will involve frustration and pain. Love a hobby, and you will eventually find it boring. Love a woman, she will eventually pass away. The curse tells us that we were made for a better world than this, because nothing in this world can truly and permanently satisfy our hearts.

I really like warm weather. I prefer 110 degrees to 40 by far. I remember joking that ‘Cold weather is due to the fall of man… if they were walking around naked in the garden, it couldn‘t have been that cold.’ Maybe was more right than I thought. I do not claim to be an expert in the hydrology of the early Earth, but from my limited knowledge, I understand that there was a vapor canopy that covered the Earth. There was eternal sunshine, eternal summer. I imagine it was great back then. I think that now, though, we would get lost in it. So He breaks summer and makes winter. Winter keeps us from getting lost in summer, from taking it for granted. It brings renewal in spring, and fall takes it away before we can get too comfortable. But even winter has snow. There is grace even in the brokenness.

Desire will lead us home, if we follow it where it leads. We see Him reflected in many things. Really, anything we truly love is a reflection of Him. That is, after all, what our hearts were made for: loving Him and being loved by Him. The curse makes sure that it cannot end anywhere but with Him, for in Him the curse is broken. So even the curse is His servant, His agent to prod desire from resting too long in one place. The curse is the counterpart to desire after the fall, the goad to our passions.

Lewis is still right, though. Our desires will not be fulfilled in anything other than loving Him, but that fact cannot become license not to love anything but Him. If you wanted to find the perfect artwork, you would not stop frequenting art stores, nor would you stop buying other artworks. As your tastes became more and more refined, you would buy better and better works, and in those works you would see more and more aspects of that perfect artwork that you truly desire. Without learning to appreciate the artwork available, you would never be able to appreciate the perfect artwork. You might not even recognize it if you saw it.

We love Him incompletely, safely, imperfectly. Through loving His works and loving others, He breaks us and perfects our love. You get love by giving it away. In approaching His love, we must give away more and more of our own. The more love we give away, the more He gives us. He just makes sure that our love is never completely satisfied with anything but Him.

In the Kingdom, we won’t need goads or fences. We will ride bareback, and desire will run free in His pastures. But as long as we live in a world of briar patches, the curse keeps desire from destroying us. If we listen.