Divine Plagiarism

09 June 2008

Miracles and Mechanics.

The latest Star Wars movie had some pretty amazing special effects during the battle scenes. The latest Lord of the Rings movies, on the other hand, had some pretty amazing battles. Special effects are a lot like spices in cooking… they’re at their best when they’re least apparent. Like too much Tabasco, overbearing SFX calls into question the quality of the storyline’s meat. Conversely, well-measured effects help the viewer overcome their disbelief and hence advance the story. I know that, at least in modern Florida, there is no such thing as a fawn. Still, when I watch Tumnus walk across the screen on life-like goat legs, I don’t have to try so hard to lose myself in Narnia’s storyline. Perhaps, then, this is another way to put it: effects bolster the viewer’s faith in the story‘s validity in order to hold their interest through to its conclusion.

Which, incidentally, sounds a lot like the purpose of signs, wonders and miracles. Jesus didn’t come to Earth to inaugurate a miraculous new vintage for a wedding, nor to make fast food for crowds of Galileans out of thin air, nor to resuscitate the dead only to see them die again. But those things definitely keep you on board for the rest of the story. How many times did the Old Testament prophets call Israel’s attention back to the miracles of the Exodus? The special effects, as it were, illustrated the Producer’s commitment to the storyline and His capability to see it through to a good ending. Even so, we should not take the God of the Universe as some conjuror of cheap tricks. Even the most playful of His miracles serve solely to advance His storyline. This is His elegant universe, and even in the extravagance of His greatness nothing is gratuitous. And certainly nothing is clumsy.

The Ancient Greeks were known for their playwrights. Notable amongst their innovations on the stage was the idea of Deus ex Maschina. Equal parts fast-forward and plot fix-a-flat, a god would appear in the middle of the play to explain away glaring holes in the storyline. While this device may have salvaged a number of otherwise irredeemable works, it is not exactly a highlight of elegance in story-craft. Instead of advancing the plot from within the mechanics of the story, the author has to introduce an outside element to move things along. Perhaps this is the difference between the petty contractor-gods of old and the One True Landlord. Producer, Director, and Chief Protagonist, this was His story from the outset and it is played out upon His stage. I have little difficulty imagining that the Creator made His stage sturdy enough to accommodate the requirements of His special effects.

A good friend of mine is completing her graduate degree in Biology. Her advocacy of Intelligent Design theory stirs up unending controversy amongst her colleagues. One day, another student approached her exultantly exclaiming that the plagues of Exodus could be explained away through natural causes. Apparently, he was a bit crestfallen when he discovered that a naturalistic explanation actually bolstered her faith in the veracity of the miracles. Her response, if more polite, was something to the effect of, “obviously Michelangelo didn’t make this thing… its got paint all over it.” Is it so impossible that Nature’s Creator would use His Creation to accomplish His will?

The naturalistic account of the Plagues goes something like this: a volcanic eruption turns the Nile red, which causes the fish to die, which leads to a spike in the fly population, which in turn provides food to frogs, and so on. Taking this account as given, the timing and the sequencing of the plagues still demands an answer. First, these plagues occur at a particularly propitious time for the nation of Israel, as evidenced by the undeniable historical result of Israel’s first nationhood. Second, the progression of the plagues systematically discredits the entire Egyptian pantheon of the time. What could be a more poetic curse for a culture with a frog god of fertility than an overabundance of overly fertile frogs? The naturalistic explanation points to a cause outside nature. The special effects serve the storyline, not vice versa.

Naturalism is predicated upon a certain view of nature. Hence the name. Unfortunately, our perspective on nature is skewed by the human propensity for overestimating our span of understanding. Like every generation before us, we assume that we are the ones who finally have things figured out. Do we really know everything yet? Is our sample size really large enough to justify the assertions that we are so comfortable making? Is our present encyclopedia of natural processes truly sufficient to explain everything in nature? Until we can answer these questions in the affirmative with certainty, naturalism must view itself with a certain degree of humility. And humility teaches us to look to others for help, especially in our shortcomings.

I imagine it would be remarkably tricky for a person living in a world of permanent eclipse to form a coherent theory of orbital mechanics. What if, for as long as we can remember, we have been living in a world under eclipse? This world is caught in an anomaly of discord with its Creator, and such a rift could cut all the way to the dynamics of reality itself. Our present thoughts on the nature of things would then be tremendously incomplete; they would hold true only for the area of the anomaly and deeply lacking for the rest of the universe. What if all of this is a blip in eternity, a momentary deviation from Things As They Are? All of our theories would then be deeply suspect, along with all of our definitions.

The Old Testament miracles seem to best fit the rules of the anomaly. This stands to reason: they are miracles for a world of Sin and Death, and they are themselves often miracles of death (even if to preserve greater life.) The plagues of Egypt, the selectively fatal Red Sea crossing, the flood of Noah, the fall of Jericho, all of these miracles involved the shedding of blood. The physics of a fallen world seem to suffice in explaining miracles of death. In contrast, the ultimate miracle of Christ’s resurrection defies all attempts at explanation. There is no process within our naturalism that can reverse death. Perhaps the fault lies with our definition of nature.

The ultimate and crowning miracle of death happened atop Golgotha. The invincible Creator dies at the hands of His creation, and this cannot be considered anything but miraculous. The last and most terrible miracle of the Old Physics. And it is followed by the first and greatest miracle of the New Physics. Death itself was turned backwards by love, the first and greatest of all governing dynamics. The resurrected Christ demonstrates in the flesh that the newly inaugurated law of love applies to biology, to physics, to time and space and everything. This is the true physics, this is nature restored to its true self. Thus, the miracle that defies the old naturalism fits perfectly into the new naturalism.

So perhaps it is Deus ex Machina after all. The actors have evicted the playwright and turned the play into a mockery. The stage itself is disfigured, incapable of bearing any story worth the telling. So God enters the play, and patches the holes the actors continue to tear in the plot. He moves the characters places that they could never get on their own, and He somehow crafts a good ending for one particularly bad play. This is the greatest miracle of all: the story actually makes it to its ending. How strange… a magnificent Producer and some spectacular special effects actually makes up for some absolutely pathetic actors.

21:11 Posted in Thoughts | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this

27 April 2008

Beyond Nirvana (The Liberation of Meaningless.)

This place that I’m supposed to be/
it’s not a chair or a desk in front of a mirror/
Can’t you see, man/ it’s not here, or there, or anywhere
But in speaking distance with God/
and where can you go that’s too far?
‘Cause I can worship Him anywhere…
- Plankeye, ‘Bicycle.’

There’s no better way to ruin a book than to read the last few pages first. Which would, of course, explain why it took me so long to appreciate Ecclesiastes. To steal a line from Switchfoot, I’m just like everyone else my age… I don’t wanna read the book, I’ll watch the movie. So the Cliff Notes version of Ecclesiastes goes something like this: ‘Everything is meaningless, except for serving God, so that’s what you should do.’ It’s almost like a rainy-day-realization that you can’t go outside and play, so you might as well stay inside do your homework. Hard to find a less exciting message than that.

The Teacher is right, though. His logic is impeccable and utterly inescapable. There is no denying the fate of the rich man. I’ve never seen a hearse pulling a U-Haul. Store it up for your children and they may squander it, but even if they don’t, they can’t take it with them any more than you can. So health is not an answer. Rounding out the ‘obviously not the answer’ category is immortality. Despite what the drug reps will tell you, survival is a fight you’re going to lose. The global mortality rate is holding rock solid at 100% with a standard deviation of zero. The rich man may buy off Cerberus for a bit and the healthy man may outrun him for a time, but you can’t escape the inevitable. Health and wealth are meaningless. But we already knew that (or at least should have.)

Perhaps legacies, then. Make a great name for yourself and become known amongst the nations for your great deeds. Known, though, is a tricky word. Do you remember the names of the one-hit-wonders of last year, much less the who’s who of the last hundred years? Say you make it to the history books. For a time, schoolchildren may have to learn the school-board-approved version of the things you did. Soon enough, though, you will be consigned to increasingly arcane texts, becoming one more data point in some grad student’s thesis about psychoanalysis or geographic determinism or some other sort of nonsense. Whatever echoes remain of your name will be inevitably consumed by eternity and entropy, whether in dramatic Alexandrian purges, not-quite-as-exciting computer crashes or not-exciting-at-all library budget cuts.

You yourself will be lost long before your name slips into the void of cultural amnesia. Even before your children pass away, the children of a hundred factions will be re-defining you in their image. The more famous you were, the worse they will squabble over your legacy; a rich man’s estate sale is always well attended, and a great man’s name is portioned out even at his death. They don’t make statues of you. They make statues of themselves in your image. And by the time they make statues of you, everyone who actually knew you won’t be around to argue with them about who you really were.

Consider C.S. Lewis, the legendary scholar of Christianity. Christendom’s factions seem to have a peculiar fancy for re-inventing Lewis into themselves. To an Evangelical, he becomes an intellectual version of Billy Graham, preaching the four spiritual laws in academic language. To a Catholic, he was just on the verge of a conversion his whole life; really, if he was born today he would have been (the same logic fits Martin Luther remarkably well.) To an American, he becomes an American, despite the fact that he was offered many trips to the States and steadfastly refused on all occasions (of course, his opinion of one specific American seemed remarkably high in his later days.) To a socially progressive Upper East Side preacher, he becomes a social progressive, in spite of Lewis’ remarkably Hobbesian views on politics, his support of the draft, his ambivalence toward animal rights and his open hostility toward Marxists. The real Lewis, if such a concept is even useful for the vast majority of us who never knew him, was a devout practitioner of mid-twentieth-century Anglicanism, which is distinctly different even from early-twenty-first-century Anglicanism, much less contemporary Evangelicalism or Catholicism. Knowledge of the husband Lewis passed away with Joy Gresham decades ago, knowledge of the father Lewis will pass away with Douglas Gresham in the hopefully-distant future. Lewis sets the bar very high indeed, but the point still holds: meaningless, meaningless, says the Teacher.

If not a name, then perhaps a cause. Invest yourself in something great, something beyond yourself. We’ll be Enjolras of Les Miserables, waving the flag atop the barricades, shouting, ‘Let others rise to take our place, until the Earth is free!’ There is, of course, a slight problem. Just as the rich man must pass his wealth to his children, the revolutionary must eventually pass the cause down to his followers. As the sins of the parents bloom in their children, the compromises of the revolutionary undermine the revolution in time. The more compromises there are, the less time it takes… just ask Robespierre. Even the best considered cause will come apart in time. In the name of women’s rights, Elisabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony outlawed abortion in several states, a practice they saw as exploitative and hurtful toward women. In the name of women’s rights, the second wave of feminism systematically eradicated those same laws only a few decades later. You never know what future generations will do in the name of your cause. Unfortunately, you won’t be around to set them straight.

What is true for a cause is true for a culture and a country. The parents make wise decisions and find prosperity, which endows their children with a sense of entitlement and isolates them from the consequences of their poor decisions for a time. By the time the children experience the logical outcomes of their choices, the fortune is squandered. Perhaps it was this tendency of things to veer from their intended purpose that inspired the framers’ dour predictions about the long-term viability of their newborn country. It is honorable, no doubt, to give your life for your country. But it is still not an answer. Veterans Day is no longer celebrated in Carthage, Sumer, or Songhai. People don’t last forever, and neither do peoples. This too is meaningless.

What about living legacies? Family is perhaps the most beautiful thing under the sun. That said, I do not remember the names of my great-great-grandparents. I only have a vague sense of where my relatives lived five centuries ago. I have no knowledge whatsoever of any ancestors beyond two millennia ago, save Adam and Noah. Even if I had scrolls tracing my lineage back to the Garden of Eden, it wouldn’t give me an answer. I would just have another chronicle of human fallenness passing from generation to generation; even the children of Abraham fall away. Some things are more meaningless than others, but moth and rust take their due here too. Even children are meaningless.

One meaningless thing remains. Saving the world. There’s a hundred different flavors of this one, each of them uniquely matched to a flavor of workaholism. The researcher that needs to find the cure. The general that needs to win the war. The minister that needs to reach the world. If you don’t do it, who will? It’s almost as if the world needs you, as if God needs you. You are Atlas, and the weight of the world rests upon your shoulders. But how many times has Atlas shrugged, tripped, or straight-up fallen on his face? The world survived each time. Ultimately, though, saving this world is a doomed endeavor: the Earth‘s not going to last forever and nothing we can do will change that. So if you fail or if you succeed, you still haven’t changed any of the fundamental variables. Saving the world is the biggest meaningless of all, because it’s the easiest to lose yourself inside of.

Consider Esther. Hers is a ‘save the world’ story if there ever was one. The fate of an entire people, the people of the promised Messiah no less, hinges upon this one young woman. Only her brave and well-chosen words can hold back the might of the Persian Empire…Hadassah, the lobbyist-queen upon whom so much rests. It’s almost easy to forget who is writing the story. Her uncle Mordecai does not forget. Rather than filling his niece’s head with a bunch of nonsense about how much she’s needed, He assures her that God will work salvation for Israel regardless of her choices. He tells her instead of the great role God has set out for her in His great drama of salvation, and invites her to take part. This is the key. Jesus has already saved the world, and nothing we can possibly do will add or subtract in the least from His salvation. God may set out a role for us in His great drama, but it is the role of actor, never director. He blesses us by inviting us to participate in His story. He does not need us in order for that story to be told. It is the pinnacle of human pride to think that the omnipotent God needs our cooperation to accomplish His plan; it is the apex of human arrogance to imagine that the will of the Most High could be thwarted by our failures. We are not Atlas, but neither are we afflicted with Atlas‘ curse. The sooner we realize this, the lighter our burden will become. Meaningless is a freeing word.

Solomon, wisest one, tell me what you have found/
under the sun/
He answered, get over the sun, where life is hidden.
- Shane & Shane, ‘Under the Sun.’

I am hardly a disciple of Siddhartha Gautama. He does have this much right, though: in order to achieve any sort of enlightenment, we need to get over all the things that we think are so important…and we ourselves are foremost amongst those things. You’re not going to find your answers in any of the meaningless things under the sun. So get over the sun. Start by getting over yourself. Like some petty Soviet bureaucrat awarding himself medals, like some silly popularity contest of a student council election, we invest our self worth in baubles. Isaiah mocked the idolater of the ancient world, cooking his dinner on half a piece of wood, and prostrating himself before an idol made from the other half. Are we any less foolish? On one piece of paper, we write a resume and ask it to tell us who we are; the next piece of paper we use to wipe ourselves after using the bathroom. The emperor has no clothes, but neither do any of his subjects. So long as we assess each other’s merit on the basis of these trinkets, we collude in the charade. So we weigh ourselves down with rules and regulations, success and ambition, and a hundred other empty things that we’ve decided are important. Every hiccup on our path toward proving ourselves becomes a referendum on who we are as a person. Thus, we willingly lock ourselves inside a prison of our own contrived self-image. Meaningless is the word by which we escape all the weight we have piled upon our own shoulders. Meaningless tears down the walls of our castles of identity. Meaningless teaches us to get over ourselves.

And here is where the Teacher departs from the Eightfold Path. Buddhism teaches that the man who has many cares has many heartaches, whereas the man with few cares has few heartaches. The Teacher teaches that there is a time for heartache, along with a time for happiness. Gautama seeks nothing and finds it, stripping away the self and becoming one with the universe. The Teacher seeks the Lord and finds Him, losing himself in the vastness of His universe. Instead of fading into one forever chord, the Teacher discovers the majesty of the symphony of God; ten thousand dancing interwoven melodies, new voices forever added to an eternally growing perfect harmony. He discovers a world real and thick and substantial, a world that sticks to you like peanut butter to bread, a world so different from the watery transient nothing that we mistake for life as it slips through our clenched fists.

It’s like a man who climbs a mountain hoping to find a great treasure. Reaching the summit, he finds out that there isn’t anything on top. Disappointed, the man sits down, and realizes all at once that he has just discovered the best view of his life. His desire for an answer propelled him up the slope, and perhaps he will find it there, if only because he brought it with him. He won’t find it until he stops, but he may need to climb the peak to find a good stopping place. And this is well and good... most of us need some sort of mountain in order to find ourselves in the ascent. Our problem isn’t generally in the climbing. It’s the sitting down part. As soon as we discover there is no treasure, we run as fast as we can to the next mountain to repeat the process again. Or we give up and head back down the mountain, head held low and eyes blind to the beauty around us. Our expectations cut us off from the joy around us. We have our ideas about how the universe should run, and we get angry when things don’t follow our little plan. So our ancient enemy of pride resurfaces once again. We would rather live in our suffocating little worlds than open our eyes to the vastness of God’s universe. The first step toward understanding that vastness is realizing your own insignificance.

Meaningless sets us free. Everything you’ve ever done is meaningless. Everything you’ll ever do and anything you could ever hope to do is meaningless. You’re not God. God doesn’t expect you to be Him. He only expects you to be you. Once you figure that out, you realize it’s actually a pretty good deal. You don’t need to run the company. In fact, you get to be executive vice president of doing things you love. The Teacher isn’t standing there with a somber face, lecturing you about responsible investment strategies. He’s telling you to live life like you are dying, because you are.

Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of your meaningless life that God has given you under the sun--all your meaningless days.

Be happy, young man, while you are young, let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth. Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see, but know for all these things, God will bring you into judgment.
- The Teacher, Ecclesiastes.

In the West, we invest so much of who we are into what we do. Because of this, when the Teacher says ‘meaningless,’ we hear ‘worthless.’ But he doesn’t say worthless, and there’s a world of difference between the two. We enjoy a tremendous number of things we know to be meaningless. Moving pieces around on a chessboard isn’t going to somehow reveal the meaning of life or change the world. Knowing this, people still enjoy playing the game. I spent last weekend out on Santa Rosa Sound, desperately trying to hang onto a tube behind my friend’s boat. Absolutely meaningless. I had a great time nonetheless. And certainly not worthless. It was a good weekend and I would do it again. Here’s the thing: if you think water tubing, or work, or whatever else will tell you who you are, you will forever be disappointed. None of those things made you, and only your Creator can tell you who you are. Once you abandon that expectation, you might find out you actually love the things you’re doing. Meaningless is simply a direction sign… it tells you where you won’t find meaning. Meaningless teaches us not to ask things questions they can’t answer. Whatever you’re doing is meaningless. It’s not worthless…so enjoy it.

Think of it this way: God’s given you the keys to a sports car. It’s not a rental…He doesn’t expect you to bring it back. In fact, He promises that in about eighty years, it will break down. If you drive it foolishly, or if you don’t maintain it, it will probably break sooner. It’s a nice car, but it won’t last forever, so you might as well have some fun with it. Of course, God gave you the car in a spirit of respect and love, and He expects you’ll honor His gift accordingly, but that’s all He asks. And it’s not really that much. So pursue joy with all your heart, pursue it under God’s skies with the rational reckless abandon of someone truly in love with life.

It almost seems like license, like an excuse to abandon all responsibility. But it is quite the opposite. A five course meal is far more enjoyable than a really big bowl of ice cream. A loving physical relationship within the bounds of marriage is much more satisfying than any number of random hook-ups. A workout after a full day of work is much more fulfilling than a day sitting on my couch playing XBox. Theologians talk about liberating constraint, the idea that rules set us free to use things as they were intended. The immutable laws of physics allow me to push eighty tons of metal across the skies. Were it not for gravity and aerodynamics, I could not enjoy flying. It is the same for the rest of God’s laws. Joy can be found thickest in the center of His will, in accordance with His guidelines. This is the heart of the matter: humanity was made to enjoy God. He invites us to be part of His work, not because He needs us, but because He wants us to participate in the joy of His story.

I think of a couple good friends of mine who’ve been blessed with a two-year-old daughter. Whenever they clean up the house, they invite their child to take part (invite in the volun-told sense of the word.) In actual terms, they don’t need their child’s help to get the cleaning done. In fact, more often than not the kid makes more of a mess in her attempts to clean. They invite the child to participate because they want to include her in what they are doing. It is for her joy that they ask her to take part, not because they need her. So it is with God. The Ancient of Days is more than capable of writing history on His own. He doesn’t need our paltry contributions to bring about His plan. More often than not, our efforts to help seem to get in the way. But He invites us to participate nonetheless. He sets out our role in His plan for our joy, not for His needs. We are neither able nor asked to bear this world’s destiny on our shoulders. Instead, He spots us as we press against just a little more weight than we can lift. So we live and learn and grow, more and more into His image, which is where we were always meant to be. And there is no more joy than in the place where you are meant to be.

"I believe that God made me for a purpose, but He also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure."
- Eric Liddell, Chariots of Fire.

Winner of Olympic gold, The Flying Scotsman didn’t run because God needed him to run. He ran because God made him to run and because he loved running. His heart set free, Liddell felt God most deeply when he was doing what he was made to do. Running didn’t tell him who he was. God told him who he was, and then God set him free to run. Free to run, he ran all the way to China where he served as a missionary. Martyred twenty years later in a Japanese internment camp, Liddell’s last words perfectly express the freedom the Teacher speaks of, “it’s complete surrender.” Nothing under the sun will tell us who we are. Once we find who we are in Christ, He will set us free to follow our heart after all the completely worthwhile meaningless things under His sun. There is nothing more than that. So this is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep His commands, for in loving Him and loving others you will find more love than you can imagine. In that love, enjoy every meaningless day of this life He has given you under the sun - all of your beautiful, amazing, astonishing, magnificent and utterly meaningless days.

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08 October 2007

Vindication. (Job’s Answer.)

Half of the trouble of finding something is figuring out what it looks like. The Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow all set out to find their missing pieces, only to discover at the end of the story that they had them all along. I don’t imagine it is so different with God. The Psalmist asks for vindication. Perhaps he has been vindicated all along.

There is an old Russian joke where a man with one eye, one leg, and a dead horse finds a genie in a lamp. The genie offers him three wishes, so the man wishes that his neighbor would lose an eye, a leg and a horse. I wonder if we are not so different from that man. We ask God to vindicate us, and we assume that we are asking Him to curse our enemies. We may not know what we are asking for. Our God is a God of plenty, not of poverty.

The Book of Job is a story of vindication. In the face of all seeming evidence to the contrary, Job holds out in his faith. He is torn in two, his wife telling him to curse God and die, his friends telling him that he is cursed by God. In the face of the disaster of his life, he holds to his seemingly contradictory belief that he is right and God is just. Wisely, Job submits to the God’s adjudication (even as he foolishly demands that God give an account for His actions.)

And Job finds his vindication. Everything taken from Job is restored twofold. And nothing is taken from his interlocutors. His far-from-supportive wife is blessed with twice as many children as she had before. His far-from-helpful friends are blessed by an audience with God. They receive as a rebuke no more harsh than the one given to Job. They do not receive his blessings, but that was never the point.

It’s all about perspective. We generally take the perspective of poverty. We measure ourselves against the well-being of our neighbors. There’s only so much to go around, and you’ve got to get yours. From that perspective, whatever hurts our enemies helps us. Since it is far easier to hurt our enemies than to help ourselves, that is where we spend our time and energy. Therefore, vindication must mean the fall of one’s adversaries.

Yet Job’s vindication does not mean that at all. Perspective, once again. Between man and man, the well only goes so deep. Between man and God, the well goes down forever. In Him, we leave our poverty behind and find plenty. So Job’s vindication was never between him and his friends, but between him and God. He is not vindicated by God striking down his friends, but by being blessed twenty times over.

Presumably, they notice. Presumably, he is vindicated in their eyes. But it doesn’t matter. The conversations were not between the two of them. Job’s prayers elevate the conversation. He sends his desires up, and God sends blessings back down. Some of the outpouring splashes into other discussions, but this is a side-effect, not the vindication itself. And it is a better ending. Perhaps Job invites his councilors over from time to time to share in his restored wealth. Perhaps their friendship is restored. Certainly, his relationship with his wife is restored (judging from the fact that they proceeded to have more children.) Job’s vindication leaves him richer in relationship than he was before. Bloody revenge does not.

Consider King David. Unjustly hunted and persecuted by Saul, he is a man in need of vindication. Reading the Psalms, he certainly asks for vindication in all its flavors. He calls fire upon his adversaries, and he asks mercy and blessing for himself. The latter prayers are answered by God. The former prayers are answered by Saul. Saul sets out on an ill-advised military campaign, and appropriately dies upon his own spear. The consequences of Saul’s foolish choices eventually sum into his death. God simply weaves it into His plan.

Remember that David had several chances to take Saul’s life. Perhaps it would have been permissible to do so. Our courts would have acquitted him, self-defense and all. But it would not have been for the best. David lets the story run its course. And in this he finds an unexpected blessing: he inherits all of Saul’s blessings. Striking Saul down, David would have found a measure of vindication. But all of Saul’s blessings would have died with him. Saul was strong. David becomes strong. Saul was respected. David earns Israel’s respect. Saul was a king. David inherits his crown. (I can’t help but think of Gandalf’s return. ‘I am Saruman. At least, I am Saruman was meant to be.’) Because of the manner of Saul’s death, David never had to face questions about his succession. His throne started secure, and he was able to focus his energies other places. So King David’s vindication was in his greatly blessed kingship. He is vindicated in his blessings, not in the cursing of Saul.

What holds true for patriarchs and kings holds true for each of us. In work, in relationships, in life choices, each of us desires some sort of vindication. We need to know what to expect. Until you look through eyes of plenty, all you will see is poverty. Look to His blessings, not to the cursing of others. We may find have already been vindicated a hundred times over.

21:54 Posted in Thoughts | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this

18 September 2007

Baldur in Reykjavik (An Evangelical Defense of Myth.)

I’ve heard it said that to someone with a hammer, pretty much everything looks like a nail. I believe the point of the illustration was something along the lines of ‘use the right tool for the job.’ But what if there isn’t a right tool for the job? What if you need to pound in a nail, and all you have is a wrench? I promise that if you hit a nail hard enough with a wrench, it will get the job done (I’ve tried.) Its not optimal, but it works if it’s all you’ve got… all you’ve got to do is stretch your concept of wrench a bit beyond its original conception.

Language is a tool we use in order to interact with our environment. It shapes and molds our experiences as is it shaped and molded by our experience. In that tension we find both the elegance and the limitations of language: it evolves along with our experience, yet it requires our experiences in order to evolve. As we change our worlds, we make new words and forget old ones, our language constantly keeping pace with the changes. Yet for that very same reason, we have a very difficult time describing things outside of our experience. The Sahel-dwelling Twareg, faced with a glacier, is forced to either borrow a word or create a clumsy composite word. The Norseman must do the same when he encounters a rainforest. Yet chunks of humanity live each of these environments, and each of these chunks have successfully fashioned words for their environment.

There are stranger things in this universe than deserts and jungles, things for which humanity as a whole has to borrow or stretch words in order to grasp. For instance, a black hole is something far stranger than the color black or the idea of a hole. Some things we can only describe using the language of mathematics, one far more frugal and precise than our daily speech. There are even concepts beyond our senses that we try to wrap in words. Yet there are things even deeper, higher and thicker for any of our words. Our words are vibrations carried by the wind or smudges of pigment smeared across paper. The Word of God transcends the crude mechanics of human language: His Word becomes flesh. The words of creation fall somewhere in between. We then find ourselves in something of a hermeneutical dilemma.

The Mechanics of Myth: High, Middle and Low Hermeneutics.

Speaking to the Corinthians, Paul uses infallible and inspired yet human and finite words to explain the things of God. Man speaking to man falls into the realm of traditional hermeneutics. Along the lines of C.S.L.’s brilliant counterpoint to the form critics, if the book of Job reads like an Eastern epic poem, it should be read as such. And if the epistles read like letters (hence the name epistles,) then they should be read as such. And if the Gospels look like documentary factual accounts, then they should be read as such. Let’s call this ’low hermeneutics:’ the study of inspired words between men. Prophecy pushes the bounds of low hermeneutics, for the words of the prophets are rawer, deeper and thicker than the words of men. Theirs are the unfiltered words of God to men about the events of men. Yet most of the things they describe are still within the bounds of human experience (if the upper bounds,) so they are still somewhat within the bounds of low hermeneutics.

And then there is ‘High Hermeneutics.’ Really, it has a shorter name: Jesus. The Word of God is beyond our imagination, beyond our comprehension, beyond the whole of human experience and knowledge and power and strength. There is no paper thick enough to bear the Word, no sound deep enough to carry Him, so He came to us wrapped in flesh. He came to us in humility, endured our slowness of speech, our unwillingness to learn, and became the Word to us. That is the only way we could ever speak of Him and the only way we could ever speak to Him. The only way a mind of flesh can wrap itself around God is for God to wrap Himself in flesh. Accordingly, the study of High Hermeneutics is the study by a man of his wife, the study of a dearest friend, the study of a lover. The study of Jesus is in and through relationship with Him, for only He can teach us of His words.

But there is a category in between. I know that I can speak in the tongues of men, that given enough study and time I can understand any of the words of man. I know that I cannot ascend to the mountain of the Most High, that I cannot play Hephaestus and wrench His Words from His hands. But I know that I can climb the foothills of the of mountain of Creation, even if I cannot ascend all the way to the lightning-covered peak. There, I may find words that come close, words that point at meaning even if they cannot encompass it, words that are useful if incomplete. Once again, words are tied to experience. There was not a word in English for the inside of a cloud (excluding fog, which isn‘t really the same) until the advent of aviation. There simply was no need for such a word, for the inside of clouds was not a normal part of human experience until then. As human artifice continues to advance and allow us access to more and more unexplored realms, we will undoubtedly think of more and more words to describe our growing environment. But just because we can go infinitely forward does not mean that we can go forever back. I can imagine a world before my own existence. I just take the world I know, and set it spinning without me. I can even imagine a universe without the earth. I take the universe I know, and set it spinning without this world. But when I start to push back through the laws of physics to the what-ever-it-was before linear time, I start running out of words. And when I try to rewind past the advent of energy, I have nothing at all with which to describe whatever is left of reality (if that is even a useful concept at that point.) My thoughts are constrained to words, and my words are constrained to my environment. So while I may be able to climb the foothills of Creation, I must still wait for God to come down from the summit and give my own words to me. This is ‘middle hermeneutics,’ the study of language describing things just beyond its fingertips. The hallmark of middle hermeneutics must be humility. The temptation is to make excuses for the pre-scientific language of the Bible, yet in reality the language of the Bible is making allowances for our minds of clumsy neurons and messy serotonin.

The idea of middle hermeneutics is not confined to the first chapter of Genesis. Ezekiel sees things beyond his imagination, beyond human events. He tries to wrap words around his experiences, and God gives him words as well. (What else would you expect from the throne room of the Most High? I’m pretty sure you can’t find His bathroom fixtures in the Ikea catalog.) Neither is it confined to the Bible, though it is most perfect and complete there. The Word calls to all mankind, for He is revealed in His creation. In the absence of the fullness of His Revelation in Christ, cultures find different ways to wrap ideas around these deep truths that lay just beyond their fingertips. So to the Norsemen, the god Baldur dies and is reborn. And in the East, the corn god dies and is reborn. So the Greeks and the Romans and the Mayans and a hundred other cultures all find themselves in agreement about the absolutely insane concept of a god who dies and is resurrected. And they are all right. God died on a tree outside Jerusalem and three days later He returned from death.

There are then two uses of middle hermeneutics. Within Scripture, middle hermeneutics teaches us to read passages that describe things well outside the bounds of human experience with humility. Outside of Scripture, middle hermeneutics allows us to connect extant myths with the One True Myth of Jesus Christ. In effect, we exalt the epics and myths of a culture into High Hermeneutics with Christ by way of the low hermeneutics of the Gospels. In this, we are both exalted and humbled, for it is the unreached culture who stands on the foothills pointing at the lightning-shrouded summit, and us who must descend from the summit to fill their words with the meanings they were grasping at. Exalted, for we are the light bearers descending from the mountain, and this is a great and high calling. Humbled, for we must abandon our own words to learn theirs, lest we precondition a relationship with Jesus upon learning our words.

Therefore the heart of middle hermeneutics is epic and myth. The error of many New Testament scholars (think Jesus Seminar) is the hermeneutic of distrust with which they approach the Scriptures. Lest we make the same error, let us reframe our concept of Myth with Lewis and Tolkien’s One True Myth (ref. On Faeirie Stories, JRRT.) The deepest things in this universe are the things of Christ. If something is moving, deep or powerful, then it is in some way drawing from the deep streams of God. In a fallen world, it may be horrifically twisted almost beyond recognition, but as long as it exists at all, it is drawing from God’s deep magic of Creation. Trace the stream through the rapids, past the pollution, and it will take you to His oceans.

With that said, let us look to the mechanics of myth and the failures of language. Let us explore this idea of middle hermeneutics. There are two complimentary formulations of this line of thought. The top-down view looks to the purpose of language within context. The bottom-up view looks to the assumptions that go into a given word, examining how the word changes when the predicate assumptions start changing.

Failures of Language: Words and their Forms (Top-Down View.)

(Note: this is not in any way an endorsement of form criticism. Form criticism assumes to know a great deal about the purposes of the author, often placing them within Chomsky-esque conspiracy theories (and evil shenanigans. Movie reference, sorry.) The text explains the text by way of the Spirit, certainly, but we should find the humility to allow Him to do so.)

Language does not exist in a vacuum. People develop language in the context of their environment. Hence, languages are as different as people groups. Yet, even within one language, there are many different forms of language. The language that one uses within a context of intimacy is hardly appropriate for a board-room. The grace-tempered words that may encourage the cook of an overdone casserole are not the words that one would use in a scientific context that demands precision. Truth is not situational, but different aspects of the same truth may be more appropriate for a given situation. The casserole may simultaneously be ‘great’ and ‘charred to a crisp.’ For instance, if the casserole exists in the context of the intimacy between a husband and a wife, and the casserole is an expression of one spouse’s love for another, then it is ‘great.’ But if the casserole exists in the context of a cooking competition between strangers, then the ‘charred to a crisp’ aspect should probably take precedence.

Even beyond social tact, beyond language in the context of relationship, there is a place for different forms of linguistic expression. In a heavily scientific society, we often place a premium on precision in language, viewing imprecise language as inferior. Let’s follow this to its logical conclusion. Take all of Shakespeare’s sonnets and constrict them to fit within the confines of scientifically precise language. They don’t quite keep the same ring, do they? There is a twofold tradeoff for precision within a language. First, precision squeezes out the non-quantifiable, which may be much of the richness of a thing. Second, precision confines you to topics which you already know nearly exhaustively. It does not give you room to flirt with ideas just beyond your grasp. Precision takes and holds ground, subjecting it to strict, linear confines. This is appropriate in certain contexts, but greatly inappropriate in others… imagine Solomon trying to write Song of Songs in the historically precise terms of Luke. Because of the tension between precision and metaphor, we have different literary forms. Applying a greatly simplified view, let us discuss documentary, poetical, and mythical forms of literature.

Documentary is our most familiar form, perhaps. ’I says what I means, and I means what I says.’ Documentary form assigns concrete terms to concrete events, attempting to recreate the facts of an event as precisely as possible, even if sacrificing some of the subjective experience in the process. It is concerned with objectivity, and not particularly concerned with the impact of the events upon the author. Accordingly, the reader can transport himself into the situation quite effectively by hijacking the authors five senses, but can hardly transport himself inside the emotions of the author. Hence, it is appropriate for events in which the situation is primary… consider the contrast between a history text on the First World War vs. ’All Quiet on the Western Front.’ Yet history texts have not superseded fiction or biography, and in many ways the forms complement each other.

Notice that we have not approached a discussion of truthiness or falsehood. Multiple forms can be equally true, though it may be difficult to transpose between forms. Imagine someone audio taping a car wreck and another photographing the same wreck. The tape and the photos are both accurate depictions of the event. Even so, a sketch artist would have quite a difficult time drawing the accident with only the audio tapes to draw from. This links to a much deeper discussion of postmodernity, Heisenberg and Schrödinger, which I am going to skip because I am lazy.

Consider the Gospel of Luke as an example of the documentary form (or for that matter, any of the other Gospels.) Luke places a premium on precision. Details such as specific names for specific people at specific times and places, random statements coherent to the account yet unrelated to the main themes, individual episodes such as the blood and water from the spear, all of these are the hallmarks of a factual documentary account. There is an intention behind the writing, surely, but the belief of the author is that if you can vicariously experience the same things he experienced, you will arrive at the same conclusions that he did. Hence he accounts his experiences. We should then read it as such. Starting with the assumption that he means the words in the exact same way that we mean the words, we should allow his words to transport us to the events he is describing and experience them through his eyes.

Now consider the poetical. Poetry is the difference between Ansel Adams and a passport photo. He could have photographed one of a hundred waterfalls, for it wasn’t the waterfall itself, but the experience of being there that he captured so effectively. In the same way, the words themselves are not the point of poetry, rather a means toward an experience. Therefore, precision in definition takes a back seat to a totality of feeling. Rather than attempt to transport the reader within the situation, the words and situation serve as a means to carry the reader into the heart of the author. Poetry is an expression of the author, not the situation, even if the situation causes that expression of the author. And this is the difference between poetry and documentary. In documentary, the author gives the reader his eyes. In poetry, he gives the reader his heart.

The exact name of the Shulammite is relatively unimportant to the Song of Solomon. What is important is the experience of being in love, and that experience is communicated quite effectively with very few specific details. This does not in any way mean that it is less true. I would wager a great deal that there was in fact a Shulammite woman that married Solomon. I would also wager that the two consummated that marriage. That said, we don’t need an exact play-by-play accounting of their marital bliss, as the physical dynamics of that interaction are generally figured out pretty quickly by newlyweds (hopefully… I‘ve never been a newlywed.) We are far better off with an experiential accounting of an ideal love affair between a husband and a wife. Poetry makes room for that experience.

Our last category is the mythical. If documentary and poetry exists along a spectrum between precision and metaphor, then imagine myth as the pinnacle of a triangle with that spectrum as the base. Both poetry and documentary are concerned with the accounting of our experiences, be it the experience of ourselves within the situation (documentary) or the situation within ourselves (poetry.) Myth is concerned with the description of things that are beyond our experiences. It is the link that connects the deep, the magical and the ethereal to our daily lives. Accordingly, elements of documentary fail, for precise words cannot transcend the environment which shapes them. And elements of poetry fail, for experience cannot transcend the self which shapes it. Therefore, myth incorporates elements of both, stretching precise words to hold ideas beyond their original intent, and stretching the bounds of human experience to take us to places we have never been. Once again, mythical does not mean false. Something becomes false by being mythical no more than it does by being historical or poetical or literal. It is simply another set of conventions for communicating ideas, and certain things are more appropriate to myth than to any other style.

Consider Job (pun half-intended.) I cannot imagine that God speaks in Iambic Pentameter when He addresses the adversary in Heaven’s throne room, interspersed with rhyming quartets from Job‘s councilors. The problem is that I cannot imagine at all what God says when He is in His throne room, nor can I imagine what it is like to hear it. So I’m pretty much stuck with Job’s accounting as the closest approximation to that experience that I can find. Therefore, I need to find the humility to accept Job’s accounting, realizing that I am not infinite and neither are my words. It may be that in Job’s culture, history and stories were retold in a certain format, and describing Job’s very real personal encounter with God mythically may have happened as readily as Luke describing his experience in documentary form. Job doesn’t read like Matthew or Chronicles, but it is not intended to be read like Matthew or Chronicles. (Note that no major theology is introduced in Job, though, rather a demonstration of the power of God and the benefits of faith.)

Which brings us back to Genesis. ‘In the beginning’ is not ‘in the third year of Herod the Great.’ Neither is it ‘once upon a time.’ I’ve never seen an unconstrained beginning. I can’t even imagine it. I mean, I can do the logic on it, and figure out that there is some sort of Unmoved Mover and all, but I can’t really wrap my mind around a beginning before time. ‘Beginning’ is the closest I can get to what happened, even if the word beginning, made by finite people to describe finite events, has to be widened a bit to capture the infinite. So this is True Myth: great events require great words. So great that existing words may have to be stretched beyond their traditional definitions for lack of better words. And this is the nature of myth itself: God describes things greater than us by taking our words and exalting them, as a parent would to a child. He humbles Himself to make our words great, in order to encompass the greatness of His creation. We must find the humility to allow Him to reteach us the exalted forms of our own words.

Failures of Language: Words and their Assumptions (Bottom-Up View.)

Each word is built on the shoulders of other words and ideas. Words are often composites or developments of root words, placed in orders with modifiers to form thoughts. Yet even the most basic words of a language incorporate significant basic assumptions about the nature of things. (The naming of anything at all incorporates an assumption of differentiation that complete monism would not allow for.) So we have general human assumptions that go into words, and culture-specific assumptions that go into words. For cultural words, we should look to variations in environment and economy to explain the root words’ assumptions. But there are other assumptions that are more universal. These may be rooted in human biology and astronomical cycles, or other unavoidable aspects of the human experience. We see the evolution of words within a culture as that culture modifies those basic assumptions through development or interaction with other cultures. It is far more rare to see the universal assumptions change. (Perhaps one example is the near universal adaptation of nautical terms to aviation.) Still, in either case, modifying the basic assumptions of a root word can shake a language to its core, as root words in turn modify composite words, and together the root and composite words reshape the culture’s experience and interaction with their environment.

Consider the Russian root word ‘Mir.’ It means both ‘world’ and ‘peace.’ The development of the word can be traced to the ancient word for village. It incorporates several cultural assumptions, rooted in the Russian experience of nature and history. It implies totality, and consequently becomes an unattainable ideal, though one with a eucatastrophic sense of permanence, expressed in both the Christian and the Marxist (Hegelian) views of history. This stands in contrast to the highly temporary yet attainable Arab view of peace. Mir also assumes collectivism, created and maintained by the village. This is in contrast to the American view of an individually created and maintained peace, which in turn ties into the Second Amendment controversy. Finally, Mir assumes a right ordering of things, an assumption inherited from autocracy and orthodoxy. In direct contrast, peace to a Cossack is an absence of constricting rules and regulations. Therefore, something will always be lost when translating the word ‘Mir’ into a language with different assumptions about the nature of things. There will still be enough commonalities to make the translation meaningful, of course. Mir as ‘World’ implies a totality shared by the rest of humanity, based in the assumption of ‘all-there-is-ness.’ So as long as there are certain shared assumptions, translation remains possible.

Now, let us look at an impossible translation: the Words of God to translated into the words of man. What assumptions do we share with Him? What assumption could hope to confine Him? What commonality can there be? Our problem extends beyond the idea of two different worlds, for His world encompasses our own and everything else, and more. The Mind that forms His thoughts is so far above our own as to be completely unrecognizable. His Words can make or undo our world, for with one word He spoke all of ours into existence, all that have been or ever will be. If looking upon His face is death, then what would hearing His words do? We simply can’t handle His words. So He humbles His words and stretches ours.

Imagine a mother expecting her second child. When the three-year-old firstborn asks ‘where do babies come from,’ the mother may answer ‘babies come from mommy’s tummy.’ At first glance, we would imagine that the mother is lying. But imagine that the mother began to explain the facts of life to the three-year-old. Before she can say ‘fallopian tube,’ the kid is bored and asking for a cookie and walks away with no meaningful understanding of childbirth at all. Now think through what happens when she tells him about ‘mommy’s tummy.’ The three-year-old walks away with some sort of knowledge of a causal link between mommy and baby, as well as a localized identification of the child inside mommy’s abdomen. This is about as good as he’s going to do at that point in his life. Remember, also, that the 30-year-old’s word ‘stomach’ is not equivalent to the three-year-old’s word ‘tummy.’ The three year old may conceive of the entire abdomen as the tummy, without any concept of its contents. So using his definition, his mother’s statement is quite accurate, even if she has a far greater understanding of the contents of the tummy. And this is the essence of myth: the mother humbles herself to the words of her child, yet she stretches his words to include things that he doesn’t yet understand. The mother understands the assumptions that go into the words of the child, yet she takes those words and refines those assumptions before giving them back to him. In the same way, God must enlarge our words when He teaches us of things beyond our assumptions.

Much hangs on the word ‘yom’ in Genesis. What does a day mean? A day means twenty-four hours, and upon this everything rests: if there were not twenty-four hour days during the creation, then the Scriptures are untrustworthy, and we can view every controversial point as metaphor, up to re-interpretation. Or perhaps, ‘day’ is poetry, simply an indication of the proper order of things in the universe. And here is where humility in hermeneutics becomes critical. The problem with both the documentary and the poetic view of Genesis is that they vastly overstate the human capacity for understanding. Perhaps neither reading is appropriate, but rather the True Mythical reading. Perhaps a better approach is: ‘I am an idiot child gazing with wonder upon the mountain of Creation, waiting for God to give my own words back so that I may achieve a glimmer of understanding.’ I can’t tell you exactly what ’yom’ means in Genesis one. But I can tell you that it’s as close as I am going to get with human language.

(I do not in any way mean to deride the recent tremendous advances in cosmology. Rather, I mean to reframe them within the design debate: I am secure that the nearer we come to the truth of origins, the closer we will approximate the words of Genesis, and the deeper we will grasp those words. Therefore, I do not need to fight to the death over each refinement of cosmological theory.)

Think about all the assumptions that go into the word ‘day.’ First, ‘day’ assumes hard causality, for each day will bring the next at its conclusion, which in turn will depart with the advent of the next. Second, ‘day’ assumes orbital mechanics, for the time period itself is based in the rotation of the earth upon its axis, causing the sun to rise and fall upon the inhabitants of the Earth (which, of course, assumes the Earth and the Sun.) Finally, ‘day’ assumes linear time, for if those rotations are not associated with a real and constant progression of events, it is relatively meaningless. So what happens if you change any of these assumptions? ‘Day’ becomes a word that you can’t find in Webster’s (or your lexicon for that matter.)

What is a day without linear time, without causality, without orbital motion? To answer this is to think outside of time, and to do so is to be God. Remember that the very dynamics of human thought involve assumptions about time, for it takes a fixed amount of time for neurotransmitters to move across synapses. What is linear time before linear physics? Time progresses relatively slower the faster you are traveling. Did the tribesman that decided on the sound ‘yom’ take that into account when assigning it to the period of light between the darknesses? Before there is an Earth, how do you measure its rotation? We have no words for such things. Therefore, Someone infinitely smarter than us needs to give us words for these things. But we can not understand any words but our own. Therefore, He stretches our words to fit. All words are a best-fit approximation for things. Epic words are best-fits for things for which there can be no human words.

So our problem all along was pride. Think of Einstein trying to explain general relativity to a group of children. Likely, they will later argue with each other, thinking they understand what he meant, reforming his words to fit their assumptions. But the more they do so, the farther they will get from his meaning. Instead, they should take his words at face value, while understanding that his words are deeper than their own. In this humility they will achieve the greatest understanding. Therefore, the text does not require the excuses of Theistic evolution, nor the straight-jacket of atomic-clock-24-hour-days. Genesis One isn’t written in some fumbling ancient pseudo-science. It’s written in Army-basic-training-style ‘point the gun this way’ pictograms. We’re a lot dumber than we realize, and once we realize that fact hermeneutics gets a lot easier.

Myth as a Bridge.

In the humility of myth-reading, we rediscover the sense of wonderment stolen by modernity. Certainly there are things to be learned from cosmology, but those things may not be the most beautiful or meaningful things. Dissect a cat and you will certainly discover all the parts of a cat. But you will no longer be able to discover its personality, nor its quirks, nor the experience of it curling up in your lap. (Of course, I would hope that the vet is familiar with all the parts of a cat, lest the cat get sick.) Surely it is useful to describe the language of creation using ever more eloquent equations. But if we forsake the experience of the awakening of the universe in the hopes of gleaning a theory that allows us to build a slightly-more-efficient toaster, then surely we have missed something. Myth is not science, and science is not myth, though both may be equally true. They are simply different. I would not describe a waterfall to children in terms of terminal water velocity and time of fall. I would tell them about the crashing of the water and the feel of the mist. And I would be telling them the truth. This is how we should read myth. No strait-jacketing the words, no excusing them, let it be what it is, and gaze upon it with wonder. You are invited to a front row seat for the premiere of a great film. Don’t ruin it by talking all the way through the performance.

Remember that the Chosen People were given two millennia to soak in the True Myths before that Myth wrapped Himself in flesh and dwelt among them. The Word wrapped Himself in myth to be carried by Moses long before He wrapped Himself in flesh to be carried by Mary. Yet what started in Myth ends in flesh; the first chapter of John completes the first chapter of Genesis. And this is the natural progression: from the words of Isaiah to the cries of an Infant. And thus, Matthew links the two, the prophecies and the Messiah.

It should not then surprise us that Paul links the Greek myths to the Messiah when speaking to the Athenians. He transforms a temple to an Unknown God into a gateway to the God who is known. It is the myths that tell us the things we know to be true, the myths that remind us of the One True Myth written upon each of our hearts. It is from that middle place of myth that we descend into Salvation history and climb into relationship with Jesus Christ. So perhaps, from that middle place of myth we can draw others into relationship with Christ.

Lewis once described the difference between pagan and apostate culture as that between a virgin and a divorcee. A pagan culture was speaking in myth of things they had not yet encountered in fact. The apostate culture has encountered both, and little of its innocence remains. But myth digs deep beneath the defenses of cynicism. It was through the innocence of myth that many cultures were introduced to Christ, so perhaps it will be through myth that we will find the innocence to re-introduce apostate cultures to Christ. Our own culture is ravenous for myth. St. Patrick found the Trinity in the Triquetra of Celtic Myth. Perhaps we can find Him in the Middle-Earths of our own myths.

So at long last we end up back at the title of this article. In an Irish pub in Reykjavik, I find myself chatting with an Icelandic opera star. In no uncertain terms, he makes it known that he doesn’t have any desire to talk about religion. Yet he is fascinated by the Norse myths. Much of God’s revelation through nature is documented by myth, and so it was with the Norsemen. So Baldur, the god of innocence and son of the chief god Odin, is destined to die and be resurrected, bringing with him a new world. And so we talk about Baldur, and Asian corn gods, and the Christ. And then we talk about C.S. Lewis’ crazy idea of myth-becoming-fact, and what it would look like. And a guy who expressed very little interest in the religion of Christianity finds himself quite interested in the person of Jesus Christ by way of the language of myth.

The language of science and history feeds the mind. The language of art and poetry bathes the heart. But the language of myth finds its way to the spirit by way of the imagination. It would serve us well to become multilingual. I suggest we begin with the One True Myth.

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20 August 2007

Saul the Roman. (A Gentile with a Tan.)

It is strange, really… sometimes your greatest strengths are hidden in the things that you hate most about yourself. We are taught to hate in ourselves the things that make us different, taught by everyone around us to hate the things that don’t belong. Yet, it may be that the Creator’s signature is in those very things, and in those very things He may have equipped us for the story He has prepared. Redemption works in funny ways sometimes.

We know much of the story of Paul the Apostle. We know less of the story of Saul of Tarsus. Please allow me a bit of artistic license with his story.

The accusation was born on the day he was, through no fault of his own. Half of it was born in his curly hair and brown eyes. The other half was inherited from his father’s citizenship, in the town of his birth and in the language he would grow up speaking. None of these things were meant with malice, of course. None of them were meant to threaten anyone. A child of Shem and a child of Abraham, Saul’s hair and eyes were just part of that birthright. Likewise, his father didn’t sell out the Maccabees, didn’t betray Israel, and didn’t make sacrifices to the Emperor. He simply wanted to provide security to his family, and Roman citizenship bought more security than gold, so he wisely bought Roman citizenship with some of his gold. Alexander, Xerxes and Nebuchadnezzar decided Saul’s birthplace, each of them scattering the Jewish community to the winds as they swept through. And that birthplace came with a language. Like anyone else, Saul’s parents just wanted to go to the market and buy grain and olive oil (and maybe a little wine,) and the merchants spoke Greek. So they spoke Greek too. Saul had no real choice about any of these things.

Nor did he have much in the way of choice in his early upbringing. Like any good father with the means to do so, Saul’s father sent his son to the best of schools. And those schools, most likely, were Greek. Logic, reason and Greek poetry was drummed into young Saul’s head. But just as he spent his school days with Plato and Aristotle, he spent his weekends with Moses and the Torah. His father, a devout Jew, would make sure that Saul understood his heritage. His father lived in a tension: he was of a successful businessman in a Gentile world, yet he was first a son of Israel, a follower of the Law of Moses. It is a tension that he managed for his household, as well. Inside the walls of his house, it was safe to be a Jew in a Gentile world. But Saul could not live forever inside those walls.

It is said that children are cruel. Perhaps they have not yet learned how to hide vicious intentions behind nice words. Perhaps they have not yet realized why it would be useful to do so. Regardless, they are brutally honest, and brutally ready to ostracize those who don’t belong. So young Saul spends his hellish school days hearing his classmates speak mock Hebrew to him, seeing curly-haired stick figures on camel back, watching other students make ‘snipping’ gestures at him in first-century locker rooms. He wasn’t a Greek, and they made sure that he knew it. ‘You aren’t one of us,’ they told him.

They weren’t the only ones to tell him that. Everybody knows that Jewish children don’t go to Greek schools: after all, are not the writings of Moses and David far superior to any pagan philosophers? Everybody knows that the son of a Roman citizen is Roman, not Jewish: after all, is not Rome is the evil oppressor of the Jewish people? And everybody knows that real Jews are born in Judea: after all, what kind of Jew would leave the promised land? So a child of a Roman citizen who goes to a Greek school in a Cilician town couldn’t possibly be a Jew. I’m sure that someone informed Saul of this fact. ‘We thought you were a gentile with a tan.’ ‘Whatever you are, you aren’t one of us,’ they told him.

Young Saul finds himself in the cross-fire of a war he never chose. Too Jewish for the Greeks, too Greek for the Jews, both groups gun him down as the most accessible representative of the other. So he chooses a side. His appearance bars him from the Greek side, perhaps, though he might pass for a Cypriot. Still, were he to choose the Greeks he will always face the question, ‘so, what are you? I mean, where are you from?’ It is easier to side with the outcasts. After all, that is what both sides keep telling him that he is. The Jews are the outcast group, the persecuted minority. So if the Greeks hate him for being Jewish, he will become everything that they hate. And he will prove to the Jews, beyond the shadow of any doubt, that he is more Jewish than any of them. If they speak Hebrew, he will speak Hebrew better. If they quote Moses, then he will quote Moses, Elisha and Ezekiel. If they keep the ten commandments, he will keep all three-hundred-some. By the sweat of his brow, he will earn entrance into the nation of Israel; by the fury of his works he will vindicate himself. And when he is done, nobody will ever, ever dare say that he is a ‘gentile with a tan.’ (That is, with the exception of the voice always whispering that exact thing in the darkest corner of his fears.)

He is successful beyond his wildest expectations. Saul, now a young man, has by now become a lion in the Sanhedrin, a Pharisee of Pharisees, the brightest rising star under the great Rabbi Gamaliel. Nobody would dare voice the accusation anymore, few would even think it. Saul’s identity is at long last secure. He has arrived. At least, he should have arrived. For some reason, his mad ambition still looks too much like rage. For some reason, it still looks like he’s trying to prove something. (Deep down, further than he cares to look, he still rages at the Jews for having once excluded him. He expresses this rage by beating them at their own game. He overthrew the leaders, superseding all the playground bullies in his meteoric rise. But he never really conquered them: their cruelty was reborn in him on a much bigger playground, covered by righteous and subtle words. I wonder if Saul ever really felt at peace with his identity as a Jew, with rage fueling his doubt and doubt fueling his rage.) If the young man stopped for a moment, he might realize that his efforts are the very thing that keep the accusation alive. The shadow of that realization keeps him running. But he runs into Someone he does not expect.

Something about the followers of the Nazarene got under Saul’s skin. (This something like saying that the Inquisition was impolite.) Saul’s rage and his driving ambition find themselves perfectly synchronized in his persecution of the followers of this new heresy. He gives some pretty good reasons. He may even believe them himself. ‘They divert worship away from the Holy Temple.’ ‘They are idolaters, worshiping this carpenter Y’Shua.’ ’They blaspheme Jehovah, saying that He has a son.’ These were enough for the Sanhedrin to send Saul with their sanction and a detachment of heavily armed Temple Guards.

If Saul had been honest with himself, he might have found his deeper reasons. The greatest crime of the Nazarene was his blasphemy against the laws. Not the Law. The laws. The hundreds of rules that Saul had so fastidiously kept, proving to any law-abiding Jew that he was surely a Jew. The Nazarene also spoke against the temple. The temple, that impregnable fortress of Saul’s identity, for his service there ensured him a place of honor with his people, a place where no one would ever question whether he truly was of his people. Most abominably, the Nazarene spoke against circumcision. The gift of Abraham, the gift that had caused him so much grief growing up, the one thing the world could never deny, the Nazarene called it worthless. For all of this, the Nazarene was put to death; for all of it, everything that remains of him must be burned to the ground. For Saul must protect all the bastions of his hard-earned Jewish identity at all costs.

Just as the original accusation had two halves, so did Saul’s rage: Jew and Greek. His rage for the Greeks was as overt as his rage toward the Jews was subtle. ‘Love your brother, but hate your enemy.’ They hated him, so he would hate them. If they hated him for being a Jew, then what a Jew he would be! He would be infinitely different from the filthy goyim who reveled in their lurid perversions and pagan idolatries. He would be as far above them as a man above a cockroach. And he would look upon them only with contempt, the same way they had looked upon him. But this Nazarene, this carpenter from nowhere, he looks upon the goyim with love. He goes to the Decapolis and wins their adoration with cheap magic tricks. He goes to the half-breed Samaritans and claims to be the Messiah. He compliments a Centurion while deriding the Scribes and Teachers of the Law… he is no Jew. For no Jew can love the goyim. Because the goyim hate Jews. Because the goyim hated Saul. To Saul, being Jewish meant not being a gentile, for his identity was forged in the war between the two groups. Anyone who sought to reconcile the two must then be an enemy. And thus, Paul’s civil war finds an outlet in his war against the Nazarenes.

Like any war, there are casualties. The first casualty is Saul’s integrity. It was nothing as simple as a bald-faced lie. The most dangerous lies never are: the deadliest falsehoods turn inwards. Self-deception always starts and ends in pride. And so it does with Saul. You see, he is in a bit of a quandary. The deepest and darkest parts of his heart all scream out with rage toward this sect. But he has amassed quite a bit of religious social capital, and certain things are expected of a ‘spiritual leader.’ Rage is not one of these things. So in obedience to his own pride, he finds the loftiest of words for the basest of emotions. He paints spiritual-sounding whitewash over his hatred, which brings with it the added benefit of inciting others to do his dirty work. So Saul stands watch over the cloaks of Stephen’s killers and looks on with approval, clad in white but red in tooth and claw. With every stone, he feeds both his rage and his pride. They are his stones, and this is his stoning. Thus the heretic Stephen dies at the hands of Saul, the next casualty of his civil war.

He does not stay dead. Stephen is reborn each night in Saul’s nightmares. Stephen’s face becomes the splinter in Saul’s mind, his words the hangnail in Saul’s memories. The more he pulls at it, the deeper a wound it becomes. This man received the greatest of rage with the greatest of peace. This man answered so much hate with so much love. How can such things be? Saul’s universe, boiling and frozen with rage, was safe in its own way. Stephen is the first crack in that ice, the first doubt that is not turned inward. And face with doubt, Saul does what he has always done: he runs. If he can silence these Nazarenes, then perhaps he can silence his doubts. So somewhere between Valjean’s Soliloquy and Javert’s Suicide, Saul sets out for Damascus.

He never gets there. In the sound of thunder, eyes without sight are blinded. In the sound of thunder, the crack Stephen began shatters Saul’s universe. In the sound of thunder, Saul of Tarsus is undone. The ancient Psalmist calls for God’s vengeance against his persecutors. Like Christ, Stephen called for God’s mercy upon on his enemies. He is avenged nonetheless. Saul of Tarsus does not survive much past Stephen‘s martyrdom. He is killed by a man named Paul of Tarsus. Like Javert, Saul drowns himself in the riverine springtime swells. Like Valjean, he is reborn rising from the waters of his baptism. Three entangled streams become one river: Saul dies, Paul is born and Stephen is vindicated.

Redemption happens in a moment. Sanctification takes a bit longer. For a surgery as deep as Paul’s, the incisions will take some time to heal. Mercifully, God gives him plenty of convalescent time in the desert. The man who once wove the scriptures into arguments is taught to weave hides into tents. Yet, in that weaving, he is rewoven. It begins with the humbling of his name. Sha’ul, a Jewish name for the first king of Israel, is replaced with Paulus, Latin for child. It ends with the breaking of his fears. Like the wayward lamb with broken legs, he no longer can run from his fears. Yet in this is the greatest miracle yet: the fears of the unbroken Saul break themselves upon the broken Paul. As the flotsam of the wreckage of Saul floats to the surface of Paul’s heart, he discovers that burdens become treasures in God‘s hands. In the course of two years in the desert, the very things he hated most about himself become his greatest strengths. The Pharisee of Pharisees becomes the Apostle to the Gentiles.

He is perfect for his role; he performs it magnificently. He wields logic and reason with the elegance of intimate familiarity, illuminating the Scriptures to a people who never knew Abraham or Moses. He meets the Athenians with their own poets, translating Christ into their culture. In the Aeropagus, he intuitively identifies where the ice is thinnest, preaching to them about their Unknown God. The Greek poets that caused him so much grief with the peers of his youth become his allies for the Gospel, Greek logic and culture become weapons in his arsenal. He may have been too Jewish for the Greeks of his youth, but he is Greek enough to get inside their heads. He may have been too Greek for the Jews of his youth, but he is Jewish enough to know the Scriptures like the back of his hand. The boy that was lost in the void between two worlds becomes the man that can bridge them both in the name of Jesus Christ.

Surely there were counter-attacks. The adversary reaches for his old accusations, his old weapons of identity. He hurls them at Paul, and they shatter upon him. He is undiminished. The accusations never surrendered, but Paul surrendered the accusations. Finding his identity in Christ, every other identity lost its power over him. He no longer has anything to prove; with nothing to defend he has robbed his adversary of things to attack. He is accused by the Jews as a traitor to the law of Moses. The accusation breaks upon his identity in Christ: ‘there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, for the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death.’ The greatest hopes of Abraham, Moses, and Elijah are realized in the Messiah. The law, the promise and the covenant are all completed in the Christ. He is accused by the Greeks as a backward son of a superstitious people. The accusation breaks upon his identity in Christ: ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised pierced for our iniquities, the chastisement that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we have been healed.‘ The foresight of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah puts any Greek oracle to shame, the justice of his prophecy exceeds even the loftiest Aristotelian dreams. Beyond Jew or Greek, Paul is made whole in Christ.

In this wholeness, Paul becomes all things to all people. He puts on and takes off whatever robes will advance the Gospel; a Greek to the Greeks, a Jew to the Jews. A man who worked so hard to earn admission into his own culture lays it down freely, for he has found free admission to something beyond culture. He is free to lay one robe down and don another, knowing that God will safeguard each. He is free to lose himself in the security that he will never again be lost. In the light of that freedom, his hard-earned Hebrew resume amounts to little more than an accounting of wasted time. In Philippians, he accounts for each of his achievements, and then discounts them all in the light of knowing Christ. And so Paul is completed. The child Saul sets out to prove something to the world. The man Saul proves more than he had ever hoped. The broken Paul realizes that he has nothing to prove. The reborn Paul surrenders everything that he had proved. The most glorious chords of a symphony happen near the finale, so now the completed Paul must meet the completion of his story.

It ends as it began. The Saul was born in Tarsus to Roman Citizens. Paul dies in Rome as a Roman Citizen. Saul hid his Roman Citizenship, afraid of any association with the oppressors of his people. Paul claims his Roman Citizenship, convinced that the oppressors need the Gospel just as badly as the oppressed. So Paul becomes the freest man to wear chains, weathering storms and shipwrecks on his way into the heart of the people who hated him. Thus, Paul the Roman, Pharisee of Pharisees, proclaims the Gospel of Christ to the Emperor of Rome. And on a chopping block outside of the capital, the martyr Paul rejoins the martyr Stephen in the stream of Christ. Like Stephen, Paul is vindicated. Like Stephen, Paul is reborn in his once-enemies. Three decades later, the unthinkable happens: Christ rises in Rome from the seed of Paul‘s blood. Jove lies shattered on the ground as the Chi-Rho is lifted high. Paul triumphs over his childhood tormentors by loving them. In his weakness, Paul found his true strength. The gentile with a tan became the second most influential Jew of the last two millennia.

Ecclesiastes teaches that there is nothing new under the sun. Culture and identity, community and belonging are issues in 21st century America as much as they were in 1st century Judea. I do not think that Paul’s story is entirely unique. I have seen it happen, in bigger and smaller versions, in versions more and less complete. But as Aslan reminds Shasta, ’I am not telling you their story. I am telling you your story.’ So I will tell you mine.

‘Loser.’ That was what they called me. So I learned to succeed. And I succeeded with a vengeance. I disproved them time and again, until one day I had racked up so many successes that no one would ever dare make the accusation again. No one except myself. So I fought on with mad rage, proving something to the universe. I think they called it ambition. I think they were wrong. I think it’s called fear.

I expected to find a home at Grad School. I think I expected too much. I thought that in the self-proclaimed intellectual Mecca of the country, I would find people who understood what it was to be hated for being different. I was half right. They understood what it was to be hated. And they decided I looked a lot like the people doing the hating. Ironically, I learned to blend in so well that I became indifferentiable from my once-persecutors. ‘Oppressor’ completed the accusation. Caught in the void between cultures, I sided with the outcasts. If they hated me for being a warrior, then what a warrior I would be. So upon leaving, I set myself to winning the respect of my people while defying my interlocutors. I succeeded.

But I didn’t find an answer. Perhaps we are afflicted with Midas’ curse. We seek success, and we find it. But we never find what we’re looking for. Our need for success steals the life from our blessings. So I continued to amass joyless victories. And then I received a blessing I would never have asked for. I received failure.

I don’t think I would have opened the blessing, had I known what it was. Knowing this, God wrapped the blessing in everything I had ever wanted. Time and again, I would seek success. I fought with all my heart for a victory. But time and again I would find only defeat. And I would fight all the harder and lose all the harder. The last defeat is the only one I am proud of. In that defeat, I lost honestly, I lost before God, and I lost in the center of His will. And in that defeat, I found something I did not expect. I found brokenness.

It is amazing how much God can heal in the course of a year. Broken of success, I find that I now actually enjoy success. Now that I don’t have to succeed, I find that I want to succeed. Now that I have nothing to prove, I find that I actually value the many blessings I have been given. And I find that I have been blessed in ways that I would never have been able to understand.

Jesus calls the poor and the persecuted blessed. I would never have understood how before. It makes perfect sense, though. Christ was God in the flesh. Yet He chose to be a carpenter. The apostles were not much to speak of. Yet they unintentionally conquered the greatest empire this world has known. God has used the foolish things of this world time and again to humble the wise. He does not use pretensions of wisdom.

I hated being an outcast. I hated being a loser. But I do not anymore. I embrace the accusation. In my weakness, He makes me strong. And how many times have the outcasts won? How many times have the weak overthrown the strong? So for all the Frodos, the Skywalkers, and the Galileans, this is now my prayer. ‘For my inheritance, give me the poor, the sick and the weak.’

Perhaps weakness is such a great gift that it needs to be unlocked first. Perhaps it is a gift so beautiful that you must be taught to use it lest you hurt yourself. The most beautiful gifts are this way. And so before we can wield it, God must teach us His accounting of things. Blessed are the poor, the sick and the weak. The world hates us for our differences, but God loves us for them. This is redemption‘s deep magic. Yield your insecurities to Him and let Him astonish you. Perhaps His most precious artistry is hidden in the very things you are trying to hide. Perhaps you are a Paul.

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07 August 2007

Churchianity. (Managing the tension between faith and culture in the Body of Christ.)

I have to admit to plagiarizing the title from Joy Davidman Lewis’ ‘Smoke on the Mountain.’ My conscience thus clear, let’s get started.

‘A personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.’ Carried on horseback by circuit riders a century ago, projected by Power-Point by Campus Crusade today, this simplest of creeds stands as the very foundation of Evangelical Christianity. Easily understood and easily shared, this phrase has introduced countless men and women to the Love of their lives. It is the merest of Christianities, ideal for introducing one individual to the person of Jesus Christ. There is, of course, a slight snag. You see, when a bunch of individuals have personal relationships with Christ, they start to have a corporate relationship with Christ too. A perspective optimized to win individual souls to Christ may find itself struggling with the intricacies of Christians trying to live in community. So Evangelicals’ greatest strength is also our greatest weakness; what we gain in Evangelism, we lose in Ecclesiology. And culture is more an Ecclesial question than one of Evangelism.

People and Peoples.

‘I am not African. Africa is in me, but I cannot return.
I am not taína. Taíno is in me, but there is no way back.
I am not European. Europe lives in me, but I have no home there.

I am new. History made me. My first language was spanglish.
I was born at the crossroads
and I am whole.’
- Aurora Levins-Morales, ‘Child of the Americas.’

A Puerto-Rican Jew born in America, this poet speaks of being a hundred things all at once. She partakes in many identities, yet she cannot be entirely captured by any of them. In this simple truth, she speaks for all of us. Each of us encompass many things, but we are rarely encompassed by any one of them. I exist on many levels. I am a man. I am an American. I am a soldier. I am a human being. I am a hundred things. Some are insignificant. I am tall. Some are central. I am a son of I AM. All these things are true of me, and all at once. I am all of them together. Yet, even together, they are not all of me. I am a member of many communities, but I must first exist in order to exist in any communities. So there must be levels of existence.

Scripture confirms this conclusion. It is clear that God covenants with individuals, such as with Abraham (of course, that individual became a people in the course of that covenant.) God also covenants with nations, as the Old Testament unquestionably proves. And ultimately, He covenants with all of humanity. Genesis speaks to this, as does Revelation. Let us delineate our levels accordingly: individual, defined by the person themselves; corporate, the person in a community of culture; and universal, the person as a member of the human race. So now we have levels, but levels do not tell us what to do, nor where to start. For those answers, let’s turn to some wise council. With a Belfast accent.

C.S. Lewis, in his essay ‘Christianity and Culture,’ argues for the primacy of individuals vice cultures. (Please hold on the deconstructivist scalpels until you hear his argument. Or at least read ‘Bulverism’ first.) It has everything to do with permanence. A man lives, at most, eleven decades. A culture lives on anywhere from centuries to millennia. If this world is all that there is, then culture must logically be primary. Christianity, though, teaches that individuals live on forever. And if this is true, then the individual must be primary. It is St. Augustine, not Carthage, that goes to heaven. We must start at the person, and from there move to the culture and the universal. Even intuitively, this checks; many who are the first to point out the injustices perpetrated by humanity are the last to do anything about the injustices they perpetrate themselves. There are already enough demagogues who preach systemic ethics and practice little personal ethics. (Lewis again, ‘The Dangers of National Repentance.’) The plank in your own eye and all of that. Of course, the verse doesn’t stop there, and neither should we. ‘And then you can see clearly to remove the speck of dust from your brother’s eye.’ We are to work for social justice, but we must first pursue the justice that is closest and hardest, treating others as we would want to be treated. But I digress.

We must begin with the individual. But we cannot end there. St. Augustine goes to heaven, but he still goes as a Carthaginian. On some level, St. Augustine brings the best of Carthage (or Hippo) with him to heaven. Together with the other Carthaginian believers, they represent Carthage amongst every tribe and every tongue. There is a primacy of individuals, but it is not an exclusive primacy. We are all Ezekiel’s wheels within wheels. And salvation history plays out on every level upon which we exist.

Stories that you can’t read are just gibberish and music that you can’t understand is just noise. So we must learn to hear all the chords to understand the symphony. The individual may be the easiest to understand, as the boundaries of the identity are objectively definable and fixed in space and time. Individually, I am two hundred pounds of water and tissue. I can immediately identify where I begin and end. I can look at my outstretched fingertips and say ‘I go this far and no farther.’ My fingers are part of me. The keys upon which I am typing are not part of me. Like most people, I figured this one out before my first birthday and haven’t looked back. My identity as part of the universal is a bit more esoteric, but still one I feel as if I can nail down. Really, that one is pretty objective and fixed as well (generally only redefined in the ugliest of actions. Like Dred Scott. Or Roe.) My physiology and psyche are undeniably human. I think human thoughts and feel human feelings, and in doing so I am able to relate to other humans. Every cell of my body contains Adenine and Cytosine wrapped around each other in a uniquely human pattern, and all of those cells together are immediately recognizable to another person as a human being. While I may not exhaustively understand what it is to be myself individually or as a member of the universal, I can at least recognize the boundaries of those identities. I cannot say the same for my identity as a member of cultures. Corporate identity is written in grays, not in black and white, (even when it is defined as black or white.)

Cultural identities are the hardest for us to wrap our minds around, because it is the hardest to define. And this is why we have so many problems understanding each other: few of us even understand ourselves. Most cultural identities seem imposed on group members from within and without. You find yourself drafted without ever really being asked, people kind of assume your allegiances and run with the assumption. To try to make sense out of chaos, we write pasts-that-never-were that tell us who we are now and why. Unfortunately, we are fallen storytellers, and our stories reflect our fallenness. Many of our mythologies are simply fairy-tales to shield us from the scary complexity of the physics of a fallen world. We try to draw clear lines, generally where we are and always have been the righteous, the trespassed against, the ones-who-are-not-to-blame. And in our gerrymandered pasts, we forget the simple truth that for every time we have been hurt, we have hurt others. We live in a cascade of brokenness that reaches all the way back to the garden, and all of our identities are thus broken.

This is the challenge of cultures. There are a thousand fault-lines, and they change entirely based on context. The boundaries seem to always come down to some fuzzy definition along some mostly arbitrary distinction. The axis of the division is rarely objective, and the point of sundering along that axis is equally relative. It is who and what someone identifies with, and who and what others decide that someone should be identified with, and even those two things wrapped around each other. Americans, at least domestically, tend to see culture as an issue of race and ethnicity. But even that is hard to define… something that shows up conclusively in voting patterns cannot be defined concretely in any objective terms. There isn’t a critical concentration of melanin that predestines someone to think or act a certain way. Between contexts, the point of sundering changes; someone who is considered black in the United States may be considered white in Brazil. Economics is another fault-line, but there is no critical net worth which causes one to move from one group into another. In fact, the relationship may even be reversed at times: the nouveau riche may be ostracized from the rich-culture, while an old money blueblood, deeply in debt, may still retain their membership. Geography? It changes. The inextricably Irish Celts lived in the Carpathians in Alexander the Great’s day. Nobody’s really, truly indigenous anywhere on this side of the fall. Language? A third of the Knesset speaks Russian as their native tongue. Culture changes at every level: look at the rivalry between schools, and you will find that in each school there are punk rawkers, band geeks, jocks and preppies. Their fault-line is music, but where is the critical MP3 that moves you from one group to another? The military is almost an artificial ethnicity, almost impenetrable to an outsider, but just below the surface there are fault-lines between services: zoomies, grunts, squids and jarheads. There are always lines, but the lines are generally arbitrary. And even their gradations are relative.

There is, of course, one fault-line we haven’t discussed yet. Religion. The height of a tree has much to do with the soil in which it is planted. Plant a tree in shallow, sandy soil, and its growth will forever be stunted. Plant a tree in deep, rich soil, and its branches will reach the sky. There are few soils deeper than religion. (It can be a rocky soil as well.) It should not surprise us, then, that the identities that grow from that soil are thick and strong. I think of Orthodox churches in America. Almost invariably, next to any round-domed church, there is a cultural center of the corresponding people group. Be it Greeks, Ukrainians, or Armenians, culture is built upon a bedrock of religion. This is, of course, not confined to our Orthodox brethren. For Irish and Italian immigrants, Catholic churches served as a fortress to the beleaguered identity. And for Korean immigrants, Evangelical churches with services in Hangul served as a touchstone for identity. Synagogues have been the heart of Jewish Diaspora culture for two millennia; throughout a sixth of the world, Muezzinin broadcast culture from Minarets with their calls to noontime prayers. And lest we think ourselves immune, the ATL would be hardly recognizable without the hundreds of churches (and thousands of billboard advertisements.) I can hardly imagine a Colorado Springs without Focus on the Family, New Life Church or Glen Eyrie. There is undeniably an American Christian-ese culture, a unique religion-based identity that is not necessarily synonymous with the Christian faith. This is not a bad thing. Challenges are not necessarily bad. But they are challenges.

Growing up Christian-ese. It is remarkably easy to mistake your expression of something for a universal expression of that same thing. Especially when you haven’t encountered any different expressions of that thing. I think of Lucy Pevensee’s first meeting with Tumnus the Fawn in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Assuming that a handshake is a universal expression of greeting, she offers him her hand. And he stands there perplexed. Tumnus, of course, was well acquainted with the concept of greeting. He just didn’t see any reason that grabbing someone’s hand should have anything to do with it. Conversely, Lucy probably would have never realized the difference between a handshake and a greeting were it not for the fawn’s puzzled response. Fortunately, Lucy and Tumnus both find the goodwill and trust to understand each others’ expressions of greeting, and they are able to move from there into friendship (except for the slight complication of Tumnus kidnapping Lucy to deliver her to certain death at the hands of the White Witch. But that works itself out.)

In childhood, all the dichotomies are pretty straightforward. You go to church, church is good. Jesus is good. Jesus is associated with church. And church looks a certain way, meets at a certain time, and plays a certain type of music. You just assume these things are synonymous, because you don’t really see anything to challenge those assumptions. Truth is coherent, and A equals B equals C. Automatically, you start to build a framework for understanding your world. As you leave the comfort of the familiar, you find yourself in the middle of a complicated, chaotic universe. In the midst of that chaos, the structures do exactly what they are designed to do: bring order out of chaos. So we come back to our dichotomies. Christians talk a certain way, using words like ‘youth group,’ ‘saved,’ and ‘praise music.’ People who don’t talk that way aren’t Christians. So when you meet the kid who calls himself Catholic, you aren’t surprised to find that he doesn’t talk much about Jesus. Nor are you surprised that he spends his weekends getting drunk. Of course, you also probably don’t notice the other kid who wears a crucifix, the shy one who quietly prays every day before eating his school lunch. And until someone drives a eighteen-wheeler through your assumptions, you probably won’t even realize you have them. (In academic-ese, I think its called disturbing frameworks. I like the Big Rig picture better.)

Mine was nowhere near so dramatic. In college, I took a fascinating class on the History of Christianity. Though the subject matter was interesting, the most memorable aspect of the class was the teacher. If you’ve ever heard a pilot talk about their aircraft, it is something like a parent talking about their kid. They know all the facts, all the numbers, but it is deeper than that. It’s almost like the aircraft is a part of them. And this is how this man taught that class. He certainly knew the issues, the numbers and places, but it was deeper. It was like he was talking about his family. Really, nothing up to this point would have been particularly surprising… there were a good number of Christian professors at my college. But this professor happened to be a Lebanese Eastern Rite Catholic (and a Pave Low driver to boot.) Talking to him after nearly every class, I came to one inescapable conclusion. It wasn’t any specific doctrinal point, but he more than knew what he was talking about. Nor was it any Christian catchphrase. He didn’t really use any of those. But unmistakably, undeniably, this man loved the same Jesus that I loved. This was obviously inconvenient for my framework. Looking back, I was a bit like Lucy, realizing that there is a difference between a handshake and a greeting. A realization grew from between the cracks in my framework: Evangelical religiosity isn’t the same thing as knowing Jesus.

Denis de Rougemount tells us that love ceases to be a devil when it ceases to be a god. The same is true of cultures. There are a lot of good things about Evangelical culture. I deeply appreciate the passion in praise music, the way that we emphasize intimacy with God, the simplicity of our message. But that culture cannot be a god. It would, of course, not be a novel mistake. The Pharisees were given a perfect law upon which to build a perfect culture. Their mistake was when they made that law into a god; it was then they became devils. At the very heart of idolatry is the idea of a controllable god. And so it was there: the Sanhedrin pulled the levers and cables behind the image of the law they had constructed. It all came down to control, to pride. If they had ever found the humility to bow before the Lawgiver, they would have found Him far greater than the Wizard of Oz they had fashioned. We are no different.

When people want to hurt each other, they generally fashion some plowshare from their identity into a sword. Intellect, power and wit are all readily sharpened. And sometimes, they actually look you in the eye as they draw swords. When Christians want to be vicious to each other, we rarely allow ourselves the frankness of the profane. We usually invoke some sort of divine license. We turn the weapons of our churches, our authority and our theology against each other when we want to draw blood. Consider how many PKs ran and never looked back. Consider how many petty disagreements between elders have shattered churches. Consider how many unreached people we have turned off with our inability to be vulnerable and real. Our wars of pride have created more casualties than we care to consider.

Pride is the death of all things. It is at the heart of all discord, at the heart of every sundering. We are all undoubtedly too familiar with the ugliness of individual pride. And we should be familiar with the universal pride of humanity, blaming God for all the things that are our fault, refusing to thank Him for all the privileges we enjoy. That pride will get uglier before it is finally broken. (I hope not to be around for that chapter of history.) But there is a pride in cultures as well. Circumcision was an honor God gave to His people. It was intended to be an external expression of a circumcision of the heart. But without that true circumcision, the physical expression is absolutely worthless. Without an obedient heart, circumcision no more makes me a son of Abraham than an appendectomy makes me a son of Buddha. When circumcision became a god, it became a devil; those who worship it became, in Paul’s words, mutilators of the flesh. The Pharisees prided themselves on being children of Abraham. But Abraham was a child of God. When they got those two things out of order, they lost both. Their pride in the trappings of Abraham sundered them from Abraham and God. It is not merely an Old Testament problem. Pride has sundered the church at thousand times. A millennium ago, Eastern and Western Christians decided that they cared more about being Eastern or Western than they cared about being Christians. Fighting over the trappings of Peter, they abandoned both Peter and the God he loved. In the same way, our pride in the trappings of Jonathan Edwards sunders us from both that great saint and his God.

Culture becomes a devil when it becomes a god. But when it loses both the divine and diabolical, it becomes what it was originally intended to be: a gift. All identity is given to us as a gift, intended to adorn our reflection of Christ. Therefore, it only can fall into place when placed beneath our identity in Christ. The Church is simply many identities in Christ gathered together in fellowship. In that fellowship, there is transcendence, but the rule still holds. Individually and corporately, our identities are only beautiful when they reflect Him.

Churches vs. the Church. Circumcision does not a Jew make. But it certainly does make one easier to identify (at least in the