I wasn't even thought of when Beatlemania began, but I recently picked up a book by Steve Turner: The Gospel According to the Beatles. It's going to be my evening reading for the rest of the week, and I'll be posting a review sometime soon after that. Steve Turner is a writer of all things music biz. Go look at The Man Called Cash: The Life, Love and Faith of an American Legend.
Groovy, baby.
Last week I spent 3 days on a silent retreat with a group of local clergy. This is an annual event; it's been a January tradition to bundle up, head out to the Star of the North Retreat Center, and spend a few days in prayer, reading, listening, and fellowship.
As it was a silent retreat, I thought it only fitting to take along Pete Greig's "God on Mute: Engaging the Silence of Unanswered Prayer". I started the book a few days prior to the retreat, and thought it would be a good book to read at that particular place, at that particular time.
It was seven years ago, during the annual silent retreat, that I received a message to call home. We were expecting our second child. AK had gone to the clinic for a routine ultrasound (as if seeing into the womb can possibly be routine!). Sarah Joy was suffering from congestive heart failure in utero. There could be any number of causes. We'd like to do more tests. Would you like to schedule a termination of the pregnancy? We'd like you to speak with the geneticist. Pete Grieg's book tries to give people a way forward when God is silent. Not when God says "no" to our prayers, but when God decides to take his time in giving us the answer, when he is silent for a moment.
The overall pattern of the book is a journey through the last days of Jesus' earthly life. We walk with Jesus on Maundy Thursday. If there was ever an "unanswered" prayer, it is surely Jesus' prayer that we might be one. Jesus' prayer in the garden is often a model for our own. We pray with Jesus that cups might be taken away from us, and yet so often it seems that is the only draught God offers. Not my will, but yours.
On Good Friday we are God-forsaken. Jesus' cry of abandonment from the Cross becomes our own - why, why, why, have you forsaken me. In this section Greig tries to work through some of the "why" questions. Why does the world seem to work the way it does? Why is my prayer not being answered? What are the ways in which these questions have been answered by Christians, and how can a deeper understanding of God's will, God's world and God's work help us through our personal "Good Friday" prayers. In this section he takes us through the series of simpler answers which we might be accustomed to. I have heard many of those same answers from well meaning friends and strangers. I think my favorite was the plea to "Just pray Jabez" and SJ would be healed. But while those answers which Greig enumerates can and do have their place, I am glad that he takes us to Holy Saturday.
In our fear of unknowing, we leapfrog Holy Saturday and rush the resurrection. We race disconcerted to make meaning and find beauty where there simply is none. Yet.
This is the real place of struggle for unanswered prayers. The time when God truly is silent. Greig's observation is true - we want to hurry through Holy Saturday to Easter. It is a day of silence. Yet, we are reminded: though God is silent, He is not absent. This is the deeper place of Christian trust, when we have to say "into your hands I commend my spirit". It is the place of trusting in God's presence with us when all signs of his presence have vanished. Too often we try to rush others through this day as well. Or we try to fill the void with something of our own creation. I think of how we like to fill hospital rooms with chatter and stuff, when sometimes our mere presence is what is needed. Not our voice.
Then Greig points us to the Resurrection - the place where all prayer is answered. The book is seasoned with his own experiences of struggling with "unanswered prayer". And at the end he gives a bit of a guided resource for reflection which can be used alone or in groups. The book is a good antidote to overly triumphalist Christianity, and it addresses a concern that many Christians have, but which often (I have found) they are not very willing to admit. After all, what kind of Christian is ignored by God? This book is food for thought and prayer for all of us who have wondered why God doesn't answer... I'd give it 8 out of 10.
related post: God on Mute
Pete Greig recounts the scene from Narnia where Digory asks the Lion for the magic fruit, knowing it will cure his mother. There is a secret hope that the Lion will immediately say "yes", and a dreadful fear that he will "no". Instead, as Grieg reminds us, the Lion says neither.
He is silent...
Many of us will have had those times when there was neither a clear yes or no. There was silence. I recall a time some years ago when there were numerous people praying for our daughter, SJ. At one point I idly figured out (our minds turn to such things at such times) that there were people in over a dozen countries on 3 continents all praying for one particular person. It seems out prayers can, at times, hit the ceiling and bounce back down. There are times when we do not hear an answer. We may want to shout back: take your own advice - "say either yes or no", but say something, lest I be tempted to spit you out of my mouth.
It is the kind of struggle which we all to often keep to ourselves. Perhaps we will be accused of "not having enough faith", or "not praying persistently", or not doing it "the right way." If you have ever felt God was simply silent, well, you are not alone. This is a difficult topic, and as I make my way through the book, I hope that Greig offers something for us to hope on.
The weekend's reading:
God On Mute: Engaging The Silence Of Unanswered Prayer
Pete Greig
Update: review now posted here.
Monday books tend to be a little bit different from books from the rest of the week. Monday is a day off for me, so the reading for the day corresponds. Today's tome was "Germ".
Germ is Robert Liparulo's second novel. It's a combination good guy/bad guy, science gone awry, Nazis and American spies, with a Christian pastor and his bad brother mixed in for good measure. It's your basic entertainment suspense thriller sort of read. it's not exactly heavy lifting, but hey, what else are you supposed to read on your day off?
So what's the "Germ"? A scientist discovers a way to program the ebola virus with your DNA. In other words, if he has a sample of your DNA, he can create a designer virus which will attack only you. Of course, with people's DNA available anywhere and everywhere, he can create a set of targets at will. Which of course he does. He even has an evil Nazi past.
Enter special agents, an informer from the scientist's lab, and one of the strangest hit men in history to round out the scene. There is some good old fashioned shoot 'em up scenes, and a few interesting twists along the way. One or two twists are actually quite clever, IMHO. Overall, the book is a light, easy read. It's pure entertainment reading, with a very light dose of Christian imagery thrown in. The pastor is not overworked as a character, and there is just enough gore at the right moments.
Book and a beer - I enjoyed them both.
I just finished re-reading John Spong's latest offering. I had to read it twice to make sure I was not missing anything. After all, just a few pages into the introduction, Bishop Spong declared that if he is successful in his task, then "I believe I will have set the stage for the emergence of a new burst of Christian energy and power that has not been seen for hundreds of years.” (xiii)
Wherever this new burst of energy and power has been hidden, I have not found it here. What would allow the dam to burst and this new force of Christianity sweep the world? He argues that we will do this by seeing the Jewishness of Jesus and ridding ourselves of theistic concepts and language which are merely evolutionary leftovers. We are, it seems to Bishop Spong, a species of beatnik poets, struggling against existential "anxiety" like footnotes in a Freudian textbook. The only supposed cure for this anxiety is the illusion of a God conceived and portrayed as something other than ourselves. By freeing Christianity from outdated concepts and language, we can see the Christ-experience and embrace the real Jesus. In order to do this, it is necessary to demythologize the narratives which have grown up around the person of Jesus. Gone are any notions of a virgin birth, Mary and Joseph, most of the disciples (even Judas is historical fiction - which now saves me the trouble of addressing the Gospel of Judas) any form of the miraculous, any notion of a supernatural intervention in a purely materialistic existence. Anything else is fundamentalism - a general term for any other possible understanding, although it would appear that only the straw man makes an appearance: a "God" who does miracles is capricious (54), ascension is not possible because "one does not exit this world by rising into the sky without jet propulsion" (67);
This is the foundation: Bishop Spong claims to be aware of something called "our postmodern scientific world". That statement in itself tells us something of Spong's limited attention to the shift from modernity and its religion within the limits of reason alone (to borrow from Kant), to a post-critical reading of sacred texts, and a postmodern critique of the limits of the scientific worldview and method. Spong's entire approach has not moved beyond the limits of empiricism, and so he fails to grasp how there can be a Being beyond Tillich's ground of being.
It is the presuppositions which hinder what still can be a number of helpful commonplace observations. Spong goes to great length to point out that events in the Gospels have antecedents in the Hebrew Scriptures. Nothing new here for someone familiar with basic biblical studies. Making such connections can be helpful for people who have never grasped any continuity in the biblical narrative.
But then Spong argues that such having antecedents are themselves evidence against the historicity of almost all the Gospel events (88ff et al). "...[T]his would also mean that this intervening God would have to micromanage the world in order to guard those scriptures" (113). Given that there can be no "God" cooperating with humanity in order to produce a sacred text in the first place, the rest of the conclusions are easily drawn. We need to rid ourselves of this "superstitious way of reading the scriptures".
Still 2/3 of the way into the book, and I still have not met this Jesus for the non-religious. When he is finally introduced, he is going to cause a revolution by calling us to embrace tolerance, diversity, reject prejudice and stereotypes, and in the end, we will all become contemporary Episcopalians. Or something like that.
So what is good in this book? The connections between the Gospels and the Hebrew scriptures should generally be helpful to novices. The dismissal of the caricature of Christianity is something that most could agree with. The only problem is that it is a dismissal of a caricature.
Where does the book fall short, apart from the thoroughly modernist assumptions about humanity and reality? First, Spong offers no compelling reasons, within his framework, as to why in the world all of this mythology should have been built up around the person of Jesus in particular. As someone who has some familiarity with the classical world, I can tell you why a mythology of divinity arose around the Caesars. But there is no convincing reason in Spong's book explaining why it should have arisen around Jesus. Unless, of course...
When Jesus for the non religious is finally introduced, he does not appear to me to be a compelling figure in any way. If I were to give an introduction of Jesus to a non religious friend, I would much rather go with works by someone like Brian McLaren. Even though I don't agree with everything McLaren writes, at least his presentation of Jesus is a truly human Jesus, a Jesus who radically challenges and a Jesus who, as a character, comes alive. Spong's Jesus will be left in modernity, where he was created.
related posts:
I do not believe that anyone can, with supernatural power, cause the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the mute to sing and the lame to walk in any literal way. If that were possible, the development of medical science would have been quite unnecessary. That development, however, was necessary, because the discovery of both the causes and the cures of illness or the lack of wholeness is now and has always been a human, not a divine, responsibility.
Jesus for the Non-religious, p 12
The weekend's reading is going to be John Spong's latest offering. In his introduction to the book, Spong reiterates a number of points he has discussed before in other works: the Jewishness of Jesus, non-interventionist deity, his rejection of traditional forms and liturgy, his problems with language and his reaction to his fundamentalist upbringing. One thing remains. For someone who talks about "a 21st century Christianity", he seems awfully stuck in the paradigms of hubristic modernity. Only those things which fall under the explanatory power of modernity can be credibly held:
We know death to be a permanent state, and to be so total a shutdown of bodily function that the brain is irreversibly destroyed if it is without oxygen for a very few minutes... Certainly a crucified man, executed and buried on Friday, cannot walk out of his tomb resuscitated and alive on Sunday... I must reject all these things as not possible. (12)
Woo-hoo - hang on for the ride, kids!
Of course, in many ways the church is destined to live in perpetual advent as we wait for Christ's return... No matter how impatient we get as a society, with processing speeds rising and our whole cultural velocity increasing ever faster; we cannot speed up pregnancy. We still have to wait the same patient nine months that Mary did, not knowing, not seeing, not being able to hurry things along.
Signs of Emergence (47-48)
An atheist and a Christian do a road trip around Evangelical Church-land in America. They take along their laptops and decide to record the experience. The result is "Jim and Casper Go to Church", a short and easy read which is a bit of a religious travelogue through a smattering of Christian churches. Jim, of Off The Map, wants to know, really know, what an atheist thinks when he or she walks into a church service.
They start out big, with a visit to Rick Warren's Saddleback, which is on the corner of Purpose Drive ("yes, those are the actual street names", p.1) and Saddleback Drive. On the west coast they visit the Dream Center, and then the current incarnation of Mosaic, where they have a brief (and seemingly unproductive) chat with Erwin McManus. In Chicago they go from classic Presbyterian to inner urban - from "King James" to "w'sup, Coach".
i didn't find that there were many surprises in this book. On the one hand, a sophisticated and educated atheist goes to a variety of Christian expressions, and finds the various faults which they embody. Fair enough. There are enough specific "techniques" which the various branches of the vine use on a regular basis. My favorite ritual is described like this:
...I waited for the moment we had come to expect at the close of every church . We call it the "breaking-voice phenomenon." For some reason, the pastor ends the service sounding as if he's about to cry. Christians are largely inured to this. It's so common that we either endure it or enjoy it because it's the tribal signal that services are almost done. (55)
So is it just a church-bashing exercise? As St Paul says, by no means! What Jim Henderson wants to communicate is a two-fold proposal. First, Christians are largely unaware of how their "services" look to the outsider who is unchurched. It's the sort of principle that, I believe, you either get or don't get. Second, Jim tries to reshape our vocabulary. Rather than seeing Casper as "lost", the reader is encouraged to see him first as a person, not as a project. Jim uses language like "a person whom God misses". Rather like the Father "missing" the prodigal son, rather than focusing on the son as "lost". What we need to do, says Jim, is to "defend the space" of friendship and discussion and listening to the unchurched, rather than focus on the "place" of worship.
The heart of the book is not the critique of various churches and worship styles, but rather the modeling of a conversation between a Christian and an atheist. The book can raise a number of questions:
Overall, I'd give it a 6-7 out of 10 simply as a book to read, but closer to an 8 as a tool for starting a conversation within my own church about "us and them".
Next up is a return to Budziszewski...
I was in high school when Francis Schaeffer published A Christian Manifesto in 1981. By the time I was an undergrad a few years later, I had been introduced to Schaeffer by association with IVCF. Well, actually, it was by association with a particular student who was involved in IVCF. I was rather partial at the time to a rather more liturgical form of Christian piety. In those days they served sherry after High Mass on Thursdays. But I digress.
In "Evangelicals in the Public Square", Budziszewski claims "it was Schaeffer who first made evangelicals aware of the culture war, an odd sort of war in which, he complained, so far only the other side had shown up to fight [73]. In response to what he saw as a growing systemic program of secular humanism, Schaeffer claimed that Christians have been negligent because they "have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals". (Manifesto, rev. ed.; Wheaton: Crossway, 1982, p 17).
Budziszewski examines several of Schaeffer's points. First is the gradual replacement of a "vaguely Christian" worldview (Manifesto, 17) with the worldview of secular humanism. In great part Schaeffer blames lawyers and liberal theologians [Budziszewski, 74-75]. What has happened, Schaeffer argued, is that Christian pietism has allowed for a compartmentalization of faith - Christians "have acted as though nothing more were at stake than a few particular truths, like Christ's virgin birth..." [75] Budziszewski see in this a bit of a swipe at the Fundamentalist movement. While the "secularists" have seen things in terms of transforming a whole society, Christians have been involved in only "bits and pieces".
Authority and the State: aside
Schaeffer was concerned with the removal of moral absolutes. The overall result of the secularizing tendency, particularly in the state, is to eliminate any basis for authority beyond the state. The flip side of course is that there is then no limiting of the state: it is the state which can grant rights, and therefore the state can remove them. There is no grounding of authority in anything higher than the collective.
Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law:
It is interesting to stop at this point and consider the preamble to our own Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Why does our Charter recognize "the supremacy of God" and the "rule of law" - in that order? It is argued by some that such concepts and language have no place in the state. But what are the implications of removing any notion of an authority higher than the state? And what are the implications for a state which recognizes no authority, no "supremacy", greater than its own collective?
To be continued: laundry calls...
related posts:
Coffee and a book...
The influence of Carl FH Henry on contemporary evangelicalism is undisputed. He was a founder and first editor of Christianity Today, and one of the first faculty members of Fuller Theological Seminary, He authored more than 30 books, and is, in the words of Budziszewski,“if not the father of the new evangelical movement – for it had no single originator – at least one of its uncles.” [40]
In 1947 Henry published “The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism”, a book which is his “most influential contribution to evangelical political reflection”. [40] Budziszewski devotes the first part of Evangelicals in the Public Square to critiquing both the book and its legacy. What Henry saw in his own day was a movement away from the Fundamentalists to the “new evangelicals”, and with it Henry framed his lament over a misguided and hopeless modernity, and a challenge that Fundamentalists had ignored the social imperatives of the redemptive Gospel.
Henry argued broadly that redemption (like sin) is not only individual, but is also social [Henry, Conscience, 32, 37, 51-52]. He sought to correct the pendulum swing of the Fundamentalists, who in their reaction to a social gospel movement which seemed to downplay the divinity of Christ, had “seemed to revolt against the social imperative of the gospel itself” [41]. The underlying doctrine to drive this was the Incarnation, which has implications for wider social involvement and responsibility. Budziszewski summarizes Henry’s implications of the Incarnation for a redemptive social evangelicalism: “[Christians] should withdraw only from movements whose means or goals are explicitly anti-evangelical” [42]. What this means is that Henry was calling evangelicals and Fundamentalists to a wider engagement with the range of institutions – social, political, educational, economic.
As Budziszewski points out, Henry’s strategy for engaging these institutions is not a developed Christian theory of education, politics, sociology or economics. Rather, it is by populating these institutions with Christian individuals that the institutions will be transformed and redeemed. Here, I think, is the first question to be leveled in relation to contemporary “evangelical politics”: Is it only through populating the institution with individual Christians that the institutions can be “redemptive”? On one level, we see this played out in the elect-ability of candidates whose personal faith is agreeable to a set standard. Fill the parliament, or congress, with individual Christians, and the rest will look after itself. But is this the case? Arguing from natural law, Bud holds that such an approach is short – it fails to call us to the task of thinking through a Christian economic and social philosophy, a Christian jurisprudence, a Christian philosophy of state and governance. Christians need to have a notion of how the institutions can function redemptively. For example, can we understand and enact just laws even if we do not have “Christians” in government? And conversely, will electing "Christians" lead to more just public institutions?
Another point to be considered in the (non) development of evangelical political philosophy is eschatology. Budziszewski looks at three streams of eschatology in evangelical circles – streams which are still with us today. Think of the “Left Behind” series which has populated Christian bookstore shelves and fattened publishers’ bank accounts. Henry lamented the state of division and the amount of energy devoted to eschatology in his day, and Budziszewski looks at the legacy of these streams [44ff]. There is a large section of evangelical political thought which does not seek to transform the surrounding culture, but merely is content to be protected from it. It is an escapist ideology which becomes merely defensive. With shades of Kuyper, such evangelicals are happy as long as their own spheres are protected: “we don’t think we will change the direction of public education, but don’t try to force that stuff on MY children.” Budziszewski astutely observes that the “rise in fundamentalist political activity therefore reflects not a shift from a protective goal to a redemptive goal, but an increase in the perceived level of threat.” [46ff]
What Henry called evangelicals to do was engage the wider culture with the redemptive Gospel. But what he failed to do was articulate a way in which evangelical Christians can think about those institutions apart from simply populating them with Christian individuals. As Budziszewski points out, “Surely it would be naïve to think that better laws eliminate the need for God’s grace. But it is equally unrealistic to suppose that conversion cancels out the need for better laws.” [47]
This whole area is a fascinating one. One of the biggest charges brought against Henry and other evangelicals is that they failed to provide a “cultural apologetic”. That is, they failed to explore if there is any basis on which to engage and cooperate with non-Christians in the pursuit of the public good. This is a question which will have different answers from different quarters. Is there any commerce between the City of God and the city of man? Can there be a common notion of public “justice” among Christians and non-Christians? Budziszewski argues that a great failing of evangelicalism is the absence of natural law as a bridge to a non-Christian culture. This is the flip side of the Incarnation – all humans are made in the image of God, and as such, there are points of contact between all. In their zeal for special revelation, they have neglected the tools of general revelation.
An interesting read so far. Think I’ll have to pull out the Meno again…
related post: J. Budziszewski: Evangelicals in the Public Square
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