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Jesus, Rush, and the Nature of True Humility

May 20, 2013 — 1 Comment

God made this world, and so long as you’re alive, you can’t escape the way He made it. You might have qualms with gravity, but I’m afraid you’re going to go on living with it.

And since at the center of the world is Jesus Christ, there is no life outside of Him. All things exist and cohere in Him. Therefore, all counterfeit forms of life have to borrow from Jesus. Jesus said that in order to find your life you have to lose it. The greatest in the kingdom is the servant of all. In other words, because the cross has become the center of all human history, everybody is forced to reckon with it. Everybody, even people with qualms, have to live with this fact. And this means there are really only two options. Some bow before it, in true humility, confessing their sins, receiving forgiveness and cleansing, and then they rise bearing that same cross as God works His life into and out of their lives, joyfully following their Savior. Everybody else, failing to actually bow before Christ, must pretend to have humbled themselves. They must pretend to bear a cross. They muster up some kind of limp. They wear it like a cheap toupee. Ever since Jesus came into the world, the old pagan mythos of arrogant strength has been fading away, and now all true power and strength is found in the cross, or else some kind of faux version made with aspartame and a bad aftertaste.

In other words, everybody likes the idea of humility. Ever since Jesus, humility is heroic. Everybody likes the idea of being humble, but nobody really wants to be humbled. In other words, the popular form of humility is a sort of aw-shucks-taint-nothing sort of demeanor. In the broader Christian world it consists of apologizing for everything as often as possible. It’s telling and a little more than ironic that people often describe being humbled at the very point at which they are receiving some kind of recognition, honors, praise. Continue Reading…

In Against Christianity, Bible - 1 Peter, Culture, Politics, TRC, Wisdom

The Public Gospel

March 18, 2013 — Leave a comment

One of the hallmarks of Peter Leithart’s work has been the public nature of the Christian faith. To say that Jesus is King is to make a highly charged political claim. Worship is a political act. The sacraments are public, objective realities that proclaim cosmic truth to power regardless of and often despite the intentions of the people involved in them. Baptism means that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Jesus. The Supper proclaims the victorious and vicarious death of Jesus to the world until He comes. And this is all because the Word of God is living and powerful and thunders from heaven and demands obedience, allegiance, loyalty. God’s truth trumps all pretenders.

The last couple of weeks Pastor Leithart has continued his series through the book of Isaiah, and he has reminded us particularly that the prophet Isaiah was not foretelling a future for Israel that could exist only in their hearts. The prophet’s burden is not something that might remain safely within the confines of the minds of certain exiled Jews. Isaiah was not trying to calm everyone down, giving them a religious pacifier to suck on while the uncircumcised rejoice over the destruction of Jerusalem. No, if anything, Isaiah is trying to get the people worked up, excited, rambunctious. Yes, he promises peace and comfort, but this is the peace and comfort of victory, the peace and comfort of deliverance from their enemies, the peace and comfort of coming home. In other words, the salvation Isaiah foretold can’t leave Israel in exile, can’t leave Jerusalem in ruins, and therefore cannot be a merely private experience. God’s justice is public. God’s righteousness is always for everyone to see. It stops the mouths of kings, and it does so because they read about it in the morning paper.

What follows is my own ruminations on this fact: Over the last two hundred years (at least) the Church has been in retreat in America. We have sown the wind and now we are reaping the whirlwind politically, culturally, economically, etc. If you do the math that means that probably right around the founding of America, the retreat was already beginning. Some of the faithful old guard could see it coming and put up the best fight they knew how, but plenty were already hedging their bets, compromising, and still others were already in apostasy and full blown naturalism was on the rise. And the net result over time has been for many professing Christians to hunker down in the bunkers of a private, personal, and overly spiritualized version of the faith Jesus bled and died for. This happened in some quarters under the guise of highly emotional experiences of revival and spiritual renewal which did not (for the most part) translate into much momentum publicly. Others hunkered down with fat books and systematic theologies, and while they may have said many true things, all the pointy edges were sandpapered with the proper scholarly apparatus, footnotes, and Greek word studies. Nobody but their closest friends and relatives read them (and mostly to be polite). Continue Reading…

In Against Christianity, Bible - Isaiah, Culture, Federal Vision, Manalive, TRC

Wodehouse Reality Television by C.S. Lewis (& Jesus)

December 14, 2012 — Leave a comment

What would happen if (God help you) you pulled one of those lurid, wide-eyed tabloids off the newsstand at the grocery checkout and started reading, only to find out by the time you reached the back cover you’d just read a gospel tract, repented of several sins, and recommitted your life to Christ?

What if the stunning insight into human psychology of C.S. Lewis crash landed into a P.G. Wodehouse novel, which (somehow) managed to be about a major sex scandal in an American evangelical megachurch?

What if a faithful Christian pastor of over 30 years, immersed in evangelical Christianity (as well as Lewis, Wodehouse, and Chesterton) wrote a reality television show for MTV that could possibly spark a true reformation in America?

Well, somehow, that’s exactly what Doug Wilson has done with his recent novel Evangellyfish.

One part Wodehouse Reality Television, one part Lewis on the human heart, one part parable, and one part altar call, I finished the book (having laughed and cringed repeatedly), and realized that I had also, strangely and wonderfully, been edified.

Seriously: I was blessed, encouraged, built up. It made me love Jesus more, want to love and serve my wife and children more, want to love and serve my people better. And it’s actually a pretty strange phenomenon. How does a story about a sex scandal in some rotten-to-the-core evangelical megachurch do that? How does a fairly simple plot about a fairly average but faithful Reformed Baptist pastor who gets tangled up in the mess, how does that translate into a blessing? Continue Reading…

In Against Christianity, Books, Church, Culture, Evangelism, Grace, Pastoral Theology, Preaching, Wisdom

It’s Sexy to Talk Like a Revolutionary

November 19, 2012 — 3 Comments

A while back Doug Wilson posted some great thoughts on Jamie Smith’s book Desiring the Kingdom.

Doug writes:

His thesis, on paper, seems great. Worship shapes desire, and we should measure our success in the church and in the academy by how well we do in forming particular kinds of people — people who love Christ and one another. Education is about formation, not information. All this is great.

But the problem is:

In short, Smith wants worship to shape and form folks, but the formation he has in view involves disparagement of free markets, accepting the Word from feminine mouths and the sacraments from feminine hands, and sniffing at believing efforts to beat back the sodomization of America, then whatever kind of worship service he wants, we should not want it. If that is what is cooking, why should we want to eat? Continue Reading…

In Against Christianity, Books, Creation, Culture, Worship

Cute Mormon Secularists

November 14, 2012 — 6 Comments

So my wife and I schlepped our way through one of the more recent offerings in the “romantic comedy” genre last night. Turned the first one off out of pure boredom (despite the reputations of the actors). The one we actually watched was only slightly better, but the fact that casual sex was presented in both, within 2-3 minutes of the start of the movie was actually pretty amusing.

It was like a college kid pulling out his black rimmed glasses at a hipster conference to show his street creds. It was like a mom sheepishly laughing and explaining away her two year old flopping and doing the angry ninja dance on the floor in front of a house guest. It was like a politician well, doing what politicians always do.

In other words, it was preachy. It was like, hey this is a romantic comedy, and psssst, *wink*wink*, don’t worry, we believe in sex. Hey guys, hey guys: we’re cool too. It was so totally Mormon. It was like Maxim and Cosmo sent their best reps in white short-sleeve shirts and bland ties on bicycles to my front door. And they both had elder name tags pinned to their nerdy shirts. Continue Reading…

In Against Christianity, Bible - Proverbs, Creation, Culture, ethics, Family, Marriage Bed, Movies

Fundy Politics

November 8, 2012 — 7 Comments

I’m not much of a political pundit. I suppose this is because I’m a child of my generation, born wedged at the end of Generation X and at the beginning of Generation Y (according to the venerable Wikipedia). I’m an old Millenial or a baby GenXer, one way or the other. I have skepticism and disillusionment deep in my bones, and I would say apathy is a nice way of describing the sort of mountain I have to overcome most days. I have a deep distrust of the political establishment, little to no hope that anything that takes place inside the District’s beltway amounts to more than paper shuffling (at best) and various schemes to make money, have sex with page boys, and abuse power (at worst).

I didn’t vote for Romney or Obama because they both smell like corporate and political BS from a mile a way. I could kind of get excited by someone like Ron Paul since he said extremely reasonable things and didn’t make ridiculous promises couched in meaningless rhetorical fluff. But he has his problems too.

At the end of the day, I’m a Bible thumping fundy. I don’t mean in the “don’t drink/don’t smoke” variety. In fact as a Bible believing Christian, I think the legalization of marijuana is a good thing because if God had wanted governments to criminalize mind-altering drugs, He would have said so and He didn’t. I happen to believe that smoking dope is something like drunkenness and so there’s that, but I don’t think it should be against the law to drink a bottle of Jack Daniels and puke your guts out the next morning. The Biblical name for that is stupid, but it ain’t against the law to be stupid. Now, if you run someone over in your 4×4 while three sheets to the wind, you ought to have the book thrown at you. I drink and smoke and play cards and dance like a fool with my wife and kids. So I’m not talking about that kind of fundy. Continue Reading…

In Against Christianity, Bible - Romans, Culture, Economics, ethics, Justice & Mercy, Marriage Bed, Politics

Even A Little Thing Like Death

October 3, 2012 — 1 Comment

A few weeks ago, my alter ego tweeted that “having room in theology for the just taking of life (capital punishment, war) is a refusal to make our physical/material state absolute,” and there were a few questions about that so I’ll elaborate here.

First, full disclosure, these thoughts came off a slightly feverish (literally) day watching a couple of movies focused on fighting and warfare. In particular, the movie Warrior got me thinking: The movie centers on a deadbeat dad (Nick Nolte) who has recently repented of his alcoholism and apparently become a Christian and his two sons (Tom Hardy & Joel Edgerton) who are in various ways living with and dealing with the results of their father’s failures and sin. They are all at odds in different ways, but the last thing all three have in common is that they are into Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) style fighting. One thing leads to another, and the brothers are in the world’s biggest MMA tournament. The story is explicitly about forgiveness, justice, bitterness, and trust.

But woven through these questions are the cage fighting matches. One response might be complete disgust. Why bring Jesus into an MMA cage fight? Didn’t Jesus teach us to turn the other cheek, not punch the other guy back harder? But this brings me back to the point of my tweet: Continue Reading…

In Against Christianity, Child Kingdom, Culture, ethics, History, Justice & Mercy, Politics, Wisdom

Miniature Invasions of the Kingdom of God

October 1, 2012 — Leave a comment

Jesus came to save sinners. Jesus came to seek and save that which was lost. Jesus came to give His life as a ransom for many. And as Tim Chester points out, a central part of that mission is embodied for us in the fact that Jesus came eating and drinking. He modeled in His life the means and method by which the Kingdom of God will come on earth as it is in heaven. After Jesus suffered and died and gave His life as a ransom to free us from the power of sin, death, and the devil, He poured His Spirit on us in order that His life might multiply and fill the world. And that’s why at the center of our life together is this table where we proclaim the forgiveness of sins, the rescue of the lost, the ransom of every captive, the freedom of every slave, the resurrection of the dead. At the center of our life together, is eating and drinking with Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus came eating and drinking, and Jesus still comes eating and drinking. He does that here week after week as we renew covenant together. But He comes in your homes as you eat and drink together in gladness. He comes in your Sabbath feasting when you laugh with your children and honor your wife with compliments. He comes when you make meals for one another and show hospitality to one another. He comes in your parish groups, He comes when you make cookies for your neighbors, when you share your bread with the hungry, when you cheerfully make bag lunches for your children. He comes eating and drinking, He comes to seek and save that which was lost. He comes to ransom the captives and to set them all free. This table is a party table, a victory feast, celebrating the freedom of the captives. We have been ransomed. We are free. We are forgiven. So we celebrate this now, and our tables cannot be anything less than extensions of this table. Our meals, all of them, are just miniature invasions of the Kingdom of God.

In Against Christianity, Eucharistic Meditations, Food, Grace, Justice & Mercy, Theology - Sacraments, Wisdom

Communion, Baptism, and the Messiness of the Church

September 5, 2012 — Leave a comment

The Church is a messy place, and that means that not everything rolls out in the order that we might believe best fits with the patterns laid out in Scripture. Jesus is loving us into perfection, washing us with the water of His Word. But we’re not there yet, and in the mean time we have to be faithful when and where God has placed us.

So let me give you an example. I am told that in some communions it is common for children to begin taking the Lord’s Supper from a young age (or when parents deem appropriate) while withholding baptism until such an age that those in authority believe a true conversion has taken place.

Now in Presbyterian churches, it is frequently the opposite: babies are baptized and welcomed into the covenant and then later welcomed to the table when they are deemed old enough and/or mature enough to make a credible profession of faith in Jesus as Savior.

Now I happen to believe that both of these scenarios aren’t the best, though as far as I can tell, the latter Presbyterian practice at least has a good deal of historic precedent going for it. I have only become aware of the former practice in recent years and as far as I know hasn’t been a very widely held practice in the history of the church.

So in my ideal biblical world, I believe infants ought to be baptized and then when they begin sitting at their family dinner table at home and eating with their families, they ought to also be welcomed to the table of the Lord. In the course of things, this would probably mean that most kids would start taking communion around a year old, some earlier, maybe some a little later. Because the promises of the covenant are for us and for our children, believing those promises means naming our children in baptism into the family of Jesus and then teaching our children loyalty to that grace from their earliest days. It is absolutely necessary that they learn to trust and obey for themselves, but that is something that they learn by encouragement and discipline from faithful, believing parents. We ought to pray and trust that God’s promises are true for our children from an early age. This is not natural; it is supernatural. But God is often pleased to work His supernatural grace in little ones: for of such is the Kingdom of God. Continue Reading…

In Against Christianity, Church Polity, Federal Vision, Grace, Pastoral Theology, Theology - Sacraments, Wisdom

Fight for Your Right to Party: Job vs. Shane Claiborne

August 16, 2012 — 13 Comments

I wrote an article with Peter Leithart a few years back for Touchstone Magazine which you can find here, in which we argued that the book of Job provides a curriculum, a template of sorts for how God loves to grow His people up into maturity, particularly a maturity that is increasingly drawn into the presence of God, a maturity that is able to stand before God, to speak with God, to know God as a friend.

God is the original Principal of the School of Hard Knocks. God beams over His servant Job and sends the Accuser to trash his life. God beams again with exuberant, fatherly pride, and lets the Accuser cover Job’s body in boils. God is apparently still beaming as He lets three backstabbing friends show up, complete with Bible verses, showy religious rituals, and ultimately a Russian novel’s worth of accusations and lies.

Job cries. Job curses. Job explodes in tirades of righteous indignation. Job prays with the vehemence of the Psalmist. He argues. He defends himself. He starts blogging and opens a Twitter account and starts blasting the media, the tar and feather crew outside the royal estate, and all the hate and smear blogs popping up all over the kingdom. The climax is often misunderstood, but when God shows up in the whirlwind, this is not the cosmic smackdown it is frequently described as. Yes, God is glorious and wonderful and transcendent, and Job is a puny ant with a righteous bad attitude. Absolutely. But the thing that most commentators miss is the fact that God has a huge fatherly smile on His face. God is not upset with Job. God says at the end of the story that Job was right! Job is vindicated, justified. God says that Job threw a holy tantrum, and well done, my boy, well done. Continue Reading…

In Against Christianity, Bible - Job, Culture, Evangelism, Justice & Mercy, Pastoral Theology, Wisdom