An easily digested slurry?

[This was originally posted several days ago and then lost when Blogger went down - Blogger just now restored it]

Adam Palmer offers a decidedly qualified defense of Rob Bell's Love Wins which is really a criticism of the evangelical reaction to the book:

.... Full disclosure: I don’t really care for Rob Bell, or at least for the media image he conveys. I don’t care for his writing style; I don’t care for his over-earnest speaking delivery; I don’t care for the way he portrays himself as an iconoclast, intentionally stirring the pot of controversy. I really don’t care for the way he charges admission when he tours, so you can buy a ticket to hear him preach.

Which puts me in the uncomfortable position of defending Rob Bell.

Granted, Rob Bell brought this on himself by writing the book he wrote. That’s his deal. He is rabbinical in his approach, asking questions, then answering those questions with other questions. It’s a thought-provoking approach, to be sure, though he inevitably smarms it up with an “ain’t I a stinker?” smirk peering through the hip fonts and sentence fragments.

That said, there’s nothing revolutionary in Love Wins that I hadn’t read before. Imagine putting N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope, C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, and part three of Robert Farrar Capon’s Between Noon and Three into a blender and running it on high until it becomes an easily digestible slurry. But instead of drinking the whole thing, just skim the surface. That’s Love Wins. ....

Bell asks questions that he doesn’t answer, hems and haws, plays a bit of a shell game with Greek translations, but the overall message of the book is this: don’t base your faith on pocketing a “Get Out of Hell Free” card and instead join the redemptive work God is doing in the world right now.

So why does the Christian subculture refuse to let Rob Bell make this point to Christians? Why are they shying away from this particular controversial figure while prominently displaying material from authors that non-evangelical Christians find controversial?.... (more)

iMonk Review Of Love Wins | internetmonk.com

Asking the tough questions

When church numbers are declining Kevin DeYoung suggests that the reason is probably more basic than the worship style:

.... I’m not against changing worship styles. There may be good reasons to do so in some circumstances. But I doubt very much that’s usually the real problem. Instead of assuming that young people will flock to our churches if we drop the organ and plug in the guitar (and we have both at our church), declining denominations and shrinking churches should ask deeper, harder questions:

• Is the gospel faithful preached?
• Is the Bible taught with clarity and passion?
• Are the sermons manifestly rooted in a text of Scripture?
• Do the elders/pastors and deacons meet the qualifications for church office laid out in the New Testament?
• Are the sacraments faithfully administered and protected?
• Is church discipline practiced?
• Do the elders exercise personal care over the flock?
• Are there good relationships among the staff and other leaders?
• Is the worship service put together thoughtfully and carried out with undistracting excellence (as much as possible). ....
  

There are scores of other questions you could ask. These are only a sample. It may be after facing these questions that a church decides to change a few programs or alter a few songs. But until a congregation asks these tough questions, the quick fixes will not fix much of anything. Don’t assume the style is the thing. Check your substance first.

It’s Probably Not the Worship Style – Kevin DeYoung

Fail

Why do so many who are active in their church youth group leave the faith soon after? Drew Dyck at Leadership Journal:

.... I recall my conversation with one young man who described his journey from evangelical to atheist. He had nothing but vitriol for the Christian beliefs of his childhood, but when I asked him about youth group, his voice lifted. "Oh, youth group was a blast! My youth pastor was a great guy."

I was confused. I asked Josh Riebock, a former youth pastor and author of mY Generation, to solve the riddle: if these young people had such a good time in youth group, why did they ditch their faith shortly after heading to college?

His response was simple. "Let's face it," he said. "There are a lot more fun things to do at college than eat pizza."

Good point.

If our strategy is to win young people's allegiance to church by offering better entertainment than the world, then we've picked a losing battle. Entertainment might get kids to church in their teens, but it certainly won't keep them there through their twenties. .... [more]

The Red Bull Gospel | LeadershipJournal.net

Parenting

I'm not a parent and the chances that I could ever be one are about zero. That makes me somewhat reluctant to offer advice to those who are. But I was a child once and I was a teacher of young people for thirty-five years, and I've known several thousand kids, so I do have opinions about parenting — and this paragraph seems right to me. Via Kevin DeYoung [who got it from Collin Hansen], a quotation from David Brooks's The Social Animal about "good enough" parenting:

If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents don’t have to be brilliant psychologists to succeed. They don’t have to be supremely gifted teachers. Most of the stuff parents do with flashcards and special drills and tutorials to hone their kids into perfect achievement machines don’t have any effect at all. Instead, parents just have to be good enough. They have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads. (60-61)

The elements of "good enough" parenting:

• Creating stable and predictable rhythms and routines
  
• Meeting needs with both love and appropriate discipline
• Providing a secure refuge from which to venture out
  
• Being examples of good behavior

One of the hymn paraphrases of the 23rd Psalm ends with these words:

There would I find a settled rest,
While others go and come,
No more a stranger, nor a guest;
But like a child at home.
A "good enough" home seems like just about all anyone could want.

Good Enough – Kevin DeYoung, My Shepherd Will Supply My Need

"Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour..."

Responding to the no doubt well-intentioned idiot who is predicting the exact "day and hour" [one week from today], Phil at Brandywine Books asks the really important question:

If the Lord told your church community that he would take you out of the world and destroy everything on two specific dates (say within a few years), what would your reasonable response be? Would it not be to love others as you love yourself and to love our Lord with all of your heart, mind, and soul? Seriously, how would a defined date for the end of the age change your lifestyle? If you would make dramatic changes, then what's stopping you from doing it today, perhaps that old lie that you have several years left to get it right before you die? [emphasis added]

The first comment adds

I have always thought that if I'm prepared to be hit by a truck on the freeway tomorrow, an event with a significant probability, then I'm also prepared for the event about which no man knows the day or the hour.

Brandywine Books

Easter IV: Where true joys are found

O ALMIGHTY God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men; Grant unto Thy people, that they may love the thing which Thou commandest, and desire that which Thou dost promise; that so, among the sundry and manifold changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed, where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. [Thomas Cranmer]

EVERY good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures. Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: for the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God. Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls. [James 1]

Be Thou my wisdom, and Thou my true word;
I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;
Thou my great Father, I Thy true son;
Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one.
[Be Thou My Vision, 1538.]

"Strength Through Discipline"

One of the difficult aspects of teaching middle class, mid-America high school students about movements like fascism and communism was making real how such ideologies could appeal to ordinary people — much less how such people could become implicated in the crimes associated with the resulting regimes. I recall using a film titled The Wave in the '80's. It was based on a classroom experiment that proved altogether too effective. This article, "Experiment in Fascism at an American High School," describes the real events on which that film was based and about which a new documentary has been produced:

One day in 1967, a Palo Alto high school student asks his history teacher how the German people could have missed the signs of the ongoing genocide being perpetrated by the Nazis. This innocent question ignites an idea, and teacher Ron Jones launches a classroom “simulation,” or experiment, to illustrate how good Germans — how anyone — could fall prey to totalitarian thinking. ....

Jones reorganized his classroom that week into a simulation of a prototypical fascist youth group. He enforced physical discipline and uniformity in the students’ posture and speech per his first-day dictum, “Strength Through Discipline.” He meant it to end there, he now avers, but students were eager for more. He added more simplistic, effective sloganeering on the following days: strength through community, through action, through unity and finally through pride. Strength through Community meant, for instance, that students were to share grades. Top students helped the lower students. ....

On day 5, when he finally exposed the movement as a lesson meant to teach the students that they were no better or worse than the Germans, the young students fell apart in a fog of betrayal and emotional panic. .... [more]

Experiment in Fascism at an American High School: The Lesson Plan @ The Newport Beach Film Festival » LFM: Libertas Film Magazine

Corliss Fitz Randolph

Corliss Fitz Randolph

Current Seventh Day Baptist Historian, Nick Kersten's announcement of the Seventh Day Baptist Historical Society's annual membership meeting this weekend came with this picture of Corliss Fitz Randolph [1863-1954], the founder of the society, a president of the General Conference, trustee of Alfred University, author of, among other things, Seventh Day Baptists in West Virginia [1905], and editor of, and contributor to, Seventh Day Baptists in Europe and America [1910]. It seems entirely appropriate that one who contributed so much to the preservation of denominational history should be remembered by those who continue his work.

Mr. Fitz Randolph was largely responsible for collecting many of the materials now residing in the archives and museum of the society. Plainfield, New Jersey, was the location of the society's first museum [now in Janesville, Wisconsin] and Corliss Fitz Randolph it's curator. I recall my father telling of coming over from his home in NYC to work with Mr. Fitz Randolph in the museum. I received the impression that he could be rather garrulous. But it isn't unusual for those who have accumulated a great deal of information interesting to themselves to assume that it will be equally interesting to others.

How to get into Heaven before you die

Dallas Willard interviewed:

When it is better to be undecided

C Michael Patton gives us "The Creation-Evolution Debate in a Nutshell", describing the positions "Young Earth Creationism" through "Gap Theory Creationism," "Time-Relative Creationism," "Old Earth Creationism" to "Theistic Evolution" and "Intelligent Design." In each case he summarizes and explains — quite fairly I think — and includes a short list of well-known Christian personalities who have held each view. He closes:

I believe that one can be a legitimate Christian and hold to any one of these views. While I lean in the direction of some sort of Time-Relative creation, I only do this because my main contention is that it is very unwise to be dogmatic. Though I used to be favorable to it, I now reject methodological naturalism, believing it leads to preset conclusions that end up being awkward, unnecessary, and very unscientific. Therefore, though I rejected it at one time, I have come to accept ID as a responsible approach to these matters.

In the end, I believe that the best anyone can do is lean in one direction or another. Being overly dogmatic about these issues expresses, in my opinion, more ignorance than knowledge. Each position has many apparent difficulties and many virtues.

While I believe this is an issue we should continue to discuss with excitement and hope, this is not an issue, in my opinion, that should fracture Christian fellowship.

The Creation-Evolution Debate in a Nutshell | Parchment and Pen

"By hiding between the covers of a book"

Via Alan Jacobs, E.B. White on why a library is a good place:

A library is many things. It's a place to go, to get in out of the rain. It's a place to go if you want to sit and think. But particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books. .... Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together — just the two of you. A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people — people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

Many other letters in addition to White's here sent by well-known authors in 1971 upon the occasion of the opening of a library in Troy, Michigan.

Text Patterns: a library is a good place to go

Worship is something we do

Many of those of us who have engaged in the "worship wars" have entirely missed the real issue. The real issue isn't about what style of worship we enjoy most or what we think may be attractive to others but whether it is, in fact, worship. Worship is about God and the fundamental issue is whether what we do in worship directs our thoughts toward Him. This from an interview Skye Jethani conducted with Chuck Swindoll:

Jethani: So the issue is not innovation or tradition, but why we're using a particular method or technology.

Swindoll: Exactly. I have been to church services, and you have too, where the only people who knew the songs were the band. I'm not edified. I'm just watching a show.

And they're not interested in teaching me the songs either. They just sing louder to make up for the fact that no one else is singing. Loud doesn't help. Why do they do that? Do you want me to be impressed with how loud you are singing, how accomplished you are? I'm not. I'm not here to be impressed with you. I'm here to fall back in love with Christ.

Innovation doesn't have to be loud or a gimmick. How about silence? Most people get no silence in their world. Imagine three or four minutes of silence. No music. No background distractions.

...[B]e innovative. I'm not against screens, or new songs, or innovation. I just don't like the gimmicks. I want to know when worship is over that that leader's sole purpose was to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ. He's not important to himself, and I'm not.

Here's what troubles me: I don't know why leaders younger than me aren't saying this. .... Why aren't they raising questions and showing some concern for where the church is heading with its focus on media and headcount and passive spectating? I know one church that has 17 people on their media staff and only 12 on the pastoral staff.

When a church is spending more of its budget on media than shepherding, something is out of whack. We have gotten things twisted around. My book is simply saying come back, folks. I'm not against innovation. But we need more wisdom. [more]

A summary of the fourth chapter of Swindoll's book, The Church Awakening: An Urgent Call for Renewal, "examines how worship should be something we do, not fight about."

Chuck Swindoll: We're Creating Spectators Not Worshipers | Out of Ur | Conversations for Ministry Leaders

Best. Conspiracy. Ever

Via Joe Carter, some Lutheran humor:

Never forget

The GULAG was the Soviet network of slave labor camps and exile communities created by Lenin, expanded by Stalin, elements of which continued until the demise of the USSR. Here is a website that documents one aspect and period of its history — the experience of those "resettled" from eastern Europe to Siberia during the years of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath.

From 1939 to 1953, nearly one million people were deported to the Gulag from the European territories annexed by the USSR at the start of the Second World War and those that came under Soviet influence after the War: some to work camps but most as forced settlers in villages in Siberia and Central Asia.

An international team of researchers has collected 160 statements from former deportees, photographs of their lives, documents from private and public archives and films. .... [the site]

Related: Hollywood discovers the GULAG, Millions of dead, Lenin's great achievement

Homepage | Mémoires européennes DU GOULAG

Easter III: Daily endeavor

ALMIGHTY God, who hast given Thine only Son to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin, and also an ensample of godly life; Give us grace that we may always most thankfully receive that His inestimable benefit, and also daily endeavour ourselves to follow the blessed steps of His most holy life; through the same Thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. [Thomas Cranmer]

THIS is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully. For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God. For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps: who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth: who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously: who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed. For ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls. [I Peter 2]

God be in my head, and in my understanding;
God be in mine eyes, and in my looking;
God be in my mouth, and in my speaking;
God be in my heart, and in my thinking;
God be at mine end, and at my departing.
[Sar­um Prim­er, 1538.]

Pooh is male....

"Study Suggests That Winnie the Pooh Isn't Gender Equal."  Pooh is male — but is he masculine?

A comprehensive study of traditional children’s book characters has determined that Pooh Corner may be rife with gender inequality.

Dr. Janice McCabe, a sociologist at Florida State University, examined nearly 6,000 children’s books between 1900 and 2000 and determined the stories have a definitive gender bias and a disproportionate representation of genders.

“We found that males are represented more frequently than females in the titles and the central characters in the book,” McCabe told Fox News Radio.

Fifty seven percent of the children’s stories featured male characters, 31 percent featured female characters and the remainder had animal characters of unknown gender identity, according to the study. .... [more]

Study Suggests That Winnie the Pooh Isn't Gender Equal, But Does it Matter? - FoxNews.com

Prester John

Lars Walker provides an appropriately qualified appreciation of John Buchan's Prester John (1910).

Another Buchan lover (she places him between Tolkien and Chesterton as her "second favorite") notes that "famous John Buchan fans include CS Lewis, HP Lovecraft, Ian Fleming (natch), Mary Stewart, ND Wilson, Alfred Hitchcock, JFK, and Graham Greene."

I've enjoyed all of Buchan's thrillers, including Prester John, but, as Walker writes, "Buchan’s Prester John is a Great Story, Marred by Racial Attitudes":

John Buchan was one of the inventors of the modern thriller novel.... His most famous work is The 39 Steps, adapted out of all recognition by Alfred Hitchcock, but he wrote other excellent novels. I’m particularly fond of the Richard Hannay books.

Prester John is not part of that series. It will never be widely popular again because, fine as it is purely as a story, it strongly promotes attitudes toward race which are (rightly) offensive to the modern mind.

The hero of the book is David Crawfurd (sic)....

The action gets intense, particularly because David is the rashest of young men, consistently running into danger instead of away from it (sometimes straining the reader’s credulity). But Buchan knew the trick of keeping his characters going fast enough to divert the reader from improbabilities in the plot. The climax in a secret mountain cave is fully worthy of H. Rider Haggard.

The problem...is the racial attitudes. .... I’m no booster of the present age as opposed to the 19th Century generally, but on this subject we’re right and they were wrong.

This is the difference between white and black [David says], the gift of responsibility, the power of being in a little way a king; and so long as we know this and practise it, we will rule not in Africa alone but wherever there are dark men who live only for the day and their own bellies.

Digressions like that fatally mar what is otherwise a well-written and exciting old-fashioned adventure story. Adults who can discriminate will enjoy it. Children should be kept away from it. (more)

The illustration is from an ex-library copy I have and is probably the one to which Walker refers in his review.

Buchan’s “Prester John” Is a Great Story, Marred by Racial Attitudes | The American Culture

More on the KJV

A friend highly recommends KJB: The Book That Changed the World, a documentary about the historical, and particularly the political, circumstances surrounding the creation of the King James Version. It is narrated by John Rhys-Davies, the actor who played Gimli in the films of Lord of the Rings. In an interview also on the disc Rhys-Davies comments that "It's a special Bible, written at a special time, a time when the language was actually molten, when language could have gone any way... they shaped it thus."

The trailer for the film:

More on the KJV from Thomas S. Kidd, "If It's Not King James, It's Not the Bible":

C.S. Lewis...argued against the notion of the Bible as literature. "I cannot help suspecting . . . that those who read the Bible as literature do not read the Bible," he said.

The Bible is primarily the story of man's sin and God's work of redemption, and no version has put that story in such compelling prose as the KJV. The days of the KJV's dominance are gone, but in the Bible's most famous verses, its cadences reverberate. As John 3:16 says in the King James, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." That still sounds like the Bible to me.

"If It's Not King James, It's Not the Bible"

"A tragic shortage of selfishness"

David Bentley Hart is less than pleased that Atlas Shrugged has appeared on the screen: "I suppose I should have seen it coming. It’s the fashion of the moment. Ayn Rand and her idiotic “Objectivism” are enjoying a—well, I won’t call it a renaissance, so let’s say a recrudescence." He disagrees with Rand's "philosophy" ["For instance, I like the Sermon on the Mount. She regarded its prescriptions as among the vilest ever uttered. I suspect that charity really is the only way to avoid wasting one’s life in a desert of sterile egoism. She regarded Christian morality as a poison that had polluted the will of Western man with its ethos of parasitism and orgiastic self-oblation. And, simply said, I cannot find much common ground with someone who believed that the principal source of human woe over the last twenty centuries has been a tragic shortage of selfishness"], but at least as much he finds her aesthetic lacking ["I know one shouldn’t expect much from a writer who thought Mickey Spillane a greater artist than Shakespeare"].

Before Atlas Shrugged was The Fountainhead and it, too, was filmed — a major studio film with well-known actors. From Hart's "The Trouble with Ayn Rand":

.... Remember, the chief reason that The Fountainhead is among the most hilariously bad films ever made is that it is so slavishly faithful to the novel and to Rand’s screenplay. .... For most of the movie, the three leads—Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, and Raymond Massey—seem to be trying to outdo one another in emotional and facial paralysis. Of course, Cooper never could act; but it is positively painful to watch Neal and Massey struggling to achieve some semblance of dramatic plausibility.

The film’s defining moment for me is probably the first meeting between Dominique Francon (Neal) and Howard Roark (Cooper) at the gala opening of a house the latter has designed. “I admire your work, more than anything I’ve ever seen,” Dominique announces without wasting any words on small talk about the weather or the hors d’oeuvres. “You may realize that this is not a tie, but a gulf, between us. . . . I wish I had never seen your building. It’s the things we admire or want that enslave us, and I’m not easy to bring into submission.” (The flirtatious little gamine.) Really, one has to see the scene to appreciate quite how awful it is.

But, then again, there’s also the conversation between the same two characters later that night: “They hate you for the greatness of your achievement,” Dominique tells Roark in a tone that oddly seems to combine erotic agitation with profound catatonia. “They hate you for your integrity. They hate you because they know they can neither corrupt nor ruin you.” (Bloody they—I never could stand those swine.) By the way, in the context of the film this is actually a kind of foreplay. The whole time she’s speaking, Dominique is gazing at Roark longingly, with an inviting come-hither-and-rape-me look in her eyes (which is just what the gallant Roark does a little later on).

Who can say what the most ridiculous moment really is, though? There’s hardly a scene without a rich vein of unintentional comedy. Perhaps it’s Roark’s demented address to the jury at his trial: “The creator stands on his own judgment. The parasite follows the opinions of others. The creator thinks. The parasite copies. The creator produces. The parasite loots. The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.” And so on.

There, of course, one has the essential oafishness of Rand’s view of reality. For her, the world really was starkly divided between creators and parasites, and the vast majority of humanity belonged to the ranks of the latter. “I came here to say I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life,” Roark continues, “nor to any part of my energy, nor to any achievement of mine.” .... (more)

"The Trouble with Ayn Rand"

Religion in this republic

David Sehat, the author of The Myth of American Religious Freedom, gives us "Five myths about church and state":

1. The Constitution has always protected religious freedom.
2. The founders’ faith matters.
3. Christian conservatives have only recently taken over politics.
4. America is more secular than it used to be.
5. Liberals are anti-religious.

The reasons he gives for each of those statements being false are explained in the column and I find his explanations convincing in every case except the last — the most recent "liberal" he cites is from 1952. I fear liberal attitudes have moved on a bit since then. In some circles, at least, the desire for freedom from religion — public religious expression, public religious speech— has become the priority.

David Sehat: Five myths about church and state