The second section of my credo deals with the character and attributes of God—what God is like—including some further discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity. (The link to the first section can be found here.)
Update: read the first section here and the second section here.
The father of modern conservatism died this morning of emphysema at the age of 82. The founder of National Review, the host of “Firing Line,” the man largely responsible for untangling the conservative movement from the likes of the John Birch Society, the man who did more than anyone else to make the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan possible—the man who, as William Kristol said, “legitimized conservatism as an intellectual movement and therefore as a political movement”—is gone. He leaves behind a political landscape vastly different than the one he found in 1955 when, in the first issue of NR, he committed himself to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop”; and while I know those on the left will disagree, I firmly believe that landscape is the better for his efforts—as is evidenced, I think, in the fact that even many on the left loved and respected him. (The same cannot be said, alas, for many of those who consider themselves his heirs.) Perhaps more importantly, he leaves behind a great many people whose lives were personally enriched by his friendship, leadership, guidance, and assistance, and a great many more who were richly blessed by his work. He was a great American, and he will be greatly missed.
This isn’t a hymn that’s commonly associated with Lent, at least in my experience, but I think it fits this season; I also think it’s a magnificent text that benefits from one of the most beautiful melodies the human heart has ever produced (at least in this life).
I Cannot TellI cannot tell why He whom angels worship
Should set His love upon the sons of men,
Or why, as Shepherd, He should seek the wanderers
To bring them back, they know not how our when.
But this I know, that He was born of Mary
When Bethlehem’s manger was His only home,
And that He lived at Nazareth and labored,
And so the Savior, Savior of the world, is come.I cannot tell how silently He suffered
As with His peace He graced this place of tears,
Or how His heart upon the cross was broken,
The crown of pain to three and thirty years.
But this I know, He heals the broken-hearted
And stays our sin and calms our lurking fear,
And lifts the burden from the heavy-laden,
For yet the Savior, Savior of the world, is here.I cannot tell how He will win the nations,
How He will claim His earthly heritage,
Or satisfy the needs and aspirations
Of East and West, of sinner and of sage.
But this I know, all flesh shall see His glory,
And He shall reap the harvest He has sown,
And some glad day His sun will shine in splendor
When He the Savior, Savior of the world, is known.I cannot tell how all the lands shall worship
When at His bidding every storm is stilled,
Or who can say how great the jubilation
When all the hearts of men with love are filled.
But this I know, the skies will thrill with rapture,
And myriad, myriad voices sing,
And earth to heaven, and heaven to earth will answer:
“At last the Savior, Savior of the world, is King!”Words: William Y. Fullerton
Music: Traditional Irish melody
LONDONDERRY AIR, 11.10.11.10.11.10.11.12
Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them. And when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to him, saying, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”—Luke 18:15-17, ESVMaybe it’s just me, but I think we find it easier to ding the disciples here than we ought to. After all, we know they shouldn’t have done this—Jesus tells us so—but too often, we don’t stop and think about why they did it. We don’t have to, because we don’t hear what they heard: babies crying (if not screaming) as their mothers struggle through the crowds to get to Jesus; bigger kids running around, shrieking, laughing, crying, throwing themselves on the ground; probably a few of them coming up to Jesus, climbing up in his lap, tugging on his robe, and asking him off-the-wall questions. We don’t hear the disruptions or see the distractions, because they’re between the lines—but kids being kids, you can bet this wasn’t a quiet, peaceful scene. If you stop to think about it, you can see where the disciples were coming from. No doubt they saw all these kids as interruptions, disruptions, distractions, interfering with the real work Jesus was doing—not as part of that work; and so they tried to push the kids out of the way so Jesus could get on with the important stuff.Jesus, of course, rebukes them for that, and in the process he identifies the root problem underlying their attitude: pride. Children have no social status, so they can’t do anything for you; if Jesus is spending his time with children, that’s time taken away from teaching and ministering to adults who do have status in society, who can increase his social standing and the respect he receives as an important and influential teacher and scholar—and thus, not incidentally, raise the standing of his disciples, as well. Part of their concern, Jesus sees, is that they want people around Israel to respect them, to look up to them, to admire them—“See Thomas over there? He’s studying under Jesus.” “Oooh, impressive!”—and Jesus taking the time to bless and teach children does absolutely nothing for that, because children don’t really count. That’s not to say they weren’t valued, or that they weren’t loved—they were; but they had no legal standing, no social standing, no reputation, no right to their own opinions, indeed, no rights to be considered at all. As such, welcoming children just wasn’t a priority for the disciples.You can see where they’re coming from, but Jesus will not let their resistance stand. “Let the children come,” he says, “and don’t hinder them.” Let them come, because the kingdom of God is for them, too; let them come, because as Matthew 18 tells us, whoever welcomes a child in Jesus’ name welcomes Jesus, while anyone who drives them away bears some of the responsibility for their sin, and thus is open to judgment. This isn’t just a matter of bringing them to church and warehousing them in the basement doing crafts while the grownups are in worship, either. That kind of approach brings children to church but not to Christ; I’m convinced it’s much of the reason why we see so few people between the ages of 18 and 30 in our churches in this country, because they’ve grown up in a church that, from the only perspective they’ve been given, has no Christ in it.No, letting the children come to Jesus is a two-part responsibility, I think. One, it means loving them the way Jesus does—which means the focus has to be on what’s best for them, not what’s most comfortable and convenient for the grownups. This is harder than it sounds, because we have a real pattern in this country of doing things in the name of children that aren’t really about them. It’s all well and good to say that children are the future, but too often that comes with the unspoken corollary that we grownups are the present. We need to begin by acknowledging that our children count in the present, too; the kids in the church are our equals in the body of Christ, and “Love your neighbor as yourself” and “Consider others more significant than yourself” apply to them just as much as they do to anyone else.The other part of letting the children come to Jesus is discipling them—and he himself told us what he expects from us there. Here’s the Great Commission as translated by Eugene Peterson in The Message:
“Go out and train everyone you meet, far and near, in this way of life, marking them by baptism in the threefold name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then instruct them in the practice of all I have commanded you. I’ll be with you as you do this, day after day after day, right up to the end of the age.”
Children’s ministry is not about keeping children out of sight, out of earshot, and out from underfoot; it’s not even about teaching them to be nice to each other and quiet in church, though those things have their place in the process. It’s about training them in this way of life, instructing them in how to live out everything that Jesus has commanded us, teaching them what it means to follow Jesus, day after day after day, week after week after week, right up to the end of the age. It’s about, in other words, nothing less than discipleship, raising the children of the church to live as saints of God; it is, or should be, all of a piece with what we do in the rest of our ministry as the church. And there’s no clause in there to say, “Only the easy ones—only the ones who already know how to behave—only the ones you’re already comfortable having around.” Indeed, the ones who make us most uncomfortable, the ones who haven’t been taught how to behave, the ones full of anger they don’t know how to express against parents who have betrayed them and let them down, though they’re the hardest to reach, are the ones we have to try hardest to love; because if we don’t take them in, who will?
Atheism is a profitable subject these days, having launched a number of bestsellers—and not only by the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Dr. Richard Dawkins; the notoriety of their books has created corresponding interest in books by Dr. Alister McGrath (The Dawkins Delusion) and the Rev. Tim Keller (The Reason for God), among others. Indeed, the Rev. Keller’s book currently stands at #18 on the New York Times bestseller list and #56 overall on Amazon.com, which wouldn’t have happened without the conversation Dr. Dawkins et al. began. There is more of a market for serious apologetics in this country than there has been probably in decades, and we owe it all to enemies of the faith.
As I stop to consider that fact, I can’t help thinking that for all the outrage from some quarters directed at folks like Hitchens, Dr. Dawkins, Sam Harris and Dr. Daniel Dennett, the end result of their efforts may well be to boost the church rather than atheism. I’ve protested before the intellectual shoddiness of the “new atheists” in their engagement with theology, philosophy and history; what I hadn’t noticed was how shoddy their atheism itself is. Georgetown’s John F. Haught, writing in The Christian Century, points out that they essentially want to throw out God but keep all the trappings; Marx would have called them incurably bourgeois, and there’s no doubt that they lack either the insight (into what they’re really asking) or the courage (to face that insight) of older atheists like Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre. Hitchens and his confréres think their critique of religion is original and radical, and are quite impressed with themselves for it (as indeed they seem to be in general); but the truth is, compared to Nietzsche in particular, they’re pikers. Their atheism, far from being the evidence of maturity they appear to believe it to be, is essentially adolescent in character, founded less on a serious engagement with the world than on a visceral rejection of things they don’t like. On an intellectual level, it simply doesn’t measure up to the wealth of Christian apologetics; and if reading God Is Not Great or The God Delusion spurs people to go on to read The Dawkins Delusion or The Reason for God, I can’t help thinking that the church will come out best of it in the end.
This post of Barry’s, in response to a meme that’s going around, got me thinking. Church-bashing is a popular thing, and with a fair bit of reason; even the best of churches are human institutions that screw things up and hurt people sometimes, and there are a lot of churches out there which are far from the best. I know there are a lot of folks out there who have been badly burned by churches; I was part of a congregation for several years that had been planted to minister to people who’d been hurt by the church and never wanted to go back. Even for me, remaining in the church is an act of faith; though most laypeople don’t seem to realize it, any pastor will tell you that churches can abuse their pastors just as easily as they can abuse their members (or perhaps even more easily), and I’ve already been burned pretty good once. There were times I thought about leaving the ministry, and times I thought about leaving the church altogether; it was only the grace and the goodness of God that kept me from giving up on everything, so I have an idea where folks are coming from.
I don’t stay in the church because I have found it to be a wonderful place and a wonderful experience; taken all in all, I’ve found it quite uneven. Rather, I stay in the church as an act of faith that God meant what he said when he called us his people, his family, his body, and promised that not even the gates of Hell would prevail against us—and I say that as one who knows full well that those gates threaten us from within as well as from without. However ambivalent I may sometimes be, it remains true through all that Jesus loves the church, and died for her, and that we are called to follow his lead.
All of which is to say, as much as I understand the stones people throw at the church (having fired off a few myself at times), I do believe the church needs to be defended; and I say that not because I’m in the business, of the guild, as it were, but rather despite that fact. However badly we screw it up, as we often do, this is still something God has ordained, and it’s still important that we gather together in worship and fellowship and ministry. Yes, that means friction, which is unpleasant; but that friction is one of the things God uses to sand away our rough edges and polish our strengths. True community—where, as Kurt Vonnegut beautifully said, “the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured”—is not an easy thing, which is why far too many churches don’t try all that hard to create it; but for all that, it’s important for our well-being, and if we will commit to it, it’s a beautiful gift of God.
Unfortunately, we resist it—and this isn’t just a fault of “the institutional church,” it’s also a fault of many of those who leave it—because it challenges us. I do not say this is the reason everyone leaves—not by a long shot—and I’m certainly not presuming to attribute motives to Barry or Erin or indeed any other specific person; but I do say that it’s something I’ve seen (in past churches of which I’ve been a part, among others). Living in community challenges our selfishness, our certainty of our own ideas, and our particular ways of doing things, and a lot of people don’t like that. We tend to want to hang around people who reinforce all those things (which is why the church-growth types advocate building churches out of people who’re as much alike as possible); part of the job of the church is precisely that we challenge each other on such matters, but that’s not something we find comfortable, and so we tend to shy away from it.
Which is where, oddly enough, I come from in defending preaching. I certainly agree with Barry’s point on the value of discussion and conversation, and I believe that needs to be a major part of the teaching ministry of any church—including something many ministers do (and more have tried to do), discussion and conversation about the sermon. And yet, I do believe that the sermon also has an important place in that ministry. I will grant without argument that “sermons can be dangerous things”—but I will also say that it’s neither my practice nor my experience that “you are only exposed to one point of view, and it is usually presented as the only valid one.” Of course there are preachers who operate that way; I’ve sat under such preaching just like everyone else has. There are more preachers, though, who are so afraid of conflict that they go to the opposite extreme, leaving no punch unpulled and no thought unqualified. And there are a lot of us in the middle, too, who are careful in our preaching to lay out various points of view, to argue respectfully for our own, and to make the limits of our own understanding clear.
That said, as much as I agree there is no place for the dictatorship of the pulpit, there is a need for people who preach with real authority—authority which comes not from them, but from their total submission to the will of God. If we look at Jesus, we see that he consistently challenged people to see what they didn’t want to see and understand what they didn’t want to understand; and the great problem with a teaching ministry that relies solely on discussion and conversation is that it makes it too easy for us to avoid hearing what we don’t want to hear. One of the roles of preaching—probably the most difficult—is to bring people face to face, lovingly and graciously, with where Jesus is challenging them. This isn’t (and can’t be) something we do by our own strength, it’s something the Holy Spirit does through us, and it begins with letting him challenge us as we read the Scriptures; to try to manufacture that in our own strength is spiritual malpractice, pulpit abuse; it’s simply our responsibility as preachers to open ourselves up for God to grab hold of us and challenge us, and then share that as faithfully as we can with the body of Christ, and let God use that as he will. For that kind of preaching, there is no true substitute. For any other kind of preaching, any substitute will do, but for that kind of preaching, there truly is no true substitute.
So Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, responded to criticism of the paper’s recent piece on John McCain by . . . apologizing? Explaining that they have actual evidence for their contentions, and giving good reasons why they didn’t print it? Retracting the story? No; he responded by blaming the readers.
Frankly, I was a little surprised by how few readers saw what was, to us, the larger point of the story. . . . [that] this man who prizes his honor above all things and who appreciates the importance of appearances, also has a history of being sometimes careless about the appearance of impropriety, about his reputation.
Now, leave aside for a moment whether you believe this defense or not, or indeed whether you believe it qualifies as a defense or not, and just look at what he’s saying. First, Keller says that Sen. McCain “prizes his honor above all things,” which isn’t quite true but is certainly close enough for journalistic work. Then he says that Sen. McCain “appreciates the importance of appearances,” and then that the point of the story is that the senator actually has a pattern of not appreciating the importance of appearances. It would seem, then, that the assertion that Sen. McCain “appreciates the importance of appearances” rests not on the senator’s behavior, but on the preceding statement that he “prizes his honor.”
In other words, if I’m parsing this correctly, Keller’s defense of his paper’s story rests on the assumption that caring about honor means caring about appearances—which is to say, that honor is the same thing as reputation. I’m not surprised to find the NYT thinking this way, but I very much doubt that Sen. McCain makes this mistake; indeed, if he did, he would never have ended up with the public persona he has. You don’t earn the label of a straight-shooting maverick who’ll offend your friends as soon as your enemies if you’re concerned about appearances; that one is earned precisely by caring about the reality of honor so much that you’re willing to let your reputation swing in the wind. As the sci-fi/fantasy author Lois McMaster Bujold has one of her characters say,
Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. Guard your honor; let your reputation fall where it may.
I think Sen. McCain knows the truth of that; demonstrably, the New York Times doesn’t. We’d be better off if they did.
At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”—Matthew 18:1-4, NIVOver the centuries, people have taken Jesus’ words a lot of different ways; as the commentator Ulrich Luz has dryly noted, “every age to a great degree has read into the text its own understanding of what a child is. . . . For the most part the interpreters ask not what children are like; they ask instead what children should be. More often than not they read the text as if it said: ‘Become like good, well-behaved children.’ . . . Only infrequently do [they] remember that actual children can be quite different.”Part of the problem is with that word translated “little.” When we see “little children,” we think “young children,” but that’s not what’s in view here; what the word really means is “lowly”—one who is “insignificant, impotent, weak, and . . . in poor circumstances.” The point here is that children in that society had no social standing—nor for that matter legal standing; they were essentially property of their parents—and in fact weren’t quite regarded as fully human; they were seen as incomplete people, still unfinished. They were insigificant, physically weak, legally powerless, and utterly dependent on others. That’s why, elsewhere in the gospels, the disciples didn’t want Jesus “wasting” his time on them. But Jesus, as he so often does, flips that on his disciples and says, essentially, “I’m not wasting my time at all—you are, because your focus is in the wrong place. You’re worried about what the rich and the powerful folk think of you, and wanting to be like them—wanting to be great in the world’s eyes—when you ought to be looking at these children and learning from their example. You want to be great in the kingdom of God? Become like them—choose to be lowly. Set aside the world’s standards of importance, love those who can’t do anything for you, stop seeking honor and significance in the world’s eyes, acknowledge that you are wholly dependent on God and place all your trust in him, and serve others. Come to God not because you think you’ve earned it, but simply in the confidence that you are loved even though you haven’t.” That’s the life Jesus calls us to live; that’s the life of a child of his kingdom.
Kudos to Chris Rice for this one—one of his best, I think.
You Don’t Have to YellSo-called reality,
Right there on my TV;
If that’s how life’s supposed to be, well,
Somebody’s lyin’.
The camera’s on and we can tell,
To keep your fame, you have to yell,
‘Cause tensions build, and products sell, and
We’re all buyin’.
I hope we’re smarter than this . . .Everybody take a breath;
Why are all your faces red?
We’re missin’ all the words you said;
You don’t have to yell.
Draw your lines and choose your side,
‘Cause many things are worth the fight,
But louder doesn’t make you right;
You don’t have to yell.
Oh, you don’t have to yell.I tuned in to hear the news—
I don’t want your point of view;
If that’s the best that you can do, then
Something’s missin’.
Experts on whatever side,
You plug your ears, you scream your lines;
You claim to have an open mind, but
Nobody’s listenin’.
Don’t you think we’re smarter than this?Chorus
Everybody take a breath;
Why are all your faces red?
We’re missin’ all the words you said;
You don’t have to yell.
(If everyone will take the step,
Back away and count to ten,
Clear your mind and start again,
We won’t have to yell.)
Draw your lines and choose your side,
‘Cause many things are worth the fight,
But louder doesn’t make you right;
You don’t have to yell.
Oh, you don’t have to yell.Words and music: Chris Rice
© 2006 Clumsy Fly Music
From the album What a Heart Is Beating For, by Chris Rice
It’s been interesting reading the avalanche of media commentary on the New York Times‘ would-be hatchet job on Senator John McCain; at bottom, they mostly seem to come down to the conclusion that the Grey Lady just didn’t have the goods, and shouldn’t have let itself be stampeded into running the story without them. At this point, it looks like little harm has been done to the senator’s well-earned reputation as the most difficult man on Capitol Hill. Perhaps more interesting, though, has been watching the McCain campaign’s response, and its sequelae. Almost immediately, they said they were “going to war with the New York Times,” and they have, with deadly efficiency; he was sharp enough to hire Robert Bennett, a veteran of D.C.’s brutal infighting, to represent him, and Bennett has been particularly effective at dismantling the Times‘ case.
The campaign’s goal has been not merely to defuse this story, but to use it to bring the senator’s conservative critics on board. It’s been working, because at the same time as the campaign has been using this to reel them in, conservative pundits like Rush Limbaugh have also been trying to use the NYT’s attack—to pull Sen. McCain in a more conservative direction. The message is clear (and Limbaugh made it explicit): “Stop trying to be liberal enough to keep the media happy with you—if you’re the Republican nominee, they’re going to hate you and try to take you down regardless. Stand up and be a conservative—you might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a goat.” I think it will work to some extent (I’ve argued before that conservatives can expect this, after all); the interesting thing will be to see to what extent, and how quickly. In any case, watching the maneuvering between the campaign and the conservative media establishment, each trying to leverage this story to shift the other, is a fascinating lesson in how you play the game of politics in this country. One more for the textbooks.
Update: David Brooks has an extremely interesting column in today’s Times on a longstanding, deep, and bitter rift between Sen. McCain’s two long-time chief advisors—his campaign manager, Rick Davis, and the one source mentioned by name in the original Times piece, John Weaver. Though it isn’t clear how, it seems very likely that this vicious rivalry played some part in the story.
