Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Song of the Week

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Most people know this hymn, but most of those who know it don’t know it the way John Newton wrote it.

Amazing Grace
Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear,
The hour I first believed.

Through many dangers, toils, and snares,
I have already come;
‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promised good to me,
His Word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease,
I shall possess, within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow;
The sun forbear to shine;
But GOD, who called me here below,
Will be forever mine.

Words: John Newton
Music: traditional American melody from Carrell and Clayton’s Virginia Harmony, 1831
AMAZING GRACE, C.M.

Ministry as trinitarian work

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I noted last month that I was looking forward to reading Dr. Andrew Purves’ book The Crucifixion of Ministry: Surrendering Our Ambitions to the Service of Christ, and had been ever since reading a version of the book’s introduction in Theology Matters. It’s not a long book, only 149 pages, but I read it slowly; it’s dense material, requiring thought and reflection and intentional engagement. I’m still processing it, and I expect I will be for a while.

At the moment, though, I’m only doing so indirectly. One of the blurbs on the back of Dr. Purves’ book is from Dr. Stephen Seamands, a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary; the blurb reminded me that his book Ministry in the Image of God: The Trinitarian Shape of Christian Service had been sitting on my shelf, and my to-read list, for quite some time. On my last trip, then, I made sure to toss it in my bag so I could start reading it once I finished Dr. Purves’ book. It proved to be a wonderful pairing.

The core of Dr. Purves’ argument is that ministry isn’t something we do, because our own ministries aren’t redemptive; only the ministry of Christ is redemptive. Thus he writes, “The first and central question in thinking about ministry is this: What is Jesus up to? That leads to the second question: How do we get ‘in’ on Jesus’ ministry, on what he’s up to? The issue is not: How does Jesus get ‘in’ on our ministries?” We need to understand the work of ministry in light of “the classical doctrines of the vicarious humanity (and ministry) of Christ and our participation in Christ through the bond of the Holy Spirit,” and understand that true ministry, redemptive ministry, happens not through our work but through Christ working in and through us. Thus Dr. Purves speaks of “the crucifixion of ministry,” the displacement and death of our own ministry in favor of the ministry of Jesus.

Where Dr. Seamands’ book is proving to be such a wonderful complement to this is in the fact that he makes the same point but sets it in a trinitarian context. He agrees that, as he puts it, “Ministry . . . is not so much asking Christ to join us in our ministry as we offer him to others; ministry is participating with Christ in his ongoing ministry as he offers himself to others through us. . . . The ministry we have entered is meant to be an extension of his. In fact, all authentic Christian ministry participates in Christ’s ongoing ministry. Ministry is essentially about our joining Christ in his ministry, not his joining us in ours.”

Where Dr. Purves focuses on unpacking that truth, however—and rightly so, since its implications for how we minister are significant—Dr. Seamands broadens the picture: “The ministry we have entered is the ministry of Jesus Christ, the Son, to the Father, through the Holy Spirit, for the sake of the church and the world.” As he notes, Jesus’ ministry on Earth was directed to and guided by the will of the Father, rather than being driven by the needs, desires, demands and complaints of the people around him. “Of course, Jesus often met human needs and requests, but . . . they did not dictate the direction of his ministry; his ministry to the Father did.” This is a profoundly freeing thought for those of us who too often find ourselves captives to the wills and whims of people in our congregations—which I suspect is most of us in pastoral ministry, at least some of the time.

In discussing the role of the Spirit, at least in the first chapter (I’m not that far along in the book as yet), Dr. Seamands focuses on the fact that “only through the Spirit can we discover what the Father is doing,” and thus keep the work we’re doing oriented to the Father rather than to the church and the world. This is certainly critically true, and he’s right to emphasize the importance of surrendering ourselves to the Spirit’s guidance and leading; but I think he underemphasizes the fact that it’s also only by the Spirit’s empowering that we can in fact “get ‘in’ on Jesus’ ministry,” because it’s the Spirit who unites us with Christ and fills us with the power of God. Without the Spirit filling us by connecting us with God who is the source of all life, we have no power to do anything beyond our own skills and hard work; and as Dr. Seamands notes, “ministry . . . demands more than our best, more than anything we have to offer. To participate in the ongoing ministry of Jesus, to do what the Father is doing, we must be filled with the Holy Spirit.”

Between these two books, I suspect I’m going to be spending a lot of time thinking about these things, and their implications for the work to which God has called me within his church. I would invite you to do the same.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio . . .”

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Unexplained Blue Cloud Floats, Darts Around Customers At Gas Station

I don’t even know what to say about that except—that’s really weird. I guess it’s a salutary reminder, though, that we really don’t know as much as we think we do. Hamlet was right: there really are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy (at least, most of our philosophies).

The spirit of the soul

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My wife and I had an interesting experience while watching NUMB3RS tonight (as I’ve noted before, I like mysteries, and the writers are doing a good job with that one). Just past the teaser, up came Lynn Redgrave, looking regally and serenely into the camera, declaring, “I want to die from eating too much chocolate. Or from exhaustion, dancing the tango. I want to die of laughter, on my 87th birthday. But I refuse—I refuse—to die from breast cancer. I want to die from something else.”

I’m not ordinarily much of one for commercials (that one was for Bristol Myers Squibb), but that was truly cool. Part of it, of course, was that Lynn Redgrave is a woman of great presence. More than that, however, I really liked the attitude she expressed. There was no fear of death, nor any effort to avoid the fact that she, like all of us, will at some point die; that much, she accepted as a given (which far too many people don’t). It was simply the determination not to let that beat her, not to die that way.

I realize, certainly, that there’s a danger here, that of coming to believe that we can die on our own terms; I realize that that way lies a great many dangers. And yet . . . there is still something noble and honorable in the refusal to accept defeat at the hands of a dishonorable enemy; when paired with the acceptance that death will come at some point, and the understanding that it really is beyond our control, to stand and fight and refuse to give in is admirable, as long as it isn’t taken too far.

It reminds me of Harvey Mansfield’s recent article in First Things titled “How to Understand Politics,” in which Dr. Mansfield (a professor of government at Harvard) insists on the importance of the Greek concept of thumos. He defines thumos as “the part of the soul that makes us want to insist on our own importance . . . Sometimes translated as spiritedness, it names a part of the soul that connects one’s own to the good. Thumos represents the spirited defense of one’s own characteristic of the animal body, standing for the bristling reaction of an animal in face of a threat or a possible threat. . . . Thumos, like politics, is about one’s own and the good. It is not just one or the other . . . It is about both together and in tension.” Like almost any good, we can become unbalanced in pursuing it; but we can also become unbalanced in undervaluing it. Lynn Redgrave, in that commercial, is expressing thumos; and I say, good for her—and thanks for letting us see it.

Packing up the dreams

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For the last eighteen months, since May 2006, I have been in the process of searching for a new call—looking for a new church to serve as pastor. Last Wednesday, I accepted a call to another congregation; following subsequent developments, I’m finally feeling secure that nothing’s going to happen to derail this.

I have no doubt that this is God’s move in God’s time, from the way everything came together; but it’s still hard. For one thing, I had a lot of hopes and dreams for this congregation in this place, for what Christ could do in this community . . . and most of them haven’t been realized. What has been accomplished is really pretty remarkable, given the history of this church; I’ve been here longer than any full-time pastor in Trinity’s history except one (though my “temporary” predecessor was here on a part-time basis for eighteen years), and in that time, I think we’ve managed to break the congregation out of its death-grip survival-ministry mode, which is no small thing. There were a lot of issues and a lot of buried conflicts from past events in the church’s history, and it took a long time and considerable work to bring those out to the point where they could be addressed; mostly, I think, we’ve done that. One of my colleagues in Michigan likes to say, “In ministry, you’re either digging rocks or you’re following the guy who dug the rocks.” Here, the rocks were big enough and heavy enough that digging them needed two stages: before they could be moved, they had to be excavated. That much, at least, we’ve done. It’s not nothing. But it’s so much less than what I’d hoped, it still doesn’t feel like enough. I’ve learned to accept that, largely thanks to colleagues in the presbytery; but I’m still a little disappointed.

That’s ministry, though, often enough; and at this point, what’s done is done and cannot be changed, and it’s time to pack up the dreams I brought with me, using the lessons I’ve learned here as packing material to keep them from breaking, and carry them along to Indiana. I still don’t think there’s anything wrong with dreaming big, and I go forward hoping that what I didn’t see God do here, I’ll see him do there; after all, what’s the point in asking for less than his best? And if I’ve begun to understand along the way that it truly is Christ’s ministry, not mine—if I’ve come to see, at least dimly, what Andrew Purves means when he talks about the crucifixion of ministry (on which more shortly)—well, while it’s been painful, it’s been worth the learning. God send grace that I will be the pastor my new congregation needs to become everything he wants and calls them to be, now and (I hope) for many, many years to come. Amen.

Midway between luck and skill

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I’m not sure what this world is coming to (admittedly not an infrequent observation on my part), but the best book on military history I’ve read this year was written by a lawyer. Dallas Woodbury Isom is a retired law professor from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon who decided to explore the reasons for the Japanese defeat at the Battle of Midway because he found the existing explanations insufficient; the result was the book Midway Inquest: Why the Japanese Lost the Battle of Midway. I haven’t finished it yet, but I can already say it’s an excellent piece of work, as his lawyerly standards for evidence and inquiry match the standards required to do good history—and he’s a good writer, to boot. The book’s critical contribution, and the reason it will almost certainly be a major landmark in WWII history, is the significant amount of primary research Dr. Isom conducted in Japan, both in official Japanese sources and through interviews with survivors of the battle. He notes that as a result of his research, “many of my findings will be surprising to devotees of the battle, and some are bound to be controversial in the military history community”—but though his argumentation is marred somewhat by faulty assumptions (he does not, after all, have any first-hand experience of carrier operations in specific, or military operations in general), his evidence is so solid and his conclusions so carefully marshaled that I expect his work will stand whatever scrutiny it receives.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Dr. Isom’s work to me is the number of times he uses words and phrases like “fortuitous,” “miraculous,” “bizarre twist of fate,” “sheerest accident,” and “incredibly bad luck” in describing the events of the battle. At one point he notes that “the luckiest break of the entire day for the Americans came out of what could have been a disastrous blunder: an inaccurately plotted ‘interception point’ based on the erroneous PBY sighting report.” Luck plays a significant role in most battles, but at Midway, that was true to a remarkable degree. If you tried to write this in a novel, critics would complain that you were stretching the reader’s credulity beyond the breaking point; and yet, it happened in real life. The crowning irony here, though, comes in Dr. Isom’s conclusion, after he has constructed an alternate-history scenario based on a Japanese victory at Midway:

In a chronicle replete with ironies and paradoxes, the final irony is that Japan’s defeat would almost certainly have been much more horrible had it won the Battle of Midway than it was having lost it. All in all, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Japan was lucky to lose at Midway. Such are the vagaries of war.

The reason I find this all very interesting is that Dr. Isom has no stronger word to describe all this than “luck,” which is why he must repeatedly add adjectives like “incredible” and “bizarre”; though he does at one point use the epithet “miraculous,” he shows no sign of actually believing in miracles. From a Christian point of view, however, I’d call this something else: divine providence. If “coincidence is God acting incognito,” this many remarkable and improbable coincidences constitute a place where God is visible through the disguise, at least to those who have eyes to see. And as Dr. Isom carefully argues, this wasn’t merely to America’s benefit; as I would say, it wasn’t just God acting on behalf of America to ensure the US won the war because we were the good guys. Rather, in the long run, it was just as much to the good of the Japanese, given how things likely would have unfolded with a Japanese win at Midway; God was at work to bring about what was best for both sides. Such are the vagaries of war? Yes, from a human perspective; but more than that, more meaningfully than that, such is the providence of God—who is ever redemptively at work in human history, even when his hand is hard to see. So I believe, and so I affirm—and so Dr. Isom shows me in his account of the Battle of Midway, even if he doesn’t see it himself.

Credit where credit is due

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Over at my favorite group blog, Quaid (whom you might call a quasi-Thinkling) has been beating the drum for Mike Huckabee for a while now. (An Arkansas governor as President? Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Does lightning really strike twice in the in the same place? Anyway . . .) He’s managed to convince De in the process, but others have been more dubious that Huckabee has any real chance—me included, I’ll freely admit. The thing is, though—as Quaid has pointed out—Huckabee’s an extremely effective, engaging and winning candidate, and his supporters are fervent and committed, two factors which are doing a lot to overcome his tiny budget; he may not be able to spend much of anything, but he’s continuing to climb in the polls, and the big names are starting to notice. Dick Morris, for instance, has been pointing this fact out for a while, even betting Bill O’Reilly that Huckabee would crack 10% in the national polls, which he now has; and Morris is now saying that Huckabee can win Iowa. If he does—or even finishes a strong second, which looks at this point to be the worst he’ll do—then he will have established himself as a frontrunner. Should that indeed happen, he has a good chance to come out of New Hampshire as the leader, with second place behind Rudy as probably the worst likely outcome; and with that, the money will start to come, and the difficulties will start to fall away, leaving Giuliani as a very beatable opponent.

Huckabee’s not the greatest candidate the GOP has ever put up; his record on social issues is strongly, consistently conservative, but his fiscal policies as governor of Arkansas have led to strong challenges from the likes of Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform. Still, he’s clearly better on both fronts than George W. Bush was, to say nothing of Dole or the elder Bush; and even if he’s no Reagan, he’s still the best option we’ve had since then (as Romney would also be if he manages to recover and win the nomination). That’s not everything, but then, as Mal would say, it’s not nothing, either; and in fact, it’s good enough. Huckabee for President.

. . . and it’s not even fake Carson

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As a student at Regent College (the Canadian school—not Regent University in Virginia, which is a rather different sort of place) from 1997-2001, I had the opportunity to get to know Dr. John Stackhouse just a bit, and to appreciate him both for his first-rate theological mind and for his acerbic and rather black sense of humor (most notably expressed in his occasional turns as singer-songwriter in chapel). I’ve continued to appreciate him ever since, both for his books and more recently for his blog.

The newest post on his blog at the moment finds Dr. Stackhouse taking a swipe at D. A. Carson—and not fake Carson, either, but the real one. From the sound of things, it seems like Dr. Carson, ordinarily one of the best and most worthwhile NT scholars out there (at least on the evangelical side of things), needed a quote for his book Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church: Understanding a Movement and Its Implications and couldn’t find one from an actual emerging-church figure that fit—so he found the best quote he could find, from an article Dr. Stackhouse had written a decade before, and jimmied it in. Unfortunately, the result was that Dr. Carson ended up significantly misinterpreting and misrepresenting both the quote and its author, as Dr. Stackhouse points out (at some length).

Unfortunately, I say, for two reasons. The first is that this sort of academic misfeasance, minor though it may be, only weakens the argument Dr. Carson was trying to make. Whether you agree with his view of the emerging church or not, that’s no good thing, because to the extent that his challenge is valid, it needs to be heard and addressed—and to the extent that it isn’t, it still needs to be presented as ably as possible so that it can be answered as fully as possible. Second, this sort of misreading/uncharitable reading, whether deliberate or due to sloppy work, is unbecoming of Christian scholars, and yet (as one of Dr. Stackhouse’s commenters notes) we’re starting to see it with distressing frequency in arguments between Christian academics. Another example would be the exchange between Roger Olson and John Piper over the I-35W bridge collapse, as Alan noted over at The Thinklings. It’s getting very tiresome, and I think it makes Christians look bad. We ought to have the grace to extend our fellow believers at least the first courtesy of disagreement: the assumption that though they might be wrong (as we see it), they are wrong for good reasons. To assume that since they’re wrong, it must be for bad reasons (whether intellectually bad, morally bad, or both) is uncharitable and un-Christlike, and we need to stop doing it.

All that is old is new again

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The state of American politics these days is messy and unpleasant. Voices across the country can be heard decrying the polarization and hostility of our political culture, and rightly so, I think, because it really isn’t terribly healthy. As a consequence, we’ve seen a number of books in the last few years urging us to move beyond partisan divisions—though oddly enough, the solution most of them propose is that conservatives should capitulate and become liberals, a suggestion which seems neither plausible nor helpful.

Any truly intelligent response to the state of American politics needs to begin with the realization that we’ve been here before—indeed, that this might be considered the normative state of American politics. It certainly isn’t the most polarized time in American history; even the most pessimistic sort would have to admit that it ranks somewhere behind the 1860s in that regard, while a good case could be made that in fact, most of the 19th century was at least as bad.

If you find that hard to believe, I’d suggest you check out a new book by historian Edward Larson, published by the Free Press, called A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign. John Wilson, editor of Books & Culture, discusses Larson’s book in his column in the November/December issue; and as he notes, there’s an awful lot about the 1800 presidential election that sounds remarkably familiar, not least the overheated and over-the-top rhetoric of both sides. One suspects that had the term only existed back then, Thomas Jefferson would have been happy to off-handedly dismiss John Adams as “a raving fundamentalist”; from his comments, he’d fit right in with one of our age’s atheist enfants terrible inveighing against George W. Bush.