On naming the barbarians at the gates: A response to Mark Sandlin, Part I

Posted on 1 February 201615 April 2016 by Rob Harrison | 1 Comment

In my nine years pastoring in the PC(USA), I never ran across Mark Sandlin. I don’t just mean that I never met him, which is entirely unsurprising; it’s a big denomination, he pastors down South, and I never did. I also mean that for all the conversations/debates I got into online across various websites, I never noticed his name. (As far as I remember, anyway.) Apparently, though, he’s something of a big wheel in the liberal wing of the American church, and this week my amazing wife called my attention to a column of his which asks a provocative question:

At what point do we get to say parts of Christianity are no longer Christian?

Sandlin opens with a brief YouTube clip of a preacher bragging about leading a teenaged boy to the Lord by punching him in the chest. I don’t feel any need to repost the video; my own theology is sufficiently expressed by saying that whatever Lord this guy led that kid to, it isn’t one I know. Sandlin acknowledges that this guy is an outlier, but nevertheless takes him as the jumping-off point for his column. I think this piece deserves some careful interaction, and so I intend to respond to it in several parts; as you can probably guess, I have some critical things to say, but it seems right and proper to begin with some positive comments.

Poem of the Week

Posted on 31 January 201631 January 2016 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

I love the Metaphysical poets. Henry Vaughan wasn’t as great a poet as John Donne or George Herbert, but that’s mostly because he didn’t write as many truly great poems as those two men. At his best, his poetry was among the most brilliant the English language has yet seen. This is my favorite of his poems, a meditation inspired by the visit of Nicodemus to Jesus in John 3.

The Night

Henry Vaughan

John 3.2

Through that pure virgin shrine,

That sacred veil drawn o’er Thy glorious noon,

That men might look and live, as glowworms shine,

And face the moon,

Wise Nicodemus saw such light

As made him know his God by night.

Most blest believer he!

Who in that land of darkness and blind eyes

Thy long-expected healing wings could see,

When Thou didst rise!

And, what can never more be done,

Did at midnight speak with the Sun!

O who will tell me where

He found Thee at that dead and silent hour?

What hallowed solitary ground did bear

So rare a flower,

Within whose sacred leaves did lie

The fulness of the Deity?

No mercy-seat of gold,

No dead and dusty cherub, nor carved stone,

But His own living works did my Lord hold

And lodge alone;

Where trees and herbs did watch and peep

And wonder, while the Jews did sleep.

Dear night! this world’s defeat;

The stop to busy fools; care’s check and curb;

The day of spirits; my soul’s calm retreat

Which none disturb!

Christ’s progress, and His prayer time;

The hours to which high heaven doth chime;

God’s silent, searching flight;

When my Lord’s head is filled with dew, and all

His locks are wet with the clear drops of night;

His still, soft call;

His knocking time; the soul’s dumb watch,

When spirits their fair kindred catch.

Were all my loud, evil days

Calm and unhaunted as is thy dark tent,

Whose peace but by some angel’s wing or voice

Is seldom rent,

Then I in heaven all the long year

Would keep, and never wander here.

But living where the sun

Doth all things wake, and where all mix and tire

Themselves and others, I consent and run

To every mire,

And by this world’s ill-guiding light,

Err more than I can do by night.

There is in God, some say,

A deep but dazzling darkness, as men here

Say it is late and dusky, because they

See not all clear.

O for that night! where I in Him

Might live invisible and dim!

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Study for Jesus and Nicodemus, 1898-99.

Song of the Week

Posted on 30 January 201630 January 2016 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

Tip of My Tongue

There’s an oasis in the heat of the day,
There’s a fire in the chill of night,
And a turnabout in circumstance
Makes each a hell in its own right.

I’ve been boxed in in the lowlands, in the canyons that think,
Been pushed to the brink of the precipice and dared not to blink.
I’ve been confounded in the whirlwind of what-ifs and dreams,
I’ve been burned by the turning of the wind back upon my own flames.

Chorus
Knock the scales from my eyes,
Knock the words from my lungs.
I want to cry out,
It’s on the tip of my tongue.

Oh, I’ve seen through the walls of this kingdom of dust,
Felt the crucial revelation;
But the broad streets of the heart and the day-to-day meet
At a blind intersection.

I don’t want to be lonely, I don’t want to feel pain,
I don’t want to draw straws with the sons of Cain.
You can take it as a prayer if you’ll remember my name;
You can take it as the penance of a profane saint.

Chorus

There’s an oasis in the heat of the day;
There’s fire in the chill of night.
When I know them both I’ll know your love—
I will feel it in the twilight—

As circumstance comes crashing through my walls like a train,
Or like a chorus from the mountains of the ocean floor,
Like the wind burst of bird wings taking flight in a hard rain,
Or like a mad dog on the far side of Dante’s door.

Chorus out

Words and music: Mark Heard
© 1992 iDEoLA Records
From the album Satellite Sky

Addition to the sidebar

Posted on 29 January 201629 January 2016 by Rob Harrison | 1 Comment

A comment from my friend Kaleb Marshall prompted me to add a new site to the sidebar: Spiritual Friendship. I first discovered this group blog some time ago through the work of Wesley Hill, who’s one of the editors. Here’s how the blog’s other editor, Ron Belgau, summarizes its thematic center:

Reading Aelred of Rievaulx’s little treatise On Spiritual Friendship as an undergraduate was a life-changing experience for me. Aelred, a 12th-century Cistercian abbot, insists that we need to test our beliefs about friendship with Scripture. The treatise is a series of dialogues in which three monks join Aelred to examine their ideas about friendship in light of their Christian faith.

One of Aelred’s insights made a big impact on me. He points out that friendship is based on shared goals, and distinguishes between different kinds of friendship: carnal friendship, based on shared pursuit of pleasure; worldly friendship, based on mutual advantage; and spiritual friendship, grounded in shared discipleship.

The dialogues helped me to see that although Christian discipleship is costly, it need not be lonely. Our culture has become very fixated on sex, but sex and romance are not the same as love. Nor is Christian love the same as the kind of casual friendship that is common in our culture (Facebook informs me that I currently have 554 “friends”).

Aelred insists that, contrary to the transitory nature of so many contemporary friendships, a friend in Christ “loves always” (Proverbs 17:17). He and the other monks discuss how to select and cultivate lasting and Christ-centered friendships.

Growing up as a gay teenager, the only messages I heard from the church were negative. Most in our culture—including many Christians—uphold romantic and sexual love as the most important form of love. But God forbade the sexual and romantic love I desired. Was I just to be left out in the cold?

Aelred helped me to see that obedience to Christ offered more to me than just the denial of sex and romance. Christ-centered chaste friendships offered a positive and fulfilling—albeit at times challenging—path to holiness.

As Kaleb noted to me, the question “What should a same-sex attracted Christian do?” is a perfectly fair one to address to those who believe that sexual activity between two people of the same sex is intrinsically against God’s will, but it’s one which tends to be met with blunt-force answers that treat people as abstractions rather than as individuals. Hill, Belgau, and their co-laborers for the gospel answer that question better than anyone else I’ve seen, from the inside.

Presidential candidate Saruman J. Trump?

Posted on 28 January 201615 April 2016 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

From Narnia to Middle Earth with Donald Trump, courtesy of The Federalist:

I’m the best at talking to Sauron, I really am. Tough guy, tough negotiator but you really just have to have a man-to-man. Not like the people running Gondor, they’re stupid. I mean, how stupid are they? Now, my tower – and let me tell you, it’s the biggest, classiest tower, great views of the whole ring of stone and the forest and the river – I can get him on the line. Doesn’t answer anybody else, but when I want him, here’s there. I’ll be so good at dealing with him, it’ll make your head spin.

Read the whole thing—it’s priceless.

Orthanc, tower of Isengard. Public domain.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice . . .

Posted on 28 January 201629 January 2016 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

. . . in practice, however, there is.

Things that should work, don’t. Things that shouldn’t go wrong, do. Other people act in ways that make absolutely no sense to us (though if we looked more closely at our own sin and saw it more clearly, their actions would make more sense to us, at any rate; but of course, we don’t want to). The unlikely happens, spoiling our plans, and always (it seems) at the irredeemable moment. The world outside our head proves to be a chaotic system filled with influences of which we know nothing, far more complex—and, consequently, far less tractable—than the world as we construct it inside our head.

This is one reason for the temptation Courtney Martin has dubbed “the reductive seduction of other people’s problems.”Read more→

Enter the Carnival Sage

Posted on 27 January 201630 January 2016 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

The above image is a detail of a painting (oil on wood) by Don Swartzentruber, one of the art teachers at the high school here in town (and also, I believe, an adjunct art professor at Grace College). Don has an interesting side project going on, to which I’ve been meaning to link. He calls it the Carnival Sage project, and as best as I can summarize it, the idea is to use visual storytelling to explore various issues and prompt discussion which goes beyond (or around) the reflexive commentary that fills so much of our media. Check out the Facebook page and see what you think.

“God made me this way”? Not exactly [REPOST]

Posted on 26 January 201626 January 2016 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(The original of this post is from 2009. I need to get back to blogging the Heidelberg soon.)

Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 6
Q. Did God create people so wicked and perverse?

A. No.
God created them good¹ and in his own image,²
that is, in true righteousness and holiness,³
so that they might
truly know God their creator,⁴
love him with all their heart,
and live with him in eternal happiness
for his praise and glory.⁵

Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.

There’s a real tendency these days to appeal to genetics to explain behavior—and increasingly, to excuse behavior, as action is reframed as identity. The church can’t appeal to the word of God with regard to homosexual activity without someone (usually a good many someones) standing up and saying, “God made me this way, and therefore this is how I’m supposed to be, and therefore God can’t really have meant that.” Unfortunately, the steady repetition of that assertion has convinced a lot of folks (especially younger folks) who consider themselves evangelicals that it must be true. That has done considerable damage to the authority of Scripture in the American evangelical church.

I have no interest in the debate over whether or not or to what degree homosexual desires are a matter of genetics. To be blunt, I consider the whole question a red herring. We recognize this when it comes to other issues. From the studies I’ve seen, the heritability of alcoholism is about the same as the heritability of homosexual preferences, but nobody uses that as a defense for driving drunk. Certain cancers, we well know, come to us through our genes, yet we don’t tell cancer patients, “God made you this way, so he must want you to die of cancer.” (The federal government might, if Obamacare passes, but that’s another matter.) It would be quite consistent to label same-sex erotic desires just another inherited disease—but we don’t do that. This makes it clear that it’s not the genetic element that’s driving the argument, it’s the affective element. It’s the fact that those who practice such behaviors don’t want to give them up.

Since the appeal to genetics has been effective (whether logical or not), we can expect to see it raised as a defense for other behaviors as well. In time, it will become impossible for the church to call people to holiness without hearing, “God made me this way!” As such, it’s important to remind Christians that the Scriptures give the church a firm answer to this, to which the Heidelberg bears witness: No, he didn’t. We are all sinners, we are all bent to defy the will of God and to prefer evil to good in at least some areas of our lives, and all of our natural tendencies, preferences, orientations and desires arise out of sin-distorted hearts—but God didn’t make us that way. God created us good, in his own image. Our sinful desires are someone else’s fault altogether.

Just because something is natural to us doesn’t make it right. Just because we inherited it along with our hair and eye color doesn’t mean that God approves of it. All it means is that we’re born sinful—just like everybody else.

What do we mean by “the same God”?

Posted on 25 January 201625 January 2016 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

With the recent flap at Wheaton over Larycia Hawkins, we have yet another round of argument over whether or not Christians and Muslims worship the same God. This frustrates me, because there’s an obvious question that no one ever thinks to address in these disputes:

What the heck is that supposed to mean?

From a Christian point of view, there is only one God, for starters—a point on which Muslims would agree. Both faiths understand themselves to be worshiping the singular Creator of everything that is, who is the rightful Lord of all creation. There aren’t any other gods (let alone “Gods”) lying around whom we could be worshiping. It isn’t as if Muslims were worshiping Ahura Mazda, Nyame, Odin, Zeus, Vishnu, Marduk, Xhuuya, Ba’al, or Set. It seems to me the question we ought to be asking is, “Who is worshiping God in spirit and in truth?”

I’m not quite as alone in this as I thought, however. In response to Dr. Hawkins’ assertion that Muslims and Christians worship the same God, John Stackhouse responded,

I frankly don’t know what she meant by that.

Be different just like everyone else

Posted on 25 January 201624 January 2016 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

Given the increasingly common criticisms lobbed at orthodox Christianity in America these days, you’d think our culture was opposed to legalism; but don’t you believe it. A few years ago, while he was still the senior pastor at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Tullian Tchividjian made a trenchant observation in an essay titled “Church, We Have a Problem”:

The one primary enemy of the Gospel—legalism—comes in two forms. Some people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by keeping the rules, doing what they’re told, maintaining the standards, and so on (you could call this “front-door legalism”). Other people avoid the gospel and try to save themselves by breaking the rules, doing whatever they want, developing their own autonomous standards, and so on (you could call this “back-door legalism”). . . . Either way, you’re still trying to save yourself—which means both are legalistic, because both are self-salvation projects. . . . We want to remain in control of our lives and our destinies, so the only choice is whether we will conquer the mountain by asceticism or by license.

The world wants us all to be legalists, and on the whole, it doesn’t really care which kind. Put another way, the world wants us to be conformists. Some times and cultures favor “keep the rules” conformists, while others favor “break the rules” conformists, but what really matters either way aren’t the obvious rules being kept or broken. What matters is the deeper set of rules you aren’t allowed to question.