As I said last week, I’m on a bit of a Steve Taylor kick. For this one, I’ll let Taylor’s own words (in the booklet for the boxed set Now the Truth Can Be Told) explain my reason for posting it:
Ah, to have the Bible’s sense of balance.My goal with “A Principled Man” was to write a song that inspired me to live a principled life. The seed came from a “tree motif” in the Book of Psalms: “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, or stand in the way of sinners, or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water . . .” (Psalms 1:1-3)But lest principles become an end unto themselves, we have in Ezekiel the dark side of the tree metaphor: “Therefore, this is what the sovereign Lord says: Because it towered on high, lifting its top above the thick foliage, and because it was proud of its height . . . I cast it aside.” (Ezekiel 31:10-11)This song still inspires me. May it continue to do so for all the right reasons.
The heart of Man is not compound of lies, but draws some wisdom from the only Wise, and still recalls him. Though now long estranged, Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed. Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned, and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned, his world-dominion by creative act: not his to worship the great Artefact, Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light through whom is splintered from a single White to many hues, and endlessly combined in living shapes that move from mind to mind. Though all the crannies of the world we filled with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build Gods and their houses out of dark and light, and sowed the seed of dragons, ’twas our right (used or misused). The right has not decayed. We make still by the law in which we’re made.
—J. R. R. Tolkien, from “Mythopoeia”It has been my custom, while using my rowing machine, to watch episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street, which I consider one of the two greatest television shows I’ve ever seen. (I don’t believe TV as a medium has produced much true art, or many truly great stories, but I do believe both are possible.) Lately, however, I’ve been watching other things while I row, and this week, I started in on the other greatest series I’ve ever seen: Firefly. It’s the first time I’ve watched any of the episodes since the movie came out; what Joss Whedon did with the movie hit me too hard. That’s also why I haven’t posted about being a Browncoat, or linked to fan sites like “Whoa. Good Myth.” Rather like being a Mariners fan these days, it’s just been easier not to stress about it too much.Now, this might seem like an odd and pointless thing to get worked up about—so a TV show was canceled after fourteen episodes—so what? It’s still a TV show, after all. So Fox handled it badly, gave the show no real chance, and canceled it unfairly soon; is it really that big a deal? Well, it was that big a deal for all the folks who worked on the show, for one thing. Beyond that, we all have our reasons, and I’m sure mine aren’t the same as everyone else’s; but for me, it’s the story, or rather, the stories, which were untimely cut off, and the lives of the characters in those stories. Whedon, Tim Minear, and their crew of writers had a great world and a great set of characters and stories going, both enjoyable and deep; to have that brought to an untimely end is a great loss.That’s why I rejoiced when the movie deal went forward; which meant that what Whedon did with Serenity really hit me hard. I think he put his own ideas of what is artistic ahead of what was best for his creation—not only the story and the characters, but also the communities he had created, most importantly the actors, writers, and crew, and also all of us who call ourselves Browncoats. Tolkien speaks of us as sub-creators, people who create what he calls “Secondary Worlds,” creations which are real within their own laws, to the best of our ability to make them real; we create in reflection (or, perhaps better, as refractions) of the great Creator who made us, because we were made like him. The desire to be gods ourselves may have been what led us into sin, but it was not perhaps a wholly wrong one, properly channeled—for when we create, we are in a sense small gods to our creation. If we take Tolkien’s point of view, however (as I believe we should), this has a significant implication for our creative activity: we have the responsibility to be, as best as we can, good gods to our creation. Our work has to be primarily about what is best for this thing we are making, whatever it might be, not merely about what’s best for us or what we want to do. On my read, from the things he’s said, Joss Whedon violated that with Firefly/Serenity; he was a bad god to his creation.Still, though, you might say: does this matter? Wasn’t it, after all, still just a TV show? Yes, of course it was a TV show, but no, it wasn’t just a TV show. Nothing is ever just anything—especially not people; and thus, especially not stories, to the extent that they’re true stories about people. By that I don’t necessarily mean factual; there are biographies and histories which are factual but aren’t really true, because they miss the heart of the matter, while many historical fictions, though they depart from the facts, are far truer because they give us real understanding of people and events. Indeed, many novels about things that never happened and people who never lived are nevertheless true stories in that they broaden our awareness of ourselves and of others, open our eyes and minds to things we have not before seen or realized, and deepen our knowledge of what it means to be human.Stories are powerful things. It’s one thing to express an opinion, or to set forth a proposition about how the world works; it’s quite another thing to bring that opinion or proposition to life in a story. People who might reject, or at least argue with, your position if it were plainly stated may find themselves influenced by it, if your story is powerful enough and sufficiently well-crafted; and those who wouldn’t understand it intellectually in a propositional form may well get it intuitively and affectively if you bring it to life in a story. That’s what stories do with our ideas: they bring them to life, incarnating them in the lives of the characters we create, making them not merely intellectual realities, but human realities.This is one reason why the greatest of all Christian theologians is not Paul, but Jesus himself. (There are others, of course, such as the fact that Jesus was original, while Paul was derivative of Jesus.) This is something too often missed, as Dr. Kenneth Bailey points out (and as Jared Wilson has also said, though his emphasis is a little different), because we tend to see Jesus as a nice moral teacher telling quaint stories; we don’t really believe that those stories can be theologically profound and powerful. In fact, though, they can, and they are; the more overtly “theological” works in the New Testament, profound as they are, are simply developments, explications, and applications in propositional form of the truths already communicated incarnationally through the parables of Jesus, and also through the broader narratives of the Gospels, Acts, and the Old Testament. God doesn’t give us a three-point outline, he gives us a story—from which to learn, and in which to live.Of course, it’s possible to take this too far; there are those who would overbalance the other way, exalting the biblical narratives to the extent of diminishing or even discounting the NT epistles (and other non-narrative portions of the Bible—but the epistles, and particularly Paul, usually seem to be the main target). That’s not right either. What we need to remember is that the epistles, though not themselves narrative texts, are nevertheless part of a narrative; their context is a story. They were written for particular reasons to particular human beings in particular situations dealing with particular things, even if we don’t know all those particularities (in some cases, we have a pretty good idea; in others, we can only speculate); and when we read them, we read them in the middle of our own story as God speaking to us in our particular situations and issues. We need to understand them accordingly—and we need to understand that that fact is the reason why they matter.Stories matter. They matter because they’re the stuff of our life, of our reality and our nature, and the expression of the creative ability we’ve been given by (and in the image of) the one who made us—and we matter. They matter because they affect us, moving our emotions and shaping our view of the world, both for good and for ill. And as a Christian, I affirm that they matter because everything we do matters, because the best of what we do will endure forever. And if they matter, then we need to take them seriously, both as readers and, for those of us so called, as writers—for our sake, and for everyone’s.
My post last Wednesday set me off on a Steve Taylor kick; this song of his seems an appropriate bit of reflection for a Sunday morning. (I do wish he’d just written “want to,” though . . .)
What people don’t realise is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.
In his comments on the song inspired by this quote (video and lyrics below), Steve Taylor wrote,
The cost of discipleship—the ideal of taking up your cross everyday and following Jesus—makes it hard to believe, because Christianity demands things from us that we don’t naturally want to give. In the words of playwright Dennis Potter, “There is, in the end, no such thing as a simple faith.”
This is pure truth, at least as regards Christianity. In the broadest possible sense, believing is easy: everyone believes something, because we have to. We can’t ground our lives on reason alone, because a chain of reasoning requires a starting point; however far back you reason, that starting point recedes still further. We can’t use our reasoning to provide that starting point, because we’d end up with circular reasoning, however great the circle might be. Our reasoning has to begin from ultimate premises which we cannot prove—such as “There is a God,” or “There is no God”—but can only take as faith commitments. Once we’ve done that, we can interrogate those premises, and the conclusions we’ve drawn from them, and see if the whole thing is rationally consistent, if the beliefs we’ve developed are logically coherent with each other and accurately descriptive of the world as we know it; but we cannot remove the necessity of faith undergirding our reasoning. Indeed, even reasoning is in some sense an act of faith—faith in our ability to reason, and in the viability of reason itself. As St. Anselm put it, reason is faith seeking understanding.
That said, while believingsomethingis easy, believing inChristisn’t. Far from it, in fact. And this isn’t for the reasons atheists and others want to advance, about the problem of evil and the problem of miracles and suchlike; “scientific” objections like the latter are ultimately just assertions (no, sciencehasn’tdisproved miracles, you just want to believe it has), while philosophical and existential objections ultimately tell against atheists just as much as Christians. (If you think evil is a problem for Christians, just stop and consider the problem it poses for atheists. It’sa different kind of problem, but no less real for all that.) I’ve known people whose decision to believe in Christ rested on logical argument, but very few; and I’ve never known anyone who was actually driven to atheism by reason. (Thus the philosopher Edward Tingley, comparing modern atheists unfavorably to Pascal,writes, “Agnostics are not skeptical, half the atheists are not logical, and the rest refuse to go where the evidence is.”) Rather, in my experience, the main reason people choose not to believe in Christ is because they don’t want to. As Chesterton wryly observed,
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.
The reason for this is that the Christian faith isn’t designed to meet our “felt needs”; it isn’t, as so many atheists smugly assume, just a matter of believing what we want to believe. As Flannery O’Connor put it, it isn’t a big warm electric blanket, it’s the cross—and we don’t particularly want the cross. We don’t particularly want a God whocalls usto deny ourselves and take up our cross (which, you remember, was an implement designed to torture people to death) and then has the gall tosay, “My yoke is well-fitted and my burden is light.” We can’t get to the point where we want that until we realize that our needs go much, much deeper than what we feel on the surface; we can’t get to that point until we realize that the burden of taking up our cross is in fact light compared to the burden of our sin, and that Jesus’ yoke is indeed well-fitted, not to doing what wewantto do, but to doing what weneedto do. Getting there, however, isn’t easy; it’s far easier to turn aside and believe something else instead.
And before you start to object that the behavior of many Christians is another major reason why people turn away from faith, let me say that that’s just another example of the same problem: many of us in the church don’t want the cross either. Even for many within the church, it’s harder to believe than not to, and so it’s all too easy for us to choose not to. Instead, we find something else to believe in—a structure of behavioral rules, a set of political commitments, a system of how-tos for “the life you’ve always wanted”—and call that Christianity instead. The thing is, that kind of belief can build organizations, even big ones, and it can attract followers, even committed ones, and it can do a lot of things that impress this world—but what it can’t do is raise Christians.It takes a church to raise a Christian, and specifically, it takes a church that’s trying to be the church; and churches that take those kinds of approaches are trying to be something else. They are, essentially, counterfeit churches practicing counterfeit Christianity—and, in the process, stifling people who should be trading in slavery to sin for freedom in Christ, so that they wind upescaping one moldmerely to be squeezed into another. Follow that out too far and you wind up with the kind of thingTaylor satirizedwhen he wrote,
So now I see the whole design;
My church is an assembly line.
The parts are there—I’m feeling fine!
I want to be a clone!
You also wind up with the kind of church, and the kind of church member, that turns people away from Christianity, without those people ever realizing that it isn’t reallyChristianitythey’re rejecting.
The bottom line here is that true Christian faith is not just intellectual assent to a series of propositions, nor is it a commitment to pursue what we consider to be good and helpful behaviors (though in some sense, both of those are involved): true Christian faith is a belief in aPerson, and a commitment tofollowthat Personwhereverhe might lead us. To borrow from the old story about theGreat Blondin, it’s not just a matter of agreeing that if we get in the wheelbarrow, he’ll be able to push us safely across his tightrope over Niagara Falls—it’s a matter of actually getting in the wheelbarrow and hanging on. It’s a whole-life commitment, giving everything we have to follow Jesus.
The great offense of the Christian life to us is that it’s not about us at all—it’s not about our goals, our desires, our felt needs, and how to get what we consider to be “our best life now”; it’s not about making us better able to go out and be our best selves, so that we can take the credit for what wonderful people we are. Rather, it’s about setting all that aside and casting ourselves on Jesus, living lives of radical abandonment to the grace of God, letting him have all the glory for what he does in and through us—and letting him decide what exactly that will be, and where, and when, and how. This is the only way to real life, but it isn’t easy; in fact, O’Connor and Taylor are right: it’s harder to believe than not to.
Harder to Believe than Not to
Nothing is colder than the winds of change
Where the chill numbs the dreamer till a shadow remains;
Among the ruins lies your tortured soul—
Was it lost there, or did your will surrender control?
Chorus:
Shivering with doubts that were left unattended,
So you toss away the cloak that you should have mended.
Don’t you know by now why the chosen are few?
It’s harder to believe than not to—
Harder to believe than not to.
It was a confidence that got you by,
When you knew you believed it, but you didn’t know why.
No one imagines it will come to this,
But it gets so hard when people don’t want to listen.
Chorus
Some stay paralyzed until they succumb;
Others do what they feel, but their senses are numb.
Some get trampled by the pious throng—
Still, they limp along.
Are you sturdy enough to move to the front?
Is it nods of approval or the truth that you want?
And if they call it a crutch, then you walk with pride;
Your accusers have always been afraid to go outside.
They shiver with doubts that were left unattended,
Then they toss away the cloak that they should have mended.
You know by now why the chosen are few:
It’s harder to believe than not to.
One of my very favorite songwriters is the Scottish folksinger Dougie MacLean; this isn’t his best-known song by any means (that would be “Caledonia”), but I think it’s the one I like best. This particular version benefits from the wonderful Kathy Mattea on backup vocals—they’re friends, and it was recorded during a joint studio session. (I’d wanted to post another video from the same session as well, of Mattea singing lead on Dougie’s song “Ready for the Storm,” but embedding is disabled on that one.)Turning Away
I’d meant to post this earlier in the week—it’s perhaps my favorite Pentecost hymn; a former colleague of mine in Denver, the Rev. Dr. Tom Troeger, wrote the text.
Wind Who Makes All Winds that BlowWind who makes all winds that blow— Gusts that bend the saplings low, Gales that heave the sea in waves, Stirrings in the mind’s deep caves— Aim your breath with steady power On your church this day, this hour. Raise, renew the life we’ve lost, Spirit God of Pentecost!
Fire who fuels all fires that burn— Suns around which planets turn, Beacons marking reefs and shoals, Shining truth to guide our souls— Come to us as once you came; Burst in tongues of sacred flame! Light and Power, Might and Strength, Fill your church, its breadth and length!
These days, if people have heard of Stormie Omartian, most of them know her for her books, while her husband Michael is primarily mentioned as a producer; that’s a shame, because he put out some great albums of his own, beginning with White Horse and Adam Again back in the ’70s, and a number of fine ones together with her as well. The only one of their joint albums I have is Mainstream, and the tape is dying after a quarter-century, which is too bad, since it’s not even listed on Amazon. I’ll listen to it until it goes, anyway. This song is off that album; as I was listening to it in the car on the way back from work the other day, I had the sense that someone I know needs to hear the message of this song. So, no audio, but up it goes.
Hap’s latest post, “The Beauty of Broken Glass,” plays with some wonderful images, and I really encourage you to read it if you haven’t. For my part, given my brain’s tendency to spin off in random directions, it’s no surprise that one of the things it brought to mind was this song by Andrew Peterson. (My wife doesn’t care for it, but I like it quite well.)
Yesterday, the PC(USA)’s highest court, the Permanent Judicial Commission of the General Assembly (GAPJC), issued the most befuddling court decision I’ve ever heard of (at least since Rose Bird last served on the California State Supreme Court). Faced with a disciplinary case against a Presbyterian pastor, Jane Adams Spahr, who had conducted same-sex marriage ceremonies and made no bones about having done so, and a denominational constitution that forbids doing so, they decided, essentially, this:
Presbyterian pastors cannot perform same-sex marriage ceremonies because this is forbidden by the church’s constitution
Therefore, what Rev. Spahr performed were not same-sex marriage ceremonies, because this is, by definition, impossible
Therefore, she cannot be guilty of the charge, because she was charged with “doing that which by definition cannot be done,” which, by definition, could not have happened
Therefore, she cannot be disciplined for doing something she couldn’t possibly have done
Never mind, of course, the fact that she did do it, or at least represent herself as having done it . . . The problem here is that the GAPJC confused a legal prohibition (it is not legally possible for you to do this) with an ontological prohibition (it is not intrinsically possible for you to do this), and thus concluded, essentially, that it’s impossible for human beings to break the law because the mere existence of the law makes breaking it impossible. If this logic applied in our courts, no one would ever be guilty of anything—this logic makes the very concept of guilt impossible by definition.Of course, they don’t really believe that themselves; and so they also made it clear that “a same sex ceremony is not and cannot be a marriage . . . Officers of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) who are authorized to perform marriages shall not state, imply, or represent that a same sex ceremony is a marriage because under W-4.9001 a same sex ceremony is not and cannot be a marriage.” Unfortunately, having said that, they then pretended to believe that the Rev. Spahr hadn’t done precisely what they said she “shall not” do, thus enabling them to avoid the question of whether she shouldn’t have been disciplined for that, at least; this, of course, leaves that question hanging wide open for the next case (and there will most certainly be a next case, if only to test whether GAPJC will have the stomach to discipline people for defying their “shall not”). For now, though, they’ve tied themselves into such knots to avoid having to discipline the Rev. Spahr, they aren’t really Presbyterians anymore—they’re Pretzelbyterians.(Update: with his usual critical acumen, Ed Koster, Stated Clerk of Detroit Presbytery, has identified a few more major kinks in those knots that hadn’t occurred to me.)All this reminds me of a song by the great Steve Scott, whose album I happen to have been listening to this afternoon; this one struck me quite forcefully, given the current situation.
