Justin Taylor's Blog, page 93

7 Responses to the Strategy of Church Silence during Ethical Confusion

Andrew Wilson:

I’ve heard rumours of a silent trend beginning to take hold in some city churches in the UK and the US. I don’t just mean a trend that takes hold silently; presumably most trends do that. I mean a trend towards silence: a decision not to speak out on issues that are considered too sticky, controversial, divisive, culturally loaded, entangled, ethically complex, personally upsetting, emotive, likely to be reported on by the Guardian or the New York Times, uncharted, inflammatory, difficult, or containing traces of gluten. Since I do not attend a city church, but am a proud member of the backward bungalow bumpkin brigade, this is coming to me second hand, and it may turn out to be a storm in the proverbial teacup, or even (for all I know) entirely fictional. But let’s imagine that there were such things as well-written booklets which had been discontinued simply because they were about sexuality, and leaders who were avoiding making any public comments at all on controversial ethical issues, or churches whose lectionaries or sermon serieses were systematically avoiding passages which addressed pressing contemporary questions, presumably in the name of being winsome or wise or likeable or culturally sensitive, because of the number of Influencers and Powerful People in the area. Without knowing any of the behind-the-scenes discussions that had taken place – all well-intentioned, I’m sure—what would I say then?

Wilson outlines his response in seven steps:

Winsomeness is a good servant and a terrible master.
Likeability stops at the water’s edge.
Pastors are to proclaim the whole counsel of God, not just the parts that won’t cause any fluttering in the Fleet Street dovecotes.
Ducking difficult ethical questions leaves churches in confusion when they most need clarity.
Ethical confusion makes church discipline much, much harder.
Silence unwittingly reinforces the dominant cultural narrative.
Those of us who instinctively cheer when we read the previous six points are probably in the greatest need of hearing what the advocates of silence have to say.

You can read his explanation of each point here.

I Wish I Had Held Her Hand More

R. C. Sproul Jr., reflecting on his deepest regret: that he did not hold his wife’s hand more when she was alive:

It’s not, of course, that I never held her hand. It is likely, however, that I didn’t as often as she would have liked.

Holding her hand communicates to her in a simple yet profound way that we are connected.

Taking her hand tells her, “I am grateful that we are one flesh.”

Taking her hand tells me, “This is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.”

It is a liturgy, an ordinary habit of remembrance to see more clearly the extraordinary reality of two being made one.

It would have, even in the midst of a disagreement, or moments of struggle, communicated, “We’re going to go through this together. I will not let go.”

It would have also reminded us both of that secret but happy truth we kept from each other, that hidden reality that is equal parts embarrassment and giddy joy: that we’re just kids. Bearing children, feeding mortgages, facing adult sized hardships never really changes what we are inside. Holding her hand was like skipping through the park. Holding her hand was winking at her, as if to say, “I know you’re just a kid too. Let’s be friends.”

On the other hand, holding her hand more would have communicated to us both my own calling to lead her, and our home.

Hand holding is a way to say both, “You are safe with me” and “Follow me into the adventure.”

It would have reminded me that there is no abdicating, no shirking, no flinching in the face of responsibility. And as I lead it would be a constant anchor, a reminder that I lead not for my sake, but for hers.

Holding her hand more also would have spoken with clarity to the watching world. It would have said, “There’s a man who loves his wife.” It saddens me that so many only learn this after their wife is gone.

Perhaps most of all, however, I wish I had held her hand more so that I could still feel it more clearly.

I wish it had been such a constant habit that even now my hand would form into a hand holding shape each time I get in the car.

I wish I could fall asleep feeling her hand in mine.

I know all this, happily, because I did hold her hand. I received all the blessings I describe above. I just wish I had received them more. It cost nothing, and bears dividends even to this day. If, for you, it’s not too late, make the investment. Hold her hand, every chance you get. You won’t regret it.

You can read the whole thing here.

The Shyness of C. S. Lewis in Speaking of His Longing for the Far-Off Country

From C. S. Lewis’s beautiful sermon, “The Weight of Glory,” first preached in the [Oxford] University Church of St Mary the Virgin on June 8, 1941. It was published in Theology 43 (November 1941): 263-74, and then in 1949 by Macmillan in New York as The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses.

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter.

Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them. And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice; almost all our modem philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies of Progress or Creative Evolution themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere. When they want to convince you that earth is your home, notice how they set about it. They begin by trying to persuade you that earth can be made into heaven, thus giving a sop to your sense of exile in earth as it is. Next, they tell you that this fortunate event is still a good way off in the future, thus giving a sop to your knowledge that the fatherland is not here and now. Finally, lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, not even a story, forever and ever.

Making Team Secularism Look Bad by Comparison

Ross Douthat writes about Brian Palmer’s piece in Slate, which

passively-aggressively complains about the fact that so many of the doctors fighting Ebola on the ground in Africa are …Christians … and worse still, Christian missionaries … and not that there’s anything wrong with that, but actually maybe there issomething wrong with that (“I’m not altogether proud of this bias—I’m just trying to be honest”), or at least Palmer wants us to know that he’s a little troubled by its implications (“some missionaries are incapable of separating their religious work from their medical work … I suspect that many others have the same visceral discomfort with the mingling of religion and health care …“) even as, broad-minded guy that he is, he concedes that “until we’re finally ready to invest heavily in secular medicine for Africa,” the missionaries may deserve our grudging support.

Douthat offers his reaction:

The first time I read the piece, I was filled with a stuttering sort of rage, but reading it again it doesn’t actually merit that kind of click-bait outrage. Palmer seems less hostile to Christian missionaries and their work than he is confused by what they’re doing: He clearly has a set of ideological frames through which he sees the world, a set of assumptions (the separation of medicine and religion should be absolute, proselytization is wicked/backward/ignorant, helping people is what governments and secular groups are supposed to do) that simply don’t fit with what’s happening on the ground in Africa and who’s actually there, which in turns leaves him both unsettled and subtly resentful at all these Christian missionary doctors for unsettling him.

Palmer’s secular and scientistic worldview, of course, is not the worldview of the classical world, which was far more inegalitarian and cruel than the still-Christian-influenced secular humanism of our own era. But there is still a parallel, at once amusing and illuminating, between his tone in the Slate piece and the tone of some of the surviving comments on Christianity from Roman authorities, which so often married incomprehension, hostility and (eventually) resentment at being, well, shown up by these strange cultists and their zeal. In particular, there’s a little bit of Pliny the younger in Palmer’s essay — the 2nd-century governor of Pontus writing in bureaucratic bafflement to his emperor (in a tone that W.H. Auden borrowed, I suspect, for his King Herod in “For The Time Being”) — and a whole lot of Julian the Apostate, the 4th century emperor who tried and failed to restore paganism, and whose letters include various complaints about how “all men see that our people lack aid” from pagan sources, even as ”the impious Galilaeans support not only their own poor but ours as well.” 

Adapted to a globalized and (somewhat) more secularized age, that feels like Palmer’s real complaint: Not that the missionaries are necessarily doing something wrong (he won’t actually come out and say that), but that they’re doing something right in a way that makes his team, Team Secularism, look somewhat less impressive by comparison. Which isn’t really a reaction that Christians should be offended by. It’s one that should be welcomed, worn as a badge of honor, and joyfully provoked.

You can read the whole thing here.

The Promise of a Horse and Buggy and the Fulfillment of an Automobile: G.K. Beale’s Illustration on OT Prophecy

G.K. Beale, writing in The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (Apollos/IVP, 2004), argues that “We should want to follow an interpretive method that aims to unravel the original intention of biblical authors, realizing that that intention may be multi-layered, without any layers contradicting the others. Such original intentions may have meaning more correspondent to physical reality (hence so-called ‘literal interpretation’) while others may refer to ‘literal’ spiritual realities…” This means that “the progress of revelation certainly reveals expanded meanings of earlier biblical texts. Later biblical writers further interpret earlier biblical writings in ways that amplify earlier texts. These subsequent interpretations may formulate meanings that earlier authors may not have had in mind but which do not contravene their original, essential, organic meaning. This is to say that original meanings have ‘thick’ content and that original authors likely were not exhaustively aware of the full extent of that content. In this regard, fulfilment often ‘fleshes out’ prophecy with details of which even the prophet may not have been fully cognizant” (p. 289).

To illustrate this, Beale asks us to imagine a father in the year 1900 promising his young son a horse and buggy when he grows up and marries:

During the early years of expectation, the son reflects on the particular size of the buggy, its contours and style, its beautiful leather seat and the size and breed of horse that would draw the buggy.

Perhaps the father had knowledge from early experimentation elsewhere that the invention of the automobile was on the horizon, but coined the promise to his son in terms that his son would understand.

Years later, when the son marries, the father gives the couple an automobile, which has since been invented and mass-produced.

Is the son disappointed in receiving a car instead of a horse and buggy?

Is this not a ‘literal’ fulfillment of the promise?

In fact, the essence of the father’s word has remained the same: a convenient mode of transportation.

What has changed is the precise form of transportation promised. The progress of technology has escalated the fulfillment of the pledge in a way that could not have been conceived of when the son was young. Nevertheless, in the light of the later development of technology, the promise is viewed as ‘literally’ and faithfully carried out in a greater way than earlier apprehended.”  (352-53)

How We Know for Certain That We Are Currently Living in “The Last Days”

The New Testament distinguishes between

“the last day” (that is, the coming day of salvation and wrath; see 1 Thess. 5:1-11) and
the “last days” (the period of time we are now in, between Christ’s death/resurrection/ascension and his second appearing).

In addition to “last days,” this present-day category can also be called “the last time/s” (Jude 1:18; 1 Pet. 1:20) or “the last hour” (1 John 2:18).

So when asked if you think we are living in the last days, you can assure the questioner that we are: we are living in between the two comings of Christ. But we do not know—indeed, cannot know—the day or the hour of the last day itself (cf. Matt. 24:36).

You can see the references for last days/times/hour below:

“Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour.” (1 John 2:18)

“He was foreknown before the foundation of the world but was made manifest in the last times for the sake of you. . . .” (1 Pet. 1:20)

“Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come.” (1 Cor. 10:11)

“But in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.” (Heb. 1:2)

“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.” (2 Tim. 3:1)

“In the last time there will be scoffers, following their own ungodly passions.” (Jude 1:18)

“. . . scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing, following their own sinful desires.” (2 Pet. 3:3)

“Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days.” (James 5:3)

“And in the last days it shall be, God declares,

that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,

and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,

and your young men shall see visions,

and your old men shall dream dreams.” (Acts 2:17)

Four Reasons Segregation Is Peculiar and Wrong (And Thus Not Analogous to the Same-Sex Marriage Debate)

Anthony Esolen argues that racial segregation was based on an irrational—indeed, peculiar—prejudice, and thus is not analogous to the conviction that marriage should be reserved for one man and one woman, which is based on universal truths about human nature. He writes, “I fear that our age is so enslaved to ideology that we can no longer notice what is obvious and natural, or think sensitively about history, or craft analogies that can stand a moment of analysis.”

Consider the segregationist in Alabama, who wanted to keep one water fountain (the nice one in the middle of the hall) for whites, and another (the rusty one out back) for colored people. What can we say about that?

What the southern slaveholders themselves said about it, for one: it is a peculiar institution. It is not part of the universal human experience, this uncharitable preoccupation with race.

Ancient Rome knew nothing of it. Does anyone know the color of Saint Augustine’s skin? He was born in Africa to a father with a Roman name and a mother with a Punic name. Was his blood Caucasian, Semitic, Berber, Ethiopian, or some combination thereof? No one knows, because no one thought it worth mentioning. After the first century, none of the emperors are specifically Roman, and very few are even Italian. No one cared.

The ancient Greeks, more prone to ethnic vanity, still knew nothing of racial obsession. They considered people who were not Greeks to be “barbarians,” literally those whose speech sounds like bibble-babble, but their vanity was not based upon race. They thought that people who did not live in a free, self-governing polis were to be pitied; they were missing the blessings of a vibrantly human life. Those Greeks were far more interested in the customs of Egyptians and Persians than the other way around. They were like Odysseus, passionate to learn the ways of men.

People will always find ways to distinguish themselves from their “lesser” brothers, but the bizarre racial touchiness that characterized the American South, or that hardened into the caste system in India, a mingled modus vivendi and modus odiendi, is uncommon in human affairs. It is certainly not universal.

Second: Jim Crow laws were based upon irrational “science.”

A whole legal and cultural system had to support the tottering edifice of a lie. The lie was simply that the differences between Joe Louis and Max Baer were more than epidermal or physiognomic. Louis and Baer were to be considered wholly different kinds of human beings, with different kinds of lips and throat and stomach at their water fountains. That is nonsense.

Third: the separation violated the natural law.

The water fountain is designed to meet the natural bodily needs of a human being. Everyone needs to drink. Thirst is far more distressing than hunger. Every traveler or stranger needs a place to sleep. Every sick person needs a bed and a doctor. The black man needs water, or food, or a bed, or medicine no more and no less than does the white man, and for the same reasons. The right to these things, without any encumbrance based upon the fantasy of race, flows from our common human nature. I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink.

Fourth: the whole purpose of maintaining separate water fountains was to maintain the racist culture.

It did not touch upon the common good in any other respect. The discrimination was its own end. Now, a prudent statesman may have to discriminate according to nationality, but not for the sake of the discrimination. Let’s suppose that you shut off all immigration to the United States from Qatar. It need not be that you hate the Qatari people, or that you hate Muslims. You may be concerned that Qatar happens to be an oasis for terrorists in training. So your prohibition is aimed at a particular, specific end: preventing terrorists from entering the United States. In another decade, you might be glad to admit Qatari immigrants by the thousands. That was not the case with the southern segregationists, who wanted to extend their peculiarity forever.

You can read the whole thing here, where he goes on to argue that none of these conditions characterize the defense of conjugal marriage, which is not peculiar but universal.

Short Film on “Hound of Heaven,” Written by N.D. Wilson and Narrated by Propaganda

The Hollywood Reporter picks up on the story that the film Hound of Heaven (Kurosawa Productions) will premiere at the 2014 Raindance Film Festival on October 4. Author N.D. Wilson adapted Francis Thompson’s spiritual poem (1893), the original of which you can read here. Propaganda provides the spoken-word narration.

You can read the whole story here.

Jonathan Rogers: A Novel Every Christian Should Consider Reading

This is the final entry—and this time, I mean it!—in a blog series on Novels Every Christian Should Consider Reading.

Jonathan Rogers (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is Head of the Liberal Arts Program at New College Franklin in Franklin, Tennessee. He is the author of seven fiction and non-fiction books and is a regular contributor to the Rabbit Room website.

Rabbit Room Press has recently released new editions of his books, The World According to Narnia: Christian Meaning in C.S. Lewis’s Beloved Chronicles and The Wilderking Trilogy.

He and his family belong to Midtown Fellowship in Nashville.

It’s hard to know how to take Don Quixote. He is as thoroughgoing a fool as any figure in all of Western literature. Addled by many years’ obsessive reading of old stories of knight-errantry, Quixote is unfit for life in the (early) modern world where he finds himself. His foolishness is not entirely harmless, either. When he sallies forth with his sidekick Sancho Panza to enact his chivalric fantasies, they leave behind them a trail of property damage, bodily harm and high dudgeon. At one point, Quixote frees a chain gang from their captors, releasing hardened criminals into the Spanish countryside to commit who knows what depredations. Cervantes makes it clear that his hero is a menace to civil order, however good his intentions.

Yet for all that, we cannot help but love Don Quixote. He is a man of vision; rather than getting comfortable with the world around him, he forever strives for another, better world. Where other people see squalor and ugliness, he sees dignity and beauty and hope.

Quixote’s first adventure after leaving his village sets a pattern that will persist throughout his story. When he arrives at a nasty little inn frequented by hog drovers and mule skinners, he believes that he has come to a grand castle. When he encounters a pair of prostitutes, he sees “two beauteous maidens or graceful ladies taking the air at the castle gate.” When he speaks to them with the high-flown courtesy of a knight addressing two ladies, they laugh in his face. Though he is stung by their mockery, he doesn’t insult them back, but calls them to something higher: “Civility befits the fair,” he reminds them.

Quixote, it is true, stands too much on his own dignity, but he also insists on the dignity of those around him, even when they don’t see it in themselves.

My favorite lines from Don Quixote come not from Don Quixote the book, but from the musical it inspired, The Man of La Mancha. “I hope to add some measure of grace to the world,” Quixote tells Aldonza, the hard-bitten, world-weary tavern prostitute.

She snarls back, “The world is a dung heap, and we are maggots that crawl on it.”

Quixote will have none of it. “My Lady knows better in her heart,” he insists.

I realize that it’s cheating to quote a musical based on the book when I claim to be talking about the book. I realize, too, that Dale Wasserman, who wrote the dialogue for The Man of La Mancha, may be misreading Don Quixote. I’m not entirely convinced that Cervantes saw his fool Quixote as a holy fool or as a true agent of grace. But if any literary character ever invited willful misreading, surely that character is Don Quixote.

I don’t recommend drawing too many specific lessons from the life of Quixote. If we try too hard to make him a “fool for Christ,” we will run into trouble, and soon. I do believe, however, that to experience Don Quixote is to feel—indeed, to love—the truth that God uses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. There are many sane characters in Don Quixote, but none of them know the true, the good, or the beautiful so well as the madman Quixote.

The saddest moment in Don Quixote comes not when he breathes his last, but just before. Lying on his deathbed, Don Quixote regains his sanity and repents of all the foolish acts he had committed in his madness. When he dies, it feels like losing a good friend twice.

That sadness is a clue—to the meaning of Quixote, and to more than that. The world insists that we take it as seriously as it takes itself. The madman and the believer both know that we don’t have to.

The Curse of Knowledge As One of the Reasons for Bad Writing

Steven Pinker—Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the chairman of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary—has a new book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. John McWhorter says that “Pinker has written the Strunk & White for a new century.”

Here is an excerpt of an excerpt in the Wall Street Journal:

Call it the Curse of Knowledge: a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. . . .

The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows—that they haven’t mastered the argot of her guild, can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so the writer doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail.

Pinker asks and answers how we can lift the curse of knowledge:

The traditional advice—always remember the reader over your shoulder—is not as effective as you might think. None of us has the power to see everyone else’s private thoughts, so just trying harder to put yourself in someone else’s shoes doesn’t make you much more accurate in figuring out what that person knows. But it’s a start. So for what it’s worth: Hey, I’m talking to you. Your readers know a lot less about your subject than you think, and unless you keep track of what you know that they don’t, you are guaranteed to confuse them.

A better way to exorcise the curse of knowledge is to close the loop, as the engineers say, and get a feedback signal from the world of readers—that is, show a draft to some people who are similar to your intended audience and find out whether they can follow it. Social psychologists have found that we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us. Only when we ask those people do we discover that what’s obvious to us isn’t obvious to them.

The other way to escape the curse of knowledge is to show a draft to yourself, ideally after enough time has passed that the text is no longer familiar. If you are like me you will find yourself thinking, “What did I mean by that?” or “How does this follow?” or, all too often, “Who wrote this crap?” The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. Advice on writing is not so much advice on how to write as on how to revise.

Much advice on writing has the tone of moral counsel, as if being a good writer will make you a better person. Unfortunately for cosmic justice, many gifted writers are scoundrels, and many inept ones are the salt of the earth. But the imperative to overcome the curse of knowledge may be the bit of writerly advice that comes closest to being sound moral advice: Always try to lift yourself out of your parochial mind-set and find out how other people think and feel. It may not make you a better person in all spheres of life, but it will be a source of continuing kindness to your reader.

You can read the whole excerpt here and get the book here.