Angels in the Architecture: A Protestant Vision for Middle Earth

by Douglas M. Jones III

Nothing can take the puff out of the scientific chest more than a study of its history. Perhaps that's why it's so rare to find science departments requiring courses in the history of science. The history of science provides great strength to the inductive inference that, at any point in its history, that day's science will almost certainly be deemed false, if not laughable, within a century (often in much less time). As the saying goes, if you marry the science of today, you will be a widow tomorrow. If the history of science were a single person, we certainly wouldn't let that person drive heavy machinery or carry sharp objects.

We are sadly mistaken and think that fussiness is holiness. We think the Lord's Day is for fasting when it is a feast. We think that psalms were given to mortify the flesh when they were in fact given for the overflow of the spirit. We think that predestination is a vast and impersonal machine grinding our bones into flour, when it's nothing other than our loving Father involved in everything we say and do. In our poverty-stricken doctrine, our salvation was God's little afterthought, and besides, we were not that had to begin with, and so we have been forgiven little, and have received little. Not surprisingly, we love little and laugh even less.

For some reason foreign to our modern ears, God tells us that celebration is central to pleasing Him; it is central to leading a good life. Modern American life has no time for serious celebrations as did life in centuries past. We've got work to do; projects and deadlines press us. And yet for all our industrial-strength pragmatism, few if any truly important things get accomplished. We have forgotten that celebration isn't just an option; it's a call to full Christian living.

We want to think that the placement of individuals in history is nothing more than a random number sequence, with no authority given to those who came before. But the Lord of all history placed them there, with the command that they leave an inheritance to us. Our duty is to receive that inheritance, build upon it, and become in turn a blessing to our covenantal grandchildren.

The Bible tells us that other spiritual authorities exist, but that they are fallible and penultimate. Further, these lesser spiritual authorities are not just "allowed," they are inescapable. The question is not whether we will have them, but which of them we will have. We do not understand that when we have removed all traces of Nicean orthodoxy, this does not leave us standing in a fresh meadow with a newly-discovered Bible, but rather with the ethereal magisterium of the latest heretical balloon juice cooked up at the Christian Booksellers Association, which never met a wind of doctrine it didn't like.

But in the modern world, authority of any kind is a dirty word. True authority is written off as arrogance, but this simply shows how the arrogance of individualism dislikes any organized competition.

Once a problem has become glaring, modern conservatives all too often simply want to call us back to the status quo ante-i.e., the way it was right before our problems became obvious. They want to return to that pleasant and tranquil time when the hurricane was still over the horizon, invisible and gathering force. We did not understand our danger, we were not preparing for anything, but it was nice and the sun was shining.

To cone to the point, marriage is not an egalitarian institution. The Lord has determined, and has told us plainly, that the husband is the head of his wife. Through His apostle, He compared the marriage relation to that of Christ serving as the head of the Church. We, in the grip of modernity's individualism, think that means that the husband is supposed to be in charge. We believe that Paul was telling us that the man is "the boss." As a result, we have on the one hand a feminist reaction against this "truth" and on the other a fundamentalist macho-man embracing of it. But what this biblical teaching really means is that marriage is federal. Communicating this is difficult because our most common use of the word is limited to references to our federal government which is (in its essence) as anti-federal as can be imagined. We have not only lost the concept, we have destroyed the words which could enable us to recover it.

Stories frame 'a child's interior life for living in this world. Fiction is far more realistic than we realize. Fiction and poetry mysteriously transfer truth in a far more powerful way than anything else. God Himself chose to write in passionate poetry and narrative and parables rather than in the bureaucratic style of a systematic theology.

The entire medieval and Protestant tradition is anti-Statist, and that includes, as Augustine taught us, the view that the State is the least important institution among Church, State, and Family. Yet, the great irony of the Christian Right is that though their families are often messes and their churches splintering, they think they have the wisdom to wield the sword. In search of "real change," they charge out to conquer the institution that is most impotent in actually bringing it about. We haven't changed I11LICh from our ancient Israelite brothers. We want a king or a sword just like everybody else. We don't understand how God has structured the world, how real change occurs.