A Thousand Tongues, a Trillion Snowflakes

Denominational polity battles are to me a lot like having a pack of cigarettes in your pocket: you know they’re bad for you, but as hard as you try, you eventually get bored or distracted enough to let yourself indulge.

I stupidly squandered my afternoon reading the various arguments and counter-arguments surrounding a couple of cases withing the PCA, the denomination I call home, and found myself increasingly tired and discouraged. Trying to clear my head, I threw on a jacket and took a walk.

The birds have been heeding their internal clocks and are moving back through my part of the country. A flock of ravens in the trees across the street were bickering in a shrill, discordant dialog, none seeming to listen to the others. I couldn’t help but form unfavorable mental comparisons. I grew angrier and angrier with the birds, the inescapable analogy making me wish for the spiritual equivalent of a 12-gauge, just to clear the air.
I was about to storm back inside when the snowflakes started falling. Big, unbalanced snowflakes, glutted in the clouds until they could drink no more and then slipping down to the earth. The air around me was suddenly thick with them, and I couldn’t look away.
The ravens kept on arguing, oblivious to the bounty of the heavens, but I couldn’t really hear them anymore. A blanket of swirling silence was cast. I smiled and looked up at the heavens and took comfort.
It’s not so much that the snow falls on the wicked and the righteous. It’s more that the snow falls – in heaps and waves and eddies, as far as I can see. There are a million million snowflakes for every screeching raven, and confronted with that magnitude of scale, perspective changes.
The Lord is good. The Lord is on His throne. All the bitter invectives of all the misguided saints of all the churches in the world are covered by His mercies, a million million mercies for every angry tongue and every breaking heart. Stop for a moment, and lean against the porch railing. Hold out your hand and watch the mercy melt into your skin.
I’m licking snowflakes off my lips. I nod to the ravens, and I smile.

Everything is Connected

I promise I’ll be writing some pieces on something other than politics and economics, but my interests and the cultural conversation cannot be sidestepped. So, here we go…

As the purveyors of folk wisdom tell us, everyone knows how to raise their neighbor’s kids. It’s easy. The irony, of course, is how miserably everyone does at raising their own. From the outside looking in, any problem seems simple. If we fiddle with A and get rid of B, everything should be set to rights. But on the inside, it’s much more complicated. A and B, it turns out, are part of some irreducibly complex, chaotic web of algebraic functions and symbols that would make Mandelbrot curl up into a fetal ball and cry. The truth about childrearing is that everything is connected. When you take your neighbors’ children out of the sterile context of your backyard and place them into the mess of life, with all the failures of communication, bad days at work, and emotional investments of real life… how the mighty inevitably fall.

This same issue consistently encroaches upon our social discussions. In small-town Nebraska, I grew up with what I lovingly call “diner policy.” If you walked into the local diner around mid-morning, you’d find a group of leather-skinned old farmers sitting around drinking cheap coffee. Between talk of football and crop prices, you would hear these men’s takes on how to solve the world’s problems. “If I were in Washington, I’ll tell you what I’d do…” And what followed would be a bombastic but common-sense solution to war, poverty, education, taxes, and the repair of human nature.

Of course, nobody pays much attention to diner policy. But give these farmers a degree and some grasp of literary composition (or, worse, a spot on cable news or talk radio) and what emerges is something much more nefarious: pundit policy. We get solutions which, while perhaps more insightfully realized or worded, are no less simplistic. One would think that, with such a collection of solutions available, the lion would lay down with the lamb and all would be well. When it isn’t, the blame is laid on politicians or members of another partisan group.

The truth, however, is that pundit policy fails for the same reason you (think you) know how to raise your neighbors’ kids: problems never exist in isolation, and neither do their solutions. Everything is connected.

Let me offer an example. I recently read an article pointing out that the amount of corn used to produce ethanol could feed hundreds of millions of people. Tragic, isn’t it? All those damnable SUVs guzzling up food that could instead feed the world’s hungry? Let’s stop production now!

But consider how we got to this place. Corn is currently a lucrative crop because the federal government subsidizes ethanol. The government took this course because of environmental and political concerns. Thus, the issue of ethanol subsidies are connected with issues including American relations with the Middle East, drilling for oil in nature reserves, the war in Iraq, agricultural and environmental lobbies, scientific study of alternative energy, and a transportation-based economy. When you consider that the decisions made in these other areas were made by politicians who represented an agenda including other issues, this explodes outward even further to accompany debates about taxation, abortion, foreign policy, religion… and I could go on. To be really honest about policy, we have to recognize that our current production of fuel corn is an unintended consequence of a million unrelated choices in every sphere of life. What’s more, any policy change we make to ethanol production will have just as many other effects in just as many other spheres. Everything is connected.

I say this not to recommend a certain course of action on ethanol. That’s beside the point. Instead, I say this because pundit policy never considers these unintended consequences. Their focus is always on one problem: starvation, say, or helping the American farmer. Their solutions usually do an admirable job of solving this problem.  And, unseen by the pundit, thousands of people would starve as a result.

I know this sounds intimidating, but it’s the simple truth. The price of oil effects Supreme Court nominations, and tariffs on sugar effect health care costs. While nobody can forsee all of these consequences (they’re called unintended for a reason), failing to think them through as much as possible is simply irresponsible.

With all that said, let me recommend three conclusions I think stem from this discussion:

1. We must be humble and realistic about any proposal. We don’t have it all figured out; not even close. In particular, our insistence on thinking that we have all the answers while we haven’t even begun to wrestle with the magnitude of our interconnectedness is silly and repugnant. Chances are good our neighbors’ kids might be cussing because they learned it from ours.
2. As a corollary, we must think through and introduce social changes slowly and tentatively. The world’s problems often whip us into a panic, but quick decisions out of fear are the most likely to uncontrollably snowball. Far better to fiddle with one knob than mash all the buttons at once.
3. While I realize this conclusion will be more controversial than the first two, I also think this reality cries for as much localized decision-making as possible. Given the exponential number of variables, keeping decisions and their effects into as small an area as possible helps us see and correct for unintended consequences. In particular, this means that giving individuals all the facts and then allowing them to make up their own minds is more reliable than trying to figure out the answers for everyone at once.

Missing the Marx

(A note to those interested: I might be blogging a bit this semester after my long hiatus. Stay tuned, but don’t get your hopes up.)

In a recent conversation with several people I go to church with, we ended up talking about the Beatitudes and the priorities of Jesus’ kingdom. In particular, we were discussing what Scripture had to say about the poor. Several things stood out to me in this conversation, and I think their relationship is particularly instructive to Christians wrestling with political issues.

As we talked, some people in the conversation repeatedly said that my position – that Jesus is using such passages to teach the priorities of the Kingdom in that God focuses His concern on and exercises His power through people and things despised and oppressed by the world – was Marxist. I found this ironic on two levels.

First, those of you who know me realize that my political convictions are anything but Marxist. My tendency is rather to sympathize with a Friedman-esque libertarianism that sometimes borders on anarcho-capitalism.

Second, this comparison shows something deeper about the Christian mindset, and this is what I’d like to unpack a little bit. I would argue that the dualism which underlies my friends’ assumptions about this text (it’s about spiritual poverty, it’s about offering the poor “Jesus” in some way detached from their physical needs) actually end up fostering and encouraging the godless, utopian political tyrannies they so despise.

Here’s what I mean. In a robust view of the kingdom it is through the church, indwelt by the Spirit and empowered by Christ’s resurrection, that change comes to the world. Since the church proclaims the gospel, it has the power of God to transform hearts and make the new humanity. Since she worships the God of all creation, this gospel transformation will reach into every sphere of life – experiences, relationships, economics, politics, etc. However, these spheres are all subordinate to Him. I can meaningfully speak into the political sphere because I’m not relying on it to accomplish something. I can long to make it just and equitable and free precisely because I don’t need it to solve all the world’s problems.

When we embrace a dualism that puts the worlds problems outside of God’s concern – when we believe God’s only answer to hunger is that we’ll be fed in heaven and His only answer to injustice is eternal punishment – where do we turn when the brokenness of this world rears its ugly head? If we can’t avail ourselves of the power of Christ, we must make use of idolatrous power instead. This is where Marxism comes back in. It is the dualist who gives license to its claims, because it is the dualist who cannot offer a more excellent way.

I have no need of socialism (or, for that matter, fascism or liberalism or conservatism). The God of Scripture cares for every human need – for spiritual intimacy and forgiveness of sin, but also for hunger and injustice and sex and beauty. None of our petty political deities can compare with Him, and none of their social programs can compete with Him. I still have political convictions, but they are now in proper perspective – as one goal of God’s plan rather than the means to accomplish it.

This is why, in my concern for the poor, I could never advocate Marxism (or any other political -ism). It shares some parts of God’s vision, granted, but it is ultimately unnecessary and counter-productive. God has given us the means, through generosity and love, through the Spirit and worship, and through our possessions and prayers, to address every problem this world faces. Every one of them. The beatitudes teach us that poverty must be addressed, but they also teach us the deeper irony – that the means of healing for poverty will come not from the halls of wealth and power but from what is weak and despised by this world.

A dualistic, “spiritualized” God cannot offer us a better hope than Caesar, but Jesus Christ can.

Cloudburst

We stagger out drunkly, my neighbors and I,
startled from revery by the bass drums of heaven,
a trillion ecstatic splat-drops
denuding our wondering faces
all around the neighborhood.

These are three:
the rain that annoints wisened kings
the rain for children’s innocent druidic dances
and this rain –
a laughing hammer slaying old and young the same.

A man of the country from downstreet
insists it was some lightning-toothed devil
beating his wife.
You could hear him, said his lazy dark drawl,
in the rasping whiskey growl of the thunder.
That damned devil, out to ruin my new tennis shoes.

Perhaps, and perhaps – demons and djinns
are not to be taken lightly.
Yet the powers of hell (so I have been taught)
are all deceit and perversion, flies and slithering things.
Lucifer might dwell in fogs and muggy summer twilights,
but this cloudburst is a solid, sure promise:

“There is indeed milk and honey flowing
like candy-wrappers and floodwaters
in the land beyond the glutted river.”

A Whirling Mess

I like John Piper. I really do. Both his books and his preaching have been great helps to me in the past. That is part of why I was horrified to read this article he posted today interpreting a Minneapolis tornado as God’s judgment on the ELCA Lutheran church to consider a proposal allowing homosexuals to be ordained as clergymen.

His conclusion is as follows: “The tornado in Minneapolis was a gentle but firm warning to the ELCA and all of us: Turn from the approval of sin. Turn from the promotion of behaviors that lead to destruction. Reaffirm the great Lutheran heritage of allegiance to the truth and authority of Scripture. Turn back from distorting the grace of God into sensuality. Rejoice in the pardon of the cross of Christ and its power to transform left and right wing sinners”

Now, I agree with Dr. Piper that homosexuality is declared biblically as a sin, and while Jesus loves sinners, it is not something Christians can condone in an ongoing and unrepentant was in their clergy, any more than I can excuse a pastor who cheats on his wife because God loves sinners.

That said, this article was deeply troubling to me. I know that Dr. Piper loves the Puritans, and there are many exemplary things I too have treasured in Puritan writings. However, one of their (several) deep failings was to presume upon knowing God’s secret will. Whether this manifested in a presumption about who was and wasn’t elect or a willingness to draw a line from particular natural disasters to particular moral evils (one thinks of the “earthquake sermons” common in 1727 and 1755, which vary a great deal in this regard but often make this link), it was always problematic.

To give a counter-example: a church in the town where I used to live, faithful to Scripture and attended by several dear friends, burned down a couple years ago. Am I to assign this calamnity to some specific judgment of God? Of course not.

Indeed, this is the very point of the Tower of Siloam discussion in Luke 13. Dr. Piper cites it in his argument, but Christ’s whole point here was that, while the general brokenness of the world should point us to all of our general states of sin, we cannot link any specific disaster with some specific sin.

God is the creator and sustainer of the world, and as such his ways are beyond our knowing or finding out. While his providential rule over the world certainly must extend to things like natural disasters, it is utter presumption to think from this fact that we can discover the “why” behind it. We may never know – to suppose that we can makes God a little less holy and a little more in our own images.

real people

My wife calls them real people –

not real like tangibility or taxes,

but like bluegrass

or hip-hop before a producer’s “creative

direction” (that father of lies).

The sort of people who are atheists

because Jesus was a home-town boy,

smoking weed and tagging their tenements with

damnable revolutionary graffiti –

Not because some tsunami

on their big screen

soured their wine.

It’s not honesty,

not hearts worn on sleeves,

but that worn sleeves don’t hide bruises

like SUVs,

and what the neighbors think

is whether you’re good for a smoke

sitting on the cracked steps outside.

My wife calls them real people –

but I can’t bring myself to it.

We are all secrets locked in towers

bristling with spires and crennelations,

peering between merlons and

down murder holes, suspiciously

guarding our empty halls.

A castle beseiged or worn

by saltbreeze, seasons, intrusive ivy,

is a fortress yet; walking through

rotted gates, hostile gazes envy

my stiff keep of a neck.

“Real” is not a thing of degrees,

measured in cracks and breaches.

It is the trebuchet

whirring stony hammer-loads

across your bulwarks, and mine.

Social Programs and Sacred Callings

This is a modified e-mail I sent a friend who I’ve been visiting with about a Christian view of politics. They asked about how we should view social programs like Welfare and Social Security, which I think are complicated issues I’ve been pondering myself. Here are the three key questions I sent her that need to be under consideration; I’d love your thoughts if you have them.

1. What are these government programs? One of the challenges in talking about things like welfare is to avoid simple answers. While the classic Church and State/Cross and Sword dichotomy has value, the real world is much more complicated. Are government aid programs just exercises of the sword by an external political power? Simply put, no. Because of our republican government, they are also what could be termed “collective action” programs. That is, there is an element of cooperative problem-solving to them. This is what their proponents tend to argue for. Welfare and medicare are, in these peoples’ eyes, the result of a nation of people pooling their resources in order to combat social ills. Insofar as this is the case, it seems to me that the church can get behind and advocate them. However, it gets complicated because unlike other sorts of collective action, this one is backed up by the sword. If I decided to give my tax money that goes to social security to some other charity, I’d get thrown in jail. Because of this, the challenge is in determining how much of this is cooperative and how much is coercive. A Christian theology of politics has to make this distinction and base its support to some measure on whether the state is a helpful tool of organization or a substitute for the kingdom of heaven.

2. How effective are they? This needs to be a seperate question. For example, I agree with many of the younger, left-leaning Evangelicals I know that poverty and other social problems should be a huge priority for Christians. However, we have dramatically different political convictions because I think most of the remedies they recommend don’t actually work. This is where a lot of practical ground-level study needs to be made. Even if welfare and social security are judged to be more good than bad in theory, they are at present extremely ineffective programs. Working to reform, or even just to supplement these programs, should certainly be a Christian priority if they aren’t doing well. The same thing applies to questions of political aid versus private giving. They might be equally permissible in a Christian framework, but if one is more helpful or efficient than the other, it makes sense for us to focus resources on this area. After all, God has structured the world in certain ways, and we are responsible to live in the world has He has made it. In this regard, study of political theory, law, and economics are invaluable. I’m not arguing for simple pragmatism, but we must be practical as we implement Christ’s calling because the goal is to actually help people, not simply go through the motions to satisfy our own consciences.

3. How can the church live out its calling in a broken world? This is where I think a lot of political thought, including some that I myself have recommended, needs to spend more time than it does. Too often, we as Christians go looking for the perfect solution to a social problem, the one untainted by sin and fallenness. Of course, no such solution exists. For some, this perfectionism ends up being paralyzing. They can’t do anything because everything has issues. For others, and I’d say the majority live here, it breeds blindness to the weaknesses of the position you’re backing. In a very real sense, every political choice is the lesser of two evils. Then again, it’s also the greater of two goods. Much like the humans that create them, no political system or social program is completely good or thoroughly wicked. Our calling is to be God-loving realists who seek to see his kingdom come little by little in the world. When we try to make it happen faster, it usually ends in disaster.

Deconstruction Tastes Like Marlboro Lights

On a related note to some of what I said yesterday, I think that for some of us a fascination with “newness” and “relevance” often manifests as a love of “wrongness” – that is, the idea that we and everyone who has come before got it wrong. Nothing appeals to me more than to be told that I’ve completely missed the point.

It’s like a narcotic. Or, more accurately, it’s like some bizarre pain-addiction. Nothing compares to the thrill of learning some truth that casts our understanding of things in a whole new light. In that moment when the walls come crashing down and I realize that there is more to the world than I ever suspected, I get a rush I can only compare to something like smoking your first cigarette. And this is the root of the problem.

I’m all for gaining new insights about Jesus and the Christian story. I think there are plenty of wrong things that the church has tolerated for too long and which need to be challenged. That said, like cigarettes, it’s easy to get hooked. Before long, I’m not interested in truth anymore at all, just in the thrill of seeing it challenged.

This is only worsened by our cultural myth of the courageous hero standing against the evil system. The rush I get when I see the status quo broken, the admiration I feel when someone criticizes the reigning paradigm – these have more to do with the lone cowboy heroism of our cultural mythology than with the normal workings of the Church.

Left unchecked, I often end up mistaking ballsiness for holiness. I remember hearing a sermon in college by a guy who will remain nameless, but who I immediately fell in love with because I thought he was “speaking the hard truth.” In addressing a crowd of Southern Baptist kids, he basically made a point, and when they applauded, told them to shut up because they were the ones headed to hell. Wow, I thought, that was courageous.

It took me about 6 months to notice that maybe this wasn’t such an admirable thing. After all, according to this preacher, the reason these kids were going to hell was their TV-watching habits. Really? I didn’t agree with that. Funny, how I missed that part because I was so in love with the image of this man shouting down the masses. I inhaled the sweet smoke of beliefs burning, and it didn’t bother me that I wasn’t igniting them because they were wrong, but only because of the rush I got as they became glowing cinders.

Once again, the answer here is to be suspicious of novelty. It is a very good thing to seek truth, and sometimes this requires challenging our reigning paradigms. But most of the time, the right approach is to listen to the past. Saints for the last two thousand years have believed things for a reason. If I find myself continually chasing after the ways they got it wrong, it may be that I instead am addicted to the drug of deconstruction rather than the sweet taste of truth.

Relevance, Rehoboam-style?

I grew up in a tradition that had an unhealthy infatuation with youth. As an emotionally-unbalanced 16-year-old, my hormone-induced zeal was held up as a model of Christian virtue and commitment. I was one of the poster boys for what many in my denomination believed: that we needed revival, and that such revival would come for the young, so those of past generations need to get out of the way. My parents and grandparents were sometimes even portrayed as the enemies of God’s work in the world, and I needed to ignore their counsel in order to advance the kingdom.

While I am now in a less youth-focused denomination, I still feel the effects of this way of thinking. In particular, I often find myself seeing older, more experiences saints as the enemies of what God is doing in the world now. The more I recognize this proclivity in my heart, the more worried I am. I don’t want to look at the church this way, but it seems to be in the water. For whatever reason, I fail miserably to respect those older than me, or at least am very selective with that respect.

One of the biggest causes of my sin in this area is my constant obsession with the “new” and the “relevant.” For whatever reason, we Evangelicals have become convinced that the reason we’re losing the spiritual war in America is because we are out of touch. We don’t have the latest, shiniest weapons of our culture with which to fight for the cause of Christ, and hence we’re doomed to loss by attrition.

This is nonsense, for any number of reasons. In the first place, it doesn’t matter to Jesus how behind-the-times you are culturally. If you have the good news of Christ’s resurrection and the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit, you are far better-armed than any philosopher of this age.

What’s more, the cause of Christ is never served by mere hip-ness. I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t speak in language people can understand or apply the truths of Christ to contemporary currents in society. Of course we should. However, our failure in these areas (if there has been one) is probably not themain cause of Evangelicalism’s decline. Our problem historically has not been irrelevance, but isolationism. Much of what we see as being “culturally relevant” is simply mimicking the culture around us while still living in isolation from it. Instead, we need to take the radical re-ordering of the world’s priorities which Jesus causes and then live out these new priorities before the world.

This is where reconnecting with the older generation is so important. In our talk of relevance, we have left them behind. As one younger preacher points out, how can we talk about “relevance” without our 75-year-old elder hearing that he isn’t. What’s more, we live in a culture that hates old age. While I don’t think it has been intentional, many of us have used cultural engagement as a clever disguise for hiding the elderly away where they can’t embarrass us.

One of the most critical things we must be doing as churches if figuring out ways to reconnect wise and mature saints with younger people, both Christian and not, who can benefit from their years of walking with the Spirit. In the biblical picture of the church it is the feeble 80-something who, having walked with Christ throughout life, occupies the place of honor. He is the man we should be looking to for wisdom, rather than our postmodern spiritual trendsetters with their soul patches and trendy glasses.

Of course those of us who are younger have something to offer, and as the church lives out the mission of God, it will be important to recognize this fact. I am far better equipped to talk with college students about how the movies and music they love shows forth the splendor of Christ than my parents. But the fact that they have never listened to Radiohead or Jay-Z is a paltry thing next to the lifetime of insight they can offer about living out Christ as a spouse, or an employee, or a parent. The fact that it is Radiohead rather than real spirituality that is at the center of our approach to Christianity shows just how desperately we need older generations.

I’ve been married for two years now. I have a number of friends around the same age who are also married, and we often discuss the experiences we’re sharing. However, I can honestly say that I have learned almost nothing about being a good spouse from these friends. They offer good support and sympathy, but have very little advice (and most of what they do have is bad). Every important lesson I keep returning to was taught by my parents, or a pastor, or one of the several older, godly men who has invested in me over the years.

Such is life in the world God has made. As long as Rehoboam takes counsel from those his own age, the kingdom will keep on dividing. We desperately need to get over ourselves. I am incredibly young. Thank God that he doesn’t wait for us to grow up and figure it all out to use us for His purposes. That said, you and I are fools if we take up this calling without also availing ourselves of the wise counsel of those who have gone before. And maybe as we seek these relationships, we’ll learn that it’s not just the 20-somethings for whom God has remarkable big plans.

It All Makes Sense Now…

HT: Scot McKnight