My evangelism prof showed this video to us this morning. We’ve been talking about rival gospel narratives and how they can creep into our presentation and communication of the Gospel and distort it. Worth a look and some thoughts after viewing.

We mustn’t forget that the One who is present in confession is omniscient. God knows everything, remembers everything, all that we have ever confided to him, or what we have ever kept from his confidence. He is the One “who sees in secret,” with whom we speak even in silence. No one can venture to deceive him either by talk or by silence. When we confess to God, therefore, we are not like a servant that gives account to his master for the administration entrusted to him because his master could not manage everything or be everywhere at once. Nor when we confess are we like one who confides in a friend to whom sooner or later he reveals things that his friend did not previously know. No, much of what you are able to keep hidden in darkness you only first get to know by revealing it to the all-knowing One. The all-knowing One does not get to know something about those who confess, rather those who confess find out something about themselves.

Soren Kierkegaard

I was thinking about feet today.

It has been a particularly nice day outside here at Cedarville University, so I decided to spend some time sitting by the lake to do some reading, praying, journaling, etc. My feet were tired of being in shoes all day, so I took my shoes and socks off and enjoyed the feeling of the grass between and around my toes.

All my feet ever feel is cotton.

Not ready to return to their cotton-obsessed dwellling, my feet opted to walk back to my dorm naked and unafraid.

There’s a subculture here at Cedarville. Those that insist on walking barefoot anytime they are outside walking anywhere. Initially I labeled them as the hippies or the environmentalists or the “somehow-I-think-I-am-better-than-you-shoed-snobs” group. Now I think they are onto something. I noticed things that I never noticed before. The feeling of grass and leaves under my feet. How cold concrete is. How uncomfortable those little rocks are that sneak under your feet and cause you to hop for a few seconds while you try to get it out from being embedded in your skin.

I read an op-ed article at the New York Times earlier this week. It quoted a doctor who has been researching long-distance running and its impact on the human body. He found that the body was built for running long distances. Its only since we added fancy cushioned shoes and artificial surfaces to run on that people have associated running with extensive injury and pain.

I can’t help but wonder if our shoe-wearing is somehow causing us to miss something.

I read somewhere once that in certain religious and cultural groups, the feet are always associated with being human and finite, so any depiction of a deity or supernatural being shows the being without feet. Feet are our connection with the ground, with earth and life and death. Feet are what make us human.

In our insistence on wearing shoes and protecting our feet with cotton and laces and leather and rubber and canvas, I can’t help but wonder if we are also masking something about our humanity. In our quest for divinity and perfection (or at least the appearance of so), we distance ourselves from dirt and mess and pain, elevating ourselves on soles of rubber while our souls of humanity and pain and confusion and uncertainty try to match that similar elevation, failing in the process.

Its kind of like we are trying to hide the very thing that makes us who we are as humans. As if colored canvas could make us somehow more like God.

It seems to me that we have this habit of forgetting that we are human, of forgetting our place in this world and thinking that somehow, we’re all there is. We prop ourselves up on soles of rubber (or power or theology or money or looking good) and in the process forget what it is and what it feels like to be human and to be part of this world in all its dirt and confusion and beauty.

Maybe Jesus came to remind us that we have feet.

As part of my progression through church history, I read through the Crusades of the Medieval era tonight, and I couldn’t help but see the connections between that mistake of the Church and the earlier and (perhaps bigger) mistake of aligning itself with Constantine in the 300s. I’ve been reading through history and analysis of the Constantinian era and its implications for the Church, and my conclusions are somewhat contained within a paper I submitted for a class and which I hope to post here in a few days. But it is hard to not read through the Constantinian era of the Church and not see how so much of what has been seen as wrong or misguided with the Church stems from that period of the Church, and how, as some (for example an author I’ve been reading, Bryan Stone) would assert, the Church has been living within a Constantinian paradigm ever since.

In reading through the narrative of the Crusades, its easy to draw the line of thought stemming from Constantine into the thinking that motivated the Crusades. Prior to Constantine, the Church saw itself as separated from the world, at odds with the Empire, and living a radically different life than the average Roman citizen. Constantine rose to power through violence, claiming the Christian banner in battle and eventually taking the throne of the Roman Empire in 306. He courted the Church’s favor, supporting their cause, ending persecution, providing funds for building grand basilicas as houses of worship, and calling together councils to resolve issues within the Church. In response, Christians saw Constantine as chosen of God, the kingdom of God finally come to earth. The Church married itself to the Empire’s cause, and Constantine became, as one church historian put it, the “bishop of bishops.”

The Church never lost its ties with the imperial power from that point on and even (I would contend) still clings to that conception of Christian Empire. The Crusades were the natural result of such a marriage of the Church with the whims of the state. When the Moors threatened the Holy Land, the Church responded militantly and nationally, acting as an Empire rather than the Church. In this perspective, the humanity of the Moors and those who stood in their way was null, for the fight was not amongst people but amongst nations in the name of God. Rather than taking an individual life, you were taking the enemy, defeating the “infidel.” I find it ironic that during the Crusades “infidel” became the way the Church addressed the Moors. In today’s context we hear “infidel” and picture radical Muslim extremists, when a thousand years ago it was the Church crying “infidel” as we stormed into battle “in the name of Christ and His Church”.

Any uniting of the Church with national, socio-economic, racial, or political causes will inevitably lead to a distortion of the message of the Gospel and idolatry among those united in such a cause. In the Middle Ages, this idolatry took the form of land and power. In the 19th and 20th century this took the form of “manifest destiny” and “the white man’s burden.” Today, this idolatry occurs whenever we as the Church divide because of race or who we voted for in an election; it happens whenever we refuse to associate with the poor or when we see the Western Church as holding a majority-share of God’s kingdom. It happens when we marry the Church with the pro-life movement, and when we marry the Church with social gospel. Whenever such a marriage and such an idolatry occurs, it can only lead to an objectification of those on the other side as the enemy, as the “infidel.”

Something I am coming to learn through reading and reflection is that Christ came to earth to usher in God’s kingdom upon earth. The whole Judaic narrative speaks to the coming of God’s kingdom, when shalom would be the rule of law and man would be united in peace with his maker, the Jewish community united with YHWH in perfection. Christ coming was the ushering in of that time, of that kingdom for the Jewish people. Not only that, but Christ opened wide the kingdom, welcoming all who would enter, breaking with the lines that we so often draw between each other to categorize each other and label each other and judge each other. Christ turned that all on its head.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.         [Galatians 3:28]

In Christ we are heirs to Abraham’s promise, that promise of a nation blessed by God, welcomed in and living within shalom, that completeness and holistic living within the kingdom of God upon earth. The problem with Constantinianism, or any marriage of the Church with the powers that be, is that we mistake the kingdom of man for the kingdom of God, and fight for that kingdom through words, political maneuvering, or sword, when the kingdom of God is already present and already declared victorious. We are in trouble as a Church when we seek earthly ends, as the Medieval church did in seeking land, however holy it may be, and as the American church does today in seeking political and cultural influence, for we are called not to bring political or cultural powers into submission to Christ’s authority, but rather to bring individuals into the story and the ushering in of God’s kingdom into the lives and stories of people coming together as God’s chosen, the Church. Only when we approach Gospel and kingdom-living in light of this will we be able to break from our culture wars, our political maneuvering within and without the Church, and to reclaim the original narrative we have been called to live in: one of a community of ragamuffins (to use Manning’s word) being brought into a story of God’s working of shalom into the world through Gospel and kingdom living.

May the God of peace be with you all   [Romans 15:33]

My first allegiance is not to a flag, a country, or a man
My first allegiance is not to democracy or blood
It’s to a King and a Kingdom    [Derek Webb]

In light of the massive amount of reading and writing I have on tap for the current semester’s worth of classes, my consistent contribution to this blog has suffered. Currently I am working on a paper that will be due tomorrow on the rise of Constantine and the resulting impact on the Church, so I am waist deep in culture and theology. But I had a thought in the midst of writing the paper that I could start posting some of my more academic writing here to share with whomever should come across the site. After all, while it isn’t as personally driven as some of the other stuff I write here, it is nonetheless interesting and applicable to life.

So I am going to post my first essay that I completed about a month ago here for you to read should you choose. We focused on the definition of art and subsequent art criticism, building on a model presented in an article by Richard Hughes entitled “How Christian Faith Can Sustain the Life of the Mind.” Hughes’ thesis is that in order to approach academic study as believers, we need to be willing to set aside our own presuppositions (“breaking through our particularities” as he puts it) and approach study without suspicion initially. Once we have done so, we can then make judgment calls on the issue, thus rebuilding our particularities in light of our new knowledge. Here is my essay in response and my application of Hughes’ model to art criticism, specifically to Massacio’s Trinity.

Breaking Through the Particularities

As we approach academic study, we must be aware of the “particularities” of our faith in order to approach study objectively. Christianity presents humanity as fallen and limited compared to the infinite God after whose truth we search. In this light, we must approach study conscious of our limited understanding and its implications on our understanding of truth. Any truth we find, Hughes contends, must never be “absolutized,” becoming an end itself; rather, truth and our quest after it must direct us to the source of truth, that being God. As we accept our limitations, we find that a humble faith results, whose “particularities” are fluid rather than rigid; a faith that knows that while we understand and accept the truth of God, we also have not grasped all truth. In this understanding, we approach our study with an openness allowing for other voices to be viable in searching after the same Truth. In order to fully study and understand philosophy, art, and history, we must “break through our particularities” by accepting our limitations as finite beings and acknowledging that all truth, wherever it is found, is God’s truth.

In this light, we approach the studies of philosophy, art, and history attempting to understand the perspectives of others on the same world. To “break through the particularities” in philosophy requires that, even though we disagree with the ultimate end of a philosophy, we are open enough to acknowledge that the given philosophy does speak truth about the human condition. This necessitates that we do not resort to labeling philosophies as “humanistic” or “postmodern” and moving on; rather we engage the philosophy with an openness that accepts our limitations in understanding the world as well as the limitations of others who have attempted to understand the world. No philosophy has reached the absolute truth, not even our own, so we must approach every philosophy looking for the validity in each claim presented.

As we approach the study of history, breaking through our particularities means being open to different interpretations of history that might conflict with our own. This could involve studying history from a perspective other than our American Christian approach and seeing the implications of such an interpretation on the overall study. In addition, this involves studying the development of Christianity, understanding the progression of theological thought and the outside influencing forces. Without such understanding, we blind ourselves to these aspects of the development of our faith and may find ourselves practicing a faith in ways we do not fully understand. In accepting our limitedness, we approach the study of history with open eyes, realizing that we do not understood everything and must search history to find the reasons for our current state.

In the study of art, there are many “particularities” which we may not even be aware of. One such particularity may be the neglect of art as a valid and important means of expression of life. Christianity in the past century has neglected the artistic expressions, leaving them for the secularists, rather than continuing with the historic tradition Christianity has with the arts. In approaching art, we must overcome the presuppositions we have toward artistic expression, acknowledging the abstract expression of our faith in art. We must also acknowledge our limited perspective on the world, being open enough to consider the perspectives of different artists who see the world differently. We need to break the particularity of accepting art that we are comfortable with, instead accepting challenges to our particularities with an open mind. This means we do not write off a painting that on the surface appears blasphemous to our faith, or rather than avoiding the artistic nude as pornography we take the time to consider what the artist was trying to express in such subject matter. As we approach art with this open perspective, acknowledging our limited perspective and the artistic nature of our God, we allow art to speak without our censorship.

Initial Reaction to Masaccio’s Trinity

My first reaction to Trinity was to look for the paintings characteristic that would merit its title. As it was a depiction of the crucifixion of Christ, I attempted to find each member of the trinity within the painting. However, on my initial observation, I was only able to pick out two members, God the Father and Jesus Christ. The absence of the Holy Spirit in this painting led me to look elsewhere for the missing Spirit. I considered the possibility that the other member of the trinity could be the bones beneath the cross, and that Masaccio was breaking with Christian orthodoxy somehow. Along these same lines, I considered the possibility that Masaccio was in fact presenting a negative view of Christianity. I considered that the crucifixion took place in a cathedral as an accusation against the Church, as if they somehow were responsible for the event. The smug expression on one of the people beneath the cross also lent itself to my thinking. The bones beneath the cross continued to confuse me, as I did not know how they tied into the painting as a whole. I did consider this good art, as it evoked thought and emotion of its own merit and seemed to have a specific meaning and purpose, I just was not aware of the purpose.

Individual Judgment of Masaccio’s Trinity

After researching the painting, my initial judgment of the painting changed. In coming to understand the context of the painting, I realized that the painting is not a critique of Christian orthodoxy, as I considered. A more detailed photograph of the painting helped me to locate the Holy Spirit, aiding my understanding of the title. With this understanding, my perception of the painting changed as I saw Masaccio’s presentation as orthodox. The painting itself was painted above the altar where the Eucharist was served, and thus the painting was intended to reflect the nature of the sacrament being observed. In this light, I saw the painting as an instrument of worship, drawing worshipers to reverence at the Eucharist. Just as God the Father presented Christ, so the priest presented the Eucharist to the people. The bones depicted are symbolic of Adam, and his position beneath the cross merits him the first to be redeemed by the blood of Christ. With this knowledge, I began to see Masaccio’s view of man in light of the cross. The painting was no longer a criticism of the Church but rather an instrument of worship and theological expression of the artist.

Reflection

In light of Hughes’ concept, I considered Trinity for its own merit, but I found that difficult. My Christian perspective drew me to first analyze it in light of its orthodoxy, yet even when I considered it unorthodox I was open to what Masaccio be saying. In researching and developing my understanding of the painting, I found that it was difficult to let go of the particularities and to approach my research free of judgments and preconceptions. I assume that I have studied art, history, or philosophy in the past, which leads me to read and analyze through the particularity of my past thinking and study, rather than approaching art criticism, or any study, with an open perspective in light of my limited understanding.

Well as of an hour ago my 21st birthday has come and gone.

Of course, 21 is a big deal for those in or around my age. For the obvious reasons – being legally allowed to purchase and consume alcohol – and thus by extension somehow attaining manhood? Something about drunkenness doesn’t quite add up to manhood in my mind.

I found an interesting article/infographic courtesy of the New York Times showing the various conceptions or progressions of man as he ages and the stages he goes through.

According to these various stages, at age 21 the following should characterize me:

• The stage of youthhood or adolesence, governed by emotion (Hall)
• I arrive at full strength (questionable) and proves his manly valor (Solon)
• I should be killing pleasure (Bell)
• I am still a boy (Hippocrates)
• I am led by a mistress (not so sure about that one) (Feltham)
• I am in the age of triumphs, desires, self-love, independence, and vanity (Youth’s Miscellaneous Sketch Book)
• I am “French” – “pretentiously philosophical (possible), embarrassingly vain, ridiculously romantic, and insincere” (Gill)

Interesting the differences in opinion. I’m still trying to figure it out. And will be for a while.

Happy Birthday.

NYT – Writers Define the Stages of of Life

The Senate Finance Committee just gave the go-ahead to move forward with the health care reform bill everyone has been yelling about for the past year. According to the reports, the estimated cost of the whole thing would be $829 billion, or $829,000,000,000. Lots of zeros.

Over the past few years, with all the recession talk and bailouts and what not, it seems that money is talked about, not in terms of tens or twenties, but in billions or trillions. The talking heads spout off numbers and figures about the latest billion or trillion-dollar bill. We are numb to numbers anymore.

I’ve found a new appreciation for infographics – visual depictions of facts, numbers, stats that we would otherwise look at and shrug off. In light of the $829 billion from today’s bill, I thought I would post this one here for you to enjoy. Consider where the $829 billion fits in it, and then think about the other areas in this infographic that could be dealt with if we took that $829 billion and used it for something bigger than our nation.

With $829,000,000,000 we could:

• Feed and educate every kid on the planet for 5 years AND pay off all debts owed by African nations.
• Shift all the worlds power sources to renewable energies AND double the amount of charity given by Americans each year
• Complete a manned mission to Mars, save  the Amazon, feed every child in the world for a year, AND still have money left over.

Where are our priorities?

Whatever the gospel is, it centers on the inauguration of the kingdom of God in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead. Hence the gospel is not first and foremost about a network of moral injunctions, nor about this or that kind of religious experience, nor about the arrival of the church, nor about some scheme of political liberation, nor about some magic formula to gain health and wealth, nor about a quick and easy way to find celestial fire-insurance. It is constituted by those extraordinary events in and through Jesus of Nazareth through which God acted in history by his Holy Spirit to establish his rule in the world.

- William J. Abraham, The Theology of Evangelism

We’ve been concentrating on the spiritual disciplines lately in one of my classes, and for one assignment we were encouraged to incorporate one of the disciplines into our life for at least a week and see what came about from the practice.

The specific practice of the spiritual disciplines has been foreign to me for much of my life. Within Baptist circles it seems as if the spiritual disciplines now consist only of the stereotypical “read your Bible and pray” routine, as so many of our jokes and (at times) sermons seem to communicate. The other disciplines seem too mystical or Eastern for our Western faith, so we opt to just ignore them. (Note: I am only presenting my somewhat hyperbolic-perspective on the presentation of the disciplines from my upbringing, not characterizing all Baptists as such. end note.) As we discussed the disciplines more, I found myself intrigued at there being more expressions and practices of my faith than reading, praying, and going to church every week.

For my assignment I took up the combined disciplines of silence and solitude. The aim with these disciplines is to rid oneself of the external havoc that surrounds life every day, to escape the discord of noise and music and voices colliding upon the eardrum and the mind, and to draw one’s focus solely upon seeking after peace with God. I must say that upon the first presentation, the only thing I could picture in my mind was a toga-wrapped cross-legged Buddhist monk humming “ohmm” while sitting on a bed of nails. Christians don’t do that kind of thing, right?

The first difficulty in my pursuit of this discipline was finding a place for silent solitude. I live on a college campus, after all. Busyness is the air we breathe. Noise is the rhythm our hearts beat to. Community life is how we eat and shower and sleep. We cover the awkwardness of silence with music or YouTube. We rid ourselves of solitude by walking across the hall or down the street to the coffee place. We don’t do silence and solitude very well.

I found the closest thing I could to silence and solitude in the upper recesses of the empty chapel, in a dark corner where I felt no one could see me and thus would leave me to my solitude. My professor emphasized the importance of going into these periods of silence and solitude without a to-do list, so I just did what came to mind. Prayer. Silence. Journaling. Resting. Reading. Silent, peaceful solitude is refreshing in the noise and havoc of college life.

Through these times of silence, I have come to realize how much of our lives we try to cover with noise. I found it interesting how harsh the simplest sounds seem when you are surrounded by silence. While sitting there, a few people walked into the chapel and said a few words to each other, a sound that otherwise would have been inaudible, yet in the silence was piercing. It is almost as if the sounds that we surround ourselves with somehow deaden or round the edges of our existence. Silence seems to define things clearly – our existence becomes clear, respiration and pulse and movement are understood more clearly, and our surroundings become separate from our existence. I wonder if we do not cover over our brokenness or our sin with noise or music, because surrounded by noise our reality is extended outside of ourselves, the edges of the reality of our life are rounded off and we are somehow less guilty, or the reality of our brokenness is somehow lessened. We mask our discordant nature with exterior harmony in hopes that somehow we will be made whole.

For another of my classes we have been reading through a book called “Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale” by Frederick Buechner. In it, Buechner builds on Christ’s silent answer to Pilate’s question “what is truth?” The truth, Buechner contends, is in the silence. All of us walk around with the truth inside us and all around us, but wordless and unexplained, like the evening news, “but with the sound turned off.” The Gospel is in the silent truth of life, “life with the sound turned off so that for a moment or two you can experience it not in terms of the words you make it bearable by but for the unutterable mystery that it is.” The Gospel brings words to that truth, but only after those moments of silent reality of the unspoken truth. There is truth in silence, truth that somehow we miss in the noise of our lives and the daily busyness of doing stuff – for that is all it is – stuff. In breaking away from the noise and the activity, we somehow find the truth, not in words, but in silence.

The one who hears the truth that is silence before it is a word is Pilate, and he hears it because he has asked to hear it, and he has asked to hear it – “What is truth?” he asks – because in a world of many truths and half truths, he is hungry for truth itself, or, failing that, at least for the truth that there is no truth. We are all of us Pilate in our asking after truth, and when we come to church to ask it, the preacher would do well to answer us also with silence because the truth and the Gospel are one, and before the Gospel is a word, it too like truth is silence – not an ordinary silence, silence as nothing to hear, but silence that makes itself heard if you listen to it the way Pilate listens to the silence of the man with the split lip. The Gospel that is truth is good news, but before it is good news, let us say that it is just news. Let us say that it is the evening news, the television news, but with the sound turned off.

-Frederick Buechner

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh…”

Jack Kerouac, On the Road